Wings of Fire

‘‘Yes, it has Brian’s initials on the back. See?”

He turned it over, and she peered at it for a moment. “They all have initials on them,” he told her. “The mark of the owner.”

“How very odd. Where did you find these? Surely not inside that board! And where did they come from? Olivia must have had the ring and the locket, but surely not Richard’s and James’ things. Or Brian’s. Cormac might have wanted that crucifix.”

“They were hidden in the board, just as I showed you. One fell out—the locket—when I was going through the closet looking for Olivia’s papers. After a time I discovered the others.”

“But why were they hidden? I don’t understand!”

“They’re trophies of the dead. I thought that Olivia had collected them from each of her victims. Something they’d treasured and she’d coveted. Now, I don’t know.” He picked up the board again, and the wood that slotted so perfectly into it. “It was Nicholas who worked in wood. It was his skill that must have made this hiding place. I realize that now. Not Olivia’s. And it was Nicholas who led the hunt for the crucifix. Susannah mentioned that. What better place to keep them safe than Olivia’s closet? She wouldn’t be likely, would she, to go moving shelves around on her own.”

There was pain in her eyes. “You can’t think—but there’s the fob. Why should Nicholas add a trophy of his own, and not one for Olivia, if he was the killer. If he killed her before he took his own life?” Her face begged him to tell her it couldn’t be true.

“I don’t know what was burned in the fire. But could Olivia have carried things out there, burned them, and come back into the house without Nicholas knowing what she was doing? Especially if it was done at night? Someone made very certain that a number of things were destroyed. Secretly. It would have been easy for him to go out there. At night, while Olivia slept.”

“No, not Nicholas!”

“Rachel, Olivia couldn’t have gone out there without his knowing.”

“She could have! He went into the village, to the church, to visit the rector, to have a meal at the inn, talk to people. She could have done it then.”

“All right. But the fire—and the letter—tell me that one of them knew that it was all over. Nicholas couldn’t possibly have written to you if Olivia planned all this on her own. If he hadn’t known what was about to happen.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He may— something might have been worrying him—he might have known, without really knowing. You do sometimes! He might have—suspected what she was planning. They understood each other so well.”

“And on the moors yesterday,” he went on, ignoring her interjection, “they found what looked like a small boy’s clothing. Wrapped in oiled cloth, to keep it from rotting too soon. That means someone stripped the boy’s body. Took away the clothing that might have made it easier to identify him. That’s planning, Rachel. Someone planned his disappearance!”

“If you found his clothing, you must have found his bones,” she pointed out, desperate now.

“No. I told you, the body had been stripped. If you’re going to that trouble, you don’t leave the body and the clothing in the same hole. It would make no sense, would it? Next point. I have a witness who says that Brian FitzHugh was talking to someone on the beach just before he died. Can you see Olivia trying to make her way down through those rocks? Wouldn’t Brian have gone up to meet her, to save her the effort? Finally, if Nicholas was jealous of Rosamund’s remarriage to Brian, he wouldn’t be eager to see Thomas Chambers move in to fill FitzHugh’s shoes either. And it looked very much as if that could happen. But Chambers lived in Plymouth, not Borcombe. Nicholas couldn’t reach him. He could stop his mother from taking a new husband. In the grave, she wouldn’t betray him again. She was his.”

She backed over to the bed, her eyes still on his face, her own very bleak, her mind listening, whatever her heart was denying. She sank down on the edge of the coverlet, and as she did, he caught that same illusive hint of perfume again, and so did she. Straightening hastily, she moved across the room to the desk instead. As far from the fragrance as she could get. “You can’t prove it!” Rachel told him defiantly. “You can’t prove any of this. And I won’t let you ruin Nicholas’ memory with speculation and doubt. Olivia was famous. They won’t let you tear her down either, wait and see. You’ll end up ruining yourself. But I’m going to find out what drives you so hard, and I’m going to stop you, before I’ve lost my own way, and start believing this filth. This was a close, happy family! Why do you want to destroy it?”

“I want the truth,” he said tiredly.

“No, you don’t,” she told him coldly. “You’ve come out of the war a broken man, I can read that much in your face. You need to prove yourself again. And you think that the dead are easier targets than the living. All right, I don’t know what made Olivia want to kill herself. I expect it was suffering that drove her to it. And I don’t know why Nicholas wanted to die. But I’d rather go through the rest of my life wondering than lose him entirely. You don’t have anything to lose, do you? You’ve never loved anyone enough to give yourself for them. I must have been mad, asking for Scotland Yard to be sent down here. I believed in justice, and you only believe in revenge!”

She was moving before she’d finished, catching him off balance, and was out the door, slamming it behind her. He could hear her running down the gallery, almost stumbling in blind haste.

He didn’t need Hamish’s warning. Remembering the stairs, remembering how Stephen had fallen on the worn treads, Rut-ledge swore and was across the room in four swift strides, going after her.

He overtook her at the top of the steps, catching her arm in a fierce grip, swinging her around to face him.

“I’m not trying to ruin Nicholas! Or Olivia! There’s murder here, damn it. You’re an intelligent woman, you could see it for yourself if you weren’t so bloody wrapped up in your emotions!” he told her, furious with her, furious with himself.

Rachel didn’t cry. Where protecting Nicholas was concerned, she was braver than most of the men who wore medals from the war. He hoped that Nicholas was worth it—and feared that he wasn’t.

“Don’t talk to me about emotions!” she said, her voice like ice. “It’s Olivia, isn’t it? You don’t want her to be a killer, you don’t want all that poetry to come out of darkness and hate. Those damned poems blind you, and everybody else. Olivia was a witch, she had a withered leg, and yet she was able to take Nicholas down with her into depression and death! She could kill her own sister and her own half brother, and give an overdose of laudanum to her mother, and still you want to see her as saint! Her sufferings are just another part of the myth, her writing something you wrestle with because she’s a woman and respect because you once thought it was a man’s, and women shouldn’t write about lying in bed with a lover or standing knee-deep in your own ordure in a trench, or how near we all are to hell! But you wonder, don’t you, what kind of lover she’d have been, and where she might have learned the tricks that mattered. Well, ask Cormac. Maybe he’ll tell you what she was like!”

Stung, he let her go, dropping his hand from her arm, and she turned, walking down the stairs with her head high and her shoulders straight with anger. Fighting for breath and control even while she still seethed with the fury consuming her.

At the foot of the steps she turned to look back up at him and said, “Now you know how I felt in Olivia’s bedroom! I’ve given you a taste of your own poison, and you found it hard to swallow, didn’t you? I don’t know if a word of what I’ve just said is true, and I don’t really care. But now you can see for yourself what lies a twisted imagination might come up with. How easily you can twist the truth to debase other people’s emotions. I loved Nicholas, and I mourn the man he was. And I won’t believe your lies about him. You can think what you like about Olivia. I’m going back to London, if I can find Cormac and ask him to take me. But I promise you this: I’ll ruin you if you ruin Nicholas.”

“Rachel, listen to me—”

“No. I’ve already listened to you, and I think it’s all hog-wash. What you think is your own business. What you do about what you think is very much my business. Consider yourself warned.” She walked to the door.

“Wait!” he commanded, already on his way down the stairs.

“Why? To be insulted again? Or worse still, hurt? I can’t think how you could have been Peter Ashford’s friend. He was such a gentle, good man.”

“I’ll make a bargain with you.”

She laughed. “I don’t bargain with the devil.”

Ignoring that, he said, “Help me find out the truth. And I swear to you, if Nicholas is guilty—no, wait, let me finish—if Nicholas is the one I’m after, I’ll walk away from it, go back to London, and tell the Yard they were wrong, there was nothing further to investigate in any of the three deaths in Borcombe this spring. The past—the others—can stay buried with him.”

Rachel stood with her back to him, the door’s handle in her hand, the door already swinging gently towards her.

“I don’t believe you!”

“I swear!” And he would do it. He knew that, deep down inside.

“And if it isn’t Nicholas?”

“Then we’ll decide what ought to be done. In fairness to the dead. All of the dead.” To O. A. Manning. To the poems that might be worse than lies.

“I’ll think about that. And give you my answer tonight. I’ll send a message to The Three Bells.”

The door was open now, and she went through it without looking back, the wind from the sea picking up strands of her hair and blowing them around her face. She seemed awfully slim and lonely, very small and very bereft as she moved down the steps and onto the drive, skirting his car.

Hamish was calling him a fool for swearing to such a bargain.

“The Yard brings in their man, you can’t turn your back on your oath, no’ for a slip of a girl that can’t see where the wind’s blowing!”

“So you believe me now, do you?” Rutledge silently challenged Hamish. “You see I’m right.”

“I think ye’re a damned fool, and a long way from home! What is there about witchery in a woman that touches you? Your Jean wasn’t that sort, she’s no’ the kind to spin a man’s head or set his soul on the brink. Olivia Marlowe casts a spell out of her grave, and ye’re lost!”

“It has nothing to do with Jean. Or Olivia Marlowe,” Rutledge countered, watching Rachel’s long, clean strides as she walked towards the wood. “And it has naught to do with yon lassie, either!” Hamish retorted.

Rutledge closed the door after Rachel before she reached the shadows of the trees and then took the stairs two at a time, to put away the articles he’d left on Olivia’s windowsill. Back into their cotton nests again, for the moment. Until he was ready to bring them out for good. His sixth sense told him he’d won in his bargain with Rachel. He hoped he was right.

As he passed the closed door to Nicholas’ room, he said aloud, his voice rough, “You should have lived, you fool, and married her. She’d have made a better wife than any you’ll find in the grave.”

Hamish chuckled.

Rutledge, irritated, ignored him.

But Hamish was in Rutledge’s own mind. And Hamish recognized what Rutledge had just admitted to Nicholas.

That he couldn’t be guilty, or he wouldn’t have won Rachel’s heart.

It was one of the first lessons Rutledge had learned at the Yard. That love seldom had anything to do with murder. Pity, yes. And compassion, sometimes. Even mercy, on occasion. But not love.

And the question in this case was not whether Rachel loved Nicholas, but how Nicholas loved Rachel.

Enough to protect her, as Cormac had suggested, or enough to use her to protect himself. Which had it been? Which way had Nicholas turned?

As Rutledge carefully worked with the little gold trophies, he realized all at once that Nicholas might well have included himself among the dead, before swallowing his laudanum. But not Olivia. That’s why there was no trophy for Olivia. She had escaped through her poetry. He had waited too long to kill her—if that’s what he’d done, if that was what had actually happened. She’d already found her wings of fire.

18

Rutledge drove thoughtfully back to Borcombe, and didn’t realize, until he stepped around the men seated on their sun-warmed bench before the inn door, drinking their beer, that he’d missed his lunch.

Hamish pointed out that the dining room had already closed.

Which did nothing to improve Rutledge’s mood.

He felt he was ready to start taking statements from his witnesses: Mrs. Trepol and Wilkins the gardener, Rachel and Cormac, Smedley, Dr. Penrith and Dr. Hawkins. Getting it on paper where he could sort it, challenge it, or use it to move forward.

But Borcombe was a tiny place, and everyone knew everyone’s business. To speak to people, to ask them for a general picture of the family at the Hall and the events that might—or might not—impinge on matters that concerned him, stirred up talk and rumors. To ask for official statements was tantamount to providing a blueprint for exactly what he was after: old murders, not new ones. Room for Constable Dawlish and his choleric superior to raise hell with London. Bringing Bowles down on him like a cyclone, demanding to know what he meant by stirring up the county, causing problems for the Yard when it already had its hands full. Room too for Cormac to have him recalled summarily, citing harassment of a prominent family, never mind the local police.

And he’d be forced to reveal more than he could, at the moment, defend. Publicly. But he knew he was right. All his experience at the Yard, his own intuition, the facts that he could be sure of, pointed to a long, cold-blooded series of killings that had spanned years. Cunningly planned, meticulously carried out, skillfully concealed.

A few more days—

He’d have to wait, damn it! On the statements. It would be foolhardy to push on and wreck everything.

Which merely added to his frustration, and Hamish was there, already taking advantage of it. Rutledge tried to shut him out. The clamor in his head was ferocious, and he forced himself to ignore it.

Very well, then, he promised himself. Wait he would— until he had finally talked to the local man, Inspector Harvey, and seen the way the wind blew there. It could make a difference in his planning, he had to accept that.

Sidestepping someone coming down the stairs as if he owned them, Rutledge settled for mentally laying out his schedule, which of the villagers should give statements first, what approach he was going to take in the questions asked, how he might draw out of each witness exactly what he wanted without arousing rampant speculation, and how fast he could accomplish the lot. There was also the dilemma of what had become of Olivia’s papers. He was going to have to find them—

He realized the man on the stairs was staring hard at him, eyes narrowed and angry. Rutledge looked up at him for the first time, and swiftly shelved his own thoughts.

“Rutledge?” the stranger demanded. “Inspector Rutledge?”

“I’m Rutledge, yes.”

“Inspector Harvey,” the man retorted with equal curtness. “I’ve come to speak to you.”

Swearing silently at the timing of Harvey’s unexpected appearance—splitting headaches were not the frame of mind in which to conduct painstaking interviews with choleric Cornishmen —Rutledge led the way to the small parlor, where today sunlight tried fretfully to light the gloom. “We can have privacy here,” he said, holding open the door. And advantage to me, on my own ground, he thought to himself. It appeared that he well might have need of it.

Harvey followed, still huffing from the stairs.

He was a bluff man, neither tall nor short, but heavy in build, with a red complexion and thinning dark hair. There was an air of having his own way about him, as if on his own ground he was used to being heeded, and his advice or instructions followed. There couldn’t be, Rutledge thought to himself, many police matters in this pan of Cornwall which might draw the attention of London. What there was in the way of crime and mischief would be comfortably divided between the police and the local magistrates.

In short, tread carefully.

“I’m glad to meet you finally,” Rutledge said, holding out his hand. Harvey looked pointedly at it and walked on into the room, refusing to take it.

“Finally is the key word here, isn’t it?” he asked, keeping his voice flat.

“You were in Plymouth when I came. And you’ve only just returned, I think. Dawlish told me you were somewhere on the moors, talking to a farmer about wild dogs attacking his domestic animals.”

“So I was. It doesn’t mean I’m blind to what’s happening. I don’t like strangers meddling on my patch. Not without my keeping an eye on them or having regular reports from them to keep me in the picture. Looks bad when I know less than my constable, and less than London. I don’t see what’s wrong with our initial investigation into the three deaths in question, and I don’t see why you haven’t long since come and gone with a clean bill of health on my desk to clear the air in Borcombe.”

“As a matter of fact, nothing appears to be wrong with your initial inquiries. I believe that Stephen FitzHugh died as you said he did. In a fall. It’s the other deaths that interest me. And I accept them as suicides.”

“Just because Miss Marlowe turned out to be famous? Is that’s what this is in aid of? Sending a detective inspector all this way? Playing merry hell with my reputation and her family’s reputation, all to suit the wigs in London who realized too late they’d missed the opportunity of seeing their names in the Times in connection with her death? Or are you in fact looking for a wee success to set off the Yard’s regrettable failure to stop this knife-wielding idiot on the loose in London? Oh, yes, I’ve seen the papers—nobody has a clue! Now the local people tell me you’re trying to find a link down here with Master Richard Cheney, the boy lost on the moors. Ridiculous doesn’t cover it!”

“That’s because what you hear from your own people is not in any way the point of my investigation. But if that’s what they’d prefer to think, then I’d prefer to let them.”

Harvey all but snorted. “What I’m asking you, man, is to tell me what you’re after, not what you want the villagers to believe!” Harvey was feeding on his own sense of betrayal, letting it fuel his anger. It was a technique used sometimes by men wanting their own way—make life unpleasant enough for the other party, and he’d be too busy defending himself to attack.

Rutledge considered his own tactics, then said, “Nicholas Cheney had a brother who’s been missing since he was five. We presently have no way of knowing if the boy is dead or alive. If alive, he may be an heir. If dead, there’s a possibility it wasn’t accidental. That he was deliberately murdered.”

“By whom, pray? And if the family was concerned about him still being alive after the search was called off and the posters brought in no responses, or later was wanting to know something more about his death, why didn’t they come to my predecessor? Or to me?”

“Would you have listened? Or would you have assured them they could safely believe what they’d rather believe, that the boy died of simple exposure? Any new search was bound to lead to the same conclusion.”

Harvey bristled. “I don’t tell comfortable lies, whatever you’re used to in London. And I know how to conduct a search.”

“I’m sure you don’t tell comfortable lies,” Rutledge agreed. “And given the facts at your disposal, where would you start searching? From what I can see, there was very little evidence of foul play, unless some passing gypsies carried the boy off, or someone wandering on the moors stumbled on him and killed him for reasons of his own. And the officer in charge examined those possibilities very thoroughly at the time Richard went missing. Even when you took over here, you had no reason to suspect more than some sort of tragic accident. What has changed now is the way we’re looking at the disappearance, and that in itself may prove to be the key.”

“And what is that, pray? He wandered off during a family picnic. And was lost. And is long dead, most likely, because the moors are unforgiving. Why should I have raised false hopes? And as to the present cases, would it have prevented Miss Olivia Marlowe from taking her own life? Or Mr. Nicholas from doing the same? Would it have straightened Mr. Stephen’s cracked neck? I think not!” His own neck was red to his collar with the power of his anger.

“No. But it might have righted a very old wrong. It might have revealed secrets that the family itself didn’t know the answers to. It might make it clearer to us whose will took precedence, and at what time. Who has the right to sell Tre-velyan Hall, and who has none.”

“It was my understanding—still is—that Miss Olivia and Mr. Nicholas had nearly identical wills. In that event, I don’t quite see legal quibbling over which is which. And I can tell you that Mr. Nicholas was a very straightforward man, very able, concerned about his responsibilities to the church and the village. Fought in the war, did his duty like the gentleman he was—”

Hamish, interrupting, wanted to know what being a gentleman had to do with fighting in France. Rutledge ignored him.

“—and in my opinion had long ago put to rest the question of his brother’s death. Never spoke of it to me in the past fifteen years. And never spoke to my predecessor about it either, or it’d have been in the record. Which leaves us with Miss Olivia, and I don’t know that I’d put much past her!”

It was so different from any other comments he’d heard about Olivia that Rutledge was surprised.

Harvey smiled with sour satisfaction. ‘‘We’re not all clods here in the wilds of Cornwall, whatever London may have led you to believe.”

“No one has suggested that you might be,” Rutledge said, moving with great care now. “Tell me what reasons you have to back up your opinion.”

“Read her books, man! My wife is a decent woman, she’d never so much as feel or think what Miss Marlowe thought fit to put down baldly in print! It’s unwomanly and disturbing. A mind capable of such immodesty is in my estimation capable of the worst in human degradation.”

He’d spoken with such venom that Rutledge found himself wondering what Olivia had done to raise Harvey’s hackles. He thought he knew. She’d been Miss Marlowe of the Hall, quiet and unassuming, someone he could patronize, the cripple who was content to be seldom seen and not often heard. A tidy round peg in her tidy round hole, like Mrs. Harvey. And then the truth about O. A. Manning had come out, and Harvey had been made to look or feel a fool for misjudging her. That would be unforgivable, and he’d judge her with a vengeance now. Rutledge quelled the urge to rise to Olivia’s defense, his own temper held on a tight rein.

Harvey had already moved on to his next grievance. “Now tell me what this new evidence you spoke of might be. Those rags they found out on the moors? You’ll never prove they belonged to the boy. Could have been put there any time in the years before or since. Don’t they teach you your business in London?”

