“He’s not likely to slip up on me.”

“Aye. True enough. But ye must move the motorcar.”

Walter Teller might well be twenty paces from where Rutledge sat, asleep in his wife’s bed. He didn’t want to risk more noise.

There was no way of knowing what the man’s state of mind was. Or even if he’d come this far. Walter Teller was a man who kept his emotions close, whose feelings had been lost in a welter of events, from the day he left for Africa, or possibly even from the day he was ordained. Was he a killer? He hadn’t murdered his first wife. The odds, then, discounted his murdering the second.

Hamish said, “Why did ye no’ feel for the second wife what you felt for the first? The lass here?”

Caught off guard, Rutledge said, “Because no one else did.”

“Aye.”

“I can’t help but wonder if it would have made any difference if Florence’s son had been brought up in London, not here. He might have had better medical care. That might have occurred to Walter Teller as well.”

But Hamish had no answer for that.

“We may never explain Walter Teller satisfactorily. Tidily and with ribbons.”

He had only to open his door to find out. That is, if Walter was indeed in Sunrise Cottage—and still alive.

“Ye’re no’ thinking straight,” Hamish said.

Rutledge could feel the darkness coming down, the sound of big guns in the distance, and closer to hand, the rattle of a Vickers gun.

No, that was at the Front. When Hamish was still living and breathing. Before he’d had to shoot him for disobeying orders . . .

His mind felt as if it were stuffed with cotton wool. But he’d come this far. Pulling his motorcar out of sight on the far side of the hedge, he listened, but nothing stirred.

Opening the motorcar door as quietly as he could, Rutledge stepped out into the night. There were stars overhead, and the looming shape of the house, rising behind the hedge, the whiteness of it almost ghostly in the ambient light.

He could still hear the guns in France, distantly echoing in his mind. Closer than they ought to be.

Shaking off the encroaching darkness, he turned toward the gate, then stopped.

He could have sworn another motorcar was coming up the rise. Moving deeper into the shadows cast by the hedge, he listened. The road was empty still.

He hadn’t imagined the motorcar. Footsteps were approaching the house on the unmade road, someone trying to walk quietly.

There was a slight creak as the gate opened and closed. Rutledge stayed where he was in the deep shadow of the hedge. A shaft of lightning lit the sky like a searchlight. Peering through the hedge, he was nearly certain someone was standing on the step by the red door.

Teller, arriving? What had kept him?