“Yes, sir, that’s Florence Marshall that was. She got the most exotic packets sometimes, covered with foreign stamps. I always wondered what was inside, you know. Mrs. Greeley told me once there were silk pillow slips from China. I hardly know where to find China on the map, and here’s silk pillow slips coming to my own post office.”

“It must have been quite exciting,” he agreed. “Did Mrs. Teller write to her family or her husband’s family in England?”

“Letters, you mean.”

“Yes. Was there an exchange of letters with members of her husband’s family? We’re trying to locate them. It’s the matter of her will.”

“I don’t believe she ever did. No, nothing like that. She wrote to Lieutenant Teller and he wrote to her. And that was the end of it.”

“Where did she send the letters to Lieutenant Teller? What regiment? Do you remember?”

“But they didn’t go to his regiment, sir. They were mailed to an address in Dorset. Lieutenant Teller had told her it was faster than waiting for the Army to send them on. Still and all, it was sometimes many months before a reply came.”

“Where in Dorset? Do you remember?” He tried not to sound eager.

She frowned. “A place called Sedley, I think it was. Peter Teller, in care of A. R.—no, I believe it was A. P. Repton, Mistletoe Cottage, Sedley, Dorset,” she finished triumphantly, and smiled at him. “I rather liked Mistletoe Cottege.”

Repton was the name of the village outside Witch Hazel Farm, where the Teller family had lived for generations. In Essex, not Dorset.

He thanked her and left.

So much for the theory of blackmail.

“Any luck, sir?” the constable asked when Rutledge came back to the motorcar and they drove on.

“Another dead end, most likely. At least there was no correspondence between Mrs. Teller and her husband’s family.”

Satterthwaite said, “Just there,” and pointed out the police station, which looked as if it had once been a shop itself, the front window overwhelming the door set to the side. Inspector Hadden was waiting for them with a scruffy-looking young man who was, Rutledge thought, an undergraduate student somewhere.

He was introduced as Benjamin Larkin, who stood to shake hands with Rutledge and the constable. His voice, when he spoke, was educated, and he said at once, “I was in a pub south of Morecambe when I heard there was a murder over by Hobson. A woman in an isolated farmhouse. So I got in touch with the police. It appears to be the same one I passed several days back. I was going to stop in and ask to refill my water bottle, but there was a motorcar on the far side of the hedge, and so I moved on.”

“A motorcar? Did you see anyone in it?” Hadden asked.

But Rutledge said, “Start at the beginning if you will.”