Rutledge listened patiently to their protests and then said, “Very well. Let’s make it simple. We needn’t draw straws. Tell me, which of you will volunteer to become the fifth victim? Step forward. I’ll release you as a stalking horse, to see if you’re on the killer’s list. Or not. And if the murderer should be one of you, he will most certainly have to wait until he’s free before killing again. He’s not a fool, whatever else he may be. He won’t kill here.”

They stared at him.

“It won’t work,” Marshall told him point-blank. He was a small, compact man with a broken nose and an obvious dislike of authority. “You can’t be sure that madman is after one of us. Why not the greengrocer? Or the foreman at the brewery? The rector, or the clerk at the hotel?”

“Are you volunteering?” Rutledge asked.

“I’m not volunteering—” Marshall began.

Rutledge cut him short. “I remind you, each victim was alone after dark. No one saw the killer arrive, no one saw him leave. Think of a better plan, and I’ll consider it.”

Marshall objected again. “Look, we don’t know why those four died. I’m not saying it’s something they did. Or didn’t do. But my conscience is clear. Why should I run with my tail between my legs, like?”

There was a silence.

“Step forward. Who among you feels safe enough to take such a risk? You survived the war, the lot of you. Are you feeling lucky?”

They talked amongst themselves and then turned back to him.

“Three days,” Walker’s nephew said. “Not an hour more.”

“Thank you. But I warn you, if you give Constable Walker here any reason for complaint, I’ll have the lot of you in charge for obstructing the police. Is that clear?”

The man called Henderson said, “Where will you be?”

“Tracking down connections between the living and the dead. Unless you can tell me what you believe this is all about? Unless you know something that I don’t—and Constable Walker doesn’t. What happened in France?”

“Nothing,” Henderson replied. “Nothing that would lead to murder, then or now. We served with honor. All of us.” There was the ring of truth in his voice.

But he hadn’t been in the company that left Eastfield together. Three years younger than the rest, according to Walker, he’d volunteered on his seventeenth birthday and had served with the new tank corps. Like Anthony Pierce, he was an outsider. Still, Pierce had been murdered anyway.

No one else spoke up. Rutledge waited, looking each man in the eye, and they dropped their gaze first, even Marshall.

Hamish said into the silence, “Ye ken, it might not be what they did, but what they failed to do. And they wouldna’ remember that.”