She flushed, drew herself up and shook her head. “No, that’s not possible,” she muttered. “He wouldn’t have done that without telling me. After all, I was the person who counted most in his life, however many others there were. Mr. Mallett,” she went on, her voice rising as she spoke, “you’re not going to make me believe that Pompey meant to leave me in the lurch. I was his, I tell you, his! We made no bones about it—it was a perfectly open affair. Everybody knew we belonged to each other!”

“Including your husband?” Mallett enquired drily.

Checked suddenly in the full flood of her eloquence, Mrs. Eales was silent for a moment, while her flushed cheeks slowly paled.

“Oh, Charles!” she said at last, in a tone that might have meant anything. Then she gave a forced laugh. “Well, yes—including him too, I suppose. Does it matter very much? I mean, you don’t want to hear about all the details of a marriage that’s—that’s been a pretty bad failure, do you, Mr. Mallett?”

The plea for sympathy was prettily contrived, but the inspector ignored it.

“Obviously, I must know anything there is to know about the relations between your husband and Mr. Ballantine,” he said.

“But there weren’t any—naturally!”

“Am I to understand that you were entirely separated from your husband during your association with Mr. Ballantine?”

Mrs. Eales obviously found some difficulty in answering the question. For the first time in the interview a trace of fear showed itself in her wide-open eyes. Before she could answer, Mallett helped her out.

“You see,” he said gently, “we know that already, within a fortnight of Mr. Ballantine’s death, you are seeing him again. It hardly looks as if there has been any final breach between you, does it?”

The well-timed disclosure had its effect. Mrs. Eales, he felt certain, had been on the brink of lying, though for what purpose he was still uncertain. Once committed to a falsehood, she would have gone stumbling on from one untruth to another, and her value as a contributor to the story which he was trying to piece together would have gone for good. Now the tension was relaxed and she began to speak again fluently and naturally, though the hint of fear remained to trouble the even tones of her voice.