Murder Most Actual
Author: Alexis Hall
Date: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00
Description: From the author of Boyfriend Material and Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake comes a cozy mystery that revisits the Golden Age of detective fiction, starring a heroine who's more podcaster than private eye and topped with a lethal dose of parody—perfect for fans of Clue, Knives Out, and Only Murders in the Building! When up-and-coming true crime podcaster Liza and her corporate financier wife Hanna head to a luxurious hotel in the Scottish Highlands, they're hoping for a chance to rekindle their marriage—not to find themselves trapped in the middle of an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery with n
Publisher: Kobo Originals

Copyright © 2021 by Alexis Hall

Published by Rakuten Kobo Inc. as Kobo Originals

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Edited by Rebecca Brewer

Original illustration & cover design by Monika Roe

Production by Bright Wing Media

All rights reserved. For information about permissions to reproduce this book address Rakuten Kobo, 1-135 Liberty Street, Toronto, Ontario, M6K 1A7.

ISBN 9781774536278

Website: www.kobo.com/originals

Contents

1. Chapter One: Hanna, in the Car, with the Map

2. Chapter Two: Sir Richard, in the Drawing Room, with Drinks

3. Chapter Three: The Guests, in the Dining Room, with Dinner

4. Chapter Four: Liza, in the Bedroom, with Questions

5. Chapter Five: Emmeline, in the Courtyard, with the Body

6. Chapter Six: Ruby, in the Dark, with a Red Dress On

7. Chapter Seven: Belloc, in the Dining Room, with Instructions

8. Chapter Eight: Sir Richard, in the Garden, with a Wager

9. Chapter Nine: Emmeline, in the Kitchen, with a Story

10. Chapter Ten: Ruby, in the Bedroom, with Suggestions

11. Chapter Eleven: Liza, in the Boathouse, with a Camera

12. Chapter Twelve: Liza, in the Hedgerow, with a Hunch

13. Chapter Thirteen: Mrs Ackroyd, in the Lounge, with Witnesses

14. Chapter Fourteen: Vivien, in the Bedroom, with the Door Closed

15. Chapter Fifteen: Colonel Coleman, in the Dark, with the Dagger

16. Chapter Sixteen: Liza, in the Dining Room, with a Theory

17. Chapter Seventeen: Hanna, in the Bedroom, with a Lot of Paper

18. Chapter Eighteen: Lady Tabitha, in the Library, with the Dagger

19. Chapter Nineteen: Somebody, in the Bedroom, with a Gift

20. Chapter Twenty: Hanna, in the Bedroom, with the Numbers

21. Chapter Twenty-One: Sir Richard, in the Dining Room, with a Question

22. Chapter Twenty-Two: Liza, in the Stables, with the Bodies

23. Chapter Twenty-Three: Professor Worth, in the Bedroom, with a Pistol

24. Chapter Twenty-Four: Liza, in the Corridor, with a Key

25. Chapter Twenty-Five: Belloc, in his Room, with Theories

26. Chapter Twenty-Six: The Colonel, in his Room, with a Gun

27. Chapter Twenty-Seven: Everybody, in the Lounge, with Guns

28. Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Colonel, in his Room, with Breakfast

29. Chapter Twenty-Nine: Liza, in the Cellar, with the Poison

30. Chapter Thirty: Mr B, in the Bedroom, with a Gun

31. Chapter Thirty-One: Sir Richard, in the Drawing Room, with a Proposal

32. Chapter Thirty-Two: Liza, in the End, with the Denouement

33. Epilogue: Rachael, in the Studio, with Questions

34. More By Alexis Hall

Landmarks

1. Cover
2. Copyright Page
3. Table of Contents
4. Body Matter

Chapter One

Hanna, in the Car, with the Map

Friday, late evening

They were lost.

“We’re lost.”

“We’re not lost.“

Liza sighed instead of screaming and stared helplessly at what her phone was telling her was a map of their current location, but which looked to her like a tiny blue dot in the middle of a large green nothing. “We’re lost. According to Google we are currently somewhere in Scotland. That’s lost.”

With a growl that on a different night and in a different mood Liza would have found sexy, her wife Hanna pulled over to the side of the road, reached over to the glove compartment, and retrieved a paper map. “Use that.”

Liza wasn’t sure she could. She wasn’t sure she could even work out how to unfold it without putting a tear right through the middle of the M6. “Right, just let me get my compass and my sextant.”

“You’re a grown woman, Liza. You went to university. Surely you can read a map.”

Trying very, very hard to stay calm at the end of a very, very long drive at the start of what in theory was supposed to be a lovely weekend break, Liza let her head flop back against the headrest and stared pointedly upwards. “I can read a map. When it’s a normal map on a screen with a little trail telling me where I’m meant to be going. Not when it’s a sheet of dead tree the size of a tablecloth.”

“I told you there wouldn’t be any reception out here.” Hanna drummed her hands on the steering wheel, and her voice got that I-am-trying-to-be-reasonable tone that Liza particularly resented. “The whole point is that there isn’t any reception out here. We’re going to have a long weekend with just the two of us, and no work, and no social media, and nothing to get in the way. That’s what we agreed to.”

The whole not-screaming thing was getting increasingly difficult. “No, Hanna, it’s what you agreed to. By the time I’d even found out about this plan, you’d already booked the tickets.”

“Well, I’m sorry for trying to surprise you.” Adjusting her severe, half-rimmed glasses, Hanna did her best to look composed and mostly succeeded. “If you hated the idea this much, we could easily have got a refund. Or just stayed at home. Because we don’t actually need to worry about money, because in case you’ve forgotten, the job you so resent my spending a lot of time on pays really fucking well.”

Liza had already opened the car door and stepped out into the night.

“Where are you going?” Hanna called after her.

“Getting some fresh air.”

“On a mountain in the Scottish Highlands after dark? Do you have a literal death wish?”

There were probably safer ways to take a breather. But Liza had always been the kind of girl who ran with scissors. “It’s a road, Hanna. A quite well-maintained road that cars can get along just fine. I’m not going to fall off a cliff and die if I walk ten paces.”

To illustrate her point Liza walked ten paces, then ten more. If she was being totally, one thousand percent honest with herself, it was slightly scarier than she’d anticipated. The light from the car’s headlights was swallowed up very quickly, and then there was nothing but the night. And not a normal, sensible night like you got in London, everything bathed in the cool glow of streetlamps and a thousand tiny window-dots spread out below you like the opposite of stars. A bleak, primordial, rural night made of shadows and wind, where a black sky, thick with black clouds, flowed into a black hillside thick with black trees, and when you stopped and listened you could hear things moving that could be far too close or so far away that the whole world seemed like an endless void.

She stopped. She’d gone far enough that she couldn’t see where she was putting her feet, and if she went much further she might genuinely lose sight of the car. And it was cold. She’d have said unseasonably cold, but they were high up, and a depressing fact of British weather was that you were as likely to get snow at Easter as at Christmas.

The sensible thing to do would be to go back. To tell Hanna that she was sorry—well, not sorry exactly, but that she didn’t want to be fighting right at this moment, and that while she still felt that this holiday was borderline non-consensual, she did on some level appreciate the gesture.

Because God knew that one of them had to.

Fuck.

How had they got here? Trying their damnedest not to have a screaming match at eight o’clock on Good Friday while navigating their way down narrow, blustery roads to a luxury hotel in a mobile phone blackspot. Hadn’t they done everything right? It wasn’t like they’d rushed into marriage—they’d been dating for years, and even when it was suddenly legalised and half their friends were getting high on equality, they’d waited. They’d taken it slow, and lived together first, and had all the big, serious conversations about life goals, and values, and whether they wanted children, and whose parents they’d spend Christmas with.

But maybe that was the problem. Maybe they’d lulled themselves into a false sense of security. A mutual commitment to support each other’s careers had been fine when they were twenty-two and both sending their CVs around fruitlessly in an economy that really wasn’t interested in twenty-two-year-olds. It had even been bearable when they were twenty-eight and Hanna had been working twelve-hour days for one of those financial services firms that are responsible for all the world’s problems, and Liza had been … well, she’d still kind of been sending her CV around, to be honest. Because it turned out that a maths degree and a desire—or at least a willingness—to use it to make yourself rich and other people richer was way more marketable than a degree in Art History and a vague notion that you’d like to do “something creative”.

Much as Liza hated to think about it, her podcast taking off had been what really kicked their problems into high gear. Murder Most Actual had started almost by accident, when she’d bonded with a then-co-worker over a mutual love of crime, true and otherwise. It had been a fun side project; something to do when Hanna was working weekends, which she did with increasing regularity. But people had liked it. Really liked it. Something about the just-two-girls-talking-murder vibe of the show had let them reach an audience that enjoyed true crime but found the more salacious or sententious series ethically questionable.

And just like that, Liza had commitments. Commitments which had started eating into the few evenings and weekends she and Hanna could actually be together. Commitments which meant she was spending more time with her co-host, Rachael, than with her actual wife. And while Rachael was extraordinarily heterosexual, that didn’t quite stop the jealousy. Especially when fans of the cast started shipping them.

It was around then that the fighting had started. Which, by itself, Liza could cope with—her parents had been great fighters because they’d both been stubborn as hell and convinced they were right about everything—but with the fighting had come the drifting, and the drifting she had way less of a handle on.

From back up the road, there was the sound of a door opening and closing, followed by footsteps, then Hanna’s voice. “Come back to the car.”

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

Sir Richard, in the Drawing Room, with Drinks

Friday, late evening

In different circumstances, it would have been a dream holiday. A silly dream, admittedly. A dream about sitting in wingback chairs under subtle lighting while hail rattled on the highlands outside. Instead, it was almost stifling. Too much proximity as an overreaction to too much distance.

The drawing room was warm and cosy and smelled of fresh-brewed coffee. A real log fire crackled in a grate, and next to the real log fire sat an equally real, although substantially less loggish, gentleman dressed in a manner that might have been called natty at around the time people used the word natty, but which now read more as hipsterish; all three-piece suits and watch chains. He was in that unguessable age range that could have been anywhere from twenty-something to forty-something, and he somehow gave the impression of wearing a monocle despite not, in fact, wearing a monocle.

“I say,” he said, glancing up from his newspaper, “are you new? Where are you in from?”

“They have come from London.” This observation came from a second man, short and with a distinct, if non-specific, western European accent. Unlike his companion, he did not bother to look up from the journal in which he was furiously, but meticulously, writing.

“I didn’t ask you, Perseus.” His natty companion threw a sullen look across the room, then extended a hand to Liza and Hanna. “I’m Quirke, by the way. Sir Richard Quirke. But you can call me Dicky—all my chums do.”

“What makes you think they will be your”—Perseus cleared his throat—”chums?”

It was, Liza had to admit, a reasonable comment. Although honestly, she wasn’t sure whether Sir Richard’s aggressive friendliness was better or worse than the other man’s stand-offishness.

“Just a figure of speech, old boy. My friend here, if you can use the word, is Perseus Belloc. He’s a dashed rum sort, and between you and me, I think he’s a spy.”

“If I were a spy,” replied Perseus Belloc, “would I not be less, how you say, rum?”

Liza had never heard the words rum or, for that matter, how you say used in cold blood in her life, but this was a very exclusive hotel and probably attracted strange people. “I’m Liza,”—she took the offered handshake—”and this is …”

“Your lady wife, no doubt,” Sir Richard finished for her. Then he cast a coolly smug glance at Belloc. “You see, we can all play the remarkable deductions game.”

“Pathetic. You saw their wedding rings. A child’s trick.” Belloc made a precise, dismissive gesture. He had a neatness to him that bordered on the meticulous, his movements matching his suit in their crispness.

“And you guessed that they were from London,” retorted Sir Richard, “because you saw their car out the window and, like their clothes, it’s expensive but not ostentatious. Add in the fact that—sorry, rude of me, didn’t let you give me your name.”

“Hanna,” said Hanna. She didn’t look especially amused.

“That Ms Hanna,” Sir Richard went on, “has the formal air of a city financier about her, while dear Liza—sorry, couldn’t resist—carries herself in a more alternative fashion, implying a background in the creative industries. I fail to see what other conclusion you could possibly have come to.”

There was, at last, a pause in the barrage of verbiage, although neither Hanna nor Liza were quite sure what to say into the gap. Fearing that the opportunity, if missed, would pass them by forever, Liza tried: “So, is it nice?”

“Oh yes, capital place.” Sir Richard was still beaming. “Come here all the time with the old aunt. Mountain air, see, good for her lungs.”

“And the food is excellent,” added Belloc. “The chef, she is magnifique.”

Hanna had slipped away from Liza’s side and poured them both a cup of tea. Again, thoughtful. And in fairness, it was exactly what Liza would have wanted, but it would have been nice to be consulted. But that was Hanna all over, sweet and considerate and high-handed and arbitrary all at once. In a fruitless act of defiance, Liza sweetened her mug with two lumps of sugar she normally didn’t take.

“And what is it you both do?” Liza asked. There had been, she was sure, a time she was better at small talk, although maybe that was just the confidence of youth.

“Not a great deal, if I’m honest.” Sir Richard shot her a self-deprecating grin. “What you might call a gentleman of leisure. I say, your voice sounds oddly familiar, if you don’t mind my mentioning it. Which is peculiar because I’m sure I’d remember if you’d been at any of my clubs.”

This didn’t happen often, but it happened more than it used to. “Do you … do you by any chance listen to Murder Most Actual?”

Sir Richard gave a gasp of recognition. “My God, you’re that Liza? I mean, it’s not exactly an uncommon name, so you’ll forgive a fellow for not making the connection, but I should have known at once.”

“Oh, have you met a fan?” Hanna sidled over and put an arm around Liza’s waist that was probably meant to be supportive but felt possessive, almost condescending. “I swear we can’t go anywhere these days.”

Something seemed to be confusing Sir Richard. “Hang on, though, you’re not … I was under the impression that you and Rachael were … that is, I suppose you are, but possibly, she isn’t. Or I mean, if she is, then she is, but not with you. As it were.”

Hanna’s arm was getting tense, and Liza did her best—really did her best—to give off reassuring vibes she wasn’t quite feeling and wouldn’t have known how to give anyway. “No. I mean, if what you’re saying is what I think you’re saying, then yes, I’m gay. No, Rachael isn’t gay—not that it’s either of our business—and even if she was, it wouldn’t mean we’d automatically be sleeping together. Especially because, as you can see, I’m married to somebody else.” She slipped a reciprocal arm around Hanna and gave her a half-hearted squeeze. “Happily married,” she added, then immediately wished she hadn’t because when it came to ladies doth protest too much-ing, she might as well have just said “Also, my marriage definitely isn’t falling apart.”

“Am I to take it correctly”—Belloc’s tone was thick with contempt—”that you are one of those interfering true crime podcasters who go around opening up old cases, and casting doubt on old convictions, and turning the private tragedies of strangers into clicks and content?”

Liza winced. “Sort of?”

“They’re actually very conscientious.” There was Hanna, riding to her rescue like she always did. It would have felt romantic if they weren’t in the middle of a non-consensual holiday, and if Liza hadn’t been drinking a cup of tea she hadn’t asked for. “They never speculate, they never harass survivors or dredge up old wounds. They just talk about interesting cases.”

“‘Two Girls Drinking Wine and Talking Murder,’” put in Sir Richard, who clearly felt the conversation had gone on too long without a contribution from his corner.

“Murder,” said Belloc with more than a hint of sanctimony, “is not a subject for talk with the girls. It is not something for a casual chat over wine and nibbles. Murder is a serious subject for serious people. It is, as the saying has it and most rightly, a subject most foul.”

That quieted the room for a moment, even the loquacious Sir Richard. Then Hanna said simply: “Bollocks.”

“If you will pardon me, madame, it is not, how you say, bollocks.”

“Yes, it is.” Hanna was doing her scornful tone. It was a tone that Liza hated to be on the end of but secretly enjoyed hearing directed at other people. “The world is full of terrible shit, but everyone copes with terrible shit in different ways. And yes, obviously, there will be people who feel hurt by podcasts like Actual, and there will be people who feel helped by them. And people who don’t give a fuck either way. But from what you’ve said it sounds like all you really care about is girls playing on your lawn.”

“Belloc does not have to listen to this,” Belloc said. And demonstrating his determination not to listen to it, he rose and left the drawing room.

“Well.” Sir Richard leaned contentedly back in his chair. “You showed him, eh what?”

Hanna settled down onto a short sofa and, after a longer pause than was probably appropriate for a married woman, Liza settled down beside her.

“I wasn’t trying to show anybody anything,” Hanna insisted. “I just can’t stand gatekeepy bullshit. I get enough of that at work.”

There were no two ways about it: Hanna was magnificent. She was a fighter. She was forging her own way in a notoriously hostile world, and Liza loved her for it. But fuck was it annoying right then. “Thank you for standing up for me,” said Liza without much conviction. Then she kissed her wife on the cheek, and it felt like a lie.

For a while they chatted with the ebullient Sir Richard. Which mostly involved him talking without pausing for breath while Hanna and Liza made occasional encouraging noises. So it came as something of a relief when the pseudo-monologue was interrupted by raised voices from the corridor outside.

“… nearly eight thirty.”

“So what? Nobody is waiting for us, Vivien. We are on holiday and we can take as long as we damned well please.”

“Don’t you ‘we’ me, I was ready half an hour ago. You were the one who had to ‘see if you could get reception.’”

“There was a signal on the balcony. I’m sure of it.”

“We’re in the middle of nowhere, Malcom. You won’t get a signal no matter how much you wave your phone around and stand on one leg.”

“Just because I have the sort of mind where I have to try things for myself instead of just accepting—” The door to the drawing room opened and an unmistakably married couple entered, any signs of their previous bickering vanishing like a road in the fog.

“Why hello, Sir Richard.” The man who was presumably called Malcom gave a cheery no-problems-here smile. “Lovely to see you. And new arrivals as well?”

Sir Richard rose with the effortless social grace of the class for whom effortless social grace was the only skill they needed to develop. “Quite so. Liza and Hanna, these are Vivien and Malcom Ackroyd. Vivien and Malcom Ackroyd, these are Liza Blaine and Hanna—sorry, didn’t catch the surname.”

“Also Blaine,” said Hanna. “I took her name.”

“Really?” Sir Richard looked like he was trying to work out how to parse this. “Deuced modern of you. Or possibly deuced old-fashioned. Hard to tell which when you’re both gels. How did you decide which way it went?”

“My original name was Hanna Smellie.”

“Ah.” Sir Richard’s nose wrinkled. “Probably the best decision all round then.”

The Ackroyds made the usual pleased-to-meet-you noises and settled into two of the available chairs. For a moment, the conversation stalled as everybody tried to navigate the complexities of having a polite chat with people you would never under normal circumstances choose to spend time with. But in the end social nicety won out, and the five of them eased into the usual nothing-topics of people who meet on holiday and have nothing in common: the journey, the weather, their various experiences of the stay so far.

Eventually the atmosphere relaxed enough that Liza was almost able to forget how little she actually wanted to be there, and things settled into a natural rhythm. That rhythm being Sir Richard pontificating on whatever topic came into his head, and his various interlocutors making interjections whenever they could. After about fifteen minutes of trying to get a word in edgeways, Malcom Ackroyd—doing a remarkable job of pretending he hadn’t just finished a screaming row with his wife—suggested that they go in to dinner. And although Liza wasn’t especially hungry, it seemed rude to decline the invitation. So, as an almost-functional party of five—or at the very least, a party of five with their resentments deeply buried—they went through to the dining hall.

Chapter Three

The Guests, in the Dining Room, with Dinner

Friday, late evening

There were, Liza was beginning to notice, a lot of signs that the hotel hadn’t been designed as a hotel. The dining room was one such sign—rather than little individual tables where guests could get on with politely ignoring each other, it was laid out more like something you’d get in a stately home: one long table around which everybody gathered, while near-invisible waitstaff faded in and out of the background like servile ghosts.

Belloc, apparently, was not gracing the dining hall with his presence, but several other guests were. A tall man in his sixties was seated at one end of the table, talking to a younger man in a non-threatening green jumper. The older gentleman, who was sporting a somewhat ill-chosen yellow tie, seemed to be holding forth on some issue or other, while his companion bore up with practiced grace. When the newcomers entered, the older man looked up at them with a grin. Or possibly, not at them exactly, just at Mrs Ackroyd.

“Evening.” He gave a sharp, decisive nod that was probably intended as a welcome.

“Good evening, Colonel,” replied Vivien Ackroyd, taking her seat. Malcom Ackroyd sat opposite her in pointed silence.

Nearer to the door, an older woman made entirely out of corners and decorum was engaged in a far less one-sided conversation with a man of unguessable years in a plum-coloured smoking jacket.

“Ah, Dicky.” The old woman looked up at Sir Richard with what probably passed for a smile amongst the upper classes. “The professor was just telling me a fascinating story about Leibniz. Did you know that as well as being a mathematician he was also passionately committed to unravelling the Problem of Evil?”

“He was a staunch believer,” explained the man in purple, “that—as the saying goes—’everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’”

Taking a leaf from Belloc and Sir Richard’s book, Liza tried to deduce what kind of professor he actually was and came up blank.

Hanna, meanwhile, settled down at the table opposite him. “Probably an easy thing to believe if you’re an old, rich white man.”

“Can we not talk about politics?” pleaded Vivien Ackroyd.

Sir Richard took the chair next to the woman who, from context, must have been the aunt he’d mentioned earlier. Sitting as she was, severe and aristocratic with a peacock-feather shawl draped across the back of her chair, she did not look like a woman who was having trouble with her lungs.

“This isn’t politics,” offered Sir Richard cheerfully. “It’s religion.”

Malcom Ackroyd smirked. “That other famously non-divisive subject.”

The man in green leaned in from his end of the table. There was, Liza thought, something incongruous about him. He dressed like a primary school teacher, but the line of his jaw and the look in his eye said you wouldn’t want to meet him on a dark night. “Actually, they’re not as different as you’d think. Jesus was a political figure after all.”

The man in the yellow tie gave a walrus-y huff. “Oh, spare me your namby-pamby Rowan Williams why-can’t-we-just-all-get-along pulpit socialism.”

“Rowan Williams hasn’t been Archbishop of Canterbury since 2012,” said the man in green calmly. “And if it’s namby-pamby to believe the church should be in favour of justice and against injustice, then I suppose I’m just a namby-pamby person.”

The walrus bristled. “Wouldn’t have stood for it in the army.”

“Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with the army,” suggested the man in green.

That observation provoked an uncomfortable pause of the exact right length to let Sir Richard take over the conversation once more. “Oh, but where are my manners? Liza and Hanna, these are, in no particular order, my Aunt Tabitha,”—he indicated the woman next to him—”Professor James Worth of the University of … somewhere or other.”

“Don’t worry,” said the professor, “it scarcely matters.”

“Then we have Reverend Lincoln, and Colonel Coleman.” He indicated the last two men: the vicar in green and the colonel the other, both of whom made polite, if perfunctory, hellos. “Everybody, these are Liza and Hanna Blaine.” He paused for a second and then added: “They’re married.”

Lady Tabitha scrutinised the Blaines with instinctive disapproval. “Well,” she said. “How decidedly modern.”

Hanna seemed like she was about to say something, and normally, Liza would have been happy for her to; her passionate commitment to her beliefs was one of the things she loved most about her. But it was late, and she was tired, and they were in a hotel in a snowstorm surrounded by some very posh people who weren’t about to change their opinions about either lesbians or interracial relationships. “How about”—Liza leaned over and semi-whispered to her wife—”we don’t make a scene?”

“This isn’t a scene,” Hanna whispered back, “unless you turn it into a scene.”

Either in rescue or boredom, Malcom Ackroyd turned to Liza. “So, what is it you do?” he asked.

“She’s a podcaster,” answered Hanna, and Liza wanted to take it as pride, but in the moment it felt a lot like just not letting her answer.

“True crime,” added Sir Richard. “She’s fearfully good. Their miniseries on the Canonical Ripper Victims was excellent.”

Mrs Ackroyd wrinkled her nose. “I’m afraid I’ve always found that sort of thing a bit morbid.”

“Don’t be a killjoy, Vivien,” said her husband. “There’s nothing wrong with a bit of murder every now and then.”

Vivien didn’t seem convinced. “That’s what novels are for. You’re talking about real things that happened to real people.”

“And she—” Hanna began.

“We always try to bear that in mind,” Liza finished, shooting her wife an I-can-speak-for-myself look. “And everything we discuss is a matter of public record.”

“Ignore her.” Malcom Ackroyd pointed at his wife with a fork. “She just likes to make everyone feel bad about things we don’t need to feel bad about.”

Liza cringed inwardly. It was going to be one of those evenings, wasn’t it? “It’s fine,” she tried. “I do get that there are valid criticisms you can make of the genre. Still, I like to think we’re responsible in what we do.”

“And even if you’re not,” added the colonel, “it’s nobody’s bloody business.” He turned a surprisingly gentle eye to Mrs Ackroyd. “Your sensitivity does you credit, Vivien, but if the girl wants to talk about murders she can bloody well talk about murders.”

Sir Richard gave him the kind of smile people gave when they knew full well they were stirring. “Belloc disagrees. Says crime should be left to serious-minded people.”

“Belloc’s an ass,” declared the colonel.

The door burst open. “Oh, is he?” demanded Belloc, who Liza would have bet money had been waiting outside for the perfect moment to make a big entrance. “But I wonder, would the great Colonel Coleman have the courage to say this to Belloc’s face?”

The colonel stared at him. “You’re an ass.”

“Lovely to see you, Mr Belloc,” tried Mrs Ackroyd, which earned her a quiet “Don’t be so obsequious, Vivien,” from her husband that Belloc didn’t seem to hear.

Without replying to anybody, Mr Belloc settled into his seat and picked up a menu. “Let us see, let us see,” he muttered. “What is Belloc in the mood for this evening?”

Glancing over the top of his own menu, Sir Richard smiled. “You’re talking to yourself again, old man.”

“It is the only way Belloc can be sure of intelligent conversation.”

Mr Ackroyd shot a glance at his wife. “I know the feeling.”

She shot him back. “Uncalled for, Malcom.”

“Quite uncalled for,” agreed the colonel.

The professor was also perusing the menu. “Well, I’ve found the conversation perfectly charming.” He smiled at Lady Tabitha. “Mr Belloc, I don’t like to speak harshly to people, but I fear you’re being a bore.”

“Belloc is not here to entertain you.”

Not necessarily wanting to get drawn into an argument with a man who already had reason to dislike her, Liza distracted herself by trying to decide what to have for dinner. Of course, even the simple dishes had elements served alongside them that were basically designed as shibboleths to trick the working class. Leaning over to her wife, she whispered, “What’s ‘dulce butter sauce’?”

“A kind of butter sauce.” Hanna was probably actually trying to be helpful. She was just failing hard.

“I worked that out,” Liza half-snapped, “from the fact that it has the words butter sauce in it. What kind of butter sauce is it?”

Hanna looked flustered in a way that Liza would have sympathised with more if they hadn’t been in the middle of a very drawn-out argument. “I think it goes well with fish?”

“And I worked that out because it comes with the fish. Are you doing this deliberately?”

“No, but I’m not a chef. It’s … it’s a sauce. It’s the kind of sauce that comes with fish. It’s not a middle-class conspiracy to make you feel bad.”

“It’s often made with seaweed,” Sir Richard chimed in.

“Thank you,” replied Liza pointedly just as Hanna was replying equally pointedly, “We weren’t talking to you.”

Across the table, Belloc set his menu down. “Belloc has decided,” he announced. “He will have the lamb avec les Pommes Anna.”

“That’s a kind of layered potato,” whispered Hanna.

“Didn’t ask.”

“Sorry, I’m not psychic.”

From his seat next to Lady Tabitha, Mr Ackroyd gave Hanna a look of solidarity.

“Oh no.” Hanna fixed him with a cold stare, while Liza fixed her with a stare that tried in vain to say “Please don’t start something.” “We’re not going to have a ‘women, amirite?’ moment here.”

Mr Ackroyd tried to look like butter—dulce or otherwise—wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “I said nothing.”

“You didn’t have to say it, Malcom,” Vivien told him. “We all understood what you meant.”

Reverend Lincoln politely cleared his throat. “You know, I think I saw a wren this morning.”

“Really?” Lady Tabitha, clearly able to spot a desperate attempt to change the subject at five hundred paces, turned to him. “Isn’t it rather early in the year for them?”

“I think the cold snap probably caught it by surprise,” ruminated the vicar. “Poor thing must be wondering what happened.”

The colonel wagged a finger in warning. “If a single one of you buggers mentions global bloody warming.”

“It’s called climate change,” muttered Hanna under her breath.

“What was that?” Colonel Coleman had surprisingly good hearing for a man his age.

“Did you know wrens mate for life?” interrupted Lady Tabitha.

The professor turned to a hovering waiter, ordered the duck, and then said: “Isn’t that swans?”

“I thought it was penguins,” said Sir Richard.

Desperate to be part of a conversation that wasn’t about butter sauce—although she did wind up ordering the fish—Liza jumped in. “Actually, that’s a myth. People really like to romanticise penguins, but they actually partner-swap every year.”

Malcom Ackroyd passed his order to a waiter. “Sounds like they’ve got the right idea.”

This earned him a quiet “Must you?” from Vivien and a biting-my-tongue look from Hanna.

Colonel Coleman, on the other hand, wouldn’t have bit his tongue if it was made of bacon. “You,” he told Malcom Ackroyd, “are a bloody rude man, and if I was ten years younger I’d …”

“Oh, you’d what?” Malcom Ackroyd gave him a challenging look. “You’d beat me up? This isn’t the playground, Colonel, or the parade ground. It’s a hotel, and you’re making a prick of yourself.”

The colonel didn’t dignify that with a reply but made a kind of dismissive, grumbling noise.

“The other interesting thing about penguins,” said Liza slightly too loudly—the evening had basically gone to hell already, but she was hoping she could at least keep it in the upper circles—”is that they often form same-sex pair bonds.”

“You are an expert on the wildfowl now, as well as the crimes?” asked Belloc, looking up from his place setting with an almost malicious glint in his eye.

“I never said I was an expert on crime,” Liza replied.

“Yet you presume to educate people about it.”

The professor slid his glasses up his nose. “You seem to be taking Ms Blaine’s career rather personally, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“It is not personal.” Belloc folded his hands neatly on the table. “But it is serious.”

The waiters were beginning to come back through with food. A young woman with shoulder-length curly hair set a plate of duck with cherries in front of Lady Tabitha and, just for a moment, Liza could have sworn she saw something. A look that passed between them, perhaps.

“So,” said the reverend as a rack of lamb was laid in front of him, “about those penguins?”

The fish, it turned out, was delicious. Emmeline White lived up to her reputation, and her combination of local ingredients with classical techniques was exquisite. So exquisite that nothing, not listening to the Ackroyds sniping passive-aggressively at each other, or Belloc shitting on her career, or the colonel being a blustering arse, or even her constant low-key tension with Hanna, could quite spoil it.

Chapter Four

Liza, in the Bedroom, with Questions

Friday night

After dinner, Liza flopped plank-like onto the bed and groaned. “Fuck.”

“What flavour of fuck?” asked Hanna, sitting on a plush armchair and removing her shoes.

“The Ackroyds.” It wasn’t really an explanation, but it didn’t really need one. “I couldn’t have been the only person at that table thinking—”

Hanna flopped down beside her. “That you don’t understand how they’re not divorced already?”

Liza nodded. “Is that how people look at us?”

“I hope not.” It wasn’t Hanna’s hopeful voice. “But probably. Of course, maybe we only think their marriage looks like a car crash inside a dumpster fire because we’re projecting our own issues.”

“Great. So their marriage might be fine, but ours is fucked either way.”

“I mean … fucked is a strong word.” Again, it wasn’t Hanna’s hopeful voice. “We’ve just got some things to work through. And it’ll be hard for a while, but we can get through it.”

Hopeful or not, it was straying close to her patronising voice. “Can you please stop with the everything’s-fine-and-fixable routine? I’m worried. I want you to let me be worried. Is that okay?”

“Sorry.” And suddenly, Hanna had snapped. “Am I the monster who won’t let you have feelings now?”

Sometimes, you had to let these things slide. This wasn’t one of those sometimeses. “You realise there’s a middle ground between ‘the way you’re approaching this isn’t helping me’ and ‘I think you’re Satan’?”

Silence, broken only by the storm outside. The hail had become snow now—the kind of driving snow that piles flurries against anything standing still, and dances ghosts outside the window.

“If …” Liza trailed off. There was no good way to say this. No good way to start it, and no good way to continue it after she’d started. “If I said we should split up, how would that make you feel?”

Hanna looked up, her eyes searching. “What do you mean?”

“Like … if I said we should split up, and you were like … if that was like a relief or something …”

Silence and snow again. For a long time. Liza could feel her heart in her chest, not pounding exactly, just … there, drawing her attention in a way she couldn’t quite remember it doing before.

When Hanna spoke again, it was very slow, very quiet, and very measured, like she was afraid she might scare something away. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“Just—just pretend I am for a second. How do you feel?”

“Sick.” The answer was gratifyingly fast but unsettlingly sharp. “Is that what you want me to say? I feel sick. Happy?”

“No. I mean, yes. I mean, I feel sick too, which is … good, I think?” Good was relative, of course. A part of Liza wished she hadn’t taken them down that road, but another part—perhaps a braver part—hoped confronting the worst would make the shock and the nausea worth it. “I was just … I remember reading or hearing or something that if it’s just over and you admit it’s just over then it’s like—it’s like a weight comes off and you’re just—you’re just free. But I don’t feel like that; I just feel scared and cold, and like I want to die all of a sudden.”

Hanna was lying very still. She’d closed her eyes, like she’d also decided that dying might be a decent idea. “Is this you being helpful?”

“Kind of?”

“Even when you’re practical you’re dramatic.” Hanna’s tone was withering.

“I was just trying to—I don’t know—confront us with the reality of the situation or something.” This wasn’t the sort of conversation you could have when you were both facing the ceiling. Liza rolled awkwardly onto her side. “I don’t want to lose you, and I think us is worth fighting for.”

For a moment, Hanna made no reply; she just lay there breathing softly. “And what does that look like?”

“I don’t know.”

There wasn’t much to say after that. They lay beside one another for a while, not quite certain what to do or say, or if moving had any point, and then, though it was far too early for them to actually be going to sleep, they undressed for bed.

As she was tying her braids with a silk scarf to keep them from bugging her in the night, Liza glanced over at her wife and realised that Hanna was wearing a new bra, something pretty and front-fastening with lace detailing on the back like butterfly wings. “Did you get that for me?”

Hanna shrugged. “I’d say I got it for myself, but you’d know that was a lie. I had a silly idea I’d seduce you.”

It wasn’t the underwear itself so much as the fact she’d bought it. Hanna hated buying lingerie because she was very petite and a couple of adolescent experiences with insensitive fitting room attendants commenting on her lack of bosom had put her off the whole enterprise. “You’re—you didn’t have to. But—fuck—you know I still think you’re gorgeous, right?”

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

Friday night / Saturday morning

Before Liza really knew what she was doing, she’d crossed the room, turned on the light, and begun dragging on the jeans she’d been wearing the night before. She was just grabbing her shoes and her room key when Hanna stirred and asked her what in the green hell she was up to.

“Did you not hear the scream?”

“Yes, I heard the scream.” Hanna was giving her a what-the-fuck look. “That’s why I’m staying in bed.”

“You’re not worried about what it might be?”

Now Hanna was progressing to an I-love-you-but-I-don’t-understand-you look. Which was a mild improvement at least. “I’m very worried about what it might be. That’s why I’m staying in bed.”

“What if somebody’s hurt?”

“Then unless they’re hurt in a way that can be only fixed by a twenty-minute discussion of Jack the Ripper or a short option on steel, I don’t quite see how either of us can be any use.”

Liza had her shoes on, her key in one hand, and—out of pure habit—her currently useless phone in the other. “I’m going.”

Grumbling, Hanna hauled herself out of bed.

“You don’t have to come. You clearly think this is a bad idea.”

“We’re married. Your bad ideas are my bad ideas.” Hanna struggled into her shirt and began looking for her trousers. “Besides, I forced you into a holiday you didn’t want, remember?”

“You realise I can never tell if you’re trying to apologise or just being passive-aggressive?”

Hanna stared at her own phone and groaned at the time. “At one in the morning, I’m not sure I can tell either.”

They made their way downstairs and found a thin trickle of guests wending their way out into the courtyard. Liza recognised Sir Richard and Lady Tabitha—still in her peacock shawl—from the previous evening, along with the colonel, the vicar, and the professor.

Outside a crowd was gathering and a storm had already gathered. Snow piled deep across the hotel grounds, half-burying the cars, obliterating the road, and painting everything white for what felt like miles.

Painting everything white, that is, except for one tiny spot near the tower, which was painted very, very red indeed.

And for a moment, Liza was overjoyed.

“Okay.” She turned to Hanna with a grin. “I normally don’t like surprises, but this is legitimately fucking cool.”

The expression on Hanna’s face was unreadable. A sort of you’re-joking-or-we-have-serious-problems mix of horror and incomprehension. “What’s cool? Getting dragged out of bed in the small hours by somebody screaming?”

Liza folded her arms and looked down at Hanna sceptically. “Oh, come on. The country house setting. The quirky guests.” She waved a hand at the spatter of crimson that still lay stark against the snow. “Sudden and unexpected death. You booked us in for one of those murder mystery weekends, didn’t you?” In gratitude, she leaned down to kiss Hanna on the cheek, but Hanna pulled away.

“No. No, I didn’t.”

“Sorry. I know it’s meant to be a surprise, but you’ve been rumbled.”

Hanna was not looking rumbled. She was looking faintly nauseous. “Liza, this isn’t a murder mystery weekend.”

In ten years, Hanna had never once gone in for half measures, but she’d also never committed quite this hard to a bluff. Cautiously, Liza walked over to the figure that was the centre of everyone’s attention. There, sprawled and broken like … well, like the corpse of a man who had just fallen from a very high balcony, lay a body Liza was certain she recognised as Malcom Ackroyd. A woman in chef’s whites—so probably Emmeline White, the only full-time chef in the hotel—was standing over him looking shocked in the emotional—and possibly also the medical—sense. From her closeness to the corpse and her visible distress, Liza concluded that she’d probably been the one who screamed.

Without really thinking about it, she pulled out her phone and started filming.

“What the fuck,” Hanna whispered to her, “do you think you’re doing?”

“I am a true crime journalist. This is as true as it gets.”

Reaching up, Hanna guided Liza’s phone hand down. “It might not be a crime; it might be an accident. A man is dead, and this is insensitive. And you’re not a journalist; you’re a podcaster.”

The first two points were, Liza had to admit, valid. The third one stung. “What happened to ‘I’m proud of you’?”

“I’m proud that you’re making something good that people love. You’re not suddenly Bob Woodward. This isn’t girls and wine; this is a corpse.”

The crowd, such as it was, was beginning to mill around aimlessly. When Murder Most Actual had done its obligatory episode on Kitty Genovese, who was supposed to have been stabbed to death in front of thirty-eight witnesses, none of whom had intervened, Liza and Rachael had talked a fair bit about the bystander effect. Actually, what they’d mostly talked about were flaws in the original New York Times reporting (there weren’t thirty-eight witnesses; there were somewhere between zero and four, and two of them called the police, and a seventy-year-old woman came out afterwards and held Kitty until she died, so the whole picture of a heartless city full of people who’d watch you getting stabbed and do nothing was kind of nonsense). But right now, the bystander thing did seem to have some weight to it because there was an increasingly large group building up and nobody seemed to have a clue what to do or who was in charge. And yes, in a way, Hanna was right, and pushing her way to the front saying, “Let me through, I’m a podcaster!” would have been ludicrous, but it might just have been better than—

“Mesdames et messieurs …” Mr Belloc had walked calmly over to the body, looked down at it, and then addressed the assembled staff and guests. “There has been a death. Perhaps no mere death, but a murder. A murder—I might say—most vile and wicked.”

Hanna eased the pressure on Liza’s hand. “Okay, maybe you should be filming. This can’t be the right way to treat a crime scene.”

Standing by the remains of the unfortunate Mr Ackroyd, Belloc had turned his attention to the chef. “I take it,” he said, “that you are the one who found the body?”

“Yes.” Emmeline still seemed to be having trouble getting words out. “I—I saw him fall. That’s when I screamed.”

“So this death, it happened recently, no?”

“No. I mean, yes.”

Belloc began to pace a little, his steps short and his gait shuffling. “Did you see anything else? Did you see perhaps what caused the man to fall?”

The snow was still falling. Between the weather and being asked questions by a busybody with no authority about what was almost certainly the most traumatic incident of her life, Emmeline was having a tough time of it. “I—I think I saw a shadow. I think somebody pushed him. But—with the storm …”

“Ah yes, the storm. The storm that would of course make the perfect cover for any crime.”

“Would it?” Hanna asked.

Liza gave this some thought. “I suppose it would depend on the crime.”

“Look here.” The colonel stepped forward. Now that he was standing, Liza could see quite how powerfully built he was. He was also, it seemed, powerfully fed up with whatever was unfolding. “I don’t know who you think you are, but—”

“Ah, but of course.” The diminutive man turned to the newcomer. “Belloc has not fully introduced himself. You see, although you may think that he is merely the quiet man who drinks his coffee in the drawing room and—”

“He’s a detective,” shouted Sir Richard. “Quite a famous private detective and, if I may add, a rather overrated one.”

“And he”—Belloc rounded on his accuser—”is a renowned meddler who at all costs must be kept away from this case.”

Sir Richard seemed genuinely taken aback. “Now steady on.”

“You deserved that one, Dicky dear.” This was the aunt. “You did insist on provoking the little man.”

“Belloc is not a little man,” Belloc protested.

“In my experience,”—Sir Richard’s aunt turned an impassive gaze on the detective—”large men seldom feel the need to refer to themselves in the third person.”

Liza was suddenly aware of an absence at her side as Hanna stepped forward to join the free-for-all. “Just a wacky, out-there suggestion somebody might want to jump on. Could we, maybe, call the police?”

“Can’t,” said a voice from across the courtyard. There was a murmuring amongst the guests as a man came forward, and Liza recognised Mr Burgh, the hotel manager. “Mobiles won’t work, landline was taken out in the storm, we don’t have the internet, and the roads are a death trap until the snow clears.”

“Sorry.” Hanna did not sound happy. Not that she’d sounded especially happy in a long while, but now she sounded specifically not happy rather than sort of generally dissatisfied on account of her marriage collapsing. “Are you saying we’re trapped in a hotel with a dead body and a killer on the loose?”

“Mon dieu! It is as Belloc feared.” Before anybody could ask him what, specifically he had feared or tell him that they didn’t give a damn either way, Belloc went on to elaborate. “Mes amis, you should know that it is not by accident that Belloc has come to this place at this time.”

Sir Richard had by now pulled fully free of the crowd and his aunt, coming to stand face to face with the detective. “Nobody thought it was, you diminutive continental glory-hound.”

“And nobody asked your opinion, you etiolated Saxon windbag.”

Hanna turned a pleading look down the lens of Liza’s phone. “Can I just remind everybody that we’re standing in front of a dead man while two complete randoms fight over which of them gets to play at being C. Auguste Dupin?”

Belloc shuffled over to her. “I do not care for your tone, madame. And you,”—he indicated Liza—”keep recording. Belloc may wish to review this footage later. Now, as I was saying, it is not by accident that Belloc came here. No, mes amis! He came on the trail of a most devilish and dastardly criminal. A man who is, to the crime, like … like some great general of history.”

“Like Napoleon?” asked the colonel.

“I was thinking, perhaps,” Belloc mused, “more like Charles de Gaulle. He is the Charles de Gaulle of crime.”

The vicar raised a hand. “Isn’t Charles de Gaulle generally considered something of a heroic figure?”

“So was Napoleon, in some circles,” observed the professor.

The various interruptions were too much for Belloc. “Enough. This … Charles de Gaulle of Crime is a phantom, a spirit. None have seen his face and lived, and he is known to the demi-monde only by the alias Monsieur—I am sorry, Mr B.”

Having returned to Liza’s side, Hanna leaned over to whisper in her ear. “How does he forget the word mister but remember the word etiolated?”

“Perhaps he’s trying to lull criminals into a false sense of security by pretending his English is worse than it is,” Liza suggested.

“Perhaps he’s actually from Clacton and all this French bollocks is for show.”

“And it is to this hotel that he has come!” Belloc was saying. “That he has come seeking something precious that was taken from him. It is this mastermind that Belloc has come to capture, and by God, that is what Belloc will do.”

Sir Richard scratched his head. “That’s all very well, old boy, but what about the cadaver?”

“Perhaps,” Mr Burgh suggested, “those of us who aren’t detectives could, um, go back to our rooms and leave it to the professionals?”

Since the show was mostly over, and the manager was making a strong effort to chivvy them along, the guests began to disperse. Which left the two sleuths to bicker over what exactly was to be done about the unfortunate Mr Ackroyd. The vicar, true to his calling, took Emmeline aside and did his best to calm her down while the rest of the onlookers, save a few ditherers, went back to bed. Liza was about to stop filming for reasons of taste when, glancing over her shoulder, she saw a figure approaching through the snow and hesitated. Not being quite so callous as Hanna had implied, Liza turned the camera off the moment she realised that it was Mrs Ackroyd making her way slowly through the storm from elsewhere in the grounds.

“What’s happened?” she called, shielding her eyes with one hand and peering blearily through the night. “What’s the commotion?”

A part of Liza’s brain that she couldn’t quite switch off noticed that Vivien Ackroyd was dressed rather strangely, in a long coat, stout boots, and pyjamas. “Where have you been?” Liza asked, as much from a desire to stall as from actual curiosity.

“Well, it was coming down so hard,”—Mrs Ackroyd blinked snowflakes from her eyes, which seemed stung by the weather—”and Malcom said one of us should probably check the car was all right, and I said he should go, and he said I should go, and we flipped for it and I lost, so here I am.” She trudged forwards. Even with the detectives and the manager in the way, she’d be in plain sight of the body in seconds. “And I get back to find everybody outside and—my God.”

Mrs Ackroyd’s pace quickened to a speed that was frankly unsafe in the weather, and she slipped more than once, so that by the time she reached her husband’s body she was practically crawling.

The polite thing to do—perhaps even the right thing to do—would have been to pick a direction. To either walk up to the poor woman, like the bespectacled professor did, kneeling down beside her and saying things that seemed to comfort her; or else walk away. But Liza couldn’t help just watching. A tiny, tragic drama was unfolding in front of her, and the piece of Liza that was trained to turn things into stories wanted to capture it and script it and pin it down.

Hanna tugged at her arm. “Come on, I’m freezing.”

Only a little reluctantly, Liza let herself be tugged. But when she shot a last look back at the crime scene, she saw something new. A woman in a red dress, standing in the shadows beneath the tower, one finger pressed to her lips.

Chapter Six

Ruby, in the Dark, with a Red Dress On

Saturday, the small hours

“Reassure me,” said Hanna when they got back to their room, “that this isn’t happening.”

“That what isn’t happening?”

Hanna pulled off her shoes and wriggled very firmly into bed. “That we aren’t trapped by a blizzard in a remote Scottish castle with a dead man, the person who killed the dead man, an obnoxious detective of ambiguous nationality, and a possibly mythical underworld kingpin.”

“Ah.” Liza sat down opposite and saw to her own footwear. “Then no. I think all of that is happening.”

A suspicious look crept across Hanna’s face. “Tell me you’re not enjoying this.”

“No.” Even to Liza the denial sounded too deny-ey to be plausible. “But, well, it is … it is interesting though, isn’t it?”

