Читать книгу Murder in Stained Glass - Armstrong Margaret - Страница 7

How sharper than a serpent’s child it is to have a thankless tooth.

Mixed Proverb.

THE inquest came off on Wednesday. There had been much discussion as to the time and place, for the sheriff and the local people wanted to postpone everything until Mr. Ullathorne returned; the sheriff, because Mr. Ullathorne might suggest some way of identifying the victim, and the village, for fear Mr. Ullathorne, of whom they stood a good deal in awe, when he did come, wouldn’t like strangers poking around his premises without permission. For the same reason they didn’t want to hold the inquest in the glass shop. Mr. Merritt thought the basement of the Methodist Church where the Christian Endeavorers held their meetings would be suitable, and Mrs. Flack offered the big room over the post office. But Gleason had his own ideas. He said it was nonsense to wait for Mr. Ullathorne. All efforts to reach Mr. Ullathorne by wire and telephone had been unavailing. If Mr. Ullathorne didn’t like visitors on his premises let him come and say so. The inquest ought to be held as soon as the coroner could get a jury together, and the scene of the crime was the proper place. This was what the district attorney, Mr. Drinkwater, thought too. In the end a compromise was reached. The jury and various witnesses, including our little group, were told to come to the glass shop on Wednesday at nine o’clock in the forenoon.

I confess I was thrilled when I got the notice to attend. It was such an impersonal crime. Unreal. Your feelings weren’t involved, for those bones couldn’t belong to anyone you knew. And besides, by this time the bones were no longer very bony. Their trips back and forth in the box to Dr. Greely’s office and to the office of the medical examiner in Banbury hadn’t done them any good as exhibits. It was reported that the Banbury man was indignant, said he couldn’t be expected to report on a pint of bone meal and cinders, and Gleason scolded Mr. Merritt for not having packed the bones in cotton, and he would have scolded Dr. Greely too but the poor man was in bed with influenza and couldn’t be interviewed.

Well, Wednesday morning came, and Phyllis and I started out bright and early. But we had to park a long way from the glass shop, for the roads were simply packed with cars of all sorts and kinds, and there was such a solid mass of people jammed together in front of the shop that Phyllis and I wondered how in the world we were ever going to get through.

The path had been roped off and a policeman stood at the gate, but he was a stranger and didn’t pay the slightest attention to us when we signaled to him for help. We stopped on the opposite side of the road, and stood looking about, hoping to see Mr. Merritt, or Sam Beers, or somebody else we knew; but there wasn’t a soul. The village had been crowded out by a rather horrid-looking mob of sightseers, laughing and shouting and chewing gum. We were at our wits’ end when, to my relief, I caught sight of a familiar figure; an old friend, Edgar Farraday, had just reached the gate and was speaking to the policeman.

“Oh, Edgar!” I called. “Edgar Farraday! Come over and help us. We can’t get through.”

He turned, smiled, waved his hat, and began making his way towards us. I couldn’t help laughing a little; he looked so absurdly out of place.

Edgar Farraday is a good deal older than I am, but when I came out he was still going to dances and still considered the best dressed man in New York. Both he and I care less for dancing than we used to, but we have preserved our interest in clothes, and it did my heart good to see him now in his well-cut rough coat, so exactly right for a March morning in the country, with a red carnation in his buttonhole.

As he is over six feet tall, he hadn’t much difficulty in reaching us. We shook hands. I introduced him to Phyllis. He regarded her with pleasure.

“I knew your mother,” he said—Edgar always remembers everybody’s mother. “A charming girl. You are very like her, my dear; except that her eyes were gray.” Edgar always remembers everybody’s mother’s eyes. “Yours, I see, are forget-me-not blue. What brings you here, Harriet?”

“I’m staying with Charlotte Blair. You remember Charlotte Blair?”

“Yes, indeed,” he said politely, but without enthusiasm. “You’re staying here? Then you can give me the details of this strange affair. Is it true that a murder was committed in Fred Ullathorne’s studio?”

“It looks that way. But I can’t tell you about it now. The inquest begins at nine and Phyllis and I are expected to attend. Can you get us through?”

“Of course. Come along!” He gave us each an arm and we began our difficult progress.

“How do you happen to be here, Edgar?” I asked, as we were brought to a halt behind two stout women arm-in-arm. “Did you come for the inquest?”

