第16章 The Second Inquest

Mr. Horatio Cobley had not wanted to reopen anything. He was a cautious man, and caution had kept him twenty-five years on the bench, and when the society's solicitor had laid the grave-breaking information and the town had settled down to enjoy the ruin of a troublesome woman, the last thing Mr. Cobley had intended was to be the instrument of the ruin of the man who had laid it. But Dr. Creel had stood up in the Petty Sessions and had said what he had said, and by the following morning the county had heard of it, and the county had asked Mr. Cobley, in the person of one of the judges' clerks, what he meant to do about it. So on the second Friday of January, in the long room at the Bell and Anchor, with the fog pressed on the windows and the jury sworn anew, Mr. Cobley opened a second inquest into the death of Jonas Figgis, cooper, and this time there were no merchants' hats on the jury's knees, because there were no merchants free to sit, and the room was fuller than it had ever been, and in the front sat Sneed the undertaker and Dorcas the midwife and Ephraim the clerk, and at the back, at the very back, where the draught was worst, stood Alvina Cardew with three of the women of Throstle House, and by the door stood Sergeant Rounce, and it was Rounce, with two constables, who had been given the unenviable task of keeping the society's friends and the woman's enemies from each other's throats. Dr. Creel was called first, and this time he brought his book. It was the small book that Prudence had seen him close with his elbow, the one he kept for himself. He held it open and read from it in his dry, level voice: a register, kept without his partners' knowledge for two years, of every case of gastric fever he had attended in the lower town, with the patient's name, the society to which they belonged, the medicine they had taken, and, in a column that was his own private language, the word *doubtful*, entered against forty-one cases, of which eleven had died. He had not written poison. He had not dared. But he had written doubtful, forty-one times, and he had kept the book, and now he read it, and when the society's solicitor rose to ask him why a physician of standing should keep a private register of his own patients, he answered in five words. "Because I was afraid." Prudence was called next and gave her evidence standing, holding the jars. She gave it in the plainest terms she could, because a court is not a lecture theatre, and she had decided a week before that she would not try to be clever in front of a jury of farmers and shopkeepers. She told them what the copper foil does and does not do. She told them the nine bottles and the six that blackened and the three that did not, and the mark on the wax, and the day the December batch was drawn. She told them the clean bodies. She told them the mouth that remembered the weeks, which was the one piece of evidence that was not hers at all and which no clever man could have invented, and she saw the foreman of the jury look at the woman beside him, because they both knew a poor woman's mouth that remembers the weeks. The society's solicitor cross-examined her for half an hour, and he was good at it, and she had known he would be. He asked her whether she was registered, and she said she was not. He asked her whether she had a quarrel with the Unity, and she said she had not, and then, pressing, whether she had ever been refused anything by the Unity, and she said that she had been refused a licence by the kingdom and a hearing by the coroner and a place at the society's table, and that a woman in her trade was refused something every day of her life and could not afford to make a quarrel of it. He asked her how the bench could know that the powder in the bottles was not put there by her own hand, since the bottles had passed through her shop, and she said that six of nine had blackened and three had not, and that a woman who meant to manufacture a poisoning would have been a great fool to leave a third of her evidence clean, and the jury laughed, which she had hoped for, and the solicitor did not. He asked her, finally, why she had opened the grave in the dark instead of coming to the coroner in the light, and she answered that question the way she had answered it to herself in the weighing room, because it was the one question in the whole case that she had never once doubted. "Because I came to the coroner in the light, sir," she said, "and the coroner heard me, and the jury heard me, and the verdict was gastric fever, and I went home and waited for the law to do the rest, and the law did nothing, and eleven people were dead, and I am a chemist, and in my trade when the house is burning you do not wait for the parish to appoint a committee about the water. You break the window." The room was quiet, and Mr. Cobley, who was on the bench with his spectacles pushed up, looked at her for a long moment and wrote something down, and it was not, she was fairly sure, a note against her. Then Coombes was called, and Coombes stood up in his visitor's coat and swore to the baskets and the bottles and the wax and the Fridays, and to the certain Fridays when Mr. Skell had come upon the round, and to the paper twists in the lean-to that had never been accounted for in the making, and when the solicitor asked him whether he had known what was in them, he said, in a voice that carried to the very back of the room, that he had known and had not known, which was the most honest sentence spoken in that long room all winter, and it did more for the Crown than any jar she had ever filled. And then Mr. Cobley ordered the exhumation. He did not have to be asked twice, because the grave had already been opened once, and the only thing worse than a grave opened in the dark is a grave opened in the dark and then left unexamined, and he was too old a lawyer not to see that if he did not order it properly, the assize would order it over him, and he would be a coroner no longer. The independent analyst came up from the county town, a careful, spectacled man named Mr. Bream, who knew nothing of the society and cared less, and he exhumed Mr. Figgis in daylight and with witnesses, and he exhumed a second body, and a third, and he did his own tests with his own apparatus and his own reagents, and on the fourth day he stood up in the long room and swore to the bench that the viscera of three persons, all members of the Cinderthorpe Unity, all on its sick list and all credited with gastric fever, contained antimony in quantities that no medicine could account for and that no fever could produce. The room did not gasp. That was the strange thing, and Prudence noticed it and remembered it long after. The room simply went very quiet, the way a room goes quiet when everybody in it has been thinking a thing privately for a long time, and someone has finally said it out loud, and the saying of it has made them tired rather than excited, because it means there is now a great deal more work to be done than anybody wanted. The verdict of the second inquest was not fever. It was: died of the administration of antimony by some person or persons unknown, and the coroner issued his warrant, and it was not served, because Barnaby Skell had not been seen in Cinderthorpe since the morning of the analyst's second visit, and the chapel on Sallowfield Road stood with its windows dark, and the lock on the lean-to door was broken open, and the four casks were gone. ---