The Massingham Affair Part 23

"Not even by candle-light apparently. By the light of the moon shining through a broken shutter in the room next door?"

"I saw him," she said. "I had hold of him."

"And it was Milligan?"

"Yes."

"When he was brought to you to be identified weren't you uncertain at first?"

"Perhaps a little."

"Come now, Miss Verney, I am sure you are anxious to be fair. Isn't it true that you were very uncertain indeed? The size of the man bothered you, also the length of his hair?"

"Yes it did."

"But now you're sure it was Milligan?"

"Quite sure."

Justin closed his eyes. He knew what was coming: had indeed remarked on it himself in the early days when the 'Verney Memory' had been a joke and not something that concerned him heart and soul.

"You see, what is so remarkable," Gilmore went on, "is that you should be so certain now and yet have doubted then. Forgive my putting it discourteously like this, but can your memory really have improved with time?"

"One needs time to think things over."

"Let me suggest to you that it is the very thing one does not need. Time, to be metaphysical, is the worst enemy of truth. Or put it like this. Isn't it like a curtain that gradually obscures truth?"

"I saw the man."

"You saw a man, Miss Verney, and wasn't the rest all memory, which is a very different beast? Will you explain how it happened that you could doubt it was Milligan one night and be sure it was him eight years later?"

'Oh G.o.d, make him let her go! please let her go!' prayed Justin at the sight of that pale, desperately resolute face. He felt he hated Gilmore and the sheepish jury almost as much as the amused glances he saw around him. What made it worse was that he recognised in himself all the old feelings of exasperation at her obstinacy and refusal to admit a mistake which must be obvious to everyone. It was perverse of her: the sin of pride. And yet at the same time it was magnificent and his heart went out to her. Through the shifting patterns of the case, so full of lies and evasions, there had come just tins one voice that had never altered or compromised, and it struck him as the worst irony that it should have proved to be the one that was the most mistaken, the very furthest from the truth, of all the voices that had led him and misled him through the long game of blind man's buff.

VI.

In its next issue the Mercury delivered judgment on a somewhat apocalyptic note: On Monday at the Moot Hall there terminated the Ma.s.singham Burglary Case that has perplexed and scandalised the public to a greater degree perhaps than any other event in local memory. At last Justice has been done. Milligan and Kelly have been pardoned and have received gratuities. Sugden and Henderson are expiating their crimes in prison. Now the police officers whose misguided sense of duty led them to conspire against the liberties of innocent men have paid the penalty of their misdeeds.

It is a matter for general satisfaction-not least in that mercy has been shown. The sentences on Blair and his subordinates are mild by comparison with the suffering they caused, but they are sufficient to the purpose. It is enough that a great principle has been re-stated and the equality of all before the law made plain.

The Mercury avers that the jury who by their verdict of Guilty against all three accused gave expression to this truth have performed a public service. But they would have been unable to perform it if a love of Justice had not existed in the hearts of a host of ordinary men and women. We are not referring only to the two Gentlemen of Smed-wick who bore the brunt of the battle and first brought a grave wrong to the attention of the public. Their efforts deserve outstanding praise. But there were many others who played their part and contributed to the satisfactory ending of the affair. The friends and relations of the innocent accused who never ceased to strive for them; the witnesses who came forward with their evidence, often against their own interest; the barrister and Member of Parliament who espoused the Cause; the public whose weight was always on the side of right; even the Mercury itself which became the voice of the general disquiet-all played their part. As long as such people and such inst.i.tutions are to be found, injustice will never flourish. Such is the true lesson to be learnt from the harsh and lamentable case now ended.

209.

But was it ended? Not many months later the Mercury felt called upon to supply an epilogue:- Those of our readers not insensible to the charms of Cupid's darts (it wrote) will have rejoiced at the news of the nuptials celebrated last week at Ma.s.singham. There were joined together in connubial bliss Mr Justin Deny and Miss Charlotte Matilda Verney. Divided by the claims of a long and bitterly contested case, they have been united by the unconquerable power of love.

