Page 46 of Murder Most Actual

“And,” added Liza, “Belloc said he was on somebody’s trail. This ‘Mr B’ figure.”

Waving a dismissive hand, Sir Richard made a sound that could roughly be approximated as “pish.” “Belloc was a fine man, no doubt, but his ‘Charles de Gaulle of Crime’ is probably a phantom.”

“Whereas your avenging angel is flesh and blood?” Reverend Lincoln looked unconvinced.

To say that the conversation descended into squabbling from there would be unfair, but only slightly. The guests finished up their mildly rationed breakfast and, in ones and twos, filtered out of the dining hall to go and do whatever it was they did when they weren’t telling one another about newly discovered corpses.

Eventually, Liza and Hanna were the only two that remained.

“Well, this is …” Hanna began.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think Sir Richard is right? Is this some kind of … some kind of weird PG-rated Saw thing?”

Liza had long since gone past the point where she had a clue. “Maybe? It seems a bit far-fetched, but then so does the idea that we’re stuck in a hotel with a criminal mastermind who decided to murder two tourists for no reason.”

Quietly, Hanna picked at the edge of a crust of bread. “So what now?”

“We could go for another walk? I know it feels a bit … off to be trying to enjoy the holiday with everything that’s going on, but, well, if we are in PG Saw then we should probably be trying to make the most of our lives.”

That at least got a laugh. “I’m not sure I want to be making my decisions based on what I think fictional serial killers would think of them.”

Despite this objection, they went for a walk. New snow had fallen, Liza noted, and whatever tracks had been running to and from the woodland the day before were long gone. But she tried not to think about tracks and clues, and missing guns, and broken safes, and motives, and mysteries. And after a while she found she didn’t need to try not to; she just didn’t. Because the grounds were beautiful, and away from the hotel it was easy to get lost in the beauty of them—the highlands rising snow-capped around them and the loch, still not entirely without its unpleasant associations, stretching silver-grey beneath.

And for a while it was like … like nothing. One of the problems—not problems; quirks, qualities—about having been with somebody for ten years was that everything became an echo of something else. This evening much like last evening, this Christmas like last Christmas, this fight like the last fight. But they’d never been here before, never really been anywhere like here before. And not just because of the, well, the murders. When they’d first got together, expensive holidays were an unjustifiable waste of money; later on they’d become an unjustifiable waste of time. So this moment was just this moment, instead of a thousand reflected moments arcing away like colours in a kaleidoscope, the same things rearranged and spiralling off to infinity.

Hanna laid her head on Liza’s shoulder. “This is …”

“Yeah.”

They walked down towards the loch, veering west away from the woodland where the corpse had been. And for a while they stood on the banks watching the water. A group of ducks had been caught off-guard by the unseasonable weather and were now dabbling about the snowline looking for … whatever it was ducks looked for. Liza wasn’t exactly sure.

A combination of cold noses and wet feet was about to send them back inside when they were hailed by Reverend Lincoln coming down from the hotel. They waved an ambiguous reply and let him intercept them.

“Can I have a word?” he asked, looking directly at Liza. “Ideally somewhere quiet?”

“Does quiet mean without me?” Hanna didn’t seem happy about the implication.

The vicar gave it a moment’s thought. “No. I think that would be unreasonable. But I’d like to be out of sight of the house.”

So they turned and went back to walking around the lake, relying on the curve of the land down the hillside to shield them. Not that it struck Liza as a terribly helpful precaution; a hypothetical observer watching from the hotel would have seen him approach them anyway, and it seemed unlikely anybody would be spying on them.

At least she hoped it was unlikely. But now that Sir Richard had put out the idea that one of them was hunting the others, it might only be a matter of time before things got confrontational.

“You might not be the right person to talk to about this,” Reverend Lincoln said eventually. “But you caught the thing with the suicide note, and that makes me think you know what you’re doing.”

Liza half-laughed and was about to say she really didn’t when Hanna cut in with, “She does. At least as much as any of us does. This isn’t exactly a situation you can have experience of.”

They walked a bit further. Whether the vicar was waiting for the house to vanish or just having trouble trusting her, Liza couldn’t tell.

“What do you reckon to Sir Richard’s theory?” he asked at last. “About somebody picking us off?”

Technically, sharing her opinions with strangers was Liza’s whole job. But pontificating into a microphone with a glass of wine in her hand was quite a different situation from telling a man something to his face that, if she was wrong, could lead to one or both of them getting killed. “I don’t know,” she hedged. “I suppose it sort of fits the facts, but I also think that it’s the sort of thing that could fit any set of facts, so I’m a bit suspicious.”

“And the other theory?” The reverend wasn’t looking at her—at either of them. He was just staring at the floor directly in front of him.

“Also possible. I mean, part of me says that if Belloc was good at his job, he wouldn’t have got shot so easily, but he obviously thought he was following somebody.”

---