What to Do When Someone Dies Read Online Free PDF Page B

a series of swing doors into a room where lines of chairs faced a long table. The air-conditioning hummed loudly and the fluorescent light shimmered overhead. I had been expecting something impressive, wood-panelled perhaps, with an air of formality, not this blandly cheerful room with louvred blinds. Only the crest of the lion and the unicorn, squeezed between the two windows, gave any hint that this was a court. Several people were already there, including a couple of middle-aged men wearing suits and ties, with folders on their laps, and two police officers in the second row, sitting up stiff and straight.
    To one side there was a table with a piece of lined paper taped to it, reading ‘ PRESS ’. Behind it a bored-looking young man was reading a tabloid newspaper.
    A grey-haired man in a suit was blocking our way. He had a moustache and the air of a sergeant major. ‘Sorry to bother you. Can I take your names, please?’
    ‘I’m Eleanor Falkner. I’m Greg Manning’s wife. These are my friends.’
    He introduced himself as the coroner’s officer and pointed us to seats in the front row. Mary sat on one side of me, Gwen the other. A middle-aged woman in fawn slacks and a red sweater came to the front of the room and tinkered with a huge old-fashioned tape-recorder. She pushed cables into sockets and fiddled with switches. She looked up at the room and smiled vaguely at us. ‘It’ll be all right on the night,’ she said, and bustled out again, throwing bright, complicit smiles round the room, as if we were all in on a tremendously good joke.
    Two women with identical bright-blonde helmets of hair positioned themselves just behind us; they were whispering to each other and occasionally giving discreet chuckles. It was like a register-office wedding, I thought. I wiped my palms down my skirt and pushed invisible strands of hair behind my ears.
    Just before ten, the door opened again and a group of three entered and were directed by the coroner’s officer to the front-row chairs a few places along from where we sat. A middle-aged man with corrugated greying hair and a silk tie, a slender young woman, whose pale hair rippled down her back and whose aquiline nose quivered, and a young man with untidy dark hair, untied shoelaces and a stud in his nose. I tensed and clutched Gwen’s arm.
    ‘That’s them,’ I hissed.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘Her family.’
    I stared at the man. After a few seconds he turned and met my gaze. Again I felt it was like a wedding: the bride and bridegroom’s families finding themselves in the same room, curious and suspicious. Someone near him murmured something and he turned round. It was his name. Hugo. Hugo Livingstone. The proceedings were late getting under way because the woman couldn’t get her tape-recorder to function. She pushed switches up and down and even banged it with her hand but nothing worked. A couple of men behind me got up and joined her. In the end, they just pushed the plug into another electrical socket and its lights came on. The woman put on some earphones and sat down behind the machine, which almost hid her from view. The court officer asked us all to rise. I had expected a judge in robes and a wig but Dr Gerald Sams was just a man in a suit, carrying a large bundle of files. He sat down behind the table at the front and began to address us in a calm, deliberate tone. He offered his condolences to me and to Milena Livingstone’s husband and two children. ‘ Step- children,’ muttered one loudly.
    He gave a brief talk about the process. He said there might be some details that family members would find upsetting, but that the inquest was often helpful to the next-of-kin, giving a clear account of what had happened and perhaps some sort of closure. He would call witnesses, but this was not a trial. Any interested person could question them and, indeed, ask questions at any point. He also said that he had read through the preliminary material, it seemed to be a