I drew near to the house, and a curtain of white cloud rolled off the hill to prevent me entering, then rolled over me and down the track. There were two other cars, one a Volkswagen Golf, the other a battered grey Dormobile, with a triangle of faded red flag on the aerial and flat tyres. The Volkswagen was parked on the far side of the forecourt. The Dormobile stood forlornly in the hay barn, which seemed to be its final resting place. I saw now that the Mercedes had two doors, that its paintwork was indeed metallic, and that its windows were coated with grime.
Parking my red Ford, I was faced with a problem I should have solved already: to take the briefcase with me or leave it in the car? Keeping my back to the house and using the open door for cover, I fished the .38 revolver from the briefcase and jammed it once more in my waistband. I was getting a little too used to it. I locked the briefcase in the boot. Passing the blue Mercedes, I brushed my knuckles against the bonnet. It was stone cold.
The front entrance to the house was protected by a storm porch of quarried black stone. The door was painted green. The doorbell was linked to an intercom. Beside the bell was a brushed-steel plate with numbers on it. Either you rang the bell or you punched in the combination. The door had an eyehole and strips of stained-glass window either side of it, but the glass had no luminosity, and I guessed it was boarded on the inside. A curled visitor card read: "Aitken Mustafa May, BADA, Oriental Carpets, Objects d'Art, Chmn, The Hardwear Company, GmbH." I pressed the bell and heard it ring inside the house: one of those sleigh-bell chimes that are supposed to calm spirits but drive them to the brink. I rang a second time, my eyes fixed upon the Volkswagen. This year's registration. Local licence plates, like the Mercedes. Blue, like the Mercedes. And its windows, like the Mercedes, coated with grime and weather. When Aitken's ship came home, everyone got a new car, I decided.
I pressed the bell three times. Rather than listen to any more sleigh bells, I walked along the front of the house in search of another door to try, but there wasn't one, and the windows gave onto a narrow corridor of white-painted brick. And when I tap-tapped on the glass, no smiling, friendly face appeared to welcome me, not even Larry's.
I walked round to the back, picking my way through the remains of an old timber mill: rusted circular saws, cumbersome engines with frayed belts, a pile of sawn logs that lay as they had fallen years ago, a rusted axe, heaps of sawdust overgrown with weeds and lichen, all abandoned as if at a single summons. And I wondered what it was about this place that, however many years ago, a sawyer and his mates should have stopped sawing and fled, leaving everything exactly as it was now; and that Aitken Mustafa May and his storeman and his secretary had abandoned their nice new cars and followed him.
Then I saw the blood, or perhaps I had seen it already and was finding other things to think of: one patch of unisex blood, Emma's or Larry's equally, one finely fretted island about a foot long and six inches wide, congealed, lying across the sawdust; but so rich, so assured, that as I stooped to it I perceived it first as solid rather than liquid, and was half inclined to pick it up—until I saw my hand recoil and fancied Emma's pale dead face staring up at me through the sawdust. I delved. The sawdust turned out to be common sawdust all the way to the ground.
But no gruesome trail, no telltale drips or stains led the keen-eyed detective to the next clue. There was the patch of blood, and it lay on the pile of sawdust, and the sawdust lay five paces from the back door. And between the sawdust and the back door I made out a lot of busy footprints in both directions, not unisex this time but distinctly male: either track shoes or just standard flat-soled shoes with nothing special to distinguish them. But still emphatically male, and going back and forth enough times and with enough male haste and vigour to establish an oily river of churned mud, ending at the island of poured blood that seemed so determined to remain separate from the sawdust it had settled on.
