“I see,” Rutledge commented into the silence that expected a response. But what he saw was a judgment, a sense that the accused had not lived up to the high standards others had set for themselves and, by extension, for her.

Oliver looked across the room at another table, something else on his mind, then picked up the thread of his narrative. “On the heels of the anonymous letters came another correspondence, and that damned more than it exonerated. I thought, as did the Chief Constable, that it bore looking into. Where there is a pattern—”

Where there was smoke . . .

“And that’s when I sent my constable—who knew her well enough to question her gently—to ask for her marriage lines. She as much as told him there weren’t any, and when he asked if she’d submit to an examination by a physician in regard to the birth of the child in question, she adamantly refused. McKinstry had no choice but to conduct a search of the premises but failed to carry it out to my satisfaction, and I came back. Instead of a buried woman, I came across a man a hundred years dead, and it made me a laughingstock, I can tell you. Dr. Murchison had more to say than I cared to hear on the subject.”

“Aye,” Hamish remarked, “it touched his pride.” Rutledge thought that that was possible and might account for Oliver’s unflagging determination to find answers to the questions raised about the woman.

“I sent out a request for information on any missing persons, and that’s when I heard about the corpse found up the glen. I’d just come back from viewing it, when Menton contacted me with the information they had on the Gray woman. And fool that I was, I set off to England with the feeling that I was bringing the loose ends tidily together, and got my head bitten off instead!”

He regarded Rutledge for several seconds, as if weighing how his view of the situation had been received. Apparently satisfied, he asked, “Can you tell me what you’re considering as the next step?”

“I don’t know,” Rutledge replied with honesty. “You’ve most certainly done all that was required of you, and more. What has the accused told you?”