“There’s an en suite. Besides, chap’d have to be pretty dashed lucky to catch me just at the moment I was visiting the little boys’ room.”

Sir Richard gave a gallows chuckle. “Not if he was coming for me. The pipes in my room make a fearful racket whenever you run the shower.”

“Perhaps”—Ruby’s flawless eyebrow curved into a flawless arch—”just don’t shower for a day or so.”

“Good God, madam.” The look on Sir Richard’s face suggested he couldn’t have been more appalled if she’d suggested he relieve himself in his own undergarments. “What do you take me for?”

“Somebody who wants to live,” she suggested calmly.

Reverend Lincoln raised his hands in a valiant but probably doomed effort to make peace. “Can we at least agree that the colonel is well, and that we are doing no further good standing outside bickering?”

“Quite right,” said the voice from within. “Sod off the lot of you. Got no need to be hanging about here.”

So off they sodded and, none of them being especially keen to follow the colonel’s advice and barricade themselves in a bedroom, they made their way to the drawing room. There they arranged themselves across the various armchairs and sofas, Ruby seating herself at a piano which she emphatically did not play. For a while nobody spoke, because it was hard to make small talk when three of you were armed and one of you was almost certainly a serial killer.

Eventually, Sir Richard decided he’d gone long enough without hearing his own voice. “Of course, the downside of the colonel being holed up like that is that we’ve only got his word that he’s actually doing it.”

“If you’re going to suggest,” said Hanna, “that what we just heard was an elaborately staged tape recording, then I’ll—well, I won’t do anything because I’m trapped in a murder hotel and can’t, but I’ll be kind of annoyed.”

“Nothing like that. Just that if I was him, and I was the murderer, and I’m neither—”

“So you say,” interjected Ruby.

“Well, I’m definitely not him and if I was the murderer I wouldn’t tell you. And either way, my point is that if I was the murderer, then I might think it was a jolly good idea to lock myself in my room and then get you all to lock yourselves in your rooms so that I could go around the whole place without being spotted and pick everybody off one at a time.”

It was, Liza had to admit, a distinct possibility. “But you’d also be telling them to hunker down and point guns at the door.”

Sir Richard smiled. “And as I’m sure your lovely wife would remind us—”

“Her lovely wife has a name,” said her lovely wife.