Frances had been wrong-he was not ready to meet old friends and pick up the threads of an old life. There were too many walls that shut him off from people who remembered a very different man called Ian Rutledge.

Still, Elizabeth had not let him go without extracting a promise that he’d be back on 10 November.

“You will ask for leave, I hope,” she said anxiously, a reminder. “And Chief Superintendent Bowles will agree, won’t he?”

“I see no reason why not,” Rutledge responded, bending his head to kiss her cheek. “I’ll be here. If I can.”

What he didn’t tell her was that-with or without leave-he had no intention of being in London on 11 November.

But on the long drive home, watching the headlamps pick out the verges of the road and pierce the heavy shadows of trees and hedgerows, Rutledge had found himself seeing again and again the face he’d carried with him since the bonfire.

It lingered against his will, as if once having surfaced it refused to be stuffed down once more into the bleak depths from which it had risen. And there was no respite, for traffic was too light to distract him. The cloudy, moonless night seemed to be its ally, and even Hamish was silent. By the time Rutledge reached the outskirts of London, the shoulders and chest attached to the face had fleshed themselves out, bit by bit gathering substance like a reluctant ghost. They belonged not in the proper English clothing Rutledge thought he’d glimpsed tonight, but in a torn and bloody uniform.

And Hamish said, as if he’d been waiting for Rutledge to reach this point, “I’d no’ pursue it. There were sae many…”

In the pale morning light, as he made his way to Scotland Yard the next day, Rutledge realized he had arrived at the same conclusion.

3

It was 9 November. Rutledge was at the Yard, preparing to clear his desk for leave due to begin that afternoon.