“But I have him at last,” Liza continued. “His minions, they have betrayed him, as Belloc always knew they would—fuck, he even does the third-person thing in writing—and he has been forced to come, himself, to Scotland, and that is where Belloc will catch him. He’s saying him a lot. Do you think he knows for certain Mr B is actually a man, or do you think—?”

“Do I think he’s just the kind of guy who assumes a master criminal has to fit into quite a narrow definition of masculinity?” The look on Hanna’s face already answered the question, but she answered it aloud anyway. “Yeah, I think he was exactly that sort.”

“So, nothing so far we don’t already know.”

“No.”

It was a bit of a disappointment, but probably not a surprise. She flipped a couple of pages ahead. “There has been a murder most wicked, and Belloc is sure that Monsieur B was behind it. It doesn’t say why he’s sure.”

“Did he ever?” asked Hanna

Liza carried on reading. “His goal, I am convinced, is to create the screen of smoke behind which he can hide the murder of his true target, the one who has betrayed him. That makes more sense, and it lines up with Sir Richard’s theory that we’re being picked off.” She turned back to the journal. “This he has done before, with the murders in Andover and Bexhill.”

“Andover and Bexhill?” It was strange how naturally Hanna asked the question, in a way she never would have before they’d come to Scotland.

“Sounds a bit familiar, but it’s not like we’ve done an episode about every murder.” Liza trawled her memory for similar incidents. “There was something in the eighties or nineties where a guy killed a bunch of … bank managers, I think? And did it up as this whole big anti-capitalist thing when he was actually just looking for a way to off his brother-in-law.”

Hanna shuddered. “That seems really fucking cold.”

“Some people are. It’s not common. Something I keep talking to Rachael about is that I worry we cherry-pick interesting cases too much and give a distorted impression of what crime is like. But the weird stuff does sometimes happen.”

“So, Belloc would have agreed with Sir Richard.” From the way Hanna said it, it seemed like she considered this less a question of great minds thinking alike than one of fools seldom differing. “That might just make them both wrong in the same direction.”

There was that. Flipping over a couple of pages, Liza carried on consulting the book. “He seems to have narrowed it down to four suspects.”

“All men?”

“Yes.”

“Figures.”