Watchers of Time

For Elayne K. McCullough—

For whom traveling the world was a joyous adventure

And whose friendship was a treasured gift.

And for Bill and her family, who brought her so much

happiness.

Bon voyage . . .

Praise for the novels of Charles Todd

WATCHERS OF TIME

“A COMPELLING MYSTERY RICH WITH DEPTH AND SHADING.”

— The Washington Post Book World

“A SPOT-ON RECREATION OF THE 1919 PERIOD, SOME WILY USE OF THE TITANIC TRAGEDY AND VILLAGERS’ XENOPHOBIA, AND THE MOST PERSISTENT PLAGUING BY A GHOST SINCE MACBETH. TODD FANS WILL QUEUE UP FOR THIS ONE.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“COMPELLING . . . PSYCHOLOGICALLY ASTUTE.”

—Publishers Weekly

“POIGNANTLY MOVING AND SUSPENSEFUL . . . THIS IS A SERIES THAT ONLY GROWS STRONGER AS IT GOES ALONG.”

—Romantic Times

LEGACY OF THE DEAD

“ELOQUENT . . . RICH.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“TIGHTLY WORKED, POIGNANT . . . A MOST MOVING STORY.”

— Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

“A RICH, COMPLEX NOVEL INTELLIGENTLY WRITTEN AND VERY AFFECTING.”

—The Purloined Letter

“IMMENSELY INTRIGUING . . . A FINE, UNIQUE, AND MOVING MYSTERY.”

—Booklist

“POWERFUL.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“SUPERB . . . CLAIM[S] OUR INTEREST AND HOLD[S] US FAST UNTIL THE LAST CHILLING PAGE.”

—Romantic Times

“READERS WILL CONTINUE TO BE CAPTIVATED BY TODD’S PORTRAIT OF THE DANGEROUSLY UNRAVELING DETECTIVE, AND HIS EQUALLY INCISIVE EVOCATION OF THE GRIEVING POSTWAR WORLD.”

—Publishers Weekly

“MUCH MORE THAN YOUR AVERAGE ENGLISH COUNTRY HOUSE MYSTERY.”

—Mystery Lovers Bookshop News

A TEST OF WILLS

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

“TODD GIVES US A SUPERB CHARACTERIZATION OF A MAN WHOSE WOUNDS HAVE MADE HIM INTO A STRANGER IN HIS OWN LAND, AND A DISTURBING PORTRAIT OF A COUNTRY INTOLERANT OF ALL STRANGERS.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“TODD DEPICTS THE OUTER AND INNER WORLDS OF HIS CHARACTERS WITH AUTHORITY AND SYMPATHY AS HE CLOSES IN ON HIS SURPRISING —AND CONVINCING—CONCLUSION.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“THE EMOTIONAL AND PHYSICAL CARNAGE IN WORLD WAR I IS USED TO REMARKABLE EFFECT.”

—Chicago Tribune

SEARCH THE DARK

“TODD WORKS . . . VOLATILE ELEMENTS INTO A REMARKABLE VILLAGE MYSTERY . . . DRIVEN BY CHARACTERS OF GREAT PSYCHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“TODD’S IAN RUTLEDGE MYSTERIES ARE AMONG THE MOST INTELLIGENT AND AFFECTING BEING WRITTEN THESE DAYS.”

—The Washington Post Book World

WINGS OF FIRE

“[TODD WRAPS] HIS CHALLENGING PLOT, COMPLEX CHARACTERS, AND SUBTLE PSYCHOLOGICAL INSIGHTS IN THICK LAYERS OF ATMOSPHERE.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“A STRONG MYSTERY, FILLED WITH FINE CHARACTERIZATIONS [AND] A SUPERB EYE FOR CORNWALL . . . WISE AND WILY.”

—The Boston Globe

CHAPTER 1

SEPTEMBER 1919

Osterley

DR. STEPHENSON TURNED AWAY FROM THE bed where the dying man lay breathing so lightly the blanket over his thin chest barely stirred. His bony, restless fingers plucking at the edge of the wool were the only signs of life and awareness. Twice the young woman sitting on the bed beside him had tried to still them, covering them with her own, but her father’s hand picked up the silent tattoo again, like a drummer remembering his place, as soon as she released it. He had already frayed an inch of the binding. She gave up and sat back, sighing.

His face was grooved by illness, and a stubble of beard emphasized the lines, like a rough landscape of suffering below the sun-weathered skin of forehead and nose. Shaggy gray eyebrows hung heavily over the sunken lids. Age weighed him down, but there was a certain strength there as well, as if life had made him fight for all he had, and he had not forgotten the battles.

Catching the eyes of the man’s sons, who were standing on the far side of the bed, faces in shadows cast by the scarf draped over the lamp’s shade, the doctor nodded toward the window across the room, out of earshot of the patient. The young woman looked up as they moved away, but stayed where she was. She didn’t want to hear what was being whispered.

Another gust of wind swept the front of the house, and rain was driven heavily against the panes, rattling them. The storm had stalled, as they sometimes did here along the coast, reluctant to move inland and lose itself in the hilly terrain there. For three hours or more it had hovered over the village, flailing everyone and everything out in the open.

The older of the two brothers bent his head to catch the words as Stephenson said softly, “He’s moving comfortably and peacefully toward the end. There’s nothing more I can do. But he might wish to have Mr. Sims here? And I should think your sister would be comforted as well.”

Mr. Sims was the Vicar.

The younger brother answered, “Yes. I’ll go for him, then.” He went quietly across the room to the door. The scarf that shaded the lamp by the bed riffled as he passed, and the light flashed once across his face. There were wet trails of tears on his cheeks.

His sister reached out and briefly took his rough hand.

The other brother sighed. “He’s had a long life, Pa has. But not that long. Sixty-four. We’d thought he’d be with us another five, ten years. His own father lived to just past eighty. And Uncle Tad’s young for seventy-six.” He shook his head.

“Your uncle Thadeus has the constitution of an ox,” Stephenson agreed. “He may well outlive your grandfather’s years. But your father’s heart has given out, and his body must follow.” He studied the grieving man’s face, noting the deep lines of worry and sleeplessness. Hetty Baldwin, his housekeeper’s daughter, was getting a good man in Martin Baker, the doctor told himself. Much like Herbert in character—God-fearing, with strong ties to his family and a fierce sense of duty. It was a sound match. “Everything happens in God’s own time, you know. Even this. And it’s a kindness that he won’t linger.” He spoke the words as comfort, then nodded toward the bed. “See if you can persuade Elly to rest a little. She’s hardly stirred from his side since yesterday morning. We’ll call her if there’s any—urgency. She will only wear herself into collapse, driving herself like this.”

“I’ve tried, to no avail.” Martin turned toward the window, lifting the curtain and pulling aside the shade a little to look out. Rain ran down the glass in rivulets, pushed against the house by the wind. A filthy night, he thought. A fitting night for death to come. . . . He dropped the shade back in place and said to Dr. Stephenson, “There’s naught to be done to make it easier on her?”

“I’ll leave something. A sleeping draught. Give it to Elly in a glass of water, when your father is gone. And, Martin—see that Dick doesn’t insist on being one of the pallbearers. That shoulder of his is not fully healed, and the socket will never be as strong as it was. He’s not out of the woods yet. He could still lose the arm if he’s not careful. The army surgeons can’t work miracles without a little help!”

“I’ll remember.”

“Good man!” A clap on Martin’s shoulder for comfort, and then Stephenson walked back to the bed. He reached down and touched Elly’s hands, folded tightly in her lap. They were cold, shaking. “Your father is comfortable. He would want you to be the same. Let Martin fetch you a shawl, at least.”

She nodded, unable to reply. The gray head on the pillow moved, first to the right, then toward the left. Herbert Baker’s eyes opened, and focused on his daughter’s face. He said in a gravelly voice, “I want a priest.”

The doctor leaned down and replied reassuringly, “Yes, Dick has just gone to fetch Mr. Sims.”

“I want a priest!” the old man repeated querulously.

“He’s coming, Papa!” Elly said, fighting her tears. “Can you hear me? He’ll be here quite soon—”

“Priest,” her father demanded. “Not Vicar.”

“Herbert,” the doctor said soothingly, “let me lift you while Elly gives you a little water—”

The dark, pleading eyes shifted to the doctor’s face. “I want a priest,” the dying man said very clearly this time, refusing to be distracted.

The bedroom door opened and Dick was ushering in the Vicar. “I met him on his way here,” he told them. “Coming to see if we had need of him.”

Mr. Sims was taller than Dick, thinner, and not much older. “I’ve been sitting with Mrs. Quarles, and thought it best to call on you before going home,” the Vicar explained. Herbert Baker had taken all day to die. Most of the town knew the end was near, a matter of hours at best. Sims had stopped in twice before.

Sims reached out to touch Elly’s arm, saying easily, “Ellen, do you think you could find a cup of tea for us? We could use the warmth on such a wet night.”

She flushed shyly. “Tea? Oh—yes. I’ve just to put the kettle on.”

Smoothing the blanket over her father, she got up, leaving the room with reluctance. Sims took the place on the bed that she’d vacated and squarely met the intent eyes of the old man. “You’ve had a good life, Herbert Baker. You were married to a fine woman—a caring wife and a devoted mother. Both your sons survived the War, and have work. Elly is a lovely girl. God has been kind to you.”

“Thank’ee, Vicar, and I’ll have you say a prayer for me after the priest goes!”

The Vicar looked up at Martin, then said, “Dr. Stephenson?”

“He’s been asking for a priest. Just now, before you came in. I don’t know why—”

Dick said, “Father James is the only priest in Osterley. He’s a Catholic—”

“That’s right—he’s the one!” Herbert Baker said with more will than strength. Something in the depths of his eyes flared with hope.

Martin said, “If that’s what he wants, humor him, then. Dick, go and see if Father James will come here.” His brother hesitated, glancing uneasily at the Vicar, as if he’d just been asked to commit heresy. But Mr. Sims nodded encouragement, and Dick went out the door.

Martin said, “You’ll stay?” to Sims.

From the bed came the single word “Stay.” The lined face was exhausted, as if speaking was a greater effort than he could manage.

Sims replied, “I’ll go to the kitchen, then. From the look of her, Ellen is more in need of that tea than I am!” Rising from the bed, he added gently, “I’ll be within call, Herbert. Never fear.” His smile was reassuring.

Herbert nodded; his eyes closed. The wind had dropped again and on the roof overhead the rain seemed to fall softly now, with a summer patter.

Dr. Stephenson said quietly to Sims, “He’s sound enough in his mind. But dying men often have whims like this. Best to humor him!”

“Yes. I knew a wounded man in the War who wanted to be buried with his little dog. Only he didn’t have a dog. But when they came to bury him, his arms were folded across his chest as if he’d held one as he died. Strange comfort, but who are we to question?”

The Vicar went out the door, shutting it quietly behind him. There were voices on the stairs. Sims speaking to Ellen. And then they went down again together.

The room was silent. Martin watched his father for a time, and then said anxiously to Stephenson, “It’ll be an easy passing?”

“As easy as any. His heart will stop. And his breathing will follow. He will be asleep long before that. I didn’t expect him to wake at all. I thought he’d reached the last stage.”

Herbert, roused by their voices, said, “Is the priest here, then?”

“Not yet, Papa,” Martin answered, lowering himself to sit on the bed. “Dick’s gone to fetch him.” He gripped his father’s hands, unable to say anything, a plain man with few graces. But the warmth of his fingers seemed to give a measure of peace to his dying father. Martin cleared his throat hoarsely, warmed in his turn.

The silence lengthened. After nearly a quarter of an hour, Dick came in, bringing a short and balding man of middle age in his wake. Father James greeted Stephenson with a nod and came to shake Martin’s outstretched hand. His fingers were cold from the night air. “I understand your father has been asking for a priest,” he said, his face showing only concern.

“I don’t know why, Father—”

“Nor does it matter. I’ll speak to him, then, shall I?” It was a question asked gracefully, setting Martin at his ease. The priest turned quietly to bend over the bed. After a moment he said, “Mr. Baker? Herbert? It’s Father James. What can I do to help you?”

Baker opened his eyes, seemed to have difficulty focusing them, then blinked as he looked up at the white clerical collar, clearly visible against the black cloth. “Father James, is it?”

“Yes.” As a thin, trembling hand came out from under the blanket, Father James reached for it and the claw seemed to lock onto his.

“Send them away!” Herbert Baker said. “Just you and me.”

Father James glanced across at the anxious faces of Baker’s two sons and then at Dr. Stephenson. The three men nodded briefly, walked to the door, and went out, their shoes loud on the wide boards of the passage, then moving together down the stairs.

Father James, waiting until they were well out of earshot, looked around to collect some impression of this man lying in the bed waiting for death to come. He knew who the Bakers were, but had seldom exchanged more than a word or two with any of them.

It was a big room set under the eaves, with simple but sturdy furnishings, and a worn carpet on the floor. Someone had painted watercolors of the sea and framed them for hanging. An amateur’s hand, the sunrises and ships vigorous, but showing an untrained eye. The family had taken pride in them, to frame them. The single window faced the street, the shade pulled against the night and the curtains drawn across it.

So many houses in the town had this same air of working-class austerity, Father James found himself thinking. Osterley’s years of prosperity lay in the past—well before Herbert Baker’s time. No one starved, but people here worked hard for their bread.

As the priest turned back to the bed, he saw the woman’s photograph on the table beside it. The soft whisper of the rain faded, then revived as a squall, the wind sending a gust of drafts into the house and making the lamp dance to its fitful tune. Baker’s wife? She had died before the War, as he recalled, and this must have been taken some ten years before that. The daughter—Ellen?—looked much like her. The same dark hair and sweet face, staring at the camera with trusting and expectant eyes.

He sat down carefully on the bed’s edge, where Ellen and the Vicar had sat before him, and said in the voice that was his greatest gift as a priest, deep and steadfast, “I’m here. We are alone in the sight of God. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, tell me how I may serve you?”

Nearly half an hour later, Father James walked down the stairs of the Baker house, and found the family, the doctor, and the Vicar waiting for him in the small, very Victorian parlor. Tea had been brought and poured, but the cups were still more than half full, sitting forgotten. Wind rattled the shutters, a theatrical announcement of his appearance, like a drumroll.

Every face had turned toward the priest, all eyes pinning him in the doorway, concern mixed with weariness and not a little curiosity in their expressions. Father James cleared his throat and said into the expectant silence, “Your father is resting quietly now. He has asked me to reassure you that he wishes to be buried in accordance with his own beliefs, with Mr. Sims officiating. I have served him by giving him a little comfort. If he should require me again, you’ve only to let me know. And now, if you’ll forgive me, I must go. It is late—”

He was offered refreshment, he was offered the gratitude of the grieving family. Prevailed upon by Mr. Sims, he sat and drank a cup of lukewarm tea, out of kindness. Dr. Stephenson, watching him, was struck by the tension around his eyes, putting it down to the awkwardness of being in an unfamiliar household among strangers not of his faith. The two of them, doctor and priest, had shared many long watches together over the years, and Stephenson had always found him a strong and dependable ally in the business of offering peace to the dying and solace to the survivors. Even so, the face of death was never commonplace. One learned to accept, that was all.

Father James behaved with sympathetic courtesy toward Herbert Baker’s children, that deep voice bringing a measure of comfort to Ellen, as it had to her father. Dick and Martin, both slack-faced with exhaustion, appeared to find a renewal of strength in his assurance that Herbert Baker had made his peace with his God and had not changed his faith. Simple men, they couldn’t fathom their father’s odd behavior, and were half embarrassed by it. Father James, understanding that, said only, “Your father was not frivolous. At the end, we are all in need of God’s grace, like a child before his father. I’m some years older than the Vicar. Perhaps to a man of Herbert Baker’s age, it mattered.” He smiled across the tea table at Sims.

The Vicar looked up. Tansy, the liver-and-white spaniel sitting by his chair, patiently waited for Sims’s fingers to resume scratching behind the curly ears. He said, almost diffidently, “In the War it was the same. They were so young, most of them. But old in experience that I couldn’t match. I sent more than a few of them along to the Methodist chaplain, who was closer to their fathers’ age than I was. That seemed to be the best thing to do for them.” Then he turned the conversation, adding to Father James, “You must be thanking God that this weather held until after your Autumn Fete at St. Anne’s. It was a blessing. . . .”

Ellen said, “Martin went with Hetty to the bazaar. He brought me a brush for Tansy, and a new lead.” A smile lit her pale face, and then faltered. “Papa was well enough to go last year.”

“So he was,” the Vicar answered, returning her smile. “He has been a rock of strength each spring at Holy Trinity, too. I always took pleasure in working with him.”

As soon as it was decently possible, Father James rose and took his leave. Martin Baker escorted him to the door and thanked him again. The priest stepped out into the night. The rain had dropped off once more, and there was only the wind to keep him company on his long walk home.

Dr. Stephenson, climbing the stairs once more, found that the priest was right: Herbert Baker seemed to be resting quietly, slowly losing his grip on life.

In the small hours of the night, the man died peacefully, his family gathered about him. His daughter, Ellen, sobbed quietly and his two sons watched in anguish as he drew several short, uncertain breaths, then stopped breathing altogether, only a thin sigh passing his lips. The Vicar, by his side, prayed for Herbert Baker’s soul as the sigh faded.

The funeral was well attended, and Herbert Baker, coachman by trade, was sent to his eternal rest with the goodwill of a village that had known him to be an honest and plainspoken man with no vices and no outstanding talents, except perhaps for loyalty.

A week after the funeral, Dr. Stephenson returned to his surgery late one afternoon to find Father James just walking out the door.

“Well met!” Stephenson exclaimed, with pleasure. “Come in, let me pour myself a drink, and I shall be at your service. First babies are not to be hurried! This one kept his mother and me awake all of the night and well into the afternoon, and I’ve missed my breakfast, my lunch, and my usual hours.” He led the way back through the doorway, down the passage, and into his private office. The room smelled of wax and disinfectant, a blend that Father James found to be a sneeze-maker. He dragged out his handkerchief, sneezed heartily three times, and grinned crookedly at Stephenson.

“You should hear me when they’ve waxed the pews and the confessional at St. Anne’s! The blessing is, I’m not bothered by incense.”

The office was small, painted a pleasing shade of blue, and offered three chairs for visitors as well as the more comfortable old leather one behind the doctor’s broad wooden desk. Dr. Stephenson settled into that, and Father James took his accustomed place in the ancient wingback. As Stephenson lifted the bottle of sherry and offered it to him, the priest said, “No, thank you. I’ve another call to make, and she’s temperance-mad. I’ll lose my reputation if I reek of good sherry.”

Stephenson grinned. “How does she manage communion wine, then?”

“It’s consecrated, and the evil of the grape has been taken out.”

The doctor chuckled, then poured his own glass. “Yes, well, the mind is a wonderful thing, wonderful.”

“It’s about the mind I’ve come,” Father James said slowly.

“Oh, yes?” Stephenson sipped his sherry with relish, letting it warm him.

“I’d like to ask you if Herbert Baker was in full control of his faculties when he called me to him on his deathbed.”

“Baker? Yes, well, that was an odd business, I daresay. But he was dying of congestive heart failure, and his mind was, as far as I could tell, clear to the end of consciousness. Any reason why you feel it might not have been?” His voice lifted on a query. Stephenson was a man who liked his own life and that of his patients as tidy as possible.

