Page 75 of Murder Most Actual

The conversation, like so many inhabitants of the hotel, rather died after that. And Liza found herself coming back to Sir Richard’s theories, and her own, and Belloc’s. It all felt like this impossible tangle. And slimy as Sir Richard sometimes was, Liza didn’t want to believe he’d stabbed his aunt in cold blood. Then again, she didn’t especially want to believe that some random member of the domestic staff was a killer either. For a start, it would have made her feel really silly for focusing so much on the other guests.

And Mr B, whoever they were, almost certainly wasn’t a member of staff. Unless he was Mr Burgh, and that seemed—not impossible, certainly, but improbable; at once too unlikely and too obvious. Not that “too obvious” was real evidence in somebody’s favour—in fact, usually, it was the opposite. And if the opposite was what she should be looking for, then maybe the reverend—the man who’d admitted to a criminal past and shown himself to be comfortable with both guns and corpses—was the one she should be looking at. Or perhaps she was placing undue trust in Ruby. After all, if he was behind it, wouldn’t he have been less open about his past? Or was admitting to a connection to the underworld exactly the kind of thing a criminal mastermind would do? And people would trust a clergyman. He’d as good as admitted that the staff told him things. Might he not have used that to manipulate Vivien Ackroyd into …?

She was getting ahead of herself. Hell, she was getting ahead of everything. As long as everybody stayed together and—much as Hanna would have hated to admit it—kept their guns handy, the odds of being slaughtered in the night were pretty close to zero. And then it was just a matter of waiting out the clock.

Which seemed anticlimactic somehow. It wasn’t as though she expected that she’d be able to round everybody up in the drawing room and do a big speech where she explained how only one person could possibly have been the killer, but having it peter out into, “Well, the cops will sort it out, I guess,” was … actually, it was how it always went, if she was honest. That was part of the reason she and Rachael had decided to go short-form rather than long-form in the first place. Even leaving aside the ethical considerations of digging deep into cold cases as two random strangers, the thought of spending eighteen months mired in a single mystery only to realise—as people always did—that there were no clean solutions or easy answers and no real closure for anybody, was just demoralising.

Eventually the professor woke up for his shift, taking his gun quietly back from her and returning to his seat where he sat watching the room with the air of a stern teacher invigilating an exam. Liza settled down next to Hanna, which wasn’t hugely comfortable on one sofa but had a kind of an intimate necessity to it. Still, she didn’t sleep much. There were too many fragments of ideas rattling around her head. The unknown maid and her role in everything. The reverend and his trust-me-I’m-a-vicar manner. The professor’s butter-wouldn’t-melt timidity that never quite gelled with the way he held a gun. Ruby’s obviously-a-murderer smile. Sir Richard being so very determined to convince everybody there was only one killer.

As the sun started poking intrusively through the drawing room windows the following morning, Mr Burgh and the footman arrived with what remained of breakfast. The guests, bleary-eyed and thoroughly sick of one another, ate in silence, and then, as nobody especially wanted to spend yet more time sitting quietly in the drawing room staring at one another, they trooped upstairs to check on the colonel.

And received no answer.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Colonel, in his Room, with Breakfast

Wednesday morning

“Let us all remain calm,” said Sir Richard, although he didn’t exactly have much claim to be calmer than anybody else in the group. “There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

Ruby gave him a scornful look. “Given recent events, is the most reasonable explanation not that he has been brutally murdered in the night?”

“We don’t know that.” Liza was doing her best to be reassuring despite the fundamentally un-reassuring situation.

“True.” Ruby gave a dismissive shrug. “He might have been murdered relatively quietly, which would explain why none of us heard anything.”

Sir Richard was backing up across the corridor, a look of steely determination in his eyes.

“What,” asked Hanna, “do you think you’re doing?”

“Charging down the door.”

She stepped theatrically aside. “Then be my guest. Don’t let the fact that there’s a paranoid military officer behind it, who, if he isn’t dead or unconscious, is almost certainly getting ready to shoot anything that comes his way, stop you in the slightest.”

It stopped him in the slightest. “Fair point. What say I go fetch Burgh?”

The reverend and Ruby went with him to ensure an adequate supply of firearms while Hanna and Liza stayed behind with the professor, who was slumped against the wall with a pistol held in his trembling hands.

“I’m really not sure I’m cut out for this,” he said to nobody in particular.

Doing her best to be understanding, Liza settled down next to him. “I don’t think any of us are.”

“Although if you’re not cut out for it, you should probably put down the deadly weapon,” added Hanna.

At that, the professor’s grip tightened, and his hand steadied a moment. “No. No, I think I shall keep it. Just in case the colonel is being … difficult.”

As the minutes passed and they waited for the rest of the party to get back with the key, Liza became increasingly convinced that the colonel was not, in fact, being difficult. It had been long enough with no noise from his room that he was either asleep, exhibiting remarkable self-control, or—and this was fast becoming the most likely possibility—very, very dead.

When Mr Burgh arrived he looked pale, positively drawn. “I’ve spoken to Mary,” he said, which prompted a sharp “Who’s Mary?” from all the guests except the professor, who didn’t seem to care. “She works here? You’ve all seen her multiple times. About this tall.” He held his hand at his shoulder height. “Brown curly hair? I know hotel staff are meant to be invisible, but this is an unusual situation. I thought you might have paid some attention, especially since there are only two of them around at the moment.”

“We’ve been a bit distracted,” explained Liza.

“Because of the murders,” added Sir Richard.

“Although it was also actually probably a bit classist of us,” Hanna admitted. “Especially since some people”—she glared at Sir Richard—”have made her their prime suspect.”

Looking increasingly bored, Ruby folded her arms. “Perhaps rather than wringing our hands about our failure to get on first-name terms with the staff, we could at least get the door open.”

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