Charles Todd

“When you watch the living force go out of a man’s face as you fire your weapon into his unprotected body, it is very personal,”

“No one ever stepped forward to protect me, Inspector. I wonder why I should feel any driving sense of duty to protect anyone else. Let me tell you something about love. It can be very cruel and very greedy. I’ve had done with it. And that has given me a freedom that I cherish.”

“Courage is not measured byMarching bands and banners in the wind.If you have not walkedThe bloody lines and seen the faces,You have no right to describe it so.We die here to keep you safe at home,And what we sufferPray you may never know.”

“Now he realized that somehow those who had served in France and elsewhere knew a world that couldn’t be shared. How could he tell his sister—or even his father, if the elder Rutledge was still alive—what had been done on bloody ground far from home? It would be criminal to fill their minds with scenes that no one should have to remember. No one.”

“I lost my own daughter and I’ll never have another. The hurt doesn’t go away, no matter what you tell yourself. It’s there day and night. I’d have killed any man who touched her. Why should I stand for such talk about another man’s child, if I wouldn’t have stood for it about my own?”

“There’s a beauty in birds on the wing,That stirs the heart and makes earthbound creaturesLong for flight, but the larks above the battlefieldAre silenced by the sounds of war.I have watched birds out at sea,Catching the wind,And longed to follow them,To some safe place far from here.”

“What of the hundreds of faceless men on the streets looking for work, trying to pick up the threads of family life, hoping that the dying had made a better Britain, and finding they were lost in it. Faceless men…People stepped around them now, ignored the brave boy who’d marched away to glory and now begged on the street because a one-armed man couldn’t work. He thought sometimes, in the dark corners of his mind, that the dead were the lucky ones. They hadn’t been disillusioned.”

“Children were quick to grasp the subtleties of emotions around them, to see through evasions and quickly identify prevarication.”

“Revenge was personal as a rule. Otherwise it was pointless.”

“I decided to become a policeman to speak for the dead. They have no one else, you see. Somewhere there’s always proof of what happened, some piece of evidence that will obtain a conviction. It’s important for the guilty to be brought to justice, I think. Without justice, there’s chaos.”

“That's the point of working with one's hands, you see. It gives the mind something else to do besides worry.”

“But what kind of love? It had so many faces, so many names. Jealousy wove a thread around it, and envy, and fear. People died for love–and killed for it. And yet in itself it was indefinable, it wore whatever passions people brought to it, like a mountebank, with no reality of its own.”

“We walked away from all that was warm and dear and stood frightened in cold rain where the guns fired, and in the end, we died in pain, the black stinking mud our shroud, embraced at last not by living arms, but by the bones of those who before us died …”

“There’s a narrow line between love and hate sometimes, you know. And it can be crossed unwittingly.”

“Tell me something. Why is everyone so determined to believe Wilton is innocent?"Surprised, Davies said, "He's a war hero isn't he? Admired by the King and a friend of the Prince of Wales. He's visited Sandringham, been received by Queen Mary herself! A man like that doesn’t go around killing people!"With a wry downturn of his lips, Rutledge silently asked, How did he win his medals, you fool, if not by being so very damned good at killing?”