“No,” the priest replied. “On the other hand, I’m seldom asked to second-guess Mr. Sims’s parishioners. Or he mine, for that matter. It was curious, and I found myself wondering about it afterward. Baker most certainly appeared in full control, though understandably weak. Still, you never know.”

“Which reminds me,” Stephenson said, turning the subject to something on his own mind. “There’s one of your flock I do want to talk about. Mrs. Witherspoon. She’s been refusing to take her pills again, and I’m—er—hanged if I can understand it.”

The priest smiled. “There’s a challenge for you. At a guess, I’d say that when she feels a little stronger, she’s convinced she doesn’t need them. Then she feels unwell again and quickly takes two to make up for it. A good-hearted woman, but not overly blessed with common sense. If I were you, I’d have a talk with her husband. She pays more heed to what he says than to anyone else. The sun shines out of Mr. Witherspoon, in her view.”

The ironmonger was the most lugubrious man in Osterley.

Stephenson laughed. “The eye of the beholder. Well, there’s a thought. That woman will make herself seriously ill if she doesn’t heed someone!” He looked at his wine, golden in the little glass. “I had a patient once who swore that sherry was Spanish sunlight caught in a bottle. Never been to Spain myself; I’m hard-pressed to escape for a few hours in Yarmouth. But there’s most certainly medicinal magic in it.” He finished the wine, then said, “How are those triplets of yours?”

Father James beamed. The triplets were his younger sister’s children and lived some distance away. “Thriving. Sarah is coping, with the help of two nuns I found for her, and every member of the family we can dragoon into service. I’ve done my own turn walking the floor at night. I expect those boys will be holy terrors by the time they’re eight. Their father was something of a devil himself at twelve!”

Stephenson said, “Aren’t we all? But responsibility comes soon enough.”

The priest’s face changed subtly. “It does. I’ll be on my way, then. Get some rest, you look as if you could use it!”

Watching him out the door, Stephenson had the curious feeling that Father James should take his own advice.

Nearly two weeks had passed since the funeral. Stephenson, rested and busy, had long since put Herbert Baker out of his mind when he took his wife to visit friends.

It was a dinner party like a dozen others the doctor attended with some enthusiasm whenever he could. There were eight couples, and he’d known all of them for years. Comfortable with each other, sharing a common history, they had found in one another a companionship that had few boundaries. Stephenson could count most of them as his patients, and his wife had sat on committees of one sort or another with every one of the women—church bazaars, flower arrangements, food baskets for the poor, spring fetes, charity cases, visiting the sick, welcoming newcomers to Osterley, and generally forming an ad hoc social group that was as small as it was select.

He couldn’t have said afterward how the subject arose. Someone asked a question, another guest expanded on it, and a wife raised a laugh by adding her own views. Stephenson found himself picking up the thread, and the next thing he knew, he was telling the story of a dying patient who had wanted to hedge his bets in the next life by seeing both the Vicar and the priest.

One of the guests leaned forward. “Was that old Baker? My wife remarked to me that she’d seen Father James walking out of Baker’s front door one night in a pouring rain, saying good-bye to young Martin on the step. I told her she must have been mistaken—Baker was sexton for seventeen years at Holy Trinity!”

Richard Cullen said, “Had the right idea, though, didn’t he? Who was it that said Paris was worth a Mass?”

That dissolved into a debate over whether it was Henri IV and progressed to a recital of the opening lines of “The Vicar of Bray.” Herbert Baker had been forgotten once more.

It was late in the evening on the second of October when Father James returned to the Victorian Gothic house that served as St. Anne’s rectory. He let himself in through the unlocked kitchen door, grateful for the lamp still burning on the small table by the window, and sniffed appreciatively at the lingering aroma of bacon. He crossed the room to peer into the oven. His dinner was sitting on the rack in a covered dish. Lifting the lid, he saw that the contents were a little dry but certainly still delicious. There were onions as well, and what appeared to be a Scotch egg.

The housekeeper, Mrs. Wainer, had—as always— remembered that the body needed nurturing as well as the soul. He could feel the saliva flow in his mouth. Onions were his greatest love.

Father James set the lid in place and closed the oven door. Tired from a long vigil by a very ill parishioner, he stretched his shoulders as he straightened his back. The chair by the bed had been too low, and his muscles had knotted. But the man had lived, thank God. His family needed him.

He went down the passage that led past the parlor and the small music room that he had converted into a parish office. In the darkness he moved with the ease of long familiarity. As he reached the hall by the front door, he could hear the clock in the parlor cock itself to strike the hour, the whirr of the gears a soft sound that stopped him, one hand on the newel post at the foot of the stairs.

The clear golden chimes always reminded him of the house where he had grown up—the clock had come from there—and the laughter of his mother and father, sharing the reading of a book as the children sprawled at their feet. It had been a nightly ritual just before bedtime, and it was something he himself, celibate and alone, missed. Mark had died in the War, killed on the Somme, and Judith had died of the influenza, taking her unborn child with her. But Sarah had brought her triplets alive into the world, and he looked forward to the day when their rowdy spirits and lively voices would brighten the silence of the old rectory. Sarah had already promised them for a week each year, though they were not yet three months old. He smiled to himself at the thought. Mrs. Wainer, bless her, would probably quit in dismay.

As the chimes echoed into silence, he went on up the stairs to his study on the first floor. The lamp on the desk wasn’t lit, but one in his bedroom was burning, a low flame that guided his movements. He went through the bedroom door to put his case and coat away, and then wash his hands before dinner.

Coming back into the dark study, he failed to see the shadow that stood immobile in the deeper shadows beside his private altar. The gold chain on the priest’s chest gleamed in the moonlight pouring through the windows. Noticing that the draperies hadn’t been drawn, Father James crossed the room to pull them to, reaching high over his head to move the heavy velvet across the wooden rod. The first pair were only half shut when the shadow stepped out directly behind the priest. In the figure’s hand was the heavy crucifix that had always stood on the altar between a slender pair of candlesticks. It was lifted high, and the base of the cross brought down with stunning force, straight into the bald head that seemed, in this light, to be tonsured and unnaturally white.

A target that was so clear it seemed to draw a sigh from the priest. He began to crumple, like old clothes falling to the floor. The crucifix was lifted again, the base flashing in the pale light as it descended a second time. As the priest hit the carpet with an ugly thump, the bloody scalp was struck a third time.

Then, with efficient grace, the shadow stepped back, dropped the crucifix from a gloved hand, and set about silently, swiftly, wrecking the room.

The police, summoned the next morning by a distraught Mrs. Wainer, took note of the food left untouched in the oven, the black blood pooled beneath the priest’s head there by the window, and the state of the room: the paper-strewn floor and the scattered contents of the desk drawers. They examined the tin box that lay upside down and pried open with scissors, emptied of parish funds. And came to the conclusion that Father James, returning home unexpectedly, had been attacked by someone he’d disturbed in the midst of a burglary.

Not a target. A victim.

He’d heard a noise in the house, they concluded, discovered there was an intruder upstairs, and gone to the window intending to see if there was anyone at home next door. The neighbor had three nearly grown sons—it would have taken only a few seconds to unlatch the window and call to them to come and search the house with the priest. The alarmed thief, very likely concealed in the bedroom just behind the study, must have seen Father James at the window and hastily reached for the first weapon that came to hand—the crucifix—striking the priest down from behind to stop him from calling for help. In his terror he’d hit the priest again, and then fled, the money from the box in his pocket. Muddy shoe prints near the lilac bush showed a worn heel, a tear in the sole near the toe. A poor man, then, and desperate.

As luck would have it, the house next door, usually noisy with three generations of family, had stood empty the previous night. Taking even the elderly grandmother with them, they’d traveled to West Sherham to meet the girl one of their sons wished to marry. But the thief couldn’t have known that.

If the family had been at home, they’d have arrived in force, very likely in time to glimpse the fleeing man. It would have been satisfying to have a description of the killer.

The townspeople of Osterley, whether members of St. Anne’s, Holy Trinity, or no church at all, were shocked and horrified. They gathered in little clusters, silent for the most part or carrying on conversations that ended in head shakes and stunned disbelief. A few women wept into their handkerchiefs, red-eyed with grief and misgivings. Children were shushed, told to go to their rooms, questions unanswered. It was a wicked thing, to kill a clergyman. No one could recall even having heard of such a crime happening before in Norfolk—certainly not in living memory! Osterley would be the talk of East Anglia. . . .

Mr. Sims, trying to minister to his flock as well as the murdered priest’s until the Bishop could send someone else down from Norwich, heard the same litany again and again. “He was such a good, caring man! He’d have helped whoever it was, given them the money, done his best for them— there was no need to kill him!”

A growing aura of suspicion spread through the town, as people tried to second-guess the police.

Then it slowly began to occur to inhabitants, one after another, that the killer couldn’t be a local man. Not someone they knew. It simply wasn’t possible.

Still, eyes turned suspiciously, glanced over shoulders, followed this man or that down the street with furtive conjecture—an unease spreading like a silent illness through the town.

Mr. Sims found himself thinking that there was a reason for killing Father James, if he’d seen the face of the man invading his home and threatening him with the crucifix from his own altar. Recognition was knowledge—and there were some who might be afraid that even the compassion of a priest had its limits.

Fear was seldom ruled by reason; it reacted to danger first and logic afterward. The first blow must surely have been fear—the succeeding blows could have been fear, or could have been cunning, the need to silence. How was anyone to know, until the priest’s killer had been found?

Sims tried not to look into the faces of the people of Osterley and speculate. But he couldn’t stop himself from doing it. Human nature was human nature. He was no different from the rest of his neighbors.

The War had taught Sims that frightened men did whatever they had to do to stay alive. And in the trenches, killing had become a natural reaction to peril. He wondered if the priest’s attacker was an unemployed former soldier, one so desperate that he’d felt no compunction about taking life.

One man in Osterley came close to meeting those criteria. Sims refused to entertain the likelihood that he would ever kill again.

The Vicar scolded himself for such unchristian speculation. Surely not even a war-hardened veteran would kill a priest!

All the same, how far would the few pounds stolen from the rectory go? How long before empty pockets drove the killer—whoever he was—to strike again?

That night—for the first time since he’d come to Osterley nine years before—Mr. Sims locked his doors. The vicarage stood behind a high wall in an expanse of wooded lawn, old trees that had always been his pride and given him a sense of continuity with those who had served Holy Trinity before him. Now the house seemed isolated and secretive, hidden away and intolerably vulnerable.

He told himself it was merely a precaution, to lock his doors.

In bitter fact, he was coming to terms with the unexpected discovery that the Cloth, which had always seemed his armor and his shield, was neither, and that a man of God was no safer than any other householder.

CHAPTER 2

OCTOBER 1919

London

RUTLEDGE CUT HIMSELF SHAVING AND SWORE.

His sister Frances, sitting in the chintz-covered chair by the window, winced but said nothing. When he did it again, she couldn’t stop herself.

“Darling, must you carve up your face on your own? Or could I do it for you? Surely I’m a better butcher than you are?” The words were light, intentionally.

He shook his head. “If I’m to return to work, I must learn to manage.” He was on medical leave from the Yard, and it was dragging on, day into endless day, chafing his spirit.

She regarded the heavy bandages that swathed his chest, still binding one arm close to his body. “I’m surprised the Yard will allow you back until that comes off. Surely there are regulations? You can barely button your own shirt, and I’ve done up your shoes for you all these weeks. A half-dressed policeman is hardly a proper representative of the majesty of the law?”

“Frances. Shut up!”

“Yes, I know, it isn’t a pleasant reminder, is it? I’m sorry. But I do think you may be acting prematurely.”

He put down his razor, splashed water on his face, and groped for a towel. The razor went sailing across the room. This time he swore silently.

Hamish, reflecting his anger, said, “Aye, it isna’ a brave thing you do, merely foolhardy.”

Rutledge said, “I am going mad cooped up in these rooms.” The words served to answer both of them.

Frances said, deliberately misunderstanding him, “Yes, you must be. I did ask you to stay longer at the house. It’s still warm enough to sit in the gardens in the afternoon, or walk across the street into the square. You can come back again, if you like.” She had brought him there from hospital, and found a nurse to care for him until he could fend for himself, then taken over the chore of getting him dressed and undressed each day while he impatiently healed. Wounded tigers, she had thought more than once, would have been less of a handful.

But in the beginning, when she’d been summoned north, she had been terrified that he’d die before she got there. She’d only just got used to him being home and safe, with War’s end. After four bitter years of killing, her brother had come back to her alive and so she had let her guard down at last. Policemen weren’t supposed to be shot in the line of duty. The shock had left her breathless. Still, she’d done her best not to fuss over him. . . .

Rutledge, who understood the unspoken concern that lay behind his sister’s efforts to keep him under her eye, had found it impossible to explain to her that he preferred his own flat, where he could swear at the pain or pace the floor at night or simply sit with his eyes closed until the worst had passed. Instead he’d merely said that he needed to learn to do for himself again.

Now he gingerly stooped and picked up the razor, then turned to grin at her. “Frances, you are the most capable woman I’ve ever met. When it comes to dealing with a crisis, you have no peer. All the same, it’s easier, sometimes, not to have witnesses.”

She smiled. “Yes, Father was just the same. I can’t remember a time when he was ill that he didn’t want to find himself a burrow somewhere and crawl off until he was better. It drove Mama to despair.” The smile faded. “But returning to work, Ian—is it wise?”

Rutledge studied her. She knew, a little, what he’d been through in the War. Not all of it. She knew that he had been shell-shocked. But not that he had brought back from the Western Front the living voice of a dead man, Corporal Hamish MacLeod. Nor did she know what it was like to order a man shot, or to send weary and battle-worn men into certain death. To walk on the maggot-ridden bodies of corpses, or watch a friend die hideously, screaming. Nothing deadened such memories. They stayed bottled up. Raw, brutal, barbarous. The stuff of nightmares that the mind scrambles to bury deeper and deeper, just to survive, until there was no way to exorcise the demons that had seized possession of part of him.

There were stories he could tell when friends or colleagues asked “How was it over there?” And these were tailored to each listener. For some, humorous accounts of the incessant rain and sucking mud. The lack of water for bathing. How necessary it was to shave, so that the gas masks fit properly. To others he spoke of acts of bravery he’d witnessed, or the kindness of the nursing sisters. To a few he was comfortable discussing the shared danger that had turned men who had almost nothing else in common into brothers. But seldom the whole truth for anyone, only a small measure of it. It was, he thought, better that way.

“This is no’ a wound of war,” Hamish reminded him now. “You made yourself a target, on purpose.”

Yet in some ways the confinement of this healing had once again left him vulnerable to all the horrors he’d fought these past five months to overcome. Now they were creeping out again in spite of him, reaching out to pull him back into the morass of despair and hopelessness he’d struggled so fiercely to leave behind. In the distraction of work, the subsequent exhaustion that brought him dreamless sleep, the concentration that kept Hamish at bay, he had scraped together a measure of peace.

“Until Scotland.” It was a refrain that Hamish had dinned in his head day and night for the past three weeks. Until Scotland . . .

Rutledge told his sister lightly, forcing the shadows out of his conscious mind, “There’s sanity in work. I’ve a desk full of papers to get through—hardly a test of endurance. And I am on sick leave, not permanent disability. This will heal, in good time.” Unlike the spirit . . . “It’s little more than a week early.”

Frances was that rare woman who knew when to stop persuading and start encouraging. “All right, then, let’s try a compromise. You can manage your own breakfast, and find yourself a midday meal, but come to me for your dinner. At least I can be sure you’re eating properly. You don’t, you know. You are far too thin, still—”

But it wasn’t eating improperly that kept Rutledge thin and drawn. It was so many hauntings . . . Hamish. The War. The impossibility of forgetting, when England was full of wounded men, struggling to go about lives that years in the trenches had altered irretrievably. People looked away from such men now, embarrassed by them, unable to think what to say to them. The War was finished. Over and done with. Except for the crosses in Flanders’s Fields. And the living reminders no one quite knew what to do with. He saw himself a dozen times an hour on the streets—among the amputees, the blind, the ugly coughing of the gassed—even though he’d come home from France whole in body. His wounds were invisible, yet he shared the misery of such men. Even now he could see clearly the poor devil he’d watched from his window that very morning, clumsily managing his crutches and attempting to steer a reasonably straight course among the passersby. Or the hideously burned face passing under the street lamp three nights ago, long after dark. The man had tried to hide the worst of his scars with a scarf. But with one ear missing, his hat had settled awkwardly . . . A pilot, shot down in flames and unlucky enough to have lived through it.

As he had lived through Scotland . . . somehow.

Hamish said, “Ye ken, I wasna’ ready for ye to die!”

To silence his thoughts, Rutledge agreed to dinner with Frances. The prospect of working a full day again was daunting; he knew quite well he hadn’t regained his full strength. All the same, it would do no harm to try, and possibly offer him some little respite from Hamish’s morbid concentration on Scotland.

Rutledge didn’t want to think about Scotland.

Scotland had haunted him while he was recovering from surgery. It had filled his drugged dreams. It had brought him upright, drenched with sweat and pain, in the darkest part of the night when defenses were at their lowest ebb. Words, faces, the sound of pipes, that last day of rain when nothing stayed dry . . . It was all there in his mind when he was most vulnerable—on the edges of sleep, waking in the predawn hours—fighting the overwhelming pain for fear the doctor might give him more drugs if anyone guessed how much he suffered.

He’d never wanted to go back to Scotland. Too many Scots had been killed in the trenches—he had given the orders that sent hundreds of them charging into No Man’s Land through gunfire that was pitiless, inhuman. He had watched them scream, he had seen them drop, he had stepped in the thick red blood where they had crawled in agony toward their own lines. He’d heard their last fumbling words as they died. It was a burden of guilt that still burned like live coals in his conscience. But the Yard had seen fit to send him north, whether he wanted to go or not. Barely a month ago, he’d done what he had sworn he would never do. And he didn’t want to think about it now.

There were letters from his godfather, David Trevor, who lived near Edinburgh, lying in his desk across the room. Unopened. He didn’t want to read them until he was well, until he was back at the Yard and his mind was filled with other problems. He didn’t want to hear how it had ended. He wished to God night after night that it had never begun—and knew that he lied even as he said the words. He had had to stay—

But Hamish reminded him of those letters day and night, and he’d ignored the voice until his head ached. When he was healed, fully healed, he’d read them. . . . Not until then. Hamish be damned!

Oh, God. Scotland be damned—!

Frances was watching his face, and he dragged his thoughts back to the present before she could read them.

Much as he disliked admitting it, she was right— one-armed, he was worse in the kitchen than he was with a razor. And his cooking would keep her happy, too. Less likely to chide him for looking like a scarecrow.

“Now let’s see about that tie. Then I must go, I’ve a party tonight and nothing to wear.” She smiled as she rose and crossed to the wardrobe. “This one, I think, with the gray suit.”

Chief Superintendent Bowles was not happy to see him. But then Bowles never was pleased to find Inspector Rutledge at his desk. The Chief Superintendent had hoped Rutledge might die of septicemia. Foolish of him to get himself shot in the first place! It went to prove that Rutledge was neither dependable nor competent to deal with police work. All the same, one could hope that the next time he was fired upon, the bullet would fly true.

There was already talk in certain quarters about the possibility of a promotion. Bowles had squelched it, saying, “Too soon, too soon. He’s not been back at the Yard half a year yet. Give the man time to find his feet!”

Bowles greeted his returning Inspector with what could best be described as subdued enthusiasm, and set him to clearing up files, going over paperwork for the courts, looking at the disposition of cases. Wouldn’t do to have Rutledge out on the streets, fainting in the midst of an inquiry. He’d told his superiors that as well. Wait until the man’s healed! Time enough then for him to take on a new case.

