“A photograph? Why should—no, of course, there’s one in the study. When my father had a house party last spring, she helped me entertain. It was a political weekend, and they’re always the worst, the wives are bored to tears or scratching each other’s eyes out in the politest way whenever the men aren’t around. Someone had a camera. If you’ll excuse me—”

He could feel the tension in his body now. That odd sixth sense had already leapt ahead, his thoughts tangled with the possibilities opening before him. The warning to let sleeping dogs lie passed through his mind as well.

“Then what about the children?” Hamish was saying, voice low, urgent.

“If it wasn’t his wife that Mowbray killed, there won’t be any children.”

“But there were children at the railway station. You have na’ forgotten.”

“No. But if the Tarlton woman was visiting the Wyatts in Charlbury, she might have been in the right place at the wrong time. Mowbray might have believed he’d found his missing wife.” It was the conviction that had brought Rutledge to Sherborne. The need to settle the matter of Margaret Tarlton’s whereabouts. Such thin evidence …

Miss Napier returned, a silver-framed photograph in her hand. Instead of giving it to Rutledge she walked to the door and opened it, stepping out into the last of the daylight to compare the photograph and the printed flyer Hildebrand had had made up.

After a moment she shook her head, and Rutledge came to take the frame from her, trying to read her expression. He saw only confusion.

He too stood in the light, looking down at several women shown standing by the elegant hearth in the hall, as if posed by someone oblivious to the interplay of relationships among them. There was a stiffness that betrayed their antagonism even while their expressions portrayed polite enjoyment. But second from the left was a young woman with long bones and fair hair, who looked at the camera in much the same way—and yet not the same way—as Mary Sandra Mowbray had done in 1916. An oddly ephemeral thing …

Hamish saw the truth as quickly as Rutledge did.

Rutledge told himself, It isn’t real. This resemblance between the two women. You see it only when you look for it—there’s nothing to trigger it unless you’re consciously expecting to find it. Or hoping to see it?

“It isn’t a likeness. Is it?” Elizabeth Napier asked. “I can’t tell—”