Carolyn had called me an amateur sleuth, and if I’m any kind of a sleuth at all I’m certainly an amateur. I’m a pro in two other areas, burglary and bookselling, and I know the difference between amateurs and professionals, and when it comes to sleuthery I’m not about to hang out a shingle. I know what detectives do-I ought to, I’ve read enough books about them. They knock on doors and ask impertinent questions and check alibis and gather evidence and do all sorts of things I’d be no good at.

I don’t do that. I sort of slip around and sneak around and stir things up, and sometimes things work out.

But at Cuttleford House everybody was right there. There was never a question of rounding up the usual suspects, because they never strayed very far. They couldn’t. The bridge was out and the phone lines were down and the whole place was piled deep with snow.

So what had I done? Well, I’d tried approaching the situation like a real detective, interrogating everybody one at a time, and that hadn’t been a great success. Even so, by the end of the day I had a couple of ideas buzzing in my brain. I even had a strong hunch as to the identity of the killer, but it seemed impossible. I needed more information than I had, and I couldn’t get it because there were all these people all over the place, watching my every move even as I was watching theirs. (And who could blame them? For all they knew, I was the murderer and they were next on my list.)

And so I worked out a different approach. While the rest of the household slept, I’d skulk around with my flashlight, like Diogenes looking for a dishonest man. While I was at it, I’d take a shot at faking my own death, leaving an apparent corpse in a spot inaccessible enough to discourage close investigation. That would give me a chance to continue skulking in the daytime.

I explained what I had in mind to Carolyn before we turned out our respective bedside lamps. At first she thought I was going to lie down at the bottom of the gully and play dead, and she was concerned that I might catch a bad cold and wind up with pneumonia.

“I might even freeze to death,” I told her.

“Then don’t do it,” she said. “Why take the chance, Bern? It’s not worth it.”

The news that it wouldn’t actually be me down there reassured her, and when I’d run through it a couple of times she said she had it down pat. “The tricky part,” I said, “is getting somebody to think of looking in the gully.”

“Why don’t I just say, ‘Hey, guys, maybe he fell in the gully’?”

“That would work,” I allowed, “but it would be better if someone else thought of it.”

“So they don’t think it’s a setup.”

“Right.”

“I’ll work on it,” she said. “And you’ll be out of the way somewhere while we’re all running around searching the house?”

“Snug,” I said, “as a bug in a rug.”

“But that’s hours from now. What’ll you be doing between now and then?”

“Setting the stage,” I said. “Going places. Doing things.”

“Going where? Doing what?”

“Here and there,” I said. “This and that.”

“And you’re not gonna tell me who the killer is.”

“Not until I know for sure.”

She yawned. “I’d argue the point,” she said, “if I weren’t so tired. Aren’t you tired, Bern?”

“Exhausted.”

“Can I ask a dumb question? How are you gonna stay up all night sneaking around in the dark? You’ll be dead on your feet tomorrow.”

“Never mind tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll be dead on my feet tonight.”

“So why not forget it, Bern? Get a good night’s sleep. Sleep late, in fact, and take a nap tomorrow during the day, and if the police don’t turn up by then you can stay up tomorrow night.”

“You’re tempting me.”

“So? Do what I always do when I’m tempted.”

“Surrender to it?”

“Hey,” she said. “Works for me, Bern.”

I said I’d let my body decide. I read for a few minutes and turned off the light, and there was a moment when I almost drifted off, but it passed and I knew it wasn’t going to happen. But I waited until Carolyn was sleeping, snug in the arms of Morpheus or Molly Cobbett, before I got out of bed.

And then I got dressed in the darkness and let myself out of the room. But I already told you about that, didn’t I?

I had things to do and I got busy doing them. My first stop was Young George’s Room, way down at the other end of the long hallway. I didn’t have to worry that someone would catch sight of me, because I wasn’t doing anything all that suspicious. I could always say I was looking for an unoccupied bathroom, or stretching my legs, but I didn’t encounter anyone so it didn’t matter.

The only thing that would have been hard to explain was picking the lock and letting myself into Rathburn’s room, and to minimize the chance of discovery I spent as little time at the task as possible. Earlier I’d tried my own key in the lock for starters, and I wouldn’t have been much surprised if it had worked. Those old skeleton keys are often virtually interchangeable, especially when the locks are old and well used.

The key didn’t work, but my picks did, and in not much more time than it would take to turn a key. I darted inside, closed and locked the door, and stopped myself even as I was fumbling for the light switch. No need to let light leak out into the hallway from underneath the door. The average person would never notice, but there was a murderer in our midst. He was the one person likely to notice, and the one whose attention I most particularly wanted to escape.

I stayed put for about an hour and a half, going through the effects of the late Jonathan Rathburn and searching for something in writing that he might have left behind. I found enough to keep me interested until I figured the household had had a chance to settle in for the night. Then I raided the closet for clothes and took the pillow from the bed and let myself out of there.

I was downstairs and headed out the door when I remembered the kris. I remembered what room it was in but wasn’t sure how to get there, and I was tempted to settle for some other imperial artifact-an assegai spear, say, or a horn from the oryx. But I found the kris in due course. Next I rifled a pantry, looking for some kind of twine or cord, and couldn’t come up with anything better than a ball of cotton thread. It didn’t seem very strong to me. Then I came across the fishing line, and took them both.

The line was what I used for actually lowering the dummy, but the thread came in handy for stitching the thing together. I used the pillow and some of Rathburn’s clothes for stuffing, and I tied a pair of his shoes to the pants cuffs by their laces, and tied the cuffs of the jacket sleeves tight around a pair of my own gloves. (If he’d had any gloves, I couldn’t find them.) I couldn’t get the head so it looked right-it was just a ball of clothes tied in shape with string-and up close it was about as deceptive as a scarecrow, which, come to think of it, it rather resembled.

I reminded myself that no one was going to get a close look at it, but all the same I retied it. I wrapped a dark shirt around the top portion, so that it looked like a cap of dark hair over the white undershirt that was supposed to look like a face. Lowering the sucker turned out to be one of those things that are easier said than done, and it wasn’t made any easier by the fact that (a) I was lying on my belly with my arms out over the edge and the flashlight in my mouth and (b) I was still petrified of falling. I had to lower it slowly, too, because I knew how amateurishly I had constructed it. If it landed with any impact I was sure it would come apart, and while that may also happen with real people dropped from a great height, I somehow didn’t think the results would be convincing in the present instance.

So I lowered the dummy slowly and gently, resisting the impulse to jiggle the line and adjust its position once it had come to rest. I gave the end of the fishing line a toss, transferred the little flashlight from my mouth to my hand, and looked at what I’d done.