Rutledge, in fact, didn’t care. The mind-numbing concentration needed to finish each report or check every document kept Hamish at arm’s length and silent. It was respite in the form of inescapable boredom, and he embraced it with prodigious gratitude.

The other urgent requirement was to rebuild his stamina, depleted by enforced idleness. And so he began a regimen of walking each day. To breakfast in a dark-paneled pub, chosen because it lay several streets above Trafalgar Square. To lunch at any one of several pubs on streets that ran toward the Tower, and then an ever larger loop that would bring him back to the Embankment. Frances, under the impression that he was prudently taking the Underground, said nothing about his gray face each evening. But the thought of walking down into the crowded, noisy tunnels turned him cold with nerves. It was too much like being buried alive in the trenches.

The first day, Rutledge arrived back at the Yard shaking from the exertion, and still made himself take the stairs two at a time. Even on the weekend, he refused to stay indoors and rest. By his third day at the office, a Tuesday, he could walk without the black shadows of exhaustion clouding his mind to the point that he was a danger to himself and traffic in the streets. On the afternoon of the fifth, he was able to breathe reasonably well, and stop to look about him. His legs, he thought wryly, belonged to him again. Their tendency to wobble in his weakness had angered him more than the arm strapped to his chest.

There was work being done on a plaster War Memorial in the middle of Whitehall. The construction had snarled traffic for some time, and before returning to the Yard, Rutledge decided to have a look at it. Simplicity had been the goal, but the memorial seemed inadequate, he thought, to hold the memory of so much spilled blood and so many ruined lives. Depressed, he moved on toward St. Margaret’s Church, to stand on the corner of Bridge Street for a time, looking up at Big Ben and watching pigeons wheeling against the sky. Reluctant to return to his desk in his stuffy, ill-lit office, he listened to the traffic on the Thames, and considered crossing the busy bridge.

Hamish, relishing the wind from the river and a sudden gust of rain that swept down on them, was lost in his own reflections.

The sound of voices, like small birds twittering in a bush, brought Rutledge’s eyes back to St. Margaret’s, and his thoughts back to the present. A group of young women, stylish in black, stood waiting at the door for another, just descending from a motorcar in the street. She waved and hurried toward them, the wind catching the skirts of her coat, as if sweeping her out of his reach.

He recognized her walk before he heard her voice calling to her friends. It was Jean—

She caught up with the others, and laughter surrounded them, her face holding the pale light for an instant before they turned and went inside the church. Her cheeks were flushed with excitement and warmth.

Her wedding was to be held at St. Margaret’s in a fortnight’s time.

Jason Webley had told him that, coming to visit him in hospital at the end of September and after a time awkwardly turning the subject to the woman Rutledge had once been engaged to marry. “I say, old man, have you heard? Jean’s set a date, end of next month.” Webley paused, then added, “She asked Elizabeth to be in the wedding party. Elizabeth asked me what her answer ought to be, and I told her I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

“No.” But he had minded. Not because he begrudged Jean her happiness, but because she’d taken away so much of his. He could still remember the day, nearly eight months before, when she’d told him, haltingly, in another hospital ward, that she wished to end their engagement. And he’d seen the fear in her eyes, the dread of being tied to a broken man. . . . He hadn’t yet begun to recover, a silent, empty man in the grip of nightmares she couldn’t understand, and she’d believed that he never would be more than that. An object of pity for the rest of his life.

Hamish reminded him, “It was a near-run thing!”

It had been. But Rutledge was as unprepared for her desertion as he would have been for a slap in the face. He’d needed comfort, a gentle reminder of that normal life he’d lost somewhere in the trenches. Jean couldn’t have chosen a worse time to break her engagement to the man she’d once sworn she loved above all others. A week or two more—a month— Would it have made a difference if she’d offered him the compassion of waiting a little longer? Held him in her arms and told him it didn’t matter, she loved him still— even if it was a kind lie?

He would never know. Jean had scuttled out of the hospital room in undisguised relief, grateful that he’d been willing to set her free. By August she had become engaged to a diplomat and was looking forward to a new life in Canada, where the man was taking up his next posting.

Blithe, unshadowed, she had brushed away the war years as if they were a bad dream. Shallow, Frances had called her—a woman who would never have made him happy.

Staring at the church door, Rutledge found himself thinking that he was, after all, a lucky man. He hadn’t married Jean in that golden haze of 1914, when war was gloriously linked to romance and adventure, not to suffering. She had tried to persuade him to agree to a hasty wedding then: uniforms, crossed swords, and a hero off to fight the Hun. And he had reminded her that she was far too young and lovely to find herself a widow. . . .

He wondered what kind of life they might have shared these past seven months, after he’d finally been released from the clinic, still a prisoner of his own terrors. And how deeply they would have come to hate each other, finally. Or if she might have found herself wishing that the bullet he’d taken in Scotland in September had put an end to their pretenses.

Hamish said, “She’d ha’ been bonny in black.”

Certainly she would have carried herself with great courage, impressing all his friends, trailing behind her the whisper of great passion and love lost, where neither had ever existed.

Still, he was swept by a sense of loss as he watched her pass through the door of the church, oblivious. She hadn’t felt his eyes or his thoughts. She hadn’t sensed his presence and turned to look for him. There was a loneliness in that.

By the end of that week, Rutledge told himself that he’d made rather remarkable strides from the crippled man struggling to shave one-handed while his sister watched. The throbbing in his shoulder and chest muscles had begun to subside into a dull ache that he could put out of his mind. He could do without the sling now for hours at a time, al hough the arm was still tightly bound.

Another week, he told himself, and I’ll be fit again.

The dinners with his sister were beginning to wear thin. Much as he loved her, enjoyed the variety of her cooking, and appreciated the fact that she did not fuss, Frances worried about him, and he found it difficult to smile and ignore that. On the other hand, before the War, it had been Rutledge who had worried about her. And he knew too well the signs of unspoken concern. Of skirting around issues that ought not to be discussed—what had happened in Scotland, Jean’s approaching wedding, mutual friends who were in worse straits than he was. He had reached the point of wanting to blurt out, if only for the sake of clearing the air between them: “Look—I know David is worried that I haven’t written him—I just can’t face it yet. Don’t ask me why! And as for Jean, I wish her well, I’m not heartbroken. I’m lonely, that’s all, but I don’t want to meet a dozen of your suitable friends. For God’s sake, that’s not the answer!”

Hamish reminded him, “Ye’re no’ fit company for yourself, much less a lassie. Get drunk and get it o’er with!” As advice, it wasn’t bad.

But that Friday there were more pressing matters to consider. Chief Superintendent Bowles, after a consultation with the police surgeon, considered his options, then went to see Rutledge.

“It’s a matter of setting the Bishop’s mind at rest. He’s worried about the death of one of his people. Catholic priest, murdered in some backwater of Norfolk called Osterley.”

“A priest?” Rutledge repeated, surprised. In the eyes of the law, killing a clergyman was no more heinous a crime than killing a shop girl or a fishmonger. The penalty was the same—hanging by the neck until dead. But in the eyes of society, a man of the Cloth was protected by his calling, set apart. Inviolate.

Hamish reminded him that priests had once been burned at the stake. But that was another day and time. With no bearing on 1919.

Bowles was shaking his head. “We lost our way in the War, you know.” It was one of his favorite themes. “No good ever comes of change. Women doing men’s work—it isn’t natural! The lower classes getting above themselves. I shouldn’t wonder if we’ll see worse before we’re done. Society breaking down, Bolshevism on the loose. Now a priest’s dead.”

He peered at the sheet of paper in his hand. “Struck down with his own altar crucifix in St. Anne’s rectory, to be precise. The local police haven’t caught the villain yet. The priest walked in on a thief, apparently. It’s probable he could have recognized the man, and was murdered for that reason. The police are looking at that as the primary motive, for now. Still—we may have a madman in our midst, who’s to say differently? Little wonder this Bishop wants reassurance that we’re doing all we can.”

“What was the thief after?” Rutledge interjected. There were more likely choices for breaking and entering than a church office or rectory. A poor box and a priest’s pockets were notoriously bare. Madman indeed!

“A paltry sum collected at the church harvest festival, I’m told, which means everyone at the festival, in the village, and in the countryside for miles around knew there must be money in the rectory.”

“That broadens the inquiry considerably,” Rutledge agreed. “Did the priest have a housekeeper? How did an intruder get past her?”

“She’d already gone home for the day. And the priest himself should have been in the church to hear Confession, but had put up a notice there saying he was away at a deathbed and might not be back in time. Clear sailing, the thief must have thought. But Father James came home and went up to his study, and the intruder panicked. A shame, but there it is. It could happen to any householder.”

It could—and often did.

“Word has come down from the Chief Constable in Norfolk that it’s politic to send an officer,” Bowles said. “You’re to show the Yard’s concern and have a look at the evidence. Speak with this Bishop or one of his people, assure him that the local police know what they’re about, and once he’s satisfied that everything possible is being done, come back to London. From what I hear of the local man, Blevins, he’s competent and has a good reputation for using his head. Shouldn’t take you more than a few days. And October in the Broads is usually fine.”

Rutledge remembered that it was often wet, but said nothing.

Hamish said, “It’s no’ a holiday, mind. Watch your back! You canna’ trust the man. He doesna’ want you in London.”

“It’s more likely a diversion,” Rutledge answered silently, “to take pressure off Blevins. While everyone is watching me, he’ll be free to get the job done.”

Hamish grunted, “Have ye forgotten Scotland already?”

Bowles was saying, “Leave now, and you’ll be there tonight. Anything I ought to know regarding those, before you go?” He gestured to the files spread across Rutledge’s desk. “Parker can deal with them.”

“No, I’m finished with this lot. In fact, I was about to hand them over to Sergeant Williams. He’ll know which are to be filed and which distributed to the officer in charge of the investigation.”

“I’ll send Williams up to collect them. There’s a train at half past ten, you can make it if you hurry!” Bowles smiled in encouragement. Rutledge was reminded of crocodiles. The same cold yellow eyes.

“Very well.” He stood up, took the pages Bowles handed him, tucked them under his good arm, and went to open the door. “I’ll report by telephone, shall I?”

“No need. It’s a courtesy visit; you won’t be getting involved.”

The doctor, taking the bandages off Rutledge’s chest for the last time, looked at the wound, poked and probed at it—making the patient wince—and then nodded in satisfaction.

“You were damned lucky,” Dr. Fleming said, “that no deep infection set in. Still, it won’t hurt to have a small plaster over it. A matter of prevention. How do you feel?”

Rutledge, looking down at the raised, raw scar in the matted hair on his chest, replied, “I can breathe without discomfort.” He flexed his arm. It felt like a soggy rag. “I doubt I could take on a child of six in a brawl.”

Fleming chuckled. “Nor should you. But that arm will be like new, once you begin using it. Never fear! Just don’t overdo it for the first few days—don’t carry anything heavy or push at anything that doesn’t want to budge. Again, a matter of prevention. I have found in twenty years of treating patients that Nature is a good doctor, too, given half a chance. The problem is, we seldom give her credit and therefore come to regret it.”

It was, Rutledge knew, one of Fleming’s favorite homilies. “I’m off to Norwich. Which shouldn’t be strenuous.”

“Cheating the ratepayer, are you? I’d take the train if I were you. Less demanding on the chest muscles than driving.”

But Rutledge left London in his own motorcar, his claustrophobia still rampant. It was not possible for him to sit in a compartment jammed hip and knee into other travelers. The compulsion to stand and scream for air would be as violent as it was unreasonable.

By the time he reached Norwich, his chest muscles were in open rebellion, Mother Nature urging them on. Hamish, worse than Dr. Fleming at pointing out Rutledge’s shortcomings, reminded him that he had made the drive against advice.

As a compromise, Rutledge found a small hotel on the outskirts of town and stayed the night there, not prepared to face the traffic of Norwich at the end of the day.

Hamish, who had alternately raged at him and baited him for miles of the way, was as tired as he was: The familiar voice was silent over dinner.

Rutledge slept hard from fatigue. Hamish never followed him into sleep—the voice in his head lived in the waking mind, a bitter and hourly reminder of the bloody offensive in 1916 on the Somme, where so many men had died not by the hundreds or thousands but by the tens of thousands, their lives thrown away in wave after desperate wave of futile attacks. Where he himself had been buried in mud and saved from suffocation by the body pressing down on him. He’d been told over and over again that Corporal Hamish MacLeod had saved his life. But the blood caked like a second skin all over his face and hands had come from the English firing squad and the coup de grâce Rutledge had had to deliver personally in the instant before a direct hit had blown the salient to bits. Hamish hadn’t died from German fire, and Rutledge had been too shaken, too lost in the depths of shell shock to set the record straight: that Corporal MacLeod had been shot for refusing a direct order on the battlefield the night before that final dawn assault.

The tangled skeins of truth and official reports had left Rutledge with silence, with memory, with a waking haunting that had nothing to do with ghosts. Only with the broken mind of a man who had been sent straight back into battle before he’d had any rest, or come to terms with his own deep sense of guilt for having to choose between one man’s life and the morale of the equally exhausted and dispirited soldiers who hadn’t refused the order to climb out of the trenches and fight again. And three years later, he still had not exorcised that guilt.

It had become too deeply rooted in blood and bone and sinew, like a second self.

Rutledge had tried over and over again to die during the last two years of the War, putting himself in the way of danger, courting the unholy bombardments that splintered the earth, daring the hidden machine-gun nests that raked No Man’s Land with lethal fire. Like a lover embracing a bloody mistress he had sought out any peril—and had come through unscathed.

To find himself again and again hailed as a hero, because he seemed to have no fear of dying.

It had been the bitterest irony.

CHAPTER 3

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, RUTLEDGE FOUND HIS way through the busy streets of Norwich to the address he’d been given by Chief Superintendent Bowles. It was a small house near the new Catholic church, far older than the building in whose shadow it stood, and with a small garden behind it. A gloomy house, upright and Victorian, with sharp eaves that seemed to pierce the low clouds. Rutledge walked up to the door in a misting rain that enveloped the earth like a shroud. On a small wooden board, faded gold letters spelled out Diocesan Office. Lifting the door knocker, a great brass ring that fell with a doomsday clamor, he turned to look at the street behind him. A half dozen men were waist-deep in a broken sewer, digging shovels full of stinking mud out of the pit. Urchins gaped down into the hole, fascinated, while passersby held handkerchiefs to their noses against the rank odor. A pair of women huddled together on the corner exchanging news, the hems of their black skirts even blacker with the run-off of the umbrellas they clutched over their hats. A man walking a dog moved swiftly, hurrying it along as it stopped to sniff in the gutters.

No one took notice of the caller at the rectory. Rain was a great separator.

Hamish, whose fierce Covenanter ancestors had taught him well, was skittish about entering this den of popery and idolatry. Rutledge, amused, assured him that his soul was in no danger.

“How can you be sae sure, when the Church of England is hardly better than this lot?”

The door was opened by a housekeeper whose hair, graying at the temples, was auburn, and whose face, flecked with freckles, had a touch of Irish in it. The woman looked him up and down as he gave her his name, and asked, “Are you ill, then?”

He smiled. “Official business.”

“All the same, you look as if you could do with a cup of tea! And the poor man hasn’t had his, either, writing reports all the morning! Come in, then.”

She took his hat and coat, clicked her tongue at the dark patches of rain across the coat’s shoulders, and spread it carefully over a chair to dry. Then she led the way down a passage to a room at the far end. To Hamish’s considerable relief, there were no niches filled with bleeding saints in the passage, nor a pervasive odor of incense. Except for a single small crucifix above the narrow entry, there was no sign that the occupants of this den had designs on anyone’s soul.

Opening a door into a gracious room at the back of the house, the housekeeper stood aside to let Rutledge enter. Beyond the windows the rain fell softly on a garden already drab and colorless, and dripped from a small pear tree. A tall secretary desk, the doors in the upper half standing open and the front piled with papers, stood against the far wall, and there was a table and comfortable chairs set to catch the light spilling in the windows. A man in simple priest’s garb sat there, staring out at the wet flower beds, a book open in his lap. He looked up as the housekeeper gave Rutledge’s name with a flourish.

Hardly a den of iniquity, Rutledge silently pointed out to Hamish. This was more the study of a scholarly man, a place for retreat and thought.

Hamish reserved his opinion.

Setting his book aside and standing, the man crossed the room and held out his hand. “From London, are you? That’s a fair journey! Bryony, some tea for the two of us.”

She cast a quick, smiling look at Rutledge and said, “The kettle is already on the boil.” The door closed silently behind her.

“I’m Monsignor Holston,” the tall, thin man continued. He had an aesthetic face and the eyes of a policeman— intent, knowing. The long nose, bearing a pince-nez, was aristocratic and gave the face character if not beauty. But the grip of his calloused hand was firm, strong. He offered Rutledge one of the chairs by the table, and returned to his own to mark his place in the book, close it, and set it aside. “I’m instructed to speak to you on Bishop Cunningham’s behalf. He was called away on pressing diocesan business. Scotland Yard. Well, I’m pleased to see you, I must say. This matter of Father James’s death has been worrying. What can you tell me?”

Rutledge smiled. “It’s more a matter of what you can tell me. I’ve come to listen.”

“Ah. Yes. Well, let’s not wait for our tea, then.” Monsignor Holston ran his fingers along the edge of the leather corners of the blotter. “It’s very straightforward, what the police propose must have happened. The local people took one look at the scene—at the desk broken open, most particularly—and declared that Father James had surprised a man intent on stealing funds collected at the bazaar a fortnight previously. Certainly the money was missing.” He realized how formal his words sounded, as if he were quoting directly from the police record, and made an effort to continue in a more natural tone. “Father James was usually in the church at that hour, you see, hearing Confessions, and should have been in the confessional, not his study. It must have been quite a shock to the intruder to hear him coming up the stairs! According to Inspector Blevins, the man panicked, seized the crucifix from Father James’s altar, and struck him down before fleeing. That’s all the police can tell me with any certainty.” The priest stopped, and the blue eyes studied Rutledge’s face. There was a wariness in them.

“Straightforward, yes,” Rutledge agreed. “But you—or your Bishop—apparently weren’t satisfied. Why? Is there more to the story than the police have learned? Or is it something to do with the circumstances in which he was found?”

“Sadly, no, we have no information about the crime itself.” Monsignor Holston smiled wryly. “Except that if it was robbery, it was unnecessary. Father James was a very caring priest. He’d have helped the man; he wouldn’t have turned him away. Or turned him in, for that matter. What’s frightening is—” He broke off and then added, “I spoke to the Bishop myself after I’d been summoned to Osterley by the police. I tried to explain what it was about the crime that troubled me.” He adjusted his glasses, as if to see his way more clearly through his own feelings. “I stood looking down at the body, and it’s true, the shock unsettled me. It was such a waste—a terrible, unspeakable waste! But my reaction went beyond that. I felt something that was primeval. Fear, if you will.”

Hamish stirred.

Rutledge said, “If he was a friend, that’s a fairly common reaction, Monsignor. Of a life squandered, and a certain anxiety because death has struck so near.” He paused. “Father James had died unshriven. Perhaps unconsciously, that weighed heavily. It would be natural for you to be concerned.”

