“It isn’t a likeness,” he answered finally, “but there’s something very—uncanny—about the similarity.” He had unwittingly used the same word Hamish was repeating in his mind. “At a guess, I’d say that if the two women stood side by side, you wouldn’t notice it. There’s the voice, of course, and how each carries herself. Her expression—her nature. They’re not from the same social background. They’ve lived quite different lives. These qualities would strike you first”

“I don’t follow you—”

He said carefully, looking for flaws himself, “If you saw either woman walking down Bond Street some distance ahead, you might say to yourself, ‘I think that’s Margaret Tarlton.’ If you saw either woman in the slums or along a country road, you might pass her by without a glance, because you wouldn’t expect to encounter Miss Tarlton there.”

“Except for their clothing. How they were dressed.”

“But Mowbray, expecting to find his wife in Singleton Magna, might not know her wardrobe now, in this new life he’d already accused her in his own mind of living. He wouldn’t look for differences, he’d look for similarities.” Like the color pink … if that was a woman’s favorite color.

“I begin to see. But go on.” Her face had lost some of its color.

“This man survived the war to come back to an empty life. Out of work, no home, no family to support him, nothing safe or familiar. He desperately wants this woman to be his wife, and by the time he does find her, he can’t feel anything but anger when she denies everything. He tries to make her stop lying to him—and, in the end, kills her.” There were any number of holes in this piece of speculation. He found himself trying not to think about them.

Hamish was asking vehemently how he had overlooked the one salient fact that would negate all his fine theories.

But Rutledge made himself concentrate on Elizabeth Napier’s reaction.

“It’s still guesswork,” he said, forced to honesty. “I can’t prove any of it.”

She was looking up at his face, dawning horror on hers as she assimilated the images in her mind. “You aren’t—you aren’t trying to say—that the dead woman in Singleton Magna might possibly be Margaret Tarlton! That it explains why she isn’t here—or in London. No, I refuse to believe it!”

Yet he could tell that the conviction was growing stronger with every moment. She was an intelligent woman—

Still, she fought against it. Elizabeth stood by Rutledge’s side, her hand on his arm, her eyes scanning the two faces, one in an ornate frame, the other a grainy reproduction on cheap paper. Whatever her inner struggle, whatever the deeper emotion that lay behind her fear of the truth, she couldn’t ignore the evidence before her.