‘Just take him up,’ said the sergeant, ‘I don’t think there’s any need to be extra careful with him.’

The men bent down and their practised hands lifted the corpse, with as little expression on their faces as if they had been furniture-removers.

All the same, for Vivian, something went out of the room into the clear night air that wasn’t a bit of furniture.

‘There’s nothing more, I think,’ said the sergeant. ‘You’ve got rid of the eight rats, or did you say nine?’

‘Eight,’ said Vivian.

‘Well, I hope you won’t have any more, Mr. Vosper. But just to make things straight, do you mind if I lock the door of your sitting-room to keep you safe and to let our forensic expert have a look at it? Just a matter of routine. He’ll come early in the morning, before you are up, or down, perhaps.’

‘By all means,’ said Vivian, rising as the sergeant rose. They stood together in the passage, while the sergeant locked the sitting-room door and put the key in his pocket.

‘Eight rats are better than nine, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Goodnight, Mr. Vosper.’

‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.’ Vivian brooded on those words as he went upstairs to take his sleeping tablets. They didn’t contain cyanide of potassium, but they were poison, all the same.

Revenge, revenge. It was an emotion as old as jealousy, from which it so often sprang. It was a classic emotion, coeval with the human race, and to profess oneself to be free of it was as de-humanizing, almost as much, and perhaps more, as if one professed oneself to be free of love—of which, as of jealousy, it was an offspring.

How many stories of the past, how many actions of the present, were founded in revenge. Vivian could hardly think of one that wasn’t. Even the New Testament, that idealistic vision of the better world, wasn’t free from it, or why should Christ have cursed the barren fig-tree? ‘Revenge is sweet, and flavours all my dealings,’ said, or sang, a character in one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas, with playful irony, no doubt, but with a substratum of truth.

Vivian had got even with his tormentors, and the guilty had suffered for the guilty. Ruat coelum, fiat justitia! Justice had been done, and he, Vivian, had been its instrument.

Was it something to be pleased about, something to be proud of? He didn’t know, just as he didn’t know if the police-sergeant had accepted his story about the rats. He wasn’t afraid of that. His daily help who, unexpectedly sadistic, had cut off and preserved the end of their tails, tail after tail on a string, because she said, and perhaps she was right, that rats didn’t need telling twice, still less eight times, that a place wasn’t healthy for them. She would confirm it; Mr. Stanforth, the porter, would confirm it; Vivian’s rat-infested neighbours who had tried in vain to get his recipe for rat-bane, would confirm it. So the sergeant’s suspicions, if he had them, could easily be allayed.

Would the human rats, the burglars who frequented the mews dwellings, be equally perceptive? Vivian asked himself. He couldn’t hang up their tails because, as far as he knew, they hadn’t any; but they had their bush-telegraph, just as the rats had, and the word would go round.

Vivian rubbed his shoulders and several other parts of his anatomy which still ached and perhaps would always ache from the attentions of the other gang of bandits, how many weeks ago! Well, if one bandit had paid the penalty and was now beyond feeling any ache or pain, so much the better for him. How and why had he fallen into this bad company? Why had he told them—mistakenly—since it had already been looted—that there was something in Vivian’s house worth pinching? When he had come there once or twice for a drink, he must have noted an object or two that caught his connoisseur’s eye. They weren’t there now, nor was his connoisseur’s eye, closed for ever in the mortuary.

In his medicine-cupboard, half concealed behind ranks of innocent medicines, was the half-empty bottle of cyanide which the police-sergeant had forgotten to impound.

On an impulse Vivian went downstairs. His sitting-room was locked against him but in the basement he found another bottle of Amontillado.

Corkscrew in hand he carried it up to his bathroom, opened the door and the window and set the tap running. Then with a trembling hand he poured out a measure of sherry into the washbasin and replaced it with one of cyanide.

Who was this? Who was he? A Vivian he did not know. But as he stuck on to the sherry-bottle a label (in red ink this time) PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH, and cautiously sniffed the almond-breathing perfume, he had a sensation of ineffable, blissful sweetness.

HOME, SWEET HOME

It was his old home all right, as he knew the moment he was inside the door, although who opened it to him he couldn’t remember, for in those days of long ago who could remember who opened the door to him? It must have been one of his parents’ servants who were often changing, and he himself wasn’t a frequent visitor, he had been about the world so much; but the feeling, the sense of the house, as apart from its visible structure—the front hall, the inner hall—were as clear to him as they ever had been: as vivid as a scent, and not exactly a scent but a combination of thoughts, feelings, experiences, an exhalation of the past, which was as vivid to him now, and as much a part of him, as it had ever been.

He didn’t ask himself why he was here—it seemed so natural that he should be—and then he remembered that he was expecting a guest—a guest for dinner, a guest for the week-end, a close friend of his, whom his parents didn’t know, though they knew about her, and were expecting her, and looking forward to seeing her.

What time of year was it? What time of day? Dinner-time, certainly, for the light that filtered through the big north window was a diluted twilight when it reached the hall, revealing not so much the outlines as the vague, shadowy almost insubstantial shapes of the pieces of furniture he knew so well. And yet his inner mind recognized them as intimately as if they had been floodlit—perhaps more intimately, since they were of the same substance as his memory.

But while he was still under the spell of their rather ghostly impact on his consciousness, his awareness of himself as expressed in them, another thought, more practical and more immediate, penetrated it—where was Helen Furthermore, for she was the object of the exercise, and the reason why he had returned so unexpectedly to his old home? She needed looking after, and it was his job to look after her, for she did not know the rest of the party, who he somehow divined, were his relations, mostly older than himself, but he couldn’t be sure, for he hadn’t seen them—but they must be somewhere about—nor did they know her.

She might be late, of course, but she wasn’t often late; she prided herself on not being late, but perhaps the taxi they had ordered for her—they must have ordered one—hadn’t recognized her at the station, and she was wandering to and fro outside its precincts, with the desolate feeling that the non-met visitor has—what to do next, where to go next—for there wouldn’t be another taxi at that wayside station. He could almost see her passing and repassing her little pile of luggage—not so little, for she never travelled light—growing more indistinct with each encounter in the growing gloom and more indistinct to herself, also, as the question of how to reach her destination grew more and more pressing until it began to occupy her whole being.

And then, quite suddenly, there she was—not in front of him, but behind him and round about him, a presence rather than a person. Someone must have let her in, as he had been let in, he couldn’t quite remember how, because the front door opened on a little hall divided by a pair of glass doors from the middle hall where he was standing.