Page 31 of Murder Most Actual

Hanna raised an eyebrow. “Okay, technically yes. But can you not characterise my concern for your safety as relationship drama?”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean … I just … sorry.” Liza looked down. Partly out of contrition, partly because she wanted to inspect the ground. With everything that was going on in her life at the moment, it was a lot easier to focus on the abstract. On clues and timelines and, in this case, on footprints. There was snow here—a little of it, at least. But any marks that might have been left by the killer had either been dusted over by whatever had blown off the loch in the last ten minutes, or else obliterated by people walking around and looking in the boathouse. “Do you—if you don’t want to, we don’t have to—but do you think we could just, kind of, scout the area a bit? If the killer’s gone, they must have left the woods somehow, and—I don’t know, maybe we’ll find tracks?”

Hanna was glaring but, in her defence, it looked like it was meant as a supportive glare. “And you’ll be careful?”

“As a—as a very careful person.”

If they were serious about following footprints, their best bet, Liza decided, was to skirt the edge of the copse. Although, since at least a half-dozen people including Belloc had been to the woods in the last half hour, it might turn out to be a gigantic waste of her time, because how would she even begin to tell whose tracks were whose? After a second’s thought she pulled out her camera and, after photographing Belloc’s body from two or three different angles for completeness, took close-ups of the soles of his shoes. Then she stood on one leg and photographed her own.

“What are you …?”

“Comparison. Can I do yours too?”

Sighing and wincing, Hanna forgot about her bad arm just long enough to use it to prop herself on a tree while Liza photographed her boots. “Just so you know, I’m going to pretend this is a fetish thing.”

“Noted.”

The next step was to nip back inside the boathouse, explain to the assembled guests there that she was going to go hunting for footprints, and get them all to let her photograph their feet. A plan that, to her genuine shock, worked perfectly smoothly. Then, armed with a phone full of comparative shoe pictures, she took Hanna around the edge of the tree line until they found the first set of tracks, on the northernmost side of the woodland facing the hotel. The new snowfall was already obscuring the details, but they were deep enough that you could make out size and shape well enough. Unfortunately, Liza was ninety-nine percent sure these were the tracks that she, Hanna, and their companions had made coming in, because there seemed to be a lot of them, and they all muddled over each other.

Kneeling down in the snow, she had a go at comparing them anyway. And it soon became clear that, to the untrained eye, a footprint in the snow just looked like a vaguely foot-sized oval.

“Not sure?” asked Hanna, who was taking the whole adventure in remarkably good spirits now her risk of death had dropped from immediate to merely likely.

“No.” Liza frowned. “I think that one’s me. I’m pretty sure those are you because you have tiny feet and wear deep treads. That might be the vicar, and I didn’t get a picture of the professor, so it’s anybody’s guess.”

Disheartened but not dissuaded, they carried on with their circuit. They found another pair of tracks leading into the wood, which Liza felt fairly confident identifying as Sir Richard and Aunt Tabitha. Although, honestly, she was working this out more from context clues—she’d seen them walk in together along roughly this path—than from any real skill at tracking.

The next set of prints leading in was older, the snowfall of the last half hour or so already dusting them over so that they were little more than divots, but the toes were wide and the feet short, making her suspect that this was where Belloc had come to meet whoever it was he thought he was coming here to meet.

Completing the circuit revealed three more sets of tracks, one towards the woods and one away. One of those, Liza concluded, had to be the professor. He was the only other person she knew had left the woods recently, rather than coming into them. Unfortunately, since she hadn’t seen where he’d gone, she couldn’t tell which were his. But either way, she realised with a kind of sick thrill, the other set of prints had to belong to the killer.

She photographed all three sets of tracks in as much detail as she could and followed each of them to their ends, only to find they all came from the hotel, which, when she thought about it, was the only place they could have come from. Which was fine. That confirmed that the killer was in the hotel. And once she could eliminate the professor’s footprints, which she … might not be able to do because she hadn’t seen his shoes, and even if she had they were still just tracks in snow, and …

It was all beginning to feel an awful lot like nothing. Because one aha moment didn’t actually crack a whole case open. It didn’t even mildly dent it. But then, what had she expected? She wasn’t a detective. She wasn’t even an amateur detective. She was a podcaster with a failing marriage.

Chapter Twelve

Liza, in the Hedgerow, with a Hunch

Saturday evening

The Blaines spent the next couple of hours in what Liza tended to think of as “a scratchy space.” They weren’t arguing exactly, but each was acutely aware of the many ways they could start an argument if they weren’t careful. For most of the afternoon, Liza had huddled on the floor transferring pictures from her phone to her laptop while Hanna took a long bath.

Staring at digital photographs of footprints was beginning to give Liza a headache, and more than once she’d considered giving up. But Hanna had been right: this would just eat at her if she didn’t at least try to—not solve it, exactly—but do something. Even though it was becoming abundantly clear that she was out of her depth. It wasn’t that she’d expected to be able to look at a couple of marks in the snow and say at once “aha, the killer was five foot, eight inches tall with a florid face, smoking a Trichinopoly cigar,” but she also hadn’t expected it to be quite this hard. She wasn’t even completely sure which of the three unaccounted-for sets of prints went together. Neither the professor nor the killer had been courteous enough to wear shoes that were notably large or small, or characterised with a distinctive tread, or perhaps conveniently embossed with the name of a manufacturer who only ever made three pairs of shoes a year for a very select list of clients. She thought two of them were of a size. And perhaps a little smaller? Possibly a woman? Then again, Belloc’s feet had been pretty small too.

Still, there were some things she really could work out. Some people they couldn’t have belonged to. She, Hanna, and Ruby had been together in the hotel. Sir Richard and his aunt, and the professor and the vicar, had been in pairs when the gun went off. And of course, it was possible that somebody was lying to protect somebody else—especially where Sir Richard and his aunt were concerned. Family protecting family was more likely than strangers protecting strangers, unless there was some kind of you-kill-my-inconvenient-relative-I’ll-kill-your-wife deal going on. But she’d seen all four of them walking towards the woods, and it seemed very improbable that any of them could have shot him, then looped around back to the hotel in time to make it look like they’d just heard the gunshot five minutes later. Of course, somebody could have seen something from the hotel—Ruby’s room was south-facing and so was Mr Burgh’s office—but, “By the way, I saw Mr/Ms X wandering down to the boathouse with a gun,” wasn’t the sort of information you kept to yourself when you were trapped in a hotel with a killer. Still, she filed the possibility away under worth following up on.

The bathroom door opened and Hanna emerged, wrapped in a fluffy hotel dressing gown that she didn’t look like she was at all in a mood to appreciate. “They’ll be serving dinner soon.”

Liza looked up. “Be done in a minute.”

Apparently in no great rush herself, Hanna went and slumped on the bed. “I’m trying, you know.”

“Trying?” Had her head been more in the game Liza might have had a better response.

“To be supportive of”—Hanna waved a hand—”this. But honestly, it’s creeping me out a bit.”

Shutting her laptop, Liza turned around. This was probably a full-attention conversation. “I know you’ve always found the true crime thing a bit … I don’t know, silly? Unethical? Non-specifically not okay?”

---