The Massingham affair
Page 25
From that moment the plan formed in her mind of using the threat of Longford's knowledge of the crime at Hannington to force Henderson
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and Sugden to confess to the lesser crime of burglary at Massingham, of which they were quite innocent, and so free her brother. It was a bold plan, and dangerous, as the future was to show.
First she went to Sugden's niece, Miss Binns, who had been a friend of P.C. Luke's, and by telling her part of the truth and holding out the prospects of revenge, got her to agree to back up her story with picturesque details of George's guilt—how he had returned in the small hours babbling that he might have killed a man and so on. I don't suppose that many women could have conceived of such a scheme, much less have executed it. But Miss Kelly was exceptional in every way. She saw at once that it was no use going to the magistrates or trying to get confessions from two trapped and dangerous men with only Longford to help her. She needed a middleman, someone who would act as a respectable front for her activities—and it so happened she chose me.
From that stage on, a Punch and Judy show developed. In the foreground Lumley and I worked away to get confessions, while Miss Kelly sat back and pulled the strings. In defence of myself I may say that I didn't swallow the story whole. I had doubts about Miss Binns for instance, but those vanished when I discovered that the Police, who were also alive to what was happening, had put pressure on her to recant. By an evil chance all my attempts to test the story were directed towards those aspects of it that were true. Thus I discovered that Merrick had heard no one on the road past his bothy, which made me properly suspicious of the footmarks Blair had claimed to find. Similarly, my visit to Amy Dodds convinced me that the Police had been given Piggott's jacket (as they had) and therefore must have faked the piece of paper in the lining. When George Sugden confessed I naturally took it as the most perfect confirmation of the story. I saw no significance in his sly smiles and the pointedly ironic way in which he treated me. I ignored the glimpse I had had of Longford and Miss Kelly outside his house on the night he confessed. How could I have guessed that it was not our urgings but their threats that had worked the miracle. Besides, P.C. Pugh's phantom attempts to see me only added to the pattern that seemed to be building up, so that when at last we met and he told me of Blair's ruse of the chisel I became quite certain I was on the right track and no longer intellectually capable of doubt.
All this time Miss Kelly had been working quietly in the wings. She had coached Sugden for his confession and she must have felt properly disgusted when she discovered that this high-class piece of fraud was not enough to release her brother. So she turned on Henderson and tried to coach him too. This was over-stepping things a little. Henderson was not a timid man like George to be stampeded at the first scent of danger, and his reaction, which she ought really to have foreseen, was
THE MASSESTGHAM AFFAIR
to try to short-circuit things by shooting Longford in the street, nearly killing me in the process, which was one of the ironies of the story I didn't appreciate at the time. Another was the fact that Amy Dodds had changed sides and had begun to sleep with Henderson. No doubt she had heard from him what Miss Kelly was up to; and in her alarm the poor girl first blurted out to me the truth about the coat and then, to correct things, all but warned me of what was really happening. Of course, in the end she never did tell me, because within a week they had taken her body from the river. It could have been accident or suicide, but I think someone had overheard her talking to me and guessed what she might say, and I think it must have been Longford in the passage in Clay Yard, not Henderson as I once thought, and Longford's voice that Snell and his dogs heard in the woods near the Red Mill pool. In any case I feel sure that Miss Kelly had no part in that.
The rest of the story bears all the marks of her ingenious mind, showing her understanding of the people she was dealing with and how she had learnt from her mistakes that it was in combination they worked best. Since Sugden alone couldn't do the trick, she had to set Henderson in motion. So she went to him with Longford and told him that a full description of Luke's murder had been deposited in a sealed packet in my safe. He was invited to 'confess' to the crime at Massingham. She had already sent Longford to me with an envelope which contained no statement but some sheets of foolscap and my future wife's gold watch, which had been in her possession all along.
This was the last of her manipulations and it brought by far the best performance. For Henderson had no intention of confessing. His aim was to get the supposed statement in his hands that night and then settle with Longford for good and all before he could write another. He probably had no thought that Longford was shadowing him across the market-square and along the ginnel, or, if he did, it may have crossed his mind that my office was as good and quiet a place as any to get his man. He certainly had no thought of me or any notion that there had been a 'tip-off' about the burglary in the offing. Caught red-handed in possession of the watch, in the presence of Longford, with the threat of a murder accusation hanging over him, his nerve gave way at last and he decided to 'confess', and stuck to it through the trials that followed. It was better than being hanged. He even defended Miss Kelly's story with ingenious touches of his own; as when he checkmated Jessop over the seal, which of course he had never given to Amy or even seen, though he may have enjoyed a holiday on the proceeds.
It had become a cast-iron story by that time. Why, as Gilmore said, should innocent men confess to something they had never done? Why should they go to penal servitude for it? Jessop's theory that there was
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some other charge outstanding against them which made it imperative that they should confess to the lesser crime of burglary at Massingham was right (if we believe Miss Kelly), but it was made to look ridiculous once one appreciated that the Police had no motive for wanting a confession, which in fact proved fatal to them. No one thought of Miss Kelly and Longford who had the motive. Why should anyone have thought of them? Even Jessop wasn't as perceptive as all that.
And why, finally, should 1 accept the story now? I don't know altogether that I do, though it certainly seems to answer many of the points that bothered me. If only I could talk it over with someone it would help, but my old friend at St Bede's would be too deeply grieved by it and perhaps in all the circumstances it would be better not to trouble those at home.
For, after all, everything is over now, and the guilty were punished, if not precisely in the tidy way the law would have approved of. How Hicks would have laughed about it. I could have told him. But what a story he would have made!
Such was the summary that young Mr Jobling found in the lumber room. He had not met Mrs Deny. But even without that privilege he understood—if nothing else—why Justin had not done the apparently obvious thing and taken his problem to his wife. Like any other woman she would have been bound to say: "I told you so."
(Continued from front flap)
Colonel Deverel, the wealthy father of Justin's beautiful fiancee Georgina, opposes his stand and threatens both his marriage and his business advancement; the superintendent who arrested Milligan and Kelly takes great exception to any slur on his discharge of office; Miss Charlotte Verney is too proud to retract the identifications she made so assertively at the trial long ago.
Strange and disturbing developments mark the progress of the two investigators; a girl is mysteriously drowned; a murder committed years ago assumes sinister significance; the local poachers on whom they rely for evidence weave truth and lies together in a messy web; and Justin finds himself neglecting his fiancee and falling in love with the proud Miss Verney.
After eight years spent fighting against the pride of individuals and the prejudice of the public, the lawyer and the clergymen come to the end of their search. But it is not until thirty years later that Justin Derry sits at the bedside of a dying woman and learns that, in a curious and far from legal way, justice had been done.
JACKET BY ALICE SMITH
Printed in the U.S.A.