Page 1 of Murder Most Actual

Chapter One

Hanna, in the Car, with the Map

Friday, late evening

They were lost.

“We’re lost.”

“We’re not lost.“

Liza sighed instead of screaming and stared helplessly at what her phone was telling her was a map of their current location, but which looked to her like a tiny blue dot in the middle of a large green nothing. “We’re lost. According to Google we are currently somewhere in Scotland. That’s lost.”

With a growl that on a different night and in a different mood Liza would have found sexy, her wife Hanna pulled over to the side of the road, reached over to the glove compartment, and retrieved a paper map. “Use that.”

Liza wasn’t sure she could. She wasn’t sure she could even work out how to unfold it without putting a tear right through the middle of the M6. “Right, just let me get my compass and my sextant.”

“You’re a grown woman, Liza. You went to university. Surely you can read a map.”

Trying very, very hard to stay calm at the end of a very, very long drive at the start of what in theory was supposed to be a lovely weekend break, Liza let her head flop back against the headrest and stared pointedly upwards. “I can read a map. When it’s a normal map on a screen with a little trail telling me where I’m meant to be going. Not when it’s a sheet of dead tree the size of a tablecloth.”

“I told you there wouldn’t be any reception out here.” Hanna drummed her hands on the steering wheel, and her voice got that I-am-trying-to-be-reasonable tone that Liza particularly resented. “The whole point is that there isn’t any reception out here. We’re going to have a long weekend with just the two of us, and no work, and no social media, and nothing to get in the way. That’s what we agreed to.”

The whole not-screaming thing was getting increasingly difficult. “No, Hanna, it’s what you agreed to. By the time I’d even found out about this plan, you’d already booked the tickets.”

“Well, I’m sorry for trying to surprise you.” Adjusting her severe, half-rimmed glasses, Hanna did her best to look composed and mostly succeeded. “If you hated the idea this much, we could easily have got a refund. Or just stayed at home. Because we don’t actually need to worry about money, because in case you’ve forgotten, the job you so resent my spending a lot of time on pays really fucking well.”

Liza had already opened the car door and stepped out into the night.

“Where are you going?” Hanna called after her.

“Getting some fresh air.”

“On a mountain in the Scottish Highlands after dark? Do you have a literal death wish?”

There were probably safer ways to take a breather. But Liza had always been the kind of girl who ran with scissors. “It’s a road, Hanna. A quite well-maintained road that cars can get along just fine. I’m not going to fall off a cliff and die if I walk ten paces.”

To illustrate her point Liza walked ten paces, then ten more. If she was being totally, one thousand percent honest with herself, it was slightly scarier than she’d anticipated. The light from the car’s headlights was swallowed up very quickly, and then there was nothing but the night. And not a normal, sensible night like you got in London, everything bathed in the cool glow of streetlamps and a thousand tiny window-dots spread out below you like the opposite of stars. A bleak, primordial, rural night made of shadows and wind, where a black sky, thick with black clouds, flowed into a black hillside thick with black trees, and when you stopped and listened you could hear things moving that could be far too close or so far away that the whole world seemed like an endless void.

She stopped. She’d gone far enough that she couldn’t see where she was putting her feet, and if she went much further she might genuinely lose sight of the car. And it was cold. She’d have said unseasonably cold, but they were high up, and a depressing fact of British weather was that you were as likely to get snow at Easter as at Christmas.

The sensible thing to do would be to go back. To tell Hanna that she was sorry—well, not sorry exactly, but that she didn’t want to be fighting right at this moment, and that while she still felt that this holiday was borderline non-consensual, she did on some level appreciate the gesture.

Because God knew that one of them had to.

Fuck.

How had they got here? Trying their damnedest not to have a screaming match at eight o’clock on Good Friday while navigating their way down narrow, blustery roads to a luxury hotel in a mobile phone blackspot. Hadn’t they done everything right? It wasn’t like they’d rushed into marriage—they’d been dating for years, and even when it was suddenly legalised and half their friends were getting high on equality, they’d waited. They’d taken it slow, and lived together first, and had all the big, serious conversations about life goals, and values, and whether they wanted children, and whose parents they’d spend Christmas with.

But maybe that was the problem. Maybe they’d lulled themselves into a false sense of security. A mutual commitment to support each other’s careers had been fine when they were twenty-two and both sending their CVs around fruitlessly in an economy that really wasn’t interested in twenty-two-year-olds. It had even been bearable when they were twenty-eight and Hanna had been working twelve-hour days for one of those financial services firms that are responsible for all the world’s problems, and Liza had been … well, she’d still kind of been sending her CV around, to be honest. Because it turned out that a maths degree and a desire—or at least a willingness—to use it to make yourself rich and other people richer was way more marketable than a degree in Art History and a vague notion that you’d like to do “something creative”.

Much as Liza hated to think about it, her podcast taking off had been what really kicked their problems into high gear. Murder Most Actual had started almost by accident, when she’d bonded with a then-co-worker over a mutual love of crime, true and otherwise. It had been a fun side project; something to do when Hanna was working weekends, which she did with increasing regularity. But people had liked it. Really liked it. Something about the just-two-girls-talking-murder vibe of the show had let them reach an audience that enjoyed true crime but found the more salacious or sententious series ethically questionable.

And just like that, Liza had commitments. Commitments which had started eating into the few evenings and weekends she and Hanna could actually be together. Commitments which meant she was spending more time with her co-host, Rachael, than with her actual wife. And while Rachael was extraordinarily heterosexual, that didn’t quite stop the jealousy. Especially when fans of the cast started shipping them.

It was around then that the fighting had started. Which, by itself, Liza could cope with—her parents had been great fighters because they’d both been stubborn as hell and convinced they were right about everything—but with the fighting had come the drifting, and the drifting she had way less of a handle on.

From back up the road, there was the sound of a door opening and closing, followed by footsteps, then Hanna’s voice. “Come back to the car.”

---