by Robin Blake
He had been laid out in his nightgown, with a plain nightcap on his head, and his arms crossed piously across his chest. I put my hand under the body, lifting and manipulating it to enable Fidelis to pull the garment up to the neck. Then we looked down together on the naked remains.
‘He has suffered many smaller accidents before this fatal one,’ said Fidelis.
He was right. The body had an assortment of scars and bruises, scalds and burns.
‘I have seen this at inquest on many a toper’s corpse,’ I said. ‘They trip over, they set fire to their wigs, they bump into trees.’
‘I see it on living persons, too,’ added Fidelis.
He removed the nightcap and raised Antony’s head to inspect it on all sides.
‘There are a few insignificant contusions about the head, but they’re old ones.’
‘So you don’t think he was clubbed over the head before he fell into the river?’
He laid the head back on the pillow and straightened his back.
‘No. The only conclusion I draw from this examination is that it confirms what we already know. The man was a sot, who towards the end was near incapable.’
‘Let us go down then.’
We found the jury assembling in the taproom, drinking beer and talking loudly about the inconvenience of inquest duty. I did not take them seriously because I knew they spoke like this only to cover up their happiness. Some of them must have known Antony Egan quite well and might have been sorry for his death. But that did not detract from the good feeling of having a holiday while, at the same time, virtuously performing a public duty.
I led the way into the dining room – good sized and well lit by two high windows – to find Furzey already established and writing busily at the end of a long table in the centre of the room, with an empty chair beside him. Here I sat, arranging the men on the forms six to each side, while another chair was left empty at the far end to seat witnesses as they gave their evidence. Mary-Ann and Grace Egan had their own chairs by the window, while another form ranged along the wall to my right was for witnesses after they’d spoken and others in attendance. Among those others were my wife with her mother, the sister of the dead man.
As if unwilling to let it interfere too far with drinking and eating, the jury was in a mood to get the inquest over quickly. Once they were sworn, I took them upstairs to view the body. There were some remarks made about its bumped and scarred state, some pious, others sarcastic; but they did not linger in the bedroom, and within a few minutes we were back in the inquest room ready to hear testimony from Peter Crane, followed by the two Egan daughters, the nightman and finally Dr Fidelis. None of this produced any unexpected information. Finally, with no further witnesses coming forward, I summed up, sketching Antony’s sad condition, his habit of taking a late-night walk, the events of the fatal night, and of how the body was found next morning.
‘I myself, in the company of Dr Fidelis, saw the body shortly after it was brought ashore, and the doctor has told us of the view he formed as a medical man, that the lungs were full of water. This meant Antony Egan was breathing when he entered the water, and his death was consequently by drowning. Dr Fidelis and I, as you have also heard, later inspected the riverbank beside the ferry stage, to which Antony invariably took his midnight walks. There we found signs that someone had recently slid down the steep, wet bank in the direction of the water. In a bush nearby we found Antony’s hat and you have heard it discussed as a possibility that, nearing the ferry stage, the hat blew from his head and he chased it towards the river but, failing to catch it, slipped into the water and was carried helplessly downstream, drowning as he went. Your task is to decide whether a sequence of events such as this, or some other cause, brought about his death. Are there any questions?’
The foreman looked around the table but no hand was raised. When this happens I find that a jury is already of one mind, even before they have discussed the case among themselves. I therefore rang my handbell and rose, asking everybody who was not a jury member to leave the room so that the twelve could deliberate.
‘Oh, Titus,’ said Elizabeth, coming to me with her mother in tow as soon as she saw me entering the hall and shutting the door of the inquest room behind me. ‘Tell us there was no foul play here. The business is horrible enough.’
‘That is for the jury, my dear. But you heard my summing-up. I doubt they will contradict it.’
Five minutes later we received notice to return. The jury had reached a unanimous finding of accidental death. Furzey wrote the verdict on another of our printed forms and the paper was passed round for the signature of each juror. Finally I signed it myself and dissolved the inquest.
It was a satisfactory outcome. We had avoided the financially disastrous finding of self-murder, and the lurking uncertainty of murder. All that remained was for me to release the body for burial, and write my report. I signed the release (another printed sheet – there is no end to their usefulness) and gave it, with the battered old hat, to Mary-Ann.
‘You may lay him to rest,’ I said. ‘This business is concluded.’
Of this I was utterly confident – and utterly wrong.
Chapter Five
MY FIRST WARNING of just how wrong I was about the conclusion of the Egan case came within half an hour. Fidelis and I had just stepped off Battersby’s ferry and begun the climb up the track to the top of the town, when the gate to one of the gardens lining the track swung open.
‘Hissst!’
We looked. There was no one to be seen.
‘Hissst!’
‘Who’s there?’ I called.
Stepping into the aperture of the gate I saw, half hidden behind a flowering plum tree, a shape that I realized was Dick Middleton, cultivator of that particular plot.
‘Well, Dick,’ I said, ‘come out and tell us what you want.’
The man who now edged into view was a slight figure in his fifties, who lived by selling produce from his garden, and by fishing for eels in the river, for which he had a permit from the corporation. He was also in his very nature nervous and retiring, a solitary fellow, for he had been born with a harelip that distorted his face and muffled his voice.
