The conversation, like so many inhabitants of the hotel, rather died after that. And Liza found herself coming back to Sir Richard’s theories, and her own, and Belloc’s. It all felt like this impossible tangle. And slimy as Sir Richard sometimes was, Liza didn’t want to believe he’d stabbed his aunt in cold blood. Then again, she didn’t especially want to believe that some random member of the domestic staff was a killer either. For a start, it would have made her feel really silly for focusing so much on the other guests.

And Mr B, whoever they were, almost certainly wasn’t a member of staff. Unless he was Mr Burgh, and that seemed—not impossible, certainly, but improbable; at once too unlikely and too obvious. Not that “too obvious” was real evidence in somebody’s favour—in fact, usually, it was the opposite. And if the opposite was what she should be looking for, then maybe the reverend—the man who’d admitted to a criminal past and shown himself to be comfortable with both guns and corpses—was the one she should be looking at. Or perhaps she was placing undue trust in Ruby. After all, if he was behind it, wouldn’t he have been less open about his past? Or was admitting to a connection to the underworld exactly the kind of thing a criminal mastermind would do? And people would trust a clergyman. He’d as good as admitted that the staff told him things. Might he not have used that to manipulate Vivien Ackroyd into …?

She was getting ahead of herself. Hell, she was getting ahead of everything. As long as everybody stayed together and—much as Hanna would have hated to admit it—kept their guns handy, the odds of being slaughtered in the night were pretty close to zero. And then it was just a matter of waiting out the clock.

Which seemed anticlimactic somehow. It wasn’t as though she expected that she’d be able to round everybody up in the drawing room and do a big speech where she explained how only one person could possibly have been the killer, but having it peter out into, “Well, the cops will sort it out, I guess,” was … actually, it was how it always went, if she was honest. That was part of the reason she and Rachael had decided to go short-form rather than long-form in the first place. Even leaving aside the ethical considerations of digging deep into cold cases as two random strangers, the thought of spending eighteen months mired in a single mystery only to realise—as people always did—that there were no clean solutions or easy answers and no real closure for anybody, was just demoralising.