Bowles stared at the other man. Was he too willing? Was he intending to be down in Cornwall and finished with this matter before the weekend? Or did Rutledge know something that he didn’t about the London killings? And was all too pleased to be excluded from them? That would be a fine kettle of fish, sending Rutledge out of harm’s way just as the roof started to fall in here! Suspicious, he said, “Well, I’d not rush the investigation if I were you. It’ll all be to do over again if we don’t satisfy this sod in the Home Office!”

“I won’t rush it.” Rutledge was still looking out the window, his mind already on the road west. Stirring to life, Hamish, a voice from the past, said, “It’s a bonny day. I’m not the man for four walls and a door.”

Which made them seem to shrink in upon him. Shivering, Rutledge turned back to Bowles. “What do you have on these cases?”

‘‘Precious little. His lordship didn’t deign to send us more than this.”

He passed over several sheets. Copies of death certificates for Olivia Alison Marlowe, spinster. Nicholas Michael Cheney, bachelor. Both dead by their own hands. The dates were the same. This spring. And for Stephen Russell FitzHugh, bachelor, death by misadventure. A fall. Three weeks ago. While he, Rutledge, was still in Warwickshire.

“Seems ordinary enough. In both cases.”

“It is. But as far as we’re concerned, the Home Office, like God, is never wrong!”

It was four o’clock in the afternoon before Rutledge was ready to leave for Cornwall. But the days are still long in July, and the warmth of the sun was soothing. In the trenches during the Great War he’d hated the hot days of summer, when the smells of urine and corpses and unwashed bodies overwhelmed the senses and sickened the mind. You cursed the Germans for making you stand in your own stink, never mind that they were standing in the lines smelling their own. One sergeant, who swore he’d never bathed at home in Wales, laughed at the raw replacements who gagged and puked, calling them sodding poufs for their sensitive noses. Blankets, coats, shirts, trousers, socks, they all were unspeakable in summer, and worse in winter when the wool never dried. Hamish chuckled. “Missing it, are ye?” “No,” Rutledge said tiredly, “unable to forget.” “Aye,” Hamish answered with relish from the dark corners of his mind, “that’s the game, man, you can’t run from it.”