“Me too.” She squeezed Hanna’s fingers tightly. “And it seems I’m pretty safe now since the hotel has the gun back.” The moment she said it, something began needling at the back of Liza’s brain. She tried to ignore it, to just enjoy lying there with her wife and not being in imminent danger of either death or divorce, but eventually she snapped and went back to her phone.

Sitting up, she began swiping.

“Just so you know,” Hanna said, “I am choosing to find your continued obsessive behaviour endearing.”

Half-listening, Liza turned the screen so Hanna could see it. “What do you see there?”

Hanna winced. “Fuck, Liza, I see a dead woman. What do you want?”

“Sorry. Got carried away.”

“There’s a reason I didn’t get too close to the body.” Hanna’s voice was growing harsh. “I do not like this shit.”

“Right, right.” She should have let up—Liza knew she should have let up—but she needed to check she wasn’t jumping to conclusions. “Just …can you tell me what she has in her right hand?”

“A pen. There was a suicide note, Liza—she had to write it somehow.”

Liza swiped. “And here.”

“The gun. On the floor, by the chair.”

“Which side?”

“The righ—hang on, I think I get where you’re going with this.”

Nervous in case where Hanna thought she was going wasn’t where she thought she was going, Liza bit her lip. There was still a very good chance that she was just trying to convince herself that she hadn’t accidentally driven a woman to suicide. “Where do you think I’m going?”

“You’re going to say that if the gun is on the right side of the chair and she was shot in the right side of the head, then she probably used her right hand.”

A tide of not-exactly-relief crashed over Liza. “Good, because that’s exactly what I’m going to say.”

“And then you’re going to ask how she picked up a pen in that same hand after she’d already shot herself.”

Liza nodded. “This isn’t two murders and a suicide; it’s three murders.”

Chapter Sixteen

Liza, in the Dining Room, with a Theory

Sunday morning

Liza didn’t sleep well that night. Knowing—okay, believing; okay, strongly suspecting—that Vivien Ackroyd had been murdered was a mixed feeling. On the one hand, it meant that neither she nor Hanna were responsible for her death. On the other, it meant whoever killed her was still loose in the hotel doing who knew what.