Page 24 of Murder Most Actual

“Solving it?” Ms White’s tone was much less sceptical than Liza had feared it might be. “What’ll that get you?”

“I thought it might stop me going out of my mind with worry. And you never know, I might work out something useful.”

Setting down her meat tenderiser, Ms White shrugged. “There’s not a lot I can say. I just—”

“Do you mind if I record, so I can make notes?”

“You’re really taking this seriously, huh?”

“It’s my job.”

Ms White came over to speak into the recorder. Liza had found this: sometimes, people were weirdly more willing to talk if they felt something was an interview instead of just a person asking questions.

“There’s not a lot to say,” Ms White repeated. “I was just heading back to my room after closing down the kitchen—”

“Where’s your room?”

“In the old farmhouse. All the live-in staff stay there. Anyway, I was heading back to my room when I looked up—”

“What made you look up?” It wasn’t the question Liza wanted answered. She was working up to that. She liked to think that the softly-softly approach lulled people into a false sense of security, but she suspected she was just afraid of confrontation.

The chef made a non-committal gesture. “The hotel’s pretty at night. I like to look up at it when it has all the lights on. And last night when I looked up, I saw somebody on the balcony in the tower suite.”

“Mr Ackroyd?”

“Yes. At least, I assume it was. I didn’t know him.”

“And there was somebody else up there?”

Ms White nodded.

“But nobody you recognised?”

She shook her head. “But then again, I didn’t recognise him either.”

The part of Liza that had read way too many weird cases started going down some very twisty rabbit holes. Because of course, they couldn’t be sure it really was Mr Ackroyd. The body had been wearing his clothes—she remembered that from the lounge earlier in the evening—but had anybody looked closely? And had his face really been recognisable after the fall? “Then what happened?”

“He fell, and I screamed, and when I looked up again the balcony was empty.”

Liza did some calculations in her head. If Mrs Ackroyd had pushed her husband off the balcony, would she have been able to dress, get downstairs, leave the hotel—probably by a side entrance; there was one between the library and the billiard room, although even if she’d gone out the front, the lobby wouldn’t have been manned at that time of night—and loop back in the time it took everybody to gather outside? Almost certainly, especially if she’d dressed quickly, and she had dressed quickly. And nobody would have seen her because their rooms were all on the second floor, and the door to the tower was on the first. “And this was about one o’clock?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Does it normally take you three hours to close up the kitchen?”

Liza let the question hang there. It wasn’t supposed to be a gotcha exactly, as much as she’d have liked, at some point in her life, to gotch somebody. There could easily have been an innocent explanation.

There was no explanation. There was, however, a long pause. The kind of long pause that Liza felt you didn’t normally get from people who were just recalling an innocent detail. “No,” Ms White said at last, “not normally.”

“So, what happened?”

“I went to make a phone call.”

“The phones were down.”

Another pause. Had the chef been caught in a lie, or was she just confused? “Yes, but I—I didn’t know that at the time, so I went back to my room and tried anyway.”

“Who were you calling?”

---