Chapter 16The small room with the bay window and the clean hard stuffed furniture was heavy with the smell of flowers. The sweet cloying scent hung over the whole house, half hiding those other smells—cooking from the kitchen, camphor, floor stain, and the miserable, mean odour of damp handkerchiefs. Petals lay on the imitation parquet in the dining room, on the imitation Chinese carpet in the parlour, and on the imitation Persian runner in the hall. They lay, too, on the narrow staircase down whose sleek red steps the elaborate casket with the silver-plated handles had come swaying dangerously less than an hour before.
It was over. Chloe Pye had gone. The hideous yellow earth in the cemetery had opened and taken her in. The crowd, attracted by her name, her profession, the manner of her
