That at least got a laugh. “I’m not sure I want to be making my decisions based on what I think fictional serial killers would think of them.”

Despite this objection, they went for a walk. New snow had fallen, Liza noted, and whatever tracks had been running to and from the woodland the day before were long gone. But she tried not to think about tracks and clues, and missing guns, and broken safes, and motives, and mysteries. And after a while she found she didn’t need to try not to; she just didn’t. Because the grounds were beautiful, and away from the hotel it was easy to get lost in the beauty of them—the highlands rising snow-capped around them and the loch, still not entirely without its unpleasant associations, stretching silver-grey beneath.

And for a while it was like … like nothing. One of the problems—not problems; quirks, qualities—about having been with somebody for ten years was that everything became an echo of something else. This evening much like last evening, this Christmas like last Christmas, this fight like the last fight. But they’d never been here before, never really been anywhere like here before. And not just because of the, well, the murders. When they’d first got together, expensive holidays were an unjustifiable waste of money; later on they’d become an unjustifiable waste of time. So this moment was just this moment, instead of a thousand reflected moments arcing away like colours in a kaleidoscope, the same things rearranged and spiralling off to infinity.

Hanna laid her head on Liza’s shoulder. “This is …”

“Yeah.”

They walked down towards the loch, veering west away from the woodland where the corpse had been. And for a while they stood on the banks watching the water. A group of ducks had been caught off-guard by the unseasonable weather and were now dabbling about the snowline looking for … whatever it was ducks looked for. Liza wasn’t exactly sure.

A combination of cold noses and wet feet was about to send them back inside when they were hailed by Reverend Lincoln coming down from the hotel. They waved an ambiguous reply and let him intercept them.

“Can I have a word?” he asked, looking directly at Liza. “Ideally somewhere quiet?”

“Does quiet mean without me?” Hanna didn’t seem happy about the implication.

The vicar gave it a moment’s thought. “No. I think that would be unreasonable. But I’d like to be out of sight of the house.”

So they turned and went back to walking around the lake, relying on the curve of the land down the hillside to shield them. Not that it struck Liza as a terribly helpful precaution; a hypothetical observer watching from the hotel would have seen him approach them anyway, and it seemed unlikely anybody would be spying on them.