He paused before going any further, keen to take in the scene and wary of disturbing anything when the snow made it all so fragile. The corner of the tower which held the chair 169was directly in front of him, and he could see immediately that Richard Hartley was beyond any help. The vicar’s body faced the open sea, his head slumped forward onto his chest – stiff and lifeless, like a deposed king who refused to leave his throne. The body was held in place by a length of rope, tied at the back of the chair, and although Penrose was at the wrong angle to see the actual wound, there was enough blood on the vicar’s clothes and the ground beneath the chair to suggest that his throat had been cut. The infinite patterns of crimson on white were shockingly vivid, and Penrose was struck by the peculiar beauty of blood upon snow.

There was a profound stillness about the scene which belied its lonely horror. The covering of snow in the narrow channel leading to the chair was scuffed and kicked, whether from a struggle or in a deliberate attempt to obscure any definite footprints it was impossible to say; either way, the marks would be of no help to him. He moved a little closer, still keeping clear of the area immediately around the body, and looked down at the dead man, noticing the raw, red discolouration on his knuckles where his skin had been exposed to the cold. His eyes were glazed and passive in death, and – perhaps the strangest detail of all – he was barefoot; the cuts and bruises on his feet suggested that he had been made to climb the tower steps without his shoes and socks. Hartley had obviously been killed after the blizzards stopped, but it seemed to Penrose that he had been on the chair for several hours, and he thought about what the vicar’s wife had said just now, on the terrace; who was the person he had gone off to see, and just how long ago had that been? It would take an expert to confirm the time of death more accurately; the snow had done its quiet work, affecting the temperature of 170the body, and there was little point in speculating. In any case, there were questions that interested him far more than when the death had taken place: how had the vicar been persuaded to make that fatal climb out onto the chair, he wondered, and – once he was there – why had the murderer chosen to cut his throat rather than simply pushing him to his death? And then there was the biggest question of all: as far as Penrose could tell, Richard Hartley had been a kind and decent man, so who had hated him enough to contrive this spiteful, dramatic death?