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the police.” He stuttered, and shook. “Don’t take the lamp,” I cried out in a ritual fear. He implored me. “Take it then. Christ, there’s the moon.”
    In the cold moonshine then, and alone, I went and looked into Philippe’s waxwork mask of plaster. His eyes were shut, and his lips parted. His hair now was darker than his skin. He did not resemble anyone I knew, and seemed dead a year, though it could not have been more than a day.
    The bruises and cuts of the beating I had given him were all healed. Only the barber’s gash had not gone from his throat, or it was a fresh one. From the puffy dark mottling on his neck, one long dried trickle of blood had flowed out black, running down under his shirt, down to where the nipple had checked it. There was a similar abrasion on the inside of his left wrist, and the sleeve there was stained, plummy, under the moon.
    Then I saw – he had not been quite dead, when returned. No, not quite, for on the bottom of the bath, in his blood, the artist had been drawing, as he had once drawn in the spilled ink … I looked closely. I thought I could make out the indication of a horse, slender and running, with a slender hooded thing leant forward on its back – and before that, two slender running hounds –
    “Philippe,” I said, urgently, as if he would hear me.
    What must I feel? I had spent it all, all emotion, all sickness, for her. I was bled out and had nothing over to offer him. Drained like the window of its light, like Philippe of his blood.
    I sat down on the floor by the bath, in the coldness of his death, to wait a while, to see if he could catch me up.
    Called to a painted hall in the Senate Building, I, with several others, was asked various questions. Russe, my surety, described to the officials, while clerks busily scribbled, how I had been taken sick, and spent a night and day in his home, overseen continuously by himself and Mademoiselle Y –, whom he did not wish to bring into the affair unless it were unavoidable. Philippe could not have been dead more than an hour or so, when found in the bath-house, this the doctors had quickly verified. Besides, the operation across the roof, the lowering through the vanes, these postulated several persons labouring in unison.
    One by one, forming into irked and vocal groups, Philippe’s friends, amours, money-lenders, debtors, and scavengers extraordinary were sumoned, quizzed, and dismissed to pace the antechambers.
    One sensed that, with all the muck that came swiftly to the surface, the murder of Philippe seemed not only inevitable but perhaps aesthetically fitting, to the members of this Senate Investigatory Committee.
    At no time did I think I would be apprehended for anything, despite having arrived at an unsocial hour and plainly knowing the exact whereabouts of the body. Such behaviour was too pat for an assassin, or if I were one, they could not be bothered with me. At length, they turned us all out on the street, as innocent. The Committee had got hold of the idea that some enemy from Philippe’s past had done the heinous deed, then fled over the northern borders. This was deemed a proper programme. They liked it, and did not like any of us. If a single murderer had been proved in our midst, I think it would have disgusted them, for evidently the itinerary of Philippe’s life had not pleased. They desired the whole thing filed rapidly and put in a cabinet.
    The death of Philippe was discussed generally after that. Many theories, including that of an ingenious suicide, were aired. At the
Iron Bowl
a fight broke out, and at the
Cockatrice
two more, though the
Surprise
and the
Imago
remained quiet. Indeed, under the black beams of the
Imago
’s medieval roof, they concocted weird scenarios of witchcraft. It was the Devil who rode over Philippe’s attics and dropped the corpse into the tub. Had there not been a drawing, in blood, to that effect, all over the walls, ceiling and floor? Better ask Andre, who