He took his lunch at the Swan, eating in solitary splendor in the dining room. It was nearly two o’clock, and the young woman waiting on him was yawning in a corner, her eyes drowsy as she filled the sugar bowls and then collected the salts and peppers in their turn. She looked enough like Peg, the chambermaid, to be her sister. Rutledge listened to the clink of the silver tops as she worked with them, his own thoughts busy with details.

He had called in at the railway station and persuaded the master to ask down the line whether suitcases had been unclaimed when the train made its last stop.

The telegraph key had clicked swiftly and surely, and then silence. “There’s a chance they were found by the conductor, long before the end of the line,” the man reminded Rutledge.

“I’d thought of that.” But the conductor who had put Mowbray off the train was an experienced man and according to the file had been questioned by Hildebrand himself. He’d have been the first to see the significance of any uncollected luggage that had come to light then or later.

The key began to click in response. The stationmaster listened and then shook his head. “No unclaimed luggage,” he said. “Not that day. Nor that week either.”

“Then contact any stops in between—”

“All of them?” the man demanded, staring at Rutledge.

“All of them,” he agreed. But the second message sent out by the stationmaster brought in the same response. No unclaimed luggage …

“They might not’ve had much baggage with them,” the man said, “if ’twere only a day trip. It might help if we knew what we were looking for.”

Rutledge shook his head. “I don’t know. If anything more comes over the wire, I’m at the Swan. Send word to me there.” It was a far-fetched hope.

And so he’d gone for his belated meal, letting the stationmaster do the same. “My wife’s waiting my dinner,” the man had said, following Rutledge out of the small, cluttered office. “She’s ill-humored when I’m late!”

“Tell her it was police business,” Rutledge responded, and walked on.

But it was over his meal that answers began to come to him. And he went over them again and again, to be sure he was right.

Whatever else had happened here in Singleton Magna, there was a dead woman.

And with that one incontrovertible fact, he must start.

Chapter Seven

7

Rutledge spent what was left of the day and into the dusk looking for the dead woman.

In Singleton Magna, everyone saw her as Mowbray’s wife. The one the man, burning with anger and injustice, had scoured the town to find.