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that he had put up his hand to cover his mouth, resolutely brought it down again. He looked round him with a slow deliberate gaze and then he saw a movement in the far corner.
    The jangling crashing sound that came suddenly had the effect of unlocking his voice. This time he did exclaim.
    "My God!" His voice struggled out as if someone held a hand across his throat.
    It was a telephone which had fallen on to the floor, had been pulled to the floor by some sudden involuntary movement which jerked its lead. Something was crawling towards him out of the darkest part, where there was no lamp. It made a moaning sound. The phone lead was caught round it and the phone dragged behind, bouncing and sliding on polished oak. It bounced and jiggled like a toy on a string pulled by a child.
    She was not a child, though she revealed herself as not much more, a young girl who crept towards him on all fours and collapsed at his feet, making the bewildered gibbering moans of a wounded animal. There was blood all over her, matting her long hair, sodden in her clothes, streaking her bare arms. She lifted her face and it was blotched with blood, as if she had dabbled in it and finger-painted the skin.
    He could see, to his horror, blood welling
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    out of a wound in her upper chest on the left side. He fell on his knees in front of her.
    She spoke. It came in a clotted whisper. "Help me, help me . . .
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    4
    WITHIN two minutes the ambulance was off, on its way to the infirmary at Stowerton. This time its lamp was on, and its siren, blaring its two-tone shriek through the dark woods, the still groves.
    It was going so fast that the driver had to brake for dear life and pull over sharply to avoid Wexford's car which entered the main gateway from the B 2428 at five minutes past nine.
    The message had reached him where he was dining with his wife, his daughter and her friend. This was at a new Italian restaurant in Kingsmarkham called La Primavera. They were halfway through their main course when his phone started bleeping and saved him in a peculiarly drastic way, as he thought afterwards, from doing something he might be sorry for. With a quick word to Dora and a rather perfunctory goodbye to the others, he left the restaurant immediately, abandoning his veal Marsala uneaten.
    Three times he had tried calling Tancred House and each time got the engaged signal. As the car, driven by Donaldson, negotiated the first bend in the narrow woodland road, he tried again and this time it rang and Burden answered.
    "The receiver was off. It fell on the floor. There are three people dead here, shot dead.
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    You must have passed the ambulance with the girl in it."
    "How bad is she?"
    "I don't know. She was conscious, but she's pretty bad." t
    "Did you talk to her?"
    Burden said, "Of course. I had to. There were two of them got into the house but she only saw one. She said it was eight when it happened, or just after, a minute or two after eight. She couldn't talk any more."
    Wexford put the phone back in his pocket. The clock on the car's dashboard told him it was twelve minutes past nine. When the message came he had been not so much in a bad temper as disturbed and increasingly unhappy. Already, sitting at that table in La Primavera, he had begun struggling with these feelings of antipathy, of positive revulsion. And then as he checked, for the third or fourth time, the sharp comment which rose to his lips, controlling himself for Sheila's sake, his phone had rung. Now he pushed aside the memory of a painful meeting. There would be no time for dwelling on it; everything must now give place to the killing at Tancred House.
    The illuminated house showed through the trees, was swallowed in darkness, reappeared as Donaldson drove up the drive and across a wide empty plain. He hesitated at the gap in the low wall, then accelerated and went ahead, swinging on to the forecourt. A statue that probably represented the pursuit of Daphne by Apollo was reflected