Among the trees in the churchyard, Rutledge’s night-accustomed eyes picked out a solitary figure, head bent, standing among the gravestones. Then the figure straightened to stare up at the night sky above the towers. A mourner? Or another lonely soul with no home he wanted to go to?

“Like you?” Hamish asked softly.

Turning, Rutledge walked along the main road, passing the darkened windows of Dr. Stephenson’s surgery, the brightly lit ones of the police station, and what appeared to be a small country solicitor’s office tucked—with a prosperous air—into the corner where Water Street and the Hunstanton Road met.

His mind kept returning to the different view of Father James that Priscilla Connaught had presented to him, and before he could sleep, he wanted to think it through. Right or wrong, she herself believed it implicitly. Until half an hour ago, he’d believed that everyone had mourned Father James, the man and the priest, in equal measure.

“Relegating the dead to sainthood,” Hamish pointed out, “is no’ uncommon. No one wants to speak ill of the recent dead.”

Unlike Mark Antony’s wily promise over Caesar’s bloody corpse, Miss Connaught had come to bury Father James in every sense of the word, not to praise him. Which gave the priest human dimensions rather than saintly ones.

“It might have made him a better priest, knowing he’d failed one person,” Rutledge argued.

“Aye, it’s true. Ye canna’ tell without knowing how he’d failed the woman.”

But that had been left unspoken. Had Father James failed Miss Connaught personally—choosing the priesthood over marriage—or had he given her advice that a young man devoting his life to the Church might have seen as the only answer, although not necessarily the most compassionate one?

And in spite of her agitation, Rutledge was prepared to believe Priscilla Connaught when she swore she hadn’t killed the priest. Haunting him had clearly given her far more personal satisfaction than murder ever could. The reserved woman that Mrs. Barnett had described had been completely distraught.

“Unless Father James had learned to come to grips with it,” Hamish pointed out. “It wouldna’ satisfy her, then.”

Still, this second face of the man was intriguing.

Turning down the other leg of Water Street, Rutledge could see the bowl of sky out beyond the water, dark now but filled with stars, their clarity almost breathtaking. As he reached the quay, he stopped and stood there feeling the distant whisper of the waves, although he wasn’t sure he actually heard them. There was a line of luminescence out there as well, as if far beyond his earthbound line of sight, the moon was already rising.