First Came a Murder by John Creasey

Author:John Creasey [Creasey, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Agora Books

15

Whose Body Burned

Devenish went up the staircase more quickly than he had ever moved in his life. He could not be sure, but he judged that the cries came from a room leading from the landing, approached by one of the three doors which he had seen from the hall.

For the moment he forgot the Hon. Marcus, who had disappeared from sight.

He tried the handle of the first door. It opened easily, and he thrust it open, peering quickly into a large, well-furnished bedroom. But the room was empty. Devenish hurried along the landing to the second door. Again it opened at his touch.

But this time the room was not empty.

It was a bedroom, sumptuously furnished, but Devenish was not concerned with furniture. He stood for a moment, poised in the doorway and staring at the crumpled body of a woman in the middle of the floor.

She was lying full length, her arms wide-flung, her face turned upwards. Even as he saw her, Devenish knew that this was Lydia Crane. She was dressed in a vivid red afternoon gown, torn at the shoulder and revealing her creamy skin and firm, well-moulded flesh. But the thing which startled Devenish for a moment was the fact that her dress was badly burned at the hem.

He hurried across the room and bent over the woman, seeing an ugly bruise on her temple.

For a moment he wondered whether it would be best to revive her and force information from her.

Then he noticed a door leading from the bedroom. Devenish jumped across the floor towards it, and tried the handle. As he expected, it was locked.

The door was a stout one, and he knew that it would be useless to try and force it with his shoulder. He looked quickly round the room, and caught sight of a small, heavy oak table in one corner. Without hesitating he ran to it, lifted it from the floor with effortless ease, and carried it over his shoulder to the door. Then he stood for a moment, the table raised above him, his muscles flexed, the veins standing out like whipcord on his damp forehead. He drew in a deep breath, and smashed the table against the wooden panels.

The force of impact sent a thousand darts of pain along his arms and through his shoulders, but he hardly noticed them in his satisfaction as the door creaked, quivered beneath the onslaught, and shivered open.

He stepped across the threshold, frowning as he smelt a pungent burning.

Then his heart seemed to stop.

There was a thin haze of smoke in the room, and through it Devenish could see that a part of the room had been partitioned off with a brick-built wall in which was set one narrow, wooden door. The smoke came through the cracks in the frame of the door —and through the wood itself.

It did not take Devenish long to reason why.

Inside the bricked-off part of the room, a fire was raging. Already the door had been burned

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