The Massingham affair

by Grierson, Edward, 1914-1975

  THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR

  replied: "If you can see a distinction there, you have a truly ingenious mind. You are saying our evidence was false."

  "Mistaken, my dear young lady—no more than that."

  "How can you even voice such an opinion? How are you qualified to do it?"

  "I am qualified," said Mr Lumley very slowly, "because I have seen, and we have here with us, a confession signed by one of the two men who were in your house that night."

  "What next! A confession indeed!"

  "My colleague has it in his pocket. If you will produce it, Deny."

  Justin did so, unfolding the folio sheets and holding them out towards their host, who showed some inclination to accept them until arrested by an imperious movement of his daughter's hand.

  "It is a perfectly genuine confession," explained Mr Lumley in his most conciliatory voice. "If you will look at it you will see the man's name, which I ask you to treat as confidential for the time being."

  "We don't wish to see it."

  "And you will find there a full and meticulous description of everything that happened, from the moment the men broke in to the time of their return to Smedwick."

  "I said we didn't wish to see it."

  Mr Lumley took a step towards her, his hands clasped in appeal as Justin had often seen him in the pulpit of St Bede's. "Miss Verney, I have been unkind; I have not prepared you as a wiser man would have done. I recalled to you a very terrible moment, and I did it clumsily, with too little thought for you both. It has come as too great a shock and I beg your pardon for it."

  She did not answer, but stood watching him: a small withdrawn figure in a satin dress that matched the dark hair drawn across her brow. In the background the old man was moving uneasily but she paid no attention to him.

  "Will you not say you forgive me, dear young lady, now that I acknowledge my fault? I have no desire to prolong something which is so distressing to you. We could leave the statement with you, and perhaps later . . ."

  "No," she interrupted him, "no, you must take it."

  Surprise was on Mr Lumley's face and sounded in his voice as he said: "But Miss Verney, you will surely not dismiss it quite in that way? Here is a statement which in my opinion, and that of my col-

  THE QUEST: 1899

  league who has experience of such things, is a true and detailed confession to a crime for which two other men are suffering at this moment. We have examined it closely and it bears every mark of truth. At the very least it surely deserves to be examined attentively and with an open mind—not now perhaps, not at this instant, but later, when the shock I so misguidedly forced upon you has passed. That is why I ask you to accept it."

  "We shall do nothing of the kind."

  "Do you distrust our interference so much?" said Mr Lumley sadly. "You have every reason to complain of the way I have carried out my mission."

  "That is certainly part of it."

  "But the statement itself? You surely cannot refuse to read it?"

  "I do."

  "And you, sir?"

  He had swung away from her towards the old man, but she came between them and he saw the light of passionate resentment in her eyes. "Nor will you trouble my father with such things. You have no right."

  "I have the right to expect justice," said Mr Lumley, not without dignity.

  "Justice for what? For some lying scrawl! No, Papa, I will speak out"—for he had tried to restrain her. "A tissue of falsehoods, made up for what reason? I am sorry to say it in my father's house, but you should not have come, you should not have listened to lies so credulously. For lies they are. We know it. We don't need to read that paper—which you may put away, you'll find no use for it." Her voice had risen and rang out shrilly in the high-ceilinged room. "For we will never read it. You will never persuade us we were wrong."

  XI

  The Verneys had failed them and he must try another line. Yet no problem of detection, reasoned Justin in the privacy of his own room, ought to be very hard. Something either exists or it is chimerical. If it exists in human shape it leaves traces of itself, has friends. If one could deduce a man's character from the company he kept, one could equally deduce that company from the man: indeed, so far from existing in a vacuum, Sugden's 'Other Man', whom

  THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR

  it now behoved him to find, must have certain characteristics that were individual and unlike anything to be expected of the average Smedwick citizen. Suppose, to begin with, a friend of Sugden's but with more violent inchnations: the kind of man who would use a gun; which in its turn supposed a person who had already used one. In the background of his mind was the memory of a crime earlier than the Massingham affair. Miss Kelly might remember it; she or Longford; he could look to them for help because they were the most directly interested of the Pelegate folk and perhaps the nearest approach to clients he possessed in 'In Re Milligari, as the case had been listed in his files.

