Across the courtyard, there was the soft sound of the front door closing. And there was Ruby, pausing for a moment, framed by the doorway with snow swirling about her. “Found something?”

“Maybe?” The moment she’d spoken, Liza wondered if she should have let somebody else answer. It was probably best not to be too eager to interact with the immaculate femme fatale. “I think we’ve found where the gun was hidden.”

“Was hidden?” Ruby sashayed towards them, her dress scuffing the snow up behind her.

“Somebody took it,” explained Liza. “At least, I think that’s what happened.”

“It might have been a badger,” explained Mr Burgh.

Hanna was staring at Ruby suspiciously. And not you-tried-to-seduce-my-wife suspiciously. “Aren’t you supposed to be with the colonel and Reverend Lincoln?”

The insouciant way Ruby shrugged in response must have taken hours of practice. “Didn’t work out. The colonel wanted to stop searching and try to get into the gun room, the vicar wasn’t having it, they split up, and I decided I’d rather be alone by myself than alone with a strange man who might be a murderer.”

That made things more complicated. Liza had been working with the assumption that everybody was accounted for. “How long ago was that?”

“Ten minutes, perhaps twenty. They weren’t completely hopeless.”

Still, Liza reflected, plenty of time for any one of them to find and retrieve a gun. “We should get everybody back together. Tell them what we know.”

“Do we know anything?” Hanna asked, then seemed to regret her tone. “I mean, I’m not saying—I just—we should be careful.”

“Somebody is running around this hotel with a loaded revolver,” Ruby pointed out. “Being too careful about finding and stopping them might get us killed.”

She had a point, although Mrs Ackroyd hadn’t struck Liza as the hardened killer type. Then again, if there was one thing she’d learned from over a hundred episodes of Murder Most Actual, it was that hardened killers didn’t always look like hardened killers. And if there was another thing she’d learned, it was that most murders weren’t committed by hardened killers at all. “Right,” she said, “how about we round everybody up, get together in the lounge, and talk it out?”

“Everybody,” began Ruby, “including the woman you believe threw her husband off a balcony and then went on to murder a private detective in cold blood?”

Liza thought about this. “Actually, I think so. I don’t see any point in talking about this behind her back. We’d have to go and confront her anyway.”

“Might be good to work out what we’re going to say first?” suggested Hanna. “Otherwise it’ll just be everybody shouting at once.”

Ruby’s lips curled into a smile. “Come now, I’m sure Mr Burgh can manage a few talkative guests. Besides, if she suspects something is up, she might run.”