The niceness of her day ended at ten past nine in the evening. At that time all of the other guests were locked into the obsessive self-recrimination of the Nine O’Clock Weigh-In. Mrs Pargeter was the only one at liberty on the corridors of Brotherton Hall, floating peaceably along, full of Faisan au Vin de Porto and Meringue Glacee and Barolo and Armagnac.
So she was the only one to see two burly uniformed ambulance men wheeling a trolley out of a room on the third floor.
Mrs Pargeter was just coming up the stairs to the second landing and caught a glimpse of the men above through the struts of the banisters. She froze while they negotiated the trolley through the door.
One ambulance man stopped and looked round. ‘Be easier to get her down if there was a lift,’ he growled. ‘You notice a lift?’
His colleague shook his head and gestured down the corridor. ‘Be along that way if there is one. Let’s have a butcher’s.’
They both started off, moving away from the stairs. Then the first one was stopped by a sudden thought. ‘Should we just leave the trolley here?’
‘Not going to make a lot of difference to her, is it?’
‘I don’t mean that. Suppose someone saw her or…?’
‘We still got twenty minutes. Said so long as we get her out and on the way by nine-thirty, we’d have no problems.’
Reassured, the two ambulance men turned the corner of the corridor and moved out of sight.
Mrs Pargeter, the fumes of Barolo and Armagnac instantly flushed out of her brain, hurried up the last two stairs and approached the trolley.
The body was covered by a sheet. After a quick glance to check for the ambulance men, Mrs Pargeter flicked it back.
At first sight, she thought she saw a child’s face, but closer inspection showed it to be older. A girl in her late teens, early twenties, it was hard to say. The hair was so patchy and uneven on the scalp.
And the face was so thin. So very thin, its skin waxy and white, stretched over the bones like greaseproof paper.
The deep-socketed eyes were open, frozen in an expression of terror.
And a hand, fleshless as a chicken’s foot, reached up to the neck, as if still trying to ward off some horrifying assailant.
The girl was undoubtedly dead.
But so thin. So horribly thin.