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in the dark waters of a
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    shallow pool. Donaldson drove to the left of it and in among the cars.
    The front door stood open. He saw that someone had broken one of the panes in a bow window on the left-hand or west wing of the house. Inside the front door, from an orangery full of lilies, a pillared screen at each end of it in what he thought was called the Adam style, an arch opened on to the big hall where there was blood on the floor and the rugs. Blood made a map of islands on the pale oak. As Barry Vine came out to him, he saw the man's body at the foot of the staircase.
    Wexford approached the body and looked at it. It was a man of about sixty, tall, slim, with a handsome face, the features finely cut and of the kind usually called sensitive. His face was now waxen and yellowish. The mouth hung open. The blue eyes were open and staring. Blood had dyed scarlet his white shirt and stained blacker his dark jacket. He had been formally dressed in a suit and tie, had been shot twice from the front at close range, in the chest and in the head. His head was a mess of blood, a brownish stickiness matting the thick white hair.
    "Do you know who this is?"
    Vine shook his head. "Should I, sir? Presumably the guy who owned the place."
    "It's Harvey Copeland, former MP for the Southern Boroughs and husband of Davina Flory. Of course you haven't been here long, but you'll have heard of Davina Flory?"
    "Yes, sir. Of course."
    You could never tell with Vine, whether he
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    had or not. That deadpan face, that unruffled manner, stolid calm.
    He went into the dining room, preparing himself, but just the same what he saw made him catch his breath. No one, ever, becomes entirely hardened. He would never reach a stage of looking at such scenes with indifference.
    Burden was in the room with the photographer. Archbold as Scene-of-Crimes officer was measuring, making notes, and two technicians had arrived from forensics. Archbold stood up when Wexford came in and Wexford motioned to him to carry on.
    When he had allowed his gaze to rest for a few moments on the bodies of the two women, he said to Burden, "The girl, tell me everything she said."
    "That there were two of them. It was about eight. They came in a car."
    "How else would you get up here?"
    "There were sounds from upstairs. The man who's dead on the stairs went to investigate."
    Wexford walked round the table and stood beside the dead woman whose head and streaming hair hung over the back of her chair. From there he was able to get a different view of the woman opposite. He looked at the remains of a face, laid left cheek downwards in a blood-filled dinner plate, on the red cloth.
    "That's Davina Flory."
    "I guessed it must be," Burden said quietly. "And no doubt the man on the stairs is her husband."
    Wexford nodded. He felt something unusual
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    fI've seen to that. Karen and Gerry have gone out to try and locate them. You'll have noticed we didn't pass a house on the way in."
    Wexford moved round the table, hesitated, came closer than he had hitherto been to the body of Davina Flory. Her copious dark hair, threaded with white, escaping from a loose knot on the back of her head, lay spread in blood-dabbled tendrils. The shoulder of her dress, a red silk which clung closely to her thin shape, bore a huge blackish stain. Her hands lay on the blood-dyed tablecloth in the position of someone at a seance. They were the kind of preternaturally long thin hands such as are seldom seen except on oriental women. Age
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    �T�,
    or him, a kind of awe. "Who's this? Wasn't there a daughter?"
    The other woman might have been about forty-five. Her eyes and hair were dark. Her skin, white and drained in death, had probably been very pale in life. She was thin, dressed in gypsyish clothes, trailing patterned cottons with beads and chains. The colours had been predominantly red, but not so red as they now were.
    "It would have made a hell of a din, all this."
    "Someone may have heard,"