Crime
Two plays
Escape? by E. F. Parr and Special Pleading by Bernard Duffy
It’s fog — or is it mist? — that’s all about and you are standing not quite peacefully in your cottage on the moor. You cannot see your hand in front of your face. No one can see their hands in front of their faces. You’re laying out the things for tea but something’s very strange. You know it, know it well enough, but others may not. There was a sound not that long ago — a sharp sound, a retort, a crack. You think you know what it was. You moved here in anticipation of it. Moved here all that time ago, waiting perhaps for this day. But now there is a knock at the door.
Is it that time already? You open the door. It is not the person you expected to see. Instead, the vicar’s daughter stands there, a friend of yours, it’s true, but not the person you expected tonight. She is full of news. Full of it indeed.
The prison — there is a prison near, across the moor, and the people who live here hope very much not to be reminded of it — has had an escape. Two men have broken out. This is what the daughter of the vicar has to tell you. She is very excited. Her life has been so dull. She has not had an adventure. But the village is alive with rumour now.
She had to come over, as soon as she ought, to tell you, her friend, that there was a break-out at the prison and that shots were fired by the warders, by the guards — shots fired either at the convicts as they ran, as they escaped, or in warning, in recognition of the break.
But she does not know the first thing about you. She does not know that you were expecting someone else tonight, for quite another reason.
No one can see their hands in front of their faces on the moor.
In a different city, wholly on the other side of the country — and not too far away in time — another little drama is playing out in a closed-up house. It’s a big old place, with some nice things in it. And there, by the window, just through it, are two men about to go a-robbing. One is called Jim and he’s a cockney type — one of those mythical people who are professional thieves in plays, in films. A pro, someone who takes the whole business quite seriously, a man for whom housebreaking is not a spectator sport, nor is it an amateur’s game.
Why oh why, then. did Jim bring along Michael — a westerner from Ireland, a dreamer, a man who was sure he saw a fairy, really and truly, one day (which had nothing to do, at all, with all the whisky)? He saw a fairy and that was that. Fairies exist. You see them all the time. Just like, as the two burglars start and hide their lantern at a new sound, the young woman who glides suddenly through the room and through a doorway. Just like her — that is how the fairies move.
Michael, as the dreamer of the pair, truly believes that the woman is supernatural. Did she not make no sound as she moved? Did she not go through the door without opening it at all? Jim doubts all that. The house is shut up, of course, but it is not empty. She’s just the daughter of the house, he reasons, the daughter of the house who heard a noise. A noise we made.
But then, as it happens, another man enters this little drama. He is the owner of the house, the real one. And the two burglars, hiding as they are behind the curtain, cannot stay hidden for ever. The owner confronts them; they simper a little and try to talk their way out of it. And Michael mentions the lady the two of them just saw. Was it not your daughter, old man, who came down to check upon the noise we must have made?
I have no daughter, the owner says, and no one lives here but me. Who is it you could possibly mean? There is no one else here.
The burglars are quite speechless. They disbelieve.
We can easily find out, the owner says, if she was a fairy, or a ghost. Because through that door is nothing but a great drop. There’s no way out. I’ll just open the door. I’ll just open the door and see who it is inside.