By bedtime, deep in insoluble problems, he had forgotten Miss Binns and Milligan and Kelly; never suspected that a window had opened on his life.
II
"Remember me, sir?"
If only, he thought, old Rees or Featherstone had lived to be burdened with these vexatious people. First Miss Binns with her statement which still lay in his safe in the folder which Harris had provided, complete with reference number and title in beautiful copperplate, and now this other one. He remembered her all right: Miss Kelly, old Piggott's mistress and one of the ill-starred witnesses for the Defence, but she had changed: she had the same intent look that had struck him at the trial, but she had filled out and there was more colour in her cheeks. No doubt one of the reasons for these improvements was to be found in the oafish fellow whom she was edging towards him—"This is my fiancey, sir. Jim Longford, sir. We just got engaged."
Justin smiled and said felicitous things. Beyond the fact that she was rid of Piggott he could see no significance in her remark: that was only to occur to him many years later.
"We come about George Sugden, sir. We seen Miss Binns."
"You have?"
"She telt us about her statement, sir. That she come to you, sir, and telt you about Sugden. That you said you'd take it up, sir."
"My dear Miss Kelly, I'm afraid there's nothing to take up."
She was staring at him in bewilderment, her eyes as round and bright as a bird's. "Nowt, sir? But Margaret telt us Geordie Sugden was from hame that night."
"He may have been."
"And that he were at Verneys', sir."
He shook his head decidedly. "No, that's not so. Miss Binns can't possibly say that. She may remember Mrs Sugden saying that he'd been at Mr Verney's, but I'm afraid that isn't evidence."
He thought for a moment that she would query it, and wondered how he could explain the rules of hearsay to that unwavering stare. But instead she went on doggedly: "He burnt his coat, sir."
"There may be evidence for that."
"Isn't it important?"
"In a way. It shows he may have feared arrest, but it could have been arrest for poaching or indeed for anything. Nothing points di-
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THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR
rectly to the burglary. It might be different if anyone had heard Sugden say that he was there."
"I think there were a lad as heard him. Tom Green, sir. Lived on the same landin', but he's moved."
"So Miss Binns suggested, and we could check with him of course. It would be some kind of evidence. Not much, however, I'll be frank with you. The Prosecution called a dozen witnesses, and that was eight years ago and there's a jury's verdict on the issue. To overturn it . . . why, even if Sugden himself confessed . . ."
"Suppose he did, sir?"
"If ifs and ans were pots and pans . . . ," he was beginning with a smile, when she broke in on him insistently:
"No, sir. Suppose he did?"
He stared at her, not knowing whether to be more amused or astonished by that interruption. She was an unpredictable one all right. "Oh, come now," he exclaimed, deciding to make a joke of it, "you can't be seriously suggesting that he'd confess? What would he have to gain? If he's a criminal, as you're telling me . . ."
"But he's changed, sir."
"In what way—changed?"
"Don't know what it is, sir, can't rightly say, but somethm in 'im's changed. If you was to see 'im, sir—you or his vicar, that's Mr Lum-ley, sir . . ."
"My dear Miss Kelly," he protested, "you are not asking me to call on him, I hope!"
"Why not, sir?"
"Why not!" No really, this had gone too far. "I'm sorry, but let me make this plain. I have every sympathy with you and with your brother and Milligan, because I think there was at least a doubt about their guilt. . . ." She began to protest her brother's innocence, but he held up his hand. "No, listen: you've asked my opinion and I'm telling you that nothing has happened that can help us —nothing. As for the idea that I should force myself on a perfect stranger on the off-chance that he might confess to a crime . . . well, I don't want to be unkind, but you can hardly expect me to take it seriously. And now if you'll please excuse me."
The instant they had gone he went to the safe and took out the file that contained Miss Binns's statement. "You can return this," he instructed Harris who had appeared in answer to his call. "Better draft me a covering letter saying that we regret, etcetera."
THE quest:
"Yes, sir."
"And I do regret it in a way. You've read the statement?"
"Yes, sir."
"Very interesting, don't you think? And disturbing too. If Miss Binns had come forward at the trial. . . . However, she didn't, so that's that and it's too late now; nothing can be done about it. It will just have to be returned."
"A very wise decision, sir," Harris intoned, taking possession of the file which he placed securely under his arm, rather as though he expected it might try to get away from him.
"Yes, I'm sure it is. There's nothing I can usefully do. No good getting mixed up in it."
"That is entirely my opinion, sir."
"And yet. . . . No, look here, it won't do just to send it back like that, it looks rude. After all, Binns took the trouble of coming to see me and in a sense I accepted the thing, so the least I can do is to see her personally to explain why I can't go on with it. Write and ask her to call, there's a good fellow."
Once matters were in Harris's hands they could safely be forgotten. It was an exacting week, with two court sittings and Georgina to be escorted to a subscription concert at the Assembly Rooms, and some days had passed before, going to his safe one morning, he was reminded that Miss Binns's file still lay there.
