there was no smell of death in the room. There was, though, now that I noticed it, the faintly metallic odor of blood. It wasn’t strong enough to have called my attention to it before, but I was certainly aware of it now.
I wondered if that was why Major Ramsey had paused for as long as he had when we first entered the room. As an army major, the scent would no doubt be more familiar to him.
In the time it took for all of these thoughts to charge through my head, the major had moved to the body and crouched beside it. I thought, at first, he was going to check, just to be sure, if the man was dead, but instead he made a brisk but thorough search of the man’s pockets. The beam of his torch moved once across the man’s face, and I caught another glimpse of his staring brown eyes. I felt a little lurch in my stomach and turned my gaze away.
“How … how did he die?” I asked, though I was fairly certain I didn’t want to know.
“His throat was slit,” the major replied evenly.
I gasped. I wasn’t completely a stranger to death, but I had never witnessed something so wretchedly violent. No matter what the man had done, no matter what his loyalties, I couldn’t help but feel he hadn’t deserved to be killed in this brutal way and left on the floor in a puddle of his own blood.
His search of the body apparently complete, Major Ramsey rose and moved to the big desk in the center of the room. With quick efficiency, he began moving things about and opening drawers to sift through them. Reaching into the final drawer, he drew something out and placed it in his pocket.
Then he crossed the room to me and took my arm. “Come,” he said. “We need to leave.”
“The papers aren’t here?” I asked, though the answer was apparent enough.
He glanced at the open safe in the wall. “No, they’re not here.”
No, of course not. Why else would someone have killed this man? Someone had beaten us to the papers.
His hand still on my arm, Major Ramsey led me out of the room and back down the stairs. He was still holding on to me when we slipped out of the house and moved down the street, and I was glad of it, for my head was spinning just a tad.
We went a different way than we had come, going down several dark alleyways and across a silent green that might have been cheery with its leafy trees in the daylight but seemed somehow sinister in the damp darkness of night.
At the edge of the green, a safe distance from the house, he stopped near a row of hedges, which concealed us from the street, and turned to me. There was enough moonlight now that we could see each other. “Are you all right?” he asked.
The question surprised me. So did the look of concern that crossed his face as his eyes searched mine. My thoughts had been focused, as I assumed his had been, on our exit from the house. I hadn’t stopped to take stock of my emotions, but I did so now, the intensity of all of it hitting me at once.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said faintly.
Then I turned and was immediately sick in the hedges.
It was rather embarrassing, but the major, to his credit, appeared to take it all in stride. He stood beside me and waited patiently.
“I … I’m sorry,” I said at last, when I was sure I was once again in control of my digestive system.
“No need to apologize,” he said, handing me a handkerchief. “I know what we discovered was rather a surprise.”
I let out something like a strangled chuckle. “It certainly was that.”
“Are you all right now?”
I nodded. It had been an ugly thing to come across and had clearly upset me more than I realized in the moment. Overall, though, I supposed I wasn’t much the worse for wear from the experience. I hadn’t known the man, after all.
“Was … was that your man on the fence?” I asked.
“It was, though someone seems to have given him a decisive shove off of it.”
I was still a bit too shaken to appreciate his grim humor, but I noticed he didn’t seem exceptionally surprised by this turn of events.
“Are we going to … call the police or something?” I asked.
“And tell them what?” he replied