‘How do, Coroner?’ he said, with nods of his head. ‘How do, Doctor?’
Fidelis and I gave him how-do in return and waited to hear what he had to say.
‘I heard them talking,’ he said at last, twisting his hands together as if this helped him squeeze out the words. His deformity meant that his mouth sounded blocked and his tongue impeded.
‘Who did you hear, Dick?’
‘Men after coming over from Ferry Inn. William Forrest and John Pitt, on their way up to town.’
‘Yes. They were on the jury that sat over the body of Antony Egan this afternoon.’
‘I know that. I heard, or rather I overheard, them talking to Poll Beattie, when they met her on the path.’
‘Oh, yes? What were they saying?’
His gaze found everywhere to look but into our faces.
‘They were saying that Antony were at ferry stage all alone, and his hat blew off his head, which he chased towards river, and missed it, and fell in.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That was the jury’s conclusion.’
‘And it’s not right. It’s not precise.’
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘I were there, see? I know it’s not right.’
Fidelis and I exchanged surprised looks.
‘You were there?’
‘I was.’
‘Where?’ my friend asked. ‘Be specific, Dick.’
‘I was seated on riverbank. It were high tide, best tide for eels. I wasn’t over there, mind. I was on this side of river. But I had the opposite ferry stage in the line of my eye. I could see all and I could hear a bit too.’
His tongue had loosened itself up, as if its very use made it freer.
‘Hear what?’ Fidelis persisted.
‘Talking. Antony were talking. S
o that’s why it’s wrong, I’m saying. By the talking, I could tell there was someone with him.’
‘Did you see this other person that he was talking to?’
Middleton widened his eyes and shook his head.
‘Happen there was someone in the shadows, or in the trees. There must’ve been, if he were talking.’
‘And what was he saying?’
‘That I don’t know, sir. I heard the voice coming and going, but missed the words in the water’s noise and the wind. See, the wind were first class right there for finding eels on north bank. So I were just pulling in one of my traps when Antony came in my sight, and he were talking. I heard the sound of his voice.’
‘What did his voice sound like?’
‘It sounded vexed.’
‘Like a lot of complaining…?’
‘Yes, that’ll do. And here’s another word: peevish.’
‘And what time was this?’
‘High tide, like I said.’
‘But when by the clock?’
‘Maybe midnight, or a little after.’
‘And did you see Antony subsequently go into the water?’
‘I did not. The eels were in the traps so I were busy for the next five minutes. When I looked again there were no sign of Antony. No sign of anybody.’
‘You heard no cry or splash or other activity?’
‘There are always splashes. Moorhens and such. And, as I said, the wind were blowing the sounds away.’
‘Did you hear anything else?’
‘I thought I did, Mr Cragg. Laughing, it might have been. Very faint it were, and happen I were wrong and it were a duck. I thought no more of it till now.’
‘Why didn’t you come forward and tell the inquest all this?’ I demanded.
He touched his bifurcated mouth with his fingertips.
‘With this, Mr Cragg, people don’t believe what I say. It makes me, as they think, a double talker at the best, and a liar at the worst. So I can’t ever be a witness, not in a court of law. I’ll not be believed.’
* * *
‘This changes things, Titus,’ said Fidelis after we had left Dick Middleton and begun again to walk up the steep incline towards town. ‘We must think again.’
But I had been less impressed than he by the fisherman’s tale.
‘Must we? I don’t think what he said helps us towards the truth.’
‘Surely you don’t believe this nonsense about his harelip?’
‘No, no. I don’t think he’s a liar, far from it. He is intelligent, though his tongue can’t keep pace with his brain. But on this matter, I think, he must be mistaken. I don’t think there was anyone else there. He said himself he saw no one.’
‘I am not disputing that. Let’s leave that to one side.’
‘Then what is your point? I am not reopening the inquest just because a fisherman thirty yards away in the dark heard a few ducks and a drunken man doing what drunks do – talking to himself.’
‘It isn’t about whether or not he was talking to himself. It’s about the wind.’
‘The wind?’
‘Yes. You heard Dick state that the conditions were best for finding eel on the north side of the river.’
‘Yes, though I don’t quite understand what he meant by that.’
‘The ideal spot to set your traps is on the lee shore when the tide is high.’
‘Is that the case? I didn’t know that you were an eel fisher.’
‘As a boy. But then there was something else, even more directly bearing on the matter. He said he could hear the voice coming across the water, but he missed the words because of the noise of the water, and the wind blowing them away from him. These reports taken together strongly support my idea that the wind was blowing from the north.’
‘And what is the import of that?’
Luke clicked his tongue, exasperated at the snail pace of my thinking.
‘It was blowing from Dick on one bank towards Antony on the other, Titus.’
I still did not grasp it. Now Luke, as he sometimes did when I could not absorb what was obvious to him, spoke slowly, as to a recalcitrant pupil.
