“Yes, yes, that’s very likely. I was hoping that we’d been in time.” He rubbed his face, hearing the scrape of beard on his chin. “All right, keep looking. I’ll be at the hotel. Did you reserve a room?”

“Yes. The Nancy Bell. It’s run by a retired policeman. We try to give him a little business now and again.”

Rutledge found it, a small inn at best, almost at the outskirts of town, but Sergeant Bell greeted him, took one look at him, and said, “Go up, then, top of the stairs, I’ll bring hot water and hotter tea.”

He was as good as his word. A bluff, graying man, his shoulders still broad and the line of his jaw firm, he carried the tray in one hand and a pitcher in the other, setting them down on the table. “You’ll want to sleep,” he told Rutledge. “If there’s word, they’ll send for you here.”

But after shaving and drinking his tea, Rutledge was restless, unable to settle, and he left The Nancy Bell and went out to walk.

Dover sat at the foot of chalk cliffs and was divided into two parts. Beneath the towering bulk of the castle was the port with the residential area south of it. The war had not dealt well with the town, for it had seen thousands of men and ships coming and going, expanding almost faster than the town could absorb the dramatically increasing population, and then the war had ended after four hard years, and Dover had had to shrink into itself again, finding the fit difficult.

Eventually he reached the strand and walked down on the shingle hard packed from the heavy rains of the day before. There were others doing much the same, enjoying the morning air, fresh and cool off the water. This was not a bathing center, like the towns along the southern coast, but he, like the others out this morning, enjoyed the smell of the sea, the wind buffeting his face, and the sun just warming his skin. He thought that Darwin had not been too far off the mark—men must remember coming from the sea, whether they realized it or not.

He noticed a dog racing along the strand far ahead, running to greet the handful of hardy souls walking just above the tide line. He watched it for a time, and then it began to strike him as odd that the dog showed no interest in chasing the gulls scavenging for food and starting up in a fluster of wings as humans approached. Instead, the little dog seemed frantic, dashing up to someone, racing around, then moving on to the next walker.

Rutledge started to jog toward it, feeling a growing certainty that he recognized it. And as he grew nearer, and the dog looked his way, he realized that it was trailing a lead.