The Mercury salutes them. In this union, performed as it was by the bride's venerable father, a.s.sisted by his fellow Churchman from St Bede's, in the presence of a congregation that numbered many of the witnesses and chief parties to the Ma.s.singham Affair, the Mercury sees its happy and final outcome and an end to all the hatreds and sorrows of the past.

O brother Montague, give me thy hand. This is my daughter's jointure, for no more Can I demand.

See pictures on page 6 THE VERDICT OF YOU ALL 1936.

Thirty years went by, during which the Ma.s.singham affair became a memory preserved in the amber of folklore and in the yellowing files of the Mercury's reading room. Its actors pa.s.sed away: Blair, Milligan, Henderson, Piggort, Hicks, old Mr Verney, Longford and many more. But the same Vicar of St Bede's had remained behind to scourge their successors into repentance and good works. And in the market-place the gold lettering on the windows of Justin Deny, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths (Managing Clerk: J. W. Harris ), shone resplendent on a new generation of litigants.

One summer's day Justin (young Mr Deny' no longer) was working at his desk when the phone rang and he found himself talking to Dr Hastie, a fishing crony of his. Since his marriage to Miss Verney and the anival of two daughters he had felt increasingly drawn to quiet pursuits, and his first thought at hearing Hastie on the line was to imagine that he was being asked to go out that evening to take advantage of the splendid conditions in the river, where the level was falling after the floods. It was a business call however. Dr Hastie was apologetic about it. "Fact is," he explained, "I've got a patient keeps asking for you. Old woman in the geriatric ward of the Cottage Hospital, name of Heslett, Mrs Heslett."

Justin could recall no Mrs Heslett.

"Well, I'm sorry I can't help you with your murky past," Dr Hastie said when pressed for further details. "I'm new around here, remember. As far as I'm concerned she's just an old body I took over from Dr Copeland-a bit starkers, poor soul, and driving Matron right up the wall."

Justin consulted his desk diary and found rather to his surprise that until four o'clock his afternoon was free. 'Heslett: hospital,' he noted down. He had reached an age when even the smallest break from routine is welcome and he was pleasantly intrigued by the message and the faint air of mystery surrounding it. He must have THE Ma.s.sENGHAM AFFAIR.

become a rare old fogey, he thought, to be excited by a visit to a hospital, when once upon a time to be shot at in the street and threatened with direful prosecutions had seemed all in the day's work. The truth was that he had kept from his youth a quality which his wife and daughters called nosiness', though it was really a sense of wonder at people's doings and a love of sharing in the workings of a world so rich and unpredictable. Who, he wondered, was this Mrs Heslett who Tcept asking' and had prevailed over such powerfully inert forces as Matron and Dr Hastie? The obvious thing was to ask Harris, whose memory was as exhaustive as its by-products were mimicked and abused by the younger members of the staff. In reserve was an immense steel filing-cabinet with drawers that slid in and out at the touch of a finger and looked capable of answering any query raised by man. But no Heslett of either s.e.x appeared in it.

That afternoon, as soon as he had had his sandwich lunch, he set off for the cottage hospital in the Warbury Road, not far from where Georgina had lived before she had disappeared from view into a triumphant marriage with a baronet. That brought thoughts in its train too-of relief mostly. At the entrance to Block B he found himself in the presence of the Matron, as he had rather expected. Matron would naturally wish to explain things for herself and correct any misunderstandings that might have arisen. He was shown into the Ward Sister's room (from which Sister had tactfully retired) and there the matter was put to him, rather as though he were a Consultant who had been called out in the middle of the night.

"Such a shame, Mr Derry, bringing you all this way. It's so good of you to come."

"Not in the least," he answered, fascinated by the perfect starch of her linen so reminiscent of Gilmore in the palmy days.

"Did Dr Hastie tell you about it?"

"He said there was a patient of his by the name of Mrs Heslett in the geriatric ward who had some problem for me."

