Rutledge had him pegged. This was the lawyer who had courted Rosamund and almost won her. The family solicitor, handling the wills. Regarding him with new interest, he crossed the room to light the lamps on the chimney piece. Their glow, added to the one lamp already burning on the table, pushed back the darkness and the cavelike atmosphere of the room. Breathing more easily, he could concentrate on what Chambers was saying.

“—and I understand that you’ve come down to reconsider the circumstances of their deaths. I’d like to know why.”

Rutledge stood with his back to the cold hearth and said, “Because the Home Office wished to be sure that all was as it should be. Miss Marlowe—as O. A. Manning—is a person of some prominence.”

Chambers all but snorted in disbelief. “You may tell the locals that, and they’d be impressed. I’m not.”

“Suspicious, are you?” Rutledge asked.

“Of course I’m suspicious when Scotland Yard feels it needs to stick its nose into a death where I’m handling the estate.”

“Is there anything wrong with the wills? Any provisions that make you especially nervous?” He was deliberately misunderstanding the man, stripping him of his authority and aggressively taking charge of the meeting. Not out of personal animosity but as a tool.

Chambers stared at him. At the thinness, the gaunt face, the lines that had prematurely aged a much younger man than he’d guessed at in the beginning. And wasn’t above a little aggression of his own.

“In the war, were you?”

Rutledge nodded.

“Wounded?”

Rutledge hesitated, then said briefly, “Yes.”

“Thought as much! Stephen looked the same way when he came back. Shell of himself. Damned foot killed him in the end, too.”

Over Hamish’s rude comments about that, Rutledge recaptured the salient.

“What did you do in the war?”

“They wouldn’t take me,” Chambers said in disgust. “Too old, they told me. But I knew that part of France better than they did! My mother’s mother was from there. Stupid place to fight infantry battles, for God’s sake! No geographical advantage. No high ground. Prolonged deadlock, that’s what you’ll get, I told them. Enormous loss of life, I told them. No one will come out of it a winner. Americans tipped the balance, of course. And the tank. And still the best they could do was an Armistice!” Chambers realized suddenly that he’d mounted one of his hobby horses, and stopped, watching the advantage slip back to Rutledge. Then he grinned. ‘‘Over to you, I think.”

Rutledge found himself grinning back. He liked Chambers. He could also see what had attracted Rosamund FitzHugh to the man.

“Who sent for you?” Rutledge asked. “Susannah Hargrove?”