SEBASTIAN WAITED OUTSIDE. IT SEEMED WISER. ALTHOUGH Lydia Bancroft hadn’t shown him any actual hostility, he’d given her good reason to be cool toward him. How was he to have known that the subject of his insensitive inquiry—as she must have seen it—was actually the librarian’s own grown-up daughter?

He stood at the bottom of the street, looking out across the harbor. There wasn’t much to the harbor itself; a sea wall, some fishermen’s huts, a low tidal jetty with its pilings hung with weed. The sea was a way out, the sound of its rollers like a distant train. Where the river estuary spilled across the sand, the masts of beached sailboats pointed this way and that.

After only a few minutes, he heard the faint sound of a latch and the opening of a door. He turned and looked back up the street, expecting to see Stephen Reed emerging from the library. Instead he saw a young woman in a short-waisted coat and a full traveling skirt. Her hair was up, with a hat pinned in place. She looked back as she emerged; Stephen Reed was right behind her, a small traveling bag in his hand, drawing the library door closed after them. As he stepped out to join the young woman, Stephen Reed gestured down the street, in Sebastian’s direction. She looked his way and seemed suddenly confused. As they moved toward Sebastian, Stephen Reed was explaining something.

Sebastian did not need an introduction to tell him the young woman’s name. With her hair pinned up, the resemblance to her mother was unmistakable.

Sebastian straightened up and made an effort to look pleasant.

“Mister Becker,” Stephen Reed said. “This is Evangeline Bancroft.”

Sebastian briefly took her hand and felt almost as much at a loss as the young woman looked.

“Evangeline heard the news and came up on the morning train,” Stephen Reed explained.

“Heard it how?” Sebastian said. “I thought it hadn’t reached the papers yet.”

“The murder of a barrister’s child,” the young woman said. “It’s all over the Inns of Court.”

“You work in the Inns of Court? Are you in the legal profession, Miss Bancroft?”

“I carry out clerical work for lawyers,” she said, and looked from one man to the other. “Forgive me. There seems to be something I don’t understand here. Are you also a policeman, Mister Becker?”

“A servant of the Crown,” Sebastian said, “with an interest in this case. I’d intended to seek you out in London, but instead I find you here. You came because you see a parallel with your own history. Am I right?”

“It’s a shocking crime, Mister Becker,” she protested.

“I know,” he said. “And I know your own experience had a happier outcome. But there may be something we can learn from whatever you may remember.”

Evangeline looked unsettled and uncertain. Then she looked back toward the library, as if half inclined to retreat to it.

“A happier outcome,” she said, and there was no color at all in her tone.

Stephen Reed spoke then.

“Please, Evangeline,” he said. “Trust us.”

“Walk me to my mother’s house,” she said.

THEY FOLLOWED the shore road away from the harbor, overlooking the dunes and the empty beach beyond them. In the dunes stood posts where cork life preservers hung on weathered boards. The cork in the rings was old and splitting, but appeared to have been freshly painted for the season.

Stephen Reed continued to carry Evangeline’s weekend bag. Sebastian held back and let him do the talking.

“Evangeline,” Stephen Reed began, “forgive me. But for a moment I have to be a professional man and not your childhood friend. This may cause you some personal distress. But strictly in that professional capacity, I’ve had sight of the case notes from the time that you and Grace Eccles went missing. They tell a different story from the one in the newspapers. I wish I could spare your blushes, but there it is.”

“I’m not blushing,” she said, though she was. And so, for that matter, was he.

“This is very awkward,” he said. “If you want me to stop, I will.”

“No,” Evangeline said, betraying that she was aware of Sebastian without quite looking at him. He felt that his presence was that of part intruder, part chaperone. “Forget my embarrassment,” she said. “This is important.”

“We need to know what you remember of that night.”

The road made a steep and sandy turn and they began to climb away from the beach, toward a part of town where modest houses competed for hillside space.

Evangeline said, “That’s very easy to answer. I remember nothing.”

Stephen Reed said, “The doctor’s notes are in the file. Please be assured, I didn’t look at the medical details. But when he asked the two of you to explain what happened, he wrote that he saw a look pass between you. Evangeline, if there’s something you know that you have never spoken of, I urge you to tell it to us now.”

“With all honesty,” she said, “I have no memory of anything that took place. Or even of the exchange of looks that he describes. I can’t imagine what it may have meant. If it happened at all. Stephen, I’m concealing nothing from you. I’ve written to Grace several times over the years. She wrote back to me only once, to tell me that she’d taken over her father’s business and to ask if I’d send her notices for London horse traders’ sales. I imagine that in the usual run of things, we’d be strangers by now. I’ve done my best to keep our association alive, even though we’ve only the past in common.”

“Then why persist?”

“Because I think Grace remembers more than I do. I’m sure of it. I’ve been hoping that one day I can persuade her to share what she knows.”

“Mister Becker’s been out to speak to her,” Stephen Reed said.

“I had to dodge a rock for my trouble,” Sebastian said.

Though she’d been serious to the point of a frown until this point, this news transformed the young woman’s expression. Her face lit up, and she let out a laugh that she quickly tried to cover with an apology.

“Grace is a tricky one,” Evangeline said. “She always has been.”

“Perhaps you can talk to her,” Stephen Reed said.

“I will.” She stopped and took the weekend bag from his hand.

“I’ll walk on from here,” she said. “I’d like some time to think.”

AS THE two men walked away, Sebastian said, “The medical details?”

“Both girls were violated.”

Sebastian looked back, but Evangeline was already gone from sight. “Does she know that?”

“I imagine it won’t have escaped her, Mister Becker, memory or no memory. How does such an act fit in with your picture of Sir Owain’s madness?”

On the walk up from the beach, they’d passed a board fence that had been set up to hold back the gorse and sand from the road. Its timbers had all but disappeared behind a pasted mass of notices and handbills for pier-end shows, political meetings, temperance rallies, Fry’s chocolate, traveling circuses, and the Judgment of the Lord. They were passing it again now. The freshest, cleanest addition among the posted bills was the notice of the forthcoming inquest, placed within the last hour or two. The paste was still wet.

Sebastian said, “I don’t have an answer for you. But let me take the machine.”

“What machine?”

“The camera, if it won’t be missed for a few hours. I think I may know where to track down someone with the expertise we need.”