Doctor Teesdale visited the condemned man in prison once or twice during the week before he was
put to death. Condemned men often find a strange peace as the hour of their death comes closer.
Linkworth was like this. While there was still hope of saving his life, Linkworth had experienced
horrible doubts and fears. When all hope had gone, he seemed to accept that his death was certain, and
he became calm and quiet. The murder had been a particularly horrible one, and no one felt sympathetic
towards the murderer. The condemned man owned a small paper shop in Sheffield, in the north of
England. He lived there with his wife and his mother. The old lady was not rich, but she had five
hundred pounds, and Linkworth knew this. Linkworth himself needed money because he owed a
hundred pounds, and he simply killed his mother for her money. While his wife was away from home
visiting some relations, Link− worth strangled his mother.
He and his mother had had many arguments and disagreements over the past few years. She had
often threatened to take her money and go and live somewhere else. In fact, during his wife's absence,
Linkworth and his mother had another violent argument. The old lady took all her money out of the
bank and made plans to leave Sheffield the next day. She told her son that she was going to live with
friends in London. He saw his chance, and that evening he strangled her. During the night he buried thebody in the small back garden behind the shop.
His next step, before his wife's return, was a very sensible one. The next morning he packed up all
his mother's clothes. He took them down to the station and sent them off to London by passenger train.
In the evening he invited several friends to supper, and told them about his mother's departure. He
openly admitted that he and his mother had never really agreed with each other. He said that he was not
sorry that she had left. He added that she had not given him her London address. That too seemed quite
natural, but it was a clever idea all the same. Linkworth did not want his wife to write to the old lady.
When his wife returned, Linkworth told her the same believable story and she accepted it
completely. Indeed, this is not surprising, for there was nothing strange or unusual about it. And for a
while everything went very well. At first Linkworth was clever. He did not pay the money he owed
immediately. Instead, he took a paying guest into his house. This young man rented the old lady's room.
At the same time Linkworth mentioned to everyone how he was making money from his little shop. It
was a month before he used any of the money from the locked drawer in his mother's room. Then he
changed two fifty−pound notes and paid back the money that he owed.
At that point, however, he became careless. Instead of being patient, he paid another two hundred
pounds into the bank. And he began to worry about the body in the garden. Was it buried deeply
enough? He bought some rocks and stones, and spent the long summer evenings building a rock garden
over the grave. The flowers grew, and he began to feel safer and more confident.
But then something quite unexpected happened. His mother's luggage had arrived at Kings Cross
Station in London, and of course nobody collected it. It was sent to the lost−luggage office to wait for
its owner. It waited and waited − until there was a fire at the office. The old lady's luggage was partly
destroyed, and the railway company wrote to her about it at her Sheffield address.
The letter was of course addressed to Mrs Linkworth, and naturally Linkworth's wife opened it.
That letter was the beginning of the end for Linkworth. Why was his mother's luggage still in the
lost−luggage office? He could give no reasonable explanation. Of course he had to call the police and
tell them his mother was missing. Then the silent, slow machinery of English law began to move. Quiet
men in dark suits visited Linkworth's shop. They enquired at his bank, and inspected the rock garden
behind his shop. Then came the arrest, and the trial, which did not last very long.
Finally, the last day of the trial arrived. Well−dressed ladies in large hats came along to hear the
judgement, and the room was bright with colour. No one in the crowd felt sorry for the young man who
was condemned. Many of the audience were mothers themselves. The prisoner's crime, they felt, was a
crime against motherhood. They felt pleased when the judge put on his black hat. They understood what
the black hat meant, and they agreed with the judge. The man was a murderer, and the judge was right
to condemn him to death.