“I’ve got every right to that money! I feed and clothe these brats. I keep a roof over their heads. What they have is mine.”

“Beat your children again, Lawlor, and I’ll haul you in for drunk and disorderly, and keep you in prison until you rot, do you hear me!” MacDougal’s voice was cold. “Do you hear me, man!”

“It willna’ do any good,” his wife said in a tired voice. “When he’s like this, he doesna’ remember a word.”

Lawlor swung a fist in her direction, but she moved away with the ease of long practice.

Rutledge thought of that same fist beating the thin child he’d seen on the mountainside. Whatever Betty had done, she was better off out of here.

“I want her back!” Lawlor was saying now, his voice plaintive. “There’s nobody to tend the sheep.”

“You should have thought of that before you beat her,” MacDougal answered roughly. “Mrs. Lawlor, did your daughter tell you where she earned the money for her shoes?”

She shook her head. “But she’s out wi’ the sheep noon and night. Who’s to say?”

“Whore, that’s what she was. Slut. Selling herself, I’ll be bound.”

“No, she hadn’t sold herself, Lawlor. She provided the police with some information they badly needed.” Rutledge added, “Mrs. Lawlor, do you know if your daughter has had a piece of jewelry in her possession for some months now? It was a brooch with a cairngorm center.”

She laughed. “And how’d she keep something like that where he didna’ find it? In her boudoir? I never saw her with anything more than the bit of dyed yarn she’d twisted into a bracelet for her sister and herself. If you think my Betty had anything like a cairngorm brooch, you’re mad.”

MacDougal and Rutledge exchanged glances. Rutledge said to her, “My mistake. I must have misunderstood.”

MacDougal walked with Rutledge back to his car. The small boy had come outside now and was fingering the bonnet, then running his hand over the smooth leather of the seat. MacDougal was saying, “She had the brooch. Whether her mother saw it or not. It doesn’t make a difference to your case.”

“The brooch was seen in Glasgow several weeks ago. In the shop of an engraver. Can you believe that Betty Lawlor was the one who took it there?”

“Great God, no one told me that! When did Oliver find out?”