"Yes, that is so," Matron replied, with a clear intimation in her voice that the Doctor in his blundering way had contrived to say both too little and too much.

"Is she very ill?"

"Not well, Mr Derry, not well at all. Of course she is an old lady and one mustn't expect too much. It is her mind, chiefly. Not that I'm implying she is certifiable, you understand."

He nodded and made sympathetic noises.

THE VERDICT OF YOU ALL: 1936.

"But the dividing line is blurred sometimes. Old ladies suffering from her complaint get queer notions; they imagine things and have to be humoured. Old people are secretive; they are very cunning," Matron said, leading the way into the ward.

At first sight it looked almost full. About twenty women were in bed or wandering about in dressing-gowns, their scanty white hair scrimped into nets or set in curling pins. At the far end a screen had been drawn around a bed, and pa.s.sing behind it in Matron's wake he found himself in the presence of a very frail woman with a mop of snow-white hair who lay back against the pillows, her hands folded on her breast. He had no idea who she was.

"Now, Granny," began Matron brightly, "this is Mr Derry the solicitor whom you asked for and who has most kindly come to see you. Isn't it nice of him?"

Granny Heslett, however, continued to stare straight ahead at the screen as though unaware of their existence.

"Stubborn, that's what they are," Matron remarked. "They fuss for days on end and then they're stubborn, that's all the thanks we get. Put another pillow behind her, Nurse."

The patient shut her eyes while she was lifted and a stray lock of hair was discovered and clipped firmly into place. "She's in one of her moods," Matron announced, "but perhaps if we went she might come round. Here's her bell if you should require anything. I don't think she'll give trouble. She may even talk. And I hope you will, Granny, now that the gentleman's come all this way just to be with you. You'll not get another chance, you know."

As soon as they had gone he pulled up the bedside chair and sat down in it cosily, like a man in his own home. There was something pitiable about that still figure, so neatly brushed and clean, in the white bed with the spotless sheets and the vase of flowers on the table beside her, but if he was to help her he must give her no inkling of his thoughts. "Such heaps of nurses," he remarked encouragingly. "Weren't we just the centre of attention! And now they're all off elsewhere." He heard a movement beside him and rejoiced: she had turned towards him on the pillows, and when he next looked her way he saw her dark eyes regarding him-quite youthful eyes at the centre of a network of fine lines running to the hollows below the temple and the sharp promontory of her nose. "All gone away," he said. "Not a Sister in sight. Let me see now: why did you send for me?"

He got no answer.

"Of course I could make it a social call and have tea, if they give us tea. Can't stay too long though." He took out his watch and solemnly consulted it. "Now I have a secretary," he said: "someone rather like Matron really, and she says I must be back by four. Not that I'm tied to minutes. I like it here. It's cosy. Have we met before?"

Still no answer.

"If we have I expect I've changed. Put on weight-that's bad for a man of my age. And my sight's not what it was. Don't recognise people. Pa.s.s them in the street. People I know quite well."

"Like you knew me, sir?"

An enormous and quite disproportionate sense of triumph flooded over him. Yet the voice had eluded him completely: old and broken, more a whisper than a voice, and charged with echoes he could not catch.

"So we knew one another?" he said. "I had the feeling we'd met."

"Yes, sir."

"Was it connected with Ma.s.singham in some way?"

"In every way."

And suddenly he saw that she was smiling and memory came flooding back. "Why, you're Miss Kelly," he accused her.

"Now you've got it, sir. I knew you would."

"You're Mrs Longford."

"He's dead is Jim, poor lad. And Heslett too. There's just me left, sir. Just me left to tell you something 'fore I die."

II.

What she told me (wrote Justin on the last foolscap pages of his Summary of Facts in In Re Milligan) was that Lumley and I had been made fools of and used', as Jessop said of us. We thought that we were imposing our own harmony on events, and really we were like conductors beating time at an orchestra that is playing some completely different tune.

