The Lily Hand and Other Stories by Ellis Peters Page A

shock. Queer the way the human mind works. Nothing whatever had happened to him physically, nothing new had come to his knowledge; the thing that shocked him had been there within his consciousness for over a year; the only new development was that it had just been taken from behind his eyes and set, as it were, in front of them.
    Exactly half an hour earlier, the police had arrested him for falsifying the books of his firm on a dozen separate occasions, and misappropriating to his own use something like five hundred pounds.
    I had to touch him before he realized I was there. I sat down in front of him, and took his hands, and my grip seemed to penetrate his consciousness.
    But when I said, ‘Hullo, Frank, what’s been happening to you?’ he only stared at me helplessly, and said, ‘I don’t know,’ like a child who’d had a fright.
    He’d been like that from the first moment, they said. He’d listened to the caution and the charge, and then simply let go of everything. It was too much for him now that it was out in full view. He couldn’t grasp it.
    All he’d said to the charge was, ‘Yes.’ And some minutes later, as though he wanted to explain, ‘She was used to nice things. She didn’t understand about money.’
    It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
    He’d been slightly careless, it seemed, over the last transaction, and the amount was bigger, too. Almost all of it was still in the house; he showed them where, moving like a sleepwalker.
    So far as he had any mind left he did his best to co-operate. I could understand that. Thirty-two years old, hard-working, a mirror of unassuming respectability, kindly, scrupulous, patient, precise, his natural place was on the side of the law.
    There wasn’t much I could do for him at that stage, either as probation officer or as friend. His police-court appearance had to be deferred for three weeks or more, because he wasn’t fit to be put in the dock.
    For two or three days he continued half dead, and then the numbness wore off and he was infinitely worse, alternating between collapse and hysteria. He spent a week under sedatives, and slowly emerged into a sort of calm, a sort of articulate life.
    As soon as he was fit to talk to a solicitor I went to see his wife, to urge her to get him into the hands of a good man as quickly as possible.
    I’d never really noticed her before, or I should have understood. She received me in the sitting room of their small, respectable house, in a dress which wouldn’t have been out of place at an embassy cocktail party, and wearing a sapphire pendant on a platinum chain. Twenty-eight, very pretty, very chic, with a hard, bright finish. Gold hair and a very short, full, hungry mouth.
    She was very voluble indeed on the subject of her husband. It had been a terrible shock to her, and she couldn’t forgive it. He’d brought disgrace on her, drawn down a barrage of gossip and calumny upon her innocent person. For innocent she certainly felt herself to be, and deeply injured. It was no part of her duty to associate herself with a criminal, and she didn’t intend to.
    He could get legal aid, couldn’t he? She had her own position to think of. If she left the public in any doubt of where she stood she would be doing herself an injustice.
    She meant to give evidence for the prosecution. Oh, she knew she wasn’t forced to by law, but she owed it to herself. Frank must take the consequences of his own actions, he wasn’t going to shuffle them off on to her. As for briefing a lawyer, where did I think she was to get the money? She was left to provide for herself now; not that he ever had been very good at providing for a wife. And besides, there was the principle of the thing!
    I was glad to get out of there. The room was as much of a revelation, in its way, as Mrs Willard herself. It was most expensively decorated, and full of possessions. There was a