Read Online Prelude for War by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online

reserved for the press, and there was not a
vacant chair among them. In front of them, and at
right angles to the general public, sat the
coroner’s jury, five good men of the county and two women.
There was an attitude of respectful decorum about them,
as if they had been in church. The Saint sized them up
as being a representative panel of local shopkeepers. Only
one of them was markedly different from the others —a
little black-bearded scowling man who seemed to resent being
in court at all.
    The coroner was a well-fed,
well-scrubbed looking man with close-cropped gray
hair and a close-cropped gray moustache. He wore a dark
suit, with a stiff white collar and a blue bow tie with
small white spots on it. While the jury was being
sworn, he shuffled over a small batch of papers
on his table, which occupied the centre of a dais at the
very end of the room.
    When the jury were seated
again, he cleared his throat noisily and addressed
them.
    “We are here to
inquire into the circumstances attending the
death of the late John Kennet. It is your duty to listen carefully to the evidence which will be put before you and to return a verdict in accordance with that evidence. The facts concerning which evidence will be given are as
follows. On the night of the seventeenth, the
house known as White ways, the property of Mr Fairweather,
was burnt to the ground. Various people were in the
house when the fire started, including Mr Fairweather
himself, General Sir Robert Sangore and Lady
Sangore, Mr Kane Luker, Lady Valerie Woodchester,
Captain Donald Knightley and the deceased. All of them
except Captain Knightley are in court today. They will
tell you that after they had left the build ing
they discovered that John Kennet was missing. An attempt
to reach his room was unsuccessful owing to the rapid
spread of the fire, and on the following day his charred
remains were found in the wreckage of the house.”
    His manner was brusque and
important; quite plainly, nobody could tell him anything about how to run
an inquest, and equally plainly he regarded a
jury as nothing but a necessary evil,
to be kept firmly in its place.
    “If you wish to do so
you are entitled to view the body. Do you wish to view
the body?” He paused perhaps long enough to take another breath, and said:
“Very well, then. We shall proceed to hear
evidence of how the body was found. Call the first
witness.”
    The sergeant standing
behind him consulted a list of names and called out:
“Theodore Bream.”
    A man who looked rather
like a retired carthorse lumbered up on to the dais, sweating profusely, and
took the oath. The coroner leaned back in his chair and looked him over like a schoolmaster inspecting a new pupil.
    “You are the captain
of the Anford Fire Brigade?”
    “Yessir.”
    “On the morning of
the eighteenth you examined the ruins of Whiteways.”
    “Yessir.”
    “What did you
find?”
    “In the ruins of the
library, among a lot of daybree, I found the body of the deceased.”
    “Did you find anything
else?”
    “Yessir. I found bits
of a burned-up bedstead—coil springs and
suchlike.”
    “What deductions did
you make from the position of the body and the burned fragments of the
bedstead?”
    “Well, sir, I come to
the conclusion that they’d dropped through the ceiling
from one of the rooms above.”
    The coroner rubbed his
chin.
    “I see. You came to
the conclusion that the bed, with the deceased in it,
had dropped through the ceiling from one of the rooms
above the library when the floor collapsed in
the fire.”
    “Yessir.”
    “That seems quite
plain. Did you find anything to suggest what
might have been the cause of the fire?”
    “No sir. It might ‘ve
bin anything. The place was burned out so bad there wasn’t enough left to show
how it started.”
    The coroner turned to the
jury.
    “Have you any
questions to ask this witness?”
    Hardly giving them any time
to answer, he turned again to the sergeant.
    “Next