“Not exactly. I happened to be in Banbury, staying with the Lorrimers, on my way back from New Hampshire where I went to look at a piece of property. I’ve been dabbling in real estate, lately. Of course, when the news came of this murder, being such an old friend of Fred Ullathorne’s, I thought—”

He broke off; the crowd was moving again. With some powerful pushing and a good deal of persuasion, in a few minutes we were at the gate.

The policeman let us through when I explained that we were all friends of Mr. Frederick Ullathorne. The door stood open. The furnace cellar, “scene of the tragedy,” had been roped off, and we were told to go straight upstairs to the workroom.

Up we went. Edgar followed close behind me. I anticipated an exclamation of delight as he saw the rose window, and I wasn’t disappointed.

“By Jove!” he exclaimed, pausing. “Ullathorne has surpassed himself. That’s magnificent!”

“Come along,” I whispered. “It’s a crime, not art, we’re after for the moment. Where shall we sit? Over there in the corner?”

“Why not sit on this side facing the window? If the proceedings are dull—most legal proceedings are dull—we can look, not listen.”

I nodded. We moved to the chairs he had pointed out. I beckoned to Leo. He joined us. We all sat down.

In some ways, the workroom was less changed in appearance than I had expected. The drafting tables had been taken down and stacked in a far corner, and the local undertaker had provided plenty of camp stools; but the cartoons on the walls—Moses and Elijah, Ruth and Naomi, Saint George and Saint Patrick—and the rose window blazing down over everything, preserved the medieval effect that had impressed me when I first saw the place. We might have been in Rheims five hundred years ago, instead of twentieth century New England. I noticed that almost every person stopped talking as he entered, gave an upward glance at the rose window, and took his seat as if it were a pew.

The room was not crowded. No one spoke above a whisper. I had heard the coroner was a martinet, a stickler for decorum. Cameras were taboo, radio wires and extra telephone connections forbidden, and only persons involved in the investigation were to be allowed to come in.

Evidently the coroner had been obeyed, and when I saw him I wasn’t surprised. There the old gentleman sat enthroned in a magnificent Gothic bishop’s chair of carved oak from Mr. Ullathorne’s studio, placed against the wall at our left. An equally ancient carved oak stand that might once have been part of a miserere seat stood at his elbow. The pitcher of water and the tumbler upon it seemed oddly modern by contrast. So did the single “exhibit,” a very small pearl-handled revolver that didn’t look as if it could kill a bird, much less a man.

But the coroner himself fitted his surroundings to a T. He might have been a doge, or at least a prime minister. He sat motionless, contemplating the assembled company with the serene indifference of extreme old age. His attitude and dress reminded me of Saint Gaudens’ statue of Peter Cooper. He looked very frail, as if a breath would blow him into the grave. Only his eyes were vividly alive.

They roved about the room for a moment. He considered the jury, farmers and farm hands, filing out into the next room to “view the corpse.” He glanced at the reporters herded in a corner; his eyes turned to our side of the room, regarded Leo for a second or two, moved on to Edgar Farraday’s face and paused. His head bent in a nod of recognition. Then away his eyes went again, and came to rest on the rose window. For the next ten minutes he sat motionless, gazing contentedly at that galaxy of heavenly beings surrounded by the wealth of the animal and vegetable kingdom, as if district attorneys and sheriffs and all of us mortals didn’t exist. No doubt, I reflected, when you get to be very old the celestial world seems a good deal more important than the terrestrial.

“Do you know the coroner?” I whispered to Edgar.

“Oh, yes. Everybody knows Lucius Cornell. I’ve known him all my life. A splendid old fossil. Ought to have been retired years ago. He’s nearly ninety. But the community is proud of him and won’t let him go. They give him an assistant, fellow by the name of Culver, who does all the work.”

“Is he just a figurehead then?”

“Lord, no! You’ll see. When the evidence is all in he’ll address the jury, and very ably too. By the way, I don’t see Fred Ullathorne. Isn’t he here?”

“No, he isn’t. He went to New York a few days before the murder and hasn’t been back.” I glanced at Leo, saw he was too taken up with Phyllis to hear what I was saying, and went on: “Leo has tried to get in touch with him, of course, and so have the police. Leo isn’t accustomed to responsibility, and I think it worries him not to have his father here.”

“Naturally. Fred will blame Leo if anything goes wrong. He has always been hard on the boy and—Here comes the jury!”

Twelve men were emerging from the studio. They moved solemnly to a row of chairs placed below the rose window and sat down.

