Jenkins came clumping up the wooden stairs and stopped just inside the door. “Sorry, Inspector.”

Hackett did not turn. He was standing at the desk with his hands in his trouser pockets and his hat pushed to the back of his head. There was a shine, Jenkins noted, on the elbows and the backside of his blue suit. He peered past his boss’s shoulder at the thing that had been thrown over the desk like a side of beef. He was disappointed; he had been hoping for a murder, but the corpse was holding the gun in its own hands.

They heard a car drawing up in the yard. Jenkins glanced back down the stairs. “Forensics,” he said.

The Inspector made a chopping gesture with the side of his hand, still not turning. “Tell them to wait a minute. Tell them”-he laughed shortly-“tell them I’m cogitating.”

Jenkins went down the wooden steps, and there was the sound of voices in the yard, and then he came back. Hackett would have liked to be alone. He always had a peculiar sense of peace in the presence of the dead; it was the same feeling, he realized with a start, that he had now when May went up to bed early and left him in his armchair by the hearth, with a glass of something in his hand, studying the faces in the fire. This was not a good sign, this hankering after solitude. It was the other, sweeter smells, of horses and hay and the like, that was making him think in this way-of the past, of his childhood, of death, and of the ones of his who had died down the years.

“Who was it found him?” he asked. “The groom, was it?”

“Yard manager,” Jenkins, behind him, said. “Name of Maguire.”

“Maguire. Aye.” Scenes such as this of bloody mischief were a stopped moment of time, a slice taken out of the ordinary flow of things and held suspended, like a specimen pressed between the glass slides under a microscope. “Did he hear the gunshot?”