Moving slowly once again, Lizzie picks her way through the scattered boxes and lowers herself cautiously onto the edge of a chair. She keeps the gun in her lap, thumb tracing unconsciously over the grooves in the chamber.

(Once upon a time, it was believed that the miniaturisation of laser technology would make bullets obsolete, that - with the new generation of weapons flooding the market - guns like this would cease production, become antiques. Instead, they simply became Option B: weapons for those discerning customers looking to go back to basics, without all the unnecessary paraphernalia of things like registration, or electronic tags. Waste not.)

"It looked like an accident," she says. She's more composed now, and there's a certain sureness in her voice that's part real, and part projected.

It was supposed to look like an accident.