Flowers For the Judge Read Online Free Page B

it testily, as though irritated by his obtuseness.
    ‘Yes, the strong-room. Mike got the folder from it last night. Yes, the same room. Oh, and Mr Campion –’ she lowered her voice – ‘the doctor’s here. He seems to think the poor man’s been dead for some
days
’
    Again Campion put a query, and this time Miss Curley’s reply did not sound irritable. Her tone was aweful, rather.
    ‘Right in the middle of the room, sprawled out. No one could have opened that door without seeing him.’

CHAPTER II
Funeral Arrangements Later
    THERE ARE MOMENTS which stand out in clear detail in the recollection of an hour of horror. They are seldom dramatic, and those who are haunted by them are sometimes puzzled to discover why just they and none other should have been singled out by the brain for this especial clarity.
    Neither Mike Wedgwood nor Miss Curley ever forgot the instant when the doctor looked up from his knees and said half apologetically:
    ‘I’m afraid we shall have to move him after all. I can’t possibly see here.’
    It may have been that the bounds of their capacity for shock had been reached and that his words coincided with the moment immediately before the first degree of merciful callousness descended upon them and they were able to begin again from a new level. But at any rate, the scene was photographed indelibly upon their minds.
    The extraordinary untidy room stood out in every detail. They saw with new eyes its lining of dusty junk-packed shelves, broken only at the far end where an old-fashioned green and black safe replaced the cooking range which had once been there. They saw the heavy table which took up nearly the whole of the centre of the room, heaped high with books and files and vast untidy brown paper parcels.
    They were even aware of the space beneath it; that, too, fully occupied by flimsy wooden boxes whose paper contents would have overflowed had it not been for the books piled carelessly on top.
    The fog, which enveloped the city and now crept into every corner, hung about the air like smoke, giving the single swinging bulb a dusty halo. The body lay upon its back, the head in the shadow of the table ledge and the sagging legs and torso sprawled out towards the doorway where they stood.
    The doctor rose stiffly to his feet and faced them. He was a short man, grizzled and of a good age, but still spruce, and his little eyes were shrewd beneath his fierce brows. In contrast with his sombrely smart clothes his bare forearms, muscular and very hairy, looked slightly indecent.
    ‘Where can we take him?’ he inquired.
    Miss Curley, who took it for granted that the question was addressed to her, considered rapidly. Space at Twenty-three was restricted. In the basement, besides the present room, there was only the packers’ hall at the end of the passage, the stock-room, or the little wash-room next door, none of them suitable resting-places for a corpse. Upstairs the amenities were even less inviting, since the business of the day had begun and the staff was already hysterical.
    She glanced at the table.
    ‘If we move those things on to the floor and spread a sheet on the table you’ll be right under the light, Doctor,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a better bulb.’
    The little medical man looked at her curiously. He knew Paul had been a director, and although he did not expect office employees to have quite the same attitude towards a dead man as a family might have adopted, he was surprised to find an absence of the general tendency of laymen to get the body to the most comfortable place possible at the earliest moment. Aloud he said he thought Miss Curley’s a most sensible suggestion.
    Mike stepped into the room, avoiding the piteous thing upon the floor, and began to shift the dusty papers to the ground on the opposite side.
    The place was dry from the furnace on the other side of the passage, with occasional icy draughts from the door into the yard. Mike worked like a man in a