Ignoring that, he said, “Help me find out the truth. And I swear to you, if Nicholas is guilty—no, wait, let me finish—if Nicholas is the one I’m after, I’ll walk away from it, go back to London, and tell the Yard they were wrong, there was nothing further to investigate in any of the three deaths in Borcombe this spring. The past—the others—can stay buried with him.”

Rachel stood with her back to him, the door’s handle in her hand, the door already swinging gently towards her.

“I don’t believe you!”

“I swear!” And he would do it. He knew that, deep down inside.

“And if it isn’t Nicholas?”

“Then we’ll decide what ought to be done. In fairness to the dead. All of the dead.” To O. A. Manning. To the poems that might be worse than lies.

“I’ll think about that. And give you my answer tonight. I’ll send a message to The Three Bells.”

The door was open now, and she went through it without looking back, the wind from the sea picking up strands of her hair and blowing them around her face. She seemed awfully slim and lonely, very small and very bereft as she moved down the steps and onto the drive, skirting his car.

Hamish was calling him a fool for swearing to such a bargain.

“The Yard brings in their man, you can’t turn your back on your oath, no’ for a slip of a girl that can’t see where the wind’s blowing!”

“So you believe me now, do you?” Rutledge silently challenged Hamish. “You see I’m right.”

“I think ye’re a damned fool, and a long way from home! What is there about witchery in a woman that touches you? Your Jean wasn’t that sort, she’s no’ the kind to spin a man’s head or set his soul on the brink. Olivia Marlowe casts a spell out of her grave, and ye’re lost!”

“It has nothing to do with Jean. Or Olivia Marlowe,” Rutledge countered, watching Rachel’s long, clean strides as she walked towards the wood. “And it has naught to do with yon lassie, either!” Hamish retorted.

Rutledge closed the door after Rachel before she reached the shadows of the trees and then took the stairs two at a time, to put away the articles he’d left on Olivia’s windowsill. Back into their cotton nests again, for the moment. Until he was ready to bring them out for good. His sixth sense told him he’d won in his bargain with Rachel. He hoped he was right.

As he passed the closed door to Nicholas’ room, he said aloud, his voice rough, “You should have lived, you fool, and married her. She’d have made a better wife than any you’ll find in the grave.”

Hamish chuckled.

Rutledge, irritated, ignored him.