Although filthy, with leaves still clinging to it, it was not an old and rotting thing. It had been hidden here fairly recently, buried just deep enough that a policeman searching among the sparse hedge trunks close to the ground would have seen only what he expected to see—the carpet of leaves. But someone had taken the sharp end and used it to thrust the length of the cane out of sight well below that layer.

“If I hadn’t felt it under my sole, I wouldn’t have thought to dig,” Rutledge said, running his hands along the wood, gently brushing off the debris.

“There’s no head,” Satterthwaite pointed out.

The head had been broken off, and the smooth dark red shaft was still raw where the wood had been splintered.

“It would match the wound in Florence Teller’s head—or at least the murderer thought it might.” He frowned. “It wouldn’t be easy to snap off the head. Rattan palm canes are very strong. There must have been a weakness—where the cane had dried and cracked around the knob that served as a handle.”

“Why leave the rest? Why not take the cane and throw it off a bridge far from here?”

“The killer wouldn’t have wanted to be seen with it in his possession.”

“But if he brought it here—”

“Yes, that’s the point. But it only became a weapon once Florence Teller was killed. Before that it was simply someone’s cane.”

He looked around. The tidy bit of lawn, the flowers on the path, the step and the street door . . . They hadn’t been disturbed.

Hamish said, “The step.”

It was a long, rectangular slab of stone, smoothed to serve the doorway. Rutledge walked over to it and ran his hands along the edge. Someone could have shoved the head of the cane under the slab, and with the force of anger or of fear, managed to snap it off. Brush the earth back again, where the head had dug in, and who would notice what had been done. If the police hadn’t found the cane, the slab of step would hold no significance. Someone, having just killed, had taken the time to think through what to do with the weapon.

That was an interesting look into his state of mind, whoever he was.

Rutledge began to sift the earth very gently through his fingers, moving aside a plant and reaching down under the stone. The head of the cane wasn’t there. He hadn’t expected it to be, but he’d had to be sure.

He was just smoothing the earth back into place when Hamish said, “There!”

Rutledge stopped. There was nothing he could see at first, and then he recognized what was caught in the roots of the pansy.