“It may only be in the murderer’s mind,” Rutledge said.

Walker turned to him in surprise. “I hadn’t considered that.”

“It’s possible that whoever it is uses a garrote because the face of the victim isn’t important,” Rutledge said.

But that would indicate random killings.

7

In the morning, Inspector Norman in Hastings sent a man to Eastfield with the message. He was held up first by the heavy rain and then having to wait for Walker.

Constable Petty, standing in the window of the police station, finally saw his fellow constable coming down the street. Walker, just returning from another round of the village, in an effort to reassure himself that indeed nothing had happened in the night, came through the doorway, nodded, and began to strip off his rain gear.

“A cup of tea, Petty?”

“Much as I could use one, I don’t think there’s time,” the man replied, and he said what he’d been told to say, refusing to answer any of Walker’s questions.

Walker, growling in frustration, pulled on his gear again and set out for the hotel.

When he began his rounds the night before, he had had no way of knowing that Rutledge, awake at two and again at three o’clock, had also gone quietly out of the hotel and with only Hamish for company, had also walked through the darkness, pausing now and again to listen to the night sounds around him. It was amazing, he thought as he moved through the silent streets, that a habitation with so little history to scar it could seem so ominous in the broken moonlight. If there had been rape and pillage and fire and sword here at some time in the distant past, it had not left its mark. Except perhaps during those hours between midnight and dawn.

Hamish observed, “Where there are people, there’s death.”

And it was true. Hopelessness, starvation, plague, disease among the animals, all of these brought death as surely as armies.

As his footsteps echoed on the hard-packed surface of the road then vanished in the soft earth of the churchyard, Rutledge had wondered if he were being watched. He had no feeling on that score, but he considered what he would do in a murderer’s shoes. Would he choose one of the taller buildings along the main street, with a wide sweep of views in either direction? The church tower, tall enough to allow an overview of the village and the surrounding farms? Or the shadows of a dense stand of lilac he’d noticed where the road curved just beyond the brewery buildings on its way out of Eastfield? How had the murderer found his victims, if he hadn’t followed them or watched them walk by themselves in a direction in which he could expect to find his killing ground?

Hamish said into the silence, “Ye ken how Donald MacRae found the snipers?”