“Inspector,” she said, when she looked up to find him striding down the path from the side of the house. “How thoughtful of you to come to me. As you see, we are our own gardeners here at the rectory.” Straightening her back as if it hurt, she added, “Mind you, I recollect the day when there were two gardeners and a lad to keep these grounds! Not that I stayed out of them even then.” She took off her gloves and extended her hand. “What can I do to help you?”

Rutledge smiled as he took her hand and said, “I need your knowledge. Of people, and of one person in particular.”

She looked at him straightly. “I will not help you put Simon Wyatt in prison for a crime he’s innocent of.”

“I shan’t ask it of you,” Rutledge promised. “No, my interest is in a maid who vanished some time ago.”

“The body in the field.” She nodded. “I doubt it’s Betty Cooper, but then you never know, do you?” She set the gloves beside the trowel and the pruning shears in the barrow at her side. “Come along, then, we can sit over there.”

Over there was a small rustic bench in the shade of a great, ancient apple tree, its branches bowed down with green fruit. Before them the beds and borders of the rectory garden spread out like a fan toward the house. It was a pretty scene, peaceful and quiet. Rutledge followed her and sat down beside her. She sighed, as if tearing her thoughts from the rosebush and bringing them to bear on what he wanted to hear.

“I can’t tell you much about the girl. But enough, perhaps, for your purposes. Betty came to Dorset during the war. From a poor family near Plymouth. Many girls went into war work of some sort, omnibus conductors and the like. Mrs. Darley ran a large dairy farm and needed help. Betty was sent to her because the girl had some experience with animals and the work was to her liking, or so I was told. At any rate, she pulled her weight until the end of the war and afterward asked Mrs. Darley to give her some training as a parlor maid. As I heard it, Betty didn’t want to be a clerk in an office or a shopgirl, she wanted to be the person who opened doors to guests and served tea. That’s a rather silly view, maids do more than that, but Betty had aspirations, you see, and they included learning how to dress and how to speak properly. And she was quite pretty; it was only a matter of time before the lure of better prospects took her away. Mrs. Darley,” she ended dryly, “entertains less than stellar company. She’s a farmer’s wife, not a society hostess.”