Proof of Guilt Read Online Free Page B

the running for the position of Acting Chief Superintendent. It was a loss to the Yard that he wasn’t.
    “A dark horse. So far he’s been reasonable enough to work with, but his reputation precedes him. He doesn’t care for leaps of intuition and is a stickler for regulations.”
    “The new broom sweeping clean, yet?”
    Rutledge considered the question. “He’s too new. Time will tell.”
    “One school seems to think Bowles is mending and will have his old position back or know the reason why. Another thinks he’s stepped on too many toes and that he’ll be asked to retire, if the Home Office finds a satisfactory replacement.”
    Rumors that Rutledge hadn’t heard. “Thank you for the warning.” Better the devil you know? He wasn’t sure.
    “Good to see you again, Ian. Keep your head down, and you’ll be all right.”
    But Rutledge stopped him. “Do you miss it? The Yard?” He hadn’t intended to ask the question. It was too personal for one thing, and none of his affair for another.
    After the clinic, he had used his return to the Yard to stop himself from sliding into irreversible madness, and he had fought to hold on to that in the face of Bowles’s intransigence and the fearsome darkness occupying his mind. He had survived, because he had never dared to look beyond the Yard. Never dared to contemplate what would become of him if his work were suddenly taken away. As it had been for this man.
    “I do,” Cummins said, and Rutledge felt cold. And then Cummins added, “But not as much as I’d expected to. Does that make sense?”
    Rutledge could only say, “Yes.”
    A t the Yard, Rutledge’s first order of business was to ask Gibson to find out whatever he could about the helpful Mr. Belford. In his office with the door shut, he sat down at his desk, turned his chair toward the dusty window, and looked out. He was grateful for this glimpse of the outside, even if it consisted mostly of trees and a part of the road below. His claustrophobia, a relic of the trenches, hadn’t gone away with time, as the doctors had suggested it might. And it helped him to think, staring out at green leaves and tree trunks that hadn’t been blighted by artillery and turned into churned-up mud, bone, blood, and lost hopes.
    The Acting Chief Superintendent would be impatiently awaiting his report, but Rutledge wasn’t quite satisfied with what he’d seen in that street in Chelsea.
    The victim was still wearing both shoes. Surely if he’d been dragged ten feet, one of them would have fallen off. Had someone replaced them? And while his coat showed every sign of dragging, no attempt had been made to simulate a track in the dust of a Chelsea street. Rutledge found that interesting. Where, then, had the man come from? And why was he brought to London? Because it was large and anonymous, or because this was the place where he needed to be?
    “Because where he died would point to the killer,” Hamish suggested in the back of his mind, answering so clearly his voice seemed to come from just behind Rutledge’s shoulder.
    He should be used to it by now. That voice, neither specter nor friend nor rational thought.
    Whatever had brought the dead man to Chelsea, it would be necessary now to circulate a description of him to large cities all over the country. And hope that inspectors there would pass the word to the smaller towns and villages in their patches. If the Yard was very lucky, a constable somewhere would recognize the man and put a name to him.
    Rutledge had been warned that the Acting Chief Superintendent didn’t care for inquiries with loose ends.
    He was more optimistic about the watch. It was expensive enough that jewelers in England, like Galloway, would have kept a record of such a purchase and a satisfied client, in the expectation of future business. But would that be true in Portugal?
    Why had the killer overlooked that watch when he—or she—had emptied the dead man’s pockets?
    By accident? Or by