“Having done all, to stand”

“Having done all, to stand” becomes Peter Pascoe’s compact statement of duty under uncertainty. First presented as a chapter heading and then spoken aloud in a biblical, sermon-like register, the phrase links the investigators’ effort to their unresolved question of whether they have done enough.

Wording and Recurrence

The phrase appears in the chapter heading “and having done all, to stand” and returns within Peter Pascoe’s recitation about taking up the whole armour of God and standing against evil. Its recurrence moves it from a heading into the investigators’ immediate conversation: the words become a frame for how they understand their work, rather than a promise that their efforts will settle every question.

Pascoe’s Use of the Phrase

Before invoking the scriptural language, Peter Pascoe recalls asking Ellie Pascoe why people treated him as the CID’s moral conscience. Her reply—that they should treat him that way—had left him without an answer. Now he delivers the passage in a parsonical voice, smiles at the baffled faces, and asks what the others make of it. Andrew Dalziel identifies himself as a man of flesh and blood; Edgar Wield agrees. Pascoe treats their shared response as a majority and turns from elevated religious rhetoric to the practical conclusion facing the inquiry.

Duty, Limits, and the Ending

Pascoe says that Palinurus Maciver Junior discovered he had an inoperable brain tumour and took his own life, and predicts that this will be the inquest verdict. He distinguishes that anticipated finding from the wider affair: he cannot say whether the verdict will end it, but believes it will end the investigators’ part. “We have done all we can, I think,” he says, while leaving open whether they have done enough; the answer belongs to an “evil day” that has not yet arrived. The phrase therefore holds together commitment and limitation. Standing is not proof of success or certainty, but the position the investigators occupy after exhausting what they can do.