“Yes, I’d take that into account. Of course I would. But it was more than that. God knows I’ve attended my share of deathbeds. Like a physician, I’m able to separate my emotions into tidy cubbyholes, in order to function. But not this time.” He looked down at his hands. “I grant you that to a poor man the sum collected at the bazaar must have seemed enormous. The blows, Inspector Blevins told me, were struck in rapid succession. A frenzy, if you will. A terrified man, caught out unexpectedly, might well have reacted in that fashion, hating what he was doing but driven to shield himself. And yet somehow I can’t accept that. If he had come openly—”

“There may have been reasons why the intruder couldn’t come openly. Or perhaps he’d convinced himself that theft was the easier way. That he couldn’t keep his promise to repay—or see that he worked out the money in time or kind.”

“Yes, I grant you that. But consider two things. The intruder must have known the pattern of Father James’s usual movements. Otherwise, why choose that time of day? And he must have known that the study was upstairs, and that that was where the money was being kept. He didn’t ransack the rest of the house. He went directly to the study! And surely the first place he’d have searched— the most logical choice—was a desk drawer. The money was in there. Why tear the room apart, if he’d got what he came for? In my opinion, if the thief had been more careful opening that drawer and had slipped away before Father James came back from hearing Confession, surely no one would have been able to say with any certainty just when the money went missing!”

“Logic seldom enters into it. A man robbing a house is usually in a hurry and not eager to be caught. If he’d just killed in a fit of panic, he might have wanted to make it seem he’d expected a better haul. To point a finger away from the fact that he was desperate enough for the little he’d found in the desk.”

Hamish said, “Ye ken yon priest’s been busy worrying ow’r it. Gnawing at it like a dog with a bone.”

Monsignor Holston was shaking his head. “I am trained to think about religious issues. When I apply the same logic to this murder, I find—questions. Not solutions.”

“No murder is simple,” Rutledge told him. “But if I understand what you are telling me, Father James must have been killed by one of his own parishioners. It’s not a pretty possibility, though a likely one. And surely the police have considered it.”

A shadow of relief passed over the priest’s face. He said, “I’m afraid that several other things point in that direction as well, which I felt the Bishop had to be told. Father James wore an antique gold medal of Saint James on a chain, a gift from his family when he was ordained. The candlesticks from his private altar might have fetched a goodly sum, as would the altar crucifix that was used as the weapon. They were old, at a guess they’d belonged to the priests of St. Anne’s since the early 1700s. Why should a thief pass up such tempting opportunities? If he’s in desperate need and has already committed murder? What’s another minute taken to stuff a crucifix in a pocket or candlesticks under one’s coat?” An eyebrow lifted quizzically, as if inviting Rutledge to prove him wrong.

“Perhaps because the thief was afraid they were objects far easier to trace than a small handful of bills or coins.”

“Yes, I’d thought of that, too. My answer was, the metal could be melted down, if you knew where to go. The thief might not receive more than a portion of its real value, but it must surely come to a tidy sum. I find myself returning again and again to the fact that if he’d wanted only the money, he could have run out, shoving Father James out of his way, and taken the chance that in such a brief, unexpected encounter in a dark room, he might not be recognized. Better that than the sin of murder on his soul!”

“He’s fearful,” Hamish interjected, “that he might ken the killer—”

The door opened and Bryony came in with the tea tray, shadowed by a tiger-striped gray cat. Bryony set the tray onto the table close to the priest’s elbow, cast an eye over it, then left, the cat following at her heels with a smug air. Rutledge tried not to remember a white cat lying on a pillow in an empty room, looking for its owner to come again.

“The rectory doesn’t own Bruce. The cat,” Monsignor Holston said in amusement, catching Rutledge’s eye on the animal. “He owns the rectory. If I understand his genealogy correctly, his great-great-grandmother was a resident here. That’s before the Bishop’s time, and mine.” He poured a cup of tea for Rutledge and then for himself, passed the pitcher of thick cream and the bowl of sugar. A plate of thin sandwiches and another of thin slices of cake followed.

Rutledge was beginning to see a pattern in the dispassionate account Monsignor Holston had given. His reasoning had been easy to follow—someone who had no connection with the church might have considered the candlesticks and the crucifix an unexpected windfall. This thief hadn’t. But he’d known or guessed where to look for the money. As Holston had all but said, the evidence pointed directly to a member of the church. But was that his only deduction?

There were shadows behind the priest’s eyes, worry more than mourning. Rutledge decided to bide his time.

As Monsignor Holston settled to his tea, Rutledge asked, “Have the police interviewed members of St. Anne’s congregation? Surely they were most likely to know that the bazaar money was still in Father James’s hands. As well as where it was being kept.”

“Oh, yes, that was done, and done again. There are, as in every parish, Catholic or Protestant, a few . . . er . . . black sheep. These were questioned a third time. But such men aren’t likely to commit murder—petty theft, perhaps. Even burglary, if pressed by circumstances. There were at least three needy parishioners who might well have talked their way out of trouble, if Father James caught them in his study. Ill wife in one case, and too many children to feed in another, and a third is known for his taste for the horses. In their straits, any sum might have been tempting. In Inspector Blevins’s opinion, none was likely to be a killer. He said not one of them had the stomach for it.”

“Perhaps Inspector Blevins should be searching for a man who might have had one of the booths at the fair. Or had come to the fair for the express purpose of finding money somehow. And chosen to come back and try his luck at the rectory, when he had been unsuccessful anywhere else.”

The cake was heavy with eggs and sultanas. Rutledge thought, Frances would tell me it’s strengthening. . . .

“Yes, the local authorities have been quite thorough there also. They’re still searching for individuals who had set up a booth and any strangers who had drawn attention to themselves. Apparently it isn’t easy to trace their movements—this is a popular time of year for harvest fetes and bazaars. They could be in a dozen towns.”

Rutledge finished his cake and set aside his plate. The thin man opposite him had consumed three helpings to his one. Filled with a nervous energy that demanded stoking, Monsignor Holston seemed not to notice the richness of the cake.

“Let’s return to my earlier suggestion—and yours. What if we turn the tale around, and ask ourselves if the priest was killed—and the pittance taken to cover up the crime?” Rutledge asked.

“The police also dismissed that theory. They reported to the Bishop that there is no reason to believe that Father James had enemies.” The blue eyes had become watchful.

Policemen often interviewed witnesses and friends of a murder victim who felt a driving need to find explanations, to look for answers. But Rutledge had the strong impression that Monsignor Holston was trying to shape the thinking of this man from London, guiding it carefully toward an unclear goal.

Rutledge said, “I think it might be time for you to give me the whole of the story.”

Monsignor Holston smiled. “Do you usually have so little faith in the things you’re told, Inspector?”

“Which is another way of saying, perhaps, that I believe you yourself have not yet come to face the truth.”

The priest sighed.

“It isn’t a matter of truth,” he replied, turning for a moment to look out the window at the rain. “It’s a matter of faith. Sometimes there’s a feeling one can’t shake off. Have you ever experienced such a thing?” When Rutledge nodded, he went on, “Try as hard as I will, I can’t ignore that primeval response—that sense of danger—of fear for myself, as well as for Father James. I asked the Bishop to send for Scotland Yard because my instincts tell me it was the right thing to do. What if there is more here than meets the eye? What if this murder is beyond the experience and training of the local people to investigate fully? What if the killer is able to outwit them, and we see no one brought to justice?” He paused, then said in a strained voice, “It’s likely that I’ll be sent as the interim pastor at St. Anne’s, until a replacement can be found. I don’t want to be the next victim!”

CHAPTER 4

RUTLEDGE STARED AT THE PRIEST, HIS mind working swiftly as he weighed what had been said—and what had not.

“You’ve been afraid from the beginning, haven’t you, that Father James was not killed for money? For the sake of argument, what if you’re right? What if the theft was no more than a cloud of confusion, to mislead the police? If you’re worried about being the next victim, the only conclusion I can draw is that you’ve been told something—”

Monsignor Holston interrupted, his voice earnest. “I was in that room, before they’d taken Father James away. And there was violence in the presence of his body. Violence that went unexplained. And it spilled over on me! Do you understand what I am trying to say? What if this murderer isn’t satisfied that it’s finished? Or has your profession inured you to death, Inspector? Perhaps it’s out of fashion—after the slaughter of thousands in the War— to put the death of any man—even a priest!—down to an unspeakable act?”

“They are both unspeakable acts, murder and war,” Rutledge answered grimly. “I haven’t become inured to either of them. You’re describing the force of the crime, I think, not the motivation.”

Monsignor Holston shook his head. “No. It was something in that room. The policemen were about, the lamps lit, the spirit of the man long since departed, the body cold, even—but the lingering sense of violence was frightful.” He paused. “As a priest I have no key to unlock the mind of this murderer. But I fear it, and in doing so, I fail the man who has just taken a life. And in failing him, I have failed God.” He set his teacup aside.

Rutledge said, “If you’ve sent for Scotland Yard to restore your faith in your God, we aren’t trained for that.”

“No, it isn’t what I need from you. I need your intelligence and your knowledge of how or why such a crime is committed. I want to be sure that the man the police take into custody this week—next week—next year—is the culprit. It will be easy, I think, to find people who might have been needy enough to steal. And put the blame on them. I want to be absolutely sure it isn’t misplaced!”

The priest had failed to answer the question directly.

“He’s as slippery as a fish,” Hamish warned.

“You’re a trained and intelligent man yourself, Monsignor. Surely you’ve taken the question a step further. If it wasn’t something Father James knew—or had told you— then it must be something in that rectory that the killer was searching for. And if he failed to find it, you must feel fairly certain that he’ll come back to try again. If you’re there, he won’t let your presence stand in his way, just as he didn’t spare Father James. What in heaven’s name could Father James have kept there that would be worth one priest’s life, and perhaps two? What could have put him at such risk?”

“If I knew the answer to that,” Monsignor Holston said in resignation, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I’d have told Inspector Blevins at once!”

“Then I’m left with the original police supposition that this was a breaking-and-entering gone wrong. And the people in Osterley can handle that. If I’m to present a case to my superiors that calls for the Yard’s intervention, I’ve got to persuade them that there is very good reason to think the Yard’s time is well spent here. Yes, the fact that the victim is a priest naturally weighs with them, or I wouldn’t have been sent to Norwich in the first place. But the rule of thumb is that the local constabulary often knows more about the people they need to interview than an outsider could, and are therefore more likely to spot the killer.”

“I have given you all the information that it’s in my power to give you,” Monsignor Holston replied, his austere face clouded with doubt. “I can’t tell you more than that—I wish I knew more! And I won’t lie to you, either. I will say this: Father James was a very good man. Sober and hardworking. A man of faith and deep convictions. I have a duty to him. If his murderer can be found, I want him found.”

Hamish said, “A priest could be killed for what he knows.”

It was true. . . .

Rutledge, finishing his tea, shook his head as he was offered more and set his empty cup on the tray. “There’s another avenue we haven’t really explored. A clergyman learns to cope with a variety of responsibilities, some of them rather onerous. There’s always the chance that what happened to Father James is in some way related to his duties. And in taking them over, you may put yourself at risk as well. Someone may believe you will come to know more than you safely should.”

“It’s always possible, of course. The truth is, a clergyman can often make quite good guesses about what’s going on in his parish. And he’s often privy to confidences—never mind what he’s told in the confessional. But in that confessional, he may learn the whole story. A husband is unfaithful to his wife, a clerk has cheated his employer, someone has spread a lie that hurt others, a child was not fathered by the man who believes it’s his. That’s the reason the words uttered in the confessional are a sacred trust. It must be a place where a person tells the truth and unburdens his soul before God. We believe in this sacrament, and we protect it with our silence. Father James wouldn’t have broken that vow.”

“And if a man or a woman tells the priest something, and later regrets that confidence?”

“He or she may regret having spoken. But God knew long before he or she stepped into the confessional. And the priest is sworn to silence.”

“That’s not always the practical answer,” Rutledge told him.

Monsignor Holston removed his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “No, it isn’t. The practical answer is, that man or that woman may simply move to another parish, leaving behind the priest who knows the truth and finding another one who will accept this newest member of his flock at face value. One doesn’t murder the priest for the secrets of the confessional. It would have changed the face of the Church hundreds of years ago if that had become the common practice.” He restored his glasses to their proper place, settling them into the deep indentations on either side of his nose, then tried to smile. And failed. “Were you told that Father James was a chaplain in the first two years of the War, until he was sent home with severe dysentery in 1917? Who can be sure that the truth doesn’t lie there? In the War?” Monsignor Holston turned his head again to look out at the garden, as if he half expected to find the answer he wanted in the grassy paths and the shrubbery. Or half expected to find someone standing there.

Hamish said, “He fidgets like a man with an uneasy conscience!”

Rutledge answered silently, “Uneasy? Or uncertain?” Aloud he said, “In that event, I see no reason why you should feel that you’re in any particular danger.”

Monsignor Holston turned from the window to Rutledge. “I have told you. It’s primitive—the hair rising on the back of my neck in a dark corner of my church, or coming down the passage here in the house when it’s late and I’m alone. Sitting in a lighted room when the windows are dark and the drapes haven’t been drawn, and looking up suddenly to see if someone is out there, staring in at me. It isn’t real, it’s all imagination. And I’m not by nature easily frightened. Now I am.”

“Did you serve with the same units that Father James did?”

“I never went to France. I worked among the wounded here in England as they were being sorted out when the ships came in. Most of them were in too much pain to do more than accept a cigarette and a little compassion, some reassurance that God was still watching over them.” Monsignor Holston shook his head. “You’re probably right, I’m not thinking very logically about any of this. But somewhere in this muddle there must be an explanation for Father James’s murder and my own strange sense that something’s wrong.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. You’re a very clever man, Inspector Rutledge. You’ll sort it out. I am reassured that Scotland Yard has sent us its best.”

And that was all that Monsignor Holston was prepared to say.

Leaving the rectory, Rutledge paused to speak to Bryony as she showed him to the door. Around them the house was silent, shutting out the sound of the rain and the echo of shovels scraping against stone out in the street. “I understand that Father James was well thought of.”

“Now there was a black day, when Father was killed! I’ve not got over the shock of it. Well thought of? Of course he was, and well loved, well respected, too!” She took Rutledge’s hat and coat from the chair beside the door and held them to her as if they offered comfort. “You can ask anyone.”

“People always speak well of the dead,” he told her gently. “Even a priest is human, and sometimes frail.”

“As to that, I wouldn’t know! I’m not one to go around looking for failings. I can tell you Father James was a patient man, and generous. If someone had come to him with a tale of hard luck, he’d have given them the money, they needn’t have killed him for it! It’ll turn out to be a stranger, mark my words. A cruel and ungodly man with no regard for his own soul.” Her eyes remained on his, as if expecting him to make a pronouncement that would set her mind at rest.

“A non-Catholic? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Neither Protestant nor Catholic, in my view—no churchgoing man would murder a clergyman, would he? I’m saying that whoever it was killed Father James wasn’t hungry or in debt. He was calculating and self-serving, with a devil in him. Or her. Women can be terrible cruel sometimes. Are there so many of those walking about that it takes all this time for the police to track down the right one? It’s been days now since Father’s death, and what have the police got to show for it? I call it a crying shame!”

“Surely they’ve tried.”

“Oh, as to trying, now, I’d agree with you there. They’ve tried. But they’re not what I’d call clever men.” She moved to open the door for him, letting in the damp and the reek of the filthy mud being piled high at the roadside. “Housebreaking and petty theft, fire-setting or assault—they’ll find the culprit, because chances are he’s done it before. But that’s not clever, is it? It’s only a matter of knowing where to look!”

“And in this case, perhaps only a matter of finding out who has extra money jangling in his pocket, the money he stole from Father James,” Rutledge responded reasonably. “Six of one—”

“Is it, now?” She tilted her head to look up at him. “Father James was a family man, did they tell you? This past August his sister presented her husband with three little ones, and Father James was always helping out with the babes. What’s she to do now, with winter coming on and no one to come and stay a few days, when one’s sick of the croup and she’s up all the night? You might speak to Mrs. Wainer. She was Father James’s housekeeper, and a more decent woman you’ll never meet. Ask her about walking into the study and finding him there stiff and cold, blood all over the place. And for all she knew, the killer lurking in the bedroom, ready to strike her down as well! If you’ve set Monsignor’s mind at rest just now, it would be a kindness to reassure her, too. And only a few hours out of your way, mind!”

“Where will I find her?” He stepped through the doorway as she handed him his coat and hat. He could feel the blowing mist on his face, fine as silk against his skin.

“She’s at the rectory still, though I don’t know for the life of me how the poor woman can walk through the door. It’s her duty to be there, she says. Every day. Just as if Father James was still alive. Osterley is the name of the town. Surely they told you that in London? It’s closer to the sea in the north, and easy enough to get to from here.” Her eyes were shrewd. “Easier, of course, to go back to London satisfied you’ve done your duty by us. There’s many would do that. Somehow I don’t think you’re one of them!”

And with that she bade him a good day and closed the door.

Rutledge turned the crank and got into his motorcar, out of the rain. And then he surprised himself by sitting there, considering what Bryony had said, the motor idling under his gloved hands as they rested on the wheel.

He hadn’t anticipated being drawn into the life or the death of this man. It wasn’t the task that had been set him. . . .

Go to Norfolk to reassure the Bishop that the police are doing their job properly.

And instead he’d been expected, he thought wryly, to perform a small miracle or two. Find a true explanation for the murder of the priest—and then track down the killer.

He didn’t envy the local man, Blevins, struggling to conduct an investigation in a climate of disbelief that refused to accept simple murder for what it really was, a commonplace calamity, not the stuff of legends.

But even as he tried to make light of Bryony’s forceful plea and Monsignor Holston’s fears, Rutledge couldn’t escape the fact that their intensity had touched him.

Hamish said, “Aye, but it will pass, with the mood.”

Which was probably true. The thing was, Bryony had made it very hard for him to walk away.

Instead, he put the motorcar in gear and turned the bonnet north instead of south toward London, driving on to Osterley.

As a schoolboy, learning to draw the map of Great Britain, Rutledge had been taught that the island resembled a man in a top hat riding a running pig. The top hat was the northern part of Scotland—the Highlands. The man’s head and body were the Lowlands and the Midlands of England. The pig’s head was Wales, its front feet the Cornish peninsula, its hind feet the downs of Kent. And its rump was East Anglia, the great bulge of Essex, Suffolk, and Norfolk jutting out into the North Sea toward the Low Countries.

It was a picture he and his schoolmates had found diverting, endlessly practicing their drawing of the pig and its rider, unaware that the effort sealed forever in their minds the geography of their country.

Now, as he covered the miles between Norwich and Osterley, Rutledge watched the raindrops collect on his windscreen and resisted Hamish’s efforts to draw him into a debate over the interview with Monsignor Holston. He didn’t want to delve into the priest’s motivations or Bryony’s. The earlier mood (as Hamish had predicted) was wearing off, and in its place was a rising doubt about his own judgment. He hadn’t been cleared for a return to full duty—and his instructions had been to travel to Norwich. Nothing had been said about continuing north.

Old Bowels would have his liver if he upset the local man on a whim and brought the wrath of the Chief Constable down on both their heads. On the other hand, Rutledge could say with some certainty that he had made precious little progress in “reassuring” the Bishop’s representative. The Monsignor wouldn’t have settled for less than a full-blown investigation by the Yard, given any choice in the matter. If a visit to Osterley was what it took to satisfy him of the Yard’s faith in Inspector Blevins, there would be no official objections to that.

But Hamish wouldn’t be put off. “It’s no’ the body that’s standing in your way! Ye havena’ put Scotland out of your mind. Ye werena’ ready to return to work because you werena’ ready to face living!”