“Quite well,” Rutledge said through his teeth. “And I intend to continue going about it until I’m satisfied.”

Harvey was furious, but something about the other man’s voice, the steel in it, the natural air of command that came with years in France, made him stop short and reexamine his opponent. His first impression had been of an ill, weary man with no stamina for the course. Someone who could be bullied and sent back to London with his tail between his legs. Stake your ground, wield your temper like a club, and he’d soon apologize and be off.

Instead he’d come up against hard core, and more experience than he’d expected. Harvey tried to think if he’d heard the name Rutledge before in connection with any of the major cases the Yard had handled. It rattled him more that he couldn’t. Knowing what Rutledge might be capable of gave him more range to push. Not knowing left him in pitch dark on a steep cliff.

Rutledge, meanwhile, was making his own assessment. Of a man who did his job thoroughly and properly, but lacked imagination to do it cleverly. That was going to matter a great deal.

After a swift, appraising silence, both men moved to chairs and sat down, as if the confrontation was finished and the conference begun.

As a form of peace offering, Rutledge said, “Apart from your natural disinclination to see a case opened again for no sound reason—and I understand that, I’d dislike it myself— were you quite serious when you said that Miss Marlowe was capable of anything? Any degradation. Would you for instance include murder in that list?”

And then Harvey surprised him a second time by vacillating. “Yes and no.”

“If you discount her poetry, and her reputation there, what gave you the feeling that she was different?” Or was it all hindsight, the willingness to believe that Olivia hadn’t hoodwinked him completely .. .

Mulling it over, Harvey said, “It was not something I could put my finger on, mind you. It was more her interest in the subject of crime that made me uneasy. People, most especially women, don’t think to ask the questions she asked, unless there’s worry in the mind, or fear. Or even depravity. Now in a pub talking to a man about my work, I’ll be asked a hundred questions, from how I know I’ve got the right miscreant to whether I’ve watched a hanging. That’s different, it’s curiosity, the same as he’d ask an undertaker or even a glassblower about his trade. Idle conversation. You can tell the man knows naught about it, and you could give him lies and he’d be just as satisfied.”

Rutledge nodded. The farmers and tradesmen and lorry drivers he’d fought with had often found it odd to be in the same trench as a policeman. As if he viewed all mankind with innate suspicion. Expecting the worst.

“So it was different when Miss Olivia asked me what made a man take another man’s life. What goaded him, whether he was evil by birth and nature or only caught up in a web of happenstance he couldn’t fight his way clear of. Whether murdering ran in families or wasn’t inheritable.” He paused. Rutledge realized that Harvey had kept this conversation buried deep inside himself for a very long time. And was only reluctantly revealing it now. Because he was a fair man, whatever he lacked in cleverness. “Whether a murderer could truly repent and change. And her as fair and innocent looking as the day she were bom! I didn’t know about the poetry, not then, but I can tell you it gave me the willies, because she was that intense I knew it wasn’t idle talk, meeting the new man in charge and making polite noises about his job. She wanted—she wanted something more. And I couldn’t have told you on peril of my life what it was.”

“Knowing about murder isn’t the same as killing. A victim’s family may understand it better than the murderer himself.” If Nicholas had been the killer, Olivia would have felt it deep in her very bones.

“Aye, that’s true. But once I read some of her verse, now, I knew it was inside that woman, and not something she’d happened to think of, meeting me on the road, like. That last book has one poem in it that kept me sleepless of nights for nearly a week. The sheer cruelty of it. I don’t recollect what it’s called, but I’m not likely to forget how it started:‘Murderer I am, of little things, small griefs,

Treasures of the heart.Of bodies and of souls I have taken

All that is there to give,

Life’s blood, the spirit’s wealth.

And these secrets I keep locked away,

For my own joy and your pain.’

Not what Mrs. Browning might write, or even that Rossetti woman.”

“No,” Rutledge said quietly, considering possible treasures of the heart. Those small golden trophies of a death.

“Are you thinking she killed that boy? Good God! She was hardly more than a child herself!”

“You said you believed she was capable of murder.”

Harvey looked at him, mind working, mind sorting, but not coming up with anything he could put into words.

“Aye, that’s true enough, in the heat of the moment I felt it could be so. But it’s different when you have a face to put to someone she may’ve killed ...” He shook his head. “We don’t get many child murderers in these parts. I wasn’t that fond of the woman, but it’s another matter saying she was one. She was different. That was her problem. She was ... different.” There was something in his eyes that pleaded for Rutledge to understand what he was trying to say. That whatever Olivia Marlowe was, by its very extraordinariness she was outside the realm of his comprehension, and therefore suspect, even if he couldn’t condemn her for a specific crime. Capable of anything.

“When did this discussion with Olivia take place?”

“Oh, long before the war. I’d just arrived in Borcombe. I didn’t know her mother, the one they still call Miss Rosamund, that everyone was so fond of, and I knew only that Miss Olivia was one of the family up at the Hall. Her and her brother, and the two younger ones, the twins.”

“How did you answer her?”

“I had to tell her the truth as I saw it. That the darkness in the human soul was something I’d never come to understand in my years of policing but I believed it to be beyond healing. That struck her as sad, I could see it in her eyes. And then she said, ‘Do families believe you, when you tell them a son—or a daughter—is guilty of murder?’ I said, ‘They’re often the last to believe,’ and she nodded as if she understood, and thanked me for my time, and walked away.” When Rutledge made no answer, Harvey added, “Not a natural conversation to have with a young woman, would you say?”

He wanted reassurance. He wanted to believe that Olivia and not he himself had been out of line. He didn’t want to think that she had had a guilt on her conscience, had turned to the figure of authority in Borcombe, and been rejected because he had somehow failed to understand her. Rutledge wondered if she’d brought this up before, with Harvey’s predecessor, or the rector before Smedley. And found no absolution for the burden she carried.

Which meant in turn that Rutledge was not going to confide in Harvey either. Not until he was sure of his ground. It would be wasted breath, and if he, Rutledge, turned out to be wrong, the damage as Rachel had pointed out, and Cormac as well, could be enormous.

And so, in pacification, Rutledge said, “To the end of the week, then. I’ll continue the search for the boy, I’ll continue my questions, and then if I have no more to go on than I have now, I’ll come to you and confer.”

“Find him or not, mark my words, the lad is dead.”

The innkeeper, Trask, brought a tray and a pot of coffee to Rutledge in his room and made a show of setting the cup within reach, putting out the sugar bowl and small pitcher of milk, refolding the napkin that had covered the thick sandwiches. Affably mentioning Harvey’s visit, he showed all the signs of a man prepared to linger and gossip.

For once Rutledge preferred the innkeeper’s opinions to the silence of his own thoughts. Or Hamish’s.

“A good man, we’ve had no complaint of him, keeps the peace and is fair-minded. The magistrates seem to think well of him too, from what I hear. Thorough, that’s the reputation they give him.” Disappointed when Rutledge didn’t take the hint and offer his own views on the local constabulary, Trask reminisced for a time about the Trevelyan family, leaving the impression that The Three Bells had been the center of social life for generations of them. Rutledge swallowed that with his first cup of coffee, and a grain of salt.

Then something the innkeeper was saying caught his attention. “And of course her mother was the old nanny there. That’s the reason Miss Rachel prefers the cottage to the inn.”

“Are you telling me that the Trevelyan nanny is still alive?” He felt a surge of wrath that no one—least of all Rachel—had seen fit to tell him that.

“Lord, no, she’d be near ninety, wouldn’t she! Polworth, her name was, she’d been nanny to Miss Rosamund, then married and had a daughter of her own, Mary, and when Mary was off to school, she went back to the Hall to care for Mr. Stephen and Miss Susannah. Only ever had the one child herself. Mr. Polworth died of the consumption early on. Mary Otley, the daughter is now. Husband was killed out in Africa, place called Mafeking.”

“Soldier?”

“God save you, sir, no, he were a missionary. His death took the heart out of Mary, and she came home. Wasn’t her cup of tea, so to speak, preaching to the heathen, suffering from dysentery and them big flies, and water not fit to drink—”

“Thank you, Trask,” Rutledge said, cutting him off. Trask wasted another few minutes filling his tray with the empty dishes, brushing away crumbs, leaving the pot of coffee, as if hoping for another opening. But he got none and soon took the hint.

Afterward, Rutledge sat there and listened to the birds singing outside his window in the ruined garden, laying his plans carefully.

19

It was nearly four in the afternoon when Rachel left the cottage and crossed the road to the rectory, disappearing into the house when the liverish housekeeper opened the door. Rutledge, lying in wait in the small wood from which he could see the cottage quite clearly, gave her a full minute in case the call was a short one, then strode quickly to the gate that shut the cottage walk off from the village street.

The woman who opened the door to his knock was elderly, but not, he thought, as old as she appeared to be. From the yellow of her eyes, he could see that she’d had malaria more than once, and still paid dearly for her years in Africa. It was not a continent that was kind to European women.

Startled to see him, she said, “Miss Rachel’s just gone over to visit Rector” Her voice held a degree of reserve, and no Cornish accent.

“I know. I wanted to speak to you, if I may. Mrs. Otley, is it? I understand that your mother was nanny at the Hall.”

She let him in, and the room itself reflected the odd life she’d lived. There was the coziness of chintz, embroidered cushions, and a worn Axminster carpet. A Zulu shield hung cheek by jowl with a crossed pair of long, deadly spears on the wall, next to a print of the King and Queen in a wooden frame, and a hand-lettered certificate stating that Mary Pol-worth Otley had crossed the Equator on the ship Ramses. The chair she pointed out to him wore a fine fringe of pale cream dog hairs. Resigning himself to collecting them on his clothing, Rutledge wondered where the dog was. It came trundling in, a fat puppy that sniffed his trousers and then tried to tear his shoelaces out by the roots. Mrs. Otley, referring to it as Rhodes, shooed it away and sat down, her face solemn.

“What was it you wanted to see me about, sir? If you’re here to ask questions about Miss Rachel—”

“No. I was more interested in your mother’s work at the Hall. Did she talk about the family very often?”

“To me? No, sir. She adored Miss Rosamund, you could see that, and was very fond of the children at the Hall, but she wasn’t one to make comparisons. And she treated their business as theirs, and mine as mine.”

Which was certainly to her credit. “Did you play with the Trevelyan children?”

“No, sir, I was far older than any of them. I did lend a hand in the nursery from time to time, when there was sickness or company coming. It helped me, when I was out in Africa teaching little ones.”

“Were you there when Anne Marlowe fell out of a tree in the orchard? Or when young Richard was lost on the moors?”

“No, I was away at school. I wanted more than anything to be a governess, and Miss Rosamund was kind enough to take an interest in me. She sent me to Miss Kitchener’s Academy in Kent.” A rueful smile moved quietly across her face. “Then in my first position as governess, I met Edwin, just back from Africa and a widower. He was a fiery man, full of God and grand ideas. I became the third Mrs. Otley, but this time it was Edwin who was buried in Africa, not his wife. I came home a widow and childless. I worked in a slum school in London for a time, telling myself it was best for me to stay busy in the church. But it wasn’t. I hadn’t had a calling, you see. Only Edwin’s dream, second hand.”

He could hear the sense of grief, not for her husband or herself but for the waste of her life on something she hadn’t believed in.

And then as if she’d picked up his earlier conclusion, she said, “Africa’s hard on women. That’s why I persuaded Miss Rachel not to follow Peter Ashford to Kenya. She was all for going. She’d have been left out there a widow, if she hadn’t listened. And—and for many reasons I was right.”

He wondered if Mary Otley knew—or guessed—about Rachel’s feelings for Nicholas. He asked a few more questions that took him nowhere, then stood to go.

Rhodes, caught napping, leaped to his own feet before he was quite awake and scrambled to the attack. Rutledge sidestepped smoothly, and the little dog skidded to a halt by the chair, taking on its already well-chewed skirts instead.

But Mrs. Otley, looking up at Rutledge and ignoring the dog as if used to mock battles, said, “Of course I was back here in Borcombe when Nicholas nearly died. If that’s any help to you, sir. I wouldn’t want Miss Rachel to know of it, but she tells me you’ve an interest in such happenings at the Hail, and I wouldn’t want to be remiss in my duty. But if it serves no purpose, I’d as soon have it left a secret. If you wouldn’t mind.”

“Secret?” Rutledge repeated, as unprepared as Rhodes for the sudden shift in direction.

“Yes, it was kept very quiet at the time. No one wanted it talked about, but I suppose it doesn’t do any harm now, if you’re interested in the family’s history, as they say in the village you are. Though God knows why. They were always perfectly respectable people up at the Hall.”

“Tell me.” He spoke more sharply than he’d intended.

“There isn’t much to tell, actually. He was coming home to the Hall, late one night, Mr. Nicholas. He’d been visiting the rector—this was well before the war, oh, 1907 or thereabouts, and there’d had been rumors at the time about Mr. Nicholas leaving soon to see some of the ships being built up on Clyde Bank, in Scotland. Those liners everyone was talking about, and the prize for the Atlantic crossing speed record. Young Stephen told me he’d overheard Mr. Cormac saying he’d look into finding a place for Mr. Nicholas in one of the fleets, if he was interested. But I don’t know if that’s true or not, nothing came of it. At any rate, on the way home from Rector’s, Mr. Nicholas was stabbed by some drunkard. Too drunk to know what he was about, thank God, because the knife missed Mr. Nicholas’ heart and took a long slash out of his ribs instead. Dr. Penrith sewed him up, ordered him to stay in his own bed and not go wandering off to London or Scotland or anywhere else, and that was the end of that. I don’t think anyone knew about it except Miss Olivia and the doctor, and of course me, because the poor man dragged himself to my door when he couldn’t make it through the wood and up the hill to the Hall.”

“And the drunkard?”

“Oh, he was long gone away by the time Miss Olivia took some of the grooms out to hunt for him. She told them only that the man’d been making a nuisance of himself on the drive. I daresay he fled the minute he’d seen what he’d done. Drunk or not, he’d have known there’d be a hue and cry over it.”

“And Rachel never knew?”

“She was away, and Miss Olivia said she’d be here in a flash, worrying herself to death, and to no good purpose. I agreed, and never said a word to anyone. Mr. Nicholas ran a fever for a day or two, then began to heal. It wasn’t as if Miss Rachel was needed to help nurse him.”

“Did Nicholas get a good look at his assailant?”

“He said he was too rattled at the time to take much notice, except that the man was tall and thin and dressed poorly. Which was very unlike him, to my mind. Not one to lose his nerve, Mr. Nicholas. But men are strange sometimes, when it comes to pride. He wouldn’t have a fuss made over it. Someone dragged up before the magistrate for the attack, everyone talking—”

Rutledge agreed with her first comment. Nicholas—raided?

He thought it was much more likely that Nicholas knew exactly who had attacked him, and didn’t want to say ...

And could that explain the gold watch fob in the small collection in Olivia’s closet? Had she tried to stop him from leaving her and the Hall?

He asked Mrs. Otley not to mention the matter to Rachel or anyone else for the time being, and left the house before Rhodes had finished trouncing the chair skirt and recollected his shoelaces.

Rutledge went off through the woods, not ready to return to the inn, restless with the complexities of the evidence in front of him, needing the physical exercise to clear away the temptations offered, to absolve Olivia of blame. It was still there, deep inside, although he knew it was wrong, a muddle of emotions from the war, from his loss of Jean, his insecurities, the persistent fear he might still be unready to do his job properly.

Olivia’s poetry had been an anchor for many men. Why hadn’t the woman herself lived up to the talent she’d been given?

He crossed the lawns of the Hall, noticing in the afternoon light that the house seemed to have changed since he came to Borcombe. Once it had seemed warmly welcoming, then haunted and alive with pain. Now—it was odd, but he could sense it strongly—there was merely emptiness. As if the occupants, man or ghost, had given up on the living and gone away. But it had only been a trick of the light, he told himself, that had once made the house seem to him so vital. And the fineness of the architecture, which led the senses astray.

He made himself remember instead the house that he’d just visited, the Beatons’ Victorian deception. A house without a soul, his father would have called it, because it had been built to reflect a passion, not as a thing in and of itself. The ghosts there would be just as fraudulent, wanting to be noticed as part of the decor, wandering in the turrets and along the battlements like figments of the style, not as figments of reality.

He smiled at the fanciful thought.

For a time he stood down by the shore, near the rocks where Brian FitzHugh had died. Watching the sea come in, listening to Hamish reminding him that what you wanted was not to be considered as proper evidence.

“And ye’re missing something, man! Ye’re wrapped up in your feelings, because that woman made sense of the war for you, and sense of love, and blinded you with her bonny words. Use your head! Ye’ll no’ find yon murderer in the sea, nor in the answers people gie you. And ye’ll no’ find it in Rachel Marlowe’s memory, mark my words. Ye’ll find it in black and white, or gie it all up for good!”

‘‘What about the clothes on the moor?” he asked, as gulls called overhead, blotting out the sound of his voice.

“Someone stripped the lad. That’s what it means. And why strip a corpse? To keep him from being identified.”

“No, they’d know, God help them, who the boy was. It was done for another reason. Not to prevent identification, but to confuse.”

“Confuse! D’ye no’ think that the mother of that child would know his flesh? Clothed or bare, rotting or whole, she’d know!”

“And if they found the clothes but not the boy—”

“She’d know those as well!”

Rutledge sighed. “True. So why strip the boy? Then bury the clothes in an oiled sack or cloth? Making them last as long as possible, rather than letting them rot. You’d think the sooner they rotted the better, as far as the killer was concerned. All right, who stripped the body? If I had the answer to that, I’d know the whole. And why the poem about the pansies? Pansies for remembrance. I don’t think anyone was likely to forget that wretched child!”

Nicholas or Olivia. That was his choice. Break Rachel’s heart—or wound his own by taking away that one small thing Olivia’s poetry had given him, a little space of comfort in a bloody terrible war.

He skimmed a few stones across the incoming tide, watching them skip and dance. Just as his evidence seemed to skip and dance. From one suspect to the other. And yet he knew, as strongly as he knew where he was standing at this instant, that it was not the two of them. Not working together. It had to be one—or the other. And he knew—God help him—he knew which.

Walking back to the wood, he saw the old woman by the trees, standing there staring up at the house, looking for something in its shadows, needing something it could no longer give. Sadie, whose mind wandered but whose brain understood more than she was telling him. He was convinced of that. Or else, it was something she didn’t know that she knew—

She turned to stare at him as he came over the rise of the lawns and turned towards her. He thought at first she was going to leave before he reached her, disappearing so as not to be faced with more seemingly useless questions. But after a twitch of indecision she stayed her ground.

“A fine evening, isn’t it?” he asked, trying to test her mental stability, as always. “Who’s strolling on the lawns today? Which spirits do you see?”

“I see Miss Rosamund weeping. I see the Gabriel hounds sniffing around the chimneys, their big feet pattering on the roof like hailstones. Sniffing, looking, searching. They’ll howl in the night, once they’ve scented prey. I’ll be snug in my own hearth corner when they howl.”

The Gabriel hounds. Her favorite theme when her mind was disturbed. He said, “Did you see the hounds when the Light Brigade charged? Did you hear them howling and racing across the field with the guns?”

“I wasn’t there, was I? I was back in hospital, waiting for the dying. But I heard them howling. Heathen, they were, those Russians, no better than the Turks. Bloody heathen, with nothing to lose, having no souls.”

“No souls? I thought the Turks went to Paradise if they died in battle?”