  They made a quaint pair as they sat facing him in the tall-backed chairs: the thin, rather pretty but fading woman and the loutish man in his shapeless breeches and tweed coat. He felt sorry for them both, and grateful too, because they had not vexed him lately with endless visits and questions. They had their curiosity, however:

  "What happens next, sir?"

  He began to explain as discreetly as he could, choosing each word with scrupulous care. "Nothing's settled. There's still a lot to be done. But certain facts have come to light which will be passed to the authorities, and if a certain view is taken of those facts we may expect some kind of enquiry and perhaps the arrival of a Commissioner to take evidence—from you among others, I expect."

  "And from George Sugden, sir?" she asked.

  "If he gets well, as I think he will. If he'll oblige and give it."

  "Why shouldn't he give it? He give it you, sir."

  Justin sighed and answered as soothingly as possible: "I'm sure he'll be helpful. But as to what he said or didn't say to me, that's something I'm not free to tell you."

  "Though I'm Mick Kelly's sister, sir?"

  She had begun to bridle; her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright, as though she had sensed an enemy. A brave, quick, determined young woman. He felt a real admiration for her.

  "Now see here," he said gently. "I have to keep faith with people who trust and confide in me, you must see that. But don't be anxious. Things are moving at last. I feel quite sure that he's in the mood to be helpful if only he doesn't get frightened by the thought of punishment, of prison."

  "He deserves worse, sir. He might get it too."

  "What do you mean, Miss Kelly?"

  She hesitated and then turned to him, trembling with the force of her emotions. "What do I mean, sir? That some of us have waited and waited and we want something, sir—justice—and we want it done: but there are others, sir, that don't want it and they might take steps, sir."

  "You mean the 'Other Man'?" said Justin softly. "His companion at Massingham that night. Because of course there was another man." She seemed to hesitate, and suddenly a forgotten name recurred to him and he said out of the blue: "Wasn't there a crime at Hannington some years back? Wasn't some policeman killed?"

  He had no sooner spoken than he saw his mistake, for she had swung round and he saw in her eyes the glint of fear. "I mind there was, sir," she said in a defensive voice.

  "There was a gun used, wasn't there?"

  "Aye."

  "And it seemed to me that perhaps the same man might have used it that shot at Mr Verney."

  But he could see from her face that he would get no further. Perhaps she had good reason to be afraid, as Sugden had been afraid at the mere mention of his companion. He had no right to press her further, or Longford, who was her shadow and might be in the same danger. For that matter, the unwelcome idea had come to him that he himself might be treading on perilous ground—not that he had any intention of being deterred by such thoughts, which his sturdy common sense rejected ou
t of hand as a piece of imagination very much out of keeping with the spirit of the age. He had a problem to solve and he would approach it rationally, making use of the best material to hand. Miss Kelly had failed him, and since Blair still ruled in the Lawnmarket it seemed wiser to avoid the Police, to whom he would otherwise have gone, and rely instead on the Smedwick Mercury, in whose filing room, among the back numbers of the paper, he felt sure he would encounter Sugden's past and his associates among the Bewley and Pelegate poachers.

  He found it hard going at first—wading back through the dust-laden pages. But after a while, as he began to get his bearings, the fascination of the search grew on him. Events he had forgotten suddenly re-surfaced, but quaintly, in reverse: the conviction before the crime, the inquest leading the death. Some of his own cases were there, in somewhat obscure corners. Mr Lumley was there too, his

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  THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR

  "Was he?"

  "In a small way, I expect. They were poachers who did it, and poor Luke copped 'em and someone shot him. That wouldn't be Sugden, not wee Geordie, though he may have been around. They never proved it."

  "Who do you think shot Luke?"

  Hicks considered, feeling behind his free ear as though he had mislaid something. "There was talk of a chap called Longford," he remarked at last.

