Frances said, deliberately misunderstanding him, “Yes, you must be. I did ask you to stay longer at the house. It’s still warm enough to sit in the gardens in the afternoon, or walk across the street into the square. You can come back again, if you like.” She had brought him there from hospital, and found a nurse to care for him until he could fend for himself, then taken over the chore of getting him dressed and undressed each day while he impatiently healed. Wounded tigers, she had thought more than once, would have been less of a handful.

But in the beginning, when she’d been summoned north, she had been terrified that he’d die before she got there. She’d only just got used to him being home and safe, with War’s end. After four bitter years of killing, her brother had come back to her alive and so she had let her guard down at last. Policemen weren’t supposed to be shot in the line of duty. The shock had left her breathless. Still, she’d done her best not to fuss over him. . . .

Rutledge, who understood the unspoken concern that lay behind his sister’s efforts to keep him under her eye, had found it impossible to explain to her that he preferred his own flat, where he could swear at the pain or pace the floor at night or simply sit with his eyes closed until the worst had passed. Instead he’d merely said that he needed to learn to do for himself again.

Now he gingerly stooped and picked up the razor, then turned to grin at her. “Frances, you are the most capable woman I’ve ever met. When it comes to dealing with a crisis, you have no peer. All the same, it’s easier, sometimes, not to have witnesses.”

She smiled. “Yes, Father was just the same. I can’t remember a time when he was ill that he didn’t want to find himself a burrow somewhere and crawl off until he was better. It drove Mama to despair.” The smile faded. “But returning to work, Ian—is it wise?”

Rutledge studied her. She knew, a little, what he’d been through in the War. Not all of it. She knew that he had been shell-shocked. But not that he had brought back from the Western Front the living voice of a dead man, Corporal Hamish MacLeod. Nor did she know what it was like to order a man shot, or to send weary and battle-worn men into certain death. To walk on the maggot-ridden bodies of corpses, or watch a friend die hideously, screaming. Nothing deadened such memories. They stayed bottled up. Raw, brutal, barbarous. The stuff of nightmares that the mind scrambles to bury deeper and deeper, just to survive, until there was no way to exorcise the demons that had seized possession of part of him.