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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”