They arrived in good time for their crossing, and Rutledge took a few minutes to call on Sergeant Bell.

“The laddie is still restless,” he said. “I took him for a walk along the strand today, and he was searching for scents, wanting to run up to anyone he spotted. There’s no word on Mrs. Summers?”

“None.”

Bell said, “Well, then. We’ll see that he’s fed and kept safe.”

The boat left on time. Meredith stayed below, while Rutledge stood by the rail, watching the water pass under the hull.

He had sworn, once, that he would never set foot in France again. And here he was, not on police business after all but to support a friend.

Friend.

He ignored that thought and instead considered the letter that had come into Chief Inspector Cummins’s possession.

What sort of man would have a flint knife sitting on his desk, what kinds of interests would he have? Historian, schoolmaster, world traveler, expert in ancient weapons, geologist, even a collector of oddities.

It would take hundreds of man-hours to find likely men in those fields and interview them.

Schoolmaster . . . Hadn’t it been a schoolmaster who had brought the latter-day Druids to Stonehenge for the summer solstice?

He was above suspicion, Cummins had said when Rutledge asked about him. But where had he taught? And were there other masters in that same school? Had Cummins interviewed any of them? But of course at the time Cummins hadn’t had the benefit of Rutledge’s find of the flint knife. He had been completely in the dark about the murder weapon.

Hindsight seldom caught murderers.

He walked along the deck, watching the white cliffs of England recede, the castle a gray mass on the top of the highest cliff. France was still a blue smudge on the horizon. The wind striking his face was warm, and sometimes laden with salt spray. Skirting the busy crew coiling ropes, stowing gear, and seeing to the general running of the ferry, he paced for a few minutes, deep in thought.

If the killer considered the victim’s murder well deserved, what had the man done to earn it?

Rutledge recalled studying the photograph of the dead face and thinking that the victim looked far more intelligent and of a better class than Harvey Wheeler was said to have been.

There was only a small window of time when the body could have been carried to Stonehenge—or the living man brought there to be dispatched. After all, this was the shortest night of the year. And the situation was complicated by the latter-day Druids celebrating the Summer Solstice.