As the motor came to life and he turned to walk back to the driver’s side, he found himself thinking about Bryony again. The housekeeper had told him that the police had got nowhere. Why had no one in Osterley come forward with information about the priest’s death? It was a crime that any community should instantly condemn, the kind of sudden death that drove people to lock their doors at night and look askance at their neighbors and remember small events that might be pieced carefully together until the puzzle was solved.

“I saw a man . . .”

“I overheard such and such while waiting to pay my account at the greengrocer’s . . .”

“Father James told me one day after Mass . . .”

A village thrived on prying. Privacy was an illusion protected by silence.

Rutledge turned the car once more and went back the way he’d come.

The answer to his question seemed to be that they had no information to give, the residents of Osterley. Or they had closed ranks around the murderer of the priest.

“But that’s no’ likely,” Hamish pointed out.

“Or does it explain why the Bishop called in Scotland Yard?”

Reaching Old Point Road again, Rutledge turned in. The second church was smaller than Holy Trinity, its steeple a slim finger pointing into the gray sky. Built of flint and weathered by the sea winds, it offered a plain face to the world, but seemed to be timeless, after a fashion. A survivor. A black board with gold letters informed him that this was indeed St. Anne’s Roman Catholic Church. The churchyard lay behind it, a low stone wall enclosing the gravestones that over time were slowly encroaching on the building. Another hundred years, Rutledge thought, and the stones would reach the apse.

Next to the church was the brick rectory, small and Victorian, but with such a flair for extravagance it might have alighted here one night in a storm and decided to stay. An exotic bird faring well in this northern climate far from its native land. Hardly a setting for bloody murder.

He stopped the motorcar in the yard of the rectory and was on the point of getting out to knock on the door when a woman pushing a pram along the road called to him, “Mrs. Wainer has gone to do her marketing in the town. But I should think she’ll be back in an hour at most.”

Rutledge thanked her. He turned for a third time, and decided to make his way back to the waterfront. He might even find his lunch there. It had been some time since he’d breakfasted in Norwich.