her body and face. It dealt kindly with the face, despite the battered forehead and half-open eyes. He had felt blood clotted on the forehead, and matting the long tumbled hair; but Marcia Tait's last expression was less one of anguish than one of fright and defiance, mingled with that assured consciousness of fleshly powers which made her face almost grotesque in death. That, Bennett thought vaguely, was the most terrible feature of all. She wore white: a heavy white lace negligee, which lay about her in a heap, and was torn down along the right shoulder.
Murder. Head beaten in with what? Again trying to keep himself calm and sensible, Bennett fixed his brain desperately on details, and looked about him. Under the hood of the stone fireplace were the ashes of another small fire: as though with a sort of horrible tidiness, it was exactly the size of the one in the other room. Into the ashes had rolled the end of a heavy poker from an overturned set of fire-irons. The poker? Possibly.
On the hearth, and strewing the edge of the gray carpet, he saw smashed fragments of heavy gilded glass from an ancient decanter and there were dark stains near it. Port wine: it still exhaled a stale sweetish odor. Crushed fragments of one or two — yes, two-drinking-glasses lay on the hearthstone. A low tabouret of gilded Japanese lacquer had been knocked over, and an oak chair with a wicker back and scarlet cushion. All these things were on the far side of the fireplace. On the near side of the fireplace, a similar chair stood facing the one that had been overturned.
He tried to visualize what had happened. It was not difficult. Marcia Tait had had a visitor, somebody who sat in the chair that was still upright. The visitor attacked. When he struck, chair, tabouret, decanter, and glasses went over. Marcia Tait ran from him. He struck again, and must have beaten her head long after he had finished her.
The thick air of the room, heavy with spilled wine and stale perfume and smoke, made Bennett feel light- headed. Air! Air, to cleanse even these images away. He moved round her body, towards the big window, and noticed something else. Strewn over the carpet, all in the general direction of the fireplace, lay a number of burnt matches. He noticed them because of their colored stems: they were the fancy green, red, and blue-painted matches you buy on the Continent. But it made no impression on him at the time, although, as he lifted his eyes, he saw on a side-ledge of the fireplace a gold jewel-box, open and containing cigarettes, with a box of ordinary safety matches. Stumbling over to the big window, he wrenched at it, and had got it up part way when he remembered that in cases of this kind you were not supposed to touch anything. Never mind. He still had one driving-glove on; and the chill air was strengthening. He breathed it deeply for a moment before closing the window again. The curtains had not been drawn, and the Venetian blind was still tied up at the top of the window.. Staring out blankly, he saw the unbroken snow touched with bluish shadows. And, beyond the lake and a thin fringe of trees, he saw on higher ground the rear of the line of stables only forty odd yards away, with a little green-shuttered house which evidently belonged to servants. You would never take this for a lake, at first glance, when the snow masked it. It was a good thing John Bohun had warned him not to.
Thin ice, and unbroken snow.
Momentarily he felt a horrible and incredible idea. Wherever he had been able to see the pavilion, it flashed back on him, the snow about it had been unbroken except for the single line of John Bohun's tracks going in. But the murderer had to go in and out. Even if there were sixty feet of solid ice all around the pavilion, he could not have done it without leaving a track. There must be tracks around at the rear, on another entrance somewhere.
This was insane theorizing. Of course Marcia had been dead some hours. The murderer had left while it was still snowing, and the snow had obliterated previous tracks. Why bother with it? Yet he had a vague impression that the snow had stopped fairly early in the morning, from what he remembered in London. Never mind.
He was startled by a voice rather nervously calling his name from the front room. When he hurried into the other room, Bohun was standing in the eerie electric-candlelight with another gilded decanter, which he had evidently taken from one of the drawing-room cabinets, in his hand. He lifted it and drank.
'Well?' he said. He was very quiet and composed now. 'The show's over, Bennett. All over. I suppose we had better send for a doctor or something.'
'It's murder. '
'Yes,' the other agreed, nodding. 'It's murder.' His dull eyes wandered round the room. 'When I find the man who did it,' he said quietly, 'I'll kill him. I mean that.'
'But what happened last night?'
'I don't know. But we're going to wake up everybody in the house and hammer the truth out of them. I was detained in town-I would be. So I didn't get here until three o'clock this morning or thereabouts. Everything was dark. I didn't even know in what room they'd put Marcia. She swore she was going to stay in this place, but I didn't know she meant it.' He looked round again, and added slowly: 'Maurice's work, I fancy. But she'd made me promise to ride with her early. So I got a little — a little sleep,' he said, looking at Bennett out of haggard eyes, 'and got up and woke Thompson. Butler. He'd been up half the night with a toothache anyway. He said she was here. He said she'd fixed it with Locker to bring round the horses at seven o'clock. So I came out here, and Locker hailed me as I was going in just when that dog Have a drink? Or shall we go up to the house and get some coffee?'
After a long pause, while he tried to make his manner inhumanly casual, Bohun broke a little. His eyes squeezed up.
'She looked pitiful, didn't she?' he asked.
'We'll find him,' said Bennett; 'at least, I know a man who will. Sorry, old son. Were you — were you so very much-'
'Yes,' said Bohun. 'Come on.'
The other hesitated. He felt like a fool, and yet a nervous fear worried at him. 'I was only thinking before we go out of here and make more tracks… There weren't any tracks beside your own coming into this place..'
Bohun whirled round. 'What the bell do you mean?'
'Wait a minute — Steady I didn't mean-“ Bennett saw his unintentional implication, and saw it too late. It startled him as much as it obviously startled John Bohun. 'The wise, right, and sensible thing.' Good God, diplomacy) He went on: 'Believe me, that wasn't what I meant at all. There was only the possibility that the man might still be in the house.'
'what?'
'Well, is there any other way in except the front door?'
'No.'
'And are you sure the ice is thin all around the place?'
Still Bohun did not grasp the question, though in a dull way he seemed to sense that it was important. 'I suppose so.
At least, Old Thompson warned me about it before I came out. He said some kids had-'
Then he stopped, and his eyes widened.
'You're talking nonsense,' he said curtly. 'What the devil's the good of mucking up the issue when we've enough on our hands as it is? Tracks) You're talking like a fool detective in a play. This is real. This is true. I'm only beginning to realize it's true. You'll be saying next that I killed her.'
'All the same, don't you think we'd better make sure there's still nobody hidden here?'
Again after a long pause, Bohun stalked ahead while they searched the pavilion, muttering to himself and holding the decanter tightly in the crook of his arm. The search did not take long. There were only four rooms in the pavilion, excluding a tiny cubicle with a garish gilt-leafed bath at the back of the bedroom. A narrow hall or anteroom ran the depth of the house. On one side were drawing-room and bedroom, on the other a music-room and an uncanny replica of a seventeenth-century private salon set out with rosewood card-tables. All of it was faded; but it was swept and garnished as though for ghosts. Under the dull yellow candle glow it was as though somebody had arranged a shrine.
But there was nobody there. And, as they could see by looking out of windows on each side of the house, nowhere was there any mark in the snow.
'I've had enough of this,' said Bohun, when he had looked out the window of the card-room and turned sharply away. 'Let's go up to the house and not act the fool any longer. It snowed again and effaced any tracks, that's all. Don't look so worried, man. Leave that to me. When I find the man who-'
His own nervousness, the jerking of his mouth and false brittle sarcasm of his look, was evident. He wheeled round. Bennett thought that he almost cried out when a faint voice rose outside, faint and insistent on the morning air, calling John Bohun's name.
