Page 59 of Murder Most Actual
She sat in the same chair she had been sitting in yesterday, head down as if reading. Even the record from the night before was the same, caught skipping on a high, trilling note that, with repetition and the grim tableau in front of them, soon began to sound like a scream. Lady Tabitha’s body was soaked in blood from the neck down, and the solid platinum poignard lay discarded on the floor beside her.
“I don’t believe it,” said the reverend. “We are being ten-green-bottles-ed.”
Mr Burgh went to find Sir Richard’s party while Liza, feeling a little numb and a little like she was halfway through a tunnel and wishing she’d turned back earlier, pulled out her phone and began photographing the body. As she reached into her pocket, she felt the USB key nestling there like a tiny, unexploded bomb.
“So you don’t think was him, then?” asked Hanna. “Mr B?”
“No.” Reverend Lincoln was grave. Then again, that was in many ways part of his job description. “Why would he?”
Trying very, very hard not to retch, Liza photographed Lady Tabitha’s throat. She’d taken a single stab wound to the neck and, from the way she was sitting, must have died pretty quickly. “Throw us off the scent?” she suggested. “Make us think we’re chasing a serial killer when there are only one or two real targets?”
The reverend seemed to consider this, then dismissed it. “Bit pointless. The more people he kills off, the fewer suspects there are left. Plus, more murders means more evidence when the police get here.”
He did, Liza thought, have a point.
From where the poignard had fallen, Liza estimated that the killer had probably stood to Lady Tabitha’s right and struck down, which probably made them right-handed—not exactly narrowing things down since as far as she could tell nobody in the building was left-handed—and since there didn’t seem to be much sign of a struggle it was probably somebody she didn’t see as a threat. But then, since Lady Tabitha had been from the kind of unflappable aristocratic stock that was bred not to react to any outside stimulus with more than a raised eyebrow and a polite tutting, that was basically everybody.
“My God, Tabitha.” That was Sir Richard, appearing at the door with the rest of his party, his hands pressed over his mouth and his eyes wide. “I knew it. I knew we were being ten-green-bottles-ed. I should have kept a closer eye on the old girl.”
Behind him, the colonel was fixing Mr Burgh with a beady glare. “Now look here, old boy, this clinches it as far as I’m concerned. Some bounder is running around this place picking us off one at a time like lobsters in a tank, and I’m damned if I’m going to sit around and—”
“Please tell me,” said Hanna, “that you are not asking for a gun again?”
Colonel Coleman folded his arms. “I most certainly am. From what we’ve been told we’ve got two days. Well, give me two days with a gun in my hand and a wall at my back, and I’ll be getting out of this mess alive, you mark my words.”
“And what if you’re the killer?” asked Liza.
With a calculating blink, Professor Worth slid his glasses back up his nose. “Well, logically, we already know the killer has accessed the firearms cabinet at least once, and so he—or she—could be reasonably expected to do it again. So in a way, wanting a gun could be seen as evidence of the colonel’s innocence.”
“It’s evidence of his imbalance,” insisted Hanna. “When has putting a firearm into a situation ever made it less dangerous?”
The look in Colonel Coleman’s eyes grew dark. “When the other fellow’s already got one.”
“May I remind everybody”—Reverend Lincoln stood firmly between the bickering crowd in the doorway and Lady Tabitha’s body—”that a woman is dead. Show some respect.”
Being chastised by a vicar was sobering enough. Being chastised by a vicar with a possible background in organised crime was chilling. The intruders quieted down, leaving Sir Richard to spend a little time with his late aunt while Liza finished up her observations. When they were done, Reverend Lincoln said a few words over the body, and two of the staff—now Liza thought about it, the same two staff; they must have been the only ones to get trapped here when the snow hit—came to take her away to wherever Mr Burgh was keeping the long weekend’s many, many victims.
Although there had been three deaths already in the hotel, there was something about Lady Tabitha’s demise that changed the atmosphere. Mr Ackroyd’s death had been an aberration, Belloc’s had been the killer trying to eliminate the one person who could catch them, and Mrs Ackroyd’s had seemed a sort of coda. The three together had represented a scarlet thread of murder through the holiday, but they’d seemed self-contained; whatever danger they represented remote and hypothetical. But now it seemed clear that Sir Richard had been right: some unknown or unseen malefactor was hunting down the guests one by one and dispatching them.
But why?
Back in their room, Liza paced while Hanna sat, and neither made very much progress on either the question of, “What do we do about the incriminating financial information we’ve been given?” or that of, “What do we do about the murders that keep happening?”
“It doesn’t make sense,” said Liza for the fourth time.
“It’s Ruby,” replied Hanna, for the fifth.
Outside, the highlands stretched away into the distance. With the snow melting, the deep greens and vivid purples of the mountains were a sight that on any other day, on any day with fewer corpses in it, would have been a beautiful vista to share with one’s wife. “She didn’t kill Belloc.”
“Details.”
“I still think we might be looking at more than one murderer.”
Hanna sighed. “I know. Vivien kills her husband and Belloc; Mr B kills Vivien. But then who kills Lady Tabitha? Mr B again?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. Hell, for all I know, Mr Ackroyd actually faked his death and he’s lurking somewhere in the grounds waiting to take us all out.”
For a moment, Hanna was silent. “I suppose,” she said. “I suppose we do know that all the people who we’ve found so far are definitely dead?”