“And you are not to tell him. This is a Yard matter. We’ll leave him out of it until we need to question him again. Meanwhile, I was very glad to see you’d kept your charges.”

“Actually, I let one of them go in the middle of the night. His wife had her baby, there were complications, and Dr. Gooding sent to ask if he could come home. I locked the door to the police station and took him there myself. As it turned out, mother and child are fine, but they could have lost the baby.”

“Well done. Let’s see how the rest of our charges are faring.”

Walker unlocked the door to total silence. He glanced at Rutledge, and crossed to the cabinet behind his desk to retrieve the lantern he kept there. Then he led the way to the large holding cells where he’d incarcerated the six men. When he opened the second door into that passage, his eyes had to adjust to the gloom before he saw his five remaining prisoners. They were standing, backed up against the cell wall, faces pale and eyes squinting against the sudden glare of the lantern, trying to see who was behind it. And then they recognized their jailer, their gaze traveling on to the tall figure behind him.

There was an outburst of protest, vociferous and heated.

Rutledge had expected their anger to be directed at him, since he’d insisted on locking them up here. He wasn’t disappointed. As he sorted through the words tripping over one another as the men demanded to know why Walker had abandoned them for the remainder of the night, he realized that they had come to agree with him about the danger they were in.

After a moment, Rutledge raised his own voice, accustomed to being heard on a battlefield, and stopped them in midsentence.

They glared at him but fell silent. He turned first to Walker’s nephew.

“Now. One at a time. What’s happened?”

“There was someone outside. Not fifteen minutes after my uncle had left with Tom. And here we were locked tight in here, like fish in a barrel,” Tuttle told him.

“What do you mean, someone outside?” Walker demanded. “In front?”

“No, there,” Tuttle said, pointing to a side door.

Walker said to Rutledge, “There’s an alley outside. It led down to the stables and outbuildings. They were torn down at the turn of the century, and a warehouse for Kenton Chairs built in their place, facing the street that runs behind the station.” He strode down the short passage and shook the latch, but it was still secure. As he came back, someone else took up the story.