It must have been touch and go there for a minute before she walked obligingly into the dark. Carrying a purse with the money in it saved for nothing, and an overnight case she wouldn’t live to open. Torrant took a last look at the gray open-mouthed ice, knowing that this was one of the reasons why police hated meddling amateurs. But what had he had to take to the police? A year-old suicide, tucked away under official blessing, and his own conviction that the quiet sedate shell of a woman housed a killer who must be growing increasingly confident.
He thought of Maria Rowan, then, and walked back to the waiting car.
Maria was a moving blur behind the window of the garage apartment. Torrant gave her a small salute, feeling a tension leave him and not even wondering at it any more. Then he walked up the bank and across the patch of frozen grass and knocked at the door of the Mallow house.
Would Annabelle come, knowing that he must know? Torrant waited grimly, hearing silence and then footsteps and a sliding noise. A drawer? No, something heavier than that . . . The door opened without warning, and he looked at Annabelle Blair and tried to see her all over again in the light of this particular morning.
Pale and rather heavy face, blank eyes, repressive black dress which expertly didn’t quite fit: she was difficult to see, Torrant told himself, because she wasn’t really there at all. How Martin’s widow must be leaping and lunging inside this husk . . .
She didn’t ask by word or gesture why he was there, and her acceptance of him as something inevitable gave Torrant a cold satisfaction. He followed her into the living room, and because he saw it so often in his mind he knew instantly that something about it had changed. A table missing, a chair pushed out of place? Something, anyway, that lost its sharp edge when he tried to pin it down.
He said without preamble, “I thought you might be interested in the news about Mrs. Partridge—unless you’ve heard already.”
Annabelle turned a little too quickly. “Mrs. . . . ? Oh, of course—what is it?”
Her eyes and her voice were only politely interested, but Torrant thought that she wore her hands like gloves this morning, aware of them, not quite sure how to dispose of them gracefully. He said, “I told you yesterday that she was coming back to Chauncy for a visit. She only got as far as Willet’s Pond, unfortunately. They recovered her body a couple of hours ago.”
Just the right span of silence, a shocked stare, a look of pity—Annabelle Blair almost carried it off. She spoiled it, just as she turned away from him, by the pale flashing glance she shot at him around the edge of her lifted hand.
And what was it that was wrong about this room?
“It was icy last night,” Annabelle was saying slowly, “and I suppose she fell . . . There ought to be a railing there, of course.” She turned back from the window and said earnestly, “It’s a terribly dangerous place, Willet’s Pond.”
Torrant agreed; he added gently, “You’d think that Mrs. Partridge would have known that, living here so long.”
“People get used to things—hazards—and after a while they don’t even . . .” Annabelle caught herself there; had her own persuasive voice warned her? She finished coolly, “At least I presume that’s what must have happened. I don’t suppose anyone will ever know exactly.”
Torrant looked at the challenge and let it go by. He was thinking about the one normal natural question she hadn’t asked—and all at once, as though her brain were tuned warily in on his, Annabelle said with a faint frown, “But I thought you said Mrs. Partridge wasn’t arriving until today, Mr. Torrant?”
She looked directly at him as she spoke, and Torrant’s deep bitter anger moved a notch nearer the surface at her air of inquiry. He said steadily, “She changed her mind, Miss Blair. Unlucky for her, wasn’t it?”
Annabelle Blair didn’t answer him. Torrant realized that for the last few moments she had had a listening air, realized a split second later that a car had slowed in the road outside. She had transferred her gaze to the windows behind Torrant; now she said, “Will you excuse me?” and walked unhurriedly past him to the front door and opened it and went out, pulling it lightly to behind her.
Torrant had swung in time to catch a glimpse of a moving fender, black and polished, before the car moved beyond the range of the windows. A taxi? Someone, at any rate, whom Annabelle wanted to put off because of her awkward visitor. The sitting room on the other side of the hall, the vivid red room which she was transforming with paint into a place as cold and pale as herself, would look out on that part of the road. Torrant started for it, and stopped.
The change in perspective showed him what had changed in the room, and what had made the heavy sliding noise audible outside the door. A rust-colored wing chair had been pushed back from the far side of the hearth, leaving a paler patch of rug and parallel scratches on the oak flooring.
Torrant crossed the room rapidly and soundlessly. He stared down through shadow between the angle of the chair and the wall at a calf suitcase, and on top of it a folded coat and a black purse and gloves. Something warned him then, the faintest of sounds. Annabelle Blair stood just inside the living room, the front door behind her open on the icy gray morning, watching him.
Slowly, not taking her eyes from his face, she retreated a step and put a hand behind her and pushed the door shut. Something careful about
