Liza did some calculations in her head. If Mrs Ackroyd had pushed her husband off the balcony, would she have been able to dress, get downstairs, leave the hotel—probably by a side entrance; there was one between the library and the billiard room, although even if she’d gone out the front, the lobby wouldn’t have been manned at that time of night—and loop back in the time it took everybody to gather outside? Almost certainly, especially if she’d dressed quickly, and she had dressed quickly. And nobody would have seen her because their rooms were all on the second floor, and the door to the tower was on the first. “And this was about one o’clock?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Does it normally take you three hours to close up the kitchen?”

Liza let the question hang there. It wasn’t supposed to be a gotcha exactly, as much as she’d have liked, at some point in her life, to gotch somebody. There could easily have been an innocent explanation.

There was no explanation. There was, however, a long pause. The kind of long pause that Liza felt you didn’t normally get from people who were just recalling an innocent detail. “No,” Ms White said at last, “not normally.”

“So, what happened?”

“I went to make a phone call.”

“The phones were down.”

Another pause. Had the chef been caught in a lie, or was she just confused? “Yes, but I—I didn’t know that at the time, so I went back to my room and tried anyway.”

“Who were you calling?”

“My sister.”

“At one in the morning?”

“At midnight. But when I couldn’t get through, I thought it was just the farmhouse, so I went back to the main hotel and tried reception.”

That explained why Ms White hadn’t just stayed in her room, but it had the ring of improvisation to it. Of course, the truth sometimes did. “And then you went back to your room?”

“Yes. And that’s when I saw—what I saw.”

It more or less lined up, and there was nothing else that immediately leapt out. So, Liza thanked Ms White for her time, and Hanna echoed those thanks in a way that was surprisingly un-sarcastic, and the couple retreated.

“Well,” asked Hanna on the way back to their room, “how do you think that went?”

Liza was already tapping notes into her phone as she walked. “Seemed shady to me. Did she seem shady to you? I thought she was being shady.”

“There was an element of shade,” Hanna agreed. “In the non-drag-queen sense. But—” She pushed open the door to their room and stooped to find something on the carpet. “Hold on, what’s this?”

She was holding a piece of hotel notepaper, on which was written, in elegantly nondescript handwriting: I have information. Come to my room—R.

Chapter Ten

Ruby, in the Bedroom, with Suggestions