Her temple had been crushed by a carpenter’s hammer, a single blow with the weight of the husband’s heavy shoulders behind it. The weapon lay on the floor where he had dropped it, bright blood on its head. He had, he said, been using it to mend the cellar stairs.

Rutledge couldn’t recall now what the pair had quarreled about. Only that he’d felt like picking up the hammer and using it himself on the man. He’d been young, idealistic still, unused to murder. The man was on his knees by the quiet body of his wife, begging her to get up, to clean up the mess on the floor. To pull down her skirts before the policeman, and Rutledge had felt the upsurge of a fearsome anger.

And the wound—the wound was a bloody gouge on the temple. Not like—and yet somehow very like—the bloody hole in Walsh’s temple.

Why had he associated the two cases?

Because he was tired enough for his mind to play tricks. . . .

The dog came back with the rag, tail waggling, asking for another toss. But Rutledge was lost in the past, his eyes turned inward, his fingers moving involuntarily over the head of the hammer as he tried to bring back the images in his mind, to observe them more clearly. What was it that had stirred his memory? Not the shape of the wound— Not the kitchen floor, where the broken egg yolks ran into the thicker stickiness of the blood . . . Nor the man whimpering at his side.

He took the wet rag and threw it once more, and realized that it had left a smear of saliva across his fingers. He looked down at them as Hamish said something, and was on the point of wiping them on the loose hay when he stopped.

Rutledge stared at the tool in his hand, another thought rising among the confused images that exhaustion was fusing, like drug-induced dreams in hospital, into a semblance of reality.

The mare hadn’t been at the scene when the doctor arrived—he wouldn’t have been able to examine her shoe for signs of blood and hair. And by the time she was found, any useful traces on the shoe would have been worn away. A pity. It would have been clearer evidence in the chain of events Blevins had to sort out. Indeed, someone ought to wait here until the mare was brought in.

He himself should be on his way to Priscilla Connaught. . . .

His mind fragmented by multiple lines of thought, Rutledge tried to find coherence. And the fatigue riding him refused to let him.

How many hammers were there in Osterley—in a twenty-mile radius of Osterley?

It didn’t matter. The bodies of the dead often told their own stories of how they died. But not always why. It was the why that mattered now.