Liza looked at the DCI with an appropriate level of defiance, given which of them was capable of arresting the other for obstruction of justice. “Will everybody stop insulting my career? Also, I was right.”

“You may well have been,” admitted DCI McManus, “but you can understand why I’m not just taking your word for it. Anyway, once you’d reached that conclusion, Sir Richard proposed the further theory that you were in a”—he turned the page with a barely-disguised sneer—”‘Ten Green Bottles’ situation. Evocative language, Sir Richard.”

“Thank you.” Sir Richard gave the kind of nod you needed centuries of breeding to give. “I’ve a gift.”

“Aye, I might have gone with Ten Little Soldier Boys myself. But whatever you called it, this theory led you to conclude that you were being hunted down by some mysterious villain for crimes that nobody has been particularly able to specify.”

This was, from Liza’s perspective, getting embarrassing. Sir Richard, by contrast, seemed determined to brazen it out. “We think the Ackroyds ran somebody over, the colonel did something in the war, my poor aunt had an illegitimate daughter she cruelly abandoned—”

Mary wasn’t letting that one lie. “Nobody said cruelly. My mum had a perfectly good life, thank you very much.”

“Either way,” the DCI continued, “the next three victims were Lady Tabitha Quirke, stabbed in the library. Then Colonel John Coleman, poisoned with—again, according to the expert testimony of an internet broadcaster—arsenic boiled off from antique flypaper, and finally, the Reverend Thomas Lincoln, who was just shot. Which must have made a nice change for you all.”

“Touch dark, old fellow,” protested Sir Richard.

“Oh yes, and during this time you also decided that it would be a good idea to give everybody a handgun, which is how you”—his eyes flicked briefly and scathingly to Sir Richard—”wound up taking a completely unnecessary bullet to the shoulder. Now, is there anything I’ve missed out?”

The assembly made a series of begrudging no noises.

Looking the opposite of amused, the DCI closed his notebook. “I think you should all know I’ve been on the force for more than twenty years and I have never seen a shitfire like this in all my days. And as for the theories you bag of Sassenach bastards have come up with, do you really think that some Jigsaw Killer-type criminal mastermind has lured the lot of you up here to die in a blizzard?”

Sir Richard made the best apologetic gesture he could with one arm. “All I know,” he said, “is that somebody has killed six people, and they’ve done it without being caught or leaving a trace. Now, if the official force is baffled, well, that will be quite the ordinary state of affairs as far as I’m concerned.”