War, he thought, was madness of a different kind. And the final ordeal had been the death of Corporal MacLeod. Not by enemy fire, like so many others, but by Rutledge's own hand. The epitome of waste, a man who had broken under fire even as Rutledge himself was breaking-a man who preferred dying in shame to leading others into another futile massacre: the long, deadly slaughter called the Battle of the Somme. Hamish MacLeod's decision had left an indelible mark on his surviving officer. A good man-a lost man-who had perished on the unhallowed altar of Military Necessity. In bald truth, murdered.

And yet Rutledge-and Hamish-had survived the trenches, after a fashion. Haunter and haunted, they had lived through the bloodiest conflict in the history of warfare. It was Peace that had made the presence of the young Scots soldier, invisible and at the same time more real than in life, an even more unspeakable burden for Rutledge to carry.

“You were one of the lucky ones,” Dr. Fleming had told him not a fortnight ago. “But you can't see it as luck. In your view it's intolerable, your survival. You're punishing yourself because a whimsical God let you live. You think you've failed the dead, failed to protect them and keep them alive and bring them back home again. But no one could have done that, Ian. Don't you see? No one could have brought all of them through!”

But Hamish had tried, Rutledge answered Fleming silently. And so I had had to try as well.

Rutledge had come to the doctor's London rooms that fair and windy December afternoon before driving to Preston to ask when-if-his expiation would end. After concluding a particularly unsettling investigation where Hamish seemed to be on the brink of revealing himself at every turn, Rutledge was looking for absolution-hope-from a man he had once hated and slowly learned to respect.

Only eight months before, sleep-deprived, goaded beyond endurance, he had lived in silence and despair, hardly aware of himself as a man.