‘What her reasons were, I have no idea. I imagine it will come out in the investigation. I suspect Bradley knew what was going on, and that he was killed for it.’ He looks down at her, his face serious. ‘I think Lauren is probably a psychopath – and very good at pretending that she isn’t.’ He hesitates. ‘They’re different you know – not like you and me.’

She looks at him more closely. He seems different to how he did the first night they arrived. More weary, less sure of himself. They’re all different. She wonders how she seems to him now, how she’s changed. She knows that when she gets into her car, Riley will be in the passenger seat beside her, saying, He killed his wife. Stay away from him.

Beverly walks slowly and sadly out of the front door of the hotel past David and Gwen and down the steps. But Henry is still in the hotel, in his chair by the fire, as if he will never leave. It feels strange to leave without him, to leave him stuck there. But of course the coroner will have him taken away for an autopsy. There must be an autopsy. There will be arrangements to make, a funeral to see to. She thinks about how to tell the kids that their father is dead. It will come as a shock. You don’t expect your parents to go away together for a weekend and only one of them to come back.

But first she must stop at the police station and give her statement. Then, they’ve been told, they will all be allowed to go home. All except Lauren.

Matthew is getting into his car. His grief weighs him down. David and Gwen are still talking on the front porch. Beverly gets into her car, backs up, and then turns slowly down the drive, towards town and the police station.

What a difference a weekend can make. She’d come up here in hopes of reconnecting with her husband. Now she is going home a widow.

She checks her rear-view mirror to see if anyone is watching her. There’s no one behind her, and no one can see her in the dark. Even so, she waits until she is around the first curve of the drive before she smiles.

She feels so light it’s like she’s floating.

She thinks back to when they were searching the hotel, when she helped search the others’ bags. She saw the drugs that Lauren had, the sleeping pills. An entire vial of them. Full. After holding it up for all to see, no one had noticed her spill part of the bottle into her hand inside the overnight bag and then slip the pills into her pocket. It was dark, and no one was paying much attention.

She hadn’t known for sure that she would do it, not until Bradley had been killed, too. And she hadn’t known for sure if it would be enough, but she sneaked the pills into her husband’s Scotch in the dark and hoped for the best. Perhaps, combined with all the Scotch he’d been drinking, it would be enough. It was. She knows that the autopsy will show the sleeping pills, that he was murdered. But he will be one of four people murdered at Mitchell’s Inn this weekend. And Lauren, the murderer of the other three, can’t exactly say anything without implicating herself. She can’t say, But I didn’t kill Henry!

She can’t say a thing.