“You can try,” he said. “But if I were you, I’d do everything in my power to keep my son safe.” He stood up, and for a moment regarded the frightened man on the other side of the desk. “Including asking the police to help me. As it is, if Daniel is killed, it will be no one’s fault but your own.”

He turned and walked out the door, not waiting for a reply. Behind him he heard Pierce clear his throat, as if on the point of calling him back, but in the end, he did not.

Rutledge went from the brewery to the school begun by an émigré Frenchman and now run by Mrs. Farrell-Smith.

She was just finishing a report when the girl on duty that morning led Rutledge to her office. She frowned when she saw who was standing in the doorway, but signed her name to the report, put it in a folder, and set it to one side before acknowledging her visitor with a nod.

Rutledge suppressed a smile. She would, he thought, have been quite happy to live in the era when a policeman was relegated to the servants’ entrance and was shown to the family’s quarters by a housemaid stiff with disapproval.

He stood there in silence, and finally, she was irritated enough to offer him a chair and ask him what brought him to the school this morning.

“Daniel Pierce,” he said, and waited.

It took her a moment to compute this, clearly having expected him to begin with the murders.

“Daniel Pierce?” she repeated, trying to recover control of the conversation. “And what have I to do with Anthony’s brother?”

“I’m waiting for you to tell me.”

A slow flush crept up her fair skin. “Nothing,” she snapped. “I have nothing to do with him.”

“I’d wondered why you had been willing to take this position with the Misses Tate Latin School. I thought perhaps you were in straitened circumstances after your husband’s death. Or that you felt a strong family tie to your aunts. Now I’m coming around to the possibility that you chose to accept this position because Daniel Pierce lived in Eastfield, and you expected him to return to the village when the war was over. Which he did. But he hardly spent a fortnight here. Was it because of you?”

“I shall have you recalled for incompetence and rudeness—”