Page 56 of Murder Most Actual
Probably a good call. “Sorry, sorry. I just mean—I thought it was pretty safe and she probably didn’t want to kill me, and if she did, I’d probably be dead already, and also she gave me these.” Liza spun her laptop around and showed Hanna the numbers.
“I don’t care what she—hey, are those what I think they are?”
“What do you think they are?”
“Offshore bank accounts.” Hanna sat down next to Liza and began to read closely through the lines of figures. “Cayman Islands, I think.”
“You’ve seen these before?”
Hanna nodded. “Not these specific numbers, but yeah, I spend all day moving rich people’s money around. I know a dodgy bank account when I see one.”
It took a while for Hanna to look in detail through the data, and while she waited, Liza set her phone to record and quietly dictated a summary of the day’s events.
“This is … this is very complete,” Hanna said at last. “It’s not just account details; there’s transactions, dates of payments … This could be big. If it’s real, it could be nuclear for whoever it’s about.”
“And if it’s not real?”
“Then it’s a very elaborate bluff.”
Putting her phone away, Liza came back to sit by Hanna’s side. “Elaborate enough that it’s probably not one?”
Hanna shook her head, but in a confused way, not a no way. “I can’t say. This is all so … like, if she was telling the truth, this is what I’d expect to see, but how much effort would you go through to get away with murder?”
It was a fair question. Although if getting away with murder was Ruby’s plan, surely keeping her head down and being quiet was a better way to do it.
For a moment, Hanna looked back at the data. Then a thought seemed to strike her. “Also, if it is real … this is incredibly fucking dangerous.”
Aaaand there was also that. Liza nodded. “Umm, yes.”
“Fuck.”
Fuck was about the size of it. “We could just throw it away?”
“Maybe, but—” Hanna’s lips were pursed thoughtfully. “What if, and I can’t believe I’m living in the universe where I’m just talking about this casually like it’s just a thing, what if Mr B finds out we were given this and tries to get it from us, and we’ve lost it?”
“Then we say, ‘Sorry, lost it’?”
“And he says, ‘Okay, in that case, can I interest you in today’s special offer on being horribly tortured?’”
Liza shuddered. “Is horribly tortured on the table?”
“You’re the true crime expert, you tell me.”
Ah. Yes. Thinking about it, Liza had studied a lot of this kind of criminal in her time, and being horribly tortured was very much on the table. It was almost the whole table. “Well, fuck.”
“So I think we should keep it,” Hanna said. “Hide it. Don’t make a copy of it. And really, really hope nobody comes looking for it.”
It was a plan.
Okay, it wasn’t a plan, really; it was wishful thinking. But it was what they had to go on.
The question then became how exactly to conceal the USB drive. Keeping it on either of their persons seemed dangerous, but keeping it in their room—which they often left unattended, which it was abundantly clear an only moderately determined intruder could gain access to with ease, and which the staff came into daily to clean—seemed foolish. In the end they agreed to pass it between them so that at least that way, one of them wasn’t shouldering all the responsibility, and to keep it in the little safe in their room while they were asleep. They’d briefly flirted with the idea of hiding it somewhere completely random around the hotel, or burying it somewhere in the gardens, but letting it out of their sight also seemed like a bad plan when they were dealing with an unknown criminal mastermind.
Once they’d finished deciding how to dispose of the documents, they found it was nearly time to go down to dinner—a reduced menu again, but at least no new absences this time. After that, the rest of the day passed in a kind of quiet tension. Sir Richard and the colonel had gone back to the billiard room where, it seemed, Sir Richard had still yet to win a game. The professor and the vicar had gone for a walk together in the grounds, while Ruby had vanished on errands of her own, leaving Liza and Hanna to slope back to their room. There they stuck with the plan, locking the USB drive that might get them both killed in the little safe that they were pretty sure was meant to be for jewellery and credit cards rather than a lethal weapon against organised crime. Then they sat for a while just staring at it like it was a wasp at a picnic and they were both worried that if they lost track of it, they’d get stung.
Eventually, they managed to tear their eyes off the box of doom, and having nowhere much else to look with night closing in and the highlands becoming, once more, just a suggestion of mountains in the dark, they looked at each other.
“I’m sorry I yelled,” said Hanna.