They lingered for a while, not quite sure how to grill either of the players on their whereabouts last night and/or if they were a criminal genius. But there was a … not lead exactly, more a thread, that Liza wanted to follow up on. So she and Hanna waited and watched while balls clicked and went into and out of pockets until finally, realising that there was never going to be a perfect moment to start throwing suspicion around, she launched straight in.

“I don’t suppose you remember Vivien Ackroyd having any kind of argument with your aunt, do you?”

Sir Richard stood back and chalked his cue. “Come again?”

In a hole and with no option but to dig, Liza dug. “I heard a … Somebody mentioned to me that your aunt had a fight with Vivien Ackroyd yesterday. I was wondering if you knew what it was about.”

Liza would have loved to pretend that she could read faces like the quirky detective in a police procedural. That she could look at somebody and go, “Dammit, Malone, I know you’re hiding something.” She couldn’t, of course, but she did get the sense that this was news to Sir Richard.

“I understand the impulse, old girl,” he said after what Liza was convinced was a moment’s incomprehension. “But given how it went the last time, do you not think that maybe you should back off on this one?”

“How it went last time”—Hanna stepped forward, interposing herself between Liza and Sir Richard—”was that Vivien Ackroyd was upset and then, for totally unrelated reasons, somebody else murdered her.”

“Still means she wound up dead,” the colonel pointed out.

“Yeah, by coincidence.” Hanna was giving him a look that was usually withering, but which he totally blanked.

By the table, Sir Richard bent over to line up another shot, knocking a ball into another ball in a way that was apparently good. “If you wanted to know, you’d have to ask Aunt Tabitha yourself. I think she’s in the library. Just don’t go giving her a heart attack—it’d be deuced inconvenient.”

Before Hanna could make an unhelpfully sarcastic reply, Liza gave him a quick, “Thanks, we won’t,” and the two of them ducked out into the corridor.