“Oh!” she said, smiling up at him with relief on her face. “I thought I heard voices when I walked in. I didn’t know who might have found their way in. The press has been very troublesome.”

She was slim, perhaps in her thirties—it was hard to tell— her oval face pink from walking, her light brown hair curling ridiculously around it, escaping from the knot at the back of her neck. Not pretty, yet very attractive. She waited until he had reached the hall and said, “I’m so glad they’ve finally sent someone from Scotland Yard. I’m Rachel Ashford. The one who’s been fighting to get these ... deaths ... reopened.”

“Lady Ashford?”

Her smile changed. “My husband is dead. His brother has the title now. Sir Henry. Did he tell you that Lady Ashford wanted to reopen the investigation? How very like him!”

“You’re Peter Ashford’s widow?” Rutledge asked, surprised. “I was in school with him.”

“Peter died in the war. Trying to take Mount Kilimanjaro, out in Kenya.”

“I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.” So much for Bowles’ “titled old bitch.” But it was a shock, Peter’s death. Another name added to the long list of friends gone. More than once he’d felt the guilt of surviving. As if it was somehow obscenely selfish, when so many had died. After a moment, he made himself go on. “And you believe the investigations done by Inspector Harvey and Constable Dawlish were mishandled?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because—oh, because of intuition, I suppose.” She made a wry face at him. “And I can’t help but feel that coincidence can only be stretched so far. Three deaths in the same family in little more than a month? I—I knew Livia and Nicholas, they weren’t at all what the papers say, an invalid and her devoted keeper. It’s wrong, the notion that they could have killed themselves because of ill health!”

“I understood that Olivia Man—Marlowe—was crippled. And that Nicholas Cheney had been gassed in the war.”