“Of all of us,” Liza pointed out in the gentlest way she could manage, because starting a long debate about privilege and the legal system wasn’t the way she wanted to spend however much time she had left before they were all killed or arrested, “I sort of think you’re the one with least to worry about on that front.”

“You say that, but my own damned brother was falsely accused of murder a few years back. Second case I ever got involved with.”

Ruby gave him a cold smile. She, Liza noticed, still had her pistol ready. “Well then, you’ll surely be able to clear your name if it comes to it.”

“Well, maybe.” Sir Richard stiffened, then he winced as the gesture aggravated his wound. “But a chap shouldn’t have to clear a chap’s name at all in an ideal world.” For a moment he looked thoughtful. “Of course, it would probably help all of us if we could agree on a … how best to put it … a consistent version of events.”

Hanna, having now set the gun aside and visibly paling, gave him a sceptical look. “What do you mean, ‘Consistent version of events’?”

“He means pin it on me,” said Mary with surprisingly little rancour.

“Weren’t you in the kitchens when the detective was shot?” asked Emmeline White. “That means you can’t have been the one who killed him, at least.”

“Well, leaving that little detail aside,”—the expression that crossed Sir Richard’s face was bordering on sly—”I remain a champion of the ‘Ten Green Bottles’ theory.”

“That somebody lured you all here to kill you?” clarified the chef.

“Exactly. And clearly quite a lot of rather terrible things have happened over the past few days, and it seems to me that the most likely explanation is that we’re dealing with a … a vengeance-driven vigilante who has decided that each of us is guilty of some kind of terrible crime and picked us off one at a time.”

Emmeline White nodded. “Make sense.”

“Does it?” asked Liza. Because to her, at least, it made very much the opposite of sense.

“Well, the reverend clearly had a dark past,” said Ruby. “And who knows what the colonel did in the war?”

It probably wouldn’t help to argue. The police would draw their own conclusions anyway, and if people wanted to spin fantasies it wasn’t really Liza’s business to stop them. “And what about Belloc, or Lady Tabitha? What about the Ackroyds?”

Sir Richard gave a little cough. “Not wishing to speak ill of the dead, but Aunt Tabitha had a very storied history. And her own husband did peg out under rather suspicious circumstances. Now, I would never cast aspersions on family, of course, but then I’m not a mysterious avenging angel.”

“And she did have an illegitimate daughter,” added Mary, apparently hoping the mysterious avenger narrative would play to her advantage.