“What we wanted,” Stanley Fleetwood interrupted, “was to persuade him to allow a divorce to go through quietly. Then we could have regularised matters with as little fuss as possible. From what I'd heard of him, he didn't seem the sort who would refuse a bribe, if it was big enough——”
He caught the lawyer's warning eye and halted abruptly.
“I understand,” Sir Clinton interposed smoothly. “You wished to come to some agreement with him. We needn't discuss the terms. Will you go on, please, Mrs. Fleetwood?”
“I wrote him a letter,” Cressida pursued, with rather more courage in her tone as she saw that Sir Clinton was obviously not directly hostile, like the inspector. “Mr. Fleetwood took it across to Flatt's cottage that afternoon—Friday afternoon—and dropped it into the letter-box. You'll understand in a moment that I didn't wish Mr. Fleetwood to meet this man face to face.”
The inspector looked up from the note-book in which he was making a shorthand report of the interview.
“You might identify the letter we found on the body,” he suggested.
Sir Clinton produced the letter, and Cressida examined it.
“Yes, that's it. I arranged to meet him at Neptune's Seat late in the evening, when no one was likely to be on the beach. I didn't want to have him coming about the hotel, naturally.”
She halted for a moment or two, as though she felt she was coming to the difficult point in her tale.
“Perhaps you won't understand what I've got to say next. If I could let you know what sort of man he was, you'd understand better. There are some things one can't tell. But I want you to know that I was really in physical fear of him. I'm not easily frightened; but during the month or so that I lived with him he stamped fear into me—real physical fear, downright terror of personal violence, I mean. He drank; and when he had been drinking he seemed to grow almost inhuman. He terrified me so much that I left him, even before he went back to the Front.”