Page 47 of Murder Most Actual

They walked a little further, then the vicar said. “What if I—?”

A grim inevitability struck Liza. “Let me stop you there. Are you going to say what if I told you I wasn’t always a vicar?”

Reverend Lincoln gave a rough smile. “So you do know what you’re doing.”

“We’ve seen three bloody corpses in the last two days, and you’ve walked up to all of them without blinking. And you know a lot about guns for a clergyman.”

Again, he was quiet for a while. “I used to work for the man Belloc called Mr B. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Then I got caught, I cut a deal, got a reduced sentence, and found God. In about that order.”

That explained why Ruby said he wasn’t what he seemed. Of course, since he did seem kind of like an ex-con and didn’t seem hugely like a vicar, that wasn’t the biggest hint in the world. “So you are a real clergyman then? You’re not a paid assassin?”

“Yes. Not that you have any real reason to believe me.”

Liza thought for a moment. “Umm … what’s Numbers chapter sixteen, verse forty-two?”

“You know I didn’t actually have to memorise the whole Bible? But I think it was: ‘And it came to pass, when the congregation was gathered against Moses and against Aaron, that they looked toward the tabernacle of the congregation: and, behold, the cloud covered it, and the glory of the Lord appeared.’”

With an expression of not-sure-how-I-got-into-this-mess on her face, Hanna looked at her wife. “Well, did he get it right?”

“I don’t know. I’m a lapsed Anglican at best.”

“So,” Hanna concluded, “he’s either a vicar or was willing to risk a bluff?”

Reverend Lincoln tucked his hands into the pockets of his olive-green winter jacket. “Whether you trust me or not, I think Mr B has sent somebody to kill me, and I think I know who it is.”

Ruby. Definitely Ruby. But this time Liza chose not to share the deduction. It was, after all, still possible that he was here to kill her, in which case sharing that she was onto him might put her in danger. “Who?” she asked, doing her best to keep poker faced.

“The one in the red dress. Calls herself Ruby. We did jobs together in the day, and I know she still works for … for him.” She also, Liza noted, had the only south-facing room, apart from Burgh, so she was the only one who could have been watching from the house.

The arc of their walk took them down a dip in the ground that brought them well out of sight of the hotel, and it struck Liza rather too late that if the vicar wasn’t on the level then she’d just given him a perfect window in which to murder both her and her wife.

“So,” Hanna said, hopefully not coming to the same conclusion, “what do you want us to do about it?”

Reverend Lincoln shrugged. “I thought if I was honest with you, you might be honest with me. Let me know if you’ve worked anything out. I’m still not sure I trust the other guests.”

“Why not?” Liza asked the follow-up question on sheer instinct.

“One way or another, I have funny feelings about all of them.”

Hanna gave him two thumbs up. “Thanks. Very not vague.”

“I’m not totally sure I trust you either,” the reverend pointed out. “I just thought if I wound up face down in the loch, you could at least, I don’t know, make a YouTube video about me or something. See whoever does it gets caught.”

That seemed like a lot of pressure, and way above Liza’s paygrade. On the other hand, anything that would get people giving her information instead of, say, trying to murder her was probably a good thing. “Sure,” she said, “if that’ll help.”

The vicar shrugged. “Don’t see how it can hurt.”

“And, just to check,” Liza was pretty sure she already knew the answer to this but thought it was worth a try anyway, “you didn’t actually meet Mr B in person, did you?”

“No.”

“So he could be anybody?”

“Yes.”

That figured. They turned towards the hotel, Liza holding Hanna tight around the waist and watching Reverend Lincoln very, very closely all the way back.

Chapter Seventeen

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