Billy was struck by how little had been disturbed.
Take away the smashed door and the pitiable figure on the carpet and the room was relatively untouched.
Chairs and tables stood in their places. Nothing was disarranged. A cabinet where china was displayed remained shut, with the glass unbroken. Above the carved stone fireplace a pair of shepherdesses graced the mantelpiece beneath a painted portrait of a woman sitting on a sofa with two young children, a boy and a girl, on either side of her. All three were fair-haired.
Billy was starting to sweat. If anything, the smell was getting worse. He saw Madden's eyes were on him.
'If you're going to throw up, Constable, do it outside.'
'I won't, sir. Truly.'
Madden's glance implied disbelief. Billy gritted his teeth. He watched as the inspector started to move away from the body, then changed his mind and returned to it, this time to look at the back. He bent and peered at the area between the shoulder-blades.
Billy wondered why. There was nothing to see there.
He took a deep breath, then checked himself hurriedly as the surge of nausea returned.
He couldn't understand it. In three years on the force he'd seen his share of corpses, not all of them pretty. Week-old cadavers found in abandoned tenements.
Floaters hauled from the Thames. Earlier that year he had worked on his first murder case since moving from the uniform branch to the CID. An old pawnbroker battered to death in his shop in the Mile End Road. His skull had been reduced to a red pulp, yet Detective Constable Styles hadn't turned a hair.
Why now?
Searching for an explanation, Billy was left with the feeling that it had something to do with the enormity of what had happened in this house. He had seen it in the faces of the villagers and of the men who waited outside. Even Madden's grim features had registered a sense of disbelief as he recounted the bald details on their taxi ride to Waterloo. It was something that shouldn't have happened — that was the closest Billy could come to explaining it — not in the peaceful Surrey countryside, barely an hour's train ride from London. Not in England!
Madden rose. Skirting the body, he went to an inner door that stood open and paused on the threshold.
Billy joined him. In front of them was a hallway with a passage branching off it, running the length of the house. To their left, a trousered leg protruded from a doorway. Madden went towards it, walking in the middle of the carpeted passage, his eyes on the floor in front of him. Billy stayed on his heels.
They came to the body of a middle-aged man lying on his stomach with his arms outstretched in the shape of a cross. His head was twisted to one side, the lips drawn back in a rictus of agony. A stab wound in the middle of his back had left a dark stain in the checked hacking jacket he wore. Some deep internal injury was signalled by the gush of blood from his mouth on to the surrounding floorboards. At the very edge of the pool of dried blood, a curved indentation was visible.
'Do you see that?' Madden pointed. 'Someone's walked there.'
'One of the killers, sir?' Billy peered over his shoulder.
'I doubt it. The blood was already dry. Make a note for Mr Sinclair.'
Madden stepped carefully over the body. Billy followed, fumbling for his notepad. They were in an oak panelled study, furnished with a desk and two stuffed-leather armchairs. The walls were hung with photographs, mostly of men in military uniform. Some showed them sitting on chairs, stiffly posed. Others were less formal. There were pictures of polo matches and clay-pigeon shooting. Madden seemed more interested in a pair of shotguns mounted on a wall rack.
'Was he trying to reach one of those, I wonder?' He spoke the thought aloud.
'Or the telephone, sir?' Billy seized on the chance to participate. He indicated the instrument standing on the desk.
Madden grunted. He was still looking at the gun rack, frowning.
'Something's missing from the mantelpiece, sir.'
Billy tried again. He was feeling better. The smell was less strong in here. 'That mark on the wallpaper 'A clock, most likely.' Madden spoke without turning.
'There might have been other stuff up there.
Silver cups. The maid will know.'
He led the way out and walked back along the passage, checking each room as he came to it. He paused at only one, the dining-room, where plates and cutlery from the previous night's meal lay on the uncleared table.
At the far end of the corridor was a swing door.
The inspector pushed it open and went through. Billy, following on his heels, retched involuntarily and almost threw up as a pungent reek assailed his nostrils.
They were in the kitchen. The afternoon sun poured through unshaded windows on to a table where the remains of a roast chicken rested on a platter beside a glistening ham. As Madden approached, a cloud of flies rose into the air and then settled on the food again. Beyond the table a chair had been knocked over on its back and directly behind it a woman's body lay on the flagstoned floor, half propped against the wall.
Grey-haired, plump-featured, she was dressed in a bloodstained white blouse and an ankle-length skirt of dark blue material. Her face wore a surprised expression.
'The nanny,' Madden murmured. He glanced at Billy, who had chosen that moment to shut his eyes while he tried to control his heaving stomach. 'Give me your handkerchief, Constable.'
'Sir?' Billy's eyes shot open.
'You've got one, haven't you?'
'Sir!' He gave it to Madden, who wet the cloth at the sink and handed it back to Billy.
'Put that over your nose, son.'
'Please, sir, I don't need-'
'Do as I say.'
Without waiting to see if his order was carried out, the inspector crossed the room to where the body lay.
Brushing aside the flies he bent down and unfastened the blouse, drawing it apart. From where he was standing Billy could see the wound, neat as a buttonhole, between the tops of the veined breasts. Madden stayed staring at it for a long time. When he rose his eyes had that unseeing 'other world' look, and Billy was relieved. The damp mask across his nose made the stench in the kitchen bearable, but the handkerchief felt like a badge of shame. As soon as they were back in the passage he tugged it off.
They returned to the hallway and he followed Madden up the stairs to the floor above. When they came to a landing the inspector paused.
'Do you see?' he asked, pointing.
Billy peered into the shadows. Embedded in the pile of the wine-coloured stair carpet were tiny pinpricks of reflected light. 'What are they, sir?' he asked.
'Seed pearls. From a bracelet, I should think.
They've been trodden in. Watch your step."
At the top of the stairs there was another passage, like the one below, running the length of the house.
'Wait here,' Madden told Billy.
He walked down the corridor to his right, checking the rooms, and then returned to the stairway. At the first doorway on the other side he paused.
'Over here, Constable.'
The inspector's voice carried a note that gave Billy time to prepare himself. He walked the few steps to the door and followed Madden into the room. At first he could make nothing of the twilight gloom. The curtains, which must have been drawn the previous evening, still blocked out most of the daylight. Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the half-darkness, he saw the body. Mrs Fletcher, Billy thought. The colonel's lady. (The painting in the drawing-room was fresh in his mind.) She was lying on her back on the bed, flung across it, it seemed, with her legs parted and her arms spread out, the fingers clenched. A silk dressing-gown of Oriental design, embroidered with red flowers and tied at the waist with a sash, was spread out on the bed on either side of her like a half opened fan. Her legs and the bottom of her stomach were bare. The sight of her pubic hair made Billy blush and turn away. He couldn't see her face — her head was hanging over the other side — but when he followed Madden around the foot of the bed he saw the fair hair cascading down.