“He kens who you are,” Hamish warned. Rutledge was already striding toward Reception.

The man quickly turned his back and hurried out of Rutledge’s line of sight. By the time Rutledge reached the lobby, the man had disappeared. Rapidly scanning first the staircase and then the lounge, Rutledge realized that the only direction the man could have taken was through the hotel door and out to the terrace.

He hastily surveyed the terrace, but the families and couples who were sitting beneath their pastel umbrellas seemed not to have noticed anything amiss. And on the street below the broad steps there was only a woman walking with a small child.

He went down the steps and stopped her, asking, “I just missed my friend. He came out of the hotel and I didn’t see which way he was going.”

Startled, she looked up at him. “A man? Um, I think he went that way,” she told Rutledge, gesturing east. “No one has come by me going in the other direction.” She inclined her head toward the west, the way she had come.

He thanked her with a smile that brought an answering smile, and then he was walking east along the Hastings Road.

But it was hopeless, there were more people on the walk now, and one man could easily have disappeared among them or popped into one of the small shops that catered to holidaymakers. He would need half a dozen policemen to help him search them all.

Standing to one side so as not to obstruct pedestrians coming toward him, he waited, on the off chance that the man, thinking himself safe, might reappear.

But his quarry was far too canny. And even though Rutledge returned to The White Swans and sat for a time in the quiet lounge, facing Reception, he never returned. Rutledge even spoke to the desk clerk, but he had been busy putting a jewelry box into one of the hotel guest safes, and never noticed the man waiting at Reception for him.

Rutledge drove back to Hastings Old Town and stopped where he had before, near the net shops. Even this space was more crowded than it had been, but he closed his eyes and tried to recall his brief glimpse of the man’s face before he had turned away.

What had he seen? What could he be sure of?

How many times had he asked witnesses to describe someone?

The man was of a little above medium height, broad shouldered, hair a medium shade of brown, eyes indeterminate, but Rutledge thought they must be light rather than dark. Gray, possibly, or a pale blue.

Hamish said into the silence in the motorcar, “Gray eyes. Ye ken, he was wearing a gray suit.”

It was true.

“What else?”

“He moved well.”