Page 63 of Murder Most Actual

“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.

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