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It was a bittersweet compliment to get from somebody you’d been with for ten years. But that was the problem with long relationships: it was so easy to fall into patterns; to miss huge, important parts of each other out of sheer habit and repetition. “But you see it now?”

“Yes. I see it now.”

And then Hanna kissed her.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The Colonel, in his Room, with a Gun

Tuesday morning

Breakfast the next morning was sparsely attended. Or at least it felt sparsely attended, although that was partly on account of how several of the people who would have been attending were dead. The professor was still picking at what was left of the fresh fruit while Sir Richard, conspicuously alone, munched morosely on his cereal, and Ruby and the reverend eyed one another suspiciously from opposite sides of the room. The colonel was absent, and while in any other circumstances Liza might have put that down to the kitchen running low on bacon, given what had happened to Lady Tabitha the day before, she wasn’t very inclined to make assumptions.

They did at least manage to eat without Mr Burgh coming back in to inform them all of some additional disaster or imminent danger, but that didn’t keep anybody from eyeing the empty space where the colonel would normally have been sitting.

“I suppose,” began Sir Richard, “that if he’d died, Mr Burgh would have told us.”

“If he knew,” Ruby pointed out. “If somebody got him in his room, he could be up there right now.”

Hanna gave Ruby her most sardonic look. “But surely that’s impossible. He had a gun. And the whole point of his having a gun was that it’s completely impossible for somebody with a gun to be the victim of any kind of violent crime.”

As ever, Ruby was unbaitable. “You put your faith in the innate goodness of humanity. I’ll put mine in a healthy dose of paranoia and a small-calibre pistol. We’ll see who lasts longer.”

“How about”—Liza pushed back her chair and stood up—”we go check on him and make sure he’s okay?”

Setting down his spoon, the reverend joined her. “That does seem like a good idea.”

“And what will we do if he’s not?” asked Sir Richard.

“Speaking personally,” said Hanna, also rising, “I shall say I told you so.”

Ruby curled her lips into half a smile. “How unspeakably morbid. I might almost be starting to like you.”

“If he’s not,”—Liza made her way over to the door and held it open—”then we will have one more piece of evidence that you were right and that somebody is picking us all off one by one.”

That seemed to convince Sir Richard, who, Liza suspected, was never one to miss a chance at vindication. “Well then, I suggest we go check on the old bugger.”

To Liza’s mild and Hanna’s significant dismay, he, Ruby, and the professor all produced pistols for the journey, such as it was, up to Colonel Coleman’s room. In this instance, however, they proved neither a necessity nor a liability, as the party managed to make it upstairs without being ambushed by a single knife-wielding marauder or gun-toting shadow.

“You realise,” Hanna said as they lined up in the corridor outside the colonel’s room, “that if we bang unexpectedly on his door, there’s a good chance he’ll shoot us through it?”

Sir Richard pulled himself up very tall and straight. “Oh, I’m sure he … Actually, that’s rather a good point. One moment.” Inching towards the door, he reached out gingerly and, standing as far to one side as he could manage, rapped on it.

“Not done yet,” came the colonel’s voice from inside. “You can have the tray in about an hour.”

“It’s me,” Sir Richard replied. “And everybody else for that matter. We’re trying to make sure you’re all right, old chap, and, well, are you all right, old chap?”

There was a pause, which, if Liza was overestimating the colonel’s paranoia to a degree that was itself probably a little paranoid, she suspected he was using to work out if this whole setup was part of an elaborate charade to murder him. “Perfectly fine, old boy. Curtains closed, holed up with a pistol, plenty of cover, and clear lines of sight. Suggest you do the same if you want to last until the snow melts.”

“That does seem like a rather good idea,” Sir Richard admitted.

Hanna let her head fall against the wall. “It’s a terrible idea. We can’t all hole up in our rooms like doomsday preppers. All it’ll take is one unexpected cleaning visit and somebody will be filling some poor maid with lead.”

“Rather the maid than me,” said the colonel, sounding only a little muffled from wherever he was bunkered. “Besides, I’ve told Burgh the situation, and there’s a system. The staff know to put my meal trays on the floor, knock once, say who they are, then open the door slowly with their hands in the air, shove the food through, close the door again, and—”

“Is this still the same system?” asked Hanna. “Because it sounds like you’re making a lot of hard work for some people whose job descriptions definitely didn’t involve dealing with old men waving guns at them.”

From inside the room, there came a sound that roughly approximated to “harrumph.” “These are desperate times, Miss Blaine. And desperate times call for desperate measures.”