Despite the mackintosh, his clothes now felt like a weight of cold, wet pulp; his hat hung sodden over a streaming pair of eyes. He groped forward towards the shed. His wet fingers had some difficulty with the catch of the door. Inside, in a close mustiness with the rain hammering on the roof, he stepped on a rake and blundered into the lawn-mower (a whole welter of inanimate objects endowed with whirring, malicious noise) before he struck a match.
The ladder, as he remembered from this afternoon, was a short ladder. It would reach one of the ground-floor windows. He trundled it out, bringing down with a crash everything which had been stood upright.
Not difficult, though. Propping the ladder against the concrete drive behind the house, he lowered it until its upper edge rested on the sill of the nearer back drawing-room window.
And the window at the top was unlocked. He was just raising it when he remembered that he had left Major Adams's infernal rifle lying on the floor in the shed.
Why bother, anyway?
The rifle was no good to him.
Pushing up the window to the top, writhing round awkwardly like a squeezed concertina until he could sit on the window-sill, he pushed his legs through and dropped into a pitch-black room.
Many times, of course, he had heard described the agonizing cracks and creaks which could be drawn from the floor here. But when those creaks and cracks burst out, suddenly, under his own feet, he nearly jumped out of a crawling skin.
Disentangling himself from the curtains, he stood upright and listened. No noise, no life, no movement in a dark room. He took a step forward, waking the creaks again. He had never been in this room before. He had no notion of where the light-switch lay, except that it was probably by the door. And the door would be-yes. Ahead a good way, then to the left.
Courtney struck a match.