“I say”—Sir Richard reached a trembling hand towards his pistol but mercifully thought better of it—”why is the professor tied up? Why does the Blaine filly have a gun? Bad enough the vicar’s bought it; are we putting the old man down too?”

“The old man,” Hanna explained, “is the mysterious Mr B who has been making this whole experience so shitty for all of us.”

“Allegedly,” added Mr Burgh.

Sir Richard gave the professor a suspicious look. “You did shoot me.”

“An accident,” he protested, his voice rising to that nervous squeak he’d perfected. “I was as shocked as you were.”

Ruby’s eyes were even more piercing than usual. “I suspect Sir Richard would dispute that.”

“Well, either way, I can’t have shot the reverend.” His tone was becoming almost petulant now, but Liza was convinced it was a studied petulance. “Because as you can see, I was being tied up by two misguided women who thought I was a hardened criminal.”

“It does seem a touch not on,” observed Sir Richard.

For a while they all sat in silence. Then Emmeline White asked: “What do we do now?”

“Wait,” replied Mr Burgh. “The roads are open, and the phone lines have come back up, so we should be getting some kind of resolution to this whole mess in a matter of hours.”

“The phones are back?” Ruby’s generally impassive mask slipped just for a moment. “And you didn’t tell us?”

Mr Burgh gave a half-shrug-half-squirm. “I was going to. But then two guns went off.”

A small squabble broke out amongst the survivors. The imminent arrival of the police had shifted the events of the last few days out of the strange snowbound neverspace they had been in and dropped them with a plunk onto muddy reality.

“Fuck.” Hanna turned to Liza, suddenly much less confident about the gun in her hands. “We assaulted a guy.”

“We assaulted a guy who was trying to murder us.”

The professor clung to his act with infuriating consistency. “I was not.”

“I don’t know what you’re worried about,” said Mary-who-worked-there. “You’re a bunch of rich tourists from the south. It’s us local plebs who’ll take the fall for this.” She shot a cold look at Sir Richard. “You see if we don’t.”

Mr Burgh gave a sorry-for-interrupting cough. “Can we not just assume that the police will sort it all out, and that if we haven’t done anything we’ll be okay?”

A range of laughs answered him.

“Well,” said Sir Richard, “the police are fearfully good chaps, but they’re not always … entirely on the ball about this sort of thing.”