Page 77 of Murder Most Actual

Only Burgh was actually still carrying his gun, but he obediently lowered it. “I should—I should summon the staff and think about—oh dear. Are you going to be okay, Sir Richard?”

“She shot me,” Sir Richard repeated. “She bloody shot me.”

While the professor and the reverend were taking their leave, Liza looked around the room in a this-means-something kind of way. There were pieces to put together here, she was sure of it. She just didn’t know what they were. “I don’t think she did,” she said, although she wasn’t quite sure why she thought that. Or didn’t think it. There was just something about the angles—something about the people involved.

Without saying anything else, she walked over to where the reverend had been standing, trying not to disturb the colonel’s body more than it had already been disturbed. There was a hole in the wall, which, despite her total lack of expertise, Liza was certain was from a bullet, fired from about waist-height, assuming it had travelled fairly level.

“Should I ask?” asked Sir Richard.

“Two bullets went this way.” She was still mostly talking to herself. “One was Mr Burgh, the other had to be Ruby, so it wasn’t her that shot you.”

“Does it matter?” Sir Richard was staggering to his feet. “Help me up, Burgh. I’m going to need to see a first aider. Preferably a good first aider.”

Mr Burgh helped Sir Richard to his feet and the two men limped out of the room, Sir Richard trying not to drip too much blood as he went.

The moment they were alone, Hanna dropped onto the bed and put her head in her hands. “That was awful.”

“It could have been worse.”

“Somebody was shot.”

Sitting down, Liza put an arm around her wife. “I know it’s pretty crappy that we’re in a situation that yeah, but not fatally is the best thing I can say, but … yeah, but not fatally.”

Hanna folded herself against Liza’s side, burying her face in her shoulder. “We should probably get out of here. It seems weird to be having this conversation next to a guy’s body.”

The door opened and a woman entered. She was about as high as Mr Burgh’s shoulder and had long curly hair.

“Mary?” asked Liza, really wishing she’d paid more attention to the staff.

“Yes?” The woman had a mild Scottish accent and didn’t seem especially thrilled to have walked into an interrogation. “I’m—umm—I’m supposed to be dealing with the body.”

“On your own?”

She shrugged. She seemed curiously calm about having to move a corpse, which might have meant—as Sir Richard would have suggested—that she was a cold-blooded killer, or might have meant that once you’ve had to shift five dead bodies in as many days you developed a new perspective on these things. “Quinn’s coming up in a minute.”

Liza didn’t know who Quinn was either, although by process of elimination it must have been the footman. “And you’re the one who delivered his breakfast?”

“Yes. I should have looked closer, but, you know, I was pretty keen to get out of there.” Again, her manner was muted, almost matter of fact. And again, it could have meant she was a clinical psychopath, or that she’d just had it up to here with working in a hotel full of murder.

In the circumstances, Liza would have been too. “Do you think he was dead when you arrived?”

Mary gave a half-squirm-half-shrug. “I wouldn’t want to say. He might have been.”

“But he might not.”

“Well.” The maid gave Liza an apologetic look. “No offence, but you lot have all been acting pretty weird since this whole thing kicked off. And I don’t really know any of you, so when the colonel started hiding in his room and not moving from that spot under the window, I just sort of went with it.”

“And”—this was a bit of a punt, but Liza felt it was worth punting—”how well do you know Mr Burgh?”

“Not very. He’s only been here a month or so. The company sent him after Mr McCall had his accident.”

“Accident?” asked Liza, trying not to sound too eager for a story of human suffering.

Mary nodded. “He had a nasty fall. He could have died, and he was in his sixties, so they gave him early retirement.”

That was sounding suspicious. Potentially very suspicious. But sitting around grilling a woman who was just trying to do her job was probably not fair, so Liza and Hanna got up and were just about to leave when Liza stopped in the doorway and turned around. “One more thing. There aren’t any, y’know, incredibly deadly poisons lying around the place, are there?”

“There’s something for the rats,” Mary replied. “They keep it in a cupboard in the cellar.”

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