She began a third drawing, forcing all her concentration on keeping her right hand steady. Seeking to hold her panic at bay, she tried to duplicate the angle of the alder branches. She tried to copy the crisscrossing of the bridge balusters. She tried to suggest the pattern of the foliage. The charcoal snapped in two.

She pushed herself to her feet. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The creative power was supposed to take over. Time and place were supposed to disappear. The desire itself was supposed to return. But it hadn’t. It was gone.

You can, she thought fiercely, you can and you will. Nothing can stop you. No one stands in your way.

She thrust the sketch pad under her arm, grabbed her camp stool, and struck out southward on the island until she came to a small spit of land. It was overgrown with nettles, but it provided a different view of the bridge. This was the spot.

The ground was loamy, matted by leaves. Trees and bushes formed a web of vegetation behind which at a distance the stone bridge of Fen Causeway rose. Sarah snapped open the camp stool here. She dropped it to the ground. She took a step back and lost her footing on what seemed to be a branch that was hidden beneath a pile of leaves. Considering the location, she should have been more than prepared, but the sensation still unnerved her.

“Damn it,” she said and kicked the object to one side. The leaves fell from it. Sarah felt her stomach heave. The object wasn’t a branch, but a human arm.

2

Mercifully, the arm was attached to a body. In his twenty-nine years with the Cambridge Constabulary, Superintendent Daniel Sheehan had never had a dismemberment occur upon his patch, and he didn’t want that dubious investigatory distinction now.