Bowles greeted his returning Inspector with what could best be described as subdued enthusiasm, and set him to clearing up files, going over paperwork for the courts, looking at the disposition of cases. Wouldn’t do to have Rutledge out on the streets, fainting in the midst of an inquiry. He’d told his superiors that as well. Wait until the man’s healed! Time enough then for him to take on a new case.

Rutledge, in fact, didn’t care. The mind-numbing concentration needed to finish each report or check every document kept Hamish at arm’s length and silent. It was respite in the form of inescapable boredom, and he embraced it with prodigious gratitude.

The other urgent requirement was to rebuild his stamina, depleted by enforced idleness. And so he began a regimen of walking each day. To breakfast in a dark-paneled pub, chosen because it lay several streets above Trafalgar Square. To lunch at any one of several pubs on streets that ran toward the Tower, and then an ever larger loop that would bring him back to the Embankment. Frances, under the impression that he was prudently taking the Underground, said nothing about his gray face each evening. But the thought of walking down into the crowded, noisy tunnels turned him cold with nerves. It was too much like being buried alive in the trenches.

The first day, Rutledge arrived back at the Yard shaking from the exertion, and still made himself take the stairs two at a time. Even on the weekend, he refused to stay indoors and rest. By his third day at the office, a Tuesday, he could walk without the black shadows of exhaustion clouding his mind to the point that he was a danger to himself and traffic in the streets. On the afternoon of the fifth, he was able to breathe reasonably well, and stop to look about him. His legs, he thought wryly, belonged to him again. Their tendency to wobble in his weakness had angered him more than the arm strapped to his chest.

There was work being done on a plaster War Memorial in the middle of Whitehall. The construction had snarled traffic for some time, and before returning to the Yard, Rutledge decided to have a look at it. Simplicity had been the goal, but the memorial seemed inadequate, he thought, to hold the memory of so much spilled blood and so many ruined lives. Depressed, he moved on toward St. Margaret’s Church, to stand on the corner of Bridge Street for a time, looking up at Big Ben and watching pigeons wheeling against the sky. Reluctant to return to his desk in his stuffy, ill-lit office, he listened to the traffic on the Thames, and considered crossing the busy bridge.

Hamish, relishing the wind from the river and a sudden gust of rain that swept down on them, was lost in his own reflections.