Here is the beginning

The Story

1 a) Make notes about the crime in the chart below. You will not find all the information in this extract, but you will be able to complete it later on.

place: .

victim: .

accused: .

time: .

weapon: .

b) Consider your notes on the accused. Do you share the narrator's opinion about him or have you formed a different one?

THE CASE FOR THE DEFENCE bv Graham Greene

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 out1ined 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 hadn't forgotten him, who had seen hurrying away from the little red villa in Northwood Street. The clock had just struck two in the morning.

Narrative Technique

a) Underline the parts where the narrator comments on what he reports.

b) Consider the parts you have underlined.

which reinforces the man's physical appearance?

which of them creates expectations of developments contrary to the evidence given?

which contains the narrator's comment on human justice?

which involves the reader directly in the story?

c)     Does the reader know why the narrator is present at the trial?

Making Predictions

What do you think the story will be about?

Go on reading and find out.

Mrs Salmon in 15 Northwood Street had been unable to sleep; she heard 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 the 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 eves. 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.

"I understand," counsel said, "that the defence proposes to plead mistaken identity. Adams's wife will tell you that he was with her at two in the morning on February 14, but after you have heard the witnesses for the Crown and examined carefully the features of the prisoner, I do not think you will be prepared m admit the possibility of a mistake."

The Story

a) Complete the chart on p 36 and make notes in the chart below about the witnesses.

b) What course will the defence take?

c) What alibi does the criminal have?

Narrative technique

Underline the parts where the narrator comments.

a) Do you think there is a possibility of an unpredictable development? If so, which words or phrases suggest it?

b) Is there any fresh information that explains the presence of the narrator at the trial?