'They could be if the reasons for his death disclosed a criminal offence-blackmail, intimidation – but there was never any suggestion of that.'

'Are you personally satisfied that he killed himself?' The Sergeant looked at her with the sudden keen intelligence of a hunting dog on the scent.

'Why should you ask that, Miss Gray?'

'I suppose because of the trouble you took. I've interviewed Miss Markland and read the newspaper report of the inquest. You called in a forensic pathologist; you had the body photographed before it was cut down; you analysed the coffee left in his drinking mug.'

'I treated the case as a suspicious death. That's my usual practice. This time the precautions proved unnecessary, but they might not have been.'

Cordelia said:

'But something worried you, something didn't seem right?' He said, as if reminiscing:

'Oh, it was straightforward enough to all appearances. Almost the usual story. We get more than our share of suicides. Here is a young man who gave up his university course for no apparent reason and went to live on his own in some discomfort. You get the picture of an introspective, rather solitary student, one who doesn't confide in his family or friends. Within three weeks after leaving college he's found dead. There's no sign of a struggle; no disturbance in the cottage: he leaves a suicide note conveniently in the typewriter, much the kind of suicide note you would expect. Admittedly, he took the trouble to destroy all the papers in the cottage and yet left the garden fork uncleaned and his work half-completed, and bothered to cook himself a supper which he didn't eat. But all that proves nothing. People do behave irrationally, particularly suicides. No, it wasn't any of those things which gave me a bit of worry; it was the knot.'

Suddenly he bent down and rummaged in the left-hand drawer of his desk.

'Here,' he said. 'How would you use this to hang yourself, Miss Gray?'

The strap was about five feet long. It was a little over an inch wide and was made of strong but supple brown leather, darkened in places with age. An end was tapered and pierced with a row of metal-bound eye holes, the other was fitted with a strong brass buckle. Cordelia took it in her hands; Sergeant Maskell said:

'That was what he used. Obviously it's meant as a strap, but Miss Learning testified that he used to wear it wound two or three times round his waist as a belt. Well, Miss Gray, how would you hang yourself?'

Cordelia ran the strap through her hands.

'First of all, of course, I'd slip the tapered end through the buckle to make a noose. Then, with the noose round my neck, I'd stand on a chair underneath the hook in the ceiling and draw the other end of the strap over the hook. I'd pull it up fairly tight and then make two half hitches to hold it firm. I'd pull hard on the strap to make sure that the knot didn't slip and that the hook would hold. Then I'd kick away the chair.'

The Sergeant opened the file in front of him and pushed it across the desk.

'Look at that,' he said. 'That's a picture of the knot.'

The police photograph, stark in black and white, showed the knot with admirable clarity. It was a bowline on the end of a low loop and it hung about a foot from the hook.

Sergeant Maskell said:

'I doubt whether he would be able to tie that knot with his hands above his head, no one could. So he must have made the noose first just as you did and then tied the bowline. But that can't be right either. There were only a few inches of strap between the buckle and the knot. If he'd done it that way, he wouldn't have had sufficient play on the strap to get his neck through the noose. There's only one way he could have done it. He made the noose first, pulled it until the strap fitted his neck like a collar and then tied the bowline. Then he got on the chair, placed the loop over the nail and kicked the chair away. Look, this will show you what I mean.'

He turned over a new page of the file and suddenly thrust it towards her.

The photograph, uncompromising, unambiguous, a brutal surrealism in black and white, would have looked as artificial as a sick joke if the body were not so obviously dead. Cordelia felt her heart hammering against her chest. Beside this horror Bernie's death had been gentle. She bent her head low over the file so that her hair swung forward to shield her face and made herself study the pitiable thing in front of her.

The neck was elongated so that the bare feet, their toes pointed like a dancer's, hung less than a foot from the floor. The stomach muscles were taut. Above them the high rib cage looked as brittle-as a bird's. The head lolled grotesquely on the right shoulder like a horrible caricature of a disjointed puppet. The eyes had rolled upwards under half-open lids. The swollen tongue had forced itself between the lips.

Cordelia said calmly:

^‘I see what you mean. There are barely four inches of strap between the neck and the knot. Where is the buckle?'

'At the back of the neck under the left ear. There's a photograph of the indentation it made in the flesh later in the file.'

Cordelia did not look. Why, she wondered, had he shown her this photograph? It wasn't necessary to prove his argument. Had he hoped to shock her into a realization of what she was meddling in; to punish her for trespassing on his patch; to contrast the brutal reality of his professionalism with her amateurish meddling; to warn her perhaps? But against what? The police had no real suspicion of foul play; the case was closed. Had it, perhaps, been the casual malice, the incipient sadism of a man who couldn't resist the impulse to hurt or shock? Was he even aware of his own motives? She said:

'I agree he could only have done it in the way you described, if he did it. But suppose someone else pulled the noose more tight about his neck, then strung him up. He'd be heavy, a dead weight. Wouldn't it have been easier to make the knot first and then hoist him on to the chair?'

'Having first asked him to hand over his belt?'

'Why use a belt? The murderer could have strangled him with a cord or a tie. Or would that have left a deeper and identifiable mark under the impression of the strap?'

'The pathologist looked for just such a mark. It wasn't there.'

'There are other ways, though; a plastic bag, the thin kind they pack clothes in, dropped over his head and held tight against his face; a thin scarf; a woman's stocking.'

'I can see you would be a resourceful murderess, Miss Gray. It's possible, but it would need a strong man and there would have to be an element of surprise. We found no sign of a struggle.'

'But it could have been done that way?'

'Of course, but there was absolutely no evidence that it was.'

'But if he were first drugged?'

'That possibility did occur to me; that's why I had the coffee analysed. But he wasn't drugged, the PM confirmed it.' 'How much coffee had he drunk?'

'Only about half a mug, according to the PM report, and he died immediately afterwards. Sometime between seven and nine p.m. was as close as the pathologist could estimate.'

'Wasn't it odd that he drank coffee before his meal?'

'There's no law against it. We don't know when he intended to eat his supper. Anyway, you can't build a murder case on the order in which a man chooses to take his food and drink.'

'What about the note he left? I suppose it isn't possible to raise prints from typewriter keys?'

'Not easily on that type of key. We tried but there was nothing identifiable.'

'So in the end you accepted that it was suicide?'

'In the end I accepted that there was no possibility of proving otherwise.'

'But you had a hunch? My partner's old colleague – he's a Superintendent of the CID – always backed his hunches.'