“Knowing about murder isn’t the same as killing. A victim’s family may understand it better than the murderer himself.” If Nicholas had been the killer, Olivia would have felt it deep in her very bones.

“Aye, that’s true. But once I read some of her verse, now, I knew it was inside that woman, and not something she’d happened to think of, meeting me on the road, like. That last book has one poem in it that kept me sleepless of nights for nearly a week. The sheer cruelty of it. I don’t recollect what it’s called, but I’m not likely to forget how it started:

‘Murderer I am, of little things, small griefs,
Treasures of the heart.

Of bodies and of souls I have taken
All that is there to give,
Life’s blood, the spirit’s wealth.
And these secrets I keep locked away,
For my own joy and your pain.’

Not what Mrs. Browning might write, or even that Rossetti woman.”

“No,” Rutledge said quietly, considering possible treasures of the heart. Those small golden trophies of a death.

“Are you thinking she killed that boy? Good God! She was hardly more than a child herself!”

“You said you believed she was capable of murder.”

Harvey looked at him, mind working, mind sorting, but not coming up with anything he could put into words.

“Aye, that’s true enough, in the heat of the moment I felt it could be so. But it’s different when you have a face to put to someone she may’ve killed ...” He shook his head. “We don’t get many child murderers in these parts. I wasn’t that fond of the woman, but it’s another matter saying she was one. She was different. That was her problem. She was ... different.” There was something in his eyes that pleaded for Rutledge to understand what he was trying to say. That whatever Olivia Marlowe was, by its very extraordinariness she was outside the realm of his comprehension, and therefore suspect, even if he couldn’t condemn her for a specific crime. Capable of anything.

“When did this discussion with Olivia take place?”

“Oh, long before the war. I’d just arrived in Borcombe. I didn’t know her mother, the one they still call Miss Rosamund, that everyone was so fond of, and I knew only that Miss Olivia was one of the family up at the Hall. Her and her brother, and the two younger ones, the twins.”

“How did you answer her?”