The Assize of the Dying

by Edith Pargeter

  ‘Margaret!’

  He crashed after her, surging through the bushes, leaping the wall and swearing aloud at the unexpected drop below. The curious, uneven double rhythm of their steps, the sharp staccato of her heels, the heavier beat of his rubber-soled shoes, re-echoed between the tall houses, diminishing slowly. The quietness came back almost before Mr Justice Manton had dragged open the vestry door and threaded the jungle of sharp-set bushes to stare after them.

  Margaret reached the corner of the street, and for a moment hesitated in a stupor of bewilderment, having no reason to go one way rather than another. She heard him bounding after her, heard him call: ‘Margaret!’ with an urgency which drove her forward like a blow. She was not running anywhere in particular, she was merely running away from belief, away from realisation. Instead of going towards the remote and lulling continuo of the traffic in the High Street, she turned aside and plunged into the side-street, where the light was as subdued and the vague shadowy spaces between fence and fence as unpeopled as in the corner by the churchyard.

  Twice, realising that she was about to meet a late stroller, she checked to a rapid walk and heard Malachi’s feet slowing after her. She felt very tired, but as soon as the innocents were gone she began to run again. And yet she had not tried to speak to anyone she met. She was not thinking at all, every instinct and every energy she had left were concentrated on running away.

  Malachi was gaining rapidly. She could hear his long, angry breaths and feel his nearness; and in a passage off Greville Street he caught her at last. His arm took her hard about the body, and pulled her round to face him, his left hand caught her right wrist as she threw up her arm. He thought she had meant to strike him, or ward him off, but actually she was going to do no more than steady herself by clutching at his shoulder. He held her hard against him, for fear she should break loose again. They were both panting, and their eyes, staring despairingly, met in mutual indignation. She had not realised until then that she felt no fear of him, and had not been running to preserve her life, but rather her dignity. It was all, in the end, a little ridiculous.

  ‘Oh, no, you don’t! What’s the idea, running off like that? What are you doing here at all? I told you to stay at home, didn’t I? How did you follow me? How did you find out anything about it?’

  ‘Let me go!’ But after one tentative contortion she did not struggle, for he was much too strong for her. ‘Leave me alone! I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘But you’re going to. You’re going to tell me what you were doing there, and why you had to run off like a scalded cat as soon as I saw you.’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you anything. Why should I? I’m not accountable to you for what I do. Malachi, you’re hurting me!’

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he said instantly but sulkily, and somewhat relaxed his grip, though warily. ‘But I’ve got to understand—My God, it’s all crazy! I thought you were safe at home, and I needn’t worry about you. I suppose you saw that damned “agony” in the Gazette too, and guessed what it was all about? Or was it you who put it in?’ The thought was new to him, his voice grew loud with fury, realising at once how easily this was possible. He shook her by the wrist.’ Was it you?’

  ‘Yes, it was!’ she said, suddenly hopelessly calm. ‘I rang you up this morning, intending to tell you about it, but you’d gone out already. And then this evening you wouldn’t listen to me.’

  ‘You never tried to tell me it was anything like that!’ he protested, raging. ‘As though I’d have let you do such a damned silly thing—’

  ‘I couldn’t go into details, my uncle came down, I had to pass it off pretty casually. And you rang off, you never gave me a chance. But it didn’t matter,’ she said bitterly, ‘you’d seen it yourself, it seems, and knew what it meant without being told.’

  ‘Well, how could I miss it, knowing what I knew? I thought it was Jody MacClure, trying to make one big touch and get out while he was safe. What else could I think? And you came down here alone to see what happened! My God!’ he groaned, ‘what I could do to you for taking a chance like that, you crazy fool!’

  They had begun to walk on again, her arm dragged tightly through his, his hand still gripping her wrist. They stared ahead into the dark and the pools of lamplight, with angry, embittered eyes.

  ‘And that doesn’t explain why you took one look at me, and ran for your life.’