“Paradise? Pshaw! A place of pools and cool water, with dancing girls no better than they ought to be, and wine to soak the brain in forgetfulness? I don’t call that much of a reward for the faithful. Endless whoring and sinfulness, that’s what it means. But fit for hounds. They know no better!”

He said, “Who are the hounds of Gabriel here? At Tre-velyan Hall?”

“The same as the others,” she said, looking away from the Hall to study his face. “Heathen.”

“Protestant? Catholic?”

“Neither, and that’s the point, now, isn’t it? An unbaptized soul, with nothing but evil filling it. Darkness, not light.”

Rutledge thought for a long moment. Olivia and Anne were twins. Was Sadie trying to tell him that one of them hadn’t been properly baptized? That with two babies screaming bloody murder by the baptismal font, one had been baptized twice and the other not at all?

He said, “Was Olivia baptized? Was Anne?”

She looked at him as if he’d run mad. “Do you think Miss Rosamund would allow it otherwise? Of course they were. I was there, I watched the babes handed to the old rector one at a time. There was blue ribbon on Miss Olivia’s christening gown, and pale green on Miss Anne’s. To be sure ‘twas all done properly!”

Green ribbon . . . a christening gown? No, he couldn’t quite see that ...

“Who burned some small personal belongings in a fire, just above the gardens? Beyond the headland, where the blaze couldn’t be seen from the village?”

“What fire?”

“Oh, come now!” Inspiration struck. “The rags you wanted, the rags that’d been promised to you by Miss Olivia. Someone used them instead to keep a fire going, because there were a number of things he—or she—wanted to burn well. A leather notebook. A leather picture frame with silver corners. A pile of letters, perhaps. Who was it who wanted such possessions destroyed?”

“It weren’t Mr. Cormac!” she said briskly. “Nor Miss Rachel. I’d have known. It could have been Mr. Nicholas. I don’t know why he’d go there in the dark to burn them, but I know it might have been him that did it, because of what I saw.”

“What did you see?” He kept his voice low, gentle. Curious, but not probing.

“I saw him with pails, going down to the sea to fill them with water. And then he set them up on the headland. Left them there. And walked back into the house with empty hands.”

Nicholas.

“Was this the night they died? Olivia and Nicholas?”

“No,’twas the night before. I was in the wood, looking for roots while the moon was near full. I watched him for a time because my back hurt, and it felt better to straighten it. So I stood there, and wondered what he was about. And then I knew.”

“Knew? Knew what?”

“He was putting water out for the hounds to drink. Because he knew they were coming.”

He felt a coldness between his shoulders. As if something evil had come up behind him and laid a hand on his back.

“Do the Gabriel hounds have a human face? Have you ever seen it?”

“I told you. Miss Olivia warned me to have naught to do with them!”

“Yes, I understand that. But Miss Olivia is dead. I think the hounds killed her. I think now she’d want you to be the one to tell me his name. Or how he looked. I think it’s time to make them pay for the harm they’ve done.”

She shook her head. “You can’t make the hounds pay for killing. It’s in their nature. It’s part of their blood. Like the Turks.”

“Was Mr. Nicholas baptized?”

“Aye, at the Hall, because he was sickly at first. Jaundice. And there was a storm coming that promised to be a bad one. Miss Rosamund said she’d not risk him driving in the carriage, nor in the drafty church. Truth to tell, he was better within the week, but she insisted, and the old rector came to the Hall.”

Did a baptism in the Hall count for less in her eyes than one in the church? She was leading him round in circles.

But Hamish, Highland bred, understood better what was being said, and rumbled with uneasiness beneath the surface of his mind.

“The face of the hounds. You said you could tell me, now that Miss Olivia is dead.” Rutledge added, “Safely dead.”

Her eyes were clouding over, and she said querulously,

“You said it, I didn’t.”

After a time he left her there, and walked back to the village. On impulse he stopped at the church. The heavy west door was locked, but the smaller one in the porch was not. He lifted the latch and walked inside. There was a chill in the place, the stone cold as death. He stood for a moment looking at the architecture, the style of the arches, the strength of the pillars, the tall nave that bowed before a shorter, older choir. It was a very fine church, but not distinguished. Its proportions made it fall just short of perfection. The carvings, unlike the angel in the churchyard, were heavier, earthier, more formidable and less delicate, like some of those he’d seen in Normandy.

He walked down the central aisle, looking back over his shoulder at the Victorian organ in the loft, then towards the stone altar that was rather handsomely carved, as if it had come from an old monastery. The choir was plain, the stalls of dark oak, and off to its left was an octagonal chapel dedicated to the Trevelyan family dead.

There was a knight in the far shadows, old and worn, and memorials set into the walls for the dead lying in the crypt below. A very beautiful marble sarcophagus, made for two, held the remains of Rosamund Trevelyan’s parents. Weeping figures at each corner, veiled and bent, must have been carved to represent earthly mourning. Above the tomb, where the arches entwined in perpendicular harmony, a cherub with a trumpet floated among voluptuous robes. To one side was a smaller tomb carved from what appeared to be a solid block of alabaster, with a delicate tracery of flowers and birds more like a wedding bower than a place of burial. A figure on the top was barely visible in its shroud, the body seeming to melt into the marble earth almost as it touched. But at the head, the shroud was opened to show a woman’s features with curling strands of hair escaping to frame them, as if holding back death. It was Rosamund, he realized as he looked down into her face.

There was beauty and strength, dignity and love there. Warmth. A woman who had much to give in her own right, and in the arms of her family. A woman who had lost three husbands and two of her children, but never faltered, a veritable pillar of life even in death.

He touched the cold marble cheek, and almost swore he could feel its own warmth against his hand. But it was an illusion, and he knew it.

On the wall to his left were several family memorials. The one for Stephen, set between his father’s and a slender pillar that supported the chapel, was inscribed with his name, dates, the Trevelyan and FitzHugh coats of arms, and his rank and regiment in the war. And in the back, their newness brightening the darkness there, were two blocks of black marble, side by side. Incised in them were, simply, the names and the dates of the dead. Olivia and Nicholas. Plain, for suicides.

For a moment he stood looking at them, wishing he could reach the living people they had been. But it was too late for that, except in Olivia’s poetry. Extending his arm, he again laid his palm against the marble, seeing its reflection against the lettering as if in a black mirror. The long fingers, the strong palm. His hand, no one else’s.

“Was it you, Olivia? Or Nicholas,” he asked aloud.

“... Nicholas ...” the echo repeated softly.

“And you are free of guilt.”

“... free of guilt ...” it replied.

“Who was your lover? Was it Cormac?”

The echo caught the question in his voice as it responded.

“... Cormac ... ?”

“And who is the Hound of Gabriel?”

“... rial ...?”

“Do you know? If so, where will I find the answer?”

“... answer ...”

“Is it in your papers—or your poetry?”

“... poetry ...”

He stepped across the small space to where he could touch Nicholas’ memorial, ignoring the forcefulness of Hamish’s voice, calling it witchcraft to question the dead, warning him not to meddle in such matters, to leave it be.

“I talk to you. How is that so different!” he retorted in his mind.

After a moment he asked the shining black face of Nicholas’ marker, “Were you the killer Olivia protected?”

But in that single step he’d shifted the odd acoustics of the chapel and there was no echo to answer him. Only the sound of his own breathing. As if even in death Nicholas knew how to hold his peace.

20

Back at the inn Rutledge ate a fast meal in one corner of the dining room, an old book he’d found in the parlor propped in front of him to ward off conversation from either Trask or any other diners. But it was still early, and he had the place to himself. Asking for another pot of coffee and a cup, he went up to his own room to open the books of poetry again.

They seemed to raise more questions than they answered, but he thought it might be his own frame of mind raising doubts, not the lines he read over and over.

The last volume, Lucifer, had very little of the lyricism of Keats, and more of the strength of Milton. The writer was coming into maturity, looking at life and death as if they were the same, a coming from darkness and a returning to it, a brief, bright, glorious span that was often marred by man’s own incapacity to learn and trust.

He found the poem that had disturbed Inspector Harvey, and read it first. What Harvey hadn’t remembered was the title. It was, oddly enough, “The Failure.” Rutledge thought about that for a time, then moved on.

The poem about Eve seemed on the surface to answer the question of the tree of knowledge, from which she’d taken the apple. Eating it had opened her eyes to the realities of life and cost her the Garden of Eden.

But looking at it not as verse, instead as the experience of a young girl faced suddenly and shockingly with the death of a loved one—her own twin—Rutledge saw something else. Something he’d have missed if he hadn’t delved so deeply into the history of the Trevelyan family. Eve was Olivia, tasting of the knowledge that evil existed, and struggling to understand it, to find a place for it in her small, comfortable, once-safe childhood world. Losing her own Garden of Eden. Watching helplessly as the serpent twined itself into the branches and plucked the apple. But it was Anne who had fallen, and the last lines proved it to him.

The apple was one I knew, had loved, and would not wish

to fall—

lt was myself, my other self and terrified, my soul denied

it all

Denying that murder had taken place? Refusing to believe in it?

But then Anne’s death was the first to happen. And they were all children at the time. Whatever Olivia might have seen, whatever she might have understood—or feared—murder was not a reality she was ready for. Cruelty, perhaps, she’d comprehend that, because children are capable of great cruelty. A knowledge of murder would come afterward. Meanwhile, Olivia had lived with silent, terrified grief.

He sat there, forgetting to watch the sunset, forgetting the coffee growing cold in his cup, his mind focused on the finely printed words on the richly watermarked page. Then after a time he moved on again.

Several pages later, when he had nearly convinced himself that the interpretation he’d given to “Eve” was subjective, not objective, he found the next movement in a symphony of pain and grief.

The title was “The Prodigal Son,” and it seemed to capture the story of the youngest son who left home, taking his share of his inheritance with him, leaving older brothers to support their aging father. But life had not been kind to him, and he returned a failure, expecting to be a slave in his father’s holdings, only to be treated like the lost and golden boy he’d been.

Richard.

It could be no one else. Richard—still alive? No, that was impossible! But still a threat to his brothers, because his body hadn’t been found. They would be left to wonder what had become of him. To wonder if he might someday come home in truth.

Rutledge thought about that.

The second murder.

There had been a long and intense search for the boy. No sign of him had been found. Flyers and posters had been sent out, gypsies and tramps questioned, farms fringing the moors turned inside out. He himself, reading over the reports and the final verdict, had believed that the killer had hidden the corpse—no body, no evidence of foul play. But, what if that was all wrong?

What if murder had been made to look like an accident? A drowning, a fall, a boy’s game of hide and seek that had tragically pitched him headfirst into a mine shaft? Knocked down and trampled by wild ponies? There were any number of possibilities. Then consider—

Someone else had found the body—not a search party of half a dozen men, but one person. Who might well have known for other reasons—or guessed—who was behind this carefully arranged scene. And who might have decided that Richard’s death—irreversible in itself—might still be a threat to his murderer. Gathering up the corpse, carrying it away in the night while the searchers were occupied on the moor, taking it where it might never be discovered, someone had altered the murderer’s design. Left a question mark in his mind, a doubt, a worry. And later, near where the body had been lying, the clothes had been buried. In case the murderer came back to search on his own for the child that the searchers ought to have found . ..

Hamish was busy picking the concept to pieces, but Rut-ledge ignored him. You couldn’t bury Richard in the church or the churchyard. Any digging or movement of stones there would have been suspect. Nor at the Hall. There were gardeners—they would have seen the first signs of a grave large enough to hold a five-year-old. Most of the villagers had gardens too, digging in them every season, turning them over, disturbing the soil. The wood then? No, it was too close to the Hall, within sight and sound of the village as well. The sea? It sometimes failed to give up its secrets, and other times, it brought them back to shore. All right, none of the obvious choices, then. But somewhere safe ... for the boy as well as the person who’d moved him ...

Who could be trusted to keep such a dark and horrible secret?

Someone who might not know what it was ...

Rutledge got up and went to the wardrobe. He’d brought a heavy sweater with him, dark wool—with dark trousers he was nearly invisible in the night. And there was an entrenching tool in the boot of his car. Changing quickly, he shut the door of his room and went downstairs. No one was around, though he could hear voices from the back, by the kitchens. Letting himself out the front door, he went around to his car, found the small shovel, and set off on his macabre errand.

He’d learned, in the war, to move silently in the darkness. Snipers, trip wires, booby traps, mines—every step might bring sudden death. Where you put your feet and how decided whether you came back safely and unseen, or not at all. And so he walked with stealth and care, leaving the village, circling well out of his way, letting the starlight and his own sense of direction guide him. After half an hour he came to the small cottage half-nestled, half-crouched in its narrow valley. There was lamplight at one of the windows, and he stood in the shadows of the hillside, waiting and listening.

Women like Sadie sometimes had a sixth sense. And the cat she kept would hear him if she didn’t. The lift of its head, the twitching ears, the eyes narrowed and still—it was as good as any alarm.

After a time, moving with extreme care, the wind blowing towards him to carry both scent and sound away, he searched the gardens,

When he’d asked whether or not she grew pansies, Sadie had answered that they didn’t dry well. That was probably true. But he’d taken it to mean that she didn’t have any of the plants in her garden. And that had been his mistake.

How much did the old woman know?

Or, perhaps more to the point, how much had she known? She hadn’t always been senile . . . there might have been a time when she was a willing party to what was happening. But just as it was impossible to turn back the clock, it was nearly impossible to lift the veil in that old and tired brain.

Well, then, make some assumptions. Could Richard have been brought here without in any way involving Sadie?

If the boy had been buried here, could Sadie have been told that a small patch of pansies set apart from her own flowers was a reminder of a brother lost, a private place to grieve? Possible, yes. Likely, no. On the other hand, she might have pretended to believe. And whatever suspicions she might have harbored deep in her unsettled mind, she’d have kept them to herself. It all came down to how much she understood about the killings at the Hall. And whether she knew the face of a murderer.

He made each step with minute attention to the ground, so as not to leave prints in the earth or crushed blossoms in his wake, his eyes roving this way and then that. Not near the cottage, no, and not where the herbs and flowers grew best. Not where heavy rains might wash the bones out, nor where the boy wouldn’t be under the eye of his mentally frail and possibly unwitting guardian. And disguised, somehow, the kind of place that wouldn’t draw attention to itself or tempt anyone to rearrange it.

And he found it on the hillside, just where a small natural outcropping formed the anchor of an asymmetrical rock garden. It was no more than a few feet wide in any direction, yet large enough for a child’s curled body. A spill of unusual white stones brought from somewhere else lay like a small river tucked in among the flowers. Pansies, and some sort of small, narrow leafed things that formed a mat. Plants that would reseed themselves, half tame, half wild, clinging among the stones and holding the earth with their roots.

He squatted there in the darkness, studying the rock garden.

Very simple, not the sort of thing that would catch the eye of a casual observer, a little patch of color above an outcropping that lent itself to this one use only, wild and half-neglected, unimportant and oddly touching.

There was the sound of a door opening, and he froze, keeping his silhouette low and dark against the greater darkness of the hillside.

Sadie stood for a moment, a hunched figure against the lamplight behind her, in the open doorway. Rutledge could feel her eyes on him, although he knew she couldn’t possibly see him where he was.

‘‘Who’s there?” she called. After a moment, she went on, “Have you come for me?”

His mouth tightened in anger at himself for disturbing her, giving her a fright. It had been the last thing he’d wanted.

“But she has a sixth sense,” Hamish reminded him.

“I’m going to bed,” she said, when Rutledge didn’t answer her. “Come again in the light, if you have honest business here.”

He was very close to standing up and identifying himself. But she shut the door again, and in a minute or two more, the lamp was snuffed out.

His legs were stiff from squatting, but he waited for a little longer, then turned his attention back to the garden.

If the body had been hidden here, how much would be found now? The long bones, perhaps, the jaw. Kneeling, feeling the night’s damp soaking into his trousers, he lifted a few of the stones very carefully from their bed and touched the soil beneath. His fingers worked down into it, among the plant roots and the friable earth, spreading and probing. There were no tree roots here, on the hillside. If there had been a body in this ground, some trace would remain to a trained eye. He mustn’t disturb it too much.

It was useless to dig. In the dark. Leaving behind signs of his presence. Wait until later, and let the experts—

His fingers struck something rough and hard. In spite of himself, a coldness swept over him even though common sense told him he couldn’t have found bone at this shallow depth. And not the boy’s bones.

Someone had been here before him, lifting the rocks in the center just as he’d done, loosening the soil. He should have realized that as soon as he touched the earth—it would have made sense if he’d had his wits about him.

Working carefully, winkling it and using his other hand to clear a little space here, a little there, he very soon had the long slender length of wood out of its hiding place.

A carving. No, something else, the sides were too smooth.

He let his fingers gently feel the thing in his hand. It was not old wood—he knew the texture of that. They’d used and reused whatever lumber came to hand in the trenches, scavenged for boardwalks to keep their feet dry above the filth, for shelter from the rain, for a place out of the hot sun or the cold wind. On the Somme the generals had forbidden even such simple, rough comforts, while the Germans had lived in tunnels they’d efficiently dug deep in the earth. No, this wood was hard and firm and new to the ground it had been buried in. Three sides were smooth as sanding could make them. The fourth had something cut into it. Deeply incised, and at midlength. Like a blind man he worked at the shapes, slowly letting his sense of touch and not his eyes tell him what was there. There was a flow to the shapes, but they were separate. Letters, then.

R, yes, most certainly an R. Then a space before the next. A. Next to that an E, he thought. No, he was wrong. H. And the very last, C.

He thought back to the photographs he’d been given by Rachel Marlowe, and the names on the reverse. Richard Allen Harris Cheney.

Nicholas had left his calling card. And not very long ago ...

21

Rutledge put everything back exactly as he’d found it, brushing the pansy leaves clean of any bits of earth, using his hands to smooth and press the disturbed earth. Then he got to his feet and thought about what he’d done, whether he’d left any task undone. Then he remembered the entrenching tool, and groped for that.

With the same care he’d exercised coming here he made his way out of the valley and back to the inn, returning the tool to its place in the car before going upstairs again to his room. Looking down at his shoes, he grimaced. The caked mud reminded him of the trenches. Taking them off, he set them outside his door for the boot boy.

Washing his hands well, then blotting the worst of the dew out of his trouser knees, he went back to his earlier task. The poems.

It was in some ways quite unnerving to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Like working out the obituaries of people he knew. But Olivia seldom failed him once he learned the technique of what she had tried to do. All the members of her family were here, cleverly disguised by the allegorical themes she’d chosen for each. Sometimes, like “Eve,” they were given biblical names, at others wrapped in Cornish legends, or cloaked in bits of well-known history—whatever fit her purpose, but always with such artistry that the mask itself had a life and drama of its own. He marveled again at such talent, and the tragedy of its loss. She had barely reached her prime .. .

Of course she wasn’t the first to use poetry as a vehicle for her own designs. Poets—Swift and Wordsworth were the first names he thought of—had employed their pens to mock political figures or make literary allusions to famous events or writers. Some employed satire and a vicious humor to bring down governments or ruin reputations and careers. But to his knowledge this was the first time one had grimly catalogued a murderer’s career.

“Bathsheba,” the faithful wife whose husband had been placed in the forefront of battle because King David desired her, had become Rosamund. Olivia described her as an unwitting pawn of a cruel and passionate man who wanted her at any price, and took from her the mainstay of her life, the kind and thoughtful husband who had filled her with happiness. James Cheney? Or Brian FitzHugh? Which had been killed because he was Rosamund’s husband?