Probably all inquests start off in much the same routine way, recapitulating what everybody knows already. Anyway the first half hour of this one was as dull as ditch-water. There was nothing new and repetition had taken the life out of stories that had once seemed thrilling. Clarence’s account of his gruesome find was now as prosaic as if the bones had been twigs or rusty nails. Leo, called in place of his father, gave the necessary information as to the alterations in the building, the rent and the stained glass business in general, calmly enough though he looked haggard and more disturbed than the occasion seemed to warrant, and finished by telling of Clarence’s arrival at Miss Blair’s house late Sunday afternoon, of going to the glass shop with Clarence and finding what appeared to be a quantity of charred bones scattered on the floor in front of the kiln. Phyllis and I were called on merely to corroborate Clarence and Leo. The Ullathorne workmen had nothing important to contribute. A juror asked one of them, Peter Curtis, to explain the process of firing glass, and Peter said it was baked “like you’d bake china,” but when the juror kept on asking intelligent questions Peter explained that, as he was a glass cutter and leader, firing wasn’t much in his line, and after saying where he had spent Saturday night—all the men had fairly good alibis—he was allowed to step down.

Dr. Greely’s sworn statement was read—perhaps it came in sooner, I’m not sure—and might have enlivened things a little. But it was read to the jury by Culver, the coroner’s assistant, in a droning monotone that made it hard to follow, and it was so technical—so crammed with tibias and femurs and craniums—that you couldn’t get much out of it until the final paragraph, when the doctor did say right out that the bones were human bones, though too charred to tell whether male or female, and we all drew a breath of relief.

Then the medical examiner from Banbury rose. He was in a bad temper. He flung out several sarcastic remarks as to rustic incompetence, and what he would have thought and said and done if he had been on hand when the bones were found, and before they had been reduced to a mass of rubbish by being carted hither and yon. But, at length, he too became technical. He rattled off all of Doctor Greely’s tibias and femurs, added a clavicle and a few other tidbits of his own for good measure, and finally consented to accept his esteemed colleague’s conclusion: the bones were undoubtedly human bones. In his opinion, those of an adult, probably a man. He declined to give any opinion as to age or physical condition.

A moment of mild excitement was provided by Mrs. Podsnap, mother of the hungry baby, who had seen smoke rising from the chimney of the glass shop on Sunday morning last at five minutes past four. Asked how she could be sure of the exact time, she said the baby always woke about four for his bottle and screamed bloody murder—one of the jury snickered at this point, finding the phrase humorous, under the circumstances—and she always kept an eye on the clock while she was heating the milk so’s it would be just right. Asked whether she had perceived any peculiar odor, as of roasting flesh, she faltered a wan:

“I—I might of, except for the milk boiling over. It burned.” She was excused, and Skinner took her place.

Like the medical examiner, the detective began with a scolding. Valuable evidence had been destroyed, bones moved and practically reduced to ashes, footprints and fingerprints obliterated, by well-meaning but thoughtless persons. Phyllis and I exchanged uneasy glances. At length he reached his own discoveries. He had made a great many. He had found a bullet hole in one of the ground floor windows, a minute blood stain on the hose where it was attached to the stand-pipe, and an axe, recently washed; also he had observed that the cellar floor was still damp under a pile of excelsior and boards. Two buttons and a small shred of cloth had been found among the ashes left in the furnace after the fragments of bone had been removed by Dr. Greely. No fingerprints of any value had been discovered, nor bullets among the ashes or elsewhere. Possibly the victim had been killed by the bullet that went through the window. The ground outside had, of course, been carefully examined, but that bullet had not been found. Fortunately, the search for a weapon that could have been used by the murderer had been more successful.

Skinner raised his voice and thrust out a triumphant forefinger.

“That revolver,” he announced, indicating the table beside the coroner, “was found in the skating pond!”

We all craned our necks and stared at the pistol on the table. A woman behind me whispered to another:

“Ain’t he the mean man! It was my Elmer found that gun and Skinner, he’s taking all the credit.”

“What do you expect?” the friend hissed back. “You don’t get walnuts off a pig-nut tree!”

