Paviour came jerkily to his feet. ‘I am quite willing to be the first, Chief Inspector.’ Too willing, too eager, in far too big a hurry, in spite of the fastidious shrinking of all his being from the ordeal to which he was so anxious to expose himself. George was interested. Was it as important as all that to him to get his story in before his wife got hers?
‘I should like to see Mrs Paviour first, if it isn’t inconvenient.’
‘But as a matter of fact,’ Paviour said desperately, ‘I believe I was the last person to see Mr Hambro…’
‘That will emerge,’ George said equably. ‘I’ll try not to keep any of you very long.’
It was useless to persist. Paviour sank back into his chair with a twitching face, and let her go, since there was now no help for it.
She was quite calm as she sat in the study, her small feet neatly planted side by side, and described in blunt precis, but sufficiently truthfully, how she had slipped out instead of going to bed, and wilfully staged that brief scene with Gus Hambro.
‘Not very responsible of me, I know,’ she said, gazing sombrely before her. ‘But there are times when one feels like being irresponsible, and I did. There was no harm in it, if there was no good. It was a matter of perhaps three or four minutes. Then my husband came.’ Her face was composed but very still, in contrast to her usual vivacity. It was the nearest he had ever seen her come to obvious self-censorship. ‘My husband,’ she said guardedly, ‘is rather sensitive about the difference in our ages.’
She had not gone so far as to mention the embrace, but her restraint spoke for itself eloquently enough.
‘So he ordered you home,’ said George, deliberately obtuse, ‘and you obeyed him and left them together.’
Her eyes flared greenly for one instant, and she dimmed their fire almost before it showed. Her shoulders lifted slightly; her face remained motionless. ‘I went away and left them together. What was the point of staying? The whole thing was a shambles.
‘And did they?’ George prompted gently. ‘You know one of them, at least, very well. The other, perhaps, less well? But you have considerable intuition. What do you suppose passed between them, after you’d gone?’
‘Not a stupid physical clash,’ she said, flaring, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I’m thinking nothing, except what your evidence means, and what follows from it. I’m asking what you think happened between those two men. Of whom one, I would remind you, is now missing in suspicious circumstances.’
She shrank, and took a long moment to consider what she should answer to that. ‘Look!’ she said almost pleadingly. ‘I’ve been married to an older man a few years, and I know the hazards, but they’re illusory. I’ve known him jealous before, for even less reason, but nothing happened, nothing ever will happen. It’s a kind of game—a stimulus. He isn’t that kind of man!’ she said, in a voice suddenly torn and breaking, and closed her eyes upon frantic tears. They looked astonishingly out of place on her, like emeralds on an innocent, but they were real enough.
‘You’re very loyal,’ said George in the mildest of voices. Her momentary loss of control was over; she offered him a wry and reluctant smile. ‘So is he,’ she said, ‘when you come to consider it.’
‘And your husband joined you—how much later?’
The voice was still as mild and unemphatic, but she froze into alarmed withdrawal again at the question; and after a moment she said with aching care: ‘We occupy separate rooms. And we don’t trespass.’
‘In fact, you didn’t see him again until this morning?’ In a voice so low as to be barely audible, she said: ‘No.’
‘So he left,’ said George, ‘because you asked him to leave.’
‘I didn’t have to ask him in so many words,’ said Paviour laboriously. ‘I made it clear to him that it was highly undesirable that my wife should see him again. He offered to pack up and go at once, and make some excuse to account for his departure. I told you, I make no complaint against Mr Hambro, I bear him no grudge. I’m aware that the initiative came from my wife.’
There was sweat standing in beads on his forehead and lip. He had had no alternative but to tell the truth, since he had no means of knowing how fully Lesley had already told the same story; but his shame and anguish at having to uncover his marital hell, even thus privately, without even the attendance of Reynolds and his notebook, was both moving and convincing. A humiliation is not a humiliation until someone else becomes aware of it.
‘And you manage not to hold this propensity against her, either?’ George asked mildly.
‘I’ve told you, it’s a form of illness. She can’t help it. And it can’t possibly go beyond a certain point—her own revulsion ensures that.’
‘And yet you deliberately kept watch on her last night, and followed her out expressly to break up this scene. You won’t try to tell me that it happened quite by chance?’
‘It’s my duty to protect her,’ said Paviour, quivering. ‘Even in such quite imaginary affairs, she could get hurt. And she could cause harm to relatively innocent partners, too.’
It was all a little too magnanimous; she had caused plenty of pain, fury and shame to him in her time, by his own account, but apparently he was supposed to be exempt from resenting that.
‘Very well, you parted from Mr Hambro close to the lodge, and came back to the house. And that’s the last you saw of him?’
‘Yes. I had no reason to think he wouldn’t keep his word.’
‘As apparently he did. We’ve seen the note he left behind. You can’t shed any light on what may have happened to him afterwards?’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve told you I came straight back to the house, and went to bed.’
‘As I understand,’ said George gently, ‘alone.’ There was a brief, bitter silence. ‘You realise, of course, that no one can confirm your whereabouts, from the time your wife came back to the house without you?’
