Page 44 of Murder Most Actual

“There’s a reason I didn’t get too close to the body.” Hanna’s voice was growing harsh. “I do not like this shit.”

“Right, right.” She should have let up—Liza knew she should have let up—but she needed to check she wasn’t jumping to conclusions. “Just …can you tell me what she has in her right hand?”

“A pen. There was a suicide note, Liza—she had to write it somehow.”

Liza swiped. “And here.”

“The gun. On the floor, by the chair.”

“Which side?”

“The righ—hang on, I think I get where you’re going with this.”

Nervous in case where Hanna thought she was going wasn’t where she thought she was going, Liza bit her lip. There was still a very good chance that she was just trying to convince herself that she hadn’t accidentally driven a woman to suicide. “Where do you think I’m going?”

“You’re going to say that if the gun is on the right side of the chair and she was shot in the right side of the head, then she probably used her right hand.”

A tide of not-exactly-relief crashed over Liza. “Good, because that’s exactly what I’m going to say.”

“And then you’re going to ask how she picked up a pen in that same hand after she’d already shot herself.”

Liza nodded. “This isn’t two murders and a suicide; it’s three murders.”

Chapter Sixteen

Liza, in the Dining Room, with a Theory

Sunday morning

Liza didn’t sleep well that night. Knowing—okay, believing; okay, strongly suspecting—that Vivien Ackroyd had been murdered was a mixed feeling. On the one hand, it meant that neither she nor Hanna were responsible for her death. On the other, it meant whoever killed her was still loose in the hotel doing who knew what.

She should, she told herself repeatedly, have realised something was wrong sooner. Even if Vivien Ackroyd had killed her husband—which was still possible even if she’d killed Belloc as well, which was looking less likely—how did she get the gun (and how long had Hanna been unhappy in her job)? It had been locked in a safe; the key to which was locked in a different safe. And yes, this was a hotel, not the Tower of London, and she didn’t know what the Ackroyds’ backgrounds or skillsets were, but it seemed very unlikely that they involved lockpicking and safecracking (why would anybody devote a decade to a career they didn’t care about?).

Which meant that somebody else had stolen the gun to begin with, and then shot Belloc for some reason, and then shot Vivien (was she taking her wife for granted? Was she just accepting the financial security that came from being married to a fancy city broker and let you jump on every passion project that …?). Or else Vivien got the gun from them and then they got it back when she threw it out the window, or …

At some point, she actually managed to fall asleep.

Breakfast the next morning was a subdued affair, partly because three guests were dead and partly because Mr Burgh began by explaining that the phones were still down, the snow wasn’t letting up, and there was no knowing when anybody was going to be getting out.

“But,” he added, “we can at least be—well, I suppose grateful isn’t the word, but at least with the sad death of Mrs Ackroyd we can put the unpleasantness of the last couple of days behind us and—Ms Blaine?”

Liza put her hand down. “Um, about that. The unpleasantness, that is.”

A half-dozen pairs of eyes turned on her. “Don’t you think you’ve interfered enough?” asked Professor Worth. “I mean, you’ve already as good as driven poor Mrs Ackroyd to take her own life.”

“Be fair, dear.” That was Lady Tabitha. “As gauche and premature as young Liza may have been, Mrs Ackroyd was a murderer, and that’s all there is to it.”

Once again, Liza was concerned that things were getting away from her. “Um, actually, that’s—”

“Even if she was”—the colonel, no longer wielding a solid platinum poignard, was reduced to gesticulating with a forkful of bacon—”no call to lay into her the way you laid into her.”

At the back of the room, Ruby reclined on her chair and smirked. “How exactly do you tell somebody you think they murdered their husband without it seeming like you’re laying into them?”

“Perhaps,” suggested the vicar, “we should listen to what Ms Blaine has to say before judging.”

Relieved to have somebody at least partially on her side, Liza launched into it. “I don’t think Vivien Ackroyd killed herself.” There was no sense beating around the bush.

For a moment there was no reply. Then the colonel said, “But we found a suicide note.”

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