CHAPTER XIII

THE CORONER'S QUEST

The proceedings of that fine old inst.i.tution, the coroner's court, are apt to have their dignity impaired by the somewhat unjudicial surroundings amidst which they are conducted. The present inquiry was to be held in a long room attached to the inn, ordinarily devoted, as its various appurtenances testified, to gatherings of a more convivial character.

Hither I betook myself after a protracted lunch and a meditative pipe, and being the first to arrive--the jury having already been sworn and conducted to the mortuary to view the remains--whiled away the time by considering the habits of the customary occupants of the room by the light of the objects contained in it. A wooden target with one or two darts sticking in it hung on the end wall and invited the Robin Hoods of the village to try their skill; a system of incised marks on the oaken table made sinister suggestions of shove-halfpenny; and a large open box filled with white wigs, gaudily colored robes and wooden spears, swords and regalia, crudely coated with gilded paper, obviously appertained to the puerile ceremonials of the Order of Druids.

I had exhausted the interest of these relics and had transferred my attentions to the picture gallery when the other spectators and the witnesses began to arrive. Hastily I seated myself in the only comfortable chair beside the one placed at the head of the table, presumably for the coroner; and I had hardly done so when the latter entered accompanied by the jury. Immediately after them came the sergeant, Inspector Badger, one or two plain-clothes men, and finally the divisional surgeon.

The coroner took his seat at the head of the table and opened his book, and the jury seated themselves on a couple of benches on one side of the long table.

I looked with some interest at the twelve "good men and true." They were a representative group of British tradesmen, quiet, attentive, and rather solemn; but my attention was particularly attracted by a small man with a very large head and a shock of upstanding hair whom I had diagnosed, after a glance at his intelligent but truculent countenance and the shiny knees of his trousers, as the village cobbler. He sat between the broad-shouldered foreman, who looked like a blacksmith, and a dogged, red-faced man whose general aspect of prosperous greasiness suggested the calling of a butcher.

"The inquiry, gentlemen," the coroner commenced, "upon which we are now entering concerns itself with two questions. The first is that of ident.i.ty: who was this person whose body we have just viewed? The second is: How, when, and by what means did he come by his death? We will take the ident.i.ty first and begin with the circ.u.mstances under which the body was discovered."

Here the cobbler stood up and raised an excessively dirty hand.

"I rise, Mr. Chairman," said he, "to a point of order." The other jurymen looked at him curiously and some of them, I regret to say, grinned. "You have referred, sir," he continued, "to the body which we have just viewed. I wish to point out that we have not viewed a body; we have viewed a collection of bones."

"We will refer to them as the remains, if you prefer it," said the coroner.

"I do prefer it," was the reply, and the objector sat down.

"Very well," rejoined the coroner, and he proceeded to call the witnesses, of whom the first was a laborer who had discovered the bones in the watercress-bed.

"Do you happen to know how long it was since the watercress-beds had been cleaned out previously?" the coroner asked, when the witness had told the story of the discovery.

"They was cleaned out by Mr. Tapper's orders just before he gave them up. That will be a little better than two years ago. In May it were.

I helped to clean 'em. I worked on this very same place and there wasn't no bones there then."

The coroner glanced at the jury. "Any questions, gentlemen," he asked.

The cobbler directed an intimidating scowl at the witness and demanded:

"Were you searching for bones when you came on these remains?"

"Me!" exclaimed the witness. "What should I be searching for bones for?"

"Don't prevaricate," said the cobbler sternly; "answer the question: Yes or no."

"No, of course I wasn't."

The juryman shook his enormous head dubiously as though implying that he would let it pa.s.s this time but it mustn't happen again; and the examination of the witnesses continued, without eliciting anything that was new to me or giving rise to any incident, until the sergeant had described the finding of the right arm in the Cuckoo Pits.

"Was this an accidental discovery?" the coroner asked.

"No. We had instructions from Scotland Yard to search any likely ponds in this neighborhood."

The coroner discreetly forbore to press this matter any further, but my friend the cobbler was evidently on the qui vive, and I antic.i.p.ated a brisk cross-examination for Mr. Badger when his turn came. The inspector was apparently of the same opinion, for I saw him cast a glance of the deepest malevolence at the too inquiring disciple of St.

Crispin. In fact, his turn came next, and the cobbler's hair stood up with unholy joy.

The finding of the lower half of the trunk in Staple's Pond at Loughton was the inspector's own achievement, but he was not boastful about it.

The discovery, he remarked, followed naturally on the previous one in the Cuckoo Pits.

"Had you any private information that led you to search this particular neighborhood?" the cobbler asked.

"We had no private information whatever," replied Badger.

"Now I put it to you," pursued the juryman, shaking a forensic, and very dirty, forefinger at the inspector; "here are certain remains found at Sidcup; here are certain other remains found at St. Mary Cray, and certain others at Lee. All those places are in Kent. Now isn't it very remarkable that you should come straight down to Epping Forest, which is in Ess.e.x, and search for those bones and find 'em?"

"We were making a systematic search of all likely places," replied Badger.

"Exactly," said the cobbler, with a ferocious grin, "that's just my point. I say, isn't it very funny that, after finding the remains in Kent some twenty miles from here, with the River Thames between, you should come here to look for the bones and go straight to Staple's Pond, where they happen to be--and find 'em?"

"It would have been more funny," Badger replied sourly, "if we'd gone straight to a place where they happened _not_ to be--and found them."

A gratified sn.i.g.g.e.r arose from the other eleven good men and true, and the cobbler grinned savagely; but before he could think of a suitable rejoinder the coroner interposed.

"The question is not very material," he said, "and we mustn't embarra.s.s the police by unnecessary inquiries."

"It's my belief," said the cobbler, "that he knew they were there all the time."

"The witness has stated that he had no private information," said the coroner; and he proceeded to take the rest of the inspector's evidence, watched closely by the critical juror.

The account of the finding of the remains having been given in full, the police surgeon was called and sworn; the jurymen straightened their backs with an air of expectancy, and I turned over a page of my notebook.

"You have examined the bones at present lying in the mortuary and forming the subject of this inquiry?" the coroner asked.

"I have."

"Will you kindly tell us what you have observed?"

"I find that the bones are human bones, and are, in my opinion, all parts of the same person. They form a skeleton which is complete with the exception of the skull, the third finger of the left hand, the knee-caps, and the leg-bones--I mean the bones between the knees and the ankles."

"Is there anything to account for the absence of the missing finger?"

"No. There is no deformity and no sign of its having been amputated during life. In my opinion it was removed after death."

"Can you give us any description of the deceased?"

"I should say that these are the bones of an elderly man, probably over sixty years of age, about five feet eight and a half inches in height, of rather stout build, fairly muscular, and well preserved. There are no signs of disease excepting some old-standing rheumatic gout of the right hip-joint."

"Can you form any opinion as to the cause of death?"

"No. There are no marks of violence or signs of injury. But it will be impossible to form any opinion as to the cause of death until we have seen the skull."

"Did you note anything else of importance?"