Prelude for War (11 page)

“Yus,” he said
defiantly. “I’ve got some questions.”

The coroner’s hands
tightened together.

“Very well,” he
snapped. “Go on and ask your questions.”

The way in which he spoke
explained to the entire audi
ence that the questions
could only be a pointless waste of their time as much as his own.

The little man turned to
Simon.

“You’re the chap they
call the Saint, ain’t you?” he said.
“You’ve
‘ad a lot of experience of crime—murders, and
that
sort o’ thing.”

Before Simon could answer
the coroner intervened.

“Mr Templar’s past
life .and any nickname by which he
may be known to the
public are not subjects which we have
to consider at this
inquiry. Kindly confine your questions to
facts
relevant to the case.”

There was an awkward pause.
The little juryman’s attitude was still undaunted, but he didn’t seem to know what
to say next. He looked about him desperately, as if
search
ing the room for inspiration. Finally he spoke.

“Do you think there
was something fishy about this fire?”
he
demanded.

“Mr Templar’s personal
opinions are not matters which
concern this court,”
interrupted the coroner sternly.

The Saint smiled. He
looked at the little juryman, and
spoke very clearly
and distinctly.

“Yes,” he said.
“I think there were a lot of very fishy
things
about it.”

There was a moment of
silence so heavy that it seemed almost solid. And then it broke in a babble of
twittering
speculation that surged over the room
as if a swarm of
bees had been turned loose. There was
a craning of necks
all over the court, a quick rustling of
notebooks among the
reporters.

Simon stood at his ease,
absorbing the pleasant radia
tions of the sensation he
had created. Well, he reflected,
he had certainly done it
now. He glanced at the rows of
seats where the party from
Whiteways was sitting. Luker’s expression had not changed: he wore his usual
cold stony
mask. Fairweather looked acutely
unhappy: he could not
meet the Saint’s gaze. The
General and Lady Sangore had
adopted an indignant pose
of having nothing to do with
what was going on: they
sat as if red-hot pokers had been
inserted into their
backs and they were pretending not to
notice it.

Simon’s glance travelled on
and found the faces of Peter
and Patricia among the
scatter of pink blobs that were
turned up to him. He held
their eyes for a moment with a
message of impenitent
devilry.

The jury were goggling at
him openmouthed, with the
sole exception of the
small black-bearded man, who had
taken up a Napoleonic
posture with his arms proudly folded
and a radiance of
anarchistic joy on his face. The coroner
had
gone slightly purple; he banged on the table in front
of
him.

“Silence!” he
shouted. “Silence, or I’ll have the court
cleared!”

He turned angrily on Simon.

“We are not interested
in your theories, Mr Templar,
and you had no right to
make such a statement. You will
please remember that this
is a court of law.”

“I’m trying to,”
said the Saint unflinchingly. “I thought
I
was summoned here to give evidence. I haven’t had the chance to give any yet.
I’m not offering theories. I’m trying
to draw attention to
one or two very curious and even fishy
facts
which I have not been allowed to mention.”

“What are they?”
chirped the little juryman exultantly,
before
the coroner could speak again.

“For instance,”
said the Saint, “there is the fact which I noticed, which the lady who was
with me noticed, and
which even the police who
were on the scene must have
noticed, that every ground-floor window in
sight was open,
producing a draught which
must have materially helped the
growth
of the fire.”

Fairweather stood up.

“I could have
explained that if it had been brought up
before,”
he said. “It is true that most of the windows were
probably open. It was a warm evening, and they had been
open all day. It has always been the butler’s duty to lock
up the house before he retires, and it had completely
escaped my attention that he was not there to do it that night when we
went to bed. He would, of course, have
locked
up as soon as he came in; but unfortunately the fire
started
before that.”

“Thank you, Mr
Fairweather.”

The coroner shifted the
papers on his desk again with
two or three aimless, jerky
movements, as if to gain time
to re-establish his
domination. Then he leaned back again
and put his finger
tips together and went on in a more
trenchant voice.

“This is a
regrettable but instructive example of the
danger
of jumping to rash conclusions. It is one very good
reason
why the personal opinions of witnesses are not
admissible
in evidence. There are some people whose
warped
minds are prone to place a malicious interpretation
on
anything of which the true explanation is beyond their
limited
intelligence. There are also persons whose desire
for
cheap notoriety leads them to distort and exaggerate
without
restraint when they find themselves temporarily in
the
public eye, in the hope of attracting more attention to
themselves. It is the duty of a court to protect the reputations of
other witnesses, and the open-mindedness of the
jury,
from the harm which may be done by such irresponsible insinuations. In this
case, an insignificant fact which is
not contested has
been brought up with much ado. But so
far from supporting
the suggestion that there is something
‘fishy’
involved, to any normal and intelligent person it
merely confirms the
chain of mischances through which the
deceased
lost his life.”

