Pell found the cupboard open at first light.
She had come down the passage with the lamp still burning in the grey window and the bread-tins in her arms, and she had seen it from the Kitchen door: the drawer pushed in an inch past the place where she had left it, the grey wool cloth lying crooked on the lip of the box, the hasp hanging loose on its Hand’s lock as though it had been opened by somebody who did not want to close it again. She did not need to look twice. She knew the set of the drawer as she knew the set of a loaf in its tin. Somebody had moved it, and somebody had been in a hurry, and somebody had come back from the Kitchen door in the dark to find the cook standing in it, and had stood quite still, and had said nothing at all.
She put the bread-tins down on the flour bin. She did not glance at the drawer again.
Above the cupboard, on the wall of the passage, a faint red mark had appeared in the air. It was not paint, and it was not on the plaster. It was the colour of a bruise coming up under the skin, and it hung there in the grey light like a stain seen through a sleeve, and Pell could see it from the bread shelf as clearly as if somebody had written it on the wall in chalk. It…
