A flush had risen in Arthur’s face. “Perhaps if Baker had met her at the hotel at the hour he’d promised, she wouldn’t have taken it in her head to show she could fend for herself! And as for Titanic, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” He got up from his chair and moved about the room, rigidly at first, and then with more ease as the muscles in his back stretched. He was plausible, his voice and his manner carrying indignation and a sense of injustice nicely blended. But was it real? Rutledge couldn’t tell. Just as he refused to submit to the pain in his back, Arthur Sedgwick refused to be intimidated.

Hamish said, “He canna’ be shaken.”

Arthur walked to the rain-wet window, peering out at the dark gardens, his back to the room. His father and brother waited for him to speak again. And Rutledge remembered something that Sedgwick had told him about his elder son—the Watchers of Time had given the boy nightmares. . . .

When Arthur said nothing else, Sedgwick cleared his throat. “Inspector, I think you ought to leave. Miss Trent, we apologize for this distressful business, you shouldn’t have been subjected to it.”

Hamish spoke swiftly, and Rutledge shifted in his chair to look at Edwin.

Edwin’s eyes were still on his brother. As Rutledge had noted once before on the quay in Osterley, they were as cold as the winter sea. Edwin was the physically stronger now, and harder. He had made no effort to come to his brother’s defense, and it had become a telling silence.

His intuition alive and working, Rutledge suddenly realized why. A jealousy lay like acid under the skin of the second son. It had nothing to do with Virginia Sedgwick’s death. The title would go to Arthur, not Edwin.

Rutledge was on the point of continuing when May Trent spoke for the first time. “But it isn’t true,” she said with conviction to the room at large, “that the Inspector doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And it isn’t true that your wife was on board Titanic, Mr. Sedgwick. Because I was, you see, and I’d have met her. Father James made a study of the ship. That’s how he found me.”

The logs on the hearth crackled and sent sparks flying, but no one noticed. A gust of rain rattled against the windows. May Trent waited.

Rutledge forced himself not to look at her. But Lord Sedgwick and Edwin were staring at her with an almost malevolent expression, as if she had called them liars. And she had.

“My dear lady,” Sedgwick said. “Virginia was a wretched sailor—it’s very doubtful that she ever left her stateroom!”