Invading his thoughts, Hamish scolded, “Ye’ve read the same lines three times, man!”

Realizing he’d done just that, Rutledge finished the paragraph and signed the report, setting it aside to be handed to Superintendent Bowles. His mind often grappled with the long nightmare of the trenches, the blighted landscape of northern France, the narrowed focus of trying somehow to protect the men under him, and the black despair of failing. Sometimes these seemed more real than the paperwork in front of him.

He was reaching for the next folder when a young constable tapped at his door and stepped aside to usher in a florid-faced, middle-aged woman in a dowdy black coat and a black hat that did not become her.

“A Mrs. Shaw to see you, sir! She says you’d know who she is.”

The woman stared at Rutledge, her heavy features twisting into a mask of pain. Tears began to trickle down her face, ravaging it.

Rutledge nodded to the constable as the man hesitated before closing the door. It swung shut with a click.

“Please, sit down, Mrs. Shaw,” he said gently as he strove to find her name in his memory. But there were no Shaws in the files he’d been reviewing, and as far as he could recall, no Shaws who had served under him in France. She watched him from behind her tears, waiting for the first stir of recognition.

Before the war, then?

And it came back to him as she sank heavily into her chair.

She was the widow of a man he’d sent to the gallows. Shaw… Ben Shaw. Convicted of murdering elderly women and robbing them. He had been trusted: a man-of-all-work who came on call to do the small and necessary repairs that aging and ill householders couldn’t manage. And when they didn’t die soon enough to suit him, he’d eased their going with a pillow, and then ransacked their meager possessions for anything of value. Alone in the world and bedridden, they had had no chance against him.