The room was not unduly small, but with five people it suddenly seemed crowded. It was a little smaller than the sitting room but furnished with an elegance which intensified the dark horror of what lay on the bed. With Kate and Benton at the rear, they approached the body. Dalgliesh switched on the light at the door and then turned to the bedside lamp. He saw that the bulb was missing and that the cord with its red call button had been looped high above the bed. They stood by the body in silence, Chandler-Powell keeping a little distant, aware that he might be there under sufferance.

The bed faced the window, which was closed with the curtains drawn across. Rhoda Gradwyn was lying on her back; her two arms, the hands clenched, were raised awkwardly above her head, as if in a gesture of theatrical surprise; the dark hair was splayed over the pillow. The left side of her face was covered by a taped surgical dressing, but what flesh could be seen was a bright cherry red. The right eye, filmed in death, was fully open; the left, partly obscured by the thick dressing, was half closed, giving the body a bizarre and unnerving look of a corpse peering balefully from an eye not yet dead. The sheet covered her body up to the shoulders as if her killer were deliberately exposing his handiwork framed by the two narrow straps of her white linen nightdress. The cause of death was evident. She had been throttled by a human hand.

Dalgliesh knew that speculative gazes fixed on a corpse—his own among them—were different from the gazes fixed on living flesh. Even for a professional inured to the sight of violent death there would always be a vestige of pity, anger or horror. The best pathologists and police officers, standing where they stood now, never lost respect for the dead, a respect born of shared emotions, however temporary, the unspoken recognition of a common humanity, a common end. But all humanity, all personality was extinguished with the last breath. The body, already subject to the inexorable process of decay, had been demoted to an exhibit, to be treated with a serious professional concern, a focus for emotions it could no longer share, no more be troubled by. Now the only physical communication was with gloved exploring hands, probes, thermometers, scalpels, wielded on a body laid open like the carcase of an animal. This was not the most horrific corpse he had seen in his years as a detective, but now it seemed to hold a career’s accumulation of pity, anger and impotence. He thought, Perhaps I’ve had enough of murder.