‘Data! data! data! I can’t make bricks without clay.’
Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’
When separated out from the distraction of the attempted murder allegation, the fundamentals of the prosecution’s murder case were straightforward enough. In essence, the narrative went that, after prolonged attempts to manipulate the Hambrough family’s finances, Monson hit upon a scheme to kill Cecil and claim a large life insurance payout. The misrepresentation and subsequent disappearance of Scott/Sweeney was, furthermore, evidence of a murderous conspiracy.
Yet for all its seeming simplicity, it was devilishly tricky to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Monson’s financial dealings in relation to Cecil and Major Hambrough certainly looked suspicious, and men had been killed for much less than the £20,000. However, without a confession from Monson or Scott, it was difficult to do more than insinuate greed as the motive. Moreover, the defence was convinced they could unpick this argument, and would in due course attempt to do just that. The absence of Scott was also a major setback for the prosecution, even as it cast further shadows on Monson’s character and actions. Accepted, nothing looks so guilty as slinking off from the scene of the crime and Monson struggled to escape the taint that went with faking his associate’s identity. Nonetheless, without Scott/Sweeney to interrogate, the Solicitor-General was again left only able to suggest and insinuate. The circumstantial evidence was plentiful but a skilled defence counsel might well tear apart even the most apparently unbreakable web of circumstantial connections.
That was why the forensic evidence was set to be so vital in the case. Prove that Cecil did not die by his own hand, either intentionally or by cruel fate, and the case was all but won for the Crown – for what other suspects were there than Monson and Scott? But should any room for doubt be left, the jury would have no choice but to allow Monson to walk. Understandably, then, there was a certain charge in the air as the courtroom filled ahead of the third day of action, when Henry Littlejohn and Joseph Bell were due to take the stand. After the second day, which had seen a succession of estate staff, local residents and sundry other eyewitnesses give often inconclusive evidence, there was the feeling that this third day was to be pivotal in the proceedings. Although the courtroom was relatively small – no more than seventy or eighty feet across – its extensive panelling, array of frosted circular windows and high ceiling created the subdued lighting and the acoustic conditions that ensured those present were in the mood for some star performances.
Keen historians of the Scottish judicial system had picked up on echoes in the Ardlamont case of a trial that had been heard in the very same building some thirty-nine years earlier – that of Dr William Smith. Its outcome bolstered the idea that much now lay on the shoulders of Littlejohn and Bell as they entered the witness box. Smith had been a respected medical practitioner from the village of St Fergus in Aberdeenshire when, one morning in November 1853, the body of William McDonald, a local young farmer – and friend of Smith – was found lying in a ditch. He had been shot through the head by a bullet from a pistol that was found lying beside him. As was customary, Smith was called as the local doctor to come and certify the death, which he confirmed as having been caused by McDonald himself – either on purpose or by the gun going off accidentally in his pocket. Dr Smith then took personal responsibility for the funeral arrangements. However, it was not long before suspicion began to fall upon the doctor. It turned out that there were three life insurance policies upon McDonald, worth about £1,500 altogether, taken in Smith’s name, one of which was due to expire within a week of the death. Moreover, McDonald had left his home the previous evening saying that he was going to meet up with Smith. One witness claimed to have seen a flash and heard a loud bang at half-past seven the same evening, in the direction of Smith’s field close to where the body was discovered. There was other circumstantial evidence, too, not least testimony that Smith had several years earlier purchased a pistol very much like the one found by the victim, and had recently bought gunpowder.
However, all the evidence was of the circumstantial variety. Smith denied he had been set to meet McDonald the night before and, indeed, had been seen at various locations around the village that evening on his own (although his alibi was never comprehensively confirmed). He also claimed that the life insurances had been taken out at the behest of the victim’s uncle and that Smith had not expected them to pay out anyway, since they were invalid in the case of suicide, which the medical evidence had been insufficient to rule out. Critically for Dr Smith, nor could the authorities say with complete certainty that a murder had even taken place. With his defence conducted eloquently by John Inglis (a future Lord President of the Court) and the judge summing up that there was too little evidence to infer the guilt of the doctor for a murder that might or might not have occurred, Smith walked free after the jury declared the peculiarly Scottish verdict of ‘Not proven’ (a verdict that acknowledges reasonable doubt while leaving the cloud of suspicion hanging over the defendant). A crowd outside the court hissed its disapproval as the verdict was returned. Fast forward to 1893, and it was now for Littlejohn and Bell to provide the certainty that had eluded the prosecution in the Smith case nearly four decades earlier.
