“His mother and I separated years ago. I didn’t know he was in trouble. I’d been working in the north. When I heard, I started looking. I nearly caught up with him the day Bynum was killed. Too late to save him. He needed a father’s hand. I wasn’t there. The men she lived with were bad for him. I didn’t know. Criminal records.”

“Why did he want to kill me?”

“I think—you got in his way. He never liked being thwarted. He tried to kill me once, when he was twelve. I made him return a stolen bicycle.”

“Sir?” a constable said, and Rutledge pulled away. The motorcar gathered speed as it turned back the way it had come.

Billy too was gone, in custody.

A constable had stayed with Rutledge, rain cascading off his helmet and onto his cape. “Sir?” he said again.

“Yes, very well.” And Rutledge turned with him toward the Yard. He realized he was wet to the skin and cold.

Mickelson had disappeared.

The constable said, “Are you all right, sir?”

“I’m fine,” he said shortly, and the constable was wise enough not to say more.

In truth he was not fine. Tired, hurting, and angry enough to take on Mickelson and Billy at the same time, he set the pace, stride for stride with the constable.

When they reached the Yard, the constable—he realized in the light above the door that it was Miller—said, “He held us back, sir. He said he couldn’t see who was with you. The other man confused him. He said.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rutledge told him.

“I think it does, sir.”

But Rutledge refused to be led into answering. He went to his office and sat there for some time in the dark, watching the storm move downriver, thinking about Billy and the man who had called him Will.

After an hour had passed, and then most of another, Rutledge stood up and walked to the door.

Chief Superintendent Bowles had not come to find him. Not to apologize for Inspector Mickelson’s disregard for orders or to congratulate Rutledge on his role in capturing the killer the newspapers had begun to call the Bridge Murderer.

He drove to his flat, bathed, and changed to dry clothes, then slept for two hours. When he woke, his face on one side was bruised, his knee ached, but on the whole no damage had been done.

He stopped at the Yard to ask the night duty sergeant for news of Hood and was told that the hospital reported he was holding his own.

“And there’s a message as well from Inspector Cummins, sir.”

He handed it to Rutledge.

The single word Thanks was written in a bold script he recognized.

Nodding to the sergeant, he left and drove to Essex.