Dark Entry by M. J. Trow Page B

needed to retire. They didn’t.
    ‘Your task,’ Winterton told them in time-honoured fashion, ‘is to decide how, when, where and by what means the deceased came to his death.’ He paused, secretly enjoying, as he always did, his moment in God’s light. ‘But if you’ll take my advice, you will find that, in a moment of madness, Ralph Whitingside took his own life.’
    The murmurs in the hall grew to a mutinous rumble. There was nothing in anything anyone had heard to lead to such a conclusion. The Parker scholars looked at Winterton, at each other. They hadn’t known Whitingside like Marlowe had, such was the age gap among former schoolboys. But Kit didn’t believe it. And if Kit didn’t believe it, it wasn’t so. There was so much shouting that the jury’s foreman could barely agree with the coroner that that was, indeed, the verdict of them all.
    Winterton rammed his staff down for silence and the usher proclaimed, with all solemnity, that the business of the court was over. He commended Ralph Whitingside’s lost soul to God and called for three cheers for Her Majesty. Everybody responded lustily. Everybody except Christopher Marlowe.
    ‘Machiavel,’ Winterton called to him as the crowd shuffled out into the sunlight of King’s quadrangle.
    Marlowe turned to him. ‘Sir?’
    The coroner stepped down from the dais, slowly passing his staff and chain of office to his clerks. Now, he was stripped of his role and stood toe to toe with Marlowe, man to man.
    ‘You don’t approve of the Court’s findings?’ he asked.
    ‘You were wrong,’ Marlowe told him.
    ‘The Court was wrong,’ Winterton said.
    Marlowe half turned, as if to leave. ‘You are Sir Edward Winterton,’ he said softly. ‘A Queen’s Coroner, knight of the shire. You own half of Cambridgeshire –’ he pointed to where the jury had sat – ‘and half those men, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’
    Winterton started. ‘You insolent young puppy,’ he snarled. ‘Do you accuse me of jury tampering?’
    Marlowe looked at him. ‘They are serving men, tapsters, petty bookkeepers and Bible readers. If you told them the moon was made of cheese, they’d believe it. They’d walk into the fire for people like you. It’s the way of it and it always has been. But it still doesn’t make it right.’
    ‘And what of you, Master Machiavel?’ Winterton asked, calmer now. ‘Who will you walk into the fire for?’
    Marlowe smiled. ‘When I know that, Master Coroner,’ he said, tapping the man lightly on his fur-edged robe, ‘I shall be sure to let you know.’

FOUR
    There is no good time to bury a man of just twenty-two summers, but that night, in its moonless dark, was as good as any other. The lingering warmth of the summer day had gone, but the dew had not yet come as the flickering lights of the dark lanterns began to gather in the lee of the wrong side of the churchyard wall. Whispered voices greeted each other as Ralph Whitingside’s friends came together to say goodbye.
    The gravedigger’s cleared throat sounded as loud as a trumpet blast in the sibilant near silence. Then, he spoke, in the normal voice of one to whom death and decay is a normal stock in trade. ‘I’ll just leave you gentlemen to your business, then.’
    ‘Thank you, my man.’ Dr Steane, also no stranger to gravesides, was dismissive.
    ‘I’ll have my payment before I go,’ the man said, not unkindly, but merely speaking as someone who had often had trouble, after his necessary deed was done, in extracting the coins from the suddenly parsimonious bereaved. There was too much work in digging the body back up, and what other recourse did a man in his line of work who had not been paid have?
    Marlowe’s voice sounded, low and respectful to Whitingside, a reminder to the others. ‘Thank you for your work, Master Harkness. Here is your fee, and a little for a drink to warm you tonight.’
    The man mumbled his thanks. It wasn’t many men who would bother to find out his