The Massingham affair

by Grierson, Edward, 1914-1975

  No sooner said than done with so efficient a machine. The Headquarters staff was alerted, constables were sent running to every outlying officer, and within half an hour the roads into the town were guarded and patrols had begun the rounds in the Bewley and Pelegate sectors where all the more notorious poachers were known to live. Having thus galvanised his force to deal with what he saw as a heaven-sent chance of smiting the Amalekites, the Superintendent got into his gig and drove by the Deeping Road to Massingham which he reached about half-past five, while darkness still lay over the countryside.

  He found the villagers swarming in the Rectory and its grounds in a pleasurable state of ghoulishness. No doubt it was felt that after thirty years the Rector and his family had at last edified the neighbourhood. "Can't have this, now can we?" the Superintendent reasoned with them as he began to shoo them out. "Destroy the clues you will, if any, and then wherell we be?" With tact and good humour he got the place cleared of all but the Verneys, who were under sedatives in their bedrooms, and the household staff, which consisted of a cook, two daily maids and a general handyman by the name of Bell who did not sleep on the premises.

  "Now see here, Jane," the Superintendent said, waylaying his quarry in her kitchen, "you're the one to help me, you are. Did you see or hear anything?"

  "Just a noise like, and the gun going off—and then the master hollering."

  "I want you to show me where they got in."

  Preceded by a constable carrying a candlestick, they went into the drawing-room. One of the sash windows had been forced with some instrument and panes of glass had been broken. The window stood open. The Superintendent leaned through it over the flower-beds, but it was still too dark to see anything out there, so he turned back into the room, following the trail of damage that led towards the central table lying on its side and the bureau against the far wall, all its drawers open and littered with paper.

  "Seems they couldn't have found much," he said. "Anyways, they went next door."

  "That's right, sir. Into the dining-room."

  The confusion was even greater there. The dining-table had resisted stoutly, but almost every other stick of furniture had been overturned in the course of that frantic melee in the darkness, and the plate from the sideboard was strewn around the room. Under the table, where it had been thrown, lay the burglars' candle, and the Superintendent bent to pick it up. "There's this, sir, I was looking round before you came, sir, and I found this," the cook announced, handing him a chisel with paintmarks on it that might have come from the forced window in the drawing-room. "Found it here, sir, near the door."

  "Find anything else?" said the Superintendent, grimacing slightly at this amateur detection.

  "There's this sheet o' paper, sir. Jim Bell found it in the hall."

  The Superintendent, muttering a little louder to himself, accepted it. He seemed to be accumulating clues at second hand. But on his way out of the dining-room he stopped and pointed triumphantly to a mark about shoulder level on the door jamb where part of the woodwork had been blown away. Beyond him on the passage wall and considerably higher was another mark where the rest of the charge had struck. The shot must have been deflected from the door jamb, to pass close to Mr Verney's head before embedding itself, a few pellets ricocheting on the way. A sporting gun had caused it—a poacher's gun, most probably, as he had cleverly divined.

  Furthermore, when dawn came and he went outside, he found in the soil of the flower-bed a set of marks made by the second burglar who had hurled himself through the window on all fours. These the Superintendent covered over carefully with boards. His case was

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  THE MASSESXHAM AFFAIR

  taking shape, and he returned in excellent humour to his headquarters in the Lawnmarket and to the discovery that in his absence a first-class pair of suspects had been unearthed for him.

  Ill

  That morning, soon after five o'clock, while the Superintendent was driving down to Massingham from the moor, the poaching fraternity in the Bewley Road and Pelegate received unwelcome visitors, the Toliss' in the shape of pairs of burly constables. In the fraternity, certain personages stood out by virtue of their skill and the number of their com-ictions. George Sugden was certainly one of them: a wiry man in his late thirties, about the average height a famous runner, with a reputation for artfulness. He received his visitation about five-fifteen in the room in a tenement house which he shared with his wife and infant child. It was a brief visit. Sugden was asked to show his boots. He did so and they were seen to be dry. The trousers were inspected and they were dry also. Toull know in the morning" was the only answer he got when he asked what the visit was about, and the constables then left.

