“No, it can’t wait,” Rutledge said uncompromisingly. “Take your mind out of that ledger and listen to me!”

Simon reluctantly pushed it to one side, though whether he’d shut the figures out of his mind was another matter. “Very well. What’s the problem?”

“I’ve got a corpse on my hands, I think it must be the woman you were expecting to hire as an assistant, and I have witnesses who tell me that your wife drove Margaret Tarlton back to the railway station. If they’re speaking the truth, it means that Aurore Wyatt was probably the last person to see her alive.”

He frowned. “I don’t see what the problem is. Aurore isn’t a murderess!”

Simon Wyatt had also said his wife wasn’t a liar. Rutledge found himself wondering if Simon was shallow—or under the stress of his work wasn’t able to absorb anything that wasn’t connected directly to his museum. “What do you know about your wife—her background, her family?”

“Good God, what do they have to do with it!”

“Her parents,” Rutledge said patiently, ignoring Hamish’s irritated remarks about the constable and now this man.

“They’re both dead—mother died some years before the war,” he said in some exasperation. “Father killed when the Germans came through—shot, trying to stop the looting of his house and farm. Aurore herself barely escaped—she reached a nunnery just over the Belgian border and was taken in. She was ill for weeks, exhaustion and a fever. Then she tried to make her way south, hoping to stay with a cousin in Provence. I found her, ill again and terrified, in a group of refugees that had come into our sector during the night, and got shot at for their pains. Mercifully nobody was killed, but it was a near thing, scared the very devil out of my men, I can tell you! Word had already been passed that there was movement along the German lines, and then out of the dark!… I wouldn’t put it past the Hun to think this was a great joke!”

Rutledge understood. You shot at anything that came at you out of the dark without password or provenance.

“What did you do with them?”

“Sent them to the rear, told somebody to take a look at them. That was that. It wasn’t until later that I saw Aurore again and hardly recognized her, she’d been so thin, half starved and half out of her mind when she reached us. She had some medical skills, and the doctors must have put her to work.”

It was a very superficial account, without emotion, without any sign that the woman he was speaking about was his wife.

“Tell me about your political career,” Rutledge asked, trying to find the measure of the man. “I’m told it was very promising.”