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ways? Did you harm your child? Did you conceal that poor bastard’s death?”
    “No,” she said again, delivering a look the investigator had not seen before. But Bartwain could not tell which question she was answering.
     
    He could not fall asleep that night. Each time he started to drift off, something his suspect had said would spring into his mind, snapping him back to consciousness. Bartwain resented Rachel Lockyer’s impingement on his rest. He possessed neither the youthful idealism nor the digestion to lie awake at night reflecting. Yet here he was.
    His suspect had not answered his questions, he complained to his wife, Mathilda, who had rolled on her side in their narrow bed, facing away.
    “What did you expect her to say?” she mumbled. “Let me sleep.”
    “I expected her to deny any wrongdoing. Or to confess and beg for leniency.” Bartwain sighed and punched his pillow into a more accommodating position. To bury a child in secret was to conceal its death, which according to the statute was a crime equivalent to murder. But what was the difference between a burial no one attended and a burial conducted in secret? That is, what if someone buried a bastard and no one attended because no one
wanted
to attend? Did that, too, count as concealment? “Bother,” he exclaimed, loud enough that his wife jumped.
    “Probably she knew you were going to pounce on her no matter what she told you,” Mathilda said through the covers. “So why should she say anything?”
    “I’m a murder investigator.” He was sitting up now, his back against the wall; he was talking to himself more than to his wife. “I’m impartial. I listen to my witnesses. I don’t ask why. Neither does the law. I only ask what. That’s all the law requires! I follow the law.”
    “Maybe you
should
ask why, for once,” she replied. “You’re old and tired, that’s what you are. Old, tired, and never got a promotion.”
    Four hours passed. Bartwain’s eyes stayed maddeningly open. He wondered if he should take a cup of cream to induce drowsiness. He tried—it accomplished nothing. Maybe he would be able to sleep if he went ahead and wrote the indictment. Yes, that was it. That was the key. He just needed to finish things up, wash his hands, and be done with it. This strategy had worked well enough in the past. Then he could rest. Yes, yes, he would do it right now. Do it and be done with it. Do what was right. He rose in the dark and patted around for a candle.
    “What are you doing?” Mathilda wanted to know. But Bartwain was already tiptoeing down the stairs to his study.
    He sat in his ancient velvet chair. He read his interview notes again, all the way through. Then he opened his statute book and read the 1624 Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children. He read it through three times, even though he could have recited it by heart. Nothing new announced itself to him. His eyelids were drooping. His eyelids were begging to fall. His mouth was hanging slack, and he was breathing through it—that was how tired he was.
    “Enough,” he said out loud. He rose and padded over to his water basin, washed his face, and dried himself with a mildewing towel. He moved to the kitchen, where he drank the hot buttered ale he took each evening purely for medicinal purposes. There, seated at the table in his stocking feet, he wrote and signed an official order of indictment in the case of Rachel Lockyer. The entire process took less than an hour, not counting the five hours of tossing and turning that had gone before.
    “Well, that’s over with,” he said to himself as he signed and stamped the order.
    He went back to his bed, relieved. After the trial he would have to submit a final report to the Council of State, but that was nothing—he could do that in his sleep. He chuckled, burrowing under his quilt, delighting in his little wordplay. He closed his eyes and rested.
    Possibly an hour later, he awoke to Mathilda