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Chief Medical Examiner's journal
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Mystillery Morgue
Monday, June 8:
When the Werrymouth lodge of the Order of Ancient Mariners amalgamated with their rivals, the Eccentric Order of Oddfishers and moved into the Oddfishers’ Hall, their imposing and vacant headquarters were purchased by the County Council which was hunting around for a Coroner’s Courthouse. In this building, therefore, Mr. Titus Jackson, County Coroner, held the inquests on Sam and Harriet Prank.
Mr. Jackson was a small man with a smooth, pink face, a bald head shaped like a melon and large, even false teeth which made him resemble a ventriloquist’s dummy. On the rostrum on which he was perched on that eventful Monday morning, the Coroner’s chair was elevated by a small hidden platform to make him look taller and to raise him to a respectable level above his desk. Otherwise, he would have looked to be hanging on to it by his chin. As it was, his short legs dangled a good six inches from the floor. Above the Coroner’s dais, a single eye, wide-open and all-seeing, cunningly carved in wood, glared down on the body of the court. One of the insignia of the departed Ancient Mariners which had not been removed. It served to remind those present that from Mr. Titus Jackson nothing could be hid, as from God, whose eye the Ancient Mariners used in their ritual to terrify new members as they were sworn-in. Mr. Jackson was very excited at the prospect of two murder enquiries. Here was a chance to rehabilitate himself on the upper rungs of the ladder of social life in Werrymouth, in which, since his second marriage a year or so ago, to a lady of inferior rank, Mr. Jackson and his partner had been mere also-rans.
George Bellairs, writing in The Crime at Halfway Bridge, 1946.
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