Rutledge took it through to the public bar, where he ordered a pint and when it came, sat staring at the package for another several minutes before opening it. Faces somehow lent reality to facts ...

There were photographs inside, as he’d expected. With a note: “Please, I’d like to have these back when you’ve finished with them.”

There was no signature, but he knew they’d come from Rachel Ashford. He tried to see Rachel and Peter together, to imagine Peter marrying her, and failed. Not because she wasn’t the sort of woman Peter could have loved, but because Peter as he remembered him in school must have been very different from the man who’d died on Kilimanjaro. Just as he, Rutledge, had changed out of all recognition from the boy who’d had so many fine dreams and plans for his future.

Taking the photographs out of their wrapping and spreading them out on his table, he looked at them, not sure what he was going to see, not certain he wanted to see them now.

There were several older ones. Rosamund Trevelyan at twenty—there were names and dates on the back—shining with youth and beauty and some inner peace. He looked at her more closely. Yes, there was strength as well, and a sense of laughter in her eyes. Anne and Olivia standing amid the roses in the back garden, so alike that there was a question mark on the reverse by their names. Two girls in lace-edged white dresses with long sashes and ribbons in their hair, smiling shyly for the camera. Pretty girls, with tumbling curls and the shape of Rosamund’s face if not her beauty. The same girls again, this time a little older, with a small boy and another child in a long dress. Nicholas and Richard. Nicholas was already tall for his age, dark unruly hair and dark eyes, although in the photograph you couldn’t tell if they were brown or dark blue. Another one, when Richard was five and Nicholas was seven or eight, on the moors with their family. Richard was now a boy with a wide, mischievous grin and gleeful eyes. A born troublemaker, some would say, ready for any game. Was that how he’d been lured away?