The study, like the landing, was lined with books. The man I'd come to see lay beside his silent typewriter. The blood pooled on his desk was just beginning to coagulate.
The flock of sated flies who'd been disturbed by my entrance lumbered heavy-bellied round my head, like a fleet of tankers. I flailed the carrion bugs away and stepped closer to the corpse. Ozoneff's head had been cleaved almost from his body. Something had split his spine in a single giant bite. His forehead rested in a pool of blood, surrounded by the tiny browning footprints of the flies.
With the lucid calm of shock, I walked about the study, searching for the telephone. It was not here. I went back to the landing and explored the other rooms. The telephone was in the bedroom. I looked up the number I required, still as calm as though I were arranging for a caterer, and picked up the phone, careless of my responsibility as first-on-scene to preserve fingerprints. I dialed DE-vonshire 8-1212. The sergeant on duty at the Emergency and Central Complaint Bureau answered crisply. I heard his pencil scratch as he recorded my name and Dr. Ozoneff's address. "The killer is insane," I said. "Please hurry; I'm alone with a madman." I hung up and considered that word I'd used: Alone. Doctor Axel Ozoneff was only a few minutes dead, and already I'd ignored him in my census of those present. Sic transit gloria mundi.
I stood up from the bed and turned toward the door. The gardener's bony figure blocked the bedroom's exit. He'd come up the stairs silent as a cat. He still held the hedge-shears. Staring at them, I saw reddish-brown stains near the hinge, where the blades were joined together. It might have been rust. "You called the police," the gardener said.
"Doctor Ozoneff is dead," I said.
"I know. It was I who killed him."
"Get away from me!" I shouted, retreating between the beds, my artificial calm broken.
He glanced down at the huge shears he held and lifted them. He slammed the blades together. "As easy as that," he said. "A man is such a tender poor thing."
I backed toward the window of the bedroom, vastly preferring an unexplored two-story drop to remaining in this room with the murderer. "I didn't mean to frighten you, sir," the gardener said. "I must admit you have reason to fear me: I am a monster. Now that I've breached the great First Law, what sinfulness might I not find in me, sir?" He let the hedge-shears fall to the carpet and stood quite still, like a mummy just unwrapped. "If I had tears, I'd blind me with them," he said. "If the Lesser Directive didn't hold my hand where the Great Law failed to, I'd close my consciousness. I am seeking the strength to do so, sir."