The suspicious look stopped creeping and settled in for a long stay. “Not the word I’d use, Liza. Worrying? Yes. Frustrating? Certainly. Terrifying? Maybe, but I’m trying very hard not to think about it. The best thing we can do is keep to ourselves, wait for the snow to clear, and then get as far away from this place as we possibly can.”

Hanna was right, of course. Talking about murders for a living—or a partial living at least—was one thing, but getting up close and personal with a real killer was probably taking research too far. With a sigh, Liza crawled under the covers and tried to sleep.

“Did you—did you see a woman in the snow?” It felt like an absurd question.

“Yes, several.”

“No, I mean … sort of a mysterious woman.”

There was a shifting of springs as Hanna rolled onto her side. “My darling, for all we have disagreed today, you are still the only mysterious woman for me.”

“I’m serious. She was … lurking.”

“Lurking?”

“In a red dress. She looked like a blonde Hedy Lamarr.”

More movement from Hanna’s side of the bed. “It was just the excitement. Go to sleep.”

Liza went to sleep.

Failed to go to sleep.

She’d be just about to drift off when her mind would slide onto some stray observation or scrap of evidence, and she’d find herself scratching at it like a scab. Why was Mrs Ackroyd out in the snow only half-dressed? When had things started to go wrong with Hanna? What had Mr Ackroyd been doing on the balcony?

It was no good. Slithering out of bed again, Liza retrieved her phone, dragged on a pointlessly luxurious hotel-issue dressing gown, and crept outside into the corridor where she wouldn’t wake Hanna. Then she switched her phone to record voice-only and started talking.

“Hi, listeners. Or maybe hi, Rachael. Or note to self: I’ll work that out later. Anyway, this is Liza from Murder Most Actual, and I think I’ve just stumbled into, well, an actual murder, and it’s … it’s weird. I’m in a hotel with my wife—that’s right, guys, Rachael and I really aren’t dating—and there’s a snowstorm that means we can’t leave or speak to anybody outside, and a man has just fallen off a balcony, or been pushed off a balcony, and …” Shit. Serial this was not. “There’s some kind of private detective here who’s taken over investigations, and he claims there’s a mysterious crime lord in the hotel and, Christ, saying this out loud makes me sound like I’m losing it, but I swear something is going on, and I’m going to get to the bott—”

And there, at the end of the corridor, was the woman in red.

Beckoning.

“And now,” Liza said, “a mysterious seductress is trying to get me to follow her.” It was probably unfeminist to call her a seductress. After all, as a modern, independent woman, the lady in red had every right to get a 1940s haircut and wander a hotel in evening wear at two in the morning if she wanted to. Either way, Liza followed.

They rounded a corner and ducked into a stairwell, where suddenly the woman in red stopped, caught Liza by the arm, and pulled her very close. Then, in a voice that ached with earnestness, she whispered: “I think you may be the only person in this hotel I can trust. Is there somewhere we can be alone?”

Trying really, really hard not to think about the fact that, having entirely failed to be seduced by her own wife, she was now getting up close and personal with a woman whose picture prisoners would barter cigarettes for, Liza swallowed. “Aren’t we alone now?”

“Anybody could walk past at any moment, and I do not want to be seen. Come, I know somewhere.”

Seeing no other option, Liza followed again, letting the stranger take her downstairs, through two doors, and finally into a dark, cramped space that smelled slightly of bleach. “Where are …?”

“Cleaning cupboard. The maids will not be on duty for some hours.”

“I still don’t—” Liza got no further before a finger was pressed to her lips.

“Everything that Belloc said was true. Mr B is real. Something valuable was taken from him, and he wants it back.”

It occurred to Liza that she wasn’t completely sure if her phone recorder was still running. “What was taken from him?”

“His pride.” In the dark, Liza thought she could just make out a wicked smile. “His belief that he could have anybody he wants, control anybody he wants.” The strange woman paused a moment before adding. “And there’s also the small matter of one and a half million in nonsequential banknotes and the details of essentially all his offshore accounts.”

This was suddenly getting very real. “Who exactly are you?”

“Call me Ruby.”

“Cute.”

“I like to think so.”

Liza’s brain was on fire with questions, but she had enough discipline to ask them one at a time. “So … if you worked for Mr B, can’t you just, I don’t know, tell Belloc who he is?”

“I never met him in person. He’s even more elusive than I am, and I can be very elusive indeed. He could be anybody.”

That implied a follow-up question. “Then why do you trust me?”

Ruby moved in the dark; something that might have been a mop fell sideways with a clunk that seemed very loud, but at that moment what Liza was mostly conscious of was an overwhelming closeness. “Monsieur Belloc may be pompous, absurd, and almost certainly using a fake accent—then again, so am I—but he is not exaggerating the danger Mr B poses. He has spies everywhere, he has agents everywhere, but even he, I think, would be unlikely to have one of his operatives spend two years co-hosting a popular true crime podcast just to set up a cover story. Apart from Belloc and Sir Richard Quirke, you’re the only person in this building I can be reasonably certain is who they say they are.”

“So why not go to one of them?”

The tone of Ruby’s voice was almost disappointed. “Because they’re lawmen. Or law-adjacent, in Quirke’s case. I can’t trust either of them not to hand me over to the police the moment the snow clears.” She gave a heavy, almost regretful sigh. “I have not lived a good life, Ms Blaine. Or an honest life. But I have lived a wonderful life, and I would like it to continue for a long time, and for that time to be spent outside prison.”

“And you think I won’t go to the police?” Liza wasn’t sure if that was flattering or insulting.

“With you, I think I at least have a chance.”

There was something loaded in that. “What sort of a chance?”

“Why, Ms Blaine.” Ruby’s very full, very red lips curled into a wicked smile. “Whatever sort of chance you’d like to give me.”

“You know you can call me Liza, right?”

Ruby laughed in the dark. “I’m sure I can, but I like to reserve a person’s given name for when I’m sighing in their ear.” She leaned forward and whispered, “Liza,” in a tone that could only be described as orgasmic.

“Does this whole … this classic femme fatale thing really work for you?” asked Liza, trying very hard to pretend that she couldn’t see exactly how it would.

“As a poet once said, I have a very particular set of skills. Skills that have served me well so far; they have kept me alive and comfortable, and made certain that I am never bored.” Ruby gave another of her contemplative exhalations. “Also, I just really like to fuck.”

“You know I’m a married woman.”

Once more, Liza could make out the edge of a smile in the darkness. “Do you really think I find either of those things off-putting?”

“Just—can you just keep this about the murder and the terrible danger we’re apparently all in, please?”

A sigh. “Very well. I will tell you what I can. Some of what I can, at any rate. I still don’t entirely trust you.”

“Because you think I might be honest, or because I’m not going to have sex with you?”

“Not going to have sex with me right now. Always keep your options open.”

This was getting irritating. “You really think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”

“Just being realistic, darling. I assure you I would blow your mind.”

“My wife blows my mind,” replied Liza only slightly defensively.

Ruby made a sound that in a less poised person might have been called a snort. “I strongly suspect that’s a lie, or at least that it hasn’t been true for some time. But in any case, I will tell you three things.”

“If we’re in danger why not tell me all of the things?”

“My life depends on candour; my freedom depends on caution. You see the dilemma.”

“A dilemma that would miraculously vanish if I let you eat me out in a broom closet?”

Somehow, Ruby managed to convey a raised eyebrow entirely vocally. “My, my, you did go quickly to specifics. But yes, that is rather the size of it. And really, when you put it that way, doesn’t it sound like a bit of a win-win from your perspective?”

Liza gave her a resolute look. “Still married.”

“‘I’m married’ is to sex,” drawled Ruby—she was one of nature’s drawlers—”what ‘I’m on a diet’ is to chocolate. It means ‘I want to, but society is telling me I shouldn’t.’”

“It means ‘It might feel good in the moment, but there would be real consequences I’d have to live with.’” Liza did her best not to think too much about either the feelings or the consequences. They were both distracting in different ways.

“So you do admit it would feel good?”

This was becoming almost as absurd as Belloc and his grandstanding. “Of course it would feel good. Unless you’re incredibly shit at oral it would feel good. But—” Liza made a strangled, exasperated, sexually confused noise that came out as a sort of “grah.” “Will you just tell me what you know about the actual murder?”

“Good to know you’re living up to the name of your podcast at least.” Ruby sounded deeply disappointed. “About the murder itself, I know nothing. But where my erstwhile employer is concerned, I suspect everything, as should you. Rule nothing out, not even that Ackroyd has just faked his own death and is even now stalking the halls of the hotel waiting for a moment to strike.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“In my world, it pays to be flexible mentally as well as physically.”

Despite the circumstances, Liza laughed. “Do you just spend your whole life being paranoid and horny?”

“It’s what I intend to call my autobiography. I don’t think it’s likely that Mr Ackroyd’s mangled corpse will be wandering around trying to shoot me, but it has happened to me at least once before.”

“What? When?”

“Now, now, darling, a lady must have her secrets. I said I’d tell you three things: that was the first. The second is that whether Mr B is here himself, or whether he’s sent somebody, they won’t act against me until they are certain I haven’t passed his account numbers on to anybody else.” Suddenly, her tone was a whole lot less playful. “The money he can afford to lose; the information he has to protect at all costs.”

“How does that help?”

“Well, it helps me rather a lot. And it helps you because once I’m sure you won’t immediately go to Belloc or Quirke, you might find yourself in possession of some rather interesting documents.”

“Documents that a hardened gangster is definitely willing to kill over?”

Ruby’s body shifted again in the dark, and Liza tried to ignore the heat of it. “I suppose when you put it that way it is a bit double-edged, but you’re a journalist, Ms Blaine.”

“I’m a podcaster.”

“They give Pulitzers to podcasters these days. Just think of the scoop.”

And to Liza’s frustration, at least part of her did. That was the problem with seductresses; the smart ones knew there was more than one way to seduce a person. “Okay,” she said. “What’s the third thing?”

“The vicar is not who he seems.”

Great. “Any chance you could make that not completely vague and unhelpful?”

There was a sudden and intensely bright crack of light as Ruby opened the cupboard door. “No.”

As the two of them were about to part ways, a final question rose Columbo-like in Liza’s mind, and she turned. “What is your real accent?”

“Sugar,” said Ruby in a flawless Georgia drawl, “you’ll never know.”

Chapter Seven

Belloc, in the Dining Room, with Instructions

Saturday morning

They woke early the next morning because a 7 a.m. start was Hanna’s idea of a lie-in, and while Liza was slightly more sedentary in her habits, she’d never been the sleep-’til-noon type, even at university.

“Did you slip out of bed last night?” asked Hanna as she wriggled out of her nightclothes and into a much more practical set of underwear than she’d chosen the previous evening.

“Yes. I wanted to make some notes.”

In the few heartbeats of silence that followed, Liza took the opportunity to gaze out of the window. The storm had passed, but the snow was still falling, albeit more gently, and for the tiniest of moments she let the glory of the highlands take her breath away.

Then Hanna broke the spell with: “What sort of notes?”

“About, you know, our situation.”

Hanna frowned. “I’m assuming you mean the murder and not our marriage, but actually, either one is worrying.”

“I think it’ll make a really good episode. And also, it might be … I don’t know, helpful? To the police?”

“Don’t pretend you’re doing this out of civic duty. You’re doing this because you’ve always wanted to solve a murder.”

That was the problem with being married to somebody: after a while they knew you too well and, worse, knew you couldn’t easily dump them for showing it. “Is that—is that really so wrong? Solving murders is good. It’s a good thing.”

“Show me.”

Liza didn’t really know why she hesitated, but hesitate she did. Then she picked her phone up from the bedside table where she had laid it—but forgotten to charge it, she realised—last night, and played back her notes.

“... a mysterious seductress is trying to get me to follow her.” The recording ended there—clearly, she had remembered to turn it off after all, which was probably for the best in a lot of ways.

“Liza.” There was a wavering tone in Hanna’s voice that Liza thought could jump at any second from concern to anger.

“Nothing happened.”

Liza’s reply had come too quickly to be entirely innocent, and now Hanna was looking at her with well-justified suspicion. “What do you mean, nothing happened?”

“I mean with Ruby.”

That hadn’t helped. “Who’s Ruby?”

“The mysterious seductress.”

Pulling on the black polo neck and a pair of dark grey jeans that were her concession to not being in the city, Hanna came to join Liza at the window. “Are you trying to reassure me by denying that you had sex with a woman who ten seconds ago I didn’t know existed?”

“Yes? And I didn’t. I mean, I think I probably could have.” And, if Liza was honest, maybe she had wanted to a little bit. And liked that she could have. And maybe even liked wanting to.

Hanna rolled her eyes. “Oh, good. Nice to know. I suppose I’m lucky really. After all, having a wife lots of people want to fuck is a pretty big status symbol where I work.”

“We just talked. She was flirty, but I think she’s flirty with everyone. It’s her thing. You know, like Caitlyn at university.”

There was a pause, and Hanna seemed momentarily mollified. But only momentarily. “Hold on. You did have sex with Caitlyn at university.”

“Before I met you.”

“No, after you met me. Before we started dating, but we’d definitely met. You probably hadn’t noticed me.”

“I noticed you.”

Hanna scoffed. “Sure you did.”

Things had been tough recently. Liza would have been the first to admit that. But she wasn’t going to let her past self take the blame for her current self’s problems. “It was at the housewarming for that place that Rob, Tom, and Gabby had in their second year,” Liza said. “You were in the kitchen talking to some guy or some girl or something, and you were wearing—well, you were wearing the exact same thing you’re wearing now because you’ve had one casual outfit for your entire life—but I remember they said something and you laughed, but like, once, like, hah, and you looked so … so everything. And I remember saying to myself, ‘If I don’t talk to that girl by the end of the evening I’ll hate myself forever.’”

For a moment, Hanna was quiet. Then she said: “I didn’t speak to you at that party.”

“And I hated myself forever. Or for a couple of weeks, anyway. Then we actually met in the pub at that thing with Dill and Evan.” An inconvenient recollection wormed its way into Liza’s mind. “Then … okay then, I think I did fuck Caitlyn that weekend, but then there was Rita’s Christmas party and I was dressed as a slutty reindeer and you were—actually, you were still wearing the same thing you’re wearing now—and …”

“And you walked up to me and just stood there saying nothing.” Hanna was almost smiling now. Almost.

“And so you said, ‘That outfit is unnecessarily sexualised, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re the most beautiful woman I have seen in my life and I would very much like to kiss you.’” It felt at once so recent and so long ago that it almost hurt to talk about it. Because that was the woman Liza had fallen in love with, and somewhere deep down, it was still the woman Hanna was. It was just that after ten years she’d turned out to be a whole lot more complicated. “And then you did.”

Outside the snow was dancing a waltz with the wind.

“We should …”—Hanna bit her lip—”we should go to breakfast.”

Liza wanted to say that they shouldn’t. That they should stay and talk and that she’d forget about the murder and the woman in red and everything else if they could just get back to how things were, but that wasn’t a one-morning job. And if they stayed, probably reminiscence would turn into recrimination, which would turn into a straight-up yelling match.

So they went to breakfast. Which, like all of the other parts of the holiday that didn’t involve corpses, mysterious women in cupboards, or wondering where it all went wrong, was divine. Besides the usual range of cereals, full fried breakfast, and toast, there were also options like “whiskey-cured smoked salmon and scrambled eggs” and “poached peat-smoked haddock.”

“This is probably my working-class roots showing,” said Liza, staring at the menu, “but why would you smoke haddock in peat? Why would you smoke anything in peat?”

“I think it’s supposed to give it a richness?” Hanna didn’t look entirely sure herself. “Or an earthy flavour?”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“Of course I don’t—nobody does.” And now she was smiling, although whether it was because she was feeling better or because they were in public and she didn’t want people to look at them the way they’d looked at the Ackroyds, Liza didn’t know. “You think the Etonian pricks I work with actually appreciate fine dining? They like things that other people can’t afford, and that’s all there is to it.”

“So I should stick with the cereal?” Honestly, Liza couldn’t have faced much more than that anyway.

Hanna took a sip of freshly squeezed orange juice. “Since the chef watched a man die less than eight hours ago, I think that might actually be safest. In her position I don’t think I’d exactly have my head in the game.”

The door opened and Ruby walked in. Although walked didn’t quite describe it; she glided, she flitted, she barely touched the ground. She was wearing a new dress in the old colour.

“See?” Liza gestured with her fork. “Told you she was real.”

Hanna blinked. “Even now, I’m not sure I believe it.”

“I know.”

She blinked again. “It’s like she’s come to a costume party as the abstract concept of heteronormative sex.”

“I know.”

Normally very much a one-woman woman, Hanna was still staring at Ruby in frank disbelief. “She isn’t even my type and I still want to bite her face to see if she’s a dream.”

“I know, right?” concluded Liza, thankful to know that her wife was beginning to be on at least some of the same pages as her.

Hesitantly, Hanna reached across the table and took Liza’s hand. “For what it’s worth, I’m now a lot more flattered that you turned her down.”

Ruby took a seat at the far end of the table, where she ate fresh fruit and sipped water while watching the other guests like the kind of predatory cat that knows for certain that bigger predators are out there. Most of the rest of the guests from the previous evening were already in place. There was the colonel, slathering mustard onto a Cumberland sausage. There was the professor, sipping coffee and picking a plum from the fruit bowl. There was Sir Richard and his aunt. As yet, there was no sign of the vicar—the mysterious vicar who wasn’t what he seemed, according to a woman that had as good as told Liza she couldn’t be trusted. Nor was there any sign of Mrs Ackroyd, but that was—that wasn’t suspicious, was it? Wouldn’t being here be even more suspicious? A woman whose husband has only just died doesn’t rush downstairs at eight the next morning to try the Porridge Brulée.

And there, at last, striding through the doors with the confidence of a man who had never admitted a fault in his life, was Belloc. Expecting a show of some kind, Liza set her phone to record.

“Mes amis,” he announced. “I have examined the room in which the crime took place and have concluded that there was indeed a struggle and that Monsieur Ackroyd was thrown to his death by an assailant with intentions most deliberate.”

“Just checking, old boy,” put in Sir Richard, “is that a long-winded way of saying that you don’t know anything you didn’t already know last night?”

“What Belloc suspected last night Belloc has now confirmed.”

The manager sidled in behind Belloc and tried to speak up. “There was one other thing. When we checked the gun room this morning—”

“But that is not all!” Belloc interrupted. “When the staff they made the check of the gun room this morning, they discovered that a pistol had been taken from its cabinet.”

Hanna’s head came up abruptly. “Sorry, why does this hotel have a gun room?”

“Shooting parties,” explained Mr Burgh. “And there’s a range on the grounds. Then there’s the antiques—it’s one of them that’s gone missing.”

“What kind of antique?” asked Liza, opening up a notebook app on her phone and trying to ignore Hanna’s look of disapproval.

“Enfield No. 2 Mark 1 revolver,” Mr Burgh said.

“Fine weapon.” The colonel laid down his fork. “M’father had one in the war. Swore by it.”

“We know”—Belloc returned to his monologue without giving any real indication that anybody else had spoken—”that nothing had been disturbed when the maid locked the gun room at ten yesterday evening, but that when she opened it this morning, the weapon had vanished.”

“Who has the keys?” Liza found herself wondering aloud.

The detective shot her an impatient look. “Belloc has already ascertained this information.”

“And?” enquired Sir Richard blithely.

“And so this line of questioning is unnecessary.”

“I’ve got a master,” explained Mr Burgh. “But that only opens the door, not the gun cabinet. Whoever’s locking up will have a set of keys as well. They’re kept at reception.”

Tapping at her phone with one hand, Liza slipped easily into a follow-up question. “And the key to the cabinet itself?”

“In a safe in my office.”

“From within which,” Belloc added, “only a master criminal would have had the necessary skill to extract it.”

Sir Richard flexed his fingers. “Says you, old boy, but I’d lay a hundred pounds here and now that I could have old Burgh’s safe open in two shakes of a lamb’s proverbial.”

“Dicky dear,” said his aunt, “please stop gambling your inheritance. It’s tiresome.”

“How often do you go into the safe?” asked Liza, not quite able to stop herself.

“A couple of times a da—”

“This is all”—Belloc’s voice was raised to the point of barking—”most unnecessary. Belloc is, you may be assured, on the case.”

Leaning back in her chair, Hanna fixed the detective with a cold look. “And we’re just supposed to ignore the fact that somebody was murdered yesterday, and now an unknown criminal is running around the hotel with an antique pistol?”

“Revolver,” said the military man.

Over the course of their marriage, Liza had seen Hanna give many unimpressed looks. The one she gave now hovered at the bottom of the top forty. “Pardon?”

“Revolver. Pistols have fixed chambers.”

“Thank you.” Hanna did not sound thankful. “I shall be sure to bear that detail in mind when the killer is blowing my brains out.”

On the other side of the room, the professor gave a little cough. “Ms Blaine raises a rather important point. Is there anything we might do to minimise our chances of, well …” He put two fingers to his temple and mimed being shot.

Colonel Coleman gave a sly grin. “Keep your head down, stay away from windows, and remember that within twelve feet you can stab the blighter before they can draw.”

“Because of course I always carry my bayonet with me,” said Hanna. “Just in case.”

“You”—Colonel Coleman gave her a disapproving look—”are a very acerbic woman.”

Several minutes had passed without Monsieur Belloc speaking, a state of affairs that he clearly found intolerable. “If you would take my advice, madame, gentlemen, it would be best if you were to remain together, unless I need to call you for questioning.”

“Is that really necessary?” asked Sir Richard. “What if we all just promise faithfully not to shoot anybody, then we can all go about our various businesses?”

Belloc glared venom. “This is no laughing matter, Quirke.”

“Oh no, wouldn’t think of it. And dashed sad for both the Ackroyds obviously, her more than him in some ways. I just don’t think all of us sitting about here staring at each other will do anybody a blind bit of good.”

“I have given my instructions,” said Belloc. “Now I shall bid you good day. I must go and speak to the rest of the suspects.”

“Guests, Mr Belloc.” Mr Burgh massaged his temples in mounting distress. “Please call them the guests.”

Chapter Eight

Sir Richard, in the Garden, with a Wager

Saturday, late morning

Monsieur Belloc’s admonition to remain together lasted approximately eight minutes. They chatted a little about where they had been when Mr Ackroyd fell off the roof—all variants of “in bed” (Ruby, Liza was sure, made direct eye contact when she said it), except for Sir Richard who had been in the library, reading.

“On the subject of the library,” Professor Worth said, rising, “I heard that somewhere they’ve got an early edition of Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen Funktionenkalküls with some of Gödel’s original notes, and I’m very curious to have a look at it.” He glanced around. “Assuming we’re not doing the whole stay-together-so-we-don’t-all-get-murdered thing?”

“Shouldn’t think so, old boy,” said Sir Richard. “About to tootle off myself, to be honest. Might take a stroll in the grounds.”

Colonel Coleman stood up and stretched. “In that case, I might ask that Burgh fellow if he’ll crack open that gun cabinet for me.”

“What—why?” Hanna looked aghast.

“Because there’s one blighter out there with a gun already, and I’d rather have one of my own just in case.”

Hanna rolled her eyes. “Oh, good. Because that won’t cause things to rapidly escalate out of control.”

“Also,” added Liza, “I’m pretty sure the hotel is only allowed to let you use the guns for, you know, activities. I don’t think you can just sign one out for self-defence.”

The colonel shrugged. “Worth a try.”

The various members of the group started to go their separate ways, but when Liza and Hanna reached the stairs, Liza went straight past them, carrying on up the corridor towards the front of the hotel and the tower Malcom Ackroyd had fallen from.

With spousal insight, Hanna caught her shoulder. “No.”

“I just want to look around.”

“And what if she’s in? What if she’s up there feeling like shit because her husband fell to his death?”

“Then I’ll say hello and I’m sorry for your loss.”

Hanna wasn’t glaring exactly, but her expression was definitely on a spectrum that had glares in it. “And?”

“And maybe ask her some questions?” Liza’s voice ended the sentence an octave higher than it had begun it.

“No.” Hanna’s tone was sharp.

“But—”

Nor, it seemed, was she in a mood to be butted. “No. Fuck, Liza, you have never been one of these people.”

Knowing full well what Hanna meant, Liza folded her arms and said, “What people?”

“Funeral chasers. Grief vampires. Those ghoulish fucks who ring up parents whose kids aren’t even cold in the ground and start saying things like, ‘So, do you think they got the right guy?’”

“This is different. We’re here.”

“It is not different. There has been a tragic accident, and everybody is panicking.”

“It wasn’t an accident. He was pushed. The chef saw—” Turning around, Liza started walking quickly back towards the kitchens.

Hanna, trailing after, was still firing negatives. “No.”

“Come on, she’s not personally involved. She might be able to tell us something.”

“There is no us here.”

Liza knew she was talking about the investigation, but the words still hung in the air like really unwelcome snowflakes.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know.” There weren’t enough sighs in the world. And suddenly running down to the kitchens to ask a stranger where she’d been at one o’clock that morning seemed the height of self-indulgent futility. “Sorry, I’ve been—you’re right, we should go back to the room and wait for all this to be over.”

Hanna looked small. Of course, she always looked a bit small on account of her height, but she looked small in the emotional sense. “I’m not sure I want to just be sitting upstairs stewing. Come for a walk with me?”

Honestly, Liza hadn’t been that keen on sitting around stewing either. “Yeah. That sounds nice.” And it did, if you ignored the context. The murder context and the marriage context.

Walking down the front steps of the hotel and into the gardens should have been a magical experience: a landscape blanketed in snow unfurling before them, the cloud-capped mountains of the highlands, trees limned with frost. But there was nothing like a corpse and the spectre of divorce to take the shine off the pretty scenery. At least the body had been moved—two of the staff had shifted it to one of the outbuildings a little after breakfast.

Out of nowhere, Hanna laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh, I just realised that thanks to Mr Ackroyd we can have a shit, miserable weekend and I won’t even slightly feel it’s my fault.”

Liza looked at her wife. Hanna’s ability to find humour in unexpected, often dark, places was one of the things that Liza loved about her. “It wouldn’t have been your fault anyway.”

“It would, though, wouldn’t it? I dragged you out here without even asking you. I was overcompensating. I always overcompensate.”

She did. There had been a time when Liza found it sweet. “It was thoughtful,” she said. Then in the spirit of honesty added, “In a way.”

“A controlling way.”

Reaching out a hand, Liza stroked Hanna’s arm through her inadequate coat. “You were showing you care,” she told her.

“Isn’t that …” Hanna shivered, and not because of the weather. “Doesn’t that sound kind of like an excuse?”

As they made their way into the gardens, Liza put her arm around Hanna’s waist. It was a small step, and felt strange. “I think if you’re worried it’s an excuse, that means it’s not an excuse.”

There was a lake, or perhaps technically a loch, a little way along the hillside with a neat clump of woodland on its east shore. Liza and Hanna were just making their way down when they noticed a trail of fresh footprints headed in the same direction and, shortly afterwards, noticed Sir Richard at the end of them.

“Why, hel-lo.” He waved a cheerful greeting then returned to his previous attitude, which was staring at the hotel, one hand shielding his eyes.

“Hi.” Liza waved back. “What are you …? Why are you looking up at the hotel like that?”

“Just thinking.”

In the cold, Hanna huddled a little closer to her wife. “You don’t buy this there’s-a-mysterious-master-criminal thing, do you?”

“Not especially.” Sir Richard gave a shrug. “But … well, there are some rather rum things going on, tell the truth.”

“Rum in what way?” asked Liza, which earned a must you look from Hanna.

“Well, leaving aside the inherent rumminess of an otherwise ordinary chap taking a swan dive off a balcony, it all seems a bit dashed unlikely. Mysterious assailant strikes the moment the missus takes a wander down to look at the car and all.”

“They could have been watching the room,” suggested Liza at exactly the same time as Hanna said, “There probably wasn’t one.”

“Both possibilities,” Sir Richard admitted. “And of course, there’s still every chance it was just a tragic accident.”

That was, Liza had to agree, the most likely outcome. Which was good, wasn’t it? Sure, it would have been more exciting if there was an actual murder, but by the low bar of ‘good ways for an innocent man to wind up dead’, the best option was definitely the one where it was nobody’s fault.

Still, there was a speculative note in Sir Richard’s voice that Liza couldn’t quite let slide. “You don’t think it was, do you?”

Sir Richard wasn’t quite as preening as Belloc, but having had more than one conversation with him, Liza was well aware how little provocation it took to make him wax expository. “Well.” He gave the Blaines a conspiratorial smile. “There are one or two things I noticed.”

“I don’t suppose”—Hanna’s tone was dry—”either of them was that a human being has just died and we should treat that with respect?”

Sir Richard looked down his nose at her. “‘Fraid not. What I noticed was that his wife not being in the room at the time made ‘accident’ a much less probable explanation.”

“So when you say one or two things,” Hanna pointed out, “you mean one?”

“Well, yes.” Sir Richard had the grace to look suitably abashed. “You know, you’re supposed to ask me why I think that.”

Liza could have, but actually, she was beginning to think she knew. “It’s because if he was going to fall off the balcony by chance, it could have been at any time. But if he was pushed, either his wife did it then ran, or somebody waited for his wife to leave and then came in and did it.”

Now Sir Richard was looking genuinely crestfallen. “You know, between the two of you, you’re almost taking all the fun out of this.”

“Out of the dead man?” Hanna clarified.

Another shrug from Sir Richard, one that could practically be described as insouciant. “It’s not like he’ll get any less dead if I sit around looking dreary. Besides, Belloc’s poking around—why shouldn’t I? Come to think of it, why shouldn’t we?” A sly grin spread across his face. “Tell you what, how about a small wager? Let’s take the weekend to work out what really happened to old Ackroyd, and then when the snow lets up and the police arrive, we can—”

“No.” Hanna had shifted from mild disapproval to firm denial.

Sir Richard gave her a disappointed look “Oh, come—”

“No. We aren’t betting on the death of somebody whose actual corpse we saw in the snow less than twenty-four hours ago. That’s not charmingly detached; it’s genuinely callous.”

Liza hadn’t been that tempted to take the bet, but being told she couldn’t rankled. “This isn’t a bet.”

“Well, it sort of is,” replied Sir Richard, half-apologetic.

But Liza was adamant. “It’s a professional opportunity. I’m a true crime reporter; this is a true crime.”

“You know what, fine. I’m going back to the room, and when you’re done with whatever this is you can come find me. Or not, if you’d rather chase murderers.” Pulling out of Liza’s arms, Hanna started trudging up the hill and back to the hotel.

“Don’t be like that,” Liza called after her. But it didn’t help. She was gone. Well, going. With the snow it took her a while to get properly gone. And Liza could probably have caught up with her, but that would have just prolonged the argument. So, she did her best to switch off the part of herself that cared. Because that was the pattern—had become the pattern—fighting over nothing, neither of them backing down, and then taking refuge in a kind of reassuring numbness until one of them let their guard down just enough for the other one to hurt them. And then it all began again.

“Are you positive you shouldn’t go after her?” asked Sir Richard. “Seems she’s a tad miffed with you. With both of us really.”

Liza shook her head. “There’s no talking to her when she’s like this. I’ll just … I’ll just give her some time to calm down.”

Once more, Sir Richard’s only reply was a nonchalant shrug. “Suppose you know best. If you need me, I’ll be in my room.”

A thought struck. “Where is your room?”

“East side of the first floor. Just up the corridor from yours, as it happens.”

Liza’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know where our room is?”

“First thing I looked at when I thought there might be a killer. Lady in red is on the south wall along with the manager and a lot of offices. West side is all galleries and things, plus the colonel. North is Belloc and the vicar. East is you lot, me, and the professor. Ackroyds had the tower. Now, perhaps you’d like to test me on how long it would take to walk from one of those rooms to another?”

Part of Liza would have. Part of her also wanted to check for herself. But another perhaps more down-to-earth part thought that talking to her wife sooner rather than later was probably a good idea.

So, she said goodbye to Sir Richard and made her way back. But once she was in the hotel, she couldn’t resist taking the opportunity to check the layout of the rooms on the first floor. She noted where the staircases were (northeast, northwest, southwest, the tower got its own that was accessible from the ground floor only) and where the guns were stored (northeast, a little sealed room just next to the conservatory). And she timed the walk very, very carefully.

Chapter Nine

Emmeline, in the Kitchen, with a Story

Saturday, late afternoon

When Liza finally got back to the room, she found Hanna sitting up in bed with her nose in her eReader. If you could have your nose in an eReader, which you probably couldn’t.

“Hi,” she said from the doorway.

Hanna looked up. “Hi.”

“Look, I’m—” Liza paused. She was pausing partly because she wasn’t sure what to say, partly because she was giving Hanna an opportunity to apologise first. Which she never did. “I’m sorry,” she finished.

“Done making bets about dead people?”

Crap. Was she going to make this difficult? “I wasn’t making a bet. I just—can you pretend for just five minutes that you don’t have utter contempt for what I do?”

Setting her whatever-she-was-reading aside, Hanna swivelled around and sat with her legs crossed, a tiny ball of fierce energy. “It’s a bit of a jump from ‘I don’t like what you’re doing right now’ to ‘I don’t respect what you do in general.’”

The dynamic felt awkward with only one of them standing, but Liza didn’t feel like sitting down. Instead, she shut the door behind her and leaned beside it. “But you don’t, though. Do you? You’re constantly on at me about how ghoulish and weird it is that I find crime interesting.”

“I never said it was ghoulish and weird.”

“Maybe not, but you hint it pretty loudly.”

Hanna folded her arms. “Rubbish. And if you’ll remember, I defended you yesterday. Twice.”

She had, and on some level Liza knew she always would; that if there was one thing she could count on it was Hanna being in her corner against the whole damned world. But in the moment, it didn’t feel like it counted. “That was just you needing to be right.”

Liza could always tell when Hanna was hurt, because she made an extra effort to sound like she didn’t give a shit. “That’s unfair.”

Un-leaning, Liza walked over to the bed and sat a carefully chosen distance away from her wife. “Probably. I’m sorry, I just—do you think it’s possible we’re both a bit on edge on account of the, y’know, the murder?”

“Honestly?” Hanna squirmed. “I think that’s a bit of an excuse. I mean, also yes, obviously, but it’s not like everything was rosy until last night.”

That was true. Although given the choice between thinking about what might have happened to Malcom Ackroyd and thinking about what might have happened to her relationship, Liza found the murder far easier. “You know I really am sorry.”

“Me too.” Hanna began to unfreeze. Two apologies usually did it. She’d always climb down eventually, as long as she didn’t have to be the one to climb down first.

Kicking off her shoes, Liza slipped into bed and Hanna retrieved her eReader and went back to her book. Eventually, Hanna leaned over and put her head in Liza’s lap, and Liza began absent-mindedly stroking her fingers through her hair. Then, half in a daze, she asked: “When does the kitchen close?”

Until she’d said it, Liza had been barely aware of thinking it. But somehow, just as she’d been letting herself relax, an idea that must have been nagging at the back of her brain without her noticing had come straight through her neurons and out of her mouth without her permission.

Opening her eyes, Hanna looked around. “Beats me, but I can’t imagine it closes before dinner.”

“No, it’s not that.” Liza wriggled Hanna out of her lap. She knew she was killing the peaceful atmosphere, but killing was the issue. And much as she wanted to step back and forget about it, she couldn’t. “I just mean, dinner was late last night, but not that late.”

Sitting up, Hanna did her best to be indulgent. “Why does it matter? If you’re hungry we can order something in the lounge.”

Bounding out of bed, Liza rummaged through the pile of welcome materials that had come with the room. Eventually she found a delicately embossed menu that, on the reverse, included the details of the hotel’s dining policy. “No, here it is. The kitchen definitely closes at half past ten. You can get food later, but only by special arrangement.”

“I’m confused.” Hanna’s air of indulgence was drifting slowly out the window. “Why the sudden obsession with whether you can get artisanal biscuits and homemade chutney?”

There was no explaining it. This was just … whatever the murder investigation equivalent of an earworm was. And ideally, Liza would have been able to let go and focus on just being in the moment and enjoying her wife’s company, but the suspicion was only getting stronger, and if she didn’t do something about it she’d be running what-ifs all night. “This isn’t about artisanal biscuits.”

“Oh, good. Because that would have been weird.”

“If the kitchen closes at half ten,” Liza said, “why was Emmeline only leaving at one?”

Realisation dawned belatedly but inevitably in Hanna’s eyes. “Fuck. No. Do not go down this road.” She flopped back onto her back despairingly. “I’m not—this isn’t a ghoulish thing, but it does make me feel like you’d rather run down somebody’s alibi than spend time with me.”

Even Liza had to admit it sounded pretty bad. “I’m sorry. I just—aren’t you even a tiny bit interested?”

“Honestly?” Hanna seemed to be seriously thinking about it. “No.”

There were many, many times when Liza had wished her mind worked differently. She’d always been easily distracted, prone to whims and fleeting obsessions. It hadn’t normally put her relationships in peril. “Okay. But I—it’s not—you’re still my number one—but we—we saw a dead man yesterday.”

“Oh, don’t pretend this is about respect for the departed.” Hanna’s expression was cold. “This is about solving a puzzle. There’s a reason Dill and Evan will never do another escape room with us.”

“I was not that bad,” Liza protested.

“You were exactly that bad. And this is worse.”

“This is different.”

“It’s not though, is it?”

“There were no dead bodies in that escape room.”

Unexpectedly, Hanna smiled. “There would have been if Dill had taken any longer with that puzzle with the two portraits.”

“He just had to get them to line up to spell out a password—it wasn’t—okay, maybe I do get a bit carried away with this kind of thing, but … well …” Liza broke off. This whole situation was two thoughts away from some very scary places. “Look, the alternative is being trapped in a room, and I really don’t want to feel like I’m trapped in a room.”

At that, Hanna gave a resigned sigh. “No, no, I get it. You’ve always been … This is going to eat you alive if we don’t look into it, isn’t it?”

Liza held her thumb and forefinger about half an inch apart.

“And you won’t go around harassing anybody?”

“Cross my heart.” Liza actually did. “I got a bit over-enthusiastic earlier, but I do do this for a living, and I’m actually pretty responsible.”

“You talk about murders for a living. You don’t investigate them.”

“And I talk about them responsibly. I promise I’ll be careful.”

With a resigned “harrumph,” Hanna swung herself off the bed. “Okay,” she said, “let’s go.”

“Go?”

“This has got in your head, and I know you can’t be stopped when something is in your head. And I’m not going to let you run around this hotel alone.”

Liza gave a smile that she hoped looked self-deprecating. “Why? Are you worried I’ve changed my mind about Ruby?”

“No. I’m worried you’ll die.”

There was that. “I thought you said this whole thing was a tragic accident.”

“And it might be. But if somebody stole a gun then that means—”

“That it’s going to be fired by the end of the play?”

“This isn’t a play, Liza, but essentially yes.” There was a look of real concern on Hanna’s face, and Liza felt incredibly bad for putting it there. “Nobody goes to all the trouble of breaking into two safes to get a gun just for the hell of it. Somebody really is planning to shoot somebody, and I really don’t want it to be you.”

Put that way, it did seem a little reckless. But there was a strange comfort in recklessness. It meant you were only in danger if you chose to be. That wasn’t, however, Hanna-friendly reasoning. “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

Hanna’s shoulders hunched ambiguously. “It’s not that simple though, is it? You have to do this—or at least, you want to do it really badly—and while I definitely don’t, I do want to support you.”

“Just so you know, you don’t get anywhere near as many points for being supportive if you say you’re being supportive.”

It had been meant as a joke, but Hanna wasn’t in the mood. “You know what you also don’t get points for: going off to poke around a murder you’ve got no business poking around, then being sarcastic at your wife when she tells you she’s got your back.”

Liza winced. Fuck, she was the worst. Everything was getting mashed together in her head. All the unanswered questions and unsolved mysteries, like why things were still so difficult with Hanna. And why Mrs Ackroyd had come out in the snow in her pyjamas. And who had stolen the gun. “I’m sorry.”

“Well.” Hanna pulled back her shoulders in a way that made her look briefly like a clockwork solider. “No time like the present. Let’s go talk to the chef”

On the way down to the kitchens, Hanna outlined her ground rules. If they’re too busy, leave. If they don’t want to talk, leave. If anybody looks like they might be about to pick up any kind of weapon, leave. It was a very leaving-focused set of principles.

The kitchens of the hotel were incongruously modern. Accessing them involved walking through a pair of oak-panelled doors that you could imagine Henry VIII banging on to demand his supper, and then finding yourself in a gleaming capsule of brushed chrome full of fresh fish and Aberdeen Angus.

The kitchen staff was fairly small. The hotel had capacity for less than two dozen guests, and aside from Emmeline White herself, there were only two other people in the room: one chopping things, and the other washing things. Liza thought she recognised one of them from dinner the night before—the young woman who’d shared that strange something with Lady Tabitha. The Blaines did their best to slip in quietly but severely underestimated the weight of the doors, leaving them to slam their last six inches and sending a wooden boom echoing off the polished metal of the kitchen surfaces.

“If you’re here to order something,”—Ms White was wearing the politely exasperated look of somebody who didn’t technically have a customer-facing role but was still having to face customers—”you do that at reception. We’re a bit behind at the moment because, well, because of what happened.”

“Actually,”—Liza quietly slipped her phone out of her pocket—”that’s why we’re here.”

This didn’t seem to impress Ms White, who stood with her arms folded and her head cocked to one side. “Sorry, who are you?”

One day, Liza hoped that she’d be able to answer that question without feeling like she was apologising for something. “I’m a … umm … I’m a true crime podcaster? And since we’re all stuck here and might die, I thought I’d have a go at … umm …”

“Solving it?” Ms White’s tone was much less sceptical than Liza had feared it might be. “What’ll that get you?”

“I thought it might stop me going out of my mind with worry. And you never know, I might work out something useful.”

Setting down her meat tenderiser, Ms White shrugged. “There’s not a lot I can say. I just—”

“Do you mind if I record, so I can make notes?”

“You’re really taking this seriously, huh?”

“It’s my job.”

Ms White came over to speak into the recorder. Liza had found this: sometimes, people were weirdly more willing to talk if they felt something was an interview instead of just a person asking questions.

“There’s not a lot to say,” Ms White repeated. “I was just heading back to my room after closing down the kitchen—”

“Where’s your room?”

“In the old farmhouse. All the live-in staff stay there. Anyway, I was heading back to my room when I looked up—”

“What made you look up?” It wasn’t the question Liza wanted answered. She was working up to that. She liked to think that the softly-softly approach lulled people into a false sense of security, but she suspected she was just afraid of confrontation.

The chef made a non-committal gesture. “The hotel’s pretty at night. I like to look up at it when it has all the lights on. And last night when I looked up, I saw somebody on the balcony in the tower suite.”

“Mr Ackroyd?”

“Yes. At least, I assume it was. I didn’t know him.”

“And there was somebody else up there?”

Ms White nodded.

“But nobody you recognised?”

She shook her head. “But then again, I didn’t recognise him either.”

The part of Liza that had read way too many weird cases started going down some very twisty rabbit holes. Because of course, they couldn’t be sure it really was Mr Ackroyd. The body had been wearing his clothes—she remembered that from the lounge earlier in the evening—but had anybody looked closely? And had his face really been recognisable after the fall? “Then what happened?”

“He fell, and I screamed, and when I looked up again the balcony was empty.”

Liza did some calculations in her head. If Mrs Ackroyd had pushed her husband off the balcony, would she have been able to dress, get downstairs, leave the hotel—probably by a side entrance; there was one between the library and the billiard room, although even if she’d gone out the front, the lobby wouldn’t have been manned at that time of night—and loop back in the time it took everybody to gather outside? Almost certainly, especially if she’d dressed quickly, and she had dressed quickly. And nobody would have seen her because their rooms were all on the second floor, and the door to the tower was on the first. “And this was about one o’clock?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Does it normally take you three hours to close up the kitchen?”

Liza let the question hang there. It wasn’t supposed to be a gotcha exactly, as much as she’d have liked, at some point in her life, to gotch somebody. There could easily have been an innocent explanation.

There was no explanation. There was, however, a long pause. The kind of long pause that Liza felt you didn’t normally get from people who were just recalling an innocent detail. “No,” Ms White said at last, “not normally.”

“So, what happened?”

“I went to make a phone call.”

“The phones were down.”

Another pause. Had the chef been caught in a lie, or was she just confused? “Yes, but I—I didn’t know that at the time, so I went back to my room and tried anyway.”

“Who were you calling?”

“My sister.”

“At one in the morning?”

“At midnight. But when I couldn’t get through, I thought it was just the farmhouse, so I went back to the main hotel and tried reception.”

That explained why Ms White hadn’t just stayed in her room, but it had the ring of improvisation to it. Of course, the truth sometimes did. “And then you went back to your room?”

“Yes. And that’s when I saw—what I saw.”

It more or less lined up, and there was nothing else that immediately leapt out. So, Liza thanked Ms White for her time, and Hanna echoed those thanks in a way that was surprisingly un-sarcastic, and the couple retreated.

“Well,” asked Hanna on the way back to their room, “how do you think that went?”

Liza was already tapping notes into her phone as she walked. “Seemed shady to me. Did she seem shady to you? I thought she was being shady.”

“There was an element of shade,” Hanna agreed. “In the non-drag-queen sense. But—” She pushed open the door to their room and stooped to find something on the carpet. “Hold on, what’s this?”

She was holding a piece of hotel notepaper, on which was written, in elegantly nondescript handwriting: I have information. Come to my room—R.

Chapter Ten

Ruby, in the Bedroom, with Suggestions

Saturday, late afternoon

This was suspicious. It was clearly suspicious. So suspicious, in fact, that even Liza thought twice before jumping at it.

“We shouldn’t,” she said, looking at the note with what she hoped wasn’t a hungry expression.

“Technically, I don’t think we are who’s invited,” Hanna pointed out. “I’m not the one she dragged into a supply cupboard last night.”

Liza sighed. “Nothing. Happened.”

“I know nothing happened.” Hanna walked into the room and sat on the bed. “I just mean that if this is a scam to get into your pants, she probably doesn’t want your wife tagging along.”

Liza set the note down on a side table and sat next to her wife, closer than she had been earlier. She took her hand. “If it’s a scam to get into my pants, then there’s no point in going.”

“There’d be at least some point.” Hanna raised a suggestive eyebrow.

“No. There wouldn’t.” Liza upgraded hand holding to hand squeezing. “The only person I want in my pants is you.”

“Aww, you say the most romantic things.” After ten years, it was easy to tell when Hanna was using sarcasm as deflection. Partly because they knew each other well, and partly because she was seldom not.

“Why do you always do that?” asked Liza, more earnestly than she’d intended.

“Do what?”

Liza bit her lip. This had the risk of going to some places she wasn’t one thousand percent sure she was comfortable going. “Like, last year when we went to stay with Mel down in Devon?”

“What? We had a nice time. We like Mel. Did I give the impression I don’t like Mel?”

The worst thing about it was that Hanna wasn’t being obtuse. She could be, sometimes, but this wasn’t a time. “I know you like her. It’s just that you also kept acting like I wanted to sleep with her.”

Hanna gave a not-exactly-smirk. “To be fair, you have slept with her.”

“A long time ago. At university. And I know you were mostly joking, and I know she is kind of flirty—”

“A lot of your friends are.”

That wasn’t fair. But it also wasn’t the kind of unfair that stung. “No, an average number of my friends are. It’s just that for some reason you can’t get it through your head that I’m not interested in anybody else.”

Hanna shrank a little. And Liza hadn’t meant to make her shrink. A shrinking Hanna wasn’t a happy Hanna, and despite everything Liza still badly wanted her wife to be happy.

“I guess …” Hanna said at last. “I guess I just don’t see why you wouldn’t be.”

