Murder in Stained Glass. Armstrong Margaret

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СКАЧАТЬ enthusiasm. “You’re staying here? Then you can give me the details of this strange affair. Is it true that a murder was committed in Fred Ullathorne’s studio?”

      “It looks that way. But I can’t tell you about it now. The inquest begins at nine and Phyllis and I are expected to attend. Can you get us through?”

      “Of course. Come along!” He gave us each an arm and we began our difficult progress.

      “How do you happen to be here, Edgar?” I asked, as we were brought to a halt behind two stout women arm-in-arm. “Did you come for the inquest?”

      “Not exactly. I happened to be in Banbury, staying with the Lorrimers, on my way back from New Hampshire where I went to look at a piece of property. I’ve been dabbling in real estate, lately. Of course, when the news came of this murder, being such an old friend of Fred Ullathorne’s, I thought—”

      He broke off; the crowd was moving again. With some powerful pushing and a good deal of persuasion, in a few minutes we were at the gate.

      The policeman let us through when I explained that we were all friends of Mr. Frederick Ullathorne. The door stood open. The furnace cellar, “scene of the tragedy,” had been roped off, and we were told to go straight upstairs to the workroom.

      Up we went. Edgar followed close behind me. I anticipated an exclamation of delight as he saw the rose window, and I wasn’t disappointed.

      “By Jove!” he exclaimed, pausing. “Ullathorne has surpassed himself. That’s magnificent!”

      “Come along,” I whispered. “It’s a crime, not art, we’re after for the moment. Where shall we sit? Over there in the corner?”

      “Why not sit on this side facing the window? If the proceedings are dull—most legal proceedings are dull—we can look, not listen.”

      I nodded. We moved to the chairs he had pointed out. I beckoned to Leo. He joined us. We all sat down.

      In some ways, the workroom was less changed in appearance than I had expected. The drafting tables had been taken down and stacked in a far corner, and the local undertaker had provided plenty of camp stools; but the cartoons on the walls—Moses and Elijah, Ruth and Naomi, Saint George and Saint Patrick—and the rose window blazing down over everything, preserved the medieval effect that had impressed me when I first saw the place. We might have been in Rheims five hundred years ago, instead of twentieth century New England. I noticed that almost every person stopped talking as he entered, gave an upward glance at the rose window, and took his seat as if it were a pew.

      The room was not crowded. No one spoke above a whisper. I had heard the coroner was a martinet, a stickler for decorum. Cameras were taboo, radio wires and extra telephone connections forbidden, and only persons involved in the investigation were to be allowed to come in.

      Evidently the coroner had been obeyed, and when I saw him I wasn’t surprised. There the old gentleman sat enthroned in a magnificent Gothic bishop’s chair of carved oak from Mr. Ullathorne’s studio, placed against the wall at our left. An equally ancient carved oak stand that might once have been part of a miserere seat stood at his elbow. The pitcher of water and the tumbler upon it seemed oddly modern by contrast. So did the single “exhibit,” a very small pearl-handled revolver that didn’t look as if it could kill a bird, much less a man.

      But the coroner himself fitted his surroundings to a T. He might have been a doge, or at least a prime minister. He sat motionless, contemplating the assembled company with the serene indifference of extreme old age. His attitude and dress reminded me of Saint Gaudens’ statue of Peter Cooper. He looked very frail, as if a breath would blow him into the grave. Only his eyes were vividly alive.

      They roved about the room for a moment. He considered the jury, farmers and farm hands, filing out into the next room to “view the corpse.” He glanced at the reporters herded in a corner; his eyes turned to our side of the room, regarded Leo for a second or two, moved on to Edgar Farraday’s face and paused. His head bent in a nod of recognition. Then away his eyes went again, and came to rest on the rose window. For the next ten minutes he sat motionless, gazing contentedly at that galaxy of heavenly beings surrounded by the wealth of the animal and vegetable kingdom, as if district attorneys and sheriffs and all of us mortals didn’t exist. No doubt, I reflected, when you get to be very old the celestial world seems a good deal more important than the terrestrial.

      “Do you know the coroner?” I whispered to Edgar.

      “Oh, yes. Everybody knows Lucius Cornell. I’ve known him all my life. A splendid old fossil. Ought to have been retired years ago. He’s nearly ninety. But the community is proud of him and won’t let him go. They give him an assistant, fellow by the name of Culver, who does all the work.”

      “Is he just a figurehead then?”

      “Lord, no! You’ll see. When the evidence is all in he’ll address the jury, and very ably too. By the way, I don’t see Fred Ullathorne. Isn’t he here?”

      “No, he isn’t. He went to New York a few days before the murder and hasn’t been back.” I glanced at Leo, saw he was too taken up with Phyllis to hear what I was saying, and went on: “Leo has tried to get in touch with him, of course, and so have the police. Leo isn’t accustomed to responsibility, and I think it worries him not to have his father here.”

      “Naturally. Fred will blame Leo if anything goes wrong. He has always been hard on the boy and—Here comes the jury!”

      Twelve men were emerging from the studio. They moved solemnly to a row of chairs placed below the rose window and sat down.

      Probably all inquests start off in much the same routine way, recapitulating what everybody knows already. Anyway the first half hour of this one was as dull as ditch-water. There was nothing new and repetition had taken the life out of stories that had once seemed thrilling. Clarence’s account of his gruesome find was now as prosaic as if the bones had been twigs or rusty nails. Leo, called in place of his father, gave the necessary information as to the alterations in the building, the rent and the stained glass business in general, calmly enough though he looked haggard and more disturbed than the occasion seemed to warrant, and finished by telling of Clarence’s arrival at Miss Blair’s house late Sunday afternoon, of going to the glass shop with Clarence and finding what appeared to be a quantity of charred bones scattered on the floor in front of the kiln. Phyllis and I were called on merely to corroborate Clarence and Leo. The Ullathorne workmen had nothing important to contribute. A juror asked one of them, Peter Curtis, to explain the process of firing glass, and Peter said it was baked “like you’d bake china,” but when the juror kept on asking intelligent questions Peter explained that, as he was a glass cutter and leader, firing wasn’t much in his line, and after saying where he had spent Saturday night—all the men had fairly good alibis—he was allowed to step down.

      Dr. Greely’s sworn statement was read—perhaps it came in sooner, I’m not sure—and might have enlivened things a little. But it was read to the jury by Culver, the coroner’s assistant, in a droning monotone that made it hard to follow, and it was so technical—so crammed with tibias and femurs and craniums—that you couldn’t get much out of it until the final paragraph, when the doctor did say right out that the bones were human bones, though too charred to tell whether male or female, and we all drew a breath of relief.

      Then the medical examiner from Banbury rose. He was in a bad temper. He flung out several sarcastic remarks as to rustic incompetence, and what he would have thought and said and done if he had been on hand when the bones were found, and before they had been reduced СКАЧАТЬ