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“There’s one person I should like to expose, if a certain guess of mine is right; but it’s not the unfortunate Mrs. Foley.” He rose. “And now I must go and look for your Chief.”

    Commander Bowen was a small, slim, cheerful man with a springy step. a brown face, and neat curly grey hair. As Best had predicted, he had heard of Fen, and seemed pleased enough to meet him. And although his assent to Fen’s presence at the interview with Mrs. Foley was unenthusiastic, he did in fact give it. Accordingly, they were soon settled in Best’s office, which Best himself had in the meantime grudgingly vacated; a shorthand writer was summoned to stand by; and presently Mrs. Foley and the imbecile, together with the Yeopool village constable, were ushered in and made as comfortable as the furniture, and their own several anxieties, permitted.
    The woman was much as she had been when Fen had seen her earlier; though it seemed to him that on the present occasion her face was rather more flushed, and her breathing rather more rapid. She sat bolt upright in her chair. twisting a cotton handkerchief between her hands, with the idiot close beside her. And whereas she appeared more nervous now than she had been at the Mortuary, the half-wit, in contrast, was clearly more at ease. It was impossible, Fen found, to tell how much he understood of what was going on: little enough, probably. Only when the woman addressed him directly did he show any sort of intelligence, and then he would grow restless and excitable and uncertain, like a dog given an order which it does not understand. Bowen made no attempt to question him. He addressed himself solely to the woman, with an occasional aside to the village constable; and his manner, though brisk, was sympathetic and straightforward. For the record, even details which all of them knew were elicited. And so it was that for the first time Fen heard the story in a connected, coherent form.
    Mary Foley was thirty-seven years old, she said; she had been married to Edgar Foley for nearly sixteen years, but they had had no children. They lived at Rose Cottage, a farm-labourer’s cottage on the bank of the river just outside Yeopool, and Foley had worked for Mr. Thomas of Manor Farm, on whose land the cottage stood. Foley (she always spoke of him thus formally, never using his Christian name) had not been a good husband to her; he had beaten her on a number of occasions.
    “Nor I couldn’t stop ‘un, neither,” the village constable interposed indignantly at this point. “Us all knew ‘twas goin’ on—as you knew it yourself, sir—but ‘er wouldn’t never say nothin’ against ‘im, so what was us to do?”
    “I'd taken ‘im for better or for worse, ‘adn’t I?” she said lifelessly. “‘Twasn’t no one else’s business ‘ow ‘e treated me.”
    For a moment Bowen seemed to consider debating this; but he thought better of it, and resumed his questions. Last Monday, then-
    Last Monday, she said, she had left the cottage at about six o’clock with a view to strolling along the river bank and meeting Foley on his way home. Orry (this was the idiot) had been at the cottage during the afternoon, and she had given him tea and a piece of cake. But she had supposed that by the time she set out Orry was back in the village, for he knew that Foley disliked him and was normally careful to keep his distance whenever the husband was at home. Mrs Foley had not walked far; about a hundred yards from the cottage she had halted and waited, and after some ten minutes Foley had joined her. He had been in an ill humour and had picked a quarrel with her, accusing her of idleness; and when she had attempted to defend herself he had knocked her down and kicked her. She was still not very clear about what had happened next; she had a dim recollection, she said, of Orry’s shambling forward from the bushes and pushing her husband in the back, and that was all. In any case, the upshot of it was that