he stood beside me, but I could feel the warmth coming off him in the cool room, and I found it distracting. I wasn’t used to working this way, with someone literally hovering over my shoulder. Did he intend to trail behind me all the way to the safe on the wall?
We stood like that for a moment, still and silent. I didn’t know what, exactly, we were waiting for. Surely the alarm would have been sounded by now had our arrival been detected. But this was his operation. We could play it his way. Within the hour, if all went well, my part of it would be done, and Uncle Mick and I could go back to our lives.
I knew I still had to face the safe, but I didn’t foresee that being a problem. It was normally the entry into the house that worried me. That and the exit, but I supposed that Major Ramsey would be able to get us out of here as easily as he had got us in. It had all been rather simpler than I thought.
So now I had only to get into the safe, replace the papers, and we could be on our merry way.
At last, Major Ramsey spoke. “All right. Turn the torch on.”
I removed a torch from my pocket and flicked it on, flashing the beam of light across the walls. The wall before us was a bank of covered windows. My light moved to the right wall. It was bookshelves, floor to ceiling, no room for the safe. I flashed it to the left, taking an automatic step in that direction.
Then I stopped suddenly, the beam from the torch shining against the wall.
There was something wrong. The door of the safe stood in plain view against the pale blue paint, and it appeared to be open. Surely that couldn’t be right.
The major went over to the wall and looked inside the safe. I thought I heard him curse beneath his breath.
I moved toward him, my torch lighting on a painting on the floor, the one that had concealed the safe, no doubt. The gold frame was broken, as though it had fallen from the wall.
Then I saw something from the corner of my eye. Swinging the torch in that direction, I focused the light on a spot behind the sofa a few feet from the safe.
I barely stifled the gasp that rose to my lips.
A man lay on the floor, a thick, black pool of blood spreading beneath him.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I hadn’t had what you might call a genteel upbringing, and I wasn’t a shrinking violet by any means, but the unexpected sight of a man lying dead on the floor gave me quite a shock.
I stumbled backward, nearly dropping the torch and only barely managing to keep from crying aloud by pressing a hand to my mouth.
Major Ramsey had apparently caught a glimpse of the body in the flailing light of my torch, for in a moment he was at my side, a steadying hand on my arm.
“Don’t scream,” he said in a low voice. It was a stupid thing to say; if I was going to scream, I would have jolly well done it already.
He reached down and took the torch from my hand. His fingers as they brushed mine were perfectly warm. My own hands felt as though they had turned to ice.
“Perhaps you’d better look away,” he said, as he shined the light back at the inert figure on the floor.
“I … I’m all right,” I whispered, though I was lying through my teeth. My entire body was shaking, and I felt very much like I might be sick. Still, my eyes followed the beam of light to the body. It was horrible, yes, but there was something so shockingly out of the ordinary in seeing a man in a dinner jacket laid out on the floor of a library that I couldn’t quite seem to make enough sense of it to lose my head.
It seemed he had been dead for some time, for he was very stiff. All the color had leached out of his face, leaving it a mottled gray, and his eyes were staring up at the ceiling. The blood beneath him had congealed into a thick, treacly puddle. I clenched my teeth against a wave of nausea.
Despite the ghastliness of it all, however, some coolheaded part of me took note that he hadn’t been dead longer than a day or so, for