“Shall I go with you, sir?” Walker asked, half rising from his chair.

“No. I don’t want this to appear to be an official visit. Merely a matter of being thorough.”

“I see,” Walker said, but Rutledge thought he didn’t.

The Misses Tate Latin School was at the head of Spencer Street. Two houses had been connected by an addition that closed the gap between them, apparently by someone who knew what he was about, because the results were pleasing, rather than haphazard. A central door had been let into the addition, but Walker had said that Mrs. Farrell-Smith had chosen to live in the smaller house to one side of the school, and that she could usually be found there at this hour of the day.

He went up the pair of steps leading to the walk and the door, and was let in by a young girl in a school uniform, her hair hanging down her back and held away from her face by a blue ribbon. She was quite pretty, and meticulously polite, asking him to wait in the hall while she inquired if Mrs. Farrell-Smith would receive him.

She disappeared through a door to the left of the staircase and returned with a smile, asking him to come in. He had wondered if Mrs. Farrell-Smith would speak to him, given her complaint to the Chief Constable.

The girl announced him, then went away, closing the door softly behind her.

The room had been turned into a private office, with bookshelves and chairs set in front of a lovely old desk of well-polished walnut. At the moment, it was cluttered with papers and folders, some of them held in place by a large, chipped glass paperweight, as if she had been recording marks or sorting files before the start of a new term.

The woman behind it rose as he came in. She was tall for a woman, and far prettier than she allowed herself to be. Her hair, pulled back into a bun at the nape of her neck, was fair and determined to wave in spite of attempts to keep it straight and tidy. Her eyes were a very dark blue, and her nose was straight above firm lips. He put her age at thirty.

“Inspector Rutledge,” she said in acknowledgment of his presence, then waited for him to speak.

“I’ve come to ask you a few questions about Anthony Pierce,” he said, and she seemed to find that surprising, because her eyebrows flew up in spite of her self-control.

“Please, be seated,” she replied, and when he had taken one of the two chairs before the desk, she said, “What sort of questions?”

“I expect there were things he wouldn’t have discussed with his father. But I was told he’d grown fond of you, and I thought perhaps he might have said something to you that could help the police find his killer.”

“I don’t think Anthony confided in me anything he couldn’t have told his father.” After a pause, when he didn’t speak, she went on, as if unwilling to allow the silence to go on too long. “Are you saying he had secrets?”