The faces were pale, true, but—Henry noted with a sinking heart—quite aggressively merry and free from any sign of stress: the voices were unnaturally loud and friendly. The whole dingy place had the air of a monstrous end-of-term party.

All at once, Henry had an extraordinary impression of tension, as if each remark had more than its surface meaning, as if purposeful streams of innuendo were being directed by the speakers towards—whom? Everybody? One other person? He glanced round.

Far up the mountain, where the trees thinned out, just on the dividing line between sunshine and shadow, was a single, isolated building, as dwarfed by its surroundings as a fly drowning in a churn of milk. “The Bella Vista,” said the Colonel, almost reverently. There was a silence. “I didn’t realise it was so far up,” said Emmy at last, in a small

Henry Tibbett was not a man who looked like a great detective. In fact, as he would be the first to point out, he was not a great detective, but a conscientious and observant policeman, with an occasional flair for intuitive detection which he called “my nose”. There were very few of his superiors who were not prepared to listen, and to take approp

The Baron interrupted. “Kindly speak in German,” he said. Red-faced, Spezzi began again. “I would gladly have spared you this unpleasant interview, Baroness, but the fact that you were on the chair-lift at the crucial time makes it—” “I know, I know. Let’s have the questions,” said Maria-Pia, in Italian. Spezzi mopped his brow, and continued, dogge

Not everybody’s cup of tea—hotel stuck up all by itself at the top of a chair-lift. Can’t get down to the village at all after dark, you know.”

Emmy always remembered the scene that followed as a sort of El Greco tableau. The lean, cadaverous figure of Carlo, his long face creased into vertical lines of distress, lit sharply by the stark glare of the single bulb in the cabin: the skeletal shapes of the empty chairs as they clattered on their way: the huddled figure lying motionless in the

Henry stopped climbing and stood stock-still, just in the shadow of the trees, and watched, with a terrible fascination. Little by little, foot by foot, the pursuer seemed to be gaining ground on his quarry. Then the slim black figure of the leading skier accelerated, as though propelled by some superhuman force of desperation, and the distance bet

Great barrels of spaghetti and macaroni of every shape and colour jostled festoons of children’s shoes strung up like Breton onions; picture postcards (of course) shared a counter with sugared almonds and cheese; Parma ham glowed pinkly delicious beside disorganised heaps of sunglasses; graceful flasks of Chianti dangled from hooks alternately with