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First published in Great Britain in 1972 by Collins Crime
Copyright © Emma Page 1972
Emma Page asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008175986
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN: 9780008175993
Version [2016-02-18]
CONTENTS
A damp and desolate afternoon in Milbourne, a hangover day filmed with the melancholy of the old year’s passing.
Little swirls and eddies of fog among the grey stone streets. The yellow lights of shops half-heartedly welcoming the straggle of dispirited housewives beginning the new year as they had finished the old, plugging the gaps in the family store-cupboard against yet another weekend, another succession of mountainous meals to be consumed in the name of festivity.
In the manufacturing quarter of the town, a mile or more away from the main shopping area, Owen Yorke sat at his desk in the small cramped office on the ground floor of Underwood’s. He had built the factory in the years of restriction that followed the second war.
No thought of luxury then, no concern to provide himself–the managing director and joint owner–with impressive surroundings of pale wood and a wide sweep of window, only the urgent necessity to produce, to sell, to start the wheels turning and keep them turning.
Now, twenty-five years later, success and the eternal need for expansion had brought Underwood’s to the point at which the old factory would no longer do. The plans for the new building had already been approved, work was to begin on the site in a matter of weeks, as soon as the fierce grip of frost showed signs of slackening.
Owen Yorke bent his head over the plans uncurled on his desk, considering the layout of the storage bays. The factory was silent now, the machines idle until Monday morning brought the workers streaming in again through the gates. Only a skeleton staff in today, the man who looked after the old-fashioned heating system, a handful of clerks catching up with the paperwork, cleaners busy with mops and buckets.
Owen tilted back his chair and stared thoughtfully at the opposite wall, not seeing its clutter of charts and graphs, the gay new calendar, the framed photograph of Ralph Underwood, his father-in-law, dead now for more than a quarter of a century but still looking out from the yellowing cardboard with his habitual half-smile of tentative goodwill.
Rather astonished, old Ralph would have been, at the way his modest gown and mantle shop in the High Street had given birth to this thriving garment factory. Even more astonished if he could have run his eye over the new plans and glimpsed the magnificent edifice his son-in-law was proposing to erect on the new manufacturing estate outside Milbourne.
Owen ran a finger along his nose. Everything was going well. I’m barely fifty, he thought, I have fifteen good years of work in me, twenty perhaps with luck. He looked after himself, didn’t smoke, took a drink only when the social side of business demanded it; he paid attention to his diet, found time for a round of golf now and then.
And he was respected in the town, highly thought of both as an employer and a responsible citizen. He lent his name to good causes, wrote out dutifully philanthropic