and came around it, standing face-to-face with Rutledge. “Now if you will show yourself to the door, I have other matters to attend to.”

Rutledge crossed to the door and, with his hand on the knob, he said, “I understand that before the war you were often in Scotland building private boats. I wonder if in your comings and goings you might have stopped off in Lancashire or walked in that vicinity. It’s said to be a very popular spot for walking.”

Edwin, alarmed, said, “I have never been to Hobson in my life. In the first place I was too busy, and the second, because of my health, I always traveled by private rail carriage.”

Rutledge thanked him and went out, closing the door behind him.

Hamish was battering at the back of his mind, and as Rutledge cranked his motorcar to continue his rounds, he said, “Ye never telt him yon woman lived in Hobson.”

Rutledge pulled the crank, listened to the motor turn over softly, and came around to the driver’s side to open his door.

“Interesting, isn’t it? That family knows about Florence Teller—I’ll give you any odds you like. And who her husband is. But which of the brothers married her? And which of them killed her?”

Leaving London, Rutledge drove to Essex. The telephone could outpace him, but there was still the possibility that whatever the rest of the family knew—or thought they knew—about Florence Teller, their brother Walter had not been a party to it.

Hamish said, “His brothers were fashed wi’ him, when he came back.”

That was true. They had been very angry. For vanishing, instead of playing his part in whatever was happening during those crucial days?

“Ye ken,” Hamish pointed out, “yon doctors believed he’d had a great shock after leaving the bank.”

Was that it? Had he been drawn into something that he couldn’t face?

But why now? Why had Florence Teller suddenly become a problem, if any of this speculation was true? She had not seen her husband since the war. She thought he was dead. She had lived for years, as far as anyone in Hobson could testify, perfectly quietly in Sunrise Cottage, making no demands on anyone. Who then had felt threatened by her?

“But ye havena’ asked the person in the post office if there were ither letters.”

He hadn’t. It was an important oversight. The only excuse was, at that early stage of the inquiry, he hadn’t been sure who Peter Teller really was. A member of the family that Chief Superintendent Bowles had demanded that he treat with circumspection and courtesy, or an outsider who happened in a bizarre twist of fate to be christened with the name of Peter.

That rosewood box—what had it contained besides letters from a soldier on the other side of the world to a lonely wife waiting for him to be given another leave? A will? An exchange of correspondence of a different sort that had gone unnoticed in a tiny village like Hobson where the business of everyone was everyone’s business? Hardly likely.

“There’s the ither town . . .”

And Hamish was right, there was Thielwald. But how would Florence Teller have got there and back, to fetch her mail? It was too far to walk.

Still, the farmer with the sick ram might occasionally have given her a lift.

Rutledge couldn’t accept that the woman he’d seen lying dead on a table in Dr. Blake’s office was a blackmailer.

“Or ye do na’ wish to believe.”

The main road forked, and Rutledge followed the sign to Repton. Not five miles on, he came to the turning into Witch Hazel Farm.

As the drive meandered toward the house, it passed a bed of handsome roses just now in their prime that gave off a sweet perfume in the warm air and filled the car with their spicy scent all the way to the door of the house.

He lifted the knocker and let it fall. After a moment or two Mollie, the housekeeper, answered the door.

“Mr. Teller, please. Inspector Rutledge to see him.”

“Inspector.” She repeated the word cautiously. “I’ll see if he’s in,” she said finally and disappeared, leaving him to admire the white roses in stone tubs by the door. They hadn’t been here when last he called, he thought.

Mollie had come back, and she led him to the study, whose windows looked out toward the drive. Teller had seen him coming, Rutledge suspected.

Walter Teller was sitting in a chair, an open book in his lap, and he said as Rutledge came in, “One of my