“You’d be surprised. They seem to think you’re on the trail of a murderer. They’re wondering—among themselves, not to your face—if that terrible man doing the killings in London might be a Borcombe man. They’ve gone through the lists of who lived here once, and who moved away. Failing that, someone who’d passed through. It’s the only explanation they can come up with for a Scotland Yard inspector wasting his time on two suicides and an accident when half London is in absolute terror thinking the other half is about to cut him to ribbons.”

Astonished, Rutledge found himself speechless. Hamish, quick to point out the fact that Rutledge might well be more useful there, was not.

Smedley lifted his shoulders deprecatingly. “The newspaper yesterday morning reported that someone named Bowles was quoted as saying that all available manpower had been diverted to the killings. Do you know him?”

“Yes,” Rutledge answered curtly. “The truth is, I was sent down here to keep me out of the picture. Not to run any leads to earth.”

“That reassures me,” Smedley answered, and there was something in his voice that made Rutledge look more closely at him. “All this fuss over the boy, searching for his grave. His body. Proof that he was in fact dead. I don’t know why, I found myself fearful that perhaps he hadn’t perished on the moors, that he’d been taken away and somehow turned into a monster.”

“You prefer the possibility that someone in his own family might have purposely let him die of exposure?”

“No.” There was sadness in his voice. “I prefer that he rest in peace, wherever he may be. Alive. Or dead. I don’t want to think of anyone suffering and lost and alone, in need of comfort. Least of all someone I held in my arms and christened. Whose soul is, in a sense, my responsibility. And most certainly not Rosamund’s son.”

“The murderer in London is very likely mad. What he’s doing is the work of a ruined mind. The murderer I’m searching for isn’t mad. Whatever reasons he—or she—had for killing, there was a reason.”

Smedley sighed. “I can give one to you. Envy.”

“Envy?” Rutledge repeated. It wasn’t necessarily his first choice of sins. And often not a murderer’s, either, in his experience.

“Envy is at the root of many small cruelties. Watch children at play, if you don’t believe me. It’s a natural emotion in them, and they aren’t yet civilized enough to suppress it.”

A child might kill out of envy ... “What could Olivia envy?”

“Oh, I daresay many things. A whole leg rather than a shriveled one, for starters.”

“And Nicholas?”