THE ANCIENT OFFICE OF CORONER
The discovery of Wallingford's will, which lay uppermost amongst a small
collection of private papers in a drawer of the dead man's desk, led
Brent and Tansley into a new train of thought. Tansley, with the ready
perception and acumen of a man trained in the law, was quick to point
out two or three matters which in view of Wallingford's murder seemed to
be of high importance, perhaps of deep significance. Appended to the
will was a schedule of the testator's properties and possessions, with
the total value of the estate estimated and given in precise
figures--that was how Brent suddenly became aware that he had come into
a small fortune. Then the will itself was in holograph, written out in
Wallingford's own hand on a single sheet of paper, in the briefest
possible fashion, and witnessed by his two clerks. And, most important
and significant of all, it had been executed only a week previously.
"Do you know how that strikes me?" observed Tansley in a low voice, as
if he feared to be overheard. "It just looks to me as if Wallingford had
anticipated that something was about to happen. Had he ever given you
any idea in his letters that he was going to do this?"
"Never!" replied Brent. "Still--I'm the only very near relative that he
had."
"Well," said Tansley, "it may be mere coincidence, but it's a bit odd
that he should be murdered within a week of that will's being made. I'd
just like to know if he'd been threatened--openly, anonymously, any way.
Looks like it."
"I suppose we shall get into things at the inquest?" asked Brent.
Tansley shrugged his shoulders.
"Maybe," he answered. "I've no great faith in inquests myself. But
sometimes things do come out. And our coroner, Seagrave, is a
painstaking and thorough-going sort of old chap--the leading solicitor
in the town too. But it all depends on what evidence can be brought
forward. I've always an uneasy feeling, as regards a coroner's inquiry,
that the very people who really could tell something never come
forward."
"Doesn't that look as if such people were keeping something back that
would incriminate themselves?" suggested Brent.
"Not necessarily," replied Tansley. "But it often means that it might
incriminate others. And in an old town like this, where the folk are
very clannish and closely connected one with another by, literally,
centuries of intermarriage between families, you're not going to get one
man to give another away."
"You think that even if the murderer is known, or if some one suspected,
he would be shielded?" asked Brent.
"In certain eventualities, yes," answered Tansley. "We all know that
rumours about your cousin's murder are afloat in the town now--and
spreading. Well, the more they spread, the closer and more secretive
will those people become who are in the know; that is, of course, if
anybody is in the know. That's a fact!"
"What do you think yourself?" said Brent suddenly. "Come now?"
"I think the Mayor was got rid of--and very cleverly," replied Tansley.
"So cleverly that I'm doubtful if to-morrow's inquest will reveal
anything. However, it's got to be held."
"Well, you'll watch it for me?" said Brent. "I'm going to spare no
expense and no pains to get at the truth."
He sat at Tansley's side when the inquest was opened next morning in the
principal court of the old Moot Hall. It struck him as rather a curious
fact that, although he had followed the profession of journalist for
several years, he had never until then been present at the holding of
this--one of the most ancient forms of inquiry known to English law. But
he was familiar with the history of the thing--he knew that ever since
the days of Edward IV the Coroner had held his sitting, _super visum
corporis_, with the aid of at least twelve jurymen, _probi et legales
homines_, there was scarcely in all the range of English legal economy
an office more ancient. He inspected the Coroner and his jury with
curious interest--Seagrave, Coroner of the Honour of Hathelsborough, was
a keen-faced old lawyer, whose astute looks were relieved by a kindly
expression; his twelve good men and true were tradesmen of the town,
whose exterior promised a variety of character and temperament, from
the sharply alert to the dully unimaginative.
There were other people there in whom Brent was speedily interested, and
at whom he gazed with speculative attention in the opening stages of the
proceedings. The court was crowded: by the time Seagrave, as Coroner,
took his seat, there was not a square foot of even standing space. Brent
recognized a good many folk. There was Peppermore, with his sharp-eyed
boy assistant; there, ranged alongside of them, were many other
reporters, from the various county newspapers, and at least one man whom
Brent recognized as being from the Press Association in London. And
there was a big array of police, with Hawthwaite at its head, and there
were doctors, and officials of the Moot Hall, and, amongst the general
public, many men whom Brent remembered seeing the previous day in Bull's
Snug. Krevin Crood was among these; in a privileged seat, not far away,
sat his brother, the Alderman, with Queenie half-hidden at his side, and
his satellites, Mallett and Coppinger, in close attendance. And near
them, in another privileged place, sat a very pretty woman, of a
distinct and superior type, attired in semi-mourning, and accompanied by
her elderly female companion. Brent was looking at these two when
Tansley nudged his elbow.
"You see that handsome woman over there--next to the older one?" he
whispered. "That's the Mrs. Saumarez you've heard of--that your
unfortunate cousin was very friendly with. Rich young widow, she is, and
deuced pretty and attractive--Wallingford used to dine with her a good
deal. I wonder if she's any ideas about this mystery? However, I guess
we shall hear many things before the day's out; of course I haven't the
slightest notion what evidence is going to be given. But I've a pretty
good idea that Seagrave means to say some pretty straight things to the
jury!"
