The Lily Hand and Other Stories by Ellis Peters

eyes open, but there was no sign of him. All the same, I didn’t go to bed; I couldn’t have slept.
    It was just after midnight when something came fumbling at the door, like a blind man feeling about its surface for a latch. A tiny, shuffling, hair-raising sound one wouldn’t have heard at all in the day. I opened the door, scared for my life of what I was going to find; and there he was, groping stiffly with one hand, and dangling a gun from the other.
    The light made stony, pale pebbles of his staring eyes, and his jaw hung open and rigid. I brought him in on my arm, and he stumbled up the steps and moved like an automaton across the room, wherever I led him. He let me put him into a chair, and lay there, still with that fixed, horrified face. I tried to get some brandy into him, but he choked on it, and it ran down his dangling chin.
    Then I tried to take the gun from him, but he held on to it with sudden resolution, and said, ‘No, don’t touch it! Not you; only me!’ And he began to weep, almost silently, without any sobs.
    â€˜What’s happened?’ I asked him, shaking him by the shoulders. ‘Where have you been? What have you done?’
    â€˜I’ve killed her,’ he said. The voice that came out of him was small, still dazed but quiet. ‘I shot her. I’m sorry about your driver, but you see, I had to go and get the gun. And I didn’t want you to be involved. I had to get away from you. I was going to kill her, and then myself. And I’ve done the one, but there’s no need to do the other. I’m going to die, anyhow. I’ve had a sign.’
    I wasn’t interested in signs, only in facts. I shook him roughly, shouting at him to tell me exactly what had happened, and how he’d obtained the gun in the first place. He said it belonged to an old lag he’d made friends with in prison, who had revealed the fact that he possessed one. Willard had asked if he could borrow it when he went out, and the man had given him a note for his wife, so that she would let him have it. Then he’d gone to earth in a cinema until night, and on to Eileen’s house under cover of darkness.
    â€˜The door wasn’t locked,’ he said in the same soft, hopeless voice. ‘She was expecting somebody. Not me. One of them ! The hall was in darkness, and the stairs, too, but upstairs her bedroom door was half open, her light was on. It cast a very faint light down the well of the stairs. I didn’t need any light. I knew every knot in the floor, every worn place in the carpet.
    â€˜I began to climb the stairs; and when I was coming up to the midway landing I met myself coming down. I’m not mad! I looked up suddenly as I stepped on to the landing, and I was there – face to face with myself – coming down. I’m not mistaken! I know what I saw. I know this face, I know the clothes I’m wearing. And the gun! He – I – had the gun, too. So I knew I’d already done it, and she was dead. And I’m going to die, too. When you meet a sending of yourself, you know you’re going to die.’
    It made no sense, it couldn’t have happened, and yet I was afraid. I bullied him, trying to get straight answers out of him.
    â€˜You turned back on the stairs? You didn’t go on to her room?’
    â€˜What need was there?’ he said, beginning to shake all over with horror and the reflection of my fear. ‘He’d already been.’
    â€˜But you didn’t – did you? When you met him – yourself – you were frightened, you ran out of the house—’
    â€˜Yes, I ran out of the house.’
    â€˜You didn’t go on? You remember that?’
    â€˜I don’t know! No – I killed her! She’s dead!’
    â€˜What time was it? Do you know? Did you come straight here to me when you ran away?’
    I was only confusing and frightening him even more. The awful sobs came,