Now that she was at last free to leave, Mrs. Skeffington became gracious and bestowed vague thanks and insincere smiles indiscriminately on everyone present. Chandler-Powell escorted her out to the car. No doubt, Kate thought, he would take the opportunity to reassure or propitiate her, but even he could hardly hope that she would hold her tongue. She wouldn’t return, of course, nor would others. Patients might enjoy a small frisson of vicarious terror at the thought of a seventeenth-century burning, but were unlikely to choose a clinic where a relatively helpless post-operative patient had been brutally done to death. If George Chandler-Powell depended on his income from the clinic to keep the Manor going, he was likely to be in trouble. There would be more than one victim of this murder.

They waited until they heard the sound of the departing Rolls-Royce, and Chandler-Powell reappeared. Dalgliesh said, “The incident room will be in the Old Police Cottage, and my officers will be staying at Wisteria House. I would be grateful if the household could be assembled in the library in half an hour’s time. Meanwhile, the scene-of-crime officers will be busy in the west wing. I’m grateful to you for putting the library at my disposal for the next hour or so.”

Chapter 9

9

By the time Dalgliesh with Kate had returned to the bedroom Rhoda Gradwyn’s body had been removed. The two mortuary attendants had with practised ease zipped her into a body bag and wheeled the stretcher into the lift. Benton was below to see the departure of the ambulance, which had arrived instead of a mortuary van to collect the corpse, and to await the arrival of the scene-of-crime officers. The photographer, a large nimble-footed man of few words, had completed his work and had already left. And now, before beginning the protracted routine of interviewing the suspects, Dalgliesh returned with Kate to the empty bedroom.

When the young Dalgliesh had first been promoted to the CID, it seemed to him that the air of a murder room always changed when the corpse had been removed, and more subtly than the physical absence of the victim. The air seemed easier to breathe, voices were louder, there was a shared relief, as if an object with some mysterious power to threaten or contaminate had been robbed of its potency. Some vestige of this feeling remained. The disordered bed with the indent of the head still on the pillow looked as innocuous and normal as if the occupant had recently got up from sleep and would shortly return. It was the dropped tray of crockery just inside the door that, for Dalgliesh, imposed on the room a symbolism both dramatic and discomforting. The scene looked as if it had been set up to be photographed for the jacket of an upmarket thriller.