Thomas Penhallow

Thomas Penhallow was twenty-four on Lantern Night, 1953. That evening he quarreled with his father in public, and a few hours later his father was dead. He was never charged and never cleared, and Porthgrey made sure he never forgot it.

He left the next year and never went back. He married, raised a daughter, and in seventy-two years never once spoke about the town he was born in. When Morwenna asked why they never went to Cornwall on holiday, he said the sea there was too cold.

After his death, she found a biscuit tin behind a panel in his attic. Inside was his father’s missing ledger, and a note in his own hand:

“He had it with him that night. I found it on the stairs. I was afraid they would say I took it.”