“No, no, that was the first sign that things were not as they should be. I said so in my statement,” he said plaintively, as if dealing with a stupid and recalcitrant child.

Thinking furiously, Lindsay gave it her best shot. “The lock?” she hazarded.

“Exactly. The mortise was unlocked. It was only the Yale that was engaged. As if someone without a key had just slammed the door shut behind them. Well, I knew the Thomases on the ground floor wouldn’t dream of leaving themselves so vulnerable. I had had occasion to mention the importance of it to Ms. Varnavides, but since then she’d been quite reliable about it, so I was rather upset.” He pursed his lips and sighed through his nose. “I assumed she’d just been remiss again. As I think you were today?”

Lindsay looked surprized, recalled she hadn’t locked a mortise behind her as she’d come in and smiled sheepishly.

“I thought as much. Of course, I had no idea there was more to it than carelessness.”

“Of course not,” Lindsay said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. “Thinking back, was there anything that struck you as being out of place? Sometimes, with the passage of time, things become clearer to us . . .”

Knight crossed his legs at the knee, revealing an inch of bony, milk-white leg between gray sock and gray trouser cuff. He knitted his fingers together in his lap and pondered, clearly revelling in selfimportance. “Nothing springs to mind,” he eventually said reluctantly.

“Never mind. So you climbed the stairs and saw . . .?”

“The door to the Steinbergs’ flat was open.” He gave a tight little smile, as if imagining the impact when he imparted this in the witness box.

“When you say open, do you mean ajar, or standing wide open, as if someone had flung it back?”

A momentary flicker of a frown tugged at the skin round Knight’s eyes. “Are you sure you read my statement?”

Lindsay willed herself to relax and smiled. “Like I said, I just had time to glance at it. We like to do these follow-up interviews without too many preconceptions. A fresh eye on the subject, you know?”

“Hmmm. Waste of time, more like,” he muttered. “I wouldn’t stand for a waste of resources like this in my hospital.”

“The door?” Lindsay prompted, biting back a sharp comment about patients being shunted from one hospital to another in the futile search for an intensive care bed before they died in the attempt.

“It was half open. Considerably more than ajar, but not wide open.”

“As if someone had come out in a hurry?”

He pulled a face Lindsay recognized. It was the same one her chemistry teacher had used whenever he’d been asked a question he didn’t really know how to answer. “I wouldn’t really have thought so,” he eventually said. “The Steinbergs have one of those thick-pile carpets in the hall, so the door doesn’t swing free. If someone had yanked it open in a rush, it would have been wider than it was.”