Then she saw the policeman.

He stood just inside the flat, the brass buttons of his uniform straining over his big belly, sweat streaming off his face in the oppressive heat, and his expression oddly panicked. His presence relieved her on one level. Nobody called the police because a baby or a mother died in childbirth. But the police didn’t just show up for no reason, either. Something terrible had happened, even though it wasn’t the thing Sarah had most feared.

“Oh, look, Mrs. Brandt has come,” one of the neighbor women said, seeing Sarah. “Thank heaven you’ve come.”

The policeman turned to look at her, and his sweaty face brightened. “The midwife’s here now, missus,” he said to someone inside, someone who was crying more loudly than any of the women in the hallway. “I’ll just be on my way. Someone will let you know when you can claim the body.”

The body? Good heavens, what was he talking about? Had something happened to Agnes’s husband? No wonder everyone was hysterical.

“What’s going on here?” Sarah demanded of the policeman, but he was in too much of a hurry to leave. He tipped his hat as he passed, but he did pass, as quickly as he could push his way through the group of women and squeeze by Sarah, and then he hustled his bulky frame down the dark stairwell and was gone.

“It is Mrs. Otto’s sister, Gerda,” one of the women obligingly explained, dabbing at her eyes with the comer of her apron. “Somebody has murdered her!”

The words brought back ugly memories that Sarah had worked very hard to store away forever. Her own husband had been murdered a little more than three years ago, and just last April, Sarah had helped solve the murder of another unfortunate young woman. Although she sometimes had to deal with death in the course of her work, that at least was natural. She’d hoped never again to encounter the kind that came unnaturally, from the violent hand of another.