English Magazine for Advanced Learners 1958/6. [antikvár]

OUR SHORT STORY Graham Greene The Case for the Defence It was the strangest murder trial I ever attended. They named it the Peckham murder in the headlines, though Northwood Street, where the old woman was found battered to death, was not strictly speaking in Peckham. This was not one of those cases of circumstantial evidence in which you feel the jurymen's anxiety — because mistakes have been made — like domes of silence muting the court. No, this murderer was all but found with the body; no one present when the Crown counsel outlined his case believed that the man in the dock stood any chance at all. He was a heavy stout man with bulging bloodshot eyes. All his muscles seemed to be in his thighs. Yes, an ugly customer, one you wouldn't forget in a hurry — and that was an important point because the Crown proposed to call four witnesses who had^t forgotten him, who had seen him hurrying away from the little red villa in North-wood Street. The clock had just struck two in the morning. Mrs. Salmon in 15 Northwood Street had been unable to sleep; she beard a door click shut, and thought it was her own gate. So she went to the window, and saw Adams (that was his name) on the steps of Mrs. Parker's house. He had just come out and, he was wearing gloves. He had a hammer in his hand, and she saw him drop it into the laurel bushes by the front gate. But before he moved away, he had looked up at her window. The fatal instinct that tells a man when he is watched exposed him in the light of a street-lamp to her gaze — his eyes suffused with horrifying and brutal fear, like an animal's when you raise a whip. I talked afterwards to Mrs. Salmon, who naturally after the astonishing verdict went in fear herself. As I imagine did all the witnesses — Henry MacDougall, who had been driving home from Benfleet late •— and nearly ran Adams down at thé corner of Northwood Street. Adams was walking in the middle of the road looking dazed. And old Mr. Wheeler, who lived next door to Mrs. Parker, at No. 12, and was wakened by a noise — like a chair falling—through the thin-as-paper villa wall, and got up and looked out of the window, just as Mrs. Salmon had done, saw Adams's back, and as he turned, those bulging eyes. In Laurel Avenue he had been seen by yet another witness — his luck was badly out ; he might as well have committed the crime in broad daylight.