Who Calls the Tune

by Nina Bawden

  “We’ll get him now,” I heard Walker say, and the satisfaction in his voice made me want to retch.

  Then he was gone. I could see the bobbing of his torch as he went away from us, and Henry and I were left alone with the sergeant, who settled himself on a stone a little way away, solid and unmoving as Gibraltar. I wondered if he had been left to protect us, or to see that we didn’t get away.

  “He’s gone to the hut,” said Henry in my ear. “It’s near those rocks. He said we were to stay here. I suppose he’ll be all right alone?”

  I might have laughed at the idea of Henry worrying about Walker’s safety, but I felt too cold. So I only grunted and felt for a cigarette. The flame of the match made a warm circle of light for a moment, shutting out the dark and the cold, but when it died with a splutter in the damp heather the night seemed colder and darker than before. I wondered why Adlesburg had been such a fool as to run away. He couldn’t have expected to get far; there must have been one moment of panic, and then, once he was on the run he couldn’t go back. I wondered what had made him go over the edge. It started to rain. That put the finishing touch to the evening as far as I was concerned, and I buttoned my coat up to the neck, and tried to collapse into the collar. Then I heard Walker shouting; his voice sounded reedy and thin against the wind.

  The sergeant got up from his stone and started off at a blundering run.

  “Ought we to go too?” I said. “Or are we merely employed as beaters?”

  Henry grunted something that I didn’t hear, but he showed no signs of moving, so we stayed where we were, in ever-increasing discomfort, until the sergeant came back. It may have been five minutes or half an hour. I don’t know.

  He was out of breath, and he blew heavily in our faces. “Mr. Walker says I’m to drive you two gentleman back,” he said. “He’s staying at the ‘ut till the others come up. I’m to tell them how to get up from the road.”

  Henry said, in a voice that I didn’t recognise, “Have you found him?”

  The man hesitated, and then he said, “Why, yes, sir. Dead as a doornail, ‘e is. Hung himself by the looks of it.” He was silent for a moment, and then he added, with wonder, “Poor devil.”

  Neither Henry nor I spoke till we were back in the car. We sat together in the back, and I lit another cigarette. I couldn’t see Henry’s face, but when he spoke there was bewilderment in his voice, and pity.

  He said, “What made him do it? Can you tell me that? Poor devil.” And he said again, in a lower voice, and this time with a shade of relief, “Poor, silly devil.”

  Chapter Twelve

  We were all subpúnaed for the inquest. We had known that we should be, but that didn’t lessen the shock of the long, buff-coloured envelopes on the breakfast table, one beside each plate.

  On the morning of the inquest, Henry’s solicitor arrived. He and Henry were shut up in the study for more than an hour, and when they came out Henry looked angry, and the solicitor, unhappy. He was a bluff little man with an overgrown bedside manner, and a nervous habit of pulling at his fingers while he talked, so that conversation with him was punctuated by a series of sharp little cracks like pistol shots. We all filed into the study and sat around while he walked up and down the room, cracking his joints, and looking at the ceiling, the window, the desk, anywhere but at our faces.

  He said that there would be a jury at the inquest, and that we would have to make statements in turn; then he explained that we would have to be very careful about the statements because they could be used as depositions in a higher court.

  Perhaps he hadn’t meant to say that bit about the higher court; anyway, as soon as he had said it, he stammered and stuttered and said that of course it was very unlikely that there would be a higher court. Then he looked at us anxiously and made a nervously silly joke about a doctor’s mistakes being buried underground, and a lawyer’s swinging at the end of a rope. There was a nasty little silence when he’d said this, and he looked miserably and pathetically uncomfortable, and left as soon as he decently could.

  After he had gone, I tried to talk to Rella. She had been in bed when we got back the day before; I had not seen her since we found Tom Adlesburg. She looked white and ill. She left the room before I could speak to her; somehow, I got the idea that she was avoiding me.

  When we were alone, Henry told me the solicitor had tried to persuade him not to give evidence in person at the inquest and that he had refused. “He’s thinking I’ll make an ass of myself,” he said, and there was a narrow, angry line on his forehead. “He’s probably right. Only I’ll be damned if I’ll let them think I’m trying to get out of it. Look as if I was condemning myself out of my own mouth. Damned impertinence, that’s what it was. Damned impertinence.”

  He looked heated, and very military, and I could see what the solicitor was worried about, all right. Only I didn’t say so to Henry. It wouldn’t have done any good.

  After lunch, we all drove to the inquest in Henry’s car, Brigid in the front with Henry, and Rella in the back with me. No one spoke, we were all uneasy with each other, I think. I could see Henry’s face in the driving mirror. His eyes looked very blue and blank. I remembered that Brigid had said that the coroner was a friend of his, and I thought that it must make things more difficult for him than for us. I could see the sweat on his forehead, and I wondered if he was thinking of the furtive, excited stares, of seeing a friend in the crowd, and watching him look away.

  The inquest was to be held in the church hall, and when we drew up at the door there was a crowd waiting for us. They stood silent in the cold, their faces blue and pinched and eager. They drew back silently as we got out of the car, and formed a kind of guard of honour up the steps to the door. The quietness of the people was extraordinary. If it hadn’t been for that, I should have felt like royalty. I was surprised to find that I felt sick and excited at the same time as if I were a small boy again and going to my first pantomime.

