Page 79 of Murder Most Actual

Wednesday evening

Liza and Hanna made their way down a flight of stairs that probably wouldn’t have been health-and-safety compliant if it had been installed any time in the last century and into an atmospherically dark cellar. Liza switched on the torch that she’d borrowed from Mr Burgh and swept it around the room.

“What’re we looking for?” asked Hanna. “And perhaps more importantly, what’ll we do if we find it?”

Liza continued rummaging. The cellar seemed to have been in continuous use for centuries, and half its contents were buried under layers of dust and cobwebs. The rat poison, however, was on a shelf to one side. One packet was open. “We’re looking for this,” she said. “As for what we’ll do with it … honestly, I just want to know what’s happening.”

“And it’s great to see you get your detective on. I just—we’re really close to getting rescued.”

“Which is why it’ll be helpful to know if we’re going to get poisoned or not.” Holding her torch in one hand while the bag hung awkwardly from the other, Liza scanned the warnings on the packet. “It wasn’t this,” she said at last.

Hanna came cautiously down the steps. “How do you know?”

“There’s an emetic in it. The colonel wouldn’t have been able to keep it down.”

“He didn’t, though, did he? He threw it up.”

Putting the rat poison back on its shelf, Liza went back to searching the corners of the room. “He threw up. He didn’t throw the poison up. There’s a difference.”

“Is the difference that the first one doesn’t stop you dying?”

At the back of the cellar, Liza spotted a suspicious tear in a box that looked like it otherwise hadn’t been touched in years. “That’s right—hang on, I might’ve found something.”

She moved forward carefully, partly because she didn’t want to trip over some long-discarded piece of detritus in the darkness, partly because the sense of anticipation was bordering on the unbearable.

With a click and a plink, an overhead light came on. “I thought that might help,” said Hanna.

It did. But it also killed the atmosphere in a way that Liza found strangely disappointing. Walking more normally now, she bent and looked at the mysteriously torn box. It was old—pre-war old—and crumbled as Liza touched it. Reaching inside, she pulled out a box and read the label with a feeling of very slightly inappropriate triumph. “Got it.”

“Got what?”

“Flypaper.”

Hanna came over to look at her wife’s new discovery. “You think the colonel was glued to death?”

“No, I think somebody in this hotel knows about the Angel Makers of Nagyrév.”

“I know you did an episode on that.” Hanna sounded apologetic. “But you’re going to have to remind me.”

“It’s actually a really complex, interesting story, but the short version is that in the early twentieth century, this one town in Hungary had a whole lot of arsenic poisonings. And at least some of the killers got the arsenic by boiling flypaper. You haven’t been able to buy the poison stuff legally for years, but this is a very old hotel, and this cellar is full of crap.”

“Cool. So now we know, I guess?” Hanna’s tone was wary, as if she was expecting another shoe to drop.

Incriminating flypaper in hand, Liza was already heading back to the stairs. “Come on.”

“Come on where?” demanded Hanna, running low on patience. “You wanted to check out the cellar; we’ve checked out the cellar. You wanted to know how the colonel was poisoned; you know how the colonel was poisoned. I say we go back to the room, lock ourselves in, and don’t eat anything.”

Halfway up the stairs, Liza turned back. “We could. But the colonel thought he’d be safe as long as he had a gun, and he was wrong. Belloc thought he’d be safe just because of who he was, and he was wrong. I think we just need to accept that—”

“That if we’re going to die, we’re going to die?”

She’d been trying not to think about it that way. Because yes, that was exactly what she was trying to say; she was just afraid to admit it, and afraid to admit that she was afraid to admit it. “That this is a weird situation and we can’t control it. So I’m going to keep investigating, because otherwise …”

Following reluctantly behind, Hanna had just reached her wife on the stairs. “Otherwise what?”

Liza stared at the packet of antique flypaper in her hand. And what had seemed like a thrilling discovery a few minutes ago now just felt sordid and pointless and wrong. “I don’t know otherwise what.” She sat down heavily and hung her head. “Otherwise this is all really fucking scary.” Reaching out, she took Hanna’s hands. “Five people are dead. Somebody might well be coming to kill us, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it, and that’s—that’s fucked up, Han. That’s fucked up.”

She set the flypaper down, buried her face in Hanna’s shoulder, and started crying.

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