Page 80 of Murder Most Actual

Gently, Hanna put her arms around her, although the angle on the steps was awkward. “It’s okay. We’re going to be okay.”

“And what if we’re not? What if this is it and we’re going to die here?”

“Hush.” Hanna stroked her hand across Liza’s hair. “We’ll be all right. The snow’s melting. It’ll all be over soon.”

“That’s what the colonel thought.”

Moving up a step, Hanna looked Liza in the eyes, told her once more it was going to be all right, and then kissed her.

“Is this your way of distracting me?”

“Is it working?”

Tears still drying on her cheeks, Liza gave a half-nod. “A bit?”

“Leave the flypaper. Come upstairs with me. We’ll lock the door and wait.”

She couldn’t. For the past few days, the mystery had been the only thing keeping Liza together. Without it, what was she? A woman barely into her thirties with a moderately successful podcast who might not live to see another morning. Pretending to be a spunky amateur detective had made things just about bearable, and if she let go of that, all she had left was the fear.

Hanna took her hand. “It’s okay. It’ll be okay. You’ve done really well, but this is getting … this is getting super real and super close to being over, and what I want, more than anything, is to know that we’re both safe.”

And wasn’t that what Liza wanted too? For all her questions and her curiosities, wasn’t this, right here, right now, what really mattered? So she put the flypaper down and let Hanna lead her back to their room. They could have gone back to Belloc’s, but since a lot of the evidence was pointing to Mr Burgh as the killer, it didn’t seem like moving was going to help them much.

Once inside they locked the door, dragged an armchair in front of it, closed the curtains, locked the thumb drive in the safe, and went to sit on the bed holding hands and facing each other.

“I’m sorry,” Hanna said for what felt like the hundredth time. “I didn’t realise you were this freaked out.”

Liza was shaking slightly. “I don’t think I did either. It was just easier to—I don’t know—treat it all like a big mystery to solve instead of something that might actually hurt us.”

“And you did a good job,” said Hanna reassuringly. “The flypaper thing seems like it was probably right.”

“Maybe, but it does us no good.” She slid forward and let herself fall into Hanna’s arms; let herself feel protected for a moment, even if it was an illusion. “We still can’t defend ourselves.”

Hanna shook her head. “I know. But—but we’re as safe as we can be right now, and, well, if I’m going to be trapped in an inescapable murder hotel with anybody, I’m glad it’s you.”

It seemed like the moment to kiss her. So Liza did. And at first it still felt strange, like trying to remember something you were about to say that you were sure had been important. But after everything that had happened there seemed less and less point holding on to the past. Because who they were now wasn’t who they’d been when they met, or when they were married, or when they’d drifted apart. Or even who they’d been when Malcom Ackroyd had taken the long drop off the balcony.

As she let Hanna ease her back onto the bed, Liza was aware, suddenly, of everything around her. Or perhaps more accurately, was aware of being aware of it. Almost since she’d arrived, she’d been watching and listening for the slightest sign of something wrong: footsteps in the night, a dusting of snow that shouldn’t be there, the scent of blood in the air. It had been keeping her up at night and making her sick and tense. So, she let it go, let herself focus on something else—on Hanna, and the play of her hands across her skin, her lips tracing the line of her collarbones.

“Is this …?” Hanna asked. “Are you okay?”

Somewhere off in the hotel a door opened and closed, and Liza tried to ignore it. “No. But I want to think about something that isn’t murder.”

“Same.”

So for a while, they did. In a room with shuttered windows and a barricaded door, they built themselves a tiny island of calm out of fingertips and memories. A quiet place to re-learn ten years of coming together and parting and fighting and loving and forgetting. And as Liza undid the buttons of Hanna’s black shirt that was identical to every other black shirt that she owned; and as Hanna slipped off Liza’s jeans and looked up for just a fraction of a second with wonder in her eyes—the same wonder that was always in her eyes—there was a moment when they were everybody they had ever been. When they kissed it was their wedding day again; their first date again; the night they hadn’t quite met and Liza had gone home telling herself she’d missed out on something incredible.

Somewhere in the darkness, birds were calling. Somewhere in the hotel, a floorboard creaked, and the timbers whispered with the weather. Somewhere in Liza’s mind fragments of facts and scraps of observations were catching together like burdock seeds and forming a conclusion that she couldn’t quite see. But she didn’t care. What was, was, and what would be, would be, and there and then she was alone in the night with the woman she had loved for a decade, and nothing else mattered.

“You are still,” Hanna whispered, as the row of kisses she had been running up Liza’s body brought her lips close to her ear, “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”

“And you”—Liza turned, her face so close to her wife’s that their lips brushed as she spoke—”still take my breath away.”

Hanna’s fingernails dug into Liza’s flanks as she drew her closer. “I’m sorry I stopped for a while.”

“I’m sorry I stopped too.”

There were, Liza decided, different kinds of silence. There was the kind that had settled over their marriage in the last couple of years—a carbon monoxide silence that stifled and killed without a whisper or a trace. Then there was the kind of silence that fell on the hotel every time they found a new body—tense and bloody and ready at any moment to erupt into screaming. Neither were silences she was keen to revisit. And then there was this—the intimate silence of lovers in the dark. A place where the words had all been spoken and there was nothing left but breath and heartbeats and skin on skin on skin.

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