Free The Long Farewell by Michael Innes

it strike you as advantageous to get in first?’
    ‘If it’s as a police officer that you are coming to Urchins, I much doubt whether your method of questioning isn’t singularly irregular.’ Ruth offered this with spirit. And she was now quite calm again. ‘It was simply this: if there is to be further investigation, I ought to be heard first. It’s due to my position that it should be so. But if I’d simply let you arrive at Urchins, there might have been a stupid scene, with Alice barging to the front.’
    ‘A matter of precedence – I see. By the way, what kind of person would you say this Alice was?’
    ‘Dead vulgar.’ Ruth snapped this out. And then at once she added: ‘I’d say she wasn’t a bad sort.’
    ‘Lewis Packford’s taste wouldn’t lead him far astray?’
    ‘As far as poetry and that sort of thing is concerned, Lewis’ taste simply didn’t exist. But I think he’d be not too bad on people.’
    Appleby’s interest in Ruth grew. He still didn’t at all know whether she was positively likeable. But certainly she was formidable, which was a quality he rather liked anyway. ‘It would be fair to say,’ he asked, ‘that you really were two angry women, and that neither of you made any bones about showing it?’
    ‘That’s perhaps fair enough. But you mustn’t suppose that my feelings are bitter now. Indeed, I don’t know that they were ever that. As soon as I’d got control of myself I felt Lewis’ actions had been – well, quite understandable. Indeed, it was some quite good qualities that had got him into his jam.’
    ‘I see – or rather I don’t.’ Appleby paused, awaiting explanations. He had to ask himself, he was acutely aware, whether he was not in the presence of a clever woman rather over-playing her hand. One could readily decide that all this dispassionateness and magnanimity was a little too good to be true.
    ‘He was a boundlessly enthusiastic person. And marriage – which was, of course, quite a late adventure with him – took him decidedly that way. And then we made that foolish decision. Don’t think I can’t really see it as a foolish decision. And I must insist that it was very much my fault at the time. If I hadn’t, I mean, showed that I’d much like to keep my job, then that secretive genius of Lewis’ which you seem to know about wouldn’t have had this new sphere to exercise itself in. But there it was. And keeping our marriage dark meant a lot of separation – and at a time when Lewis, a middle-aged man new to the whole thing, was in a thoroughly excited state. Sex had taken an entirely novel role in his life. And being sanguine and generous and careless, he was – well, very vulnerable.’
    Ruth paused. She was saying all this in a low steady voice which was far from suggesting an insensitive attitude to her subject. ‘I can see,’ Appleby said cautiously, ‘the kind of thing you mean.’
    ‘Before he knew where he was, he was in bed with this girl. It’s not gratifying to reflect on, but I suppose it is natural enough.’
    ‘Perhaps so. But there was nothing natural in going through a form of marriage with her.’
    ‘Wasn’t there? I doubt whether you know Lewis really well. The girl was on his hands – quite suddenly. He must have felt rather like a cricketer, fielding close in, who becomes aware he’s made a catch. He’s planned nothing, made no sort of grab, but there the ball is.’
    ‘Very apt,’ Appleby said. He spoke a shade dryly. Ruth, he thought, was going out of her way in search of charity.
    ‘There she was, I say. And she wasn’t a person with any less real a claim on him simply because she did a little smell, perhaps, of the public bar.’ Ruth paused on this – so that it was almost possible to suspect that she had divined the fact that verisimilitude would be furthered by at least the hint of an astringent note. ‘And no doubt she revealed herself as artlessly and trustingly inclined to matrimony. In such