“All right,”
said the Saint, through his teeth. “Then why
was
Kennet’s door locked?”

The coroner lost his head
for a moment.

“How do you know it
was locked?”

“Because I saw it. I
got as far as his room, and I could
have got him out if
I could have got in. But it was locked,
and
it was too strong to break down. I went back to get
an
axe, but the floor of the corridor caved in before I could
get back.”

“Well, supposing his
door was locked—what of it?”
demanded the
coroner in an exasperated voice. “Why shouldn’t he lock his door?”

Simon spoke very gently and
evenly.

“I imagine he had
every reason for locking it,” he replied.
“When
a man goes to stay in a house full of his bitterest
enemies,
people whom he’s fighting with all the resources at his command, people to whom
wholesale slaughter is merely
a matter of business, he’s
a fool if he doesn’t lock his door.
But it hasn’t been
proved that he did lock it. I simply said
that
his door was locked; and I might add that the key was
not
in it.”

“Beg pardon,
sir.” The captain of the fire brigade stood
up
at the far end of the room. “I found a door key among the daybree in the
libry.”

There was a hushed pause.

“Exactly,” said
the coroner, with sarcastic emphasis.
“Kennet locked
his door and took out the key. I fail to
see
any sinister implications in that—in fact, I have frequently done it
myself.”

“And have you
frequently held inquests without bringing
any
evidence to establish the cause of death?” retorted the
Saint
recklessly.

For an instant he thought
that even he had gone too far.
When he thought about it
afterwards, in cold blood, the
consequences that he had
invited with it brought him out
in a dank sweat. But at
that moment he was too furious
to care.

The coroner had gone white
around the nostrils.

“Mr Templar, you will
withdraw that remark at once.”

“I apologize,”
said the Saint immediately. It was the
only
thing to do. “Of course I withdraw it.”

“I have seen the body
myself,” said the coroner tightly.
“And
in a straightforward case like this, where there is
absolutely
no evidence to justify a suspicion of foul play,
it
is not thought necessary to add to the suffering of the
relatives of the deceased by ordering an autopsy.”

He moved his hands over his
blotter, looking down at
them; and then he brought
his eyes back to the Saint with
grim decisiveness.

“I do not wish to
repeat my previous remarks. But I
cannot too strongly
express the grave view which I take of
such
wild and unfounded accusations as you have made.
I
have only refrained from committing you for contempt
of court because I
prefer not to give you the publicity which
you
are doubtless seeking. But you had better go back to
your seat at once, before I change my mind.”

Simon hesitated. Every
instinct he had revolted against
obedience. But he knew that there was nothing
else he could do. He was as helpless as a fly caught in the meshes of a
remorseless machine.

He bowed stiffly and
walked down from the dais into
the midst of a silence in
which the fall of a feather would
have sounded
deafening.

None of the party from
Whiteways even looked at him.
But he noticed, with one
lonely tingle of hope, that Lady Valerie’s eyes were narrowed in an expression
of intense
concentrated thought. She seemed to be considering astounding
possibilities.

The coroner consulted
inaudibly with the police sergeant,
and then he cleared
his throat again as he had done when
the court opened.
His well-scoured face wore a more tran
quil
expression.

“I don’t think that
we need to call any more witnesses,”
he
said.

He went on to give his
summing up to the jury. He pointed out that fires usually started by accident,
and
usually from the most trivial and unsuspected causes.
He
drew their attention to the fact that a number of
fortui
tous circumstances, for none of which Mr Fairweather
or
his guests were to blame, such as the heavily timbered
con
struction of the house, and the pardonably forgotten
open
windows, had contributed to make the fire far more
serious
than it might otherwise have been. He reminded them
that
it was by no means unusual for some people to be such
sound sleepers that even an earthquake would not waken
them, and that in the haste and stress of an emergency a verbal
misunderstanding was even less extraordinary than
it
was in everyday life. And he urged them to dismiss from
their minds altogether the fantastic accusations with which
the issue had been confused, and to consider the case solely
on the very simple and coherent evidence which had been
placed before them.

In twenty minutes the
seven jurors, including the black-
bearded little man, who looked vaguely
disappointed,
brought back a verdict of
death by misadventure.

2

A hungry pack of reporters
fell on the Saint as he left the building. They formed a close circle round
him.

“Come on, Saint; give
us the story!”

“What’s the
use?” Simon asked grittily. “You couldn’t
print
it.”

“Never mind that—tell
us about it.”

“Well, what do
you
think?”

One of them pushed his hat
on to the back of his head.

“It looks easy
enough. Maybe Kennet was dead drunk,
but they’d want to
keep that dark for the sake of the old
man.
It doesn’t make much difference. It’s pretty obvious
that
the whole lot of them lost their heads and just ran
like
hares and left him behind; but with a crowd like that
it’s
bound to be hushed up. You couldn’t do anything about
it.
What was the use of asking for trouble?”