“No. The dead woman’s name was Florence Teller. She lived in Lancashire.” He watched her face and then said, “There’s the matter of a will. We can’t seem to locate one, and it’s rather important that we do. We need to know her wishes in regard to her burial as well as the disposition of her property. That could lead us to her murderer.”

“You’d better come into the sitting room,” she told him and led the way to a small, very feminine parlor with a desk and several comfortable chairs. “You think her husband’s family might have killed her for her property?” she went on when they were seated.

“We won’t know, will we, until we find the will and contact them.”

“What about her own famiy?”

“Sadly she had none.”

“And—and there were no children to the marriage?”

“A son,” he said, and she bit her lip.

“Doesn’t he know where the will might be?”

“We have no way of asking him that.”

“He wasn’t—was he harmed when his mother was killed?”

“He wasn’t in the house at the time.”

She nodded. “Of course you would need to find her will. But I’m afraid I don’t know any other Peter Teller. Which doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Or half a dozen of them for that matter.”

“We wondered—forgive me, but the police must consider all possibilities—if perhaps this Peter Teller was not an—er—recognized member of the family.”

Amy stared at him. “Are you suggesting that my husband—or his brothers—might have a child out of wedlock? But you met Edwin, and he’s the eldest. It’s not possible that he could have had a child old enough to serve in the war.” She was deliberately misconstruing his words.

“It would have been his father, I should think,” he corrected her patiently.

She laughed outright. “You never met the man. I could believe Edwin had an affair before I could see his father with another woman.”

“You knew the man when he was older and had grown children. You can’t judge what he might or might not have done as a young man. These things happen in the best families.”

Amy shook her head. “He could have matched Prince Albert in rectitude,” she told him, and then suddenly seemed to realize that she had closed a door that the police were willing to walk through. Rutledge could almost read her thoughts as they flicked across her face. And he wasn’t surprised when after a moment she said, “Of course, you’re right. I can’t say with certainty.”

“Perhaps your grandmother might be in a position to know.”

“Gran?” she all but squeaked in her astonishment. “But she’s—I mean to say, you couldn’t possibly expect a woman of her age and her diminished mental capacity to remember something like that.”