He waited, patient, silent. After a moment she pointed to a carafe of water on the desk, a crystal jug with an upturned glass for its lid. A band of silver at the neck caught the reflected light of the courtyard, shining and clear. “Like that,” she said, and smiled shyly.

“Like light on water, silvery,” the Wyatt maid Edith had said.

Rutledge slowly straightened and turned to Hildebrand.

The inspector said abruptly, “If you’d excuse us for a moment, Mr. Andrews?” Without waiting for an answer, he went around the desk and looked at Rutledge.

The two men went out into the dark, cramped passage, carefully closing the door behind them and moving away, out of earshot. At the far end of the passage, the other door that locked Mowbray away was deep in shadow. Rutledge found himself thinking about the man inside.

“He didn’t kill them,” he said, more to himself than to Hildebrand.

“We don’t know that,” Hildebrand said.

“That child just identified the color of the hat Miss Tarlton was wearing. If it was Miss Tarlton at the station, if it was Miss Tarlton that Mowbray saw and came looking for, it means his wife must surely have died in 1916, with the two children. And it was only his imagination—” He stopped. Knowing—who better?—how imagination tricked the mind. How what you believed was shadowed and shaped by what you had done. Mowbray hadn’t been in London to save his wife or his children, he’d been away in France. He’d come home to bury them. He’d missed them every day since. To the point that in a desperate time of his life, he had seen what he wanted most in the world to see … a return to what had been.

“We don’t know that!” Hildebrand repeated stubbornly. “A child that age in a courtroom? It would be a farce, the questioning could tangle her into knots. Are you willing to put that family through such a nightmare?”

“What are you going to do instead? Will you continue this search, widen it, go on looking until there’s nowhere else to try?”

“I fail to see that it’s any of your business! If we have found those children, you may return to London and leave the rest to the local police.”

“Then allow me one final test. Let Mowbray see them—”

“Have you run stark mad—”

“No, listen to me!” As their voices clashed, the constable on duty at the desk opened the door at the head of the passage and stared down it. He quickly shut it again at a gesture from Hildebrand. “What I want to do is this.”

An hour later it was arranged. Not without complaints from Robert Andrews and from Hildebrand and from Marcus Johnston, Mowbray’s attorney.