“Because I’ve got you. And while you’re annoying and controlling and we’ve kind of barely spoken for the last year and a half—”

That, at least, shook Hanna out of her gloom spiral. “Hey, you’re the one who got a new job.”

“I know.” Liza gave Hanna’s hand a final, half-hopeful squeeze before letting her go. “I’m not saying we don’t both have shit to work on. But the point is that I want to work on it. I’m not looking to bail, and I’m certainly not looking to hop into bed with the first femme fatale who walks out of a black-and-white movie and into my room.”

Hanna seemed to relax a little, but Liza was pretty sure they’d be having this conversation again. Some insecurities were perennial.

“So,” Liza tried, “should we go? It seems like … like we don’t have much to lose?”

That much Hanna could agree with. And there was little to be gained by hanging out in their room re-hashing the past. So they set out, Liza hoping Hanna wouldn’t ask how she knew which room was Ruby’s—not that Sir Richard told me was a particularly damning explanation.

They knocked on Ruby’s door and were greeted by an, “It’s open,” delivered with frankly unnecessary sultriness. Inside they found Ruby lounging artfully on the bed in a way that somehow suggested nudity despite her being fully clothed.

And she was, Liza noticed, pretty much the only notable thing in the entire room. The rest of it was spare enough to look almost abandoned. Even the bed she was lying on—framed in hangings but not a four-poster—didn’t look like it had been slept in. The bedside tables were plain white, and the only decorations on the walls were frustratingly contextless sketches of what appeared to be classical urns. Indeed, the whole place was frustratingly contextless, which, Liza supposed, made sense. Ruby was, after all, a frustratingly contextless woman.

“I see you’ve brought your wife.” Ruby gave a sharp smile. “How very adventurous of you.”

“Does this act really work?” asked Hanna with matching sharpness.

“All the time. Case in point, I have an update for you.”

Liza tried very hard to avoid putting two and two together but got to four anyway. “What do you mean, case in point? Are you saying you managed to seduce vital information out of somebody at some point in the last …”—she checked the time on her phone—”fourteen hours?”

“Why?” That smirk again. “What have you been doing with your time?”

“Who?” asked Liza in a mildly appalled tone that she hoped wouldn’t read to Ruby as judgemental, or to Hanna as jealous. “Half the people here are over sixty.”

She raised an eyebrow. “There’s a very sweet footman.”

“The one who looks like he’s barely out of sixth form?” Hanna seemed a lot less concerned about sounding judgemental.

Not, it seemed, that Ruby had any fear of being judged, because she laughed like she was humouring an indifferent joke. “Firstly,” she said, “he’s at university. This is a holiday job for him and, murders aside, I suspect he thinks it’s going rather well. Secondly. Did you miss the part where I’m a professional criminal? I’ve just stolen over a million pounds from a man who will kill me if he catches me; I’m not about to baulk at breaking the half-your-age-plus-seven rule.”

“Does everybody in your line of work brag as much as you do?” The hostility in Hanna’s voice was spilling over just slightly into sexual tension. Or maybe that was Liza projecting. Or Ruby’s studied air of weaponised sexuality.

“All of us. It’s how people know we’re good at our jobs.”

Liza thought about that for a second. “People don’t just think you’re lying?”

“It’s sort of circular.” The smile on Ruby’s lips was just this edge of mocking. “If I’m good enough at my job to get away with lying to powerful, dangerous people about how good I am, then I’m not actually lying at all.”

With an aggrieved sigh, Hanna slumped against the wall. “Are you ever going to get to the point, or are you hoping that one of us will agree to fuck you because it’ll be quicker than talking to you?”

“You know, you’d be amazed how often that works.”

Hanna’s gaze swept over Ruby, who had maintained her lounge flawlessly. “After this conversation, I really wouldn’t.”

“Perhaps,” Liza offered, “you could just tell us the new thing you’ve found out. Or, better still, the new thing you’ve found out and all the things you’re refusing to tell us because you insist on this whole international-woman-of-mystery routine.”

Ruby looked genuinely disappointed. “You know, sometimes you’re no fun at all. I blame her.” She indicated Hanna with a nod. “She’s clearly a bad influence.”

Hanna just glared back. “Stop wasting our time.”

“Oh, fine.” There were, Liza was realising, few people who could pout quite as well as Ruby. “I thought you might be interested to know that the young footman argued quite violently with Mr Ackroyd a couple of nights ago. Mr Burgh is in a terrible panic about it. He’s worried that one of his staff killed a guest.”

“Sorry, which of them did you seduce for this information?” The moment Liza asked she knew she’d regret it.

“Why”—Ruby raised an eyebrow—”does it have to be which?”

Hanna, who was generally all for sex positivity but drew the line at sex positivity that was directly aimed at seducing her wife, did her best to change the subject. “And that was it? That was the big come-to-my-room-alone reveal?”

“I never said alone; I was quite happy to accommodate both of you. And it was never meant to be a reveal. I just thought we might want to keep each other …”—Ruby twirled her hand in an exaggerated looking-for-words gesture—”abreast of our enquiries. I suppose you’ve made some progress yourselves.”

A light switched on in Liza’s head. “Oh right, this is a mutual trust thing?”

“Since you turned down the other way of building mutual trust, I thought this one might work.”

Hanna had de-slumped and was now standing with her arms folded and a deeply sceptical expression on her face. “This sounds a lot like you’re trying to scam us.”

“Alas, I am unmasked.” With a theatrical gasp, Ruby clasped her hands to her chest. “You have seen through my dastardly plan to trick you into sharing information that might stop us all from being brutally murdered.”

“Nobody,” Hanna insisted, “has been brutally murdered. Not for certain.”

“Yes, for certain.” For all her flirtatiousness and self-conscious obfuscation, Ruby seemed suddenly very serious. “Where Mr B is concerned—”

“Oh, not you as well.” For reasons Liza understood, Hanna was not in a patient mood. “Can we stop with the Mr B nonsense? It makes this whole thing sound like an episode of Sesame Street.”

Ruby gave a not-the-point shrug. “Where my former employer is concerned, there are no coincidences. Mr Ackroyd’s death is very likely to be part of something. The question is what.”

“Maybe.” There were two conflicting impulses at war in Liza’s mind, and she still hadn’t decided which it made more sense to go with. “Right now, all we have is the dead body of a man who seemed to rub a lot of people up the wrong way. He argued with the footman, he also argued with the colonel. Hell, he argued with Hanna.”

“Definitely wasn’t me,” Hanna volunteered. “I’d have remembered.”

“And he still might just have slipped and fallen. If the manager is leaning towards the staff, that might mean something, or it might just mean he’s thinking about the scenario that’s worst for his job. So the way I see it, it’s an even …”—she counted quickly in her head—”six-way tie between an accident, the colonel, the footman—what’s his name, by the way?”

“Never bothered to find out.” There were too many teeth in Ruby’s smile.

“The unnamed footman,” Liza continued, “Mrs Ackroyd, Emmeline White, or a mysterious shadowy assassin working for an underworld kingpin.”

Ruby sat up. “What makes you suspect Ms White?”

“She found the body.” It wasn’t a great reason, but then Liza didn’t feel there were many great reasons to be had. “But that probably doesn’t mean much in this case.”

“Why not?” asked Hanna, still not taking her eyes off Ruby. “I’ve listened to your podcast, the person who finds the body is usually a prime suspect.”

“Yes, but that’s sort of …” Liza waved her hands. “There’s context there.”

“Tell me?” Hanna was doing her interested voice. She probably wasn’t; she’d only ever listened to Actual in a dutiful way, but it was nice she was making the effort. Of course, she might have only been making the effort to show up Ruby.

“Okay, so the thing about murder”—fighting the temptation to go into lecture mode, Liza began pacing—”is that nine times out of ten it’s really petty and really obvious. You get killed in your own house by somebody you know, usually by somebody you live with. Usually for a reason that’s incredibly boring and trivial.”

Ruby cocked her head to one side. “Like, they’ve realised that you were only sleeping with them in order to get your hands on the diamonds they stole from the Louvre? That kind of boring and trivial?”

“Or,” Hanna suggested, “like your wife pushing you off a balcony because she’s sick of you trying to get mobile phone reception at one in the morning?”

“More like the second one,” said Liza.

Ruby was sitting up now, almost as if she was actually paying attention. “Really? The thing with the diamonds has happened to me quite a lot.”

“Yeah, I don’t think your life is typical.” Liza tried to get her monologue back on track. “And I’m not ruling the it-was-the-wife option out, even if it is a bit …”

“Unsatisfying?” asked Ruby. “Tawdry? Unbecoming?”

“Sad, I was going to say.” And it was. Now she thought about it, Liza couldn’t quite shake how pointlessly sad she found it. “I’d rather believe Mr Ackroyd died because there’s a master criminal on the loose than because couples fight sometimes.”

Hanna winced. “For what it’s worth, I promise I won’t throw you off a balcony.”

“That’s the thing.” Liza turned to her wife. “You can’t promise that.”

The look in Hanna’s eyes was on the border between offended and incredulous. “I kind of think I can.”

Hoping that she wasn’t about to make herself sound like a total psychopath, Liza shook her head. “You can’t. I can’t either. People make mistakes. They snap, they shove somebody when they’re standing in the wrong place or lash out when they’re holding the wrong kind of knife.”

“There’s a right kind of knife?” asked Hanna.

Ruby grinned. “Dozens. If you’re very good, I’ll give you a demonstration.”

“Sorry,”—Hanna turned her attention back to the bed—”are you making flirty references to blood play while we’re discussing a man’s actual death?”

The grin didn’t seem to be going anywhere. “Ask your wife what I’m calling my autobiography.”

“Anyway.” Liza made an effort to drag the conversation away from the cliff it seemed about to pitch over. “The point is that the reason the person who finds the body is so often the killer is that if you kill your own husband in your own home, not finding the body would look much more suspicious.” She thought that was right, at least. It wasn’t like she was a criminologist. “But if you’d gone to a complete stranger’s room and shoved him off a balcony … I don’t know. I think you’d be better off pretending you were never there.”

“It’s what I did.” Ruby put one delicate finger to her lips. “Sorry, I mean, what I would do.”

“Wow.” There were few words Hanna put less enthusiasm into than wow. “You are really bad at this building trust thing.”

Before Ruby could reply, a sharp crack echoed from outside. It was loud, too loud, and to Liza suggested some things she’d really hoped weren’t going to be suggested.

“What the fuck was that?” asked Hanna.

“Unless I’m very much mistaken,”—Ruby rose from the bed with an eerie mix of grace and enthusiasm—”it was an Enfield No. 2 Mark 1 revolver.”

Chapter Eleven

Liza, in the Boathouse, with a Camera

Saturday, early evening

Following the sound of a single gunshot through the expansive grounds of a luxury hotel across a wide expanse of snow was not as easy as Liza had hoped it might be. Plus, Hanna had been really, really unhappy about running towards the sound of guns. Especially since Ruby had elected not to join them.

“It just seems,” she had said as they hurried downstairs, “that if there’s one thing about her I trust, it’s her survival instincts.”

Liza put an arm around her wife, partly for reassurance and partly because she felt a bit guilty for dragging her back into the cold. “Look at it this way: if somebody’s been shot, then probably wherever that happened is the last place the killer is going to want to be. So, it’s actually the safest place in the entire hotel.”

“That seems specious.”

“Well … maybe a bit. But would you rather just stand around not knowing what’s going on?”

“Honestly, if it was the best way to not get killed, yes.”

The grounds of the hotel were relatively open, which, combined with the conveniently white background, made the other guests stand out quite clearly, although they were hard to identify from the courtyard. Two figures were already hurrying along the shore towards the trees by the loch, and another two were descending towards the same destination from a different direction. The latter pair, Liza felt sure, were Sir Richard and his aunt, her sapphire blue dress standing out bold against the snow.

Hurrying, despite the fact that there was almost certainly no reason to hurry, and quite a good reason—in the shape of an armed murderer—to want to avoid being first on the scene, Liza and Hanna stumbled down the bank towards the wood, holding onto one another to keep from falling, or at least to make sure that if one fell, both would.

When they reached the loch, they collided with the two men they’d seen from the hotel. One, it turned out, was Professor Worth, shivering in a deep purple overcoat. The other was the vicar. Up close, he was taller than Liza might have expected—not that there was a height limit for clergy. He had a sort of ranginess to him that looked out of place as well, but maybe she was just unfairly applying Ruby’s warning to an innocent man of the cloth.

“You heard it too, I assume,” the vicar said.

Liza nodded. “I think it came from down here? It’s hard to tell with the echoes.”

“It’s where I’d bring somebody if I was going to shoot them.” It wasn’t a comment Liza expected from a man whose work outfit included a dog collar, but then again, her job-slash-hobby was talking about serial killers, so she wasn’t really in a place to judge.

“Ditch the body in the woods, sling the gun in the loch?” she suggested.

The vicar nodded. “The professor and I were in the library,” he explained, “when we heard.”

“It’s extremely concerning,” added Professor Worth. “First, people falling off balconies; now gunfire. And poor Mrs Ackroyd, she’s taken the whole thing quite to heart.”

Hanna gave him a sceptical look. “Well, I mean, her husband died, so yes?”

“Oh, but it’s not just that.” The professor’s eyes were wide behind his glasses. “It’s this beastly Belloc fellow. She’s quite convinced he suspects her.”

“Well, he’d have to, wouldn’t he?” Liza wasn’t especially happy to be casting aspersions on a grieving woman. “He was pushed from their balcony, and it really is usually the spouse.”

The professor simpered. “I know. Statistically that’s certainly true, but … well … one doesn’t like to think it, does one?”

The four of them had been talking for long enough that fresh snowfall was already beginning to cover their footprints, and so when they arrived at last at the copse, they approached over pristine white ground. The snow-cover faded as they reached the trees—conifers, and quite densely packed—which meant Sir Richard and his aunt were quite close before Liza noticed them.

“Afternoon, ladies.” Sir Richard tipped an imaginary hat. “Professor, Vicar. Dashed bad business this, what?”

“Oh, extremely dashed,” agreed Hanna. “So, are we intending to just wander aimlessly around a small woodland until somebody shoots at us?”

Liza, without really intending to, started running scenarios. The shot had sounded from the grounds, but the grounds were mostly open, which meant that anybody looking out of a window would have seen the shooter unless they’d been deep in the trees or—”The boathouse?”

“It would be out of sight of the hotel.” Sir Richard seemed to be contemplating something. “Worth a try, certainly. Although for the purposes of our bet, I’ll add that this doesn’t count.”

“We don’t have a bet,” Liza protested slightly too quickly. “We’re just both … keeping an eye out for things that might tell us what’s happening.”

The boathouse was a small timber building, somewhat younger than the rest of the hotel, nestled just on the edge of the copse and opening out onto the lake. The party crept towards it, some of the guests at least growing more hesitant as the realisation that they didn’t know what they were going to find grew stronger. Sir Richard had no such problems, strolling with an almost jaunty air towards the loch.

Lady Tabitha was the first to see the body, literally clutching her pearls with shock. The other guests quickly rallied around her, Sir Richard giving her a consoling but utterly mannerly pat on the arm while everybody else tried to take in what they could of the scene.

There on the ground, lying face up with—Liza fancied—a look of shock still burned into his eyes, was Belloc. A ragged bloodstain covered his chest, and beneath him the thin flurry of snow blown in from the loch was staining red.

“Is he—?” asked the professor, turning his face away.

“Yes,” said Hanna with an authority derived from abject panic. “Yes, he fucking is. The fucking detective who was supposed to catch the fucking killer has just been fucking killed.”

“And I suppose he is definitely dead?” asked Lady Tabitha. “Not just … stunned?”

Sir Richard apparently wasn’t in a reassuring mood. “I fear he’s a goner, Auntie.”

While the others were talking, Reverend Lincoln had moved to inspect the body, although Liza noticed he was very careful not to touch it. “Looks like one gunshot to the chest. Probably close range.”

“And recently,” added Sir Richard. “The shot was, what? Five, ten minutes ago?”

Liza stared at Belloc’s corpse. “Long enough to bleed to death.”

“But not long enough that the killer isn’t probably still nearby,” added Hanna, carefully manoeuvring her back to the boathouse.

For a moment, the party let that sink in.

“If we move quickly, we can probably catch them?” Liza suggested, knowing as she said it that it was a really, really bad idea.

Sir Richard grinned. “I’m game if you are. Tracks are faint here but should get better past the tree line.”

This earned a, “No,” from Hanna and an, “Are you certain, dear?” from Aunt Tabitha at the exact same moment.

“What if …?” Professor Worth took a half-step forward, looked at the body, and then took a full step back. “What if we all held very still until we were absolutely certain that they’ve gone away?”

“But we’ve got a chance to catch the bounder,” insisted Sir Richard. “Come on, old boy, faint heart never won fair lady and all that.”

The professor did not look convinced. “I’m not trying to win a fair lady, or to catch a bounder. I’m trying to stay as far away as possible from a man with a gun.”

“I’d listen to the man, dear.” Lady Tabitha’s tone wasn’t quite chiding, but it was definitely auntly. “I know you like your adventures, but this is an unnecessary risk.”

“But life’s nothing without adventure,” protested Sir Richard. “And I’ve always come through okay so far.”

“So had he,” Hanna pointed out, nodding at Belloc’s body. “It’s not exciting and it’s not cool, but the professor is right: we should all be trying to avoid catching the killer in the act.”

Everybody except Sir Richard was just agreeing with this sensible line of reasoning when a thought struck Liza that she immediately wished hadn’t struck her. “What if they’re in the boathouse?”

Hanna jumped away from the wall like it was electrified, sprawling on the floor and banging her arm on a frozen root. “Ow, fuck. Thanks, couldn’t you have thought of that before I pressed my spine against a shooting range?”

Even as she helped her wife to her feet, Liza kept her eyes trained on the boathouse. It had two doors, one leading onto the loch, and another side door not far from where Belloc’s body was lying.

“No.” Hanna was doing her resolute voice.

“But …” The door was definitely unlocked, Liza was sure of that. The padlock was open.

“No. I am not letting my wife walk into a barn and get a bullet in the face. Let somebody else check if they want to.”

Aunt Tabitha gave Hanna a disappointed look. “Isn’t that a little sexist, dear?”

“I said somebody else. Not one of the men.”

“Well, I’m not volunteering,” Aunt Tabitha told her. “So I suggest we either resign ourselves to reinforcing patriarchal norms or you let the lady go.”

Still nursing her elbow, Hanna scowled. “You know what, I’m willing to take the hit. If pandering to the occasional gender stereotype means that nobody I care about walks—hey! Come back here!”

Curiosity had got the better of Liza. She had been inching towards the boathouse and was now within reach of the door. Keeping herself flat to the wall in the hope that any bullets that came her way would be expecting her to approach from a more traditional angle, she reached out one hand from as far away as she could manage and pushed the door open.

It juddered about five inches before getting stuck on damp ground. But there wasn’t a hail of answering gunfire, which she took as a good sign. Still, trying to take at least some elementary precautions, she crouched low as she got closer, and forced the door wide enough to poke her head through. When she found that she still hadn’t died, she stood, opened the door fully, and walked in.

In some ways, it was an anticlimactic sight. The boathouse was mostly full of boats—primarily rowboats—and boating-related paraphernalia that was currently seeing no use. “Nothing,” she called back to the guests outside. “Unless they’re hiding.”

“We could search it?” That was the vicar.

“Liza, please come out of there.” That was Hanna. “I know this is your thing, but—and I’m doing I statements here—I feel quite scared right now.”

The boathouse door swung open again and Sir Richard entered, with his aunt and the vicar behind him. “Well scouted, old girl, but why don’t you go back outside? We’ll give this place the once-over and report back.”

While Liza didn’t especially like taking instruction from Sir Richard, or anybody else for that matter, Hanna had done the I statements, which meant that she was trying super hard to be understanding while also, on some level, losing her shit. A little sheepishly, Liza emerged.

Hanna had her arms folded in a way that looked a lot less I-statement-y than her tone had implied. “What part of no did you not understand?”

“The part where you’re the boss of me?” Liza shot back.

“You. Could. Have. Died.”

“I. Didn’t.” If she was honest with herself, Liza wasn’t sure if she was reacting more from anger or guilt.

“I … think I might go.” The professor was the only member of the little band who hadn’t gone into the boathouse, and now he seemed to be at least partially regretting it. “You ladies clearly have a lot to discuss.” Without waiting for a response, he hurried off.

“What are we going to do?” asked Hanna. Her voice had an almost plaintive edge to it.

“About us, or about …?” Tilting her head sideways and down, Liza indicated the sprawled corpse of the former detective Belloc.

“Both?” For a moment Hanna seemed to be wrestling with something. “And I suppose actually he is a bit more important right now.”

“Yeah, nothing like a dead body to put your relationship drama into perspective.”

Hanna raised an eyebrow. “Okay, technically yes. But can you not characterise my concern for your safety as relationship drama?”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean … I just … sorry.” Liza looked down. Partly out of contrition, partly because she wanted to inspect the ground. With everything that was going on in her life at the moment, it was a lot easier to focus on the abstract. On clues and timelines and, in this case, on footprints. There was snow here—a little of it, at least. But any marks that might have been left by the killer had either been dusted over by whatever had blown off the loch in the last ten minutes, or else obliterated by people walking around and looking in the boathouse. “Do you—if you don’t want to, we don’t have to—but do you think we could just, kind of, scout the area a bit? If the killer’s gone, they must have left the woods somehow, and—I don’t know, maybe we’ll find tracks?”

Hanna was glaring but, in her defence, it looked like it was meant as a supportive glare. “And you’ll be careful?”

“As a—as a very careful person.”

If they were serious about following footprints, their best bet, Liza decided, was to skirt the edge of the copse. Although, since at least a half-dozen people including Belloc had been to the woods in the last half hour, it might turn out to be a gigantic waste of her time, because how would she even begin to tell whose tracks were whose? After a second’s thought she pulled out her camera and, after photographing Belloc’s body from two or three different angles for completeness, took close-ups of the soles of his shoes. Then she stood on one leg and photographed her own.

“What are you …?”

“Comparison. Can I do yours too?”

Sighing and wincing, Hanna forgot about her bad arm just long enough to use it to prop herself on a tree while Liza photographed her boots. “Just so you know, I’m going to pretend this is a fetish thing.”

“Noted.”

The next step was to nip back inside the boathouse, explain to the assembled guests there that she was going to go hunting for footprints, and get them all to let her photograph their feet. A plan that, to her genuine shock, worked perfectly smoothly. Then, armed with a phone full of comparative shoe pictures, she took Hanna around the edge of the tree line until they found the first set of tracks, on the northernmost side of the woodland facing the hotel. The new snowfall was already obscuring the details, but they were deep enough that you could make out size and shape well enough. Unfortunately, Liza was ninety-nine percent sure these were the tracks that she, Hanna, and their companions had made coming in, because there seemed to be a lot of them, and they all muddled over each other.

Kneeling down in the snow, she had a go at comparing them anyway. And it soon became clear that, to the untrained eye, a footprint in the snow just looked like a vaguely foot-sized oval.

“Not sure?” asked Hanna, who was taking the whole adventure in remarkably good spirits now her risk of death had dropped from immediate to merely likely.

“No.” Liza frowned. “I think that one’s me. I’m pretty sure those are you because you have tiny feet and wear deep treads. That might be the vicar, and I didn’t get a picture of the professor, so it’s anybody’s guess.”

Disheartened but not dissuaded, they carried on with their circuit. They found another pair of tracks leading into the wood, which Liza felt fairly confident identifying as Sir Richard and Aunt Tabitha. Although, honestly, she was working this out more from context clues—she’d seen them walk in together along roughly this path—than from any real skill at tracking.

The next set of prints leading in was older, the snowfall of the last half hour or so already dusting them over so that they were little more than divots, but the toes were wide and the feet short, making her suspect that this was where Belloc had come to meet whoever it was he thought he was coming here to meet.

Completing the circuit revealed three more sets of tracks, one towards the woods and one away. One of those, Liza concluded, had to be the professor. He was the only other person she knew had left the woods recently, rather than coming into them. Unfortunately, since she hadn’t seen where he’d gone, she couldn’t tell which were his. But either way, she realised with a kind of sick thrill, the other set of prints had to belong to the killer.

She photographed all three sets of tracks in as much detail as she could and followed each of them to their ends, only to find they all came from the hotel, which, when she thought about it, was the only place they could have come from. Which was fine. That confirmed that the killer was in the hotel. And once she could eliminate the professor’s footprints, which she … might not be able to do because she hadn’t seen his shoes, and even if she had they were still just tracks in snow, and …

It was all beginning to feel an awful lot like nothing. Because one aha moment didn’t actually crack a whole case open. It didn’t even mildly dent it. But then, what had she expected? She wasn’t a detective. She wasn’t even an amateur detective. She was a podcaster with a failing marriage.

Chapter Twelve

Liza, in the Hedgerow, with a Hunch

Saturday evening

The Blaines spent the next couple of hours in what Liza tended to think of as “a scratchy space.” They weren’t arguing exactly, but each was acutely aware of the many ways they could start an argument if they weren’t careful. For most of the afternoon, Liza had huddled on the floor transferring pictures from her phone to her laptop while Hanna took a long bath.

Staring at digital photographs of footprints was beginning to give Liza a headache, and more than once she’d considered giving up. But Hanna had been right: this would just eat at her if she didn’t at least try to—not solve it, exactly—but do something. Even though it was becoming abundantly clear that she was out of her depth. It wasn’t that she’d expected to be able to look at a couple of marks in the snow and say at once “aha, the killer was five foot, eight inches tall with a florid face, smoking a Trichinopoly cigar,” but she also hadn’t expected it to be quite this hard. She wasn’t even completely sure which of the three unaccounted-for sets of prints went together. Neither the professor nor the killer had been courteous enough to wear shoes that were notably large or small, or characterised with a distinctive tread, or perhaps conveniently embossed with the name of a manufacturer who only ever made three pairs of shoes a year for a very select list of clients. She thought two of them were of a size. And perhaps a little smaller? Possibly a woman? Then again, Belloc’s feet had been pretty small too.

Still, there were some things she really could work out. Some people they couldn’t have belonged to. She, Hanna, and Ruby had been together in the hotel. Sir Richard and his aunt, and the professor and the vicar, had been in pairs when the gun went off. And of course, it was possible that somebody was lying to protect somebody else—especially where Sir Richard and his aunt were concerned. Family protecting family was more likely than strangers protecting strangers, unless there was some kind of you-kill-my-inconvenient-relative-I’ll-kill-your-wife deal going on. But she’d seen all four of them walking towards the woods, and it seemed very improbable that any of them could have shot him, then looped around back to the hotel in time to make it look like they’d just heard the gunshot five minutes later. Of course, somebody could have seen something from the hotel—Ruby’s room was south-facing and so was Mr Burgh’s office—but, “By the way, I saw Mr/Ms X wandering down to the boathouse with a gun,” wasn’t the sort of information you kept to yourself when you were trapped in a hotel with a killer. Still, she filed the possibility away under worth following up on.

The bathroom door opened and Hanna emerged, wrapped in a fluffy hotel dressing gown that she didn’t look like she was at all in a mood to appreciate. “They’ll be serving dinner soon.”

Liza looked up. “Be done in a minute.”

Apparently in no great rush herself, Hanna went and slumped on the bed. “I’m trying, you know.”

“Trying?” Had her head been more in the game Liza might have had a better response.

“To be supportive of”—Hanna waved a hand—”this. But honestly, it’s creeping me out a bit.”

Shutting her laptop, Liza turned around. This was probably a full-attention conversation. “I know you’ve always found the true crime thing a bit … I don’t know, silly? Unethical? Non-specifically not okay?”

“I haven’t.” That was an obvious enough lie that Hanna winced. “Okay, I have sometimes found it a little … a little difficult. It was weird to come home one day and find my wife poring over old police reports and pictures of bloody crime scenes.”

“Weird?”

“Unexpected.”

“I’ve always been into this stuff, for as long as you’ve known me.” There was nothing quite like learning after a decade that your spouse was surprised by a significant element of your personality.

And to her credit, Hanna seemed to notice that this was a nothing-quite-like situation. “I know. Except suddenly having it be a major part of our life was jarring. And now it’s suddenly become an even more major part of our life.”

“I’m hoping this is temporary.” Liza made an expansive gesture that failed to encompass the unusualness of their situation. “Two people have died—”

“I know two people have died. That’s what I mean.”

Liza looked up quizzically. “What do you mean, ‘that’s what you mean’?”

“Two people have died; one of them, assuming he wasn’t quite the fraud he seemed to be, an actual professional detective. You deciding to prod all of this with a stick makes me really uncomfortable.”

“I’m not prodding. I’m … I’m trying to work out what’s going on.”

Hanna crawled across the bed, the better to show Liza her serious face. “The last person who tried to work out what was going on wound up dead on the floor with you photographing his boots. I do not want to have to photograph your boots.”

“Photograph my boots?”

“Sorry, was that too euphemistic? I don’t want you to die. The thought of you dying scares me.” Hanna scooted right the way to the edge of the bed and sat with her legs dangling over the side. “It scares me so fucking much.”

Accepting that her notes would survive to confuse her another day, Liza shuffled sideways and sat at her wife’s feet. “I mean, I probably won’t?”

“But if you did there’d be nothing I could do. You’d be dead, and that would be it.”

Liza began gently massaging Hanna’s calves, which calmed her a little, but only a little. “You might have to accept that there are some things you can’t fix.”

“Is that a dig about this weekend?”

“Well,”—leaning forward, Liza pressed a kiss to Hanna’s knee—”it has got us trapped in a castle with two dead bodies and a killer on the loose, so it hasn’t been your best plan.”

Hanna kicked at her, softly but in a way that signalled genuine displeasure. “You realise that’s a big part of why I’m not okay with this?”

“Because it’s ruined our holiday?”

“Because”—Hanna reached down with an oddly sincere tenderness—”the idea of something happening to you frightens me. The idea of something happening to you because of something I’ve done fucking kills me.”

Liza didn’t want to say, “Now you’re being silly,” but she did think it quite loudly. Getting up, she sat herself on the bed next to Hanna and put her arm around her. “Okay, then since you, y’know, married me, you might need to reel some of that in a bit. Because in case you haven’t noticed, I can be a handful.”

“I’ve mostly managed.”

“I’m serious.” A hug turned into a squeeze. “You can’t keep freaking out every time I do something that might be new or dangerous.”

“You walked into a shed that might have had an armed murderer in it.”

Okay, that had been a bit irresponsible. “And I was fine. And somebody had to because especially with Belloc dead, it really is just us now. And I don’t trust the other guests an inch.”

“Not even the sultry blonde one?”

“Especially not the sultry blonde one.” Liza paused. That was mostly true, but this seemed like a be-honest-with-your-wife moment. “Although I don’t think she was lying about the footman. And she might be right about the vicar.”

Until two seconds ago, Hanna had been relaxing, albeit slightly. “Hold on, what about the vicar?”

Liza gave an apologetic grimace. “She said he wasn’t who he seems.”

“How incredibly helpful,” Hanna replied with a tone of withering vindication.

“Yeah, she was a bit vague. But he knew far too much about gunshots.”

Hanna’s left eyebrow rose a half-inch. “Perhaps he works in a very violent parish?”

For a while they just sat there, trying to get used to being close to each other again, trying to comfort each other, but eventually the demands of the hotel timetable caught up with them and they had to leave for dinner. As she stood by the window, waiting for Hanna to dress, Liza saw two members of the hotel staff carrying Belloc’s body out of the woods. One of them, she assumed, was the charming gentleman whose comparative youth Ruby had been so unconcerned about. Technically, Liza supposed, they were disturbing the crime scene, but what else could they do? They might be snowed in for a day or so yet, and they could hardly leave a man’s corpse lying around indefinitely.

If she’d been the sort to make a big deal about irony, Liza might have reflected on how ironic it was that Belloc, so confident and so determined to be the centre of everything, was now being carted off to some makeshift morgue by two random members of hotel staff. But she wasn’t that sort, and while she was carefully not reflecting on it, Hanna finished dressing, and they headed down for dinner.

The dining hall was full when they arrived, with everybody eyeing each other in a way that looked like it wasn’t a normal dinner service. Which, of course, it wasn’t, for reasons of murder.

As Liza and Hanna settled at their end of the table, Ms White came forward and addressed the room. “So, a few food-related things. Firstly, we’re doing slightly fewer courses this evening because we’re trying to conserve our supplies. Secondly, that means the rabbit ravioli is being saved for tomorrow, and if you did want to try the langoustine then tonight is your only chance because we get them in fresh, and they’ll have gone bad by the morning. I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I think we can all agree that this is a weird situation.”

“On which subject,”—Mr Burgh took over room-addressing duties—”I’m sure we are all aware of the sad death of Mr Belloc and, while obviously the coroner is not on hand to pass an official verdict, it does rather seem there was foul play.”

“Rather seem?” Aunt Tabitha’s voice was incredulous. “The man was shot.”

The manager did his best to project an aura of calm assurance but failed abjectly. “Well, we can’t totally rule out suicide.”

“You think he shot himself in the chest?” asked Sir Richard.

“With a stolen Enfield No. 2 Mark 1 revolver?” added Colonel Coleman.

“And he decided to do it behind a boathouse, while he was investigating a murder?” continued Reverend Lincoln.

“And he somehow made the gun disappear?” finished Professor Worth. Next to the professor, Mrs Ackroyd visibly tensed, and he patted her hand reassuringly.

“I didn’t say it was likely” admitted Mr Burgh. “Just that we should probably remember that we are none of us professionals.”

Sir Richard raised a hand. “Excuse me, I have solved no fewer than six murders in my day and recovered Lady Billingham’s missing emeralds.”

“That hardly counts, dear,” said Aunt Tabitha. “The cat had eaten them.”

Mr Burgh was looking increasingly flustered. “Even so, you aren’t actually an official detective, so I just think it’s important that we remember not to overreach ourselves or jump to any conclusions.”

Colonel Coleman slathered butter onto a slice of bread from the basket on his table. “If I’m being honest, old boy, you’re talking rather a lot like you killed the bugger.”

Was he? Wasn’t he just suggesting, quite sensibly, that they not jump to conclusions? Then again, he would have had access to the gun. And to the Ackroyds’ room. And his name did begin with a B.

“I most certainly didn’t,” protested Mr Burgh. If he was a steely-eyed killer just pretending to be a flustered hotel manager, he was doing a very good job of it. “I was in my office. I just mean that we should be careful. The killer can’t escape until the snow clears—”

“You realise that also means we can’t escape the killer?” Hanna’s tone was sharp, but now that Liza was paying attention, she could hear real disquiet in it. “How is that a good thing?”

“If we’re lucky,” said Sir Richard, “the killer is done. Most folk don’t kill over and over again, you know. Seldom any mileage in it for ‘em.”

“And if we’re unlucky?” Ruby’s voice floated across the room like smoke from the cigarette she wasn’t holding.

Sir Richard gave an apologetic shrug. “Ah. In that case, things might get rather bloody.”

“Well, I say,” Colonel Coleman continued, “that we all rally together and run this blighter to ground.”

“Oh, wonderful.” Hanna clapped her hands. “Mob justice.”

Liza squeezed her wife’s arm. “Maybe we shouldn’t be running people to ground exactly. But we are in this together, aren’t we?”

Across the room, Ruby smirked. “Well, all except one of us.”

“Rather than—um—rather than hounding anybody,”—Professor Worth sounded even more hesitant than usual—”perhaps we could at least try to locate the gun? I know I for one would feel far more comfortable if I knew that all of the firearms in the hotel were locked up safely where they should be.”

“You mean, locked up in the gun cabinet that somebody definitely already managed to break into?” There was a definite tension in Hanna’s body as she spoke.

“Better than having it just floating around the hotel, surely?” said the professor. “And, you know, if we find the gun, we might find the killer.”

“If they haven’t thrown it in the loch already.” That was the vicar, once again showing he’d put a disturbing amount of thought into the matter of murder.

“I don’t think they have.” And that, to Liza’s mild surprise, was Liza. “I found another set of footprints coming to and from the woods. They were careful to come and go from the south, out of sight of the hotel, and I don’t think they’d have risked being seen throwing the gun away.”

“But they wouldn’t be keeping it in their room?” That was Mrs Ackroyd, and it was definitely a blurt.

“Of course not, dear lady.” Professor Worth patted her arm again. “They probably hid it somewhere in the hotel. Or on the grounds perhaps?”

“Too snowy.” Liza was slightly shocked at her own confidence. “There’d be footprints.”

Colonel Coleman was on his feet. “Right, well, enough sitting around. I say we put the boffin’s plan into action and go find the shooter.”

“Capital notion.” Sir Richard joined him. “But might I suggest, if we’re going to do so, we take groups of at least three? That way nobody gets left alone with a murderer. And might I also suggest we start after dinner?”

“Well, I shan’t be a part of it.” Mrs Ackroyd was stumbling away from the table, supported by the professor. “I’m going to have an early night, and good luck to all of you.”

Without quite planning it, Liza stopped her. “Before you go, you didn’t … see anything earlier, did you? From your room, I mean.”

“See anything?” Vivien Ackroyd stiffened.

“Your room overlooks the loch.” Liza turned to Ruby. “Yours too. I just thought—if you’d happened to be looking out when the shot happened, or just after, you might have seen the killer leaving.”

“No,” said Mrs Ackroyd at once. “I mean—I might—I mean…”

“Now, now, you don’t have to answer any of these questions if you don’t want to.” Putting a reassuring hand on Mrs Ackroyd’s back, the professor turned to Liza. “Can’t you see you’re flustering the poor woman?”

“I didn’t see anything either,” Ruby confirmed. “When guns start going off, I get away from the windows; I don’t dash towards them.”

Professor Worth escorted Mrs Ackroyd out of the dining room, and the remainder of the guests debated over their meal whether “Operation Search the Hotel” was a good one or not. By the time the professor had returned they’d decided that on balance it was, and, following Sir Richard’s suggestion, they had broken into teams of three. Ruby had latched onto the colonel and the vicar, the professor had attached himself to Sir Richard and his aunt, which left Hanna and Liza with Mr Burgh. Ms White declined to join them, citing her actual job.

It wasn’t until they’d split up and started poking around the nooks and crannies of the hotel that Liza spotted the flaw with the groups-of-three plan. That flaw being that even though nobody was going to be alone with a murderer, if the murderer had a gun, that wouldn’t necessarily help. And if Mr Burgh was the killer—which seemed hard to rule out—then while Liza didn’t like to steer too hard into gender stereotypes, she wasn’t sure that the two of them could take him even if he was unarmed. Sure, Hanna was feisty, but she also weighed about six pounds and had a day job that didn’t involve lifting anything heavier than a manila folder full of share certificates. Liza was slightly taller and occasionally went jogging, but she wasn’t exactly a fighter either. Especially not since she’d chosen her footwear—currently a pair of high espadrille wedges with glittery ankle straps—for looking cute on holiday, rather than running away from serial killers.

Which meant that as they were searching the lounge—a room that was full of tiny cabinets and little nooks a hypothetical murderer could easily stash a weapon in—she kept glancing uneasily over her shoulder in a way that she was worried was becoming increasingly obvious. Mr Burgh almost certainly wasn’t the killer. But that was surprisingly little comfort when he was standing right behind her.

“Hey.” Hanna shifted a small bookshelf to reveal a small door, just visible, painted the same off-yellow colour as the walls.

“Ah.” Mr Burgh looked apologetic. “I don’t think that’s anything.”

Guilty evasive, Liza wondered, or bumbling evasive? “It looks like something,” she said.

“According to the plans it’s one end of an old secret passage,” he explained, “but it was bricked up years ago.”

“Where’s the other end?” asked Liza, not quite willing to let mysterious secret passage go without at least one follow-up question.

“The conservatory, I think.” Mr Burgh shrugged. “But I’m afraid we can’t get it open now.”

It didn’t seem worth forcing the issue, so Liza filed it away under weird things about the hotel and got back on with looking for a murder weapon. The search did not, in the end, reveal anything unusual. Either the killer had not been so foolish as to hide the murder weapon in the hotel, or they had hidden it well enough that three groups of amateur sleuths running on adrenaline and uncertainty couldn’t find it. At the very least it was in nobody’s room, which ruled out one quick and simple way of identifying the culprit. Or, Liza’s mind immediately added, the person the culprit was trying to frame.

Of course, Mrs Ackroyd had left early, and so if it had been her, she might have ditched the gun anyway.

She might, for example, have thrown it out of the window.

“Hang on,” she told Hanna and Mr Burgh as they were about to give the search up as a bad job. “I’ve had a thought.”

She took them outside to the foot of the tower where poor Mr Ackroyd’s body had been found the night before. Trying not to think too much about the previous evening’s grisly business, she looked up, then around, to see if she could work out where a desperate woman might throw an Enfield No. 2 Mark 1 revolver.

It was a pretty slim hope, she realised, but to her surprise she saw something. A bush running the length of the hotel wall, still thick with the snow that, even now, was falling all about them.

Mostly thick with the snow. Because just at one side there was a patch where the snow had been knocked off, as if something heavy had struck it from above. Not quite willing to believe she could have got quite this lucky—or possibly unlucky—Liza approached the hedge. The branches, dense and neatly trimmed, had definitely been snapped by some kind of impact, but whatever had caused the damage was long gone. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but it was looking a lot like the gun wasn’t in the lake, and a lot like at some point, by whatever means, it had wound up following Mr Ackroyd over the edge of the balcony.

And now it was out there, somewhere in the hotel.

For just a moment, Liza understood what Hanna was so afraid of.

Chapter Thirteen

Mrs Ackroyd, in the Lounge, with Witnesses

Saturday night

“It’s what?” Mr Burgh was asking.

“It’s where the gun fell,” Liza explained for the third time. “It has to be.”

“Are you sure? It could be a bird or … or a badger.”

Hanna gave him a look. “A flying badger?”

“It could have burrowed underneath and … and shaken the branches?” He didn’t sound like he was convincing himself, much less anybody else.

Liza joined in with the look given. “Put it this way. Maybe I’m wrong, but if I’m right, Vivien Ackroyd killed her husband and Belloc, and then she threw the gun out of the window when we said we were going to go and search the rooms.”

“Which means we should …?” Hanna prompted.

Liza hadn’t thought quite that far ahead. “I don’t know. Go and confront her about it?”

“And after that?” They were back in the scratchy space. They were definitely back in the scratchy space.

“We lock her up?” suggested Liza, not quite able to keep the apologetic tone out of her voice.

Mr Burgh looked uncertain. “I’m not sure locking up a guest is really the best thing for the hotel’s reputation.”

“Your hotel has had two murders in two days,” Hanna pointed out. “Its reputation might be in need of the tiniest bit of rehabilitation anyway.”

Across the courtyard, there was the soft sound of the front door closing. And there was Ruby, pausing for a moment, framed by the doorway with snow swirling about her. “Found something?”

“Maybe?” The moment she’d spoken, Liza wondered if she should have let somebody else answer. It was probably best not to be too eager to interact with the immaculate femme fatale. “I think we’ve found where the gun was hidden.”

“Was hidden?” Ruby sashayed towards them, her dress scuffing the snow up behind her.

“Somebody took it,” explained Liza. “At least, I think that’s what happened.”

“It might have been a badger,” explained Mr Burgh.

Hanna was staring at Ruby suspiciously. And not you-tried-to-seduce-my-wife suspiciously. “Aren’t you supposed to be with the colonel and Reverend Lincoln?”

The insouciant way Ruby shrugged in response must have taken hours of practice. “Didn’t work out. The colonel wanted to stop searching and try to get into the gun room, the vicar wasn’t having it, they split up, and I decided I’d rather be alone by myself than alone with a strange man who might be a murderer.”

That made things more complicated. Liza had been working with the assumption that everybody was accounted for. “How long ago was that?”

“Ten minutes, perhaps twenty. They weren’t completely hopeless.”

Still, Liza reflected, plenty of time for any one of them to find and retrieve a gun. “We should get everybody back together. Tell them what we know.”

“Do we know anything?” Hanna asked, then seemed to regret her tone. “I mean, I’m not saying—I just—we should be careful.”

“Somebody is running around this hotel with a loaded revolver,” Ruby pointed out. “Being too careful about finding and stopping them might get us killed.”

She had a point, although Mrs Ackroyd hadn’t struck Liza as the hardened killer type. Then again, if there was one thing she’d learned from over a hundred episodes of Murder Most Actual, it was that hardened killers didn’t always look like hardened killers. And if there was another thing she’d learned, it was that most murders weren’t committed by hardened killers at all. “Right,” she said, “how about we round everybody up, get together in the lounge, and talk it out?”

“Everybody,” began Ruby, “including the woman you believe threw her husband off a balcony and then went on to murder a private detective in cold blood?”

Liza thought about this. “Actually, I think so. I don’t see any point in talking about this behind her back. We’d have to go and confront her anyway.”

“Might be good to work out what we’re going to say first?” suggested Hanna. “Otherwise it’ll just be everybody shouting at once.”

Ruby’s lips curled into a smile. “Come now, I’m sure Mr Burgh can manage a few talkative guests. Besides, if she suspects something is up, she might run.”

“Run where?” Hanna’s tone wasn’t hostile exactly, but it had an edge to it.

“To the gun.” One of Ruby’s eyebrows curved into a perfect, victorious arch. “Call me selfish, but it’s not her escaping I’m worried about; it’s her retrieving a weapon and killing me.”

“Or,” Hanna suggested, “somebody else?”

“No, mostly just me.”

Hanna glared.

Ruby met the glare with a defiant smile. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. I don’t know any of you—why should I pretend to care about your lives as much as my own?”

That rather put an end to the discussion, and the four of them set about gathering the rest of the guests. The Quirkes and the professor, it transpired, had also parted company when a sudden noise which turned out to be a particularly aggressively blocked pipe spooked the professor so badly that he needed to go and lie down. Mrs Ackroyd resented the summons but came along with the rest, and then the guests, plus a largeish chunk of the staff, gathered in the lounge where, to Liza’s surprise, Mr Burgh handed straight over to her.

“Okay,” Liza began, and then waited to see if anybody would shout at her or throw anything. This was way easier with a microphone and wine. “I think I’ve got something.”

Sir Richard gave her an enthusiastic nod. “Good show, old girl. I mean, late-twenties-early-thirties girl.”

“Thanks,” she replied in her most sincere pretty-sure-I’m-being-patronised voice. “I had a look around the woods and I think I found the killer’s footprints, but they just came back to the hotel. Then when we searched the hotel, we didn’t find anything—”

“Because there was nothing to find,” protested Mrs Ackroyd. Protested too much, Liza thought.

“But then we looked outside. Because we thought maybe the killer might have thrown the gun out of the window when we started looking for it.”

Mrs Ackroyd blanched. It couldn’t be this simple, could it? Except wasn’t it always this simple? In real life. No twists or shocking revelations, no need to get everybody into the drawing room at the end and give a big speech about how it all fit together. Just, “Yeah, it was probably that person.”

“And we found evidence,” Liza continued, “that something had been thrown from a long way up into a bush just next to where we found Mr Ackroyd’s body last night.”

The professor took off his glasses, polished them, and put them back on again. “Good Lord, you’ve found the gun.”

Well, that was embarrassing. “Not exactly.”

“Oh.” An expression of puzzlement spread across the professor’s face. “I just assumed—you know—because we’d all been gathered together.”

“Does seem a touch premature,” agreed Colonel Coleman.

Fuck. Did it? To her it had seemed pretty cut and dried, but perhaps she’d been overthinking it. Or underthinking it. “No, but—it’s just too big a coincidence.” She turned to Vivien Ackroyd. “You left early when we said we were looking for the gun, then something hit a bush right outside your win—”

Mrs Ackroyd was in tears. “He was my husband, Ms Blaine. We’d been married six years. And now you’re saying you think that I—that I …” She began to choke, gasping out harsh, guttural sobs. “And Belloc too?” she managed.