  The effect of this name on Justin was prodigious. It was about the last he had expected; it conflicted with all his thinking, for if Longford were his 'Other Man' it made Miss Kelly's part in the Massing-ham case enigmatical to say the least. She had certainly shown fear at mention of Hannington, and perhaps there was some connection that the reporter would know. "Isn't Longford the chap who's just got himself engaged to Mick Kelly's sister?" he enquired.

  "I wouldn't know about that, sir." Indeed Mr Hicks did not look well equipped by nature to enjoy life's happier occasions: it was acknowledged on the Mercury that he was at his best at funerals. "But to my mind they were wrong about it, sir. He never shot Luke; he was only a lad at the time, a bit lad."

  "Who did shoot him, then?" demanded the Editor, scribbling away for dear life.

  "It's hard to tell. Some older man, more likely—one of the Pelegate tykes, and there are enough of 'em. Green . . ."

  "You mean the roadman?"

  "He works a bit that way. Or Henderson—he's turned respectable. Piggott, O'Malley and some others of the Irish set. Ah, there's a wheen of 'em. Has something turned up about Hannington, sir?" he asked, changing tune quite suddenly.

  "Not that I know of."

  "I thought it was Massingham you were interested in—you and the Reverend Gentleman. People seem to think so. You got something for us, sir?"

  "Not a thing."

  "I've got something for you, sir, right up your street," said Mr Hicks with gloomy satisfaction. "One of your witnesses passed on. Lass by the name of Amy Dodds down Pelegate. They just fished her body from the pool below the weir."

  XII

  It was a mild evening, with a sudden thaw out of the west bringing quite a springlike air to the gardens where a few snowdrops were raising their heads. He passed the vicarage of St Bede's and the castle, whose sprawling mass receded into darkness, pricked by points of light from the windows of the bailey. Further west, where the last of the afterglow still lingered, he could see the crest of the moor where the road swept up the hill, and below it the amorphous shapes of streets hiding in its shadow.

  In Pelegate and Bewley, in this sad quarter of the town, lay the answer to his problem, if indeed the whole thing did not turn out to be a hoax or the fantasy of a sick mind. There had been times when he had thought that this might be the truth of it, remembering the scene at Sugden's bedside, the man's strange humour, as though he had been enjoying a joke at his expense. But there was nothing humorous about the fate of Amy Dodds. Whether she had committed suicide, as Hicks seemed to accept, or whether there was some more natural explanation, the fact of her disappearance from the scene and the timing of it, so soon after his visit to Clay Yard, filled him with a profound disquiet; he even felt a kind of responsibility, though he knew this to be absurd.

  As he argued it over in his mind he reached the foot of the hill and began the climb between the old stone-built houses of the quarter. The town ended abruptly on that side: it was not the polite suburban world you found along the Warbury Road where the moneyed folk were building streets of new 'residences' for themselves. He felt the need of a walk and went striding up the hill, beyond the last of the gaslight, till he was in the open country where the fields were lapped by the moor. It was good to be out there with the wind moist against his face. From the ridge he could look right across Smedwick, but no stranger would have guessed there was a sizable town down there, so thinly spread and faint was the lighting under the clouds that had rolled in from the west. There was not a sound to be heard except the distant rumble of a train on its way up the coast and a dog howling in a Bewley yard as though its heart would break. Old Matt, perhaps.

  After a while he turned back down the hill. The first houses ap-

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  THE MASSIXGHAM AFFAIR

  peared, their curtains drawn close, hardly a chink of light showing. Here the day had already ended, but there were still a few people abroad, for he could see someone ahead of him in a patch of light near the entrance to Gilesgate, and nearer at hand a door had opened to disgorge a cat which came racing out almost under his feet. The dog was still howling, and now he could place the sound to within a few yards of Sugden's tenement, the shape of which he could just make out from the darkness some distance to his right, and he crossed towards it, suddenly taken with a desire to see his penitent again.

