The Massingham Affair

249 Pages·1963·1 MB·English

by  Edward Grierson

THE LETTER 1936
"Old father antic the law," says one of the characters in King Henry IV.
One day in the late nineteen-forties, a young solicitor in Smedwick, near the
Scottish border, happened to be going through some papers left in the lumber
room by his predecessor from whom he had bought the practice, a Mr Justin
Deny, recendy deceased, when his attention was caught by a folder marked in Mr
Derry's rather crabbed handwriting Summary of Facts in In Re Milligan and
containing carbon copies of some twenty typescript pages, the originals of which
the old man had probably taken away with his other possessions at the time of
the sale.
Young Mr Jobling had a quick eye. It had led him to the cobwebby but
immensely lucrative practice in the historic ducal town (as the municipal guide
book had it), and where most men would have passed on with a cursory nod to
In Re Milligan, he looked closer and saw that what he had stumbled on was a
personal confession of the most beguiling kind. Nor had he read far before he
suspected that the carbons, which must have been left behind by accident, had
been typed by Mr Derry himself, not entrusted to the somewhat formidable lady
who had passed with the firm and was now designated, in Mr Jobling's idiom,
his P.S.
12th July 1936 Something that has happened recently [he readl had decided me
to write down all the facts of what came to be called trie 'Massingham Affair'. It
is still not quite forgotten in Smedwick, though it ended in 1899, nearly forty
years ago, and poor Milligan and so many of the others are dead. I would have
said only last week that it ought to be forgotten. Now I am not so sure. I shall
write it all down first and then decide what to do. It will not be an easy decision.
There are still people alive who could be hurt most deeply by what it is in my
power to say. And can I even be sure it is true? Can I say with absolute certainty
THE MASSINGHAM AFFAIR
that I know what happened at Massingham that night; what Sugden's part was,
and poor Amy's; or whether the old woman was lying in her last words to me?
Mr Jobling could make nothing of it. He was a newcomer to the district and had
never even heard of Massingham. And though the twenty closely typed pages
opened his eyes to many things and helped to make him in future years perhaps
the most cautious of a notably cautious breed of men, it gave him no insight into
the secret heart of Mr Deny. He understood the lawyer's problem and missed the
man's. But then perhaps there would have been no problem for Mr Jobling. He
would never have given house-room to the Massingham Affair.
THE CRIME 1891
The young woman came to the head of the stairs and peered down into the
darkness. From there the sounds from the drawing-room were much more
audible. Rats, most probably. The Rectory was plagued with them: Tike Hamlin
town', her father would complain as they set off on their nightly pilgrimage,
candles in hand, up the stairs and along the narrow, shadowy corridors of the
house. Only last year young Merrick from the bothy by the bridge had found a
nest of them behind the cistern in the attics, and on his advice there had been
imported, despite the Rector's marked repugnance to the tribe, a large and
somnolent tom-cat that dozed all day by the fire and did his duty, one supposed,
by night. Not in the drawing-room, apparently, where the sounds persisted even
more loudly than before.
Miss Verney stamped her foot imperiously to stop them. She was an imperious
girl: it came of being an adjutant in the care of souls. The Rector was a widower,
and in the remote parish lost in the wilds of the Northumbrian hills he had no
other helpmate. He would not have desired one. He would certainly not have
been permitted one.
Below the stairs the passage stretched out to the front door with the two main
living-rooms on its right. All was dark down there. The moon was full, but the
hall had no windows and all the doors into it were closed. Suddenly Miss Verney
was aware of a shaft of light shining diagonally across her view like a sunbeam
through cloud, marking the wall of the passage on the left, and she saw that it
was coming from the drawing-room door which had begun to open.
She drew back from the stairhead, but not hastily, for she was not a timorous or
hasty person. The Rector's room was next to her own, and she entered it,
knocking gently at the door.
"Father."
He too had been awakened. She heard the scraping of a match
THE MASSEMGHAM AFFAIK
and by its glow she saw him sitting up in bed, a Biblical figure with his ragged
white beard, wearing a flannel nightgown of the same stuff as her own and a cap
with a tassel that dangled down over one ear.
"Father," she said, "there are burglars in the house."
Mr Verney was nearing seventy, but a man of spirit, and he received this
alarming news with something approaching relish. "Where's my sword?" was his
first remark as he jumped up. Some time elapsed before he got his candle lit and
found it, but he was armed at last and was just starting for the door when he was
firmly ordered back to bed.
"Didn't you call me, my dear?" he protested, taking the logical point as he
usually did in their arguments, without much noticeable success.
"Perhaps I did," she answered. "It was foolish of me. Please don't go out."
"But I will," he said, taking a good grip of the sword.
He had got the door open by this time and their raised voices, still arguing