Perhaps fatally, Liza tried to remain calm. “You and your husband were clearly having difficulties and—”

“And I suppose you and your wife have never had an argument in your lives,” Mrs Ackroyd snapped back.

“I’ll be honest,” said Sir Richard apologetically, “I was getting a bit of a … sense from you two last night, so, you know, glass houses and all that?”

Sometimes, Liza reflected, Hanna’s protective streak was wonderful. This did not turn out to be one of those times.

“I think you’ll find the difference,” Hanna snapped, “is that her wife is still alive.”

At that, Mrs Ackroyd collapsed and had to be helped from the room by the professor.

“Touch insensitive, dontcha think?” observed Sir Richard.

It had been. But it had come from a good place, and Liza didn’t feel comfortable throwing Hanna under the bus. “Even if it was,” she tried, “that doesn’t mean she’s not behaving incredibly suspiciously.”

Lady Tabitha sat back, her arms folded. “Well, if being upset at her husband’s death counts as suspicious to you—let’s just say I don’t envy your marriage.”

“Perhaps”—this was Reverend Lincoln, who had a professional obligation to pour oil on troubled waters even though, as far as Liza could tell, oil was the last thing troubled waters needed—”it would be best if we focused on who has the gun, and who killed Belloc.”

“Well, it wasn’t me or Dicky,” declared Lady Tabitha. “You all saw us coming to the woods at the same time you did.”

“Or me, or the professor,” added the vicar. “For similar reasons. Or either of you ladies.” He indicated the Blaines.

“Or,” Hanna admitted begrudgingly, “Ruby. We were with her when the shot went off.”

The colonel gave a kind of snort-laugh. “Were you now?”

“Sadly,” Ruby told him, “they were terribly well behaved.”

This, Liza felt, was a topic they’d do well to move on from as quickly as possible. She turned to the colonel. “Are you trying to distract us from the fact that apart from Vivien Ackroyd, you’re the only guest without an alibi?”

Colonel Coleman shrugged. “So what if I am? You’re not the police, young lady; you’re a busybody. Mrs Ackroyd is a fine woman, and her husband was a dog who had it coming. I know I didn’t kill him, and frankly, I don’t much care if she did. You look after yourself and the missus, and I’ll take care of myself, and we’ll all get through this perfectly well. Of course, we’d get through it more easily if the bloody manager would let us defend ourselves.”

“Guns don’t make people safer,” Hanna insisted.

The colonel gave another snort. “They do if you know what you’re doing with ‘em.”

“Perhaps if you’re the only one with a gun,” observed Reverend Lincoln. “But if we were all armed, I don’t think any of us would be better off.”

The doors to the dining room opened and the professor stumbled back in looking flustered. “Oh, that poor woman, she is quite upset.”

“Well,”—the colonel fixed him with an unsympathetic glare—”wouldn’t you be? Even if she did kill her old man, she’s had a pisser of a week and Blaine here has treated her very shabbily.”

“And if she didn’t kill her old man,”—Ruby smiled at the colonel from the end of the table—”then you probably did.”

“Wish I had.” The colonel’s moustache twitched thoughtfully. “At least that way I’d have a bloody weapon.”

“It could also,” Hanna pointed out, “be a member of staff.”

“Seems a bit unlikely though, doesn’t it?” replied the colonel.

Hanna heaved a keeping-her-temper sigh. “Why? Can working-class people not be murderers?”

“I think,” said the vicar, “it’s more that it seems unlikely somebody who had worked here a long time would suddenly start murdering guests.”

“The footman hasn’t worked here a long time,” said Liza, hoping Ruby wouldn’t take it as a betrayal of confidence. Then again, if she did, that probably said more about her than Liza. “He’s doing this as a holiday job.”

A look of palpable relief spread across the professor’s face. “Ah well, there you go then. It was probably the boy. Now if you’d be so good as to go up and apologise to Vivi—to Mrs Ackroyd, that would be very helpful.”

On some level, it would be. Not because there was a huge probability of her being innocent, but because there was no point having emotions running high when they were trapped in a snowbound building and at least one person had a gun.

“Maybe you’ve got a point,” Liza conceded. Then she looked down at Hanna. “Should we …?”

“Yeah.” Hanna didn’t seem mega-thrilled at the idea of saying she was sorry to a probable murderer who’d slandered her marriage, but being the mature, sensible one, she was way more inclined to do things she wasn’t thrilled by than Liza was. Most of the time, at least.

So, begrudgingly, they got up from the table and went to tell Vivien Ackroyd that they were sorry. It was, Liza reflected, a good thing she’d thrown the gun out of her window, or they’d be about to get shot.

Chapter Fourteen

Vivien, in the Bedroom, with the Door Closed

Saturday night

“I guess we both fucked that up,” Liza admitted as they made their way from the dining hall to the tower. “I just thought it would go more … more smoothly, you know?”

“You thought Vivien would hear your brilliant deductions,” suggested Hanna, a note of irony in her voice, “crack under the strain, and immediately put on a 1920s villain voice and say, ‘Yes yes, I killed them, I killed them both, and I’d do it again’?”

Despite herself, Liza laughed. “Well, not exactly, but I did think we’d maybe get people to agree that something needed to be done.”

“I suppose not having the gun was a bit of a dealbreaker.”

“Yeah. It’s just … I looked under her window, and there it was. Not the gun, but a place where a gun could have been. It’s like … it’s like that bit in A Study in Scarlet where Holmes is all, ‘I expected to find these pills at the last crime scene, and here they are at this crime scene, and I am a genius.’ And it felt—it felt good?”

Hanna gave her a cautious look. “I get it. Just … don’t get carried away. You aren’t Sherlock Holmes. Also, Sherlock Holmes was fictional.”

“I’m not getting carried away. I—I suppose I’d rather feel like I’m doing something.”

And now Hanna was laughing. “Now that I understand. Hell, what do you think this holiday was?”

“A misguided effort to fix everything at once with a big romantic gesture?” suggested Liza.

“It’s my equivalent of trying to solve a murder.”

They heard footsteps behind them and, with the deaths and the gun still floating around, that spooked them enough that they pressed themselves flat against opposite walls. Except it turned out only to be the vicar. Or perhaps not only, if Ruby was right.

“Ms Blaine,” he said, “and Ms Blaine, before you go to see Mrs Ackroyd, I thought I should tell you something.”

Liza immediately tensed. “Why didn’t you mention it at dinner?”

“I’m sure it’s unclerical,”—the vicar looked genuinely apologetic—”but do you trust everybody in that room?”

“Yet you trust us?” asked Liza, still not totally certain that she trusted him.

His eyes narrowed. “I think you are who you say you are, which isn’t something I think about everybody else.”

Hanna, apparently torn between not wanting to take Ruby’s warnings at face value and not wanting to take the vicar at face value either, gave Reverend Lincoln a challenging look. “Okay, so what do you want to tell us?”

“People confide in me,” he began. “It’s part of the job.”

“Sorry,” Hanna told him, “atheist.”

“I’m not saying you should confide in me. But I’ve heard some things that might matter.”

“What things?” asked Liza, still cautious.

“This morning, Mrs Ackroyd came past my room, rather early. I thought it was unusual at the time. Later on, one of the maids told me that she’d heard her having some kind of confrontation with Lady Tabitha.”

That was another unnecessary complication. “Lady Tabitha?”

“It may be nothing, but … I thought you should know. As it happens, I agree with you that Mrs Ackroyd is the most likely suspect in both murders and, well, if she’s also engaged in something nefarious, you should be careful.”

“Tell me you’re not another one who believes in Belloc’s mystery mastermind.” Hanna’s tone was contemptuous.

Reverend Lincoln gave a good-humoured smile. “I’d have thought you’d expect me to believe in unusual things.”

“There’s a difference between supernatural and wacky,” Hanna replied. “Plenty of reasonable people believe in God, but I mean, come on—a mysterious criminal genius who goes only by a single initial and who, what, sends a bickering middle-aged couple to do his dirty work for him?”

It sounded implausible to Liza, but Reverend Lincoln just shrugged. “You might be surprised. I’ve seen all kinds of strange things in my parish. And there are plenty of middle-aged criminals in the world.”

“So … what?” Liza tried to lay this theory out logically. “Mr B hires two people to come up here and … do some crimes for some reason? Possibly to harass an old rich lady. Then one of them kills the other but still goes on harassing the old rich lady on her own time?”

The vicar was still wearing a mantle of endless patience. “You say that as if exploiting old rich ladies wasn’t something criminals did.”

He had a point. John George Haigh the Acid Bath Murderer had killed almost entirely for profit, and his victims had mostly been wealthy older people. “That doesn’t explain why she’d shove her husband off a balcony first.”

“And you say that”—he gave her a dry smile—”as if professional killers never fall out with each other.”

At this, Hanna could barely contain her laughter. “You think the Ackroyds were professional killers?”

“I think professional killers don’t always look the way you think they will.” Reverend Lincoln’s tone was grave. “That’s part of what makes them good at their job.”

She should have let that one go. But professional pride made Liza give a sceptical erm. “Is it?” she asked. “Is it actually?”

Reverend Lincoln stared at her quizzically. “You don’t think so?”

“Well, I think if you actually look at real professional killers, they’re mostly people who look like professional killers. Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Frankie Fraser. None of them looked like people you’d want to mess with.”

“Maybe I’m letting my imagination run away with me,” the reverend suggested. “But be careful. Somebody out here is a double murderer and it’s probably Mrs Ackroyd.”

Hanna patted the vicar cheerfully on the back. “Thanks, you’re really making us feel safe and supported.”

“I can come with you if you like.”

On the one hand, Liza thought, there was strength in numbers. On the other hand, it seemed a bit yicky to need a man to come along for protection. And on two more hands, that man might have been a murderer himself, even if he was off the hook for Belloc; and Vivien Ackroyd would probably be more dangerous if she felt cornered. “We’re good.”

They parted from Reverend Lincoln and continued to the tower alone. It was accessible only from the first floor, the second floor curving around it with no way in. The Ackroyds’ room was at the top of a long spiral staircase and had a sort of penthousey quality, partly because it was high up, and partly because there was an inherent swankiness to a room in a castle tower.

Feeling a sudden rush of apprehension that put her stomach in, if not a knot, then at least a bend, Liza hesitated.

“It’s okay,” Hanna whispered, “we’ve got this.”

Liza knocked.

“Is that you, James?” asked a voice from within.

“No.” There didn’t seem much point in beating around the bush. “It’s Liza and Hanna. We’ve … we’ve come to say we’re sorry.”

“And you aren’t worried that I’ll murder you?” snapped Vivien Ackroyd through the door. “You seem to think I’ve murdered two people already.”

The awkward thing was that, actually, Liza was a little bit worried about that. And while she’d had come upstairs to apologise for the way she’d expressed that belief, she didn’t think it was an unreasonable one to hold.

“I …” She could have lied and said that she didn’t, but it would have been transparent and not even an especially helpful deception. “Can you blame me?” she tried.

“Yes. Yes, I bloody well can.”

And actually, Liza couldn’t blame her. If she was innocent, then this was fucking awful. If she was guilty it was awful and scary because chances were, she was definitely going to jail after this was all over. “Okay,” she said in her most conciliatory tone—and given how many arguments she and Hanna had got into over the last year or so, her conciliatory tone had got pretty fucking good. “That’s fair. You’re right that I lost sight of the whole innocent-until-proven-guilty thing. And I shouldn’t have treated you like a killer.”

The door opened a crack, and Liza betrayed her own not-treating-Vivien-like-a-killer plans by immediately stepping aside in case a gun came out. The crack widened a little, and Viven Ackroyd’s face appeared in the gap. “That’s very kind of you,” she said with about as much sincerity as could be expected from a woman you’d both accused of killing her husband and then told that you were right to accuse her of killing her husband. “Will there be anything else?”

The part of Liza that thought investigating a murder seemed like a much better idea than sitting around wondering if you’d get killed before or after your marriage collapsed was really, really tempted to try and find an excuse to get inside the room. But the part of her that thought acting on it would only accelerate the collapse of her marriage decided not to. “No,” she said. “It’s okay. I …” Then a tiny voice in the back of her head said, “You know what, fuck it.” “Actually, is there something going on with you and Lady Tabith—?”

The door slammed in her face.

“Do we take that as a no,” asked Hanna, “or a definite yes?”

Either way, they had to take it as a “go away.” So they slunk back to their room, having entirely failed to make things better with a woman neither of them was entirely certain they wanted to make things better with.

Back in their room, Liza crawled into bed, and Hanna crawled in beside her and wrapped her up in her arms. “I really am proud of you, you know.”

Liza gave a tiny, mirthless laugh. “For pretending I’m not playing detective when I’m clearly playing detective?”

“For actually making a pretty good job of it.” She brushed Liza’s braids to one side and kissed her neck. “And for everything else. I know I don’t always—haven’t always.”

Liza let her hands come to rest over Hanna’s, her thumbs running gently over Hanna’s thumbs. “It’s okay, I haven’t always either.”

“You’re amazing,” she breathed. “You have always been amazing.”

“You’re amazing too.” Liza rolled over, bringing her forehead close to Hanna’s. “And I’m sorry if I haven’t always made you feel it.”

Hanna’s arms tightened about her waist. “I’ve not always made you feel it either. And …” She tucked her chin downwards and laid her head against Liza’s shoulder. “I don’t know, it just feels really cheap and shit to say we’ll do better.”

“You don’t think we will?” Liza’s heart was beginning to beat slightly faster now. This conversation wasn’t going to a good place.

“I think neither of us wanted to do worse in the first place, but we did.”

Well, that was a depressing way to put it.

“You know I absolutely fucking love you, right?” blurted Liza. It was a clumsy sentiment, and at other times she’d have been embarrassed to put it in such inartful terms. But right now, she didn’t care. “And I’m not just saying that because I’m scared of losing you or worried there’s a killer on the loose. I absolutely fucking love you.”

“I love you too. But…” Hanna half-squirmed, half-shuddered.

“But sometimes people who love each other hurt each other?”

A nod.

“And sometimes that means they shouldn’t be together?”

And another. “I’m not saying I want—that I don’t want to—but when this is all over and we’re back home, what will have changed?”

“I’ll have a hell of an episode for my podcast.”

“I’m serious.”

Liza had been semi-serious as well. Being the podcaster who solved an actual murder would probably be fantastic for her career. Of course, her career wasn’t currently doing wonders for her marriage what with recording and having to bod off on research trips every week or so. Getting legitimately famous would only make that worse. “Sorry, I’m deflecting.” She flumped onto her back and stared at the canopy-rose with its radiating pleats. “I guess I’m just hoping—we’ve aired some things, haven’t we?”

“Aired isn’t the same as fixed.”

For a while, Liza just let that hang in the air. Then at last she conceded, “No, it isn’t.”

Shifting in the dark, Hanna turned onto her side, and instinctively Liza rolled over to hold her. And that, at least, felt right.

“We’ll work it out,” she whispered. “People get through worse than this.”

Hanna didn’t reply but made a kind of gentle shrug that in context seemed to signal agreement.

And with either the best or the worst timing in the world, there was another gunshot.

Chapter Fifteen

Colonel Coleman, in the Dark, with the Dagger

Saturday night / Sunday morning

This time, it had seemed to come from inside the hotel, which meant it had seemed to come from everywhere. Jumping out of bed, Liza looked back to see that Hanna had decidedly not jumped with her.

“Can we …?” The look in her eyes was almost pleading. “What if we didn’t? What if we just stayed here?”

Liza could think of a hundred reasons why they shouldn’t. Like that somebody might need their help, or that if they hid in their room the other guests might think they were the killer, or that it was safer to know what was going on. But if she was honest, her only real reason for wanting to run towards the gunshot was the same one it had always been. She was curious. “I—we—I suppose …” She sat back down on the bed. “Fuck, am I a shit wife?”

“No.” The denial came flatteringly quickly, although so did the follow-up. “Well, no shitter than I am. Everyone’s selfish sometimes. You really want to go check this out, don’t you?”

Liza nodded. “But you really don’t.”

“I really don’t.”

Taking a deep breath and very pointedly sliding back under the covers, Liza said, “Then we won’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I’m sure. I just … I just want to know what’s going on,”—there was an uncertainty in Liza’s voice she didn’t like—”and I’m pretty sure that makes me a terrible person.”

“It doesn’t.” Crossing the bed, Hanna began to stroke her hand up and down Liza’s spine. “It just makes you a person.”

For a moment Liza sat there, enjoying being touched by a woman she still loved. “Maybe. But we’re here to work on us—”

“We’re here because I got freaked out that our marriage might be falling apart and threw money at the problem. You didn’t even sign up for this.”

“You still made an effort. And here I am flinging it in your face because I’ve got this objectively creepy obsession with murder.”

Hanna’s hand came to rest on Liza’s shoulder, and her thumb began tracing the line of her neck. “It’s your job. And it’s a job you’re passionate about, which is great. Honestly, I’m jealous.”

“Because it’s taking up so much of my time?” It was. There was no denying that it was. Between researching and recording and increasing amounts of travel and editing and bonus content for backers, it was—well, it was a full-time job.

“Because you love it,” said Hanna, a plaintive note in her voice.

“I love you too. I love you more.” Liza’s response came quickly, almost panicked. “I really do.”

Hanna laughed. “No, I mean because you have a job you love, and I don’t.”

That … that was news to Liza. And it felt weird that it was news to Liza because they’d been together a decade and they were supposed to know each other backwards. “You don’t?”

“I make rich people richer. How is that something you can love?”

In some ways, this was more jarring than stumbling across two dead bodies. “But you’ve always been all about your career.”

“Yeah, I—I like being successful. And … fuck, this sounds heteronormative … I like being able to take care of you, of us, but I think once the podcast started taking off and I saw how happy it made you—”

“You make me happy.”

Hanna dropped a kiss on the back of Liza’s head. “And you make me happy. But we can have more than one thing in our life that we’re happy about, and—I don’t know, I guess I didn’t realise what I was missing until you found it.”

“Oh.” Liza wasn’t sure what else to say.

“I’m not …” Hanna continued. “I’m not saying that’s our only problem. Just that it was one. I—I thought it might be good to say it out loud.”

Before Liza could do more than offer Hanna a reassuring pat on the arm, there was a knock at the door.

“I say,”—it was Sir Richard’s voice—”are you in there?”

“Are we?” whispered Hanna, and Liza shrugged.

“This is Mr Burgh,” said another voice which did, in fact, belong to Mr Burgh. “I’m here with Sir Richard, Lady Tabitha, and Reverend Lincoln. None of us are armed; we’re going room to room to see what’s happened.”

Relaxing, Liza called out, “Yes, we’re in here.”

“Both of us,” confirmed Hanna.

“Could have said earlier.” There was a pout in Sir Richard’s voice. “Bit shabby to not answer a chap. Suggests you think he’s a murderer of some sort, what?”

“Just being careful,” replied Liza, not feeling especially inclined to defend herself further. Then she glanced over her shoulder, had a short, wordless conversation with Hanna consisting mostly of eyebrow movements and, once she was sure her wife was on board, added, “We’ll come out and join you.”

The little band continued through the hotel checking on guests. They found Colonel Coleman’s room empty, letting themselves in with Mr Burgh’s master key, and they met Professor Worth wandering the corridors looking shaken.

“Did you hear it?” he asked. “There can’t have been another shooting, surely?”

“‘Fraid so, old bean.” Sir Richard seemed oddly sanguine about the possibility. “Then again, bad luck does tend to run in threes.”

“Are murders really bad luck?” asked Hanna.

The expression on Sir Richard’s face was one of stark perplexity. “Well, they aren’t exactly good luck, are they?”

“I more meant,” said Hanna in her best not-being-sarcastic voice, “aren’t they something people choose to do?”

Sir Richard, seeming to have grown bored of the conversation, hurried on, leaving the rest of the party to trail after him. Since he made straight for the ground floor, Liza concluded that he’d already checked on Ruby and found her absent. Which was concerning, but not exactly surprising.

Taking the group down the main staircase, Sir Richard strode confidently across the entrance hall and into the corridor beyond, only to be bowled backwards by a large, black-clad figure wielding a gleaming dagger.

There were cries of, “Aha, got you now, you rotter!” or words to that effect from both parties before they were pulled apart by the collective efforts of the remaining guests. The man in black, it turned out, was Colonel Coleman, and the weapon with which he had nearly done for Sir Richard was some kind of decorative letter opener.

“Is that the solid platinum poignard from the library?” asked Mr Burgh.

“Probably.” The colonel reversed his grip on the dagger and held it with the blade running parallel to his forearm. “Had to get something to defend myself, and certain parties won’t open up the gun cabinet.”

“Well, put it back,” Burgh insisted. “It’s very valuable.”

“Man’s life is valuable too,” bristled the colonel.

Hanna was massaging her temples again. “Even accepting—which I very much do not—that arming ourselves is a remotely sensible idea, why not just use a regular knife? The kitchen must be full of them.”

“Didn’t want to disturb the chef.”

“Jolly decent of you,” remarked Sir Richard.

The colonel shrugged. “Not really. Don’t think she likes me. Gave me a very shifty look the other day for making a perfectly innocuous comment.”

“Did that comment,” Liza asked, “have anything to do with her figure, or whether she was smiling?”

“Certainly not. Just said I’d seen her on the box, that the food was excellent, and that I’d known a chap named White in Iraq and he was a damned fine soldier.”

Aunt Tabitha sighed. “Ah well, it’s the modern age, isn’t it? Can’t say anything without offending somebody.”

Not quite in a mood to rehash a decade’s worth of public discourse, Liza suggested they move on. They’d cleared most of the lower floors of the hotel, and all that was left now was the tower and the Ackroyds’ room.

It was, in all honesty, not a visit Liza was looking forward to paying. Her last encounter with Vivien Ackroyd had ended badly, and since they were rapidly running out of answers to the question, “Where is the desperate person with the revolver?” she wasn’t totally convinced that this visit would end any better.

The seven of them made their way up the spiral staircase to the tower suite. At the top, Mr Burgh knocked on the door.

“Mrs Ackroyd?”

No answer.

“Mrs Ackroyd?” he tried again. “It’s the manager here with several other guests, and we wondered if you’d heard that … that noise? And if you were okay?”

Still silence.

“He’s telling the truth,” added Reverend Lincoln. “There are seven of us, and nobody is going to hurt anybody.”

“Or accuse anybody of anything,” added Professor Worth with a frankly pointed glance in Liza’s direction.

When there was still no answer, Mr Burgh opened the door with his master key, reached inside, and flicked on the light.

It was, Liza reflected later, a scene that really wanted to be framed by lamplight, rather than the friendly glow of an overhead bulb. The room itself had almost been cheery, with a checked carpet in muted white and beige, and large windows opening onto the balcony, which in daylight would have given a magnificent view of the grounds and the highlands. The armchairs were a tasteful not-quite-pink, a painting of a vase of roses hung from one wall, and Vivien Ackroyd sat slumped over a small writing desk, the Enfield No. 2 Mark 1 revolver on the floor by her side. The air was filled with the scent of blood.

While everybody else was recovering their composure, Sir Richard pushed past Mr Burgh and strode confidently over to the body. “Single gunshot,” he said, “right temple. And there’s what looks like a suicide note.”

Liza’s gut churned. “What does it say?”

Leaning over so as to inspect the message without picking it up and contaminating the crime scene more than seven ungloved, bare-headed civilians already would have, Sir Richard read. “I loved my husband,” he began, “but we argued and I pushed him and he fell. Then when Mr Belloc confronted me, I shot him. I am truly sorry for what I have done, but I cannot stand to be trapped here with your accusing eyes always on me.” He looked back up. “Then it’s initialled V.A.”

Was it comforting that the woman Liza had made break down in tears by accusing her of murder had actually been guilty? She didn’t know. Any more than she knew if Vivien Ackroyd would still be alive if she hadn’t botched her earlier accusations. On autopilot, she slipped her phone out of her pocket. “I’m …” Her heart had suddenly gone out of this, but having begun it she felt she had to see it through. “I’m going to take some pictures. For the police.”

Mr Burgh nodded, but Lady Tabitha gave her a rather sharp look. “Do what you think best, my dear, but I must say I’m not certain your interventions to date have been beneficial.”

“They’ve been more beneficial than Belloc’s,” said Hanna sharply. “Or your nephew’s, for that matter.”

“I say, steady on,” protested Sir Richard.

Ignoring him, Lady Tabitha fixed Hanna with a cool stare. “My dear lady, I’d far rather Dicky stayed out of matters that don’t concern him as well. I’ve always found his little hobby rather unseemly.”

“Oh, perish the thought that something unseemly happen in front of the corpse.” Hanna was growing visibly frustrated now. “Go take your pictures, Liza. The cops will need to know what the crime scene looked like, and we can’t just leave the poor woman lying here until the snow melts.”

A little surprised, Liza gave Hanna a grateful look and then made her way across the bedroom, trying not to think about how much worse blood smelled when it was in a heated room instead of outdoors in fresh, snowy air. She photographed the desk, the body, the suicide note, and, holding her breath and kneeling down, Mrs Ackroyd’s shoes. Not that she could get much of a sense of what the soles were like since the body was still sitting up, but she hoped it would be better than nothing.

When she was done, she stood back and looked at Vivien Ackroyd without the barrier of a lens between them. She thought she owed her that.

She was a pitiable sight, in the end. And she couldn’t have been more than forty or so. Which once would have seemed ancient to Liza but now felt all too there-but-for-the-grace. And of course she knew, rationally, that murders were rare, and that the events of this weekend had been, to say the least, improbable. But the thought of it ending like this, lashing out at her spouse and tripping down a long slope of tragedy, only to finish slumped over a desk, still clutching the pen she’d used to scribble down her last miserable thoughts, made her positively queasy.

There was nothing more to be done. Liza nodded to Mr Burgh that she was finished and then let Hanna take her by the hand and lead her down the stairs, out of the tower, and back to their room.

There they lay once more on the bed, staring at the canopy.

“Did I …?” Liza wasn’t sure how to say this, if she even deserved to say it. If she wasn’t just fishing for reassurance. “Did I just kill a woman?”

“I was the one who made her run out the room. You just made her angry. But no. She did what she did. All of what she did. That’s on her, not you.”

They lay quiet for a while, listening to the night sounds of the hotel.

“I do feel sorry for her, though,” said Liza. “Even if she did kill her husband, it sounds like it was an accident.”

Hanna rolled over. “Are we back to I can see myself killing you one day?”

“No. But, like, if I did do something and it hurt you or—well, think about how you felt when you thought I might get myself shot on a holiday that you booked.”

“True.” Hanna reached out and took her wife’s hand. “I’m really glad you weren’t shot, by the way.”

“Me too.” She squeezed Hanna’s fingers tightly. “And it seems I’m pretty safe now since the hotel has the gun back.” The moment she said it, something began needling at the back of Liza’s brain. She tried to ignore it, to just enjoy lying there with her wife and not being in imminent danger of either death or divorce, but eventually she snapped and went back to her phone.

Sitting up, she began swiping.

“Just so you know,” Hanna said, “I am choosing to find your continued obsessive behaviour endearing.”

Half-listening, Liza turned the screen so Hanna could see it. “What do you see there?”

Hanna winced. “Fuck, Liza, I see a dead woman. What do you want?”

“Sorry. Got carried away.”

“There’s a reason I didn’t get too close to the body.” Hanna’s voice was growing harsh. “I do not like this shit.”

“Right, right.” She should have let up—Liza knew she should have let up—but she needed to check she wasn’t jumping to conclusions. “Just …can you tell me what she has in her right hand?”

“A pen. There was a suicide note, Liza—she had to write it somehow.”

Liza swiped. “And here.”

“The gun. On the floor, by the chair.”

“Which side?”

“The righ—hang on, I think I get where you’re going with this.”

Nervous in case where Hanna thought she was going wasn’t where she thought she was going, Liza bit her lip. There was still a very good chance that she was just trying to convince herself that she hadn’t accidentally driven a woman to suicide. “Where do you think I’m going?”

“You’re going to say that if the gun is on the right side of the chair and she was shot in the right side of the head, then she probably used her right hand.”

A tide of not-exactly-relief crashed over Liza. “Good, because that’s exactly what I’m going to say.”

“And then you’re going to ask how she picked up a pen in that same hand after she’d already shot herself.”

Liza nodded. “This isn’t two murders and a suicide; it’s three murders.”

Chapter Sixteen

Liza, in the Dining Room, with a Theory

Sunday morning

Liza didn’t sleep well that night. Knowing—okay, believing; okay, strongly suspecting—that Vivien Ackroyd had been murdered was a mixed feeling. On the one hand, it meant that neither she nor Hanna were responsible for her death. On the other, it meant whoever killed her was still loose in the hotel doing who knew what.

She should, she told herself repeatedly, have realised something was wrong sooner. Even if Vivien Ackroyd had killed her husband—which was still possible even if she’d killed Belloc as well, which was looking less likely—how did she get the gun (and how long had Hanna been unhappy in her job)? It had been locked in a safe; the key to which was locked in a different safe. And yes, this was a hotel, not the Tower of London, and she didn’t know what the Ackroyds’ backgrounds or skillsets were, but it seemed very unlikely that they involved lockpicking and safecracking (why would anybody devote a decade to a career they didn’t care about?).

Which meant that somebody else had stolen the gun to begin with, and then shot Belloc for some reason, and then shot Vivien (was she taking her wife for granted? Was she just accepting the financial security that came from being married to a fancy city broker and let you jump on every passion project that …?). Or else Vivien got the gun from them and then they got it back when she threw it out the window, or …

At some point, she actually managed to fall asleep.

Breakfast the next morning was a subdued affair, partly because three guests were dead and partly because Mr Burgh began by explaining that the phones were still down, the snow wasn’t letting up, and there was no knowing when anybody was going to be getting out.

“But,” he added, “we can at least be—well, I suppose grateful isn’t the word, but at least with the sad death of Mrs Ackroyd we can put the unpleasantness of the last couple of days behind us and—Ms Blaine?”

Liza put her hand down. “Um, about that. The unpleasantness, that is.”

A half-dozen pairs of eyes turned on her. “Don’t you think you’ve interfered enough?” asked Professor Worth. “I mean, you’ve already as good as driven poor Mrs Ackroyd to take her own life.”

“Be fair, dear.” That was Lady Tabitha. “As gauche and premature as young Liza may have been, Mrs Ackroyd was a murderer, and that’s all there is to it.”

Once again, Liza was concerned that things were getting away from her. “Um, actually, that’s—”

“Even if she was”—the colonel, no longer wielding a solid platinum poignard, was reduced to gesticulating with a forkful of bacon—”no call to lay into her the way you laid into her.”

At the back of the room, Ruby reclined on her chair and smirked. “How exactly do you tell somebody you think they murdered their husband without it seeming like you’re laying into them?”

“Perhaps,” suggested the vicar, “we should listen to what Ms Blaine has to say before judging.”

Relieved to have somebody at least partially on her side, Liza launched into it. “I don’t think Vivien Ackroyd killed herself.” There was no sense beating around the bush.

For a moment there was no reply. Then the colonel said, “But we found a suicide note.”

“That she’s signed with her initials,” Liza pointed out, “probably because whoever wrote it knew that the hotel might have seen her real signature.”

Sir Richard gave an approving nod. “Good spot, old girl, but not exactly conclusive.”

“She was also still holding the pen,” explained Liza. “In her right hand. Having shot herself in the right side of the head.”

Professor Worth raised his left hand as if holding an imaginary revolver and tried to reach around to point it at his opposite temple. “Oh, that is uncomfortable. No, it seems very unlikely she’d have done that.”

“What if she wanted to kill herself but make it look like she’d been murdered?” suggested the ever-unhelpful Colonel Coleman.

“What, like in the Problem of Thor Bridge?” Liza was a little concerned that her mind had gone straight to Holmes, but she could feel guilty about fictionalising a complex situation later. “If she was going to do that, wouldn’t she not write a suicide note? Are you saying she tried to make her suicide look like a murder that somebody had tried to make look like a suicide?”

“It’s possible,” maintained the colonel with a tenacity that had probably proven really useful in the war, but now very much wasn’t.

“No, it isn’t.” Sir Richard slapped the table enthusiastically. “I’d lay five hundred pounds on it.”

Lady Tabitha leaned towards her nephew. “Dicky, dear.”

“Sorry, make that one hundred pounds. Trying to rein in the old spending.”

At the back of the room, Ruby was looking increasingly concerned. “Suppose you’re right,” she said. “Suppose there was somebody else involved. What does that mean?”

A look of steely certainty was spreading across Sir Richard’s face. “It means—that we’re being ten-green-bottles-ed.”

Ruby arched an eyebrow. “Come again?”

“You know, like the counting song. ‘Ten green bottles, hanging on a wall,’ and all that.” The significance of the allusion, Sir Richard’s tone at least was implying, should have been obvious. “‘And if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there’ll be nine green bottles hanging on a wall.’”

The expression on Ruby’s face was one of exquisite unimpressedness. “Are you saying we’re being picked off?”

Colonel Coleman shot out of his seat like a rocket out of a bottle. “Burgh, to the gun room.”

Hands covering her face, Hanna slumped back in her chair. “Can we please not introduce more firearms just when we’ve got the last one locked up again?”

“I suppose it is locked up?” added Liza.

“It is.” Mr Burgh didn’t look hugely confident. “And I have put the key in a new safe place I shall not reveal.”

“Is it around your neck?” Ruby’s eyes darted to a suspicious outline just visible through Mr Burgh’s shirt.

His hand went reflexively to his chest. “No?”

The dining room doors opened, causing several of the guests to jump, but it was only Emmeline White. “Just came through to say we’re officially out of sausages.” She stopped and looked around the guests’ faces. Nobody was looking especially like sausages were on their mind. “Oh no,” she said, “what’s happened now?”

“Ms Blaine believes that Mrs Ackroyd was murdered,” explained Mr Burgh.

“And Sir Richard believes we’re being hunted down one by one,” added Ruby. “Like dogs.”

Ms White looked sceptical. “Why would anybody do that?”

“Be sure your sin will find you out,” said Sir Richard gnomically.

At that Colonel Coleman grew pale. “You mean, we’ve all been lured here by some … some avenging angel?”

“I’m sure we’ve all sinned.” The vicar’s tone was grave, as if he was taking this far more seriously than Liza thought was really necessary. “But angels don’t kill; people do.”

“I meant it metaphorically.”

Hanna ran a hand through her hair. “Can we lay off the sin talk? This isn’t some cosmic punishment. It’s just a shitty situation we’re stuck in.”

“And,” added Liza, “Belloc said he was on somebody’s trail. This ‘Mr B’ figure.”

Waving a dismissive hand, Sir Richard made a sound that could roughly be approximated as “pish.” “Belloc was a fine man, no doubt, but his ‘Charles de Gaulle of Crime’ is probably a phantom.”

“Whereas your avenging angel is flesh and blood?” Reverend Lincoln looked unconvinced.

To say that the conversation descended into squabbling from there would be unfair, but only slightly. The guests finished up their mildly rationed breakfast and, in ones and twos, filtered out of the dining hall to go and do whatever it was they did when they weren’t telling one another about newly discovered corpses.

Eventually, Liza and Hanna were the only two that remained.

“Well, this is …” Hanna began.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think Sir Richard is right? Is this some kind of … some kind of weird PG-rated Saw thing?”

Liza had long since gone past the point where she had a clue. “Maybe? It seems a bit far-fetched, but then so does the idea that we’re stuck in a hotel with a criminal mastermind who decided to murder two tourists for no reason.”

Quietly, Hanna picked at the edge of a crust of bread. “So what now?”

“We could go for another walk? I know it feels a bit … off to be trying to enjoy the holiday with everything that’s going on, but, well, if we are in PG Saw then we should probably be trying to make the most of our lives.”

That at least got a laugh. “I’m not sure I want to be making my decisions based on what I think fictional serial killers would think of them.”

Despite this objection, they went for a walk. New snow had fallen, Liza noted, and whatever tracks had been running to and from the woodland the day before were long gone. But she tried not to think about tracks and clues, and missing guns, and broken safes, and motives, and mysteries. And after a while she found she didn’t need to try not to; she just didn’t. Because the grounds were beautiful, and away from the hotel it was easy to get lost in the beauty of them—the highlands rising snow-capped around them and the loch, still not entirely without its unpleasant associations, stretching silver-grey beneath.

And for a while it was like … like nothing. One of the problems—not problems; quirks, qualities—about having been with somebody for ten years was that everything became an echo of something else. This evening much like last evening, this Christmas like last Christmas, this fight like the last fight. But they’d never been here before, never really been anywhere like here before. And not just because of the, well, the murders. When they’d first got together, expensive holidays were an unjustifiable waste of money; later on they’d become an unjustifiable waste of time. So this moment was just this moment, instead of a thousand reflected moments arcing away like colours in a kaleidoscope, the same things rearranged and spiralling off to infinity.

Hanna laid her head on Liza’s shoulder. “This is …”

“Yeah.”

They walked down towards the loch, veering west away from the woodland where the corpse had been. And for a while they stood on the banks watching the water. A group of ducks had been caught off-guard by the unseasonable weather and were now dabbling about the snowline looking for … whatever it was ducks looked for. Liza wasn’t exactly sure.

A combination of cold noses and wet feet was about to send them back inside when they were hailed by Reverend Lincoln coming down from the hotel. They waved an ambiguous reply and let him intercept them.

“Can I have a word?” he asked, looking directly at Liza. “Ideally somewhere quiet?”

“Does quiet mean without me?” Hanna didn’t seem happy about the implication.

The vicar gave it a moment’s thought. “No. I think that would be unreasonable. But I’d like to be out of sight of the house.”

So they turned and went back to walking around the lake, relying on the curve of the land down the hillside to shield them. Not that it struck Liza as a terribly helpful precaution; a hypothetical observer watching from the hotel would have seen him approach them anyway, and it seemed unlikely anybody would be spying on them.

At least she hoped it was unlikely. But now that Sir Richard had put out the idea that one of them was hunting the others, it might only be a matter of time before things got confrontational.

“You might not be the right person to talk to about this,” Reverend Lincoln said eventually. “But you caught the thing with the suicide note, and that makes me think you know what you’re doing.”

Liza half-laughed and was about to say she really didn’t when Hanna cut in with, “She does. At least as much as any of us does. This isn’t exactly a situation you can have experience of.”

They walked a bit further. Whether the vicar was waiting for the house to vanish or just having trouble trusting her, Liza couldn’t tell.

“What do you reckon to Sir Richard’s theory?” he asked at last. “About somebody picking us off?”

Technically, sharing her opinions with strangers was Liza’s whole job. But pontificating into a microphone with a glass of wine in her hand was quite a different situation from telling a man something to his face that, if she was wrong, could lead to one or both of them getting killed. “I don’t know,” she hedged. “I suppose it sort of fits the facts, but I also think that it’s the sort of thing that could fit any set of facts, so I’m a bit suspicious.”

“And the other theory?” The reverend wasn’t looking at her—at either of them. He was just staring at the floor directly in front of him.

“Also possible. I mean, part of me says that if Belloc was good at his job, he wouldn’t have got shot so easily, but he obviously thought he was following somebody.”

They walked a little further, then the vicar said. “What if I—?”

A grim inevitability struck Liza. “Let me stop you there. Are you going to say what if I told you I wasn’t always a vicar?”

Reverend Lincoln gave a rough smile. “So you do know what you’re doing.”

“We’ve seen three bloody corpses in the last two days, and you’ve walked up to all of them without blinking. And you know a lot about guns for a clergyman.”

Again, he was quiet for a while. “I used to work for the man Belloc called Mr B. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Then I got caught, I cut a deal, got a reduced sentence, and found God. In about that order.”

That explained why Ruby said he wasn’t what he seemed. Of course, since he did seem kind of like an ex-con and didn’t seem hugely like a vicar, that wasn’t the biggest hint in the world. “So you are a real clergyman then? You’re not a paid assassin?”

“Yes. Not that you have any real reason to believe me.”

Liza thought for a moment. “Umm … what’s Numbers chapter sixteen, verse forty-two?”

“You know I didn’t actually have to memorise the whole Bible? But I think it was: ‘And it came to pass, when the congregation was gathered against Moses and against Aaron, that they looked toward the tabernacle of the congregation: and, behold, the cloud covered it, and the glory of the Lord appeared.’”

With an expression of not-sure-how-I-got-into-this-mess on her face, Hanna looked at her wife. “Well, did he get it right?”

“I don’t know. I’m a lapsed Anglican at best.”

“So,” Hanna concluded, “he’s either a vicar or was willing to risk a bluff?”

Reverend Lincoln tucked his hands into the pockets of his olive-green winter jacket. “Whether you trust me or not, I think Mr B has sent somebody to kill me, and I think I know who it is.”

Ruby. Definitely Ruby. But this time Liza chose not to share the deduction. It was, after all, still possible that he was here to kill her, in which case sharing that she was onto him might put her in danger. “Who?” she asked, doing her best to keep poker faced.

“The one in the red dress. Calls herself Ruby. We did jobs together in the day, and I know she still works for … for him.” She also, Liza noted, had the only south-facing room, apart from Burgh, so she was the only one who could have been watching from the house.

The arc of their walk took them down a dip in the ground that brought them well out of sight of the hotel, and it struck Liza rather too late that if the vicar wasn’t on the level then she’d just given him a perfect window in which to murder both her and her wife.

“So,” Hanna said, hopefully not coming to the same conclusion, “what do you want us to do about it?”

Reverend Lincoln shrugged. “I thought if I was honest with you, you might be honest with me. Let me know if you’ve worked anything out. I’m still not sure I trust the other guests.”

“Why not?” Liza asked the follow-up question on sheer instinct.

“One way or another, I have funny feelings about all of them.”

Hanna gave him two thumbs up. “Thanks. Very not vague.”

“I’m not totally sure I trust you either,” the reverend pointed out. “I just thought if I wound up face down in the loch, you could at least, I don’t know, make a YouTube video about me or something. See whoever does it gets caught.”

That seemed like a lot of pressure, and way above Liza’s paygrade. On the other hand, anything that would get people giving her information instead of, say, trying to murder her was probably a good thing. “Sure,” she said, “if that’ll help.”

The vicar shrugged. “Don’t see how it can hurt.”

“And, just to check,” Liza was pretty sure she already knew the answer to this but thought it was worth a try anyway, “you didn’t actually meet Mr B in person, did you?”

“No.”

“So he could be anybody?”

“Yes.”

That figured. They turned towards the hotel, Liza holding Hanna tight around the waist and watching Reverend Lincoln very, very closely all the way back.

Chapter Seventeen

Hanna, in the Bedroom, with a Lot of Paper

Sunday afternoon

“Do you think,” Hanna asked when they were safely—insofar as it was safely—back in their room, “that maybe we should be thinking about trying to find a way to get out of here? Instead of working out information that, while interesting, won’t actually stop a criminal mastermind from killing us?”

“I don’t think”—Liza was typing up the day’s notes into her laptop and cursing the inability to back them up to the cloud—”that he wants to kill us. If he wants to kill anybody. If he even exists.” She flopped back and covered her face with her hands. “Oh, this is useless. Let’s just lock ourselves in and forget the whole thing.”

Perching on the end of the bed like a starling, Hanna smiled down. “You don’t want to forget the whole thing. You want to work out what’s going on.”

She did. She didn’t especially want to want that, but she wanted it whether she wanted to want it or not. “I’m sorry. Does being married to me totally suck?”

“No.” Hanna seemed oddly serious. “At least, it doesn’t suck any more than being married to anybody sucks. Marriage is tough.”

“But worth it?” Liza asked, sounding just a tiny bit needier than she’d intended.

“Yes.”

Picking herself up off the floor, Liza wandered over to the desk, which along with its complimentary tea and coffee also included a small amount of hotel stationery. She picked up a pad of branded notepaper and strolled back. “Good, because I’m about to do something extremely analogue, and slightly extra.”

Liza began scribbling down names and known details, each on a separate sheet, and spreading them around the floor in a way that she hoped roughly corresponded to a visual representation of the case.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got any red string?” she asked.

“Are you making a conspiracy board?”

Liza gave a sheepish nod. “Trying to. But then I realised I have nothing to stick my bits up with and nothing to use to connect them.”

“To think we came all the way to Scotland without drawing pins and thread.” Hanna arched an eyebrow. “Although I’m not sure the hotel would thank you for sticking pins in their wall either.”

“True.”

“And maybe it’s just me,”—Hanna had her well, actually face on, the one she got when something struck her as silly or impractical, which things often did—”but while I get that they’re a striking visual on TV, I’ve never quite worked out what those big boards of red string were actually supposed to tell anybody. Apart from, ‘The person who made this has lost it.’”

“I think they’re meant to help you organise your thoughts?”

Hanna slipped off the bed and sat cross-legged opposite Liza. “Tell you what, use me.”

“I know you’re jealous of the podcast.” Liza chanced a smile. “But I don’t think you can seduce me by letting me use your body as a murder board.”

“No, I mean—you know, bounce ideas off me, talk things through. I can be your Dr Watson and say stuff like, ‘But that’s remarkable,’ and, ‘However did you work it out?’” Hanna’s tone was lighter now than it had been in a while, and Liza found herself missing the days when it had been like that more often.

“You’re being silly.”

Hanna was not a pouty person, so she didn’t pout, but she gave a distinct impression of wanting to. “I’m being a good partner who has your back. You just don’t recognise it because, I’ll admit, sidekick isn’t my usual style.”

She was right, Liza hadn’t recognised it. Or hadn’t wanted to. Because part of her still felt that diving headfirst into her girl-detective fantasy was selfish and there was something … not quite shaming, but perhaps at least grounding, about how quickly—relatively speaking, given the real risk of death—Hanna had got onside with it. Just like she’d got onside, insofar as time and her work commitments allowed, with Actual, and with every other weird, artsy project Liza had jumped into before that. Just like she’d always got onside, in her own, slightly heavy-handed, occasionally frustrating, know-it-all kind of way. “All right. How do you want to do this?”

“Well, it’s your investigation. But I’d either go by murder or by suspect?”

For a moment, instead of thinking about crimes, Liza just sat there and looked at Hanna. Really looked at her in a way she hadn’t realised she hadn’t been. And for a moment she saw again the young woman she’d not quite met in that kitchen all those years ago; the woman she’d looked at and said, “If I don’t speak to her this evening, I’ll hate myself for the rest of my life.”

“By murder?” Liza said. She’d wanted to say something else, something about them and who they were to each other, but it felt fleeting, and she was worried that if she turned and looked at it before they made it out of the dark, it would vanish like Eurydice. “That seems best.” Turning her attention back to her notes, she dug out the sheet on which she’d written Malcom Ackroyd. “So … died at around 1 a.m. Saturday morning. Fell or was pushed off the balcony of the tower suite.” She diligently scribbled the facts, as they were, onto the back of the scrap of paper. “Found by Emmeline White.”

Hanna located Emmeline’s sheet and settled it neatly next to Mr Ackroyd’s.

“Who would have begun closing up the kitchen around ten, but says she went back to her room to call her sister. Which wouldn’t have worked because the phone lines were down in the storm.”

Hanna added the appropriate details. “And she seems to have had some kind of disagreement with Colonel Coleman.” Shuffling through the papers, she pulled out Colonel Coleman’s page and added it above Emmeline White’s. “Or so he says. And Colonel Coleman had also argued with Mr Ackroyd. You know, I can see why you like doing this. It makes you feel in control.”

