Page 82 of Murder Most Actual

This seemed slightly disingenuous. “You’re still planning on killing her, though?”

“But for entirely practical reasons. One simply can’t let one’s associates go around stealing from one. It’s bad for business.”

Liza gave a begrudging wince. “I suppose that’s fair. And … I guess the same applies to us?”

“No witnesses, I’m afraid.”

It wasn’t the most comforting answer, but at least it was an honest one. “That doesn’t give us much incentive to tell you where we’re hiding your bank details.”

The professor glanced at the safe. “I’d be willing to bet a reasonable sum of money that they’re in there.”

“And how will you get them out?”

“Oh, please, I’m a master criminal. Do you really think a cheap safe in a hotel is going to stop me?”

He was, Liza had to admit, right. But he also hadn’t just shot them both dead, which suggested there was something else going on. “No,” she tried, “but I think you’ve realised that once you fire that gun, you’ll have about six minutes to get the safe open, grab whatever it is you think you’re going to find in there, and then be out and wandering around the hotel looking innocent, and I don’t think you’ve got time. This isn’t like faking a suicide where you can do all the work in advance.” A thought struck her. “And that was sloppy, by the way. Putting the gun in the wrong hand.”

He laughed again, and this time it had a harder edge to it. “Every man has his weakness. Mine is the classics. Besides, if we do not build flaws into our works, God may think we are trying to usurp his domain.”

“Are you for real?”

“A woman in your profession”—the professor gave her a wicked smile—”must surely realise that truth is far stranger than fiction. Now, please unlock the safe and give me the codes.”

“So you can shoot me?”

“Yes.”

“You get why that’s not an appealing offer, right?”

The professor crossed to the side of the bed where Hanna was lying, still pretending slightly desperately to be asleep. “My fault entirely, Ms Blaine. I should have made myself clearer. I certainly intend to shoot you once you have given me what I want. But if you do not,”—he lowered the pistol to point directly at Hanna—”I will shoot your wife. I will, to be more specific, shoot her through the gut and the spine. She will die slowly, and in terrible pain. Then I will shoot you, then I will leave. You are going to die, Ms Blaine, but the manner of your death remains very much of your own choosing.”

Raising her hands and moving very, very slowly, Liza got out of bed. “Okay, just don’t hurt her.”

“I assure you, if you are compliant, I shall make things quite painless.”

Liza had run out of ideas. Keeping him talking had worked for a while, but playing the if-you-kill-us-you-won’t-get-what-you-want card had probably been a mistake. The professor may have claimed to be more motivated by pragmatism than spite, but the difference between the two seemed fairly minimal from where Liza was standing.

Going as slowly as she felt able, walking the line between antagonising the narcissistic crime lord with the firearm, and buying time to think of something, anything, to stop him, she made her way over to the safe. It was a simple three-digit code that they’d set when they’d taken the room, and the professor was probably right that it wouldn’t have posed him any serious difficulties if he’d had the time to crack it. She opened the safe and took out the USB key.

“Excellent.” The professor turned and pointed his pistol directly at Liza’s head. “Now hand it over and don’t get any foolish ideas about heroism.”

A gunshot rang out. And the fraction of a second it took Liza to realise that it hadn’t come from inside the room was also the fraction of a second in which the professor turned towards the door in case he’d been ambushed, and the fraction of a second in which Hanna sprang off the bed and threw a blanket over his head.

To Liza’s horror, the two of them crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs and bedlinen, the gun going off in the struggle, barely muffled by the layers of cloth over it. Forcing herself not to dwell on the thought that Hanna might have been hit, Liza grabbed the nearest thing that looked like a weapon: a large glass vase full of spring flowers.

On the floor, Hanna was just about managing to keep the professor entangled, but Liza had lost sight of the pistol, and she suspected that if there was anybody who knew how to fire a weapon into somebody without looking at them, it was Professor Worth. So Liza hit him. She wasn’t, she had to admit, particularly strong, but the vase was heavy, and gravity was doing a lot of the work. It landed with a thunk on a protruding lump that Liza really hoped was the professor’s head.

Whatever she’d hit, he sagged, and for a moment he was still. Hanna sat back, torn between the conflicting desires to keep him pinned down and to keep him as far away as humanly possible. “Fuck,” she said, looking at the limp body underneath her, “you’ve killed him.”

“He was going to kill you.”

“I don’t think that stops it being murder.”

Liza looked for signs of blood on the blanket. “I think it actually does.”

Underneath Hanna, the professor shifted. “Okay, new problem. Hit him again.”

“No, then I really might kill him.” Instead, Liza scoured the mess of blankets, dead flowers, and water for signs of the gun and, spotting it by one of Hanna’s feet, scooped it up. “Right, got him covered.”

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