The Assize of the Dying

by Ellis Peters

  Malachi brought Margaret back before half-past eleven that night, because she wished to present him at once to her uncle and announce their engagement. It seemed to him that half-past eleven might be regarded as a rather late hour for such family ordeals, but Margaret over-ruled his protests and towed him into the house by the hand.

  ‘Of course he’ll still be up, he never goes to bed before midnight. And the ice will be broken then, and in any case at this hour you needn’t stay long. I believe you’re scared of him,’ she said, looking up into his face as she switched on more lights in the hall.

  ‘Aren’t most people? You are!’ said Malachi provocatively.

  She smiled, but rather thoughtfully. ‘Not scared, exactly, but I could never get any nearer to him. I can’t say I’ve ever known him – really known him. Nobody does, unless it’s Charlie, and they’ve gone their own ways since long before I came here to live.’

  She threw open the door of the drawing-room, but it was empty and dark, and the fire was almost out. ‘He must be up in his study. Let’s go up to him.’

  They climbed the first flight of stairs hand in hand, and saw together the thin line of brightness under the study door; but when Margaret tapped confidently on the panels and made to go in, the door resisted her. She looked round at Malachi in surprise: ‘It’s locked! I never knew him do that before.’

  She raised her voice, and called cheerfully: ‘Uncle John, can I come in? I want to talk to you.’

  The silence after her voice was like a blow. Malachi, who had been about to protest once again that they should postpone the interview and not disturb an old man at this time of night, let the words die in his mouth. Margaret’s face had changed, sharpening into serious anxiety. ‘There must be something wrong. Malachi, I don’t like this!’

  ‘He may have fallen asleep,’ said Malachi sensibly.

  ‘He doesn’t sleep like this – he’d have heard me.’ But she knocked again on the door, and called again: ‘Uncle John, are you all right? Please let me in – it’s Margaret!’

  After every knock, every call, the silence fell back stonily. She turned and shut her hands on Malachi’s arm tightly. ‘Malachi, I’m afraid! Something’s happened to him!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, what could happen to him? You don’t even know that he’s there at all. He may have forgotten to put the light out.’

  ‘Then why should he lock the door? He never does keep it locked. Malachi, there is something wrong. You ask what could happen to him. But something happened to the foreman of the jury, didn’t it?’

  ‘Now you’re being absurd.’ Malachi’s voice was peremptory, as if to a potential case of hysteria, but Margaret, calm as she was, had no energy to spare for resenting his tone. ‘If a locked door can start you back to all that nonsense—’ It was the first time the case had been so much as mentioned between them all that day.

  ‘One locked door may not be much,’ said Margaret. ‘But come into the library. There’s a way through from there into the study, too. Let’s see if that’s locked.’

  This time it was Malachi who put his hand to it, and then the weight of his shoulder. It resisted him solidly. The silence in the sealed study prolonged itself levelly, inhumanly. It no longer seemed possible to him that anyone could be in there, and sleep through the growing storm of their uneasiness.

  ‘He is there,’ said Margaret with absolute conviction.

  ‘Would there be another key? To either of the doors?’

  ‘Mrs Platt might have one, I don’t know. Shall I go and wake her?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Malachi, swallowing hard, ‘I think perhaps you’d better.’ It was three flights up, and the errand might keep her away for ten minutes or more, as well as providing another woman to bear her company in whatever revelation was to come. He waited until she was on the stairs, and then went to the long windows of the library, and let himself out between the heavy burgundy curtains, on to a narrow stone balcony.

  It did not reach the window of the room next door, but that window was identical with this one, and the distance between the two low stone balustrades was not more than two feet. He negotiated it easily, and tried the catch of the window, but it was fastened, and the glass was closely curtained within, so that only a glow of wine-coloured light came through. He hesitated for a moment, but, remembering Margaret, put away his doubts and, muffling his fist in his sleeve, smashed it through the glass beside the catch and let himself into the room with fragments of glass glittering like frost on his coat. He parted the curtains with a hand suddenly reluctant, and would have given anything to be absolved from the necessity: but someone had to venture, and it seemed to have become his responsibility. In the end it was with a lunge and a gulp that he passed through into the light.

  Mr Justice Manton was still at his desk, lying forward over it almost as if in sleep; but the awkward fall of his left hand and arm, sprawled under his head, had none of the ease of sleep, and only his right hand, fallen half-open beside him on the blotter, kept its appearance of life and competence to the end. The revolver, the queer lump of the silencer clipping the barrel, rested naturally in the relaxed fingers, as if he had been used to handling such weapons, though until he had taken it from Charlie’s pocket he had never so much as held one in his hand before.

  He had made sure of suppressing the evening papers, and also extended a last courtesy to Mrs Platt, by spreading the Gazette and its fellow where his head would come to rest. The act conveyed to Malachi more about Mr Justice Manton than he had ever understood until this moment. Three sealed and addressed letters, all in the same strong Gothic hand, he had placed on the most distant corner of the desk, with the same consideration. It was as well, for the revolver was a heavy job, and had made a hideous mess. But the letters were clean. Malachi put out a hand which was perceptibly shaking, and took the one which was addressed to Margaret. The others seemed to be for the coroner and the police respectively. He knew he ought not to touch anything, but the old man had meant Margaret to have the letter, and it was hers, and – they could run him in for it if they liked – he was damned if she should have to wait for it.

