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Lewis quietly. ‘He wouldn’t want to be remembered as a suicide. He could have realized the game was up and, knowing Professor Carrington would more or less be bound to be blamed, shot himself in order to incriminate him.’
    Gerard Carrington started to his feet. ‘No,’ he breathed. ‘No, he couldn’t. No one could.’ His voice quavered. ‘Could they?’
    Lewis shrugged. ‘I tell you, I knew the man. He lived for his reputation. It meant everything to him.’
    ‘But this could let my father off the hook,’ muttered Carrington. ‘I thought he’d lost his temper and perhaps didn’t know what he was doing, but he could have been telling the truth all along. Is there any way of proving it? If we could show that Mr Otterbourne did know he’d been found out, it might make all the difference.’
    Ragnall and Lewis swapped glances. ‘We could look in the study,’ suggested Ragnall. ‘I know where I left the accounts. If they’ve been disturbed, then that would surely tell us that Mr Otterbourne had looked at them.’
    ‘Come on,’ said Lewis. ‘The body was taken away this afternoon but I don’t think anything else has been touched.’
    The three men walked into the study. There, on the floor, was the manila folder. Ragnall stooped down and picked them up. ‘These are the accounts,’ he said breathlessly. He opened the folder, flicking through the papers. ‘He must have looked at them.’
    ‘Come on!’ said Carrington urgently. ‘We have to tell the police.’
    They drove to the police station in Lewis’s car. As they drew up outside the station, Carrington noticed a black Rolls-Royce parked nearby. ‘It looks as if Sir David Hargreaves has arrived,’ he said. ‘It’s just as well. Even if Dad’s not guilty, he’s still in a pretty bad way.’
    Sir David was standing by the desk in the police station, talking to Inspector Gibson. Three other policemen were in the room. They all looked very solemn. Sir David looked up as Carrington, Lewis and Ragnall came in.
    ‘Sir David,’ said Gerry Carrington. ‘It’s good of you to come, sir.’ He stopped, chilled by the sudden silence in the room and the grave faces of Sir David and the policemen.
    Sir David glanced at Inspector Gibson, then came forward and, looking at Gerard Carrington compassionately, put his hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry to have to break the news, Mr Carrington, but your father is past my help. The Inspector found him in his cell.’ He paused. ‘I’m afraid your father is dead. He took his own life.’

FOUR
    F or the first couple of weeks or so after her father had died, Molly found it hard to work out exactly what was happening and why. She had loved her father and he had betrayed her. She was grief-stricken, hurt, but, most of all, angry. A chilled, hard anger that ripped into her emotions like ice ripping away the top layer of unshielded skin.
    She’d refused to believe it at first. Dad couldn’t be a thief. Everything he’d stood for, every rule he handed down, every hoop he’d made her jump through was undermined by that one stark fact. Her father was a crook.
    Ever since her mother died she had protected Dad from the world, shielding him from unkind remarks and cynical appraisal. Why? Because she believed he believed in his ideal of an ideal life for ideal workers.
    It was so quixotic, so unattainable and so worthwhile that she loved him for it. She had enough worldly knowledge to see how some regarded him as nothing more than a self-serving, unctuous, pompous hypocrite. The knowledge had hurt. And now the cynics were proved right. Her father was a self-serving, unctuous, pompous hypocrite. All her past happiness had been poisoned and she’d been trampled by those feet of clay.
    To make it worse, at the one time in her life when she wanted to hide like an injured animal, she was forced to parade her scarred emotions for public enjoyment in the press. Not that she could feel any emotion any longer. She was numb. The