Lament for a Maker

6

We did what we could but it was plain that Hardcastle had gone to his account. I suppose he had been drinking in verity: he could hardly otherwise have mistaken a mess of poisoned meal for his dinner. Mrs Hardcastle had been merely negligent – no more; I saw clearly enough after the event that so slender-witted an old person ought never to have been entrusted with large quantities of poison. Speight sent a message to Dr Noble – who could do no more than certify the cause of death – and then Erchany, with its two dead men, settled down to mark time. It was a dreich wait and I for one, taking a breath of chill air in the snow before the dark and mouldering castle, felt the fatality of the place heavy upon me. I thought with what must have been akin to pity and awe of the strange childhood and youth of the girl Christine Mathers, and for a moment I felt with Noel Gylby that no one could break through to happiness from such an environment. It was with positive relief that I saw the arrival of the motor hearse that was to take Guthrie’s body to Kinkeig. A few minutes behind it came my own hired car with a most respectable elderly electrician from Dunwinnie. Gylby and I had then work enough until it was time to return to the village.

I ought here to say that a sheriff’s inquiry, while it takes the place of a coroner’s inquest in England, is a less formal and at the same time a more restricted affair. The English coroner’s court has gradually come to usurp many of the functions that properly belong to the police court, and is in consequence frequently the scene of elaborate and prolonged investigation and argument. The Scottish sheriff, who has more varied duties than the coroner, confines himself to the investigation of accidental fatalities; when the appearance of criminal matter emerges the case passes at once to the Procurator Fiscal, who may then institute proceedings before the courts. I need not enlarge on the superiority of the Scottish practice: it is sufficient to indicate that in England a man may virtually be put on his trial before the coroner, and often without the safeguards of good criminal law. I venture on this note the more willingly in that I do not intend to embark upon an account of the afternoon’s proceedings in Kinkeig. The reader is now familiar with the facts educed, the opinion of the good Inspector Speight, and my own discoveries. It will be sufficient to say, with modesty, that I carried all before me. The case was clear: moreover, as both Guthrie and his accomplice Hardcastle were dead, it was virtually closed. The papers which recorded Guthrie’s highly criminal conduct would pass immediately to the Procurator Fiscal, but unless the weak-minded Mrs Hardcastle could be indicted as a second accomplice it seemed unlikely that any proceedings could be instituted. What actually followed, including the further clarification afforded by the young people who had now been brought back to Dunwinnie, I will therefore leave in what I may confidently term the capable hands of the next narrator.