Flowers For the Judge (11 page)

His first words to the jury provoked furious activity at the Press table. He leant over his desk and his sharp eyes ranged over the seven embarrassed-looking citizens.

‘Before you hear the evidence in this case,’ he said, ‘ perhaps it would be as well if I defined your duty to you. I do this because possibly some of you may be under a misapprehension concerning this important matter, due to recent misleading criticisms of Coroners and Coroners’ juries which have appeared in the Press.

‘In the laws of England your duties are specifically laid down. There can be no question about them. They are clear and rigid.

‘First of all let me repeat the oath which you took before me on this day one week ago. I must ask you to listen
carefully
and judge for yourselves what is the meaning of these very plain words.’

He paused and they blinked at him owlishly. Taking a card from his desk he peered at it through his spectacles.

‘This is your oath,’ he said, ‘listen to it – understand it. “I swear by Almighty God that I will diligently inquire and a true presentment make of all such matters and things as are here given me in charge on behalf of our Sovereign Lord the King touching the death of Paul Redfern Brande, now lying dead, and will without fear or favour, affection or ill-will, a true verdict give according to the evidence and the best of my skill and knowledge.”

‘There,’ he said, throwing down the card. ‘You have each of you repeated these words and I now ask you to consider to what you stand pledged. When the evidence has been set before you the law will demand of you that you answer several questions, and I think it would be as well if I told you now what those questions will be.

‘Firstly, you will be required to state who the deceased was. Then how and where he died and afterwards how he came by his death.’

He paused and regarded them steadily.

‘This will constitute the first part of your verdict. But afterwards, and it is this point to which I want to call your attention because there has been much mischievous and misleading rubbish talked and written about it, you may possibly be called upon to answer another question. There is set down in Halsbury’s
Laws of England
, a book whose authority cannot be questioned, the following incontrovertible decree. It is there stated that if the jury find that the deceased came by his death by murder or manslaughter those persons whom they find to have been guilty of such an offence, or of being accessories before the fact of murder, must be pointed out. It is the jury’s responsibility, and they are in duty bound, if they know the persons guilty, to say their names.’

Everybody in court save the seven people to whom these sober words were addressed seemed to be more than startled by them. The jury merely looked uncomfortable
and
cold. In the back of the court Mr Lugg nudged Mr Campion.

The Coroner had not quite finished.

‘I wish to make it clear that this duty of yours does not apply in any particular or special way to the case you are about to hear to-day. It is your general duty. It is the duty of all Coroner’s juries and I have called attention to it because I have found so much misapprehension on the subject, not only among the public, but even among members of the legal profession.

‘Now we will hear the first witness.’

GINA SHRANK BACK IN
her seat and waited for a merciful unreality to settle over the proceedings. In the past, embarrassing or even harassing situations had always had for her this mitigating quality. To-day, however, it was absent.

Instead the reverse seemed to have taken place. Faces seemed clearer, their less pleasing qualities emphasized, while each spoken word appeared to be charged with underlying menace.

The Coroner and the jury took on a Hogarthian quality, and those witnesses whom she knew resembled brilliantly cruel caricatures of themselves.

She tried to disassociate herself from it all, and to look upon the inquiry as though it were a play, but it was not possible even when she forced her eyes out of focus and persuaded her ears to hear only meaningless unrelated sounds.

Presently she found herself listening intently to Miss Marchant giving evidence about the discovery of the body. The Coroner was taking her gently through her written statement, but his tone became peremptory at the point where the actual appearance of the corpse was mentioned,
warning
her that any display of nerves which she might have contemplated would not be received sympathetically.

The fair-haired girl stepped down, relieved and a little nettled, the colour in her demure face heightened and her blue eyes embarrassed. The jury looked studiously disinterested.

The two doctors followed, one after the other. Consequential little Doctor Roe bustled forward, giving everyone in the court the impression that he wished to appear in a great hurry. Gina stirred uneasily. Was this awful clarity to be the peculiarity of the whole inquiry? In other circumstances Doctor Roe’s hurry might have passed as genuine, but here in court it seemed monstrously overdone, his self-importance and his vanity painfully obvious.