“The bandages are off,” Rutledge answered flatly. “By the time I’m back in London, the police surgeon will be satisfied that the medical leave can be rescinded.”

“Aye, but watching yon fine doctor cut away bits of bandage is no’ the same as coming to grips with yoursel’.”

“I’ll deal with Scotland. When I’m back in London.”

“Oh, aye? Then tell me why we’re driving north again?”

It was a pretty route, leaving Norwich to follow country lanes through gently rolling hills. Many of them hid small flint or brick villages in pocket-size valleys. And the still-green meadows on the rounded hillsides were sheltered by a line of trees, where fluffy clusters of Norfolk sheep dotted the landscape, their fleece thickening for the winter. So unlike France, with its broken walls and stark chimneys lining the roads from the Front. He could almost pretend that it was 1914, and nothing had changed. But of course it had. There was never any going back.

To Hamish this was “soft country”—peaceful and prosperous, where a living came more easily than in the harsh, often barren landscapes of the Highlands. That very harshness, in Hamish’s opinion, had made the Scots formidable fighting men.

Norfolk had produced fine soldiers, too, Rutledge reminded him. But as far as Hamish was concerned, training and blood were two very different factors in the making of an army. One could be taught—the other was in the very bone.

Even in the trenches Hamish had been fond of citing examples—some of them ranging back to the twelfth century—of Scottish prowess in battle. It was, Rutledge thought, a way of life that had seldom brought prosperity or contentment to the Highlands, but in pride and fierce spirit, it had bred a full measure of courage.

The miles rolled away behind them, and then the road Rutledge was driving wound through a cut in a hill and unexpectedly came to an end facing a broad expanse of marshes, as flat as they were striking and bronzed now with the coming winter’s palette of red-brown and yellow and old gold. He paused at the junction to stare out across them, thinking to himself that for such a small country, England had its share of beauty.

Here the road went either right toward Cley or left toward Hunstanton, running along the landward edges of the marsh as far as the eye could see. Rutledge turned left, feeling the wind coming in from the northwest, bearing with it the cries of gulls out along the ridge of dunes by the sea. Rounding a curve a few miles farther on, Rutledge found himself in the outskirts of a small, sprawling village, lying under a sky that looked like a great gray bowl, holding in the light from the unseen water beyond the marshes to his right.

This wasn’t the famous “Constable sky,” those broad horizons that the artist had made his signature: vast banks of clouds filled with delicate color that somehow emphasized the simplicity of the ordinary lives he chose to paint. Farm lads fishing or tired horses drawing a haywain across a tree-shaded stream, each caught in his workaday world—rustic beauty unaware of the grandeur overhead.

Here the sky was self-effacing canopy, accepting its more prosaic role of joining sea and land even when the sea was nowhere to be seen. But it was out there, beyond the marshes that had taken root on the salty, wet silt it had left behind. This part of Norfolk had fought long battles with the forces of wind and water, which had often changed the shape of the coastline. A village might lie on the shore this century and find itself miles away from the sea in the next.

The first scattering of houses led him next into the village of Osterley. To his left a great flint church stood high on a grassy knoll, well above the main road and looking down across it to the houses that marked the waterfront. A church, Rutledge thought, that must have been built by the wool trade and heavy coastal shipping. There were a goodly number of these cathedrals in miniature in Norfolk, which had seen a flourishing economy in its day. If he remembered his history correctly, Osterley had been one of the great ports in the Middle Ages, and some of those riches had gone into the clerestory and the strong soaring towers, creating a sense of light and power at the same time.

Rutledge turned up the lane leading to the church, driving up the hill for a better look. A sign posted by the churchyard gate told him that this was Holy Trinity.

Someone—a woman—walked out the church door, a notebook in her hand, and shielding her eyes, looked up at the clerestory. The way the wind played with her skirts and the long coat she wore, Rutledge got the impression that she was slim, fairly young, and attractive. It was there in the set of her shoulders and the tilt of her head, though her hand and arm hid her features.

“There must be a fine view from yon tower,” Hamish said. “It’s verra’ high.”

“A landmark from the sea as well, I should think.” The town of Boston in Lincolnshire had used its church tower as a beacon for centuries.

The woman walked back into the church. Frances, Rutledge thought, would have approved of the hat she was wearing. Dark red, with silver and blue feathers on one side that gave it a stylish air. He was tempted to get out and pay a visit to the church, to see her better. Just then a man came up the hill from the village, not by the road but through the churchyard, and went inside. A workman from the look of him, wearing a smock and heavy shoes. She’d been waiting for him, perhaps.

He turned his attention back to the terrain.

Ahead of the motorcar’s bonnet, the lane disappeared into a small copse. He thought there must be five or six houses scattered beyond it, but decided not to trust his axles to that twisting, rutted stretch of muddy road. He could just see a few chimneys rising above gabled roofs, and at the far end, what might have been a barn, judging from its bulky silhouette.

Across the lane from the church stood the vicarage, half hidden behind a flint wall, its drive disappearing into old trees that gave some hint of its age.

He turned the motorcar and went back down the lane to the main road. Just on the corner of a street to the right—Water Street, the sign informed him—stood the police station.

Rutledge pulled up in front of it, and got out to pay his courtesy call on Inspector Blevins. But there was a notice posted on the door, dated this morning: Gone to Swaffham. In the event of an emergency, contact East Sherham police station. A number was given.

He opened the door and looked inside. The front room was silent, uninviting as a place to wait.

“Aye, and for how long?” Hamish asked querulously. Rutledge closed the door again.

Starting the motorcar, he decided his time would be better spent exploring the village and calling on Mrs. Wainer. That could be viewed as an extension of his original brief—putting Bishop Cunningham’s mind at rest—rather than an infringement of the local man’s investigation.

Water Street clearly went down to the quay. It ran along there for some distance before turning back to the main road, as if disappointed by what it had found at the harbor. But he passed that turning and stayed on the main road, interested in the size and general layout of Osterley. It appeared to be prosperous enough, no ugly areas of run-down housing or noticeable poverty, but without signs either of money to waste on ostentation.

There were some half a dozen streets running inland to his left, short streets for the most part, although he thought that Sherham Street went on to the next village, for it appeared to vanish over the hill into farming land. Two streets turned to his right, Old Point Road and Marsh Lane. Down Old Point Road he saw the second church in the village, and decided that it must be St. Anne’s.

And then as suddenly as he’d come upon Osterley, he was out of it.

A muddy farmyard on the right, a house half glimpsed on a rise to his left, and the main road west dropped sharply down a hill and ran along the marshes that spread to his right as far as the horizon.

Even Hamish was struck by the splendor of the view, and Rutledge turned into a small stony cul-de-sac to look out at the scene. Grasses and marshes covered the land like a rough brown-gold blanket, and a few stunted trees bowed before the wind, on the point of giving up against its force. The grasses moved as if with a will of their own as the wind ran capriciously through them. Here ducks and geese and sea birds owned the silence. A thin line of white at the very fringes of the marshes marked the sea. It was wildly beau iful, and Rutledge thought, Here is something man hasn’t destroyed.

Hamish said, “Aye, but give him time!”

A small falcon rose from the thick grass to fly some twenty yards, then hover with beating wings above its unsuspecting prey. Rutledge watched it swoop, and then take off again with a dark smudge hanging from one claw. A mouse?

The stillness was broken only by the wind sweeping in from the sea, and he thought he had caught the sound of waves rolling in, a deep roar that was felt as much as it was heard, like a heartbeat. The sense of peace was heavy, and the sense of isolation.

A formation of geese, out over the surf, flew like a black arrow toward Osterley.

Following them with his eyes, Rutledge remembered the lines of poetry from which the words had come. They ran through his mind almost without conscious thought: “Across the moon the geese flew, pointing my way, / A black arrow on the wing. / But I was afoot and slow, / And stumbled in the dark. By moonset, I was left, / Alone and sad, still far from the sea . . .”

O. A. Manning had been writing about a man’s desperate struggle against despair.

Here in the marshes, watching the wedge of geese, it seemed to be possible to reach the sea after all. . . . He felt his spirits lift.

“Unless,” Hamish told him harshly, “it’s only an illusion. . . .”

CHAPTER 5

IGNORING HAMISH, RUTLEDGE SPENT ANOTHER FIVE or ten minutes there, his eyes scanning the marshes. But now it seemed devoid of life, the spell it had cast broken.

He got out to crank the motor. Under his feet was a bed of stones, white round pebbles that, when split, showed their opaque, flinty core. Many of the towns along the North Sea had been built of such stone, hard and durable at the center.

As the motor came to life and he turned to walk back to the driver’s side, he found himself thinking about Bryony again. The housekeeper had told him that the police had got nowhere. Why had no one in Osterley come forward with information about the priest’s death? It was a crime that any community should instantly condemn, the kind of sudden death that drove people to lock their doors at night and look askance at their neighbors and remember small events that might be pieced carefully together until the puzzle was solved.

“I saw a man . . .”

“I overheard such and such while waiting to pay my account at the greengrocer’s . . .”

“Father James told me one day after Mass . . .”

A village thrived on prying. Privacy was an illusion protected by silence.

Rutledge turned the car once more and went back the way he’d come.

The answer to his question seemed to be that they had no information to give, the residents of Osterley. Or they had closed ranks around the murderer of the priest.

“But that’s no’ likely,” Hamish pointed out.

“Or does it explain why the Bishop called in Scotland Yard?”

Reaching Old Point Road again, Rutledge turned in. The second church was smaller than Holy Trinity, its steeple a slim finger pointing into the gray sky. Built of flint and weathered by the sea winds, it offered a plain face to the world, but seemed to be timeless, after a fashion. A survivor. A black board with gold letters informed him that this was indeed St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church. The churchyard lay behind it, a low stone wall enclosing the gravestones that over time were slowly encroaching on the building. Another hundred years, Rutledge thought, and the stones would reach the apse.

Next to the church was the brick rectory, small and Victorian, but with such a flair for extravagance it might have alighted here one night in a storm and decided to stay. An exotic bird faring well in this northern climate far from its native land. Hardly a setting for bloody murder.

He stopped the motorcar in the yard of the rectory and was on the point of getting out to knock on the door when a woman pushing a pram along the road called to him, “Mrs. Wainer has gone to do her marketing in the town. But I should think she’ll be back in an hour at most.”

Rutledge thanked her. He turned for a third time, and decided to make his way back to the waterfront. He might even find his lunch there. It had been some time since he’d breakfasted in Norwich.

Osterley was built of local flint with brick facings at windows and doors, the lumpy pebbles seeming to cling to the walls like hungry leeches. And yet there was a quality to the construction that spoke of sturdiness and endurance, and a certain seaworthiness, as if prepared for the onslaught of storms.

He found the street that turned off to the harbor, and it swept him around an unprepossessing bend where houses clung to the edge of the road on either side, then down to the narrow quay, to run along it for some distance before Water Street turned back toward the main road. It was a busy part of the town, people coming and going, carriages and carts standing in front of shop doors, horses with their heads down dozing where they waited. But Rutledge’s attention was drawn to the harbor as he drove slowly through the congestion.

Where there had once been the blue wash of water, banks of silt met his eye instead. These grassy hummocks rolled like earthen waves out to the North Sea’s edge, and the muddy earth below the stone quay gleamed wetly under the gray sky, a small ghost of its medieval magnificence. A handsome port, suitable for coastal trading, where fishing boats had brought in heavy nets filled with plaice and cod and mackerel, had become a narrow ribbon of water that wandered halfheartedly into view, touched the quay at high tide, and then wandered away again. Two or three small boats had been drawn up behind a line of sheds at the far end of the quay and left to rot. Another pair sat in the black mud, waiting to be pushed into the main stream of the ribbon.

He lifted his gaze to the great arm of sand dunes, covered with shore plants and grasses, which was flung out beyond the marshes on his right, ridged with color—rust and waning green and dull gold. It had once sheltered Osterley from storms, making it a safe haven. But it must also have allowed the sand to find a haven as well, until the water had been lost amid the pits and shallows rising faster than it did. A haunt of waterfowl now, but through the breaks in the ridges one could still glimpse the sea, tantalizing and perhaps close enough to hear when the wind fell off. There must be a fine strand still, out where the headland rose to his left, the kind of place that would have attracted fishermen and bathers had there been easier access.

Small houses, shops, and a single hotel had taken over the waterfront now. Cheek by jowl, they presented a blank face to the sea: few windows and most of the doorways shielded by narrow, rectangular entries that kept out the wind and provided some protection in storms. These were a signature of many seaside towns accustomed to rough weather.

Neither rich nor poor, and mostly unchanged over the past century or more, Osterley offered a middle-class solidity that was the backbone of England, attitudes still firmly fixed in Victorian morality and the responsibility of Empire. Clinging to the edge of the land, the town was no longer a part of the sea.

His was the only motorcar on the street today, although he saw three more standing at angles in the walled yard beside the only hotel.

A fat gray goose, wild, not domestic, picked at the black mud beyond the quay, and its mate stood watch, neck straight and eyes bright. Early winter arrivals. Beyond the town to the right of the harbor the marshes spread east for miles. Rutledge found a small space in which to shift into neutral and look out across them. They held a fascination for him, always had, but he had forgotten their odd beauty.

Just below him in the water, a boat was coming in, the man at the oars handling them well, keeping the bow midstream as if he knew his way, his fair hair dark with sweat as he pulled toward the quay. He wore a good tweed coat, and an English setter sat between the thwarts, tongue lolling as it watched the quay come closer. Rutledge turned off the motor and got out, standing there until the boat had reached the stairs, and then walked forward to catch the rope the man threw up toward him.

“Thanks!”

“My pleasure.”

The rower stood up and stepped out onto the lower stair. A man of middle height with a strong face and eyes the color of a winter sea, he was fit and trim. Clicking his tongue, he waited as the dog leaped up the stairs ahead of him, excitement in its movement, waiting for a sign to run.

“Heel, you ragbag!” he said, and looking up at Rutledge added, “He’s got more energy than I have! But then he hasn’t been working the oars for the past hour or more. I’ll have the devil of a time walking home; he’ll be there and back twice over before I cover half the distance.” It was said with a mixture of impatience and affection. The voice was cultured, without the local accent.

“Can you go out as far as the sea?” Rutledge asked, nodding toward the distant headland.

“Oh, yes. It’s quite nice out there. Silent as the grave, except for the waves breaking as they come in, and the birds putting up their usual fuss. I rather like it.”

He spoke to the dog and the pair set out up Water Street, the dog matching the man’s strides for the first twenty paces and then bouncing ahead like a thrown ball, urging his master on. Then an older woman, coming out of a shop to her horse-drawn carriage, called out, “Edwin? Care for a lift?”

The man waved to her, and whistled the dog to heel. Rutledge watched him swing himself into the carriage and heard his laughter as the woman agreed to allow the wet, wriggling animal to leap up with them.

Returning to his motorcar, Rutledge noticed The Pelican Inn, standing at the far end of the quay, where the road turned up. A barmaid had just finished sweeping the entry and was now shaking out the bit of carpet where customers wiped their feet. She was buxom, fair, and middle-aged, with a good-natured face.

Children rolling hoops ran up the street, shouting to each other, drawing a frown from two well-dressed men conversing under the wrought-iron sign for the baker’s shop. A black cat sat in a sheltered corner, licking its fur and ignoring the small terrier that was trotting at the heels of an elderly man with a cane. The man spoke to the barmaid and she laughed.

A pub, Rutledge thought, was one of the best places to test the temperament of a village. He left the car at the end of the quay and walked across to The Pelican.

The barmaid had gone inside and was wiping down the last two tables, her face pink with exertion as she gave them a good scrub. She looked up and smiled at him, saying, “What can I do for you, love?”

“Is it too early for a lunch?”

“The ham’s not near done, nor the stew neither, but I can give you a Ploughman’s.”

“That will be fine,” he answered. Bread and good English cheese and a pint.

“Here, sit by the windows where you can enjoy the view.” She shrugged plump shoulders and added, “If you like the marshes. I find them dreary, myself. Too much wildlife for my taste. Of the crawly kind, if you take my meaning! More of them than there are of us, and that’s no lie!”

He sat down by the window that looked out across the marsh and counted a flight of some dozen ducks coming in to what must be a pool hidden somewhere among the tall grasses. The barmaid had disappeared into the kitchen, and he heard the rattle of cutlery and dishes.

As his eyes adjusted to the dimness created by smoke-blackened beams and tables, he realized that he wasn’t alone. Another man sat in a corner nook by the bar, his head bent over a newspaper. Rutledge wasn’t certain whether he was reading it or using it as a barrier against conversation.

Decoratively, The Pelican contained the flotsam and jetsam of a seafaring port: an iron anchor in one corner, several ships’ models suspended from the beams, a handful of blue-and-white Chinese plates resting on shelves nailed to the walls with haphazard artistry, carved seabirds of every shape and size perched on the wide windowsills as if trying to find a way through the glass.

A stuffed greylag goose, enormous and showing signs of moth, occupied one end of the bar, with a sign around his neck advertising a Norfolk ale.

There were even odd bits and pieces from around the world, hung wherever they might fit. A great hammered-copper dish from Morocco or Turkey, set above the hearth, was large enough to serve an entire family without crowding. A small elephant sat in one corner, carved from teak and caparisoned in fraying velvet, with tiny silver bells in the fringe. What appeared to be a water buffalo’s horned skull was mounted above the door. And on another wall, curved knives in ornate sheaths shared honors with a hideous mask from somewhere in Africa, leering through shell-rimmed eyes and mouth.

It gave the public house a decidedly eccentric air, as if more than one seaman had settled his account with whatever souvenirs he had in his kit.

Hamish commented, “I canna’ say the goose is an encouragement to a man’s drinking.”

The barmaid came toward the table with Rutledge’s lunch—chunks of freshly baked bread and sharp cheddar cheese, a pickle, and a pot of mustard. As she set them before him, she tilted her head to the room at large and said, “We’re generally busier than this, but it’s market day at East Sherham, and most people won’t be back before two o’clock.”

She went to draw his pint, and added, friendly gossip that she was, “Here on business, are you?”

He answered that he was, and she continued to chatter for a few minutes longer, telling him that she had been born in Hunstanton and had come to Osterley with her husband, who had since died fighting a house fire, and that she and her two daughters had found a good home here. She seemed to ignore the man in the corner, as if he was another fixture along with the elephant and the mask.

Rutledge said, “I was shocked to hear that a priest was murdered in Osterley a week ago. It doesn’t strike me as the sort of town where such a thing could happen.”

She shook her head. “I never thought it, either. None of us has got over it, I can tell you. I keep my girls close, and lock the doors at night. If he’d kill a priest, he won’t stop at children, will he? I shudder to think what sort of devil could do such a thing! I haven’t slept deep since it happened.”

Rutledge was on the point of asking her another question when a group of men strode in, hailing her with accounts of their success bidding on a pair of rams at the sale in East Sherham and eager to relive it blow by blow. She went off to serve them, and listened with good grace to their rambling story of the day’s best bargain. Underlying their enthusiasm was a more somber thread of strain, and they seemed to be intent on ignoring it. Their laughter was a little loud, a little forced. The barmaid—Betsy, they’d called her—soon had them settled with pints to celebrate their success.

Rutledge decided, from the strong noses that marked each weather-beaten face, that they were father and sons. He finished his meal amid the general hilarity and a rash of newcomers bringing their own news of the market. It was, as far as he could tell, the only topic of conversation of interest just now: who was there, what they’d bought or failed to buy, how the prices ran, and any gossip gleaned. For an hour or so, the shadow of the priest’s death was being resolutely lifted.