No, Rutledge told himself, from the description it had to be Cheney, the kind and thoughtful man who’d replaced the dashing soldier.

The hidden depths of feeling in the lines, the understanding of love and lust, gave them a soaring beauty that worked at any level, but it was also a devastating portrait of a killer scheming to have what he wanted most, at any price.

He went on, skimming again, looking for something, missing it at first glance, then turning back again to see.

It was a short poem. Two men standing at the water’s edge argued over possession of the land that stretched out behind them, rich and fallow in the sun. Anger turned to blows, and one was killed. To that point the lines seemed to follow the death of Brian FitzHugh, and then it took an odd twist as the killer stared down at the bleeding body. “My hand it was that gave you this, Mine that takes it from you!” And the dying man answers, “Was it so—was it yours to give? I’m glad I never knew.”

Nicholas? Somehow Rutledge couldn’t quite see that parallel. What could Nicholas have given and taken away again from Brian FitzHugh? He reread the poem, and shook his head. Be patient, man! he told himself. Olivia knew the answer to that—she’d leave it for him somewhere if not here.

Hamish, in the back of his mind, was more or less agreeing with Harvey about women penning such lines. “A tormented soul—” he began.

“Yes. And a damned brave one,” Rutledge retorted.

Later there was a reference to a man passing through a wood, finding Death waiting for him there, and facing it with courage and disdain. Death struck, and laughed. The man managed to break away, but felt no sense of victory, only of postponement.

For Death could come again, and it was not what he

desired ...

Not yet, with so much of life in his grasp.

So much of life . .. and yet Nicholas had chosen suicide.

Rutledge was tired, his eyes burning, his head spinning from the effort he was making to follow the remarkable thread set out for him. To sort through Olivia’s allusions, to find the bedrock of accusation beneath. And yet he felt he was missing something. What was behind what Olivia was trying to tell him? She hadn’t written a great body of poetry just as a memorial to her family’s suffering. Or just as a record for any astute policeman who might stumble over the evidence she’d documented in it. It was a warning. A very public forum of denunciation, but to what end? She must have said. Somewhere . . .

Then where had he, Rutledge, gone astray? Surely it wasn’t just his own stubborn insistence on closure, surely Olivia would have wanted that too. Then why hadn’t he seen it? What didn’t he know about the Trevelyan family that might have guided him now?

Another poem to Rosamund was moving, a tribute that made his eyes sting with tears as it spoke of her life, her loves, her deep belief that she could find peace for herself and her family.

And the last line left him chilled.

“When he couldn’t have her, the hound of Hell destroyed her.”

They were all there. Anne, Richard, Rosamund, James, Brian. All of them. Except the last pair to die .. .

He went through the book again, searching. Finding nothing. And then he saw something unexpected. It was in a poem—on the surface—about Rome, and two small children suckled by a wolf. Romulus and Remus, who grew up to found a great city. Only this was not a city, this was a tower of the heart. He’s missed it, confused by the legend. Mistakenly taking the wolf literally, as an animal and not as a childhood nightmare of death and fear that drove two people to a strange and tender interdependence.

I have loved, and he has listened, both have given

holy grace.

In his eyes I saw my soul, then found my life in his

embrace ...

Unexpected—and enlightening. If it was true, it explained so much.

But it was only half of the final answer. He was sure of it now.

It was well after three o’clock—he’d heard the church clock strike the hours since midnight, and felt time passing like a heavy burden. His mind was worn and his spirits had sunk like a stone, the earlier enthusiasm already attacked by doubt. Writers often used their own experience for inspiration. Was that all she’d done? Had he counted too much on her, wishing his own need into her words?

No, that was all wrong, all wrong. He just hadn’t learned to see it in the right way yet. With exhaustion nagging at him, caught in the tumult of his own depression and Hamish’s prodding, he’d failed her. Not the other way around.

He rubbed his eyes, then got up and washed his face in the cold water from the pitcher. The coffee was even colder, but he forced himself to drink it, and then stretching his shoulders as he’d done a thousand times on night watches in the war, he finally sat back down again. Giving up was defeat. And by God, he wasn’t going to face the shaving mirror in the morning with excuses and evasions. He’d start all over again, if he had to. At the beginning if that’s what it took to cudgel his wits into action.

“There’re still the papers,” Hamish reminded him. “If ye’re half the detective ye think ye are, you’d have found them by now.”

The finest moment in the final volume was “Lucifer,” the centerpiece of the book, a description of the great and glorious prince whose ambition reached too far. To Milton he’d been the archangel who had dared to envy God, finally to be disgraced and hurled, headlong and flaming, into the pit of Hell to reign over the damned.

To Olivia Marlowe, he’d been the dark angel of death.

Rutledge read the lines again, and this time the image created by the words took shape in his mind.

The dark angel. Beyond her power to control, beyond her power to condemn. Beyond her power, nearly, to understand.

But not an angel, not an allegory of Death. A man.

Clever, unemotional, his own law. Resolute, fearless. Without compassion. And immutable. However long it took, however dangerous it was, however destructive, he got what he desired.

A man who was neither good nor evil, merely unbound by the constraints of humanity or God. A glittering archangel, perhaps, but without a soul. And yet, like Lucifer, filled with envy and the need to possess what to him was omnipotence. Only, his heaven had been earthbound.

A Gabriel Hound, the old woman called him, heathen.

It was a chilling portrait, and it was the most truly devastating study of cold, hard ego, of a core of being without light or grace, that he’d ever seen.

By the time Rutledge had finished the poem the last time, he felt an exaltation in his blood that had nothing to do with poetry or Olivia Marlowe, and everything to do with the great courage of O. A. Manning.

He knew now the name and face of the Gabriel Hound. Proving it was going to be very dangerous. And Rachel would be brought to tears if he succeeded.

22

Rutledge found it hard to sleep, and Hamish, ever vigilant for an opening, was there in his mind, critical, disagreeing, ridiculing, citing all the objections to his arguments. Pointing out over and over again— “You havena’ found a why. You havena’ got the reason!” “I don’t need reasons. Leave that to the lawyers—” “Lawyers are no’ policemen, they’ll twist the truth until it’s lost!”

“All I need is proof, and Olivia gave me that—” “Proof, is it? A muckle of lines, that’s what ye’ve got! Would ye stand and recite in yon courtroom, while your fine jury nods in their seats and yon judge begs you to get on with it before he declares a mistrial? Och, man, it’s no’ a case, it’s professional suicide!”

“What about her papers? You’ve reminded me of them yourself. You must have thought they were important when you did.”

“They’re gone, man, face it. Ye havena’ found them, and never will.”

“Nicholas wouldn’t have destroyed those out on the headland, she wouldn’t have let him! Cormac might have, if he found them first, before the lawyers and Stephen got there. But somehow I don’t think he did find them. I think he’s been looking as hard as I have. I can’t believe he wants anyone to know the truth about what happened between him and Olivia. Before I’m finished, I’ll find those bloody papers!” “Oh, aye, we’re back again to a dead woman’s poems! A

dead woman’s papers! What you need is a live killer. And a

confession. A witness to confront him! And there’s no’ any

hope of finding those.”

“No,” Rutledge retorted bitterly. “But I’m not beaten yet.”

He rose at five o’clock, his head feeling stuffed with cotton wool from an hour’s heavy sleep at the very end. Shaving with cold water, he dressed and hurried down the back stairs, startling the elderly scullery maid setting out the crocks of butter and putting the new-baked bread into cloths in a basket in the kitchen.

“Lord, sir! You gave me such a fright!” she cried, looking up at him and then burning her fingers on a hot loaf of bread, nearly dropping it. “Was it coffee you were wanting, sir? It’s not been put on yet.”

“Is there someone here who can carry a note over to Mrs. Otley’s house for me?”

Her eyebrows flew up. “A note! At this hour, sir? Surely not!”

“As soon as may be,” he said testily.

“There’s the boy taking out the ashes—”

“He’ll do.” He was already writing several lines on a sheet from his notebook, frowning as he worded it to his satisfaction, then ripping it out to fold and address on the outside. “Bring him here.”

She went to fetch the boy, looking at Rutledge over her shoulder as if he’d lost his wits. The sleepy child, no more than nine or ten, took the note, opened his eyes wider at the sight of the sixpence in Rutledge’s hand, and paid close heed to his instructions.

Then he was off.

Rutledge followed him out of the kitchen and down the hall, watched him drag open the inn door and set off through the early mists up the hill towards the Otley cottage.

It was ten minutes before he was back, breathless and red-faced, but smiling.

“She wasn’t that happy with me, sir, for waking her. She said I was to tell you that, and say that I’d earned a shilling for the trouble it took to bring Mrs. Otley to the door.”

It was highway robbery, but Rutledge handed over a shilling, and the boy went dashing back down the passage towards the kitchens.

Rachel’s reply was hardly more than a scrawl. “If you haven’t run mad, you soon will. But if this is what it takes to send you back to London, I’ll do it.”

Grinning, he stuffed the paper into his pocket and went around to the back of the inn where his motorcar was parked in one of the disused sheds.

Within five minutes he was driving up to Mrs. Otley’s cottage, the sound of the car loud in the street, and down near the wood someone’s dog was barking in savage displeasure at the racket. The dog the rector had warned him of? You could hear the damned thing all over Borcombe!

Rachel came down the cottage steps ten minutes later, dressed in a dark coat and a hat she’d tied down with a scarf.

Rutledge got out and held the door for her. “Are you sure you can drive this automobile?”

She looked at him in disgust. “Of course I can. Probably better than you do, on these roads. I know them, you don’t.”

“And you’ll tell Susannah that if she’ll grant this one wish, I’ll be leaving for London as soon as I’ve tied up all the loose ends?”

“Yes, but I still don’t see why you need something like this. It’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of!”

“You’ll understand. Afterward. It will save days of work. Trust me.”

“I’ve seen spiders I trust more,” she said tartly, and stepped into the driver’s seat. “If you cause Susannah any pain, any grief—if she has a miscarriage because of you—”

“She won’t. What I’m about to do will give her peace of mind.”

“Learning that her half sister was a murderess? Oh, yes, I call that quite soothing for a woman in her condition.” She turned and looked at Rutledge, a long, earnest look that seemed to probe beneath his skin and into his very brain.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Are you quite sure?” she asked quietly, her face sober and very worried.

He reached out and touched her hand as it rested on the wheel. “I can only tell you that what I’m doing will be for the best. If there was murder done, it ought to be known, and the past put to rest. There ought to be justice, for the dead, if no one else.”

“The dead are dead. It’s the living I’m worried about now. And—and Nicholas.”

“No one can touch Nicholas,” he said gently. “Not now. Not ever again. You know that better than I do.”

“I won’t let you destroy his memory, Inspector Rutledge. I won’t let you. If you do try, I’ll find a way to put it right. Whatever I have to do, I will do. Believe that.”

He felt cold in the early morning breeze, in spite of his coat.

“I can’t hurt Nicholas,” he said again. “He’s dead, Rachel. You have to accept it, and what it means. He left you, he chose to die with Olivia, not to live with you.” He could see the flare of pain in her eyes, and ignored it. “That’s what he told you in his last letter. He didn’t want you.”

Her mouth tightened. “I wanted him,” she said quite simply. “Now start this damned thing or I’ll not go at all, not even for Susannah’s sake!”

He shut the door, walked around, and bent down to turn the crank. He could sense her watching, he knew what was in her mind. As the engine roared into life again and he stepped back, the crank in his hand, she looked straight at him over the bonnet of the car. “Leave Cormac out of this,” he said, coming around the wing towards her. “Don’t send for him. It’s between Olivia and Nicholas, you and me. He’s not a Trevelyan. Don’t send for him, he’ll just make matters worse.”

“No one could make them worse. Except you.”

She took off the brake, let in the gear and the car moved briskly off down the road. She didn’t look back. He watched her handle the car around the curve, his mind on her driving, judging whether he’d made the right decision to send her. But there was no one else who could have persuaded Susannah.

Hamish, lurking in the shadows, said only, “Play with witchcraft, and you’ll burn yourself.”

“It isn’t witchcraft,” Rutiedge answered harshly. “It’s the only way I can think of to get at the truth!”

There was an echo of the engine from the narrow hedgerows, although the car had long since vanished to sight. Rut-ledge started to turn back towards the inn, then looked up to find Mary Otley watching him from the doorway of the cottage.

“You haven’t put her in harm’s way, have you, sir?” she asked.

“No. With any luck, I’ve put her out of it,” he answered, and walked back to the inn for his breakfast.

“The constable’s still at his breakfast, sir,” Mrs. Dawlish said, opening her front door to the Inspector from London.

“I’ll just come through and have a word with him in the kitchen,” he said, gently pushing the door wider. “If you don’t mind.”

She did, but was too polite to say so, though he could read her face clearly enough.

The constable stood up hastily, napkin still stuck under his chin, as Rutledge came down the passage and turned into the kitchen. It was a large room, with windows on two sides and a door into the back passage at the rear, next to the great polished black stove. A table with the remains of breakfast and an unexpectedly bright bowl of zinnias stood in the very middle of the room. A vast Cornish dresser took up most of one wall, the pantry through a door beyond, and against the other wall the smaller, scraped wood top of the cooking table shone in the light from the east. The curtains at the windows, the pattern on the tablecloth, and the walls themselves were all a summer blue, as if somehow to bring the color of the sea into the house.

“Sir!” he said in alarm.

“It’s all right, Dawlish. I’ve just come to tell you that you can call off the search on the moors. This morning.”

The man’s face brightened. “Then you’ve given it up, sir? All this nonsense about the Trevelyan family? You’re going back to London?”

“There are some loose ends to tie up. Some statements I’ll need, to cover the questions I seem to have raised. You won’t mind helping with those?”

“No, sir, not in the least,” Dawlish said expansively, willing to do cartwheels if it got rid of the inconvenient man from London and put Inspector Harvey into a pleasanter mood. “Whatever you wish, I’ll be happy to help.”

Rutledge smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes, and for an instant Dawlish was filled with a new uncertainty. But he brushed it aside as Rutledge said, “I’ll be back in two hours with a list of names. I don’t want you to tell anyone else who is on that list. Do you understand me? You’ll send for these people one at a time, exactly as you’re told to do, and you’ll have them write their statements for me exactly in the order I’ll give you, and in the circumstances I describe. It may seem strange to you, but I think in the end you’ll see what I’m driving at. There will be a specific list of questions for each interview. And I want you to ask them exactly as written. Change them in any way, and I’ll have it all to do over again. It will only take longer. Do you understand me?”

Dawlish didn’t, and Rutledge knew he didn’t. But Dawlish nodded, and Rutledge turned to go.

“Two hours. Be here when I come. And don’t forget the men on the moors.”

“Not bloody likely!” Dawlish answered to himself as Rutledge turned and walked out of the sunny, blue kitchen.

Working fast and steadily, Rutledge made his lists, his mind tied up with the complexity of details, setting them out with precision. He had always been good at organizing his thoughts, at creating a picture of events from start to finish. And this time the facts were there. No gaps, no guesses. No room for doubt. No room for Hamish to creep in and haunt him. But Hamish was there, still debating the wisdom of what lay ahead, a stir in the silence.

Trask came up with a telegram for Rutledge, and he opened it reluctantly, knowing it came from London, knowing it was from Bowles.

It read, “If you aren’t doing your job, you’re needed here. If there’s something happening, I want to know about it.”

“No answer,” Rutledge told Trask, and went back to what he was writing.

Explaining to Bowles would be the same as emptying the Sahara with a teacup. There was not enough time for it. Not today. Tomorrow might be different.

Finally he sat back and looked at the sheets of paper on his desk.

How weak was the evidence?

Damned weak at the moment.

Without statements, without the voices of people and their written words, evidence was always thin.

And yet, it was there. It was there. Waiting to be culled.

He felt satisfied.

Rachel had driven straight to the Hall and left the car there before walking back into the village. She came into the inn as Rutledge ran lightly down the stairs, and he knew the instant he saw her face that he’d got what he wanted.

“You’ll have to get it out of the car yourself. Susannah says if you damage the frame at all, she’ll have you up before the courts. It took two grooms to load it safely.”

“Thank you!” he said, smiling, and she felt a deep sense of foreboding as she watched it light his eyes. He seemed to have lost five years over night, a man who had changed so much that she was afraid.

And then the smile was gone, and with it the strangeness. He was himself again, the thin face, the lines. The bone-tiredness. But she thought that that might have been a sleepless night, not the weariness he’d seemed to bring from London with him.

Rachel opened her mouth to say something, then decided against it. “Come on, then,” she said instead. “It shouldn’t be sitting out there in the sun.”

They walked in silence to the house, and Rutledge was grateful for it, for the lack of questions in spite of the doubts that he knew were seething just below the surface in the woman at his side.

She was spirited. She’d have made someone a very good wife. But not for Peter, who had valued his peace. In the long run, Rachel would have needed more than a book-filled house in the country and quiet evenings by the fire discussing Roman ruins. And not for Nicholas. Because the Nicholas she’d seen and loved was a figment, a falsehood built on lies that he couldn’t do anything about. The man who cared for Rachel, the man who’d done his best to send her away, was there inside, but for reasons Rachel herself would never willingly grasp.

Rachel’s tragedy, he thought, as they came out of the woods and turned up the drive towards the house, was that love had seemed so real and so possible because she had wanted it too much.

Just as he had wanted to believe Jean loved him as deeply as he believed he’d loved her. Jean, who hadn’t had very much courage, who turned from him because she couldn’t accept any other dream but the shiny, perfect one that had been shattered in 1914. Four years of war hadn’t changed her. And it had changed him—their lives—beyond recognition. Had he wanted her so much because he’d thought she could restore what was gone? Or had it really been love? He didn’t know any more.

“Which may be an answer of sorts,” Hamish reminded him.

In the back of the car, now sitting below the steps at the front door of the Hall, was a large object wrapped in heavy brown paper.

It took him fifteen minutes, with Rachel offering unsolicited advice, to gently dislodge it from its cocoon of surrounding blankets and cushions, then lift it out onto the drive. Between them they got the package up the steps and then, unlocking the door, into the hall and across it to the drawing room.

Another fifteen to find a small ladder and carry it there too. But in the end, stepping back to see the results, he was satisfied.

Rosamund Trevelyan smiled benignly down from her proper place above the hearth, her face turned slightly, her cheek smooth and creamy against the background of light, her eyes full of life and love and hope.

An extraordinary woman, mother of another extraordinary woman. As full of goodness and joy and beauty as the Gabriel hound had been full of darkness and destruction.

23

Rutledge was just returning from the kitchen, where he’d left the ladder, when the bell rang loudly in the emptiness of the house and brought Rachel, frowning, out of the drawing room.

“Who is that?” she demanded.

“Dawlish,” he said, and opened the door to the constable, who had Mrs. Trepol at his heels. The elderly housekeeper was staring over his shoulder, her eyes moving nervously from Rachel to the London policeman.

Before Rachel could say anything more, Rutledge closed the fingers of his right hand around her arm to silence her, and nodded to Dawlish. “The drawing room. You’ll see the chairs and a table. Use them where they are.”

Uneasy and uncertain, Dawlish glanced at Rachel, but Rut-ledge cut short any query. “See to it, man!” And he led Rachel towards the stairs, his eyes commanding her to wait. Not here. Not now. Her mouth was tight with suspicion and anger, and she moved ahead of him with the stride of a woman biding her time with a vengeance. Behind them, Mrs. Trepol followed Dawlish into the hall, their steps sounding loud and uncertain as they moved towards the drawing room.

