“A professional requirement,” Rutledge said lightly.

“I’ve never talked about it before. The truth is, I couldn’t. I’d survived, you see—even come to terms with losing my arm. I was ready to go on living. And then this nightmare came out of nowhere. And I was terribly afraid of dying from it. It shook my nerve rather badly. I’m only beginning to understand that.”

“We all have our nightmares,” Rutledge said with more feeling than he’d intended. “Even when they last into the daylight.”

“Yes, but most people don’t wake up in a cold sweat, on the verge of screaming. I’ve done that a time or two—frightened the hell out of my wife, I can tell you.” But his face said it had happened far more often than he cared to admit.

The woman serving tables came to take their order. Fraser leaned back, sipping his wine. Some of the lines in his face smoothed out as he relaxed.

“Find what you were looking for at Robbie’s house?” he asked with frank curiosity.

“I may have. It appears—there’s no proof, mind you!— that Eleanor Gray came here in 1916, shortly after she heard the news of Captain Burns’s death. And she stayed at the house for two nights.”

Fraser stared at him. “Old Raeburn—I’m sorry, she’s the neighbor, Mrs. Raeburn—never told me that!”

“She didn’t know. Eleanor came to Scotland with someone who’d been told which door to knock on to find the key. Therefore a friend of Burns’s. Or so we assume. He could have been a friend of Eleanor’s, acting on her instructions. Mrs. Raeburn remembers him.” Rutledge gave Fraser a brief description of the man, pieced together from what Mrs. Raeburn had told him and a description of the friend who’d come to the Atwood house with Robbie Burns. “Recognize him?”

“Lord, no.” After a moment, he added, “Robbie must have met him in London while he was convalescing. Palestine, you say?” He shook his head. “Afraid I never had much to do with that lot. And the first time I was invalided home, I came here, I didn’t stay in London. I wonder why Robbie stayed.”

“He’d met Eleanor.”

“Yes. That probably explains it.” Their meal arrived. Rutledge saw that someone in the kitchen had already sliced Fraser’s chicken for him, the pieces tidily rearranged so that a left-handed man could spear them with his fork. “He was in hospital for well over a month, you know, then spent another two getting his strength back. It might be possible to discover the names of other patients there at the same time. The house was somewhere in Sussex. Saxhall—Saxwold—some such name.”

“Thanks. I’ll see what I can learn there.”