  She was silent, hating him; but his own phrase had stabbed him into understanding. His step wavered for a moment. He went on, in a voice faint with fury: ‘You don’t mean to say you thought that I—You thought I’d put that answer in the Gazette tonight? When I appeared, you thought I was keeping that date with Jody because I’d made it?’

  Her continued silence answered him sufficiently clearly.

  ‘Thank you! It’s nice to know that after all this, you think I’m Zoë’s murderer. Cui bono, and all that! Don’t be such an idiot! If I was the one who had cause to shut Jody’s mouth, don’t you think I could have done it yesterday?’

  ‘While I was there with you?’ she said, angry in her turn.

  ‘I could have gone back without you, couldn’t I? Why on earth should I risk answering an advertisement like that, just to get a quiet meeting with him, when I knew perfectly well where to find him alone whenever I chose?’

  ‘It might have been safer to get him away from his room,’ said Margaret, hotly arguing a case in which she did not believe, in which she had never believed for more than one disastrous moment.

  ‘And in any case, if I were the man, why on earth should I take the trouble ever to meet him again? Why should I ever have considered paying him or killing him? He had long enough to take a good look at me yesterday, didn’t he? Did he show any sign of recognising me for the man? And do you think he was the kind to keep a straight face and brazen it out if he had known me again? So what had I got to fear from him?’

  ‘Then what were you doing there?’ she asked more gently.

  ‘Exactly what you were doing, I suppose. I saw the answer in the paper tonight. I was waiting to see who came to keep the appointment, of course. That’s why I was early on the spot, I wanted a good place to lie up and watch from.’

  Margaret admitted, her step slackening: ‘You were early. That’s why you startled me so much. I wasn’t prepared for you.’

  ‘Well, did you think I’d turn down meeting you for some ordinary thing?’ he asked, still smarting. ‘I thought you were safe at home, out of range. That’s the way I wanted you. I thought with luck I might be able to tell you, tomorrow, who it was. I didn’t have to tell you, you decided for yourself that it was me!’

  Margaret lowered her head and walked beside him in bitter silence, the swing of her light hair hiding her face even when they passed under a lamp. In a moment he began to be uneasy and, having tried in vain to catch a glimpse of the expression she was so assiduously hiding, he halted abruptly and drew her face to face with him again. Obstinate still, she would not look up, but pressed her forehead into his shoulder.

  ‘Margaret, what’s the matter? Margaret, look at me!’

  She was crying with fury and shame, but very softly.

  ‘Oh, lord! Margaret, don’t – please!’ He began to melt into alarm and dismay, stroking her hair. ‘Oh, Margaret, darling! If you cry, you’ll have me saying I did do it, anything you like, anything to please you.’

  She lifted her face to him, stained, ill-tempered, vaguely lovely in the half-light where they stood. Malachi kissed her. They were both trembling.

  ‘I never really thought you’d done it,’ said Margaret in a grudging whisper. ‘Only for a moment, anyhow. You startled me, and when I made that movement and you heard me – well, I just lost my head and ran, without thinking at all. And all the time I knew it was only you, but by the time I’d started thinking I was already running, and I was ashamed to stop. I didn’t want to face you, because I’d made it look as if I really believed you were a murderer – as if I were afraid of you.
’

  ‘And weren’t you?’ asked Malachi, with a last impulse of anger.

  ‘Idiot, don’t you suppose I should have made straight for a main street if I’d been afraid of you?’

  Her subtlety confounded him, and her tears had brought him to heel so sharply that he no longer knew how to argue with her.

  ‘You wanted me to catch you?’

  ‘I did and I didn’t,’ she admitted bewilderingly, her lips against his cheek. ‘But more particularly I did. I didn’t know any other way to get out of the mess we were in.’

  Malachi said helplessly into her hair: ‘Margaret, darling, I do love you so. I couldn’t bear you to run away from me.’

  ‘I never shall again,’ she said consolingly.

