said and went up the stairs like a drugged man, to fall into the bed by the windows overlooking the river, and after that he could remember nothing until he awoke two hours later. It was still dark outside, but he got up, shaved, and dressed, and went to find a telephone in the town.

Clouds had come in during the night, and now intermittent showers were cropping up. He ran through one on his way to a hotel near the railway station, and dashed in. He was shown to the telephone closet, where he put a call in to the Yard.

Gibson answered and Rutledge gave him a brief summary of what had transpired in Hobson.

“I’m going now to Essex. I’ll be back in London as soon as may be.”

Gibson said, “You were supposed to be on the bridge last night.”

“Yes, well, a different murder took precedent.” And then he paused. “No one else was killed?”

“They sent the constables out again in your place. And nothing happened. The Chief Superintendent was not best pleased.”

“I don’t suppose he was.”

And then he was driving through the last of the darkness toward Witch Hazel Farm, chased the last five miles by a shower. As he came down the wet drive and his headlamps swept the front of the house, splintering into fragments of light against the mullioned windows, he had a premonition that all was not well.

He couldn’t have said why, except that Hamish, in the back of his mind, was as moody as the weather, his voice as depressing as the rain.

As he stepped out of the car, he realized that the rain had brought a chill with it. He splashed to the door as the shower grew heavier.

He lifted the knocker and let it fall. Even though it had been draped in black crepe to mark a house of mourning, its sound echoed through the silence, startling birds taking shelter in the greenery below the windows.

No one came.

And then the door was flung open and a frantic Walter Teller cried, “Come quickly, for God’s sake—”

He broke off, staring at Rutledge in bewilderment. “How did you get here so soon? The doctor isn’t even here.” Then looking over Rutledge’s shoulder, he exclaimed, “Here he is now. Let him in, will you? I must go—” And he ran back into the house, leaving the door standing wide.

The doctor’s motorcar was barreling down the drive, pulling up smartly behind Rutledge’s.

“This way,” Rutledge said, and Fielding nodded, preceding Rutledge into the house and taking the stairs two at a time.

Rutledge followed. On the first floor, the passage ran to the right and to the left. The doctor turned right, entered a room two doors down, and disappeared from view. Rutledge could hear someone crying.

He reached the doorway, and the first thing to meet his eyes was the great four-poster bed from another era, its bedclothes scattered and some falling onto the polished floorboards in a wild tangle.

Jenny Teller lay on the bed in her nightdress, her fair hair tumbled and uncombed, her feet bare.

Walter Teller was stepping aside to let the doctor work with her.

Fielding bent over the bed, his hands quick and sure. But after only a matter of minutes, he straightened and said, “There’s nothing I can do. She’s gone. I’m so sorry, Walter.”

“But she was alive when you got here!” he exclaimed. “I could tell.”

“I don’t think she was. And if she had been, it was too late, far too late. The laudanum had done its work. She must have been dying when you found her.”

“She can’t have been. I won’t believe it.” He leaned over his wife, touching her face, calling her name, begging her to wake up. The doctor watched him for a time, then caught his shoulder and pulled him away. “There’s nothing more you can do, man. Let me make her decent. She shouldn’t be left like this.”

It took some time to convince Teller to go out of the room. He reached the doorway, his face wet with tears, his mouth open in a silent cry of grief, then stumbled into the passage, going as far as the stairs, where he sat down on the top step, his head in his hands.

Shutting the door, Rutledge began searching the room from where he stood, his eyes roving from the armoire to the tall dresser, to the smaller chest of drawers on the far side of the bed, a desk by the windows, and a long mirror.

“There was a glass verra’