AS HE MADE HIS WAY back to the hall, Sinclair was only too aware that the calm front he’d presented to Baxter and Doris in the kitchen was far from reflecting his true state of mind. If Gonzales was the man who had killed Greta Hartmann—always supposing she had been murdered—then he was danger personified and the chief inspector was only too aware that with the phone still not working both he and the whole household were in peril.
True, he could send Baxter down to the village to seek help, but without his presence they would be even more at risk. And what if he encountered Gonzales on the way? Would he be able to hide his suspicions, and if not, what might result? If Gonzales had already killed once—if he had murdered Greta Hartmann—there would be nothing to stop him doing so again. And why had he been absent for so long? What was he planning?
The chief inspector’s head was in a whirl. There’d been a time when he could have stood back from all this and considered it coolly. But those days were past; he was no longer the man he’d been and his present confusion was merely a symptom of the decline in his faculties brought about by age. Or so he told himself as he paused at the foot of the stairs to consider his next move.
He had no doubt now that the strange letter Julia had shown him was somehow connected to Gonzales, and the fact that her admirer had done his best to shift suspicion away from himself and onto Ilse Holtz was reason enough to persuade Sinclair that he ought to speak to Julia’s secretary. He didn’t as yet know what her reaction to the letter was. She had not been feeling well that morning according to her employer and hadn’t emerged from her room for some time.
Meanwhile, there was something else he had to do, and having climbed the stairs he walked to the end of the corridor where Gonzales’s room was located—it was opposite his—and went in. The bowl Doris had mentioned was sitting on the dresser at the foot of the bed and when he went over he spotted the cuff link at once. Unlike the broken one, which he took from his pocket, it was intact and lying on top of a bunch of keys. Placed side by side on top of the dresser the heads of the two snakes faced in opposite directions. Had the ends of their coils been joined they would have made what he had heard Andrew Fielding describe at the dinner they had attended in Oxford: a double-headed serpent.
The discovery, though expected, still came as a shock, and the chief inspector felt the need to steady his nerves as he replaced the second link in the bowl just as he had found it.
Would Gonzales really have been so careless as to leave it there in plain sight? he wondered, and almost at once he realized that the question was an idle one. Unless he was aware of the quest that had brought Sinclair to Oxfordshire he would have had no reason to conceal the object, and so far as the chief inspector knew Julia had not found an occasion to explain his presence in the house other than to say that she and Baxter had come across him snowbound in Chipping Norton and ‘rescued’ him.
Although he would dearly have liked to search the room, the knowledge that he was only a guest in the house was sufficient to keep the impulse in check and, having left things as he had found them, he crossed the passage to his own room. His need at that moment was to take one of his pills and lie down. His breathing had grown short in the last few minutes, no doubt the result of the growing tension he felt. But when he reached into his pocket for his tablets he got a shock. The bottle wasn’t there. Even more disturbing was the discovery a few seconds later that the pills weren’t on his bedside table either. Obviously he had left them somewhere else in the house, but where?
Troubled as he was by this new turn of events, the chief inspector knew he had to remain calm. Although he wanted to go in search of the tablets—he felt exposed without them—he knew that a wiser course would be for him to rest for a few minutes. Stretched out on his bed, he waited for his breathing to resume its normal rhythm, and while he did so he retraced his movements during the last few hours, trying to isolate the moment when he was most likely to have mislaid the bottle.
He had swallowed a pill the previous morning at breakfast, which he had taken with Julia and Philip Gonzales, but he knew for a fact that he had still had the bottle with him when he’d encountered Baxter in the yard outside the kitchen, because he had taken a further pill then to counter the effects of the effort it had cost him to cross the deep snow in front of the house. He recalled Doris giving him a glass of water to wash it down, but thereafter his memories of the moment were overlaid by the dramatic irruption of Daisy into the kitchen and her tale about the argument between Gonzales and Ilse Holtz, which she had overheard.