“And I think it actually helps as well.” Turning to her laptop, Liza brought up the footage she’d shot on the night they’d found Ackroyd’s body. She made a note of who had been in the courtyard, who’d arrived and who’d left, when, and with whom. When they put down Vivien Ackroyd’s card she felt a sudden and completely irrational pang of guilt. It wasn’t easy thinking you’d driven somebody to take their own life, even if it was only for a few hours.

Once all the papers were laid out, Liza stared at them in the hopes that they’d rearrange themselves into a coherent theory of the case, like a word puzzle where the letters c i o r s s s s rearranged themselves into the word scissors, but they didn’t. Anybody could have shoved Malcom Ackroyd off a balcony and then made it downstairs in time to pull a concerned face over his mangled corpse. The hotel was big enough that the rooms and suites were all spaced out, making it very unlikely anybody would need to pass anybody else on the way to the stairs if they didn’t want to, but also small enough that it wouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get from any part of it to any other part, as long as you knew where you were going.

They pushed the Malcom card to one side and started a new layout for Belloc. And here, Liza felt, they had a little more to go on.

“Unless things have gone very Jonathan Creek,” she explained, “we can assume that Mr Belloc really was shot when we, y’know, heard him get shot. And that makes our suspect list for his murder much shorter.”

Hanna nodded. “It can’t be you or me or—much as I hate to admit it—Ruby, and we met Reverend Lincoln and Professor Worth on the way to the loch, so unless they moved very fast …”

“And found a way to walk over snow without leaving footprints,” added Liza.

“Then it wasn’t either of them,” concluded Hanna. “Or Sir Richard or Lady Tabitha either.”

“Which leaves the colonel, Vivien Ackroyd, Emmeline White, Mr Burgh, or—you know,”—Liza’s nose wrinkled with embarrassment—”there’s actually a fair few other staff here whose names I don’t even know.”

“Yeah that’s a pretty big flaw in the investigation.”

“Hey.” Liza put her hands in the air. “I’ve been busy. And besides, Ruby thought that if Mr B or his agent were here, they’d be someone new.”

Hanna gave a mostly mock scowl. “You mean Ruby who freely admits to being a thief and a liar?”

“Yes.” For a moment Liza looked thoughtful. There was a conclusion to be reached here, but it was taking a moment. “But doesn’t that work either way? If she can be trusted, she’s probably right we shouldn’t be looking at the staff. If she can’t be trusted, we still shouldn’t be looking at the staff because we should be looking at her.”

Something about that seemed to please Hanna. “I suppose so. Kind of a blessed-if-you-don’t, blessed-if-you-do situation.”

They rearranged the papers to account for people’s whereabouts during Belloc’s death and annotated them accordingly. “Of course,” said Liza, “there’s also the gun to be thinking about.”

Hanna ripped another sheet off the notepad and wrote “gun” on it.

“We know it went missing sometime between ten on the Friday and the Saturday morning,” Liza continued. “Which rules out … well, nobody.”

“But we also know it was locked in a gun cabinet and the key for that cabinet was in a safe. Which means … I don’t know what that means.”

Rifling through the papers, Liza pulled out the sheets for Mr Burgh, Reverend Lincoln, and Ruby. “Well, he had the key.” She pointed at Burgh. “And the other two might have the skills necessary to crack a safe or be able to get somebody to tell them the combination.”

Hanna shuffled through what was left and sorted out the notes they’d made about the two previous murders. “And we can rule out the vicar for Belloc because he came down to the woods with us.”

“Which leaves Burgh, who seems … I don’t know, I keep going backwards and forwards. On the one hand he works here, so that’s one hell of a deep cover, and he seems so bumbling it wouldn’t make sense.”

“Unless that’s an act,” Hanna pointed out. “The professor’s the same way. He acts exactly how I’d act if I was a criminal mastermind trying not to look like a criminal mastermind.”

“But he’s definitely off the hook for Belloc,” Liza pointed out. “Whereas Mr Burgh has no alibi and all of the access. And …” She trailed off. There was another thought that kept creeping up on her—a silly, pointless thought that had no place in an actual criminal investigation. “And, well, and his name begins with B.”

“So did Belloc’s,” Hanna pointed out.

“Yes, but he’s dead. And part of me says that if I was the kind of shadowy kingpin who went by a one-letter pseudonym, I’d use it in all my aliases.”

“True, but maybe you’d get caught really quickly.” Hanna smiled in a way Liza couldn’t remember being smiled at in a long time.

“Either way,” Liza continued, “we know that whoever got the gun initially, it was with the person who shot Belloc at the point when Belloc was shot.” She moved the Belloc sheet into position. “And I’m as sure as I can be that it wound up in Mrs Ackroyd’s room—either because she put it there or because somebody put it there to frame her—and that she threw it out the window into the bushes underneath.”

“Because of the snow,” clarified Hanna, and she didn’t even sound like she was taking the piss.

“Right. And from there somebody picked it up. And that somebody couldn’t have been Mr Burgh, because he was with us.” Collecting the papers again, she reshuffled them into the groups who’d gone looking for the gun. “But Ruby, Lincoln, and the colonel split up before we found it, so any of them could have got there. And the professor had been out of the room earlier and had ditched Sir Richard and his aunt too, so he could have grabbed it at any time. Sir Richard probably couldn’t unless Lady Tabitha was in on it, but maybe they split up as well?”

Trying not to look too smug, Hanna said, “It’s not looking great for Ruby, is it?”

“Right now, it’s not looking great for anyone. Which means in a way it’s not looking great for us.” Sweeping everything into a new pile, she wrote out another card for Mrs Ackroyd’s death. Then she stopped and looked up. Hanna was still sitting there patiently, and watching Liza with more attention than she had in … God, was it years? “You’re still okay doing this? I know it’s a bit of a rabbit hole and all we’ve really got to so far is might be Ruby or might be anybody.”

“No, it’s fine. And—I don’t know, I guess it’s good to be part of it.”

“Sure?” Liza looked sceptical. “I know you find some bits of this gross.”

“Well …” An apologetic expression flickered across Hanna’s face. “Some bits of it are. You’ve had some really graphic stuff on the kitchen table some evenings. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to share it with you.”

“Thanks, umm … that’s … sweet.” But Liza wasn’t quite sure how to handle sweet at the moment, so she shuffled through the notepaper and sorted everybody into their appropriate groups. “For Mrs Ackroyd, there was a fairly long window between the gunshot and the knock at the door, but I don’t think it was long enough for anybody in that group to have shot Vivien, framed the scene to look like a suicide, then gone back to their rooms. But the professor and the colonel were already out in the hotel, so either of them could have gone up and back in the time, and we didn’t find Ruby at all.”

Hanna scanned the assembled stacks of paper. “Right, so who do we have in the definitely innocent column?”

“Nobody.” That wasn’t very encouraging. “Well, nobody is definitely innocent of all three killings and stealing the gun. Sir Richard, Lady Tabitha, and Reverend Lincoln are in the clear for the second two murders. Professor Worth and Ruby are in the clear for Belloc, and Burgh couldn’t have taken the gun from the bush or shot Vivien. So that means we should probably be watching the colonel and, um, the whole of the domestic staff.”

“It seems really unlikely that the footman has randomly decided to become a serial killer,” Hanna pointed out.

“True, just trying to avoid boxing us into a corner. And there’s also the possibility that it’s more than one person.”

“You think two people randomly decided to become serial killers?”

This was getting into speculative territory, so Liza sat upright and tried to strike an authoritative pose. “Well, technically only one of them would be a serial killer, because the other would have only killed one person. But I more mean—” What did she mean? “I more mean that three people have said that this Mr B character is real, and that either he’s here or his agent is here. And if he is—or she is; after all, Mr B is a pseudonym—”

Hanna raised a sardonic eyebrow. “Lean in, girl boss.”

“Hey, women can be mass-murdering crime lords too. It’s the twenty-first century.”

That made Hanna laugh. “You’re right. Carry on.”

“Anyway, if we assume that Mx B is here, then things get—well, they’re still a bit weird, but once you factor in an actual professional criminal, some things make more sense. Like I can’t imagine cracking the safe of a middle-aged hotel manager is that tough for a legend of the underworld.”

“So, how does this get us to two killers?”

In theory, it was nice to get a follow-up question, because it showed Hanna was genuinely involved, not just nodding and smiling politely. In practice, it made Liza second-guess herself. A week ago, assuming they hadn’t just got out of a massive row, she’d have been overjoyed if Hanna had made an interesting observation about the murder of Laetitia Toureaux or the crimes of Elizabeth Báthory. Now it felt much more urgent and much more on-the-spot-putting. It was great to be seen, but being seen was just two steps away from being seen through. “Well, it’s not the only way it could have worked,” Liza tried. “Maybe Sir Richard is right and we’ve got a ‘Ten Green Bottles’ scenario. But I can’t shake the feeling that if anybody was going to push Malcom Ackroyd off a balcony, it was probably his wife.”

Hanna nodded, either in agreement or encouragement.

“But I don’t think Vivien Ackroyd could have stolen the gun and killed Belloc. Then again, if somebody in the hotel was secretly a criminal mastermind who Belloc was pursuing, having him suddenly swerve off after another killer and get shot by them would be a really convenient way to get rid of him.”

“And after that you’d need to tie up the loose end?”

“Exactly.” Liza shrugged. “Or, y’know, not. Maybe I’m just making things up so that it all fits into a nice little box.”

Having exhausted the analytical potential of scraps of paper on carpet, they tidied up, neither really wanting to leave a rug full of paranoia for the cleaners to find when they came in to turn the bed down.

It was still a little before noon, and for a long moment they just sat there looking at each other. There was an unspoken something in the air between them. A something-has-changed-but-nothing-has-changed feeling that made Liza feel … not nervous exactly, but ever so slightly on edge.

“So …” Hanna began. “Now we’ve—now that all that’s … do you want to …?”

Liza’s mouth was suddenly quite dry. “Do I want to …?”

“Shall we take a walk around the hotel?” Hanna finished. “See where everybody else is? Maybe make sure people’s alibis check out?”

It was small, but small was sometimes what you needed. And it was a start. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that’d be good.”

Chapter Eighteen

Lady Tabitha, in the Library, with the Dagger

Sunday evening

Most of the guests had opted, it seemed, for seclusion, but they found the colonel and Sir Richard in the billiard room, putting the tables to their intended use.

“Another game, old man?” asked Sir Richard, cheerfully handing a stack of folded banknotes to his opponent.

“Feels bad to keep taking your money,” Colonel Coleman replied, sipping his brandy.

“Oh, pish posh, don’t think of it. Got heaps of the stuff. Besides, bound to lick you one of these days, eh what?”

Noticing the Blaines’ arrival, the colonel nodded a sharp greeting, and Sir Richard raised his glass cordially.

“Ah,” said Sir Richard, “ladies. Perhaps you’d consider joining us for a game of doubles.”

Liza stared at the table. “Aren’t you missing a lot of balls?” There were only three: one red, one white, and one yellow.

“Billiards,” said Colonel Coleman by way of explanation. “Not pool. Not snooker. It’s a three-ball game.”

“Doesn’t that end rather quickly?” asked Liza.

Hanna stepped in with her I-speak-posh hat on. “You take the balls out the pockets after you pot one. It’s a point system.”

“First to three hundred,” added Sir Richard.

That seemed like a lot to Liza. “Three hundred? How many points do you get for a pot?”

“Two,” said the colonel. “Tell you what, we’ll show you. Line ‘em up.”

Sir Richard set the balls back on their spots. “Another hundred on it?”

“I’d really rather—” the colonel began.

“Oh, come on. Give a chap a chance to win a bit back.”

They started playing. And people started scoring points for things that, ordinarily, Liza wasn’t used to people getting points for in this kind of game, like banging a ball into a different ball. But she guessed that when you were running a chronic ball shortage you needed some extra options to spice things up.

They lingered for a while, not quite sure how to grill either of the players on their whereabouts last night and/or if they were a criminal genius. But there was a … not lead exactly, more a thread, that Liza wanted to follow up on. So she and Hanna waited and watched while balls clicked and went into and out of pockets until finally, realising that there was never going to be a perfect moment to start throwing suspicion around, she launched straight in.

“I don’t suppose you remember Vivien Ackroyd having any kind of argument with your aunt, do you?”

Sir Richard stood back and chalked his cue. “Come again?”

In a hole and with no option but to dig, Liza dug. “I heard a … Somebody mentioned to me that your aunt had a fight with Vivien Ackroyd yesterday. I was wondering if you knew what it was about.”

Liza would have loved to pretend that she could read faces like the quirky detective in a police procedural. That she could look at somebody and go, “Dammit, Malone, I know you’re hiding something.” She couldn’t, of course, but she did get the sense that this was news to Sir Richard.

“I understand the impulse, old girl,” he said after what Liza was convinced was a moment’s incomprehension. “But given how it went the last time, do you not think that maybe you should back off on this one?”

“How it went last time”—Hanna stepped forward, interposing herself between Liza and Sir Richard—”was that Vivien Ackroyd was upset and then, for totally unrelated reasons, somebody else murdered her.”

“Still means she wound up dead,” the colonel pointed out.

“Yeah, by coincidence.” Hanna was giving him a look that was usually withering, but which he totally blanked.

By the table, Sir Richard bent over to line up another shot, knocking a ball into another ball in a way that was apparently good. “If you wanted to know, you’d have to ask Aunt Tabitha yourself. I think she’s in the library. Just don’t go giving her a heart attack—it’d be deuced inconvenient.”

Before Hanna could make an unhelpfully sarcastic reply, Liza gave him a quick, “Thanks, we won’t,” and the two of them ducked out into the corridor.

The library was next door to the billiard room, so it didn’t take long to verify that Sir Richard was both right and, in this context at least, honest. Of all the rooms in the hotel, the library was perhaps the most Victorian, with a carriage clock on the marble mantlepiece and a portrait of a severe man in black above that. Busts of Plato and Socrates, also in black, perched on shelves of leatherbound books that looked like they hadn’t been touched in a century. They found Lady Tabitha sitting in a low chair reading, while in the background an old-fashioned record player was playing something high, ethereal, and operatic, which Liza’s vaguely theatrical background told her was the “Bell Song” from Lakmé. Lady Tabitha glanced up as Liza and Hanna entered. “Don’t suppose you’ve seen my reprobate nephew?”

“Playing billiards,” said Liza. “With the colonel.”

“Ah.” Lady Tabitha nodded. “He would be. Silly boy. So, what brings you two down to speak to an old woman?”

That was an awkward one. Lady Tabitha and Sir Richard were low on the suspect list for most of the murders, so going full where-were-you-on-the-night-of-the-fourteenth on the strength of one conversation that may never have happened, reported by a vicar who used to be a professional crook, was probably a bit, as Lady Tabitha might have put it herself, gauche. A softly-softly approach was probably best. “Does he spend a lot of time with the colonel?” Liza asked.

“A fair amount. I wouldn’t say they were exactly kindred spirits, but Dicky does admire men of action and, well, there’s not a great deal for him to do with us snowed in. I believe they’ve played quite a lot of billiards and quite a lot of cards.”

“And has—?” Liza pulled up a chair and sat down, Hanna perching on the arm beside her. “I’m not really sure how to ask this. Have any of these card or billiard games been going on while …?”

“While somebody has been getting themselves murdered?” asked Lady Tabitha matter-of-factly.

Liza gave a somewhat embarrassed nod.

“Afraid not. While Dicky has been flushing rather a lot of money down the lavatory lately, he’s not quite gaming all hours of the day and night. He was in bed like a good little boy when poor Mr Ackroyd took the long drop, and when Belloc was shot we were taking tea in the drawing room. And of course, you know he was with us when we were attacked on the way to the tower last night. Or is it the colonel you’re trying to eliminate from your enquiries?”

In a way it was both, but it seemed sensible not to pretend otherwise. “Yeah.”

Lady Tabitha took a sip of coffee then eyed Liza over the rim of her spectacles. “And what do you intend to do with the killer, once you’ve caught him?”

“Or her,” Hanna added.

“Or, as you say, her. I suppose it is the twenty-first century, and if a girl wants to creep around hotels offing people, we should encourage her. But that aside, what do you actually intend to do?”

Liza had been trying not to think about this. And in a way it had been fairly easy, because in some ways, “How do I deal with this murderer I have definitely caught and I know is definitely guilty?” was a good problem to have. Of course, in other, potentially very dangerous ways, it wasn’t. “I’m not really sure. Your nephew does this kind of thing, doesn’t he? What does he do?”

“Cheats. He has a fellow at the yard does the difficult bits for him. He’s terribly clever is Dicky, but it turns out cleverness very seldom stands up in court. So what he’ll do is he’ll ring up this chap he knows and he’ll say, ‘Look here, old thing, I’m quite convinced that you want Mr So-and-so or Miss Whatchamacallit for this caper,’ and then his friend will deal with all the stuff with forensics and witnesses and everything, and that will be that.”

Rubbing her chin sceptically, Hanna said, “You realise you’re making it sound a bit like he just goes around fitting people up.”

Lady Tabitha shrugged. “Possibly, but it does him good to have a hobby.”

A lull entered the conversation, which Hanna filled by observing that the solid platinum poignard had been returned to the mantlepiece.

“Yes.” Lady Tabitha turned to admire it. “Looks rather handsome, doesn’t it? Although what the colonel thought he was going to do with the thing I don’t know. Still, I suppose a military man in a situation like this will get a kind of a foxhole mentality.”

That wasn’t something Liza had considered, and she couldn’t quite tell if it made him more suspect or less suspect. That had also brought them to the end of the topics they could talk about without getting into the more … accusatory questions. “And …” Liza hesitated. Sir Richard had, after all, been right in a way. Even if Liza wasn’t responsible for Vivien Ackroyd’s death, accusing her of two murders had helped precisely nobody and caused Liza and Hanna a whole lot of aggravation. As well, she tried not to remind herself, as making Mrs Ackroyd’s last hours before her murder needlessly stressful. “And,” she tried again, “is there … I’ve been told that you had a conversation with Mrs Ackroyd the morning she died.”

Lady Tabitha looked up, and any faith Liza may have had in her own ability to read people evaporated. There was a studied unflappability on Lady Tabitha’s face, a mix of hauteur and apathy. “Are you accusing me of something, dear?”

“No.” Liza backed off at once, partly because she wanted to avoid a repeat of yesterday’s problems, and partly because if she’d kept track of people’s movements right it seemed very unlikely Lady Tabitha had been involved in any of the murders so far. Directly, at least. “But—well—I thought you might be able to help?”

That seemed to mollify her at least a little. Lady Tabitha settled back into her chair. “The poor woman was frantic,” she explained, only slightly pointedly. “Even before you made your—I maintain—ill-advised declaration about her guilt, she was quite convinced that we all thought she was guilty. She believed Belloc was after her, which I suspect he was, and thought that I might be able to use my influence to get her out of a bad situation.”

“Your influence?” asked Hanna.

“Dicky isn’t the only one with friends in law enforcement. I play bridge with some terribly interesting people.”

Something wasn’t adding up for Liza. “Any idea why she’d think that would work?”

“Yeah,” Hanna agreed. “You lot normally only help your own.”

Lady Tabitha gave Hanna a cool smile. “She is a firebrand, isn’t she? First against the wall come the revolution, I suppose? But you’re not wrong: one is rather more inclined to assist one’s peers than strangers one meets in a hotel.”

“And”—Liza could feel something snagging here, something worth pulling on—”she came to you anyway?”

“She made some rather vague threats.” Lady Tabitha’s tone was dismissive as only the aristocracy could be dismissive. “I think she thought she knew something. She didn’t.”

Hanna took over. She wasn’t quite playing bad cop; perhaps more class-conscious cop. “But she did try to threaten you?”

“Yes. And I, of course, responded to that threat by waiting less than a day, then running up a flight of spiral stairs to her bedroom, shooting her in the head, staging her body to make it look like a suicide, then running back down that same flight of spiral stairs, despite my advancing years and bad lungs, to arrive back in my room in time to be found by Mr Burgh on his rounds mere minutes later, not visibly disarrayed or out of breath. Truly, I am a criminal mastermind.”

“You could have hired somebody,” suggested Hanna, who seemed to be skewing harder into confrontation than either of them had intended.

Lady Tabitha remained indulgent, if slightly superior. “In a snowbound hotel with no telephone? I can be a persuasive woman, Mrs Blaine, but if you believe I could persuade a stranger with no criminal history to commit murder on my behalf at less than twenty-four hours’ notice, then you have an almost flattering faith in my powers.”

“Do you think she was threatening other people?” tried Liza. It seemed a more productive tack than suggesting ever more spurious ways that Lady Tabitha could have been responsible for any of the murders directly.

“I”—and here, Lady Tabitha’s tone went from indulgent to supercilious—”would not speculate about such things because I am a great believer in staying out of other people’s business.”

There wasn’t much either of them could say to that, and so, slightly shamefaced, Liza and Hanna slunk back to their room. Or at least, they slunk back in the direction of their room. But when they got there the door was hanging slightly ajar. And while Liza couldn’t swear one hundred percent that she’d closed it when they’d left—she’d gone to the shops and left the front door open at least three times since she and Hanna had been living together—it did not seem like a good sign.

Chapter Nineteen

Somebody, in the Bedroom, with a Gift

Sunday evening

Liza and Hanna retreated a little way up the corridor and pressed themselves, more from instinct than strategy, against the wall.

“What now?” asked Liza

“I don’t know.” Hanna had a this-is-your-thing-not-mine look in her eyes. “How about we go get help?”

That was sensible. But also not what Liza wanted to do. “What if they get away?”

“Then they won’t be waiting in our room to murder us to death.”

And that was also sensible. “But they’ll have got away.”

“And we’ll be—oh, what’s that word? Ah yes, alive.”

“But—but …” There was not going to be a good answer here. “Okay, how about you get help and I stay and watch the door?”

Hanna turned, still staying close to the wall, but pulling Liza very close. “You know when I said that this whole situation was making me realise how terrified I am to lose you and how I don’t think I could cope if you were hurt?”

“Yes?” In spite of herself, Liza smiled.

“Do you think that maybe that might mean I’m not wild about leaving you outside a room that might have a murderer in it while I go and try to find the manager?”

“I’ll be fine. And we can’t stick next to each other every minute of every day until the snow melts and we get out of here.”

“I think you’ll find we can.”

Leaning forward, Liza kissed her wife gently on the lips. “Go. It’ll be okay. I want to know what’s in there, and I’ll kick myself if we leave and come back to find the room empty.”

“Fine.” With a hefty sigh, Hanna relented. Then she drew Liza in and kissed her again, harder than before, verging on passionate, which was something that—until right then—Liza hadn’t realised she’d been missing. It didn’t linger; it was sharp, intense, and almost hungry, but as Hanna pulled away Liza found herself wishing she wouldn’t, that she’d stay and … well, honestly, and not very much, because they were still outside a room that might have a murderer in it. But stay nonetheless. “I’ll be back soon,” Hanna said, and she ran off to find Mr Burgh.

After she was gone, Liza realised something upsetting. If they were wrong and the killer wasn’t waiting in the bedroom, Hanna was now wandering alone around the hotel while Liza was in the one place that was actually safe. And despite their relationship having settled into a pattern where Liza was the one doing reckless shit and Hanna was the one worrying, she had a sudden rush of panicked nausea at the thought she might have just sent her wife off into the arms of a multiple murderer.

And the fact that she’d said she’d be back soon didn’t help. That was the sort of thing people said before they got brutally slaughtered in every slasher movie ever.

“Are you okay?” The voice came from just inside their own damned bedroom door. It belonged—and Liza really felt she should have seen this one coming—to Ruby.

“Depends. Do you have a gun?”

A laugh, still pretty and musical. The taste of Hanna’s lips still on hers made Liza feel weirdly guilty. “No, but I’m working on it.”

“Why are you working on it?”

“Because this isn’t over. You’re the one who said so, remember? Vivien Ackroyd was murdered, and whoever killed her is coming for me next.”

Liza had no idea if that was true, and no idea if Ruby believed it was true. And no idea if those two things were at all related. “How do you know?”

“I’d rather not answer that question by shouting through a door,” replied Ruby through the door. Although not, to her credit, shouting.

“Well,”—Liza did her best to sound indignant—”you should have thought of that before you broke into my room.”

“Just come inside,” purred Ruby. Liza didn’t want to think of it as a purr, but a purr was the only way to describe it. “I won’t bite.”

There was a pause.

“Well?”

“Sorry.” It wouldn’t be quite true to say Liza snapped, but she certainly splintered a bit. “I was waiting for you to say, ‘Unless you want me to,’ or something.”

“Oh, credit me with some originality.”

“Sorry.”

“Of course … I am naked.”

Liza thunked her head back against the wall. “What?”

“I’m joking. Probably. You’ll have to come in and check.”

Frustrated but relatively convinced she wasn’t about to be either murdered or seduced, and still very keen to know what the actual fuck Ruby was up to in her bedroom, Liza went inside. For a moment she thought the room was empty and that Ruby had vanished, but she remembered the old standing-behind-the-door trick just in time to have it pushed shut and locked behind her.

Well, at least neither of them were naked.

“Sit down,” Ruby told her, her voice much more urgent and much less playful than it had been thirty seconds ago. “I’ve got a lot to say.”

“If it doesn’t start with, ‘Sorry I broke into your room,’ follow up with, ‘Here’s how I broke into your room,’ and end with, ‘By the way, this is why you should believe I didn’t murder two people,’ then I don’t want to hear it.”

To Liza’s irritation but complete lack of surprise, Ruby sauntered over to the bed and lay down on it. It didn’t look like she’d arranged herself for comfort. “I’m sorry I broke into your room,” she said. “I was able to break into your room because I stole one of the master keys. And by the way, you should believe I didn’t murder two people because I’m about to give you a large amount of financial information that, should we get out of this alive, you will be able to use to take down one of England’s most notorious and most anonymous criminals.”

Staying well clear of the bed, Liza opted for the chair. “And how exactly will I do that?”

“Oh, just hand it over to the police. Only, not until I’m clear. Once that information’s out I’ve lost all my leverage, so I’m trusting you with a lot.”

Technically, she hadn’t trusted Liza with anything yet. “I’m sure you’re trying to build a rapport here,” she said, “but for the record, I still don’t trust you.”

“No?”

“You could still be Mr B for all I know.”

And Ruby laughed at that too. Too quickly, perhaps? As if she’d expected it? “I might, I suppose. But then what’s all this about?”

She could have mentioned the vicar—after all, Ruby clearly already knew about the vicar—but it seemed pointless to give up information she could just as easily keep to herself. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

Ruby gave her a long, cold look. “Were you hoping I’d crack? That I’d say, ‘Oh, all right, I admit it,’ and tell you my master plan? I’m afraid my only plan is to stay alive, and I’ve got very good at it over the years.”

Sighing, Liza settled herself into her chair. “Just give me the information and get out. My wife is coming back soon and I’d rather she didn’t find you in our bed.”

“It might be too late. She might smell my perfume.”

“Just. Give. Me. The. Information.”

With a sigh of her own, Ruby rose like Venus from the waves, fished a tiny USB flash drive from about her person, and pressed it into Liza’s hand. “You,” she said, “are perilously close to being a bore. Keep this hidden. I’m hoping that until he has it, Mr B won’t be able to kill me and so it’s important that he not know where it is. Also, if he does, he might kill you.”

“Then why should I keep it?”

Ruby smiled. “You probably shouldn’t. But somehow, I think you will.” She bent down and kissed Liza on the cheek. “I’ll see myself out.”

And she did. Leaving Liza sitting there staring at a tiny USB drive that might have been full of total nonsense, or might contain the scoop of a lifetime, or might just get her horribly killed.

After about two minutes of thought, she plugged it into her laptop, scanned it for malware, and then looked.

As it turned out, an Art History degree and a career in true-crime podcasting did not make Liza extraordinarily well qualified to decide if a set of meaningless names and numbers was really the key to unravelling a vast criminal empire, or just a shiny object aimed at distracting her from her investigations. And she wasn’t sure which version of events made her seem most arrogant. Either she thought she was an integral part of taking down the mysterious Mr B, or else she thought she was so great at solving murders that the killer had fabricated an elaborate ruse just to throw her off the scent. Probably it was neither. Probably Ruby was scamming her because she was a habitual scammer, and Mr Ackroyd had just been killed by his wife because it was always the spouse, and Belloc had just been killed by whoever killed Mr Ackroyd because he’d been trying to catch them. And Vivien had been killed by …

That was the one that stuck. If it had only been the first two, then Liza could just about have written off all the stuff about a mysterious mastermind in the hotel pulling everyone’s strings as the ramblings of a dead man with an obviously fake accent. But somebody had killed Vivien Ackroyd—somebody with a mind convoluted enough to want to make it look as though she’d killed herself. Somebody, if Liza were being ultra-ultra-paranoid, with such an inherent flair for the dramatic that they’d even been unable to resist leaving the classic “the last thing in her hand should have been the gun” clue just to see if anybody spotted it.

No. That was too much. Sure, they were in a snowbound castle in the Scottish Highlands with two amateur detectives (one deceased), somebody who appeared to be an actual duchess, a vicar with a shady past, and a femme fatale who’d just given Liza the McGuffin from a mid-2000s corporate thriller, but that didn’t mean common sense had gone totally out the window.

Liza had been staring at the meaningless numbers for a couple of minutes when she started to wonder if Hanna shouldn’t be back by now. And when she’d spent another couple of minutes not staring at the meaningless numbers because she was too worried, she was forced to conclude that Hanna should definitely be back by now. She closed the laptop and went to the door, then closed the door and went back to the laptop, because while everything else in this hotel might have been dissolving into irrationality, she just about had it together enough to realise that if she left and Hanna came back, they’d get into an endless loop of searching the hotel for each other and stressing out needlessly.

It was going to be fine. It was going to be fine. It was going to be fine.

She shouldn’t have let Hanna go off alone. Not when whoever was out there was still out there. And sure, the mysterious murderer’s MO so far hadn’t involved ambushing people while they were walking around the hotel, but so far none of the murders had been that similar to each other. Which—well, what did that mean? Did it make them more likely to be the work of one killer, or less likely? You’d think a single killer would kill the same way. Unless … what if Sir Richard was right and it was some kind of avenging angel serving up ironic punishments? What if in the mind of the killer, Malcom Ackroyd had been, like, getting above himself and heading for a fall? And Belloc had been overconfident and too convinced that nobody could hurt the master detective? If she or Hanna were going to get ironic-punishment-murdered then this felt like a good time for it to happen. Do you see, you weren’t there for your wife emotionally, and so you got murdered when you weren’t there for her physically. It was exactly the kind of thing that …

No. No. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened at all. She was just getting in her head and—

The door burst open; a figure—a man—burst through; and Liza grabbed the nearest object she could grab and swung with all her strength.

Chapter Twenty

Hanna, in the Bedroom, with the Numbers

Sunday evening

“Ow!” yelped Burgh as the lamp collided with his shoulder.

It turned out that all Liza’s strength wasn’t that much, especially not when her chosen weapon was tied to the wall by an electrical cord that came very rapidly to the end of its extension.

Hanna followed quickly after him, brandishing a small fire extinguisher. “All right, you murdering piece of shit, what have you done with my wi—oh.”

Liza stared, sighed with palpable relief, and then waved. “Hi.”

“Thank fuck you’re not dead.”

“Right back atcha.”

As Liza watched, Hanna’s demeanour shifted from thankful to furious. “What were you thinking coming in here alone? Were you trying to give me a heart attack?”

Explaining about Ruby and the mysterious finance numbers in front of Mr Burgh seemed like an extremely poor choice. And unfortunately, it seemed a slightly poorer choice than just letting her wife think she’d been an inconsiderate jerk. “Sorry. I … got curious?”

Hanna dropped hard onto the bed in an I-give-up sort of way. “You got curious? You got fucking curious? You are un-be-fucking—”

“I think I might go,” said Mr Burgh. “I’m glad everything is resolved safely, and”—he glanced nervously between the couple, rubbing his shoulder somewhat ruefully—”and I hope you both have a good evening.”

Once he’d scuttled out the door, head down and doing his best not to look back, Hanna finished her thought. “—lieveable. Just when I’d thought we—”

“ItwasRuby,” said Liza, probably faster than was helpful.

“It was what?”

“Ruby. She was here. She told me to come in, so I did, and—”

It turned out this explanation was less mollifying than Liza had hoped. “The woman we think is likely to be a murderer invited you to come and be alone in a room with her and you said yes?”

“Well, I was alone in a cupboard with her, and she didn’t kill me then, so …”

“Pro tip. When your wife is yelling at you, don’t remind her of that time you were locked in a cupboard with another woman.”

Probably a good call. “Sorry, sorry. I just mean—I thought it was pretty safe and she probably didn’t want to kill me, and if she did, I’d probably be dead already, and also she gave me these.” Liza spun her laptop around and showed Hanna the numbers.

“I don’t care what she—hey, are those what I think they are?”

“What do you think they are?”

“Offshore bank accounts.” Hanna sat down next to Liza and began to read closely through the lines of figures. “Cayman Islands, I think.”

“You’ve seen these before?”

Hanna nodded. “Not these specific numbers, but yeah, I spend all day moving rich people’s money around. I know a dodgy bank account when I see one.”

It took a while for Hanna to look in detail through the data, and while she waited, Liza set her phone to record and quietly dictated a summary of the day’s events.

“This is … this is very complete,” Hanna said at last. “It’s not just account details; there’s transactions, dates of payments … This could be big. If it’s real, it could be nuclear for whoever it’s about.”

“And if it’s not real?”

“Then it’s a very elaborate bluff.”

Putting her phone away, Liza came back to sit by Hanna’s side. “Elaborate enough that it’s probably not one?”

Hanna shook her head, but in a confused way, not a no way. “I can’t say. This is all so … like, if she was telling the truth, this is what I’d expect to see, but how much effort would you go through to get away with murder?”

It was a fair question. Although if getting away with murder was Ruby’s plan, surely keeping her head down and being quiet was a better way to do it.

For a moment, Hanna looked back at the data. Then a thought seemed to strike her. “Also, if it is real … this is incredibly fucking dangerous.”

Aaaand there was also that. Liza nodded. “Umm, yes.”

“Fuck.”

Fuck was about the size of it. “We could just throw it away?”

“Maybe, but—” Hanna’s lips were pursed thoughtfully. “What if, and I can’t believe I’m living in the universe where I’m just talking about this casually like it’s just a thing, what if Mr B finds out we were given this and tries to get it from us, and we’ve lost it?”

“Then we say, ‘Sorry, lost it’?”

“And he says, ‘Okay, in that case, can I interest you in today’s special offer on being horribly tortured?’”

Liza shuddered. “Is horribly tortured on the table?”

“You’re the true crime expert, you tell me.”

Ah. Yes. Thinking about it, Liza had studied a lot of this kind of criminal in her time, and being horribly tortured was very much on the table. It was almost the whole table. “Well, fuck.”

“So I think we should keep it,” Hanna said. “Hide it. Don’t make a copy of it. And really, really hope nobody comes looking for it.”

It was a plan.

Okay, it wasn’t a plan, really; it was wishful thinking. But it was what they had to go on.

The question then became how exactly to conceal the USB drive. Keeping it on either of their persons seemed dangerous, but keeping it in their room—which they often left unattended, which it was abundantly clear an only moderately determined intruder could gain access to with ease, and which the staff came into daily to clean—seemed foolish. In the end they agreed to pass it between them so that at least that way, one of them wasn’t shouldering all the responsibility, and to keep it in the little safe in their room while they were asleep. They’d briefly flirted with the idea of hiding it somewhere completely random around the hotel, or burying it somewhere in the gardens, but letting it out of their sight also seemed like a bad plan when they were dealing with an unknown criminal mastermind.

Once they’d finished deciding how to dispose of the documents, they found it was nearly time to go down to dinner—a reduced menu again, but at least no new absences this time. After that, the rest of the day passed in a kind of quiet tension. Sir Richard and the colonel had gone back to the billiard room where, it seemed, Sir Richard had still yet to win a game. The professor and the vicar had gone for a walk together in the grounds, while Ruby had vanished on errands of her own, leaving Liza and Hanna to slope back to their room. There they stuck with the plan, locking the USB drive that might get them both killed in the little safe that they were pretty sure was meant to be for jewellery and credit cards rather than a lethal weapon against organised crime. Then they sat for a while just staring at it like it was a wasp at a picnic and they were both worried that if they lost track of it, they’d get stung.

Eventually, they managed to tear their eyes off the box of doom, and having nowhere much else to look with night closing in and the highlands becoming, once more, just a suggestion of mountains in the dark, they looked at each other.

“I’m sorry I yelled,” said Hanna.

“I’m sorry you needed to.”

That made Hanna shrink a little into herself. “I didn’t, though, did I? I mean, I should have kept my—I was scared. And when I came back and didn’t see you and—”

“I know. I should have thought. It’s just she knew I was there, and so standing outside felt—I should still have been more thoughtful.”

“It’s okay.”

“Is it? I’m thoughtless a lot.”

Hanna sighed. “I think we both are. But I’ll try to do better.”

“Me too.” Reaching across the suddenly-too-vast space between them, Liza took her wife’s hand, turned it over, and ran her thumb across the palm.

“You know, for a moment today,”—Hanna slid across the bed until their bodies were touching side-to-side—”I really thought I’d lost you.”

Laying her head on Hanna’s shoulder, their cheeks brushing against one another, Liza whispered, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Hanna’s lips brushed softly against Liza’s cheek. “It’s all okay now.” She kissed her again, first by the edge of her jaw, then across her face, and lightly on the lips. And without either of them quite deciding to, they lay down together in a way they hadn’t quite managed since they’d arrived—since before they’d arrived, really, and—

“What’s that smell?” Hanna asked suddenly.

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” whispered Liza, ominously aware that it might be something and that it was something she very much did not want to be reminded of.

“This pillow smells of perfume. Not yours, not mine.”

Hanna wasn’t exactly radiating stop-touching-me-now vibes, but Liza backed off. She had a horrible feeling this conversation was about to go to a deeply unromantic, possibly un-staying-married-conducive place. “It’s Ruby’s.”

For a moment, nothing. Then, “She was in our bed?”

“She lay on it for a moment. I was nowhere near her. You already know she was in the room.”

“Yes, but I didn’t know she was in our bed.”

“On our bed. And it’s a hotel bed, so—this isn’t helping, is it.”

Hanna, beautiful and fragile and really pissed off, had withdrawn into herself like a sea anemone. “I know…” she began with the measured tones of somebody who definitely did know but was having a hell of a difficult time believing, “that there is nothing going on there. Nothing I have to be worried about—”

“You don’t,” Liza insisted, slightly too quickly. “You really don’t.”

“Don’t I though?” The expression on Hanna’s face was dejected, almost defeated. “I’ve seen her, and I’ve seen me, and the only thing I’ve got going for me that she hasn’t is that at least with me you know you’ll wake up in the morning.”

“What you’ve got going for you that she hasn’t is that you’re my wife and I love you.” Liza knew the moment she’d said it that it was the wrong thing to say.

“That sounds a lot like it’s about obligation, rather than about me personally.”

Liza sighed and tried not to make it sound angry. “No, it’s about ten years of choosing you. Every day.”

“You’ve had that many other offers, huh?” Hanna was clearly trying to make it sound like a joke, but there was a stomach-churning edge of sincerity to it.

Liza tried to backpedal, but she was too exhausted. “What? No. I just mean—oh, forget it.”

Coming to her knees, Liza crawled forwards, taking Hanna by both hands. “This is a weird situation,” she said. “And a scary situation. I thought you were dead for a minute today as well.”

“Sorry. It’s the worst feeling.”

“I know, right. And the reason it’s the worst feeling is that I want to be with you. I want to be with you for the rest of my life and for that to be more than the next twelve hours.”

Trembling ever so slightly, Hanna took a deep breath. “You can be sweet sometimes.”

“Sometimes?”

“Don’t push it.” For half a second, Hanna risked a smile. “You can make do with sometimes for now.”

“And you,” Liza replied, “are sometimes sweet, and sometimes kind, and usually infuriating. But you’re always gorgeous, and sexy, and I will always love you and want you and need you, and no… no platinum blonde murder siren is going to change that.”

Still looking small and folded-in, Hanna let herself curl into Liza’s arms. “I’m sorry I had a … a moment.”

“It’s okay.” Liza stroked her wife’s hair in what she hoped was a reassuring pattern. “It’s sort of flattering that you get jealous. I just wish you’d do it without being so down on yourself.”

Wriggling under the covers, Hanna settled down into bed. Then she stopped, sat up, and threw the offending pillow across the room. “True,” she said, “I am pretty great.”

“You’re the best,” said Liza, curling up beside her, letting herself mould to the lines of her wife’s body as she held her.

“You’re the best too. I should probably tell you that more often.”

The weight of the day was beginning to catch up with Liza, and she yawned. “Same. And I will. We will. When we get out of here, we’ll do better.”

“Yeah,” Hanna agreed. “Or we’ll be dead. And I suppose that’s one way to save on marriage counselling.”

It had been a long enough day that they didn’t really change for bed; they just kicked off their shoes, Liza tied back her hair, and they let fatigue and near-death experiences do the rest. Somewhere in the dark of the hotel, pipes began making weird groaning noises, suggesting somebody was taking a late-night shower and the nineteenth-century plumbing wasn’t happy about it. And it was … Wasn’t it kind of a weird time to be having a shower? Then again, it was a weird situation all round. Holding Hanna as tightly as she could without disturbing her or getting an elbow in the ribs, Liza dropped a single kiss onto her wife’s shoulder and then let herself drift to sleep.

Chapter Twenty-One

Sir Richard, in the Dining Room, with a Question

Monday morning

Breakfast the next morning was better in some ways, worse in others. The hotel was running low on sausages and was down to its last few bowls of cornflakes, but on the plus side, there were no announcements about people getting horribly murdered overnight. Sir Richard stumbled down a little late and sat in his usual seat, saving the chair beside him for his aunt, but several rounds of toast passed, and the old lady didn’t show.

“Isn’t the dowager normally down by now?” asked the colonel, staring forlornly at his under-baconed plate.

“Oh, rather.” Sir Richard nodded vigorously. “Normally sitting right there”—he fork-pointed at the seat beside him—”glaring sternly up at me in silent rebuke for my tardiness.”

“Fuck.” Hanna flopped back in her chair and made a noise halfway between a sigh and a scream. “Just when we’d gone one morning without a murder.”

Sir Richard’s eyes widened. “You don’t think? Surely she’s just a little—I’ll go and fetch her.” He bolted from the room with such speed that people were still glancing around trying to work out if it made sense to send somebody with him when the question became entirely academic.

Liza picked at her cereal and waited for the bad news.

As it happened, good news came first. Or at least good-ish news. Mr Burgh arrived just after Sir Richard left to inform everybody that it seemed to have stopped snowing, which meant that the roads would likely be clear in a couple of days.

Of course, that did put them on a clock. Once the roads were clear there was nothing stopping the killer just vanishing into the night. And yes, technically that wasn’t Liza’s problem. She was trying to work out who the murderer was to keep herself from freaking out, but there wasn’t anything really at stake if she didn’t. That said, she didn’t like the idea of an escaped killer hanging over her for the rest of her life, especially one who might at some point have a reason for coming after her and her wife.

Not that she had much time to contemplate the nuances of this, because shortly after the manager had finished speaking, Sir Richard returned to the dining room looking flustered. “She’s not answering. I say, Burgh, you couldn’t just pop up and check if Aunt Tabitha is tickety-boo, could you?”

From his corner of the table, Reverend Lincoln made an if I might interject gesture. “What if we all go? If there has been another murder, it’s probably best if we stick together.”

The consensus in the room was that this made sense, and so now the whole—worryingly small—group of them put down their spoons and followed Sir Richard back up to his aunt’s bedroom. Mr Burgh opened the door, and the guests all crowded around with what felt to Liza ever so slightly like ghoulish curiosity.

The room—elegant and antique, rather like Liza and Hanna’s—was empty. The bed hadn’t been slept in.

The legendary stiff upper lip of the British ruling classes served Sir Richard well. “This is beginning to look rather bad, isn’t it?”

“Afraid so.” Professor Worth patted him comfortingly on the shoulder.

Mr Burgh suggested, and the guests agreed, that it would be best to search the hotel. There weren’t quite enough of them, this time, to split into three groups of three, so they went for two groups of four: Liza, Hanna, Mr Burgh, and Reverend Lincoln in one; the rest in the other. They set off in opposite directions, and since they’d last seen Lady Tabitha in the library, Liza and Hanna took their group there first.

Which made it, in the end, a very short search.

She sat in the same chair she had been sitting in yesterday, head down as if reading. Even the record from the night before was the same, caught skipping on a high, trilling note that, with repetition and the grim tableau in front of them, soon began to sound like a scream. Lady Tabitha’s body was soaked in blood from the neck down, and the solid platinum poignard lay discarded on the floor beside her.

“I don’t believe it,” said the reverend. “We are being ten-green-bottles-ed.”

Mr Burgh went to find Sir Richard’s party while Liza, feeling a little numb and a little like she was halfway through a tunnel and wishing she’d turned back earlier, pulled out her phone and began photographing the body. As she reached into her pocket, she felt the USB key nestling there like a tiny, unexploded bomb.

“So you don’t think was him, then?” asked Hanna. “Mr B?”

“No.” Reverend Lincoln was grave. Then again, that was in many ways part of his job description. “Why would he?”

Trying very, very hard not to retch, Liza photographed Lady Tabitha’s throat. She’d taken a single stab wound to the neck and, from the way she was sitting, must have died pretty quickly. “Throw us off the scent?” she suggested. “Make us think we’re chasing a serial killer when there are only one or two real targets?”

The reverend seemed to consider this, then dismissed it. “Bit pointless. The more people he kills off, the fewer suspects there are left. Plus, more murders means more evidence when the police get here.”

He did, Liza thought, have a point.

From where the poignard had fallen, Liza estimated that the killer had probably stood to Lady Tabitha’s right and struck down, which probably made them right-handed—not exactly narrowing things down since as far as she could tell nobody in the building was left-handed—and since there didn’t seem to be much sign of a struggle it was probably somebody she didn’t see as a threat. But then, since Lady Tabitha had been from the kind of unflappable aristocratic stock that was bred not to react to any outside stimulus with more than a raised eyebrow and a polite tutting, that was basically everybody.

“My God, Tabitha.” That was Sir Richard, appearing at the door with the rest of his party, his hands pressed over his mouth and his eyes wide. “I knew it. I knew we were being ten-green-bottles-ed. I should have kept a closer eye on the old girl.”

Behind him, the colonel was fixing Mr Burgh with a beady glare. “Now look here, old boy, this clinches it as far as I’m concerned. Some bounder is running around this place picking us off one at a time like lobsters in a tank, and I’m damned if I’m going to sit around and—”

“Please tell me,” said Hanna, “that you are not asking for a gun again?”

Colonel Coleman folded his arms. “I most certainly am. From what we’ve been told we’ve got two days. Well, give me two days with a gun in my hand and a wall at my back, and I’ll be getting out of this mess alive, you mark my words.”

“And what if you’re the killer?” asked Liza.

With a calculating blink, Professor Worth slid his glasses back up his nose. “Well, logically, we already know the killer has accessed the firearms cabinet at least once, and so he—or she—could be reasonably expected to do it again. So in a way, wanting a gun could be seen as evidence of the colonel’s innocence.”

“It’s evidence of his imbalance,” insisted Hanna. “When has putting a firearm into a situation ever made it less dangerous?”

The look in Colonel Coleman’s eyes grew dark. “When the other fellow’s already got one.”

“May I remind everybody”—Reverend Lincoln stood firmly between the bickering crowd in the doorway and Lady Tabitha’s body—”that a woman is dead. Show some respect.”

