“Oh, quite lately—less than two years ago.”

“I see. Then it was after you had come to live with Mr. Ballantine?”

“Yes.”

Mallett pursed his lips. He thought he saw light.

“Was it Mr. Ballantine who told you?” he demanded.

She nodded. “I believe he’d known about it all along,” she muttered half to herself.

“And I suppose,” the inspector pursued, “he told you about it when your—when Captain Eales began to threaten divorce proceedings?”

She did not answer. Mallett had no need to press for a reply. The situation was quite clear to him now. Obviously the couple had marked down Ballantine as their prey from the start. Eales had allowed or encouraged his “wife” to ensnare the financier, with the intention, from the first, of making him pay dearly for his pleasure. But Ballantine had been too clever for him. A man in his position would have ample means of investigating the history of anyone he pleased, and when the blackmailing demands began he calmly called the bluff, and threatened the would-be petitioner with exposure as a bigamist. It was a trick quite in keeping with all that he, Mallett, had heard of Ballantine’s character. Only one point remained obscure. Was Mrs. Eales telling the truth when she declared her ignorance of her husband’s first marriage? If so, perhaps she was as much the victim of his plot as Ballantine had been intended to be. In the upshot, she had chosen to stay with Ballantine, enjoying all the comforts he could provide, while Eales was left out in the cold, an outwitted, impoverished, furiously angry man—a man with murder in his heart, perhaps. “But why wait two years?” Mallett asked himself, and could find, at the moment, no answer.

He turned to Mrs. Eales again.

“In spite of this disclosure, you went on helping your husband as far as you could?” he asked.

She nodded. “He was my husband, you see. I couldn’t let an accident like that make any difference, could I?”

Mallett with difficulty suppressed a smile. The naïveté of the reply was disarming. He went on:

“And what exactly has your husband been doing during these two years?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I never knew exactly,” she said lightly. “He used to sell things on commission a good deal, I think. He tried the motor trade for a time, I know. Then it was silk stockings—anything that offered. He was always dreadfully hard up.”

“Where was he living?”

“Oh . . . different places, I suppose.”

“Including this one—when Mr. Ballantine was away?”

“No. He’d only come here during the daytime when he knew Pompey would be out. It was a little difficult, of course. Very often we’d have a meal together, and if he had any work to do he could do it here.”

The inspector looked round the room. “Here?” he asked.

“In Pompey’s study, I mean.”