The bar and the snug were empty, and the landlord said affably, “Don’t mind if I do. Thank you, sir.”

Rutledge sat at the heavy wooden bar—as black as the walls and the beams that supported them—on a stool worn shiny by generations of trousers sliding across the wood. The landlord lighted a lamp to one side of the mirror, and it gave a sense of reclamation to the room. The brass appointments gleamed like gold.

“Passing through?” the innkeeper asked as he pulled a pint and set it on the bar in front of Rutledge.

“I’m staying at Singleton Magna,” Rutledge said, sidestepping the question. “Yesterday and this morning I’ve been taking in the countryside.”

“Any word on the murders over there?” As if Singleton Magna were across the Channel, somewhere in the neighborhood of Paris, and news was hard to come by. “Sorry business,” he added, echoing the words of the woman at the Swan. He pulled a second pint and drank deeply, appreciatively, as if he enjoyed his own wares.

“They’ve got the man in custody. You probably know that. But no signs of the children still. They—that family, I mean—never came as far as Charlbury?”

“No, we don’t run to many visitors here. Not like in the old days. Not since the war, at any rate. I see strangers once or twice a month at best.”

“What brought visitors before the war?”

“Some came because of the Wyatts. Old Mr. Wyatt was MP for nearly forty years, and that drew the curious. He cut quite a dashing figure in his youth and was as popular in London as he was here. Mr. Simon was cut from the same cloth. Mr. Wyatt served this constituency his life long, and we all looked up to him in Charlbury, aye, and so did most of Dorset.”

The memory clicked. The sign—and the family that had made a name for itself in Parliament for three generations. Like the Churchills and the Pitts, a long tradition of public service and golden oratory.

“He’s dead, I think?”

“Aye, in the last year of the war, that was. He wanted to see his son take his seat, and he lived three years longer than anybody thought he might. But to no purpose.” A veil came down over the man’s eyes, as if the subject was ended.

Rutledge paid it no heed. “His son died in the war?” It was no more than an attempt to keep the innkeeper talking, but something flared behind the veil.

“No, Simon Wyatt came through it with hardly a scratch. But somewhere along the way he lost his taste for politics.”

It was a warning not to ignore the message a second time. Rutledge changed the subject. “And once the Westminster connection was gone, Charlbury settled back into tranquility again?”