wave, filling the horizon.
'See! They smashed in the French windows.' Boyce pointed. 'They're not cracksmen. Not professionals.'
One of a pair of tall glassed doors at the front of the house had been knocked off its hinges. The empty frame lay across the doorway. Broken glass glittered in the sunlight. Madden crouched down to examine it.
In the silence Billy heard the sound of flies buzzing. It came from inside the house. He wrinkled his nose at the rotten-sweet smell.
'We can't leave 'em there much longer,' Boyce observed. He watched Madden with narrowed eyes.
'Not in this heat. There's a mortuary wagon standing by in the village. Should I bring it up to the house?'
'Better wait till Mr Sinclair gets here.' Madden stood up. 'You can begin fingerprinting, though. Start with the people who've been in the house.'
A grin replaced the anxious frown on Boyce's face.
'Does that include the Lord Lieutenant and Lord Stratton?'
'Certainly.'
'Sir William told Mr Norris they hadn't touched anything.'
'I'm sure he did. Print them both.'
Madden glanced at Billy. 'Constable?'
'Sir?' Billy straightened automatically.
'We'll go inside now.'
As Billy stepped over the broken door frame into the house, the smell of decaying flesh triggered a rush of nausea and he had to dig his fingernails into the palms of his hands to stop himself retching.
Eyes watering, he tried to block out the stench and concentrate on what was before him. They had entered the drawing-room, that much he could see. Madden was bending over the body of a young woman sprawled on the floor in the middle of the room. She lay on her side with her legs splayed like a runner in mid-stride, hands clutching at emptiness. Billy noted the black dress and frilled cuffs. This must be the maid, Sally Pepper, he told himself.
His glance took in the tray and coffee things silver pot and two small cups and saucers — strewn across a cream-coloured carpet edged with vine leaves.
The spilled coffee had spread into the shape of a flower. Black petals for a funeral wreath.
He knew the woman had been stabbed, Madden had told him earlier, but he couldn't see where. Then he noticed the inspector examining a small tear in the maid's uniform over her chest. It looked as if the black cloth had masked the flow of blood.
Billy was struck by how little had been disturbed.
Take away the smashed door and the pitiable figure on the carpet and the room was relatively untouched.
Chairs and tables stood in their places. Nothing was disarranged. A cabinet where china was displayed remained shut, with the glass unbroken. Above the carved stone fireplace a pair of shepherdesses graced the mantelpiece beneath a painted portrait of a woman sitting on a sofa with two young children, a boy and a girl, on either side of her. All three were fair-haired.
Billy was starting to sweat. If anything, the smell was getting worse. He saw Madden's eyes were on him.
'If you're going to throw up, Constable, do it outside.'
'I won't, sir. Truly.'
Madden's glance implied disbelief. Billy gritted his teeth. He watched as the inspector started to move away from the body, then changed his mind and returned to it, this time to look at the back. He bent and peered at the area between the shoulder-blades.
Billy wondered why. There was nothing to see there.
He took a deep breath, then checked himself hurriedly as the surge of nausea returned.
He couldn't understand it. In three years on the force he'd seen his share of corpses, not all of them pretty. Week-old cadavers found in abandoned tenements.
Floaters hauled from the Thames. Earlier that year he had worked on his first murder case since moving from the uniform branch to the CID. An old pawnbroker battered to death in his shop in the Mile End Road. His skull had been reduced to a red pulp, yet Detective Constable Styles hadn't turned a hair.
Why now?
Searching for an explanation, Billy was left with the feeling that it had something to do with the enormity of what had happened in this house. He had seen it in the faces of the villagers and of the men who waited outside. Even Madden's grim features had registered a sense of disbelief as he recounted the bald details on their taxi ride to Waterloo. It was something that shouldn't have happened — that was the closest Billy could come to explaining it — not in the peaceful Surrey countryside, barely an hour's train ride from London. Not in England!
Madden rose. Skirting the body, he went to an inner door that stood open and paused on the threshold.
Billy joined him. In front of them was a hallway with a passage branching off it, running the length of the house. To their left, a trousered leg protruded from a doorway. Madden went towards it, walking in the middle of the carpeted passage, his eyes on the floor in front of him. Billy stayed on his heels.
They came to the body of a middle-aged man lying on his stomach with his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross. His head was twisted to one side, the lips drawn back in a rictus of agony. A stab wound in the middle of his back had left a dark stain in the checked hacking jacket he wore. Some deep internal injury was signalled by the gush of blood from his mouth on to the surrounding floorboards. At the very edge of the pool of dried blood, a curved indentation was visible.
'Do you see that?' Madden pointed. 'Someone's walked there.'
'One of the killers, sir?' Billy peered over his shoulder.
'I doubt it. The blood was already dry. Make a note for Mr Sinclair.'
Madden stepped carefully over the body. Billy followed, fumbling for his notepad. They were in an oak panelled study, furnished with a desk and two stuffed-leather armchairs. The walls were hung with photographs, mostly of men in military uniform. Some showed them sitting on chairs, stiffly posed. Others were less formal. There were pictures of polo matches and clay-pigeon shooting. Madden seemed more interested in a pair of shotguns mounted on a wall rack.
'Was he trying to reach one of those, I wonder?' He spoke the thought aloud.
'Or the telephone, sir?' Billy seized on the chance to participate. He indicated the instrument standing on the desk.
Madden grunted. He was still looking at the gun rack, frowning.
'Something's missing from the mantelpiece, sir.'
Billy tried again. He was feeling better. The smell was less strong in here. 'That mark on the wallpaper 'A clock, most likely.' Madden spoke without turning.
'There might have been other stuff up there.
Silver cups. The maid will know.'
He led the way out and walked back along the passage, checking each room as he came to it. He paused at only one, the dining-room, where plates and cutlery from the previous night's meal lay on the uncleared table.
At the far end of the corridor was a swing door.
The inspector pushed it open and went through. Billy, following on his heels, retched involuntarily and almost threw up as a pungent reek assailed his nostrils.
They were in the kitchen. The afternoon sun poured through unshaded windows on to a table where the remains of a roast chicken rested on a platter beside a glistening ham. As Madden approached, a cloud of flies rose into the air and then settled on the food again. Beyond the table a chair had been knocked over on its back and directly behind it a woman's body lay on the flagstoned floor, half propped against the wall.
Grey-haired, plump-featured, she was dressed in a bloodstained white blouse and an ankle-length skirt of dark blue material. Her face wore a surprised expression.
'The nanny,' Madden murmured. He glanced at Billy, who had chosen that moment to shut his eyes while he tried to control his heaving stomach. 'Give me your handkerchief, Constable.'
'Sir?' Billy's eyes shot open.
'You've got one, haven't you?'
'Sir!' He gave it to Madden, who wet the cloth at the sink and handed it back to Billy.
