“Is he, or is Roger, well-a neurotic type? Would it be either of them playing tricks?”

“I don’t know. It wouldn’t be like either of them if they were normal. And both things might have been accidents. In the first case a tap had been left running and a sink had overflowed. That’s what brought the ceiling down. In the second Roger went to sleep in front of a fire and the whole place littered with papers he’d been sorting. A spark may have jumped out of the fire.”

Judy said, “Is that all?”

There was a little scorn in her voice. It got him on the raw. He said more than he had meant to say.

“Roger doesn’t believe his father’s death was an accident.”

“Why doesn’t he?”

Frank’s shoulder jerked.

“Old Pilgrim went for a ride and never came back. They found him with a broken neck. The mare came home in a lather, and the old groom says there was a thorn under the saddle-but as they’d come down in a brier patch there’s a perfectly believable explanation. Only that makes rather a lot of things to explain, don’t you think? I don’t want you to go there.”

He saw her frown, but there was no anger in her eyes.

“It’s not so easy, you know. Everyone says there are millions of jobs, but there aren’t-not with Penny. Even now people don’t want a child in the house-you’d think you were asking if you could bring a tiger. And then a lot of them seem to think I couldn’t have Penny if she wasn’t mine. When I tell them about Nora and John they get a kind of we’ve-heard-that-tale-before look. I was just beginning to think I should have to go round with Nora’s marriage lines and Penny’s birth-certificate and even then they’d have gone on believing the worst, when I saw Miss Pilgrim’s advertisement and answered it. And I liked her, and it’s a nice safe village. And anyhow I couldn’t back out at the last minute. We’re going down there tomorrow. It’s no good, Frank.”