The fury which had possessed her earlier was gone. She was as utterly, queerly calm as the day when she had stood in an old-fashioned bedroom at Stedman Circle and watched—
With decision but no hurry, a woman who had made up her mind to go on into the cocktail lounge and secure a table while she waited for her companion, Celia passed the desk and turned to her right in the direction of the corridor with the soft gold sign that said “The Wreath Room.” There was also a powder room along the way, and public telephone booths, and a mirrored little alcove and, at the far end of the corridor, an exit onto one of the terraces that ran along the back of the lodge.
The propped-wide glass door of the cocktail lounge, as she passed it, gave Celia what was in effect an around-the-corner reflection of a portion of the lobby. The woman in gray tweed was no longer there, and the wing chair was empty. In an ashtray on the table beside it, a cigarette which had been only partially extinguished out of carelessness or haste was sending up a furred column of smoke.
Celia did not dare turn her head. She gave a quick little wave at the untenanted terrace in its fringe of darkness and slipped rapidly through the door.
The iron purpose that had left no room for rage was also a shield against the cold, deepened by a wind that Celia hadn’t noticed in the taxi or the protected forecourt. If anything she felt the icy brush of it reassuring, an ally against whoever it was who had just emerged from The Priory behind her, making a pulse of paler gold on the flagstones like someone breathing on a flame. The woman in gray? The occupant of the wing chair?
On her brief visit here three days earlier, with Adelaide addressing the manager firmly about the wedding arrangements, Celia had stood at a window and noted without any particular interest a small artificial pond, sunken and iron-railed, behind a wing of the lodge. She had thought idly at the time that as it was obviously too small for skating it must have some decorative display in the summer—goldfish, or birds, or lilies. At present, and especially so in her mind’s eye for the last hour, it was a frozen lightless gray under blown veils of snow, no more hospitable than concrete to someone crashing heavily down onto it.
Celia turned left in the almost total blackness of the night, guided by the pale stiff ruffle of snow left from the clearing of the brick path. And in the distance behind her, in a voice half blown away by the wind, someone called her name.
Celia’s heart gave a great pound of triumph, because although she had imagined that she heard or felt a faint impact of following feet along the path, and even a click that might have been a woman’s high heel coming incautiously down, there was always the possibility that the pursuer had suddenly sensed danger, and realized that the pretense of flight was a deadly ploy with certain animals. She did not halt or even slow beyond the necessary few seconds to fumble the gas gun out of her bag, because the trap was now only yards away: the rigid bars of the railing around the lake, and the pale curls of frozen snow in the staggery shape that was a pinon tree at one side of the stone steps down. She reached the tree and crouched beside it, gloved finger on the plastic trigger.
Oddly, in view of her purpose here, she had no fear for her own physical safety. She wasn’t intended to die but to live and see her success mocked and the prize snatched away at the last minute. Celia knew, she supposed she had always known, that there was only one person capable of this calm, dry-eyed remorselessness.
. . . And here she came, scarfed like Celia, looking taller and somehow bulkier from this perspective, swinging the round darkness of her head from side to side in a baffled way. Celia had taken off the glove after all, because the gun was a household defense and not designed to accommodate wool, and now, springing to her feet, she pulled the trigger, grasped a staggering shoulder, caught the other, and pushed with all her strength.
There had been a deep convulsive sound of anger and alarm when the gun went off with a surprisingly crisp crack, but after that there was only a single thump as the figure hit the stone stairs once and then a hollow echoing knock as it struck the ice. The ice held, but Celia, filtering out her own harsh breathing, thought that there must be water underneath; nothing else could produce that drumming effect. She moved to the top of the steps, wiping her eyes although the wind had been with her and she had received only a whiff of the gas, and stared down.
Susan Vestry did not stir. She had evidently somersaulted when she struck a stair-edge because she lay almost on her back, a surprisingly big-looking, dead-looking crumple of black on the vaguely paler ice. But almost certainly not dead, thought Celia; people survived astonishing falls all the time. Was she unconscious enough, damaged enough for the penetrating cold to do the rest?
Better make sure. Another rap against the ice . . . and in any case Celia had to retrieve the gun, which had left her hand as she pushed. It would hardly contribute to the theory of accident, and although she had never been fingerprinted and there was no surface connection between her and Susan Vestry, she would
