Page 55 of Murder Most Actual
And she did. Leaving Liza sitting there staring at a tiny USB drive that might have been full of total nonsense, or might contain the scoop of a lifetime, or might just get her horribly killed.
After about two minutes of thought, she plugged it into her laptop, scanned it for malware, and then looked.
As it turned out, an Art History degree and a career in true-crime podcasting did not make Liza extraordinarily well qualified to decide if a set of meaningless names and numbers was really the key to unravelling a vast criminal empire, or just a shiny object aimed at distracting her from her investigations. And she wasn’t sure which version of events made her seem most arrogant. Either she thought she was an integral part of taking down the mysterious Mr B, or else she thought she was so great at solving murders that the killer had fabricated an elaborate ruse just to throw her off the scent. Probably it was neither. Probably Ruby was scamming her because she was a habitual scammer, and Mr Ackroyd had just been killed by his wife because it was always the spouse, and Belloc had just been killed by whoever killed Mr Ackroyd because he’d been trying to catch them. And Vivien had been killed by …
That was the one that stuck. If it had only been the first two, then Liza could just about have written off all the stuff about a mysterious mastermind in the hotel pulling everyone’s strings as the ramblings of a dead man with an obviously fake accent. But somebody had killed Vivien Ackroyd—somebody with a mind convoluted enough to want to make it look as though she’d killed herself. Somebody, if Liza were being ultra-ultra-paranoid, with such an inherent flair for the dramatic that they’d even been unable to resist leaving the classic “the last thing in her hand should have been the gun” clue just to see if anybody spotted it.
No. That was too much. Sure, they were in a snowbound castle in the Scottish Highlands with two amateur detectives (one deceased), somebody who appeared to be an actual duchess, a vicar with a shady past, and a femme fatale who’d just given Liza the McGuffin from a mid-2000s corporate thriller, but that didn’t mean common sense had gone totally out the window.
Liza had been staring at the meaningless numbers for a couple of minutes when she started to wonder if Hanna shouldn’t be back by now. And when she’d spent another couple of minutes not staring at the meaningless numbers because she was too worried, she was forced to conclude that Hanna should definitely be back by now. She closed the laptop and went to the door, then closed the door and went back to the laptop, because while everything else in this hotel might have been dissolving into irrationality, she just about had it together enough to realise that if she left and Hanna came back, they’d get into an endless loop of searching the hotel for each other and stressing out needlessly.
It was going to be fine. It was going to be fine. It was going to be fine.
She shouldn’t have let Hanna go off alone. Not when whoever was out there was still out there. And sure, the mysterious murderer’s MO so far hadn’t involved ambushing people while they were walking around the hotel, but so far none of the murders had been that similar to each other. Which—well, what did that mean? Did it make them more likely to be the work of one killer, or less likely? You’d think a single killer would kill the same way. Unless … what if Sir Richard was right and it was some kind of avenging angel serving up ironic punishments? What if in the mind of the killer, Malcom Ackroyd had been, like, getting above himself and heading for a fall? And Belloc had been overconfident and too convinced that nobody could hurt the master detective? If she or Hanna were going to get ironic-punishment-murdered then this felt like a good time for it to happen. Do you see, you weren’t there for your wife emotionally, and so you got murdered when you weren’t there for her physically. It was exactly the kind of thing that …
No. No. It wasn’t the kind of thing that happened at all. She was just getting in her head and—
The door burst open; a figure—a man—burst through; and Liza grabbed the nearest object she could grab and swung with all her strength.
Chapter Twenty
Hanna, in the Bedroom, with the Numbers
Sunday evening
“Ow!” yelped Burgh as the lamp collided with his shoulder.
It turned out that all Liza’s strength wasn’t that much, especially not when her chosen weapon was tied to the wall by an electrical cord that came very rapidly to the end of its extension.
Hanna followed quickly after him, brandishing a small fire extinguisher. “All right, you murdering piece of shit, what have you done with my wi—oh.”
Liza stared, sighed with palpable relief, and then waved. “Hi.”
“Thank fuck you’re not dead.”
“Right back atcha.”
As Liza watched, Hanna’s demeanour shifted from thankful to furious. “What were you thinking coming in here alone? Were you trying to give me a heart attack?”
Explaining about Ruby and the mysterious finance numbers in front of Mr Burgh seemed like an extremely poor choice. And unfortunately, it seemed a slightly poorer choice than just letting her wife think she’d been an inconsiderate jerk. “Sorry. I … got curious?”
Hanna dropped hard onto the bed in an I-give-up sort of way. “You got curious? You got fucking curious? You are un-be-fucking—”
“I think I might go,” said Mr Burgh. “I’m glad everything is resolved safely, and”—he glanced nervously between the couple, rubbing his shoulder somewhat ruefully—”and I hope you both have a good evening.”
Once he’d scuttled out the door, head down and doing his best not to look back, Hanna finished her thought. “—lieveable. Just when I’d thought we—”
“ItwasRuby,” said Liza, probably faster than was helpful.
“It was what?”
“Ruby. She was here. She told me to come in, so I did, and—”
It turned out this explanation was less mollifying than Liza had hoped. “The woman we think is likely to be a murderer invited you to come and be alone in a room with her and you said yes?”
“Well, I was alone in a cupboard with her, and she didn’t kill me then, so …”
“Pro tip. When your wife is yelling at you, don’t remind her of that time you were locked in a cupboard with another woman.”