Joe stopped, looked up to the high ceiling and took a deep breath.
‘Take your time, Mr Bradbury,’ said the coroner. ‘I realise that this is very difficult for you but it would be most helpful to the court if you could continue.’
Joe took another deep breath.
‘I reached down to Amelia to try and wake her but her skin was cold to the touch — very cold. She was clearly dead. Had been for hours, I reckon. Then I saw the strap around her throat. That was when I called the police.’
He paused again, swallowed hard, and tears appeared in his eyes.
Crocodile tears. The bastard.
He and Amelia had been at loggerheads for the past three years, with some of his texts and emails reducing her to real tears, and he was the main reason she had ended up in hospital with mental health problems.
I found it impossible to believe that he was really upset by her death. After all, it was he who’d been doing his utmost to drive her to suicide.
‘What did you do while you waited for the police to arrive?’ asked the coroner, still writing notes on his pad.
‘I can’t really remember,’ Joe replied. ‘I was in shock.’
The coroner looked up at him with misplaced sympathy. ‘I won’t keep you much longer, Mr Bradbury, but can you confirm that you formally identified the deceased to the police as your sister, Mrs Amelia Jane Gordon-Russell?’
‘I can. There was no doubt about it.’
‘Thank you,’ said the coroner, making another note. ‘Just one more thing. Can you tell us why you went to see your sister that particular morning, a weekday morning when you would normally have been at work?’
‘Because she asked me to. She called me at home on Tuesday evening. Our mother has just been diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer and Amelia wanted to discuss her treatment, and how we could make her remaining time a little easier for her.’
‘Liar!’ I shouted loudly.
I didn’t mean to. I hadn’t planned it. It just slipped out.
All eyes in the public gallery swung round in my direction, as they did in the courtroom below.
‘Silence!’ ordered the coroner. ‘You,’ he said, pointing up at me with his right forefinger extended. ‘Who are you?’
I removed the tweed cap and stood up.
‘I’m Bill Russell. Amelia Russell’s husband. And her brother is lying.’
My outburst brought the inquest proceedings to a halt, at least for a while.
I was warned by the coroner that I could be held in contempt of court.
‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘Joe Bradbury is lying to you when he’s just sworn an oath to tell the truth. Surely that’s more a contempt of the court than a bit of shouting.’
‘That would be committing perjury not contempt,’ the coroner corrected.
‘Well, that’s what he’s doing. There is absolutely no way on earth that my wife would have invited her brother over to our house. She’d have rather cut off her own hand with an axe. She hated him with a passion for what he’d done to us over the past three years.’
‘Mr Gordon-Russell,’ said the coroner. ‘In the light of the loss of your wife, I can understand your anger and frustration at a perceived wrong, but this is neither the time nor the place for this conversation. Please resume your seat.’
‘It’s not a perceived wrong,’ I said. ‘It’s real. And this is the time. I’m fed up of not saying anything and letting him get away with it. Joe Bradbury is nothing more than a habitual liar and all his smarmy protestations otherwise are yet more lies.’
The coroner had run out of patience. ‘Mr Gordon-Russell. If you don’t retake your seat immediately and be quiet, I will have you forcibly removed from the court.’
All through this exchange, Joe Bradbury had been standing silently in the witness box, a supercilious smirk on his face.
‘I object to being called a liar,’ he said haughtily. Then he turned to the bench with his nose held high in an arrogant pose. ‘Your honour,’ he said, addressing the coroner incorrectly, ‘I am an officer of the High Court and I take severe exception to having my name blackened in such a manner by that man.’
Sue me, then, I thought. That will give me a chance to prove his lies.
I sat back down and the coroner had the good sense to excuse Joe from the witness box and recall DS Dowdeswell.
But my troubles weren’t over. Far from it.
‘Now, Sergeant,’ said the coroner, clearly relieved to be getting the inquest back on track. ‘I am sure I don’t have to remind you that you are still under oath.’ The detective nodded at him. ‘Good. Before I deal with the pathologist’s interim report, could you please give us a brief update on the progress of the police investigation?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the DS. ‘The police are treating the death of Mrs Gordon-Russell as one of murder and, as such, a murder inquiry incident room has been set up at Banbury Police Station under the leadership of DCI Priestly.’
The coroner wrote it all down. ‘Has it not been reported in the press that an arrest has been made?’
‘Yes, sir,’ replied the detective. ‘A forty-year-old man was arrested yesterday morning on suspicion of murder. However, at this time, there is insufficient evidence to charge the individual so he has been released under investigation.’
As he spoke, the detective sergeant stared straight at me from the witness box and no one in the courtroom, nor anyone in the public gallery, was left in any doubt about who was the forty-year-old individual concerned. Those sitting near to me shifted away slightly, as if too close a proximity might cause them to be contaminated.
‘But we continue to search for and examine the evidence and we are hopeful of tabling charges against the man in the near future.’
It wasn’t a hope I shared.
‘Thank you, Detective Sergeant,’ said the coroner. ‘Have you anything else to add at this time?’
He hesitated for a moment and I wondered if he was going to ask the coroner if he could arrest me for contempt of court but then he shook his head. ‘No, sir.’
‘Then you are excused.’
The DS left the witness box but continued to stare up at me as he walked back to his place in the body of the courtroom.
‘Next I come to the post-mortem results,’ said the coroner. ‘Dr Nicholas Brewster, the Home Office pathologist who performed the examination, will attend the full hearing as and when that is convened. However, for the purposes of the official recording, I will read out loud his interim report.’
He lifted a single sheet of paper from his desk.
‘Having been informed by Thames Valley Police that a suspected murder victim had been found, I attended the scene at a house in the village of Hanwell, Oxfordshire, at eleven-thirty a.m. The body was that of a female aged approximately forty years of age. I confirmed that life was extinct and conducted an initial examination in situ, including recording the core temperature of the deceased.
‘This temperature, plus the fact that rigor mortis was already detectable in the eyelids, neck and jaw, indicated that death had probably occurred between two and eight hours previously. General lividity of the body, that is the pooling of the fluids after death due to gravity, indicated that the victim had likely died where she was found.
‘I had the body removed to the mortuary at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford where I conducted a full post-mortem examination.
‘An external inspection of the corpse showed considerable pinpoint haemorrhaging, known as petechiae, in both the skin and in conjunctiva of the eyes, a clear indication that asphyxia was the likely cause of death.