The man at the corner table had not moved, as far as Rutledge could tell, nor had he turned a page in the newspaper. No one encouraged him to join in the good-humored banter or asked him to drink with them.

Settling his account, Rutledge left the pub and went out to start his motorcar.

“It doesna’ appear to be a town with dark secrets,” Hamish said. “And they didna’ stare at you—a stranger— with suspicion.”

“Interesting, wasn’t it? But then market day generates its own excitement. When the euphoria of a bargain wears off and night begins to fall, people will begin to look over their shoulders again.” He’d been to towns where the silence hung heavy as mist, faces shut and unfriendly, where there was no distraction from fear and uncertainty. Here there seemed to be a determined refusal to acknowledge that Osterley had been touched by evil. He wondered why.

Where Water Street turned at harbor’s edge to run back up to the main road, there were two horse-drawn carriages outside the green-grocer’s shop, and a lad from the butcher’s next door was carrying a bulky package out to deposit in a pony cart, accompanying a woman dressed in black with a small touch of cream at her wrists and collar. An elderly woman stepped out of the greengrocer’s with a large basket filled with her purchases, and turned to walk up toward the main road. Rutledge thought she might be Mrs. Wainer. But there was no one to ask.

“You can feel the water,” Hamish said. “It must be verra’ bitter here in winter. Raw with an east wind.”

“Sometimes,” Rutledge agreed. “When the storms roll in.”

Back on the main road, Rutledge braked as he came to the police station, but the sign hadn’t been removed from the door. He drove on to St. Anne’s and got out of the car, staring up at the rectory. Cupolas and mock turrets and gingerbread gave it a frivolous air that the simpler lines of the Victorian frame seemed half ashamed of. There were carvings at the peak of the gables, and he told himself that if the builder had found a place to add gargoyles, he’d have done it. And yet the whole seemed far more pleasing than any one part.

Next to the rectory was a fair-sized flint house with a small glass conservatory now flecked with moisture from an array of tall plants inside. Most certainly the home of the neighbor who had been away on the night of the priest’s murder. The windows on that side of the rectory looked across a narrow stretch of grassy lawn almost into the windows of the larger house.

But the rectory windows also looked down the lawn to the road. Had Father James seen someone there, someone he believed would hear his shout? A laborer walking home from the fields? A constable on patrol?

Hamish said, “Was it luck that the family was no’ at home? Or did the killer choose his time because of that?”

“Yes, it’s possible,” Rutledge answered. “If he’d been watching the house for several days.”

The next three houses were more modest in design, curving toward a house closest to the point that must have been part of the port buildings in its heyday. A small hotel? Or a customs house. A placard nailed to a board and neatly lettered in white identified it as a rooming house in its present incarnation. Across the street from where he stood, there were five flint houses, built for comfort more than style.

Rutledge walked up the short path to the rectory door. The knocker, he discovered, was a bit of whimsy as well: a coffin. He let it drop, and the echoing ring of sound startled him, deep as a bell tolling. Hamish, responding to his unspoken thought, said, “It must ha’ been the last owner’s, an undertaker’s.”

Rutledge was about to answer him when the door opened and a small white-haired woman dressed in black warily asked his business.

He explained who he was, offering his credentials for her inspection. She glanced at them with relief and then stood aside to allow him to enter a dark hall with two doors on either side of a wide staircase of worn mahogany. A passage ran down beside the stairs to a third door at the back end of the hall. Mrs. Wainer opened the one to her right and invited him into a small parlor, with a gesture offering the sofa as the most comfortable seat. It was a room of surprisingly lovely proportions, with long windows facing the church, a selection of old but well-cared-for furniture, and an oak mantelpiece that rose nearly to the high ceiling. This was ornately carved with ferns and acorns and leaves, and Rutledge wondered if it had come from an even older house.

The scent of lemon wax pervaded even the upholstery and rose to greet him as he sat down. The sheen on every wooden surface spoke of the brisk application of a polishing rag, and there was no dust on the green leaves of the large plant in one corner. Hamish eyed it with dislike. “Yon’s the ugliest aspidistra I’ve ever clapped eyes on.”

Rutledge was in agreement. It seemed to thrive without beauty, out of place here, but certainly well fed and watered.

Mrs. Wainer was saying, as she stood before him like a schoolmistress, “Did I understand you rightly? Scotland Yard, you said. That means London.”

“Yes, that’s correct.” Behind her, on the mantel, was a small china clock with a French dial and beveled glass. It ticked with a soft grace.

Her eyes closed for a brief moment, and she said, “I have prayed for answers. And there have been none. Until now.”

Rutledge said, not absolutely certain he understood her, “I haven’t come to tell you that the murderer has been found.”

“No. You’ve come to look for him. That’s what matters!”

“I’m here because Bishop Cunningham was concerned enough to contact the Yard—”

“As he should have been! It was a despicable crime. Despicable! I looked at Father James lying there, and I knew straightaway that such a thing hadn’t been done by an ordinary man. Inspector Blevins can’t seem to grasp that. Or won’t. I’m beginning to think he wants to believe it was a thief, come for the bazaar money. But it wasn’t. Now you’re here, something will be done about what happened.” There was an intensity in her face that made Rutledge feel uneasy.

“Why are you so certain that the killer wasn’t a thief?”

“Because he wasn’t! I don’t care what they say. You don’t knock a man down for such a pitiful sum, then leave behind a medal around his neck worth more than fifty pounds. If you’d kill a priest, you’d feel no compunction stealing his medal. In my opinion, this was vengeance. Someone wanted him dead!”

It was an interesting choice of words. Rutledge said, “What had Father James done to bring such wrath down on him?”

“That’s what you must find out,” she told him earnestly. “I’ve been Father James’s housekeeper since first he came here to Osterley, and that’s been well over ten years now. He was a good man and a wonderful priest. A caring priest. And good people make enemies.” She turned her head to look over her shoulder, toward the door and the stairs, as if expecting someone to come down them and call to her. “I don’t think I’ll ever be free of that horror, him lying there in his own blood, his hand so cold when I touched it that I cried out for the pity of it.” Her eyes came back to Rutledge. “A monster did that killing, retribution for Father James standing up against cruelty and evil and sin. Mark my words, that’s what you’ll find if you search hard enough!”

Hamish said, “She believes what she said, and she willna’ be satisfied with any other solution.”

Rutledge answered him silently. “She must have loved him, in her own way. And anything less than a monster will make Father James’s death seem—senseless—to her.” Aloud he said to Mrs. Wainer, “Did you know the money was here? The money from the autumn fair?”

“Of course I did! Father James gave it to me that evening when the fair was over, and said, ‘Lock this away in my desk, will you, Ruth? I’ll give you the key, and fetch it again as soon as I’ve cleaned up.’ He’d been dressed as a clown, to entertain the children, you see, and the paint was still on his face.”

“Did you usually lock money away for him?”

“I did whatever he asked. He trusted me,” she said simply.

“Was the desk broken into? To find the money?”

“Yes, it was, damaging the drawer something fierce! But there’s only a small lock on the drawer, a flimsy thing at best. It was secure enough from prying eyes, if anyone came into the room. Hardly more than that—and we never had a ha’penny stolen until now! There was no need for safes and bolts on doors. I have told you, he trusted people, Father James did. It wouldn’t have occurred to him that this house might be invaded the way it was!”

“Sadly enough, that’s often the case,” Rutledge answered her. “It’s one reason why housebreakers—and the like”—he added hastily—“are often successful. But I have no authority here, Mrs. Wainer. Except to assure the Bishop that everything possible is being done to find Father James’s murderer—”

“And how, pray, could you hope to assure the Bishop of that, when you haven’t lifted a finger toward setting Inspector Blevins on the right track?” Her eyebrows rose, and she regarded him with a scornful expression.

“The Yard—” Rutledge began.

But she was not interested in the politics of the Yard or its role outside London. Like Bryony in Norwich, she was concerned only with finding a reason for an otherwise incomprehensible crime.

He had disappointed her. And her face let him know it.

Making amends as best he could, Rutledge said, “You tell me that goodness makes enemies. Can you give me the names of anyone who might have had a reason to harm Father James?”

“Don’t be daft. If I could have made such a list, I’d have handed it over to Inspector Blevins. And I never heard Father James speak ill of anyone. He had a way with him, listening to what was said to him, considering what was to be done for the best. And, good man that he was, he always looked for the best in people. But he didn’t always find it. There are some that are two-faced, smiling and agreeable under your eye, but mean-spirited and venomous behind your back. He knew that, just as any good policeman should.”

Her views on the failings of human nature met with approval from Hamish. He said, “Aye, a man owed my grandfather money, and said he couldna’ pay it back, his business was sae puir. But it wasna’ true. He was hiding the profits.”

Rutledge said, “You were in this house every day, going about your duties. How did Father James behave those last weeks? As he always had? Or could you see that he was worried, preoccupied?”

For the first time, he caught a glimpse of fear in her eyes. It was unexpected, as if she had locked it away and didn’t want to bring it into the light.

Mrs. Wainer was silent for a moment, then answered, “I’d find his bed not slept in, some mornings. And he’d often be standing at the kitchen window by the back garden, looking out, the tea already made, as if he hadn’t been able to rest. That last morning, he turned a surprised face to me when I came in at my usual hour. As if he’d lost track of the time.”

“Was there a problem in the parish that kept him awake?”

“If there was, it never reached my ears! But he’d been to the doctor’s, several times to my certain knowledge, and I was beginning to wonder if he was ill—a cancer or some such. And it was on his mind.”

“A local man?”

“Dr. Stephenson, yes. It’s all I could think of, that Father must have been given bad news. I waited for him to confide in me, but he never did. And then he was killed, God rest his soul, and I couldn’t help but think as they put him into the ground, he’ll not have to worry any more about the cancer.”

“Did he show signs of being ill? Coughing—complaining of pain—taking medications you hadn’t seen before?”

“No, I’d have come right out and asked him then! It was just—I don’t know—just a feeling that he was sorely troubled. I asked him the first time I found him standing in the kitchen if there was anything on his mind, and he said, ‘No, Ruth, I’m well.’ But there was something wrong. He wasn’t himself!”

“Something on his conscience, then?”

She gave him a stern and heavy look. “Priests like Father James don’t have evil on their conscience! I’d as soon believe that my own son was wicked, and him a respectable bank clerk in London!”

CHAPTER 6

JUST PAST THE FIRST TURNING FOR Water Street, Rutledge saw the small board indicating Dr. Stephenson’s surgery. On impulse he pulled over and stopped, left the car out in front, and rang the bell. It would do no harm to confirm or deny Ruth Wainer’s fears.

A woman admitted him, her apron crisp and her hair tightly pulled back into a small knot. It gave her face a severity that was belied by the kind eyes. Rutledge gave his name and asked to speak to the doctor.

“His surgery is closed for the afternoon.”

“It isn’t a medical matter. It concerns a police investigation.” He showed her his identification.

She considered him, uncertain what to do. Finally, as Rutledge smiled at her, she said, doubt heavy in her voice, “He’s in his office, writing up a patient’s record to send to London. If I let you go in, you won’t keep him long, will you? The post won’t wait!”

He was taken to Dr. Stephenson’s private door down the passage and admitted into the small office, where the doctor sat at his desk, papers spread around him. He looked up, saw Rutledge behind his nurse, and said, “I don’t have hours today. Have you told him that, Connie?”

“It isn’t a medical matter,” Rutledge said. “It’s police business. I’ve been sent down by Scotland Yard.”

“The Yard, is it?” Stephenson said, giving his visitor his full attention. “Oh, very well, I can spare you five minutes! No more.” He put the cap on his pen and sat back in his chair, locking his fingers together and stretching his arms in front of him.

He was a brisk man, Rutledge thought, but not cold. And he appeared to be competent, for his eyes examined his visitor openly, and behind the short, neat beard, his mouth twitched with interest.

The nurse withdrew, closing the door, and Stephenson said, “You don’t look well, you know.” He gestured toward a wing chair.

“It isn’t surprising. I was shot some weeks ago.”

“In the line of duty?” Rutledge nodded. “That explains it, then. You still carry that shoulder a little higher, as if it’s stiff. What brings you to Osterley? This business about Father James?”

“I’ve been asked to reassure Father James’s Bishop that everything that can be done has been done in the matter of the priest’s death—”

“Then you should be speaking to Inspector Blevins, not to me.”

“On the contrary. The questions I have to ask are medical.” Rutledge’s glance moved from the prints hanging on the blue walls to the bookcase stuffed with medical treatises and texts.

Stephenson pointedly shuffled his papers. “If you are asking me in some roundabout fashion to tell you which of my patients was likely to have committed murder, I can’t help you. I’d have gone straight to Blevins if I’d had even the faintest suspicion that one of them could have been responsible.”

Rutledge smiled. “The patient I’m inquiring about is Father James himself. You were his physician. And I’ve been told that he had something on his mind shortly before his death. His housekeeper believes that he might have been seriously ill, and was keeping it from her. If it wasn’t his health that troubled him, then we have another avenue to explore. If it was, we can close that door.”

“I don’t see how his state of mind will help you find the thief who killed him. But I can assure you that Father James was as healthy as a horse, save for a few bouts of sore throat now and again. Bad tonsils, but never serious enough to require more than a box of lozenges for the soreness. They worked well enough, most of the time.”

“And yet he came here to see you several times in the weeks before he died.”

“There’s nothing surprising about that! Religion and medicine walk hand in hand, as often as not. I confer with the priest or the Vicar as frequently as I summon the undertaker. People grieving or in pain or frightened need comforting, and that’s the role of the church when medicine has done all it can.”

Rutledge let a silence fall. It expressed nothing, but Stevenson seemed to read into it a refusal to accept his offhand remarks. After a moment, the doctor added, “But you’re right. The last time or two it wasn’t an illness that brought him here—his or a parishioner’s. He wanted to ask me about a patient of mine. Man named Baker. Father James had been to see him just before he died. Afterward he began to wonder about Baker’s state of mind at the end. Far as I know, it was clear and coherent. I saw no reason to believe otherwise, and I was in attendance.”

“One of Father James’s flock?”

“Actually, no. I suppose that’s what lay behind his questions, although Father James didn’t go into the matter. Baker was staunch Church of England, but he wanted to be shriven by a Catholic priest as well as his own Vicar, and his family humored him. Father James, to his credit, attended even though it was one of the nastiest nights I’d seen in a year or more. A few hours later Herbert Baker died of natural causes—I can vouch for that—and his Will was quite straightforward. As a matter of fact, I’d been asked to witness it some years back. None of Baker’s children has complained about it, as far as I know. There was no reason to feel any concern, and I told Father James that.”

“And yet you tell me he spoke to you again about Baker.”

The doctor picked up his pen, indicating that he wanted to get back to his own work. “I just explained what happened. There was some confusion the night this patient was dying. Baker insisted he wanted a priest. The one from St. Anne’s. But it was the Vicar who sat beside the old man when he breathed his last, close on to three in the morning. Father James had already gone back to the rectory, having spent no more than half an hour with the patient. I grant you that it wasn’t the usual sort of thing, but then I’ve sat by enough deathbeds myself to know that there’s no accounting sometimes. Martin Baker sent for a priest to give his father ease. Rightly so!”

“What do you think was resting so heavily on Herbert Baker’s conscience?” Rutledge asked the question conversationally, as if out of simple curiosity.

“I expect it was no more than some youthful indiscretion. Baker had been sexton at Holy Trinity for many years, and he may not have relished spoiling the Vicar’s good opinion of him, just at the end. I’ve known more than one case where a man’s wild oats came back to haunt him on his deathbed.”

“I shouldn’t think that Father James—an experienced priest from all I’ve heard—would be overly concerned about a young man’s wild oats.”

“Father James often surprised me with the breadth of his concern for people. There was compassion to spare for any lost sheep. I found it admirable in him.” The doctor uncapped his pen. “I’ve given you far more than your five minutes. This is pressing, the report I’m writing. I have a patient in hospital in London, facing surgery. It can’t wait.”

“Just two other questions, if you will. Did anyone to your knowledge hold a grudge against Father James?”

“He wasn’t that kind of man. His predecessor was autocratic, and while everyone respected him, there was little love for him. Father James on the other hand was a reasonable, clear-thinking individual who took his duties to heart but was never oppressive about it. I wasn’t one of his parishioners, but I am told he preached a fine homily in a voice that made the rafters sing.”

“I understand Father James was a chaplain at the Front, and was sent home early. With severe dysentery.”

“Yes, it was chronic, and the army surgeon was of the opinion he would be dead in a month if he wasn’t sent home. Decent water, decent food, and bed rest saw him right enough. Father James wasn’t happy to be sent home. He wanted to serve. There was a Father Holston in Norwich who set him right again by telling him that God, not Father James, decided where he could serve best. Which oddly enough came true. In the influenza epidemic he was my right hand. I’d have lost twice the number of patients without his dedication. Seemed to have the constitution of an iron man, I can tell you!”

Rutledge thanked Stephenson and stood up to leave. As he walked to the door, he turned and asked, “When did Baker die? Before or after the Autumn Fete at St. Anne’s?”

“A day or two after the bazaar. As I recall, the Vicar said something about the timing of the storm—that it was a blessing it hadn’t struck earlier. Now that’s all I have to say to you. Good afternoon!”

Hamish grumbled as Rutledge walked out of the surgery, “If it wasna’ his health that worried yon priest before his death, and this man Baker didna’ weigh unduly on his mind, what kept him awake at night? Was it yon fair at the kirk?”

“Yes, I was wondering about that myself. Sometimes people come a long distance to attend these affairs, if they have any sort of reputation for good food and good entertainment.”

“People travel far to funerals as well.”

“I think the bazaar is a more likely choice. Father James didn’t officiate at Baker’s services—the Vicar would have done that.”

Looking around him at the town of Osterley, where a watery and inconsistent sunlight was reflected from the flint walls, Rutledge found himself thinking that he would be on his way back to London tomorrow. Back to the letters lying unopened in the desk drawer in his sitting room. Away from the smell of the marshes and the call of gulls overhead. He answered absently, “The local police will know more about such evidence than I do.”

But would they? Whatever lay at the core of this murder, whether it was theft or a killing with a purpose, someone appeared to have covered his tracks very well.

Was he clever—or merely lucky?

Hamish said, “For a man who willna’ be involved with this death, you ask a good many questions.” There was a taunt behind the simple words.

Rutledge said, “No. I’ve merely tried to be sure that the good Bishop’s fears are unfounded. . . .”

But was that really true? In Rutledge’s experience, investigations often floundered when the police failed to ask the right question. Or failed to look behind the most obvious evidence at what could have been overshadowed by it. Damning connections grew out of persistence, connections that at first glance were not even visible. Most mistakes were made by the human element—the refusal to be objective.

An old Sergeant at the Yard had told him once, at the start of his own career, “When the police look for guilt, there’s always enough to serve their purpose. Nobody is free of guilt. But if you search for the truth, now, that’s a different tale!”

What was intriguing about this case was the reaction of those who were close to Father James. They ignored the theft and believed that nothing short of a Greek tragedy could explain this murder: The assumption that the death of great men grew out of cataclysmic events. It was implicit in their denial of the facts: Even though a small sum was stolen, it had nothing to do with the actual crime.

But what if it had? A life was not always given its real value. . . .

Hamish said, “Aye, but what if this killer only hunts priests, and there’s another one in jeopardy now?”

