We can’t give more manpower to the search for him, with this murder case hanging over us. But I wouldn’t wish the family to feel we aren’t doing all we can. At least thank God there has been no plague.”

“There’s something wrong with this inquiry,” Rutledge told him. “I sometimes feel I’m chasing a ghost.”

“Nevertheless, if you know what’s best, you’ll find him—or what’s become of him—as soon as may be. Am I understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you taken the time to read Teller’s book? It might be useful.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Rutledge moved on, pausing to speak briefly to Sergeant Gibson just as Constable Turner came up the stairs two at a time.

Gibson, frowning, said, “That one’s in a tearing rush.”

Turner reached Chief Superintendent Bowles and saluted smartly. “Sir. There’s a train off the tracks up the line. Word just came in.”

Rutledge called to him, “Which train?”

“The northbound to Edinburgh,” Turner answered over his shoulder.

Rutledge said quickly, “Where, man, where did it derail?”

“Just to the north of a village called Waddington. Not that far—”

But Rutledge was already racing for the stairs, his mind filled with his godfather’s last words: Time has a way of slipping through our fingers.

If he’d asked Trevor to stay, if he’d come out with the words in time, they wouldn’t have been on that train—

He ran to where he’d left his motorcar. Out of breath and damning himself for not speaking up when he’d had the chance, Rutledge drove out of London at the best speed he could make, cursing the motorcars and lorries and pedestrians that held him up.

As soon as the outskirts of the city lay behind him, he gunned the motor and prayed he would be in time.

Chapter 14

The train to the north had just come around a curve before it derailed, and that had slowed its speed enough to prevent a catastrophe. It was bad enough as it was.

Three of the carriages were still smoking when Rutledge got there, a fire having started from a spark from the firebox. It was a scene of chaos, people milling about, debris everywhere, twisted metal and the stark white of shorn wood marking where the worst of the damage had occurred. The great engine lay half on its side like some wounded beast, and steam still trickled from the cooling boiler. The cars nearest it had accordioned before they derailed. As he slowed the motorcar and looked across the flat pasture that had been scarred and torn by the impact, he could see where a short row of bodies already lay covered in whatever was to hand: coats, a blanket, and even a tarp marked piers brewery in block letters that someone must have carried down from a brewery wagon left in the middle of the road, the horses standing patiently, heads down, half asleep in their traces.

He could hear people crying and shouting and a child screaming. Hamish said, “O’er there.”

Hamish had always had the keenest hearing in the company. Rutledge turned to look for a small boy and saw instead a little girl crouched beside her weeping mother, neither of them able to take in what had happened to them. He hurried across the uneven ground and knelt by the girl, and she clung to him as the mother said, “Her father—they’re having to cut him out of the carriage.”

Comforting both of them as best he could, he scanned over their heads, looking for a man and a boy—or come to that, either of them alone.

Then a woman from the nearest village was there to help, and he left her to it, moving past broken carriages toward the pathetic remains recovered before he’d arrived. He looked at each in turn, and felt a swift surge of hope. Trevor and his grandson weren’t among the dead. It was difficult now to be sure which carriage he’d put his godfather in. And so he leaned into the wreckage of each one as he walked down the line, calling Trevor’s name.

Trevor and the child were not there either. “I should have begged him to stay,” Rutledge said aloud, unaware that he’d spoken. “It’s my fault.”

“It’s no’ your fault,” Hamish said. “There—yon man waving—”

He helped lift three more passengers down from damaged windows or doorways, then with another man’s aid, pulled a fourth from the rubble. It was a woman, too frightened to cry, her eyes huge in her pale face. She looked around, dazed, uncertain, and then saw her husband standing to one side earnestly telling the