‘No.’
‘But have you on other occasions visited the church whilst Mr Harsch was playing the organ?’
‘Oh, yes. He played very well. I have gone in to listen to him.’
‘Did you ever find the door locked?’
Like Bush, the rector paused.
‘I don’t think so. I cannot recall any such occasion.’
‘Thank you, Mr Cavendish, that will be all.’
As the rector returned to his seat, the coroner inclined his head in Miss Fell’s direction, and spoke her name.
Garth took her up to the platform. She pinched his arm very hard indeed, and looked a good deal as she might have looked if she had been ascending the scaffold. Much to her relief, she was first asked about the key. The coroner heard her answers, because he wrote them down, and Garth could hear them in the second row, so presumably the jury heard them too, but as far as the rest of the hall was concerned there was merely a fooffle.
What the coroner wrote down was that Miss Fell kept her key in the unlocked left-hand top drawer of the bureau in the drawing-room, and that Miss Brown, who had very kindly been acting as organist, took it whenever she had occasion.
‘Are you sure that your key was in the drawer on the night in question?’
Miss Fell was understood to say that it was always there unless Miss Brown had taken it.
‘When did you actually last see it?’
Miss Fell had no idea. She had had to give up doing the flowers in the church – she really never used the key now.
She had begun to feel more at home. She remembered meeting the coroner a good many years ago when he was a young solicitor. Ingleside… Yes, that was the name – Ingleside. Her colour came back, and her voice became much more audible.
‘Now, Miss Fell – you have made a statement to the effect that you heard a shot fired on this Tuesday evening. Your house is next to the church? It is in fact the Rectory?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where were you when you heard this shot?’
‘Well, I was in the drawing-room, but I had opened the glass door into the garden and gone down the steps. There are three steps-’
‘Why did you do this?’
‘I wanted to smell the night-flowering stock, and I wanted to know whether Mr Harsch was still playing the organ.’
Something like a faint rustle went over the hall. Garth thought that everyone within hearing must have moved a little.
The coroner went on with his questions.
‘You knew that Mr Harsch was playing the organ in the church?’
‘Oh, yes. It was a warm night, and the window was open behind the curtains. I can always hear the organ when the window is open – not the soft bits of course, but when anyone is using the swell.’
‘How did you know that it was Mr Harsch who was playing?’
Miss Sophy looked surprised.
‘Miss Brown is the only other person who plays the organ, and she was in the drawing-room with me.’
‘And was she with you when you heard the shot?’
‘No – I don’t think so – I think she had gone to bed… Oh, yes, I know she had, because I remember putting out the light in the hall.’
‘What time was it when you heard the shot? Do you remember?’
‘Oh, I remember perfectly. It was a quarter to ten – because I had just looked at my watch and thought it was rather early to go to bed, but since Miss Brown had gone up I had better go too.’
‘Miss Fell – when you heard this shot, did you think it came from the church?’
‘Oh, no – indeed I didn’t!’
‘What did you think?’
Miss Sophy put her head on one side, as she always did when she was considering anything. Then she said quite briskly, ‘I thought it was Mr Giles. His fields run right down to the church on the other side of the Cut. I knew that he had been losing some of his fowls – the foxes are terrible now that there is no hunting.’
From his seat in the fourth row on the left of the hall Mr Giles, a rubicund elderly farmer, was seen to nod emphatically, and heard to ejaculate, ‘That’s right!’
Miss Fell having been released, he was called to the table and asked whether he had in fact been out with his gun on Tuesday night, to which he replied that he had been up until midnight with a sick cow and much too busy to trouble his head about foxes.
Miss Brown was the last witness. She was so pale in her deep black that she might have been the chief mourner. It passed through Garth’s mind to wonder whether she was. If he had ever seen a figure of tragedy in his life, he thought he saw one now. And Aunt Sophy talking about happy gifts, and how much ‘My dear friend Miss Brown’ had brightened her life! There seemed to have been a slip-up somewhere. Of course she might have been in love with Harsch – he supposed middle-aged people did fall in love. Somehow he didn’t find the idea convincing.
He listened to the deep voice taking the oath in a kind of husky whisper. Then the coroner was asking her about Aunt Sophy’s key.
‘You were in the habit of using it?’
Still in that husky whisper, Miss Brown said, ‘Yes.’
The hall had plain windows set rather high up on both sides. Through the second window on the left, the sun came slanting in, to touch the edge of Miss Brown’s hat, her shoulder, the hand which hung at her side. Garth, watching attentively, saw the hand clench upon itself. There was no glove upon it. The knuckles were as white as bone. Under the brim of the black felt hat the cheek muscles were tense, the skin was bloodless. Between the heavy black hair and the curving arc of the eyebrow there was a gleam of sweat. In some apprehension he thought, ‘Good lord – she’s going to faint!’
The coroner put his next question.
‘Had you occasion to use this key on the day of Mr Harsch’s death?’
Miss Brown did not faint. She said, ‘I used it in the morning. I went to the church to practise between eleven and twelve. I put the key back in the drawer. I did not go to the church again.’
‘Thank you, Miss Brown.’
The words dismissed her. Garth saw the tense muscles relax, the clenched hand fall limp. She got up, came through the shaft of sunlight to the steps, and back to her seat. She had to pass him on the outside of the row, and Miss Sophy next to him. Unlike Mr Madoc, Garth stood up to make way for her, stepping out into the aisle between the rows. As she went by, he heard her take a low sighing breath. To his mind, there was no doubt at all that Miss Brown was very much relieved. He thought her emotion at her release a good deal overdone – much ado about nothing in fact. She had only to answer a couple of harmless questions about Aunt Sophy’s key, and she had been within an ace of passing out. Odd, because she hadn’t struck him as a swooner.
He began very carefully to consider those two harmless questions, both about the key. ‘You were in the habit of using it?’ – ‘Had you occasion to use this key on the day of Mr Harsch’s death?’
Nothing in question number one. Everyone in the village knew she was in the habit of using Aunt Sophy’s key. Yet it was immediately after this question that she began to look as if she was going to faint. Quite obviously, she had the wind up.
Why? Again quite obviously, she didn’t know what was coming next. She was waiting for question number two exactly as a man might wait for a bullet. But when it came it wasn’t a bullet after all – just a harmless blank cartridge. So far from swooning when it hit her, she was able to get quite a lot of unsolicited information off her chest and depart heaving sighs of relief. Yet this second question in one form or another was just the one question which was bound to be put – inevitable, unescapable. He came back on the words in his own mind – ‘in one form or another’. She had known – she must have known – that she would be asked whether she had used the key. That was why she had the wind up. There couldn’t be any other reason.
Suppose the second question had been, ‘Did you take the key out of Miss Fell’s drawer on that Tuesday evening?’ Would her hand have unclenched and those tense muscles relaxed? He wondered. But the Coroner had asked, ‘Had you occasion to use this key on the day of Mr Harsch’s death?’ and Miss Brown had replied, ‘I used it in the morning. I went to the church to practise between eleven and twelve. I put the key back in the drawer. I did not go to the church again.’ A very comprehensive answer for a lady who looked as if she was going to swoon.