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course: too strict and rigid and pound-of-flesh and letter-of-the-law for my liking, but I suppose that’s a fault on the right side; and I’ll grant you he’s read up all the text-books since he got his job with us—for what that’s worth… But they don’t appoint his sort these days.” Best reached for the door-handle. “They appoint proper full-time cops, and a darned good thing too.”
    With this view Fen was on the whole in agreement. But for the time being he only nodded abstractedly, and his abstraction appeared to be deepened, rather than otherwise, by the subsequent business of dictating a statement about his recent chance encounter with the suicidal financier; so that Best was not altogether surprised when presently, while they waited for the statement to be typed, he returned to the attack.
    “Motive,” he said without preamble. “Obviously Foley’s brutality to his wife was enough in itself to make her wish him dead, but was there anything more?”
    “There was life-insurance.” Best shifted rather uneasily in his chair. “Not a fortune—not by any means—but a surprising lot for just a farm labourer… Look here, sir, I quite see what you’re getting at: it’s obvious the wife could have done it, and put the blame on the idiot, and no one a bit the wiser. But there’s no proof—can’t be—and what with one thing and another—”
    “You think it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.” Fen lit a cigarette. “Only sooner or later, you know, they wake up of their own accord and then there’s liable to be trouble anyway…” Did they come on here from the Mortuary—the wife, I mean, and the idiot?”
    “Yes. They’re waiting here now for the C.C. to arrive.” Best craned his neck to look out of the office window. “Which he hasn’t done yet, because his car’s not in the yard. He had an informal talk with them last night, after he’d been to Clapton to look at the body, and today he’s going to have it all taken down in shorthand… Hello, here he comes. We’ll have to clear out of here now, I’m afraid-though why the devil he has to choose my office to hold his interviews in…”
    “I want to stay,” Fen interrupted. “I want to be present at this thing.”
    Best shrugged. “Well, you can ask, can’t you?” he said. “He’ll have heard of you all right. But I shan’t sponsor you, if you don’t mind. Life’s too short, and so’s his temper, every now and again.”
    “I won’t involve you in it,” Fen promised. “What I’d better do, I think, is try to catch him as he comes in… Oh, just one other thing.”
    “Yes?”
    “What about the imbecile? Why was he there , that’s to say?”
    “Oh, that… Well, the thing about it is, you see, that he dotes on Mrs. Foley—doggishly, I mean, nothing unpleasant—he’s always hung around her a good deal. He’s the old-style Village idiot, really—quite harmless, born in Yeopool, lived there all his life; but ever since he was a kid, Mrs. Foley’s been the only person he’s seemed to like or trust, so it’s quite logical he should have attacked Foley, and pushed him into the river, when he saw Foley mauling her.”
    “Quite,” Fen murmured. “Did she go to a doctor, afterwards, by any chance—or wasn’t she hurt badly enough for that?”
    Best raised his eyebrows. “Still sceptical, sir? Yes, she did see a doctor, that same evening, and he’ll tell you she was horribly bruised, with actual marks of the boot-nails on her flesh in some places. Nothing phoney about that, in fact—quite enough. actually, if she had killed him, to justify a plea of self-defence.”
    “Manslaughter, more likely, I should have thought,” said Fen. “And even a quite nominal sentence for manslaughter would prevent her from touching the insurance money.”
    Best’s expression hardened. “You’ve got it in for her, sir, haven’t you? You want her found guilty.”
    But Fen shook his head.
    “Far from it,” he answered.