He said, 'Mrs Batty, I'm sorry. I believe your father was as much a victim here as anyone else. I'm sure if he had ever known-'
'Oh he knows,' she burst out. 'He knows!'
It took a few seconds for the tense to sink in.
'Knows?' he echoed.
He saw Thomas Batty's warning glance, David Batty's wry grin, remembered the nurse he'd seen going up the stairs on his first visit to the Maisterhouse.
'He's still alive?' he said incredulously. 'He's here?'
He saw the answer in Janet's face. Illogically this somehow made it all far worse. When all concerned had shared their common end, whether it means repose in a carefully tended family plot, or in a distant soldier's grave, or even in the sodden clay of a ravaged wood, there was a distancing which made the woman's living pain a great dissuader from further public rage and accusation.
But the thought that not only had this man enjoyed a long and comfortable life with all the blessings of family and fortune but was still enjoying it..
Or perhaps not. Forcing himself to speak evenly he said, 'He must be very old.'
'Oh yes,' said David Batty almost mockingly. 'We're all looking forward to the telegram from Her Majesty.'
'He's very frail,' said Janet Batty defensively. 'But he's still got all his mental faculties.'
'That must be a blessing to all concerned,' said Pascoe savagely.
'We thought so. Till this week, that is.'
'He heard about it on television, didn't he?' said Pascoe. 'He knew at once who it was; he didn't even need to wait for the details to come out. What was his reaction? That he wanted to make a clean breast after all these years? That's why you saw me personally, Mr Batty, to stress that ALBA wouldn't be prosecuting the ANIMA women, to start putting the lid on things as firmly as you could. No wonder you jumped when I told you I was one of the Kirkton Pascoes! Felt like someone walking over your grave, did it?'
He rose to his feet. He was sick of all this. Time to do what he'd come to do and get out. He tried to suppress a deep-down tremor of pleasure at the unexpected revenge he was going to take on this family which had so comprehensively misshaped his own.
Thomas was up too, getting between him and the door.
'You can't see him, Mr Pascoe,' he said. 'He's too frail to take it.'
Pascoe regarded him with some irritation in which there was an element of pity. He didn't really believe that the elder Batty had been party to the raid on Fraser Greenleaf, guessed that the news that his own son was an instigator of theft and an accessory to murder would destroy him.
'Why should you imagine I want to see your father-in- law?' he asked scornfully.
The question started rhetorical, but somewhere along the line it became real.
Why should Batty think he wanted to confront Gertie? Or rather, why was it he still got the feeling, especially from the senior Battys, that the bottom line in all this was still unread?
Arthur's statement. That feeling he had of something still requiring explication. The bottom line literally, or rather, the bottom lines.
'Your grandfather mentions contributions to the maintenance of the sergeant's family,' he said to Mrs Batty. 'He never made any, I'm sure of that.'
'He couldn't find them, no one could,' she replied.
Young Colin Pascoe did, thought Pascoe. Only perhaps he looked harder.
He said, 'But why should he feel the need even to try? He'd seen his son's efforts at help tossed back in his face.'
She shrugged as if not trusting herself to speak.
Thomas Batty said, 'It's time, I think, to let sleeping dogs lie. You're a reasonable man, Mr Pascoe, and I'm sure you can see that…’
'What sleeping dog?' said Pascoe. 'I thought we'd woken them all up. What sleeping dog?'
He picked up the handwritten statement again, reread the final paragraph. Responsibility in law… allegations made concerning my own conduct. . why should old Arthur have put in these apparently utterly redundant disclaimers?
What responsibility in law could have been alleged against him …?
He looked at Thomas Batty's blank unrevealing face, turned from it to Janet's pale stretched-out features out of which stared a pair of intent and very blue eyes, turned finally to David and met the same blue eyes in that narrow intelligent face whose features had always created in him an uncomfortable sense of near-recognition.
He thought, not this! He recalled that other Peter Pascoe's piece of self-improving autobiography which recounted how his mother had been in service with the Grindals up to the time she left to get married and give birth to her son, recalled the dreadful Quiggins woman's screamed accusations that she'd been no better than she ought to have been..
Not this!
He said, 'I'm going to see him.'
'What? No!' protested Thomas.
'Mrs Batty,' said Pascoe. 'Feel free to go and prepare him as best you can, but I'm going up whatever any of you say. Don't you think I'm entitled?'
She didn't argue but rose at once and left the room.
David Batty laughed out loud and said, 'Thought you'd get there in the end, Peter. Kind of mind that doesn't miss a trick. Takes a one to know a one!'
Pascoe left the room, stepping round Thomas who didn't move.
He ran lightly up the stairs, saw an open door and made for it.
In a large airy bedroom giving a view out across the high boundary wall towards the church and old village of Kirkton, he saw Janet Batty sitting on the edge of a bed with her arm around the shoulders of an old man, propped up by pillows. His face was pared down almost to the skull, but a shock of soft white hair still fell over his brow and the eyes which fixed on Pascoe were bright blue and alert.
Then they began to fill with tears just as his daughter's had filled a little while earlier.
'Peter,' he said brokenly. 'It's you.. after all this time … I didn't know.. not then … I swear..'
He's not seeing me, thought Pascoe. He's seeing that other Peter who died for him.
'Didn't know what?' he asked, knowing the answer but needing to hear it from this ghost incarnate who could be himself a half-century on.
That we are brothers,' said Bertie Grindal.
Brothers. Had the sergeant known? Had his mother said something to him on that visit to her deathbed in Cromer? Was this the reason that Arthur had so long delayed passing on the information about her illness? He would need to read the journals again and again to find answers to these questions. And perhaps they weren't there. And perhaps he didn't want to know them.
Janet Batty was speaking.
'He had to make a choice. Grandfather had to make a choice.'
Between the legitimate heir and the left-wing bastard?
'No choice,' said Pascoe, his eyes riveted on the old man in the bed.
'I've just been working it out,' said David's voice from behind him. 'Funny really, but because you've got an extra generation in, I must be something like your half-uncle, once removed. Welcome to the family!'
Pascoe now let his gaze leave the old man and his pale-faced daughter, and turned slowly to take in David Batty with his father behind him on the landing.
He recalled his admission to Ellie … I used to fantasize about discovering I was a changeling and I really had this completely different family I could make a fresh start with. . And here it was, his new family to set alongside the old one which had proved so singularly unsuccessful. No point in hanging around. Time to make that fresh start. .