  He felt a wave of nausea rising in him, and fought it down doggedly. The sound of women’s voices in the library sent him flying to that door, but the key was in the lock there, so they could not get in, even if they had another key. He spoke quickly, before he let himself out to rejoin them, because a movement within there might well be misinterpreted unless he identified himself at once.

  ‘Margaret, I’m here. It’s me, Malachi – I’m coming out.’

  She said, with a laugh which was as near hysteria as it was in her nature to come: ‘My God, we thought we’d lost you, too!’

  He turned the key warily, and slid through the door and closed it quickly behind him. She confronted him large-eyed and pale, the older woman at her elbow, in a long woollen housecoat.

  ‘Was there another key?’

  ‘No, only those in the doors. How did you get in? Malachi, you’re hurt!’ She caught at the sleeve of his jacket and, pushing it up from the wrist, displayed the single long scratch where the glass had penetrated; but he put her off gently.

  ‘No, that’s nothing. I climbed over by the two balconies, and had to break the glass to get in.’ He relocked the door and put the key thankfully into his pocket. ‘We’ve got trouble, Margaret.’

  The ‘we’ was meant to have its effect on her, and indeed she received it with gratitude, surrendering herself to his arm as he led her away from the door.

  ‘Will you stay here with Mrs Platt, while I do some telephoning? Then I’ve got something to give you.’ The silent questioning of her eyes, wildly intelligent, assured him that she was feeling her way so near the truth that he might as well put it into words. ‘Yes, he’s in there. You were right, something bad did happen to him. He’s dead, Margaret. I’ve got to call the police.’

  ‘The police?’ she said in a whisper. It was not she, but the housekeeper, who had broken into
disordered tears.

  ‘He shot himself,’ said Malachi, so gently that the words seemed to have lost all their impact, and sank into her consciousness very gradually. ‘He left letters, Margaret. I don’t know why he did it, but it was quite deliberate. Here, this is for you.’

  She took it automatically, but for a long minute did not look at it. She found, somewhere in her, the faint shadow of a smile with which to comfort Malachi, whose pain for her was as yet the only pain she felt at all. ‘All right – yes, I understand. I’m quite all right, Malachi, don’t worry about me. You could telephone from—’

  She remembered in time that the only telephone up here was on her uncle’s desk, and turned her head away with a gesture of distress which he chose not to see, because any responsive distress on his part might have broken her.

  ‘I’ll go down,’ he said, ‘and leave the door unfastened for them. You stay here and take care of Mrs Platt. I’ll be very quick.’

  At least he knew she could not get into the study. He heard them talking spasmodically as he ran down the stairs, the housekeeper’s voice shattered with tears.

  Margaret took the older woman by the arm, and led her to a chair and sat beside her. ‘Did you know this might happen? Did anything happen today, to make you think a thing like this was possible?’ For it seemed to her that this grief had little surprise in it.

  ‘He told me not to say anything to you,’ whispered Mrs Platt, between her sobs. ‘He said he’d tell you himself, so I never said a word this evening. But by the time he came home you were out again. I thought he’d be waiting up to see you, because he came into his study here and said he wasn’t to be disturbed unless you came in. So I had to leave him to take care of everything himself. But I never thought of him doing a thing like that! Still, after what’s happened, you can understand it—’

  ‘What has happened? What is it I wasn’t to be told?’

  Mrs Platt lifted a face of ravaged despair. ‘It’s Mr Charlie. He hoped you wouldn’t see the papers, to read about it like that, without any warning. Mr Charlie had a smash with his car, this morning. The police down in Sussex telephoned the Judge, and he went down there, but I wasn’t to tell you the reason. I ought to have thought of this – you could see it in his face when he came back, but I never realised.’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me,’ asked Margaret gently, ‘that Charlie’s dead too?’ She felt nothing yet except a coldness, such as she supposed falls on the senses when something too large and grotesque for belief confronts and challenges them.

  ‘He was killed outright. The car was all smashed up, he ran it into a stone quarry, the Judge said.’ Her tears had calmed her, now that the worst was told and Margaret sat so still and composed under the burden. ‘I could hardly believe it was happening, he was so quiet about it. You’d have thought he’d been preparing himself for news like that – really, you’d almost have thought he was expecting it.’

  It was then that Margaret felt the light, astonishing kiss once more upon her lips, and saw for an instant Charlie’s face hovering close above her just-opened eyes, out of focus, plaintively smiling. She heard again the soft, light tones of his voice, still playful in farewell, explaining that, though he would not be back that night, it would not be long before he came home, and that when he came home this time, it would be to stay. She heard his ‘Goodbye!’ which had seemed to her to hold no particular solemnity of leave-taking; it was poignant and final now in the ears of her memory. How could she have let such a visitation, such a valediction, pass without question? How was it she had not realised what lay behind it? Yes, the old man had been expecting it. He had known it was coming. So had his son. Something like this resolute and violent death had been agreed between them.

