“Who else could have done it?” Miss Dinmont wanted to know.

“It must have been someone passing through the neighborhood,” Cissy said. “A tramp or vagrant of some sort.”

“In this weather?”

Everyone looked at the window. Outside, the snow lay sufficiently deep and crisp and even to gladden the heart of King Wenceslaus, and of almost nobody else.

“He’d want shelter,” Cissy said. “He couldn’t sleep outside on a night like this. And so he broke in, and-”

“And wanted something to read,” Mrs. Colibri suggested.

“And was drawn into this room by the light-”

“Like a moth,” Earlene Cobbett said, and then looked quite startled at having spoken the thought aloud, and clapped a freckled hand to her little mouth.

“And found poor Mr. Rathburn,” Cissy went on, “who had already died in an accidental fall. And then the tramp, fearing he’d be suspected of involvement in the death, turned off the light and left.” She heaved a sigh. “There, Mr. Rhodenbarr! None of us were involved, and it’s not a murder after all!”

“Darling,” Nigel Eglantine said. “Darling, that was so well said that I only wish it weren’t ridiculous.”

“Is it ridiculous, Nigel?”

“I’m afraid so, darling.”

“Oh. But-”

“There’s something else,” I said, and stepped closer to the fallen Jonathan Rathburn and pointed down at his eyes, which continued to stare vacantly up at us. I bent down, clucked knowingly, and got to my feet. “If you look closely,” I said, “you’ll see evidence of pinpoint hemorrhages in both eyes.”

No one went over for a closer look. Most of them stared instead at me.

“I don’t think he died of loss of blood,” I said. “He did bleed quite a bit, and it is possible to bleed to death from a scalp wound, but he didn’t lose that much blood. And it’s possible to strike your head and die of the effects of the blow, but I don’t think that’s what happened here. The kind of fall that could have caused that much damage would have been a noisy affair, yet nobody here seems to have heard a thing. I don’t think Rathburn fell from the library steps. I don’t think he mounted them in the first place. I think he was sitting down when his killer struck him.”

Greg Savage wanted to know what gave me that idea. I crouched down beside the corpse and pointed to the source of the bleeding, a gash high on the left temple, the area around it showing a lot of discoloration. “If the killer was standing over him,” I said, “and if he was right-handed and struck downward, well, that’s a logical place for the blow to land.”

The colonel wanted to know if a fall couldn’t inflict a similar injury. I said I supposed it was possible, but he would have had to bang his head on something-the bottom step, say, or the sharp corner of a table. In that case we ought to see blood on the surface he struck.

“But we don’t,” I said. “We don’t see the proverbial blunt instrument lying about, either, probably because the killer carried it off, but that’s very likely what was employed. A bookend, say, or a glass ashtray, or a bronze knickknack like that camel over there. In fact…”

The colonel followed me over to the revolving bookcase, and I caught his hand as he was reaching for the camel. “Best not to touch,” I said, “although I’ll be surprised if it hasn’t been wiped clean of prints. There’ll probably be microscopic evidence, though. It looks to me as though there’s blood on the base of it, but you’d have to run tests to establish that conclusively.”

“My God,” Cissy Eglantine said. “You can’t be saying he was killed with our camel.”

“I think he was struck down with it,” I said. “But not killed.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the blow knocked him down,” I said, “and drew blood, and may well have rendered him unconscious. It might have eventually proved fatal-it’ll take an autopsy to determine that-but it didn’t kill Rathburn right away, and the killer didn’t want to sit around and wait. He knew better than to strike a second blow and try to pass it off as the result of a fall. So he used something else.”

“What?”

I pointed to the couch. “That throw pillow,” I said. “No, don’t pick it up, but have a look at it. I think the fabric’s stained, and my guess is the stain’ll turn out to be blood, and the blood’ll turn out to be Rathburn’s.”

Rufus Quilp blinked rapidly. He was sitting on the couch within reach of the pillow in question, and drew away from it now. “I was following you up to that point,” he said slowly, his voice thick as if with sleep. I don’t think I’d heard him speak before, and had barely seen him awake. “But now you’ve lost me. Are you suggesting that, having struck the man once with a bronze camel, your killer finished the job by swatting him with a pillow?”

If you’ll swallow a camel, I thought, why strain at a pillow? But I couldn’t say that, and before I could come up with something else to say, Millicent Savage said, “He didn’t hit him with the pillow, silly. He smothered him with it!”

“Millicent,” her mother said, “you mustn’t interrupt.”

“It may have been an interruption,” I said, “but she got it right. That would explain the pinpoint hemorrhaging. It’s a telltale sign in mercy killings, when a nurse or a relative hurries things along for a terminal patient by holding a pillow over his face.”

“If that is blood on the pillow,” the colonel said, “it would be damning evidence, eh? Couldn’t have got there if Rathburn was alone when he fell.” His eyes went to Mrs. Eglantine. “Hate to say it, Cecilia, but it rather knocks your theory of a tramp into a cocked hat.”

“I did so want it to be a tramp,” Cissy said.

“Because the alternative is insupportable,” the colonel said, “but I fear the insupportable in this instance is true. Nigel, there’s nothing for it. You’ll want to call the police immediately.”

Nigel Eglantine drew a breath, swallowed whatever it was he’d been about to say, and left the room. Dakin Littlefield came over for a look at the pillow, the camel, and the fallen Jonathan Rathburn. “I don’t get it,” he said. “If this killer went to so much trouble to stage an accident, why would he leave a bloodstain on the pillow and blood specks on the camel? He was inches away from a perfect crime and suddenly turned sloppy. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“I just said it didn’t,” he reminded me. “But I’m sure you’ve got an explanation.”

And I’m sure you’ve got an alibi was on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back. “My guess is the accident was staged after the fact,” I said. “The assault must have been hasty, even impulsive. Afterward the killer was in a hurry to get back to…well, whatever it was he had to get back to. He didn’t want to linger there where anyone could walk in and discover him standing over his victim’s body. He took a minute to position Rathburn at the foot of the library steps, let him bleed a little into the carpet, then finished him off with the pillow. He gave the camel a quick wipe and put it back on top of the revolving bookstand. He probably didn’t see that the pillow was stained. Who knows if there was even a light burning when the murder took place? Rathburn wouldn’t have been looking at bookshelves in the dark, but he might have had a quiet talk in a dimly lit room, and how much light do you need to kill a man by?”

“Why not just carry the pillow away?” Littlefield wanted to know. “Why leave it around?”

“Where would he put it? In his luggage? Or on the chair in his room?”

“I don’t know, but-”

“It would draw attention anywhere else,” I said. “It would be least conspicuous in its usual position, on the couch where he’d found it. Even if he knew there was blood on it, he was better off leaving it there. His hope was that no one would be looking for blood, that the death would get a cursory inspection by the police, that the autopsy would be perfunctory and incomplete, and that Rathburn’s death would go into the books as an accident.