The Dead Shall be Raised and The Murder of a Quack by George Bellairs

Author:George Bellairs [Bellairs, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press, Inc.
Published: 2017-05-22T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter XIX

The End of Many Things

And those who husbanded the golden Grain,

And those who flung it to the Winds like Rain,

Alike to no such aureate Earth are turned,

As, buried once, Men want dug up again.

—Omar Khayyam

Although he deserves no more of our consideration, we cannot leave Sir Caleb Haythornthwaite on the cold slab of the Hatterworth mortuary. Mr. Simeon Mills is waiting for him, and then, the undertakers.

The coroner thoroughly enjoyed a double event, in the form of consecutive inquests on the ironmaster and his victim, Three-Fingers, the tramp. In pursuance of the powers vested in him, Mr. Mills transferred the proceedings connected with the latter from the country pub to the larger urban centre, greatly to the disgust of old Seth Wigley, who talked of being on his feet and about for the replay, as he called it.

Lady Haythornthwaite was by far the most dramatic of the witnesses called. She was a little, shrivelled woman, who had shared none of her husband’s public life. She had been almost as much a recluse as the late Mrs. Myles, whom Mr. Mills had found, on the day before the greater double event, committed suicide whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed. Her Ladyship had long ago divorced herself from Sir Caleb in her heart, and had, for many years, resorted to very eccentric behaviour as a result. This had principally been manifest in the form of scuttering from shop to shop in the town, armed with a string bag, buying-in the following day’s dinner. In the humbler days of her dear father, Lady Haythornthwaite, then Deborah Cross, had been entrusted with his entire domestic economy. For a time after her marriage to Sir Caleb, she had abandoned her shopping, but later resumed it, endeavouring to live the happy past over again. She made no bones about telling Mr. Simeon Mills that for the past twenty years, she had known who killed Sykes. Her late husband had, during a brain-storm, insisted on sharing with her his awful secret. Later, on recovering his poise, he had enumerated all the horrible things he would do to her if she breathed a word of what he had said, and he had clinched the argument by stating that a wife could not bear witness against her husband.

The end of Haythornthwaite brought relief to many people. Young Haythornthwaite, for example, abandoned his drinking habits and joined the R.A.F. He has been over the Ruhr on several occasions and whenever there is a foundry to bomb, he is in his element. His mother, although the recipient of gestures of sympathy and goodwill on every hand, fled from the valley of her fear, and settled down in a small village in Sussex.

The half-finished Haythornthwaite Gardens, which Sir Caleb had been subsiding as a memorial park to himself, was turned into allotments by the embarrassed local council. Emeritus-Inspector Entwistle, now a local celebrity for his share in bringing to book the viper in Hatterworth’s bosom, was elected nem. con.

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