The pillared portico was still in place but framed a rectangular gap where the front door had been. Every floor had been consumed. When they reached the east end of the front and turned left, the full extent of the destruction was revealed. The east wall had fallen outwards. Most of the internal walls had vanished or had been reduced to bare brick. A tangle of smoking debris filled the cellar area, heaped up to various heights, with black, crooked fingers of half-consumed beams sticking up at crazy angles. Possibly, Paul thought, the heavy downpour of rain had helped to prevent their total consumption by the flames. He raised his eyes, traced along the inside of the front wall the regular indentations where once the first-floor main beams had had their ends embedded in the stonework. There had been the floor of the bedroom, just there had stood the bed. . . . As Carol had remarked, a honeymoon to remember.

The three men walked on slowly, picked their way over rubble fallen out from the scullery. The cellar underneath it was also filled by debris. Paul noted one of the old-fashioned sinks half-sunk in the rubble. They turned left again round what had been the back of the house and the small overgrown yard between scullery and ruined conservatory. So far none of the three men had made any comment to any of the others. Paul felt depression heavy on his mind. The sordid scene of violent destruction by fire seemed no more than a fitting end to Ardvreck House’s history of treachery, murder, suicide and hate. He wondered if Pollard would still bring his men to finish the job with explosives. Even if every trace of the house were removed and the vegetation allowed to grow over the area, he thought it more than likely that any sensitive person visiting the spot in the future would still feel the sombre, brooding tones of misery and terror that lingered on.

He saw Bourne look up at the place on the east wall where bedroom number six had been then look downwards into the heaped-up debris. Meredith stood beside him, also scanning the debris. Paul, his stomach like cold lead, walked towards them. Reluctantly he examined the jumbled interior. But there was no sign of the blackened shrivelled things he feared to see.