Here Tansley proved to be right. The Coroner, in opening the
proceedings, made some forcible remarks on their unusual gravity and
importance. Here was a case in which the chief magistrate of one of the
most ancient boroughs in England had been found dead in his official
room under circumstances which clearly seemed to point to murder.
Already there were rumours in the town and neighbourhood of the darkest
and most disgraceful sort--that the Mayor of Hathelsborough had been
done to death, in a peculiarly brutal fashion, by a man or men who
disagreed with the municipal reforms which he was intent on carrying
out. It would be a lasting, an indelible blot on the old town's fair
fame, never tarnished before in this way, if this inquiry came to
naught, if no definite verdict was given, he earnestly hoped that by the
time it concluded they would be in possession of facts which would, so
to speak, clear the town, and any political party in the town. He begged
them to give the closest attention to all that would be put before them,
and to keep open minds until they heard all the available evidence.
"A fairly easy matter in this particular case!" muttered Tansley, as the
jurymen went out to discharge their distasteful, preliminary task of
viewing the body of the murdered man. "I don't suppose there's a single
man there who has the ghost of a theory, and I'm doubtful if he'll know
much more to-night than he knows now--unless something startling is
sprung upon us."
Brent was the first witness called into the box when the court settled
down to its business. He formally identified the body of the deceased as
that of his cousin, John Wallingford: at the time of his death, Mayor of
Hathelsborough, and forty-one years of age. He detailed the particulars
of his own coming to the town on the evening of the murder, and told how
he and Bunning, going upstairs to the Mayor's Parlour, had found
Wallingford lying across his desk, dead. All this every man and woman in
the court knew already--but the Coroner desired to know more.
"I believe, Mr. Brent," he said, when the witness had given these
particulars, "that you are the deceased's nearest blood-relative?"
"I am," replied Brent.
"Then you can give us some information which may be of use. Although the
Mayor had lived in Hathelsborough some twelve years or so, he was
neither a native of the town nor of these parts. Now, can you give us
some particulars about him--about his family and his life before he came
to this borough?"
"Yes," said Brent. "My cousin was the only son--only child, in fact--of
the Reverend Septimus Wallingford, who was sometime Vicar of Market
Meadow, in Berkshire. He is dead--many years ago--so is his wife. My
cousin was educated at Reading Grammar School, and on leaving it he was
articled to a firm of solicitors in that town. After qualifying as a
solicitor, he remained with that firm for some time. About twelve years
ago he came to this place as managing clerk to a Hathelsborough firm;
its partners eventually retired, and he bought their practice."
"Was he ever married?"
"Never!"
"You knew him well?"
"He was some twelve years my senior," answered Brent, "so I was a mere
boy when he was a young man. But of late years we have seen a good deal
of each other--he has frequently visited me in London, and this would
have been my third visit to him here. We corresponded regularly."
"You were on good terms?"
"We were on very good terms."
"And confidential terms?"
"As far as I know--yes. He took great interest in my work as a
journalist, and I took great interest in his career in this town."
"And I understand that he has marked his sense of--shall we say, kinship
for you by leaving you all his property?"
"He has!"
"Now, did he ever say anything to you, by word of mouth or letter, about
any private troubles?"
"No, never!"
"Or about any public ones?"
"Well, some months ago, soon after he became Mayor of Hathelsborough, he
made a sort of joking reference, in a letter, to something that might
come under that head."
"Yes? What, now?"
"He said that he had started on his task of cleaning out the Augean
stable of Hathelsborough, and that the old task of Hercules was child's
play compared to his."
"I believe, Mr. Brent, that you visited your cousin here in the town
about Christmas last? Did he say anything to you about Hathelsborough at
that time? I mean, as regards what he called his Augean stables task?"
Brent hesitated. He glanced at the eagerly-listening spectators, and he
smiled a little.
"Well," he replied half-hesitatingly, "he did! He said that in his
opinion Hathelsborough was the rottenest and most corrupt little town in
all England!"
"Did you take that as a seriously meant statement, Mr. Brent?"
"Oh, well--he laughed as he made it. I took it as a specimen of his
rather heightened way of putting things."
"Did he say anything that led you to think that he believed himself to
have bitter enemies in the town?"
"No," said Brent, "he did not."
"Neither then nor at any other time?"
"Neither then nor at any other time."
The Coroner asked no further questions, and Brent sat down again by
Tansley, and settled himself to consider whatever evidence might follow.
He tried to imagine himself a Coroner or juryman, and to estimate and
weigh the testimony of each succeeding witness in its relation to the
matter into which the court was inquiring. Some of it, he thought, was
relevant; some had little in it that carried affairs any further. Yet he
began to see that even the apparently irrelevant evidence was not
without its importance. They were links, these statements, these
answers; links that went to the making of a chain.
He was already familiar with most of the evidence: he knew what each
witness was likely to tell before one or other entered the box. Bunning
came next after himself; Bunning had nothing new to tell. Nor was there
anything new in the medical evidence given by Dr. Wellesley and Dr.
