Page 62 of Murder Most Actual
Hesitantly, the professor raised his hand. “I think I’m willing to give it a try. After all, it isn’t like things can get much worse.”
Having run out of coherent gestures, Hanna was reduced to making vaguely ragey noises. “Yes. Yes, they can. For example, just off the top of my head, we could start shooting at each other.”
Ruby held out her hand. “Just give me a gun. There’s no point arguing—we’ve decided.”
Although he seemed a little peeved to have had his drillmaster moment interrupted, the colonel knew an opportunity when he saw it and started handing out weapons. In the end, everybody in the hotel was armed save Hanna, Liza, and Reverend Lincoln.
Lacking anything pressing to do in the hotel, and morbidly curious as to how this was going to shake down, Liza and Hanna trooped down to the range with the rest of the guests—apart from Reverend Lincoln—and much of the staff.
Now that the firearm genie was out of the securely locked bottle, there seemed little point in interrupting the colonel, who did, at least, seem intent on giving the assembled suspects-slash-potential-victims at least some instruction in gun safety.
“Not going to beat around the bush,” he told them as they lined up in a snow-covered field facing a large, equally snow-covered sandbank. “Guns are dangerous. Only a fool says they aren’t. But we’re all adults, and we can handle dangerous things. Just remember four simple rules and you’ll be fine.”
Privately, Liza doubted that. Or rather, she suspected that following four simple rules when you thought a serial killer was coming to serial kill you was easier said than done.
“Rule one,” the colonel continued. “Always treat a gun as if it is loaded, even if you’re sure it is not. Rule two, never point a gun at anything you don’t want to shoot. Rule three, keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire. Rule four, be sure what you’re shooting at, and what’s behind it.”
That seemed simple enough, and despite Hanna’s strident opposition to packing heat, there was a tiny, treacherous part of Liza that did make her wonder if being armed might not be a comfort.
“Normally,” the colonel continued, “I’d say you should use ear protection in training, but we have a killer on the loose, and any one of you may have to defend yourselves with lethal force at any time. So you need to get used to the noise.”
If Hanna was going to say anything in response to the colonel’s claims about the urgent need to deploy lethal force, they were quickly drowned out by the sounds of gunfire.
After the first round of shooting, the professor decided that it was rather too noisy for him, even if it might save his life one day, and set off back to the hotel for a stiff drink. Although he did, Liza couldn’t help noticing, keep the gun. Liza and Hanna didn’t last much longer. Whatever brief inkling Liza might have felt that a handgun might be useful dried up quickly. There was just no way a group of relative strangers all earnestly preparing for the moment they needed to shoot each other in the head could be anything but a disaster.
Their ears still ringing, they walked back up to the hotel and settled down in the drawing room, where they found Reverend Lincoln sipping coffee and tapping something into his phone.
The Blaines settled onto the sofa opposite him, and Liza was slightly reassured to realise that they were sitting closer together than they had a couple of days ago, and that even with the threat of death there was less tension in the air.
“Planning a sermon, Reverend?” asked Liza, hoping that it wasn’t an insulting way to open a conversation.
“Yes, actually. I’d be a pretty awful vicar if I couldn’t get at least a couple of Sundays’ worth of material out of this experience.”
The sounds of gunshots were still echoing up from the grounds, although in a way that was almost comforting. If people were still practicing shooting, that suggested nobody had been shot yet. Of course, it could only be a matter of time.
A thought wormed its way into Liza’s brain and, although she wasn’t really meaning to pry, she let it come out of her mouth. “I’d have thought you’d want a gun yourself,” she said. “If you’re worried somebody’s coming after you.”
“I’ve left that part of my life behind.” The reverend typed a few more thoughts into his phone. “If that gets me killed, so be it. But I don’t think a gun would have saved Malcom Ackroyd from falling to his death from a balcony, or Belloc from walking into a trap.”
“At fucking last.” Hanna leaned back on the sofa. “I was beginning to think I was the only one around here with any sense.”
Reverend Lincoln shrugged. “If I was sensible I’d have taken a weapon. They’ve saved my life before. But I won’t risk harming another person by accident, and I think this hotel is becoming a place where accidents are very, very likely. Now, if you ladies will excuse me, I should probably retire. The guns are beginning to quiet, and I might actually be able to sleep.”
He left them sitting in the drawing room and, after a long day of looking at corpses and listening to pistol shots, the Blaines took the opportunity to relax. Liza curled lazily on the end of the sofa, Hanna leaning against her, one arm trailing gently on her knee. If it weren’t for the cold, the gunfire, and the fact that Hanna was carrying a thumb drive full of data that somebody was willing to kill over, it could almost have been a normal evening on a long weekend away from it all.
At least until Reverend Lincoln came back and told them his room had been searched.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Professor Worth, in the Bedroom, with a Pistol
Monday evening
It was subtle. Sufficiently subtle that if Liza had seen the room without its actual owner to point out the changes, she wouldn’t have known anything was wrong.
“That cabinet has been moved,” he explained. “The bed has been made, but not as well as the staff do it, so somebody searched it and put it back in a hurry. Whoever was here, they were thorough and careful but weren’t sure how much time they’d have.”
If you ignored the potentially deadly invasion of privacy, it was a rather nice room. Suitably clerical, with green-and-white striped wallpaper and a vase of daisies, now slightly out of place, on the coffee table. Liza started checking off a list of suspects. Apart from the reverend, the professor had been the first to leave the shooting range, but she and Hanna hadn’t gone that much later and, the moment they had, they’d lost eyes on the rest of the guests. At least they’d more or less ruled out the possibility of Malcom Ackroyd’s headless corpse wandering the corridors riffling through people’s underwear, but besides that, the shortlist of suspects wasn’t looking much shorter than the longlist.