“I met her,” Bony smilingly admitted.

“Rude, ignorant, violent and almost always objectionable,” Mr Harston proceeded. “Mary Answerth has shouted me down in my own office. She has called me every name used by rough working men. She has openly insulted me in the street. Because now and then I feel that her attitude is less deliberately intended than natural to her, and in view of her forebears, I’ve put up with it, and eventually found it best to give back as much as she gives. I have to admire her for her business acumen. Peculiarly enough, I get along better with her than with her sister. Yes, old Jacob Answerth didn’t leave behind him easy clients.”

“May I assume that Miss Mary Answerth is equally objectionable to other people?”

“That is so.”

“Would the Answerths, as a family, be likely to have enemies?”

“It’s likely that Mary Answerth has a hundred enemies. But Mrs Answerth, no. Mrs Answerth was entirely negative. From the time her husband died, she was never seen in Edison but once, and on that occasion she came to town to consult Dr Lofty.”

“Did you know the first wife?”

“Oh, yes! The first wife was a kind of hanger-on to a gang of travelling shearers. If you think of the last woman on earth to snare into marriage a wealthy pastoralist, you will see that woman. Mary is her very flesh and bone and mind. Janet takes after her father, or rather her father would have been more like her had he been more balanced. The second Mrs Answerth was the daughter of respectable and affluent pastoralists. She wasn’t happy with her husband.”

“Was she happy with her stepdaughters?”

Mr Harston blinked. His eyes hardened. Yet he spoke with seeming frankness.

“I cannot honestly say that she was particularly unhappy, Inspector. She was not a normally happy woman. Her only son, Morris, was ever a sore disappointment, and her husband never forgave her for that boy.”