Free Designs on Life by Elizabeth Ferrars

about upstairs. Their voices sounded on the staircase. Mr. Shew started telling anecdotes.
    Presently Superintendent Cust came down and asked Margaret if she had heard anyone leave the house before the water started. She told him that she had had the radio on. Mr. Cust asked Mr. Shew what he had been doing between half past five and six. The councillor said that he had been reading The Wind in the Willows to his housekeeper, Miss Pattison, who was ill in bed with bronchitis.
    Mr. Cust left them and Mr. Shew went on with his anecdotes.
    The deluge was almost at an end. It was only a drip-drip from corners and ceiling cracks, when Margaret heard the sound of a key turning in the front door.
    She leapt towards it, calling out, “Michael!”
    But the sergeant was there before her and when the door opened it was not Michael Haddow who stood there, but Philip Boyle.
    He was a short man, slight and wiry, with stiff fair hair that stood up in a brush. His face was a rather red one, with bushy fair eyebrows, hard blue eyes and a small moustache. His manner, which had the assertiveness and suspiciousness of a man who never forgot his rights, was markedly uncordial. He was wearing a loose tweed overcoat of loud pattern and carried a dispatch-case.
    Stepping inside, he started rubbing his shoes on the mat.
    The sergeant said, “Shouldn’t bother with that if I was you. Place is in a worse mess than you can make it in. Who is he, miss?” He looked over his shoulder at Margaret.
    “It’s Mr. Boyle, the top floor tenant,” she replied.
    Philip Boyle stared at the sergeant. “What’s happened?” he demanded.
    “Burst pipe,” the sergeant said. “Come along in, Mr. Boyle. The superintendent will be glad to see you.”
    Philip Boyle looked past the man at Margaret.
    “What’s happened?” he repeated sharply.
    She shrugged her shoulders slightly and said nothing.
    With a look of irritation on his face, Philip Boyle strode forward, and the sergeant, coming immediately after him, called up to Mr. Cust that the man from the top floor had just come in. Leaving Mr. Shew to a fourth cup of tea, Margaret followed them upstairs.
    Someone had placed candles on the staircase and landings. In their soft light the devastation of the house had lost its menace, but the amount of destruction showed clearly.
    Mr. Cust came to meet Philip Boyle. He greeted him, “A grim homecoming for you this evening, Mr. Boyle.”
    “What is all this about?” Boyle’s voice was naturally harsh. “What’s happened? Does one have to have police in to deal with a burst pipe?”
    The plumber sidled past them. “I’m here to deal with the burst pipe,” he said. “Joseph Loveday, Plumber and Practical Builder. There’s a hole in the main pipe up there big enough to stick your three fingers through.”
    He went on downstairs.
    Mr. Cust stood aside so that Philip Boyle could see into the cupboard.
    “This is why we’re here, Mr. Boyle.”
    In Margaret’s head at that moment there woke echoes of the laughter with which Paul Wragge had greeted the dead man. It was her impulse to plunge downstairs immediately. But suddenly she realised that Paul Wragge himself was standing beside her. He was a tall man whose wide shoulders should have been squarer than they were, whose fine-drawn features should never have been ravaged by the fiend-ridden imagination that possessed him.
    As if she had some responsibility concerning him, Margaret stayed where she was.
    But there was no laughter in Philip Boyle’s reaction to what he saw. He simply clutched the banisters and looked as if he wanted to be sick.
    “Have you ever seen this man before?” the superintendent asked.
    Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, Boyle wiped it over his mouth. He glanced down at the dead man once more and then away again.
    “Yes,” he said.
    “Do you know him?”
    “I—I met him for a few moments once. I don’t know his name.”
    “Where did you see him?”
    Philip Boyle turned