On Harrow Hill

He followed Slovak under the arch of a wood-framed device with wheels on each of its four corners and a system of overhead pulleys—presumably designed for lifting and moving the heavier plants in their large earth-filled urns.

As they passed through a sliding door into the house itself, the loamy scents of the conservatory were replaced by something equally distinctive—the smell of money enshrined in polished chestnut floors and antique Persian carpets; in paneled mahogany walls and hand-carved balustrades; in fireplaces the size of alcoves; in alcoves the size of living rooms.

Having led Gurney to an alcove off the main dining room, Slovak explained that this was where the discovery had been made—where the blood from the victim’s slashed throat, seeping down through the floorboards, had stained the ceiling and then dripped onto rug beneath it, next to the chair where Mrs. Russell had been seated. “If she’d been just a couple of feet to the left, it would’ve dripped right on her.” He sounded both excited and appalled.

Gurney peered up at the stain on the high ceiling.

“If you want a closer look,” said Slovak, “I can have a ladder brought in.”

“No need. I’d rather see it from the top side.”

Slovak led the way through the dining room into a hallway lined with lifesize portraits of old men in elaborate gilt frames and up a staircase. Gurney noted that segments of the carpeting on several stair treads had been neatly cut out and removed.

The stairs led to a second-floor hallway, from whose carpet two similar excisions had been made. There were several doors along one side of the hallway. One was open, and a plastic crime-scene-containment curtain was hanging in front of it. Slovak held it aside.

“You can go right in, sir. The tech team’s already been through here. Twice. This is the husband’s bedroom. The next one down the hall is the wife’s.”

Gurney pointed to the carpet. “I’m curious about those cutouts.”

“Bloodstains. One was obvious. Others showed up under luminol—partial shoe-prints, like the attacker had stepped in the victim’s blood and tracked it out here. Also a couple of drops, maybe off the scalpel. Barstow cut the carpet pieces out and sent them to the lab. Hopefully, what we get back will answer questions, not just raise more. That business about Tate’s prints . . .” Slovak shook his head, his voice trailing off.

“You sound like you might have . . . some difficulty . . . with your tech officer?”

“I don’t have any difficulty. It’s just that she’s got this attitude thing going.”

“Oh?”

“The superior tone. ‘I’ve been doing this for nineteen years.’ That kind of crap.”

“Has she ever been wrong?”

“Who knows? She pretends to be perfect. But people cover things up, right?”

Gurney decided that this was not the best time to pursue what was likely a routine problem of personal chemistry. He stepped past the plastic curtain into the bedroom.

Everything in there was big—a king-size four-poster bed, a chest of drawers twice the size of his own, and two seven-foot-high armoires on one side of the room; a massive Queen Anne table on a Persian carpet in the middle; and a ceiling-high stone fireplace on the other side. There were three large windows along the wall opposite the doorway.

He went to the nearest window. It overlooked the carriage house, which placed the bedroom on the opposite side of the house from the conservatory—perhaps sufficiently isolated from the breaking of the glass that it might not have been heard.

He turned back to the room, letting his gaze wander around it. Noting dusting powder on most of the hard surfaces, he asked where Barstow had found Billy Tate’s fingerprints.

Slovak pointed at the doorway. “Two of the prints she claims are his were lifted from the doorknobs. And there were some partials on the floor by the bathroom, just outside that area where the blood is.”

Exactly where someone might have knelt to cut off the victim’s finger, thought Gurney, as he made his way to that end of the room.

The size of the bloodstain surprised him. A good six feet in diameter, it filled the area between the side of the bed and the bathroom doorway. The chair Russell had toppled over was in the middle of it. On the wall to Gurney’s right there was a line of dried droplets, which he recognized as the spatter that occurs when a blade is slashed through an artery and specks of blood are sent flying onto nearby surfaces.

“If you want to see what this place looked like when we got here yesterday, I can show you,” said Slovak, taking out his phone and starting to tap icons.

Gurney didn’t answer. He was busy reconstructing the basic elements of the attack in his mind. Angus Russell getting up, half-asleep, going to the bathroom; then stepping out of the bathroom, heading for his bed. His attacker stepping in front of him, scalpel in hand. A sudden backhand slash across the side of the neck—a fatal incision severing both right carotid and right jugular. Russell falling headfirst over the chair.