Driving slowly, his headlamps scouring the road ahead while the farmer watched the verges, Rutledge could feel nothing—no sense of a fugitive hiding in the edges of the marsh or ducking behind trees and garden gates. He’d mastered that instinct during the War, where German snipers were skilled at picking off the unwary, and machine gunners hidden in cleverly disguised trenches and shell holes and uprooted trees waited for the onslaught of troops, holding fire until the unsuspecting were well within range. Hamish, behind him, seemed to keep watch as well, softly noting a high growth of shrub or a clump of wind-twisted trees that provided a likely covert for the human fox they were hunting.

The one factor on their side, Rutledge found himself thinking, was that Walsh was too big to hide himself in smaller and harder-to-see coverts. But in the dark, out in the marshes with their sluices and dikes, shadows could play deadly tricks. . . .

The farmer cleared his throat. “Ain’t likely, is it, that we’re going to find him in the dark? It’ud take an army searching in daylight—”

He broke off as a dog turned out of a field and trotted down the road, caught brilliantly in the headlamps. “That’s old Tom Randal’s dog—blessed beast got out again. I never saw such a one for wandering off every chance that comes. You’d think he’d be grateful for a good home!”

They were nearly past the dog when the farmer sat up and added, “On second thoughts, mayhap we should look in on Randal. Can you turn this thing around?”

Rutledge saw a drive ahead next to a high wall. He reversed into it and went back down the dark, empty road, the way he’d come. The dog had already disappeared into a patch of thick reeds and grasses.

“Just there!” the farmer finally said, pointing to a turning. A small cottage was set back from the road on the inland side, half lost among trees and a wild tangle of shrubbery. “Not much now, but once it was a pretty enough place. My wife treasured the plant cuttings Mrs. Randal offered her. She’s gone now, Mrs. Randal, some six or seven years back. Tom’s let her gardens run to seed.”

Rutledge drew up in the rutted, overgrown drive. The house was dark, hunching in on itself, vines running up the porch and struggling to hide the windows on the first floor.

Hamish said, “If ye believed in witches—”

Rutledge smothered a chuckle. The house needed only a cauldron smoking in the yard.

They walked to the door and with his fist the farmer pounded on the panels as hard as he could. “Deaf as a post,” he explained. “When he wants to be. My wife always claimed he’d rather be left alone.”