The repetition of his statement already made to the police went slowly on, the Coroner interpolating an occasional question and writing down the replies with unhurried calm.

Gina tried to fix her mind on the evidence, but the mannerisms of the man, his love of the Latin cherished by his profession, his unction and gratification at his own importance obtruded themselves and all but eclipsed his information.

The Coroner kept him only a very short time, and the police doctor, a wholly unexpected person called Ferdie, appeared upon the stand.

Doctor Ferdie was a Scot from Dundee, and thirty years of work in London had not robbed him of his accent. He was a vast, untidy old person draped in elephant-grey clothes which managed to convey that there was something extraordinary about their cut without being actually peculiar in any definable particular. His face was seamed and rucked like the bark of an oak and from out its mass of indentations two very bright and knowing blue eyes peered at the world.

He cocked an eye at the Coroner with the confiding air of a trusted expert confronting an old client and the whole court became alive.

Preliminaries, the names and addresses of witnesses who had attested to Doctor Ferdie that the body of Paul
Redfern
Brande was the body of Paul Redfern Brande and not any spare corpse which might have been lying around at the time; the little matter of the warrant for examination and the address of the mortuary were all disposed of with perfunctory speed, and the doctor passed on to the external appearances of the body indicative of the time of death.

‘The body was that of a well-nourished pairson,’ he remarked, his bright inquisitive eyes fixed upon the Coroner. ‘Not sae lean an’ not sae stout. Just ordinary, ye see. There was no death stiffening, or, as ma colleague Doctor Roe here would put it, rigor mortis. I examined the body carefully, and in my opeenion death had taken place within three to five days.’

He paused and added confidentially:

‘There were certain signs, ye see.’

The Coroner nodded comprehendingly and turned to his personal notes.

‘The man was last seen alive on Thursday afternoon, January the twenty-eighth; that is to say, somewhere between ninety-four and ninety-five hours before you saw him,’ he began at last. ‘In your opinion would the condition of the body be consistent with the suggestion that his death took place within an hour or so of his disappearance?’

Doctor Ferdie considered, and Gina found her heart beating suffocatingly fast.

‘Ah, it might,’ he said at last. ‘It might indeed. But I couldn’t commit myself, ye see. There were definite signs of the beginning of decomposition and in ordinary condeetions these do not appear until after the third day. But I wouldn’t go further than that.’

‘Quite.’ The Coroner seemed satisfied, and after he had written for some moments he looked up again. ‘In regard to these ordinary conditions, you have said that the deceased was a well-nourished person of normal weight.’

‘Ah, he was,’ Doctor Ferdie agreed. ‘A healthy normal pairson.’

‘I see. Did you examine the room where the body was found?’

‘I did.’

‘Was there anything about it which might have hastened or retarded the natural decomposition of the body?’

‘No. It was a cool dry room, very badly ventilated, but otherwise nothing extraordinary.’

‘I see.’ The Coroner glanced at the jury, who made a visible effort to appear more intelligent. ‘Would the coolness hurry the termination of the period of death stiffening?’

The doctor cocked an eye again and spoke to the jury rather than to the Coroner.

‘No, ye see, it would rather tend to prolong it.’

‘Death might easily have taken place between eighty-eight and eighty-four hours before you saw him, then?’

‘Ah, it might.’ The Scotsman hesitated. ‘I’d say it was very probable.’

‘Thank you, Doctor.’ The Coroner wrote again. ‘Now, as to the cause of death …’

Doctor Ferdie cleared his throat and launched into a careful and extremely delicate description of the colour of the face and chest, followed by a technical account of the autopsy which he and Doctor Roe had performed.

Gina’s head began to swim. The brutality of the facts related in the soothing Scotch voice produced in her a sense of outrage.

