At least she hoped it was unlikely. But now that Sir Richard had put out the idea that one of them was hunting the others, it might only be a matter of time before things got confrontational.

“You might not be the right person to talk to about this,” Reverend Lincoln said eventually. “But you caught the thing with the suicide note, and that makes me think you know what you’re doing.”

Liza half-laughed and was about to say she really didn’t when Hanna cut in with, “She does. At least as much as any of us does. This isn’t exactly a situation you can have experience of.”

They walked a bit further. Whether the vicar was waiting for the house to vanish or just having trouble trusting her, Liza couldn’t tell.

“What do you reckon to Sir Richard’s theory?” he asked at last. “About somebody picking us off?”

Technically, sharing her opinions with strangers was Liza’s whole job. But pontificating into a microphone with a glass of wine in her hand was quite a different situation from telling a man something to his face that, if she was wrong, could lead to one or both of them getting killed. “I don’t know,” she hedged. “I suppose it sort of fits the facts, but I also think that it’s the sort of thing that could fit any set of facts, so I’m a bit suspicious.”

“And the other theory?” The reverend wasn’t looking at her—at either of them. He was just staring at the floor directly in front of him.

“Also possible. I mean, part of me says that if Belloc was good at his job, he wouldn’t have got shot so easily, but he obviously thought he was following somebody.”

They walked a little further, then the vicar said. “What if I—?”

A grim inevitability struck Liza. “Let me stop you there. Are you going to say what if I told you I wasn’t always a vicar?”

Reverend Lincoln gave a rough smile. “So you do know what you’re doing.”

“We’ve seen three bloody corpses in the last two days, and you’ve walked up to all of them without blinking. And you know a lot about guns for a clergyman.”

Again, he was quiet for a while. “I used to work for the man Belloc called Mr B. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Then I got caught, I cut a deal, got a reduced sentence, and found God. In about that order.”

That explained why Ruby said he wasn’t what he seemed. Of course, since he did seem kind of like an ex-con and didn’t seem hugely like a vicar, that wasn’t the biggest hint in the world. “So you are a real clergyman then? You’re not a paid assassin?”

“Yes. Not that you have any real reason to believe me.”