He had changed his mind a dozen times as to what he would say to her, what manner he would adopt. Every decision was in one way or another unsatisfactory.

When he reached the hospital, paid the cabbie and alighted, he walked up the steps and met her without having had time to prepare himself. She was coming along the wide corridor at a brisk, purposeful walk, her head high. She was wearing a very plain blue dress with a small, white, lace collar, almost like a kind of uniform. On anyone else it might have been a little forbidding, but it was how he always visualized her: as a nurse, determined about something, ready to start some battle or other. The familiarity of it almost took his breath away. No amount of imagining this moment could stab like the reality. The sunlight in the corridor, the smell of vinegar, footsteps in the distance, all were printed indelibly in his mind.

"Oliver!" She was startled to see him, and pleased. He could detect none of the roar of emotion in her that he felt himself. But then he should not have expected it. She was happy. He wanted her to be. And part of him could not bear it.

He made himself smile. If he lost his dignity they would both hate it. "I was hoping to see you. I trust I am not interrupting."

"You have news of some sort?" She searched his face.

He must think only of the case. They had a common cause, one that mattered as fiercely as any they had ever fought. The lives of two women depended on it.

"Very little," he replied, moving a step closer to her. He caught a warmth, a faint air of some perfume about her. He ached to move closer still. She was so different now, so much less vulnerable than before. And yet in so many ways she was exactly the same. The will to battle was there, the stubbornness, the unreason, the laughter he had never completely understood, the arbitrariness that exasperated and fascinated him.

There was a very faint flush on her cheeks, as if she guessed some part of his thoughts.

He looked away from her, avoiding her eyes, pretending to be thinking deeply of legal matters.

"I have been to see both Cleo Anderson and Miriam Gardiner. Both deny either conspiracy or murder, but Miriam at least is lying to me about the murders. She knows who committed them, but I believe her when she says it is not she. I have not met Lucius Stourbridge."

Hester was startled. "Do you believe he could be guilty of killing his own mother?"

"I don’t think so, but it would seem to have been someone in the family, or else Miriam Gardiner," he reasoned.

She looked up and down the corridor. "Come into the waiting room here. There is no one needing it at the moment. We can speak more easily." She opened the door and led him in.