Neither theft nor Greek tragedy but madness? Rutledge raised his eyes to look up at the church standing high above the road, and wondered how such a killer would choose his next victim. Or if he had already killed before . . .

Since the Osterley police station was no more than a few doors from the doctor’s surgery, Rutledge left his motorcar where it was and walked there.

The sign was still up, and he started to turn away, intent on the drive back to Norwich. But there was the sound of a voice somewhere inside, and he hesitated, then reached for the knob, thinking he might find someone with whom he could leave a courtesy message for Inspector Blevins.

He stepped into a scene of chaos.

A huge man had been pushed against his will into a chair that faced the Sergeant’s rough, wooden desk, and two constables were attempting to hold him down on the seat while he bellowed at an Inspector listening to his curses with an expression of distaste. A Sergeant stood at the Inspector’s shoulder.

The constables turned to see who had come through the door, glanced back at their Inspector, and in that instant of distraction loosened their grip on the massive shoulders.

The Inspector glared at Rutledge, demanding, “What do you want?” and then savagely ordered, “Franklin— watch what you’re doing, damn it!”

“Inspector Rutledge, Scotland Yard—”

The man in the chair surged to his feet like a whale breaching.

Hamish yelled a warning and Rutledge hastily leaped aside.

The enormous man broke away from the constables and lunged toward the door, one shoulder ramming into Rutledge and sending piercing swords of fire through his body. He gasped for breath, the pain nearly doubling him over, but thrust out a foot instinctively, managing to trip up the man and then to dodge his thundering fall.

Everyone was shouting at once: The clamor was deafening.

The constables were on the man like monkeys, and Blevins, breathing hard, swore again. “Don’t stand there, Sergeant, give them a hand!” As his Sergeant, an older man, jumped into the fray without much effect, Blevins added at the top of his lungs, “Hit him if you have to!”

The wildly struggling man went limp as something struck him on the head with a solid thud of flesh against flesh. A fist.

Rutledge, leaning back against the wall, was trying hard to breathe normally again, dizzy with the effort. The Sergeant, calling angrily to the constables to hold on, leaned over his desk to fumble for handcuffs.

Between them the four men managed to haul their dazed captive to his feet and out of the room, toward the rear of the station. As the prisoner regained his senses, Rutledge could hear his rising bellows and the thumps of his heavy boots as he kicked out at his captors or the walls, whatever was in reach.

Blevins walked back into the room rubbing his thigh with his fist. “Damned ox! Rutledge, did you say? From the Yard? What do they want? Is it about the priest’s murder?” As Rutledge nodded, Blevins bent to pick up papers that had fallen from the desk to the floor. He added, “Well, you’re just in time.” He jerked his head toward the rear of the station, where the protests and curses marked the location of a holding cell. “That’s our man. At least there’s every likelihood it is. He was the Strong Man at the bazaar. Quite an act, pulling a line of carriages against a team of horses, picking up a bench with two young ladies seated at either end, defying ordinary men to lift his iron weights. Very popular with the young people, engaging personality, they tell me. Name’s Walsh.”

It had been simple theft after all. “What connects him with the priest?” Rutledge felt like hell, his mind refusing to function, while his lungs burned.

“Circumstantial evidence so far. Mrs. Wainer was quite put out when she found Walsh wandering about in the rectory on the day of the bazaar looking—he said—for water to wash up. She sent him away with a flea in his ear. Fortunately, later on she remembered what had happened and told Sergeant Jennings. And when the police in Swaffham caught up with him at a fair there, he had a new cart for his gear. We’ve just brought him in, as a matter of fact.”

“Nothing suspicious in a new cart, surely?” The fire was subsiding.

“It was paid for two days after the priest was killed. With bits and pieces of bills and coin.” Blevins gestured to the chair vacated so abruptly by the Strong Man, then sat himself down behind the Sergeant’s desk. There was a cut on the heel of his hand, and he stared at it, then at the bloody stain spreading on his cuff. “Damn the bastard! Teeth like steel traps!”

Rutledge took the chair. His chest was settling into a dull ache now. Gingerly testing, he took a deep breath and felt nothing beyond the usual resistance. But the memory of the pain was still fierce. “The sort of money a bazaar takes in, yes. But surely the kind of thing his act brings in as well.”

Blevins glared at him. “Look, we’re just at the beginning of this business. I’ve got men asking questions at the smithy where the new cart was built to see when it was ordered. I’ve got men asking questions about Walsh’s movements the day of the festival here as well as the night Father James was killed. A man that size can’t slink around without being noticed. Half the county force has been given to me for the duration to track the killer down. A local lord has even put up a reward for information leading to an arrest. Father James was well liked. We’re doing the best we can!”

Rutledge rejoined peaceably, “Yes, I can see that. You seem to have the investigation well in hand. Bishop Cunningham was alarmed enough to ask the Yard to see if there was anything we could do. Monsignor Holston will be glad of the news that someone’s in custody.”

“I suppose he will.” Blevins rubbed his eyes tiredly. “He was a friend of Father James’s. Do you want the truth? This is the first reasonable lead we’ve found. And if he didn’t kill the priest—Walsh, I mean—why did he put up such a fight? Here and in Swaffham!”

Because, Hamish pointed out, the man might well have other secrets to keep, unrelated to murder.

Rutledge said, “Then you don’t want me underfoot. I’ll return to London and leave you to it.” He had already been planning to do just that, but now there was an unexpected sense that he had somehow failed the people who had turned to him for answers. This arrest wouldn’t bring them peace. . . .

Hamish said, “They were wrong—Bryony and Mrs. Wainer and Monsignor Holston. It wasna’ a Greek tragedy that brought Walsh here. Only a new cart.”

Blevins was staring thoughtfully at Rutledge, debating something on his mind. Then, to Rutledge’s surprise, he said, “I’d take it as a favor, Inspector, if you stayed on. A day or two. At least until we’ve had an opportunity to look into Matthew Walsh. The Strong Man.” He used the words with irony, then meticulously straightened the stained green blotter before adding, “I’ve felt a good deal of anger over this business. I was one of Father James’s parishioners, you see. I’m not certain I’m detached enough to do my job properly. To judge Walsh’s innocence as well as his guilt.”

“Have you spoken to the Chief Constable—?”

“He tells me that it isn’t a question of my feelings,” Blevins interrupted. “It’s a simple matter of the facts. Well, I ask you, how am I to judge the ‘facts’ in this murder case when I’d cheerfully watch the bastard who did it hanged?”

“You must have known Father James fairly well. What was he like?”

“Middle-aged, but he went out to France. All through the Somme, he was there, ministering to any man who needed him. Of any faith. Even Hindus, for all I know. You could come and sit down in his tent and talk. I mean—talk.” He considered Rutledge. “In the War, were you?”

Rutledge nodded.

“I wondered, when I saw you flinch just now. Thought it might be an old wound caught wrong. Well, then, you know what I’m trying to say. Half of us were scared of dying, and the other half knew we were already dead—there was no hope of getting through it. But I never once heard Father James say it was ‘duty.’ What we owed to England. Or any of that other—” He broke off and grinned sheepishly as he remembered where he was. “He never treated us like fools. Instead he’d help us pray for courage. I was never much of a praying man until the Somme. No more than was required of me, at any rate. Father James taught us to pray for strength to see us through whatever came our way. It was all that saved me sometimes, walking into No Man’s Land in a hail of fire. My guts would turn to water, I’d shake so the rifle jerked in my hands. And I’d pray loud enough to hear myself. I wasn’t the only one, either.”

“No.” Rutledge had heard men pray in such straits. An odd mixture of pleading and defiance sometimes, trying to bargain for their lives. He’d done it himself, until the prayer had turned to begging for release.

Blevins shook his head. “Well, that’s the kind of man Father James was. And some bloody coward strikes him down for a few pounds. All that good—all that kindness and compassion—wiped out for a bloody handful of coins!” He waited for a response, watching Rutledge. There was nothing in his face to show how he felt, but his eyes pleaded.

Hamish observed, “Yon’s a worried man . . .”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t stay. Until you’re satisfied,” Rutledge answered slowly. Bowles had, after all, given him a few days in which to carry out his original orders. And the Bishop would never complain of thoroughness. . . .

“There’s a hotel here in Osterley. Not up to London standards, perhaps, but it’ll suit you well enough. The woman who runs it is pleasant, and the food is good. I’ll call round later to see if you need anything. Best to let Walsh calm down before we try to talk to him.”

Rutledge heard dismissal in Blevins’s voice. The Inspector also needed to calm down, Rutledge thought. Hamish, agreeing, said, “He’s no’ a bad policeman, if he sees his own weakness.”

Standing, Rutledge said, “I left my luggage in Norwich. I’ll go back there tonight, and drive up tomorrow. I’d also like to have a look at Father James’s study, if you don’t mind. Before we talk to Walsh.”

“Mrs. Wainer will see to it. I don’t think she’s opened that door twice since it happened. No doubt pretends the study and the bedroom don’t exist anymore. She took it very hard, Father James’s death. Blamed herself for not staying on until he’d come back for his dinner. But that’s always the way, isn’t it?”

“Hindsight. Yes, it’s common enough.” Rutledge thanked him and left.

He drove back to the outskirts of Norwich, to the hotel there, and left a message with Sergeant Gibson at the Yard that he was staying over. Within half an hour Frances telephoned him to see how he was managing and to pass on the good news that a mutual friend had just given birth to a daughter, mother and child doing well, father recovering.

She had always managed to pry information out of Gibson. The crusty old Sergeant was apparently water in her hands.

There was still an hour before dinner, and Rutledge sat down in the most comfortable chair in his room and shut his eyes against the lamplight.

His chest ached with a vengeance, and he could feel the waves of exhaustion that swept him, too strong to allow him peace. Too much driving, too much strain on the still-healing flesh. But it had been worth it. Away from London, he found he was free of that obsessive need to appear to be unchanged by what had happened to him in Scotland. Here, no one knew his past, or cared about his future.

Rest seemed to elude him, his body tense with pain.

And yet at some point he slept, the quiet in the room giving way to the sound of battle, the distant roar of artillery, the chatter of machine guns cutting down the men struggling across No Man’s Land. The rain that beat against the windows in a sudden squall became mud underfoot, slippery, black. He went down, unsure whether he’d been shot or lost his footing. He lay there, unable to find the will to rise again, hoping he was dying. Corporal MacLeod’s voice was shouting at him, asking if he’d been hit. He scrambled to his feet, wondering why his chest felt heavy, wondering when there had been time to bandage it. It was hard to breathe as he ran, calling to his men, his eye on the barricaded hole where the Hun gunners lay hidden. He could hear the thump of bullets all around him, the screams of the wounded, the prayers and cries of angry, terrified men. His men. He couldn’t reach the gunners, he couldn’t get within range—the spotters had given him the wrong coordinates, it was a slaughter, and he couldn’t get to the gunners—!

And then a well-hidden sniper’s rifle fired, and somehow he heard it over the din of battle, and it fired again, and at the third shot, for a mercy the machine gun nest fell silent—

CHAPTER 7

RUTLEDGE ATE DINNER IN THE QUIET little restaurant attached to the hotel. Most of the other diners were local people, and he belatedly remembered, thinking about it, that it was Saturday evening. The hats of the ladies lacked style but were worn with pride, and the suits of the younger men were pre-War, ill-fitting, as if the weight lost in whatever theater they’d served hadn’t been regained. Couples chatted self-consciously, keeping their voices low and falling silent from time to time as though they had no idea what to say to each other. Four–five years of war left gaps in their lives that would be slow to mend.

He wondered what Jean had to say to her Canadian diplomat. How long, even, she had known him. Not that it mattered . . .

As the door from the lounge bar opened, Rutledge looked up. In that brief instant he thought he recognized the man standing by the hearth drinking down what appeared to be a Scotch and water. But when the door opened again the man was gone.

It was the same man he’d seen bringing in the boat at the Osterley quay, he was nearly sure of it. Edwin, his name was. . . .

The hotel’s food was simple but well cooked: carrot soup, roast mutton and potatoes, with a side dish of cabbage and onions, and an apple tart to finish. With only Hamish for company, Rutledge’s mind, unbidden, returned to the murder of Father James.

Why is it, he found himself thinking, that there has to be meaning in an unforeseen death? All of nature kills without compunction. Why should Everyman die with a fanfare of trumpets, like another Hamlet? In London he, Rutledge, had seen his share of wanton murder, where life had been snuffed out callously. And yet Father James’s friends had searched for purpose in his death, as if this somehow provided a legacy. . . .

Hamish, with relish, reminded him that there was no longer a case. “If yon Strong Man is the murderer, it’s no’ your duty to finish the investigation.”

Rutledge heard him, and even agreed. But he was not satisfied.

If he was guilty, Walsh’s motive had been theft. To pay for his new cart. And Father James most certainly would have recognized him. Even in a dark room, the sheer size of the man would have given him away. That alone might have turned Father James toward the window to call for help. On the other side of the coin, if Walsh had been startled to find someone walking into the study, he couldn’t have guessed that the priest was not likely to press charges. Cornered, he would have tried to protect himself as best he could, and once the crucifix was in his hand, it was a very small, frantic step to using it. A frightened man, looking for a way out . . .

What would Mrs. Wainer have to say to that? Or Monsignor Holston?

Even Inspector Blevins, with his man apparently safely tucked away in a cell, had asked Rutledge to stay on in Osterley.

Why?

By the time Rutledge had reached his dessert, he had come to realize that each of Father James’s defenders had spread over the indignity and degradation of murder a cloak of tragedy. But even their vision of that cloak was different.

What was it about this priest’s death that made everyone wary of the simple truth? Or made the simple truth a very odd choice? What had they failed to tell their visitor from Scotland Yard?

Hamish interrupted him to ask why a Protestant in apparently good standing with his own pastor would suddenly demand to see a different one—and one outside his own faith? It was not something that set well with his Covenanter’s view of things. Come to that, he persisted, why would Father James feel concerned about that dying Protestant’s mental stability?

Rutledge was moving on to the lounge for his tea. In a quiet corner, where the bay window looked out over the dark gardens, he discovered that he was staring at his own reflection in the uneven, two-hundred-year-old glass. It distorted his features, giving him a sinister look. But mercifully, the chair had been set at an angle, the reflection of Rutledge’s right shoulder masked by the shadows of the velvet drapes, and there was no way to tell if there was anyone standing behind him— A shiver ran through him and he turned away from the window. Even the teacup in his hands couldn’t warm the coldness that had touched him—what if the chair had been placed only another few inches one way or the other, and he had stared without warning into a bloody and accusing face?

Hamish prodded again, the voice just out of Rutledge’s line of sight. Still shaken, it took him several minutes to answer.

Confession was a sacrament in the Catholic Church. . . . The stricture on silence was not as strong in the Church of England.

If there had been something on the old man’s conscience, something serious enough for confession to ease his dying, he might well have chosen not to tell his own Vicar. As Dr. Stephenson himself had pointed out, Sims knew the family—the wife, if there was one, the children. Instead Baker might have turned to a priest who not only was bound by secrecy but had no close ties with the survivors.

“I canna’ see it makes sae great a difference! Unless the truth would prevent Baker from lying in consecrated ground.”

That was something Rutledge hadn’t considered.

“He wouldna’ fash himsel’ o’er small sins,” Hamish continued. “And I canna’ think whatever it was weighed sae heavily on his conscience, if he carried it about wi’ him to auld age!”

Rutledge agreed. Nothing so common as infidelity or an unpaid debt would send Father James to the doctor to ask questions about Baker’s sanity. And a man confessing to a sin, even to a crime long forgotten by everyone else, would present no question of conscience for the priest. A dying man was past trying in a court of law. Justice, after a fashion, had been done.

Father James had spoken of the dead man’s Will . . .

What if one of the inheriting children had no right to the family name?

“Aye. That,” Hamish answered his thought, “would be a serious matter.”

Or had another name that had been kept hidden for a lifetime—

Was that the secret the dying man wanted to impart to Father James? To leave behind a record of a child’s true heritage?

Was it that responsibility that had kept the priest pacing the rectory floor at night? Surely he might have felt he owed some duty there.

If it was a Confession, Father James wouldn’t have spoken of it to Monsignor Holston. He was bound by his vows not to tell anyone, even another priest. Or even to seek comfort in his own quandary. But Monsignor Holston might have been aware of some distraction, of a heavy burden that was never brought into the open. . . .

It was an interesting dilemma, what to do about a Confessed sin.

And where there was a Will, there was a solicitor who had drawn it up. If there were dark secrets in the Baker family, perhaps he would also have a few of the answers. If there were none to be found . . .

“We’re back again to the War,” Hamish said without enthusiasm. “You ken, better than most, what secrets soldiers bring home with them. Or what secrets a man might confess before battle, no’ expecting to survive it!”

And how to find such a needle in a haystack of returned veterans?

Yet that same needle might have found Father James, nearly a year after the War had ended. . . .

Because he’d come to a bazaar?

The next morning Rutledge left the Norwich hotel and drove back to Osterley, Hamish battering at the back of his mind.

Rutledge hadn’t slept deeply the night before, unable to find a comfortable position. His chest had throbbed relentlessly, torn muscle overtired from fighting the wheel (Frances would have had his head if she’d known) and refusing to be eased.

Consequently he’d been subjected to a long and unpleasant interlude every time he’d roused enough to turn over. Hamish, for one reason or another, had taken a dislike to the damp, dreary weather and was in full form.

If he wasn’t comparing the rounded green land of this part of Norfolk to the great barren mountains and long glens of Scotland, he was reviewing the circumstances surrounding the death of Father James or mulling over the conversation with Monsignor Holston or Inspector Blevins. Awake, Rutledge was unable to let down his guard. Asleep, pain found him again in an endless, restive circle.

Hamish, Rutledge discovered he was thinking at some point, was a malevolent spirit with no need for sleep.

This morning, fighting a headache from the unpredictable shifts in subjects, some of them seeming to lie in wait for him and aimed with a deadly accuracy, others following the unsettled state of his own thoughts, Rutledge was glad to see a modicum of sunlight sifting through the overcast. It seemed to foretell a lifting of the clouds in his mind.

Hamish seemed to find it more to his liking as well. As the land changed a little, announcing their approach to the sea, Hamish unexpectedly said, “It isna’ a verra’ pleasant thought, returning to London. I canna’ ken why people live in cities, jammed cheek by jowl like so many sheep off to market!”

Rutledge agreed. His cluttered office was claustrophobic when rain ran down the soot-blackened windows, shutting him in with the lamplight and the musty smell of cigar smoke and wet wool. When it rained, Old Bowels’s moods were as unpredictable as the shifts in Hamish’s trains of thought.

Nor was he eager to return to Frances’s watchful care. His sister was a master at concealing her worry behind a light facade of humor, but he knew her too well to be taken in by it. He said aloud, in the silence of the motorcar—a habit he found nearly impossible to break— “I’ll be here at least one more day. It will do no harm.”

A lorry, bound from King’s Lynn to Norwich, sent an arc of muddy water across Rutledge’s bonnet as it passed in the southbound lane. He blinked as the spray washed the windscreen and left behind a dark and odiferous residue that slowly vanished in the drizzle that had resumed, swallowing up the sun.

As he drove into the town, Rutledge saw people hurrying toward Holy Trinity, bound for the service. He recognized a few of the faces from his brief visit on Saturday— the farmer and his sons who had successfully purchased the prize ram, the young woman he’d seen earlier in the churchyard, the barmaid at The Pelican, and two of the children who had been playing in Water Street. The familiar habit of Sunday worship comfortably being followed: occasionally greeting a friend, often looking up at the great tower that marked their destination as if already focused on the service. There was something very English about it.

