Once at the hotel, it was simple: Ida would kill Harriet, Richard would kill Ida, and I would kill Richard. Each killer, when his or her turn came, would place a cufflink bearing Patrick Ive’s initials in the victim’s mouth and set up the crime scene to look identical to the other two, so that the police would take for granted that the same killer had committed all three . . . deaths. I was about to say murders, but they weren’t. They were executions. You see, it occurred to us that after people are executed there must be a procedure, mustn’t there? The prison staff must do the same thing with every body of an executed criminal, we thought. It was Richard’s idea that the bodies should be laid out in the way that they were—respectfully and with dignity. Ceremonially—that was Richard’s word.

Since two of the victims, Ida and Harriet, would have given their home addresses to the hotel as Great Holling, we knew that it would not take the police long to go to the village, ask around, and begin to suspect Nancy. Who else was so obvious a suspect? Sammy could pretend to have seen her running out of the hotel after the third murder, and dropping the three room keys on the ground. That’s right: three room keys. Richard’s key was part of the plan too, you see. Ida was supposed to take Harriet’s key to her own room after killing Harriet and locking Harriet’s door. Richard was supposed to do the same: take Harriet’s and Ida’s keys with him when he left and locked Ida’s room after killing Ida. Then I would kill Richard, lock his door, take all three keys, meet Sammy outside the Bloxham and give the keys to him. Sammy would then sneak them somehow into Nancy Ducane’s home, or, as it turned out, her coat pocket one day on the street, in order to incriminate her.