Once in the back sitting room overlooking the sea, Rachel rounded on him in a fury. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? I won’t have it! This is wrong, this is trickery! Tell me what’s going on, or by God, I’ll find the nearest telephone and call London!”

“Look,” he said earnestly, “I’m trying to get at the truth. Do you want me to walk away and leave this unfinished? I can’t. What I think has been done here—if I’m right, mind you—has to be settled. Now. It can’t be put off.”

“What you think has been done!” she repeated. “But you haven’t told anyone what you think, have you? Not me, not the rector, not Inspector Harvey—”

“I have told you. There have been a series of suspicious deaths starting with Anne—”

“Yes, yes! Olivia killed them, you say. Or Nicholas. Dead people who can’t answer, can’t defend themselves! Well, let me tell you what I think! While I was at the Beatons, I made a telephone call. To a friend of Peter’s who knew you as well. He tells me that after the Armistice you spent months in a private clinic—a head injury, he said. Quite severe, he said, because you weren’t allowed any visitors. Nurses told him that for a time you didn’t even know who you were. Everyone was surprised when you returned to the Yard—they didn’t think you were well enough, that you’d recovered sufficiently to take on stressful work. He’s right, you aren’t capable of carrying out your duties! That’s why you aren’t in London, looking for that man—that’s why you were sent out to Cornwall, to get you safely out of the way, and why you’re searching out old, imaginary murders. You can’t do any better!”

Shocked by her vehemence, he turned away towards the windows, looking out at the sea, his back to her, his face hidden from her angry eyes.

“You sent for Scotland Yard,” he reminded her for a last time. “If I’m mad, if I’m imagining the need for this investigation, then some of the blame must be yours.” It was on the tip of his tongue to say more, and he caught himself in time, and added only, “I’m sorry, Rachel. More than you know.”

His refusal to defend himself, the odd tone of his voice, brought her up short.

They were a woman’s weapon, words. She’d deliberately wielded them to wound, to hurt him, to stop him. She’d telephoned Sandy MacArdle because he was a gossip, and she’d known he was a gossip, and she wanted the worst possible interpretation put on anything Ian Rutledge had done, to use that knowledge herself as savagely as she could.

And suddenly, she felt sick, ashamed. “Oh, Nicholas,” she cried to herself with weary grief, “why did I have to love you so much!”

Rutledge still had his back to her, the set of his shoulders betraying his own pain, waiting for her to go on.

She found she couldn’t.

“Why did you want the portrait?” she asked quietly, after a time.

He was watching the sea, but his eyes were blind to its beauty. Only the pain within him seemed real. And to his credit, he told her the truth.

“Because I can’t close this investigation without taking statements from half the people in Borcombe. But you see, if I do that in the normal fashion, by the end of the day I’ll have taken down whatever embroideries they’ve devised between them to shield themselves and Rosamund’s family from scandal, and then we’ll never get at the truth. Because they all know bits of that truth, Rachel, whether they realize it or not. And I need to bring it out cleanly, bare and unvarnished. It occurred to me that sitting in that formal drawing room where each of them will feel desperately ill at ease, and watched by the one woman they all revered both in life and in death, I won’t get lies. I’ll have facts. And before anyone in Borcombe has quite understood where what they’re telling Constable Dawlish might be leading, the whole picture of murder and deception will be down in black and white. They can’t turn around then and deny it. They can’t pretend that they were misled or misinterpreted the questions. They’ll have to accept it themselves. And come to terms with it, however they can. But that’s the grievous cost of murder. We all pay it, along with the victims.”

“What a very cruel thing to do.” Her voice was harsh with disbelief, her brief episode of sympathy washed away. He deserved to be savaged!

He turned to face her again, his eyes sad. “It probably is cruel. I’d thought long and hard about that myself. I didn’t know what else to do. I could have told Harvey and these people what it is I’m after, but I don’t think they’d have believed me any more than you have. And the wall they’ve all drawn around the Trevelyan family would only go higher.”

“All this for a dead woman! For Olivia!”

“No, not for Olivia. For two small children who never lived to grow up. For James Cheney who died in despair, and Brian FitzHugh who trusted the wrong person, to his cost, and for Rosamund, who was driven to taking her own life to make it all stop. For Olivia, who gave up a quite incredible gift because something far more precious was threatened. And for Nicholas, who had spent a lifetime in her service, because he believed he failed her. For all I know, Stephen’s death was a part of it all. He was searching for something just before his fall, and I think I now may know what it was. If he hadn’t been late, if he hadn’t been in such a damned hurry, he might not have gone headfirst down those stairs. He was, in a sense, a victim too.”

“How very morally upright of you, to set the record straight. And will we have a wax effigy of Olivia in the dock, when you present your evidence to the jury?”

“No,” he said tiredly. “We’ll have a living person.”

She stared at him, her mouth moving soundlessly, as if the words were there, but her voice had failed her.

24

There was a pounding at the front door, the sound traveling up the stairs like thunder, and Rutledge brushed past Rachel without a word, going out of the door and closing it behind him before crossing the hall to find Inspector Harvey waiting impatiently outside. Rather than ushering him into the house, Rutledge went out to stand in the bright sunlight beside him.

“I’m told my constable is here. That you ordered him to call off the search on the moors this morning. And that you’ve got him taking statements from witnesses in the Trevelyan Hall drawing room, rather than his office.”

“Yes, I left a message for you, explaining. I’m returning to London—”

“So you said! And what use, pray, are these statements you’ve gone to such lengths to obtain?”

“To clear the record. It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

Not mollified at all, Harvey retorted, “Indeed. But I shouldn’t have thought that interviewing the good citizens of Borcombe would serve any better purpose now than it did at the time of the suicides.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Rutledge agreed, watching gulls wheeling over the shoreline. He chose his words with great care. He needed Harvey’s support, but not his suspicions. “They probably can’t shed any further light on the deaths of Miss Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney. What I’m hoping they might do is give me sufficient understanding of Miss Marlowe’s state of mind over the last few years. Family affairs were worrying her—at least I have reason to believe that may be true. It could explain why, in spite of her literary success, she felt she couldn’t face living. Would you mind very much giving Dawlish an account of your discussion with her, about what makes a murderer?”

“I’d feel a fool! That was a private conversation between you and me, what I told you!”

‘‘So it was. But if Miss Marlowe’s mind was already dwelling on such matters when you came here as a police officer, such evidence might provide additional weight. I feel she carried ... a sense of guilt, for want of a better word, about the misfortunes in her family. I found some confirmation of that in her poetry as well. Gifted imaginations are often sensitive and very impressionable. They sometimes see what we overlook.”

Harvey looked searchingly at him.

“Are you having me on?” he demanded.

Rutledge’s eyes came back from the sea to Harvey’s face. Something in them made the other man wary. “I’ve never been more serious. Olivia Marlowe believed that there was a murderer loose in her family. She believed she knew the identity of the killer, and that she had proof of a sort. Of a sort, mind you. Not the kind of proof you and I might use to ask for an arrest warrant, perhaps, or that a good barrister couldn’t make laughable in a courtroom. But she believed it. And she tried to document it as carefully as she could.”

“That’s—that’s preposterous!” Harvey blustered, his neck brick red and the color rising fast. “I’ve never heard a more ridiculous fiction in all my years as a policeman! This is my country, I’d have known if there was murder done here. My predecessor would have known!”

“Precisely why,” Rutledge responded, “I need these statements. I see no point in taking unsubstantiated rumors back to London. In my opinion we should set Olivia Marlowe’s fears to rest once and for all. She was famous, and there will be biographers. They shouldn’t be left to draw conclusions that might reflect badly on the police.” He shrugged. “What may come of it is the truth. I can’t think of anything fairer than that.”

“That damned woman was a bother when she was alive, and worse now that she’s dead,” Harvey fumed, thinking over what Rutledge had said. And from the sound of it, Olivia Marlowe wasn’t going to stay quietly dead. He hadn’t reckoned on biographers trampling about his turf and prying into village business. Asking questions, raising doubts, stirring up people. He’d thought that was finished when the reporters had come to find out about O. A. Manning. The specter of an endless parade of troublemakers still to arrive was decidedly unsettling at best.

Rutledge watched the slow, careful progress of Harvey’s mind as he considered the situation facing him. And then came to his decision.

Harvey had been told the truth. Not all of it, but the cold, hard kernel of truth that was the center of what Rutledge was doing. The rest would come when the facts were down on paper and irrefutable. When the warrant was required.

“Yes, well, I can understand what you’re saying, that there’ll be no peace for any of us. If the Home Office wanted this case reopened, we’ve already had the first round. Some newspaperman may get wind of it next, God forgive us, and we’ll be on the front pages! And the academics will be the worst of the lot, reading whatever they damned well please into her verse, and turning Borcombe upside down to show they’re right.” He sighed. “Oh, very well. Do what you have to do. Just make what haste you can.”

Harvey turned and walked off down the drive. Rutledge felt the tension in his shoulders begin to loosen and absently rubbed the back of his neck.

There was something more he wanted to do in the house, but Rachel was still there, and it was more important to avoid her now. The other matter could wait.

The day wore on, a long straggle of people coming to the house, the rector among them, giving their statements to Daw-lish and then leaving again, strangely subdued. For a time Rutledge watched them from the headland, and he saw too that Harvey made his appearance in due course, then left shaking his head. Rutledge wondered whether Dawlish had told him more than he should have about the questions asked—and answers received. Reporting to his superior, that’s how he’d have viewed it. Rutledge hoped he had not. Harvey’s stubborn, straight mind might just make the right leap. Good policemen, clever or not, had a sense about some things. It didn’t take imagination to learn from experience. The problem was, where would Harvey turn if he learned the truth? How would he use it? Hasty decisions had a way of wrecking a clean, tight investigation. And Harvey wanted to be seen as running his own territory, not following the lead of strangers from London.

By dinnertime Rutledge had collected the statements from the weary constable eager to get home to his wife. Then he went up the stairs two at a time, and carefully collected the small gold articles from Olivia’s closet. For a moment he held them in the palm of his hand, where they shone with soft beauty, as if innocent of blood and death.

As they were, in themselves, he thought sadly.

Downstairs he took one last long look at Rosamund’s portrait, silently apologizing for what he’d caused to be done in her drawing room that day. She stared back at him in silence, a faraway look in her eyes.

He walked back towards the village alone, his mind busy.

Sadie hadn’t come, Dawlish reported, though Dr. Penrith, walking slowly on his daughter’s arm, had arrived at the Hall at the time set for him. And Wilkins, and Mary Otley. Later someone would have to interview Susannah and her husband, and Tom Chambers, the solicitor. Rutledge himself had questioned Dawlish at the end of the day, writing down his answers without looking up at the man’s accusing eyes.

The constable was an intelligent man, he could think through what he had spent the long day doing. But how far had he gotten in putting the pieces of the puzzle together? Far enough to wonder, Rutledge thought, but not quite far enough to know the whole ...

Passing through the woods, Rutledge considered the problem of Sadie. Did she know what a sworn statement was?

He would have to go to her, then, and hope her mind was clear.

As he passed the Otley cottage he could see someone standing in the shadow by the door. Rachel, watching him. He could feel her eyes, the intensity of emotions, the uncertainty. But she stayed where she was, and he wondered what was going through her mind. What she would do now. Or if she would wait. Women often thought along different lines. Where a man saw duty, women were more concerned with emotions, feelings. He’d learned early on that a policeman ignored such differences at his peril.

Rutledge was just beside the Trepol gate when the housekeeper stepped out her door and called to him.

“Inspector Rutledge?”

He opened the gate and went up the walk where he would be out of earshot of Rachel. If Mrs. Trepol had questions about the statement she’d given, it was better not to broadcast them.

When he reached her, she acknowledged him with a nod and then said, “You’ll be wanting me to clean up after all those feet tracking dirt into the hall and the drawing room?”

“It would be kind of you,” he said. “Yes, thank you.”

“Miss Rosamund would never have allowed it,” she said, resigned to what she must have considered little short of desecration. One did not invite half the village in to sit in a fine chair under the best portrait in the house, not in the age in which Mrs. Trepol or Rosamund Trevelyan had grown up and learned their respective places in Borcombe.

“I know,” he told her, “but sometimes the law must do what has to be done, and worry about the fitness of it afterward. I think she would have been glad to be a party to settling her family’s affairs.”

“Is that what you’re doing, sir?” Mrs. Trepol asked earnestly.

“It’s what I’m trying to do. To explain the deaths of Olivia Marlowe and Nicholas Cheney. To set it right.”

She nodded, as if she understood.

“Thank you, sir,” she said quietly. “I’d not like to think of them in pain and grief over what they did. A sad end to two lives, that was. I could never feel quite right about it, and I couldn’t see the purpose. We have to live the lives we’ve been given, there’s naught else for it. God doesn’t give us a choice. That’s what the church says. Suffering teaches in its own way.”

“Yes, sometimes,” he said, knowing how close he himself had come more than once to ending his own suffering.

She nodded again, and looked around her for her cat. Rut-ledge turned and started up the walk again.

Mrs. Trepol said, tentatively, “Sir?”

“Yes?” He only half turned back towards her, wanting to go on to the inn and read the statements.

“If you’re finished with us, well, sir, I was wondering if maybe you’d know what was best to do with them boxes Mr. Stephen gave me to hold for him. I kept expecting Mr. Chambers to come and fetch them, after Mr. Stephen died, but he hasn’t. Maybe he doesn’t want them any more, now that Mr. Stephen is dead? Just some old things, he told me, some treasures he wanted to keep for himself, memories of the family, he said. Nothing but a boy’s foolishness, he said, but he didn’t want them left behind in the empty house and he wasn’t ready to take them up to London with him, no room in the car with all those things Miss Susannah and the others wanted to carry away.”

Rutledge turned and looked at her in the late evening light, at the plain, earnest face that waited for him to do what was best.

“I thought of mentioning it to Miss Rachel, but they’re Mr. Stephen’s things, and I haven’t seen Miss Susannah by herself, only with Mr. Daniel there, and I didn’t know—I thought perhaps that wasn’t what Mr. Stephen would want. He’d said I was to keep the boxes for him, you see. Just for him, as a favor. And he was always a hard one to say no to, so I thought I’d just ask and you might tell me what was best. They’re not my things—I wouldn’t want to do anything wrong.”

He couldn’t turn to see if Rachel was still in her doorway. He couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t see him carrying boxes away.

Instead, he scooped up the cat that was coming through the open gate, and said, quietly, “Show me.”

Mrs. Trepol went indoors, and Rutledge, still carrying the cat, followed her. In a closet set in the hall between her bedroom and the kitchen there was a stack of boxes, three of them. To the other side two coats, a rack of gardening boots, and a line of old umbrellas crowded the narrow space.

Rutledge had already put down the squirming cat, and he stood there staring for a moment at the boxes. Then he lifted down the first of the three and opened it carefully. Mrs. Trepol turned away, as if afraid she might be trespassing if she looked at the contents.

He felt no such compunction.

The first box held Olivia’s notebooks of verse, annotated and revised, her record of creative thought, the process of making words do her bidding. He regarded the neat rows thoughtfully, not reading any of them but paying silent homage to them as his fingers gently touched their spines. The second box held contracts, letters, and bank records. He was amazed at how well good verse paid. The third was a collection of many things, photographs, a genealogy of the Trevel-yan family, personal letters, childhood scribbling that gradually foretold the growth of a formidable talent, and a number of books with her name in lovely script on the flyleaves.

Rutledge, trying to hide his disappointment and quell Hamish’s fierce litany of “I told you so!” prodded the contents again, as if expecting them to produce, by magic, the answers he wanted. Mrs. Trepol had gone into the kitchen to feed her cat, and he squatted on the wide floorboards, refusing to give up.

It wasn’t until then that he noticed that some of the contents, stacked as if in a file drawer, were higher than the others. Lifting them out gently, he found a slim journal under this batch, and took it out in its turn.

The hand was strong and clear, the writing of a woman who had used a pen most of her life and was at home with words.

Not a journal, a letter to her half brother. He skimmed it swiftly.

Dear Stephen,There are some things you must know, and I shall not be here to tell them to you. I’m sorry about that, to leave you with these revelations when you are grieving for us. But I must arm you for what’s to come. I have done my best to protect you and Susannah. For one thing, 1 have left the house in such a way that it must be sold, and you’ve been aware for years that that was my wish as well as Nicholas’. For another, I have kept you in ignorance as long as I dared, and drawn the lightning myself all these years. By dying, I have set him free at last. And you will be safe now. You have nothing he wants. I have promised him that. But who can know what the future holds? Circumstances change, and I cannot foresee every possibility. The time may come when what I am writing down here is all you have. Whether you believe me or not, I pray you’ll trust me and for your own sake, keep the confidence I am sharing with you. Vengeance will only bring you and Susannah down into the pit. And my death will have been for nothing!

Let me tell you, then, about the murderer who has lived with us for all of your life and most of mine .

25

Rutledge stopped there and closed the journal, returning it to its resting place. Hamish for once was silenced, his voice if not his presence shut down in the face of truth. Rutledge felt his heart racing, his mind torn between triumph and depression. Triumphant that there was something more than lines of verse on which to base his case, and depressed that Olivia Marlowe had had to sacrifice herself to keep her younger half brother and sister alive. Had that been what drove her to suicide? A threat against Stephen: his life or yours?

Was that the bargain struck with Lucifer? Or only a part of it?

Mrs. Trepol stuck her head around the kitchen door and said, “Will you be taking them with you, sir? Mr. Stephen’s things?”

Rutledge got to his feet and began to stack the boxes into the closet again.

“Go on keeping them safe for now,” he told Mrs. Trepol. “Let them stay where they are. I’ll come for them myself before I leave. Sooner, if I can. And I wouldn’t bother either Miss Rachel or Miss Susannah about them now. They’ve got enough on their minds, I don’t want to worry them about Mr. Stephen at the moment.”

She thanked him gravely and followed him to her door, closing it after him.

Hamish, never silenced for very long, had found his voice again. “I’ll hear no crowing, now or later! Ye didn’t find them, did you? They had to come to you, out of nowhere, and you can’t take any of the credit for that!”

“I don’t want credit,” Rutledge said, walking down the path and closing the gate behind him, still torn between taking the boxes with him and leaving them where they were. He turned towards the inn once more, only part of his mind taking in the emptiness of the street, the quietness—no noisy children, no neighbors gossiping over garden walls, no young couples strolling hand in hand through the evening light. He’d seen it before, the way villages drew inward in a time of crisis. “I’m starting with the statements. After that, I’ll have Harvey collect that letter. Once I’ve organized all my own information clearly in black and white, he’ll be able to see how the letter corroborates it. And if he can see it, London will have to do the same.”

“And what about Stephen FitzHugh? Did he find yon letter? Was that why he left the boxes here?”

“He must have read it,” Rutledge said tiredly. “He was her executor because she trusted him. That may have been her only mistake. I believe Stephen had changed after the war. Rachel said much the same thing, that he wasn’t the same man when he came home. My God, how few of us are!” There was bitterness in his voice, hearing again Rachel’s diatribe, and feeling no triumph for what he’d accomplished this day, only doubt over his methods. Beside him the tip of the church tower was touched by the slanting brightness, like a beacon. It gave him no comfort.

Hamish clicked his tongue in disagreement.

“Damn it, look at the facts, then! He decided on a memorial—that was the word Rachel used—instead of selling the house. That went against Olivia’s express wishes, and yet he hid the boxes where no one could find them and stumble on the truth. I think Stephen looked at his choices and felt he could turn the Hall into a museum by blackmailing the killer into allowing it. That was arrogance, not courage.”

