The House by the River by A.P. Herbert — Read

After the inquest The Chase had plenty to talk about. Mrs. Ambrose and Mrs. Church were kept very busy. For few of The Chase had been actually present in the flesh -- not because they were not interested and curious and indeed aching to be present, but because it seemed hardly decent. Since the great Nuisance Case about the noise of the Quick Boat Company's motorboats there had been no event of communal importance to The Chase; life had been a lamentable blank. And it was an ill-chance that the first genuine excitement, not counting the close of the Great War, should be a function which it seemed hardly decent to attend: an inquest on the dead body of a housemaid from The Chase discovered almost naked in a sack by a police-boat at Barnes. Nevertheless, a sprinkling of The Chase was there -- Mrs. Vincent for one, and Horace Dimple, the barrister, for another -- though he of course attended the inquest purely as a matter of professional interest, in the same laudable spirit of inquiry in which law students crowd to the more sensational or objectionable trials at the High Court. There were also Mr. Mard, the architect, who was on the Borough Council, and Mr. and Mrs. Tatham, who had to visit the Food Committee that day. These, being in the neighbourhood of the Court, thought it would be foolish not to "look in. " Few of them overtly acknowledged that the others were visibly there, or, if they were compelled to take notice, smiled thinly and looked faintly surprised.

But so startling and sensational was the course of the inquest that when they returned to their homes any doubts about the propriety of attending it were speedily smothered by the important fact that they had positively been there, had been eyewitnesses of the astonishing scene, whether from chance or compassion or curiosity, or wisdom, or simple power of divination, which most of them felt they must undoubtedly possess. They had known all along that there was "something fishy" about that girl's disappearance, and now, you see, they were right. They looked eagerly in the morning papers and in the evening papers as only those look who have seen something actually take place, and insanely crave to see it reported in dirty print in the obscure corners of a newspaper. So do men who happen on a day to hear part of a Parliamentary debate anxiously study on the morrow the Parliamentary reports at which they have never so much as glanced before, and are never likely to glance again. But this is human nature, and we must not be unkind to The Chase because they were unable to depart from that high standard.