This was London, not the trenches, and there was no mud— He repeated the words, listening to their sanity.

Around him were his own belongings: the carved armoire by the door to the sitting room, the mirror where he put on his tie every morning, the chair that had been his father’s, the tall posts of the bed he had slept in as a boy, the dark burgundy draperies his sister had helped him hang. All of them familiar, and in their own way, unexpectedly comforting. They had been his before the war, just as this flat had been, and returning here had been a bulwark against the intervening hell of the trenches. A promise that one day he would be the same man again.

I’ve been working too hard, he thought, moving between the bed and the tall chest and coming to a halt by the table set beneath the window. He pushed aside the draperies. Outside, rain clouds were hanging heavily over the city. Gray and depressing. He turned away, letting the heavy fabric fall again. Frances is right, I need rest. It will stop when I can rest.

His sister Frances had put it in no uncertain terms. “You look terrible, Ian! Tired and thin and still very unlike yourself. Tell Old Bowels to give you leave, you’ve worked as hard as ten men since you came back to the Yard, and the doctors told you quite clearly—”

Yes, they’d told him. But in work was—sometimes—forgetfulness.

Hamish, tireless at the back of Rutledge’s mind, said, “It’s no’ true, you canna’ forget. There’s only emptiness, sometimes.”

“I’ll settle for that. When I’m weary enough to sleep, there’s peace—was peace,” Rutledge corrected himself. From long habit he answered the voice only he could hear, the voice of a dead man. It was as clear as his own in the silent room, with a Highlander’s soft accent, and so real it seemed to come from just behind him. As if the speaker might be standing there if Rutledge turned his head. But there was no one behind him—although the dread of being wrong about that was nearly as real as the voice.

He tried to shove the dream back into the far reaches of despair, refusing to remember any shred of it, refusing to believe any part of it. Then realized that he was standing in the middle of the floor, frowning, remembering.

He shook himself and went back to the window to look out again. Hamish said behind him, “It’s no’ so gloomy in the Highlands—the rain’s clean, sweet.”

Rutledge, grateful for the distraction, nodded.