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Sorry, I’ll steer clear of the puns, shall I?’
    ‘It’s your story,’ I said. ‘Cheapen it as much as you wish.’
    ‘What I meant to say,’ Tom continued, ‘was that you are quite right. It was all very far from proven. But there was never more than one suspect. And the only hard evidence was the knife.’
    ‘Witnesses?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘So, you think they got the wrong man?’
    ‘The evidence wouldn’t have convicted somebody these days.’
    ‘And the name of the murdered man – your ancestor?’
    ‘John Gittings.’
    I took out my notebook and jotted both names down, then closed it and allowed the elastic to snap back intoplace. ‘So, in the absence of any real evidence, how did they prove that he’d done it?’ I asked.
    ‘As far as the jury was concerned, the fact that it was his knife was pretty much conclusive. No DNA then or fingerprinting. No CCTV. A bloody knife thrown down in haste beside a lifeless body was plenty – that and the fact that the Gittings were the richest family in the village in those days. If we swore it must have been one of them there Paghams, then it must have been one of them there Paghams.’
    ‘So your family swore under oath that it was Lancelot Pagham?’
    ‘Yes, they did swear – and very much under oath – but not intentionally.’
    ‘So how do you swear under oath accidentally?’
    ‘John’s brother George gave evidence at the trial that, the same morning, he’d seen Lancelot Pagham walking towards the church – in the opposite direction to the Herring Field. He actually tried to say that it couldn’t have been him.’
    ‘That was helpful under the circumstances – it was after all his brother who had been done in.’
    ‘I’m sure he intended to be helpful but, as the judge pointed out, there was a shortcut from the church down to the coast. All George had done was to prove that Lancelot was out and about just before the time of the murder. The detour via the church might have cost him five minutes, but not more. Plenty of time to do the murder and get back home.’
    ‘Not as helpful as all that, then.’
    ‘Not to the accused, anyway. George tried to protestthat he had been misunderstood, but was told to sit down. The jury seems to have placed some weight on George’s testimony, albeit not in the way he meant it. They say George was guilt-stricken for the rest of his life. He was never quite the same man after the trial. He died in 1875 – exact causes unknown.’
    ‘George didn’t believe Lancelot Pagham was guilty then?’
    ‘I suppose not. Or if he did believe it, he’d still tried to save him and failed miserably.’
    ‘But why would he particularly want to save him if he didn’t have good reason for thinking him innocent? Lancelot Pagham was a fisherman, you say?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And John Gittings was the lord of the manor or something?’
    ‘Not quite. He was a farmer and a big landowner.’
    ‘But still – not likely to be close friends with a poor fisherman.’
    ‘No. But Lancelot’s brother, Perceval Pagham, worked for the Gittings family. He was a labourer on their farm.’
    ‘OK – that makes a bit more sense, then. So, George tried to save the brother of one of his employees, who had been wrongly accused? I can understand that. But, and I have to come back to this, the person murdered was still his own brother . He’d have had to be pretty convinced they’d got the wrong man.’
    ‘Yes, as you say, he’d have had to be fairly certain to have intervened like that. Otherwise, he should have been shouting for Lancelot Pagham to be strung up, as everyone else was. But family tradition holds that, after the trial,he never smiled again. So, we have to assume he knew something. Maybe something he couldn’t reveal at the trial.’
    ‘Did Lancelot Pagham appeal?’
    ‘I don’t think people did in those days. Once convicted you were hanged in short order. Justice was a lot more efficient then.’
    ‘At least two Sundays had