“Was she your sister-in-law?” Rutledge asked without emphasis.
Edwin Teller stared at him. “This is neither the time nor the place,” he snapped.
Rutledge replied, “Where then is the proper place?”
But there was no answer to that. Even Amy Teller looked away, her face pale.
They had nearly reached the Teller motorcar. Before he could press the issue, Rutledge was distracted by a boy running toward the churchyard, in the direction of Constable Satterthwaite. Rutledge excused himself and left the Tellers standing there.
By the time he’d reached the spot where Satterthwaite was standing listening to the boy, the constable looked up.
He said in a low voice, “A message from the police in Thielwald. They’ve found a walker who admits to being in the vicinity around the time Mrs. Teller was killed. He can’t be sure of the exact day, but it fits well enough. He’s being held there. Are you coming, sir?”
“Yes. My motorcar is at Mrs. Greeley’s house.”
“I’ll meet you there in five minutes,” Satterthwaite said. He thanked the boy and turned to speak to the curate, commenting on the service.
Thielwald had ancient roots, but the town itself looked as if it had been born in the last century and had no recollection of any past before that.
Rutledge had only seen it in late evening, the night he and Constable Satterthwaite had called on Dr. Blake, whose surgery was in a side street before they had reached the High Street.
He could see now that Thielwald’s gray stone houses were crowded along the main road, which was bisected by a few cross streets. In the town center there were the usual shops and a busy pub called The Viking’s Head. The church was just beyond the center, as plain as the one in Hobson but slightly larger, its churchyard clustered around it like lost souls on the windswept rise.
Hamish, who had been quiet during the service and the drive here, said, “It’s no’ a place I’d like to live.”
Rutledge had been thinking the same thing—no character to set it off, no natural features to make it more attractive. A small town with no pretensions.
Seeing the post office set in a corner of an ironmonger’s shop, Rutledge said, “Ah. I’d like to make a brief stop here before we see this walker. I want to ask the postmistress a question.”
“Can it wait?”
“No.” He halted the motorcar, and leaving it running, he said to the constable, “Wait here. I shouldn’t be more than five minutes.”
Striding into the ironmonger’s, he turned to the left and found the tiny square of space that was Thielwald’s post office. The middle-aged woman behind the counter smiled as he approached and said, “What can I do for you today, sir?”
Rutledge identified himself and asked if she handled the mail for Hobson as well.
“Oh, yes, sir. It’s carried up to the village once a day and delivered. Not that there’s much of it, now the war’s over. Business was quite brisk then, you know, everyone writing to a soldier son or father or brother. Quite brisk.”
“Do you recall mail for Mrs. Florence Teller?”
“Yes, sir, that’s Florence Marshall that was. She got the most exotic packets sometimes, covered with foreign stamps. I always wondered what was inside, you know. Mrs. Greeley told me once there were silk pillow slips from China. I hardly know where to find China on the map, and here’s silk pillow slips coming to my own post office.”
“It must have been quite exciting,” he agreed. “Did Mrs. Teller write to her family or her husband’s family in England?”
“Letters, you mean.”
“Yes. Was there an exchange of letters with members of her husband’s family? We’re trying to locate them. It’s the matter of her will.”
“I don’t believe she ever did. No, nothing like that. She wrote to Lieutenant Teller and he wrote to her. And that was the end of it.”
“Where did she send the letters to Lieutenant Teller? What regiment? Do you remember?”
“But they didn’t go to his regiment, sir. They were mailed to an address in Dorset. Lieutenant Teller had told her it was faster than waiting for the Army to send them on. Still and all, it was sometimes many months before a reply came.”
“Where in Dorset? Do you remember?” He tried not to sound eager.
She frowned. “A place called Sedley, I think it was. Peter Teller, in care of A. R.—no, I believe it was A. P. Repton, Mistletoe Cottage, Sedley, Dorset,” she finished triumphantly, and smiled at him. “I rather liked Mistletoe Cottege.”
Repton was the name of the village outside Witch Hazel Farm, where the Teller family had lived for generations. In Essex, not Dorset.
He thanked her and left.
So much for the theory of blackmail.
“Any luck, sir?” the constable asked when Rutledge came back to the motorcar and they drove on.
“Another dead end, most likely. At least there was no correspondence between Mrs. Teller and her husband’s family.”