The pressure was palpable on Littlejohn and Bell as they prepared to give their testimony. What thoughts ran in particular through the mind of Bell, the recently bereaved father, as he prepared to give evidence on the death of another poor, unfortunate young man?
The challenge for Littlejohn, the first of the pair to give evidence, was intellectually to remove himself from the growing excitement of the crowded courtroom and focus on presenting his evidence succinctly so as to render it comprehensible to the layman. He would write in an article about expert testimony for the Edinburgh Medical Journal a couple of years later:
An intelligent reporter, indeed, shows his knowledge of his art as much by what he withholds as by what he gives in detailed description. An account of a post-mortem examination may be stated at tedious length, and to an unpractised eye appear from its bulk to be exhaustive and complete. Yet it may be overburdened with details of not the slightest consequence in determining the cause of death or the nature of the case, and the very appearances which alone could settle the question, and which were undoubtedly present, remain unnoticed. The reporter feels himself at sea, and, in his desire to mention everything, allows points of the greatest moment to escape his notice.
They are words closely echoed by Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’: ‘The principal difficulty lay in the fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant.’
As the Scotsman reported the next day, he rose above the furore that attended his appearance with consummate professionalism: ‘The calling of Dr Littlejohn as the next witness produced a buzz of excitement in Court, and the veteran doctor, without whom no great trial would be complete, stepped into the box, and having taken the oath, poured out a glass of water, and settled down to an examination which lasted well over two hours.’
The courtroom itself had started to take on the look of an eccentric shop of curiosities, a strange array of items having been accepted into evidence. Cluttered around the dock were, for example, the two guns that had been carried during Cecil’s last hunting trip (brought into the courtroom covered in black crêpe of the sort then used for mourning dress), as well as the suit of clothes he had been wearing, several packets of cartridges, the side of the boat that had been taken out fishing, three plaster casts of Cecil’s head and a goodly portion of a rowan tree that would be vital to contextualizing the evidence the court was about to hear. Littlejohn himself added to the scene by bringing to the witness stand a model skull for the purpose of illustrating the nature of Cecil’s injuries. He produced it from his silk hat, where it had been lying along with a pair of white gloves. With his left hand tucked into his pocket, he used his right index finger to point out appropriate details as he began his testimony with a summary of his post-mortem findings – all delivered in the short, sharp sentences so familiar to the students who flooded his lectures.
By close analysis of Cecil’s wound, the scene of the shooting and the various experiments subsequently undertaken in partnership with MacNaughton the gunsmith, Littlejohn set out to establish the trajectory of the fatal shot. From there, he would seek to convince the jury that the shot could not possibly have been self-administered but must have been fired by a third party some distance away. However, in order to do so, Littlejohn needed to establish certain facts that were fiercely disputed by the defence.
In terms of the nature of Cecil’s wound, everyone was in broad agreement. He had died from a shot that struck the back of the head behind the right ear, part of which had been shot away. The shot was of the No. 5 type fired from the twelve-bore gun that Monson customarily carried. Most of the brain remained intact, save for that part that had been in front of where the skull had been shattered. Only four pellets were found to have entered the brain, out of a total of some 150 to 180 that would have been expected to have filled a gunshot cartridge of the type used. There was little evidence of blackening or scorching around the wound.
