Rutledge agreed. His cluttered office was claustrophobic when rain ran down the soot-blackened windows, shutting him in with the lamplight and the musty smell of cigar smoke and wet wool. When it rained, Old Bowels’s moods were as unpredictable as the shifts in Hamish’s trains of thought.

Nor was he eager to return to Frances’s watchful care. His sister was a master at concealing her worry behind a light facade of humor, but he knew her too well to be taken in by it. He said aloud, in the silence of the motorcar—a habit he found nearly impossible to break— “I’ll be here at least one more day. It will do no harm.”

A lorry, bound from King’s Lynn to Norwich, sent an arc of muddy water across Rutledge’s bonnet as it passed in the southbound lane. He blinked as the spray washed the windscreen and left behind a dark and odiferous residue that slowly vanished in the drizzle that had resumed, swallowing up the sun.

As he drove into the town, Rutledge saw people hurrying toward Holy Trinity, bound for the service. He recognized a few of the faces from his brief visit on Saturday— the farmer and his sons who had successfully purchased the prize ram, the young woman he’d seen earlier in the churchyard, the barmaid at The Pelican, and two of the children who had been playing in Water Street. The familiar habit of Sunday worship comfortably being followed: occasionally greeting a friend, often looking up at the great tower that marked their destination as if already focused on the service. There was something very English about it.

He had the odd feeling that he had come home.

The constable on duty in the police station informed him that Inspector Blevins was at Mass, and had left word that he would expect his London counterpart after lunch.

“If there’s a Mass, there’s a priest,” Hamish told Rutledge as he walked back to the motorcar.

“Yes. I’d like to see who has been sent to conduct it.”

He turned the car and drove to St. Anne’s. The watery sunlight brightened.

Stopping in the drive beside the rectory, Rutledge sat back in his seat, trying to ease the tense muscles in his chest, massaging his upper arm near the shoulder, commanding it to relax. He’d nearly succeeded by the time the first of the parishioners came out of the service and walked away down the street.

Watching them, he wondered which had been under suspicion before Walsh had been taken into custody. Surely Blevins had considered a good many of them, before the investigation had widened.