Page 51

“Another game, old man?” asked Sir Richard, cheerfully handing a stack of folded banknotes to his opponent.

“Feels bad to keep taking your money,” Colonel Coleman replied, sipping his brandy.

“Oh, pish posh, don’t think of it. Got heaps of the stuff. Besides, bound to lick you one of these days, eh what?”

Noticing the Blaines’ arrival, the colonel nodded a sharp greeting, and Sir Richard raised his glass cordially.

“Ah,” said Sir Richard, “ladies. Perhaps you’d consider joining us for a game of doubles.”

Liza stared at the table. “Aren’t you missing a lot of balls?” There were only three: one red, one white, and one yellow.

“Billiards,” said Colonel Coleman by way of explanation. “Not pool. Not snooker. It’s a three-ball game.”

“Doesn’t that end rather quickly?” asked Liza.

Hanna stepped in with her I-speak-posh hat on. “You take the balls out the pockets after you pot one. It’s a point system.”

“First to three hundred,” added Sir Richard.

That seemed like a lot to Liza. “Three hundred? How many points do you get for a pot?”

“Two,” said the colonel. “Tell you what, we’ll show you. Line ‘em up.”

Sir Richard set the balls back on their spots. “Another hundred on it?”

“I’d really rather—” the colonel began.

“Oh, come on. Give a chap a chance to win a bit back.”

They started playing. And people started scoring points for things that, ordinarily, Liza wasn’t used to people getting points for in this kind of game, like banging a ball into a different ball. But she guessed that when you were running a chronic ball shortage you needed some extra options to spice things up.

They lingered for a while, not quite sure how to grill either of the players on their whereabouts last night and/or if they were a criminal genius. But there was a … not lead exactly, more a thread, that Liza wanted to follow up on. So she and Hanna waited and watched while balls clicked and went into and out of pockets until finally, realising that there was never going to be a perfect moment to start throwing suspicion around, she launched straight in.

“I don’t suppose you remember Vivien Ackroyd having any kind of argument with your aunt, do you?”

Sir Richard stood back and chalked his cue. “Come again?”

In a hole and with no option but to dig, Liza dug. “I heard a … Somebody mentioned to me that your aunt had a fight with Vivien Ackroyd yesterday. I was wondering if you knew what it was about.”

Liza would have loved to pretend that she could read faces like the quirky detective in a police procedural. That she could look at somebody and go, “Dammit, Malone, I know you’re hiding something.” She couldn’t, of course, but she did get the sense that this was news to Sir Richard.

“I understand the impulse, old girl,” he said after what Liza was convinced was a moment’s incomprehension. “But given how it went the last time, do you not think that maybe you should back off on this one?”

“How it went last time”—Hanna stepped forward, interposing herself between Liza and Sir Richard—”was that Vivien Ackroyd was upset and then, for totally unrelated reasons, somebody else murdered her.”

“Still means she wound up dead,” the colonel pointed out.

“Yeah, by coincidence.” Hanna was giving him a look that was usually withering, but which he totally blanked.

By the table, Sir Richard bent over to line up another shot, knocking a ball into another ball in a way that was apparently good. “If you wanted to know, you’d have to ask Aunt Tabitha yourself. I think she’s in the library. Just don’t go giving her a heart attack—it’d be deuced inconvenient.”

Before Hanna could make an unhelpfully sarcastic reply, Liza gave him a quick, “Thanks, we won’t,” and the two of them ducked out into the corridor.

The library was next door to the billiard room, so it didn’t take long to verify that Sir Richard was both right and, in this context at least, honest. Of all the rooms in the hotel, the library was perhaps the most Victorian, with a carriage clock on the marble mantlepiece and a portrait of a severe man in black above that. Busts of Plato and Socrates, also in black, perched on shelves of leatherbound books that looked like they hadn’t been touched in a century. They found Lady Tabitha sitting in a low chair reading, while in the background an old-fashioned record player was playing something high, ethereal, and operatic, which Liza’s vaguely theatrical background told her was the “Bell Song” from Lakmé. Lady Tabitha glanced up as Liza and Hanna entered. “Don’t suppose you’ve seen my reprobate nephew?”

“Playing billiards,” said Liza. “With the colonel.”

“Ah.” Lady Tabitha nodded. “He would be. Silly boy. So, what brings you two down to speak to an old woman?”