Free All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By by John Farris Page B

color—lavender shading to green—at the heart of the fireball."
    "Why, yes, almost word for word. How did you—"
    "I've survived a magnetic mine blast myself. But this, obviously, was not a mine. Nor could it have been a bomb filled with flash compound for night aerial photography. Either one would have left at least a trace of its substance behind. Therefore we have something entirely new, an experimental weapon fearsome beyond belief, or else all this"—he swept a hand around the withered circle—"resulted from a spontaneous and perverse act of nature."
    "A bolt from the blue?" Kellow said incredulously.
    Instead of replying, Lord Luxton walked slowly to the oak tree, after a while venturing to touch the trunk carefully, as if it were 'a bomb casing.
    "Who was the victim?"
    "A Dr. Eustace Holley," Kellow said, consulting his notebook.
    "No one else in the park at the time? That is fortunate."
    "Many of the in—the residents, my lord, are too unreliable to be left on their own out of doors."
    His lordship looked around. "Inmates? Is that what you were about to say?"
    "They're not referred to as such by staff, but some of them are—apparently they often went mad in the bush. The attrition rate, even among our colonial officials in the more hospitable coastal regions of tropical Africa, is quite high."
    "Yes, isn't it. Perhaps I should have a look at the body. Would it be inside?"
    To Kellow's surprise, their request to view the remains encountered resistance, even resentment. No one seemed to have time for them. There was a great deal of muted but urgent scurrying about in the dim halls, cries and whimpers from befuddled, apprehensive residents. The gentlemen from Bomb Disposal were allowed to cool their heels for an unconscionably long time in the outer office of the administrator. When Kellow began to be vocal about the delay and threatened action in the name of the minister of home security. Lord Luxton smiled more painfully than usual and excused himself.
    In the ground-floor hall he encountered two workmen carrying buckets of calcimine and brushes to the stairs.
    "Can't scrub it off," one of them complained. "Charcoal on these old walls? It's there for eternity."
    "Waste of time painting it over," said the other. "A new course of stucco, that's what's needed."
    "Old duffer, scribbling on his walls. Not like him, Thomas. He was always the tidiest one of the lot. Picked up after himself. Never careless about where he moved his bowels."
    "Have they decided it was a bomb did him in?"
    "What else could have done it? There's just no place that's safe anymore, Georgie. Next thing you know we'll be having one through the roof."
    Lord Luxton watched the workmen up the oak staircase, then on impulse followed them to a second-floor chamber with a small brick hearth. The room had been fitted out with bookshelves, a comfortable Morris chair and reading lamp, a prie-dieu at the foot of the iron bedstead. Chessmen stood in rows on an octagonal game table. The private library consisted of classics in at least three languages. There were bland Currier and Ives prints on three walls. The unpolished parquetry was overlaid with rag rugs of the type displayed at rural fairs. It seemed almost a typical institutional common room, lacking keepsakes, the flavor or reflections of one man's personality.
    Except for one odd thing: An invocation (perhaps) had been starkly scrawled on the wall at the head of the bed, apparently with a piece of wood char from the hearth.
    Â 
    LADY
    IN THY SERPENT
    PRISON-HOUSE
    SOME PITY SHOW
    Â 
    Luxton noticed iron brackets in the wall, where something had hung for a long time. A large cross? The yellowed calcimine within the brackets confirmed this.
    "Who has this room?" Luxton asked.
    The workmen turned in surprise. "Shouldn't be up here, guv'nor," Georgie said.
    "May I know whose room?" his lordship repeated pleasantly.
    "The one that was blowed to smithereens in the park this