“Tell me about the owner—” He broke off. After being buried alive in the impenetrable mud of a shell crater, weighed down by Hamish’s body, Rutledge had come to hate being shut in—confined in any fashion. Traveling on trains, sleeping in a small room, seeing himself cut off from escape through a door or down a stair—the need for space was so urgent that it ignited a rising panic. Even here he could feel the sudden dampness of sweat on his face, the difficulty breathing, the awareness of hideous danger—

“You’ll be wanting to speak to the police, then,” the man told him bluntly but didn’t elaborate. His stance was intentionally threatening now, belligerent, as if he sensed Rutledge’s sudden uneasiness. Rutledge felt his own muscles tensing.

Rutledge replied, “A woman, I understand. What has she done to find herself of interest to the police?”

“None of your affair, is it?” At last the man moved out into the sunlight, and Rutledge followed, his breathing still uneven.

Damn this, he swore, fighting the claustrophobia. Keep your mind on what you’re doing, can’t you?

But Hamish, too, was responding to the man’s aggressive stance, asking if he had believed the innuendoes and the letters—or was incensed by them. Rutledge thought, It was difficult to tell. He was a man who showed little in his face; he would not be easy to interrogate.

“Does she have any family? Heirs?”

“None.” Uncompromising. Cold. Then, grudgingly, “None that I know of.”

No mention of the boy. But he would inherit nothing . . . would he?

“Then I’ll be on my way.” Walking back toward the inn, Rutledge could sense the man’s stare boring into his back between his shoulder blades.

If this was any example of how the townspeople felt about the woman who owned this property, it was evident that she had somehow made abiding enemies.

Which didn’t fit into the picture of her that McKinstry had so glowingly painted.

Who was the woman in the eye of a controversy that might well end with a hanging?

Rutledge realized suddenly that he didn’t even know her full name. Not that it mattered, he thought, but it was an indication that whatever crime she had committed—from lying to murder—she had somehow lost her identity because of it. As if, by refusing to call her by name, Duncarrick could finish what they had begun back in June—shunning her until she was without reality and finally disappeared.

What had this woman done to stir up such dark passions?

It was odd, he thought, crossing the quiet street to his car. First the venomous letters and then the one to the minister—Elliot? The finding of one body that didn’t match the crime, and another that did. Persistence, patience—and what else? Luck? Or persecution?

It smacked of the latter. Hamish, in the back of his mind, agreed.