Barber--all the town knew how the Mayor had been murdered, and the
purely scientific explanations as to the cause of death were merely
details. More interest came when Hawthwaite produced the fragment of
handkerchief picked up on the hearth of the Mayor's Parlour, half-burnt;
and when he brought forward the rapier which had been discovered behind
the bookcase; still more when a man who kept an old curiosity shop in a
back street of the town proved that he had sold the rapier to
Wallingford only a few days before the murder. But interest died down
again while the Borough Surveyor produced elaborate plans and diagrams,
illustrating the various corridors, passages, entrances and exits of the
Moot Hall, with a view to showing the difficulty of access to the
Mayor's Parlour. It revived once more when the policeman who had been on
duty at the office in the basement stepped into the box and was
questioned as to the possibilities of entrance to the Moot Hall through
the door near which his desk was posted. For on pressure by the Coroner
he admitted that between six and eight o'clock on the fateful evening he
had twice been absent from the neighbourhood of that door for intervals
of five or six minutes--it was therefore possible that the murderer had
slipped in and slipped out without attracting attention.
This admission produced the first element of distinct sensation which
had so far materialized. As almost every person present was already
fairly well acquainted with the details of what had transpired on the
evening of the murder--Peppermore having published every scrap of
information he could rake up, in successive editions of his
_Monitor_--the constable's belated revelation came as a surprise.
Hawthwaite turned on the witness with an irate, astonished look; the
Coroner glanced at Hawthwaite as if he were puzzled; then looked down at
certain memoranda lying before him. He turned from this to the witness,
a somewhat raw, youthful policeman.
"I understood that you were never away from that door between six and
eight o'clock on the evening in question?" he said. "Now you admit that
you were twice away from it?"
"Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir, I clean forgot that when--when the
superintendent asked me at first. I--I was a bit flustered like."
"Now let us get a clear statement about this," said the Coroner, after a
pause. "We know quite well from the plans, and from our own knowledge,
that anyone could get up to the Mayor's Parlour through the police
office in the basement at the rear of the Moot Hall. What time did you
go on duty at the door that opens into the office, from St. Laurence
Lane?"
"Six o'clock, sir."
"And you were about the door--at a desk there, eh?--until when?"
"Till after eight, sir."
"But you say you were absent for a short time, twice?"
"Yes, sir, I remember now that I was."
"What were the times of those two absences?"
"Well, sir, about ten minutes to seven I went along to the charge office
for a few minutes--five or six minutes. Then at about a quarter to eight
I went downstairs into the cellar to get some paraffin for a lamp--I
might be away as long, then, sir."
"And, of course, during your absence anybody could have left or
entered--unnoticed?"
"Well, they could, sir, but I don't think anybody did."
"Why, now?"
"Because, sir, the door opening into St. Laurence Lane is a very heavy
one, and I never heard it either open or close. The latch is a heavy
one, too, sir, and uncommon stiff."
"Still, anybody might," observed the Coroner. "Now, what is the length
of the passage between that door, the door at the foot of the stairs
leading to this court--by which anybody would have to come to get that
way to the Mayor's Parlour?"
The witness reflected for a moment.
"Well, about ten yards, sir," he answered.
The Coroner looked at the plan which the Borough Surveyor had placed
before him and the jury a few minutes previously. Before he could say
anything further, Hawthwaite rose from his seat and making his way to
him exchanged a few whispered remarks with him. Presently the Coroner
nodded, as if in assent to some suggestions.
"Oh, very well," he said. "Then perhaps we'd better have her at once.
Call--what's her name, did you say? Oh, yes--Sarah Jane Spizey!"
From amidst a heterogeneous collection of folk, men and women,
congregated at the rear of the witness-box, a woman came forward--one of
the most extraordinary looking creatures that he had ever seen, thought
Brent. She was nearly six feet in height; she was correspondingly built;
her arms appeared to be as brawny as a navvy's; her face was of the
shape and roundness of a full moon; her mouth was a wide slit, her nose
a button; her eyes were as shrewd and hard as they were small and
close-set. A very Grenadier of a woman!--and apparently quite unmoved by
the knowledge that everybody was staring at her.
Sarah Jane Spizey--yes. Wife of the Town Bellman. Resident in St.
Laurence Lane. Went out charing sometimes; sometimes worked at
Marriner's Laundry. Odd-job woman, in fact.
"Mrs. Spizey," said the Coroner, "I understand that on the evening of
Mr. Wallingford's death you were engaged in some work in the Moot Hall.
Is that so?"
"Yes, sir. Which I was a-washing the floor of this very court."
"What time was that, Mrs. Spizey?"
"Which I was at it, your Worshipful, from six o'clock to eight."
"Did you leave this place at all during that time?"
"Not once, sir; not for a minute."
"Now during the whole of that time, Mrs. Spizey, did you see anybody
come up those stairs, cross the court, and go towards the Mayor's
Parlour?"
"Which I never did, sir! I never see a soul of any sort. Which the place
was empty, sir, for all but me and my work, sir."
The Coroner motioned Mrs. Spizey to stand down, and glanced at
Hawthwaite.
"I think this would be a convenient point at which to adjourn," he said.
"I----"
But Hawthwaite's eyes were turned elsewhere. In the body of the court an
elderly man had risen.