“Inspector Rutledge, sir? I’ve been doing some digging in Gloucestershire, looking for that Tarlton woman. No luck, I’m afraid, but I’ve come across a small bit of information that you might want to hear. The cousins who live there are middle-aged, I’d say closer to forty than thirty. They’ve got a little boy of three or thereabouts. Proud as punch of him, they are. But one old gossip down the street tells me Mrs. Tarlton—that’s the cousin—couldn’t have children, it was the sorrow of her life, and this is a miracle baby.”

Rutledge felt a ripple of excitement. “Have you spoken to Mrs. Tarlton’s physician?”

“Aye, I did that, and he said—mind you, he didn’t like it one bit!—that Mrs. Tarlton had seen fit to go to Yorkshire to have the lad. He hadn’t even known she was pregnant. Returned with her baby, looking like the cat that ate the cream, very pleased with herself indeed. He didn’t have the direction of the doctor who’d delivered the boy, didn’t know, if you ask me! So I took it upon myself to look up the boy’s birth certificate. Very interesting reading, that. Sarah Ralston Tarlton, mother, father listed as Frederick C. Tarlton. Which is as it should be, if the boy’s truly theirs. I went next to the attending physician in York, and he says Mrs. Tarlton stayed in a rented house with her sister-in-law, an older woman. Her husband came several times to visit.”

He waited.

Rutledge said, “Any description of him?”

“Vague. Fits Freddy, right enough. The doctor said they were there only a few months, until Mrs. Tarlton and of course the baby were fit to travel. They were emigrating to Canada, he thought. But I’ll be willing to wager that it was all a farce, and our Miss Tarlton had a baby which she handed over to the cousins. She wouldn’t be the first young woman in London to slip up with some soldier.”

But was it “some soldier”? Or was the child Thomas Napier’s? If the arrangements had been so carefully made from the start, that link would be buried deepest. Napier had enemies; they would like nothing better than to catch even the faintest whiff of scandal.

“Well done, Sergeant! You’re vastly underrated. Has anyone told you that? I owe you a drink when I get back to London.”

“As to that, sir, rumor here says you’ve taken root in Dorset.” There was a deep chuckle at the end of the line as Gibson hung up.

“Interesting information or no’,” Hamish was saying, “what’s it got tae do wi’ this business?”

“Everything—or nothing,” Rutledge said, replacing the receiver. “It could give Elizabeth Napier a damned fine motive for murder.”

“Or yon Daniel Shaw. If he was to learn what happened.”