The Long Farewell by Michael Innes Page A

those women. They should both go to prison.’
    ‘Mrs Packford and the other lady who appears to have – well, some interest in that title? You regard them as implicated in Mr Packford’s death?’ Appleby, who hadn’t adopted the suggestion that he should begin to eat, glanced at Mrs Husbands with what was no more than an air of polite interrogation. But he was now very interested in her indeed. For she had spoken in a sudden flare of anger. If Packford’s death had been clamped down, so to speak, under a tolerably firm lid, this was the first really promising jolt it had received.
    ‘Implicated in his death? They caused it.’ Mrs Husbands was breathing quickly, but her voice was again under control.
    ‘You mean that they murdered him – the two of them together?’
    ‘Not that. Of course I know that he shot himself. But they drove him to it.’
    ‘I see. Well, that is a very different matter. These ladies may have confronted him with an awkward situation, leading to his committing suicide. But it’s not clear that, as a result they should be put in prison.’
    ‘Hadn’t they both married him? Isn’t that utterly illegal?’
    Appleby received this question in thoughtful silence. It was obvious that Mrs Husbands, although only a superior employee, was fully informed of the present situation at Urchins. It was obvious that, although both competent and distinctly frightening, she was not a woman of much intelligence. Either that – or, what was equally tenable at the moment – she was in so deep a state of emotional disturbance over Packford’s death that her power of quite ordinary judgement was impaired.
    ‘Illegal?’ Appleby said. ‘Of course, there has undeniably been illegality somewhere in the business – if, that is to say, two marriages were actually performed and registered. But it is extremely unlikely that the first of the ladies has in any degree broken the law. There would have to be most unusual circumstances of collusion to bring about anything of the sort. And the second lady is much more likely to have been an innocent party than not. I fear, in fact, that your mind is in some confusion in this matter. The only person who had certainly performed a criminal act was Mr Packford himself. But you are disposed to judge him innocent?’
    ‘I judge him base and despicable!’
    Appleby received this too in silence for a time. Mrs Husbands, to put it mildly, seemed a little lacking in discretion. For what was emerging from her performance was the portrait of a woman who felt herself to have been betrayed, and who had undergone some violent revulsion of feeling in consequence. It was odd that Cavill had missed so striking an addition to his gallery of psychological types. Not that there was anything out-of-the-way in her. Indeed, in this very house there were two other women upon whom similar emotional confusions might be at play at this very moment. Perhaps Mrs Husbands differed from Ruth chiefly in the disposition to let her hair down in tense situations. As for Alice the barmaid, she was still an unknown quantity.
    ‘It certainly seems,’ Appleby said, ‘as if the late Mr Packford allowed himself to behave in a manner suggesting some little weakness of character.’
    ‘He was an extremely upright and generous man!’ Mrs Husbands had produced this like a flash. She hadn’t much power of resistance, Appleby reflected, to the quite elementary wiles which a policeman carries round. About Lewis Packford she would allow herself words as bitter as she could lay her tongue to. But the mildest stricture advanced upon him by anybody else would produce an instantaneous impulse of defence. She was an impulsive woman, and perhaps she was an unstable one. What she didn’t seem to be was cunning. But this might be the consequence of her being very cunning indeed. And if she were that, there was every probability that her place wouldn’t prove to be entirely in the background of this affair.
    ‘Mr