Four Past Midnight

him she was going in the first place, but Ted only shrugged. So they went to New York together, rode up to the fifty-third floor of a large skyscraper together, and were together shown to the small cubicle in the offices of the Consolidated Assurance Company which Fred Evans called home during the working day . unless he was in the field, of course.

She sat as far into the corner as she could get, and although the offices were quite warm, she kept her shawl wrapped around her.

Evans's manner was slow and kind - he seemed to her almost like the country doctor who had nursed her through her childhood illnesses - and she liked him. But that's something he'll never know, she thought. I might be able to summon up the strength to tell him, and he would nod, but his nod wouldn't indicate belief. He only knows that to me he will always be the man who shot Mort, and he had to watch me cry on Mort's chest until the ambulance came, and one of the paramedics had to give me a shot before I would let him go. And what he won't know is that I like him just the same.

He buzzed a woman from one of the outer offices and had her bring in three big, steaming mugs of tea. It was January outside now, the wind high, the temperature low. She thought with some brief longing of how it would be in Tashmore, with the lake finally frozen and that killer wind blowing long, ghostly snakes of powdered snow across the ice. Then her mind made some obscure but nasty association, and she saw Mort hitting the floor, saw the package of Pall Malls skidding across the wood like a shuffleboard weight. She shivered, her brief sense of longing totally dispelled.

'Are you okay, Mrs Milner?' Evans asked.

She nodded.

Frowning ponderously and playing with his pipe, Ted said, 'My wife wants to hear everything you know about what happened, Mr Evans. I tried to discourage her at first, but I've come to think that it might be a good thing. She's had bad dreams ever since

'Of course,' Evans said, not exactly ignoring Ted, but speaking directly to Amy. 'I suppose you will for a long time. I've had a few of my own, actually. I never shot a man before.' He paused, then added, 'I missed Vietnam by a year or so.'

Amy offered him a smile. It was wan, but it was a smile.

'She heard it all at the inquest,' Ted went on, 'but she wanted to hear it again, from you, and with the legalese omitted.'

'I understand,' Evans said. He pointed at the pipe. 'You can light that, if you want to.'

Ted looked at it, then dropped it into the pocket of his coat quickly, as if he were slightly ashamed of it. 'I'm trying to give it up, actually.'

Evans looked at Amy. 'What purpose do you think this will serve?' he asked her in the same kind, rather sweet voice. 'Or maybe a better question would be what purpose do you need it to serve?'

'I don't know.' Her voice was low and composed. 'But we were in Tashmore three weeks ago, Ted and I, to clean the place out - we've put it up for sale - and something happened. Two things, actually.' She looked at her husband and offered the wan smile again. 'Ted knows something happened, because that's when I got in touch with you and made this appointment. But he doesn't know what, and I'm afraid he's put out with me. Perhaps he's right to be.'

Ted Milner did not deny that he was put out with Amy. His hand stole into his coat pocket, started to remove the pipe, and then let it drop back again.

'But these two things - they bear on what happened to your lake home in October?'

'I don't know. Mr Evans ... what did happen? How much do you know?'

'Well,' he said, leaning back in his chair and sipping from his mug, 'if you came expecting all the answers, you're going to be sorely disappointed. I can tell you about the fire, but as for why your husband did what he did ... you can probably fill in more of those blanks than I can. What puzzled us most about the fire was where it started - not in the main house but in Mr Rainey's office, which is an addition. That made the act seem directed against him, but he wasn't even there.

'Then we found a large chunk of bottle in the wreckage of the office. It had contained wine - champagne, to be exact - but there wasn't any doubt that the last thing it had contained was gasoline. Part of the label was intact, and we sent a Fax copy to New York. It was identified as Moet et Chandon, nineteen-eightysomething. That wasn't proof indisputable that the bottle used for the Molotov cocktail came from your own wine room, Mrs Milner, but it was very persuasive, since you listed better than a dozen bottles of Moet et Chandon, some from 1983 and some from 1984.

'This led us toward a supposition which seemed clear but not very sensible: that you or your ex-husband might have burned down your own house. Mrs Milner here said she went off and left the house unlocked - '

'I lost a lot of sleep over that,' Amy said. 'I often forgot to lock up when I was only going out for a little while. I grew up in a little town north of Bangor and country habits die hard. Mort used to . . .' Her lips trembled and she stopped speaking for a moment, pressing them together so tightly they turned white. When she had herself under control again, she finished her thought in a low voice. 'He used to scold me about it.'

Ted took her hand.

'It didn't matter, of course,' Evans said. 'If you had locked the house, Mr Rainey still could have gained access, because he still had his keys. Correct?'

'Yes,' Ted said.

'It might have sped up the detection end a little if you'd locked the door, but it's impossible to say for sure. Monday-morning quarterbacking is a vice we try to steer clear of in my business, anyway. There's a theory that it causes ulcers, and that's one I subscribe to. The point is this: given Mrs Rainey's - excuse me, Mrs Milner's - testimony that the house was left unlocked, we at first believed the arsonist could have been literally anyone. But once we started playing around with the assumption that the bottle used had come from the cellar wine room, it narrowed things down.'

'Because that room was locked,' Ted said.

Evans nodded. 'Do you remember me asking who held keys to that room, Mrs Milner?'

'Call me Amy, won't you?'

He nodded. 'Do you remember, Amy?'

'Yes. We started locking the little wine closet three or four years ago, after some bottles of red table wine disappeared. Mort thought it was the housekeeper. I didn't like to believe it, because I liked her, but I knew he could be right, and probably was. We started locking it then so nobody else would be tempted.'

Evans looked at Ted Milner.

'Amy had a key to the wine room, and she believed Mr Rainey still had his. So that limited the possibilities. Of course, if it had been Amy, you would have had to have been in collusion with her, Mr Milner, since you were each other's alibis for that evening. Mr Rainey didn't have an alibi, but he was at a considerable distance. And the main thing was this: we could see no motive for the crime. His work had left both Amy and himself financially comfortable. Nevertheless, we dusted for fingerprints and came up with two good ones. This was the day after we had our meeting in Derry. Both prints belonged to Mr Rainey. It still wasn't proof - '

'It wasn't?' Ted asked, looking startled.

Evans shook his head. 'Lab tests were able to confirm that the prints were made before what remained of the bottle was charred in the fire, but not how long before. The heat had cooked the oils in them, you see. And if our assumption that the bottle came from the wine room was correct, why, someone had to physically pick it up out of the bag or carton it came in and store it in its cradle. That someone would have been either Mr or Mrs Rainey, and he could have argued that that was where the prints came from.'

'He was in no shape to argue anything,' Amy said softly. 'Not at the end.'

'I guess that's true, but we didn't know that. All we knew is that when people carry bottles, they generally pick them up by the neck or the upper barrel. These two prints were near the bottom, and the angle was very odd.'