“As a rule, Father James collected the post,” she explained. “But you’d have thought, if they were that important, he might have asked me to be on the lookout for them.” She peered down at the cuttings again. “I’d have put them in a scrapbook for him if he’d wanted me to. It’s just not like him not to say a word!”

“And no’ like him to lie to the doctor,” Hamish added, an echo of Rutledge’s own thought.

Turning to the coal man, Rutledge asked, “Did you ever tell anyone about the favor your daughter was doing for the priest?”

The jowly face flushed. “No, sir!”

“It would be natural—a matter of pride!”

“My work takes me into any number of houses, sir,” the coal man said with a certain dignity, “and I never gossip about one to t’other. Ask Mrs. Wainer if she’s ever heard me gossip!”

Mrs. Wainer shook her head. “No, he never does.”

Rutledge collected the cuttings once more and put them back in the case. “Thank you, Mrs. Wainer. You’ll have these papers back within the week. I shan’t have time for tea after all. Do you mind?”

She was still more than a little concerned about the papers, but said doubtfully, “If they’ll help in any way, sir, then by all means . . .”

Rutledge spent the next hour in his room, going through the yellowing cuttings. They were dated in an untrained hand, with the name of the newspaper or magazine written underneath. The coal man’s daughter? Another—the priest’s?—had underlined names of passengers, marking each with an S noting survivors, an X noting the recovered and identified dead, and an M for known missing. This was a sad and depressing list, but those who had not been recovered were sometimes mentioned by name—the wealthy, the powerful, the famous. There were hundreds with no grave but the sea and no one to ask about them— or grieve for them. Whole families lost together.

Which was, in a sense, more haunting, but at the same time perhaps, kinder.

Rutledge put the cuttings aside for a moment and stood by his windows looking out at the marshes. He glimpsed Peter Henderson walking along the quay, head down, shoulders hunched, and wondered if the man had a home to go to. And then recalled that his family had cut him off. Where then did he live?