61 Hours

paintings. The empty hat stand.
    No movement. No one there. No sign of disturbance.
    All quiet.
    Forty-three possible ways in, according to his earliercalculation, fifteen of them practical, eight of them easy. He backed away from the door and recrossed the porch. Stepped down and floundered through deep crusty snow alongside foundation plantings, around the side of the house, to the rear. He knew from his earlier inspection that the lock on the kitchen door was a sturdy brass item with a tongue neatly fitted into a heavy escutcheon plate. The plate was set into the jamb, which was a strip of century-old softwood. It was painted, whereas the front door’s jamb was a piece of lacquered chestnut, fine-grained and milled and exquisite. Harder to replace. All things considered, breaking in at the rear would be the considerate thing to do.
    He stepped back and took a breath and raised his boot and smashed his heel into the wood directly under the lock. No second attempt necessary. He was a big man, and he was anxious, and he was too cold for patience. The door stayed whole, but the escutcheon plate tore out of the jamb and clattered to the floor and the door swung open.
    ‘It’s me,’ he called. ‘Reacher.’ She might not have heard the bell, but she might have heard the splintering wood. He didn’t want her to have a heart attack.
    ‘It’s me,’ he called again.
    He stepped into the kitchen. Pushed the door shut behind him. It hung within an inch of fully closed. All the familiar sounds and smells came back to him. The hissing of the pipes. The percolator, now cold. He stepped into the small back hallway. He clicked on the light. The door at the bottom of the stairs was closed.
    ‘Janet?’ he called. ‘It’s me, Reacher.’
    No response.
    He tried again, louder. ‘Janet?’
    No response.
    He went down the back stairs. Knocked hard on the basement door.
    He called, ‘Janet?’
    No response.
    He tried the handle.
    The door opened.
    He took off his glove and got his gun out of his pocket. He stepped into the basement. It was dark. He listened. No sound, except the roar of the furnace and the squeal of the pump. He fumbled his left hand across the wall and found the switch and clicked on the light.
    The basement was empty. Nothing but sudden shadows from the vertical baulks of timber jumping across a bare expanse of floor. He walked through to the furnace room. Empty. Nothing there, except the old green appliance loudly burning oil.
    He walked back to the door. Stared back up the stairs over the front sight of his gun. No one there. No movement, no sound.
    He called, ‘Janet?’
    No response.
    Not good.
    He climbed back up to the kitchen. Walked through it to the hallway. It was the same as he had seen it through the stained glass panel from the front. All quiet. The chair, the table, the rug, the paintings, the hat stand. No movement. No disturbance.
    He found her in the library. She was in her favourite chair. She had a book in her lap. Her eyes were open. There was a bullet hole in the centre of her forehead.
    Like a third eye.
    Nine millimetre, almost certainly.
    Reacher’s mind stayed blank for a long, long time. It was his body that hurt. From thawing. His ears burned like someone was holding a blowlamp on them. Then his nose, then his cheeks, then his lips, then his chin, then his hands. He sat in the chair in the hallway and rocked back and forth and hugged himself in agony. His feet started hurting, then his ribs, then the long bones in his arms and his legs. It felt like they were all broken and crushed.
    Janet Salter had not had a thick skull. The back of it was blown all over her favourite chair, driven deep into the split the exiting bullet had made in the stuffing.
    I’ll have plenty of time to read
, she had said,
after all this fuss is over
.
    Reacher cradled his head in his hands. Put his elbows on his knees and stared down at the floor.
    I am privileged
, she had said.
Not everyone gets the opportunity to walk the walk
.
    Reacher rubbed his eyes. His hands came away bloody. The ice spicules driven on the wind had peppered his face with a thousand tiny pinpricks. Unnoticeable, when his flesh had been frozen. Now they were raising a thousand tiny beads of blood. He rubbed both palms over every inch of his face, like he was washing. He wiped his palms on his pants. He stared down at the floor. Traced each whorl of muted colour in the rug, one by one. When he reached the centre of each