Charity Ends At Home
Colin Watson
Chapter One
One of the most notable examples of what a former mayor of Flaxborough described, with unconscious felicity, as “the venereal institutions of this ancient town” was its coroner, Mr Albert Amblesby.
He had endured in his office through four reigns. Only the oldest citizens could recall his appointment. It had been canvassed as a political favour by a group of local dignitaries whose affairs during the first world war had prospered through the shrewd advice of the junior partner in the firm of Sparrow, Sparrow and Amblesby, solicitors. What the advice had been, there was now no means of learning. The beneficiaries had long since departed, as had murmurous, lugubrious lawyer Sparrow and his dim brother. Even rumour, once pungent with questions about fraudulent cattlecake contracts, selection board bribes and a military highway that got no further than the staithes of the Flaxborough Docking Company, had thinned and dissipated on the wind of time. As for Albert Amblesby himself, he had forgotten the circumstances of his preferment together with many, many other things. His only certain knowledge was that he was clever enough to have awakened that morning to the lovely discovery that one person on whom no inquest could yet be called was Her Majesty’s Coroner for Flaxborough and District.
Survival was the central fact and chief joy in the life of Mr Amblesby. It was a triumph of which he was perpetually conscious. The deaths, one by one, of his partners, his wife, his old political cronies and, best of all, his enemies, had been as gratifying as the salutes of guns in the ears of a tenacious old fortress commander.
Those who interpreted this attitude as callousness and affected to be sickened by his eager and almost gay perusal of the obituary columns of the Flaxborough Citizen did Mr Amblesby less than justice. He grudged life to no one. He certainly had never wished anybody dead. But his firm and uncomplicated belief was that survival, like success in business, was purely a matter of personal acumen. If one caught pneumonia or stepped under a bus—well, it was a bit of bad management that carried its penalty as surely as did a faulty contract or a carelessly framed conveyance. And every failure, whether of a firm or of a heart, made a little more room in that field of personal advancement that Mr Amblesby saw as the ordained tilthyard of mankind.
It was natural, then, that the Flaxborough coroner should conduct the functions of his office with neither sentimentality nor gloom. He presided over an inquest with a certain sardonic sharpness, admirably calculated to save the bereaved relatives from the embarrassment of that public display of emotion which a kind word can so easily unloose. It was rather as if the affairs of the deceased had come under the scrutiny of an official receiver, prepared at the slightest sign of careless book-keeping to order the corpse alive again to show cause why it should not be committed for contempt.
Sergeant Malley, the Coroner’s Officer, would always privately warn witnesses that they might find Mr Amblesby’s bearing somewhat lacking in sympathy. “He doesn’t mean any harm, really,” he would tell them. “It’s just that he’s getting on a bit. You mustn’t take notice of everything he says—he’s a wonderful old gentleman for his age.”
The sergeant’s personal, and carefully guarded, opinion that the coroner was “a wicked old sod and a damned disgrace”, was thus transmuted into terms that he hoped would soften the shock of the coming encounter without altogether frightening the witnesses out of offering their depositions.
Such thoughtfulness was characteristic of Malley. He was a heavy, contemplative, wry-humoured, patient man. His authority, such as it was, troubled and even shamed him. Who was he—who was anybody—to order other human beings around? They had grief enough without being bullied and badgered by senile inquisitors and their jacks-in-office.
One day in late summer, the sergeant called for Mr Amblesby a little before ten o’clock. There had been a road accident the previous afternoon and an inquest on the young motorcyclist who had died during the night in Flaxborough General Hospital was to be opened at eleven. An hour was not an over-generous allowance for the collection of Mr Amblesby, his rousing into awareness of what had happened and what he was supposed to do about it, and the arrangement of the old man in some semblance of official dignity at the coroner’s table in Fen Street. He would also have to view the body in the hospital mortuary on the way.
Malley parked his car on the weed-dappled gravel outside Mr Amblesby’s front door. The hand-brake ratchet made a noise like a splintering plank. As the sergeant climbed out, the chassis rose four inches. It was an old car, nearly as big as a hearse, but very tolerant. It was Malley’s own. If policemen below the rank of inspector wished to get anywhere in Flaxborough otherwise than on foot, that was their business.
The sergeant rang the bell and without waiting for an answer pushed open the front door and entered the dim, damp hall. He walked confidently over ten yards of bare, echoing tile, and stood at the foot of a staircase. Peering up into the gloom, he called loudly but without urgency: “Are you there, sir?” It was a deep, amiable voice, fattened upon oratorio.
In the upper distance, a door clicked. Slippered feet rustled to the stair head.
“Eh?” Sharp, querulous, hostile by habit.
“I’ve come to take you to the office, sir.”
In Malley’s unhurried hands was a tin of tobacco. He levered off the lid and nudged the dark, aromatic flakes with his thumb. He looked at the tobacco carefully while he spoke, as if his errand were an irrelevant favour.
“There’s another inquest for you to open. At eleven o’clock.”
Mr Amblesby was descending the stairs. He came slowly into what light filtered into the hall from the stained glass panels in the front door. His black solicitor’s clothes, half as old as himself and limp with wear, were too big for him. The jacket swung like a cloak.
The old man was holding something up to his face with both hands. Malley had the ridiculous fancy that it was a mouth-organ. Then he saw that it was a kipper. The old man was nibbling at it with quick, determined little pecks.
“I thought you’d like a lift, sir,” Malley said. “It’s at eleven, the inquest. Just an opening.”
“Eh?”
On reaching the foot of the staircase, Mr Amblesby looked round for somewhere to put the kipper skeleton. It looked now like a comb. Malley took it from him and carried it to the front door, where he threw it into some shrubs.
Mr Amblesby wiped his fingers on a big white handkerchief which he then stuffed into his jacket pocket.
“You’ll not want a top coat,” the sergeant told him.
Mr Amblesby gazed sourly out past the door that Malley had left open. “Why not?”
“Because it’s warm, sir. A lovely warm day. And you’re coming in the car.”
Malley always nursed the old man along with this half comforting, half chiding manner of a mental hospital attendant. It was part of his revenge for the coroner’s cruelty to others.
“That makes two,” Malley remarked. “One still to come.”
“Eh?”
“Inquests. We know that perfectly well, sir, don’t we? That inquests always come in threes. There’ll be another before the end of the week.”