  The hall smelt pretty grim, a queer, sweet, fusty smell. I wondered if they ever opened the windows, and then I saw pots of geraniums on the window sill, and recognised the smell. I remember thinking that I should never forget their scent, that it would be part of me till I died.

  The hall was pretty full; the people sat on rows of straight-backed chairs, joined together in sixes. At one end of the hall there was a small stage with fusty looking velvet curtains that were drawn back, and in the middle of the stage there was a trestle table that had a glass and a jug of water standing on it. The hall might have been arranged for a dreary address to the local literary society, except that, to the right of the stage, and apart from the audience, there was a line of chairs with the jury sitting on them. They looked a depressing lot. Most of them looked like small tradesmen, but there were two in breeches and shiny boots who were probably farmers. There was one woman; a great fat cow of a creature with a face like a rat trap and eyes like the malignant little buttons on a child’s teddy bear.

  I was glad when someone, the coroner’s officer, I think, ushered us to a row of seats in the front where we couldn’t see the jury unless we twisted round, and we couldn’t do that very easily, because the seats were joined together and not very wide, so that we sat uncomfortably squeezed together.

  There was a lot of whispering and coughing and throatclearing as if it was the beginning of a church service. After a bit, we were joined by Dr. Lewis and Dr. Carter. Carter looked older than ever, and so brittle that I thought he might drop apart if you touched him. Another man who looked like a doctor too came up to them, and they drew apart and talked together. I supposed that the third man was the doctor who had done the postmortem; I caught him glancing at our little party with a speculative and scientific air.

  Then there was a little bustle, and the coroner came in and everyone was quiet. He was a middle-aged man with a neat moustache and a vaguely professional air. He didn’t look at all happy; I saw him look at Henry, and Henry looked down at his boots.

  There was a
chair at the side of the stage; it made me think of the mock trials we had had at school on wet afternoons. Walker went up and took the oath. He talked to the coroner in a quiet, respectful voice, and now and then the coroner asked him questions in a conversational way. Walker was telling him how the body was found, and he referred to statements made by the policemen who had been on the spot. He explained that a post-mortem had been asked for because the doctors in attendance had not been satisfied that death was due to natural causes. He seemed to be taking a long time over his statement, and I thought he was being too wordy. I found the first, sick excitement leaving me, and my attention began to wander, so that I didn’t hear everything he said. He ended up by telling the coroner the long rigmarole about Adlesburg, and he read out the statement that he had made at the station before he had run away. It was pretty much what Rella had told us, and we sounded a scurrilous household. The coroner looked pink and upset, and I risked knocking us all over and peered over my shoulder at the jury. The tradesmen were looking righteous and tight-lipped, the farmers embarrassed and bewildered, and the woman had her mouth pursed up so hard that it didn’t look as if she had any lips at all.

  When Walker had finished, they called the doctor who had done the post-mortem. He was a fat, pompous fellow with a pale, hairless face that had the fleshy opaqueness of a magnolia. He kept looking at his watch while he was making his statement, as if to impress us with what a very busy man he was. He used a lot of technical phrases, and the coroner kept pulling him up and making him explain what he meant more simply. You could see that he hated that; his voice was curt, and he tapped with his fingers on his fat knee.

  He didn’t say anything that was new. He explained about the carbon monoxide, and that Venetia hadn’t had enough to kill her, but enough to make it impossible for her to have walked from the car to the quarry without collapsing on the way. He couldn’t tell exactly how much of the stuff she’d had, because she’d been alive for some time afterwards and a certain amount would have been eliminated, but there was sufficient saturation of the blood to make it quite clear that she had inhaled a considerable amount, certainly too much for her to have walked unaided. There was a lot more, most of it too technical for me to understand, and I supposed that it wasn’t necessary for the jury to understand either, because the coroner didn’t ask him to put it more simply. He seemed to grasp it all right himself; I wondered if he was a doctor after all, and was surprised, because he didn’t look like one, and you can usually tell doctors by their smugly assured air, as if, enshrined behind their Hippocratic oath and their medical books, they thought themselves not as other men. At last, the coroner said loudly, directing his voice at the jury, “Then you don’t think that death could have been accidental?”

  The doctor puffed out his creamy cheeks and said, “I thought I’d made that quite clear. Certainly death could not have been accidental. Most certainly not.”

  He was dismissed, and Henry’s solicitor popped up in the body of the hall, and asked that the family doctor should give evidence. Lewis went up on the stage and took the oath. He said that he thought Mrs. Sykes could have walked from the car to the quarry without help, that she was physically very strong and that carbon monoxide varied in its effect upon different people. He seemed nervous and upset, but he made a good impression, largely, I think, because the first doctor had been so unpleasant. Then the coroner said:

  “I believe, Dr. Lewis, that you said in your statement to the police that you had been prepared at first to give a death certificate to the effect that Mrs. Sykes had died from exposure?”

  Lewis coughed, and said, “Er … yes.”

