The Massingham Affair Part 20

"Didn't you seek out a constable by the name of Pugh?"

It was not the first time that Justin had been subjected to this particular innuendo and he reacted indignantly: "No, I did not. He saw me. It was entirely his initiative."

"Would it distress you if I called that quibbling? You met Pugh and heard some rigmarole or other. You had your knife into the Police?"

"Not at all."

"Hasn't your att.i.tude towards the Police been hostile and prejudiced throughout?"

"No. I respect the Force in general very much."

"Hasn't your att.i.tude been obstructive too? Well, Mr Derry, you may shake your head and make gestures, but that is the question I am putting to you, though perhaps I should remind you at this stage of your legal right to refuse to answer certain questions. I say you were obstructive."

"No."

"Caution here. Didn't you fail to report an incident that happened in Bewley Street when a gun was fired at you by night?"

"Certainly a gun went off. But I was sure it was by accident."

"So you didn't report it?"

"No."

"Did you report the fact that you had caught Henderson in the act of breaking into your safe?"

"Not at once, not for some days."

There was a general gasp of astonishment in court, but Jessop for his part had already plumbed the depths of human obloquy and did not even look mildly surprised. "Of course you knew," he remarked, "that by failing to do so you were committing a crime?"

"I suppose I was."

"You suppose! Come, sir, you know. You are a solicitor."

"I did what I thought was right."

"By doing wrong! Now here is a mystery which perhaps my learned friend will elucidate in one of his celebrated asides, since you seem unable to. You misprised a felony. Wasn't your motive a blind prejudice against the Police?"

"No."

"I had better repeat my caution. Didn't that prejudice lead you to consort with criminals?"

"No."

Jessop drew himself up on tip-toe, and leaning forward like the banderillero who plants the darts into the flanks of the bull delivered himself of his final thrust: "Didn't that prejudice cause you to conspire with certain persons to mislead this court, to practise a fraud upon it? Didn't you even try to enlist the Treasury and the resources of the Crown . . . ?"

Gilmore was on his feet, his junior behind him; there was a flurry of furious activity strange to that slumberous place. And above the uproar the voice of Mr Jessop could be heard declaiming: "I have asked a question. Let him answer if he can."

When the judge rose at one o'clock there was a general scramble out of court in search of food, and Justin, following more leisurely, found the hall empty except for a group of magnates dawdling down the staircase, among whom he recognised Sir Miles Curvis, deputy chairman of the Smedwick court, arm in arm with Mr Freeze-Urquhart and Mr Ponsonby, who were clients of his as well as Justices before whom he had appeared many times.

At sight of him all conversation stopped and a kind of tremor seemed to pa.s.s across their faces. Their eyes became cold and solemn and then by some miracle of breeding ceased to register any awareness of his presence, but travelled through and past him like the lenses of cameras trained on some distant object.

His first sensation was one of outrage at this treatment. That he had been expecting something of the sort for weeks made no difference to what he actually felt when the thing happened. He knew a burning desire to impress on his tormentors in some signal way his absolute indifference to what they thought of him-preferably by a.s.saulting them violently from behind.

"Mr Deny," a voice said from close behind him.

He swung round to see Miss Verney standing in the hall, her gloved hands clasped together, her eyes oddly luminous under the shadows of her veil.

"Mr Derry, I am most terribly distressed."

And so no doubt she was, he thought unkindly. It could not have been pleasant to sit in court and hear her father's b.u.mblings and the evidence of the innocent men she had accused; but though at most times he would have felt sorry for her, the humiliation he had suffered was too recent and somehow she herself seemed part of it.

"No one need reproach themselves," he said.

She came a hesitant step towards him. "But I do. I feel ashamed for all of us. That awful man."

"Milligan?"

"Jessop of course. Those dreadful questions!"

Justin was suddenly aware that the conversation had taken an odd turn. "You can't surely be meaning the questions he asked me?" he said, trying to make a joke of the very notion.

"Of course I do."

"But Miss Verney . . ."

"He had no right to ask them. Oh, I know you have been misguided and very wilful, but to say more than that . . . Oh, it was infamous. To suggest you were a criminal!"

"Misprision is a crime, you know," he said mildly, astonished by the pa.s.sion in her voice.

