Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Halloran Cross ·
The Death Certificates in the Wrong Hand
After the coroner's return, the Halloran Cross office finds death certificates signed in the registrar's hand on days the duty book places him out of the town.
- filed: "after the coroner's return"
- reference: "HX/DR/18"
1. This report is filed after the coroner's return and concerns a discrepancy at the Halloran Cross registry between the duty book and the certificates of death, forty-one of which are signed in the registrar's hand on days when the registrar, by every record the office keeps of itself, was not in the town.
2. The duty book is the oldest instrument at Halloran Cross and the least forgiving. It is ruled for each day of the year; the opening clerk enters the hour, the staff present, the premises checked, and the registrar's own initials alongside the words DUTY TAKEN or REGISTRAR ABSENT, NOTIFIED. The registrar absents himself more than most. He keeps his mother at Ramsgate, he is frank about it, and he travels to her by the early train some eight or ten weeks a year. The book has never contradicted him.
3. The certificates contradict the book. In the years 1979 through 1986 the office holds forty-one certificates of death dated on days the book marks REGISTRAR ABSENT. On each such day the certificate is otherwise entire: the cause given in the terms the coroner settles, the informant's signature proper and witnessed, the fees ruled off, the counterfoil intact. Each is signed with the registrar's initials in the margin and the registrar's hand throughout, and the hand is not merely similar but correct to its year, the 1979 certificates carrying the 1979 slant, the looser it, the break he took in his f after the operation, mending by degrees through the later volumes the way a hand actually mends.
4. The registrar, shown the certificates at the coroner's request, went through them in silence and then said, in the words taken down for this file: those are mine. He did not say when he wrote them. Asked whether he recalled the days, he consulted the duty book, found himself in Ramsgate on every date presented to him, and confirmed the absences without hesitation. He added that he had never in his service registered a death at Ramsgate, that Ramsgate has a registrar of its own, and that a death registered outside its district is void, which he would know better than most, since it is the whole of his work.
5. Checks made. The train records for the absent days are held and were examined: the registrar travelled as stated, both ways, with the ticket stubs to prove it. The Ramsgate guest house, written to, returned the old ledger: his name, in his hand, at dinner on the nights in question, one of the forty-one falling in the middle of a whole week away. A death cannot be registered by proxy; the informant must attend in person, and every counterfoil carries an informant's name, none of whom, written to, has ever failed to confirm the day and the office they stood in. They all describe the same room, the Halloran Cross room, and the same desk, and of several of them it is said by the porter that he showed them in.
6. The coroner's return makes no finding. The arithmetic, though, is the part this file is required to notice. Forty-one certificates over eight years, and the absences over the same eight years number forty-one, one to one, no absence without its certificate and no certificate without its absence. Nobody in the district died twice, and nobody died on a day the registrar was present whom the certificates fail to cover. Whatever writes in his hand when he is away writes one death per absence, and no more, as though keeping the books level for him while he keeps his mother company.
7. The file therefore rests on a question the office is not equipped to put to anybody. The registrar is booked away again from the 9th of March, and the duty book stands open at that week with nothing ruled in it yet. The question left at filing is his, and he has agreed to let it be recorded: whether, before the 9th, he should enter REGISTRAR ABSENT in advance, or wait to find out what the days are for.