Page 88 of Murder Most Actual
And there she was. Everybody in the room was staring at her and either expecting her to have answers for them, or worse, expecting her to not have answers for them and waiting to see her fail. But this was … this was it. It was the end, the summing-up. It was … almost exciting. And terrifying. And she could do this. No, she could nail this. And nobody was going to stop her.
Shit, why was nobody stopping her?
“Right,” Liza began. “So, first off, as much as I hate it when people have a go at my job, the DCI is right. I’m just a podcaster. I’ve never solved a crime in my life; I’ve only ever read about other people solving them, and I’m not claiming to have all the answers here. But six people are dead, and I … I don’t know, I guess I just feel I owe it to them to at least put together what I can for when the real detectives take over.”
“Flattery will get you everywhere,” commented DCI McManus from the sofa.
“What I will say, though,” she continued—this was getting into trickier territory—”is that I have learned some things about crime over the last couple of years. And the most important thing I’ve learned is the thing I do my best not to let on when I’m actually podcasting. Which is that crime is … well … crime is … it’s kind of boring?”
Sir Richard gave a snort. “A strange opinion both for a woman who has dedicated her career to the subject, and for somebody who has just spent several days in immediate danger of death.”
“Not boring like that. And obviously, I find it really interesting as a subject. But criminology—and before you say anything, DCI, yes, I’m not a criminologist—is just like any other subject: most of it is rubbish. Most art is bad. Most maths is just adding up—”
“It most certainly is not!” exclaimed the professor, seemingly more sincerely offended by this than by the accusation that he was a mass murderer.
Liza sighed. “I mean, when most people do it. I’m sure there’s some incredibly beautiful mathematics out there, just like there are incredibly beautiful paintings, and incredibly fascinating crimes; but in day-to-day life, most maths is splitting the bill, most paintings are signs outside pubs, and most crimes are shoving your husband off a balcony because you got in an argument on a snowy night.”
Ruby arched an eyebrow. “I don’t think that’s most crimes.”
“Not the details. The, you know, the spirit. Back me up on this one.” She turned to DCI McManus. “When somebody gets killed, it’s almost always their husband, or their wife, or a member of their family. And it’s always because they were angry, or jealous, or greedy.”
“I’m not sure I’d put it quite that simply,” said the DCI, “but I get what you mean. You’re far more likely to get shanked with a kitchen knife by your missus because she’s sick of the way you grind your teeth than to get poisoned with hemlock by your secret granddaughter’s secret lover because they think you stole your aunt’s emerald necklace.”
“For the record,”—Mary stepped forward again—”I don’t have a secret lover, I didn’t poison or stab anybody, and there’s no necklaces involved anywhere.”
Taking grudging vindication as better than no vindication, Liza nodded. “Yeah. That. I mean, the grinding-your-teeth that; not the emerald-necklace that. I think … this is really dull, but I think for at least half the murders that’s what we’re looking at.”
“Which half?” asked DCI McManus, suddenly taking Liza far more seriously than he had a few minutes ago. And it was a strange feeling, because the part of her that had grown up on detective stories and true crime had always wanted to be in this position, to be the one who worked it out. Only now she was here, she was realising it came with a whole lot of scrutiny.
“The way I look at it,” she began, “everybody except Belloc and Vivien Ackroyd. I don’t necessarily know who did all of the rest, but they’re the only ones I think have … where I think it gets conspiracy-ish.”
Sitting back and folding his arms, DCI McManus huffed out an I-should-have-seen-this-coming sigh. “So, you do think there’s a conspiracy.”
And again, Liza felt that strange rush of fear-excitement. That strange sense that she was doing something at once remarkable, and deeply banal. “Not exactly. But I do think improbable things happen sometimes. It’s like—back in 1998 there was a woman called Sally Clark who was convicted of murdering her two children. The key evidence for the prosecution was an expert witness who said that the probability of two children in the same family dying of natural causes at such a young age was one in seventy-three million. Now, there was a lot wrong with that claim, but even taken at face value it ignored the fact that double homicides are just as rare as double accidents, and that in a country with more than sixty million people, you can expect to see one in seventy-three million chances come up every now and then.”
“A priori probability gets confused with a posteriori probability,” interjected the professor, apparently not willing to let being tied up keep him from giving a spontaneous maths lecture.
Loath as she was to agree with the man behind the whole nightmare they’d just been through, Liza nodded. “I’ll take your word for it. But the general point is that unlikely things do happen, and—and this isn’t proper maths, so don’t shout at me—if you’re an unusual person, you sort of make unusual things happen around you by definition. Like most people have never met Taylor Swift, and most people you meet will never have met Taylor Swift.” Why she was using Taylor Swift as an example, she couldn’t say. Was she blowing this? She hoped she wasn’t blowing this, but it turned out that summarising murders was way harder than it looked on TV. “But if I was Taylor Swift, then any room I was in would have a much higher ratio of people who’d met Taylor Swift than an ordinary room.”
The DCI’s expression had gone from indulgent to strained. “I hope you’re going somewhere with this, because it’s getting rambling, and I don’t like rambling.”
“The point is that organised crime does exist. And while most people never meet anybody who is involved with organised crime, once somebody who is involved with organised crime walks into the room, things change.” For a moment she let that hang, hoping that it could rescue the Taylor Swift analogy.
“I know this whole mysterious Mr B thing seems weird,” she continued, “but think of it as … as a bad person with a slightly silly nickname. And if you also think of everything that has happened as being the result of one tragic accident being exploited by that one bad person, creating a situation where otherwise normal people did some pretty fucked up things, then it’s suddenly—I mean, yeah, it’s unlikely, but it’s a whole lot less unlikely than the alternatives.”
“You’re still giving me the intro, Miss Podcaster,” said the DCI coldly. “Get to the middle eight, or I’ll just arrest everybody in this hotel.”
Liza took a deep breath. She’d been working this through in her head on and off since the whole affair started, but now it came to it, she wasn’t at all sure she could get it out clearly. But she also knew she had to, because if she fucked this up, the professor could get loose, and then he might be free to come after her and Hanna. Besides, she’d seen this movie a hundred times; she knew how it played out.
“Okay,” she said. “This story all starts when a …”—she shot a look at Ruby, then at Hanna—”… striking, audacious woman stole a ton of money and a set of banking information from the gangland figure we’re stuck calling Mr B. She fled with her ill-gotten gains to a nice, isolated hotel in the Scottish Highlands in the hope that somewhere with no internet or mobile phone reception would be a good place to hide. But Mr B followed her, and the detec—the private investigator called Perseus Belloc followed him. There are a couple more coincidences here, like one of the guests also being one of Mr B’s former enforcers, but that’s where we’re starting off.”
“This already sounds a touch implausible, dontcha think?” said Sir Richard, still apparently championing his “Ten Green Bottles” model of the crime.
Ruby, however, was watching the whole situation unfold with a look of cautious optimism. “Not necessarily. Why don’t you carry on, Liza?”
“I’ll tell people when to carry on, thank you,” said the DCI. Then, less abashed than most other people would be, continued, “Carry on.”
Liza carried on, and now she was relaxing into it the words were starting to come more naturally. “When he got here, Mr B had two priorities. To get rid of the traitor, and to get his banking information back before it could go to the police. He knew that she couldn’t have sent it out electronically because they were somewhere with no means to access the internet, so it was just a question of getting hold of whatever she’d stored the data on. And it would probably have been an easy job, except there was an investigator on his tail, and a good one, if his reputation is to be believed.”