Page 72 of Murder Most Actual

“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?”

---