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sad eyes had triggered some overgrown memory circuit. The only trouble was, I could not remember the
where,
the
when,
or the
who
of it.
    No time for that now,
I thought.
    At this short range, my view of the dead man’s face was almost microscopic: I could see the pores on his nose (large, but clean) and the myriad of minute red blood vessels in his nose, broken and spreading in all directions like a map of the Amazon and its tributaries.
    Aha!
I thought.
He drinks.
    But wait!
Although I had not yet searched the house thoroughly, I had come across no liquor bottles.
    Used
to drink,
I decided.
    Was it my imagination, or did the corpse’s face show a little relief at my change of mind?
    Around the clearly defined outline of his beard, the cheeks, chin, and neck were clean-shaven without the slightest sign of stubble, which seemed to suggest that he had died early in the day, soon after shaving, rather than later.
    I turned my attention to the hair again, which now, hanging down towards the floor, appeared to me, in my inverted position, to be standing on end in fright, but was otherwise a healthy bush, as if its owner had faithfully used a patent hair tonic from birth.
    “The hair of a much younger man,”
said the voice of the Whisperer in my ear.
“Is it possibly a wig?”
    Lowering myself to balance on my head and one elbow, I reached out carefully for a handful of strands and gave them a sharp tug, thinking as I did so that (a) you can’t hurt the dead and (b) as with lips, you can’t leave fingerprints on hair.
    But this was no wig. The hair was natural. And—I should have thought of this before—it matched perfectly the color of the hair in the man’s ears and nose.
    People who dye their hair, beards, mustaches, and eyebrows for nefarious purposes seldom think to include their earlobes and nostrils.
    I studied the skin. The cheeks and forehead were liver-spotted, as were the backs of the hands, which hung helplessly to the floor, the fingers turned in and clawlike—as if their owner had died clutching, like a drowning man, at the proverbial straw.
    I examined the fingernails. As I had suspected they would be, several of them—notably the first three on each hand—were broken. And under each of these, partly dried blood was caked. The fingertips themselves were raw and covered with abrasions, a word I had learned from Dickens’s
Martin Chuzzlewit,
in which the eldest Miss Pecksniff found abrasions on the knobby parts of her father’s anatomy after he had been knocked down the front steps. I had heard it again from Dogger as he dressed my wounds the first time Gladys shied and dumped me onto the gravel drive.
    The abrasions made it likely that the blood under the nails was the corpse’s own.
    If his wounds had been inflicted
after
Mr. Sambridge was hung up by his heels, the source of the damage could not have been more than an arm’s length away. It—or they—would have been within reach.
    I lowered my feet and sprang out of my headstand.
    I didn’t have far to look. The contraption by which Mr. Sambridge was suspended was a sort of windlass: an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys attached to the back of the door—not so very different from the rack upon which medieval torturers stretched their victims in the Tower. At the heart of all this was a hand-carved wooden gear assembly, which looked for all the world like a waterwheel in the millstream of some quaint Victorian village. In miniature, of course.
    A wooden pawl, or tongue, fell into the teeth of a ratchet gear, assuring that it could turn in only one direction, unless released. The device was a simple one: a mechanism I had learned to recognize when Dogger taught me the art of lock-picking.
    The pulleys had been beautifully hand-carved, apparently from single blocks of oak, and polished by someone who was proud of his work. They must have taken weeks of patient work. I could still smell the beeswax with which they had been lubricated.
    I could