Page 85 of Murder Most Actual

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.”

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