“Would you like a cup of tea?” the doctor asked solicitously. “Before we go on? My wife will be glad to have you step across to the house, Mrs. Daulton.”

Her eyes strayed to the white screen in one comer of the room. “I’d rather—” She cleared her throat with an effort. “I’d rather finish as quickly as possible,” she said. “If you don’t mind?”

As he led her forward and withdrew the screen, she looked at Rutledge with anxious eyes. “I tell myself this is no worse than comforting the dying. Or helping to lay out the dead.”

The body had been made as presentable as possible, which wasn’t saying much. Even the sheet covering it seemed stark and horribly suggestive.

When it was drawn back, Joanna Daulton gasped and seemed for an instant to cringe into herself. Then she recovered, from what inner wells of strength, Rutledge couldn’t tell, but he felt only admiration. She looked down at the battered face, tatters of rotting flesh and yellowed bone, the broken nose. Her eyes were wide, observing. Careful.

Then she shut her eyes, reached out a hand, and turned away. Rutledge took the trembling fingers and held them in his. They were icy cold.

“I—that might be Betty,” she said shakily. “There’s—a resemblance—of a kind. Still—Could I have some air, please?”

Rutledge transferred his grip to her arm and led her out into the main surgery, while the doctor quietly drew the sheet back over the dead woman’s face. Mrs. Daulton took the chair Rutledge drew away from the desk for her and sat down with a suddenness that told him she was close to fainting.

He thrust a waiting glass of cold water into her hand and said bracingly, as he would have done to a raw recruit shaking with reaction after his first battle. “That was well done. You were very brave, and it’s over now.”

“No, I wasn’t,” Mrs. Daulton said quietly after she had drank the water and rested for a moment. “I shall see that face in my nightmares for a very long time to come. The sad thing is, I appear to have been no help at all to you. I’m sorry.”

And to his astonishment, she buried her face in her hands and began to cry.

Rutledge delivered a subdued Mrs. Daulton and her son to the rectory in Charlbury and then, after two other stops, went back to Singleton Magna for his lunch. He was sick of death and bodies and questions.

But there was no respite. Halfway through his meal, there was a telephone call from London.

He expected it to be Bowles, complaining and demanding. Instead it was Sergeant Gibson.