As to where Cecil was when he was shot, the prosecution’s case relied on the acceptance that he died where he was found – on top of the dyke. This was where all the witnesses present on the day had seen the body and where they had directed the attention of the various expert witnesses as they examined the scene in the weeks after the death. Monson, however, had claimed that he and Scott/Sweeney had moved the body there from the ditch where they said Cecil actually perished. But Littlejohn refused to countenance this version. He explained that, generally speaking, gunshot wounds did not leave much blood, owing to the smashing of the arteries, but one of Cecil’s veins had been lacerated so causing a ‘profuse haemorrhage’. This was, he went on, why so many witnesses had described seeing the blood slowly oozing from Cecil’s head. Littlejohn had examined the turf on the dyke where Cecil had lain and concluded that it perfectly corroborated the suggestion that this was where he was felled. In contrast, there was no evidence in the ditch of profuse bleeding, nor (as other witnesses had noted) any other signs that a body had lain there. Furthermore, there had been no reports that either Monson or Scott/Sweeney had been covered in the blood one might have expected after moving a man with such a wound. Two small pieces of bone were also discovered close to where Cecil had ended up on the dyke, leading Littlejohn to assert: ‘If the two pieces of bone … were found where I was told they were found, and if they belonged to the skull, then the question as to the place where the shot was fired is, in my opinion, settled; the body must have been shot at the place where it was found.’
Having thus striven to establish the spot where Cecil fell, Littlejohn turned his attention to the flight of the shotgun cartridge. In order to establish its trajectory, he had examined trees in the surrounding wood to look for evidence of shot marks. Sure enough, he detected what he described as ‘certain wounds’ in a rowan tree (the one that, in part, now resided in the courtroom) a short distance away from where Cecil’s head had been on the ground. There were similar wounds on two more trees a little way further on, too. ‘I am not an expert in shot marks on trees,’ Littlejohn conceded, ‘but so far as I could make out these wounds appeared to have been produced by pellets … I saw several grooves in the wood, which showed a transverse grooving, and, so far as I could make out, the line of these grooves was exactly in a line with the line of the body. I was informed that two pieces of bone had been found a little way from the head, and these were sent [to] me for examination; I found that there were three distinct metallic fragments driven, so to speak, into the tissue of the bone. I was also informed that a portion of a cartridge was found nearer the rowan tree than the body. Having seen the place where the head was lying, the rowan tree, the pieces of bone, and the wad [a small paper disc used to separate the contents of the cartridge], I formed the opinion that the shot had been fired from behind and slightly to the right side.’
The Ardlamont rowan trees reached a level of fame perhaps unrivalled in arboreal history, since they might serve either to confirm or debunk the prosecution’s forensic case. Indeed, their importance was recognized early so that while they were still in situ at Ardlamont, they were given a twenty-four-hour police guard. One night, at around 2 a.m., a policeman emerged from his tent to discover someone grasping the tree that ended up in the Edinburgh courtroom. The identity of this individual and their reasons for their bout of nocturnal tree-hugging were never discovered.
Back in the courtroom, Littlejohn next dealt with the crucial question of how far the shot had travelled before it hit its victim. He directed the jury to the evidence garnered from the various MacNaughton experiments:
We found that at any distance under three feet the injuries were dissimilar from what we found in the case of the deceased. I therefore would be inclined to place the possible distance between three feet and fifteen feet. In all the experiments we made the wounds at nine feet present the closest similarity to the injuries we found on the deceased’s head. Any distance under three feet would be inconsistent with what was found on the skull; the injuries were something frightful under three feet, the head was blown to pieces. We made four experiments on the cadaver, firing to the best of our ability in the direction towards the head which the wounds on Mr Hambrough’s head would lead us to expect as to the shot. From these experiments we found that whenever we got beyond four feet the injuries assumed a remarkable similarity to the injuries found on the head of the deceased; at less than four feet we found such a shattering of the head as rendered it quite unlike the comparatively limited shattering in the case of Mr Hambrough.