  Another likely candidate, Joseph Henderson, was seen about the same time in his house in Pelegate. It was of this stalwart fellow with the shoulders of a pugilist that the Vicar of St Bede's, the Reverend Walter P. Beaumont Lumley, whose agreeable name was a byword in the district for his eloquence and charity, wrote with unmistakable feeling: "He is a parishioner of mine. I have sometimes wished it otherwise." The constables that morning, however, found his trousers, boots and clogs were dry. They retreated empty-handed.

  Yet, as it happened, not all these visits were in vain; not all the Smedwick poachers were at home that morning. Patrick Milligan, labourer, was not with his wife and two small children in their room in Bewley Street. Michael Kelly, his young workmate, was not in the house next door where he lodged en famille with his fiancee Amy Dodds, his sister Eliza Jean, and her protector, an old half-blind reprobate by the name of Piggott. Soon after seven o'clock both these men. accompanied by their terrier Matt, were seen coming into town near the Methodist chapel by P.C. Lang and P.C. Buchan. who stopped and searched them, but finding nothing incriminating on them, allowed them to continue home. The hunt was

  THE CREME: 189I

  up, however, and no sooner had the two suspects begun to change their clothes than they were told to get dressed at once and were marched off in custody to the police office in the Lawnmarket, where Blair awaited them.

  The Superintendent's sense of triumph had been growing steadily all morning. For months he had been plagued by this feckless community living by its wits, and here at last he held a couple of the most notorious—held them on a charge which, if proved, would put them away where they would never trouble him again. Surprise at the identity of his suspects was the last thought in his mind. He knew too much about them. Only a matter of weeks earlier he had lost a case on prosecution thanks to the evidence of Kelly, and the experience had not sweetened his regard for him.

  Once at the Lawnmarket, the prisoners were immediately stripped and searched, Blair personally performing this office for Kelly, much the younger man, who had some bruising on his body, though nothing in the way of the sword thrusts that Mr Yerney's testimony had led even-one to expect. There were no marks of any kind on the bearded, middle-aged Milligan. "Never mind, I've plenty of grounds to lock them up," the Superintendent confidently remarked. Certain articles of the prisoners' clothing were removed, and when they were dressed again. Blair for the first time revealed his hand—"Come here, you damned rascals, while I tell you what you are charged with. You are charged with breaking into the Reverend Mr Yerney's house at Massingham last night and shooting at him with a gun with intent to murder him." To which Milligan, the spokesman, said that they had never been near Massingham at all but rabbiting; on Bridewell Moor, six miles or more to the north-east, returning by the Coomber Road and the wall of the Duke's park to Pear Tree Lane, where they had been seen at dawn by witnesses. "Perhaps youll be naming them," the Superintendent replied, suffering this with difficulty, for the whole breed was anathema to him after the murder of P.C. Luke at Hannington.

  "It was young McGuire and Andy Reede. They was comin' in to work, sir."

  "Coming from the same sort of work, you mean. I know your kind. Scoundrels the lot of you."

  That evening the prisoners were dresse
d in the clothes they were thought to have been wearing when seen near the chapel, and were

  THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR

  driven over to Massingham and placed in the dining-room between the table and the door.

  The grand moment of confrontation had arrived and old Mr Ver-ney was seen, candle in hand, peering at them from the landing at the turn of the stairs. "It's like them, very like them," he was heard to murmur.

  "You identify them, sir?" Blair called out encouragingly from the passage.

  "There were two of them and they were standing just where these are now, like drilled men, like soldiers in a line. One had something in his hand—a gun it must have been. It was the bigger man."

  "This one, sir? The prisoner Kelly?"

  "I think so, yes, I think it was. He is very like him—the same build. Of course it was candlelight."

  "Of course, sir. Do you identify the accused?"

