“It’s a classic for a reason. But really, I think I just want something to—I don’t know, distract me?”

“And here I was feeling flattered.”

Hanna sighed. “You’re also a beautiful, talented, incredibly sexy woman that I desire intensely.”

“And so are you. But we’re in a dead man’s bed.”

With a playful smirk, Hanna slipped off the bed and onto the floor, where she lay invitingly on the carpet. “How about now? You can’t object to defiling a dead man’s floor.”

Sliding across on her stomach, Liza looked down. “I can. For all I know he’s still got his things down there.”

Hanna made a show of sweeping the area in her general vicinity. “Nothing at all. It’s almost as if he was never he—” She stopped. And although it was hard to tell in the dark, she looked almost crestfallen.

“Are you okay?”

“Fine. But if hypothetically, I thought I’d found something under the bed, that would probably derail the whole evening, wouldn’t it?”

The correct answer was, “No.” Or maybe, “Yes, but only because I’m really serious about not wanting to have sex in a dead man’s bedroom.” The honest answer was … “Maybe?”

Hanna held up a small leather-bound notebook. “I think this might have obvious clue written on it in big red letters.”

In hindsight, Liza would be slightly embarrassed at how eagerly she snatched the book from Hanna’s hands.

“I’ll get the lights,” said Hanna resignedly.

Liza sat cross-legged on the bed, took a couple of deep breaths to steady her nerves-slash-moral-qualms, and opened the journal. “This,” she read aloud, “is the how-you-say journal—hang on, he actually wrote how you say?”

“Also,”—leaning on the wall by the light switch, Hanna was looking way more indulgent than she could have done given the circumstances—”he’s writing in English.”

“Yeah, he was definitely a fraud, wasn’t he?”

“Definitely.”

Liza turned her attention back to the journal. “I’m hoping that even if he wasn’t really French, he was really a detective.”

“One of the many things I love about you is your eternal optimism.”

The journal was thick and densely written in neat, almost copperplate script and seemed to contain a great many entries for old cases that Belloc had worked on over the last year or so, many connected to Mr B. According to Belloc’s notes, the man was involved in a quite remarkable number of incidents, including a murder at a golf course, an assassination on an international flight, and any number of deaths at stately homes.