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You should not have waited for me.’ I knelt down before her, taking her hands in mine, and told her as gently as I could what had happened.
    She could say nothing coherent for a few moments, half-formed questions dying in disbelief on her lips. Tears filled her eyes and spilled out over the lashes. I wiped them away with my hand.
    ‘Hush, hush.’
    ‘But he was so good – what harm was there ever in Robert? What would he have ever done to anyone, that he should die like that? He did not deserve that.’
    I could summon no words, no platitude, no portion of the scripture to answer her. ‘It is not ours to know.’ I could not say that to my wife, the well-worn admonition to those seeking to understand the mind of God. For I knew that what I had seen in the library close that night had been no work of God.
    ‘Robert shall have some justice in this world, we are determined on that.’
    She looked up at me, instantly suspicious. ‘We?’
    ‘The burgh authorities have begun their investigations, and, God willing, they may find the perpetrator, but the principal has asked that I should assist him in looking into matters in so far as they affect the college.’
    ‘But why you?’
    I shrugged as I stood up. ‘Because I am the oldest of the regents, I suppose. I do not think he altogether trusts Matthew Jack, and the other two have – well, they have not lived in the world as I have.’ And because I knew Death in ways they did not. I had seen Death and tracked its malign pathways in ways they had not.
    I could see my answer had done little to ease the concerns creeping into her mind. ‘What are these matters?’
    I poured myself a beaker of ale from the jug on the sideboard. It was warm and tasted stale. ‘They concern the library, for the main part. I am to interview the students and masters who were in there yesterday – their names are in the register – and I have been examining the books Robert was cataloguing when he died. It seems obvious to Dr Dun and to myself, that whoever killed him took his keys from him and made a careful search of the library. If we can find what he was looking for, it may help us to discover who he is.’
    Sarah’s face paled. ‘Do not tell me you have been in the library until now?’
    I nodded. ‘Well, yes, where else?’
    ‘Are you gone mad, Alexander? You were there, until now, alone?’
    ‘Yes, I …’
    ‘What if he had come back? What if this murderer had come back there and found you? What would have happened …?’
    I went to her and took her by the shoulders. ‘He no longer has the key. The constable found it, dropped beneath the library stairs. And you forget: I am no gentle Robert Sim: I can defend myself.’
    ‘Can you, Alexander?’ She reached up and touched my still-tender eye, and then her eyes went to the silver scar at my throat, made by the knife that had come close to killing me in Ireland, less than three years ago. I could not have hidden it, but I had often cursed the night I had told her of how in Ireland I had come to believe I would not live to see her face again.
    I stroked her hair and kissed it. ‘If God had not meant us to be together, he would have found a thousand ways by now to part us. Do not fear for me.’
    She sniffed then straightened herself. ‘If I do not, who will? You take no care for yourself. Look at that shirt!’
    I looked down at myself and smiled. It had been warm, still, in the library that night, and the books of Duncan’s benefaction very dusty. The sleeves of my best college shirt, assiduously scrubbed by Sarah on a weekly basis and put over my head by her little over three hours ago, had not fared well in my labours, and were now a mottled grey. I pulled the shirt over my head and dropped it in her laundry basket. ‘What would I do without you?’ I said, pulling her to me.
    ‘I do not know. You will just have to see to it that you do not find yourself without me.’
    Later, as she slept, I lay with my hands behind my