Had he left the bottle on the kitchen table? It was quite possible. He couldn’t remember putting it in his pocket, but if he had forgotten it Doris would certainly have noticed it lying there after his departure and put it aside for him. Not knowing that they were missing, he hadn’t raised the question with her when they had been together in the kitchen only a few minutes before and neither had she. But that was hardly surprising, given what had just come to light. The only other place it might be was in Julia’s study, where he had spent some time with her after lunch. But he had not taken another pill while he was there and as far as he could remember hadn’t even put his hand into his pocket, let alone brought the bottle out. So the kitchen seemed to be the most likely place to go in search of it and he resolved to rouse himself as soon as he felt better and go downstairs.
Glancing at his wristwatch he saw it was nearly four o’clock; already the light outside was dying as the clouds, harbingers of the coming storm, gathered in a grey mass overhead. The product of a strict Presbyterian upbringing, it was not in his nature to indulge in fanciful thoughts, but it occurred to him just then that his earlier feeling that there was something amiss at Wickham Manor had proved all too prescient. Nor was he alone in his fears. He had every reason to believe they were shared by Baxter. The chauffeur had made no secret of his concern at the sudden appearance of the cuff link and its possible implications.
Increasingly troubled by the line of reasoning he had embarked on, Sinclair rose from his bed and went to the window. It had begun to snow again, only this time the flakes weren’t falling in slow spirals as before but were being driven by a wind that seemed to be gaining in strength by the minute. It wouldn’t be long before the storm was on them and the realization only added to the chief inspector’s feeling of helplessness. Cut off from the outside world, the occupants of Wickham Manor were at the mercy of the elements.
First things first, however, he told himself. Before he did anything else he must find his pills.
Quitting his room, he went downstairs to the hall and set off in the direction of the passage that led to the kitchen. But he’d hardly taken two steps when he heard a knock on the front door.
Gonzales! It had to be.
Rooted to the spot he saw the handle of the door turn and braced himself for an encounter he would much rather have avoided. But the door remained shut. Baxter had been as good as his word. He had promised to lock it.
Now he need only get to the kitchen, where the chauffeur would be waiting. Having failed to enter by the front door, Gonzales was certain to make his way there and the two of them could confront him together. But on reaching his destination—it was at the far end of the corridor—the chief inspector found a fresh shock awaiting him. The room was deserted. There was no sign of either Doris or Baxter. It was possible the maid had gone upstairs to rest, he thought; she would be down later to get tea ready. But where had Baxter disappeared to?
Although the kitchen was in half-darkness he checked his impulse to switch on the light. He didn’t want to be seen from outside. Instead he went to the window above the sink and peered out into the yard.
‘Good lord!’
In the few minutes it had taken him to come downstairs the beginnings of the blizzard he had glimpsed from his window had turned into a maelstrom of swirling snow and ice, which the savage wind flung against the window like a thousand tiny daggers, while the yard itself had been all but swallowed up in the whirling cloud of white particles. As he stood there, transfixed by the scene, he heard what sounded like a door being slammed and saw that a man who was not Baxter had appeared outside. Head bowed, he was coming from the direction of the garage, crossing the icy ground towards the kitchen door and lighting his way with a torch.
Instinctively Sinclair stepped back out of sight, and then moved further away to the end of the room, putting the kitchen table between him and the back door. His heartbeat had quickened, but there was little he could do about it except wait and watch as the handle turned. After a second the door was pushed open and the figure of a man appeared. Little more than a silhouette in the doorway, his entry was accompanied by a sudden rise in the gusting wind’s pitch along with a cloud of ice and snow that blew into the kitchen and settled where his torch was pointing at the floor in front of him.
‘Gonzales?’ The chief inspector spoke more harshly than he meant to.
At the sound of his voice the torch shifted. It turned upwards and when Sinclair saw the face that appeared in the bright beam a flood of relief the like of which he had never experienced before washed through him.
‘John!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thank God it’s you.’