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They walked back up to the graveyard more or less the way Runcorn had come with Mrs. Warner, and found the sexton still standing guard alone and shivering with cold.

Trimby looked past him at the body and his face bleached so pale Runcorn was afraid for a moment that he was going to collapse. But after a painfully intense effort, he regained his composure, then bent and began to make his professional examination.

Runcorn excused the sexton and waited quietly in the rising wind, growing colder and colder as the minutes passed.

Finally Trimby stood up awkwardly, his legs stiff from kneeling, his balance a little uncertain.

“No later than midnight,” he said hoarsely. He coughed and began again. “Far as I can tell from the rigor mortis. But you can see that yourself with the frost, I expect. Cold, exposure makes a difference. Look for whoever saw her last, if you can trust them. Can’t … can’t make a wound like that without getting blood on yourself. She didn’t fight.” His voice broke and he took a long, difficult moment to regain his self-control. “Nothing much else I can tell you. Can’t learn anything more from this. I’ll get her out of here, get her … decent.” He turned to go.

“Doctor …” Runcorn called out.

Trimby waved a hand at him impatiently. “You can see as much as I can. This is your business, not mine.” He continued to walk rapidly between the gravestones.

Runcorn’s legs were longer and he caught up with him. “It’s not all you can tell me,” he said, matching his step to Trimby’s. “You know her, tell me something about her. Who would have done this?”

“A raving madman!” Trimby snapped back without turning to look at him or slacken his pace.

Runcorn snatched his arm and pulled him up short, swinging him around a little. It was a thing he had never done before in all the violent and tragic cases he had ever dealt with. His own emotions were more deeply wrenched than he had imagined. “No, it was not a madman,” he said savagely. “It was someone she knew and was not afraid of. You know that as well as I do. She was facing him, she wasn’t Running away, and she didn’t fight back because she wasn’t expecting him to strike her. Why was she here anyway? Who would she meet in a graveyard alone, late at night?”

Trimby stared at him, angry and defensive. “What kind of world do you live in where a man who would do that to a woman is considered sane?” he asked, his voice trembling.

Runcorn saw the profound emotion in him, the bewilderment and the sense of loss far deeper than what he must have felt from the expected deaths he encountered in his practice from time to time. Olivia had presumably been his patient and he might have known her all her life. Runcorn answered honestly. “When we say ‘madman,’ we mean someone unknown to us, who acts without reason, attacking at random, someone outside the world we understand. This wasn’t someone like that, and I think you know it.”

Trimby lowered his gaze. “If there were anything I could tell you, I would,” he replied. “I have no idea who it was, or why this happened. That is your job to find out, God help you.” And he turned and strode away through the last of the gravestones, leaving Runcorn alone, cold, and spattered by the first heavy drops of rain.

It was a miserable day of small duties before Runcorn finally met again with Constable Warner and told him what Trimby had said. The medical evidence, such as it was, confirmed his own deduction, but added nothing that was of help. Olivia Costain had been stabbed in the stomach with a broad blade. The single thrust had severed the artery and she had bled to death within moments, falling backwards from where she had been standing. As Runcorn had supposed, there were no defensive wounds on her hands or arms, or anywhere else on her body.

“She probably died before midnight,” he finished. Warner looked tired, his eyes red-rimmed as if he had been sleepless far longer than one interminable day. They sat at the same kitchen table as they had in the morning, again with a