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steel.
    It’s amazing what the discovery of a corpse can do for one’s spirits.
    I licked the tip of my mental pencil and began to make notes.
    Age,
I thought:
about seventy, at a guess
. We had been taught to estimate ages in Girl Guides, not only by physical characteristics but also by comparison. The latter method told me that the man was much older than Father, who was fifty, and younger than old Canon Eastlake, who, at ninety, had crept quavering back to St. Tancred’s last summer to be presented with a purse of money for his half-century of services to the Building Fund.
    I ticked off the main indicators: gray hair and bushy gray beard tending to white, wrinkled facial skin (dark as it now was and dragged down by gravity), faded gray eyes (yes, they were open, and staring at me), scandalously bushy eyebrows, and a profuse undergrowth of hair in the ears.
    I stuck a curious finger into the surprisingly warm mouth, remembering as I did so that fingerprints cannot be taken from dead lips. Mr. Sambridge possessed a remarkably good mouthful of natural teeth for someone his age, whether ritually maintained or expensively corrected I could not tell.
    As someone who has spent hours of agony strapped down in Dr. Frankenstein’s chamber of dental horrors in Farrington Street, I could only respect—and hate—anyone who still possessed such a spotless set of choppers.
    That would do for basics, but I knew that I could be much more thorough.
    My task was complicated, though, by the position of the body, and by the fact that much of its blood had settled in the head.
    Cutting him down was out of the question. If I had learned one thing from Inspector Hewitt in the past, it was not to meddle with dead bodies.
    At the very thought of my old friend, I felt my face flushing. How exciting it would be to call in the inspector: to be the one to break the news of Mr. Sambridge’s death. But before I could do so—and before I could receive the inspector’s generous and wholehearted praise with an entirely innocent heart—I needed to remove any traces of my own investigation.
    But before turning things over to the police, there was much to do, and I’d better get on with it. My time here was limited. I needed to get back to Buckshaw in time for the taxi to visit Father in Hinley; that was one thing that couldn’t be delayed.
    I also had to consider the possibility that someone—the postman, perhaps—would come to Thornfield Chase and find me there alone with Mr. Sambridge.
    Gladys, parked outside, would be a dead giveaway. There wasn’t time to go downstairs and move her to a hiding place, and to be caught doing so would be even more difficult to explain.
    No, the best thing was to get on with it, and hope for the best.
    Father had once lectured us:
“In even the most desperate of situations, you must always put efficiency first. Efficiency is paramount.”
    And he was right. How wise my father was!
    Efficiency was everything.
    The problem at hand was in making a careful study of Mr. Sambridge’s features, hampered as I was by the fact that he was hanging upside down and cutting him loose, as I have said, was out of the question.
    The solution came to me at once. I stepped to one side, threw my hands above my head, bent sideways at the waist, planted my right hand down firmly upon the carpet, flung myself into a half cartwheel, and ended up in a handstand, face-to-face—nose to nose, almost—with the corpse.
    Much better!
    At once—and in spite of the grimace—it looked much more human. Everything seemed to snap into place.
    There must be a part of our brain,
I thought,
that is designed to recognize human features: a part of the brain that switches off when the face is upside down. I must remember to research this theory at a more convenient time.
    But for now—and with a sharp shock of recognition—I realized I had seen this face before.
    The ocean wave of gray hair, that large, bulbous forehead, the long ears, and the