  Footsteps sounded to his left, quite close—no doubt the man he had seen in the lamplight—and there might be company behind him too, for he heard a sudden stirring, as though someone had moved in the deep shadows under the wall of the house. He halted and swung round, a little surprised, for he had passed no one and had heard no door opening on that side: and in that same instant it seemed to him that a sheet of flame reached out towards him, moving with paralysing speed across his line of sight. He saw no meteor, no change of colour such as Mr Verney had described; just an impression of fire swallowed up by the shattering roar of the explosion.

  An instant of silence fell, during which he stood quite still, uncertain whether he had been hit or indeed still lived, for all was darkness around him. Then the night was rent by the pounding of feet and a voice crying out something, though he could not catch the words; and he found himself leaning against the rough stone of a wall, hearing the waves of sound receding into the distance like the disembodied noises in a dream.

  "Mr Deny, sir, Mr Deny!" he heard a voice exclaim almost in his ear. Immediately in front of him a small dumpish figure, apparently in a state of great excitement, seemed to be bouncing up and down as though it or the pavement beneath it were made of indiambber. "Mr Derry, are you hurt, sir?"

  "All in one piece, I think," he answered, trying to focus on this apparition, whose gnomic shape made him fear the worst until he recognised the Mercury's Mr Hicks peering solicitously up at him. "What happened, anyway?"

  "Well, what happened, sir," said the reporter in a voice not entirely free of satisfaction, "is that someone took a pot shot at you. Are you sure he missed?"

  "Feels like it. No bones broken. No holes in me to speak of."

  "If you'd let me look, sir."

  A match was struck, and by its light Justin saw the inquisitive eyes darting over him. "That set your mind at rest?" he asked as the flame died and they were back in darkness.

  "Seems like he missed you, sir. Providential, I'd say. Very providential. Almost uncanny. Was he close?"

  "I'm not sure."

  "How d'you mean you're not sure, sir? You were nearer to him than me—much nearer."

  Around them the quiet streets had begun to come to life. Across the way the curtains in an upstairs room were drawn back and a face could b
e seen at the window, while further down towards the market-place a door opened and someone came out into the road, calling over his shoulder to those inside the house. "Wonder who it is and if he saw much?" Hicks said, watching these signs with interest. "A proper cause celebre he'd have here and no mistake. Smedwick Solicitor Fired On. Make a good headline, sir."

  Justin put his hand on the reporter's shoulder and said with great earnestness: "Don't use it. If you do, you'll lose a story, a far bigger one than this."

  "Oh, I see that, sir," Hicks agreed.

  "I knew you would. You'll be discreet about it?"

  "Of course, sir. That's if the others will. If no one saw him and they don't tell on him to Blair."

  There was a moment of silence and then Justin demanded plaintively: "Tell on whom?"

  "On young Longford, sir. I saw him go haring off, as plain as plain, as I came up and found you by the wall."

  XIII

  The more Justin thought the matter out, tossing and turning in bed that night, the more incomprehensible it became. If Longford were his attacker, then Longford must surely be the 'Other Man' and Sugden's partner in the burglary. Granted that, however, why should the fellow have tried to kill him, when Sugden looked so much the more likely and indicated victim? It was Sugden who was making statements and knew the dangerous facts that could send a

  THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR

  man to penal servitude. Where was the point in attacking the agent, who had a mere confession which was of limited value, rather than the man himself who could give the evidence on oath? Perhaps it had been meant as a warning, to frighten, not to kill, which would account for the fact that the shot had missed; or might he have been chosen as a land of 'second best' because Sugden had a healthier regard for his own skin and was too fly to be caught in the dark? That made some land of sense. But if Longford were the 'Other Man', how could one account for the role this apparently stupid and guileless fellow was playing as Miss Kelly's fiance and one of the advocates of Sugden's guilt?

  Next morning, on his way to work, he went by the main shopping street, loitering in his tobacconist's which was a clearing house for gossip, but everything seemed normal and he noticed no curious glances from the passers-by. Indeed all seemed so quiet, that it came as quite a surprise to Justin when in mid-morning a note was delivered asking him to call at the police office in the Lawnmarket.