  So now, though she did not understand the details of the dénouement, she recognised its force and finality. The Judge had been summoned to a tribunal, and he was gone to keep his appointment, in the only way it could be kept. Charlie, who had never been threatened by name, was gone with him. Had not one nameless person also been called with the rest of the guilty?

  The last thing she had said to Malachi about the Stevenson case, last night as they walked home together tranquilly in the small hours after the rain had ceased, was: ‘And now, after all, I suppose we shall never know who did it!’

  She had spoken too soon, it seemed; she knew now, only too well, who had killed Zoë Trevor.

  The detective-inspector looked at the unopened letter Margaret was holding out to him, and shook his head gently.

  ‘I don’t think we shall have to make use of that, Miss Manton, since you can verify the handwriting. They’re all three his, obviously. And he’s told us everything we’re going to need, in detail. A very clear statement. This one – no, that’s yours.’ He rose and turned towards the closed door of the study, behind which the doctor and a sergeant were already at work. Privately he had warned Malachi that they would have to take away the old man’s body for a more thorough examination. They wanted to extract the bullet, which’ was deeply embedded; but there was no need to pass on these thoughts to Margaret. ‘I’m afraid we shall be some time. We’ll try not to be more noticeable than we have to. If I were you, I should try to get some rest.’

  Margaret looked up, hollow-eyed with shock, from the depths of the big chair in which she sat, and said in a low but level voice: ‘I’m quite all right, thank you. Please go ahead.’

  Mrs Platt had been sent back to bed with a sedative, under the doctor’s orders, as soon as her own part of the story had been told. Margaret and Malachi were alone in the library now. He came and sat down on the arm of her chair and embraced her shoulders. They read the Judge’s last letter together.

  MY DEAR MARGARET,

  By the time you receive this I shall be already dead, and unable to apologise in person for leaving you alone to face so terrible a series of discoveries. I can only ask you to forgive me for what will seem to you a betrayal, but I find I am not so strong as I had believed, and what I have to tell you is more mercifully said in this way, without the distress of another meeting.

  You will know by now that Charlie is dead. I had intended to break that news to you myself, for I know that you were very fond of him, as indeed he was of you; but, apart from the fact that cowardice prompts me to take this easier way, I find myself believing also, rightly or wrongly, that it is a matter of urgency that I should lose no time in rejoining my son. If any continued travelling awaits us, I should like to think that we may undertake it in company; and that is why I am in so unseemly a hurry to overtake him.

  You will forgive me if I do not again go into details. I have left a full account for the police of everything that has happened. But I must tell you that owing to observations I made during the last two days, both of your behaviour and of Sir Robert Wyvern’s, I felt it incumbent upon me to be present at the proposed meeting at St Lucian’s Church last night. I was already convinced that some interested person, most probably you, my dear Margaret, was trying to make the supposed murderer break cover by means of this appointment; and my absolute conviction that we had already done justice in that case had already been shaken, not by the accidental death of the foreman of the jury so much as by some inward uneasiness within myself, of which I think Robert’s fatalism was the earliest source. It seemed to me that if there really did exist some person who could be alarmed by the threat of revelations regarding Zoë Trevor’s stolen jewellery, that person could be none other than the murderer, and we had indeed destroyed an innocent man. You will understand, therefore, that I had to be present.

  I was in hiding on the scene when you came and when you were startled into flight, and I have seen in your bearing today that that particular encounter did not belong in the orbit of this tragic evil in which the rest of us are caught. My only consolation in leaving you like this is my conviction that I leave you to a happiness which cannot always be shadowed by the manner of my departure.

  After you left, I continued to wait, and
two men came singly to the church and met there. One of them, whom I knew afterwards to be Robert, flashed a torch in the other one’s face and clearly recognised him, though I myself did not have the opportunity at that time of seeing him clearly. Robert was thereupon shot down immediately by the other man, who then made his escape, and whom I followed from the scene. It was clear to me then that this was the murderer. He had come for the sole purpose of killing the person who, as he supposed, could incriminate him. There had been almost no noise throughout, and the revolver was silenced. I was sorry to have to leave poor Robert like that, but he was already dead, and my duty was quite clear to me.

  I followed the murderer, and he led me to my own house. The clothes my son had been wearing I recovered from his wardrobe in his presence. He must have received a mortal shock when he heard me open and close the front door so promptly upon his own entry. The revolver also I took from him, and after my death it will come, with all the rest of the vital evidence, into the hands of the police.

  It is characteristic of my son Charlie that since he began to consider himself a man, which he did very early, he has asked no favours nor concessions of me, of any other person, or of life. He grew too early and too easily into a celebrity in warfare, and reached a height of accomplishment in this dubious line which has debarred him from all achievement in less exciting fields since. What he needed to while away the remainder of a deflowered life he considered it his natural part to take, never to ask for. He was self-supporting, emotionally as well as in every other way. The world owed him whatever he could take from it. Yet you have reason, I think, to know as well as I do that he could be moved to an equally staggering generosity. It is true that probably no one in the world but himself was quite real to him, but he had moments of realisation when they became real, and then he could make large and terrible gestures in celebration of his vision.