Page 2 of Murder Most Actual

With the wind and the cold and the still being kind of pissed off, Liza couldn’t tell if her wife’s tone was conciliatory or not. “Just—can you not—why can’t you just—why do you have to try to fix everything?”

“I’m not trying to fix everything.” Hanna took a couple of steps forward, more cautious in the dark than Liza had been. “I only want you to come back to the car. It’s dark, and there’s a storm coming.”

“Don’t be melodramatic.”

“I’m not.” Hanna was still doing her trying-to-deal-with-your-irrationality voice. “There is an actual storm coming, and we will actually get stuck in it if you don’t come back to the car. Come on, I’ve found the turning we missed. If we get going, we’ll be at the hotel in half an hour.”

Liza stared at her wife silhouetted in the car headlights and tried desperately to sift through a decade of love and bitterness. Standing there backlit, her close-cropped hair—it had been greying since her mid-twenties and was now a steely shade that matched her eyes—and business-casual suit made her look like an elf who’d quit working for Santa and hooked up with MI5. For the best part of ten years, Hanna had been the most fascinating human being Liza had ever laid eyes on. Right now, she was a pain in the arse.

“All right.” Shivering slightly, and at least a little glad to be escaping the night air, Liza began to trudge back to the car. “But so we’re clear: I’m still not okay.”

“Noted.”

They drove in silence for a while, and when fat, heavy raindrops started to pelt the windscreen, Liza allowed herself a quiet moment to resent the fact that Hanna hadn’t just been overbearing; she’d been overbearing and right.

When the predicted half hour had passed, light wavered like will-o’-wisps out of the darkness. The Westmacott Hotel was a castle, an actual castle, because of course Hanna had booked them an actual castle. Her inability to do anything even remotely by halves was one of the things Liza loved about her. Had loved. Still loved. Even if it was hard to remember sometimes.

With the rain, it was difficult to make out details of the hotel-slash-castle until it was practically on top of them. It loomed out of the storm in a tableau of gothic excess, a flag flying from a tower overlooking the courtyard, windows gleaming defiant against the night. Leaving the car in the sparsely occupied car park, Liza and Hanna fought their way through downpour to the main doors.

Inside, the near-medieval opulence of the hotel’s façade gave way to a more modern refinement. The fittings still had an original vibe, in the old rather than new sense of the word. Neoclassical pillars stretched from floor (marble) to ceiling (rose-decorated), and deep leather armchairs were scattered in corners for the convenience of guests. To Liza’s right, a spiral staircase led up into the tower, while ahead a set of majestic steps swept up to the first floor and down to who knew where. Even the gleaming hardwood check-in desk had an air of antiquity about it that the man behind it—despite his relative youth—matched effortlessly.

He introduced himself as Mr Burgh and explained that he was the manager of the hotel. This raised a bit of an eyebrow from Hanna, who had made the reservation with somebody different, but it was late, and both of them were tired, and the mystery of the recently replaced hotel manager would need to wait for another time.

Mr Burgh checked them in with benign efficiency, and they were helped upstairs by a skinny young man who couldn’t have been more than twenty. The room itself was sumptuous, with a four-poster bed and fresh flowers, and a portrait of some woman in a white dress like the mysterious, tragic victim in a Victorian ghost story.

It was perfect. It was fucking perfect. Perfect enough that for a moment it was really hard for Liza to stay angry at Hanna for booking it without consulting her.

“They had more modern rooms,” Hanna explained, still a little defensive, “but I thought you’d want something classic.”

She did. Because even though part of her—quite a large part of her—thought that being into gothic splendour and old-world opulence was problematic and imperialist, and probably internalised colonialism or internalised classism or something, Liza fucking loved this shit. The rain was turning to hail now, rapping a tattoo against the windowpanes, but she could already imagine the view over the highlands and how majestic it would look. How it would feel to stand there and gaze out over the lochs and mountains like she was the heroine of some gothic novel. Or the villain.

And perhaps it was subversive. Here she was, a girl from Tooting Bec whose grandparents had come over from Jamaica on the Windrush, and she’d married a swanky city stockbroker and was staying in a room Queen Victoria might have stayed in. Or perhaps it was just capitalism masquerading as subversion.

“It’s …” Liza tried. But gratitude was still at war with anger. “It’s really thoughtful,” she said flatly. “Of course, actually asking me first would have been more thoughtful.”

Hanna sat down on the bed. Not that long ago—and when had they reached the point where three or four years counted as not that long—the sight of Hanna perched on the edge of a four-poster bed in an elegant hotel room would have been it for the evening. They’d have been lost in each other until gone midnight, a private fantasy of wanting and longing that made all the difficult parts of their relationship seem trivial.

Without even looking up, Hanna said, “We’ll miss dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Neither am I, especially, but Emmeline White is the head chef here.”

Liza looked blank.

“The one with the big glasses and kooky earrings who sometimes judges a round on Great British Menu.”

“Oh, right.” There was still a tension in the air, but the drive and the relatively pleasant surroundings were bleaching hostility into apathy. “I like her.”

“I know you do. Of course, she was also an internationally renowned chef before she did a spot on a TV show.”

Hanna didn’t mean it as snide. Liza knew she didn’t mean it as snide. And it was important to remember that you could be a successful career woman without also getting your face on iPlayer. But now wasn’t the time to make that point. “Sorry, not all of us grew up eating in Michelin-starred restaurants.”

“I did not grow—” Hanna checked herself. “There’s drinks in the drawing room if you want to go down. It’s pretty, I think.”

In all honesty, Liza was not especially interested in drinks, and while she was interested in pretty drawing rooms, she wasn’t quite willing to give Hanna the satisfaction of admitting that. But she also wasn’t interested in sitting around an expensive room in an expensive hotel for two days and three nights, glaring at her wife with nothing to say. So they went downstairs to see if they could find something to say there.

Chapter Two

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