Cormac swung to face them and smiled as Harvey clapped handcuffs over his wet wrists. Watching, Rutledge unconsciously braced himself. It would be an appalling trial. The tragedy—as always, in Rutledge’s eyes—was that the murderer could never be charged with the havoc he’d brought to other people’s lives, only with the deaths laid at his door. Smedley was right, it wasn’t over for the villagers of Borcombe. Not for Rachel and Susannah. Not even for Olivia and Nicholas and Rosamund ...

“And you. They’ll be after breaking you on the stand,” Hamish warned.

“They can try,” he answered, silently.

Rachel, looking up at him, said in a low, strained voice as she gripped his arm with wet, icy fingers. “I have to know. Was it me that Nicholas loved, or was it Olivia?” The words seemed to be torn from her, as if they had never been allowed to surface from the darkness of her dread. Until now.

Rutledge shook his head. And consciously told a lie, out of infinite compassion. “He didn’t want her to die alone,” he said. “It took courage to make such a choice. Forgive him for it.”

She bowed her head and began to cry.

When they’d taken Cormac away, and Rachel, her face set and pale, had followed Smedley back towards the village, Rutledge was left on the headland alone. Pulling one of the blankets she’d brought tighter against the cold air that had followed the storm, he limped across to where the black patch of burned grass had once been, even its shadowed outline filled in with green now, the ashes long since washed away.

He knew what had perished here in the fire Nicholas had built. Why Olivia and Nicholas chose that moonlit night of beauty in which to end it.

A love they couldn’t have.

After a time ... “I envy you both,” he said softly in the night, lifting his head to look up at the room where they had died.

As he turned towards Borcombe, the wind followed, but Rutledge wasn’t aware of it. He stopped at the end of the drive and looked once more at the house below the headland. It stood there dark and silent, man-made and vulnerable, yet somehow invested with a grace all its own.

And he knew, without knowing how, that Olivia was finally at peace.

But that he would be possessed, for a very long time, by the woman she had been.

Here s an excerpt from
Charles Todd’s next book

SEARCH THE DARK

Now available from
St. Martins/Minotaur
Paperbacks!

The murder appealed to be a crime of passion, the killer having left a trail of evidence behind him that even a blind man might have followed.

It was the identity of the victim, not the murderer, that brought Scotland Yard into the case.