Teller might use his brother’s revolver. Who would hear the shot? Even Mrs. Blaine was gone. But he hadn’t wanted to alarm them.

But on his way he detoured to speak to Inspector Jessup. The Teller motorcar had been moved from the scene of the accident, and it was now sitting in the small paved area to one side of the police station.

Inspector Jessup had gone home to bed. Rutledge was turned over to one of his constables, who gave him the report on the accident.

“Nothing anyone did caused Mrs. Teller to run off the road,” he said. “But someone had tried to tamper with the brakes and failed.”

He went out to have a look for himself and saw that Jessup had been right. “Any report on Mrs. Teller?”

“Dr. Fielding gave her something to calm her and kept her overnight. But he thinks she will be fine. Bruised and shaken, he said, but nothing time won’t heal.”

It was late when Rutledge finally arrived in Hobson, and he was tired. He debated knocking on Mrs. Greeley’s door and asking if his room was available. But he was afraid that Cobb might still be staying there, and the last thing he wanted tonight was to talk to anyone.

Instead, he found his way in the dark to Sunrise Cottage, and well before he reached the house, he stopped and stared up at it. There were no lights. The house looked just as it had done when he’d left it the last time.

“You wouldn’t see a change. He’s asleep,” Hamish said quietly.

If he was even inside.

There was a rug behind his seat of the motorcar. It was tempting to reach for it and sleep for half an hour. Neither his wits nor his reflexes were at their best.

When he didn’t immediately open the door, Hamish said, “It isna’ wise to stay here on the road.”

“He’s not likely to slip up on me.”

“Aye. True enough. But ye must move the motorcar.”

Walter Teller might well be twenty paces from where Rutledge sat, asleep in his wife’s bed. He didn’t want to risk more noise.

There was no way of knowing what the man’s state of mind was. Or even if he’d come this far. Walter Teller was a man who kept his emotions close, whose feelings had been lost in a welter of events, from the day he left for Africa, or possibly even from the day he was ordained. Was he a killer? He hadn’t murdered his first wife. The odds, then, discounted his murdering the second.

Hamish said, “Why did ye no’ feel for the second wife what you felt for the first? The lass here?”

Caught off guard, Rutledge said, “Because no one else did.”

“Aye.”

“I can’t help but wonder if it would have made any difference if Florence’s son had been brought up in London, not here. He might have had better medical care. That might have occurred to Walter Teller as well.”

But Hamish had no answer for that.

“We may never explain Walter Teller satisfactorily. Tidily and with ribbons.”

He had only to open his door to find out. That is, if Walter was indeed in Sunrise Cottage—and still alive.

“Ye’re no’ thinking straight,” Hamish said.

Rutledge could feel the darkness coming down, the sound of big guns in the distance, and closer to hand, the rattle of a Vickers gun.

No, that was at the Front. When Hamish was still living and breathing. Before he’d had to shoot him for disobeying orders . . .

His mind felt as if it were stuffed with cotton wool. But he’d come this far. Pulling his motorcar out of sight on the far side of the hedge, he listened, but nothing stirred.

Opening the motorcar door as quietly as he could, Rutledge stepped out into the night. There were stars overhead, and the looming shape of the house, rising behind the hedge, the whiteness of it almost ghostly in the ambient light.

He could still hear the guns in France, distantly echoing in his mind. Closer than they ought to be.

Shaking off the encroaching darkness, he turned toward the gate, then stopped.

He could have sworn another motorcar was coming up the rise. Moving deeper into the shadows cast by the hedge, he listened. The road was empty still.

He hadn’t imagined the motorcar. Footsteps were approaching the house on the unmade road, someone trying to walk quietly.

There was a slight creak as the gate opened and closed. Rutledge stayed where he was in the deep shadow of the hedge. A shaft of lightning lit the sky like