  They clung together gently, there at the edge of the lamplight in the prim little street. A soft, fine rain had begun to fall, but they did not notice it.

  ‘And we spoiled our one chance,’ sighed Margaret at length, raising her head from his shoulder. ‘After all the trouble I went to to make it! If anyone really did come to keep the appointment, we’ve missed him. He’ll have gone long ago now – no point in going back.’

  For some reason it no longer seemed so important to them; they could not keep their minds anchored to it.

  ‘We’d better get under cover somewhere,’ said Malachi, at last becoming aware of the rain. ‘Let’s go and find one of those all-night places and get something to eat, shall we? Somewhere where we can talk.’

  But it seemed that they no longer needed to talk, for as they linked arms closely and stepped out together along the street they gazed at each other, from time to time, with dazzled and charmed eyes, and found nothing at all to say.

  Mr Justice Manton, watching with consternation the flight of his niece, and the young man’s angry pursuit of her, had some moments of fear and confusion which were so unfamiliar to his usual poise as to leave him, to some extent, a different man. He could not hope to overtake either of those active young people, even if he could have persuaded his dignified legs to break into a run; and it was for him an effort even to think of shouting after them. The logical deduction from the encounter was obviously that this Malachi must be the murderer, since he had certainly come to the appointment, and that Margaret, horrified by the discovery, was in flight from a danger which might well threaten her life.

  Yet there was something quite remarkably improbable about the way they ran, not at all as the Judge would have expected a prospective victim to flee from a murderer. It was the young man who was making all the noise, actually calling after her as he ran: ‘Margaret!’ in tones peremptory and indignant, even amazed, more like a frantic lover than a villain at bay. So perhaps Mr Justice Manton’s perturbation was calmed at the heart by doubts, even before Margaret reached the corner; after which point it died altogether.

  In the stretch of lighted street rising gently ahead of the cross-roads where Margaret had checked, a man was walking firmly and decorously towards her, a small figure yet, but already aware of her. If she had run straight on she would have met him within a minute. Instead, she turned aside and bolted into the narrow, dark side-street, where in an instant she and her pursuer were lost to sight. The Judge smiled in the darkness; he did not understand how far their relationship had gone, but he saw that no serious fear was involved in it. He drew breath gratefully, relaxing.

  The approaching man, walking evenly, passed by the side-street without curiosity, and came on. Only then did the Judge remember that it was still only eight minutes to eleven, and a man walking towards him might be walking towards an appointment.

  He could not withdraw into the interior of the church now without the risk of being seen. He drew back instead into the thickest clump of bushes, where Margaret had stood, and froze into stillness there, waiting. The man might turn in at any gate in the cul-de-sac, and let himself into his own house. But he did not. He walked along the pavement without stealth as far as the empty gateway of the churchyard, turned in there and made his way straight to the south porch. On the stone bench within he sat down composedly, and the darkness took all of him except a pair of long, black-clad legs, and one hand, a paler patch in the deep shadow, laid open and firm and still upon his knee.

  Upon that hand, soon the only discernible shape in the shades, the one signature of human presence in the almost superhuman stillness, the Judge fixed his eyes, and wondered if this could be the hand which had obliterated Zoë Trevor, destroyed Louis Stevenson and defaced beyond erasure his own honour. Once the man had seated himself, he did not move, not even with the nervous tension of waiting. He had passed through the olive-green gloom of the trees as a large shape in movement, his dark overcoat and hat dappled faintly with confusing threads of light through the tangle of branches, from the lamp at the blind end of the street. Something in the deliberate shape had troubled the Judge with tremors of recognition, while he had no clear glimpses of either gait or face to make identification possible. Now the hand alone, large, calm and somehow tragic, lay resignedly on the crossed knees. It did not look like a murderer’s hand. No agitation troubled its sad serenity.

  Mr Justice Manton, in the silence and chill of the night, felt the seconds running out towards a judgement in which he, too, was involved. Justice had been his life, implication in an injustice was already a kind of death. His certainty was gone. At what precise moment he had lost it, whether at his friend’s hands or Margaret’s, he could not discern; but he knew that it was irrecoverable.

