“By murder?” Liza said. She’d wanted to say something else, something about them and who they were to each other, but it felt fleeting, and she was worried that if she turned and looked at it before they made it out of the dark, it would vanish like Eurydice. “That seems best.” Turning her attention back to her notes, she dug out the sheet on which she’d written Malcom Ackroyd. “So … died at around 1 a.m. Saturday morning. Fell or was pushed off the balcony of the tower suite.” She diligently scribbled the facts, as they were, onto the back of the scrap of paper. “Found by Emmeline White.”

Hanna located Emmeline’s sheet and settled it neatly next to Mr Ackroyd’s.

“Who would have begun closing up the kitchen around ten, but says she went back to her room to call her sister. Which wouldn’t have worked because the phone lines were down in the storm.”

Hanna added the appropriate details. “And she seems to have had some kind of disagreement with Colonel Coleman.” Shuffling through the papers, she pulled out Colonel Coleman’s page and added it above Emmeline White’s. “Or so he says. And Colonel Coleman had also argued with Mr Ackroyd. You know, I can see why you like doing this. It makes you feel in control.”

“And I think it actually helps as well.” Turning to her laptop, Liza brought up the footage she’d shot on the night they’d found Ackroyd’s body. She made a note of who had been in the courtyard, who’d arrived and who’d left, when, and with whom. When they put down Vivien Ackroyd’s card she felt a sudden and completely irrational pang of guilt. It wasn’t easy thinking you’d driven somebody to take their own life, even if it was only for a few hours.

Once all the papers were laid out, Liza stared at them in the hopes that they’d rearrange themselves into a coherent theory of the case, like a word puzzle where the letters c i o r s s s s rearranged themselves into the word scissors, but they didn’t. Anybody could have shoved Malcom Ackroyd off a balcony and then made it downstairs in time to pull a concerned face over his mangled corpse. The hotel was big enough that the rooms and suites were all spaced out, making it very unlikely anybody would need to pass anybody else on the way to the stairs if they didn’t want to, but also small enough that it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get from any part of it to any other part, as long as you knew where you were going.

They pushed the Malcom card to one side and started a new layout for Belloc. And here, Liza felt, they had a little more to go on.