Page 7 of Murder Most Actual

“Oh no.” Hanna fixed him with a cold stare, while Liza fixed her with a stare that tried in vain to say “Please don’t start something.” “We’re not going to have a ‘women, amirite?’ moment here.”

Mr Ackroyd tried to look like butter—dulce or otherwise—wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “I said nothing.”

“You didn’t have to say it, Malcom,” Vivien told him. “We all understood what you meant.”

Reverend Lincoln politely cleared his throat. “You know, I think I saw a wren this morning.”

“Really?” Lady Tabitha, clearly able to spot a desperate attempt to change the subject at five hundred paces, turned to him. “Isn’t it rather early in the year for them?”

“I think the cold snap probably caught it by surprise,” ruminated the vicar. “Poor thing must be wondering what happened.”

The colonel wagged a finger in warning. “If a single one of you buggers mentions global bloody warming.”

“It’s called climate change,” muttered Hanna under her breath.

“What was that?” Colonel Coleman had surprisingly good hearing for a man his age.

“Did you know wrens mate for life?” interrupted Lady Tabitha.

The professor turned to a hovering waiter, ordered the duck, and then said: “Isn’t that swans?”

“I thought it was penguins,” said Sir Richard.

Desperate to be part of a conversation that wasn’t about butter sauce—although she did wind up ordering the fish—Liza jumped in. “Actually, that’s a myth. People really like to romanticise penguins, but they actually partner-swap every year.”

Malcom Ackroyd passed his order to a waiter. “Sounds like they’ve got the right idea.”

This earned him a quiet “Must you?” from Vivien and a biting-my-tongue look from Hanna.

Colonel Coleman, on the other hand, wouldn’t have bit his tongue if it was made of bacon. “You,” he told Malcom Ackroyd, “are a bloody rude man, and if I was ten years younger I’d …”

“Oh, you’d what?” Malcom Ackroyd gave him a challenging look. “You’d beat me up? This isn’t the playground, Colonel, or the parade ground. It’s a hotel, and you’re making a prick of yourself.”

The colonel didn’t dignify that with a reply but made a kind of dismissive, grumbling noise.

“The other interesting thing about penguins,” said Liza slightly too loudly—the evening had basically gone to hell already, but she was hoping she could at least keep it in the upper circles—”is that they often form same-sex pair bonds.”

“You are an expert on the wildfowl now, as well as the crimes?” asked Belloc, looking up from his place setting with an almost malicious glint in his eye.

“I never said I was an expert on crime,” Liza replied.

“Yet you presume to educate people about it.”

The professor slid his glasses up his nose. “You seem to be taking Ms Blaine’s career rather personally, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“It is not personal.” Belloc folded his hands neatly on the table. “But it is serious.”

The waiters were beginning to come back through with food. A young woman with shoulder-length curly hair set a plate of duck with cherries in front of Lady Tabitha and, just for a moment, Liza could have sworn she saw something. A look that passed between them, perhaps.

“So,” said the reverend as a rack of lamb was laid in front of him, “about those penguins?”

The fish, it turned out, was delicious. Emmeline White lived up to her reputation, and her combination of local ingredients with classical techniques was exquisite. So exquisite that nothing, not listening to the Ackroyds sniping passive-aggressively at each other, or Belloc shitting on her career, or the colonel being a blustering arse, or even her constant low-key tension with Hanna, could quite spoil it.

Chapter Four

Liza, in the Bedroom, with Questions

Friday night

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