Page 84 of Murder Most Actual

“It does seem irregular,” agreed Mr Burgh.

“More irregular,” Liza asked, “than everything else that has happened since Friday?”

That at least confused Mr Burgh enough that he didn’t demand the professor be freed immediately. “It’s just we’re running a bit short on guests. I’m afraid, that is, I came to tell you that the reverend’s been shot as well.”

“How badly?” asked Liza, suspecting she already knew the answer.

“Really quite badly.” Mr Burgh pulled a sort of bad-news grimace. “Dead badly.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, the professor jumped on the opportunity to shift focus. “Ah well, there you are, none of us could possibly have done that. Now if you’d kindly untie me.”

“Not a chance.” Hanna seemed to have got really comfortable with firearms really quickly.

“How about,” suggested Mr Burgh, “we take the blanket off his head, keep him tied up, and we all go together to the drawing room where this can all be sorted out?”

Conceding that the blanket probably wasn’t the one thing standing between them and a grisly death and trying not to think too hard about the fact that there was apparently at least one other killer still loose in the hotel, Liza and Hanna agreed. But they held firm on giving him his gun back and insisted on retying the belt around his wrists. Burgh accepted the compromise on the grounds that, with the deaths of the reverend and the colonel, the list of suspects was getting increasingly short.

“And you don’t think,” suggested the professor—and to Liza, the peevishness that crept into his tone where there would once have been only uncertainty was a giveaway that Burgh unfortunately failed to notice—”that if one of these two was the villain all along that letting them tie me up would be playing straight into their hands?”

Hanna gave him a done-with-your-bullshit look. “Maybe, but I’m the one with the gun.”

“Yes.” The professor’s voice had that musing quality that people used when they wanted to hint that other people should come to the same conclusion they were about to. “And isn’t it interesting that you handle it so confidently, having argued for so long that we shouldn’t be arming ourselves?”

Mr Burgh’s hand drifted to his own weapon, tucked insecurely in one jacket pocket. “Yes, that is suspicious.”

“He came to my room and tried to murder me.” If Hanna hadn’t been obeying the colonel’s rule about only putting your finger on the trigger when you were ready to fire, the tension that ran through her then would have sent a bullet through the professor’s ribcage. “I adjusted.”

Bickering all the way, the little band descended to the drawing room, where Ruby, Emmeline White, Mary-who-worked-there, a very pale Sir Richard, and the footman who Ruby had seduced but whose name she hadn’t bothered to learn were assembled. It was a depressingly small crowd, given where they’d started.

“I say”—Sir Richard reached a trembling hand towards his pistol but mercifully thought better of it—”why is the professor tied up? Why does the Blaine filly have a gun? Bad enough the vicar’s bought it; are we putting the old man down too?”

“The old man,” Hanna explained, “is the mysterious Mr B who has been making this whole experience so shitty for all of us.”

“Allegedly,” added Mr Burgh.

Sir Richard gave the professor a suspicious look. “You did shoot me.”

“An accident,” he protested, his voice rising to that nervous squeak he’d perfected. “I was as shocked as you were.”

Ruby’s eyes were even more piercing than usual. “I suspect Sir Richard would dispute that.”

“Well, either way, I can’t have shot the reverend.” His tone was becoming almost petulant now, but Liza was convinced it was a studied petulance. “Because as you can see, I was being tied up by two misguided women who thought I was a hardened criminal.”

“It does seem a touch not on,” observed Sir Richard.

For a while they all sat in silence. Then Emmeline White asked: “What do we do now?”

“Wait,” replied Mr Burgh. “The roads are open, and the phone lines have come back up, so we should be getting some kind of resolution to this whole mess in a matter of hours.”

“The phones are back?” Ruby’s generally impassive mask slipped just for a moment. “And you didn’t tell us?”

Mr Burgh gave a half-shrug-half-squirm. “I was going to. But then two guns went off.”

A small squabble broke out amongst the survivors. The imminent arrival of the police had shifted the events of the last few days out of the strange snowbound neverspace they had been in and dropped them with a plunk onto muddy reality.

“Fuck.” Hanna turned to Liza, suddenly much less confident about the gun in her hands. “We assaulted a guy.”

“We assaulted a guy who was trying to murder us.”

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