The Paying Guests(135)
But at nine Vera returned, to help prepare Lilian for the inquest. The five of them set off an hour later; and after that her spirits lost some of their buoyancy. The day was gusty and chill. Their journey was the one that she and Lilian had taken to view Leonard’s body, but this time they were travelling on foot: they must have made an odd-looking group, processing down the road at Mrs Viney’s clumping pace. Shoppers paused to stare at them; they were stared at again in the mean little residential streets beyond the Green. And as they approached the coroner’s court they discovered that a crowd had gathered, people who had heard about the case and, attracted by the horror and glamour of murder, had come simply to gawp. Unnerved, they pushed their way through them. But then there was the confusion of arrival at the building itself; there were newspaper men, starting forward with questions, all calling Lilian’s name. When Frances caught sight of Inspector Kemp, she felt a rush of pure relief; he was bizarrely like an ally here. He took them along a corridor into a crowded panelled chamber. She saw faces that she recognised: Constable Hardy, Leonard’s father, Charlie Wismuth and Betty. There was more uncertainty for a minute or two – over where to sit, this time. Finally a clerk led Lilian to a lonely place beside the coroner’s chair while Frances and her mother remained with Mrs Viney and Vera, beside a man who introduced himself as Leonard’s superior at the Pearl.
The whole thing, she decided, was like a nightmarish wedding, with Lilian the unhappy bride, Leonard the eternally jilting bridegroom, and none of the guests wanting to be there or quite knowing what to do. Even the coroner, Mr Samson, looked a little vicar-like, in a chinless, wet-lipped sort of way. He settled himself fussily in his special chair, and the jurymen were brought in. Inspector Kemp rose to give a statement of events, the police surgeon spoke briefly about the suspicious nature of the injury, but the only other witness called was Lilian. It was agonising to have to watch from a distance as she got to her feet, her face as pale as ivory, her figure made small by the trumpery panelling of the room. She was asked to state her name and her relationship with the deceased, and to confirm that she had made the identification of the body. She spoke almost inaudibly, her gloved hand put out to a table at her side to steady herself. Her dark velvet hat had been borrowed from Vera. The open collar of her coat gave a glimpse of sooty-looking crochet: her frock was the plum-coloured one, Frances realised, dyed black.
The coroner declared the inquest adjourned, pending the results of the police inquiry, and they found themselves dismissed. Again it was oddly like a wedding: the abrupt release from ceremony, the confusion about what was coming next. But this time they were all thrown together in the narrow corridor. The man from the Pearl approached Lilian to tell her how stunned they all were at the office. Leonard’s father came to exchange a few words with Frances and her mother. ‘To think of people like us being mixed up in something like this!’ he said, mopping his forehead.
And there too, of course, was Charlie. He gave Lilian a clumsy hug. ‘How are you bearing up?’ Frances heard him ask her.
Lilian shook her head. ‘I can’t think how I am, Charlie. It doesn’t feel real, any of it. When I saw you sitting in there, before, I couldn’t believe that Len wasn’t going to walk in and join you.’
‘I thought the same,’ he said, ‘when I saw you. It just – It just beggars belief.’
Betty took hold of his arm. ‘The police won’t leave him alone, you know. They saw him on Saturday, and yesterday too.’
He blushed. ‘I just wish I had something to tell them! They say this fellow might have followed Len all the way home from Blackfriars. That he’d been watching him all evening. But if that’s true – well, I didn’t see him. Honest to God, I wish I had! When I think of Len going off like that – when I think of us shaking hands at the tram-stop, saying, Good night, see you next week —’
His voice thickened, with real emotion. But Frances, who knew that he was lying, though she still had no idea why, could see the falseness of his manner; she could see it in the tug in the muscles of his face. And it struck her that, of course, they needed his lie now. They needed it almost as much as their own. The same thought must have occurred to Lilian: Frances saw her pose slip as his did, her expression grow forced.
But then someone produced newspapers, the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror. The crush in the corridor grew more awkward as people drew together to look. The papers were not like The Times, Frances saw with a chill. They’d both made room on their front pages for the CHAMPION HILL MURDER, and while the Express offered only a blurry artist’s impression of ‘The Lonely Spot At Which The Body Was Found’, the Mirror included two good-quality photographs. One showed policemen on the street, picking their way through the gutters: ‘The Search for the Weapon’. The other, more startling, was of Leonard himself – a younger Leonard, uniformed, some studio portrait from the War.
When Lilian caught sight of this she gave a cry, and Frances and Vera moved close to her, to read the paper over her shoulder. The report had a quote from the man who had found Leonard’s body, and another from Inspector Kemp. It mentioned Lilian by name: she was said to be still in that ‘collapsed condition’. But it was the photograph of Leonard that seemed to bother her the most. She didn’t understand. Who had let the paper have it?
Leonard’s father looked slightly shifty. Well, he said, a man from the Mirror had been round at Cheveney Avenue yesterday. ‘We didn’t see any harm in it, Lilian.’