‘No room’s private when the street door’s once passed,’ he said. ‘Had you forgotten I was a policeman?’

‘Was?’ said Walter, edging away from him. ‘You are a policeman.’

‘I have been other things as well,’ the policeman said. ‘Thief, pimp, blackmailer, not to mention murderer. You should know.’

The policeman, if such he was, seemed to be moving towards him and Walter suddenly became alive to the importance of small distances—the distance from the sideboard to the table, the distance from one chair to another.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said. ‘Why do you speak like that? I’ve never done you any harm. I’ve never set eyes on you before.’

‘Oh, haven’t you?’ the man said. ‘But you’ve thought about me and’—his voice rose—’and you’ve written about me. You got some fun out of me, didn’t you? Now I’m going to get some fun out of you. You made me just as nasty as you could. Wasn’t that doing me harm? You didn’t think what it would feel like to be me, did you? You didn’t put yourself in my place, did you? You hadn’t any pity for me, had you? Well, I’m not going to have any pity for you.’

‘But I tell you,’ cried Walter, clutching the table’s edge, ‘I don’t know you!’

‘And now you say you don’t know me! You did all that to me and then forgot me!’ His voice became a whine, charged with self-pity. ‘You forgot William Stainsforth.’

‘William Stainsforth!’

‘Yes. I was your scapegoat, wasn’t I? You unloaded all your self-dislike on me. You felt pretty good while you were writing about me. You thought, what a noble, upright fellow you were, writing about this rotter. Now, as one W.S. to another, what shall I do, if I behave in character?’

‘I . . . I don’t know,’ muttered Walter.

‘You don’t know?’ Stainsforth sneered. ‘You ought to know, you fathered me. What would William Stainsforth do if he met his old dad in a quiet place, his kind old dad who made him swing?’

Walter could only stare at him.

‘You know what he’d do as well as I,’ said Stainsforth. Then his face changed and he said abruptly, ‘No, you don’t, because you never really understood me. I’m not so black as you painted me.’ He paused, and a flicker of hope started in Walter’s breast. ‘You never gave me a chance, did you? Well, I’m going to give you one. That shows you never understood me, doesn’t it?’

Walter nodded.

‘And there’s another thing you have forgotten.’

‘What is that?’

‘I was a kid once,’ the ex-policeman said.

Walter said nothing.

‘You admit that?’ said William Stainsforth grimly. ‘Well, if you can tell me of one virtue you ever credited me with—just one kind thought—just one redeeming feature——’

‘Yes?’ said Walter, trembling.

‘Well, then I’ll let you off.’

‘And if I can’t?’ whispered Walter.

‘Well, then, that’s just too bad. We’ll have to come to grips and you know what that means. You took off one of my arms but I’ve still got the other. “Stainsforth of the iron hand” you called me.’

Walter began to pant.

‘I’ll give you two minutes to remember,’ Stainsforth said. They both looked at the clock. At first the stealthy movement of the hand paralysed Walter’s thought. He stared at William Stainsforth’s face, his cruel, crafty face, which seemed to be always in shadow, as if it was something the light could not touch. Desperately he searched his memory for the one fact that would save him; but his memory, clenched like a fist, would give up nothing. ‘I must invent something,’ he thought, and suddenly his mind relaxed and he saw, printed on it like a photograph, the last page of the book. Then, with the speed and magic of a dream, each page appeared before him in perfect clarity until the first was reached, and he realized with overwhelming force that what he looked for was not there. In all that evil there was not one hint of good. And he felt, compulsively and with a kind of exaltation, that unless he testified to this the cause of goodness everywhere would be betrayed.

‘There’s nothing to be said for you!’ he shouted. ‘And you know it! Of all your dirty tricks this is the dirtiest! You want me to whitewash you, do you? The very snowflakes on you are turning black! How dare you ask me for a character? I’ve given you one already! God forbid that I should ever say a good word for you! I’d rather die!’

Stainsforth’s one arm shot out. ‘Then die!’ he said.

The police found Walter Streeter slumped across the dining-table. His body was still warm, but he was dead. It was easy to tell how he died; for it was not his hand that his visitor had shaken, but his throat. Walter Streeter had been strangled. Of his assailant there was no trace. On the table and on his clothes were flakes of melting snow. But how it came there remained a mystery, for no snow was reported from any district on the day he died.

THE TWO VAYNES

Those garden-statues! My host was pardonably proud of them. They crowned the balustrade of the terrace; they flanked its steps; they dominated the squares and oblongs—high, roofless chambers of clipped yew—which, seen from above, had somewhat the appearance of a chessboard. In fact, they peopled the whole vast garden; and as we went from one to another in the twilight of a late September evening, I gave up counting them. Some stood on low plinths on the closely-shaven grass; others, water-deities, rose out of goldfish-haunted pools. Each was supreme in its own domain and enveloped in mystery, secrecy and silence.

‘What do you call these?’ I asked my host, indicating the enclosures. ‘They have such an extraordinary shut-in feeling.’

‘Temene,’ he said, carefully stressing the three syllables. ‘Temenos is Greek for the precincts of a god.’

‘The Greeks had a word for it,’ I said, but he was not amused.

Some of the statues were of grey stone, on which lichen grew in golden patches; others were of lead, the sooty hue of which seemed sun-proof. These were already gathering to themselves the coming darkness: perhaps they had never really let it go.

It was the leaden figures that my host most resembled; in his sober country clothes of almost clerical cut—breeches, tight at the knee, surmounting thin legs cased in black stockings, with something recalling a Norfolk jacket on top—he looked so like one of his own duskier exhibits that, as the sinking sun plunged the temene in shadow, and he stood with outstretched arm pointing at a statue that was also pointing, he might have been mistaken for one.

‘I have another to show you,’ he said, ‘and then I’ll let you go and dress.’

Rather to my surprise, he took my arm and steered me to the opening, which, I now saw, was in the further corner. (Each temenos had an inlet and an outlet, to connect it with its neighbours.) As we passed through, he let go of my arm and bent down as though to tie up his shoe-lace. I walked slowly on towards a figure which, even at this distance, seemed in some way to differ from the others.

They were all gods and goddesses, nymphs and satyrs, dryads and oreads, divinities of the ancient world: but this was not. I quickened my steps. It was the figure of a man in modern dress, and something about it was familiar. But was it a statue? Involuntarily I stood still and looked back. My host was not following me; he had disappeared. Yet here he was, facing me, with his arm stretched out, almost as if he were going to shake hands with me. But no; the bent forefinger showed that he was beckoning.

Again I looked behind me to the opening now shrouded in shadow, but there was no one. Stifling my repugnance, and to be frank, my fear, and putting into my step all the defiance I could muster, I approached the figure. It was smiling with the faint sweet smile of invitation that one sees in some of Leonardo’s pictures. So life-like was the smile, such a close copy of the one I had seen on my host’s face, that I stopped again, wondering which to believe: my common sense or my senses. While I was debating, a laugh rang out. I jumped—the figure might have uttered it; it sounded so near. But the smiling features never changed, and a second later I saw my host coming to me across the grass.