Page 69 of Murder Most Actual

With a playful smirk, Hanna slipped off the bed and onto the floor, where she lay invitingly on the carpet. “How about now? You can’t object to defiling a dead man’s floor.”

Sliding across on her stomach, Liza looked down. “I can. For all I know he’s still got his things down there.”

Hanna made a show of sweeping the area in her general vicinity. “Nothing at all. It’s almost as if he was never he—” She stopped. And although it was hard to tell in the dark, she looked almost crestfallen.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. But if hypothetically, I thought I’d found something under the bed, that would probably derail the whole evening, wouldn’t it?”

The correct answer was, “No.” Or maybe, “Yes, but only because I’m really serious about not wanting to have sex in a dead man’s bedroom.” The honest answer was … “Maybe?”

Hanna held up a small leather-bound notebook. “I think this might have obvious clue written on it in big red letters.”

In hindsight, Liza would be slightly embarrassed at how eagerly she snatched the book from Hanna’s hands.

“I’ll get the lights,” said Hanna resignedly.

Liza sat cross-legged on the bed, took a couple of deep breaths to steady her nerves-slash-moral-qualms, and opened the journal. “This,” she read aloud, “is the how-you-say journal—hang on, he actually wrote how you say?”

“Also,”—leaning on the wall by the light switch, Hanna was looking way more indulgent than she could have done given the circumstances—”he’s writing in English.”

“Yeah, he was definitely a fraud, wasn’t he?”

“Definitely.”

Liza turned her attention back to the journal. “I’m hoping that even if he wasn’t really French, he was really a detective.”

“One of the many things I love about you is your eternal optimism.”

The journal was thick and densely written in neat, almost copperplate script and seemed to contain a great many entries for old cases that Belloc had worked on over the last year or so, many connected to Mr B. According to Belloc’s notes, the man was involved in a quite remarkable number of incidents, including a murder at a golf course, an assassination on an international flight, and any number of deaths at stately homes.

“But I have him at last,” Liza continued. “His minions, they have betrayed him, as Belloc always knew they would—fuck, he even does the third-person thing in writing—and he has been forced to come, himself, to Scotland, and that is where Belloc will catch him. He’s saying him a lot. Do you think he knows for certain Mr B is actually a man, or do you think—?”

“Do I think he’s just the kind of guy who assumes a master criminal has to fit into quite a narrow definition of masculinity?” The look on Hanna’s face already answered the question, but she answered it aloud anyway. “Yeah, I think he was exactly that sort.”

“So, nothing so far we don’t already know.”

“No.”

It was a bit of a disappointment, but probably not a surprise. She flipped a couple of pages ahead. “There has been a murder most wicked, and Belloc is sure that Monsieur B was behind it. It doesn’t say why he’s sure.”

“Did he ever?” asked Hanna

Liza carried on reading. “His goal, I am convinced, is to create the screen of smoke behind which he can hide the murder of his true target, the one who has betrayed him. That makes more sense, and it lines up with Sir Richard’s theory that we’re being picked off.” She turned back to the journal. “This he has done before, with the murders in Andover and Bexhill.”

“Andover and Bexhill?” It was strange how naturally Hanna asked the question, in a way she never would have before they’d come to Scotland.

“Sounds a bit familiar, but it’s not like we’ve done an episode about every murder.” Liza trawled her memory for similar incidents. “There was something in the eighties or nineties where a guy killed a bunch of … bank managers, I think? And did it up as this whole big anti-capitalist thing when he was actually just looking for a way to off his brother-in-law.”

Hanna shuddered. “That seems really fucking cold.”

“Some people are. It’s not common. Something I keep talking to Rachael about is that I worry we cherry-pick interesting cases too much and give a distorted impression of what crime is like. But the weird stuff does sometimes happen.”

“So, Belloc would have agreed with Sir Richard.” From the way Hanna said it, it seemed like she considered this less a question of great minds thinking alike than one of fools seldom differing. “That might just make them both wrong in the same direction.”

There was that. Flipping over a couple of pages, Liza carried on consulting the book. “He seems to have narrowed it down to four suspects.”

“All men?”

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