Sighing, Liza settled herself into her chair. “Just give me the information and get out. My wife is coming back soon and I’d rather she didn’t find you in our bed.”

“It might be too late. She might smell my perfume.”

“Just. Give. Me. The. Information.”

With a sigh of her own, Ruby rose like Venus from the waves, fished a tiny USB flash drive from about her person, and pressed it into Liza’s hand. “You,” she said, “are perilously close to being a bore. Keep this hidden. I’m hoping that until he has it, Mr B won’t be able to kill me and so it’s important that he not know where it is. Also, if he does, he might kill you.”

“Then why should I keep it?”

Ruby smiled. “You probably shouldn’t. But somehow, I think you will.” She bent down and kissed Liza on the cheek. “I’ll see myself out.”

And she did. Leaving Liza sitting there staring at a tiny USB drive that might have been full of total nonsense, or might contain the scoop of a lifetime, or might just get her horribly killed.

After about two minutes of thought, she plugged it into her laptop, scanned it for malware, and then looked.

As it turned out, an Art History degree and a career in true-crime podcasting did not make Liza extraordinarily well qualified to decide if a set of meaningless names and numbers was really the key to unravelling a vast criminal empire, or just a shiny object aimed at distracting her from her investigations. And she wasn’t sure which version of events made her seem most arrogant. Either she thought she was an integral part of taking down the mysterious Mr B, or else she thought she was so great at solving murders that the killer had fabricated an elaborate ruse just to throw her off the scent. Probably it was neither. Probably Ruby was scamming her because she was a habitual scammer, and Mr Ackroyd had just been killed by his wife because it was always the spouse, and Belloc had just been killed by whoever killed Mr Ackroyd because he’d been trying to catch them. And Vivien had been killed by …

That was the one that stuck. If it had only been the first two, then Liza could just about have written off all the stuff about a mysterious mastermind in the hotel pulling everyone’s strings as the ramblings of a dead man with an obviously fake accent. But somebody had killed Vivien Ackroyd—somebody with a mind convoluted enough to want to make it look as though she’d killed herself. Somebody, if Liza were being ultra-ultra-paranoid, with such an inherent flair for the dramatic that they’d even been unable to resist leaving the classic “the last thing in her hand should have been the gun” clue just to see if anybody spotted it.