Page 9 of Murder Most Actual

Carefully, as if trying not to crack ice or break a spell, Hanna edged along the bed and pressed a hand to Liza’s cheek. “And I think you’re beautiful. Endlessly, heartbreakingly fucking beautiful.” She leaned forward and kissed Liza gently on the lips, and it was intimate and distant at the same time and Liza almost wanted to cry from it.

With a decidedly conflicted knot in her stomach, Liza pulled back. “I want to—but—it’s been a long day.”

“It’s been a long year,” Hanna pointed out.

“And … we’re still … we’ve just had a fight. A serious this-might-be-over fight.”

Hanna pulled her hand away. “Remember when post-fight sex was the best sex we ever had?”

“Yeah.” Without thinking, Liza gathered the covers around herself like a child’s safety blanket. “But that was when fights were about politics or books or friend group drama. Not when they were about—I don’t know—how you make me feel superfluous.”

If she’d slapped Hanna she couldn’t have got a stronger reaction. “I make you feel superfluous?”

“No. Yes. Sometimes. Not really. It was—” Shit. She was fucking this up. She was fucking this up, and she was going to lose her wife. “I’m tired. But you’re so in control of everything and so decisive about everything, and I sometimes feel like I’m just … just following you.”

“Most Actual wasn’t following me.”

“And it’s killed our time together. It might have killed us. And it’s not like it brings in half the money your job does, so it’s just me throwing away my time on a vanity project when I could be spending it with you.”

Another silence. The world outside was black and white and empty. “I don’t—” Hanna said at last. “I don’t know how to fix that. I’m proud of you, of what you do, I really am. It’s just …”

“Not sustainable?”

And Hanna, who so often had all the answers, had no answer.

“How about we think about this in the morning?” Liza suggested. “How about you just—can you just hold me?”

So Hanna held her. And it helped.

Or that’s what Liza told herself.

She couldn’t sleep, but she pretended she could for Hanna’s benefit, and she suspected Hanna was doing the same for hers. In the dark, without needing to look at each other or speak to each other, when your only language was touch, it was so easy to be reassured, to feel that this person you were with, whose shape and scent and body you knew almost as well as your own, could never not be there. So they lay with their eyes closed and held each other, their arms making promises neither of them were sure they could keep.

It seemed silly, just then, to be wondering where it all went wrong. Not even silly; naïve. After all, marriage didn’t work like that. It wasn’t a machine, or a game, and if it was a mystery, it was a whole lot more Dashiell Hammett than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was messy and complex, and the really awkward thing about it was that it wasn’t supposed to be anything. Anything except what you made it, at least.

That, Liza felt, was the great thing about a murder. With a murder you knew where you were. Somebody was dead. Somebody was responsible. And at the end somebody went to jail. Well, sometimes somebody went to jail. A depressing fact you learned in true crime reporting was that a whole lot of murders went unsolved, and even if somebody was convicted, beyond reasonable doubt was a whole lot more doubtful than it seemed in the books.

But compared to marriage, murders—even real murders—were a walk in the park. Marriage was getting to the end of the serial and hearing the host say, “When I first started this journey, I thought I’d find answers, but all I have is more questions,” every single day.

Forensics. That was what relationships needed. You should be able to send arguments off to a lab and get a little report back saying, “This happened because your mother-in-law is an unbearable snob,” or, “Trace DNA evidence shows that you definitely did say you were going to be back late this evening and your wife just didn’t hear you because she never pays attention.”

Except, given the way she’d seen forensics work in actual cases she’d studied, the reports would be more likely to come back saying, “There’s a thirty percent chance that one of you is being an arsehole here, but we can’t reliably say which.”

Besides, where did it all go wrong wasn’t even the right question. Because it hadn’t. It wasn’t like they’d stopped loving each other. Liza was pretty sure you couldn’t get as titanically furious as she and Hanna sometimes got with each other if you didn’t, on some level, give a shit. It was just … somewhere along the line, everything had become so much work.

And to give Hanna credit, she was doing the work. This holiday was proof of that. Of course, as usual she was doing the work without consulting her, y’know, wife, so she lost some major points there. But on the long list of things of which Hanna could never be accused, apathy definitely came near the top. Apathy, and unwillingness to speak her mind.

It was no use. Sleep wasn’t happening and pretending to sleep wasn’t helping. Easing gently out of bed, Liza made her way over to the window and stood staring out into the snow. Their room was on the east side of the hotel, overlooking the road they’d driven down on the way in. Not that it was visible now. Even without the snow, the rural night meant everything beyond the golden light of the hotel windows was swathed in shadow, just eerie impressions of forests and mountains in the distance. It was, all in all, an unfairly romantic place to be physically when you were in such an unromantic place emotionally. For a couple with its shit together, it would, she was sure, have been a once in a lifetime experience.

In a fit of sentimentality, she looked back at Hanna still curled up in bed. It was a cliché, but there was something about the artless vulnerability of sleep that made her—made everyone, Liza supposed; that was the cliché part of it—look almost mythologically beautiful. Like some nymph that one of the more arseholey Greek gods (insofar as that narrowed it down) had trapped in an enchanted slumber at the back of a cave. Well, at the back of a cave in a rather nice hotel in Scotland.

With a heavy sigh that expressed a bewildering cocktail of feelings that Liza preferred not to think about, she came back to bed.

Or at least, she would have come back to bed if she hadn’t been interrupted by a scream.

Chapter Five

Emmeline, in the Courtyard, with the Body

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