It stepped forward into the light and revealed itself to be Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.
«Do you know,» said Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, blinking with suppressed emotion, «that when I arrive back here to discover one police officer guarding a sofa with a saw and another dismembering an innocent wastepaper basket I have to ask myself certain questions? And I have to ask them with the disquieting sense that I am not going to like the answers when I find them.
I then find myself mounting the stairs with a horrible premonition, Svlad Cjelli, a very horrible premonition indeed. A premonition, I might add, that I now find horribly justified. I suppose you can't shed any light on a horse discovered in a bathroom as well? That seemed to have an air of you about it.»
«I cannot,» said Dirk, «as yet. Though it interests me strangely.»
«I should think it bloody did. It would have interested you strangely if you'd had to get the bloody thing down a bloody winding staircase at one o'clock in the morning as well. What the hell are you doing here?» said Sergeant Gilks, wearily.
«I am here,» said Dirk, «in pursuit of justice.»
«Well, I wouldn't mix with me then,» said Gilks, «and I certainly wouldn't mix with the Met. What do you know of MacDuff and Way?»
«Of Way? Nothing beyond what is common knowledge. MacDuff I knew at Cambridge.»
«Oh, you did, did you? Describe him.»
«Tall. Tall and absurdly thin. And good-natured. A bit like a preying mantis that doesn't prey — a non-preying mantis if you like. A sort of pleasant genial mantis that's given up preying and taken up tennis instead.»
«Hmm,» said Gilks gruffly, turning away and looking about the room.
Dirk pocketed the tape.
«Sounds like the same one,» said Gilks.
«And of course,» said Dirk, «completely incapable of murder.»
«That's for us to decide.»
«And of course a jury.»
«Tchah! Juries!»
«Though, of course, it will not come to that, since the facts will speak for themselves long before it comes to a court of law for my client.»
«Your bleeding client, eh? All right, Cjelli, where is he?»
«I haven't the faintest idea.»
«I'll bet you've got a billing address.»
Dirk shrugged.
«Look, Cjelli, this is a perfectly normal, harmless murder enquiry, and I don't want you mucking it up. So consider yourself warned off as of now. If I see a single piece of evidence being levitated I'll hit you so hard you won't know if it's tomorrow or Thursday. Now get out, and give me that tape on the way.» He held out his hand.
Dirk blinked, genuinely surprised. «What tape?»
Gilks sighed. «You're a clever man, Cjelli, I grant you that,» he said, «but you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid. If I turn away it's for a reason, and the reason was to see what you picked up. I didn't need to see you pick it up, I just had to see what was missing afterwards. We are trained you know. We used to get half an hour Observation Training on Tuesday afternoons. Just as a break after four hours solid of Senseless Brutality.»
Dirk hid his anger with himself behind a light smile. He fished in the pocket of his leather overcoat and handed over the tape.
«Play it,» said Gilks, «let's see what you didn't want us to hear.»
«It wasn't that I didn't want you to hear it,» said Dirk, with a shrug. «I just wanted to hear it first.» He went over to the shelf which carried Richard's hi-fi equipment and slipped the tape into the cassette player.
«So do you want to give me a little introduction?»
«It's a tape,» said Dirk, «from Susan Way's telephone-answering machine. Way apparently had this habit of leaving long…»
«Yeah, I know about that. And his secretary goes round picking up his prattlings in the morning, poor devil.»
«Well, I believe there may be a message on the tape from Gordon Way's car last night.»
«I see. OK. Play it.»
With a gracious bow Dirk pressed the Play button.
«Oh, Susan, hi, it's Gordon,» said the tape once again. «Just on my way to the cottage» —
«Cottage!» exclaimed Gilks, satirically.
«It's, er, Thursday night, and it's, er… 8.47. Bit misty on the roads. Listen, I have those people from the States coming over this weekend…»
Gilks raised his eyebrows, looked at his watch, and made a note on his pad.
Both Dirk and the police sergeant experienced a chill as the dead man's voice filled the room.
«— it's a wonder I don't end up dead in the ditch, that would be something wouldn't it, leaving your famous last words on somebody's answering machine, there's no reason» —
They listened in a tense silence as the tape played on through the entire message.
«That's the problem with crunch-heads — they have one great idea that actually works and then they expect you to carry on funding them for years while they sit and calculate the topographies of their navels. I'm sorry, I'm going to have to stop and close the boot properly. Won't be a moment.»
Next came the muffled bump of the telephone receiver being dropped on the passenger seat, and a few seconds later the sound of the car door being opened. In the meantime, the music from the car's sound system could be heard burbling away in the background.
A few seconds later still came the distant, muffled, but unmistakable double blam of a shotgun.
«Stop the tape,» said Gilks sharply and glanced at his watch. «Three minutes and twenty-five seconds since he said it was 8.47.» He glanced up at Dirk again. «Stay here. Don't move. Don't touch anything. I've made a note of the position of every particle of air in this room, so I shall know if you've been breathing.»
He turned smartly and left. Dirk heard him saying as he went down the stairs, «Tuckett, get on to WayForward's office, get the details of Way's carphone, what number, which network…» The voice faded away downstairs.
Quickly Dirk twisted down the volume control on the hi-fi, and resumed playing the tape.
The music continued for a while. Dirk drummed his fingers in frustration. Still the music continued.
He flicked the Fast Forward button for just a moment. Still music.
It occurred to him that he was looking for something, but that he didn't know what. That thought stopped him in his tracks.
He was very definitely looking for something.
He very definitely didn't know what.
The realisation that he didn't know exactly why he was doing what he was doing suddenly chilled and electrified him. He turned slowly like a fridge door opening.
There was no one there, at least no one that he could see. But he knew the chill prickling through his skin and detested it above all things.
He said in a low savage whisper, «If anyone can hear me, hear this.
My mind is my centre and everything that happens there is my responsibility. Other people may believe what it pleases them to believe, but I will do nothing without I know the reason why and know it clearly. If you want something then let me know, but do not you dare touch my mind.»
He was trembling with a deep and old rage. The chill dropped slowly and almost pathetically from him and seemed to move off into the room.
He tried to follow it with his senses, but was instantly distracted by a sudden voice that seemed to come at him on the edge of his hearing, on a distant howl of wind.
It was a hollow, terrified, bewildered voice, no more than an insubstantial whisper, but it was there, audible, on the telephone-answering machine tape.
It said, «Susan! Susan, help me! Help me for God's sake. Susan, I'm dead» —
Dirk whirled round and stopped the tape.
«I'm sorry,» he said under his breath, «but I have the welfare of my client to consider.»
He wound the tape back a very short distance, to just before where the voice began, twisted the Record Level knob to zero and pressed Record. He left the tape to run, wiping off the voice and anything that might follow it. If the tape was going to establish the time of Gordon Way's death, then Dirk didn't want any embarrassing examples of Gordon speaking to turn up on the tape after that point, even if it was only to confirm that he was, in fact, dead.