The motorcar slowed as it came nearer and then braked as it drew abreast of him. A woman was driving it, and he knew the instant he saw her face that she wasn’t English. There was something about the way her dark hair was swept up into a bun, the blue dress she wore with a scarf around the throat. Style. His sister Frances would have recognized it instantly.

She was French—

“Are you in trouble?” she asked, her English lightly and fascinatingly accented. He found himself suddenly at a loss for words.

It wasn’t beauty. Not that she wasn’t damned attractive. But it was more subtle. Good bones, his sister Frances could have told him. A sensuality that came from within, a curve of the lips, a lift to the eyebrows. The way her clothes set off her coloring, the shades of blue in the scarf like stained glass, vivid and rich, bringing light to the gray eyes that shifted as he watched from clear, still water to dark, unfathomable pools of speculation.

He spoke quickly, and in French. “No, I’m a policeman. Inspector Rutledge from London. I’m taking part in the search for the missing Mowbray children.”

She smiled a little, hearing his French, unexpected in a deserted lane in the middle of Dorset, then she caught what he was saying. “Ah. The children. It is very sad, is it not? I hope they will be found alive. But one wonders, as the time goes by. I have no children—” She stopped, then went on wryly, “—it is something one feels, I think, about children, whether one is a parent or not.”

The smile, even as brief as it was, had been like sunlight over the sea. What in God’s name had brought such a creature as this to England? Rutledge glanced at her hands on the wheel and saw a wedding band. That explained it then. A man …

“Yes.” He moved slightly, away from her car.

She took that as a signal that the conversation was finished, although he’d meant it in another sense. “Then I shall leave you to your search. I wish you success with it—and living children at the end of it.”

The motorcar moved off, and as he watched her drive on, he cursed himself for being a tongue-tied fool. He hadn’t even asked her name, or where she lived. And what had brought her here, to this stretch of road connected with a murder investigation. If she knew of any place the police had not thought to search—

“She’s a stranger here hersel’,” Hamish reminded him. “She’d no’ be likely to ken what the police have na’ thought of.”

Which was true. He couldn’t hear her engine in the distance now. She was gone.

Rutledge started his car again and got in.