“That depends. Is there anyone in Eastfield who isn’t well known to you? A distant cousin come to visit? A mate from the war—someone we could have overlooked?”

“Nobody. I’ve been thinking about it. I’d recognize Tommy Summers if I saw him.”

“I doubt it.” Rutledge told him of the visit to Regina Summers’s cottage. “You’re remembering the child, not the man. He could be someone we see every day but never think twice about.”

“Constable Petty?” Walker asked with dry humor. “He’s a great help, I don’t doubt that, but the man gets on my nerves. Always creeping about. It’s as if he knows where he’s not wanted, and pops up there on purpose.”

“If there are no strangers, what about someone who has lived quietly here for the past year or less? A new worker at the brewery? A laborer on one of the farms? Someone at Kenton Chairs? Above suspicion, because he’s been accepted?”

“There’s the groundskeeper at the school,” Constable Walker said, suddenly galvanized. “I hadn’t thought about him.”

“What is his name? Where does he come from?”

“He called himself Ned Browning. Ex-soldier looking for work, never any trouble, kept himself to himself. I saw him once or twice in The Conqueror, but he wasn’t a drinking man, as far as I could tell. When I asked Mrs. Farrell-Smith how he was getting on, she told me he knew something about gardening and pruning, and did what he was told without complaint. Deferential, she said, knew his place. He was allowed to live in that tiny cottage behind the stables, where the coachman lived in the Misses Tates’ day.”

Rutledge could see another cottage, Old Well House, with its long beds of iris and other plantings. He had assumed that Regina was the gardener. Or had she just kept up the work that her brother had begun? He hadn’t thought to ask. Landscaping was landscaping, except to admire the results.

“What does he look like?”

Constable Walker said with a shrug, “Not as tall as you are, as I remember. Brown hair, shaggy, falling into his face. Looked like it had been trimmed with his own secateurs. Ordinary features. If he was on the street or at the pub, he’d wet it down and slick it back, making it appear much darker. Rarely looked you in the eye, but not hangdog. More like the life had been sucked out of him. I doubt I heard him speak a dozen words.”

“An ex-soldier? But not with the Eastfield Company?”

“No, from the north, I was told. My nephew wondered if he’d been shell-shocked, but I didn’t see any signs of that. You’d know, wouldn’t you?”

Rutledge felt a frisson of panic at the words shell shock. As if the constable could see in his own eyes the shame that haunted him.