With the lucid calm of shock, I walked about the study, searching for the telephone. It was not here. I went back to the landing and explored the other rooms. The telephone was in the bedroom. I looked up the number I required, still as calm as though I were arranging for a caterer, and picked up the phone, careless of my responsibility as first-on-scene to preserve fingerprints. I dialed DE-vonshire 8-1212. The sergeant on duty at the Emergency and Central Complaint Bureau answered crisply. I heard his pencil scratch as he recorded my name and Dr. Ozoneff's address. "The killer is insane," I said. "Please hurry; I'm alone with a madman." I hung up and considered that word I'd used: Alone. Doctor Axel Ozoneff was only a few minutes dead, and already I'd ignored him in my census of those present. _Sic transit gloria mundi._ I stood up from the bed and turned toward the door. The gardener's bony figure blocked the bedroom's exit. He'd come up the stairs silent as a cat. He still held the hedge-shears. Staring at them, I saw reddish-brown stains near the hinge, where the blades were joined together. It might have been rust. "You called the police," the gardener said. "Doctor Ozoneff is dead," I said. "I know. It was I who killed him." "Get away from me!" I shouted, retreating between the beds, my artificial calm broken. He glanced down at the huge shears he held and lifted them. He slammed the blades together. "As easy as that," he said. "A man is such a tender poor thing." I backed toward the window of the bedroom, vastly preferring an unexplored two-story drop to remaining in this room with the murderer. "I didn't mean to frighten you, sir," the gardener said. "I must admit you have reason to fear me: I am a monster. Now that I've breached the great First Law, what sinfulness might I not find in me, sir?" He let the hedge-shears fall to the carpet and stood quite still, like a mummy just unwrapped. "If I had tears, I'd blind me with them," he said. "If the Lesser Directive didn't hold my hand where the Great Law failed to, I'd close my consciousness. I am seeking the strength to do so, sir." "Why did you kill Dr. Ozoneff?" I asked, alert to keep the madman talking while the Boston police raced to capture him. "I was imperfect," he said. "The best of us is," I answered him. Permissive counseling. "But with all your weakness," he said, "you have poetry and progeny and history. I have none of these, nor even the pitiful gift of the sense of smell. I am color-blind as well, sir. Do you know that the blood spilled by my master in the next room looks to me like so much ink? Black ink, sir. I have spilled a good deal of ink in this house." "Why did you kill Dr. Ozoneff?" I insisted. * * * * *