Rutledge swore with feeling. He’d had the man within reach, and he’d lost him.

Hamish said, “He used another man’s name.”

And how had he convinced his bride to allow that?

My friends will track us down, they’ll stand on the terrace and serenade us. It will be shockingly embarrassing. Everyone will stare. Daniel is a good friend, he told me he doesn’t mind, as long as we don’t leave him to settle up.

She would laugh and find it exciting to be someone else.

She had a sweet face, she’d stared up at her husband adoringly in that wedding photograph. Was she the nurse he’d gone in search of?

“Did you by any chance look into Edna Stallings?”

“I did that, sir, when I discovered who her father was. Matthew Edgeworth Stallings. She’s a little younger than Summers, at a guess, and was a nurse in a clinic in Bedford during the last two years of the war, before going to live in Hertfordshire with an aunt until she came of age this past spring.”

Matthew Stallings, it seemed, had made his modest fortune in footwear, and the Army contract for boots had sealed it. He’d died of a stroke six months after the Armistice, leaving a large sum to the National Trust and another to a fund for war widows. The bulk of his estate went to his only child. His daughter, it appeared, was an heiress.

“Well done,” Rutledge told Sergeant Gibson. It was praise well earned. There was more he wished to say to Gibson, but not with half the brewery office staff listening with one ear.

Putting up the receiver, he thanked Starret and left the brewery.

Constable Walker was not in the police station when Rutledge stopped there. And so he drove on to Hastings with all the speed he could muster.

He caught Inspector Norman just as he was leaving his office and said, “There have been developments. I need to speak to you.”

“Not now,” Norman told him. “I’ve just been informed that Inspector Mickelson is showing signs of coming to his senses again. And I’m not letting this opportunity slip through my fingers, I can tell you. Your developments can wait.”

And he got into the motorcar waiting for him, one of his constables at the wheel.

Rutledge watched them pull out into the afternoon traffic, then returned to his own vehicle.

For the next six hours, he called at every hotel of any size between The White Swans and the town of Brighton.

And as he searched, he tried to think through this swiftly evolving situation.