“Right now, it’s not looking great for anyone. Which means in a way it’s not looking great for us.” Sweeping everything into a new pile, she wrote out another card for Mrs Ackroyd’s death. Then she stopped and looked up. Hanna was still sitting there patiently, and watching Liza with more attention than she had in … God, was it years? “You’re still okay doing this? I know it’s a bit of a rabbit hole and all we’ve really got to so far is might be Ruby or might be anybody.”

“No, it’s fine. And—I don’t know, I guess it’s good to be part of it.”

“Sure?” Liza looked sceptical. “I know you find some bits of this gross.”

“Well …” An apologetic expression flickered across Hanna’s face. “Some bits of it are. You’ve had some really graphic stuff on the kitchen table some evenings. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to share it with you.”

“Thanks, umm … that’s … sweet.” But Liza wasn’t quite sure how to handle sweet at the moment, so she shuffled through the notepaper and sorted everybody into their appropriate groups. “For Mrs Ackroyd, there was a fairly long window between the gunshot and the knock at the door, but I don’t think it was long enough for anybody in that group to have shot Vivien, framed the scene to look like a suicide, then gone back to their rooms. But the professor and the colonel were already out in the hotel, so either of them could have gone up and back in the time, and we didn’t find Ruby at all.”

Hanna scanned the assembled stacks of paper. “Right, so who do we have in the definitely innocent column?”

“Nobody.” That wasn’t very encouraging. “Well, nobody is definitely innocent of all three killings and stealing the gun. Sir Richard, Lady Tabitha, and Reverend Lincoln are in the clear for the second two murders. Professor Worth and Ruby are in the clear for Belloc, and Burgh couldn’t have taken the gun from the bush or shot Vivien. So that means we should probably be watching the colonel and, um, the whole of the domestic staff.”

“It seems really unlikely that the footman has randomly decided to become a serial killer,” Hanna pointed out.

“True, just trying to avoid boxing us into a corner. And there’s also the possibility that it’s more than one person.”

“You think two people randomly decided to become serial killers?”