Most Loving Mere Folly by Ellis Peters

Author:Ellis Peters
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480464162
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

2

The inquest on Theo Freeland opened on the following Monday, but after evidence of identification had been given the police asked for an adjournment of one week, the medical evidence being still incomplete. This was granted, together with the coroner’s permission for the funeral to take place; and two days later Theo was buried, as quietly as was possible by then. The word had gone round. There were reporters in and out of the Great Leddington shops and pubs, and crowds of people gathered at the churchyard to stare, which they did with unwavering determination throughout the scene at the graveside, and as long as Suspiria, or Dennis, or one personal mourner remained in sight.

The widow was not even in black, said the scandalised witnesses afterwards, and whispered further that such disregard of the decencies proved she had murdered him. She had on the dark green corduroy suit she had often worn before, with a black lamb coat over it, and a small black hat, but that was not proper mourning. Even her stockings were only a soft sort of iris-grey. And what sort of woman would go to her husband’s funeral with her lover beside her in the car?

Dennis suffered hideously on that ride, but would not be dissuaded from it. He knew that his family were in furious conclave behind his back, he knew that for once they were all united against him in the shocked recoil they had made towards their threatened respectability, about which they stood in a solid phalanx of protective rage. But he could not help it. There was no conflict, for he was aware of only one duty. His place was with Suspiria. The avid looks which followed her, the craning curiosity gaping at her across the churchyard wall, the flash of the cameras in her face as he helped her out of the car, these flooded his heart with such a passion of dedicated anger that he could not spare one thought for himself. And it had hardly begun yet. They both knew that.

The opening of the inquest had not attracted a great deal of notice, because the sensation was then so new, and its full possibilities hardly realised; but the resumed hearing was another matter. Everyone was well primed by then, a Sunday had passed, and the newspapers had their teeth well into the promising scandal, even though they had to confine themselves to carefully oblique suggestion of revelations to come. Dennis sat tense and sweating through Suspiria’s evidence, his hand braced on the edge of her empty chair beside him, suffering vicariously everything she suffered, and perhaps some pangs of his own of which she knew nothing.

It was impossible that the coroner should let the obvious questions pass unasked, and hopeless for her to try to let them go only half answered. The affair was practically common property already, but this was the first time she had been forced to rehearse it before an audience so large, censorious, and greedy for sensation.

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