Being chastised by a vicar was sobering enough. Being chastised by a vicar with a possible background in organised crime was chilling. The intruders quieted down, leaving Sir Richard to spend a little time with his late aunt while Liza finished up her observations. When they were done, Reverend Lincoln said a few words over the body, and two of the staff—now Liza thought about it, the same two staff; they must have been the only ones to get trapped here when the snow hit—came to take her away to wherever Mr Burgh was keeping the long weekend’s many, many victims.

Although there had been three deaths already in the hotel, there was something about Lady Tabitha’s demise that changed the atmosphere. Mr Ackroyd’s death had been an aberration, Belloc’s had been the killer trying to eliminate the one person who could catch them, and Mrs Ackroyd’s had seemed a sort of coda. The three together had represented a scarlet thread of murder through the holiday, but they’d seemed self-contained; whatever danger they represented remote and hypothetical. But now it seemed clear that Sir Richard had been right: some unknown or unseen malefactor was hunting down the guests one by one and dispatching them.

But why?

Back in their room, Liza paced while Hanna sat, and neither made very much progress on either the question of, “What do we do about the incriminating financial information we’ve been given?” or that of, “What do we do about the murders that keep happening?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Liza for the fourth time.

“It’s Ruby,” replied Hanna, for the fifth.

Outside, the highlands stretched away into the distance. With the snow melting, the deep greens and vivid purples of the mountains were a sight that on any other day, on any day with fewer corpses in it, would have been a beautiful vista to share with one’s wife. “She didn’t kill Belloc.”

“Details.”

“I still think we might be looking at more than one murderer.”

Hanna sighed. “I know. Vivien kills her husband and Belloc; Mr B kills Vivien. But then who kills Lady Tabitha? Mr B again?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. Hell, for all I know, Mr Ackroyd actually faked his death and he’s lurking somewhere in the grounds waiting to take us all out.”

For a moment, Hanna was silent. “I suppose,” she said. “I suppose we do know that all the people who we’ve found so far are definitely dead?”

No. No way. This was getting silly. It was one thing to be speculating about a mysterious criminal mastermind hiding amongst a group of eccentric hotel guests, picking them off one at a time in the hopes of either eliminating a traitor or recovering potentially damaging information. It was quite another thing to imagine that people were faking their deaths and … “Where are the bodies being kept again?”