“I don’t know. I assumed that Simon would make another arrangement for her. He had several workmen here, and there’s the motorcar at the inn, belonging to Mr. Denton. Simon has borrowed it before. It wasn’t impossible to find someone to take her so short a way.”

“How many motorcars are there in Charlbury?”

“Simon’s of course, which I seem to drive more often than he does these days. And we have a little carriage we use sometimes. That of the innkeeper. And the rector had one; his widow uses it now.”

“No one else?”

“No,” she said, then added dryly, “but the horse is not dead in the countryside, you know. There are far more carriages and carts and wagons than there are motorcars in a ten-mile radius. Even Dr. Fairfield who comes to the village drives a buggy. That very fierce little man from Singleton Magna, with the face that looks as if he’s bitten into a very sour lemon. If transportation was a problem, anyone in Charlbury would have been glad to take her. If only to please Simon. Why do you ask these things? They have nothing to do with the day that Margaret arrived.”

She has a very clear memory for detail, Rutledge thought. What Margaret Tarlton might have seen, arriving on the same train as Bert Mowbray, had been his excuse when he had asked for her London direction.

“We don’t know where Miss Tarlton went from Singleton Magna. She hasn’t returned to her flat in London, and she failed to arrive at the Napier country home in Sherborne. They were expecting her there.”

Her gray eyes changed as he watched. Anger—or was it resignation?—stirred in their depths. “Ah. Why does that not surprise me?”

“Did you believe Miss Tarlton was sent here as a spy in your midst?” he asked bluntly. She had nearly admitted as much before. It hadn’t mattered then.…

“But of course! Why did Elizabeth Napier all at once have no further need of her services? Why, after nearly eight years with the Napiers, was Margaret prepared to come here?”

“It’s the nature of women, sometimes, to look for a change. I don’t know that Elizabeth Napier has been an easy mistress. Or Margaret Tarlton may prefer work that reminds her of growing up in India.”

“But that’s exactly the point, Inspector. The nature of women,” she said. “Margaret is nearly twenty-nine years old. The age when a woman is reminded that if she’s to marry, it must be soon. How many eligible young men would you say there are here in Charlbury?”