Page 60 of Murder Most Actual
No. No way. This was getting silly. It was one thing to be speculating about a mysterious criminal mastermind hiding amongst a group of eccentric hotel guests, picking them off one at a time in the hopes of either eliminating a traitor or recovering potentially damaging information. It was quite another thing to imagine that people were faking their deaths and … “Where are the bodies being kept again?”
“Search me. We’d have to ask Burgh.”
For a while Liza carried on pacing, because storming downstairs to the manager’s office and demanding to see the corpses seemed to be verging on paranoid behaviour. Then again, if Sir Richard was right, they were trapped in a snowbound hotel with a faceless killer hell-bent on destroying them all. And that shifted the window on what counted as “paranoid” quite a lot.
So storm they did. Well, less storm really, more drizzle, although not before swapping custody of the USB key because carrying it was making Liza incredibly jumpy. They intermittent showers-ed downstairs to the manager’s office and knocked politely on the door. Then they just opened it up and walked in because, with all the shouting already coming from inside, it seemed like interrupting was less rude than eavesdropping.
“For the hundredth time,” Mr Burgh was saying to Colonel Coleman, “no. It’s a bad idea.”
“Bad idea for you, maybe. Not my fault you can’t shoot straight.”
Hanna leaned her head against the door frame. “Tell me this isn’t still about the gun cabinets?”
“Open ‘em up,” Colonel Coleman repeated, “let us all take our chances. It’s two days, you say; that’s enough time for the determined blighter to take down three or four of us easily, and I won’t have one of ‘em be me.”
“And you don’t think having everybody armed might turn the whole situation into—oh, I don’t know, a massive bloodbath?” There was no way Hanna was letting this one go.
“Risk worth taking. That’s the trouble with your generation: won’t take responsibility for yourselves.”
In a desperate plea to defuse the situation, Mr Burgh at last asked Liza and Hanna what they wanted.
At which point Liza realised quite how absurd what they wanted actually was. “We, umm … we wanted to look at the bodies of the four victims so far.”
And to Liza’s relief, Mr Burgh filled in the reasoning for her. “Think there might be more clues?”
“Yes,” she said firmly, nodding in a way that signalled that she was in no way entertaining the theory that one of the bodies was a fake or was secretly wandering around the hotel at night stabbing old women. “It’s definitely about clues.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Liza, in the Stables, with the Bodies
Monday afternoon
The bodies, it turned out, were being kept in the old stables, which hadn’t actually been stables for the best part of a century. The stabling function of the stables had been transferred to the new stables, which were somewhere else on the grounds, and the old stables were a sort of multipurpose leisure/gym space. Of course, now, with the heating turned off and the whole building rapidly cooling to the same freezing temperatures as the world outside, they were a multipurpose leisure/gym/morgue space.
There were, at least, definitely four bodies. The most recent, Lady Tabitha’s, was still lying in an awkward position, which suggested that a reasonable amount of rigor mortis had set in while she was sat in that chair. And after over a hundred episodes of true crime podcasting, Liza really felt she should have been able to remember what that said about the time of death other than, “Probably not that recently, but not, like, ages ago.” Early last night, she thought?
Vivien Ackroyd and Mr Belloc looked much as she remembered them. Paler, perhaps, and she suspected if she turned them over, she’d be able to see blood pooling at their backs— what blood was left in them—but she wasn’t about to start trying. There was playing amateur detective, and then there was interfering with the dead.
At last she came to Malcom Ackroyd. It was the first time she’d had an up-close look at his body, which she’d previously only seen from the back of a crowd. And she was kind of wishing she hadn’t seen it now. The other three victims had suffered horrible injuries, obviously, fatal in fact, and Vivien’s body had reminded her—if a reminder was ever needed—that a gunshot to the head did a lot more than make a picturesque pool of blood trickle out from under your cheek. But a headfirst drop from a balcony, even onto a layer of snow, was something else.
Liza had only seen Malcom Ackroyd once, albeit for the length of a whole dinner, but she’d been mostly trying to avoid eye contact. Still, given the state of his head, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to recognise him even if she’d known him better. The rest of his body was nondescript, a man in his early forties perhaps, no obvious scars or convenient missing digits to say, “Yes, this is definitely the guy it is supposed to be.” He was wearing his wedding ring, and it seemed to fit, but the thing about wedding rings was that they all looked the same, so barring a convenient inscription, there was no clue to be had there. Of course, if this wasn’t Malcom Ackroyd, the only person who could have proved it wasn’t would have been Vivien Ackroyd, and she was lying dead on the next table.
Turning her back on the remains of Malcom Ackroyd, Liza rested her chin on two fingertips and tried to piece together any scenario where this all fit together neatly.
“What if,” she tried, “the reverend was right and the Ackroyds weren’t really a married couple at all? All the arguing was just staged—”
“Felt pretty realistic to me,” said Hanna.
“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t staged. And if it was, maybe they were Mr B’s agents. Only to cover everything up their plan was to kill a whole lot of people and make it look like a …”
“Like a ‘Ten Green Bottles’ situation?” Hanna didn’t sound totally convinced, but she was going with it.
“Exactly,” Liza continued. “And they start by faking Malcom’s death, then they take out Belloc. But then Malcom turns on Vivien because she’s a loose end, and now we’re all chasing ghosts, but actually he’s still out there somewhere …”
Hanna gave her a matter-of-fact stare. “Where?”
“I don’t know.” Liza made a gesture of calculated non-specificity. “In the grounds.”