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Mina hope that England might eventually be the same—for her, for Anne, for their children. Hell, it had given Rhys hope, too.
    Now he hoped that this murder wouldn’t take away Mina’s optimism. He hoped that when she discovered who’d killed him, the reasons wouldn’t have a thing to do with Redditch’s ancestry.
    “He did seem the decent sort,” Rhys finally said, and meant it when he added, “I’m sorry he’s gone.”
    Her gaze flattened again. “Hopefully I will make someone else a lot sorrier.”
    Rhys had no doubt she would. He walked with her as she followed the crushed path across the grass, and wondered how the Black Guard felt about aristocrats with native blood. The brotherhood wanted a purified country, settled by Englishmen with no nanoagents infecting their blood. But in his lifetime, Rhys had run into plenty of men who thought “pure” meant no native blood, no Liberé blood. Did the Black Guard feel the same way?
    He couldn’t know. The one member of the Black Guard they might have asked had committed suicide in his cell while awaiting trial.
    But though he wondered, he wouldn’t suggest the Black Guard’s involvement now. If it began to look as if the brotherhood had been involved, Mina would come to that conclusion, too—but she’d use evidence, not conjecture.
    “And that’s Newberry,” she said, tilting her head. Faintly, Rhys heard the puttering of the police cart. “Good. I’ll ask him to take pictures of these tracks, too, before the grass recovers. At least they tell us how the wheel got in and out.”
    The path of crushed grass led to the garden gate set into the rear wall. Mina tugged on the handle, and it opened easily. Arching her brows, she looked back at him. “It only locks from the inside.”
    “So someone unlocked it to let the wheel in,” Rhys said.
    “We’ll find out if the household was diligent about locking the gate, but yes. Perhaps someone even opened it for them—though I don’t see any footprints in this area. It might have been unlocked earlier, in anticipation. Redditch regularly walked in his gardens; they knew he’d be out here eventually.” She bent to examine the face of the wooden gate. “There are no scratches, nothing that tells me a giant wheel pushed it open—and if it runs on a track as the impression in the grass suggests, it would at least be scraped. Come, let’s see how far we can follow it.”
    Not far. The track remained clear in the dust of the alley between the garden wall and the mews, but disappeared where the alley met the cobblestone street.
    Frustration tightened her mouth. “Blast. We’ll have to ask people whether they’ve seen it.”
    Rhys knew that she found eyewitness testimony unreliable at best, and impossible to procure at its worst. “There are always people out at this time of night. Now that Newberry’s here, I’ll walk the streets around the square and ask if anyone saw it.”
    She looked up from the tracks, studied him as if considering his offer—though by the humor tilting the corners of her eyes, he knew she’d already decided it was impossible. “And what would you do if they obviously had seen something but didn’t want to talk?”
    “Drag them here by the scruff of their necks.”
    Her grin lit her face, twisted straight through his gut. God, what she did to him. If there hadn’t been a dead man on the other side of the garden wall, he’d have taken advantage of the shadows and shagged her against it.
    But he wouldn’t interfere with her work. In the space of a few minutes, he’d seen how brilliant she was at her job, at looking, at seeing. Mina was more than he’d ever deserved, but she was exactly what a good man like Redditch deserved; no investigator would work harder or do better to bring the viscount’s murderer to justice.
    Mina sighed as she started back toward the garden. “This wasn’t how I intended to spend this evening.”
    He hadn’t, either—but they’d get to what