Wicked Uncle by Patricia Wentworth

what he says. Him saying he’ll fix it up for me— as if I didn’t know what that meant! I may have been a fool, but I’m not such a fool as not to be able to see right through Mr. Gregory Porlock. General agent, my foot! Blackmail—that’s his business, I tell you—blackmail! But I’ll be even with him!” Mr. Tote had recourse to language again. “I’ll show him whether he can blackmail me! If he gets a knife in him some dark night he’ll only have himself to blame!”
    He had been shouting. Mrs. Tote leaned forward and tapped him on the knee.
    “Be quiet,” she said. “That’s foolish talk. Do you want everyone in the house to hear you? You get a hold of yourself, Albert, and tell me what it’s all about. What have you done?”
    He said in a sullen voice,
    “No more than hundreds of others.”
    “What was it?”
    He threw her a fleeting look, sitting up there in the sofa corner with her skinny hands held together in her lap and her eyes looking at him. A little bit of a thing, Emily, but set in her ways. You could put her into a fur coat that cost a thousand, but you couldn’t make her look like a rich man’s wife. But she wouldn’t talk—Emily wouldn’t talk. He’d got to tell someone. He said,
    “It wasn’t anything to start with, only the use of the yard so a lorry could be run in and be handy when it was wanted.”
    “Wanted for what?”
    “What had that got to do with me? Then they wanted the hire of my lorry as well, and I said I wasn’t letting it out for any Tom, Dick or Harry to drive. And they said I’d be paid for what it was worth three or four times over.”
    Emily Tote said, “Who is they?”
    “Sam Black, if you want to know. Well, by that time I was in it enough to get into trouble, but not enough for it to be worth while. I said to Sam, ‘I’m not playing about with this any more. It’s not worth my while.’ And he said, ‘It might be.’ And to cut a long story short, it was.”
    “Black market?” said Emily Tote.
    He threw himself back in his corner.
    “Money going begging—that’s what it was.”
    She sat up very straight in the blue flannel dressing-gown which it was no use trying to make her change for a silk one. That was Emily all over. She sat there, and she said as cool as a cucumber.
    “Five pounds to a lorry-driver to get out and have a cup of cocoa or a glass of beer, and a dozen barrels of sugar, or it may be butter, gone before he comes back. Was that the game?”
    His jaw dropped.
    “Why, Mother!”
    “Do you think I don’t read the papers? It’s all been there in black and white for anyone to see. And some of the ones they caught got stiff sentences, didn’t they?”
    Mr. Tote’s ruddy colour had faded.
    “That was in the war,” he said.
    “And what you did—wasn’t that in the war?”
    “Don’t talk like that! It isn’t going to come out, I tell you. Who’s going to bother about what happened three or four years ago? If I pay up, it will be only because I don’t want any unpleasantness.”
    Mrs. Tote was still looking at him.
    “You didn’t make all that money out of a few odd barrels.”
    He actually laughed.
    “Of course I didn’t! That was only the beginning. I got into it in a big way. Why, if I was to tell you some of the hauls we made, you wouldn’t believe me. Organizing ability—that’s what they said I had. One of the planners—that was me. There’s a funny thing about money, you know—once you start making it, it fair runs away with you and makes itself. When we started with that twopenny-halfpenny business in Clapham, I lay you never thought you’d be a rich man’s wife.”
    Deep inside herself Emily Tote answered with the words which she would never allow to pass her lips—“I never thought I’d be married to a thief.”
    She said aloud, “I wouldn’t say too much about that. You’ve only told me half. What does Mr. Porlock know, and what is he going to do?”
    The blood rushed back into his face,