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Updated: June 25, 2025
He walked out at that, and Cotherstone, shaking with anger, relapsed into a chair and cursed his fate. And after a time he recovered himself and began to think, and his thoughts turned instinctively to Lettie. Mallalieu was right of course, he was right! Anything that he, Cotherstone, could say or do in the way of bringing up the things that must be suppressed would ruin Lettie's chances.
If Mallalieu was a guilty man, let Mallalieu pay the richly-deserved consequences of his misdeeds. Brereton, without being indifferent or vindictive or callous, knew that it would not give him one extra heart-throb if he heard Mallalieu found guilty and sentenced to the gallows.
Mallalieu, whatever he thought, knew very well that he would never say what he thought to Cotherstone; Cotherstone knew precisely the same thing with regard to Mallalieu. But this silence bred irritation, and as the days went by the irritation became more than Cotherstone could bear.
Bent felt the arm into which he had just slipped his own literally quiver with a spasmodic response to the astonished brain; the pipe which Mallalieu was smoking fell from his lips; out of his lips came something very like a cry of dismay. "God bless me!" he exclaimed. "You don't say so?" "It's a fact," said Bent. He stopped and picked up the fallen pipe.
Cost what it might, he must be attached to the Mallalieu-Cotherstone interest. And what Cotherstone was concentrating on just then, as he ate and drank, was how to make that attachment in such a fashion that Kitely would have no option but to keep silence. If only he and Mallalieu could get a hold on Kitely, such as that which he had on them
So Mallalieu presently went away by another route, and made his way back to Highmarket in the darkness of the evening, hiding himself behind hedges and walls until he reached his own house. And it was not until he lay safe in bed that night that he remembered the loss of his stick. The recollection of that stick plunged Mallalieu into another of his ague-like fits of shaking and trembling.
And realizing that certainty, he felt himself placed in a predicament which could not fail to be painful. It was his duty, as counsel for an innocent man, to press to the full his inquiries into the conduct of men whom he believed to be guilty. In this he was faced with an unpleasant situation. He cared nothing about Mallalieu.
The firm had no dealings with any firm at Wilchester. Stoner, who dealt with all the Mallalieu & Cotherstone correspondence, knew that during his five and a half years' clerkship, he had never addressed a single letter to any one at Wilchester, never received a single letter bearing the Wilchester post-mark.
A strange look of obstinacy and hardness came into Harborough's eyes, and he shook his head. "No!" he answered. "I shan't say! The truth'll come out in good time without that. It's not necessary for me to say. Where I was during the night is my business nobody else's." "You'll not tell?" asked Mallalieu. "I shan't tell," replied Harborough. "You're in danger, you know," said Mallalieu.
Miss Pett waited in the thickness of the trees until the voices at the foot of the Shawl became faint and far off; she herself knew well enough that they were not the voices of men who were searching for Mallalieu, but of country folk who had been into the town and were now returning home by the lower path in the wood.
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