He had the odd feeling that he had come home.

The constable on duty in the police station informed him that Inspector Blevins was at Mass, and had left word that he would expect his London counterpart after lunch.

“If there’s a Mass, there’s a priest,” Hamish told Rutledge as he walked back to the motorcar.

“Yes. I’d like to see who has been sent to conduct it.”

He turned the car and drove to St. Anne’s. The watery sunlight brightened.

Stopping in the drive beside the rectory, Rutledge sat back in his seat, trying to ease the tense muscles in his chest, massaging his upper arm near the shoulder, commanding it to relax. He’d nearly succeeded by the time the first of the parishioners came out of the service and walked away down the street.

Watching them, he wondered which had been under suspicion before Walsh had been taken into custody. Surely Blevins had considered a good many of them, before the investigation had widened.

In a few moments, Monsignor Holston stepped out of St. Anne’s and stood by the door, speaking to each family as they left the service. Rutledge, watching, could see that Monsignor Holston knew a number of them, and found a brief word even for those he didn’t. For a scholarly man, the priest had a remarkably affable manner with people. Inspector Blevins, in the middle of a group, stopped to make several remarks, and the priest’s face lighted a little. But there was doubt in his expression as he turned his head to follow Blevins and his family as they walked on. A trio of elderly women, dressed in black and very eager to take Monsignor Holston’s hand in their turn, brought up the rear of the procession of people. He reassured each woman, bending to hear what the eldest, stooped and leaning on a cane, had to say. But in the end he shook his head.

Hamish said, “He doesna’ know who will replace Father James.”

“I have a feeling the Bishop may wait until the police have finished their job.”

As the women moved off down the path, Monsignor Holston turned to go back into the sanctuary, and then saw Rutledge for the first time, hailing him.

Rutledge got out of the car and strode toward the church.

“Well met,” the priest said. “Come and talk to me while I change out of my robes.”

Rutledge joined him at the door. “I see you were sent here to conduct the service. Does this mean the Bishop has made no decision about Father James’s successor? Or are you taking up residence now?”

“The Bishop’s biding his time. I think he prefers to wait until there’s some news about the killer. Not wanting to be seen to be filling Father James’s shoes with unwarranted haste. But he can’t leave it much longer. There are needs here that I can’t meet, coming only for a day. And most of all it’s a need for continuity, a sense of order having been restored.”

They went into the sanctuary together and down an aisle. “This is a very lovely church, you know.” Monsignor Holston gestured to the stark simplicity surrounding them. “Father James used to say that it was stripped of all pretension, down to the bare bones of faith. Architecturally, that’s quite true. And I think he carried that message through into his pastoring here. But this is a dying parish; there’s no work for the young people here along the coast. The Bishop should find a young priest with energy and ideals to fill Father James’s shoes. One who might reach them before they wander off to work in Norwich or King’s Lynn or Peterborough. You could see for yourself how many of those present this morning were over forty.”

“Yes, I had noticed. Is this considered advice? Or an offering to the gods to keep you safely in Norwich?”

Opening the vestry door, Monsignor Holston smiled. “Yes, there’s that. I don’t mind coming here for the services. I just don’t have a fancy for staying.”

“I should think with Walsh’s capture that much of the strain would begin to dissipate.” To soften the remark, Rutledge added, “Although that will take time, I’m sure.”

Monsignor Holston shook his head. “There’s still something in that house”—he gestured toward the unseen rectory—“that would keep me awake at night!”

“The coffin door knocker, for one?” It was said lightly.

The smile returned. “That was a bit of whimsy on some Victorian priest’s part. A reminder that dust to dust is everyone’s fate.” He took off his robes and laid them carefully in the small black case on the table. After a moment he said, “I was surprised to see you still here, Inspector. I had thought you’d go back to London, duty done.”

“I had every intention of going,” Rutledge answered. “But Inspector Blevins has asked me to stay on a day or two. Until they are sure that this man Walsh is the one they want. They only brought him in yesterday, and there’s still a great deal to find out about his movements.”

Monsignor Holston nodded. “Blevins spoke to the Bishop last night. ‘Early days’ was what he said, but I think he’s very hopeful. Bishop Cunningham asked to be kept informed.”

“Blevins would also like to see this ended.” Rutledge paused, watching Monsignor Holston as he added the consecrated wafers to his case and closed the lid. As they walked out the vestry door into a spreading patch of sunlight, he said, “I’m just going to the hotel to see about a room. Will you join me for lunch?”

Monsignor Holston sighed. “I’d like that very much. But I have to be back in Norwich for a service tonight. If you’re here next Sunday, I’ll accept.”

“If I’m still here,” Rutledge agreed. “Where did you leave your motorcar?”

“Behind the rectory. Look, if you are staying on here, will you keep me apprised of the situation? I’m sure Inspector Blevins will have his hands full. And—I’d appreciate it.”

“Yes, I will.”

And Monsignor Holston was gone, hurrying around the apse into the churchyard, lifting a hand in farewell as he disappeared in the direction of the rectory.

Hamish said, “He left with indecent haste.”

“Yes. I don’t know what he’s afraid of, but Monsignor Holston is a man looking over his shoulder. He wanted me to come inside with him because he didn’t want to be in that church alone. At a guess I’d say he’s not sure the evidence against Walsh will stand.”

“Aye,” Hamish said thoughtfully. “There’re ghosts there. But of his making or are they real?”

“I wish I knew!” Rutledge answered, walking back to his own motorcar.

The Osterley Hotel had once been grander, when the town was closer to the sea. Now it offered comfort to what travelers there were and to families and merchants staying for market day. Rutledge thought it might also be the only lodging within several miles where townspeople could put up guests.

The hotel stood on Water Street, where the road ran along the quay, and was built of the ubiquitous flint, three stories with windows looking out over the marshes or onto a courtyard at the side of the building, where carriages and motorcars could be left.

The woman who came to the desk as he entered was nearing fifty, he thought, her graying hair tidily pulled back into a soft knot at the nape of her neck. Clear gray eyes met his when he asked for a room. “For the night?”

“For several days,” he said.

She nodded, pleased. “There’s a nice view of the sea from number seventeen. If you have keen eyesight,” she added with a smile. “What brings you to Osterley? We don’t get many holiday-makers this time of year.”

“A matter of business,” he said pleasantly. “When did the sea recede?”

“Not in my lifetime. The early years of the last century. Though they say that the storms since 1900 are eroding the beaches again, and we might see the water return within the next ten or twenty years. That would be nice!” There was more hope than certainty in her voice. “We serve breakfast at seven, later if you prefer it. And if you’ll be in to luncheon, we’d like to know. It’s generally served at half past twelve. Dinner is from seven to nine. Then the cook wants to go home. You can also find a meal at The Pelican when we’re closed. That’s the pub at the end of the quay.”

She was leading him up stairs that had been painted a soft green to match the carpet running down the center of the first-floor passage. A line of photographs in gold-trimmed oak frames had been hung along the walls, and he saw that they were early photographs showing Osterley when it still managed to attract a few bathers. Dark and faded, but fascinating as history: Victorian women in black silk gowns and bonnets strolling by the sea with black silk parasols shading their faces from the sun; small boats coming in to the quay in deeper water than existed now; and a fisherman proudly displaying his catch, his cap at a jaunty angle. There was a very early photograph of a coaster unloading freight, boxes and bales and barrels, just beyond The Pelican. And next to that, children forming a ring of curious faces around a pair of seals on the strand, their sleek, wet heads cocked in wary uncertainty. In this one, the marshes were a thickening line of reeds and grasses, more prominent to the east, leaving the western side of the narrowing harbor as a last sacrifice to the encroaching silt.

Noticing Rutledge’s interest, she said, “My grandfather took those. Avid photographer with a keen eye for such things. He was lucky with the seals—they don’t come this far south very often.” She stopped before number seventeen and opened the door.

It was a bright room, flooded with light from a double pair of windows. Large, well furnished with a bedstead of mahogany wood, a dresser with a mirror, and a clothespress that matched. A painted washstand stood in the corner. Two comfortable chairs framed a table under the first pair of windows, and a desk was set under the second.

“The finest room in the house,” Hamish murmured.

“I’m Mrs. Barnett,” she told Rutledge. “If I’m not in the office, I’m in the kitchen or out to do the marketing. Leave a note if you can’t find me.”

“I will. Thank you.”

“Do you care for luncheon today? As it’s Sunday, The Pelican is closed. You’ll have to drive inland some distance.”

“If that’s no trouble.”

“We have one other guest at the moment, and she’s staying in. Not a very agreeable morning for exploring the countryside! But I think it will clear by afternoon.”

She cast one last glance around the room, nodded, and closed the door.

Rutledge went to the windows and looked out. From the first floor he could indeed see the water, a thin line of waves curling in, gleaming dully, and a flight of birds rising from the shingle strand. The hummocky, marshy ground filling the harbor from the headland to his left as far as the great hook of land that served as a natural breakwater on his right appeared to be threaded with foot-wide rivulets of no great depth, as well as the little stream that was all that remained of the harbor.

Having seen the photographs in the passage, he realized that the buildings that had once served the sea—shops selling ship’s stores, fish markets, taverns, yards—had long since been turned to other uses. He had noticed one sporting a sign proclaiming a branch of the wildfowl trust. Another had become a smithy-cum-garage.

Hamish said, “I ken the sea taking a man’s livelihood. Storms scour the coast of Scotland. Men drown, ships are lost. It’s a hard life. But here . . .”

“They turned their hands to other things, I expect. Norfolk is sheep country. Or people simply moved on, those with a skill to offer somewhere else.”

For a time he stood there simply enjoying the view, his windows open to the cry of the seagulls and the light breeze that was rapidly clearing the rain out. But the air here was fresh and clean, a tang of salt in it; the houses and shops seemed richly colored in the warming sunlight, their flint and brick walls holding the very character of Norfolk. Many of the streets of this village now looked inland, as if growing accustomed to accommodating the missing sea, but Water Street still ran toward it and then turned when it reached the quay. The pale line of water out beyond the ridges of grass seemed to lack the energy to find a way back, a wan lover with no real passion for a reunion.

Hamish said, “No one remembers when the storms brought the sea inland. I wouldna’ hae wanted to live here then!”

Which was, Rutledge thought, a perceptive remark. He noticed an elderly man in a small boat rowing up the stream, heading in to Osterley. He rowed smoothly, back bent, arms moving from long practice in the even, easy strokes of someone brought up on the water. Muscles bulged where the sleeves of his darned sweater had been rolled back to the elbows, and the heavy corduroys he wore were well worn. Watching him pull for the quay, Rutledge realized suddenly that he envied the man, drawn to the water as he himself was.

Though the harbor had vanished—even most of the little boats themselves—the gulls, ever hopeful, could be heard heading toward the lonely rower or wheeling just out of sight above the hotel—as if searching the marshy silt for the next wave. Lacking a boat, he wondered if it was safe to walk down to the distant beach, or if there was a track he could follow.

He straightened, and brought his mind back to the present. His suitcase was in the boot; he would have to fetch it. The tips of the fingers on one hand absently massaged his chest. Too much driving had aggravated the blow he’d received yesterday. Damn the man Walsh! But it hadn’t been his fault. Rutledge had been in the wrong place.

Looking at his watch, Rutledge realized that it was nearly twenty-five after twelve. His baggage could wait. He washed his hands in the basin and dried them on a towel embroidered with an OH—Osterley Hotel—ringed with blue forget-me-nots. The room was scrupulously clean and in good order. Mrs. Barnett was conscientious about her guests’ comfort.

Down the passage he heard another door open and then close. The carpet muffled footsteps. The other guest? He wasn’t in the mood for conversation. . . .

He waited for a count of twenty, opened then shut his own door, and followed down the passage and the stairs. The French doors to the right of the lobby stood open now, and there was a long dining room with some twenty tables covered in white cloths with green serviettes. But only two by the long windows had been set for the meal. Farther down the room, a woman with a book open in front of her was already spooning her soup. All he could see was the top of her dark head.

Rutledge took his own place, with his back to her, and looked out the windows. Here there was no verandah with white painted chairs, waiting for people to sit in them and watch the water. Those belonged to the south coast of England, where the sun shone with more warmth and regularity. Flowers, nearly withered in the October winds, stood in boxes by the door. A few were still colorful in the brief shelter of the wall.

The dining room with its ornate glass chandeliers was very pleasant. Once it must have been filled with guests, with a large staff to see to them. Now it appeared to be only Mrs. Barnett who served the meals. She came through the swinging doors from the kitchen carrying a tray with his soup on it and a basket of fresh bread.

With a smile she served him and was gone, not lingering to talk. It was excellent soup, a mutton stock with vegetables and barley. He ate with relish, feeling hungry. Hamish, at the back of his mind, was occupied with the street outside.

There were quite a few people about, their shadows barely visible in the pale sunlight. But there was a patch of blue sky to the north, growing steadily larger. Rutledge saw Blevins walk past, lifting his hat to a young woman who held a shy little girl by the hand. A heavy-shouldered man, who looked more like a blacksmith than a farmer or fisherman, his hands gnarled and ingrained permanently with black, was talking to a thin man with the pale face of a schoolmaster. Three laborers, awkward in their Sunday best and deep in conversation, made way for a dray pulled by a farm gray. It passed them in a rumble of wheels, and disappeared around the bend.

A well-dressed man about sixty-five years of age passed through the outer door and opened the inner door to the lobby. His footsteps could be heard approaching the dining room, and he came through the French doors with an air of command that matched the craggy power of his face.

“Susan?” he called.

After a moment Mrs. Barnett appeared in the kitchen doorway, and something in her eyes instantly altered as she saw who had come to dine. She walked forward slowly, her expression a careful blank. Rutledge, keeping his attention fixed on the last of his soup, couldn’t avoid hearing the ensuing exchange.

“I’m in town for the afternoon and felt sure you could accommodate me for luncheon today.”

“My lord, it isn’t possible—there’s no table made up.”

“Yes, yes, I know, I should have called ahead. But I didn’t expect to be delayed beyond an hour. Now I’ll be lucky to get away in three.” He looked around. “I’ll join that gentleman by the window, shall I, and save you the fuss of preparing a place for me.” His eyes swept the room again, empty but for the two hotel guests, and then came back to Rutledge. Crossing to the table, he said, “May I join you, sir? It would spare Mrs. Barnett a good deal of inconvenience if you allowed me to share your table.”

Behind his broad back, Mrs. Barnett grimaced. Rutledge said, “The question, I think, is whether Mrs. Barnett can manage in the kitchen. If she can, then I shall be happy to have you join me.”

“Susan?” She nodded with what grace she could muster. Rutledge wondered if it was her own luncheon that would appear on the extra plate. “That’s settled then,” the man declared. As she went to fetch plates and cutlery, he pulled out the chair opposite Rutledge and said, “Sedgwick is my name. I live in East Sherham, not far from Osterley. But a long way to drive home for my lunch. A guest here, are you?”

He settled heavily in his chair.

“Rutledge.” They shook hands over the silver salt and pepper shakers. “For a few days. On a private matter.”

“Yes, that’s what brings most of our visitors these days. Business, not pleasure. I understand the town was once quite famous for fish and the fine bathing.” He looked up as Mrs. Barnett set his place and then brought his bowl of soup from the tray. “Thank you, my dear! And don’t stand on ceremony. Mr. Rutledge has finished his soup; he’s ready for the next course.”

As she set the bowl in front of Sedgwick, her eyes met Rutledge’s. He had the distinct impression that she would have enjoyed nothing more than pouring the lot over Sedgwick’s head.

“I’ll wait,” Rutledge told her, and she left them.

Sedgwick ate with gusto. “I’m famished,” he said between spoonsful. “It has been a long morning and I breakfasted shortly after six. Is that your motorcar I saw in the hotel yard? The four-seater?”

“Yes, it must be.”

“My younger son bought one like it a year before the War. Found it an admirable motor. Made the run from London in excellent time and never gave him any trouble.” He smiled wryly. “I’m at the mercy of gout, myself. Don’t fancy driving when my foot is aching like a fiend in hell.”

The conversation moved on from motors to unemployment and then to some discussion of the peace treaty that had been signed. “Is it worth the paper it was written on? I ask you! The French were vindictive as hell, and the Hun is too proud to live long under their heel!” Sedgwick shook his head, answering his own question. “Politicians are the very devil. Foolish idealists, like Wilson in America, or short-sighted and closed-minded, like that lot in Paris.”

Mrs. Barnett served them roasted ham and a side dish of carrots and potatoes, seasoned with onions, still steaming from the ovens. As she rearranged the salt and pepper to accommodate the various dishes, she asked Sedgwick if he cared for hot mustard sauce. He smiled and helped himself from the silver bowl she held for him, then sighed. “I don’t think anyone can match Mrs. Barnett’s mustard sauce. She won’t tell me how she makes it. And so I try to remember which days she’s likely to serve it. You’ll find it excellent!”

As she moved away after serving the sauce to Rutledge, Sedgwick added, “Know the Broads well, do you?”

“I’ve come here a time or two. A friend kept a boat west of here, but that was before the War. He’s not up to sailing these days.” Ronald had been gassed at Ypres; the damp ravaged his lungs now.

“Never been much for the sea myself. But one of my sons was fond of boats and took us out a time or two.” He smiled sheepishly. “Not the stomach for it, if you want the truth.”

Sedgwick was an engaging man, the sort of Englishman who could spend half an hour with a stranger without fear of encroachment on either side. Which told Rutledge, watching the sharp eyes beneath the gray, shaggy brows, that he was not what he seemed.

By the end of the meal, Rutledge had his man pegged. His accent was Oxonian, his voice well modulated, his conversation that of a gentleman, but he still had occasional trouble with his aitches. London roots, and not the West End, in spite of the heavy gold watch fob, the elegant signet ring on the left hand, and apparel that had been made by the best tailors in Oxford Street.

As they finished their flan and Susan Barnett brought the teapot for a second cup, the woman who had been sitting behind Rutledge some tables away rose and walked out of the dining room.

Sedgwick bowed politely, turning his head so that his eyes followed her through the doorway.

“An interesting young woman,” he said to Rutledge. “Religious sort, I’m told. She was at a dinner party given by the doctor here, and spoke very well on the subject of medieval brasses.”

It was almost condescending.

As if to underline Rutledge’s thoughts, Sedgwick added, “Spinster, of course,” settling the question of where she stood in his scheme of the world.

“Indeed,” Rutledge said, watching her walk across the lobby. The brief flash of a shapely ankle and the glossy dark hair above the straight back seemed at odds with Sedgwick’s opinion of her.

Sedgwick excused himself after his second cup of tea and spoke to Mrs. Barnett in the kitchen before leaving the hotel.

Rutledge himself rose from the table, dropping his serviette by his empty cup, and went into the lobby. There was a small sitting room beyond the stairs, the door standing wide. Inside he could just see his fellow guest reading her book. While the room was for any guest’s use, the occupant seemed to make it clear that she did not wish for company, her chair set at an angle that discouraged any greeting.

He turned and left the hotel to walk down the street toward the water. A chill wind blew off the North Sea and whipped the saw grass he could just see far out on the dunes. The single boat he’d watched coming in was now beached on the damp strand below the seawall, with wet boot prints coming up the stone steps and leading up into the town. He could follow them, as cakes of gray mud flecked off at each step.