The Music Box Murders

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IT WAS nice there in the big yellow convertible. Any way you looked at it, it was nice. Around you the tiny hillocks and the snug little valleys seemed alive, to waft swiftly away—a monster drab-backed bird, feathered with dying grass and stiff, spiky fir trees.

Out there it looked cool, too; but not too cool. Looking at it, the gentle lift of the shadowy land, slanting upwards to the grey and rust of an hour old sunset, Detective Sully Heath had an impulse to get out and walk- walk long and hard to a mile away to the summit of the fir-clad ridge, there to listen to the wind, to taste of the lonely darkening world.

On lonely nights when he'd walked a beat, bored with dogging it over deserted streets, making routine call-ins, he'd attempted to think out poetry—stuff about such as he now saw in the swift, silent passing of the stones, the trees, the old farm fences. He'd been trying to imagine in rhyme something of which he knew nothing, and how pitiful his efforts had been. . . . He looked across at Mary McCulloch and laughed.

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