by Robin Blake
Fidelis came in and we ran through the evidence he would give later, and the timing of my prompting questions. I told him in severe terms that I would not tolerate any excursions into the wilder shores of conjecture.
‘By which you mean?’ he said.
‘That Pimbo was murdered. We must speak only of what we know, from direct observation. Nothing fanciful – is that agreed?’
‘All right,’ said Fidelis, a little gloomily.
‘And by the way,’ I went on, ‘you will be interested that your friend Mr Tybalt Jackson has turned up in town. And he’s accompanied by a negro – his servant, I suppose. They’re put up at the Lamb and Flag.’
‘I am not surprised that he’s come,’ said Fidelis. ‘There was much about that man of the terrier that won’t let go its grip.’
‘But is it a terrier or a bloodhound? Has he followed Moon’s scent here, nose to the ground?’
‘That is the question. Perhaps Moon is here at this moment preparing to give you his evidence.’
Anticipating a large attendance I had sent Furzey ahead of me to open up the inquest room in good time. When I got there the crowd was already in, jostling and bargaining over sitting space and, when they could find none, occupying the standing room at the back. The jurors stood around in a single group at the front with Furzey, who was instructing them in their proper behaviour.
We lost no time in getting the business under way, swearing the jury, and then taking them off to view the body at the House of Correction, a walk of a few minutes. As we stood around the stretched-out corpse I pointed to the two terrible wounds sustained by the dead man’s head.
‘Can you all see that the ball from a gun passed upwards through his jaw, through the roof of his mouth and his brain and came out here, at the top of his head?’
They all craned to look. One of them, the baker Thomas Proctor, said drily, ‘I see two holes in his head, all right. I see no ball.’
‘You will see it later, Thomas.’
‘What I mean is, what’s to say it didn’t go t’other way – top to bottom?’
Their chosen foreman, James Purvis, gave him a pitying look.
‘Don’t be soft, Tommy. How could he shoot his’self through the top of his head?’
‘I’m not saying he did,’ persisted Proctor. ‘What if he hasn’t shot his’self? What if another’s shot him?’
‘That’s what we are here to determine, Thomas,’ I said. ‘But we do know, at least, that the ball was shot upwards through the bottom of his chin.’
‘How could we know it? Was any of us there?’
‘You will hear how in the court, Thomas.’
Back in the inquest room we arranged ourselves around the long table. I took the middle place with Furzey at my right hand as clerk of the inquest, and the jurors along the table’s length on both sides. Chairs had been placed in rows facing us for the townspeople, and these were almost all occupied. I quietened their chatter and wasted no time in calling Robert Hazelbury. He had been first through the broken down door of Pimbo’s office, which qualified him as the first finder – and so, by tradition, the first witness.
Furzey had placed the witness chair at a right angle to our table, so that both we and the public in attendance could see the speaker’s face. The Chief Cashier looked pale and apprehensive, and took the oath with such a shaking voice that it seemed he might even begin to weep. Gently I took him through the events of that shocking morning – the time of day, the locked inner office, Mr Benn’s attempts to pick the lock and finally the intervention of the labourers with their crowbar. By this time Hazelbury seemed to have mastered himself.
‘We found him lying athwart the writing table, Sir, as you yourself saw. The blood, it had burst out of his brains and was all around him and dripping on the floor. A terrible sight, it was, terrible.’
‘Tell the court how he lay.’
‘Like he’d fallen forward from t’other side of the table. His head was turned, so that he rested on his cheek.’
‘How was he wounded?’
‘At top of his head. That’s all I saw at first. His skull had a horrid big hole in it.’
‘Did you form any opinion as to how he might have sustained this terrible wound?’
‘From the shot of a pistol, Sir, so it seemed. We found one lying on the floor near his table.’
I had brought the pistol to court, now restored to its place in the wooden case. I took the case and laid it flat, then opened it and withdrew the weapon. There was a collective gasp from the audience. I handed the pistol down the table until it reached the witness.
‘Is this the weapon?’
Hazelbury held the piece with grave uncertainty, as if any moment it may fire itself spontaneously in his hand.
‘Yes Sir, I would say it is.’
He hurriedly passed the pistol back to the juror nearest his seat and I indicated that it go hand-to-hand around the table for the rest of them to examine, which they did each in a different fashion: one with a knowing smile, another with startled reverence, a third weighing it in his upturned palms. This was Peter Lofthouse, who was a gunsmith and anxious to convey to us his interest not just as a juror but as a professional man.
‘Mr Lofthouse,’ I said, ‘while you have it in your hands, would you help the court with your estimation of the piece?’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘It’s an old’un, thirty year or more. What we call a Toby and a dagg – small, you see, to go in the pocket.’
‘Might it be a military weapon?’
Lofthouse shook his head.
‘You couldn’t use this in a battle, if that’s what you mean, Mr Cragg. See, you’ve to load it by unscrewing the barrel right off. You’ve to put the charge and the ball in, screw it back again and pour the priming. Takes too long when you’re fighting, you see, and you might drop the barrel, being hot an’ all. This is more a one-shot gun for personal safety – or for murder if you’d a mind to it.’
