What we call shell shock for lack of a better term, said the doctor at the clinic—Frances’s friend, the one who’d brought him back from the edge of insanity—is not fully understood. “I can’t tell you how it will progress. Whether one day you’ll find it gone—or whether it will stay with you for the rest of your life. Whether it will get a little better with time or a good deal worse. We don’t know, you see. A few of the men like you I’ve treated have managed to find a way to live with it. You must do the same. Don’t worry yourself about the medical aspects of it, just get on with your life and make the best of the fact that you can reason and think and act quite normally.”

Rutledge was no longer certain what “normal” was. He hadn’t been since early 1916.

His war had not ended in triumph and rejoicing.

By the time guns stopped firing in 1918 at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, he’d been locked in such desolation that he hardly knew where he was.

A month later he’d been found dazed and incoherent, wandering the roads of northern France. Wearing a German greatcoat, unable to give his name or even his nationality, he’d eventually been sent back to the British command: a major in the French army had recognized him as a liaison officer he’d met in 1915.

The British had promptly clapped him in hospital. Shell shock, the diagnosis was. Outlook: uncertain.

And it had been. Nothing had brought him out of the bleak and accusing silence in which he’d been found. He had begun to remember who and what he was—Ian Rutledge, British officer, former Inspector at Scotland Yard. He had recognized his sister Frances, and been allowed, briefly, a meeting with his fiancée.

It had not been a success. When he reached numbly for Jean’s hand, she’d snatched it away. She had been carefully coached by the doctors, but her eyes had been filled with fright as she made inane conversation in a trembling voice. He’d seen her only a few times after that, before she’d broken off their engagement.

It had been his sister who had got him out of the hellhole that was a hospital for shell-shock victims and into a private clinic.

And the doctor there, Fleming by name, had mercilessly broken him.

Rutledge had fought him every step of the way. But bone-weary and ill, he’d been no match for the tall, raw-boned doctor who had seen in the shambles a man worth saving and so refused to admit defeat.

The truth about Corporal Hamish MacLeod had come out, raggedly at first and then relived so vividly that Rutledge had believed he was in the trenches again.