Charity Ends At Home

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.”

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.