He stopped halfway to the hall and spun on his heel to look back at the still swinging door to the kitchen.

Too little to live…

He stared down at the flyer in his hand. The pale faces of the children stared back at him.

Why hadn’t the children changed since 1916? Mowbray had described them as he’d seen them on the train platform as if they’d not altered from this faded photograph. Children who should have aged three years—in size and appearance. Did that mean he hadn’t seen them, except in grieving imagination?

No wonder the flyers hadn’t brought any results!

“But the woman’s dead—she was real enough,” he told himself.

Missing suitcases. A woman who’d vanished for over twenty-four hours, between hastily leaving the train and her murder. The ages of the missing children. Questions that niggled at the edges of his mind, with no answers.

Unless the poor devil living with his own madness in that jail cell had killed a woman and children he’d never seen before!

Gentle God!

Rutledge took the stairs to his room two at a time, as if trying to outrace the horror he’d evoked. There he picked up his hat, stood thoughtfully in the middle of the floor as he debated the best course of action, then ran lightly down the steps again and out to his car.

On the road west, he could see small groups of men in the distance, searching, covering again ground they’d already tramped over three and four times. Heads bent, sticks poking into undergrowth and among the thick boughs of trees, they moved steadily and carefully across the terrain assigned to them. In the field where the body had been found the grain was alive with them, and there was a fuming, red-faced man sitting his horse at the edge of the corn. The farmer, most likely. Rutledge considered stopping to speak to him and then decided it could wait until the man’s temper had subsided. This was his best crop of the season, trampled through no fault of his own. A policeman from London would be no different in his book than one from Singleton Magna.

At the signpost, Rutledge took the northwest road this time, toward Charlbury. He drove slowly, scouting for a likely outbuilding that might offer shelter. But the two dilapidated sheds he did investigate were empty of anything except pigeons, mice, and a swarm of insects rising into the stuffy air from the dust beneath his feet.

Tramping back to his car, he heard the sound of another automobile coming fast along the lane. He stopped to watch it, his coat over one shoulder, his shirtsleeves rolled up on his forearms, wishing he’d thought to bring a Thermos of tea or water with him. His throat felt parched.