RENT was the first witness called into the box when the court settled down to its business. He formally identified the body of the deceased as that of his cousin, John Wallingford, who, at the time of his death, was mayor of Hathelsborough, and forty-one years of age. He detailed the particulars of his own arrival in the town on the evening of the murder, and told how he and Bunning, going upstairs to the mayor's parlor, had found Wallingford lying across his desk, dead.
All this every man and woman in the court knew already, but the coroner desired to know more.
“I believe, Mr. Brent,” he said, “that you are the nearest blood relative of the deceased?”
“I am,” replied Brent.
“Then you can give us some information which may be of use. Although the mayor had lived in Hathelsborough some ten or eleven years, he was not a native of the town, or of this part of the country. Can you give us some particulars about him—about his family and his life before he came to this borough?”
“Yes,” said Brent. “My cousin was the only son—only child, in fact—of the Rev. Septimus Wallingford, who was sometime vicar of Market Meadow, in Berkshire. His father and mother died many years ago. He was educated at Reading Grammar School, and on leaving it he was articled to a firm of solicitors in that town. After qualifying as a solicitor, he remained with the firm for some time. About eleven years ago he came to this place as managing clerk to a Hathelsborough firm. Its partners eventually retired, and he bought their practice.”
“Was he ever married?”
“Never.”
“You knew him well?”
“He was some twelve years my senior,” answered Brent. “I was a mere boy when he was a young man, but of late years we have seen a good deal of each other. He has frequently visited me in London, and this would have been my third visit to him here. We corresponded regularly.”
“You were on very good terms?”
“We were on affectionate terms.”
“And confidential terms?”
“As far as I know, yes. He took great interest in my work as a journalist, and I took great interest in his career in this town.”
“And I understand that he has marked his sense of—shall we say kinship—for you by leaving you all his property?”
“He has.”
“Now, did he ever say anything to you, by word of mouth or by letter, about any private troubles?”
“No, never.”
“Or about any public ones?”
“Well, some months ago, soon after he became mayor of Hathelsborough, he made a sort of joking reference, in a letter, to something that might come under that head.”
“Yes? What, now?”
“He said that he had started on his task of cleaning out the Augean stables of Hathelsborough, and that the old task of Hercules was child's play compared to his.”
“I believe, Mr. Brent, that you visited your cousin here in the town about Christmas last. Did he say anything to you about Hathelsborough at that time—I mean, as regards what he called his Augean stables task?”
Brent hesitated. He glanced at the eagerly listening spectators, and smiled a little.
“Well,” he replied, half hesitatingly, “he did. He said that in his opinion Hathelsborough was the rottenest and most corrupt little town in England.”
“Did you take that as a seriously meant statement, Mr. Brent?”
“Oh, well, he laughed as he made it. I took it as an instance of his rather heightened way of putting things.”
“Did he say anything that led you to think that he believed himself to have bitter enemies in the town?”
“No,” said Brent, “he did not.”
“Neither then nor at any other time?”
“Neither then nor at any other time.”
The coroner asked no further questions. Brent sat down again beside Tansley, and settled himself to consider whatever evidence might follow. He tried to imagine himself a coroner or juryman, and to estimate and weigh the testimony of each succeeding witness in its relation to the matter into which the court was inquiring. Some of it, he thought, was relevant; some did not seem to carry affairs any further. Yet he began to see that even the apparently irrelevant fragments of evidence were not without their importance. They were links, these statements, these answers—links that went to the making of a chain.
He was already familiar with most of the evidence. He knew what each witness was likely to tell before one or other entered the box.
Bunning came next after himself, but the watchman had nothing new to tell. Nor was there anything new in the medical evidence given by Dr. Wellesley and Dr. Barber. All the town knew how the mayor had been murdered, and the purely scientific explanations as to the cause of death were merely details.