"I don't want to hear of it. Whatever you may have done, and whatever they may say, I know you acted as you thought was right. I was very wrong to treat you as I did . . . and those others. . . ."

"My dear Miss Verney, please."

"No, I was wrong. I can't forgive myself. So grossly wrong."

Somehow her hand was in his. He had no idea at all how it came there. It was only for an instant. Looking back at it, he even doubted whether it had happened. But in that brief flash of time he felt the absolute a.s.surance that the whole world had changed.

II.

By afternoon the well had become packed almost to suffocation, and when Justin returned to his seat in counsel's wake he had to push his way through a phalanx that showed the greatest reluctance to move. "Make way, please, make way; it is a scandal," he heard Jes-sop's voice booming, though the man himself was submerged up to the top of his wig which bobbed along in the tide. The judge, arriving untimely on the scene, looked grave. "I shall ask the bystanders at the back to leave at once," he declared into the hush that had fallen. "Officials at the doors will see to it that there is no overcrowding. If there is the least disturbance I shall clear the court."

Into this setting came George Sugden in a suit that looked too large for his emaciated body, his face the colour of wax and skulllike under a convict's crop. Only the pale blue eyes darting here and 187.

there seemed to have life-the same mischievous, restless glance that Justin remembered. Gilmore had risen. "You are George Sugden? Now serving a sentence of five years penal servitude for your part in the burglary at Ma.s.singham?"

"Aye."

"Was that sentence fairly earned?"

"Oh aye, sir, it were."

A small fugitive burst of laughter escaping from somewhere caused Jessop to shake his head and an official near the doors to bellow for silence. But the judge had paid no attention and Gilmore went on: "You admit the crime. Tell us what happened. Tell us in your own way."

So Justin heard again the words he had written down on that winter evening. All was much the same, except that Henderson was now definitely named as accomplice. There was some uncertainty about who had gone through the window first or who had suggested the enterprise, but these were not matters of much moment, nor was it likely that Jessop would be able to make them seem so. What Jessop would or could find to say when his turn came to cross-examine was a matter of general wonder.

"Who stole the ruby and eagle seal?" was the first and unexpected question-unexpected because first questions are often searching ones and Miss Verney's seal had never been a live issue. Sugden himself seemed as surprised as anyone, but answered: "It were Henderson."

"Henderson, was it? Are you sure? What did he do with it?"

"Dinna ken, sir."

"Well now," Jessop said, signalling with a wave of the hand that got entangled with the stuff of his gown, "will you take a look at this exhibit?"

It was handed up by an attendant and Sugden examined it.

"Is that the seal Henderson took?"

"Aye, sir."

"Let me put it to you formally that you have never seen that seal before because you never were at Ma.s.singham?"

The witness shrugged his shoulders, obviously thinking the question beneath his notice. Then why am I here?' he seemed to be saying. 'Why am I doing time?' But when the question was repeated and he saw the small bouncing man in the wig still slightly askew was in earnest about it he answered gravely: "I were there, sir. Stands to reason."

"Oh, it stands to reason, does it?" Jessop said, seizing on the words. "Because you have confessed, you mean?"

"That's right, sir."

"I am putting it to you that your confession is untrue."

Nothing had so clearly shown Justin the nakedness of the land on the other side of the hill than Jessop's insistence on this point. The question, being part of the Defence case, had to be put, but it was plain bad tactics to go on hammering at it when everyone in court could ask himself why in the name of reason Sugden should have confessed and gone to penal servitude for something he had not done. To suggest, as Jessop proceeded to do, that the motive for the confession had been fear that otherwise the Police might lay a graver charge (not named, but Hannington probably in mind) seemed sheer fantasy the more one looked at it. What kind of advantage or protection did one get by being put in gaol? In any event the Police had not wanted Sugden put in gaol. Far from having a reason to urge him to confess, a confession was the last thing they had wanted and would have made them sour, not sweet; more ready and not less ready to bring on their 'graver charge', supposing it existed. Indeed, after a time even Jessop seemed to have become aware of the self-defeating nature of his own argument and began to concentrate instead on what he called undue influence', the moral pressure' brought to bear by Gilmore's 'just and selfless men'.

And at once he had better luck.

