Edward Grierson - The Massingham Affair

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 Smed-wick, 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