Slight Mourning Read Online Free

Sloan out, “and the only evidence that I propose to take that day will be that of identification.”
    â€œThank you, sir.”
    â€œWho’ll do that, by the way? Not the widow, I hope …” He was a compassionate man.
    â€œNo, sir. Constable Bargrave has seen her, of course, but she wasn’t keen. Still very shocked, he said. There’s a cousin, I understand, though, who was staying there at the time. A Mr. Quentin Fent.”
    The coroner nodded and made a note. “And in the first instance, Inspector, I shall adjourn the inquest for one month.”
    â€œThank you, sir. That would be a great help …”
    â€œIn the hope,” continued the coroner blandly, “that the other injured party—I’ve got his name, haven’t I? Ah, yes, Mr. Tom Exley—in the hope that Mr. Tom Exley will be recovered sufficiently by then to give evidence.”
    â€œThank you, sir,” said Sloan again, grinning to himself. There was no doubt that the coroner was as wily as they came—as befitted a man qualified in law who spent his days tangling with doctors.
    â€œNo point in rushing things, Inspector.”
    â€œNone, sir.”
    â€œAnd we don’t want any hares started, do we?” The coroner, mostly desk-bound, always thought of himself as a country solicitor.
    â€œNo, sir,” agreed Sloan stolidly.
    â€œOn the other hand this does need looking into—just in case. We haven’t got the full report yet, have we? Probably only his usual sleeping tablet stirred up a bit too much by a large nightcap.” He grimaced feelingly. “The sort of one you’d need after a big dinner party.”
    â€œCould be,” agreed Sloan. He and his wife, Margaret, did not entertain on such a scale. His own parents came to see that his wife was looking after him properly. His in-laws visited to check that his wife—their daughter—was being decently cherished. And that—so far—was all. Besides, semi-detached houses in suburban Berebury did not lend themselves to stylish dinner parties and Sloan’s own nightcap was usually milky coffee. “We do know, sir, he wasn’t expecting to have to go out again that night but Dr. Washby had a late call and at the last minute couldn’t take another guest home. Fent took him instead.”
    â€œQuite so,” said the coroner, making another note. “A month then, I think, would do very well all round. If there is anything more that I should know abut the post mortem, Dr. Dabbe and his analyst friends will have come up with it by then. And a month will do you?”
    â€œI hope so, sir.”
    â€œAfter all, Inspector,” he mused, “identification is really what inquests were all about. It was after the Norman Conquest they started having them.”
    â€œReally, sir?”
    â€œYou only had ’em at all to make sure that the dead man wasn’t a Norman,” said the coroner cheerfully. “If he was English it didn’t matter.”
    â€œFent was English all right, sir.”
    The coroner ignored this. “If he was a Norman, you see, the English had to pay a fine. Hence all the fuss about identification. You tried to prove your body wasn’t Norman. Presentment of Englishry, it was called …”
    Which was how it had come about that when the next batch of mourners entered the church the thoughts of Detective Inspector Sloan were rooted even further back in the past than those of Miss Cynthia Paterson.
    Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Marchmont were among those who came in in that batch, and neither Sloan nor Cynthia Paterson, abstracted as they both were, overlooked the fact. Mrs. Marjorie Marchmont wasn’t often overlooked. Her husband might have been. Easily. But not Mrs. Marjorie Marchmont. There was a natural ebullience about her, underlined by her large size, which even the circumstances of a funeral could not quell. And a child-like preoccupation