First the man's sickness: he established that with broad and sombre strokes-a soul at death's door; a sick child; an unheated garret. Enter the tempters bearing gifts-one in the guise of a minister of the Faith. Exhortations. Promises. Appeals to the instinct of self-sacrifice. Finally the skeleton in the cupboard of this affecting scene -"Did Mr Derry warn you that you might be tried? Were you warned you might be sent to penal servitude?"

The witness had begun to hesitate and the blue eyes to sparkle with something that might have been resentment or mischief or a combination of both.

"Not that, sir."

"Did Mr Lumley warn you?"

"'Im, sir? The Riverent?"

189.

THE Ma.s.sIXGHAM AFFAIR.

It was understood from this reply that the Vicar's ministrations had been on the celestial plane and Jessop pressed home the point at once. "He was concerned about your soul?"

"Seems 'e was, sir," replied the witness, so lugubriously as certainly to have drawn laughter from the court if the judge's eye had not been on it.

"What were you concerned about?" Jessop enquired.

"Nowt much, sir."

"Quite. You were a sick man. Did you believe that you were dying?"

"That I did, sir."

"So if it had been suggested to you that an act of self-sacrifice such as a confession would add merit to your immortal soul . . . ?"

But he got no further. "Mr Jessop," said the judge in a tone almost of incredulity, "do I understand you to be suggesting that a priest in Holy Orders urged a false confession on a paris.h.i.+oner whom he believed to be dying?"

Everyone looked horrified, Mr Jessop most of all. "The very last thing I intended," he a.s.sured the court with a glance full of respect for the Anglican communion. "It is no part of my case that the Vicar of St Bede's acted with other than propriety. He believed Sugden to be guilty-of that I am a.s.sured. His aim was to prepare a supposedly guilty man for death. The fact that the man was not guilty does not in any way affect the sincerity of his action. But let us look at the results. Believing Sugden guilty, he used pressures that this witness was in no condition to resist." Here Jessop swung back to Sugden and demanded: "Was it put to you that confession would benefit your soul?"

"Aye, sir, in a way."

"And was it put to you that by confessing you would free two men who were your friends?"

"Aye, sir."

"Isn't the truth of all this that you just agreed to what was put to you because you were tired, and it seemed the easy way out, and because you didn't think you would be punished? In other words, it was no true confession but one made under duress?"

"They said as it would be best for me."

"I have no questions," said counsel for Mathieson and Moffat as Jessop resumed his seat.

"But are you under duress now?" enquired Gilmore, rising to reexamine with the fatigued air of someone who is called on to point the obvious. "Apart from the fact that you are in gaol, I mean."

The witness shook his head.

"Nor are you dying now, I take it? Is anyone threatening you today or urging you to say anything that isn't true?-I except my friend's ingenious verbal traps."

"Not a soul, sir."

"You come here convicted by a jury and sentenced by a judge. You have been punished, and I think you feel that it was a harsh sentence and resent it?"

"Aye, sir, I do."

"Do you still say, in spite of that, today, that your confession is true and that it was you and Henderson who broke in and stole at Ma.s.singham Rectory that night?"

"It were me and Henderson."

Four questions in less than a minute. And Jessop's painstaking cross-examination lay in ruins.

For some time Justin had been feeling distinctly uneasy about the case. The mauling he had received from Jessop had bruised his confidence and the way the Defence had been able to throw doubt on the voluntary nature of the confession had appalled him and made him see disturbing visions. Then Gilmore had re-examined, and instantly the skies had cleared and he had been filled with admiration for the man's masterly timing of questions, which had not been wasted in examination-in-chief but had been held back till the moment came to explode a nonsensical theory. The danger had pa.s.sed, and if Henderson proved to be anything like Sugden, or showed even half his honesty, the case was as good as over.

In fact, Henderson in the box made a figure of considerable em-press.e.m.e.nt. They had given him back his best suit for the occasion, his collar was as high as in the days of prosperity, his face as ruddy, as though he had just come in from a Sunday afternoon stroll, and a watch-chain gleaming across his fine expanse of stomach defied the world to think that he had stolen it. Not that he was in any sense c.o.c.ky or disrespectful to the court. As an ex-gamekeeper and professional witness his att.i.tude towards it was more fraternal than anything else. He was one of the family, who understood its queer goings-on, even down to the to-ery and fro-ery of counsel that had 191.