A fisherman, coming up from the strand, caught sight of Rutledge walking towards him and made a point of crossing the street to the far side, to avoid passing him. Yes, the village had drawn its conclusions ...

“You can’t know what was in his mind!”

“No. But I know he left the boxes with Mrs. Trepol. He didn’t put them in the car to take to London. He didn’t leave them in the house where someone else might have come across them. He didn’t give them to the solicitor, Chambers. He put them in the care of a woman who would follow his instructions exactly, and he knew that.”

“Aye, but Stephen FitzHugh fell down the stairs. It was an accident, and you said as much yourself.”

“I still believe that.”

Rutledge had reached the inn, pushing open the door. It was dark and silent, except for lights at the end of the kitchen passage. He carried the statements to his room and locked them in his suitcase along with the small bits of gold before finding Trask and asking that some dinner be sent upstairs. For once the landlord had nothing to say when he brought up the tray. It was as if the village was shunning him.

Later Rutledge walked through the gloaming towards Sadie’s cottage. The setting sun still struck the headland with a rich golden light, but in the narrow valleys it was already that soft blue dusk that stole color from the land and left it almost in limbo between day and night.

Sadie was in her garden, weeding a row of carrots. She straightened her back as he came down the path towards her and stared at him in silence.

He felt a sense of guilt, as if it was written in his face that he’d been there the night before, digging among the pansies. But he knew it was impossible for her to be sure—to have seen anything, heard anything.

“She doesna’ need to hear or see,” Hamish reminded him. “She has the gift.”

“Good evening,” Rutledge began, keeping his voice neutral. “I’ve come to ask you why you didn’t walk across to the Hall to talk to Constable Dawlish. He waited, hoping to speak to you.”

“Let him wait,” she said, “I’ve naught to say to him.”

“To me then. Will you speak to me?”

“I’ve told you before—”

“That you want no part of the Gabriel Hound! I know. I won’t ask you about him, not directly. But I hope you can tell me more about Olivia. How she managed to keep such secrets, young as she was. How she grew into the woman she was, without breaking under the strain. And then this spring, why she chose to take her own life. If she expected to bring him down with her, or if she’d given up. I need Olivia’s help, and she’s dead. But she trusted you. Will you let her speak through you? I’m ready to bring this killer into a courtroom, and I need all the secrets now. Except his name. I know that. Finally.”

She cocked her head to one side and examined him. “I’d not be in your shoes, then. There’s no mercy in him.”

“That’s why I must finish this tonight.” His voice was gentle now.

“Did you come in the night? Last night?”

“Yes. I came. I found Richard. There are pansies at his feet.”

Something in her face crumpled. But she said nothing.

“She couldn’t stop the hounds,” he said. “She couldn’t bring him to justice. But she did tried to leave the evidence, one way or another. In hope. Don’t let it be wasted! Let me see that justice is done for her.”

Sadie pulled her black shawl closer about her thin shoulders. Weighing him. Judging him. “He’s run free all these years. He’ll slip any leash put on him. And come back here.”

“No one comes back from the gallows.” He searched for something else to convince her. “And the dead can sleep in peace, then.”

“I’d like that,” she answered after a time. “Before I die, I’d like to be certain sure of that.”

He thought she was still going to refuse. He thought, watching the play of emotions on her lined, tired face, the telltale eyes, that he was going to lose her.

But she straightened her back again and started to walk towards the cottage door. “Come inside, and I’ll make tea. And answer your questions.”

Sadie was the only person connected with the family that Olivia hadn’t written about in her poems. He’d noticed that omission last night, and now he understood it. He’d been right to look behind the facade.

He followed the old woman through the low doorway and took out his notebook. She gestured for him to sit, and the cat on the window ledge stared at him through slitted eyes as he took the chair Sadie indicated. In silence she put the kettle on, got out cups and the tin of tea.

He waited, giving her space and time.

When the small teapot was set on the table and she began to pour, he asked his first question. She handed him his cup before she answered.

And in the next hour, he was very glad after all that she hadn’t come to the Hall to be interviewed by Constable Daw-lish.

Her voice was shaking when she started. A thin, frail thread of sound that worried him, made him careful neither to overwhelm nor overtire her. He could see, too, when it became a catharsis, like confession before a priest. A deep and emotional release that welled up slowly, and yet brought with it waves of intense feelings. She wasn’t retelling an old story, she was quite literally reliving old and very bitter griefs. Buried so long they were part of bone and sinew, and a sense of failure. She was—he’d been told it early on—by nature and profession a healer.

“No, we none of us suspected Anne had been killed,” she replied slowly to his first question. “But Miss Olivia, she fretted herself near to death over it, and Mr. Adrian—her grandfather, that was—said it was because they were one flesh, Anne and Olivia. But it was deeper than that. The child had nightmares and sometimes I’d be called in to sit beside the bed, a lamp in the corner with a shawl thrown over it, to hold her hand. Mr. Nicholas was only a wee thing, but he’d stand at the door and watch his sister with those deep dark eyes of his, and it was as if he knew what she was suffering. But Miss Olivia, she never spoke of what was in her heart. Not even to her mother. After a time she was better, and yet not the same ever again. She’d sit with a book in her lap, and not know a word on the page. She’d be standing by the window, looking out, and never see what was beyond the glass. I’d tended wounded soldiers in my time. This was a wounded child.”

“When did she first mention the Gabriel Hound to you? Or was it you who told her?”

“One day she found a book in her grandfather’s library, and read about them. ‘Twas an old story, and she wanted to know if I’d heard of it, and of course I had. She wanted to know then if I’d believed in it, and I said, ‘Child, I’ve seen the Turks, I don’t need to fear any hounds!’ And she answered me with that straight look of hers. ‘I’ve heard them. The night Anne died.’ It was all she said, and after that, I found myself lying awake of nights, listening too. Because you took Miss Olivia’s flights of fancy serious. She was a knowing one.”

“Then why didn’t she speak to her mother? Or Adrian Trevelyan? Surely they’d have believed her.”

“I asked her once. She said, ‘I was warned.’ And she wouldn’t budge from that.”

He felt the cold on the back of his neck, as if something had touched him where the hackles rise. Small wonder Olivia had lived in her own world for so very long. She had been frightened into it, and it had become her sanctuary.

Sadie’s eyes brimmed with pain. He hastily changed directions.

“Tell me about Richard’s death.”

She looked at him over her cup before taking a long swallow. “You know about that. It’s the burying you want to hear.”

Surprised, he said, “You knew what she’d done?”

“Not then. Not when it happened, no. But once I found her crying over that little garden she’d wanted to make on the hillside, and when I smoothed her hair and told her her little brother was with God and happy, she turned to me and said in a voice that curdled my blood, ‘God doesn’t know where he is! I should have let them bury him in the vault with the others, but I thought—I thought it might make Mother happier if he wasn’t found. If there was hope alive. I thought—I thought the one who’d killed him would be terrified he’d come back and point a finger, and it would make him confess, and I was wrong!’ I can hear her, clear as I hear you, and it wrung my heart, I tell you! It was later I got the whole story from her, but by then Mr. James had shot himself, and it was better to leave Miss Rosamund with some hope, however small it was. So we did.”

Rutledge looked up from his notes. He doubted that anyone else in the village would have taken that step with Olivia. It was a measure of Sadie’s understanding of a fragile child. “Did Nicholas know?” he asked.

“Nicholas knew everything,” she replied, “and held his tongue because Miss Olivia couldn’t prove a word of it then. He was afraid the blame’d turn on her, you see. That they’d say she must’ve killed the boy herself, because she’d hid him, and was now trying to blame someone else. It was a terrible fix to be in. I thought it would be the death of them both. But Miss Olivia was strong! And he gave her all the courage he had, more than many a man possesses. I never saw such courage in a lad. These were children, mind you, carrying a secret too heavy for them. It made them older than their years. But they thought it had stopped, you see! When Miss Rosamund married Mr. FitzHugh. Mr. Cormac and Mr. Nicholas, they went away to school as it was set out they should, a governess was found for Miss Olivia, the twins were born, and the house was happy again. For ten year or more.”

“Because he had to be patient. To wait until he himself was ready.”

“Aye,” she told him sadly. “The worst, in a way, was to come. Mr. Brian was thrown by his horse, they said. Nicholas was there on the strand, speaking to him not half an hour before. Miss Rosamund wasn’t in the Hall, she was out in the gardens somewhere. Mr. Nicholas went to find her and that was when Mr. Brian died. But not before Mr. Brian had told Mr. Nicholas that Mr. Cormac, he wanted to change his name to Trevelyan, and would he, Mr. Nicholas, speak to Rosamund about it. Mr. Nicholas asked why Mr. Brian shouldn’t ask her himself, and Mr. Brian said, ‘It’s not my place. I’m not a Trevelyan, and Mr. Cormac isn’t a FitzHugh.’ Mr. Nicholas, he didn’t understand what Mr. Brian meant, but Mr. Brian just shook his head and said, ‘No, I love your mother very deep, and I’ll not ask favors of her! Let her do it out of her heart, not for my sake or Cormac’s.’ “

“Did Nicholas ever mention that conversation to his mother?”

“Lord, no! Before he’d found her, they set up a shout about Mr. Brian being bad hurt, and Mr. Nicholas, he looked like a ghost walking and never spoke of it to a soul except Olivia, and that was only after the funeral. I was the one laid out Mr. Brian, when they brought him up the stairs and put him in the bedroom beyond the landing. Looking for a clean shirt, so’s to make him presentable for Miss Rosamund, I found a letter ready to mail in his drawer, stuck deep under them. It was to Mr. Chambers, and it set out, starkly, the circumstances of Mr. Cormac’s birth. But when I spoke of it to Miss Olivia and we went to look for it, it was gone. Mr. Chambers, he never got it.”

“You read it? When you found it?”

She got up and went to the door to let the cat out into the night. He caught the breath of the sea and knew that the wind had changed direction. “Have you never lived in a house with servants? They aren’t deaf as posts and blind as bats. It was buried amongst his shirts, sir, not in his desk. I’d never have touched the papers in his desk, but it fell out on the floor and the sheet of paper went this way, the envelope that. I picked ‘em up and read the one before putting it in the other and setting it where it belonged, in the desk. And it was gone from there the next day.”

“You’re certain Mrs. FitzHugh herself hadn’t take it?”

“Well, as to that, sir, we couldn’t very well ask, could we, now! But later, when she was restless and uneasy in her mind, wandering the house all hours of the night, trying for sleep and not finding it, I wondered. Mr. Adrian, her father, hadn’t wanted her to marry Mr. Brian, and she knew it, but Mr. Brian was a kind man, he made her laugh and he had no eye for her money. The house’d gone to Miss Olivia, but the money was still Miss Rosamund’s. Mr. Brian gave no thought to it. He was happy if she was, and he gave her the twins, and Miss Rosamund adored them. It wasn’t a bad marriage to my way of thinking. Then Mr. Chambers, he started coming around when the period of mourning was finished, and Miss Rosamund, she looked for a time to be herself again, roses in her cheeks and that special way she had of tilting her head as if listening to something sweet in the air, whenever she was happy.”

Sadie, standing at the open door, shut it as the cat came back inside, and went to the hearth to stand. She was tired, her face deeply lined. But Rutledge thought he couldn’t have stopped her now if he’d tried.

“That was in June. By September she was dead, and they said it was by her own hand. But Lord, sir, I knew how much of the laudanum she’d took! I was the one that had to beg her each night to swallow half a draught to ease the despair she’d felt all through that last month. But she’d shake her head and say, ‘No, Sadie, I need my wits about me!’ ‘You’ll have no wits left, if ye don’t rest!’ I told her plain out, but she said ‘There’s something I must do, and I’m not sure exactly how to set about it. I’m not going to marry Mr. Chambers. Or anyone else. I’ve got my children to live for, and that’s the most important part of my life now.’ There was no changing her mind, she was that strong.”

“She’d decided against marrying Thomas Chambers? Had she actually told him that?”

“Oh, lord, yes, but he was there every weekend, come to call and dine with her. I heard her say to him once, ‘I’ve killed them all. George and James and Brian. I can’t bear to

see you die, and I won’t, I tell you!’ And he said, That’s nonsense, my love, you’re letting grief turn your thoughts.’ She just looked at him, her face sad. ‘I’m bad luck, Tom, I’d rather stay single than wear widow’s weeds ever again.”

“What made her think she had killed them?” He was fascinated, pretending to drink his tea and over the rim of his cup watching the old face in the lamp’s light, trying to read the eyes.

‘‘Ah, but did she? I wondered about that for the longest time. Miss Olivia, she said it was deeper than that, she thought Mr. Cormac, he was in love with Miss Rosamund. But there was no speaking of it, not to Miss Rosamund. She’d smile and say her spirits were fine, she’d just decided that marriage was not worth the grieving afterward.”

“Then how did she come to die?”

“That were odd, sir. One day she said to Miss Olivia, ‘I think I’ll ask Tom to come for the weekend. I need to speak to him. Legal matters, and perhaps after that’s done, we may find it possible to talk about other things.’ I was on the stairs, helping Mr. Cormac and Mr. Nicholas move a chest down from the attics that Mr. Cormac wanted to take back to his London rooms. You could hear their voices as you came down, talking in the drawing room. Then Miss Rosamund, she came out, she looked up at me, and her face turned that bleak I wanted to weep. I didn’t know what’d unsettled her, but it was there in her eyes. Cold as death. It was Miss Olivia who found the note she left, and burned it in the grate.”

“A note? I was never told that there was a note found when Rosamund died!” Rutledge said, appalled.

Sadie sat down, heavily and with great effort, then asked him to fetch her homemade wine, from the small cupboard by the dry sink. When she’d finished half the glass and got her breath with more comfort, she said, “No. Miss Olivia, she burned it, like I said. It was written in a scrawl you’d hardly recognize, and hidden under the pillow. Just a name. And a warning. ’Twas all Miss Olivia needed. She went whiter than she was and bent over her mother’s body in such grief I couldn’t bear it. So I walked out of the room and went

to fetch Mr. Nicholas, The note was never spoken of again. I didn’t need to be told. I’d heard the hounds myself since poor little Richard was taken. I knew who’d put the overdose in Miss Rosamund’s water. Not her, not that woman so full of life and love—she’d not have gone to her God with self-murder on her hands!” It was spoken with a vehemence that brought an angry flush to Sadie’s cheeks. In a stronger voice she added, “The twins, they were still too young to know anything about such things, only that their mother’d taken ill in the night and overdosed herself. Mr. Chambers, he was heartbroken. You’d have thought he was the grieving widower, not the family’s lawyer. It was the Gabriel hounds that whispered in her ear, bending over her as she dropped into that last sleep, and she’d known, she’d known where the danger was!”

“The danger to herself?”

“Oh, aye, that, and the danger to Miss Olivia. Because the truth of the matter was, you see, Mr. Cormac’d set his cap next for Miss Olivia. If he couldn’t become a Trevelyan in one way, he’d do it another. And Miss Rosamund, she wouldn’t marry him. Nor after begging her, how could he ask for Miss Olivia, without it all coming out? She’d have told Mr. Chambers too when he came, sure as God gave her the breath. It was what she’d decided, after all the worry and the sleepnessness. He was in a bind, and the easy answer was to remove the light of that house. Miss Rosamund, she’d used every excuse to put Mr. Chambers off, and he hadn’t run, he still wanted her with all his heart. He’d have done whatever she asked. He’d have questioned Olivia, too, and she might have told him at long last what was on her soul. But when Miss Rosamund died, Mr. Chambers was so sunk in his own pain that there was no way of reaching out to him. Miss Olivia buried her mother and told the world that grief had overwhelmed her in the night. Mr. Smedley, he loved that family, and he wouldn’t hear of suicide. Nor Dr. Penrith. He said her hands had been shaking, she’d been in a muddle from no sleep, and it was easy for her to make such a tragic mistake—dosing herself rather than waking one of the servants

from their rest. She was that thoughtful, people believed it was true. And her killer counted on that to go scot-free! Who was there to cry murder? Miss Olivia? Who burned that paper?”

“If it was murder—”

She looked at him pityingly. “I’ve laid out more than half this village in my time, dead of accidents, dead of sickness, dead of broken hearts—it’s common enough, dying. Aye, sometimes murder’s been done too, but Dr. Penrith was a good man, he could find that needle in the haystack. And we all knew each other well enough to guess whose hand had done it: the husband, the lover, the jealous neighbor. But it was different at the Hall. There was none there who didn’t love Miss Rosamund dearly, and Miss Olivia knew they’d fight against her, unwilling to believe any such tale as she could spin. He was careful, and very clever. There was no proof! But that was when Miss Olivia and Mr. Nicholas took Mr. Brian’s children out of their will. No house, and the money tied tight in trust. However long and loud the hound might bay, it wouldn’t be for their blood. But he came for her, anyway, in the end. Because of the poems. Because he has the money now to do as he pleases. Because she knew what she knew, and it was time for him to marry. There’s a new provision in the deed of that house that if Cormac FitzHugh ever chooses to live in the Hall, he must never marry. Mr. Chambers, he thought it was because Miss Olivia loved Mr. Cormac and didn’t want him to bring another bride there. But she said it was her house, she’d do as she liked with it, and nobody could stop her. Which was true enough. And Mr. Cormac, he’s never married. But he’ll live in the Hall, and I hope, with all my heart, that the hounds come for him there, in the dark, when there’s no help to be had!”

She began to weep, tears running down her white, withered face in ugly runnels, as if there had never been places for them to fall before, and now they couldn’t find a way.

Rutledge found himself breathing hard, his body tight with black and wordless rage. He gave her his handkerchief and

she took it, fumbling in the blindness of the tears. She touched her face with a dignity that was heart wrenching, because these were not tears for herself. She still hadn’t cried for herself.

26

After a long silence, Rutledge asked, “Why did Olivia choose to die? And why did Nicholas die with her?”

Sadie shook her head. “If she wanted you to know that, she’d of told you. In her poetry. Somehow.”

And, God help him, she had.

Huskily Rutledge said, “More to the point, did she tell you?”

“She didn’t have to. I may be old and tired and useless, but there was more to me, once, and a heart to match it. I knew without the telling!”

“Was Cormac ever in love with Olivia?”

“He was deathly afraid of her, if I’m a judge. It was the only thing he ever showed fear of, and that fear was nigh on to superstitious! Miss Olivia said he didn’t believe in God, but that he believed with whatever heart he had, her death would surely be his death.”

For the first time in a very long hour, Hamish stirred and spoke as clearly as if he’d sat there at the table with them from the start. Or because of the tension that held him like a vise, had Rutledge himself formed the words aloud? Somehow he was never, afterward, sure.

“She’s wrong there, it was no’ her death that brought him down, but Nicholas Cheney’s. And yon lassie not understanding it, and sending for the Yard.”

Sadie looked up at him, her eyes no longer clear and sharp. “Aye, it’s true enough,” she answered. “It was Mr. Nicholas dying. But how could he have left Mr. Nicholas alive? He’d have come for Mr. Cormac with his bare hands the instant anything happened to Miss Olivia. However carefully it were done. That’s all that saved Mr. Cormac for twenty years, Miss Olivia not wanting to see Mr. Nicholas hanged! No, they had to die together. That was the only chance Mr. Cormac had in this world.”

Rutledge had written down her words, and afterward, when he’d made more tea and coaxed her out of weariness and the peace of forgetfulness, with his help she read them over and with a shaking hand, signed at the bottom of the last page.

