“Oh, perish the thought that something unseemly happen in front of the corpse.” Hanna was growing visibly frustrated now. “Go take your pictures, Liza. The cops will need to know what the crime scene looked like, and we can’t just leave the poor woman lying here until the snow melts.”

A little surprised, Liza gave Hanna a grateful look and then made her way across the bedroom, trying not to think about how much worse blood smelled when it was in a heated room instead of outdoors in fresh, snowy air. She photographed the desk, the body, the suicide note, and, holding her breath and kneeling down, Mrs Ackroyd’s shoes. Not that she could get much of a sense of what the soles were like since the body was still sitting up, but she hoped it would be better than nothing.

When she was done, she stood back and looked at Vivien Ackroyd without the barrier of a lens between them. She thought she owed her that.

She was a pitiable sight, in the end. And she couldn’t have been more than forty or so. Which once would have seemed ancient to Liza but now felt all too there-but-for-the-grace. And of course she knew, rationally, that murders were rare, and that the events of this weekend had been, to say the least, improbable. But the thought of it ending like this, lashing out at her spouse and tripping down a long slope of tragedy, only to finish slumped over a desk, still clutching the pen she’d used to scribble down her last miserable thoughts, made her positively queasy.

There was nothing more to be done. Liza nodded to Mr Burgh that she was finished and then let Hanna take her by the hand and lead her down the stairs, out of the tower, and back to their room.

There they lay once more on the bed, staring at the canopy.

“Did I …?” Liza wasn’t sure how to say this, if she even deserved to say it. If she wasn’t just fishing for reassurance. “Did I just kill a woman?”

“I was the one who made her run out the room. You just made her angry. But no. She did what she did. All of what she did. That’s on her, not you.”

They lay quiet for a while, listening to the night sounds of the hotel.

“I do feel sorry for her, though,” said Liza. “Even if she did kill her husband, it sounds like it was an accident.”

Hanna rolled over. “Are we back to I can see myself killing you one day?”

“No. But, like, if I did do something and it hurt you or—well, think about how you felt when you thought I might get myself shot on a holiday that you booked.”

“True.” Hanna reached out and took her wife’s hand. “I’m really glad you weren’t shot, by the way.”