At the mention of murder a kind of audible shiver went round the room.
‘Thank you, Mr Lofthouse, that is very helpful. Now, Mr Hazelbury, had you ever seen this pistol before you found it in Mr Pimbo’s business room on the fatal day?’
‘No, Sir.’
‘Were you even aware that Mr Pimbo kept a pistol at the office?’
‘It wasn’t that he kept it on purpose, Sir. That pistol was pledged against an advance.’
‘Can you tell the court about that transaction?’
‘Yes Sir, I found it in the book. It’s a very old one, Sir. The pistol was pledged long ago, in old Mr Pimbo’s time. It was never redeemed and so it lay unnoticed, almost hidden it was, in the strong room.’
‘Is that likely? Were there other pledges as old as that still in the younger Mr Pimbo’s possession?’
‘Very likely, Sir. Not all unredeemed pledges were or could be sold. Sometimes the term of the loan was very long – even the length of a lifetime. Those could never be sold on until the owner was known to be dead.’
‘So who originally pledged this pistol, and when was it?’
‘Our records say it was twenty-two years ago, by a Captain Avery, Sir. He was with the militia, I believe, and has long ago moved away.’
‘And was it one of the lifetime pledges to which you have just referred?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘And is Captain Avery alive?’
‘I don’t know, Sir.’
‘And if he were – or if there were uncertainty about the matter – that would explain the continuing presence of the pistol in the strong room, I suppose. Now, Mr Hazelbury, I would like you to tell us about the state of Mr Pimbo’s affairs? I mean, the shop. Was it solvent?’
‘Oh, yes Sir. Insofar as the shop itself went, I have no reason to doubt that it was quite sound.’
‘Mr Pimbo had invited me as his legal adviser to attend him on the morning of his death. Do you know on what business this was?’
‘No, Sir. I cannot think.’
‘What was your employer’s state of mind in the days before he died? Would you say he was troubled in any way?’
Hazelbury considered.
‘He might have been. He might not. You didn’t know with Mr Pimbo. He was all jokes and hail-me-good-fellow on top, but there was much underneath that you couldn’t see.’
‘He was a difficult man to discern?’
Hazelbury nodded his head and I thanked him, then called Michael Ambler. He came to the witness chair with easy grace, a good-looking young man but with a self-pleasing smile that looked out of place in the circumstances.
‘You are Mr Pimbo’s journeyman goldsmith?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you worked under Mr Pimbo and Mr Hazelbury?’
‘I worked under Pimbo, not Hazelbury. Though I don’t know about “under”. I understand my work. I know gold and silver and how to work it. The workshop, it’s mine, really.’
‘You mean you run it?’
‘Yes Sir. I direct it, you might say.’
‘Do you have anything to do with money-handling in the business?’
‘No, Sir. That’s Hazelbury’s job. He knows about money, I know about precious metal. There’s a difference that folk don’t always appreciate.’
‘Notwithstanding that, can you give me your estimation of the state of Mr Pimbo’s business – of your side of it, I mean?’
‘It seemed all right. Business came in every day, near enough.’
‘What of Mr Pimbo himself? His state?’
Ambler glanced down and drew a deep breath.
‘In my opinion he was a man in pain, Sir,’ he said at last, looking up again. ‘Much of his usual old bluster had gone. I saw it on his face every day recently.’
‘You say “a man in pain”. Do you mean physical pain? Was he ill?’
‘No Sir, I mean mental pain. It was as if there were something gone sideways in his life, and he didn’t know how to set it right again.’
‘And how long had this been going on?’
‘He was always noisy in company, he was. But, close to, he was close himself, and didn’t confide, like Robert Hazelbury just said. But in my opinion he had got much closer over the last weeks.’
‘Thank you Mr Ambler. You may leave the chair.’
Next, I called Luke Fidelis.
‘Would you give the court your purely medical opinion of this unfortunate death?’ I opened.
Fidelis raised an eyebrow – a way he had of indicating that he sensed some mild subterfuge in my words.
‘Very well. In my purely medical opinion the man died by a pistol ball passing upwards into the centre of the jaw, cutting through the root of the tongue just a little in advance of the epiglottis. It continued on its way, boring through the roof of the mouth and the nasal sinuses before entering in turn the brain stem, the medulla oblongata and the pons from where it proceeded into the cerebrum and burst out through the parietal bone, where it left a jagged hole. The brain being awash with blood, as it always is, much of it flowed or splashed out through this hole, all over the desk and onto the floor.’
‘Would Mr Pimbo have died instantly?’
‘Oh, yes. As fast as I can snap my fingers.’
In the corner of my eye I noticed a hand movement by one of the jury. It was Thomas Proctor, with a question of his own.
‘But what I want to know is, why not the other way, doctor?’ he asked. ‘How do you know the bullet did not go downwards?’
‘Quite easily,’ said Fidelis. ‘It cannot have done.’
He looked at me and touched his wig. I took the hint, pulling the dead man’s own bloodstained peruke from the bag and passing it along, as I had previously passed the pistol. When the wig reached him, Fidelis held it up so that the jurors could see the hemispherical inside.
