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That was an awkward one. Lady Tabitha and Sir Richard were low on the suspect list for most of the murders, so going full where-were-you-on-the-night-of-the-fourteenth on the strength of one conversation that may never have happened, reported by a vicar who used to be a professional crook, was probably a bit, as Lady Tabitha might have put it herself, gauche. A softly-softly approach was probably best. “Does he spend a lot of time with the colonel?” Liza asked.

“A fair amount. I wouldn’t say they were exactly kindred spirits, but Dicky does admire men of action and, well, there’s not a great deal for him to do with us snowed in. I believe they’ve played quite a lot of billiards and quite a lot of cards.”

“And has—?” Liza pulled up a chair and sat down, Hanna perching on the arm beside her. “I’m not really sure how to ask this. Have any of these card or billiard games been going on while …?”

“While somebody has been getting themselves murdered?” asked Lady Tabitha matter-of-factly.

Liza gave a somewhat embarrassed nod.

“Afraid not. While Dicky has been flushing rather a lot of money down the lavatory lately, he’s not quite gaming all hours of the day and night. He was in bed like a good little boy when poor Mr Ackroyd took the long drop, and when Belloc was shot we were taking tea in the drawing room. And of course, you know he was with us when we were attacked on the way to the tower last night. Or is it the colonel you’re trying to eliminate from your enquiries?”

In a way it was both, but it seemed sensible not to pretend otherwise. “Yeah.”

Lady Tabitha took a sip of coffee then eyed Liza over the rim of her spectacles. “And what do you intend to do with the killer, once you’ve caught him?”

“Or her,” Hanna added.

“Or, as you say, her. I suppose it is the twenty-first century, and if a girl wants to creep around hotels offing people, we should encourage her. But that aside, what do you actually intend to do?”

Liza had been trying not to think about this. And in a way it had been fairly easy, because in some ways, “How do I deal with this murderer I have definitely caught and I know is definitely guilty?” was a good problem to have. Of course, in other, potentially very dangerous ways, it wasn’t. “I’m not really sure. Your nephew does this kind of thing, doesn’t he? What does he do?”

“Cheats. He has a fellow at the yard does the difficult bits for him. He’s terribly clever is Dicky, but it turns out cleverness very seldom stands up in court. So what he’ll do is he’ll ring up this chap he knows and he’ll say, ‘Look here, old thing, I’m quite convinced that you want Mr So-and-so or Miss Whatchamacallit for this caper,’ and then his friend will deal with all the stuff with forensics and witnesses and everything, and that will be that.”

Rubbing her chin sceptically, Hanna said, “You realise you’re making it sound a bit like he just goes around fitting people up.”

Lady Tabitha shrugged. “Possibly, but it does him good to have a hobby.”

A lull entered the conversation, which Hanna filled by observing that the solid platinum poignard had been returned to the mantlepiece.

“Yes.” Lady Tabitha turned to admire it. “Looks rather handsome, doesn’t it? Although what the colonel thought he was going to do with the thing I don’t know. Still, I suppose a military man in a situation like this will get a kind of a foxhole mentality.”

That wasn’t something Liza had considered, and she couldn’t quite tell if it made him more suspect or less suspect. That had also brought them to the end of the topics they could talk about without getting into the more … accusatory questions. “And …” Liza hesitated. Sir Richard had, after all, been right in a way. Even if Liza wasn’t responsible for Vivien Ackroyd’s death, accusing her of two murders had helped precisely nobody and caused Liza and Hanna a whole lot of aggravation. As well, she tried not to remind herself, as making Mrs Ackroyd’s last hours before her murder needlessly stressful. “And,” she tried again, “is there … I’ve been told that you had a conversation with Mrs Ackroyd the morning she died.”

Lady Tabitha looked up, and any faith Liza may have had in her own ability to read people evaporated. There was a studied unflappability on Lady Tabitha’s face, a mix of hauteur and apathy. “Are you accusing me of something, dear?”

“No.” Liza backed off at once, partly because she wanted to avoid a repeat of yesterday’s problems, and partly because if she’d kept track of people’s movements right it seemed very unlikely Lady Tabitha had been involved in any of the murders so far. Directly, at least. “But—well—I thought you might be able to help?”

That seemed to mollify her at least a little. Lady Tabitha settled back into her chair. “The poor woman was frantic,” she explained, only slightly pointedly. “Even before you made your—I maintain—ill-advised declaration about her guilt, she was quite convinced that we all thought she was guilty. She believed Belloc was after her, which I suspect he was, and thought that I might be able to use my influence to get her out of a bad situation.”

“Your influence?” asked Hanna.

“Dicky isn’t the only one with friends in law enforcement. I play bridge with some terribly interesting people.”

Something wasn’t adding up for Liza. “Any idea why she’d think that would work?”

“Yeah,” Hanna agreed. “You lot normally only help your own.”

Lady Tabitha gave Hanna a cool smile. “She is a firebrand, isn’t she? First against the wall come the revolution, I suppose? But you’re not wrong: one is rather more inclined to assist one’s peers than strangers one meets in a hotel.”

“And”—Liza could feel something snagging here, something worth pulling on—”she came to you anyway?”

“She made some rather vague threats.” Lady Tabitha’s tone was dismissive as only the aristocracy could be dismissive. “I think she thought she knew something. She didn’t.”

Hanna took over. She wasn’t quite playing bad cop; perhaps more class-conscious cop. “But she did try to threaten you?”

“Yes. And I, of course, responded to that threat by waiting less than a day, then running up a flight of spiral stairs to her bedroom, shooting her in the head, staging her body to make it look like a suicide, then running back down that same flight of spiral stairs, despite my advancing years and bad lungs, to arrive back in my room in time to be found by Mr Burgh on his rounds mere minutes later, not visibly disarrayed or out of breath. Truly, I am a criminal mastermind.”

“You could have hired somebody,” suggested Hanna, who seemed to be skewing harder into confrontation than either of them had intended.