Being chastised by a vicar was sobering enough. Being chastised by a vicar with a possible background in organised crime was chilling. The intruders quieted down, leaving Sir Richard to spend a little time with his late aunt while Liza finished up her observations. When they were done, Reverend Lincoln said a few words over the body, and two of the staff—now Liza thought about it, the same two staff; they must have been the only ones to get trapped here when the snow hit—came to take her away to wherever Mr Burgh was keeping the long weekend’s many, many victims.

Although there had been three deaths already in the hotel, there was something about Lady Tabitha’s demise that changed the atmosphere. Mr Ackroyd’s death had been an aberration, Belloc’s had been the killer trying to eliminate the one person who could catch them, and Mrs Ackroyd’s had seemed a sort of coda. The three together had represented a scarlet thread of murder through the holiday, but they’d seemed self-contained; whatever danger they represented remote and hypothetical. But now it seemed clear that Sir Richard had been right: some unknown or unseen malefactor was hunting down the guests one by one and dispatching them.

But why?

Back in their room, Liza paced while Hanna sat, and neither made very much progress on either the question of, “What do we do about the incriminating financial information we’ve been given?” or that of, “What do we do about the murders that keep happening?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Liza for the fourth time.

“It’s Ruby,” replied Hanna, for the fifth.

Outside, the highlands stretched away into the distance. With the snow melting, the deep greens and vivid purples of the mountains were a sight that on any other day, on any day with fewer corpses in it, would have been a beautiful vista to share with one’s wife. “She didn’t kill Belloc.”

“Details.”

“I still think we might be looking at more than one murderer.”

Hanna sighed. “I know. Vivien kills her husband and Belloc; Mr B kills Vivien. But then who kills Lady Tabitha? Mr B again?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Hell, for all I know, Mr Ackroyd actually faked his death and he’s lurking somewhere in the grounds waiting to take us all out.”

For a moment, Hanna was silent. “I suppose,” she said. “I suppose we do know that all the people who we’ve found so far are definitely dead?”

No. No way. This was getting silly. It was one thing to be speculating about a mysterious criminal mastermind hiding amongst a group of eccentric hotel guests, picking them off one at a time in the hopes of either eliminating a traitor or recovering potentially damaging information. It was quite another thing to imagine that people were faking their deaths and … “Where are the bodies being kept again?”

“Search me. We’d have to ask Burgh.”

For a while Liza carried on pacing, because storming downstairs to the manager’s office and demanding to see the corpses seemed to be verging on paranoid behaviour. Then again, if Sir Richard was right, they were trapped in a snowbound hotel with a faceless killer hell-bent on destroying them all. And that shifted the window on what counted as “paranoid” quite a lot.

So storm they did. Well, less storm really, more drizzle, although not before swapping custody of the USB key because carrying it was making Liza incredibly jumpy. They intermittent showers-ed downstairs to the manager’s office and knocked politely on the door. Then they just opened it up and walked in because, with all the shouting already coming from inside, it seemed like interrupting was less rude than eavesdropping.

“For the hundredth time,” Mr Burgh was saying to Colonel Coleman, “no. It’s a bad idea.”

“Bad idea for you, maybe. Not my fault you can’t shoot straight.”

Hanna leaned her head against the door frame. “Tell me this isn’t still about the gun cabinets?”

“Open ‘em up,” Colonel Coleman repeated, “let us all take our chances. It’s two days, you say; that’s enough time for the determined blighter to take down three or four of us easily, and I won’t have one of ‘em be me.”

“And you don’t think having everybody armed might turn the whole situation into—oh, I don’t know, a massive bloodbath?” There was no way Hanna was letting this one go.

“Risk worth taking. That’s the trouble with your generation: won’t take responsibility for yourselves.”

In a desperate plea to defuse the situation, Mr Burgh at last asked Liza and Hanna what they wanted.

At which point Liza realised quite how absurd what they wanted actually was. “We, umm … we wanted to look at the bodies of the four victims so far.”

And to Liza’s relief, Mr Burgh filled in the reasoning for her. “Think there might be more clues?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, nodding in a way that signalled that she was in no way entertaining the theory that one of the bodies was a fake or was secretly wandering around the hotel at night stabbing old women. “It’s definitely about clues.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Liza, in the Stables, with the Bodies

Monday afternoon

The bodies, it turned out, were being kept in the old stables, which hadn’t actually been stables for the best part of a century. The stabling function of the stables had been transferred to the new stables, which were somewhere else on the grounds, and the old stables were a sort of multipurpose leisure/gym space. Of course, now, with the heating turned off and the whole building rapidly cooling to the same freezing temperatures as the world outside, they were a multipurpose leisure/gym/morgue space.

There were, at least, definitely four bodies. The most recent, Lady Tabitha’s, was still lying in an awkward position, which suggested that a reasonable amount of rigor mortis had set in while she was sat in that chair. And after over a hundred episodes of true crime podcasting, Liza really felt she should have been able to remember what that said about the time of death other than, “Probably not that recently, but not, like, ages ago.” Early last night, she thought?

Vivien Ackroyd and Mr Belloc looked much as she remembered them. Paler, perhaps, and she suspected if she turned them over, she’d be able to see blood pooling at their backs— what blood was left in them—but she wasn’t about to start trying. There was playing amateur detective, and then there was interfering with the dead.

At last she came to Malcom Ackroyd. It was the first time she’d had an up-close look at his body, which she’d previously only seen from the back of a crowd. And she was kind of wishing she hadn’t seen it now. The other three victims had suffered horrible injuries, obviously, fatal in fact, and Vivien’s body had reminded her—if a reminder was ever needed—that a gunshot to the head did a lot more than make a picturesque pool of blood trickle out from under your cheek. But a headfirst drop from a balcony, even onto a layer of snow, was something else.

Liza had only seen Malcom Ackroyd once, albeit for the length of a whole dinner, but she’d been mostly trying to avoid eye contact. Still, given the state of his head, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to recognise him even if she’d known him better. The rest of his body was nondescript, a man in his early forties perhaps, no obvious scars or convenient missing digits to say, “Yes, this is definitely the guy it is supposed to be.” He was wearing his wedding ring, and it seemed to fit, but the thing about wedding rings was that they all looked the same, so barring a convenient inscription, there was no clue to be had there. Of course, if this wasn’t Malcom Ackroyd, the only person who could have proved it wasn’t would have been Vivien Ackroyd, and she was lying dead on the next table.

Turning her back on the remains of Malcom Ackroyd, Liza rested her chin on two fingertips and tried to piece together any scenario where this all fit together neatly.

“What if,” she tried, “the reverend was right and the Ackroyds weren’t really a married couple at all? All the arguing was just staged—”

“Felt pretty realistic to me,” said Hanna.

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t staged. And if it was, maybe they were Mr B’s agents. Only to cover everything up their plan was to kill a whole lot of people and make it look like a …”

“Like a ‘Ten Green Bottles’ situation?” Hanna didn’t sound totally convinced, but she was going with it.

“Exactly,” Liza continued. “And they start by faking Malcom’s death, then they take out Belloc. But then Malcom turns on Vivien because she’s a loose end, and now we’re all chasing ghosts, but actually he’s still out there somewhere …”

Hanna gave her a matter-of-fact stare. “Where?”

“I don’t know.” Liza made a gesture of calculated non-specificity. “In the grounds.”

“Living on berries and leaving no footprints?”

She had a point. This wasn’t exactly adding up.

“And who would that make this?” Hanna pointed as close to the direction of Malcom’s body as she could without looking directly at it. “Nobody else has gone missing. Did they bring a corpse with them?”

She had several points. “Okay, okay, this was probably a bit of a stretch.”

“No.” Hanna’s tone was gentler than Liza expected. “It was worth checking out.”

Feeling the cold, Liza shivered, and Hanna came over at once to put her arms around her. “I think …” Liza went on. “I think I just really hate the idea of it being one of the ones left, you know? I mean, I realise we aren’t, like, friends or anything, but … well … we’ve kind of got to know these people, and I don’t want any of them to be a serial killer.” She huddled down, resting her cheek against the top of Hanna’s head. “Is that pathetically sentimental of me?”

“I think as sentimentality goes, ‘I’d rather people weren’t serial killers’ is a low bar.”

That was comforting. Slightly, at least. “Come on,” Liza said, “let’s go back in. I’m freezing out here.”

They trudged out of the old stables and towards the hotel, still too recently-corpse-exposed to appreciate the gentle brush of snow across the grounds, or the bright, welcoming façade of the hotel against the mountains.

Inside they followed the sound of shouting through the hotel, down past the kitchens and, to Liza’s dismay and Hanna’s mounting and obvious infuriation, towards the gun room. Returning to the company of the other guests made Liza suddenly both paranoid about and aware of the USB drive that was still in her wife’s breast pocket.

All of the survivors, including Mr Burgh, Emmeline White, and two other members of staff, were lined up, with the gun cabinets open and the colonel parading in front of them like he was inspecting his troops. “Now, we all know the situation,” he was saying. “One of us—know it’s not me, but could be you,”—he peered at Sir Richard—”or you”—he moved his gaze to Professor Worth—”is sneaking about doing people in when they’re not expecting it. Well, no more is what I say.”

Reverend Lincoln gave him a sombre look. “This is not a good idea, Colonel.”

“You’ll be thanking me when there’s a murderer trying to beat your head in and you’ve got something to fend ‘em off with.”

Emmeline White was the first to come forward, and when the colonel handed her a pistol, she seemed to lock eyes with him, just for a moment. “Thanks,” she said.

“I’m not taking a gun,” Reverend Lincoln told him flatly.

“Yeah, neither are we,” added Hanna from the doorstep, then after a sharp elbow in the ribs amended to, “Neither am I.”

“And I don’t want one either,” said Liza before cocking her head towards her wife and saying, “Thanks for checking.”

“You’re all bloody fools.” The colonel glared as only a military man can glare. “This is no longer a hotel in the Scottish Highlands—”

Hanna folded her arms. “It absolutely still is.”

“—it is the Wild West.”

“The American West of the mid to late nineteenth century”—Hanna had broken away from Liza’s side and advanced on the colonel, getting as close to up in his face as she could, which was basically up in his chest—”was actually a relatively peaceful region in which most people were unarmed and gun violence was avoided wherever possible. The annual homicide rate in Tombstone, Arizona capped out at five.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” Liza was genuinely touched. “You remembered our episode about Old West gunslingers.”

Hanna turned back and smiled. “I do actually listen to your podcast.”

“I remember that one,” piped up Sir Richard. “Jolly interesting it was too.”

“If you’ve finished being rude,”—Colonel Coleman’s whole face bristled—”I was about to start handing out the firearms. Then I was going to take everybody down to the range for a training session.”

“This is such a bad idea.” Hanna turned to Mr Burgh. “How did you let him talk you into this?”

Mr Burgh shifted uncomfortably. “Honestly … I think I actually might also want to be able to defend myself, actually.”

“Oh God.” Hanna literally facepalmed. “Look, if I had the internet I’d dig up some statistics for you, but can’t we all agree that giving a hotel full of scared people guns they don’t know how to use is not a recipe for safety?”

The colonel wasn’t having any of this. “It isn’t my fault if none of you layabouts has learned to handle a weapon.”

“I know how to handle a weapon.” Reverend Lincoln’s voice remained calm. “But I’ve seen enough violence in my life—and in the past few days—without adding more needlessly.”

Hesitantly, the professor raised his hand. “I think I’m willing to give it a try. After all, it isn’t like things can get much worse.”

Having run out of coherent gestures, Hanna was reduced to making vaguely ragey noises. “Yes. Yes, they can. For example, just off the top of my head, we could start shooting at each other.”

Ruby held out her hand. “Just give me a gun. There’s no point arguing—we’ve decided.”

Although he seemed a little peeved to have had his drillmaster moment interrupted, the colonel knew an opportunity when he saw it and started handing out weapons. In the end, everybody in the hotel was armed save Hanna, Liza, and Reverend Lincoln.

Lacking anything pressing to do in the hotel, and morbidly curious as to how this was going to shake down, Liza and Hanna trooped down to the range with the rest of the guests—apart from Reverend Lincoln—and much of the staff.

Now that the firearm genie was out of the securely locked bottle, there seemed little point in interrupting the colonel, who did, at least, seem intent on giving the assembled suspects-slash-potential-victims at least some instruction in gun safety.

“Not going to beat around the bush,” he told them as they lined up in a snow-covered field facing a large, equally snow-covered sandbank. “Guns are dangerous. Only a fool says they aren’t. But we’re all adults, and we can handle dangerous things. Just remember four simple rules and you’ll be fine.”

Privately, Liza doubted that. Or rather, she suspected that following four simple rules when you thought a serial killer was coming to serial kill you was easier said than done.

“Rule one,” the colonel continued. “Always treat a gun as if it is loaded, even if you’re sure it is not. Rule two, never point a gun at anything you don’t want to shoot. Rule three, keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire. Rule four, be sure what you’re shooting at, and what’s behind it.”

That seemed simple enough, and despite Hanna’s strident opposition to packing heat, there was a tiny, treacherous part of Liza that did make her wonder if being armed might not be a comfort.

“Normally,” the colonel continued, “I’d say you should use ear protection in training, but we have a killer on the loose, and any one of you may have to defend yourselves with lethal force at any time. So you need to get used to the noise.”

If Hanna was going to say anything in response to the colonel’s claims about the urgent need to deploy lethal force, they were quickly drowned out by the sounds of gunfire.

After the first round of shooting, the professor decided that it was rather too noisy for him, even if it might save his life one day, and set off back to the hotel for a stiff drink. Although he did, Liza couldn’t help noticing, keep the gun. Liza and Hanna didn’t last much longer. Whatever brief inkling Liza might have felt that a handgun might be useful dried up quickly. There was just no way a group of relative strangers all earnestly preparing for the moment they needed to shoot each other in the head could be anything but a disaster.

Their ears still ringing, they walked back up to the hotel and settled down in the drawing room, where they found Reverend Lincoln sipping coffee and tapping something into his phone.

The Blaines settled onto the sofa opposite him, and Liza was slightly reassured to realise that they were sitting closer together than they had a couple of days ago, and that even with the threat of death there was less tension in the air.

“Planning a sermon, Reverend?” asked Liza, hoping that it wasn’t an insulting way to open a conversation.

“Yes, actually. I’d be a pretty awful vicar if I couldn’t get at least a couple of Sundays’ worth of material out of this experience.”

The sounds of gunshots were still echoing up from the grounds, although in a way that was almost comforting. If people were still practicing shooting, that suggested nobody had been shot yet. Of course, it could only be a matter of time.

A thought wormed its way into Liza’s brain and, although she wasn’t really meaning to pry, she let it come out of her mouth. “I’d have thought you’d want a gun yourself,” she said. “If you’re worried somebody’s coming after you.”

“I’ve left that part of my life behind.” The reverend typed a few more thoughts into his phone. “If that gets me killed, so be it. But I don’t think a gun would have saved Malcom Ackroyd from falling to his death from a balcony, or Belloc from walking into a trap.”

“At fucking last.” Hanna leaned back on the sofa. “I was beginning to think I was the only one around here with any sense.”

Reverend Lincoln shrugged. “If I was sensible I’d have taken a weapon. They’ve saved my life before. But I won’t risk harming another person by accident, and I think this hotel is becoming a place where accidents are very, very likely. Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I should probably retire. The guns are beginning to quiet, and I might actually be able to sleep.”

He left them sitting in the drawing room and, after a long day of looking at corpses and listening to pistol shots, the Blaines took the opportunity to relax. Liza curled lazily on the end of the sofa, Hanna leaning against her, one arm trailing gently on her knee. If it weren’t for the cold, the gunfire, and the fact that Hanna was carrying a thumb drive full of data that somebody was willing to kill over, it could almost have been a normal evening on a long weekend away from it all.

At least until Reverend Lincoln came back and told them his room had been searched.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Professor Worth, in the Bedroom, with a Pistol

Monday evening

It was subtle. Sufficiently subtle that if Liza had seen the room without its actual owner to point out the changes, she wouldn’t have known anything was wrong.

“That cabinet has been moved,” he explained. “The bed has been made, but not as well as the staff do it, so somebody searched it and put it back in a hurry. Whoever was here, they were thorough and careful but weren’t sure how much time they’d have.”

If you ignored the potentially deadly invasion of privacy, it was a rather nice room. Suitably clerical, with green-and-white striped wallpaper and a vase of daisies, now slightly out of place, on the coffee table. Liza started checking off a list of suspects. Apart from the reverend, the professor had been the first to leave the shooting range, but she and Hanna hadn’t gone that much later and, the moment they had, they’d lost eyes on the rest of the guests. At least they’d more or less ruled out the possibility of Malcom Ackroyd’s headless corpse wandering the corridors riffling through people’s underwear, but besides that, the shortlist of suspects wasn’t looking much shorter than the longlist.

“What do you think they were after?” Liza asked, despite suspecting that she might have a better idea than he did.

“I have no idea. If it was Mr B or his agent, then maybe they think I’ve got some sort of evidence against him, although I don’t know why they would. Or maybe they were planting something?”

Liza shot a glance at her wife. Of course, neither of them knew for absolute certain that the intruder had been looking for the bank details, but if they had been, then the kind thing to do was probably to tell the reverend. But it also was definitely not the safe thing to do. Because he could easily have been doing that old spy trick—reciprocity, Liza thought it was called—where you told somebody something about yourself so they’d be more inclined to tell you something similar about them.

“We can give it a check, if you like?” she tried instead. And for the next hour they helped Reverend Lincoln search his room for bugs or bombs, not that any of them really knew what they were looking for.

It felt kind of shitty, in a bunch of different ways, to be pretend-helping somebody who probably needed real help. And who they potentially could really help if they’d been less worried that he might also be a multiple murderer. So when they were done, they went back to their room feeling like arseholes, sat on the bed, and indulged in a small round of self-recrimination.

“But it could have been a trick,” Liza insisted. “And while I don’t like keeping things from people, I’d dislike putting you in danger even more.”

Hanna grudgingly agreed. “I can’t believe we’re in a situation where we’re having to ask ourselves questions like, ‘Should we tell the seemingly friendly vicar who we know also used to work for a shadowy underground mastermind about the secret data drive the femme fatale gave you, or would that get us both killed?’ I thought we were just going to take walks by the loch and maybe go horse riding.”

Laying back on the bed, Liza smiled. “I think I’d have liked to go horse riding.”

“I thought you might. You said you always wanted a pony.”

“Yeah, although I think that was mostly the idea rather than knowing anything about them at all.”

For a moment Hanna was quiet, then she lay down beside Liza and said, “So I was trying to work out if there was some cool, romantic pony-related gesture I could spontaneously make, but I tried to think of some things and they all came out really fetishy.”

“Yeah.” Liza risked a smile. “‘I wanted a pony as a kid,’ isn’t the same as, ‘I want to do pony play right now.’”

“Noted. I did book us in for the horsies though. We’d have gone on Sunday. There’s this trail they do up through the mountains with lookout spots and things. I thought it’d be really nice.”

Liza reached out a hand across the bed to take Hanna’s, and they lay awhile, fingers entwined. “Yeah, that would’ve been lovely.” Then, after lying there a little while and just enjoying it, she added. “Or maybe it just would have given me a really sore arse.”

“It might have done, but it’d be a sore arse in a good way, I think.”

“Ah, well. That makes all the difference.”

It had been another long day, and they spent that evening in bed quietly pretending that nobody was trying to murder them, and trying not to put too much pressure on each other to take the quiet intimacy of an evening in a hotel room to an intimacy of a more directly physical kind. Because, actually, things had been … better? They’d still had multiple major rows, one of them about another woman, but fighting had been pretty normal for them over the past year or so. At least here there’d been moments in between of… something else. Of maybe being able to see a way back to how it had been or, perhaps more helpfully, forward to how they could be. Either way, pushing things seemed like a good way to make them worse again.

Besides, it was hard to get really in the mood when you were being constantly interrupted by—

There was a gunshot.

Liza wasn’t sure when her instinctive reaction to hearing the sound of a deadly projectile weapon being discharged in her vicinity had gone from “avoid at all costs” to “spring out of bed and run towards it,” but she sprang out of bed and ran towards it. Or at least as towards it as she could manage given the difficulty of following a single bang in an enclosed space. And it took her a moment to notice that this time, Hanna had come with her.

“You realise,” Hanna pointed out breathlessly as they rounded a corner towards one of the places the shot might have come from, “that we’re now dashing through a dark hotel full of scared people with guns?”

The thought had occurred. “I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

“Fear and firearms, a famously safe combination.”

They moved down the next couple of corridors slightly less recklessly, which might possibly have saved their lives when they near-collided with Sir Richard coming the other way around a corner, holding his pistol in the air like he was re-enacting the title sequence of a James Bond movie.

“Freeze!” He was not, Liza noticed, obeying either the rules about only pointing guns at things you intended to shoot, or the rule about keeping his finger off the trigger.

“Sir Richard, chill.” Liza put her hands very slowly into the air. “It’s us. We don’t have any weapons; we aren’t going to hurt you.”

He looked unconvinced, but to Liza’s immense relief he lowered the gun, although he still had his finger on the trigger. “Sorry. Jumpy. I think it came from this direction.” He set off down the corridor, and, figuring it was best to keep the jumpy man with the gun where they could see him and, perhaps more to the point, where he could see them, Hanna and Liza followed.

They found Colonel Coleman, Ruby, and Reverend Lincoln outside Professor Worth’s bedroom. Ruby and the colonel had each other at gunpoint, while the reverend was standing back, his hands raised, trying to look mollifying.

“Perhaps,” the reverend was saying, “you could stand back, and I could open the door.”

Ruby and the colonel both instinctively turned their guns on the reverend before realising their basic tactical miscalculation and turning them back on each other. Then, seeing the approach of the newcomers, they moved them rapidly to cover Sir Richard and the Blaines.

“Could we perhaps,” Hanna suggested, “all put our weapons down? Whoever has just shot whomever, we can be pretty sure that neither of them is anybody here right now.”

Ruby eyed her darkly. “How exactly can we be sure of that?”

“Because we’re all outside the room, not inside it? And because it would be a pretty bold move to come up to the professor’s room, shoot him, nip away for two minutes, then come back with your gun still smoking and pretend you’ve just arrived.”

There was no change in Ruby’s expression, and she kept her weapon unerringly trained on the colonel while staring at Hanna. “And you don’t think that the man behind all this might be exactly that bold?”

Much as Liza hated to admit it, it was a reasonable point. Before anybody could elaborate, the door opened and a sheepish Professor Worth poked his head out. “Oh, I say.” He sounded deeply apologetic. “Have I—have I caused a lot of bother?”

Three guns swivelled to point at the professor.

“A certain amount of bother, yes,” said Reverend Lincoln.

The door swung open and Professor Worth, pistol still hanging limply from his hand, stood aside to let the assembled crowd in. He was visibly trembling, so much so that he collapsed onto a nearby chair almost immediately. A draught was blowing through from a shattered window, and it didn’t take Colonel Coleman very long to put two and two together and work out what had happened. “Saw something outside, did you?” he asked.

Professor Worth nodded as if the slight movement of his head was all he had strength for. “Yes. Something was moving and—well, I’m …I’m sure it was just a shadow or a branch or something, and, well, there’s climbing ivy up to the window, and what with everything that’s gone on I suppose I …” He presented the gun, his hand still shaking so much it seemed he could barely lift it. “I suppose I panicked.”

“And what exactly did you see?” asked Liza, trying not to get too invested in the possibility of a mysterious, unaccounted-for suspect not already in the room.

“Just a shadow, really.” Professor Worth looked like he was trying to hide inside his own jacket. “I thought it was a person, but really, it was probably a—a cat or something. Or a bird. There are very big birds in this part of the country, aren’t there?”

There might have been, but it seemed unlikely to Liza that anybody would mistake a bird, however big, for an intruder.

Colonel Coleman lowered his pistol and addressed the room. “Well, what do you say we go and look anyway? If the filthy bounder behind all this really is skulking around outside fellows’ windows, we should go and see him off.”

On the one hand, running around in the dark looking for an intruder who had at least a couple of minutes’ head start and could have gone in literally any direction seemed unlikely to be fruitful. On the other hand, giving up without a chase felt wrong on several other levels. Besides, there was still snow on the ground, so if there had been a prowler poking around there would probably be tracks of some kind to follow. “Come on then,” said Liza. “Two groups of three again?”

Ruby gave a cold smile. “Boys versus girls?”

“I might sit this one out, actually.” The professor was staring into the middle distance and talking to nobody in particular. “Had a bit of a scare. Made rather a loud bang. Spooked myself.”

“Then that settles it,” said Ruby despite the fact that it didn’t actually settle anything. “I’ll go with the ladies, the three remaining gentlemen will go with each other, and we’ll try not to shoot one another in the dark.”

And with the inevitable momentum of a decision made, that was how they arranged themselves. The six investigators walked together out of the front door of the hotel and around to the east wall, where, sure enough, climbing ivy led up to a lighted window. The ground was strewn with broken glass, but the tiny, paranoid part of Liza that had taken to viewing every tiny detail of the case as a potential misdirect noted that it was possible the window had been broken from the outside and the glass thrown out afterwards. Not that there was any reason at all for anybody to do that; it would have been needlessly circuitous and entirely pointless.

Except all of this was pointless. Murder, at its heart, was a fundamentally pointless endeavour. And not for the first time in her career, Liza felt a tiny roil of uncertainty at her decision to devote her adult life to talking about it.

From the window, they split up to look for footprints. Now that the snow had stopped falling, prints were lasting longer without being covered, but in the immediate aftermath of a mysterious figure showing up at a window, that proved to be a mixed blessing. The staff and guests had been coming and going all day, with people wandering out for walks or heading down to the old stables to look at corpses, and so there were dozens of trails to follow, leading all over the grounds and crisscrossing each other in unhelpful ways.

To her mild embarrassment, Liza was only about seventy percent certain she could identify, and thus rule out, the tracks that she and Hanna had made earlier in the day, even with the pictures on her phone to act as a reminder. So between them, the two groups divided the grounds in half, with Liza’s group taking the east and the colonel’s group (or Sir Richard’s group—there seemed some disagreement between the gentlemen as to who precisely was in charge) taking the west.

They swept down towards the woods where Belloc’s body had been found—there were tracks leading that way, although Liza suspected they might have been old—and it wasn’t until they’d lost sight of the other group and were just losing sight of the hotel that Liza realised something very important, and deeply troubling.

Of the three of them, only Ruby had a gun.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Liza, in the Corridor, with a Key

Monday night

They were in the copse now, where there wouldn’t be any footprints, and if the mysterious figure had come this way it was an open question whether they really wanted to find him. Or, as Liza kept pointedly reminding herself, her. Although the most sinister her in the equation thus far was right with them: clearly visible, clearly armed, and clearly up to something.

With her back to a tree, Ruby stopped, which made Liza and Hanna stop too out of a kind of unspoken sympathy. And for a moment, the three of them just stood there listening to the wind and their own breathing.

“Is it still safe?” asked Ruby, having apparently convinced herself nobody was in earshot.

Liza nodded, not quite so convinced herself.

“It won’t be long now,” Ruby went on, apparently to the middle distance. “If he’s coming for me, he’ll come soon. But he won’t until he’s sure that those numbers aren’t getting out.”

Propped against her own tree, Hanna sucked in a sharp breath. “Yeah, that kind of sounds like you’ve screwed us.”

“I would, but you keep turning me down.”

Sometimes, Hanna could take a joke really well, but for some unfathomable reason, in a dark wood with a gun-toting stranger who kept trying to fuck her wife wasn’t one of those times. “I’m serious, you … you … self-consciously enigmatic tube of amorality. You’ve set a fucking serial killer after us.”

“He’s not a serial killer,” Ruby replied only slightly chidingly. “Serial killers are pathological. Mr B is just very, very ruthless.”

Liza’s true crime podcaster instincts kicked in before she could stop herself. “Actually, there’s some debate about that. While a lot of people do think that killing to satisfy a psychological need rather than for some other motive is a necessary part of the definition, most law enforcement organisations define a serial killer as anybody who kills three or more people in separate events.”

“Oh, good.” Hanna did not sound amused. Apparently, in a dark wood with a gun-toting stranger who kept trying to fuck her wife was also a context that lowered her tolerance for pedantry. “I’m so glad that we’ve got the man who is going to murder us both in our beds properly classified. And”—she glared angrily at both Liza and Ruby—”if either of you two even thinks about saying, ‘Well, actually, none of the victims so far have been in their beds at point of death,’ I will fucking scream.”

“And risk alerting whoever’s out here?” One of Ruby’s less attractive qualities was her refusal to rise to anything resembling bait.

“Oh, nobody’s out here.” When irritated or frightened, Liza knew from long experience, Hanna had a habit of retreating into certainty. “The professor probably just shot at a menacing branch.”

“Perhaps,” wondered Liza aloud. The whole situation was growing increasingly suspicious, and the more pieces of the puzzle she picked up the more convinced she was that there was more than one picture. She had too many corners, for a start. “Or perhaps it was the chef, or Mr Burgh, or one of the staff.” Or, she added silently, Malcom Ackroyd wandering around headless, or having faked his death. “Anybody could be skulking around out here.”

“But,” Hanna added, “they probably aren’t.”

Despite the probably-aren’tness, they peeled themselves away from their respective trees and continued their circuit of the eastern grounds. The snow had thinned enough that if it hadn’t been after dark, and on a mountainside, and with temperatures still hovering in the vicinity of freezing, Liza might almost have suggested that the three of them say fuck it and try to make a break for the nearest town. Well, not the three of them, except she figured Ruby would be hard to shake.

In the end, though, the risk of falling off a frozen road to their frozen deaths proved more worrying than the risk of falling victim to a mysterious gunperson in an otherwise warm and cheerfully lit hotel, so they made their way back around to the loch, and from there towards the main building.

At the front entrance, they met the trio of other guests that Ruby insisted upon referring to as “the boys.”

“Find anything?” asked Sir Richard.

“A lot of darkness, a lot of snow, and no sign of anybody,” replied Liza. “Probably a false alarm.”

The colonel made a sort of harrumphing noise and returned his pistol to his coat pocket. “In that case, I’m going for a nightcap. Anybody joining me?”

Sir Richard indicated that he would be, as did Ruby, but Reverend Lincoln demurred, citing the clerical virtue of temperance and the need to get a good night’s sleep.

“Yeah,” Liza said, casting a glance at Hanna, who did not seem especially keen to spend an evening in the drawing room with people who were all armed and drinking. “We might turn in too.”

Ruby smiled. “Well, if I’d known that was an op—”

“Stop it.” Hanna held up a hand. “It’s late, we’ve just been chasing a ghost around a snowfield for the best part of an hour, and none of us are in a mood to be seduced.”

One of Sir Richard’s eyebrows quirked upwards. “Speak for yourself.”

Leaving the trio of drinkers to negotiate the question of seduction or otherwise, Liza and Hanna decided that politeness required them to stop by Professor Worth’s room on the way back to theirs in order to tell him that whatever he’d shot at probably wasn’t a murderer.

They knocked at his door and he opened it a crack, the gun waggling through the gap and the gleam of his patent leather shoe just visible beneath. “Who goes there?” he asked in the tones of somebody who vaguely thought that was the kind of thing you should say, but who wasn’t really sure what answer he was expecting.

“Liza,” said Liza, “and Hanna. We’ve looked outside and we didn’t find anybody. We think you probably just shot at a shadow.”

“Oh.” There was a very, very audible sigh of relief from the other side of the door. “Well, thank you for telling me. Good night.”

The door clicked shut, leaving Liza and Hanna standing alone in the corridor, a little miffed at the abruptness of the farewell but generally pleased that they didn’t have a man who seemed to know nothing about guns pointing a gun at them.

Upstairs, they let themselves into their room, and at once a feeling like needles ran down Liza’s spine. Unlike the reverend’s room, she was familiar with the space and so could spot the little things out of place—the dressing table that had been slightly shifted, the pillows on the bed not quite the way they were normally arranged by the staff. The way her laptop was very obviously missing.

“Fuck.”

Hanna shut the door carefully behind them and then stood with her back to it. “This is bad, right? This is very, very bad.”

“Probably?” Searching for an upside, Liza settled on, “I mean, unless it’s good. Maybe whoever it was realised that what they were looking for isn’t here and has moved on. Maybe this is it, and we’re done now.”

“Does that honestly seem likely?”

Honestly, it didn’t. Hell, the very fact that her laptop—which contained all her notes for the next episode of Murder Most Actual and the half-edited recordings of the last episode, along with just straight up being logged in to her personal email—had been stolen and it wasn’t her biggest concern right then was a pretty major sign that something was very wrong indeed.

“Do we tell the manager?” asked Hanna.

Liza was at best only sixty percent sure that Mr Burgh was trustworthy. Which meant there was a forty percent chance of his being a manipulative sociopath who would definitely want them dead if they confirmed that they had access to his banking information. And forty percent seemed like bad odds. Especially because he was on quite a short list of people who could have searched their room in the time they’d been out of the hotel. “I think maybe no. At least not everything. We should probably report the computer stolen because,” she winced; this was about to go down a but-we-know-that-they-know-that-we-know rabbit hole, “if we didn’t suspect that somebody came to my room looking for something specific, that’s what we’d probably do.”

Perching on the very corner of the bed, Hanna rested her chin on her hands. “While we’re there, do you think we could get a different room?”

“It does feel a bit yicky still staying here, doesn’t it?”

“Not yicky. Unsafe.”

Liza went and sat next to her wife, putting an arm around her protectively. Not that she was really able to offer much protection. Maybe she should have taken that gun. “We’ll be okay.”

“Will we?” It was a challenging will we, not a reassurance-seeking one. “Because if somebody came through that door right now and tried to murderise us both, I’m not sure what we’d do.”

“Hide under the bed?” Liza was trying to be light-hearted, but it was scary to think about.

“First place anybody would look.”

“You say that, but when was the last time you looked under a bed?”

With an almost apologetic air, Hanna peeled Liza’s arm from around her shoulders and stood again. “I’m sorry, I’m not in the mood to joke about this. Now can we please go and try to get another room?”

So they went down to Mr Burgh’s office. They found him sitting in a wheely chair backed against the wall, a gun on his desk. His hand was hovering suspiciously near it when they opened the door, even though they’d knocked.

Reporting the laptop missing was a formality. Liza held out little hope that it would be found, and Mr Burgh, like everybody else in the entire hotel, had other things on his mind. Getting a room reassignment was more difficult.

“The thing is,” Mr Burgh explained, “we’re actually quite a small hotel. So we do have some free rooms available, but, well …”

“But they all belonged to dead people?”

“Um … yes.”

Liza and Hanna formed a little huddle at the back of the office, talking in low voices and hoping that Mr Burgh would be polite enough not to try to listen in.

“I actually think we should take it,” said Hanna.

That wasn’t the outcome Liza had been expecting. “Really?”

“Really.” Hanna nodded. “I’m worried about a murderer, not a ghost.”

Liza almost couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “And you don’t think it’ll be … you know, morbid?”

“Better morbid than dead.”

It was, Liza had to admit, a compelling argument. And while moving into the room where Vivien Ackroyd had died seemed genuinely disrespectful, there were other guests who had died a convenient distance from the place they’d actually slept. Also …

“I don’t suppose we could take Mr Belloc’s room, could we?” Liza asked in her most I-have-no-ulterior-motives of tones.

Mr Burgh looked worried. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t. He’s technically still a resident.”

“Yes, but he’s dead,” Liza pointed out. “And we might be too if we have to stay in a room that’s been ransacked.”

Apparently at least slightly invested in minimising casualties amongst his guests, Mr Burgh nodded. “Yes, I was just about to say.” He produced a key from behind the desk. “I’m afraid we haven’t cleaned any of his things out. There didn’t seem much point.”

“That,” said Liza, taking the key, “will not be a problem.”

The moment they left the office, Hanna yanked Liza aside and said simply, “No.”

“It was the only way to get a new room.”

“I’m fine with the room. You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

“He was”—glancing back towards Mr Burgh’s office, Liza lowered her voice—”he was a detective. If anybody knew anything about Mr B, it was Belloc.”

“Belloc, the guy who got immediately murdered the moment he actually tried to investigate anything?”

“Anyone can have a bad day.”

“That was a very bad day.”

Clutching the key, Liza set off once more towards Belloc’s room, Hanna trailing behind her. “Look at it this way. We’re continuing his work.”

“You’re snooping. You’re snooping through a dead man’s things.”

Upstairs, they stopped outside Belloc’s door. As keen and as curious as Liza was to see what, if anything, the detective had left behind, Hanna did kind of have a point. “Should we just go back to our room?”

Leaning against the wall, Hanna massaged her temples. “I don’t know. Honestly, the thought of going back there tonight scares me, but even though Belloc was a detective and a weirdo, I do think he’s entitled to some privacy.”

“That’s fair. I guess …” Liza tried her best to separate what she thought was right from what she thought would satisfy her desire to poke at things that didn’t need poking, and partially succeeded. “I guess if it was me, I … I think I actually would want somebody to look at my notes. One of the things I’m most pissed about with my laptop going missing is that all my work on this case has been wiped out. I think if I—”

Hanna raised a warning digit. “Don’t say it.”

“Okay, but if anything happened and I was in the middle of something big, I’d want that something to be finished by somebody.”

“But by a total random?” asked Hanna. “A total random who you clearly didn’t respect.”

Liza cocked her head to one side. “I’m not sure, ‘He was disrespectful and low-key sexist’ is making me more inclined to care about his wishes, if I’m honest.”

“Ordinarily, I’d say fair enough. But the man is dead.”

“Tell you what,” Liza said. “We’re here now. Let’s go in anyway so we don’t get murdered, and I promise I won’t go looking around unless there’s something that has obvious clue written on it in huge red letters.”

Hanna moved close behind her and guided the key into the lock. “Deal.”

So they opened the door and went inside.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Belloc, in his Room, with Theories

Monday night / Tuesday morning

Belloc’s room was slightly less opulent, and a whole lot less Victorian, than the one the Blaines had left, having a beige carpet, austere walls with a notable lack of women in dresses, and a bed without a single post. There was a wingback chair in one corner, along with a low coffee table strewn with papers that, to Liza’s disappointment, turned out to be brochures depicting local attractions rather than detailed notes about the identity of a mysterious mass murderer.

For a moment, Liza sat on the sofa looking through the pamphlets advertising scenic walks and historic sites. She’d really hoped—well, not hoped exactly; perhaps idly fantasised—that she’d walk in and there’d be some kind of journal open on a desk with a page of notes reading, “Everything I Know about Mr B, by Perseus Belloc.” Instead, she’d found the room tidy—immaculately tidy, in fact—which meant that if she wanted to find anything, if there was anything to find, she’d need to search the place.

Hanna had stretched out on the bed. She didn’t look comfortable. “You’re really tempted to turn this place upside down, aren’t you?”

“Yes.” Liza flipped over one of the leaflets restlessly. “No. Maybe. I just thought—he must have known something. But you’re right. It feels wrong to do to him what somebody just did to us. Even if he’s dead. Maybe because he’s dead.”

Hanna patted a space next to her. “How about you come lie down?”

It was an increasingly tempting idea. Setting aside the irrelevant paperwork, Liza got up, switched off the lights, and tried to get comfortable. Hanna’s hand found hers in the darkness, and for a long while they just lay there, fingers twined together, trying to be in the moment instead of in their heads.

Her eyes closed, Liza felt her breathing slide into an easy rhythm and listened to the night sounds of the hotel. It was an old building and its timbers creaked in the dark in ways she was beginning to find familiar, almost comforting.

“Do you remember,” Hanna whispered into empty space, “the weekend we spent camping in Cornwall?”

“It rained for three days straight and we had to sleep in mud, and the campsite toilets backed up, and so we had to walk twenty minutes to the nearest pub every time we wanted to use the loo?” Liza remembered it. She remembered it very clearly. It had been utterly miserable, and she would probably have left before lunch on the Saturday if Hanna hadn’t insisted they see it through. And if the engine hadn’t fallen out of their old car.

“That’s the one. I’m just trying to work out if that’s still our worst ever holiday, or if this one just beats it.”

“Well, on the one hand,” said Liza, “our lives were never actually in danger in Cornwall.”

There was a shifting in the dark as Hanna rolled over, fishing the USB key out of her pocket and staring at it for a moment before handing it over to Liza. “You say that, but we could have drowned if it had rained much harder in the night.”

Letting herself relax just a fraction, Liza laughed. “I told you we should have gone home.”

“And miss all that beautiful scenery we could barely see?”

“Or that lovely romantic walk down Widemouth Bay in the pissing rain.”

Hanna moved closer, facing Liza in the darkness. “You know it was kind of romantic. We shared an umbrella, got mildly fetishising comments from surfers …”

“Oh, that was the worst. Like, we were already wet to the skin, what did they want us to do?”

“Kiss, I think,” said Hanna

Memories were drifting back to Liza in fragments. “And we did that too, didn’t we?”

Reaching out, Hanna traced her fingertips up Liza’s arm. “Well, I wasn’t going to not kiss my then-girlfriend-now-wife just to spite some surfer bros.”

“Good call.” They were closer now, and not thinking about the hotel or the murders or that the risk of joining the victims was getting easier. Although easier wasn’t quite the same as easy. “And then we found that little cafe and decided to stay there until the rain eased up.”

“And it just got worse and worse, and we were trying not to spend too much, so we just shared one cup of hot chocolate for hours and the owner got really hacked off with us.”

Liza moved herself closer still so that they lay body-to-body. And it felt … good? She thought so, anyway. Natural. Like it used to be. Like it had always been that way. She leaned towards Hanna and kissed her, and for just a moment it was as if they were back on that beach in Cornwall, with surfers watching them while they held each other in the rain.

They had been together so long that the rhythms of intimacy were second nature. It was just that, in the last year or so, they’d lost the habit of following them. But there in the dark, in a dead man’s room, they flowed into each other like waves on the sea. Like snow in flurries. Like blood into earth.

This was wrong. Or if not wrong, at least a little creepy. Liza pulled back, the taste of her wife’s lips still on hers. “We shouldn’t,” she said. “I know he didn’t die in here, but this is still …”

“Yeah.” There was a hunger in Hanna’s expression that Liza hadn’t seen in a long, long time. “Yeah, it’d be … disrespectful.”

“Very.”

“And being disrespectful”—Hanna slid her hand up from Liza’s hip to the small of her back to the nape of her neck—”is bad.”

“Extremely bad.”

They kissed again, more hesitantly. For all that they could make a game of it, there was still death in the air, and whether that was an aphrodisiac or a mood killer was very much a matter of perspective. “Okay.” Liza pulled back again. “We should really stop.”

“I know. It’s just—we could be in actual danger here, and—”

“And you wanted to do the Hollywood cliché thing and doink just as we’re about to do something that might get us killed?”

“It’s a classic for a reason. But really, I think I just want something to—I don’t know, distract me?”

“And here I was feeling flattered.”

Hanna sighed. “You’re also a beautiful, talented, incredibly sexy woman that I desire intensely.”

“And so are you. But we’re in a dead man’s bed.”

With a playful smirk, Hanna slipped off the bed and onto the floor, where she lay invitingly on the carpet. “How about now? You can’t object to defiling a dead man’s floor.”

Sliding across on her stomach, Liza looked down. “I can. For all I know he’s still got his things down there.”

Hanna made a show of sweeping the area in her general vicinity. “Nothing at all. It’s almost as if he was never he—” She stopped. And although it was hard to tell in the dark, she looked almost crestfallen.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. But if hypothetically, I thought I’d found something under the bed, that would probably derail the whole evening, wouldn’t it?”

The correct answer was, “No.” Or maybe, “Yes, but only because I’m really serious about not wanting to have sex in a dead man’s bedroom.” The honest answer was … “Maybe?”

Hanna held up a small leather-bound notebook. “I think this might have obvious clue written on it in big red letters.”

In hindsight, Liza would be slightly embarrassed at how eagerly she snatched the book from Hanna’s hands.

“I’ll get the lights,” said Hanna resignedly.

Liza sat cross-legged on the bed, took a couple of deep breaths to steady her nerves-slash-moral-qualms, and opened the journal. “This,” she read aloud, “is the how-you-say journal—hang on, he actually wrote how you say?”

“Also,”—leaning on the wall by the light switch, Hanna was looking way more indulgent than she could have done given the circumstances—”he’s writing in English.”

“Yeah, he was definitely a fraud, wasn’t he?”

“Definitely.”

Liza turned her attention back to the journal. “I’m hoping that even if he wasn’t really French, he was really a detective.”

“One of the many things I love about you is your eternal optimism.”

The journal was thick and densely written in neat, almost copperplate script and seemed to contain a great many entries for old cases that Belloc had worked on over the last year or so, many connected to Mr B. According to Belloc’s notes, the man was involved in a quite remarkable number of incidents, including a murder at a golf course, an assassination on an international flight, and any number of deaths at stately homes.

“But I have him at last,” Liza continued. “His minions, they have betrayed him, as Belloc always knew they would—fuck, he even does the third-person thing in writing—and he has been forced to come, himself, to Scotland, and that is where Belloc will catch him. He’s saying him a lot. Do you think he knows for certain Mr B is actually a man, or do you think—?”

“Do I think he’s just the kind of guy who assumes a master criminal has to fit into quite a narrow definition of masculinity?” The look on Hanna’s face already answered the question, but she answered it aloud anyway. “Yeah, I think he was exactly that sort.”

“So, nothing so far we don’t already know.”

“No.”

It was a bit of a disappointment, but probably not a surprise. She flipped a couple of pages ahead. “There has been a murder most wicked, and Belloc is sure that Monsieur B was behind it. It doesn’t say why he’s sure.”

“Did he ever?” asked Hanna

Liza carried on reading. “His goal, I am convinced, is to create the screen of smoke behind which he can hide the murder of his true target, the one who has betrayed him. That makes more sense, and it lines up with Sir Richard’s theory that we’re being picked off.” She turned back to the journal. “This he has done before, with the murders in Andover and Bexhill.”

“Andover and Bexhill?” It was strange how naturally Hanna asked the question, in a way she never would have before they’d come to Scotland.

“Sounds a bit familiar, but it’s not like we’ve done an episode about every murder.” Liza trawled her memory for similar incidents. “There was something in the eighties or nineties where a guy killed a bunch of … bank managers, I think? And did it up as this whole big anti-capitalist thing when he was actually just looking for a way to off his brother-in-law.”

Hanna shuddered. “That seems really fucking cold.”

“Some people are. It’s not common. Something I keep talking to Rachael about is that I worry we cherry-pick interesting cases too much and give a distorted impression of what crime is like. But the weird stuff does sometimes happen.”

“So, Belloc would have agreed with Sir Richard.” From the way Hanna said it, it seemed like she considered this less a question of great minds thinking alike than one of fools seldom differing. “That might just make them both wrong in the same direction.”

There was that. Flipping over a couple of pages, Liza carried on consulting the book. “He seems to have narrowed it down to four suspects.”

“All men?”

“Yes.”

“Figures.”

Liza pored over the notes Belloc had made on each of his possible candidates. “Sir Richard Quirke,” she began. “He is clever, arrogant, and knows crime well. Never trust a man who involves himself unasked in police investigations. Well, that seems a little hypocritical. Then there’s Professor James Worth. An educated man, and Mr B is certainly educated. Was quick to speak with Mrs Ackroyd after the death.” Liza tried to remember if that was true. She’d watched her video from the first night a dozen times already, but she couldn’t quite remember, and with her notes stolen she couldn’t check.

“And now he’s playing the must-be-an-educated-man card.” Liza could practically hear Hanna’s eyes rolling. “What next, is he going to insist that the killer must have gone to Cambridge?”

“I suppose you do have to be kind of smart to be a criminal mastermind,” suggested Liza.