Asked to reconstruct the crime for the jury, Skinner announced that in his opinion two persons, probably only two and one a man, had entered the glass shop on Saturday night last. One had shot the other while a passing train muffled the sound; had dismembered the body, in all probability with the axe already mentioned; lighted a hot fire in the kiln and succeeded in cremating the remains, except for the fragments of bone and the aforesaid buttons and shred of cloth. As soon as the remains were safely in the furnace, the murderer had washed the axe and the cement floor clean with the hose installed for washing cars when the building had been used as a garage. As there was a powerful head of water, it was a simple matter to flush the blood down the drain so rapidly that no traces were left except the dampness previously mentioned. The excelsior was not, however, stained with blood, merely damp with clear water. The only blood to be found anywhere after an exhaustive search was the smear, not a fingerprint, on the hose. Chemical analysis proved this smear to be human blood. The murderer had wiped the hose clean except for this small spot. He probably wore gloves. The cleverness with which he covered his traces indicated a person of intelligence. On the other hand, the brutality of the murder indicated a low type. The identity of both murderer and victim would soon be known, Skinner ended, throwing out his chest and glancing about for approval. The murderer would be traced through the revolver and the victim by means of the cloth and buttons; although badly melted, the latter proved on examination to be trouser buttons bearing the name of L. P. Fortune, a New York tailor. A report from Mr. Fortune was momentarily expected.

All this was most satisfactory. The faces of the jury showed relief. Their verdict would be arrived at without much difficulty.

But it seemed that Skinner hadn’t quite finished. He whispered to the coroner’s assistant. Culver nodded and asked Peter Curtis to return.

Peter took the stand again, looking worried.

“Mr. Curtis,” Culver said. “In answer to a question, you said just now that you were not an expert on firing glass, and Clarence Burbank appears only to have heated the oven. Who then had charge of the firing?”

To my surprise, Peter flushed as if this question bothered him. I glanced at Leo and realized that he too found this question disturbing. He sat gazing at Peter as if the man’s answer were of vital importance.

Peter hesitated, glanced uneasily at Clarence, and then blurted out.

“Jake Murphy did the firing.”

“Jake Murphy? Is he present in the room?”

“No, he ain’t. He’s in New York. Went there last Thursday and didn’t come back.”

A ripple of excitement ran through the audience. The jury looked depressed, foreseeing complications.

“Why has no one mentioned this Jake Murphy before? Didn’t you realize that his continued absence was peculiar, under the circumstances?”

“Well, no; we didn’t. Jake is sort of uncertain and he likes a holiday once in so often. We’ve been looking for him to come back any day.”

“You didn’t connect his disappearance with the crime we are investigating?”

Peter stared and shook his head.

“It did not occur to you that the body might be that of Jake Murphy and . . . .”

Culver broke off abruptly. Leo was on his feet, beckoning to Sam Beers. Sam came. Leo told him to let Peter step down. He, Leo, had something important to say.

In another moment Leo, very pale but quite calm, had taken Peter’s place.

“Your Honor,” he said. “The bones found in the kiln are not the bones of Jake Murphy. They are the bones of my father, Frederick Ullathorne.”

A long sigh swept through the room. The jury registered dismay. The coroner straightened himself in his chair, and, for the first time, spoke:

“This is an extraordinary and most horrifying statement, Mr. Ullathorne. On what is it based? Have you any concrete evidence?”

“This!” Leo held up his hand. “I found it in the ashes from the kiln on Sunday evening.” He advanced to the table and laid a small object upon it.

The coroner peered at it. The legal lights crowded around and peered at it. Everybody stood up, trying to see what it was. I didn’t have to. I had seen it when Leo first picked it up. It was a tooth. All along I had been wondering why Leo had not spoken of it. Now I knew.

“This appears to be what is called by dentists an ‘appliance,’ ” the coroner said. “Are we to understand that it was used by your father?”

“Yes. About a month ago he broke a tooth, stepped off a scaffold while plating a window, slipped and struck the ladder. He went to the dentist in Banbury at once—he was proud of his teeth—and Doctor Pratt made this appliance. He can identify it.”

“No doubt. But I am not aware that a porcelain tooth can be considered a part of the corpus delicti. If—”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” Leo put in. “The tooth is not porcelain. It is the identical tooth that was broken off at the root. My father insisted on Doctor Pratt setting it in a gold claw, as you see it. The dentist didn’t approve, of course. He said the tooth wouldn’t last, and the work would all have to be done over again. But my father said he had always depended on his own ivory, and he wasn’t going to begin chewing on china any sooner than he could help. In the end Doctor Pratt gave in.”

“I see. But why, may I ask, have you kept this knowledge to yourself until now, Mr. Ullathorne? You should have mentioned this tooth at once.”

