He walked around the house trying each of the shutters in turn. At the back there was a yard and a crop of crumbling outbuildings. A slab of snow slid from the glistening tiles on the roof and fell with a thud behind him. The stab of fright that shot through him made him conscious for the first time of a growing uneasiness. He cast his eyes over the surrounding countryside, looking – for what? He didn’t know. There was nothing to be seen. Not a movement, not a sound. And yet he had the strangest sensation of eyes upon him. Watching him. It was foolish, he knew. He was just tired.

He went around to the south side. Here the windows were set just above head height, and he saw that the shutters on the first of them were not properly closed. Where one half met the other the wood was splintered and broken. He reached up and pulled them open. The steel-framed windows behind them were opened inwards, the glass on one side broken, jagged shards still caught in the frame. Bannerman felt a rush of both excitement and disappointment. Someone had been here before him, though not within the last twelve hours. For there were no tracks in the snow, and it had stopped snowing the night before.

He stepped back, and on the wall below the window he saw the marks left by the intruder’s boots where they had sought a grip to push him up and into the house. Again he turned and looked out across the fields. Still nothing stirred. He threw his holdall into the house, took another two or three steps back and then ran at the window, jumping to get his hands up over the sill. His soles scraped on the wall below him as he pulled himself up, first straddling the window ledge and then dropping down into the semi-darkness. He crouched for a while, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom.

The room took shape around him. A small bedroom, sparsely furnished. A bed, a dresser and a short bedside table with a lamp. The sheets had been torn from the bed and discarded on the floor. The pillows and mattresses had been cut open and searched. Horsehair and down lay in clumps all around the bed. The drawers had been pulled from the dresser and piled untidily on top. Bannerman, still squatting on the floor below the window, accepted even then that his trip to Flanders had been a waste of time. Gryffe’s country house had been thoroughly searched. He would find nothing here. He could not even tell when this search had taken place. It might have been yesterday, a week ago, or even a month before Gryffe was murdered. But no! He revised that thought. The broken wood on the shutters was too fresh. Within the last couple of days perhaps.