Elsie burst into hysterical sobs and tears.
The man pushed her gently into another room where another official and a young man in plain clothes sat at a table with papers and pens in front of them.
The interrogatory that followed was conducted with grave suavity by the senior official, but Elsie was conscious only of a horror of committing herself.
She said again and again that she and her husband had always been happy together.
It was a faint relief when at last they came to actual questions of fact, and she could reply with direct statements to the enquiries as to her movements on the previous evening.
(O God, was it only last night that she and Horace had gone to the theatre—only this morning that they had started to walk home from the Tube station?)
“Mrs. Williams, I want you to tell me in your own words exactly what happened in the alleyway just before your husband was struck.”
Elsie realised with despair that she must say something.
She was not imaginative, but almost without her own knowledge she had evolved a sort of account by which, it seemed to her, confusedly, that she might safeguard herself.
“We were walking along,” she said in a trembling, almost inaudible voice, “and there wasn’t anybody in sight, and suddenly someone rushed up from behind and pushed me away from my husband. I was sort of dazed for a moment—I think I must have been pushed against the wall—and when I recovered I saw Horace—my husband—struggling with a man. Then the man ran away.”