“I couldn’t bear to,” Leo said in a low voice. “My father would have hated all this, the publicity, the headlines in the newspapers. He loathed publicity. Why, he moved the business out here from New York to get away from it.”

“I see. But you must have known it would come out in the end.”

“I—I hoped it wouldn’t.”

“How did you propose to account for your father’s disappearance?”

“My father was eccentric. When he had finished a big piece of work like this cathedral window, he usually went off on a long trip, sometimes forgetting to tell anyone where he was going. All his friends knew this.”

The coroner nodded kindly. “I think I understand,” he said. “Your filial piety is commendable though mistaken. Why have you spoken now?”

“Because of Jake Murphy. I couldn’t let you think Jake had been murdered, when I knew the bones were those of my father.”

“Quite so. You have my sincerest sympathy, Mr. Ullathorne. One more question: Do you know if your father had any enemies?”

Leo flushed. “No one who would have killed him,” he said. “My father was temperamental, apt to get excited over trifles and imagine that people were insulting him. He had old-fashioned ideas about honor, and what he called the ‘manly art of self-defense.’ ”

“Then he might have become involved in an unpremeditated quarrel?”

“Yes; that might have happened. But I think robbery is more likely to have been the motive. My father was careless about money and often carried large sums loose in his pockets.”

“Large sums? How much?”

“I’ve known him to draw two or three thousand dollars from the bank for business purposes, and forget he had it until I reminded him.”

“What about last week?”

“He went to Banbury and cashed a check for the payroll before he went to New York, and left me what I needed to pay the men. I don’t know how large the check was. He often forgot to fill out the stubs in his check book. The bank can tell you the amount of the check, of course.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ullathorne. That will be all for the present.” The coroner turned to Sam Beers. “Find out if Dr. Pratt is present and, if he is, ask him to come forward.”

Dr. Pratt, being interested in the case, did happen to be present. He corroborated Leo’s story of the broken tooth and identified the “appliance.”

While it was being labeled, the coroner leaned back in his chair, his forehead wrinkled in a meditative frown.

Edgar Farraday glanced at him, scribbled a sentence on a scrap of paper, handed it to Sam Beers, and told him to give it to the coroner.

The coroner took the paper, waited to read it until he had told Sam that Peter Curtis was to be recalled; then he read it, glanced at Edgar Farraday with a slow smile, nodded and turned to Peter:

“I fear, Peter Curtis, that you have not been entirely frank in your testimony. Please remember that you are required to tell not only the truth, but the whole truth. Why did not you, or any of your fellow workmen, mention Jake Murphy until you were obliged to do so?”

“Because he went off in a huff.”

“A huff? Why was that? What happened?”

“Well, you see Jake and Mr. Ullathorne they had words. Jake’s got a god-awful temper, and Mr. Ullathorne he called him down good and plenty for leading up some red flash, a sort of glass we don’t use much, in the big window ’stead of what Mr. Ullathorne picked out that got broke some way. Jake’s diamond slipped, I guess. Mr. Ullathorne said that panel would have to go back on the bench, and the flash ripped out as soon as he got back from New York, and Jake would be docked for what it cost, and Jake said he’d see him in hell first.”

“In short, there was a quarrel.”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Do you know Jake Murphy’s address in New York?”

“I don’t. He wasn’t a particular friend of mine; Jake sort of kept himself to himself. But that don’t mean nothing. Jake wouldn’t hurt a fly, Jake wouldn’t.”

“No doubt. One more question: Were Mr. Ullathorne’s relations with his employees amicable upon the whole? Were they attached to him?”

“Well,” Peter hesitated, “Mr. Ullathorne never had any difficulty getting men to work for him. He was the king of the glass business, and we were all proud of him. But I don’t know as you could say we were attached. He was a hard man. You’d oughtn’t to speak ill of the dead, but he had a cruel tongue, Mr. Ullathorne had. What I mean is, he wasn’t any nastier to Jake than he was to the rest of us.”

“Thank you, Mr. Curtis. You may go.”

Peter turned away. Skinner approached and said, loud enough for us all to hear:

“Your Honor, I have just received a report on the shred of cloth and the two trouser buttons found in the kiln. The New York police inform me that L. P. Fortune, the tailor, made a suit of this sort of cloth, a Canadian homespun, for Mr. Frederick Ullathorne about two years ago. It is of a peculiar weave and color, imported especially for Mr. Ullathorne.”

