Jimson hadn’t heard the sound of Rutledge’s engine—and he wouldn’t have heard the Wyatt car leave—or return. Speak to him directly, while he stared at your face, and he could follow a conversation well enough to give reasonable answers. It took concentration and to some extent a painfully learned ability to read lips. This most certainly explained the tension in him.

The man wasn’t lying. He was going deaf. He had told Rutledge what his eyes had seen, but there was no way for him to know what sounds he might or might not have missed. Anyone could have come—or gone—from here. And at any time. Jimson could only say with any certainty when Aurore had come.

As an alibi for Aurore Wyatt, he was useless.

Yet she must have known… so why had she left her own safety to hang on such a fragile thread?

Rutledge asked if he might look through the house or the barn, but Jimson shook his head. “Not without permission,” he said staunchly. “I don’t have authority to let you go poking about in Mr. Wyatt’s property. He might not like it, policeman or no.”

The last thing Rutledge wanted to do was ask Aurore for permission.

Neither Hildebrand nor Bowles would authorize a search warrant. Both of them would be far more likely to read him a lecture on the exact nature of his responsibility in this inquiry.

If the suitcase was here—the hat—even the murder weapon—they would have to remain here until he had enough evidence to show cause to search.

And yet as he stood in the drive, he had a feeling that this farm had played a role in Margaret Tarlton’s death. How or why, he wasn’t sure. Alibi—or evidence? For—or against Aurore Wyatt?

Instinct, light as the breeze that ruffled the leaves of the trees and toyed with the grass at his feet, made him say to Jimson, “No matter. It was purely curiosity, not police business. This was quite a prosperous dairy in its day.”

“Aye, it was,” Jimson said, sadness in his voice as he looked around him. “The best dairy in the county, to my way of thinking. Now we’ve not got thirty cows in milk, and I see to all of them, with Mrs. Wyatt’s help. I was that proud to work here, man and boy. That’s the trouble with living too long. In my time I’ve seen more change than I liked. Mrs. Wyatt, now, she says change is good, but I don’t know. I’ll be dead and in the ground before this place turns around. There’s no money, and no hope here. If I was her, I’d go back to France tomorrow and leave it to rot, instead of watching it fall slowly to pieces.”

“She has a husband. She can’t leave.”