Page:The Viaduct Murder (1926).pdf/92

atmosphere helped) as if he were back at school again, had just been "put on construing," not at the passage he had specially "mugged up," but at the passage next door to it, and had acquitted himself better than he expected in the circumstances. The feeling was intensified when Marryatt got up; Marryatt was still intensely nervous over the prospect of a suicide verdict; and he answered the questions put to him confusedly and at random, like a schoolboy who has omitted the formality of preparing the lesson at all.

The heroine of the afternoon was undoubtedly Mrs. Bramston. The coroner was not ready for her, and she got right in under his guard, pouring out a flood of promiscuous information which he neither demanded nor desired. Then strangers came—people from Brotherhood's office in London, people from the Insurance Company, people representing the creditors: people, too, who represented the railway company, and dilated for hours on the impossibility of falling out of their trains by accident. In fact, nobody seemed to care a straw about the mangled temple of humanity that lay in the next room, or whether it cried to heaven for vengeance. Only two points mattered, whether the Insurance Company had got to pay up, and whether the Railway Company owed Compensation. Brotherhood had, as far as could be discovered, neither kith nor kin in the world, and it was perhaps not unnatural that the verdict given was one of death by suicide.