It was perhaps inevitable that Mrs Gillen said that compassion was to blame for the chain of events that led to the death of her husband, Thomas. What was less certain, but more lamented by all her knew her, was that this chain led to her renouncing her culprit’s beneficent ways for the rest of her living days. In years to come people would remark at her callous nature and shocking bluntness in matters of delicacy. Her caustic decrial of a childhood friend’s suffering at the whim of a particularly painful terminal cancer indeed closed the final doors of friendship and, unbeknown to her, was the cause of her own final descent to death less than a year later.
What you can be sure of is that the physical events themselves were recorded by the court and as such stand immemorial, even though their motivations were already somewhat cloudy by the time that this empirical record was made. There is very clear video footage, along with matching testimonies from the numerous witnesses and participants that remove beyond all reasonable doubt who was to blame for starting the fight in The Masons Arms that day.
For the four builders, who were three months into an eight month contract working on a new building of apartments round the corner, Gillen was murdered, clear and simple. With the focused clarity of intention and morals that often come with people content with their lots they found themselves in agreement with his stand. After the event they were to be found holding on to the unfortunate Thomas Preedy and preventing his flight, full of righteous fury.
They had seen a disheveled man enter the pub through the side door, when the bar staff were busy with customers, and start moving from table to table selling cigarette lighters. To their credit, three of these builders bought one each (the fourth didn’t smoke, but did donate 50p) from the man and sent him on his way with a blessing. As such they were particularly enraged when he was loudly and aggressively berated and ejected from the pub by the less sympathetic Preedy. They were in discussion about how to teach him a lesson when Gillen took the matter into his own hands.
Gillen’s offence was to purposefully stride past Preedy and ask this homeless man for a lighter, paying him £2 and then sending him on his way with a friendly hand on the shoulder and a smile. He was never to sit down again as on his way back to his table Preedy said, “just feeding his habit, you shouldn’t give them any fucking money.”
Hindsight is a wonderful gift, but not being in possession of it Mr Gillen turned to confront Preedy. The builders supported him with a “good on yer, mate” and proceeded to watch, and occasionally pitch in, as the subsequent argument sprawled over 7 minutes. It was at this point that Preedy’s patience snapped, however. Having finished his pint before the conversation, dropped his peanuts, and stood to face Mr Gillen, his only route of escalation left open was to strike, which he did with a spontanseous accuracy by bringing his fist round to hit Gillen square on the mouth and cheek.
This is the moment from which every testimony aligns. The builders knocked their own table and drinks over in their rush to join Gillen, the barmaid let out a little yelp and rushed to call the police, Dr Green shifted back, more in confusion than fright, the other patrons further away all began to take notice and, finally, Gillen licked some blood from his cut lip, passed a second of fear and confusion across his face, and collapsed.
* * *
Dr Robert Green was the person closest to the opening barrage of incivilities, which was something he had no appreciation for on account of the numerous stitches he had in his arms. Having fallen off of his bicycle in wet weather only two days before he had folded his very tall frame under one of the small tables to consume enough alcohol to numb his pain but also allow him to navigate his way home without brushing his damaged limbs against anything. Being in possession of a doctorate in statistical analysis, he was taking a grim pleasure in trying to predict this amount with complicated calculations. Those who have met dedicated academics before will consequently understand that when the altercation began he was somewhat distracted with his chosen occupation, despite having the appearance of staring directly at the events. It wasn’t until he had finished constructing a rudimentary analysis of his previous drinking tolerances and had assigned it a nominal constant for the purpose of his calculations that the increasingly urgent updates from his ears entered his perception.
As such, I hope you will not blame him for being unable to testify in the court as to who started the fight, for in truth he does not know. His clarity in the subsequent events was of great help, however, especially given he was the only one to see the crucial, and seemingly inconsequential, details which proved the manslaughter. Those of you interested in justice should know at this point that the guilt of having passed this knowledge on would haunt Dr Green for years to come - indeed he would develop a reputation amongst his future students for seeming incredibly nervous of a sudden, or occasionally trailing off into a nail-bitten silence mid-speech.
What Dr Green could provide though, was the observation that Preedy had been in the middle of a packet of salted peanuts before the altercation began. Whilst he had not registered the presence of the man vaguely offering him a lighter, or the manner of his departure, he did see Preedy continue eating his peanuts, somewhat slobbishly indeed by Dr Green’s testimony at first. As his frustration at being challenged grew he had slammed the packet on the table and driven his fist into the remainder, scattering them everywhere. When this fist struck Mr Gillen in the mouth barely 5 minutes later it was a cruel stroke of Fate’s brush that left some trace there.
It is certainly accepted that had the rest of the patrons spent less time physically reprimanding Preedy and cheering on the builders, who had taken Gillen’s fight on for him, or preventing his escape then no life need have been lost. As it was though, the fear was very real for Gillen who, having discovered at a young age he was violently allergic to peanuts, comprehended what had happened after the point at which he was capable of communicating his plight. And when the crowd had calmed down enough to check on him he was already suffocating and beyond the redemption of anything other than an immediate dose of epinephrine.
* * *
It would be rather presumptuous to name Preedy as the progenitor of all the subsequent sufferance that befell these participants. And yet he was to bear the burden of guilt and blame for what had happened here. Mrs Gillen was closer when she identified compassion as the perpetrator, closer certainly than the builders who as a group could only recall Preedy’s unprovoked aggression and not his misfortune.
Mr Gillen was not graced with a great deal of time to contemplate the matter, indeed all his thoughts were hinged on the ingratitude of the person he was dying for and the seemingly countless number of times his wife had scolded him for wasting his time and money on such acts of charity. He was to leave this world in some state of confusion as a result, uncertain if he had been right or wrong to intervene.
Preedy himself spent some considerable time pondering the issue himself, at Her Majesty’s pleasure and could only assume that he was being punished by some higher authority for his sin of wrath. His narcissism is both understandable and unenviable. It is sometimes said that extremes of stress can produce stark changes in someone’s character and through this particular quirk of his reaction to imprisonment Preedy became a model citizen on his release.
As for Dr Green - in darker moments on lonely nights he would gather his thoughts, memories, and later published stories and records and try and trace the effects of this one instance on the individuals lives. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, perhaps an indication of an empirical index resulting from extremes of stress if he was fooling himself. In more honest moments he would entertain the idea that he was looking for some kind of justification for this arbitrary tragedy, something at the centre he could use as a key for all of the horror it placed inside of him. And in this, perhaps he was closest to understanding of all of them.
