Mrs Boyle flushed angrily. ‘You are young and inexperienced and should welcome advice from someone more knowledgeable than yourself. And what about this queer foreigner? When did he arrive?’
‘In the middle of the night.’
‘Indeed. Most peculiar. Not a very conventional hour.’
‘To turn away bona fide travelers would be against the law, Mrs Boyle.’ Molly added sweetly. ‘You may not be aware of that.’
‘All I can say is that this Paravicini, or whatever he calls himself, seems to me—’
‘Beware, beware, dear lady. You talk of the devil and then—’
Mrs Boyle jumped as though it had been indeed the devil who addressed her. Mr Paravicini, who had crept quietly in without either of the two women noticing him, laughed and rubbed his hands together with a kind of elderly satanic glee.
‘You startled me,’ said Mrs Boyle. ‘I did not hear you come in.’
‘I come in on tiptoe, so,’ said Mr Paravicini, ‘nobody ever hears me come and go. That I find very amusing. Sometimes I over-hear things. That, too, amuses me.’ He added softly, ‘But I do not forget what I hear.’
Mrs Boyle said rather feebly, ‘Indeed? I must get my knitting—I left it in the drawing room.’
She went out hurriedly. Molly stood looking at Mr Paravicini with a puzzled expression. He approached her with a kind of hop and skip.
‘My charming hostess looks upset.’ Before she could prevent it, he picked up her hand and kissed it. ‘What is it, dear lady?’
Molly drew back a step. She was not sure that she liked Mr Paravicini much. He was leering at her like an elderly satyr.
‘Everything is rather difficult this morning,’ she said lightly. ‘Because of the snow.’
‘Yes.’ Mr Paravicini turned his head round to look out of the window. ‘Snow makes everything very difficult, does it not? Or else it makes things very easy.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘No,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There is quite a lot that you do not know. I think, for one thing, that you do not know very much about running a guesthouse.’
Molly’s chin went up belligerently. ‘I daresay we don’t. But we mean to make a go of it.’
‘Bravo, bravo.’
‘After all,’ Molly’s voice betrayed slight anxiety, ‘I’m not such a very bad cook—’
‘You are, without doubt, an enchanting cook,’ said Mr Paravicini.
What a nuisance foreigners were, thought Molly.
Perhaps Mr Paravicini read her thoughts. At all events his manner changed. He spoke quietly and quite seriously.
‘May I give you a little word of warning, Mrs Davis? You and your husband must not be too trusting, you know. Have you references with these guests of yours?’
‘Is that usual?’ Molly looked troubled. ‘I thought people just—just came.’
‘It is advisable always to know a little about the people who sleep under your roof.’ He leaned forward and tapped her on the shoulder in a minatory kind of way. ‘Take myself, for example. I turn up in the middle of the night. My car, I say, is overturned in a snowdrift. What do you know of me? Nothing at all. Perhaps you know nothing, either, of your other guests.’
‘Mrs Boyle—’ began Molly, but stopped as that lady herself re-entered the room, knitting in hand.
‘The drawing room is too cold. I shall sit in here.’ She marched towards the fireplace.
Mr Paravicini pirouetted swiftly ahead of her. ‘Allow me to poke the fire for you.’
Molly was struck, as she had been the night before, by the youthful jauntiness of his step. She noticed that he always seemed careful to keep his back to the light, and now, as he knelt, poking the fire, she thought she saw the reason for it. Mr Paravicini’s face was cleverly but decidedly ‘made up.’
So the old idiot tried to make himself look younger than he was, did he? Well, he didn’t succeed. He looked all his age and more. Only the youthful walk was incongruous. Perhaps that, too, had been carefully counterfeited.
She was brought back from speculation to the disagreeable realities by the brisk entrance of Major Metcalf.
‘Mrs Davis. I’m afraid the pipes of the—er—’ he lowered his voice modestly, ‘downstairs cloakroom are frozen.’
‘Oh, dear,’ groaned Molly. ‘What an awful day. First the police and then the pipes.’
Mr Paravicini dropped the poker into the grate with a clatter. Mrs Boyle stopped knitting. Molly, looking at Major Metcalf, was puzzled by his sudden stiff immobility and by the indescribable expression on his face. It was an expression she could not place. It was as though all emotion had been drained out of it, leaving something carved out of wood behind.
He said in a short, staccato voice, ‘Police, did you say?’
She was conscious that behind the stiff immobility of his demeanor, some violent emotion was at work. It might have been fear or alertness or excitement—but there was something. This man, she said to herself, could be dangerous.
He said again, and this time his voice was just mildly curious, ‘What’s that about the police?’
‘They rang up,’ said Molly. ‘Just now. To say they’re sending a sergeant out here.’ She looked towards the window. ‘But I shouldn’t think he’ll ever get here,’ she said hopefully.
‘Why are they sending the police here?’ He took a step nearer to her, but before she could reply the door opened, and Giles came in.
‘This ruddy coke’s more than half stones,’ he said angrily. Then he added sharply, ‘Is anything the matter?’
Major Metcalf turned to him. ‘I hear the police are coming out here,’ he said. ‘Why?’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Giles. ‘No one can ever get through in this. Why, the drifts are five feet deep. The road’s all banked up. Nobody will get here today.’
And at that moment there came distinctly three loud taps on the window.
It startled them all. For a moment or two they did not
