Bones in the Barrow (26 page)

Hilton shielded his face with his hand, looking sadly into the fire.

“Of course, we can't be sure,” David went on. “There may have been some other reason for the mad course he embarked on. Before that first week-end visit of his to Duckington there was nothing whatever to connect him with you. You would never have thought of him. You never did think of him, did you?”

“No. Never once. Though I saw him every day.”

“Perhaps his lesser mistakes would have betrayed him in the end. He had ideas, but he was careless. It was highly dangerous to leave the suitcases with Mrs. Bracegirdle, because it became too dangerous later, after the hunt started, to attempt to get them back. It was silly and mean, or very careless, not to pay Mrs. Hunt what he owed her for electricity. And the same with old Harding. He left grievances wherever he went, and unsatisfied people always complain. Harding, who suspected him of dirty work, would not have accosted me, thinking I was Young, if he had not also wanted the money Young owed him. It was foolhardy in the extreme of Young to give Shirley that brooch, but he was probably afraid to take it to a jeweller, and I think we had rather given him to understand, by then, that you were the chief suspect. No, on the whole,” David finished, “he cooked his own goose, as most of them do. They have this uncontrollable itch to display their guilt, explain it, justify it, or transfer it. He ran true to form.”

“When did you first spot him?” asked Hilton.

“I had a faint suspicion the first time I went to Boxwood by train. There was a boy in charge at the bookstall. He said for one thing that Young had been away from work, sick, in November. And he also said, which surprised me, something about Mrs. Sims being a smasher, as he put it, but not such a smasher as Mrs. Hilton. When I showed surprise he mumbled that that was what the boss had said. I just wondered.”

“And kept on wondering,” said Jill. “I know you.”

“Of course, I ought to have spotted the advertisement boards. But I didn't. One is so unobservant.”

“Oh, I wouldn't say that,” said Alastair Hilton.

First published in 1953 by Methuen

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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ISBN 978-1-4472-2129-6 EPUB
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Copyright © Josephine Bell, 1953

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