Page 49 of Murder Most Actual

“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.”

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