into the hedge to make it easier to part the thick branches there, and grunting, Satterthwaite pushed and shoved at them. Rutledge nearly lost his footing and caught the constable’s shoulder to steady himself. He turned to look down.

The earth under the hedge was thick with last winter’s fallen leaves and possibly those of winters before that. They formed a light bed perhaps a good inch or so deep.

Cobb, the schoolmaster, had told Rutledge that since the war, there had been no one but his nephew to help with the farm. And this was proof of it.

“What’s the matter?” Satterthwaite asked as Rutledge knelt to run his fingers through the damp and rotting mass.

He had to dig deep into the soil below, but it was loose enough and damp enough for him to wedge his fingers behind something there.

He found what he was after and pulled it toward him. He could hear the constable’s indrawn breath as he realized what was coming to light.

Not a walking stick as the doctor had first suggested, but the remains of a Malacca cane. Rutledge stood up with it in his hands.

Although filthy, with leaves still clinging to it, it was not an old and rotting thing. It had been hidden here fairly recently, buried just deep enough that a policeman searching among the sparse hedge trunks close to the ground would have seen only what he expected to see—the carpet of leaves. But someone had taken the sharp end and used it to thrust the length of the cane out of sight well below that layer.

“If I hadn’t felt it under my sole, I wouldn’t have thought to dig,” Rutledge said, running his hands along the wood, gently brushing off the debris.

“There’s no head,” Satterthwaite pointed out.

The head had been broken off, and the smooth dark red shaft was still raw where the wood had been splintered.

“It would match the wound in Florence Teller’s head—or at least the murderer thought it might.” He frowned. “It wouldn’t be easy to snap off the head. Rattan palm canes are very strong. There must have been a weakness—where the cane had dried and cracked around the knob that served as a handle.”

“Why leave the rest? Why not take the cane and throw it off a bridge far from here?”

“The killer wouldn’t have wanted to be seen with it in his possession.”

“But if he brought it here—”

“Yes, that’s the point. But it only became a weapon once Florence Teller was killed. Before that it was simply someone’s cane.”

He looked around. The tidy bit of lawn, the flowers on the path, the step and the street door . . . They hadn’t been disturbed.

Hamish said, “The step.”

It was a long, rectangular slab of stone, smoothed to serve the doorway. Rutledge walked over to it and ran his hands along the edge. Someone could have shoved the head of the cane under the slab, and with the force of anger or of fear, managed to snap it off. Brush the earth back again, where the head had dug in, and who would notice what had been done. If the police hadn’t found the cane, the slab of step would hold no significance. Someone, having just killed, had taken the time to think through what to do with the weapon.

That was an interesting look into his state of mind, whoever he was.

Rutledge began to sift the earth very gently through his fingers, moving aside a plant and reaching down under the stone. The head of the cane wasn’t there. He hadn’t expected it to be, but he’d had to be sure.

He was just smoothing the earth back into place when Hamish said, “There!”

Rutledge stopped. There was nothing he could see at first, and then he recognized what was caught in the roots of the pansy.

It was not as big as a toothpick. Just a fine splinter of wood, like the proverbial needle in a haystack. It was, in fact, more like a needle than anything else, one that had been held to a flame and tarnished.

He dug it out carefully, blew away the earth that smothered it, and put up his hand for the broken end of the cane that Satterthwaite was still holding.

There was no match, of course, but there was no doubt that it was the same wood.

Satterthwaite said, “It was savagely done.”

“He’d have liked to hit her a second time, I expect. One blow was not enough to satisfy him. I wonder why? Because she died so