Mr. Grantwell recognized his workmanship at once, though he deplored the missing labels and the condition of the items he was scrutinizing. After consulting his client book with its diagrams and lists and measurements, he identified the owner of the clothing.

Looking up, he asked quietly, “May I inquire why you are bringing these to me? Does it mean that some harm has come to Mr. Walter Teller?”

“We haven’t spoken to Mr. Teller. These were found in the possession of a costermonger, and we are trying to discover who they belonged to and how they came into his hands,” Rutledge answered him. It was the truth, as far as it went, and Mr. Grantwell could make of it what he chose.

The tailor nodded. “Indeed. Which of course explains their state. I must say, I’ve always admired Mr. Teller,” he went on. “In his book, he described his years in the field. It was quite shocking. Accustomed as he was to the life of a gentleman, it was remarkable how well he coped with hardship and deprivation. It is a tribute to his upbringing that he had the resources of spirit to fall back on.”

Rutledge was struck by Grantwell’s remark. Jenny Teller had also mentioned the terrible conditions of her husband’s fieldwork, but from a police point of view, Rutledge had considered them as a possible explanation for Teller’s disappearance: events that could have preyed on his mind years afterward. But now he could see another point of view—that if Walter Teller had deliberately disappeared, for whatever reason, he was better prepared than most to deal with a completely different way of life. Sleeping rough, for one, and for another, disappearing into the London scene not as Walter Teller, Gentleman, but as an ordinary man of the streets, invisible to police eyes. And a first step would have been altering his appearance—including ridding himself of the clothing that would identify him.

Hamish, silent for some time, told him, “If ye’re right, he’s no’ coming back.”

Grantwell was saying, “My father had the pleasure of serving Mr. Teller’s father before him, and I’d like to think we’ll serve young Master Harry in the years to come.”

He was fishing, an experienced angler in search of information.

And it occurred to Rutledge that a man’s tailor knew nearly as much about him as his servants, tidbits garnered in fitting sessions or the type of cloth ordered. Military, funeral, wedding, baptism, riding, a weekend in the country or a shooting party in Scotland, receptions at the Palace or a day at Ascot. His own tailor, solicitous of the gaunt, haunted man who walked into his shop a year ago in need of new suits of clothing for his return to the Yard, had asked if his wounds were healing well and if there was to be a happy event in the near future.

Rutledge hadn’t been able to tell him the truth, the words refusing to form in his mind, and so he had murmured something about no date had been set, and then barely heard what followed as the man prattled on about his own son’s marriage in the winter.