So much was explained now. How Summers could afford to live at The Swans as Daniel Pierce. How he had been able to reach Eastfield and disappear at will. How in fact he had managed to learn the details of his victims’ lives, where he could find them when he was ready to kill them. And how he had been invisible, because the lowly school groundskeeper who kept to himself roused no interest in the village.

There was always a social hierarchy.

A groundskeeper at the school was in effect a laborer. The farmers and their wives, the tradesmen and their wives, would have nothing in common with him, and people like the brewer and Mr. Kenton, who felt they had risen above both classes, would hardly be aware of his existence, though they would know where he worked. It was that which gave him his place in the village, not his face or his qualities or his hopes and dreams. The rector would be kinder, the doctor would treat the man and whatever family he had, and the Mrs. Farrell-Smiths of this world would see that he was paid but barely know his name.

At each hotel he came to, Rutledge requested the list of guests, scanned them for any name that was familiar—Stallings, Summers, Pierce, Hartle, Jeffers, Roper, Ottley, Gooding, even his own—and each time drew a blank.

But of course Summers could have used his wife’s mother’s maiden name, or that of his sergeant in France, and Rutledge would have no way of connecting it with the man he was seeking.

Hamish said, “Go back to what ye know. It’s the only way.”

All right, then.

Summers had left a forwarding address of Brighton. But was he telling the truth? There were still men alive who went to school with him. He couldn’t have finished his work. Surely he wouldn’t have gone much farther than Brighton. He had too much invested already in his revenge.

Where then?

Rutledge thought about the case that Chief Inspector Cummins had never solved, and how misdirection had served a different purpose there. It had almost seemed that Cummins’s murderer had wanted to leave something behind, for the sake of his own conscience if not for the police.

But this Sussex killer had no conscience. If he had, he’d have stopped with William Jeffers’s death.

Rutledge looked up at the exotic lines of Brighton’s glory, the Prince Regent’s Pavilion, almost foreshadowing that his niece would one day be Empress of India.

Why would Summers leave such a message?

The most logical answer: to buy time.

To send Rutledge on a wild-goose chase in the wrong direction while he went in another.

Rutledge was already sprinting toward the hotel he’d just left, oblivious of the stares of strollers along the promenade, his mind keeping pace with his feet.