Nor, he observed, was there either the blackening around the wound from gunpowder or singeing of the hair that he would have expected to see if the shot had been from close range. In other words, unless Cecil had somehow miraculously fired his gun and then thrown himself about nine feet in front of it so that the shot could hit him in the back of the head, someone else pulled the trigger that led to his death. This from the mouth of the most respected forensics expert in the land was bound to carry weight. As a famous judge of the time, Lord Young, would later put it: ‘There are four classes of witnesses – liars, damned liars, expert witnesses, and Sir Henry Littlejohn.’ And yet, there were some serious caveats surrounding his testimony even before the defence got their teeth into it. Specifically, the doubt over where Cecil had fallen created a real sense of unease. In Littlejohn’s own words: ‘If it be the case that the body was lying, not on the dyke, but in the ditch, or on the ground on the other side of the ditch, that would undoubtedly neutralize all the deductions that had been drawn from the shot in the trees. My conclusions, I admit, depend very much upon whether it be true that the place pointed out to me as the place where Mr Hambrough fell was really the place where he was shot, and also upon the position of the weapon.’ But for all the tension of the occasion, Littlejohn’s evidence ended on a light-hearted note. As he went to leave the stand, Comrie Thomson gestured to the skull Littlejohn had not yet retrieved. ‘Stay, Dr Littlejohn, stay! You have forgotten your head,’ he called out. ‘You are very right, sir. I can’t afford to lose my head!’ replied Littlejohn.
The next two witnesses were Dr Macmillan (the GP local to Ardlamont) and Dr Brown (Littlejohn’s Edinburgh colleague), both of whom backed up core details of Littlejohn’s testimony. Then came the turn of another Edinburgh alumni, Dr Patrick Heron Watson, who had accompanied Littlejohn and Bell at the MacNaughton experiments. The Pall Mall Gazette pithily reminded its readers that Bell was ‘the original of Sherlock Holmes’ and that, ‘Readers of Dr Conan Doyle’s stories will remember that there is a Dr Watson, who is the faithful associate of Holmes, and, curiously enough, there was with Dr Joseph Bell to assist in watching the experiments a genuine Dr Watson – Dr Heron Watson.’
In fact, the Gazette may have inadvertently stumbled upon a Holmesian connection that went deeper than they realized. Bell and Watson had a history that stretched far back – all the way to 1865, when the young Bell served as Watson’s dresser. While Bell was considered an extremely dextrous surgeon, Heron Watson had a reputation for being even quicker – it was said he could complete an amputation at the hip in under ten seconds. Despite hints of an uneasy relationship in those early years, the two became firm friends and, just as with Littlejohn, Doyle is likely to have encountered Heron Watson regularly during his tenure as Bell’s assistant. Moreover, there are striking similarities between the real-life Watson’s early biography and that of his fictional counterpart. Both went into the army after completing their medical studies, Heron Watson serving at the front during the Crimean War, where he was awarded several decorations before being invalided home with dysentery in 1856. Holmes’s Watson, meanwhile, fought in Afghanistan before his return to London in 1881, having contracted enteric fever and been shot at the Battle of Maiwand. Consider also Heron Watson’s obituary in the British Medical Journal in 1913, which noted his outstanding character, his calmness and dignity, his self-control and generous kindness: ‘withal to those who knew and loved him best,’ it concluded, ‘at heart, his was an extraordinarily simple nature with intense affections’. The same words could have been used about Holmes’s doughty companion. It is far from the realms of the fantastical to think that Doyle had Dr Patrick H. Watson very much in mind as he created the character of Dr John H. Watson. There is the intriguing possibility, then, that on a single day in December 1893, the High Court of Justiciary hosted not only the two men who inspired the creation of Sherlock Holmes, but also entertained the model for his great partner, too.
In his evidence, Heron Watson was if anything less equivocal than Littlejohn had been. He agreed that the shot was likely fired from somewhere between four and eleven feet from Cecil, favouring a distance of about nine feet given the absence of any singeing and the nature of the spread of pellets. He also concurred that the victim likely fell on top of the dyke, rather than having been lifted there, and that the shot had come from behind him, in a direction slightly upwards and horizontal. ‘The wound, in my opinion,’ he stated, ‘must have been the result of a shot fired by the hand of another; it could not have been fired by Mr Hambrough himself either designedly or accidentally. My opinion is based upon the situation and the direction of the wound.’ Yet, just like Littlejohn, he had no choice but to concede that there was margin for error. ‘I will grant that to some extent we have been in the region of conjecture in the evidence I have led,’ he conceded under cross-examination. ‘I did not see the man shot.’
