down the High Street, heading for their night’s grazing on the other side of the village, their udders flaccid after milking. The bell on the leather strap around the neck of their leader clanked rhythmically as she swayed from side to side, paying no attention to the motorcar in her wake.

Rutledge could see the police station just beyond the herd and waited patiently for the last of the cows to pass. Constable Satterthwaite had just come out the door and was standing there on the point of filling his pipe.

He was a heavyset man of middle years, with an air of knowing his patch well. As Rutledge pulled up, he greeted him. “Inspector Rutledge? You’ve made good time, sir. The light’s still good. Would you like to go on out to the Teller house, or wait until morning?”

Rutledge considered the sky. “Now is best. I’ll drive.”

Constable Satterthwaite shoved his pipe back into his pocket and got in, giving directions to the scene of the crime. Then he settled back and said, “I’m that happy to see you, sir. This is a puzzle I can’t fathom. Florence Teller is the last person I’d have expected to find murdered. We’re a quiet village, not a place where there’s been much in the way of violence over the years. We know one another fairly well, and for the most part, that’s a good thing. If someone is in need, we try to help. No one needs to go stealing from his neighbor.”

“Murder isn’t always to do with need,” Rutledge told him. “There’s passion and greed and anger and jealousy—and sometimes just sheer cruelty.”

“I understand, sir. But I don’t know how any of those things might touch Florence Teller. Why someone would come to her door, and then strike her down and leave her for dead where she fell is beyond me. The doctor says it would have done no good if she’d got help straightaway. The damage was done. But how was her killer to know that? She might have lain there suffering for hours. And no one to help her. That was a cruelty.”

“She lived alone?”

“Yes, sir. The aunt who brought her up when she lost her parents died about fifteen years ago. Maybe more. And her son died some twelve years back. Then her husband didn’t come home from France. That took the heart out of her, though I never heard her complain. And she more or less kept to herself afterward. Gardening was always her joy, you might say, and even that couldn’t make a difference.”

Rutledge glanced his way. “You seem to know her well.”

“I know all my people well,” Satterthwaite said with dignity. “But yes, I kept an eye on her. To be sure she didn’t fall ill or lack for anything.”

He could hear the pain in the other man’s voice as he tried to keep his feelings in check. Not love, precisely, but a protective fondness all the same.

“She would do anything for anyone,” Satterthwaite went on, when Rutledge made no comment. “She stayed up three nights with the Burtons’ little girl when she had typhoid, and the mother was too ill to nurse her. All of us knew what sort of person she was. So where was the need to kill her?”

“What was her maiden name?”

“Marshall. Her parents lived in Cheshire. The father was originally from Cheshire as I recall.”

The village had straggled along the High Street and then, as if tired of trying to grow any larger, it simply stopped. Beyond Hobson, the land spread out in a carpet of early summer green, rising a little to show where plowed fields and pastures intersected, and flocks of shorn sheep cropped the grass.

Save for the sheep and a man on a bicycle passing them, there was no other sign of life. Yet the emptiness was friendly, not like the great haunted barren sweeps of the Highlands. Rutledge could hear Hamish making the comparison in his mind.

“Where is Mrs. Teller’s body?”

“Over to the doctor’s surgery in Thielwald. It was a single blow, he says, delivered with some force from behind. Looking at her face, you’d never guess she’d been killed. I was that surprised to see a peaceful expression, as if she had been put out of her pain, like. That’s an odd thing to say, but it was my feeling.”

“Yes, I understand.”

They made two more turnings and came up a slight rise to meet a hedge that surrounded the front of a two-story white house. The land