As the taxi turned from bad roads into worse, Charlton tried not to judge Mildred Glasscastle too harshly for continuing to live in a house where a murder had been committed. After all, she must have reasons; empty houses at low rents are hard to find, and yet not so rare that a freehold bloodstained bungalow might not be quite difficult to dispose of—the more so if it were approached by such roads as these, and named Buttercups, and had no telephone. This last concession was prompted by seeing a public telephone booth at a crossroads, the only thing in sight that was not cowering under the onslaught of a violent hailstorm.

A hundred yards further on, the taxi halted, and the driver said, ‘It’s up the bank. Folk have to walk the rest of the way. I’ll wait here.’

Peering through the curtain of hail, Charlton saw a red-brick bungalow at the summit of a precipice.

It had been no part of his intention to arrive breathless from scrambling up a rocky path, muddied to his knees, 51and as wet as though he had climbed out of a river. Yet it eased the introduction, for Mildred Glasscastle’s first attentions were given to his coat, which she hung on a clothes-horse, and his hat, which, she said, she would pop into the bread oven. These kind offices obliged her to turn her back on him, and while it was turned, he tried to compose himself before another inspection of a face so like Mary’s that thirty years seemed to have been stripped off him with the coat. Like Mary, Mildred Glasscastle was tall and heroically built. Her yellow hair had the same corn-straw glitter, and she wore it twisted around her head like a helmet, as Mary had done in the twenties. The same round grey eyes, blindly bright, protruded like glass ornaments from the same large, stupidly noble countenance. Only her total lack of sexual bravura differentiated her from Mary and established her as an aunt. The thought exploded in his mind how very hard that unknown man must have worked to kill Mary, how violent and furious the struggle must have been, spattering these very walls with blood; for this, as he realized from the newspaper accounts, was the kitchen where Mary had sat with her letters and her pilchards.

The room was hot and full of white linen that might almost be shrouds. Mildred Glasscastle gathered an armful of linen off a chair, saying, ‘Sit down. I’ve been ironing.’ She spoke as though she had known him all her life, and as he sat down he found himself falling into a dream that it was the aunt who had been murdered and now he must condole with a stranger who was also Mary.52

‘Better take it easy. The wind’s about knocked the stuffing out of you,’ she remarked.

Momentarily dizzied, he had closed his eyes. When he opened them, it was to see her in profile. He realized that she was not so identically like Mary. Her nose was flatter, and she had a long upper lip. Her clothes, too, were tidy and sturdy, as Mary’s could never have been. His heartbeats steadied, the fumes of his hallucination cleared away, and he was left bleakly aware that he was at the beginning of a difficult conversation.