“No. Not beyond any doubt. But he publicly threatened his wife. And then we found the … her. There’s no one else we have any reason to suspect. At any rate, he’s presently under arrest.”

“Then,” she said, “that relieves my mind—and my conscience.”

“In what way?” he asked, looking directly at her. But she was unfolding her serviette and laying it neatly across her lap. He couldn’t see—or read—her eyes.

She shook her head.

He said, “If there’s information you might have—if the woman in Singleton Magna is Margaret Tarlton, not Mary Mowbray—”

“No,” she replied vehemently. “I won’t make accusations and turn your policemen loose on an innocent person. That would be morally wrong!”

“Then why did the thought even cross your mind?”

The maid returned with a tray and two plates of a palegreen soup on it, the smell of lamb and white beans wafting to Rutledge, awakening his stomach if not his mind to enthusiasm. The sandwiches had been finished some time ago. She served her mistress and then the guest before filling his glass with wine. With a rustle of those starched skirts, she disappeared again into the kitchen.

“I—Margaret wasn’t the kind of woman to have enemies. She worked for her living and knew the importance of being pleasant to everyone. If I had to stand before God in the next five minutes and answer to Him, I’d be hard-pressed to think of anyone who would deliberately want to harm her!” She picked up her spoon and made a pretense of using it.

But Rutledge was good at the same game. “Perhaps not. But what if someone saw a way of getting to you—through Margaret? I offer this, you understand, as an hypothesis.”

She lifted her eyes, startled and wary, to his. There was something moving in the blue depths, and he suddenly knew what it was: jealousy.

“This was your suggestion, Inspector, not mine.”

And it was the last he could get out of her on the subject.

But he knew whom it was she accused. The name hung between them through the rest of the meal, like a miasma in the air, heavy and fraught with a mixture of strong emotions: Aurore Wyatt.

For the first time since she’d come to greet him in the hall on his arrival, Rutledge couldn’t have sworn, with any certainty, whether this woman was telling the truth—or lying.

Chapter Nine

9

They drove in silence through the night toward Singleton Magna, with Rutledge at the wheel and Elizabeth Napier by his side, wrapped in a light woolen cloak against the chill that had come with darkness. Her small leather case lay in the boot. A wind blew out of the west, and his headlamps picked up scatterings of leaves and dust as they swirled across the road. Shadows loomed black and indeterminate along the way, like watchers in mourning.