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number of occasions.
    What the butler saw was a tall man with a thin face who was clothed in a well-cut suit and a firmness that matched his voice. Something in the dark eyes moved the butler to change his mind and say at last, “Wait here, if you please.”
    He returned after nearly ten minutes. “Lady Maude will receive you in the library,” he informed Rutledge, and stepped aside to allow him to enter.
    Rutledge walked into a columned hall that reminded him of a Greek temple. The floor, paved in marble, was smooth as cold ice, and the staircases—a pair—flaunted their airy grace as they rose like swans’ necks on either side of a niche where an exquisite Roman copy of a Greek Apollo was subtly lit. The stone face, slightly turned and limned by the light, reminded him all at once of Cormac FitzHugh. He buried the memory as swiftly as it had risen.
    Hamish said, “Pagan, this is. Like the mistress, no doubt!”
    How had the missing Eleanor Gray seen it? Rutledge wondered. Had she played here as a child, sliding across the shining floor, peals of laughter echoing among the columns? Or had it seemed cold to her, forbidding?
    A long gallery led off in either direction, with French carpeting, busts on pedestals, and dark paintings of ancestors in massive gold frames.
    “There’s space enough here to hold half a regiment,” Hamish said, his voice disparaging. “Aye, and a military band to sit and play on yon stairs.”
    The library was a vast room down a passage on the first floor and was undoubtedly chosen to overawe a mere policeman. Its windows rose floor to ceiling, and books filled glass-enclosed shelves. The cream-and-rose carpet on the floor was so old, it had the sheen of antique silk, and the woman waiting for him in the center of it knew that it set her off like a jewel.
    Hamish fell silent, in its own way homage.
    Lady Maude was a tall woman with silver-gray hair and the carriage of an empress. Her afternoon dress was dark blue, austere in contrast to the handsome double rope of pearls that fell nearly to her waist. In her day she must have been quite beautiful, for the vestiges of beauty were clear in the bones of her face, her violet eyes, and the long, slender hands lightly clasped in front of her. She barely acknowledged the butler’s quiet murmur. “Inspector Rutledge, my lady.” The door closed softly behind him.
    “Inspector,” she said as he inclined his head. After a moment, regarding him coolly, she added, “At least this time they’ve had the sense to send me someone who is presentable.”
    “I haven’t met Inspector Oliver, my lady. His sense of duty, however, is something I understand, as you must yourself, having been born to it.”
    “I will not listen—” she began, but he cut lightly across her words.
    “I am not defending him, I assure you. I am merely pointing out that for any policeman, one of the most painful duties is to inform someone of a loved one’s death. If it was not your daughter the Scottish police have found, the sooner they know it, the sooner they can find her true parents. Another mother will have to bear that grief. If you were fortunate and this is not your child, then spare a little pity for the woman who has lost hers.”
    She stared at him in astonishment, something moving behind her remarkably expressive eyes. He thought,
Her
daughter
is
missing
— Then she said, “You came, as I understood Kenton to say, to make an apology.”
    “Yes. For the fact that Inspector Oliver did not handle this matter as well as he might have. That was unfortunate. I’ve come in his place to tell you that if you can give me assurances that this young woman discovered on a Scottish mountainside is not your affair, then we can move on to other names on our—”
    “She is not my child. My daughter is alive and well.”
    “And you have heard from her within the past—er—six months?”
    “My relations with my daughter are not open to public scrutiny!” She scanned his