He left them sitting in the drawing room and, after a long day of looking at corpses and listening to pistol shots, the Blaines took the opportunity to relax. Liza curled lazily on the end of the sofa, Hanna leaning against her, one arm trailing gently on her knee. If it weren’t for the cold, the gunfire, and the fact that Hanna was carrying a thumb drive full of data that somebody was willing to kill over, it could almost have been a normal evening on a long weekend away from it all.

At least until Reverend Lincoln came back and told them his room had been searched.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Professor Worth, in the Bedroom, with a Pistol

Monday evening

It was subtle. Sufficiently subtle that if Liza had seen the room without its actual owner to point out the changes, she wouldn’t have known anything was wrong.

“That cabinet has been moved,” he explained. “The bed has been made, but not as well as the staff do it, so somebody searched it and put it back in a hurry. Whoever was here, they were thorough and careful but weren’t sure how much time they’d have.”

If you ignored the potentially deadly invasion of privacy, it was a rather nice room. Suitably clerical, with green-and-white striped wallpaper and a vase of daisies, now slightly out of place, on the coffee table. Liza started checking off a list of suspects. Apart from the reverend, the professor had been the first to leave the shooting range, but she and Hanna hadn’t gone that much later and, the moment they had, they’d lost eyes on the rest of the guests. At least they’d more or less ruled out the possibility of Malcom Ackroyd’s headless corpse wandering the corridors riffling through people’s underwear, but besides that, the shortlist of suspects wasn’t looking much shorter than the longlist.

“What do you think they were after?” Liza asked, despite suspecting that she might have a better idea than he did.

“I have no idea. If it was Mr B or his agent, then maybe they think I’ve got some sort of evidence against him, although I don’t know why they would. Or maybe they were planting something?”

Liza shot a glance at her wife. Of course, neither of them knew for absolute certain that the intruder had been looking for the bank details, but if they had been, then the kind thing to do was probably to tell the reverend. But it also was definitely not the safe thing to do. Because he could easily have been doing that old spy trick—reciprocity, Liza thought it was called—where you told somebody something about yourself so they’d be more inclined to tell you something similar about them.