Page 64 of Murder Most Actual

“Could we perhaps,” Hanna suggested, “all put our weapons down? Whoever has just shot whomever, we can be pretty sure that neither of them is anybody here right now.”

Ruby eyed her darkly. “How exactly can we be sure of that?”

“Because we’re all outside the room, not inside it? And because it would be a pretty bold move to come up to the professor’s room, shoot him, nip away for two minutes, then come back with your gun still smoking and pretend you’ve just arrived.”

There was no change in Ruby’s expression, and she kept her weapon unerringly trained on the colonel while staring at Hanna. “And you don’t think that the man behind all this might be exactly that bold?”

Much as Liza hated to admit it, it was a reasonable point. Before anybody could elaborate, the door opened and a sheepish Professor Worth poked his head out. “Oh, I say.” He sounded deeply apologetic. “Have I—have I caused a lot of bother?”

Three guns swivelled to point at the professor.

“A certain amount of bother, yes,” said Reverend Lincoln.

The door swung open and Professor Worth, pistol still hanging limply from his hand, stood aside to let the assembled crowd in. He was visibly trembling, so much so that he collapsed onto a nearby chair almost immediately. A draught was blowing through from a shattered window, and it didn’t take Colonel Coleman very long to put two and two together and work out what had happened. “Saw something outside, did you?” he asked.

Professor Worth nodded as if the slight movement of his head was all he had strength for. “Yes. Something was moving and—well, I’m …I’m sure it was just a shadow or a branch or something, and, well, there’s climbing ivy up to the window, and what with everything that’s gone on I suppose I …” He presented the gun, his hand still shaking so much it seemed he could barely lift it. “I suppose I panicked.”

“And what exactly did you see?” asked Liza, trying not to get too invested in the possibility of a mysterious, unaccounted-for suspect not already in the room.

“Just a shadow, really.” Professor Worth looked like he was trying to hide inside his own jacket. “I thought it was a person, but really, it was probably a—a cat or something. Or a bird. There are very big birds in this part of the country, aren’t there?”

There might have been, but it seemed unlikely to Liza that anybody would mistake a bird, however big, for an intruder.

Colonel Coleman lowered his pistol and addressed the room. “Well, what do you say we go and look anyway? If the filthy bounder behind all this really is skulking around outside fellows’ windows, we should go and see him off.”

On the one hand, running around in the dark looking for an intruder who had at least a couple of minutes’ head start and could have gone in literally any direction seemed unlikely to be fruitful. On the other hand, giving up without a chase felt wrong on several other levels. Besides, there was still snow on the ground, so if there had been a prowler poking around there would probably be tracks of some kind to follow. “Come on then,” said Liza. “Two groups of three again?”

Ruby gave a cold smile. “Boys versus girls?”

“I might sit this one out, actually.” The professor was staring into the middle distance and talking to nobody in particular. “Had a bit of a scare. Made rather a loud bang. Spooked myself.”

“Then that settles it,” said Ruby despite the fact that it didn’t actually settle anything. “I’ll go with the ladies, the three remaining gentlemen will go with each other, and we’ll try not to shoot one another in the dark.”

And with the inevitable momentum of a decision made, that was how they arranged themselves. The six investigators walked together out of the front door of the hotel and around to the east wall, where, sure enough, climbing ivy led up to a lighted window. The ground was strewn with broken glass, but the tiny, paranoid part of Liza that had taken to viewing every tiny detail of the case as a potential misdirect noted that it was possible the window had been broken from the outside and the glass thrown out afterwards. Not that there was any reason at all for anybody to do that; it would have been needlessly circuitous and entirely pointless.

Except all of this was pointless. Murder, at its heart, was a fundamentally pointless endeavour. And not for the first time in her career, Liza felt a tiny roil of uncertainty at her decision to devote her adult life to talking about it.

From the window, they split up to look for footprints. Now that the snow had stopped falling, prints were lasting longer without being covered, but in the immediate aftermath of a mysterious figure showing up at a window, that proved to be a mixed blessing. The staff and guests had been coming and going all day, with people wandering out for walks or heading down to the old stables to look at corpses, and so there were dozens of trails to follow, leading all over the grounds and crisscrossing each other in unhelpful ways.

To her mild embarrassment, Liza was only about seventy percent certain she could identify, and thus rule out, the tracks that she and Hanna had made earlier in the day, even with the pictures on her phone to act as a reminder. So between them, the two groups divided the grounds in half, with Liza’s group taking the east and the colonel’s group (or Sir Richard’s group—there seemed some disagreement between the gentlemen as to who precisely was in charge) taking the west.

They swept down towards the woods where Belloc’s body had been found—there were tracks leading that way, although Liza suspected they might have been old—and it wasn’t until they’d lost sight of the other group and were just losing sight of the hotel that Liza realised something very important, and deeply troubling.

Of the three of them, only Ruby had a gun.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Liza, in the Corridor, with a Key

Monday night

They were in the copse now, where there wouldn’t be any footprints, and if the mysterious figure had come this way it was an open question whether they really wanted to find him. Or, as Liza kept pointedly reminding herself, her. Although the most sinister her in the equation thus far was right with them: clearly visible, clearly armed, and clearly up to something.

With her back to a tree, Ruby stopped, which made Liza and Hanna stop too out of a kind of unspoken sympathy. And for a moment, the three of them just stood there listening to the wind and their own breathing.

“Is it still safe?” asked Ruby, having apparently convinced herself nobody was in earshot.

Liza nodded, not quite so convinced herself.

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