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“Nil desperandum, dear boy,” said Sir Richard. “Nobody is going to frame you for anything. As you say, we can’t get you for the reverend, or for Belloc as I recall, so I’d say you’re off the hook. In fact, I do wonder if it might not be better all around if we stopped looking at each other altogether.”

“In what way?” asked Liza. Frankly, this whole conversation was beginning to trend in a very worrying direction. A healthy scepticism of law enforcement was one thing; Most Actual had done a half-dozen episodes about miscarriages of justice. But this was starting to sound a lot like Sir Richard was suggesting that they, “Get their story straight.”

“Well …” Sir Richard pantomimed innocence. “Is it completely impossible that there’s somebody else on the grounds?”

Hanna said, “Yes,” at the same time that Liza said, “Well, no, but,” and everybody else in the room heard whichever of the two answers they wanted to hear.

“It would be good if we could put this behind us,” offered Ruby. “Let bygones be bygones?” Perhaps it was Liza’s imagination, but she was sure she saw her glance at the professor, and saw something pass between them—a belated sense of like recognising like; of an acknowledgement that the game was over, for now at least.

“And where were they hiding?” asked Liza, rather more aggressively than she’d intended. “None of us saw anybody we couldn’t account for.”

“To be fair,” Mr Burgh pointed out, “you still don’t recognise half the staff. If the killer put on a uniform, he could have gone anywhere without any of the guests paying any attention.”

The worst thing was he had the ghost of a point. “But you’d have been paying attention. You’ve all been working together for years.”

“More like months, really,” said Mary-who-worked-there. “This isn’t a field most of us want to stay in long-term.”

Quinn leaned forward. “I was just supposed to be working over the Easter holidays.”

The part of Liza that had been trying to fit the week’s events into every pattern she’d ever seen in life or fiction jumped at once to and wouldn’t that be the perfect cover before remembering that she already knew who the real criminal was, and he’d admitted it to her, and all this talk of green bottles and mysterious intruders was nonsense. “Let’s try this again. None of us saw anybody we can’t account for—”

“I did,” said the professor. “Don’t you remember when I accidentally shot out my window?”

“Yes, but that was a lie,” Liza reminded him and, for that matter, herself.

A lie it might have been, but Sir Richard latched onto it tightly. “Well, so you say, but then you’ve invented an equally silly story about the professor being some kind of criminal mastermind.”

“There. Were. No. Footprints.” Liza could feel her hand tightening on the arm of the sofa. But she could also feel Hanna’s arm tightening around her—a silent message that said no matter how absurd or crappy this gets, I’ve got you.

“Last I checked,”—Sir Richard’s tone had grown cold, almost acid—”you weren’t a qualified forensic scientist. You aren’t even a well-recognised amateur sleuth. You’re just, pardon my français, a fucking podcaster.”

“And you’re just a rich man playing detective.” Right now, Hanna seemed almost more bothered by this than by the risk of death. “And Belloc was just a weirdo with a fake accent. And they give Pulitzers for podcasts now, so … so it shows what you know.”

Liza gave her wife’s knee a gentle squeeze. “Thanks—can you hear that?”

They all did their best to hear that. And the that in question was sirens—faint at first but growing louder by the moment.

“Fuck,” Sir Richard spluttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, hide the guns.”

Ruby rolled her eyes. “But not the corpses?”

The panic was mounting in Sir Richard’s voice. “I don’t know! I’ve never been in this situation before.”

Mr Burgh made, “I should, well, um, probably,” noises and went out to greet the police. A few minutes later he returned with two uniformed officers and a grey-haired, grim-faced man in a brown overcoat.

“I’m DCI McManus,” said the man in plain clothes. “And at the risk of sounding incredibly cliché: what’s all this then?”

Mary-who-worked-there shuffled forwards. “There’s been a murder,” she explained.

“Well,” clarified Mr Burgh, “six murders.”

“And I assure you,” added Sir Richard, “we have a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

Chapter Thirty-Two

Liza, in the End, with the Denouement

Thursday, early afternoon