She turned her head and caught a glimpse of Mrs Austin. The woman was watching her with kindly but almost hungry eyes.

‘Feel faint, duck?’ she whispered hopefully.

Gina shook her head and passed her tongue over her dry lips. Mrs Austin seemed disappointed.

Doctor Ferdie was still talking.

‘It’s lairgely a question of the colour of the bluid, ye see. I applied Haldane’s test, and in my opeenion there was between forty and fifty per cent. of carbon monoxide in the bluid. I took a test-tube containing a one per cent. solution of the bluid to be examined. Then in a second tube I put a solution of normal bluid of like strength. Then I took a third tube an’ …’

On and on it went, the details explained with endless
patience
to the seven self-conscious individuals whose acute embarrassment had given place to a sort of settled discomfort.

By the time Doctor Ferdie left the stand there could have been no reasonable doubt in anybody’s mind that Paul Redfern Brande had died from carbon monoxide poisoning, and no very great question but that he had done so within eight hours of his last appearance in the office.

The doctor lolloped back to his seat and the Coroner’s officer, a plump uniformed person with a sternly avuncular manner, produced the next witness.

At the back of the court Mr Campion sat up as Miss Netley walked hesitantly forward. Her schoolgirl affectation was enhanced to-day and she looked little more than fourteen in her severe blue jacket and sailor hat.

She gave her evidence in a very low voice, but her timidity did not quite ring true, and even Mr Lugg’s sympathetic expression faded into one of doubt as her plaintive answers reached him.

The Coroner was very gentle with her, and she smiled at him confidingly as he helped her through her very simple tale. It transpired that she had been Paul’s secretary and that so far as anybody knew she had been the last person to see him alive.

‘You say Mr Brande went out of the office at about half-past three of the afternoon of Thursday, the twenty-eighth of last month, and that was the last time you saw him alive? Is that so?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you say here’ – the Coroner went on, tapping the statement upon his desk – ‘that when Mr Brande went out he seemed to be excited. Suppose you tell the jury what you meant by that?’

Miss Netley blushed painfully.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ she stammered at last. ‘He just seemed to be excited.’

Some of the Coroner’s tenderness vanished.

‘Was he pleased or worried? Alarmed? Anxious about something?’

‘No, sir. He was just – excited.’

Mr Campion pricked up his ears. There it was again, that same indefinable thing he had noticed about the girl before. She wanted to be tantalizing and did not mind appearing a fool in order to achieve that end.

‘How did you know he was excited?’ the Coroner suggested.

Miss Netley considered.

‘He moved as though he was,’ she said at last.

Mr Lugg nudged his employer and made an expressive depreciatory gesture with his thumb, an indication which in the days of his vulgarity would have been accompanied by the succinct expression ‘Out her!’

The Coroner breathed deeply through his nose.

‘You just knew by the way he moved that he was excited?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The Coroner returned to facts.

‘How did you know it was half-past three when Mr Brande went out?’

‘Because,’ said Miss Netley, ‘the afternoon post comes at five-and-twenty minutes past three.’

‘And the post had just come when Mr Brande went out?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Her expectancy was as evident as if she had expressed it in words.

The Coroner looked up.

‘Did anything come by the post for Mr Brande?’

‘Yes, sir. One letter.’

‘Did you see it?’

‘I saw it was addressed to him and I handed it to him,’ she said. ‘It was marked “Personal”.’

The court began to sit up and even the police looked interested.

‘After Mr Brande had read the letter, did he decide to go out?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Did he tell you where he was going?’

‘No.’

‘Did he say when he was coming back?’

‘No.’

‘Did he say anything at all?’

‘No, sir.’

The Coroner sighed.

‘You are here to give us all the help you can, Miss Netley,’ he said sternly. ‘To return to this excitement you noticed in Mr Brande; had it anything to do with the letter?’

The girl considered.

‘It may have had,’ she said. ‘I noticed it after he had read the letter. He got up hurriedly, put on his hat and coat and went out.’