I have been wondering whether this could possibly be true. She was such a queer old stick and it seemed such a rigmarole as she told it. Matron and Dr Hastie would have had no two doubts about it. They pnt her down as a borderline case, subject to delusions, and certainly that Mas how it struck you as you listened. Or again I've thought that perhaps she was more rational than she seemed and invented the story to make herself feel important and annoy Matron, which was about the only pleasure left to her. Old people can be cunning. Second childhood, like childhood itself, can be a very inventive time.

As against that, she would surely have made a better job of a put-up story. There were such gaps in it. She didn't bring it out in one consecutive narrative, but there were all sorts of inconsistencies and downright lies sometimes. I had to probe and ask reams of questions. She was far more difficult than poor George Sugden ever was. Yet in the end, in some odd way, it all seemed to add up to the truth or to something nearer the truth than all the rest of us arrived at. Let me try and set it down in an orderly way.

She told me first of all that Milligan and Kelly were the men who burgled the Rectory that night, as my wife and her father maintained all along. I find that hard to write. She said there were two, not four men involved. I find that easier, since Jessop was at least wildly astray on that. And Blair and the Police had planted the false evidence, just as was alleged at their trial: they faked the footprints on the road and Milligan's trouser b.u.t.ton, just as they faked the piece of paper in the coat, which was old Piggott's coat. They did all these things exactly as Pugh said, and they did them because otherwise they would have had no hope of getting a conviction. To my mind that lessens somewhat the heinousness of what they did.

So Milligan and Kelly, according to her story, burgled the Rectory, shot at Vemey and escaped-not by the road but across the moor, wearing sacking on their feet. They had with them the watch and the seal. Instead of going straight home they decided to make an alibi for themselves, so they went poaching on Bridewell Moor, buried their rabbits and waited near the Duke's Wall for their friends. The booty, well hidden, escaped the cursory Police search of the chapel. The watch they gave into the safe keeping of Miss Kelly, the one enterprising person in their circle, and Mick Kelly gave the ruby and eagle seal to his fiancee Amy Dodds. These stolen goods were hidden in a cistern in the attic, where they survived a second search, to appear again another day. It was found that Kelly's coat was soaked in blood-rabbit's blood or from the Verneys: no one seemed sure-so Amy burned it, and when the Police came she gave them one of Piggott's. She never mentioned this at the trial, however, partly because she was too bewildered and afraid, and partly because she felt that the destruction of the coat would tell heavily against her lover. In the event, of course, the faked piece of paper put by the Police into the lining proved even more damaging, and the conviction of both men followed inevitably.

So far it seems clear that the old lady's story fits the facts of the trial of '91 and explains the things that puzzled me at the time, in particular the distrust I felt for the Police witnesses in court and for the accused men when I saw them in the cells. There was lying on both sides. But now the controversial things begin.

Between 1891 when Milligan and Kelly went to penal servitude and the January of 1899 when Miss Binns came to me with her story two very important things happened. Amy Dodds tired of waiting for her lost fiance and secretly took a lover: Henderson. They went to the seaside together where they were photographed. Perhaps Amy paid the hotel bill, and it would be ironic if she paid it with the proceeds of my wife's ruby and eagle seal which she had sold to Coates the jeweller for 25. More significantly, Miss Kelly became engaged to one of the Pelegate poachers: Longford.

Now Miss Kelly had loved her brother, whom she had mothered since he was a child. I had been struck at the Moot Hall by the force and pa.s.sion of her nature. His condemnation was the key event of her life; and what made it all the more unbearable was the fact that the cowardice of Piggott, the old man with whom she had been living, had been one of the main causes of the disaster.

Her first act was to break with Piggott, who went to the workhouse, where Wilc.o.x found him some years later. Then, as I have said, she took up with Longford, a man some years younger than herself and one of her brother's closest friends. How much she knew about him is doubtful. She was evasive about this. Perhaps she knew all about him and set her cap at him deliberately, or perhaps she just stumbled on the truth. But what is certain is that in the autumn of '98 he told her-or at all events she got to know-that he had been one of the gang which had killed P.C. Luke at Hannington.

