And, whatever else Tim Dallott was, he was a judge of ale and would have only the best. Being an observer of my fellow-man, I had early made Tim’s acquaintance and had spent more than one interesting hour with him and his customers.
Tim, himself, was a masterful man, rather given to laying down the law, though with an occasional touch of humour that leavened his bluntness; and he had a curious habit of screwing the forefinger of his right hand into the open palm of his left when he was saying anything particularly emphatic. His build was inclined to stoutness and he was very bald for all he was still some years off sixty. His wife had died just before the war and he had neither son nor daughter. It was he, the reader will recollect, who had been foreman of the jury at the Clevedon inquest.
“Well,” he said, as I entered the ‘snug,’ “and what do you think of it all? I haven’t seen you since the inquest, Mr. Holt.”
“Give me a glass of beer,” I replied. “It puzzles me.”
“What I’d like to know,” chimed in old Tompkinson, who was verger at the parish church and gardener at the vicarage, “is why old Crimin”—have I explained that Crimin was the coroner?—“worried about that whisky bottle.”
“Aye, you may say that,” Tim agreed, nodding his head with an air of vague mystery.
“It seemed main foolish to me,” Tompkinson went on, “and I couldn’t get a grip of it nohow. Nobbut Crimin is a good crowner, I’m saying nowt agin him, an’ I dessay he’d summat oop his sleeve an’ all, but I’m fair bothered as to what it could be.”
“It’s bothering better men than you, Joe Tompkinson,” Tim Dallott said dryly.
“But ain’t you got no idea, Mr. Dallott?” Joe asked.
“Perhaps I have and perhaps I haven’t,” was the cautious reply. “Now what would you say about it, Mr. Holt?”