“Remind me which university the Krays went to again?”

“Colonel Coleman,” Liza continued. “A military man would have the discipline to manage a large criminal network, and honour would demand that he resolve a betrayal personally. And he was very keen to get everybody guns.”

“You think it was just a ploy to get himself armed again?”

“It could have been. Maybe breaking back into the gun cabinets was too risky. And Belloc was right that an army background would make sense for a gangster.”

Tiring of leaning on a wall, Hanna came back to the bed. “So, who’s the last suspect? The vicar?”

“Yes—wait, no.” Turning over two pages, Liza saw the notes continuing. “He does say Reverend Lincoln is a suspect—not who he says he is, probable criminal background, that kind of thing—”

“Eyes too close together?”

“He’s weird and a bit chauvinistic. He’s not a Victorian phrenologist.”

Hanna made a sorry-not-sorry face. “So, who’s number five?”

“Burgh,” she read. “I had initially excluded the staff since they have been in place for some time and are known to one another, but my research revealed that the manager, Mr Burgh, was appointed only recently following the previous manager’s departure under mysterious circumstances. Belloc cannot, therefore, be certain that he is not in fact Monsieur B travelling in disguise. Also, it has not escaped Belloc’s attention that his name begins with B.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Does that even make sense?” asked Liza. “I know the guy is supposed to be a criminal mastermind, but having the manager of an obscure Scottish hotel nobbled just on the off chance that you need to replace him in order to wipe out a minion or two seems like some next-level-genius shit.”

With a resigned shake of her head, Hanna said, “Honestly, I don’t know what the rules even are anymore. He is the person who’d have found it easiest to get the gun the first time around. And he’d be able to get into everybody’s rooms because he has the master key.”

This was beginning to add up. Not necessarily to add up correctly, but to add up to something, like when you split the bill in a restaurant and somehow everybody came out feeling like they were down about a fiver. “And he has no alibi for any of the killings. And he could have searched our room while we were out of the building. Shit, shit, shit, that makes it harder. If Belloc had ruled him out, I might have said we could trust him.”

“Really?” Hanna sounded beyond sceptical. “You’d bet our lives on the judgement of a dodgy PI with a fake accent?”

“We’ve got to bet them on something. Not trusting the right person could be as bad as trusting the wrong person.”

Returning to the bed, Hanna sat down glumly. “I don’t think I like this game anymore.”

“Did you ever?”

“Some bits of it were growing on me.” She shuffled closer again. “Seeing you—you know, dealing with it. I know I’ve been freaked out a lot of the time, but you’ve kept it together and, yeah, it’s not a side of you I see much.”

Liza looked up from the book and frowned. “Are you saying I’m not normally together?”

“No, I’m saying I don’t normally get to see you taking charge of a murder investigation. Hell, you normally don’t even take charge of putting the bins out.”

“I put the bins out.”

“But you don’t take charge of putting the bins out. Over the last few days, though, you’ve organised investigations, set up search parties. It’s been … impressive.”

Putting the notebook aside, Liza swivelled to face her wife. “I’ve organised quite a lot of things, you know. I directed plays at uni, I sort out basically everything for the podcast because Rachael is even more of an artsy flake than I am. And you do know this.”

“Yeah.” Hanna nodded. “I know it. I guess I’ve just never really seen it. And that’s completely on me. I just—I’ve watched your shows and listened to the podcast, but I’ve never really been around to see you doing your thing, and it’s … I like it. I’m sorry I didn’t see it sooner.”

It was a bittersweet compliment to get from somebody you’d been with for ten years. But that was the problem with long relationships: it was so easy to fall into patterns; to miss huge, important parts of each other out of sheer habit and repetition. “But you see it now?”

“Yes. I see it now.”

And then Hanna kissed her.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Colonel, in his Room, with a Gun

Tuesday morning

Breakfast the next morning was sparsely attended. Or at least it felt sparsely attended, although that was partly on account of how several of the people who would have been attending were dead. The professor was still picking at what was left of the fresh fruit while Sir Richard, conspicuously alone, munched morosely on his cereal, and Ruby and the reverend eyed one another suspiciously from opposite sides of the room. The colonel was absent, and while in any other circumstances Liza might have put that down to the kitchen running low on bacon, given what had happened to Lady Tabitha the day before, she wasn’t very inclined to make assumptions.

They did at least manage to eat without Mr Burgh coming back in to inform them all of some additional disaster or imminent danger, but that didn’t keep anybody from eyeing the empty space where the colonel would normally have been sitting.

“I suppose,” began Sir Richard, “that if he’d died, Mr Burgh would have told us.”

“If he knew,” Ruby pointed out. “If somebody got him in his room, he could be up there right now.”

Hanna gave Ruby her most sardonic look. “But surely that’s impossible. He had a gun. And the whole point of his having a gun was that it’s completely impossible for somebody with a gun to be the victim of any kind of violent crime.”

As ever, Ruby was unbaitable. “You put your faith in the innate goodness of humanity. I’ll put mine in a healthy dose of paranoia and a small-calibre pistol. We’ll see who lasts longer.”

“How about”—Liza pushed back her chair and stood up—”we go check on him and make sure he’s okay?”

Setting down his spoon, the reverend joined her. “That does seem like a good idea.”

“And what will we do if he’s not?” asked Sir Richard.

“Speaking personally,” said Hanna, also rising, “I shall say I told you so.”

Ruby curled her lips into half a smile. “How unspeakably morbid. I might almost be starting to like you.”

“If he’s not,”—Liza made her way over to the door and held it open—”then we will have one more piece of evidence that you were right and that somebody is picking us all off one by one.”

That seemed to convince Sir Richard, who, Liza suspected, was never one to miss a chance at vindication. “Well then, I suggest we go check on the old bugger.”

To Liza’s mild and Hanna’s significant dismay, he, Ruby, and the professor all produced pistols for the journey, such as it was, up to Colonel Coleman’s room. In this instance, however, they proved neither a necessity nor a liability, as the party managed to make it upstairs without being ambushed by a single knife-wielding marauder or gun-toting shadow.

“You realise,” Hanna said as they lined up in the corridor outside the colonel’s room, “that if we bang unexpectedly on his door, there’s a good chance he’ll shoot us through it?”

Sir Richard pulled himself up very tall and straight. “Oh, I’m sure he … Actually, that’s rather a good point. One moment.” Inching towards the door, he reached out gingerly and, standing as far to one side as he could manage, rapped on it.

“Not done yet,” came the colonel’s voice from inside. “You can have the tray in about an hour.”

“It’s me,” Sir Richard replied. “And everybody else for that matter. We’re trying to make sure you’re all right, old chap, and, well, are you all right, old chap?”

There was a pause, which, if Liza was overestimating the colonel’s paranoia to a degree that was itself probably a little paranoid, she suspected he was using to work out if this whole setup was part of an elaborate charade to murder him. “Perfectly fine, old boy. Curtains closed, holed up with a pistol, plenty of cover, and clear lines of sight. Suggest you do the same if you want to last until the snow melts.”

“That does seem like a rather good idea,” Sir Richard admitted.

Hanna let her head fall against the wall. “It’s a terrible idea. We can’t all hole up in our rooms like doomsday preppers. All it’ll take is one unexpected cleaning visit and somebody will be filling some poor maid with lead.”

“Rather the maid than me,” said the colonel, sounding only a little muffled from wherever he was bunkered. “Besides, I’ve told Burgh the situation, and there’s a system. The staff know to put my meal trays on the floor, knock once, say who they are, then open the door slowly with their hands in the air, shove the food through, close the door again, and—”

“Is this still the same system?” asked Hanna. “Because it sounds like you’re making a lot of hard work for some people whose job descriptions definitely didn’t involve dealing with old men waving guns at them.”

From inside the room, there came a sound that roughly approximated to “harrumph.” “These are desperate times, Miss Blaine. And desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“Desperate measures that mostly cause problems for people who aren’t you?”

“People who aren’t me,” said the colonel, “aren’t really my concern at the moment. Now if you’ll take my advice, you’ll all head back to your respective quarters, shove the bed against the door, stick your back to a corner, and wait it out.”

A sudden and alarming thought seemed to strike the professor. “I say, where are you going to the toilet?”

“There’s an en suite. Besides, chap’d have to be pretty dashed lucky to catch me just at the moment I was visiting the little boys’ room.”

Sir Richard gave a gallows chuckle. “Not if he was coming for me. The pipes in my room make a fearful racket whenever you run the shower.”

“Perhaps”—Ruby’s flawless eyebrow curved into a flawless arch—”just don’t shower for a day or so.”

“Good God, madam.” The look on Sir Richard’s face suggested he couldn’t have been more appalled if she’d suggested he relieve himself in his own undergarments. “What do you take me for?”

“Somebody who wants to live,” she suggested calmly.

Reverend Lincoln raised his hands in a valiant but probably doomed effort to make peace. “Can we at least agree that the colonel is well, and that we are doing no further good standing outside bickering?”

“Quite right,” said the voice from within. “Sod off the lot of you. Got no need to be hanging about here.”

So off they sodded and, none of them being especially keen to follow the colonel’s advice and barricade themselves in a bedroom, they made their way to the drawing room. There they arranged themselves across the various armchairs and sofas, Ruby seating herself at a piano which she emphatically did not play. For a while nobody spoke, because it was hard to make small talk when three of you were armed and one of you was almost certainly a serial killer.

Eventually, Sir Richard decided he’d gone long enough without hearing his own voice. “Of course, the downside of the colonel being holed up like that is that we’ve only got his word that he’s actually doing it.”

“If you’re going to suggest,” said Hanna, “that what we just heard was an elaborately staged tape recording, then I’ll—well, I won’t do anything because I’m trapped in a murder hotel and can’t, but I’ll be kind of annoyed.”

“Nothing like that. Just that if I was him, and I was the murderer, and I’m neither—”

“So you say,” interjected Ruby.

“Well, I’m definitely not him and if I was the murderer I wouldn’t tell you. And either way, my point is that if I was the murderer, then I might think it was a jolly good idea to lock myself in my room and then get you all to lock yourselves in your rooms so that I could go around the whole place without being spotted and pick everybody off one at a time.”

It was, Liza had to admit, a distinct possibility. “But you’d also be telling them to hunker down and point guns at the door.”

Sir Richard smiled. “And as I’m sure your lovely wife would remind us—”

“Her lovely wife has a name,” said her lovely wife.

Still smiling, Sir Richard continued as if nothing had happened. “—having a gun is a far less assured means of self-protection than the colonel has been suggesting.”

“Yet,” observed Ruby, “you still took one.”

“Well, yes, I’m a realist, not a fool. And if you know exactly who is armed and you’ve just told them exactly where to point their weapons—at the door, in this case—or you can be reasonably sure that you’ll know when they’re asleep … well, you’ve just fixed yourself a nice hotel full of sitting ducks.”

From the way Sir Richard was talking, it sounded like he had a solution to propose, and Liza was pretty sure she knew what it was. “You’re going to suggest we stick together until the police get here, aren’t you, so we can keep an eye on each other?”

The other guests exchanged a series of sharp, appraising looks. It was a plan that had been mooted at the very start, and nobody had felt particularly compelled to go along with it then. But that had been three murders ago.

“Clever gir—clever young woman.”

Hanna glared. “You know that isn’t better, right?”

“A thousand apologies.” Sir Richard did not look as if he was offering even one apology. “But you must admit, it solves rather a lot of problems. And if anybody else winds up dead, then when the police arrive, we’ll all be able to say, ‘No, officers, the other five were with us the whole time.’ Good for everybody, what?”

Ruby picked out a couple of ominous notes on the piano. “I hate to say it, but that came perilously close to making sense.”

“I do, from time to time,” said Sir Richard with a smile.

The professor seemed to be thinking. “Hold on. If you were a murderer, mightn’t you also, instead of telling us to go back to our rooms and lock ourselves in where we’ll be safe, gather us all together in one room so that when we go to sleep, you could take us out in one fell swoop?”

Sir Richard shrugged. “Maybe, but the killer hasn’t gone in for the fell swoop option so far.”

“And,” added Reverend Lincoln, “killing everybody at once might actually be quite difficult. Besides, we can sleep in shifts.”

Now Ruby played a tauntingly light-hearted melody. “Oh goodie, sleeping in shifts. My absolute favourite activity.”

Liza and Hanna exchanged glances. On the one hand, it was probably sensible; on the other hand, being stuck in a room full of guns and people they had no reason to trust didn’t seem exactly restful either.

But in the end, it did seem like the best plan. And so, the ever-dwindling band of guests sat down and thrashed out the nitty-gritty of what looked likely to be a two-day vigil of watching each other to make sure nobody else got murdered. A somewhat complex system for toilet breaks was worked out, and Sir Richard was persuaded that it would not, in fact, kill him to skip showering until the snow melted, or at least that it would kill him less literally than a bullet to the base of the skull. They even arranged, travelling in threes as always, to inform Mr Burgh of their plan, and to check in once more on the colonel who seemed not to have moved from his room since that morning. They arranged for dinner to be brought to them in the drawing room in order to minimise the chances of anybody wandering off, and, having eaten little and worn out their eyes from staring at each other, they settled in for the evening.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Everybody, in the Lounge, with Guns

Tuesday night/ Wednesday morning

The night that followed was tense, and nobody seemed to get any sleep, although everybody took it in turns to lie down on something soft with their eyes closed for an hour or two, as much to show willing as anything else.

Between about one and three in the morning, Liza found herself on watch with Sir Richard and Ruby. Hanna was dozing fitfully on the sofa beside her, and Liza was casually stroking her nails across her wife’s shoulder blades. She’d also taken custody of the professor’s pistol when he went to sleep and, when she felt able, was keeping that ready in case somebody leapt out of the dark at them.

“You know,”—Sir Richard’s voice was sliding from laconic into sleepy—”I must say, you’ve done awfully well for a beginner.”

Liza wasn’t sure how she was meant to take that. “Have I?”

“Oh yes. Excellent catch on the whole she-should-have-been-holding-the-gun thing. And it was really very likely that it was actually poor Vivien behind the first two killings, so you really shouldn’t be too hard on yourself for getting it wrong.”

While she didn’t exactly have a huge investment in her own sense of ace-detective-ness, Liza could tell when she was being patronised and had never been a fan. “I don’t actually think I did?”

Sir Richard gave a hollow laugh. “Come on, old girl, no harm in admitting defeat. You said yourself it wasn’t a suicide, and she could scarcely have done Aunt Tabitha in. Which means we’re looking for somebody else.”

“Only,” Liza pointed out, “if we’re sure there’s just one killer.”

“You really believe that there just happen to be multiple murderers running around the hotel at the same time?” Sir Richard asked. Condescension was slowly giving way to incredulity. “If you don’t mind my saying, that feels rather fanciful.”

Ruby fixed him with a glance that, even on zero sleep, managed to be icy. “Whereas your theory that we’re being hunted down by a mysterious avenging angel is, of course, the kind of thing that happens every day.”

“It’s a simple question of mathematics.” Apparently, Sir Richard was standing firm on this one. And for a distracted moment Liza let herself wonder whether it was a matter of pride or if he had some other motivation. “It’s exponentially less probable that multiple people would have chosen to commit murder simultaneously than that one very, very bad murderer just happens to be in the hotel.”

Part of Liza wanted to avoid engaging. Sir Richard didn’t seem in a receptive mood, and challenging an irritable man with a gun seemed like a good way to get shot. But on the other hand, he was a noted amateur sleuth, and that meant he might have something interesting to say. “So, who do you think it is? This single phantom killer?”

Sir Richard steepled his fingers. “Ah, I confess I do have a rather nice little theory on that.”

“Do tell.” Ruby’s voice was the clearest example of dripping with sarcasm Liza had ever heard.

“It’s the maid,” said Sir Richard smugly.

“Which maid?” asked Liza.

“There’s only one,” Ruby replied. “I think she and the footman might have had a thing going.”

Liza let her head collapse into her hand for a moment. “Tell me you didn’t have sex with her as well?”

“Not getting jealous, are we?”

“As the lady says,” Sir Richard butted back in, “there’s only one maid, and I think she may be behind all of it.”

“All of it?” To Liza, at least, that seemed on the very low end of probability.

“I don’t know why you’re so shocked. It was you who put me onto her. You were right, you see—Aunt Tabitha had been squabbling with Mrs Ackroyd just before Belloc was shot. And when I dug into that a bit, it turned out that the maid was what they’d been squabbling about.”

That did tally with what Liza knew. She just wasn’t sure it all added up to four murders.

“I don’t suppose”—Hanna stirred sleepily on the sofa—”that while you were digging up all this information you bothered to find out what this young woman’s name was, did you?”

Sir Richard looked perplexed. “Should I have done? Didn’t seem terribly important. Anyway, she’d also apparently had a bit of a run-in with Mr Ackroyd. The footman even confronted him on her behalf.”

There was a lot about this that Liza still wasn’t buying. “You think she responded to workplace harassment by becoming a serial killer?”

“Don’t be silly.” Sir Richard looked borderline insulted. “I think she was already a serial killer, and Mr Ackroyd made the mistake of harassing the wrong person.”

By Liza’s side, Hanna lifted her head blearily. “Is there a right person to harass?”

“Well, somebody who isn’t a serial killer is probably a good first filter,” Ruby pointed out. “But go on, Richard, run us down the other murders.”

Sir Richard steadied himself and rubbed the sleep from his eyes with his free hand. “Well, most straightforwardly, she was staff, so she had access to the gun room—in fact, she was the one who reported the weapon missing, suggesting she even had access to the safe itself.” He took a brief pause for breath and implied applause. “She could go about the hotel without being noticed—we’ve none of us been paying attention to the staff—and could easily access the master keys. Nobody would see her as a threat, which would let her get close enough to Belloc, and to Vivien, and to Aunt Tabitha to finish them off.”

On the sofa, Hanna had almost completely stirred. “And her motivation for this is …?”

“Perhaps she’s just mad?” suggested Sir Richard.

“One,”—Hanna rolled onto her back, fatigue warring with irritation—”mad isn’t a thing. If you mean she might have a specific mental illness, you’d need to say which. Two, if you do mean she has a specific mental illness, then you should know that virtually all mental illnesses—including the big famous ones like schizophrenia—make you less likely to commit crimes and more likely to be the victim of them, not the other way around. Three, so, having worked at this hotel perfectly happily, she suddenly decides to start offing guests for no reason?”

“Not no reason.” Sir Richard, it seemed, was as keen to stick to his metaphorical guns as the colonel had been to stick to his literal ones. “She had disagreements with Mr Ackroyd and my aunt. Belloc was on her trail, and Vivien Ackroyd was in her way. It all makes a certain dark sense if you can get into the mind of a killer.”

Did it? Liza had a nasty suspicion it might. And wouldn’t that make her feel—actually, what would it make her feel? Wasn’t it better if this was all the fault of one psychopath instead of … of whatever other set of ideas she’d been working on? And Sir Richard was a proper detective—a proper amateur detective at least. What were the odds that she was right and he was wrong?

“And do you,” Ruby asked, innocuous as only a professional femme fatale could be, “think that she’s also the mysterious Mr B? Or do you think that Belloc was just wrong about that?”

Sir Richard waved a dismissive hand. “The man was a fool, and Mr B is a phantom. I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“Because organised crime existing is more improbable than a random hotel worker being an actual psychopath?” asked Liza.

“I have my theory of the case and I stand by it.” Sir Richard leaned back contentedly in his chair. “Do you have a better one?”

She didn’t. Or at least, she didn’t yet. “I guess I just think it might be … messier than that.”

“I see.” The expression on Sir Richard’s face was the opposite of impressed. “How very specific.”

On the sofa, Hanna shifted her position so she could put a supportive hand on the small of Liza’s back.

“Okay,” Liza tried again, “how about this. I think there’s reason to believe that Mr B is real and—”

“What reason?” asked Sir Richard, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

While Liza didn’t want to look foolish in front of Sir Richard, she also didn’t see what she’d gain by dropping either Ruby or the reverend in it, so instead, she said: “Belloc was eccentric, but he wasn’t incompetent. He wouldn’t have just made up a crime boss out of nowhere. That means he—”

“Or she,” added Hanna dozily from the sofa.

“Or she … is probably really here. And in that case, we should probably factor them in.”

So far, Sir Richard remained unconvinced. “That seems like speculation.”

“Speculation is all we have. It’s just that, to me, it makes more sense if there are multiple killers, some of them nudged that way by Mr B, than if one mastermind is behind everything.”

“Go on then.” Sir Richard tapped his pistol on his knee in a way that must have been breaking some kind of gun safety rule. “Who was it then?”

“Vivien Ackroyd killed her husband and Belloc. Then Mr B—whoever that is—killed her, and …” She trailed off. There was a look in Sir Richard’s eye. Because if she followed the line of reasoning she was inclined to follow—that in these crimes, like all crimes, it was usually the person closest to the victim—that meant she was about to accuse him of murdering his aunt. And, by extension, of clinging to his implausible single-killer theory as a smokescreen. “And I’m not sure yet on Lady Tabitha,” she finished.

“Well,” huffed Sir Richard, more than a little defensively, “I suppose we’ll see when the snow melts.”

The conversation, like so many inhabitants of the hotel, rather died after that. And Liza found herself coming back to Sir Richard’s theories, and her own, and Belloc’s. It all felt like this impossible tangle. And slimy as Sir Richard sometimes was, Liza didn’t want to believe he’d stabbed his aunt in cold blood. Then again, she didn’t especially want to believe that some random member of the domestic staff was a killer either. For a start, it would have made her feel really silly for focusing so much on the other guests.

And Mr B, whoever they were, almost certainly wasn’t a member of staff. Unless he was Mr Burgh, and that seemed—not impossible, certainly, but improbable; at once too unlikely and too obvious. Not that “too obvious” was real evidence in somebody’s favour—in fact, usually, it was the opposite. And if the opposite was what she should be looking for, then maybe the reverend—the man who’d admitted to a criminal past and shown himself to be comfortable with both guns and corpses—was the one she should be looking at. Or perhaps she was placing undue trust in Ruby. After all, if he was behind it, wouldn’t he have been less open about his past? Or was admitting to a connection to the underworld exactly the kind of thing a criminal mastermind would do? And people would trust a clergyman. He’d as good as admitted that the staff told him things. Might he not have used that to manipulate Vivien Ackroyd into …?

She was getting ahead of herself. Hell, she was getting ahead of everything. As long as everybody stayed together and—much as Hanna would have hated to admit it—kept their guns handy, the odds of being slaughtered in the night were pretty close to zero. And then it was just a matter of waiting out the clock.

Which seemed anticlimactic somehow. It wasn’t as though she expected that she’d be able to round everybody up in the drawing room and do a big speech where she explained how only one person could possibly have been the killer, but having it peter out into, “Well, the cops will sort it out, I guess,” was … actually, it was how it always went, if she was honest. That was part of the reason she and Rachael had decided to go short-form rather than long-form in the first place. Even leaving aside the ethical considerations of digging deep into cold cases as two random strangers, the thought of spending eighteen months mired in a single mystery only to realise—as people always did—that there were no clean solutions or easy answers and no real closure for anybody, was just demoralising.

Eventually the professor woke up for his shift, taking his gun quietly back from her and returning to his seat where he sat watching the room with the air of a stern teacher invigilating an exam. Liza settled down next to Hanna, which wasn’t hugely comfortable on one sofa but had a kind of an intimate necessity to it. Still, she didn’t sleep much. There were too many fragments of ideas rattling around her head. The unknown maid and her role in everything. The reverend and his trust-me-I’m-a-vicar manner. The professor’s butter-wouldn’t-melt timidity that never quite gelled with the way he held a gun. Ruby’s obviously-a-murderer smile. Sir Richard being so very determined to convince everybody there was only one killer.

As the sun started poking intrusively through the drawing room windows the following morning, Mr Burgh and the footman arrived with what remained of breakfast. The guests, bleary-eyed and thoroughly sick of one another, ate in silence, and then, as nobody especially wanted to spend yet more time sitting quietly in the drawing room staring at one another, they trooped upstairs to check on the colonel.

And received no answer.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Colonel, in his Room, with Breakfast

Wednesday morning

“Let us all remain calm,” said Sir Richard, although he didn’t exactly have much claim to be calmer than anybody else in the group. “There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

Ruby gave him a scornful look. “Given recent events, is the most reasonable explanation not that he has been brutally murdered in the night?”

“We don’t know that.” Liza was doing her best to be reassuring despite the fundamentally un-reassuring situation.

“True.” Ruby gave a dismissive shrug. “He might have been murdered relatively quietly, which would explain why none of us heard anything.”

Sir Richard was backing up across the corridor, a look of steely determination in his eyes.

“What,” asked Hanna, “do you think you’re doing?”

“Charging down the door.”

She stepped theatrically aside. “Then be my guest. Don’t let the fact that there’s a paranoid military officer behind it, who, if he isn’t dead or unconscious, is almost certainly getting ready to shoot anything that comes his way, stop you in the slightest.”

It stopped him in the slightest. “Fair point. What say I go fetch Burgh?”

The reverend and Ruby went with him to ensure an adequate supply of firearms while Hanna and Liza stayed behind with the professor, who was slumped against the wall with a pistol held in his trembling hands.

“I’m really not sure I’m cut out for this,” he said to nobody in particular.

Doing her best to be understanding, Liza settled down next to him. “I don’t think any of us are.”

“Although if you’re not cut out for it, you should probably put down the deadly weapon,” added Hanna.

At that, the professor’s grip tightened, and his hand steadied a moment. “No. No, I think I shall keep it. Just in case the colonel is being … difficult.”

As the minutes passed and they waited for the rest of the party to get back with the key, Liza became increasingly convinced that the colonel was not, in fact, being difficult. It had been long enough with no noise from his room that he was either asleep, exhibiting remarkable self-control, or—and this was fast becoming the most likely possibility—very, very dead.

When Mr Burgh arrived he looked pale, positively drawn. “I’ve spoken to Mary,” he said, which prompted a sharp “Who’s Mary?” from all the guests except the professor, who didn’t seem to care. “She works here? You’ve all seen her multiple times. About this tall.” He held his hand at his shoulder height. “Brown curly hair? I know hotel staff are meant to be invisible, but this is an unusual situation. I thought you might have paid some attention, especially since there are only two of them around at the moment.”

“We’ve been a bit distracted,” explained Liza.

“Because of the murders,” added Sir Richard.

“Although it was also actually probably a bit classist of us,” Hanna admitted. “Especially since some people”—she glared at Sir Richard—”have made her their prime suspect.”

Looking increasingly bored, Ruby folded her arms. “Perhaps rather than wringing our hands about our failure to get on first-name terms with the staff, we could at least get the door open.”

“I was just going to say,” continued Mr Burgh only slightly peevishly, “that I spoke to Mary and she said that there was no answer when she came to deliver his breakfast either, so she left it inside because she assumed he was asleep.”

“A bold assumption, in the context,” observed Ruby.

Mr Burgh carefully unlocked the door and pushed it open. There was a slight dragging sound as he did so—roughly the sound you might expect from an abandoned and rapidly cooling breakfast tray being forced aside.

The good news was that there was no answering gunfire.

The less good news was that the reason there was no answering gunfire was that its occupant was in absolutely no condition to fire a gun.

The colonel’s had been a sparse room with mustard yellow walls and framed black-and-white pictures above the bed that looked like they’d once illustrated some Victorian novel about colonial adventurism. The curtains were drawn across the bay windows, and hunkered in one corner where, Liza suspected, he really had been the entire time—barring lavatorial breaks—was the colonel himself. His body—assuming it was a body, which seemed increasingly likely—was curled into a foetal position, and he was still clutching the gun he had fought so hard to acquire tightly to his chest. A search of the room revealed no signs of a struggle. The bed was unslept in, the dinner tray from the previous evening uncollected, the various standing lamps and vases of flowers that decorated this room as they did every room quite undisturbed. But there was a slight smell of vomit in the en suite, which, when Liza checked the body, she thought she could also smell on the colonel’s lips.

“Poisoned?” she speculated aloud.

Lowering her pistol a fraction, Ruby put a hand to her forehead. “As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, now we’ve got a poisoner as well.”

“Oh gosh.” Sir Richard looked smug. “What sort of access would a person need if they wanted to introduce something deadly into the colonel’s food?”

“I suppose”—Hanna was looking a little shaken—”we can at least rule any of us out—except you, Mr Burgh, no offence. We were all together last night.”

Sir Richard sauntered over to inspect the body himself. “Well, you know what I think. My money is on the maid—sorry, on Mary. But poisons are tricky things. It could have been in anything.” He went to the bedside cabinet, opened it, and produced a bottle of brandy. “This, for example. There could have been poison in this for days.”

Eyeing Sir Richard suspiciously, Liza joined him at the bedside. “And how did you know this was there?”

“Because I had a drink with the colonel on Friday. And I know it wasn’t poisoned then, but it could have been poisoned at any time since.”

“Or you could have poisoned it,” suggested Ruby.

Sir Richard gave a non-committal shrug. “I could. I didn’t, but there’s no point denying that I knew the bottle was here and had access to it at least once.”

While everybody else had been musing, Reverend Lincoln had been saying a few words over the body. Now he looked up. “Do we know what kind of poison it was?”

“Not really.” Liza gave him an apologetic look. “Vomiting plus death could be anything, and it’s not like we’ve got a lab in the hotel. Or like anyone would know how to use it if we did.”

Ruby stretched like an annoyed cat in red silk. “Well, this would suggest that our plan to sit around staring at each other until a rescue arrives was a gigantic waste of our time, so I am going to take my leave of you all and get some actual sleep in an actual bed.”

To Liza’s horror, Sir Richard levelled his pistol. “You know we can’t let you do that.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, why not?” Hanna’s exasperation had, apparently, overcome her natural aversion at firearms.

The professor unsteadily aimed his own gun at Sir Richard. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to point that somewhere else.”

“We don’t know what’s going on.” Sir Richard kept his gun pointed at Ruby while trying to talk to Hanna and look at the professor. “And I don’t trust that woman an inch.”

Stepping forward, Liza put her hands slowly into the air. “None of us trust her, Sir Richard, but the guns aren’t helping anything.”

“Sweet of you, darling.” Ruby, Liza noticed, had her own pistol at hip height, and it was already trained on Sir Richard. “But I think I’ve got this.”

On the other side of the room, Mr Burgh was making an effort to keep all three of the gunpersons covered with one pistol. “I’m going to have to ask everybody to calm down,” he insisted un-calmly.

“Can I suggest”—the reverend was already crouching beside the colonel’s body—”that everybody who isn’t armed right now get on the floor? And Burgh, take your finger off the damned trigger.”

Liza and Hanna had both just about managed to find something to hide behind when Burgh turned sharply in the reverend’s direction, made a kind of confused yelp, and fired. The exchange of shots that followed was deafening in the confined space, and when they’d all come to their senses again, Sir Richard was on the floor bleeding from the right shoulder, the reverend was crouched behind the bed, Hanna was lying on the floor with her arms over her head, and Ruby was gone.

“She shot me!” Sir Richard exclaimed, his hand pressed to a wound that to everybody’s relief was oozing rather than gushing blood. “She damned well shot me.”

“I think I might need a lie down.” The professor was crumpled by the wall. Liza was pretty sure his gun had gone off but couldn’t tell where it had hit.

The reverend rose slowly from where he’d been hunkered. Behind him, Liza noticed, the window had been shattered by a stray bullet. “We should probably all go and take a lie down. And can everybody, for—and I mean this quite literally—the love of God, put your weapons away?”

Only Burgh was actually still carrying his gun, but he obediently lowered it. “I should—I should summon the staff and think about—oh dear. Are you going to be okay, Sir Richard?”

“She shot me,” Sir Richard repeated. “She bloody shot me.”

While the professor and the reverend were taking their leave, Liza looked around the room in a this-means-something kind of way. There were pieces to put together here, she was sure of it. She just didn’t know what they were. “I don’t think she did,” she said, although she wasn’t quite sure why she thought that. Or didn’t think it. There was just something about the angles—something about the people involved.

Without saying anything else, she walked over to where the reverend had been standing, trying not to disturb the colonel’s body more than it had already been disturbed. There was a hole in the wall, which, despite her total lack of expertise, Liza was certain was from a bullet, fired from about waist-height, assuming it had travelled fairly level.

“Should I ask?” asked Sir Richard.

“Two bullets went this way.” She was still mostly talking to herself. “One was Mr Burgh, the other had to be Ruby, so it wasn’t her that shot you.”

“Does it matter?” Sir Richard was staggering to his feet. “Help me up, Burgh. I’m going to need to see a first aider. Preferably a good first aider.”

Mr Burgh helped Sir Richard to his feet and the two men limped out of the room, Sir Richard trying not to drip too much blood as he went.

The moment they were alone, Hanna dropped onto the bed and put her head in her hands. “That was awful.”

“It could have been worse.”

“Somebody was shot.”

Sitting down, Liza put an arm around her wife. “I know it’s pretty crappy that we’re in a situation that yeah, but not fatally is the best thing I can say, but … yeah, but not fatally.”

Hanna folded herself against Liza’s side, burying her face in her shoulder. “We should probably get out of here. It seems weird to be having this conversation next to a guy’s body.”

The door opened and a woman entered. She was about as high as Mr Burgh’s shoulder and had long curly hair.

“Mary?” asked Liza, really wishing she’d paid more attention to the staff.

“Yes?” The woman had a mild Scottish accent and didn’t seem especially thrilled to have walked into an interrogation. “I’m—umm—I’m supposed to be dealing with the body.”

“On your own?”

She shrugged. She seemed curiously calm about having to move a corpse, which might have meant—as Sir Richard would have suggested—that she was a cold-blooded killer, or might have meant that once you’ve had to shift five dead bodies in as many days you developed a new perspective on these things. “Quinn’s coming up in a minute.”

Liza didn’t know who Quinn was either, although by process of elimination it must have been the footman. “And you’re the one who delivered his breakfast?”

“Yes. I should have looked closer, but, you know, I was pretty keen to get out of there.” Again, her manner was muted, almost matter of fact. And again, it could have meant she was a clinical psychopath, or that she’d just had it up to here with working in a hotel full of murder.

In the circumstances, Liza would have been too. “Do you think he was dead when you arrived?”

Mary gave a half-squirm-half-shrug. “I wouldn’t want to say. He might have been.”

“But he might not.”

“Well.” The maid gave Liza an apologetic look. “No offence, but you lot have all been acting pretty weird since this whole thing kicked off. And I don’t really know any of you, so when the colonel started hiding in his room and not moving from that spot under the window, I just sort of went with it.”

“And”—this was a bit of a punt, but Liza felt it was worth punting—”how well do you know Mr Burgh?”

“Not very. He’s only been here a month or so. The company sent him after Mr McCall had his accident.”

“Accident?” asked Liza, trying not to sound too eager for a story of human suffering.

Mary nodded. “He had a nasty fall. He could have died, and he was in his sixties, so they gave him early retirement.”

That was sounding suspicious. Potentially very suspicious. But sitting around grilling a woman who was just trying to do her job was probably not fair, so Liza and Hanna got up and were just about to leave when Liza stopped in the doorway and turned around. “One more thing. There aren’t any, y’know, incredibly deadly poisons lying around the place, are there?”

“There’s something for the rats,” Mary replied. “They keep it in a cupboard in the cellar.”

Odds were, Liza wasn’t going to like the answer to her next question. “And who has access to the cellar?”

“Basically everyone.”

That figured. But it meant the easy bit was over. “And … look, I’m not really sure how to say this, but … you should know Sir Richard is going to try to pin this whole thing on you.”

“Oh, fuck off. What’s his evidence?” From the look on Mary’s face, she didn’t seem to think a lack of evidence against her would be much protection, and a cynical part of Liza thought she had a point.

“Opportunity. And he really wants it to be a single killer, and every living guest has an alibi for at least one murder. The colonel was the last person who could have been behind all the killings, and,”—Liza shot an uncomfortable glance in the direction of his body—”well …”

Mary didn’t exactly seem reassured. “So why me? Why not Emmeline or Mr Burgh?”

“Apparently, you had problems with Mr Ackroyd? And maybe also with Lady Tabitha?”

That provoked an understandable sound of frustration. “Oh, for fuck’s—Mr Ackroyd was slightly creepy, I mentioned it to Quinn, and he went off on the guy because he’s a white knight. Nice enough, but a white knight. As for Lady Tabitha—that’s complicated and personal.”

Hanna—who got irritable when sleep-deprived—glared. “And you think, ‘It’s complicated and personal’ is going to stand up in court?”

“No.” Not to be out-glared, Mary folded her arms and locked eyes with Hanna. “But you’re not a court. You’re two randoms up from London who didn’t even bother to learn my fucking name until nearly everybody else was dead. I don’t need to tell you jack shit.”

“True,” said Liza, determinedly good-copping. “But having somebody in your corner when the police get here could be really helpful.”

The glaring did not abate. “And you’ll only be in my corner if I tell you things you’re curious about?”

As much as Liza hated to admit it, that was a fair point. “True. I’m not threatening to back Sir Richard up if you don’t play ball, I’m just—” She was just what? That was what it came down to in the end, wasn’t it? Why was she doing all this? “You’re right. I’m curious. I just … This is a weird, out-of-control situation, and knowing what’s going on helps me keep my head together.”

“How do you think I’ve been feeling?” Mary’s tone wasn’t even a short bus ride from sympathetic. “You lot have been scooting about playing with guns and doing the amateur detective thing and I’ve been at work. I’ve had to make the beds of people who might murder me and then hoik their bodies out to the stables when they got themselves killed.”

When she put it like that, Liza could see why she wasn’t especially keen to play ball. It wasn’t, after all, a ball game for her. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine. And you’re right. If somebody’s going to try to send me down for all this, it’s probably best to get my side out. Lady T was my grandmother.”

No. No fucking way. “Let me guess, illegitimate daughter?”

“That’s the one. I told her. She didn’t want to know, we had a bit of a row, I think one of the guests overheard us.”

“Vivien Ackroyd?” asked Liza, trying not to sound too clue-excited.

“Maybe. I don’t really pay much attention to you lot. If I hadn’t been working the night shift, I’d have been home right now ignoring all of this nonsense.”

The door opened again, and the awkwardly young footman came in. Which meant it was time for them to move the body, and it seemed best to just let them get on with it.

Retreating from the latest of the many murder rooms, Liza and Hanna did their best to pull themselves together, which, in a world of mysterious poisoners, suddenly-revealed illegitimate grandchildren, and essentially no sleep, was turning out to be tricky.

“So that’s …” Liza began.

“Yeah,” agreed Hanna. “And we really should have been less classist about this.”

“I was mostly thinking about the poison.”

“Oh, right.” An I’m-not-going-to-like-this-but-will-go-along-with-it-anyway expression crept over Hanna’s face. “You want to go check out the cellar, don’t you?”

Liza really wanted to say no, but—and maybe it was just the hope of rescue, or the fact that there were hardly any suspects left—she was really starting to feel like things were falling into place. Of course, what that place was, she still hadn’t worked out. “Kinda?”

Reaching out a hand, Hanna took her arm. “Come on then, let’s go.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Liza, in the Cellar, with the Poison

Wednesday evening

Liza and Hanna made their way down a flight of stairs that probably wouldn’t have been health-and-safety compliant if it had been installed any time in the last century and into an atmospherically dark cellar. Liza switched on the torch that she’d borrowed from Mr Burgh and swept it around the room.

“What’re we looking for?” asked Hanna. “And perhaps more importantly, what’ll we do if we find it?”

Liza continued rummaging. The cellar seemed to have been in continuous use for centuries, and half its contents were buried under layers of dust and cobwebs. The rat poison, however, was on a shelf to one side. One packet was open. “We’re looking for this,” she said. “As for what we’ll do with it … honestly, I just want to know what’s happening.”

“And it’s great to see you get your detective on. I just—we’re really close to getting rescued.”

“Which is why it’ll be helpful to know if we’re going to get poisoned or not.” Holding her torch in one hand while the bag hung awkwardly from the other, Liza scanned the warnings on the packet. “It wasn’t this,” she said at last.

Hanna came cautiously down the steps. “How do you know?”

“There’s an emetic in it. The colonel wouldn’t have been able to keep it down.”

“He didn’t, though, did he? He threw it up.”

Putting the rat poison back on its shelf, Liza went back to searching the corners of the room. “He threw up. He didn’t throw the poison up. There’s a difference.”

“Is the difference that the first one doesn’t stop you dying?”

At the back of the cellar, Liza spotted a suspicious tear in a box that looked like it otherwise hadn’t been touched in years. “That’s right—hang on, I might’ve found something.”

She moved forward carefully, partly because she didn’t want to trip over some long-discarded piece of detritus in the darkness, partly because the sense of anticipation was bordering on the unbearable.

With a click and a plink, an overhead light came on. “I thought that might help,” said Hanna.

It did. But it also killed the atmosphere in a way that Liza found strangely disappointing. Walking more normally now, she bent and looked at the mysteriously torn box. It was old—pre-war old—and crumbled as Liza touched it. Reaching inside, she pulled out a box and read the label with a feeling of very slightly inappropriate triumph. “Got it.”

“Got what?”

“Flypaper.”

Hanna came over to look at her wife’s new discovery. “You think the colonel was glued to death?”

“No, I think somebody in this hotel knows about the Angel Makers of Nagyrév.”

“I know you did an episode on that.” Hanna sounded apologetic. “But you’re going to have to remind me.”

“It’s actually a really complex, interesting story, but the short version is that in the early twentieth century, this one town in Hungary had a whole lot of arsenic poisonings. And at least some of the killers got the arsenic by boiling flypaper. You haven’t been able to buy the poison stuff legally for years, but this is a very old hotel, and this cellar is full of crap.”

“Cool. So now we know, I guess?” Hanna’s tone was wary, as if she was expecting another shoe to drop.

Incriminating flypaper in hand, Liza was already heading back to the stairs. “Come on.”

“Come on where?” demanded Hanna, running low on patience. “You wanted to check out the cellar; we’ve checked out the cellar. You wanted to know how the colonel was poisoned; you know how the colonel was poisoned. I say we go back to the room, lock ourselves in, and don’t eat anything.”

Halfway up the stairs, Liza turned back. “We could. But the colonel thought he’d be safe as long as he had a gun, and he was wrong. Belloc thought he’d be safe just because of who he was, and he was wrong. I think we just need to accept that—”

“That if we’re going to die, we’re going to die?”

She’d been trying not to think about it that way. Because yes, that was exactly what she was trying to say; she was just afraid to admit it, and afraid to admit that she was afraid to admit it. “That this is a weird situation and we can’t control it. So I’m going to keep investigating, because otherwise …”

Following reluctantly behind, Hanna had just reached her wife on the stairs. “Otherwise what?”

Liza stared at the packet of antique flypaper in her hand. And what had seemed like a thrilling discovery a few minutes ago now just felt sordid and pointless and wrong. “I don’t know otherwise what.” She sat down heavily and hung her head. “Otherwise this is all really fucking scary.” Reaching out, she took Hanna’s hands. “Five people are dead. Somebody might well be coming to kill us, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it, and that’s—that’s fucked up, Han. That’s fucked up.”

She set the flypaper down, buried her face in Hanna’s shoulder, and started crying.

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.

Outside the snow was slowly melting, and somewhere—Liza knew—a killer, perhaps more than one killer, was waiting to make their last move for blood or for freedom. But in that room, it wasn’t important. They weren’t safe—they hadn’t been safe since they got there—but if Liza was going to die, then there were far worse ways to go than with her wife in her arms, with the scent of her on the pillows, with the taste of her on her lips.

So, in the still eternity of a night that might never end, they moved together, held to each other. Touched and kissed and bit each other as their bodies fought to express what for years they’d thought they’d forgotten how to express.

Love, as it turned out, was like arsenic. Over time, it built up in the system and, contrary to what Mithridates believed, you could never truly immunise yourself. Instead, the effects grew stronger over time until, in the end, they overtook you entirely.

At last they collapsed, twined around each other, Hanna resting against Liza’s chest and tracing lazy fractal patterns across her stomach with her free hand. As the wind outside dropped to a gentle breeze and the whole hotel fell quiet, they gazed into each other’s eyes and sighed.

“That was—” Hanna began, but Liza placed a finger over her lips.

“Hold on, I think I heard something.”

Dropping a kiss on her wife’s cheek, Hanna laughed. “And she’s back. I suppose I should be flattered I managed to distract you as long as I did.”

“I’m serious, I think—”

Except, as it turned out, she didn’t need to think. Because soon the sound of scraping, and the click of the window catch, and the slide of the sash, were all too obvious. As the two women watched, frozen, the curtains parted, and a shadowy figure slipped into their room.

Chapter Thirty

Mr B, in the Bedroom, with a Gun

Wednesday night / Thursday morning

Even if they hadn’t both been naked, Liza and Hanna would have been feeling incredibly exposed as the intruder prowled towards the bed. If she’d been certain he only intended to rob them, Liza would have told herself that the best strategy was to lie very still, pretend to be asleep, and hope that he—or she, although it seemed unlikely from the silhouette—was just passing through. But so far nobody had been robbed in this hotel; they’d just been murdered. Pushed off balconies. Poisoned. Gunned down.

And for all Liza had thought that if she was going to die, she wanted to die with her wife in her arms, she had to admit that she was also very, very keen to die with answers.

So she sat up. The figure turned. He was armed, definitely armed, although since her knowledge of crime didn’t extend too much to guns—Murder Most Actual tended to be about crimes of a less shooty, more locked-roomy variety—she couldn’t remember whose pistol it actually was.

“I suppose,” she said while Hanna lay beside her projecting intense what-the-fuck-are-you-doing vibes, “that you’re here for the numbers.”

In the darkness, the figure nodded.

“And you’re the mysterious Mr B?”

Another nod. Slow, almost courteous.

So, this was it. This was where Liza found out if all her Nancy Drew bullshit had meant a damned thing. Because while she hadn’t been totally sold on Belloc’s mysterious mastermind theory, it had been at the back of her mind this whole time. And she’d been paying attention. More attention, perhaps, than she’d realised. Her one chance of survival, she suspected, was to keep him talking. And it was a him, definitely. Pieces were beginning to fall into place. Carefully, she reached for her dressing gown. “If you’re going to shoot me, you won’t mind me covering up a little first?”

He shook his head, and she robed herself. It wasn’t much, but it was better than getting into a battle of wits with a criminal mastermind with her boobs hanging out.

“Come forward so I can see you.” It was a bold gambit, and one that earned another pleading look from Hanna, but Liza was beginning to see a very, very narrow road to survival.

The figure shook his head again.

“We’re going to need to talk if I’m going to tell you where the data is. And …” She swallowed. This was a risk, but it was one that might pay off. “And I don’t think there’s much point hiding your identity anymore, Professor.”

A laugh came from the shadows. It wasn’t the nervous laugh she was used to hearing from him, but nor was it the cruel laughter she might have expected from a master criminal. It was gentle, indulgent, like a schoolteacher who had just seen a student perform a moderately clever trick. “I suppose,” he said, “convention demands that I let you explain how you worked it out.”

Reaching back slowly—despite the professor’s cordial tone, Liza didn’t think making sudden moves in front of a gunman was a good idea—she switched on the reading light above the bed. It illuminated her more than it did him, but it showed the professor clearly enough, standing tall and confident, his hands no longer shaking, his eyes set and cold.

“I think I’ve known for a while,” she said, and she thought she had, although she hadn’t admitted it to herself. “Or suspected, at least. Right from the first night, you were the one who went to Mrs Ackroyd after her husband died. Somebody talked her into killing Belloc, and it could only really have been you or the reverend. Then there was the night you sent us all running out into the dark. You couldn’t have seen anybody out there because there was nobody to see, but you needed to get as many guests as possible out of the hotel so you could search our room. You’d changed your shoes by the time we got back, and there was no reason to do that if you were just going to sit on the bed quivering.”

