And that brought him to the other puzzle: why had Emma Pascoe insisted on waiting a few years? Why had she not cashed in there and then?
Because Emma Pascoe had seen the way that things were going; she was hoping desperately; she had met the couple on that December afternoon, had stood and stared at them, knowing what she knew. That was before the theft of the papers. When she saw the papers, she still had to wait, hoping even harder.
For the one crime which, even if committed as an honest accident, could still be used to whip up community disgust, such is the long arm of folk-guilt.
‘I know what was amongst those papers,’ Kenworthy said.
‘You think you do?’
‘A copy of a non-marriage settlement.’
But Mervyn Prudhoe was a trier to the end. ‘Don’t be silly, Kenworthy, this was a long time before …’
‘I mean the non-marriage settlement that your father made on Sally’s mother. Home, Sergeant Tabrett. Don’t forget we have a note to deliver at the porter’s lodge.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
Tommy Pascoe coughed.
When he came to assemble the notes that he had taken from Kenworthy, he found that he had enough to confront Tommy with what seemed in the stress of the moment remarkably like an eye-witness account. For long minutes, it had seemed as if Tommy’s unreason was going to support him against persuasion. But there were details that Derek had known how to work on. Tommy had seemed strangely touched by the suggestion that things might have gone differently if Sammy had been there. When Derek mentioned the name Lard-head, it looked for a second as if Tommy was going to go berserk in the interrogation room.
Moreover, Tommy had an uncontrolled desire to justify himself; it impelled him to reveal things that a wiser man would have kept to himself.
His solicitor was going to rely heavily on diminished responsibility, against which the prosecution were not disposed to argue strongly. And, contrary to what a romantically-minded public might think, the ultimate colourlessness of the case did not depress the police with any sense of non-fulfilment.
Simon and Elspeth called in to see Sally on their way to start the second half of Kenworthy’s leave—on the south coast, in a village where neither of them had relatives; they had last visited the place in 1940.
But they did not spend long at Sally’s bedside. They saw Edward Milner, advancing down the aisle towards her bed, pushing an empty wheel-chair. Broadly smiling, clothes that looked every square inch new, brown shoes brought up to an unbelievable shine.
Unboundedly optimistic; irrational; and earnest.
Sally was going to need him.
Copyright
First published in 1975 by Macmillan
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © John Buxton Hilton, 1975
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