A Shock to the System

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The first murder was almost accidental. Indeed, if it had ever gone to court the charge would probably have been manslaughter.

But the legal difference between the two crimes can be one of intention, and there is no doubt that at the moment he hit the old man, Graham Marshall intended to kill him.

And that was his first taste of the power of death.

But murder can also be reduced to manslaughter by provocation, and there was no doubt in Graham Marshall’s mind that at the moment he killed the old man, he was provoked beyond human endurance.

Not provoked so much by the importuning of his victim, as by the entire forty-one years of his life. It had been a life, it seemed to Graham, of false promise and false promises; a life of carrots dangled, prizes offered, a long sequence of incentives to lure him along a road which he had only recently discovered to be a dead end.

That the realisation had taken so long to come only made it the more bitter. Like the victim of an elaborate confidence trick, he had contributed to his own deception, and was that much more reluctant to accept the real facts. For a long time he had refused to believe that he was up against a blank wall, convincing himself that the way out was merely hidden, and that finding it was another challenge to his proven intelligence and acknowledged ingenuity.

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