earnestly with one another, had already roused the cook in the servants' wing.
But from below the sounds continued uninterruptedly, and as they went down
the stairs, the Rector leading with his drawn sword in one hand and a candle held
high in the other, they saw the drawing-room door wide open and, nearer at
hand, a shaft of light shining from the dining-room and moving along the wall.
From the landing half-way down the stairs they could look directly into the
room, and there, between them and the table, they glimpsed the figures of two
men, one with a candle and something like a gun or an iron bar. Next instant the
intruders had seen the light on the stairs, and their candle was snuffed and
thrown under the table.
"Who are you?" Mr Verney called out, and repeated it as the dining-room door
was seen to close towards them. He went on unhesitatingly and had almost
reached the door when there was a loud explosion and the candle fell from his
hand, leaving them all in almost total darkness.
"Are you hurt, Papa?" Miss Verney cried.
"Merely grazed," he answered. "And you?"
Before she could reply, a man came out at them, crouching low and making for
the drawing-room some yards away, only to be seized by the militant Miss
Verney, who shouted out, "You scoun-
drel!" while the Rector slashed with his sword in all directions. The fugitive
darted from her grasp into the drawing-room, and by the light of the moon she
saw him disappear through the window into the grounds. Returning into the
passage, she took her father round the waist from behind and tried to drag him
back from the dining-room, into which he sought to hurl himself against the
armed and desperate man whom they could hear beyond the door blundering up
and down and vainly trying to open the shutters and get out. But the Rector's
blood was up. He thrust her from him roughly, shouting to her to leave him, and
she obeyed out of half-forgotten habit. From the landing, in painful agitation,
wounded by far the more severely, she heard him go, and listened to the macabre
game of blind man's buff proceeding in that room, in which one powerful fellow
with a gun went dodging from corner to corner, pursued by an old gentleman
who lunged out at shadows in Byronic style-Arras they prick'd and curtains with
their swords And wounded several shutters and some boards
—a table cloth in this instance, as she found when she came to the reckoning.
She could see nothing but a faint glow where the moonlight shone into the
passage through the drawing-room door. She heard the sound of heavy
breathing, the crash as a table went over, a sudden cry of triumph, or so it
seemed, and then the door was wrenched open, and in the uncertain light she saw
the figure of a man come bursting out in one tempestuous rush to hurl himself
into the drawing-room, from which came the tinkle of broken glass and the thud
of a body landing in the flower-bed below the windows of the house.
Above her a light was shining on the stairs as the cook came wavering into view,
uttering cries of alarm and clutching her dressing-gown around her. "Be quiet,
Jane," Miss Verney commanded her. She could feel in her thigh the slow welling
of blood, but there was no trace of it to be seen on her gown and she had no
intention that it should be seen. Seizing the candle, she ran into the dining-room,
fighting back the rising tide of panic. Her father was slumped against the table,
head thrown back, eyes open and staring. For a moment she thought that he was
dead, and a fierce, uncontrollable anguish filled her heart. Then she saw him
move and his gaze came down to hers, and she rushed into his arms as she had
not done since she had been a little girl frightened by some sound in the night.
15
THE MASSESTGHAM AFFAIR
"There, there," he said, trying to comfort her, not knowing that it was for him
that she feared. They were interrupted by a cry, as the cook, following cautiously
into the light, caught sight of the blood flowing from the wound on his shoulder
where a few scattered pellets from the charge had struck.
"Only a graze. Surely you've seen blood before. Be a good sensible woman," the
Rector admonished her in a firm voice. "I'll take no hurt. Are you sure you're all
right, my dear?" "Quite sure, Father."
"The scoundrels!" the Rector said as she began to lead him into the drawing-
room, where the bandages were kept. "They fired on us. There were two of them,
you saw that?" "Yes."
"Have they taken anything?"
She glanced around her, not really caring, for the blood seemed to be coming
faster now and she feared that at any moment he might discover it. The room
was in turmoil: the desk rifled, drawers open, papers strewn everywhere.
Something was missing; she sensed it even before her eye detected what it was;
and she said: "They've taken my watch. The one with the seal. From the
mantelpiece." "The one poor Davey gave you?" "Yes." "My dear!"
"It's all right, Father. It's no matter. Now stay still while I cut away the cloth from
your shoulder."
Working deftly, she soon had him bandaged and dosed and tucked up in bed with
a hot-water bottle. From the pillows, with his long beard straggling down over
the sheets, he watched her anxiously as she bent down to kiss his forehead under
the white woollen cap. "Are you sure you're all right, dearest? You look so pale.
You're sure they missed you?" "Of course. Now lie down and try to go to sleep
like a good papa." "Don't you go out," he said suddenly with anxious awareness
of what she would do.