“If it was a summer visitor, he had his walking stick with him. If the weapon came from a motorcar or a lorry, the killer carried it to the door with him, with the intent of committing murder.”

“That’s very likely,” Satterthwaite agreed.

They had reached the door.

“It’s not locked. We never lock our doors.”

“She might still be alive if she had.”

The constable said, “She opened it to whoever was on the doorstep. She was never afraid out here. I’ve wondered, you know, if he had stopped for a drink of water or the like, and recognized her. But that would mean she had a past, and that’s not in the character of Florence Teller.”

“What did she do before she married?”

“She came here to live with her aunt when she was very young, and later taught school over in Thielwald. She was a good schoolmistress, by all accounts. But not two years after she’d begun teaching, she met and married Peter Teller.”

“What about his family? Is there any? Is he by any chance related to the Teller family in London?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir, but I doubt it. There was never anything said about family in London.”

Rutledge remembered what Bowles had suggested, that this Peter was from the wrong side of the blanket.

He reached out to open the door. It swung back on its hinges quietly, without disturbing the evensong of a robin somewhere on the other side of the hedge.

“Who inherits the house?”

“Now there’s a good question. I don’t know who her solicitor is. We haven’t come across a will.”

The passage was narrow, a second door just beyond where they were standing, opening into the house itself. In this tiny hall, a small shelf of trinkets on one side faced a framed photograph of Morecambe Bay on the other. And only a small stain on the scrubbed wood flooring marked where a woman had died.

Rutledge examined the walls and the floor, even glancing at the ceiling above his head. But there were no scuff marks, nothing to show that a struggle had taken place.

“She must ha’ turned to go into the ither part of the house,” Hamish said.

“Her back to him,” Rutledge said, too late to catch himself from answering Hamish aloud.

“Yes, very likely,” Constable Satterthwaite agreed. “She might have known him, or if not, liked the look of him enough to invite him in. A good many of the university lads come walking hereabout, and some of them couldn’t be much older than her Timmy would have been if he’d lived. She had a soft spot for them. We’re a trusting lot, but not foolish. She wasn’t afraid of him.”

“A priest. A schoolboy on holiday. A woman in distress.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” Satterthwaite admitted. “But yes.”

“What’s beyond this entry?”