  "Well then . . . yes . . . yes, there are resemblances. I think these are the same men, I feel that increasingly. I go partiy by the faces but more by the shape of them and the way they stand, like drilled men. One had a gun and he fired at me. I saw the explosion plainly —a most extraordinary effect, like a meteor, yes, like a meteor of transcendent size. . . ."

  "I'd better see Miss Verney, if you'll allow it," the Superintendent said to Dr Higson, who stood beside him.

  He had no great hopes of the encounter. He thought of women as unpredictable, wayward creatures with little understanding and less respect for the majestic processes of the law. Also he was apt to be intimidated by them. It had been one thing to examine the garrulous old Rector, but it was quite another to beard his daughter in the mysterious surroundings of a lady's room, with the brocade and taffeta dresses behind the door, the buttoned boots in a row, the silk curtains, the engravings and devotional pictures. It was a relief to him when he had got his suspects marched up and paraded at the foot of the bed where she could see them as she lay with only one pillow behind her head, the dark eyes seeming enormous in the parchment coloured face under a cap of Brussels lace.

  She looked at them for a long time without speaking, and everyone in the room kept silent. "I had hold of the man who had the dark coat on who passed me in the passage," she said at last. "I had hold of his hair."

  THE CRIME: l8gi

  Now Patrick Milligan was wearing a dark coat. His head was close cropped, a style he had acquired while serving along with Kelly in the militia. He stooped down by the bed and asked her to take hold of his hair and compare it with that of the man she had touched that morning, and she did so, remarking that the burglar's hair had seemed a little longer.

  "Seemed?" enquired the Superintendent, looming in the background.

  She turned her gaze on him with an expression of surprise, as though grieved at finding so uncouth a person in her room. The doctor started towards her, but she stopped him with a gesture. "No, it doesn't tire me. Let me go on. It seemed to me that the man who darted past me in the passage was slighter than the man here, and the hair longer, as I have said, because no doubt he was stooping as he passed me and I never had a proper hold on him. Yet I believe they are one and the same. I feel sure these are the men we saw; it's coming back."

  "Should make a fair witness for a woman," the Superintendent remarked to his attendant constable, P.C. Pugh, as they went downstairs. "If we can trace the chisel to these damned ruffians, and maybe that bit of paper too, and if the footmarks fit the bill, they'll not poach another rabbit this side of Paradise."

  IV

  Young Mr Justin Deny sat in his corner of the railway carriage reading the depositions taken by the Smedwick magistrates. It was the first time that he had encountered 'In Re Verney, as the case was known in the highly respectable offices of Rees and Feather-stone where he was articled, and he was only attending the Assize trial at Belcastle Moot Hall because another of the clerks had been taken ill and Mr Rees liked company. It seemed an unrewarding case. Not many firms would have bothered with it, seeing that the combined resources of the accused men would not pay counsel's fee, never mind the railway fares, yet the old solicitor had come in person, leaving the practice to chance and his partner Featherstone. Such cases were his one concession to philanthropy.

  Reaching the end of the file, Justin glanced out of the window at the sea and the romantic silhouette of Rayworth Castle which

  THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR

  had just come into view. He hoped he had mastered the rudiments of the brief. He would certainly be asked about it and he had better be ready with his answers to satisfy the exacting old gentleman in the corner opposite.

  "Care to review the evidence, my boy?"

  He began rather desperately to marshal his facts. There were the Verneys to begin with: identification: not certain by the best standards, but damning enough.

  There was evidence of opportunity, for both the accused had undeniably been away from their homes at the material times.

  There was the evidence of the chisel found in the Rectory dining-room by the cook. An old man by the name of Piggott, who lived with Kelly's sister in the house where Kelly lodged, had identified it as a tool he owned. Which was bad enough. But a torn sheet of paper, found on the morning of the crime in the Rectory hall by the handyman James Bell, had been proved to fit exactly into a smaller piece discovered by the Police Surgeon in the lining of Kelly's coat, and a button and a shred of cloth, fitting just as neatly into a tear in Milligan's trousers, had been unearthed a month later from the flower-beds under the drawing-room window.

