For Elizabeth’s sake, he was glad to find himself accepted. He couldn’t have borne it if he’d embarrassed her. Yet it could have happened all too easily.

Frances had been wrong—he was not ready to meet old friends and pick up the threads of an old life. There were too many walls that shut him off from people who remembered a very different man called Ian Rutledge.

Still, Elizabeth had not let him go without making a promise that he’d be back on 10 November.

“You will ask for leave, I hope,” she asked anxiously, a reminder. “And Chief Superintendent Bowles will agree, won’t he?”

“I see no reason why not,” Rutledge responded, bending his head to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be here. If I can.”

What he didn’t tell her was that he’d have made certain that he was not in London on 11 November with or without leave.

But on the long drive home, watching the headlamps pick out the verges of the road and pierce the heavy shadows of trees and hedgerows, Rutledge had found himself seeing again and again the face he’d carried with him since the bonfire.

It lingered against his will, as if once having surfaced it refused to be stuffed down once more into the bleak depths from which it had risen. And there was no respite, for traffic was too light to distract him. The cloudy, moonless night seemed to be its ally, and even Hamish was silent. By the time Rutledge reached the outskirts of London, the shoulders and chest attached to the face had fleshed themselves out, bit by bit gathering substance like a reluctant ghost. They belonged not in the proper English clothing Rutledge thought he’d glimpsed tonight, but in a torn and bloody uniform.

And Hamish said, as if he’d been waiting for Rutledge to reach this point, “I’d no’ pursue it. There were sae many . . .”

In the pale morning light, as he made his way to Scotland Yard the next day, Rutledge realized he had arrived at the same conclusion.

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHARLES TODD is the author of A Test of Wills, Wings of Fire, Search the Dark, Legacy of the Dead, A Fearsome Doubt, and Watchers of Time. He lives on the East Coast, where he is at work on his next novel of British historical suspense, The Murder Stone.

ALSO BY CHARLES TODD

ALSO BY CHARLES TODD

A Test of Wills*
Wings of Fire
Search the Dar
Legacy of the Dead*
A Fearsome Doubt*

AND COMING SOON IN HARDCOVER:

The Murder Stone

* Available from Bantam Books

Copyright Page

This edition contains the complete text
of the original trade paperback edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

WATCHERS OF TIME

A Bantam Book

Copyright © 2001 by Charles Todd.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2001035272