Eventually the professor woke up for his shift, taking his gun quietly back from her and returning to his seat where he sat watching the room with the air of a stern teacher invigilating an exam. Liza settled down next to Hanna, which wasn’t hugely comfortable on one sofa but had a kind of an intimate necessity to it. Still, she didn’t sleep much. There were too many fragments of ideas rattling around her head. The unknown maid and her role in everything. The reverend and his trust-me-I’m-a-vicar manner. The professor’s butter-wouldn’t-melt timidity that never quite gelled with the way he held a gun. Ruby’s obviously-a-murderer smile. Sir Richard being so very determined to convince everybody there was only one killer.

As the sun started poking intrusively through the drawing room windows the following morning, Mr Burgh and the footman arrived with what remained of breakfast. The guests, bleary-eyed and thoroughly sick of one another, ate in silence, and then, as nobody especially wanted to spend yet more time sitting quietly in the drawing room staring at one another, they trooped upstairs to check on the colonel.

And received no answer.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The Colonel, in his Room, with Breakfast

Wednesday morning

“Let us all remain calm,” said Sir Richard, although he didn’t exactly have much claim to be calmer than anybody else in the group. “There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

Ruby gave him a scornful look. “Given recent events, is the most reasonable explanation not that he has been brutally murdered in the night?”

“We don’t know that.” Liza was doing her best to be reassuring despite the fundamentally un-reassuring situation.

“True.” Ruby gave a dismissive shrug. “He might have been murdered relatively quietly, which would explain why none of us heard anything.”

Sir Richard was backing up across the corridor, a look of steely determination in his eyes.

“What,” asked Hanna, “do you think you’re doing?”

“Charging down the door.”

She stepped theatrically aside. “Then be my guest. Don’t let the fact that there’s a paranoid military officer behind it, who, if he isn’t dead or unconscious, is almost certainly getting ready to shoot anything that comes his way, stop you in the slightest.”

It stopped him in the slightest. “Fair point. What say I go fetch Burgh?”

The reverend and Ruby went with him to ensure an adequate supply of firearms while Hanna and Liza stayed behind with the professor, who was slumped against the wall with a pistol held in his trembling hands.

“I’m really not sure I’m cut out for this,” he said to nobody in particular.

Doing her best to be understanding, Liza settled down next to him. “I don’t think any of us are.”

“Although if you’re not cut out for it, you should probably put down the deadly weapon,” added Hanna.