‘This is his wig,’ he said, now addressing Proctor directly. ‘The lining is as you see caked and stiffened with dried blood, with some pieces of the brain intermixed. And here in the centre is a declivity just the size of a pistol ball.’
He looked back at me for an instant and mouthed the word ‘bullet’, but this time I was ready with the item which I had taken, wrapped in a handkerchief, from the evidence bag. When it reached him, Fidelis held the pellet of lead up between finger and thumb for all to see and then showed how it fitted exactly into the little cavity in the wig’s lining.
‘The bullet lodged itself here after it had blown a hole through the cranium,’ he went on in a ringing, dramatic voice, which was now receiving the audience’s rapt attention, just as an actor’s would in a play. ‘Its momentum carried the wig up into the air and through an arc of flight before landing some feet away on the floor. There, it was picked up by Mr Pimbo’s pet dog, who took it into the nearby strong room, where he chewed and shook it until the bullet dropped out and rolled away. It was there that we found both items on the floor, detached from each other. Does that satisfy you, Mr Proctor, or will you be Doubting Tommy still?’
The audience loosened the strain of the moment by laughing heartily. Proctor flushed red and cried out,
‘Dog? What dog? I’ve heard nowt about a dog.’
He jerked his head this way and that, his mouth pouting angrily.
‘Ah yes, I should explain,’ I said, and did so, finishing by saying that the dog was now pro tempore in my own possession. Proctor was not mollified. He had taken great umbrage at Fidelis’s gibe.
I asked Fidelis, as a matter of form, to be on hand in case the court needed to hear from him again, and I then called Ruth Peel to give her evidence. She had been found a seat at the extreme end of one of the rows and now she stood and walked with a firm step to the chair.
Miss Peel took the oath, confirmed her name and place of residence, and settled herself to answer my questions. She did so throughout in a steady, unwavering voice, with little inflection and no overt emotion.
‘You are housekeeper at Cadley Place, the late Mr Pimbo’s home?’
‘I am.’
‘Do you remember the morning of Friday last week?’
‘I do.’
‘Did you see Mr Pimbo that morning?’
‘No. He’d gone to business before anyone else had risen.’
‘At what time did he leave?’
‘He would have left the house at five-thirty. It was his custom to rise at dawn, whatever the time of year, and to go to Preston half an hour after that. He liked to get started early on the business of the day.’
‘I assume you can shed little light on what business he had that day, so I shall move on to your own—’
‘Wait!’
It was Miss Peel that interrupted me. Being about to raise the difficult matter of her relationship to the dead man, I was a little put out.
‘You have something to add?’
‘Yes, Sir, I have. Quite by chance, although he did not discuss it with me in any way, I do happen to know something about the business he had that day. It was something important.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘It was because his clothes came back, brought by one of the women who washed him and laid him out.’
‘Yes? What about them?’
‘Well, amongst them I found this.’
With her good right hand she took from the bosom of her dress a paper, which she held up for all to see.
‘What is it, Miss Peel?’
‘If you like, I can read it to you. It is a note addressed to the Mayor; it is dated on the day Mr Pimbo died; and it is in his hand.’
I told her please to lose no time in doing so.
‘Your Worship’, she read, holding the paper up before her eyes. ‘Please be advised that I intend to bring before you this day under arrest a man, Moon, whom I believed I could trust in business but whom I now know to be a villain, and to have been so from the first moment of our partnership. For your consideration, as Chief Magistrate, I intend to prefer charges of fraud and embezzlement against him. Subject to his presenting himself
as I have asked him to do at my shop, I shall bring him before you at about ten in the morning. I beg you to be ready for us. The matter bears not only upon my own losses but on the good economy of the town. I shall in this business have the assistance of my attorney and a pistol, which I have ready, and shall not need the Constable’s attendance to ensure the arrest.’
She lowered the letter.
‘That is all it says.’
The entire courtroom had fallen silent at this revelation and I myself was astounded. I knew we had searched Pimbo’s pockets. How had we failed to discover this?
‘Was this letter a finished copy? Was it sealed?’
‘Yes Sir. It had been sealed ready for delivery, but the seal had cracked open.’
‘Where was this found? Was it in one of his pockets?’
‘No. I asked the woman the same question, because she had stopped for a cup of tea in the kitchen. She said she had found it tucked in between his waistcoat and his shirt.’
‘Had she read it?’
‘No Sir, she said she was not able to. She had just stuffed it back amongst his clothes.’
‘Had Mr Pimbo spoken or dropped any hint about being defrauded?’
‘Not to me.’
I took a few moments to absorb the information, then said:
‘We have heard from Mr Hazelbury that he knew of nothing amiss in Mr Pimbo’s business affairs. Can you yourself enlighten the court in any way on this matter?’
The witness was pale but steady.
‘I cannot think of anything.’
‘Is it true that Mr Pimbo had become erratic recently in his settlement of household accounts? That he had been making a smaller amount of money available to you, for instance, for household expenses?’
‘Yes, that is true. But I do not know why.’
‘In that case, may I ask you to stand down for the moment, but to remain in the courtroom, as I may have further questions?’