Rutledge knelt by Hood. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded, but Mickelson had just reached them, out of breath, saying, “Who’s this other man?” Thunder cut across the rest of his words.

“Good Samaritan,” the constable retorted as he worked. “We’ll need help straightaway, sir. This looks bad.”

Billy said nothing, standing there pale in the torch beams, looking down at Hood. Then he burst out with, “What did you want to go and do that for? Now look at what’s happened.”

Hood cleared his throat, and they could all see flecks of blood like black freckles on his lips. “I didn’t expect to see you again quite so soon,” he said to Rutledge.

“What were you doing here?” Rutledge asked again.

“My son, man. This is my son,” Hood replied haltingly.

They looked nothing alike. As Rutledge glanced from Hood’s face to Billy’s, he could find no resemblance at all. And then in a quirk of the light as Billy turned to him, fright replacing his belligerence, he caught a similarity in expression around the eyes.

He’d seen Billy only once before, and then only fleetingly. Yet he had managed to register that expression as Billy had tried to plead his innocence to another constable, and it had stayed with him. And Charlie Hood had triggered that memory.

Hood was leaning back in the constable’s arms now, his face pale, his mouth a tight line of pain.

“It’s my fault,” he whispered, smiling with an effort. “I should have been in time. Long before this.”

They were trying to lead Billy away, but he was fighting to stay with the man on the ground. A flash of lightning illuminated all their faces briefly in a shock of white light, and then they were blinded in the aftermath of blackness. Thunder rolled, and the breeze had become a wind tearing at their clothing and pulling at their hair.

Someone had come with a motorcar, and there was an effort to get Hood in the back before the rain fell. Already the first heavy drops accompanied the thunder just overhead, and Big Ben striking the quarter hour sounded muffled.

Mickelson said out of the darkness, “We couldn’t see. There was a third person, and so we weren’t sure.”

Rutledge ignored him. He went to the motorcar as the rain fell and leaned in to speak to Hood. The man was breathing with some difficulty, and pain had set in. His clenched fist beat against the seat in rhythm with the throbbing.

“Why were you hunting him?” Rutledge asked urgently, bending over Hood.