A Fatal Mistake. Faith Martin

      The coroner shrugged. ‘Who’s to say? The thing is, the reason you have an inquest in the first place is to tackle issues like the hows and whys.’

      ‘So you’re not convinced the court did get to the bottom of what really happened?’ she asked slowly. She’d learned a lot from her last encounter with this sometimes difficult, but always brilliant, man. And if he thought something was ‘off’, she wasn’t going to gainsay him out of hand.

      ‘Forget about the mechanics and facts of it for a moment, Trudy,’ Clement advised quietly, leaning back in his chair, and feeling his right leg tremble slightly.

      With a scowl, he surreptitiously rubbed it under cover of his desk, quickly checking to make sure she hadn’t noticed this sign of weakness, and sighed. ‘Just run the testimony of the students over in your mind. What strikes you most about it?’

      Trudy again went up a notch in his estimation when she didn’t answer straight away, but instead gave the question some thought. ‘Well… it does strike me as rather odd that the deceased had been invited to the party at all. I mean, from what I can tell, most of the partygoers were there at the invitation of this Lord Jeremy Littlejohn,’ she went on, checking the relevant pages. ‘The younger son of a duke, isn’t he?’

      Clement snorted. ‘Indeed he is.’

      Trudy shot him a quick look. ‘You didn’t like him?’

      ‘Irrelevant,’ the coroner said briskly. ‘Carry on with what you were saying.’

      ‘Well…’ Trudy frowned, trying to find a comfortable way of talking about social class with this professional man, while not letting her own, strictly working-class, origins get in the way. ‘It seems to me that his sort… I mean, most of his friends were wealthy and, well, upper class. But Derek Chadworth, according to his tutors and parents, was a scholarship boy. His father was merely a country solicitor. And he didn’t seem to do anything out of the ordinary to put himself on the map, so to speak, did he? He wasn’t a rowing blue, or a rugby star or anything, was he?’

      ‘So?’ Clement encouraged.

      ‘Well… he hardly seems a likely candidate to have belonged to their set,’ she concluded nervously, and immediately felt relieved when the coroner nodded approvingly.

      ‘No, he doesn’t. You’re quite right. And yet, when it came time to give his evidence—’ Clement nodded at the folder resting on her knees ‘—Lord Jeremy clearly stated, in an offhand manner, that he might have issued the invitation to Derek Chadworth. But that he couldn’t be sure whether or not he’d taken him up on it.’

      Trudy nodded, rereading His Lordship’s evidence. ‘Yes. He says… Yes, here it is. “I knew Derek from around – I’d had a few ciders with him at the Eagle and Child and that sort of thing. I told him we were having a bash at Port Meadow and, if he wanted to come, he needed to be at the bridge and on a punt by half nine.” Hmm, he goes on to say that, on the day in question, after a couple of glasses of something called… er… Buck’s Fizz… at breakfast, he was feeling a bit tight and wasn’t sure whether or not he’d seen him among the crowd piling into the punts.’

      ‘Buck’s Fizz is a mixture of freshly squeezed orange juice and champagne,’ Dr Ryder informed her dryly. ‘A popular choice for indolent young pups and arrogant lordlings who like to hold breakfast parties in their rooms for their minions.’

      Trudy nodded and mentally made a note. Dr Ryder really didn’t like Lord Littlejohn. He must have done something to ruffle the coroner’s feathers. But from what she’d read of his evidence, she couldn’t quite see what it might be. True, he had been annoyingly vague about the dead boy – but so had all the other students.

      ‘Anything else strike you as odd?’ Clement asked mildly. But his eyes, when he looked at her, were as sharp as flint.

      Trudy frowned. There was something nagging at her, something that didn’t exactly feel as if it fitted together. But no matter how hard she tried to track down the cause for her unease, she wasn’t able to. Eventually she shrugged. ‘I’m not sure.’

      Clement nodded with a soft sigh. Well, perhaps that was only to be expected. It wasn’t as if the young WPC had attended as many coroner’s sittings as he had!

      ‘OK – try this. Put yourself in the shoes of one of them,’ Clement said with a slight grimace. ‘Not that you’d want to, mind. But you’ve just finished sitting your exams. You have a job in the City, or a job in Daddy’s firm or some such, just waiting for you to step into, and your whole life is stretching ahead of you in a golden haze of wealth and comfort. Now, just how much would you want to “come down” from Oxford with your name mixed up in some death-by-drowning scandal?’

      Trudy shuddered. ‘I wouldn’t! Mummy and Daddy wouldn’t like it for a start. People like that need their reputations to be spotless, don’t they, and… oh!’ Suddenly, as light dawned, Trudy began to quickly reread the transcripts again.

      ‘Exactly!’ Dr Ryder said sharply, seeing she’d spotted the discrepancy now. ‘So why didn’t they all simply deny the dead boy had been part of their party? There is nothing, after all, in the physical evidence to say he had to have met his death while attending that celebration. He could have got into the river by some other means, at some other time. The time of death itself was given as between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., after all. Granted, that supposition stretches coincidence quite a bit,’ he added with a frown.

      Trudy, busily reading over the evidence of the Italian girl again, knitted her brows, only half-listening to him. ‘Well, perhaps they couldn’t deny it. I mean, if he was there… and there were so many witnesses… they couldn’t run the risk of being found out to be lying. Isn’t that committing perjury? Unless they all got together and agreed to say the same thing – and that’s almost impossible, isn’t it? I mean, that many people… a conspiracy on that scale… surely it’s not feasible.’ She broke off her reading to look at him intently.

      The coroner sighed and shrugged. ‘I’m not so sure about that, Trudy. People en masse can act very differently from people as individuals. Just look at riots, and mass hysteria and mobs. These students were all of an age, and all friends, and all had their own necks and best interests to look after. So they definitely had good reason to tell the same story. And don’t forget that all of them – mark my words – were under the thumb to some degree or other of our Lord Jeremy Littlejohn. A proper little Machiavelli, if ever I saw one! I thought as much the moment the man opened his mouth to give evidence in my court. Then there’s such a thing as peer pressure, you know. Nobody likes to be thought of as a snitch. And who among them could have afforded to become an outcast by going against the consensus of opinion? Don’t forget, Lord Littlejohn and his family wield a lot of influence in the world these people inhabit,’ Ryder warned her. ‘One word in a banker’s ear, and somebody doesn’t get that job in the City he was looking forward to. Or one whisper from the Countess to some society matron or other, and some young girl can find her marriage prospects withering. Oh, yes. I can quite see how they could all be coerced or bribed or bullied into towing the line.’

      Trudy went back to reading the files again. And wondered. Was she allowing Dr Ryder’s comments to colour her view of things? Or did the testimonies now all seem to have a certain ‘sameness’ about them?

      ‘So you think they were coached in what to say? By Lord Littlejohn?’ she asked uncertainly. ‘They all lied to keep him sweet?’

      The coroner caught the scepticism in her voice and shook his head with dissatisfaction. ‘Not necessarily. I’m just saying there’s something that doesn’t ring true about the evidence they gave,’ Clement said grimly. ‘Time and time again, they say the same vague thing. “Derek might have been there, but I didn’t see him.” Or, “I was so drunk, I couldn’t say for sure that he was there. But then I can’t say that he wasn’t either.” Why, if you’re going to distance yourself from such a tragic event, and you all get together and agree to put on a united front, don’t you just go the whole