On the sofa where Polly Allen had been strangled, white and ghostly in that feeble light, someone was sitting and looking at him.
He let the match burn nearly out before he dropped it. The ensuing darkness was worse; for it brought out with vividness, like the pattern of a light after you have turned it off, the scattered details he could place of that motionless figure.
"Who's there?" he said aloud. "Speak up! Who's there?"
The words were hardly out of his mouth before he remembered, as though of an impression hitherto arrested, the flat darkish patch of dried blood from the left temple of the motionless figure down to its cheek.
Courtney got out another match. He managed to strike it, though by this time his wet fingers had half soaked the box. His shoes squelched and slipped on the hardwood as, carrying the match cradled like a sacred flame, shoulders humped, not daring to look round, he walked across towards the door in search of light.
There were three light-switches beside the door. He pressed the top one, and nothing happened. He pressed the one below, and the white glow of a lamp in a parchment shade — a bridge lamp — sprang up beside the white arm of the sofa.
That sofa had been pushed a little way out into the room, the lamp set beside it so that someone sitting and reading on the sofa would get a good light over the left shoulder. And the thick upholstery had prevented the body from sliding down farther than the line of its shoulders, where the coat had rucked up at the back.
Hubert Fane, barely alive from concussion of the brain, sat as though sprawled at ease. His left arm rested on the arm of the sofa. An open copy of the Tatler lay across his lap.
The neatness of his dinner jacket and linen, the careful way in which the trousers had been plucked up to avoid bagging at the knees, above black silk socks and brightly polished shoes: all these things contrasted with the corpselike face and the wound in the back of the skull from which blood had ceased to flow.
Courtney forced himself to walk across. Though every muscle twitched with repulsion, he forced himself to touch Hubert. He rolled back the eyelid, exposing no iris. He touched the back of the head, which felt soft. A thin thread of breath trickled through Hubert's body: no more. The white light of the lamp brought it out clearly, the homelike room with the flowers on the grand piano, and Hubert, who had been sitting reading the Tatler when someone he knew opened the door…