He closed the door of the house behind them after dropping the latch. He hoped the old man had forgotten his key. He grasped his elbow and led him towards the rear door of the car.
Mr Amblesby tugged away his arm. “Front. I like the front.”
The sergeant shrugged. “Just as you like, sir. You know that seat’s tilted, though, don’t you? And slippery. You’ll fall forward if you’re not careful.”
“It’s the way you drive, sergeant. If you drove properly, I’d not be thrown forward.”
“All right, sir. I’ll be very careful. Mind now, these doors don’t shut very well.” He slammed the passenger door as if trying to stun a rogue elephant. The old man jumped and sat holding his ears.
“Sorry about that.” Malley squeezed his bulk behind the wheel and drew his own door closed. It made no more noise than the click of a barrister’s brief case.
Mr Amblesby crouched staring straight ahead. After a while, he began raising his lower denture with his tongue and making it impinge against the thin, tightly drawn top lip. A faint rattling sound resulted, like pieces of broken porcelain jostled together in a bag.
Malley drove first to the hospital. He parked beside a low concrete building with a corrugated asbestos roof and four narrow windows covered with wire netting.
Inside, the coroner glanced indifferently at the face of the dead motorcyclist. The boy seemed very young, a child almost. A tousle of black hair was bunched high on the yellowish grey, translucent flesh of the forehead. The hair, crisp and greasy, looked alive. But the face, unmarked except for the lightest of blue bruises over one cheekbone, was merely substance, inert and finished with.
The old man’s wintry gaze passed on at once. He walked to the far end of the low, white-tiled room. Malley gently re-arranged the sheet over the dead boy’s face and followed the coroner.
Mr Amblesby, suddenly interested now, clambered up on a platform. It was the balance on which corpses were weighed. A pointer swung a little part of the way round a big clock-like scale at the side of the machine. The scale was not visible to Mr Amblesby. It was calibrated in kilograms. Malley looked at the pointer and took a diary from his pocket. He opened it at a folded back page of metric conversion tables.
Mr Amblesby waited. “Well?”
The sergeant, frowning dubiously at the columns of figures, ignored him for another half minute.
The old man got off the platform and peered round the sergeant’s arm. “Haven’t you worked it out yet?”
Malley took some more time. At last he snapped the diary shut. “Eight stone three, sir. You’ve lost just over two pounds. Since last Thursday.”
“Rubbish!” said Mr Amblesby.
“Eight stone three,” the sergeant repeated patiently. “Hundred and fifteen pounds. That’s it.” The diary went back into his pocket. “Sure you’ve not been overdoing things a bit, sir?” There was kindly anxiety on his pink face. “We mustn’t have you knocked up, must we?”
“Eh?” said the coroner.
Malley took the lead as they walked back to the mortuary door. There were four deep concrete steps to be climbed to ground level. On the top step, Malley switched off the light before opening the door. Even then, he lingered. His large body kept the daylight off the steps behind him. He waited, listening. The old man’s feet scraped uncertainly on the second step for a moment, but they gained the third safely. Malley felt a spiky finger impatiently jab his back. He turned.
“Mind you don’t slip, sir.” Malley held out a hand. The old man pushed past him and got in the car.
Twice on their journey to the police station the sergeant braked violently and without warning.
On the first occasion, he told Mr Amblesby that a dog had run into their path. The coroner said that he had seen no dog. Malley’s “You didn’t, sir?” was sympathy itself.
The second emergency slid the coroner completely off his seat, hands flailing against the dashboard. He was unhurt but very angry. Malley invited him to share his own relief that a child’s life had been spared. Mr Amblesby stared at him as if at a madman.
“You mustn’t worry, sir,” Malley soothed. “We didn’t even graze him.”
Two witnesses were waiting in the small annexe to the room on the first floor of the police headquarters where inquests that required no jury were generally held. Mr Amblesby paused on his way through and nodded to one of these people, a tall man with pure white hair carefully groomed back from a face tanned by holidays abroad.
The man was seated as far apart as was possible in the ten-feet-by-six lobby from a dumpy, middle-aged woman in dark clothes. He gave a return nod but remained seated.
The woman got up the moment Mr Amblesby entered. Her chair tilted and knocked against the wall. She half turned and grasped it nervously, as if quieting a child in church. Then Malley was there, attentive to her first, screening her from the others and giving her as much as he could from his own store of fat, good-natured calm.
In the further room, under Mr Amblesby’s baleful eye, the doctor and the mother gave their evidence.
To the doctor, it was a familiar formality. His concise, velvet-voiced account of cranial fracture and laceration of the brain consistent with the deceased’s having been involved in a collision between two road vehicles, made the boy’s death sound a proper and even laudable consummation. Mr Amblesby, at any rate, was content. He delved noisily into a leather pouch and counted out the doctor’s fee in silver. The doctor picked up the coins and slipped them into a fob pocket: he would be on the lookout, the action seemed to say, for blind beggars as soon as he reached the street. Then, with a small bow to the coroner and a murmured good morning to Malley, he glided from the court.
The mother’s testimony—a matter of formal identification—was compressed into a single sentence. The body now lying at Flaxborough General Hospital had been viewed by her and was that of her son, Percy Thomas Hallam, aged eighteen years, an assistant storekeeper, who resided with her at five, George Street, Flaxborough.
And that, for the moment, should have been that. An adjournment for seven days. Malley waited for the old man to mutter his formula.
But Mr Amblesby remained staring at the woman crossly. His mouth fell open a little in preparation for the dance of the dentures. Malley saw and was alarmed. He reached over to touch the woman’s shoulder and said: “That’s all for just now, Mrs Hallam.”
The dentures came forward and rose, then rattled back. “Have you been writing letters to me?” Mr Amblesby asked.
Utterly confused, the woman looked at Malley and wonderingly shook her head.
“I’m asking you, not the sergeant,” said the coroner.
Malley bent low to speak in Mr Amblesby’s ear. “There hasn’t been any letter, sir. You mustn’t question the lady like that.”
The coroner flapped a dismissive hand. He did not take his eyes off Mrs Hallam.
“I asked you whether you had written to me. You must know, woman.”
“I haven’t written to anybody, sir.” The tips of gloved fingers moved back and forth, just touching her mouth. The glove was of black cotton and quite new.