A voice. Not that of madness, where the mind tricked itself into believing the twisted commands of its own fabrication. Or-at least he prayed it wasn't! What he heard was more fearful-a dead man. Corporal Hamish MacLeod pursued him like the Furies, following him through the last years of the war and into its aftermath as if the man were still alive. So real that the soft Scots accent created a presence of its own, as if Hamish stood just out of sight, where Rutledge would surely find him if he turned unexpectedly. A presence that was the embodiment of too much horror piled on horror. The product of shell shock. The legacy of war.

For two days Rutledge had listened to the testimony of expert witnesses, aware of the difference between himself and the prisoner in the Preston dock. And yet at the same time Rutledge had known with a cold certainty that he was the only person in that courtroom who could fully understand what the doctors and the barristers were trying to describe: a haunting so real it was at times terrifying.

He could even understand why the prisoner had wanted to kill himself. He, Rutledge, had in the depths of his torment walked into heavy fire as he crossed No Man's Land with his men and waited for the peace of death, and it had eluded him. When, against all odds, he'd survived the war, he had made a promise to himself: When he could see Hamish, when the day came that he could feel the dead man's breath on the back of his neck, or the touch of a ghostly hand on his shoulder, it would be finished. By whatever means.

The revolver that had belonged to his father lay in a flannel cloth behind the books in his sitting room in London, where he could reach it at need.

The legacy of war… It had left Rutledge so scarred emotionally that the blurred, ghostly faces of men he had led into the teeth of battle seemed to mock him, their useless deaths on his very soul.