"I suppose you didn't forget to send that letter?" he enquired of Harris on his way out to lunch. "You didn't hint in any way that I was going to disappoint the lady?"
"Excuse me, sir: you saw the letter. You signed it, sir."
And so of course he had done: he could recall the terms of it. A nuisance that people of her type were so casual, but she would come in her own time.
When another week went by, however, during which a reminder was sent, and still no Miss Binns appeared, he began to be irritated, having a tidy mind and a dislike of loose ends. Could the letters have been misdirected? He took out the statement to read and for a moment thought he had found the answer, for the address she had given was not Sugden's in Bewley Street, as he had somehow imagined, but of a house nearby in Pelegate; and might not Harris have made the same mistake, both addresses being on the file? A word with his clerk soon convinced him that the letters had been sent to Pelegate. Suppose, then, she had moved back to Sugden's house?
THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR
Suppose—this seemed the most Likely explanation—suppose she had made up her quarrel with her uncle and had returned under his wing, only too anxious to forget that she had ever made a statement or called on a solicitor? The letters could be lying at the house in Pelegate. There at least was something which could be settled, and that evening, ignoring the inner prompting that told him he was making a fuss over matters which did not concern him, he set off to see.
Forty-seven was the number. There were two numbers to each house, an upstairs and a downstairs, which in turn would be subdivided, making a perfect warren of the place. They had not been bad houses once. Someone who had not given particular thought to it, but had been bred in a tradition, had built them and arranged the gentle curve of frontages that followed the line of the street as it led uphill under the moor. There were no gardens. It had been an age that had prized symmetry above everything: ten houses to a row, six rooms to a house: no one had thought of privies, which had proliferated in the yards behind among the rabbit hutches and chicken runs.
Justin approached the house, from the rear of which came the sound of hammering and of a woman berating a child. The whole life of the street seemed to pass out of sight of it in a kind of limbo that the
passer-by on the respectable side, the blind side, could never witness. He knocked, hearing the reverberations in the apparently empty building. No lights shone behind the grimed net curtains. A strange sort of desert. He was reminded of tales he had read of explorers along the Amazon seeing no one, conscious of being watched, of a minute surveillance, of life going on around them just out of sight. He looked up. From a window on the top floor the head and shoulders of a man projected like a gargoyle from a battlement, gazing down at him. For a moment he did not know what to say, he was so much taken by surprise and felt so much at a disadvantage, as the watched always feel; then he called out an enquiry whether Miss Binns lived there.
"What do you want?"
He raised his voice. "Does Miss Binns live here? Miss Margaret Binns?"
"In gaol," the voice very laconically replied. "You're Mr Deny, aren't you? The solicitor?"
"That's right."
"I telt her not to see you," the man said.
"What do you mean? What's she done?"
The head was withdrawn; the window came creaking down; but before it shut he caught the last words, uttered in a tone of great contempt and disparagement: "Ask Blair or Geordie Sugden. Diwen't bother me."
Justin returned to his office very thoughtful. He made certain enquiries. And when he had the answers he took Miss Binns's folder from his safe and set out to call on the Reverend Walter P. Beaumont Lumley. It was the decisive step of his life.
Ill
The Reverend Mr Lumley, Vicar of St Bede's, was a well-known figure in Smedwick at that time, where his compact person with its bouncing step, suggesting one of those rubber balls that are always ricocheting in violent motion from place to place, was often to be seen rushing out from his hideous red-brick vicarage on some errand of mercy or exhortation. Everything about Mr Lumley suggested enthusiasm. His hair was luxuriant, standing up eagerly from his forehead in a quiff above rather staring eyes bright with excellent intentions, and his voice was bell-like, as though he were sounding a constant message of good cheer. Most people liked Mr Lumley, but they preferred to do it at a distance.
Justin bearded him in the vicarage study: a room with Gothic windows looking out over a shrubbery of laurels and a lawn which had once been a croquet lawn but had reverted in nature's vengeful way. Group photographs of whiskered young men in attitudes that had been fashionable in the 'eighties lined the walls, and on the mantelpiece, among an array of tobacco jars in college and club colours, stood a print of Holman Hunt's 'Light of the World' in a steel frame. Books and sermon paper were strewn over the table, which was covered with a red cloth and lit by an oil lamp with a Sheffield plate stem and glass bowl; while on the periphery, ebony tables, whose legs were carved in oriental shapes featuring elephants, were scattered haphazard about the room, loaded with magazines and old clothes for distribution to the poor of the parish. In the heart of this chaos the Vicar himself was to be seen, dressed in a Norfolk jacket and high collar—not a clerical collar, which Mr
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Lumley only wore on Sundays and in Lent—suggesting a man of excellent health and appetite, fresh from his daily exercise of wrestling with the Devil.
"My dear Deny, pray come in, come in. What a pleasure! How good of you to call, how very good. You'll take a cup of tea? Rose"— this to the parlour-maid whose cap sat on the top of her head like a halo—"Rose, my dear, will you see to it that Mr Derry has some tea?"
