Maybe I’d been right when I talked to Kirschmann. Maybe I was getting too old for this. Maybe I didn’t have the requisite sang-froid. Maybe-

Crouching was uncomfortable. I got stiffly to my feet. The attic was finished off, its central hallway covered with a length of faded maroon carpeting. I walked clear to the front of the house, where a brass floorlamp equipped with a timer sent out forty watts’ worth of light through a curtained window. A maid’s room, it looked to be, although the household no longer employed live-in servants.

A day bed stretched along one wall. I lay down on top of it pulled a green and gold afghan coverlet over myself, and closed my eyes.

I couldn’t really hear much from where I was. At one point I thought I heard footsteps on the stairs, and then a few moments later I fancied that I could hear the clatter of balls on the pool table in the library. This was probably a case of my imagination filling in the blanks. After an evening at the theater, the Arkwright routine was supposed to be quite predictable. Home around eleven-thirty, a spot of coffee and something sweet in the breakfast nook, and then Elfrida would pop upstairs with a book of crosswords while Jesse ran a rack or two at the pool table, nipped at one of the crystal decanters, read a few pages of one of his leather-bound classics, and then hied his own bulk up the stairs and joined his wife in their chamber.

Would he take a final tour of the downstairs, making sure all the doors were locked? Would he happen to check the sliding bolt on the kitchen door, and would he happen to notice that some clever chap had sawn through it? Was he, even as I thought these grim thoughts, lifting a receiver to summon the local constabulary?

I could have been at the ballet, watching a Russian imitate a gazelle. I could have gone home with Carolyn and eaten Flemish stew and drunk Dutch beer. Or I could have been home in my own little bed.