  He saw again the face of the tired and disorganised old scholar in the dock, already indefinite, beginning to disintegrate, the angry eyes keeping to the last their integrity of accusation and hate, even when they seemed no longer to have colour or form enough to contain so much feeling. The Judge, watching the big, quiet hand, thought, was it you that made so many of us murderers?

  The wind stirred a little, and a faint sheen was beginning to distil from the gloss of the rain upon leaves and grass and stone, making the darkness by a shade less dark. Somewhere a clock struck eleven, with infinite slowness, as though reluctant to acknowledge the inescapable hour.

  As if the very sound had brought him, prompt to his time, there was suddenly another figure standing at the top of the steps which climbed from the street below. Pressed close to the high wall, silent and still, the man seemed no more than a very faint shape made by irregularities in the stone. He had chosen the darkest approach, and his coming had been rubber-shod and silent, but the man in the porch knew that he was there. The vague blur of the hand had lifted; the patient fingers were in the act of lighting a cigarette. He, at any rate, did not object to being seen. It was no part of his intention to go undetected.

  The newcomer moved towards him slowly, and branches crossed and complicated the Judge’s view of him, so that he was little more than a sensation of movement. When he came to within a couple of yards of the porch he was clear of the trees, but he had his back turned upon the spot where the Judge stood and he could have been any man of medium build and active years, in a large, loose raincoat which, by its just discernible shape in the dark, might have been of some dark fawn shade, and a soft dark hat which made him headless against the black interior of the porch. In the stillness which continued for a full minute after the slow approach had ceased, the two men were looking fixedly at each other.

  The hand which held the cigarette came back into view, the little glow made a spark of red-gold in the dark. The man behind it, hidden within the inner blackness, said clearly:

  ‘Speedwell, I presume!’

  The syllables were not enough to identify the voice; before the Judge could quite believe he had detected a familiar tone, it was gone. After all, he thought, did Margaret really launch all this? Or was the threat of the advertisement a real threat, and was Margaret only one among all those who read it correctly? For if so, one of these two is a murderer and the other an accessory and a blackmailer.

  The standing man, his hands still plunged deeply into th
e pockets of his raincoat, said: ‘Yes!’ in the whisper which has no individuality, and scarcely any sex.

  The cigarette was dropped on to the stone flags, and trodden out under a shoe-heel. The hand which had held it was thrust into a coat pocket, and in an instant a shaft of light sprang up full into the newcomer’s face. Mr Justice Manton had a momentary impression of a vivid brightness, in which the twigs leaped to sight like living things, and, printed blackly against this outburst of light, the outline of a head and shoulders in flat, clean-edged black, a paper cut-out of a man.

  The man in the porch uttered something which sounded like: ‘My God, you!’ in a groan of amazement. Then from an insane confusion of small and almost soundless impressions, all simultaneous, Mr Justice Manton gathered these: the long raincoat rustled as a hand passed rapidly into and out of its pocket; the man in the porch, on the heels of his own exclamation, sprang up, or at least began to do so; there was a brief flash, and a small sound, a kind of dull thump, and the torch dropped upon the flags, rolled and went out. After the light had vanished, taking with it all outlines, all presences, the Judge was quite blind for a moment, and could not even find his way out from among the branches.

  His own heart was so thunderous in its beat that he confused with it the retreating steps, light and quick, that rushed away down the narrow passage in the wall. When he groped his way to the porch, everything was already very quiet there.

  He struck a match, and in the little, wavering light he saw the broken torch lying in a crack of the flags, and the big man slumped in the corner of the stone seat. His hat had fallen off, his head lolled sideways; and when the Judge thrust his hand into the breast of the coat it encountered the heat and stickiness of blood, but no heartbeat. The large, mournful brow, marble-white after the darkness, shone in weary placidity above half-closed eyes.