How that name came to haunt me! Anyway, what Longford told Miss Kelly was that he had seen Luke die and that Henderson had killed him at Sugden's urging. The Police, as we know, arrested the pair of them (but not Longford) and then had to release them for want of evidence, which enraged Blair against the Pelegate folk and was the cause of much that followed.

These arrests and releases had taken place a few months before the burglary at Ma.s.singham. And eight years later Miss Kelly had the evidence to send the killers to the scaffold. She could not, for Longford's sake, take it to the Police. In any case P.C. Luke meant nothing to her. But it would mean something to the murderers of Luke that she had in her pocket-or to be more accurate in her bed-the young man who could turn Queen's Evidence and hang them.

From that moment the plan formed in her mind of using the threat of Longford's knowledge of the crime at Hannington to force Henderson THE VERDICT OF YOU ALL: I936.

and Sugden to confess to the lesser crime of burglary at Ma.s.singham, of which they were quite innocent, and so free her brother. It was a bold plan, and dangerous, as the future was to show.

First she went to Sugden's niece, Miss Binns, who had been a friend of P.C. Luke's, and by telling her part of the truth and holding out the prospects of revenge, got her to agree to back up her story with picturesque details of George's guilt-how he had returned in the small hours babbling that he might have killed a man and so on. I don't suppose that many women could have conceived of such a scheme, much less have executed it. But Miss Kelly was exceptional in every way. She saw at once that it was no use going to the magistrates or trying to get confessions from two trapped and dangerous men with only Longford to help her. She needed a middleman, someone who would act as a respectable front for her activities-and it so happened she chose me.

From that stage on, a Punch and Judy show developed. In the foreground Lumley and I worked away to get confessions, while Miss Kelly sat back and pulled the strings. In defence of myself I may say that I didn't swallow the story whole. I had doubts about Miss Binns for instance, but those vanished when I discovered that the Police, who were also alive to what was happening, had put pressure on her to recant. By an evil chance all my attempts to test the story were directed towards those aspects of it that were true. Thus I discovered that Merrick had heard no one on the road past his bothy, which made me properly suspicious of the footmarks Blair had claimed to find. Similarly, my visit to Amy Dodds convinced me that the Police had been given Piggott's jacket (as they had) and therefore must have faked the piece of paper in the lining. When George Sugden confessed I naturally took it as the most perfect confirmation of the story. I saw no significance in his sly smiles and the pointedly ironic way in which he treated me. I ignored the glimpse I had had of Longford and Miss Kelly outside his house on the night he confessed. How could I have guessed that it was not our urgings but their threats that had worked the miracle. Besides, P.C. Pugh's phantom attempts to see me only added to the pattern that seemed to be building up, so that when at last we met and he told me of Blair's ruse of the chisel I became quite certain I was on the right track and no longer intellectually capable of doubt.

All this time Miss Kelly had been working quietly in the wings. She had coached Sugden for his confession and she must have felt properly disgusted when she discovered that this high-cla.s.s piece of fraud was not enough to release her brother. So she turned on Henderson and tried to coach him too. This was over-stepping things a little. Henderson was not a timid man like George to be stampeded at the first scent of danger, and his reaction, which she ought really to have foreseen, was THE Ma.s.sESTGHAM AFFAIR.

to try to short-circuit things by shooting Longford in the street, nearly killing me in the process, which was one of the ironies of the story I didn't appreciate at the time. Another was the fact that Amy Dodds had changed sides and had begun to sleep with Henderson. No doubt she had heard from him what Miss Kelly was up to; and in her alarm the poor girl first blurted out to me the truth about the coat and then, to correct things, all but warned me of what was really happening. Of course, in the end she never did tell me, because within a week they had taken her body from the river. It could have been accident or suicide, but I think someone had overheard her talking to me and guessed what she might say, and I think it must have been Longford in the pa.s.sage in Clay Yard, not Henderson as I once thought, and Longford's voice that Snell and his dogs heard in the woods near the Red Mill pool. In any case I feel sure that Miss Kelly had no part in that.

