“If I were in his shoes, I’d keep going, counting on the head start to see me safe.” Blevins’s eyes met Rutledge’s across the desk. Without words—without the need for words—the message was clear: Walsh wouldn’t have run, if he wasn’t guilty as hell!

As far as Blevins was concerned, out of the night’s disaster had come one comforting certainty.

As Rutledge followed Hadley back into the street, he found himself thinking about what Blevins had said—that Walsh would be counting on the miles between himself and Osterley to see him safe.

Was that true? His mind reviewed the road system he’d scanned on the map. Walsh was no fool. He might well lay a false trail. He’d planned his escape, and while it was a matter of luck that he’d stumbled on Randal’s farm, where a horse could be taken without arousing the household or sending the dogs into frenzies of barking, there must be a dozen farms where the barn was far enough from the house to allow Walsh to break in.

And the yellow dog must have been an unwitting accomplice, delighted to be set free and not questioning the manner of it.

Sims was grateful for the news. He looked haggard. “I’m not afraid of Walsh,” he said, and oddly enough Rutledge believed him. “Although Blevins seems to think I was quaking in my shoes for fear I’d be the next victim! And I’m not convinced, somehow, that Walsh is guilty of murder.”

“Why do you say that? Have you seen him, met him?”

“No. Which is why I’ve kept my mouth shut. But I’ve had long nights to think about Father James and his death. It seems to me that Walsh took a chance coming back here weeks after the bazaar, expecting to find money at the rectory. Most churches live hand to mouth. It would have been easier to break into a house if he was desperate. Besides, if he was wandering about in the rectory the day of the fair, as Mrs. Wainer claims he was, he’d have seen for himself that there was very little to steal.”

“He must have assumed,” Rutledge said, echoing Hamish in his head, “that no one would connect his presence at the fair with a theft a good two weeks later.” That was Blevins’s opinion. “Someone at the fair could have calculated, roughly, how much money had been taken in. And there was a last payment to be made on the new cart, before it would be handed over to Walsh.” He was playing devil’s advocate, to give Sims an opportunity to get to the bottom of what he wanted to say.

Sims took a deep breath. “That’s a tidy assumption. On the other hand—was Walsh that clever? If so, you’ll play merry hell catching him now!”

“Then who killed the priest?”