  “What made you change your mind?” asked the coroner.

  Lewis hesitated, and then he said, in a very low voice, “I asked Dr. Carter for an opinion, and he thought we should ask for a p.-m.”

  “I see,” said the coroner. Then, as if he wasn’t liking his job very much, “You mean, don’t you, that Dr. Carter pointed out that Mrs. Sykes had not died from exposure, but from carbon-monoxide poisoning?”

  I felt sorry for Lewis. He said, “But she did die from exposure as well as the carbon-monoxide. I mean, the two causes were inter-related.”

  The coroner looked angry. He said, “You know what I mean, Dr. Lewis. Dr. Carter pointed out to you that Mrs. Sykes had been suffering from carbon-monoxide poisoning, did he not?”

  Lewis said “Yes” very loudly and angrily, and when the coroner dismissed him he came down into the body of the hall and sat with his head in his hands.

  Then the police called the garage owner who had inspected the car on their orders. He was a stocky little chap, self-possessed and jaunty. He grinned at the jury as he went up on to the stage. He gave his evidence very clearly. His voice was cockney with a horrible overtone of gentility that suggested Ilford or Barking or Potters Bar, and yet there was a kind of strength in his voice, too, and his blunt-featured face made you feel confident. He said that he had found no defect in the exhaust of the car; that he had thoroughly overhauled the car and there wasn’t any way that the exhaust could have leaked and the fumes got into the car. He agreed, when the coroner suggested it, that such things did happen sometimes, but he was politely firm that it could not have happened in this case. When he came down from the stage, he smiled at the jury again, as though he had friends among them.

  Then they called Rella. She looked little and thin as she took the oath, and I found that the palms of my hands were sticky. The coroner was gentle with her. She spoke very softly, and once the foreman of the jury got up and asked her to speak louder. She corroborated Adlesburg’s statement and told the coroner what she had told us. I didn’t look at the jury. I didn’t need to. I could hear the shocked hiss of their indrawn breath.

  The coroner said, very gently, “What was your reaction when you first knew about Mr. Adlesburg and Mrs. Sykes?”

  She hesitated, and then she said, “I was not happy about it. I did not think she would make him happy.”

  “Oh,” said the coroner. “Weren’t you … angry?”

  She said “Yes” in a low voice.

  Then he asked her, “When you heard the noise of the car … on the night that Mrs. Sykes was killed … the garage doors were shut while the engine was running?” She nodded, and he went on, “Can you tell the court how long the engine was running while the garage doors were closed?”

  She said, “Perhaps ten minutes. Perhaps a quarter of an hour. I am not sure.”

  She came back to her seat then, not looking at anyone. She looked tired to death, and there were blue shadows under her eyes.

  It was my turn. The coroner didn’t ask me many questions, he just nodded every now and again, and made notes on the pad in front of him. He looked much older close to, there were a lot of fine lines running from the side of his nose to the corner of his mouth. The faces of the people in the hall seemed as impersonal as fishes in an aquarium; in particular, Henry and Brigid and Rella seemed small and far away as if I were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. When I came down from the box, I saw Walker looking at me with a curious expression on his face. He looked both confident and bewildered. When our eyes met, his seemed to grow suddenly very bright, and then he turned away.

  Brigid had trouble with her hat. While she was taking the oath it tilted sideways, and she tried to push it straight again without much success. All the time she was on the stage she looked self-conscious and unhappy; the new poise she had acquired in the last few days seemed to have deserted her. She said that she had come to stay with her sister just before Christmas; that she had not noticed anything unusual in her sister’s behaviour; that she had not known until after her sister’s death that Tom Adlesburg was her lover.

  The coroner had to help her a lot; several times she dried up completely and looked despairingly round the court. Towards the end, she looked as if she might cry.

  The coroner said unhappily, “I believe that you and Mr. Sykes are very fond of each other?”r />
  Brigid said “Yes” limply and quietly, and then she looked straight at the jury and said, loudly and without any hesitation, “We are very much in love with each other.” There was a silence, and the ugly red colour crept up her neck and swamped her face.

  The coroner said, “I see. Did Mrs. Sykes know about this?”

  Brigid said, “Oh, yes. I’m sure she knew, I think she was glad.” If she had been the greatest actress in the world, she could not have had a quieter audience. She came back to her seat with her head held high, and her eyes dark and troubled.

  Then the coroner’s officer called Henry. The silence that had held since Brigid left the box broke as he took the oath. People started to whisper; the whispering ran round the hall like a river murmuring. It was a low, excited sound; they whispered in the way people whisper round a death-bed and at the grave-side. It was a kind of sick eagerness; suddenly the hall felt like a charnelhouse.

  Brigid whispered, “Do you know who the coroner is? He’s Sir Charles Whitehead. The famous gynæcologist. He and Henry are awfully friendly.” In spite of the fact that she was frightened and unhappy she had time to be proud that Henry had distinguished friends.

  I could see that they were friends by the way the coroner put his questions. They were sharp, almost unpleasant, as though he was conscious of his friendliness for Henry and was afraid of letting him down lightly. Afterwards I wondered whether it would have been better for Henry if the coroner had been a stranger, and not a friend.