“Simon Wyatt’s not the man his father was. I never saw such a difference in all my life as when he came home from the war. What’s he want that museum for? Dead, heathenish things!” He shook his head. “Mrs. Daulton, now, she says it might be better for him than standing for Parliament. Choices are a good thing, she says. There weren’t no choices when I was a lad, you did what your pa did, you counted yourself lucky to find a good woman to marry, and you raised your children to be decent, God-fearing Englishmen. And the dead didn’t wander about in the night, talking to fence posts and trees, looking for their soul!”

Startled, Rutledge said, “Who wanders about in the night?” The first name that came to mind was Henry Daulton. He wasn’t sure why, except that Henry must find his mother’s steadfast belief in his full recovery overwhelming at times.

“Ghosts!” Jimson said direly, gesturing around him, and turned to walk back to the barn. Rutledge called to him and then swore, remembering that the caretaker was deaf.

But no amount of persuasion could pry another word out of the old man.

Chapter Eighteen

18

The police spent all day trying to find a connection between the corpse that had been discovered in the field near Leigh Minster and any of the communities ringing the location—Leigh Minster itself, Stoke Newton, Singleton Magna, or Charlbury.

But just as the constables had reported, there were no missing women. And no newly hired domestics who had failed to appear at the time set for them to begin work. No cousins, daughters, wives, sisters-in-law, or other female relatives unaccounted for. She was clearly a stranger, then. Except that there were seldom any sound reasons for killing strangers.

Hildebrand marked her down as an unsolved murder and went back to looking for the Mowbray children. He drove the teams of searchers with a determination that was both praiseworthy and single-minded.

Dr. Fairfield, a small man of few words, established the time of death at approximately three to four months earlier.

“She couldn’t have been in the ground longer,” he told Rutledge later, stripping off his white coat and hanging it on a hook behind the door of the bare room where he kept the dead. “And her clothing supports the timing. This is August. I daresay she died in late April, early May. Cool enough weather to have her coat with her. Cause of death? I’d say she was choked but not killed by strangulation. It was the beating about the head that finished the job. I found a fracture just above the temple, small but sufficient. I don’t think she was sexually molested. There’s no indication of it, from what I can see now, and her clothing is oddly tidy, as if whoever buried her had laid her out carefully on the coat.”