“No,” Rutledge answered. “I’ve come to see what news Miss Napier has to tell me.” He turned to her, waiting with polite interest.

She blushed, the rich color rising into her cheeks and giving her eyes a brightness. “You’re absolutely right! I should have waited for you to come back to the Swan. But after I’d called Gloucestershire, I thought—I felt I had to tell Simon before that awful man Hildebrand took it into his head to come here, with no regard for anyone’s feelings!” There was honest contrition in her face as she swung around to him. “I’m not accustomed to the way the police work. If I’ve done anything wrong, I sincerely beg your pardon, Inspector!”

Simon said, “You’ve not done anything wrong, Elizabeth. Don’t let them harass you with their nonsense!” He added to Rutledge, “I can’t understand why you didn’t tell me your suspicions earlier! All that rubbish about what Margaret was wearing! Look, you don’t think that maniac Mowbray got to her somehow?”

“How could he? She wasn’t walking—she was, as far as I can determine, driven from Charlbury directly to the station at Singleton Magna. If she had come across Mowbray on the road and he’d attempted to stop the motorcar, she should have been safe enough. Whoever was driving the car would most certainly have gone straight to Hildebrand afterward, even if Miss Tarlton left on the train. And no such person has come forward.”

Simon said, “It was Aurore who drove her. I don’t know why she won’t come out and admit to it! I asked her myself, as soon as Elizabeth told me what she thought might have happened.”

Rutledge felt a wave of disgust. He knew how Simon, with his oddly abrupt, unfeeling manner toward his wife, must have confronted her, making her feel she had been directly accused.… “Why have you been lying about this? I’d think it would be better to come straight out with the truth—everyone knows it was you who drove Margaret.…”

“Perhaps she didn’t take Miss Tarlton to the station after all,” Rutledge replied in her defense, before he could stop himself. His task was to determine guilt, not innocence. But he refused to watch possible innocence trampled.

There was a brief silence.

“I suppose someone else might have driven her,” Simon agreed reluctantly. “There are other motorcars in Charlbury. But Aurore promised me she’d see to it. And it isn’t like Aurore to lie. I don’t understand this, any of it!”

Yet he had told Rutledge earlier that Aurore never lied.…

“I think it’s too early to go on witch hunts,” Elizabeth put in, her voice appealing for reassurance. “Margaret’s missing. It—it doesn’t actually mean she’s—dead. I don’t know where she might have gone. Do you?”