“She knitted for a missionary society. She’d collect odd bits of yarn around the village, and then she’d make these scarves and gloves and hats for children in faraway places. Quite colorful, some of them. She said foreign children liked bright colors.”

“Which mission society, do you know?”

“One in Oxford, I think it was.”

“Not Kent?”

“No, I’m sure it was Oxford. They have missions amongst the Eskimos.”

A dead end. Circumstantial evidence with no way to learn if she was the same woman the postmistress had described. Likely, yes, but that was as far as it went. All the same, when he’d finished his lunch, Rutledge went to Shaftesbury and inquired at the post office there. But all the postmistress could tell him was that Miss Preston sent and received letters sporadically, although she didn’t recall the name Peter Teller. “I remember her only because she was eccentric,” she told him apologetically.

And then, just as Rutledge reached the post office door, the postmistress said, “Oh—there’s something else. Alice told me once she was nursery maid in the household of Evelyn Darley. My mother remembered Evelyn and her twin sister when they came out. She said they were the prettiest girls she’s ever seen. I asked Alice if it was true, and she said it was.”

Rutledge stared at her in disbelief, then smiled and thanked her.

This was the connection he’d hoped for and very nearly missed.

Evelyn Darley’s twin sister was Gran, the Teller grandmother.

Peter Teller had paid Alice Preston, onetime nursery maid to his great-aunt Evelyn, long since retired to Sedley, in Dorset, to act as go-between, so that Florence Teller never wrote directly to him through his regiment. And his letters back to her never gave away whether he was on leave or with the Army. He’d told her, according to the post-mistress in Thielwald, that it was the safest, surest way to reach him.

And when Alice Preston died in the summer of 1918, Peter let this only link to Florence die with her.

Lieutenant Teller never came home from the war.

Rutledge went to find a telephone.

He could just see the mellow stone of the church from where he was standing in the hotel lounge, asking to be connected to the Yard. When Gibson was brought to the telephone, Rutledge asked if there was any more news about one Lieutenant Burrows, whom Susannah Teller had told him about.

“It’s true enough, he was killed in the war. The only son. Widowed mother lives in Worcester, off the Milton Road. The family’s well connected, Army and politics. I’ve also had the Army looking for another Peter Teller. They move like treacle, but they searched the regimental records where our Captain Teller served, and he’s the only one of that name they could find, going back a generation.”