“I congratulate you, Mr. Skinner.” The coroner turned to his assistant: “Your arm, Mr. Culver,” and rose.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he began, in a low clear voice gaining strength as he went on. “This is a curious case presenting several unusual features. It is not, however, without precedent. Before I sum up the evidence you have heard I will describe, for your benefit, a very celebrated case—recalled to me a moment ago by a friend, but which I had already remembered.”

Edgar whispered in my ear: “I might have known it. The old boy never misses a trick.”

“I refer,” the coroner went on, “to the Webster-Parkman case. The circumstances were as follows: In the year 1854 Professor Parkman of Harvard College was murdered by Professor Webster, also of Harvard and head of the department of chemistry. The latter was in financial difficulties. Parkman had lent him money and became insulting when he was not repaid. One day he visited Webster in the laboratory, and was never seen again. When charred bones were found in the laboratory furnace by the janitor, Webster was accused of the murder. I need not give you the details of the trial. Suffice it to say that the only portion of the body which could be identified after cremation were the false teeth identified by Parkman’s dentist. Webster was convicted and hanged. Now the two cases are by no means identical; you will note several important differences. But, lest you should be bewildered by the peculiarities of the case we are considering, I wish you to know that it is not unique. I have mentioned the Webster-Parkman case not because I desire to influence you in any way whatever, but only to reassure you.” The coroner paused. The jury tried to look reassured, but did not succeed. He went on:

“I will now recapitulate the evidence.”

The summing up that followed was dispassionate and clear in every detail. He ended by reminding the jury that an inquest was not a trial, but merely a preliminary inquiry, and that their first duty was to decide the identity of the corpse and the cause of death. If they needed to confer they might retire.

The jury looked at each other. The foreman sent a whisper along the line. They all nodded. The foreman rose.

“We find, Your Honor,” he said, “that the bones discovered in the kiln are those of Mr. Frederick Ullathorne, and that he came to his death at the hands of some person or persons unknown.”

“Under the circumstances, your verdict is all that could be expected, gentlemen. You are excused.”

The audience stirred, everyone began to get up. The coroner raised his hand. We all sat down again.

“Before we go upon our several occasions,” he said, “it will be appropriate to record our sense of loss. A great man, Frederick Ullathorne, is dead. Snatched from life just as he had completed the noble work of art, the stained glass window yonder that has presided over our deliberations with a most solemnizing effect. Look up at that window, my friends!” Everybody looked at it. “Regard that glorious combination of color and design! It pictures the hymn ‘Benedicite,’ ‘Oh all ye works of the Lord bless ye the Lord, praise him and magnify him forever!’ There we see all creation—fish, flesh and fowl, sun and moon, angels, saints and souls—and in the center the Three Holy Children. Those of you who know your Bibles, and I trust you are all conversant with the Scriptures, will remember that these three, having refused to worship King Nebuchadnezzar, were thrown into a ‘burning fiery furnace, seven times heated, in their coats, their hosen and their hats,’ but emerged scatheless. Mr. Ullathorne has portrayed them with hands upraised in prayer, surrounded by the flames of the furnace. My friends, ‘God moves in a mysterious way.’ When the artist’s hand tinted those tongues of flame with such matchless skill, the forces of evil that were to destroy him were, in all probability, already at work. Little did Frederick Ullathorne think that, within a few short weeks, his bones would consume away in the fires of a furnace! A strange coincidence. I would that we could believe that Frederick Ullathorne had died, as Daniel’s friends were ready to die, for a noble cause. Not so. It appears to have been for some sordid reason such as robbery that a great genius was taken away at the height of his fame. You will, I am sure, all join me in offering our sincere sympathy to the bereaved son. Mr. Culver, your arm.”

The coroner sat down. There was a moment’s dead silence. Then a general movement towards the door began. The legal lights had gone into a huddle. As I passed I heard Drinkwater say:

“A farce. The old boy is senile. Wasting our time with a lot of sentimental poppycock.”

“More romance than law in that address, to my mind,” Gleason nodded. “Yet he’s considered an ornament to the bar.”

“The bar! The sooner Lucius Cornell is called to plead before the bar of heaven, the better for all of us. I tell you—”

They moved out of my hearing. Edgar said:

“Wait for me outside, Harriet. I want to speak to the district attorney.”

Phyllis and Leo and I made our way downstairs and out into the sunlight. I told them to go on home, that I would be back in time for lunch. They walked away, arm in arm.