“Preferable to what?” But they had no suggestions in Teller’s case.

He said, “Do you have any reason to think that Walter Teller was being poisoned?”

“No. We considered poisoning. We found no evidence of it. Is there any reason to believe—”

Rutledge cut in quickly, “No. It’s something a policeman must bear in mind.”

Hamish said as they left the clinic, “It isna’ likely that he went away to die. He could ha’ hanged himself in his room while his wife was resting at his brother’s house.”

“He didn’t want his wife to find his body.”

Rutledge spent much of that day and well into the early evening going to police stations all across London, showing the photograph he’d been given to each shift of constables coming in or going out.

They studied the photograph, but no one had seen anyone resembling Teller. And as a rule, constables on the street could be counted on to remember the faces of people not normally seen on their patch, keeping an eye out for troublemakers and strangers alike. Even a well-spoken, well-dressed man like Walter Teller would be noted for future reference.

One constable, shaking his head, said to Rutledge, “It’s more likely that he found a cab soon after leaving the clinic, well before the search began. He could be anywhere now. He could have taken an omnibus, a train, or cadged a lift from someone.”

But Rutledge had already sent a man from the Yard to speak to any cabbie who had taken up custom near the clinic at four o’clock on the afternoon in question. No one remembered seeing Walter Teller or even someone who looked like him.

“Ye’re searching for a needle in a haystack,” Hamish told Rutledge.

“Or for one man when there might well have been two, if someone had come for him, or was there to help him dress and leave.”

The clinic had had no record of visits to Walter Teller, other than the immediate family. Still, it was possible to use another patient’s name to pass the porter and gain access. But that led him nowhere, either.

Rutledge had even driven to Essex, to the house of Dr. Fielding, arriving there just as Fielding was preparing for his first patient of the afternoon.

The man reluctantly put aside the pipe he’d been smoking and addressed himself to Rutledge’s questions about Walter Teller.

“I can give you a brief sketch of his background. Missionary for many years, and then he married Jenny Brittingham. Rather than returning to the field, he chose to write a book about his experiences.”

“And this was . . . ?”

“Just a year or so before the war—1911? 1912?”

Rutledge thought how the war had defined time—before the war—after the war. As if that great cataclysmic event that had interrupted and ended so many lives was still with them like a personal watershed.

“And of course there is Harry, the son. Quite a nice child, and not at all spoiled, as you’d expect with doting aunts and uncles surrounding him. Jenny—Mrs. Teller has seen to that. She’s a very good mother.”