“She was probably given something. I can’t see how she would have let her husband leave the boat without bringing her dog to her. Most certainly she’d have created a scene. And why get rid of the animal, unless he intended to do away with her as well?” He slowed to pass a procession of villagers carrying the small statue of a saint and bouquets of flowers. They appeared to be on their way to the church on a slight rise.

“He needn’t, you know. Rid himself of her. There used to be these little convents scattered about, where the nuns took in the ill or the mad, and if there was money to pay for her board, she could stay indefinitely in their care.”

It was an interesting thought.

They were driving now on what had been the road where the German Army and the small British Expeditionary Force sent to stop their progress had clashed. Roofless ruins, shattered walls, toppled church towers still marked where the fighting had been most intense, and some fields lay fallow and torn. Villages and towns were striving to rebuild, life was struggling to return to normal, but as Rutledge looked around him, he felt a surge of tension, of memory. This was what he’d lived with for four bloody years and had hoped never to see again. But night was falling, covering what they didn’t want to see in blessed darkness.

Rutledge stopped just before the Belgian frontier for dinner and found a small pension that smelled of new mortar and paint, as if it had just been refurbished, where they could spend the night. The food was not up to French standards, but they had very little appetite. Rutledge saw Mrs. Channing to her room, and she wished him a good night. He waited until her door had been locked from the inside before going on down the passage to his to sit by the window instead of going to bed.

They reached Bruges the next day, and found their way to the old city inside its ring of canals. In the southern part, on a side street not far from the Begijnhof, a large house had been turned into a hospital that cared for the human detritus left behind by war.

It was a tall building, and broader than most. Rutledge thought it must have once been the town house of a wealthy merchant family. Even here were the scars of war—bullet holes in the facade, a niche statue of the Virgin by the door decapitated, the hasty repairs of damage from shrapnel still visible. Someone had repainted the door, to hide the nicks and scratches in the wood.

As he reached for the brass knob, Meredith Channing stopped him, putting out her hand. “Ian. I must do the rest myself. Will you wait?”

He agreed, and went to sit in the motorcar. After a moment, she resolutely turned the knob and disappeared inside.