Page 76 of Murder Most Actual

“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?”

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