Cyril Hare - Untimely Death aka He Should Have Died Hereafter

“It’s not the only thing he ought to have guessed,” remarked Eleanor.

Hester smiled at Eleanor, and Eleanor smiled at Hester. It was the kind of smile that passes between people of superior intelligence in the presence of a deplorably ignorant third party.

“Well?” said Pettigrew. “What ought he to have guessed?”

“That Mrs. Gorman was going to have a baby, of course. It was obvious. We spotted it the moment we saw her.”

“It wasn’t only the judge, it was the whole lot of you,” observed Hester. “ ‘My lord, this has taken me entirely by surprise’.” She gave a very passable imitation of Manktelow’s manner. “I never saw a crowd of men look so silly. Two of them detectives, too! Mr. Parkinson!” she called out, suddenly. “Don’t go, Mr. Parkinson. I’ve something I wanted to ask you.”

Inspector Parkinson, with Mallett by his side, was just leaving the Law Courts. He stopped and took off his hat to Hester.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Miss Greenway,” he said.

“Never mind what you were expecting. It’s what Edna Gorman’s expecting that we were talking about. Didn’t either you or Mr. Mallett guess?”

“To tell you the truth, ma’am, we hadn’t given it a thought. And now, if you’ll excuse us-”

“Of course I won’t excuse you. There are dozens of things I want to hear about, and so does Mrs. Pettigrew. Mr. Pettigrew, isn’t there somewhere near here where we can get some tea? I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m simply dying for a cup.”

“It’s very kind of you, Miss Greenway, but I really ought to be getting along.”

“Well, if you must, Inspector, I suppose you must. But I thought you told me the other day that you wanted one of Jeannie’s puppies…?”

So it was that to his great surprise Pettigrew found himself playing host to a party of five in a Fleet Street teashop. It was a somewhat constrained party at first, but once he had persuaded Mallett that he bore him no malice the atmosphere became friendly enough.

“The first thing I want to know is,” said Hester Greenway, as soon as the cups had been poured out, “When are you prosecuting that odious creature Joliffe?”

“What do you suggest he should be prosecuted for, ma’am?” asked the Inspector cautiously.

“Good gracious, I don’t know. That’s your business, not mine. Making a fool of the coroner, I suppose.”

“I’m afraid that’s not an offence known to the law, ma’am.”

“But he must have done something!”

“I can’t help thinking Miss Greenway is right,” Pettigrew put in. “I’m deplorably rusty in these matters, but might I suggest that our old friend, a Common Law Misdemeanour-”

“Against the Peace of our Sovereign Lady the Queen, her Crown and Dignity.” Mallett rolled the phrase lovingly round his tongue.

“Exactly. There must have been something like this before at some time.”

“Rather over a hundred years ago, sir,” said Parkinson. “You’ll have heard of the Resurrection men, no doubt.”

“Then you have considered a prosecution?” said Pettigrew.

“It was not a matter for me to consider, sir. I reported the matter to the Chief Constable and he took the advice of the Director of Public Prosecutions. And the decision was-not to prosecute.”

“Why on earth not?” asked Hester.

“I rather think that some doubt was felt as to whether a conviction would be secured in such an unusual class of case.”

Something in the Inspector’s tone put Eleanor on enquiry. “Was that the only reason for not prosecuting him?” she asked. “Or was there something else?”

“Well, madam, now that you have raised the subject -this is in strict confidence, of course-there was at one time the possibility that Joliffe might be prosecuted on a graver charge.”

Inspector Parkinson’s face was brick red from the strain of endeavouring to combine civility with his sense of police propriety.

“You thought he’d murdered Jack?”

“Really, madam, I haven’t said that. It would be most improper of me-”

“He could have done it easily in a fit of temper, and then remembered that it wouldn’t pay him,” Eleanor went on, sublimely regardless of the Inspector’s embarrassment. “Or not murdered him-just manslaughtered him in his car by accident.”

“Jack Gorman wasn’t killed by Mr. Joliffe’s car,” Parkinson volunteered. “As a matter of fact, I shouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t a car at all.”

“Steady on!” said Hester. “We all read what the doctor said at the inquest.”

“That doctor was a-” Parkinson hesitated, turned a darker shade of red and shut his mouth firmly. He opened it again to swallow down the last of his tea, and then with a mumbled apology left the teashop.

“Well! If he thinks he’s going to get a pup from me after that…” was Hester’s disgusted comment.

Pettigrew’s reaction to the Inspector’s disappearance was different. “Mr. Mallett,” he said, “when you were a Detective-Inspector did you discuss cases with members of the public?”

“I did not, sir.”

“Now that you are no longer in the force, do you feel at liberty to discuss this case with us?”

“I think so, sir, yes.”

“Then in that case, I think we should be grateful to Parkinson for taking himself off. I take it that everything he knows about this case, you know?”

Mallett hesitated. He was a modest man, but he had a high regard for truth.

“I think that would be an under-statement, sir,” he said.

“Excellent! That is all I need to know about Parkinson. Will you therefore please take another of those sugar cakes and give your mind to the following questions: When, where, why, how and by whom was Jack Gorman killed?”

Mallett demolished the cake in astonishingly quick time, brushed the crumbs out of his moustache and said, “When? Within fairly narrow limits, that presents no particular difficulty now. On this Saturday morning Jack Gorman must have left his wife early-”

“I can help you there. I saw him. It was just daybreak.”

“That means that he was alive about half past five Greenwich mean time, or half past six by the clock. If Mr. Joliffe is telling the truth, and I think he is in this matter, he was dead by half past seven, which was when he found him while on his way to work that morning.”

“Very well. That brings us logically to Where?”

“Assuming that he was killed where Joliffe says that he found him-two assumptions this time, sir, but they seem to be reasonable ones-we can determine that exactly. I don’t know whether you know Satcherley Copse, sir?”

Pettigrew closed his eyes and delved back into his distant memories once more. There came to him a recollection of waiting in a chilling wind and icy rain while hounds were hopelessly at fault in a tangle of neglected woodland. The pony coughed twice on the way home, and he was sick with fear that it would be unfit to ride the next hunting day. Yes he knew Satcherley Copse.

“It’s a hanging wood above Stinchcombe Water,” he said.

“Quite right, sir. And you get to it from the road by a gate near the top of Gallows Hill. That’s the direct road from Sallowcombe to Whitsea, of course. Joliffe found his son-in-law by that gate, his head and shoulders in the road, his feet towards the gate-which was open, incidentally, he says. I’ve been over the ground since, both with and without Mr. Parkinson, and, as you know, we did find Jack’s button. Apart from that, by the time we got there, there were no traces left. In any case, I should think that by midday on that same Saturday anything in the road or near it had been hopelessly obscured. Besides cars on the road, there must have been a couple of hundred horses at least through that gate within a few hours of Joliffe finding him.”