First impressions are powerful, and Winter acknowledged the spell of the unusual here, but his impassive face showed no sign of this when he asked the constable the whereabouts of Mr. Furneaux.
"In there, sir," said the man, pointing to a door.
Winter noted instantly that the floor creaked beneath his light tread. The rugs deadened his footsteps, but the parquetry complained of his weight. It was, he perceived, almost impossible for anyone to traverse an old flooring of that type without revealing the fact to ordinarily acute ears. Once when his heel fell on the bare wood, it rang with a sharp yet hollow note. It seemed, somehow, that the place was empty—that it missed its presiding spirit.
Oddly enough, as he remembered afterwards, he hesitated with outstretched hand in front of the closed door. He was doubtful whether or not to knock. As a matter of fact, he did tap slightly on a panel before turning the handle. Then he received his second vague impression of a new and strange element in the history of a crime. The room was in complete darkness.
Though Winter never admitted the existence of nerves, he did not even try to conceal from his own consciousness that he started distinctly when he looked into a blackness rendered all the more striking by the glimpse of a few feet of floor revealed by the off-shine from the hall-light.
"Are you here, Furneaux?" he forced himself to say quickly.
"Ah, that you, Winter!" came a voice from the interior. "Yes, I was dreaming in the dusk, I think. Let me give you a light."
"Dusk, you call it? Gad, it's like a vault!"
Winter's right hand had found the electric switches, and two clusters of lamps on wall-brackets leaped alight. Furneaux was standing, his hands behind his back, almost in the center, but the Chief Inspector gathered that the room's silent occupant had been seated in a corner farthest removed from the windows, and that his head had been propped on his clenched hands, for the dull red marks of his knuckles were still visible on both cheeks.
Each was aware of a whiff of surprise.