While uttering these words, the Vicar had taken his guest by the arm and urged him towards a very tall chair whose back was covered in a tapestry of St George slaying the dragon or Don Quixote and the windmills—no one had ever been able to determine which.
"Sit down, my dear sir, sit down. If you'll just wait while I remove these papers. Ha! Rose must really clear these away some time. And how are your dear good sisters? Well, I hope. What we should do without them both I can't imagine. You are doubly blessed, my dear sir. And now if you'll tell me what brings you so agreeably?"
So Justin told him of Miss Binns's visit, of Miss Kelly and what had happened since, and Mr Lumley listened. Even when listening he seemed to be the more active of the two: leaning forward in his chair, hands gripping his knees, inclining his trunk forwards and stretching out his neck as though he were about to launch himself on top of the story as a cat pounces on a mouse. At intervals he made clicking noises with his tongue against his teeth, which were not his own and not of very perfect fit. People sometimes found it an ordeal to tell Mr Lumley things. They never had to complain of his zeal or sympathy, however.
"So it comes to this, does it not?" he rushed in as soon as his visitor had finished. "You believe that two innocent men are serving prison sentences at this moment?"
"It seems possible."
"They are not my parishioners, you understand. They are Papists, I believe. Not that it matters in the least, since if they are innocent it is our plain duty to help them, no matter who they are. Are they innocent?"
"It would appear they may be."
The Vicar smiled. It was a pleasant smile, yet oddly enough the wrinkling of the lines around the eyes made him look a much shrewder person. "Now come, Derry, is it your certainty you're bringing me or your doubts?"
"My opinion, for what it's worth."
"How you gentlemen of the law hate to commit yourselves. A good fault, my dear sir, and I could certainly profit from it myself. Your opinion is worth a good deal, and you think an injustice has been done."
"Not only to Milligan and Kelly."
"Ah! You are suggesting that it was because she made a statement that poor Miss Binns has been arrested, quite falsely, for importuning in the street. And that your man at the window (who was Mr Green the roadman, also a witness) fears the same treatment from the Police and won't have you in the house?"
"That's what I'm suggesting, certainly."
"I am getting you into a dangerous state of candour, Derry, you must beware of me. Now am I right, are you suggesting that the Police were mistaken in the case they brought eight years ago and are defending their mistake?"
"I have a strong suspicion of it."
"A suspicion, yes. Forgive me examining you in this way, and most incompetently by your standards, I feel sure. But tell me this. Does Miss Binns's statement satisfy you that this man Sugden, my parishioner, was in the Rectory that night?"
"I believe her statement."
"And do you feel that legally what she says is strong enough to give you something to work on, some basis of fact?"
"Not without Sugden's help."
"You must mean his confession."
At this point in the discussion there came a knock at the door and Rose entered with a tray on which reposed the enormous silver teapot embossed with scrolls that was usually required to calm the nerves of the parochial church council. Mr Lurnley did the honours with hearty benevolence, committing the solecism—and it was a solecism in those days—of putting the milk in first: it would not have happened at the Deverels'. While he poured he talked.
"Do you take sugar, Derry? You don't? Neither do I. It has sometimes occurred to me that the decadence of civilisations is not unconnected with what is nowadays called 'the sweet tooth', a patent symbol of decay. I fear I have a tendency to labour the point a little, but to my mind ripeness is not all; it is too much, if I may be permitted an aphorism. We have gone too far from simplicity."
His voice had fallen into the booming cadence which his congre-
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THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR
gation had known and admired for a decade. Perhaps from long habit he had come to think that all those to whom he handed cups of tea must be parishioners, whose pleasure it was to listen and go away edified. But when he actually handed the cup to his guest he recalled himself.
"You were saying, my dear sir?"
Justin had been saying nothing for some time. But he had taken the measure of his host and replied at once: "My point was that Miss Binns's s
tatement is of only limited importance. One might think of it as a kind of bait, if you'll forgive the term."
"To catch Sugden with, you mean?"
"Not 'catch'," Justin said, detecting the first note of reservation in his host's voice. "'Catch' is quite the wrong word, as I perceive that 'bait' was. I don't want to trap Sugden or do anything improper. But if it should be that he was one of the real criminals of that night, then it follows that two innocent men are suffering because of rumor one at least—and that is wrong."
"Most wickedly wrong," came the resounding chime of Mr Lum-ley's voice.
"And I think, subject to your judgment, Vicar, that Sugden should be told of this statement and know what is being said. It might affect him. Don't they say confession is good for the soul?"
"Laymen say it, Deny. And priests know it. But it is not a thing to be forced. A layman and his spiritual guide are in a special relationship, you must understand. We are on dangerous ground."
Looking at the zealous face on the other side of the teapot, Justin knew that he was indeed on dangerous ground: if he was not careful the Vicar would remove the whole case into the realm of dogma and ascend with it out of sight. The assumption must be challenged at once. "You will forgive me," he said in his most legal voice, "but I think we are in danger of misunderstanding one another, and that would be a pity."
"A great pity," echoed Mr Lumley, reaching out to refill his guest's cup.
The Massingham affair Page 7