These tidings gave Vivian a sudden burst of confidence, and not only confidence but curiosity. He would like to see what the thieves had actually taken; what they had left would be plain from the cloacal smell when the sitting-room door opened. Holding his nose against that, he gently pushed the door open.

But before he had time to shut it and flee upstairs he had taken in the whole scene, or some of it, the two masked figures bending over a third whose mask had fallen off, and who was lying on the floor with his arms spread out as if crucified, and his legs knotted together, crossed like a Crusader’s so that they looked like one. The back of his head was towards the door, his chin tilted upwards. He looked like a butterfly on a stretching-board, and as motionless.

The two men who were bending over him jumped up. ‘We’ll leave him to you, governor,’ said one of them, and before Vivian could answer they pushed him aside, made a dash for the front door which they had presumably forced open, despite its chevaux-de-frise defences, and the next thing he heard, for there was no sound in the room, was the whirr of their car starting up and fading away down the quiet street.

Vivian had little experience of death and didn’t know whether the chin-tilted figure on the floor was dead or alive. Alive, he thought, for sometimes it twitched as a butterfly may twitch on the setting-board, long after it is dead. A sort of reflex action. But ought he not to find out? A revulsion seized him; why had this ill-meaning stranger chosen to come and die on him, if dying he was, and not already dead. Standing by the door, rooted to the spot where he had been pushed since he opened it and felt the rush of bodily-displaced air left by the accomplices, he felt an almost invincible reluctance to go further, to investigate further a region of experience as unknown to him as it was distasteful, and forced upon him by events. Yet it was not unknown; not many weeks ago he himself had lain on the self-same stretch of the self-same floor, struggling to free himself from his bonds, and growing feebler with every effort. It was an age of violence; but now it was not he but someone else who was demonstrating it.

Who?

A knock which Vivian didn’t hear, and two policemen were in the room. The scene seemed so natural, so usual to them that their expressions hardly altered.

Fortified by their presence Vivian, who had been lingering in the doorway as a means of escape (upstairs? out into the street?), went into the middle of the room, and for the first time looked the burglar full in his upturned face. Distorted as it was, it was the face of a man he knew quite well; not a friend or an enemy, but an acquaintance whom he had sometimes met and exchanged a few words with at cocktail parties. The revelation came as a terrific shock, altering the whole current of his thoughts, and he clutched the table to steady himself.

The sergeant who was bending down with his ear to the burglar’s heart, straightened himself.

‘I’m afraid he’s a goner,’ he said, ‘but we’ll have to call an ambulance. May we use your telephone Mr. Vosper?’

‘Of course,’ said Vivian, surprised that the sergeant knew his name.

‘They’ll be here in a few minutes,’ said the sergeant, putting down the receiver, ‘but meanwhile may I ask you one or two questions?’

‘Of course,’ replied Vivian, automatically.

‘I must tell you that anything you say may be used in evidence.’

‘Of course.’

‘This man was a burglar, there’s his mask to prove it.’

‘Yes,’ said Vivian, looking down with a distaste that amounted to horror at the frail black object. ‘There were two other men with him, also masked, but they made off when they saw me.’

‘You were lucky,’ the sergeant said. ‘And now, Mr. Vosper, can you tell us anything more?’

Vivian suddenly felt faint.

There was whisky on the sideboard and another glass.

‘Will you join me in a drink? But for God’s sake don’t take that one.’

He pointed to the half empty bottle, and the half empty glass, on the table.

‘It’s against regulations,’ said the sergeant, ‘but we won’t say no,’ and the three of them drank their whisky straight.

‘Cheers!’

‘I take it there’s poison in that bottle,’ said the sergeant, with his glass to his lips. ‘Why?’

‘Oh, for the rats. I’ve had a lot of trouble with rats, everyone in this street has. I’ve got rid of them all now.’

‘All your rats?’

‘Yes. Eight of them. Nearly all my neighbours have wanted to know my recipe, but they can’t get the proper ingredients.’

‘Why? Sherry is easy to come by.’

‘Because chemists are more particular now than they used to be.’

For a few moments the three men sipped their drinks in silence. Then the sergeant said to his colleague with a grin,

‘Tastes all right, Fred, doesn’t it?’

Fred nodded assent.

‘But if we both drop down dead,’ said the sergeant playfully to Vivian, ‘you’ll be responsible, you know.’

‘Oh no,’ said Vivian, trying to fall in with his mood, ‘because it isn’t against regulations for me to drink.’

The sergeant smiled, and still with the smile on his face, looked down at the body crucified on the floor.

‘You don’t know who it is?’ he asked suddenly.

Better not try to deceive the police. ‘Yes, I do, he was a man I used to meet at parties, and who came here once or twice.’

‘So he knew his way about?’

‘I suppose so,’ said Vivian. ‘But there isn’t much to know,’ and with an inward-turning gesture he indicated the cramped proportions of his house.

‘You didn’t let him in, by any chance?’ asked the sergeant, looking down speculatively at the body, one of whose outstretched hands, tight-fingered, might have been clutching the sergeant’s chair-leg. ‘He’s a good-looking chap, or might have been once.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Vivian. ‘Between them they forced the door open while I was asleep in bed. That’s all I know.’

‘Forget it,’ said the sergeant soothingly. ‘No offence meant, but we have to ask these questions. You’d be surprised, Mr. Vosper, if you knew how many men living alone as you do, complain of burglars who aren’t really burglars, but burglars by invitation, so to speak.’

‘Then how do you account for the mask?’ asked Vivian, looking at the fragile object which a draught from the two open doors was turning backwards and forwards.

‘You never know what they’ll be up to,’ said the sergeant. ‘A mask doesn’t always mean what it seems to mean. I could be wearing this uniform’—he touched the medals on his tunic—‘and not be a policeman at all.’

Vivian stared at him incredulously.

‘Yes, it is so, Mr. Vosper, and that’s why we can’t leave any stone unturned. I’ll take this’—and without any appearance of distaste, he stooped to pick up the frail object, which seemed all the frailer between his thick fingers. ‘You can’t tell me his name, by any chance?’

‘I can,’ said Vivian, and told him.

‘I thought it might be,’ said the sergeant, ‘I thought it might be. We’ve had our eye on him for some time.’

‘Shall I hear any more from you?’ asked Vivian.

‘You may—you may. But it won’t be serious. You go to bed, Mr. Vosper,’ said the sergeant, gently.

‘What about the front door?’

‘We’ll fix it, and have a man on the watch.’ He looked at Vivian again. ‘You don’t remember me,’ he said, ‘but I came here the other time you were burgled and beaten up and tied up. You were in a pretty bad shape, if I may say so.’

‘I don’t remember,’ said Vivian, ‘I don’t remember much of what happened after they set about me.’

‘I wasn’t a sergeant then,’ said the policeman, reminiscently, glancing down not without complacency at the three stripes on his sleeve. ‘And I hope I shall be a Chief-Inspector before you have to call me in again, Mr. Vosper.’

The bell rang, unnecessarily, since the street door and the sitting-room door were open, and the sergeant’s colleague let in two men who from their appearance might have been murderers.