“It was ridiculous. Daniel, the most exciting man I’d ever met, always a scapegrace, always fun, never dull—in France even his men adored him. And he stood there in my office and told me he was converting to Catholicism and becoming a lay brother in a contemplative order. If he didn’t love me, if he didn’t want to marry me, I could understand that. If he needed to put the war behind him, I’d have done everything in my power to help him. What was even worse, he thought I’d believe him. It wasn’t until the killing began that it all made sense. I’d found the garrote of course, and I thought, he left me because he was starting to lose his mind and didn’t want me to know. And I thought, if I can find him before the police do, I can still save him.” She turned to him, grief in her face, wanting to hear Rutledge make light of the lie and tell her that Daniel loved her as much as she loved him and would come back one day.

“That explains why you told the police it was my motorcar you saw by the rectory gates, when you thought it must be Daniel’s.”

“Yes. I’m so sorry. But I’d do it again, if I thought it would protect him.”

Rutledge considered what she’d told him, and he thought Daniel Pierce must have given this woman the literal truth. That he was withdrawing from a world he couldn’t face—not because of the war as she wished to believe, but because of the ill-found marriage of Peggy and Virgil Winslow, about which he could do nothing. It would explain too why the Yard had failed to find him. The police had looked in the wrong directions all along.

He said, “He may have told you the truth, you know. That he was looking for a peace that you couldn’t provide. An—absolution.”

He had meant the carefully chosen words to give her a little peace as well. But she was blind to what he was saying, seeing it as a reaffirmation of her own belief.

Mrs. Farrell-Smith sat back, reassured. “Then he was letting me know he’d be all right, wasn’t he? And that I must try to be patient until he’s healed.”

Rutledge let it go. She would be happier living with forlorn hope than with bitter truth. It was obvious how fiercely she could love, and he had a feeling that she could hate just as fiercely. And Peggy Winslow was vulnerable. Time was not always a healer—as often as not, it was just a measure of how long someone had waited.