Dead Men's s Boots

There was a bell push and a speaker grille, but I ignored them for the moment. There was plenty of more interesting stuff to look at.

It had crossed my mind as I walked that I might be wasting my time: that I’d find the house silent and dark, everyone safely tucked up in bed and sleeping the sleep of the more or less just. I needn’t have worried. Every light was ablaze, and figures crossed and recrossed the lawn beyond the yew hedge, calling out to each other as they went. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could hear the urgency in their tones.

I rang the bell, waited, rang it again: nobody answered. The crisis in the house, or rather in the house’s grounds, hadn’t left anybody free to deal with casual after-midnight callers. What the hell has happened to the social niceties these days?

Acting on the kind of impulse that has brought me up before unsympathetic magistrates more than once, I stowed my bags behind some bushes and shinnied up the gate. I’d already sized it up as an easy climb, and it didn’t offer any unpleasant surprises at the top where you sometimes find razor wire or bird lime: within the space of about seven seconds I was dropping down on the inside, on the margin of a flagstoned driveway that stretched off ahead of me to where it became a broad terrace in front of the distant, flamboyantly lit-up house.

The people weaving around on the big lawn seemed to be engaged in some kind of nocturnal hunt-meet. Some of them were beating the bushes, or rather combing them as though they hoped to find some shy woodland creatures nestled among the roots: others were quartering the lawn itself, occasionally shining flashlights in each other’s faces and then shouting apologies.

I walked into their midst, partly hoping to find Peter Covington and explain what the hell I was doing there, partly just curious about what it was they were looking for. Nobody accosted me, or seemed to notice me at all. Once the beam of a flashlight picked me out, but it swung away again as its owner discovered that I wasn’t who he thought I was.

‘Sorry,’ came a muttered voice out of the darkness.

‘No problem,’ I answered.

The grounds were even bigger than I’d thought. There was an ornamental lake, a summer house and a splodge of darkness that was probably some kind of arbour out in the middle of the lawn. Vague silhouettes circled around all three.

Three broad, shallow stone steps led up to the front door of the house, which was wide open.