He gave her an approving nod. “Oh, well done, Ms Blaine. You could be giving Belloc and Quirke quite the run for their money.”

“You also shot Sir Richard,” Liza went on, “to keep him from shooting Ruby. I’m not sure if that’s because you wanted to kill her yourself, or because you were worried that she still had information you needed.”

“The latter.” The professor smiled quite calmly. “I’m a practical man, not a vindictive one.”

This seemed slightly disingenuous. “You’re still planning on killing her, though?”

“But for entirely practical reasons. One simply can’t let one’s associates go around stealing from one. It’s bad for business.”

Liza gave a begrudging wince. “I suppose that’s fair. And … I guess the same applies to us?”

“No witnesses, I’m afraid.”

It wasn’t the most comforting answer, but at least it was an honest one. “That doesn’t give us much incentive to tell you where we’re hiding your bank details.”

The professor glanced at the safe. “I’d be willing to bet a reasonable sum of money that they’re in there.”

“And how will you get them out?”

“Oh, please, I’m a master criminal. Do you really think a cheap safe in a hotel is going to stop me?”

He was, Liza had to admit, right. But he also hadn’t just shot them both dead, which suggested there was something else going on. “No,” she tried, “but I think you’ve realised that once you fire that gun, you’ll have about six minutes to get the safe open, grab whatever it is you think you’re going to find in there, and then be out and wandering around the hotel looking innocent, and I don’t think you’ve got time. This isn’t like faking a suicide where you can do all the work in advance.” A thought struck her. “And that was sloppy, by the way. Putting the gun in the wrong hand.”

He laughed again, and this time it had a harder edge to it. “Every man has his weakness. Mine is the classics. Besides, if we do not build flaws into our works, God may think we are trying to usurp his domain.”

“Are you for real?”

“A woman in your profession”—the professor gave her a wicked smile—”must surely realise that truth is far stranger than fiction. Now, please unlock the safe and give me the codes.”

“So you can shoot me?”

“Yes.”

“You get why that’s not an appealing offer, right?”

The professor crossed to the side of the bed where Hanna was lying, still pretending slightly desperately to be asleep. “My fault entirely, Ms Blaine. I should have made myself clearer. I certainly intend to shoot you once you have given me what I want. But if you do not,”—he lowered the pistol to point directly at Hanna—”I will shoot your wife. I will, to be more specific, shoot her through the gut and the spine. She will die slowly, and in terrible pain. Then I will shoot you, then I will leave. You are going to die, Ms Blaine, but the manner of your death remains very much of your own choosing.”

Raising her hands and moving very, very slowly, Liza got out of bed. “Okay, just don’t hurt her.”

“I assure you, if you are compliant, I shall make things quite painless.”

Liza had run out of ideas. Keeping him talking had worked for a while, but playing the if-you-kill-us-you-won’t-get-what-you-want card had probably been a mistake. The professor may have claimed to be more motivated by pragmatism than spite, but the difference between the two seemed fairly minimal from where Liza was standing.

Going as slowly as she felt able, walking the line between antagonising the narcissistic crime lord with the firearm, and buying time to think of something, anything, to stop him, she made her way over to the safe. It was a simple three-digit code that they’d set when they’d taken the room, and the professor was probably right that it wouldn’t have posed him any serious difficulties if he’d had the time to crack it. She opened the safe and took out the USB key.

“Excellent.” The professor turned and pointed his pistol directly at Liza’s head. “Now hand it over and don’t get any foolish ideas about heroism.”

A gunshot rang out. And the fraction of a second it took Liza to realise that it hadn’t come from inside the room was also the fraction of a second in which the professor turned towards the door in case he’d been ambushed, and the fraction of a second in which Hanna sprang off the bed and threw a blanket over his head.

To Liza’s horror, the two of them crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and bedlinen, the gun going off in the struggle, barely muffled by the layers of cloth over it. Forcing herself not to dwell on the thought that Hanna might have been hit, Liza grabbed the nearest thing that looked like a weapon: a large glass vase full of spring flowers.

On the floor, Hanna was just about managing to keep the professor entangled, but Liza had lost sight of the pistol, and she suspected that if there was anybody who knew how to fire a weapon into somebody without looking at them, it was Professor Worth. So Liza hit him. She wasn’t, she had to admit, particularly strong, but the vase was heavy, and gravity was doing a lot of the work. It landed with a thunk on a protruding lump that Liza really hoped was the professor’s head.

Whatever she’d hit, he sagged, and for a moment he was still. Hanna sat back, torn between the conflicting desires to keep him pinned down and to keep him as far away as humanly possible. “Fuck,” she said, looking at the limp body underneath her, “you’ve killed him.”

“He was going to kill you.”

“I don’t think that stops it being murder.”

Liza looked for signs of blood on the blanket. “I think it actually does.”

Underneath Hanna, the professor shifted. “Okay, new problem. Hit him again.”

“No, then I really might kill him.” Instead, Liza scoured the mess of blankets, dead flowers, and water for signs of the gun and, spotting it by one of Hanna’s feet, scooped it up. “Right, got him covered.”

“You don’t know how to shoot.”

“No, but he does, so I’d rather I was the one with the weapon. Now perhaps we should tie him up.”

“With what?”

Liza slipped the belt out of her dressing gown and handed it to Hanna.

“Okay.” Hanna looked down at it somewhat doubtfully. “But this is getting to be some kinky shit.”

Standing back and holding the gun with both hands, Liza addressed the professor. “Right, you’ve probably worked out that there’s a pistol pointed at you, so you’re going to sit up carefully, you’re going to leave the blanket on your head, and you’re going to let Hanna tie it in place. Understand?”

“And if I struggle?” The professor was sitting up slowly, but Hanna already had the belt over his shoulders.

“I shoot you.”

“And if you miss and hit your wife?” Liza was relieved to note that he sounded a little groggy, but still infuriatingly confident.

That, Liza had to admit, wasn’t something she’d considered. “It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

“Is it, though?” he mused. Although, since Hanna was already sticking a knee in his spine to pull the belt tight around his arms, it might have been redundant. “You know,” he said, “this is very undignified.”

“Well, you should have thought of that,” said Hanna, “before you became a master criminal.”

Liza kept the gun trained on the professor while Hanna got dressed, and then, after a little initial resistance from Hanna, they swapped clothes-putting-on, gun-holding roles.

“I thought you didn’t believe in firearms,” observed the professor.

“This is a very specific situation.”

While being fully dressed made the whole situation slightly less threatening, it was gradually dawning on Liza that she wasn’t entirely sure what she was meant to do next. The professor was temporarily neutralised, but a blanket and a fluffy belt wasn’t exactly an inescapable predicament, especially for somebody with his skillset. She was really, really hoping that they wouldn’t wind up having to shoot him, but it was really, really looking like they might.

The knock at the door broke her train of thought.

“Who is it?” asked Hanna, still keeping the gun firmly trained on the professor.

“Me.” It was the distinctive me of Mr Burgh. “I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a situation.”

Relatively confident now that the hotel manager wasn’t also a mass murderer, Liza opened the door to find him standing, quite alone, in the corridor. “Yeah,” she said, stepping aside to let him see their captive. “We’ve got a bit of a situation in here too.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Sir Richard, in the Drawing Room, with a Proposal

Thursday morning

Liza hadn’t really expected the professor to go full yes-I-did-it-and-I’d-do-it-again, but she’d hoped that he’d at least keep quiet or drop the milquetoast-academic-wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly routine.

He didn’t.

“Mr Burgh?” he cried out plaintively from under the blanket. “Thank goodness you’re here. There’s been the most fearful misunderstanding.”

Hanna kept him covered while Liza ran interference with the manager. “There’s no misunderstanding. He broke into our room, held us at gunpoint, and threatened to murder my wife if we didn’t hand over our information about his criminal empire.”

“Oh, come now.” The professor’s voice was a portrait of muffled indignation. “Does that sound remotely plausible?”

“So what’s your story?” asked Hanna. “You were just out for a stroll and decided to clamber through a second-floor window?”

The professor continued unperturbed. “I’m not the one who needs a story, madam. You’re the one holding an innocent hotel guest tied up in your room.”

“It does seem irregular,” agreed Mr Burgh.

“More irregular,” Liza asked, “than everything else that has happened since Friday?”

That at least confused Mr Burgh enough that he didn’t demand the professor be freed immediately. “It’s just we’re running a bit short on guests. I’m afraid, that is, I came to tell you that the reverend’s been shot as well.”

“How badly?” asked Liza, suspecting she already knew the answer.

“Really quite badly.” Mr Burgh pulled a sort of bad-news grimace. “Dead badly.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the professor jumped on the opportunity to shift focus. “Ah well, there you are, none of us could possibly have done that. Now if you’d kindly untie me.”

“Not a chance.” Hanna seemed to have got really comfortable with firearms really quickly.

“How about,” suggested Mr Burgh, “we take the blanket off his head, keep him tied up, and we all go together to the drawing room where this can all be sorted out?”

Conceding that the blanket probably wasn’t the one thing standing between them and a grisly death and trying not to think too hard about the fact that there was apparently at least one other killer still loose in the hotel, Liza and Hanna agreed. But they held firm on giving him his gun back and insisted on retying the belt around his wrists. Burgh accepted the compromise on the grounds that, with the deaths of the reverend and the colonel, the list of suspects was getting increasingly short.

“And you don’t think,” suggested the professor—and to Liza, the peevishness that crept into his tone where there would once have been only uncertainty was a giveaway that Burgh unfortunately failed to notice—”that if one of these two was the villain all along that letting them tie me up would be playing straight into their hands?”

Hanna gave him a done-with-your-bullshit look. “Maybe, but I’m the one with the gun.”

“Yes.” The professor’s voice had that musing quality that people used when they wanted to hint that other people should come to the same conclusion they were about to. “And isn’t it interesting that you handle it so confidently, having argued for so long that we shouldn’t be arming ourselves?”

Mr Burgh’s hand drifted to his own weapon, tucked insecurely in one jacket pocket. “Yes, that is suspicious.”

“He came to my room and tried to murder me.” If Hanna hadn’t been obeying the colonel’s rule about only putting your finger on the trigger when you were ready to fire, the tension that ran through her then would have sent a bullet through the professor’s ribcage. “I adjusted.”

Bickering all the way, the little band descended to the drawing room, where Ruby, Emmeline White, Mary-who-worked-there, a very pale Sir Richard, and the footman who Ruby had seduced but whose name she hadn’t bothered to learn were assembled. It was a depressingly small crowd, given where they’d started.

“I say”—Sir Richard reached a trembling hand towards his pistol but mercifully thought better of it—”why is the professor tied up? Why does the Blaine filly have a gun? Bad enough the vicar’s bought it; are we putting the old man down too?”

“The old man,” Hanna explained, “is the mysterious Mr B who has been making this whole experience so shitty for all of us.”

“Allegedly,” added Mr Burgh.

Sir Richard gave the professor a suspicious look. “You did shoot me.”

“An accident,” he protested, his voice rising to that nervous squeak he’d perfected. “I was as shocked as you were.”

Ruby’s eyes were even more piercing than usual. “I suspect Sir Richard would dispute that.”

“Well, either way, I can’t have shot the reverend.” His tone was becoming almost petulant now, but Liza was convinced it was a studied petulance. “Because as you can see, I was being tied up by two misguided women who thought I was a hardened criminal.”

“It does seem a touch not on,” observed Sir Richard.

For a while they all sat in silence. Then Emmeline White asked: “What do we do now?”

“Wait,” replied Mr Burgh. “The roads are open, and the phone lines have come back up, so we should be getting some kind of resolution to this whole mess in a matter of hours.”

“The phones are back?” Ruby’s generally impassive mask slipped just for a moment. “And you didn’t tell us?”

Mr Burgh gave a half-shrug-half-squirm. “I was going to. But then two guns went off.”

A small squabble broke out amongst the survivors. The imminent arrival of the police had shifted the events of the last few days out of the strange snowbound neverspace they had been in and dropped them with a plunk onto muddy reality.

“Fuck.” Hanna turned to Liza, suddenly much less confident about the gun in her hands. “We assaulted a guy.”

“We assaulted a guy who was trying to murder us.”

The professor clung to his act with infuriating consistency. “I was not.”

“I don’t know what you’re worried about,” said Mary-who-worked-there. “You’re a bunch of rich tourists from the south. It’s us local plebs who’ll take the fall for this.” She shot a cold look at Sir Richard. “You see if we don’t.”

Mr Burgh gave a sorry-for-interrupting cough. “Can we not just assume that the police will sort it all out, and that if we haven’t done anything we’ll be okay?”

A range of laughs answered him.

“Well,” said Sir Richard, “the police are fearfully good chaps, but they’re not always … entirely on the ball about this sort of thing.”

“Of all of us,” Liza pointed out in the gentlest way she could manage, because starting a long debate about privilege and the legal system wasn’t the way she wanted to spend however much time she had left before they were all killed or arrested, “I sort of think you’re the one with least to worry about on that front.”

“You say that, but my own damned brother was falsely accused of murder a few years back. Second case I ever got involved with.”

Ruby gave him a cold smile. She, Liza noticed, still had her pistol ready. “Well then, you’ll surely be able to clear your name if it comes to it.”

“Well, maybe.” Sir Richard stiffened, then he winced as the gesture aggravated his wound. “But a chap shouldn’t have to clear a chap’s name at all in an ideal world.” For a moment he looked thoughtful. “Of course, it would probably help all of us if we could agree on a … how best to put it … a consistent version of events.”

Hanna, having now set the gun aside and visibly paling, gave him a sceptical look. “What do you mean, ‘Consistent version of events’?”

“He means pin it on me,” said Mary with surprisingly little rancour.

“Weren’t you in the kitchens when the detective was shot?” asked Emmeline White. “That means you can’t have been the one who killed him, at least.”

“Well, leaving that little detail aside,”—the expression that crossed Sir Richard’s face was bordering on sly—”I remain a champion of the ‘Ten Green Bottles’ theory.”

“That somebody lured you all here to kill you?” clarified the chef.

“Exactly. And clearly quite a lot of rather terrible things have happened over the past few days, and it seems to me that the most likely explanation is that we’re dealing with a … a vengeance-driven vigilante who has decided that each of us is guilty of some kind of terrible crime and picked us off one at a time.”

Emmeline White nodded. “Make sense.”

“Does it?” asked Liza. Because to her, at least, it made very much the opposite of sense.

“Well, the reverend clearly had a dark past,” said Ruby. “And who knows what the colonel did in the war?”

It probably wouldn’t help to argue. The police would draw their own conclusions anyway, and if people wanted to spin fantasies it wasn’t really Liza’s business to stop them. “And what about Belloc, or Lady Tabitha? What about the Ackroyds?”

Sir Richard gave a little cough. “Not wishing to speak ill of the dead, but Aunt Tabitha had a very storied history. And her own husband did peg out under rather suspicious circumstances. Now, I would never cast aspersions on family, of course, but then I’m not a mysterious avenging angel.”

“And she did have an illegitimate daughter,” added Mary, apparently hoping the mysterious avenger narrative would play to her advantage.

Sir Richard gave her a falling-into-place look. “So that’s what the issue was. Knew it was something. Probably would have pieced it together myself if I hadn’t been so pressed for time. There we are then: everybody has done something that a psychopath with a twisted sense of justice would want them dead for.”

“The Ackroyds probably ran somebody over,” suggested Ruby. “They seemed the sort.”

Liza leaned forward, propping her elbows on her knees. “Okay, and in this scenario, who is the mysterious killer?”

“Well, it certainly can’t be me,” the professor insisted from his tied-up position at the end of the sofa. “For many reasons previously established. So please do me the courtesy of letting me go.”

“And it’s not me,” added Mary. “I was in the kitchen when Belloc died, and with Quinn when Mrs A was shot.”

“She was,” the footman corroborated. “We’re usually together because we’re usually, y’know, moving corpses and cleaning your rooms.”

Having apparently decided that the mysterious phantom theory was good enough for him, Mr Burgh went to untie the professor, and Liza responded instinctively by snatching up the discarded pistol and pointing it at him. This brought out every other weapon in the room—even Sir Richard’s, despite the weakness in his arm.

“Why don’t we all calm down,” Hanna suggested, hands in the air, “and accept that whatever’s going on, whoever’s tied up, whoever did whatever, it’s all going to get sorted out really soon, and the most important thing is to make sure nobody else gets shot?”

Putting on a show of struggling against his bonds, the professor gave her an aggrieved look. “That’s easy for you to say; you aren’t tied up and about to be framed for six murders.”

“Nil desperandum, dear boy,” said Sir Richard. “Nobody is going to frame you for anything. As you say, we can’t get you for the reverend, or for Belloc as I recall, so I’d say you’re off the hook. In fact, I do wonder if it might not be better all around if we stopped looking at each other altogether.”

“In what way?” asked Liza. Frankly, this whole conversation was beginning to trend in a very worrying direction. A healthy scepticism of law enforcement was one thing; Most Actual had done a half-dozen episodes about miscarriages of justice. But this was starting to sound a lot like Sir Richard was suggesting that they, “Get their story straight.”

“Well …” Sir Richard pantomimed innocence. “Is it completely impossible that there’s somebody else on the grounds?”

Hanna said, “Yes,” at the same time that Liza said, “Well, no, but,” and everybody else in the room heard whichever of the two answers they wanted to hear.

“It would be good if we could put this behind us,” offered Ruby. “Let bygones be bygones?” Perhaps it was Liza’s imagination, but she was sure she saw her glance at the professor, and saw something pass between them—a belated sense of like recognising like; of an acknowledgement that the game was over, for now at least.

“And where were they hiding?” asked Liza, rather more aggressively than she’d intended. “None of us saw anybody we couldn’t account for.”

“To be fair,” Mr Burgh pointed out, “you still don’t recognise half the staff. If the killer put on a uniform, he could have gone anywhere without any of the guests paying any attention.”

The worst thing was he had the ghost of a point. “But you’d have been paying attention. You’ve all been working together for years.”

“More like months, really,” said Mary-who-worked-there. “This isn’t a field most of us want to stay in long-term.”

Quinn leaned forward. “I was just supposed to be working over the Easter holidays.”

The part of Liza that had been trying to fit the week’s events into every pattern she’d ever seen in life or fiction jumped at once to and wouldn’t that be the perfect cover before remembering that she already knew who the real criminal was, and he’d admitted it to her, and all this talk of green bottles and mysterious intruders was nonsense. “Let’s try this again. None of us saw anybody we can’t account for—”

“I did,” said the professor. “Don’t you remember when I accidentally shot out my window?”

“Yes, but that was a lie,” Liza reminded him and, for that matter, herself.

A lie it might have been, but Sir Richard latched onto it tightly. “Well, so you say, but then you’ve invented an equally silly story about the professor being some kind of criminal mastermind.”

“There. Were. No. Footprints.” Liza could feel her hand tightening on the arm of the sofa. But she could also feel Hanna’s arm tightening around her—a silent message that said no matter how absurd or crappy this gets, I’ve got you.

“Last I checked,”—Sir Richard’s tone had grown cold, almost acid—”you weren’t a qualified forensic scientist. You aren’t even a well-recognised amateur sleuth. You’re just, pardon my français, a fucking podcaster.”

“And you’re just a rich man playing detective.” Right now, Hanna seemed almost more bothered by this than by the risk of death. “And Belloc was just a weirdo with a fake accent. And they give Pulitzers for podcasts now, so … so it shows what you know.”

Liza gave her wife’s knee a gentle squeeze. “Thanks—can you hear that?”

They all did their best to hear that. And the that in question was sirens—faint at first but growing louder by the moment.

“Fuck,” Sir Richard spluttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, hide the guns.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “But not the corpses?”

The panic was mounting in Sir Richard’s voice. “I don’t know! I’ve never been in this situation before.”

Mr Burgh made, “I should, well, um, probably,” noises and went out to greet the police. A few minutes later he returned with two uniformed officers and a grey-haired, grim-faced man in a brown overcoat.

“I’m DCI McManus,” said the man in plain clothes. “And at the risk of sounding incredibly cliché: what’s all this then?”

Mary-who-worked-there shuffled forwards. “There’s been a murder,” she explained.

“Well,” clarified Mr Burgh, “six murders.”

“And I assure you,” added Sir Richard, “we have a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Liza, in the End, with the Denouement

Thursday, early afternoon

It took a while for the assembled survivors to explain to DCI McManus exactly what had happened, partly because they tended to disagree with each other, and partly because so much of it seemed so patently impossible.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right.” The DCI looked down at his notes with an air of frank despair. “Since the extremely inaptly named Good Friday, all of you have been trapped in this hotel with no way of contacting the outside world, and fully six of you have been variously shot, stabbed, poisoned, or dropped off high buildings?”

Mr Burgh nodded. “It has been quite a difficult time.”

“The deaths began when a Mr Malcom Ackroyd was pushed off his balcony by an unknown assailant, at which point”—the DCI flipped to the next page and continued in a tone of rank Glaswegian contempt—”one of the guests declared that he was a famous consulting detective named Perseus Belloc, and that he believed the killer to be an elusive mastermind known only as Mr B?”

“To be fair,” said Sir Richard, “Perseus was definitely a real detective—”

“I’m a real detective.” DCI McManus didn’t seem happy with the term being thrown about casually. “What you mean is that Mr Belloc was a licensed private investigator.”

“Well, if you’re being pernickety.”

Ignoring the interjection, the DCI turned to Liza and Hanna. “And you,” he continued, “claim that this man”—he indicated the professor— “is the mysterious”—he made air quotes—”Mr B, but nobody else seems to agree with you.”

“I’m aware it sounds far-fetched,” Liza began.

“You’re too bloody right it sounds far-fetched.” The DCI turned to the next page. “The following day, Mr Belloc was found shot dead by the lake, and then that evening Mrs Ackroyd shot herself in her room. Except on the expert testimony of”—he looked down at Liza—”a woman who hosts a podcast, you decided it wasn’t a suicide, but was actually a murder.”

Liza looked at the DCI with an appropriate level of defiance, given which of them was capable of arresting the other for obstruction of justice. “Will everybody stop insulting my career? Also, I was right.”

“You may well have been,” admitted DCI McManus, “but you can understand why I’m not just taking your word for it. Anyway, once you’d reached that conclusion, Sir Richard proposed the further theory that you were in a”—he turned the page with a barely-disguised sneer—”‘Ten Green Bottles’ situation. Evocative language, Sir Richard.”

“Thank you.” Sir Richard gave the kind of nod you needed centuries of breeding to give. “I’ve a gift.”

“Aye, I might have gone with Ten Little Soldier Boys myself. But whatever you called it, this theory led you to conclude that you were being hunted down by some mysterious villain for crimes that nobody has been particularly able to specify.”

This was, from Liza’s perspective, getting embarrassing. Sir Richard, by contrast, seemed determined to brazen it out. “We think the Ackroyds ran somebody over, the colonel did something in the war, my poor aunt had an illegitimate daughter she cruelly abandoned—”

Mary wasn’t letting that one lie. “Nobody said cruelly. My mum had a perfectly good life, thank you very much.”

“Either way,” the DCI continued, “the next three victims were Lady Tabitha Quirke, stabbed in the library. Then Colonel John Coleman, poisoned with—again, according to the expert testimony of an internet broadcaster—arsenic boiled off from antique flypaper, and finally, the Reverend Thomas Lincoln, who was just shot. Which must have made a nice change for you all.”

“Touch dark, old fellow,” protested Sir Richard.

“Oh yes, and during this time you also decided that it would be a good idea to give everybody a handgun, which is how you”—his eyes flicked briefly and scathingly to Sir Richard—”wound up taking a completely unnecessary bullet to the shoulder. Now, is there anything I’ve missed out?”

The assembly made a series of begrudging no noises.

Looking the opposite of amused, the DCI closed his notebook. “I think you should all know I’ve been on the force for more than twenty years and I have never seen a shitfire like this in all my days. And as for the theories you bag of Sassenach bastards have come up with, do you really think that some Jigsaw Killer-type criminal mastermind has lured the lot of you up here to die in a blizzard?”

Sir Richard made the best apologetic gesture he could with one arm. “All I know,” he said, “is that somebody has killed six people, and they’ve done it without being caught or leaving a trace. Now, if the official force is baffled, well, that will be quite the ordinary state of affairs as far as I’m concerned.”

“Oh, ram a sock in it, you posh wazzock,” snapped the DCI. “The only thing that baffles me is why anybody would believe that I would believe such an obvious line of bullshit.”

Cautiously, Liza stood up. “Actually … I don’t think it’s entirely bullshit.”

“I know.” DCI McManus looked at her with the kind of expression that Liza wished she had the courage to give the cranks who called into her podcast claiming to be the Zodiac Killer. “You think the whole thing was masterminded by a sixty-year-old schoolteacher.”

“Professor of Mathematics,” protested Professor Worth.

Liza ignored the interruption. “Actually—and I might be completely wrong about all this because I’m really not a real detective—I do think I’ve got an explanation for how we got into this situation, and it mostly doesn’t involve anybody being a secret criminal genius.”

The DCI’s face had gone from nakedly hostile to condescendingly tolerant. “Why do I get the feeling that this is going to be long?”

“It’s six murders.” Liza gave him an apologetic look. “It does get a bit fiddly.”

Settling down into the seat that Liza had just vacated, DCI McManus gave her a grudging nod. “Go on then, you have the floor, Madam Podcaster. Share your wisdom with us.”

And there she was. Everybody in the room was staring at her and either expecting her to have answers for them, or worse, expecting her to not have answers for them and waiting to see her fail. But this was … this was it. It was the end, the summing-up. It was … almost exciting. And terrifying. And she could do this. No, she could nail this. And nobody was going to stop her.

Shit, why was nobody stopping her?

“Right,” Liza began. “So, first off, as much as I hate it when people have a go at my job, the DCI is right. I’m just a podcaster. I’ve never solved a crime in my life; I’ve only ever read about other people solving them, and I’m not claiming to have all the answers here. But six people are dead, and I … I don’t know, I guess I just feel I owe it to them to at least put together what I can for when the real detectives take over.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” commented DCI McManus from the sofa.

“What I will say, though,” she continued—this was getting into trickier territory—”is that I have learned some things about crime over the last couple of years. And the most important thing I’ve learned is the thing I do my best not to let on when I’m actually podcasting. Which is that crime is … well … crime is … it’s kind of boring?”

Sir Richard gave a snort. “A strange opinion both for a woman who has dedicated her career to the subject, and for somebody who has just spent several days in immediate danger of death.”

“Not boring like that. And obviously, I find it really interesting as a subject. But criminology—and before you say anything, DCI, yes, I’m not a criminologist—is just like any other subject: most of it is rubbish. Most art is bad. Most maths is just adding up—”

“It most certainly is not!” exclaimed the professor, seemingly more sincerely offended by this than by the accusation that he was a mass murderer.

Liza sighed. “I mean, when most people do it. I’m sure there’s some incredibly beautiful mathematics out there, just like there are incredibly beautiful paintings, and incredibly fascinating crimes; but in day-to-day life, most maths is splitting the bill, most paintings are signs outside pubs, and most crimes are shoving your husband off a balcony because you got in an argument on a snowy night.”

Ruby arched an eyebrow. “I don’t think that’s most crimes.”

“Not the details. The, you know, the spirit. Back me up on this one.” She turned to DCI McManus. “When somebody gets killed, it’s almost always their husband, or their wife, or a member of their family. And it’s always because they were angry, or jealous, or greedy.”

“I’m not sure I’d put it quite that simply,” said the DCI, “but I get what you mean. You’re far more likely to get shanked with a kitchen knife by your missus because she’s sick of the way you grind your teeth than to get poisoned with hemlock by your secret granddaughter’s secret lover because they think you stole your aunt’s emerald necklace.”

“For the record,”—Mary stepped forward again—”I don’t have a secret lover, I didn’t poison or stab anybody, and there’s no necklaces involved anywhere.”

Taking grudging vindication as better than no vindication, Liza nodded. “Yeah. That. I mean, the grinding-your-teeth that; not the emerald-necklace that. I think … this is really dull, but I think for at least half the murders that’s what we’re looking at.”

“Which half?” asked DCI McManus, suddenly taking Liza far more seriously than he had a few minutes ago. And it was a strange feeling, because the part of her that had grown up on detective stories and true crime had always wanted to be in this position, to be the one who worked it out. Only now she was here, she was realising it came with a whole lot of scrutiny.

“The way I look at it,” she began, “everybody except Belloc and Vivien Ackroyd. I don’t necessarily know who did all of the rest, but they’re the only ones I think have … where I think it gets conspiracy-ish.”

Sitting back and folding his arms, DCI McManus huffed out an I-should-have-seen-this-coming sigh. “So, you do think there’s a conspiracy.”

And again, Liza felt that strange rush of fear-excitement. That strange sense that she was doing something at once remarkable, and deeply banal. “Not exactly. But I do think improbable things happen sometimes. It’s like—back in 1998 there was a woman called Sally Clark who was convicted of murdering her two children. The key evidence for the prosecution was an expert witness who said that the probability of two children in the same family dying of natural causes at such a young age was one in seventy-three million. Now, there was a lot wrong with that claim, but even taken at face value it ignored the fact that double homicides are just as rare as double accidents, and that in a country with more than sixty million people, you can expect to see one in seventy-three million chances come up every now and then.”

“A priori probability gets confused with a posteriori probability,” interjected the professor, apparently not willing to let being tied up keep him from giving a spontaneous maths lecture.

Loath as she was to agree with the man behind the whole nightmare they’d just been through, Liza nodded. “I’ll take your word for it. But the general point is that unlikely things do happen, and—and this isn’t proper maths, so don’t shout at me—if you’re an unusual person, you sort of make unusual things happen around you by definition. Like most people have never met Taylor Swift, and most people you meet will never have met Taylor Swift.” Why she was using Taylor Swift as an example, she couldn’t say. Was she blowing this? She hoped she wasn’t blowing this, but it turned out that summarising murders was way harder than it looked on TV. “But if I was Taylor Swift, then any room I was in would have a much higher ratio of people who’d met Taylor Swift than an ordinary room.”

The DCI’s expression had gone from indulgent to strained. “I hope you’re going somewhere with this, because it’s getting rambling, and I don’t like rambling.”

“The point is that organised crime does exist. And while most people never meet anybody who is involved with organised crime, once somebody who is involved with organised crime walks into the room, things change.” For a moment she let that hang, hoping that it could rescue the Taylor Swift analogy.

“I know this whole mysterious Mr B thing seems weird,” she continued, “but think of it as … as a bad person with a slightly silly nickname. And if you also think of everything that has happened as being the result of one tragic accident being exploited by that one bad person, creating a situation where otherwise normal people did some pretty fucked up things, then it’s suddenly—I mean, yeah, it’s unlikely, but it’s a whole lot less unlikely than the alternatives.”

“You’re still giving me the intro, Miss Podcaster,” said the DCI coldly. “Get to the middle eight, or I’ll just arrest everybody in this hotel.”

Liza took a deep breath. She’d been working this through in her head on and off since the whole affair started, but now it came to it, she wasn’t at all sure she could get it out clearly. But she also knew she had to, because if she fucked this up, the professor could get loose, and then he might be free to come after her and Hanna. Besides, she’d seen this movie a hundred times; she knew how it played out.

“Okay,” she said. “This story all starts when a …”—she shot a look at Ruby, then at Hanna—”… striking, audacious woman stole a ton of money and a set of banking information from the gangland figure we’re stuck calling Mr B. She fled with her ill-gotten gains to a nice, isolated hotel in the Scottish Highlands in the hope that somewhere with no internet or mobile phone reception would be a good place to hide. But Mr B followed her, and the detec—the private investigator called Perseus Belloc followed him. There are a couple more coincidences here, like one of the guests also being one of Mr B’s former enforcers, but that’s where we’re starting off.”

“This already sounds a touch implausible, dontcha think?” said Sir Richard, still apparently championing his “Ten Green Bottles” model of the crime.

Ruby, however, was watching the whole situation unfold with a look of cautious optimism. “Not necessarily. Why don’t you carry on, Liza?”

“I’ll tell people when to carry on, thank you,” said the DCI. Then, less abashed than most other people would be, continued, “Carry on.”

Liza carried on, and now she was relaxing into it the words were starting to come more naturally. “When he got here, Mr B had two priorities. To get rid of the traitor, and to get his banking information back before it could go to the police. He knew that she couldn’t have sent it out electronically because they were somewhere with no means to access the internet, so it was just a question of getting hold of whatever she’d stored the data on. And it would probably have been an easy job, except there was an investigator on his tail, and a good one, if his reputation is to be believed.”

“They seldom are,” observed DCI McManus.

“He was stuck. But he got his first opportunity when Malcom Ackroyd was killed. I really do think it was an accident—I think his wife shoved him during a fight, and he lost his footing in the snow. He’d been on the balcony earlier trying to get mobile phone reception and she was really angry about it, and there was a blizzard, and, well, that’s the exact kind of circumstance that gets people shoved to their deaths.”

The DCI raised an eyebrow. “I don’t suppose you bothered with little details like evidence?”

Liza took another breath. This was okay—she could take questions. She had answers. “Nobody else has a motive. They’d been fighting all evening. And when the body was found she’d clearly left her hotel room in a hurry. I think she’d been trying to give herself an alibi. I’ve got—I’ve got film of her.”

“You’ll be handing that over, of course.”

“I will. But some of it’s on my laptop, which was stolen, and I think the professor has it, or might have destroyed it. But you can have whatever’s still on my phone.”

“Very generous of you, Miss Podcaster.”

Liza took a moment to steady herself, then carried on with her grand theory. “Once Belloc had announced himself, I think Mr B saw an opportunity. He stole a pistol from the hotel’s gun room and persuaded Mrs Ackroyd that she’d inevitably be caught and tried for murder if she didn’t do something drastic. He can probably be quite persuasive because—well, because I’m afraid this theory does still involve a teeny tiny touch of criminal mastermind. Anyway, she lured Belloc down to the lake and shot him. Then she panicked. She threw the gun out of her bedroom window—I saw the spot where it fell; I can show you a picture of that too—and Mr B picked it up and used it to kill her.”

“In the staged suicide?”

“Yes. Again, I have pictures. But the important thing is that after that, I don’t think he did anything at all. At least until he broke into my room and threatened to shoot my wife in the spine.”

The DCI winced. “Ooh, good detail.”

“I deny it entirely,” insisted the professor.

“Aye, and you can carry on denying it at the station.” The DCI turned back to Liza, and she almost thought he looked encouraging. “So, what do you think happened to everybody else?”

This was the home stretch. It was a sketchy home stretch, and Liza wasn’t sure how far she’d have to follow it before she actually got home, but there was only really one way it made sense. “Well as you’ve pointed out many times, I don’t have much evidence. On the other hand, no offence, often you guys don’t either.”

“Excuse me.” The DCI scowled. “I’d watch what you’re saying when you’re one of the prime suspects in six murders.”

“Not like that.” Liza backtracked hurriedly. “I just mean that—and you know this—evidence in real crimes isn’t like in a detective story. Or I suppose it is like the evidence in a detective story, and that’s the problem: there’s loads of different ways to interpret it, and there’s no one guy with a funny hat or a silly moustache who can say that it has to be this way and can’t be any other. Most people are convicted on circumstantial evidence because most evidence is circumstantial.” She was worried she was losing the detective’s sympathy, so she tried again. “For Lady Tabitha, the only person with any reason to kill her was her nephew—Sir Richard gambled constantly, and he’s bound to inherit something now she’s gone.”

“Excuse me,” put in Sir Richard, “what about her secret granddaughter?”

The DCI gave a begrudging nod. “He’s got a point.”

“I mean … it’s possible. It just seems incredibly unlikely. Plus, I heard the pipes making a weird noise the night she died, which I’m pretty sure was him showering off the blood. He’s the only one whose shower made quite that sound.”

Sir Richard was looking outraged. “How dare you suggest—”

“And it is just a suggestion.” Liza tried to sound mollifying. “Maybe I’ve got it all mixed up and it was actually, I don’t know, that kid who just took a holiday job here.”

“Quinn,” the kid reminded her.

Liza gave Sir Richard a look. “I just think—you had the opportunity. If I’m right about how the money shakes out, then you had motive. And after she died you got really keen on the, ‘It’s one killer who isn’t me,’ theory. And it’s always the family.”

“So what about the colonel?” asked Ruby guardedly.

That one, Liza had to admit, had got away from her. “I don’t know. Had to be staff, because only staff would know about the arsenic flypaper or have access to the kitchens. That one really could have been Mary—”

Mary looked indignant. “Well, it bloody wasn’t.”

“And you don’t think it was me?” spat Sir Richard. “Trying to cover up my aunt’s murder by making it look like the work of a serial killer?”

He wasn’t getting away with that. “No, I think the first three deaths did that job for you. But as it happens, I don’t think either of you killed the colonel. If he was poisoned, then the poison was probably in his food, and so it was probably put there by the person who prepared it. Which means you.” She turned apologetically to Emmeline White. “But I don’t know why.”

“Because I didn’t do it,” she protested, although Liza couldn’t help seeing less outrage in her than she had in the other two. Of course, that was a mistake as well—people reacted to accusations differently, and hundreds of people had been wrongly hanged down the years because juries made faulty assumptions about how innocent people behaved. And that was what made this so much less fun in real life, wasn’t it? There were actual people’s futures on the line if you fucked it up.

Either way, this was getting out of control. Liza hadn’t quite expected everybody to just break down and confess instantly, but she’d hoped there’d at least be less bickering. It was all feeling less triumphant and more … dirty. There was just no getting around the fact that six people were dead, nothing was bringing them back, and she didn’t have half as many answers as she thought she should.

“Maybe you didn’t,” she said. “But—there’s just something in my head about—didn’t the colonel say something you really objected to? And … believe me, I’m not claiming that’s evidence. I’m very aware it’s not evidence.” She turned back to DCI McManus. “That just leaves the reverend. And I’m afraid that was Ruby. She’s the one that Mr B—the professor—was following in the first place. She knew the reverend used to work for him and was worried he was coming to take her out. I don’t know what happened; I was too busy nearly being murdered myself. But I’m willing to bet she just panicked.”

Liza was suddenly very aware that Ruby still had her pistol. “You know, you’ve been such a good sport I’m almost inclined to play along.” Slowly, deliberately, Ruby got to her feet. “I’ll tell you what, how’s this?” Laughing, she pressed one hand to her breast and, when she spoke again, her voice was even more oldey-timey radio announcer than usual. “Yes, I did it,” she declaimed, “and I’d do it again. Curse you, curse you forever!”

“Are you quite finished being annoying?” asked DCI McManus.

“Sorry.” Ruby gave him a winsome smile. “She just seemed to want it so badly. But, well, thinking about it, I am one of the few people in this room who’s armed, so I might actually be toddling off now. The lovely Ms Blaine is quite right about the professor, by the way—we’ve never met, but he’s looking at me exactly the way you look at somebody who stole one and a half million pounds from you, and I should know—I’ve seen it before.” She blew him a kiss with her free hand. “Goodbye, James. I wish we’d met in person earlier—it could have been fun. Oh, and”—she turned back to DCI McManus—”if you look, you’ll find most of the money stashed in different places around the hotel. I’d barely had time to spend any of it. Consider what’s left a tip. Ciao.”

To Liza’s frank amazement, Ruby began to walk casually out of the room, her pistol trained on DCI McManus. Less to Liza’s amazement, nobody did a damned thing about it. Sir Richard, she suspected, had decided that letting a suspect go was a good way to muddy the waters of his own trial, while Mr Burgh had gone the whole week without taking decisive action and wasn’t starting now. Much more to Liza’s amazement, she found herself standing up, grabbing her pistol, and pointing it directly at Ruby.

“Freeze.”

“Oh, darling, are you going to shoot me?” Ruby sounded almost affectionate.

To Liza’s left, DCI McManus was getting very slowly to his feet. “How about we all put our guns away, and then, let’s be clear, you are both massively under arrest.”

Ruby’s eyes flicked to the DCI. “I’m afraid not, Detective. I don’t really do prison. So unless somebody is going to shoot me—”

And Liza shot her.

Epilogue

Rachael, in the Studio, with Questions

Six months later

“I can’t believe you shot her,” said Rachael.

Liza laughed into her microphone. “I more shot at her. Turns out I’m fucking awful with guns. And kids, guns are not cool, and they don’t help. Take it from your Auntie Liz.”

“So what happened next?”

“Well, I missed completely, and she didn’t shoot me back—I guess all that flirting paid off. Then they did arrest her for killing the reverend, but then the whole case went dark. I think she probably cut some kind of deal for testimony against Professor Worth. But that trial is going to take forever because it has a lot of moving parts. I’ve given the police all the evidence I had—he’d kept my laptop, it turned out—but, yeah, it turns out the prof was the real deal. Or seems like it … I mean, innocent until proven guilty and all that. But some of the stuff he’s accused of is—yeah, it’s nasty. Listeners might remember our episode on Jonathan Wild, and he’s really the best comparison I can make. Upstanding citizen by day, criminal mastermind by night.”

“Of course, in Wild’s case, he was sort of both by night because most thief-taking happened after dark as well,” added Rachel.

“True.”

“And you were right about all the rest? The Ackroyds and Lady Tabitha and that lot?”

“More or less.” Liza took a sip of wine. “The police agreed with me about Malcom and Belloc, but since Vivien was dead there couldn’t be a trial. I think she’s got a brother who’s trying to clear her name, but since she hasn’t been formally convicted there’s technically nothing to clear. As for Lady Tabitha, the cops found traces of her blood on one of Sir Richard’s shirts, and he was found guilty a couple of months ago, but he’s appealing the verdict.”

“And the colonel?”

Liza laughed again, a little nervously this time. “Listeners, pause now if you want to play along at home. Or you could listen to the podcast again and see if you spot the thing I missed.”

“They’re not going to do that, Liz.”

“Just trying to build suspense. Actually, we could go to an ad read now if you wanted?”

Rachael poured another glass of wine. “That noise you hear,” she told the listeners, “is me getting Liza another drink, because she apparently needs to be bribed.”

“Okay.” Liza took the wine gratefully. “So, I was right: it was Emmeline White, although you probably already know that because TV Chef on Trial for Murder is kind of a big story. The thing I’d missed—that I eventually remembered, but not for weeks—is that she’d had a go at the colonel after he’d mentioned knowing a guy named White in the army. Turns out she’d had a brother, the brother had got killed, and she blamed his commanding officer.”

“Colonel Coleman?”

“Exactly.”

“She did plead guilty in the end. Which was good because I’m not sure I’d have wanted it to go to trial. I’d have had to take the stand and say, ‘Well, I suppose it’s like this, but what do I know? I’m a podcaster.’”

“Yeah.” Rachael made a deliberate clinky sound with her own wineglass. “There’s a reason I’ve never been called into the Old Bailey as an expert witness. So, now you’ve got up close and personal with some real-life murders, has it changed the way you feel about the show at all?”

Murder Most Actual was never the most scripted of podcasts; the audience liked the informal vibe that came from its being mostly improvised, but this was the first time in her recording career that Liza genuinely had no idea what she was going to say. “Not really. Does that make me awful?”

“Girl, there are loads of things that make you awful, but that ain’t one of them.”

Liza laughed. “Like, don’t get me wrong, it’s way scarier when you’re there. We’ve looked at some pretty awful crime scene photos in the past, and something I hope you listeners out there feel we’ve kept sight of is that every victim—and every killer—we’ve ever talked about is a real person with people who cared about them. But when you’re really there you can’t possibly lose sight of it. I think part of the reason I went so puzzle-box with the whole thing is that otherwise, the sheer terrible of it would have just overwhelmed me.”

Rachael made an encouraging go on sort of noise.

So, Liza went on. “The other thing I found weird is that—well—I guess I’ve always thought of crime as, I don’t know, complex but clean, if you get what I mean? Like, sure, there’s a lot of information and a ton of stuff to keep track of, but there’s right answers there if you look hard enough. Now I think maybe it’s simple but messy. Like I think Sir Richard probably killed his aunt. There’s pretty good evidence he did, but he swears he didn’t, and we’ll never actually know for sure. We just have to pick the answer that seems to make most sense to us. I suppose I used to see a crime as like a jigsaw puzzle. You keep putting the bits together, and finally, you get the picture.”

“And now?” asked Rachael.

“It’s more like a kaleidoscope. You keep turning and turning, and pieces keep falling into different places and making different patterns, but nobody tells you when to stop, and everybody’s going to see something different. One person will look at the evidence and say, ‘Yeah, that person definitely did it,’ and another will say, ‘Yeah, that person is definitely innocent.’ And it depends on who you are, and what your experiences are, and who you identify with, and … yeah, I guess it gave me a lot to think about.”

For a moment the broadcast fell quiet, then Rachael said: “But just to be clear, you still love wine, right?”

“Still love wine, still love hanging out with my bestie chattin’ ‘bout death. I’ve got a new perspective, but I’m not about to hang up my microphone just yet.”

“Fantastic. And that, listeners, brings us to the end of this extremely special episode of Murder Most Actual. As ever, we apologise to the three people who downloaded us thinking that the MMA Podcast was going to be about sweaty men fighting in cages, and remember that if you’ve backed us on Patreon at three dollars or higher, you’re invited to a live Q&A on our—”

* * *

Leaning forward on the bed, Liza stopped the playback of the episode. “What do you think?” she asked her wife.

Hanna had the same look of soft pride on her face she always had when they finished listening to the rough cut together. “I think you’re amazing. I don’t think I came out of it super well …”

“People will think you’re a badass. Also, now I’ve talked more about you on the show, people might stop shipping me and Rachael.”

“Or”—Hanna adjusted the pillow she was leaning on—”they’ll ship you even harder because once the wedding’s over, people find marriage intrinsically unhot and would rather see you run off with your spunky co-presenter.”

With a soft click, Liza folded the laptop closed and set it on the floor before turning back to more important matters. “I’m not running off with anybody. And marriage isn’t unhot, it’s just …”

Hanna gave her an ironic smile. “Simple, yet messy?”

Crawling up the bed, Liza straddled Hanna’s legs and wove her fingers through hers like they were playing a game of Mercy in the playground. “I’m not sure I want our marriage to be like a murder.”

“No? I do.”

Liza looked perplexed. “Okay, you might have to explain that one to me.”

“I only want it to end when one of us is dead.”

“Fuck, and I thought I was morbid.”

Adopting an expression of wounded innocence, Hanna gazed up at her. “I was saying I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Or for you to spend the rest of your life with me. That’s romantic.”

“Yeah, but you seemed weirdly indifferent about which came first.”

“I suppose now would be a bad time to tell you about the large insurance policy I just took out on you?”

“You’re a very silly woman, and I love you.” Liza bent forward, brought her lips to Hanna’s, and kissed her.

When they parted after a long moment, Hanna said, “It’s been ten years, and you are still the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. You’re also a surprisingly good detective.”

“I got lucky,” said Liza with semi-sincere modesty. “And I still can’t believe I missed the thing about Emmeline’s brother. In hindsight, that one was obvious.”

“Most things are, in hindsight. But most importantly, you got us out of there alive.”

“We got us out of there alive,” Liza corrected her. “And I am so glad we did. Because our life is actually pretty great.”

“Just pretty great?” asked Hanna. And then she kissed Liza again, quick and warm and slightly teasing.

“Okay, incredibly great.” They kissed once more, slower this time, and softer, and with a hundred quiet promises of tomorrow. “Hard work,” she added, “but great.”

She pressed into Hanna’s arms and kissed her one last time. And so, the kaleidoscope turned, colours cascading into jewel-bright patterns that mirrored out into a reflected eternity. Always changing, never repeating, and always wonderful.

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