The day had waned as miss Simmons went briskly up to the side entrance on the gable, the house staff entrance. As she walked up to the mansion she had noticed the place seemed dark, once she came near she also noted Mr Randle's car was absent. Had he gone off on some urgent business?`He was a charming man, impulsive in a sometimes hard-fisted way, but she was a little sutrprised at the thought he'd have gone out withput telling the few staff who would be around.
After she passed through the maids' chamber and came into the main hall, she saw: yes, no lights on. She lit a few candles in a side niche and looked around. There was faint dust and wet on the parquet. She quickly took a leaflet from her pocket and wiped it up. In the years she had been head housemaid here - after Lisa went off to college further north, she had come to help supervising the kitchen too - she had gotten to know these floors and details of the furntiture, and the gesture was almot automatic.
She stood still as something seemed to thud from above. A low, dull crack. The wind creaked in the roof and she decided it was probably just something that had been blowing about up there. She thought with a smile of Eric Randle's way of yawning. In the years she had stayed here she had grown fond of him, his bouncing energy and his care with people. In the last two years they had grown more and more intimate, though hiding it from the other staff of course. As Mrs Randle had spent most of the time in Italy in later years, she did not enter the situation, and Renee hoped at times that Mr Randle would settle for a divorce and enter a new phase of his life with her. She hoped Lisa might accept if it turned out that way, the daughter might be careless and a bit arrogant at times but they had always got along fine and she was growing into a real beauty, for whom Renee felt a kind of big-sisterly affection.

She lit a cigarette and stepped up the stairs. Shouldn't Kiel, the butler be around by now? Thre was no sound except her own faint steps. Up on the first floor she opened a cupboard to check some plates, and just then a sound like a growl, or a drill came from upstairs. Miss Simmons froze and listened. A cat or something? But they didn't keep any cat, no pets at all. She listened again.

There: a faint, muted sound, but with a shiver she realized it could be human, like a growl, or someone falling over a chair and dragging it along the floor. She stood erect, then put the plates down and walked with silent, measured steps up the staircase.