‘We have been blaming the wind, have we not? We have proceeded on the basis that Antony’s hat was blown from his head and towards the river, precipitating a desperate attempt by him to catch it, followed by his fatal slip into the water. But if the wind was blowing from in front of him, if it was a northerly, as John Middleton’s statement implies that it was, the sequence of events I have described could not have happened. If the wind blew his hat off his head at all, it must have done so away from the river, not towards it. The wind, I submit to you, is wholly innocent of this crime.’
I considered the argument.
‘That is pretty, but I have an objection. If the hat wasn’t wind blown, how did it get into the bush overhanging the water?’
Fidelis turned and punched me lightly on the shoulder.
‘That’s not an objection, Titus! That’s the question we must ask. How do you think it did?’
‘It would have to be some person that threw it there.’
‘Yes, and perhaps that person was the one Dick Middleton heard Antony being angry with.’
I sighed.
‘I suppose it may be so, Luke. But isn’t it more likely that Antony threw it there himself? This doesn’t change anything, in my judgement. No other person was seen. There is no proper evidence that such another person was there. And overtopping all that there is the problem of Dick Middleton as a witness. Even if you and I, and every other educated person in town, thinks that a man with a harelip can indeed be a credible witness, the people of Preston as a whole will still doubt him.’
‘Damned superstitions.’
‘That sounds rich in your mouth, Luke. Don’t you yourself believe in angels, and Hail Marys, and Christ’s body in a little piece of round bread?’
Fidelis perceptibly stiffened at my jibe.
‘You are being unworthy there, Titus. Those are matters of religion; of faith, not reason. And, may I remind you that it’s your wife’s faith, as well as mine?’
In this he was perfectly right. Elizabeth, like my friend, was a papist. His reference to this made me regret my sally against the Church of Rome, though not the thinking behind it.
‘Well, I am sorry, but I am not going to reopen the inquest. The only reason to do so is the testimony of Dick Middleton and he swears he won’t testify. So we must let poor Antony rest there.’
* * *
Yet I found myself for the remainder of the day dwelling on what the eel fisherman had told us, and feeling annoyed that it might overthrow our convenient theory that the wind had blown Antony’s hat towards the water, and caused its owner, in chasing it, to bank-slide into the river.
My mother-in-law would be having a bed in our house for a second night in succession, as her brother’s funeral was the next day. Her being there meant I had no chance, all evening, to talk with Elizabeth about Dick Middleton’s story. Instead I fretted about it in my own head until after supper (the salmon at last, roasted with herbs) when I dived into my library, and took down Izaak Walton’s hymn and vade mecum to an activity that I am insufficiently contemplative to take up myself – The Compleat Angler.
Walton I found is an author riddled with contradiction. Angling is like poetry, he says in one place, and best practised by men ‘born to the task’. But I turned a few pages and found him arguing that ‘as no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler’. Angling must then be learned, after all. Oh no, declared our riverside friend at yet another juncture. Angling is ‘so like the mathematics that it can never be fully learned’. I soon concluded that like every man ruled by one passion, Walton’s confusion came from seeing his mania reflected in everything, and in everything’s opposite, all at the same time.
But I had to allow he had authority on the practice of the sport and, turning the pages as far as chapter five, I read the following injunction:
&
nbsp; ‘Take this for a rule: that I would willingly fish standing on the lee shore.’
I took ‘lee shore’ to mean the bank away from which the wind blows. Walton tells the reader that, since wind cools water, the fish prefer the warmest water they can find: that is, where it is sheltered from the wind by the riverbank – the lee shore. If Middleton was in agreement with Walton when he specified ideal conditions for eel fishing, he must have meant that the wind at the time he was fishing from the north bank had been at his back.
If that was the case, Fidelis’s contention was confirmed. The wind on the night in question was from the north and, since Antony was walking on the south bank, it could hardly have blown his hat northwards into the bush where we found it hanging over the water.
With a sigh of perplexity I returned Walton to the shelf and myself to the parlour, where Elizabeth and her mother were companionably sewing. They were discussing Antony.
‘He was always a crybaby,’ my mother-in-law was saying. ‘If something he wanted was denied him, or taken from him, he would sulk and sniffle for a week.’
She was a steely woman, with a sharp nose and a decided way of expressing herself.
‘When my nephew took himself away, and then got himself killed, my brother could never leave off bemoaning his lot – a father deprived of his only son.’
‘But that is a terrible loss for anyone, Mother,’ Elizabeth objected. ‘It is why Uncle drank – to forget it.’
‘No, my dear. Antony drank so that others would be forced to remember, and so feel sorry for Antony for ever and ever.’
‘Which his own death the other night put the seal on,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, it did. But it cannot have been deliberate, Titus,’ the dead man’s sister stated firmly. ‘One may love a life of misery, you know, as much as a life of joy. And he did.’
‘Then you think my jury was right to reject suicide today?’
‘Oh, I am quite sure of that, dear Titus,’ she said, bending over her stitching.
* * *
‘Your mother is hard on the memory of her brother,’ I said to Elizabeth as we lay in bed that night.
‘She is of such a different temperament. And years ago he abandoned our religion because he hoped to be made a burgess, which she never really forgave him for.’