Now, now he could walk into a courtroom with all the evidence any barrister might need. Except for what Stephen hadn’t trusted to Olivia’s boxes. The FitzHugh family history.

It was late when Rutledge walked through the woods, trying to cope with the emotions that still consumed him, listening to his own footsteps on the path, the soles of his shoes grinding on the gritty flint and earth like the mills of the gods. Slowly but surely—But he didn’t want slowly, he wanted a reckoning now, bloody and final and with vengeance driving it.

And Hamish, ferociously wrestling for control, was losing.

As he rounded the last bend in the trees, there were lights ahead of him. And behind the bright windows, the heavy thunderheads of a storm building. Flashes of reddish gold lightning laced the clouds, dancing among them as the roll of distant sound like guns firing out to sea reached him. Rutledge felt a cleaving tightness in his stomach.

“Before the battle, aye,” Hamish remembered with him, “always the guns. But in God’s name, you’re not in France now, not tonightl That’s a storm coming in fast, and yon house has nae claim on you now. Nor the man in it! Your work’s done. This is no’ your fight, man!”

Pausing in the shelter of the darkness, he turned his eyes back to the house. There were lamps in several rooms. The drawing room. The study where Olivia and Nicholas had died. An upstairs bedroom that had been Rosamund’s ...

An invitation, then. Of a kind. “I’m here. I know what you’ve done this day. Come and face me yourself, if you dare!”

Hamish said, “Not when ye’re sae angry! Not with the darkness on ye! It’s not worth dying for, just to see how he’ll take his defeat!”

“I’m not dying in there. And neither is he, if I can help it. He’s laid down the challenge. I won’t walk away from it. Olivia didn’t.” But he knew very well it was the heat in his own blood speaking.

Hamish retorted, “This isna’ the law, it’s vengeance! And it’s for her—all for that bluidy woman!”

He didn’t answer, his mind already busy, calculating, weighing—

There was a scent of pipe tobacco on the breeze that ruffled the leaves over his head. Faint but real. Then the sound of feet walking closer.

Rutledge turned his head. Behind him on the path the rector’s voice came out of the darkness, low and passionate.

“The people of Borcombe are simple, but they aren’t stupid. They’ve talked to each other, and put most of the story together by now. So have I. And I’ve spent my day trying to undo the harm you’ve done here. You’ve shaken their faith, and in the end they’ll blame themselves for all those deaths. They’ll shoulder the burden for twenty-five years of wickedness, for not recognizing or stopping it.”

Rutledge said, “I’ve seen it happen before in murder cases. 7 could have prevented it. ‘ But not this time. Not with this killer. Tell them that.”

“If I understood why ...”

Rutledge turned his attention back to the headland. Gauging the storm and what was waiting in the house. The lamps were still burning.

“The bedrock of my faith is redemption. That everyone can be saved, because deep down there’s some goodness to search out and nurture,” Smedley said tiredly. “I want to help.”

“No. There’s no goodness to find here. Go back to the village and leave this to me. Here, take this with you.” He handed Smedley the statement he’d taken from the old woman. “Keep it safe for me.”

“What is it?”

“Just give it to Harvey. It’s finished. Or it will be, in a little while.”

“That’s what frightens me. Finished how? Olivia wouldn’t have wanted it to end in violence. As a man of God, I can try to reach out, to offer the church’s solace and forgiveness.”

Rutledge, on edge and wishing the rector back in his church, said savagely, “I’ll make it plain. This man has killed for the sake of killing. Whatever he may tell you, whatever reasons he may offer, whatever logic he can bring to bear for his defense, he killed because it suited his purpose! And because the opportunity was there. And the power of shaping his own fate with his own hands he found exhilarating. Whatever went wrong in him, it isn’t going to be exorcised by the church. Or by you.”

“No! There is good in every human being. I believe it devoutly!”

“Then go down on your knees before the altar and pray for guidance. I need it! Or, if you want to be useful, find Inspector Harvey and tell him I require a warrant. But send Constable Dawlish around to the beach by boat. Just in case he tries to leave in that direction.”

“By boat? There’s a storm coming.”

“I know. Hurry, man! There isn’t much time.”

Rutledge was already walking away as he spoke. Smedley stayed in the enclosed darkness of the trees as the Londoner came to the end of the path and started up the drive, not concealing his presence, not slowing his pace.

Hamish said roughly, “All right then, ye’ll be fighting his darkness and your own, but ye’re a clever man, and ye canna’ show weakness, it’s what he’ll watch for. Let the words roll off his tongue and your back.”

But Rutledge didn’t hear.

Slowly, one by one, the lamps were extinguished, plunging the house into darkness. All but one he could see in the drawing room, with its faint glimmer in the hall’s tall windows.

The thunder made him flinch again, his nerves raw, his senses already at fever pitch.

Lightning flickered, and through the windows of the room where Olivia had died, it seemed to dance fleetingly, as if there was a living presence there.

At the steps, Rutledge hesitated, but the door didn’t open, and he took out the key he still kept in his pocket.

The shaft of light falling from the drawing room door like a spear was very bright after the darkness outside, making him blink, and he hesitated, aware of what might come out of the hall’s shadows at him. Then he turned towards the drawing room, his footsteps brashly loud in the stillness.

There was an airlessness too in the house that seemed to suffocate him, in spite of the high ceilings and the open door behind him.

He could smell the trenches again, feel the earth shaking under his feet as the barrage began. The sappers were still deep underground. He wasn’t sure they’d make it out in time—they’d be buried alive in moving earth, as he’d been, breath shut off by tons of soil rising high into the night sky and then collapsing in on them—on him—shutting out everything, sight, hearing, air—

Hamish stirred, uneasily calling out to him.

Rutledge forced himself back into the present, making himself concentrate on the light, not the dark.

On the threshold of the drawing room, he stopped again. There was a decanter and two glasses on the small table by the hearth, beneath Rosamund’s portrait. One of the glasses was half full. The other empty.

As if waiting for him ... they’d both been right, he and Hamish ...

Leashing his anger with an iron will, he crossed the silent room and stood looking at the portrait for a time, his eyes seeing it, his ears listening to the sounds of the house. It seemed to be electric with tension.

And then Cormac FitzHugh was standing in the doorway.

“She belongs here, doesn’t she? I was sorry that Susannah insisted on taking her away.”

As if Rutledge was a guest, and Cormac, the host, was making idle conversation before dinner. Rutledge turned to see the man’s face, and felt a coldness in his blood.

There was nothing there of anger or tension or a desire to kill. If anything, Cormac’s expression was pleasant, welcoming. But the brilliant blue eyes were fire.

Answering him, Rutledge said, “Yes. She’s the spirit of the house.”

Cormac smiled at him. “That’s a very Irish way of putting it.”

“Is it?”

Cormac came to the table and picked up his drink, then gestured with the glass. “Won’t you join me?”

Rutledge said nothing, and Cormac went on easily, “There’s no laudanum in it. Will you join the search for this new Ripper?”

“He isn’t my business. Never was. But Olivia Marlowe is.”

“Ah.” He lifted the glass again, gesturing this time to the portrait. “You didn’t know her as I did. Olivia was only a pale shadow of Rosamund.”

“She had a remarkable talent. Olivia.”

“Her poetry? But talent is transient. Fame is transient. We are all going to die some day, more’s the pity. It seems man has learned to do everything except live forever. When we achieve earthly immortality, I suppose we’ll finally have the power of God.”

“I’m not sure I’d want that. Immortality. To live forever would be—tiresome. Eternal youth, that might be more useful.”

Cormac laughed, the handsome face lighting from within. “Would you choose now, or before 1914?”

“Before. I have no fond memories of the war.”

“No, I don’t think you have. I’ve read your medical reports—I still have connections in London with the people I worked with during the war. And most things are available for money. A very intriguing file. I’m amazed you survived. But you’ve nothing to fear from me. I don’t plan to expose you.”

No, Rutledge thought. You’d much rather kill me.

He said aloud, “It doesn’t matter. I never expected to keep my secrets forever. If they come out, I’ll find something else to do with my life.” But he knew how great a lie that was .. .

“Or end it?” Cormac asked softly, responding to the silent thought.

“You can pray for that. Will you be here when I leave?”

“It depends on what you’ve come to find.” For the first time something echoed in the quiet voice.

After a moment Rutledge said, “Why should I make it easy for you?” and walked past Cormac, back into the hall. To his surprise, Cormac actually let him go. But he could feel the man’s eyes still watching him, and he knew it wasn’t over.

He crossed the hall, taking the stairs two at a time while Hamish reminded him that Stephen had fallen here, the words tumbling like the man had done, over and down and crashing into the floor below. Yet only Rutledge could hear them. At the top of the steps in the gallery, he made his decision, then took up the small lamp from the table where it had been set, waiting, nearly lost in the surrounding blackness.

Down the passage to the left, not the right, past the closed doors of bedrooms, the darkness here astir with feelings Rutledge couldn’t name as the lamplight made a circle of orange light around him. The oil was hot beneath the glass, warming his hand. He thought of Olivia, and of Nicholas. Did one ever come back from the dead? It was an interesting question. He hoped it would be some time before he discovered the answer to it.

The silence in Stephen’s room was palpable. In the lamplight the furnishings seemed stark and somehow dauntingly empty, heavily shadowed.

He paused in the Norway for a moment, listening to the sound of his own breathing and Hamish’s trepidation.

‘‘Leave now!” the soft Scottish voice repeated over and over. “Now!”

But Rutledge crossed to the bed and knelt, his hands moving along the struts that held the springs in place. Fingers careful, sensing their way over the strips of dusty wood.

His nails struck the book’s binding, his fingers stretched and closed around it, drawing it out with infinite circumspection.

Then it was in his grasp.

He stood, and in the silence there was now a humming of tension, like the distant baying of hounds. The hairs on the back of his neck lifted in a primeval reaction. Hamish, hissing malevolently, heard it too.

There was very little time.

He opened the slim book. Thumbed through the pages once, then again. Found the family genealogy that had been written carefully here, ever since a century-dead FitzHugh had held this prayer book in his hand at confirmation. Long ago in Ireland. In another time and another world ...

The sound was louder, the tension something that made his body tighten with anticipation. It was like waiting for the Huns to come over the top, and yet—different. The first rumble of nearby thunder shook the house, and his pulses leaped, as if the first shells had landed.

“Hurry!” Hamish urged him.

With one swift movement he drew his pocketknife, opened it, and gently slit the handwritten pages at the binding so that they fell out in his hands.

He checked once more as the footsteps rang out on the bare wood, coming closer, boldly stalking down the passage towards him.

Yes. He’d gotten them all. The records of a family—and a single line at the end: “Cormac FitzHugh. Mother unknown. Father unknown. Taken from a ditch along the road to Kilarney. FitzHugh by courtesy, not adoption.” And the date. The Gabriel Hound, unblessed—and cursed. Without a name or blood of his own.

Lifting out the book on Irish horses from the others Stephen had kept on the table by the window, Rutledge slipped the pages inside, then returned the heavy volume to its place and the closed knife to his pocket.

Was it his imagination or did the echoes seem to double, triple the number of footfalls? As if there were hordes in the passage, crowding it, elbowing each other, cutting off all space and air.

Sudden panic seemed to choke him. He fought it down, refusing to give in to it. But he was trapped here. Damn it, he wasn’t in France, this was Cornwall!

He was facing the open doorway, the little prayer book in his left hand, his balance even, ready for whatever was coming for him.

And then once more Cormac FitzHugh came out of the darkness and into the light. He was in his shirtsleeves, now. His eyes went directly to the book Rutledge held.

“I wasn’t sure my father had kept it. After turning Anglican for Rosamund. Stephen swore he had it,” he said. “But he wouldn’t tell me where he’d put it before he died. I thought it was probably a lie, but I had to keep searching. Thank you for sparing me further trouble over it.”

“He must have found it—and hidden it-—that same morning. Did you kill him?”

“The fall would have, I think. But I gave him a more merciful end. He couldn’t move. Whether it was true paralysis or temporary, I can’t tell you. I twisted his neck until it snapped, then shouted for Susannah and Rachel. Give me the prayer book now, if you please.”

“Interesting reading,” Rutledge said, thumbing the pages lightly. “Apparently you’re illegitimate. Not the stigma it once was, of course, but you have lived a public lie for many years, haven’t you? Stepson to the Trevelyans. Even these days, the news wouldn’t sit very well in London business circles, would it, where a gentleman’s word is his bond? Especially not if it came from Stephen Trevelyan, in banking himself. His doubts, dropped in the right quarters, could have ruined you.” He flipped the book closed. “Did you ever learn who your real parents were?”

“No. FitzHugh found me abandoned along a country road. Half starved, filthy, and sickly. And he took pity on me. But you’re absolutely right about London, especially since the Troubles and that 1916 uprising in Dublin. England saw it as an unforgivable stab in the back, in the middle of war. Being Irish just now is the same as being a traitor. A bastard Irishman—an upstart and a nobody—Stephen swore he’d use that to ruin me in the City if I didn’t help turn Trevelyan Hall into a mausoleum. Rosamund’s house! The Hall is all I ever truly desired in this world. Even the money I’ve earned was only a bridge to owning it. And I wanted to come here by right, not with my tail between my legs!”

Before Rutledge could read anything more than light amusement in the man’s eyes, he’d moved, swift as lightning, without conscious preparation, like a snake striking without warning.

Rutledge, expecting it, dodged, but not quite fast enough. His head, jerked back by Cormac’s stiff forearm, hit the wall with a loud crack, and as light flashed behind his eyes, Cor-mac moved in to follow up with a blow that had the full force of his shoulder behind it.

Rutledge felt his knees buckle and his senses reel under the impact. He was nearly unconscious, Hamish fiercely yelling at him to hold on, when the third and final blow brought down a pall of blackness.

27

He awoke to block nothingness, lashed out in the primeval primeval fear of blindness, and realized suddenly that the lamp had been taken away and he was alone. A flash of lightning told him that he was in Stephen’s room, where Cormac had left him. He moved gingerly, and everything worked.

Shaking his head to clear it, Rutledge felt a wave of dizziness that threatened to send him back to his knees. Using the table’s edge to pull himself to his feet, he leaned on his hands for precious seconds, willing himself into full control of his senses again. The amazing thing, he told himself, dazed still, was that he was alive.

Rutledge stumbled across the room and in the next flash of light, saw his way through the door. Thunder rattled the windows behind him.

The passage was black but there was still a lamp in the drawing room to guide him down the stairs. He ran across the hall and looked through its door.

The portrait was there, but Cormac had gone.

Where had the man hidden his car? Or had he come by boat, as Rutledge had anticipated. It was the most silent, the most secretive means of coming and going unseen. But was it still there? The boat?

Swearing as the rising wind caught the big door when he opened it, Rutledge went out into the night, down the steps, towards the strand. Ahead of him was Cormac, moving through the darkness. Which meant that he, Rutledge, couldn’t have been unconscious very long.

Rutledge called out to him, shouting his name.

Cormac turned and lifted an arm mockingly.

“He wants you to come after him! That’s why he didna’ finish it in the house!” Hamish exclaimed. “Will you no’ stop and think, man!”

Rutledge said nothing, his eyes straining to follow the figure ahead of him. But Cormac was no longer taking the path to the beach; he’d veered off towards the headland, picking up his pace. Swearing again, Rutledge plowed on, the wind tearing at his face and his coat, pushing him sideways. His head seemed to split open with the pounding pace he’d set, but he clenched his teeth and ignored it.

At the headland, where it curved to its highest point, Cormac turned. In the lightning, his pale hair blowing in the wind, his shirt white against the black clouds beyond, he seemed to glow with malevolence.

“Lucifer—!” Hamish warned.

Rutledge saved his breath and ran on until he was within a few yards of the other man.

“The way it will look,” Cormac yelled, “you broke under the strain tonight. Unable to sleep, disoriented, you came out here to the headland to watch the storm, and in a wild moment of self-doubt, you went over the edge. Thunder brought back the guns, and guilt, and all the nightmares.”

“Did you kill Olivia? Or did she choose her own death?”

“Ah, Olivia. She mesmerizes you as Rosamund mesmerized me. I meant what I told her the weekend before. That I wouldn’t hesitate to tell London that she and Nicholas were lovers. The Lucifer poems created quite a stir. And I had the feeling another collection was coming out. That she hadn’t finished with me. I wasn’t sure I could ruin O. A. Manning, but I knew how to kill Olivia Marlowe.”

“How did she answer you?”

“She laughed in my face and said that she might welcome the darkness, if it brought me harm. And promised to burn any new poems. She’s been a sword in my flesh since I was twelve. We’ve been bound together like lovers, by the bonds of a mutual fear. But the tide’s turning and I have to go.” Then he said very distinctly, “They were not quite dead when I slipped into the house that night. I think she must have known I was there—”

The wind was snatching his words away, but Rutledge heard them and hated the man with a ferocity that was deep and cold.

Cormac, for a second time in his life, miscalculated.

This time Rutledge moved first, with such speed and anger behind it that he caught Cormac off guard and sent them both reeling back, then before either man could brake their momentum, over the edge of the cliff.

It wasn’t a sheer drop. It was rock eroded by wind and weather. It was clumpy grass and earth, punctuated by straggling shrubs and heaved outcroppings. A long and rough slope that took its toll on bone and flesh as they tumbled down towards the fringe of boulders where the surf crashed whitely. The noise rose to meet them, so mixed with the thunder that there was only an endless, deafening roar.

As Rutledge’s shoulder hit the slope, he grunted with the force of it, then forgot it as Cormac’s body slammed into his, nearly winding them both. They grappled for a hold as they rolled and slid, yelling, cursing, pure fury fueling flailing knees and fists. Rutledge tasted blood and salt on his lips and felt a warm wetness just under his ribs, where something had ripped through the skin. Cormac’s flesh was also taking a beating, but he was ignoring it with the single-mindedness of a lifetime.

Rutledge fought with the cunning and strength of the battlefield, the ruthless, unforgiving training of hand-to-hand combat. He found himself wishing fervently for a bayonet, a rifle butt, a weapon of any kind. He could feel if not hear the sucking in of breath, the grunts from the savage effort Cormac made to match him hold for hold, blow for blow. There was grit in Rutledge’s teeth, one eye was half closed, and his left elbow felt numb as they came suddenly to the end of the long, ragged slope and pitched with savage momentum into the cold, wild water, shocking both of them.

In his grasp Cormac went limp.

Rutledge heaved himself up through the rough sea and pulled the other man with him.

“You aren’t dead—I won’t—let you die!” he shouted, gasping for air, but Cormac made no response as his face came out of the water. “Damn it—you’ll hang yet!”

There was a dark smear across Cormac’s forehead where he’d struck rock under the water, laying open the skin. It was bleeding ferociously.

Now Rutledge was fighting the great rocks and the surf rolling in haphazardly before the wind, and the storm seemed to be tearing at the headland above, downdrafts sending a sandpaper of grit and dirt against his face.

He clenched his teeth with the effort, feeling his body tightening then tiring in the cold water, feeling the pull of the current and the edges of the rocks and the weight of the other body he was dragging after him.

Hamish was screaming at him, and he ignored it, concentration centered on keeping Cormac’s head above water even when his own sank and he seemed to swallow half the sea, unable to breathe, feeling himself choke and sputter. And start to fail. From somewhere in the whirling darkness he heard Hamish calling his name, forbidding him to die.

“Not now—not yet—by God, I won’t let you go this easily!”

