“Oh, I think it should be sold. There’s nothing left here now of what we loved as children, and trying to keep it alive artificially, as a museum, would be much worse than strangers moving in. I mourn the past, that’s all.” She looked over her shoulder as they walked down the headland towards the beach again, as if hoping the house itself would tell her she was wrong. After a moment she added more to herself than to him, “I expect the best course after all is for Cormac to buy it. Which keeps the Hall in the family in a roundabout way, and we’ll none of us feel guilty about choosing strangers over Olivia. Although it seems selfish to make poor Cormac the family’s sacrificial lamb!” She smiled ruefully. “Have you ever noticed how many times feeling guilty shapes human decisions? Rather than love or pity or avarice or whatever else one might have felt instead? A wretched way of getting through life, isn’t it?”

He grinned down at her. “In my work, feelings of guilt can be useful—sometimes even solve the crime for me.” But there had been other times, he could have told her, when remorse and guilt never entered into the picture. A killer caught by some tiny mistake he made, not because of any human emotion driving him. Careful, elusive, cold. Rutledge found himself thinking that this new Ripper wouldn’t be such a man. He was lashed by such savage desires he could tear flesh like paper. And he’d grow more and more careless as the fires consumed him as well as his victims.

The picnic basket was bountiful, pasties wrapped in napkins, beer for him, a thermos of tea for Rachel, an assortment of biscuits in a small tin, and a packet of cheese with a fresh loaf of bread. There were plums in the bottom in another napkin.

They did it justice, although Rutledge was preoccupied and Rachel found herself making self-conscious small talk, sticking with topics that couldn’t lead her—and the Inspector— back to the Hall or its inhabitants.

Discussing her interest in Roman ruins in England was easier, then she found herself wondering aloud why he’d chosen police work when he might have gone into the law, like his father.