He spent Sunday in Glasgow, asking the police there for any information they might have had on anyone by the name of Cook, but the half-dozen families he was sent to see were unable to help him. They shook their heads when he asked them about a Maude Cook. As one middle-aged man put it, “It’s a pretty enough name, Maude, but not one of ours.” Nor had relations to their knowledge spent part of the war years in the village of Brae. “It’s not likely, is it?” a woman asked him. “So close by? Besides, I’d have sent any daughter or daughter-in-law of mine to our kin, not to live on the charity of strangers!”

But as Hamish pointed out, if Maude Cook’s connection with Glasgow was through her own family, Rutledge didn’t have her maiden name and would never find her in the welter of people in the city. It would require a door-to-door search. An enormous amount of manpower.

Driving back to Duncarrick on Monday morning, he reached the outskirts of Lanark and stopped the car, rubbing his face. Lanark—

He considered Lanark for a time. That it was close to Brae. That it was large enough that a woman using a false name might not be noticed and gossiped about. Especially if she was already certain there were no acquaintances living there who might see her in the street and recognize her. And it would offer adequate medical care to a woman on her own. . . .

Rutledge continued into the heart of the town, finding the local police station and then searching for a place to leave his motorcar. It was a busy morning; the town seemed to be full of people and lorries, carts and wagons. Men were setting up a pavilion near the church for a fete or exhibition. Others were carrying potted palms from the hotel, walking trees that wove their way along the pavement like Great Birnam wood come to Dunsinane and about to attack the waiting Macbeth.

When Rutledge made his way back through the crowds some fifteen minutes later, he had the information he needed.

The lying-in hospital was in a back street, a small but well-kept building that had potted geraniums in front of its door and a woman in a dark dress at the desk in the small reception hall.

Rutledge asked for the doctor in charge and was soon ushered into a chilly office at the back, where a tired elderly man turned from the window to greet him. On the desk were stacks of folders waiting to be sorted.

“I’m Dr. Wilson. I was up until five this morning with a difficult delivery. If you’ll make your call a brief one so that I can sleep, I’ll help in any way I can.”

“What kind of cases do you take here?”