Or was that what he was telling Cormac, over and over in his mind?

Panting and coughing, he broke the surface again, and brought Cormac with him. The other man’s weight seemed lighter now, as if he’d come to his senses again, yet he made no effort to swim or struggle.

Every muscle seemed stretched beyond its limit, but Rutledge kept one hand locked in the collar of Cormac’s shirt and with the other fended off the rocks as his feet and legs pushed and pulled and dragged them against the pull of the water, in the direction of the strand. The numbed elbow sometimes gave way and they both crashed into rocks, were washed high on the inpouring of heavy surf, and then were slammed back into the headland, but Rutledge refused to give up, sheer will keeping the two of them afloat. Water was everywhere, there seemed to be no end of it. He dug with his heels, bobbed, bumped, thundered into sharp edges, felt the bruising and lacerations on his back, and still held on.

I didn’t survive the damned war to die in a Cornish sea! he swore to himself, again and again. I’ll live to see this bastard hang!

So absorbed was he in the ordeal of surviving, he wasn’t even aware that his feet had struck the shingle of the beach where it met the rocks. It caught him ill-prepared for the next surging wave.

The tide was flooding in and he was swept forward with such force that he lost his grip on Cormac. They both were dragged up the shelf, the water and the sand unmerciful to their faces and hands, then the salt burning fiercely where the flesh had been scoured open.

He lay there, digging in with his fingers and toes as the water worked to suck him out again, the tide pulling with an energy he’d long since lost. Then it was past him, and he fought now for breath, trying to stop the shuddering of his lungs and the pounding of his heart.

Beside him he heard Cormac breathe as well, roughly at first, then a long, deep draught of air. And then the man was on his knees, something in his hand, raising it high above his head and bringing it down with all the strength he’d hoarded while he let Rutledge struggle to save them both.

Hamish shouted as Rutledge rolled, and the stone came thudding down without sound, ploughing deep into the wet sand, unstoppable with the renewed power of Cormac’s whole body behind it.

Enough, damn it, was enough!

Rutledge swung his foot and caught Cormac in the groin. He’d lost one shoe, but the toe of the other came into the soft flesh with the might of fury driving it, and Cormac screamed in a high-pitched howl of pain that could be heard above the sound of the water and the screech of the wind, rising in a gurgling, choking cry that was cut short as he doubled over in anguish, sobbing and spluttering as the next wave came in.

The cold water, Rutledge thought with fierce satisfaction, breathing hard with the effort he’d had to make, had turned out to be an ally after all ...

Reducing Olivia’s Lucifer to the human plane of mortal suffering.

He lay there on his back on the wet shingle, rain pouring down over his face, and felt the scrapes and bruises and aches begin to come alive. His elbow throbbed with an intensity that made him wonder if it was broken or only cracked. Under his ribs there was another sensation, of fire and ice, where something sharp had gone in, and his head was still splitting with pain. Every muscle burned with exhaustion. He wanted only to sleep.

After a long, suffering silence Cormac said, in one shuddering breath, “I knew—when I first saw you that—you were different—mettle.”

“Why did you kill them?”

“You’re the policeman,” he said after a time. “You tell me.”

There was silence again.

Then an odd passion filled Cormac’s cracked voice. “The first day—the first day I came here—the Hall held me fast. There was a warmth about it—I don’t know. But—Anne laughed at me, when she heard me tell a groom I’d give anything to live in such a place. I wanted to choke it back in her throat, that laughter! Instead I had to walk away and pretend I didn’t care. When she fell—when I pulled at her sash to make her fall out of the tree—and she died on the grass in front of me, I realized I’d just found a way to have everything I wanted—if I was careful, and patient. After that, after that they were none of them safe.”

“What about the man on the moors? Did you kill him too?” Rutledge asked, suddenly remembering.

“The tramp. There was a chance—they never found Richard, you see—I thought he’d come back one day—yes.” He was still doubled over, hugging his body, his face grimacing as the waves of pain subsided in their own good time.

From somewhere in the distance they could hear voices calling.

Cormac lifted his head in the darkness, and stared at Rut-ledge.

“You had better kill me now. If you don’t, I’ll ruin you in the courtroom. They’ll blame you—before I’m done—”

For a split second, there was an overwhelming temptation to take him at his word. Rutledge clamped down on it, the policeman in him routing the soldier who’d swiftly calculated the odds, and he heard Hamish growl when the policeman won. In satisfaction? Or regret. He was too spent to care.

“Or will they be glad to convict the Irish bastard whose deception took in half the City?” Rutledge answered, and got slowly, achingly to his feet. He reached down a hand, and then thought better of it, grabbing the back of Cormac’s collar instead and dragging him to his knees.

Cormac managed to stand, half bent over, then suddenly found the strength of will to stand straight, eye to eye with Rutledge.

Lucifer had been stopped but not vanquished. Not yet.

Down the strand Constable Dawlish appeared in the heavy rain, peering towards them and shouting, “I think they’re over here!”

Inspector Harvey, with Smedley at his back and Rachel coming up at the run, something in her arms—blankets, he thought as she stumbled and slipped down the path from the lawns.

Cormac swung to face them and smiled as Harvey clapped handcuffs over his wet wrists. Watching, Rutledge unconsciously braced himself. It would be an appalling trial. The tragedy—as always, in Rutledge’s eyes—was that the murderer could never be charged with the havoc he’d brought to other people’s lives, only with the deaths laid at his door. Smedley was right, it wasn’t over for the villagers of Borcombe. Not for Rachel and Susannah. Not even for Olivia and Nicholas and Rosamund ...

“And you. They’ll be after breaking you on the stand,” Hamish warned.

“They can try,” he answered, silently.

Rachel, looking up at him, said in a low, strained voice as she gripped his arm with wet, icy fingers. “I have to know. Was it me that Nicholas loved, or was it Olivia?” The words seemed to be torn from her, as if they had never been allowed to surface from the darkness of her dread. Until now.

Rutledge shook his head. And consciously told a lie, out of infinite compassion. “He didn’t want her to die alone,” he said. “It took courage to make such a choice. Forgive him for it.”

She bowed her head and began to cry.

When they’d taken Cormac away, and Rachel, her face set and pale, had followed Smedley back towards the village, Rutledge was left on the headland alone. Pulling one of the blankets she’d brought tighter against the cold air that had followed the storm, he limped across to where the black patch of burned grass had once been, even its shadowed outline filled in with green now, the ashes long since washed away.

He knew what had perished here in the fire Nicholas had built. Why Olivia and Nicholas chose that moonlit night of beauty in which to end it.

A love they couldn’t have.

After a time ... “I envy you both,” he said softly in the night, lifting his head to look up at the room where they had died.

As he turned towards Borcombe, the wind followed, but Rutledge wasn’t aware of it. He stopped at the end of the drive and looked once more at the house below the headland. It stood there dark and silent, man-made and vulnerable, yet somehow invested with a grace all its own.

And he knew, without knowing how, that Olivia was finally at peace.

But that he would be possessed, for a very long time, by the woman she had been.

Here s an excerpt from

Charles Todd’s next book

SEARCH THE DARK

Now available from

St. Martins/Minotaur

Paperbacks!

The murder appealed to be a crime of passion, the killer having left a trail of evidence behind him that even a blind man might have followed.

It was the identity of the victim, not the murderer, that brought Scotland Yard into the case.

No one knew who she was. Or, more correctly perhaps, what name she might have used since 1916. And what had become of the man and the two children who had been with her at the railway station? Were they a figment of the killer’s overheated imagination? Or were their bodies yet to be discovered?

The police in Dorset were quite happy to turn the search over to the Yard. And the Yard was very happy indeed to oblige, in the person of Inspector Ian Rutledge.

It began simply enough, with the London train pulling into the station at the small Dorset town of Singleton Magna. The stop there was always brief. Half a dozen passengers got off, and another handful generally got on, heading south to the coast. A few boxes and sacks were offloaded with efficiency, and the train rolled out almost before the acrid smoke of its arrival had blown away.

Today, late August and quite hot for the season, there was a man standing by the lowered window in the second-class car, trying to find a bit of air. His shirt clung to his back under the shabby suit, and his dark hair lay damply across his forehead. His face was worn, dejection sunk deep in the lines about his mouth and in the circles under tired eyes. He was young, but youth was gone.

Leaning out, he watched the portly Stationmaster helping a pale, drooping woman to the gate, the thin thread of her complaining voice just reaching him. “... such hardship” she was saying.

What did she know about hardship? he thought wearily. She had traveled first class, and the leather dressing case clutched in her left hand had cost more than most men earned in a month. If they were lucky enough to have a job.

There had been no work in London. But he’d heard there was a builder hiring down Lyme Regis way. The train was a luxury Bert Mowbray couldn’t afford. Still, jobs didn’t wait, and you sometimes had to make the extra effort. He refused to think what he would do if he’d guessed wrong and there was nothing at the end of his journey but a grim shake of the head and “No work. Sorry.”

His gaze idly followed a porter awkwardly trundling his cart full of luggage across the platform, followed by a pair of elderly women. The cars were already jammed with families on their way to the seaside, but room was found for two more. Then his eye was suddenly caught by another woman outside one of the cars farther down the train, kneeling to comfort a little girl who was crying. A boy much younger, not more than two, clung to the trouser leg of the man bending protectively over them, speaking to the woman and then to the little girl.

Mowbray stared at the woman, his body tight with shock and dismay. It couldn ‘t be Mary—

“My God!” he breathed, “Oh, my God!”

Turning from the window, he lunged for the door, almost knocking the wide-brimmed hat from the head of a startled farmer’s wife who couldn’t get out of his way fast enough. He tripped over her basket, losing precious seconds as he fought for his balance. Her companion stood up, younger and stouter, and demanded to know what he thought he was doing, her red, angry face thrust into his. The train jerked under his feet, and he realized it was moving. Pulling out—

“No! No—wait!”he screamed, but it was too late, the train had picked up momentum and was already out of the small station, a few houses flashing by before the town was swallowed up by distance and fields.

He was nearly incoherent with frustration and the intensity of his need. He yelled for the conductor, demanding that the train be stopped—now!

The conductor, a phlegmatic man who had dealt with drunken soldiers and whoring seamen during the war years, said soothingly, “Overslept your stop, did you? Never mind, there’s another just down the road a bit.”

But he had to restrain Mowbray before they reached the next station—the man seemed half out of his mind and was trying to fling himself off the train. Two burly coal stokers on their way to Weymouth helped the conductor wrestle him into a seat while a prim-mouthed spinster wearing a motheaten fox around her shoulders, never mind the heat, threatened to collapse into strong hysterics.

Mowbray had gone from wild swearing and threats to helpless, angry tears by the time the train lurched into the next town. He and his shabby case were heaved off without ceremony, and he was left standing on the station platform, disoriented and distraught.

Without a word to the staring Stationmaster, he handed in his ticket for Lyme Regis and set off at a smart pace down the nearest road in the direction of Singleton Magna.

But the woman and children and man were gone when he got to the town. And no one could tell him where to find them. He went to the only hotel, a small stone edifice called, with more imagination than accuracy, the Swan, demanding to know if a family of four had come in by the noon train. He stopped at the small shops that sold food and the two tearooms nearest the station, describing the woman first, then the children and the man. He badly frightened one clerk with his furious insistence that you must have seen them! You must!

He tracked down the carriage that served as the town taxi and angrily called the driver a liar for claiming he hadn’t set eyes on the woman or the man, much less the children.

“They’re not here, mate,” the middle-aged driver declared shortly, jerking a thumb toward the back. “See for yourself. Nobody like that came out of the station today while I was waiting. If you was to meet them here, it’s your misfortune, not mine. May be that you got your dates wrong.”

“But they can’t have vanished!” Mowbray cried. “I’ve got to find them. The bitch—the bitch!—they’re my children, she’s my wife! It isn’t right—I tell you, if she’s tricked me, I’ll kill her, I swear I will! Tell me where she’s got to, or I’ll throttle you as well!”

“You and who else?” the man demanded, jaw squared and face flushed with an anger that matched Mowbray’s.

All afternoon he haunted Singleton Magna, and a constable had to caution him twice about his conduct. But the fires of anger slowly burned down to a silent, white-hot determination that left him grim faced and ominously quiet. That evening he called at every house on the fringes of the town, asking about the woman. And the children. Had they come along this road? Had anyone see them? Did anyone know where they’d come from, or where they were going?

But the town shook its collective head and shut its collective doors in the face of this persistent, shabby stranger with frantic eyes.

Mowbray spent the night under a tree near the station, waiting for the next day’s noon train. He never thought of food, and he didn’t sleep. What was driving him was so fierce that nothing else mattered to him.

He stayed in Singleton Magna all that day as well, walking the streets like a damned soul that had lost its way back to hell and didn’t know where to turn next. People avoided him. And this time he avoided people, his eyes scanning for one figure in a rose print dress with a strand of pearls and hair the color of dark honey. By the dinner hour he had gone. Hardly anyone noticed.

When a farmer discovered a woman’s body that evening, the blood from her wounds had soaked deeply into the soil at the edge of his cornfield, like some ancient harvest sacrifice. He sent for the police, and the police, with admirable haste, took one look at her there on the ground and ordered a warrant for the arrest of the man who had been searching for her. Although there was no identification on the body, they were fairly sure she wasn’t a local woman. And the way her face had been battered, there had been a hot, desperate anger behind the blows. The missing wife, then, had been found. All that was left was to see that her murderer was brought to justice.

Late that same evening Mowbray was run to earth, roughly awakened from an exhausted sleep under the same tree outside the railway station. In a daze, not understanding what was happening to him or why, he allowed himself to be led off to the small jail without protest.

Afterward, the inspector in charge, congratulating himself on the swift solution of this crime practically on his doorstep, boasted to the shaken farmer on the other side of his tidy desk, “It was all in a day’s work. Just as it should be. Murder done, murderer brought in. Can’t stop crime altogether, but you can stop the criminals. That’s my brief.”

“I thought he was the one hunting all over town for his lost family?”

“So he was. Silly bugger! All but advertising what he was going to do when he found them.”

“But where are they, then? The husband and the children? They aren’t somewhere in my fields, are they? I won’t have your men tramping about in my corn, do you hear, not when it’s all but ready for the cutting! My wife will have a stroke, she’s that upset already! The doctor’s been and gone twice.”

Inspector Hildebrand sobered. He much preferred expanding on his success to any discussion of his failure. “We don’t know where they are. Yet. I’ve got my men searching now along the roadside. More than likely he’s done for the lot, but so far he’s sitting in his cell like a damned statue, as if he’s not hearing a word we say to him. But we’ll find them, never fear. And they’ll be dead as well, mark my words. Probably saved the woman for last, she got away from him, and he had to chase her. Just a matter of time, that’s all. We’ll find them in the end.”

He didn’t. In the end, it was Scotland Yard and Inspector Rutledge who had to sort through the tangled threads of deception and twisted allegiances. By that time it was far too late for Hildebrand to retreat from his entrenched position.

Ian Rutledge drove through the countryside with Hamish restive and moody in the back of his mind. Around them in the car the warm air carried the heavy smell of new-mown hay.

The scent of phosgene . . .

Will any of us ever be free of that memory? Rutledge asked himself. Of the silent destroyer that had rolled across the battlefields of the Front in clouds of gas? One learned quickly enough to tell them apart—mustard or phosgene or CNS. But familiarity had made them more terrifying, not less—knowing what they could do.

“It’s no’ the gas I can’t forget,” Hamish said roughly, “but the haying. August fourteen. I didna’ know there was an archduke getting himself killed somewhere in some place I’d no’ heard of. The hay ... and Fiona dusty with it on the wain, and the horses dark with sweat. God, it was fair, that August, and the MacDonalds swearing like wild men because they couldna’ keep up wi’ one MacLeod

“Yes, you told me that, the night—” Rutledge began aloud, and then quickly stopped. Corporal Hamish MacLeod had talked to him about the August haying the night he’d died. In France. Odd that memory turned on something as simple as the smell of new-mown hay!

And yet he was accustomed to answering the voice in his head out of old habit. 1916. The Somme. A bloodbath for months, the toll climbing astronomically, and men so tired their minds simply shut down. Assault after futile assault, and still the German line held.

Set against such appalling losses, one more casualty was insignificant. Yet the death of a young Scottish corporal had inscribed itself on Rutledge’s soul. It was Rutledge who commanded the firing squad that killed him, and Rutledge’s pistol that had delivered the coup de grace in the hour before dawn.

The act had been a military necessity. Hamish MacLeod had refused a direct order in battle; refused to lead his men one last time into certain death. Not cowardice, but exhaustion, and the sheer bloody senselessness of throwing lives away, had broken him. But for the sake of every soldier watching, an example had to be made. For the sake of thousands of men readying for the next assault, and example had to be made. You had to know, facing death, that you could depend on the man next to you, as he depended on you.

Rutledge could still feel that late summer heat. Hear the din—artillery, machine-gun fire, the curses and cries of the wounded men. Smell the sweat and fear. He could still see the grief in his corporal’s eyes, and the acceptance. It was a relief to die rather than lead his men back into the black hail of German fire.

And all for nothing!

The artillery shell found its mark an instant later, buried living and dead, officers and men, in heavy, stinking mud. Killing most of them outright, leaving the wounded survivors to suffocate before the search dogs could find them many hours later. And ironically, the next shell sprayed shrapnel into the machine gun position they’d failed to take all that long night.

Rutledge had barely survived.

Deaf and blind, badly stunned, he lay under the corpse of one of his men in a tiny pocket of air that had sufficed to keep him alive. He hadn’t known until someone had told him at the aid station that it was Hamish’s blood soaking his coat, Hamish’s flesh clotting his face and hair, the smell of Hamish’s torn body haunting him all the rest of that day as he lay dazed. Severely claustrophobic from a living grave, severely shell-shocked, bruised and disoriented, he had been allowed a few hours’ rest and was then sent back to the Front. And Hamish went with him.

A living reality in his mind. A voice with its soft Scottish burr. A personality as strong as it had been in life.

Rutledge never spoke of it. He fought it alone, silently, as certain as the breath in his body that it was only a matter of time before death—or madness—brought an end. That expectation kept him sane.

And so he had brought Hamish home again, not as a ghost to be exorcised but as a deep-seated presence in the shocked and numbed recesses of his brain where only sleep could shut it out.

He’d shared his thoughts with a dead man for so long it was easier to respond than risk the tap of a ghostly hand on his shoulder to attract his attention or a white, empty face at the edge of his vision, demanding to be heard. That hadn’t happened—yet—but Hamish was so real to him that Rutledge lived in mortal dread of turning too quickly one day or glancing over his shoulder at the wrong instant and catching a glimpse of the shadowy figure that must surely be there, just behind him. Within touching distance. Close enough for its breath to ruffle his hair or brush his cheek.

“There was a picnic, that August,” Rutledge said, desperate to change the drift of thought. “Up the Thames, beneath a stand of beeches so heavy the sun came through the leaves in purple shadows—”

And that particular memory led to Jean ... she was as dead to him as Hamish. This very week he’d seen her engagement announced in the Times. To a man who’d served in a diplomatic posting in South America through most of the war. Away from guns and carnage and nightmares.

“He’s in line for a position in Ottawa,” Frances had said when she called round to offer what comfort there was to give. His sister knew everyone there was to know—few bits of gossip failed to find their way to her. “Away from all this.” She waved a languid hand in the air, and he’d known what she meant.

Away from a Britain still wearing the scars of death and pain and the poverty of peace. Away from Rutledge’s torment, which had frightened Jean.