  Most damning of all: footprints, which casts of the men's boots showed conclusively to be theirs, had been traced on the crown of the lane leading from the Rectory to the main Deeping Road and along a mile of that road in the direction of Smedwick across the moor. No prosecution could really hope for better. It was almost too much to expect of luck and the criminal classes, Justin thought, and paused in his review.

  "Well?" prompted the senior partner, apparently much edified by this proof of what his firm's training had accomplished in a once slipshod lad.

  "I was just thinking, sir."

  "A very desirable exercise, my boy. About what, precisely?"

  "About coincidences, sir. Take the piece of paper. The Police have that coat of Kelly's in their keeping for two weeks and find nothing. They give it to the doctor, an independent witness, and immediately the paper's found. Same with Milligan's button. They find a tear in his trousers, and a month later the missing bit obligingly turns up."

  "What about the chisel? Can you get over that?" Rees said. "And the footprints. They're conclusive, surely?"

  Justin was about to admit that the footprints certainly were conclusive, when he had an idea and changed his mind.

  "Thought of something?" asked Mr Rees.

  "Just this, sir. The footmarks were mostly in the lane. What about the ones under the window, the ones Blair discovered first and covered with boards? We don't hear of them. Why not? Seems rather selective evidence. Then take the nature of the crime itself. How comes it that two men commit a burglary at two in the morning, are interrupted, and instead of running home to bed before the hue and cry, go poaching and walk into town in broad daylight with their terrier at their heels?"

  "I thought we'd come to little Matt in time," said Mr Rees in a soothing voice. "He's certainly our most engaging witness."

  "Who'd take his dog out burgling, sir?"

  "Oh, come! They were poachers first, remember."

  "Then where's their gun? No gun's been found. Miss Verney's watch and seal were stolen. Nothing's known of them."

  "They could easily have cached them."

  "Like the rabbits they told the Police they'd poached on Bridewell Moor and buried there at dawn? Those rabbits were there all right, just as they said; they've been dug up; that's proved."

  Mr Rees conceded the rabbits with a generous flourish of the hand. "Not that they're worth much," he remarked, "when you remember that those fellows could h
ave got across the moor from Massingham and buried them with time to spare. Or they could have hidden them beforehand to stage an alibi. Nothing else supports it. The men who are supposed to have seen them at first light near the Duke's Wall have not come forward. But have your rabbits by all means," Mr Rees said, settling back in his seat.

  For the remainder of the journey Justin sat and wondered what brought an elderly, overworked man forty miles to help defend two penniless clients in whose innocence he seemed profoundly to disbelieve. Nothing would have been easier than to have sent the managing clerk or some other minion; yet here he was in person on the Belcastle train with his gout and his scepticism rampant. He must have an admirably abstract love of justice. Or perhaps he just liked travelling and a day free of Mr Featherstone, a worthy person but one whose nature it was to fuss in a teapot.

  It was not a long walk from the station to the Assize court, a porticoed building, several shades grimier than the waters of the

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  THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR

  river flowing beneath its walls. By some archaic fancy it was known as the Moot Hall, though it had in fact been erected at the beginning of the century in the profoundly un-Saxon days of the Prince Regent. The place was swarming with people. Witnesses huddled together in the hall on either side of the staircase up which marched important dignitaries and Grand Jurors on their way to their panelled room and box on the first floor. Policemen, carrying their helmets under their arms, stood guard outside the two courts opening off the hall, while immediately to the right of the main doors a bleakly appointed room had been set aside for solicitors and clients, who could be perceived sitting about in resigned attitudes waiting for Justice to begin.

  Mr Rees, with a sigh, was about to enter it when he caught sight of a tall figure in a wig forcing his way through the crowd near the bottom of the stairs.

  "Mr Gilmore."

  "Mr Rees. How fortunate."