The rest of the story bears all the marks of her ingenious mind, showing her understanding of the people she was dealing with and how she had learnt from her mistakes that it was in combination they worked best. Since Sugden alone couldn't do the trick, she had to set Henderson in motion. So she went to him with Longford and told him that a full description of Luke's murder had been deposited in a sealed packet in my safe. He was invited to 'confess' to the crime at Ma.s.singham. She had already sent Longford to me with an envelope which contained no statement but some sheets of foolscap and my future wife's gold watch, which had been in her possession all along.

This was the last of her manipulations and it brought by far the best performance. For Henderson had no intention of confessing. His aim was to get the supposed statement in his hands that night and then settle with Longford for good and all before he could write another. He probably had no thought that Longford was shadowing him across the market-square and along the ginnel, or, if he did, it may have crossed his mind that my office was as good and quiet a place as any to get his man. He certainly had no thought of me or any notion that there had been a 'tip-off' about the burglary in the offing. Caught red-handed in possession of the watch, in the presence of Longford, with the threat of a murder accusation hanging over him, his nerve gave way at last and he decided to 'confess', and stuck to it through the trials that followed. It was better than being hanged. He even defended Miss Kelly's story with ingenious touches of his own; as when he checkmated Jessop over the seal, which of course he had never given to Amy or even seen, though he may have enjoyed a holiday on the proceeds.

It had become a cast-iron story by that time. Why, as Gilmore said, should innocent men confess to something they had never done? Why should they go to penal servitude for it? Jessop's theory that there was THE VERDICT OF YOU ALL: I936.

some other charge outstanding against them which made it imperative that they should confess to the lesser crime of burglary at Ma.s.singham was right (if we believe Miss Kelly), but it was made to look ridiculous once one appreciated that the Police had no motive for wanting a confession, which in fact proved fatal to them. No one thought of Miss Kelly and Longford who had the motive. Why should anyone have thought of them? Even Jessop wasn't as perceptive as all that.

And why, finally, should 1 accept the story now? I don't know altogether that I do, though it certainly seems to answer many of the points that bothered me. If only I could talk it over with someone it would help, but my old friend at St Bede's would be too deeply grieved by it and perhaps in all the circ.u.mstances it would be better not to trouble those at home.

For, after all, everything is over now, and the guilty were punished, if not precisely in the tidy way the law would have approved of. How Hicks would have laughed about it. I could have told him. But what a story he would have made!

Such was the summary that young Mr Jobling found in the lumber room. He had not met Mrs Deny. But even without that privilege he understood-if nothing else-why Justin had not done the apparently obvious thing and taken his problem to his wife. Like any other woman she would have been bound to say: "I told you so."

(Continued from front flap) Colonel Deverel, the wealthy father of Justin's beautiful fiancee Georgina, opposes his stand and threatens both his marriage and his business advancement; the superintendent who arrested Milligan and Kelly takes great exception to any slur on his discharge of office; Miss Charlotte Verney is too proud to retract the identifications she made so a.s.sertively at the trial long ago.

Strange and disturbing developments mark the progress of the two investigators; a girl is mysteriously drowned; a murder committed years ago a.s.sumes sinister significance; the local poachers on whom they rely for evidence weave truth and lies together in a messy web; and Justin finds himself neglecting his fiancee and falling in love with the proud Miss Verney.

After eight years spent fighting against the pride of individuals and the prejudice of the public, the lawyer and the clergymen come to the end of their search. But it is not until thirty years later that Justin Derry sits at the bedside of a dying woman and learns that, in a curious and far from legal way, justice had been done.

In The Ma.s.singham Affair Edward Grierson makes use of satire as well as suspense. The reader is alternately puzzled by a mystery that will not resolve itself till the very end, and diverted as the author re-creates the style of the novelists of the Victorian era.

end.