At last it was the turn of Bell, who found himself going before a jury who had already sat through several hours of complex forensic analysis and who would also hear evidence on the validity of the life insurance policies before the day was out. Nonetheless, there was still an appetite for this cameo by ‘the original of Sherlock Holmes’. Back at the end of September, the Pall Mall Gazette had pondered: ‘The correspondents who have written re the Ardlamont mystery, suggesting that now was the time for Sherlock Holmes to show his prowess are probably not aware that Dr Joseph Bell of Edinburgh, who has been engaged for the prosecution, is the prototype of the British Vidocq [the French detective and criminologist who inspired Edgar Allan Poe and Victor Hugo].’ Few in the courtroom in Edinburgh three months later could have been unaware of his pedigree.
Although, like Littlejohn, he had an air of impressive authority, Bell nonetheless cut a very different figure. He was just as smartly attired as his Edinburgh colleague, and blessed with those hawkish features and piercing eyes that seemed to be able to penetrate into the very soul of a subject. Yet those who were not familiar with him may have been rather disconcerted by his slightly jerky gait as he made his way to the witness stand, and every bit as surprised by the high-pitched timbre of his voice when he began to speak. Yet to Doyle and the thousands of Edinburgh citizens who had encountered him as colleague, teacher or doctor over the years, these were characteristics that had long ago failed to warrant mention. In fact, they were the result of an episode that encapsulated Bell’s overwhelming desire to act for the greater good, even at significant personal cost.
In his role as surgeon at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in the 1860s, Bell had keenly felt the dismay of his young diphtheria patients, particularly when they would cough and choke as they struggled for breath. Intent on finding some practical means to lessen their ordeal, he came up with a technique of sucking out the thick, grey-white coating that characteristically obstructs the back of the throat in diphtheria victims. He even developed a specially adapted pipette for the purpose. It was, however, a treatment with considerable risk attached, given the highly contagious nature of the disease. Late one night in June 1864, Bell was by his own admission feeling very tired and was perhaps less meticulous than usual. This was the occasion, he was convinced, when he himself contracted diphtheria as he made his ward rounds, which in turn led to a bout of post-diphtheritic paralysis resulting in his distinctive gait and vocal pitch.
Not that either idiosyncrasy in any way diminished his effectiveness as a witness. Indeed, his manner of answering questions in precise, rapidly delivered staccato sentences, and the way he seemed always ready for the next question thrown at him, made him a favourite with lawyers. In relation to the shot that killed Cecil, he was broadly in concert with the other witnesses heard that day, giving a distance of between four and nine feet between the muzzle of the weapon and victim when the gun went off. Furthermore, he agreed that the shot had come from behind, in a direction almost horizontal but slightly upwards. ‘From the information given me,’ he said, ‘I have formed the opinion that Mr Hambrough died in consequence of a gunshot wound, and I have not been able to make out any way by which the injury could have been done either designedly or accidentally by Mr Hambrough himself … As the result of my examination of the case, my opinion is that this wound must have been inflicted by a gun in the hand of another than the deceased.’
But just like Littlejohn and Watson before him, under cross-examination Bell was reluctantly made to acknowledge the possibility of alternative explanations – specifically, the theory that the gun had been triggered accidentally as Cecil stumbled on the rough ground. ‘I have not visited the scene of the accident,’ Bell said. ‘If a man carrying a gun makes a bad stumble, and in falling throws the gun away from him behind, there are certainly infinite possibilities as to how he could have shot himself.’ But he was determined that the jury should not be left with the impression that this was in any way a likely scenario. ‘I have not been able to formulate any idea of how it could be done for myself,’ he concluded.
With that, the prosecution’s major block of forensic evidence – which it was hoped would remove any doubt that Cecil might have somehow been the architect of his own demise – drew to a close. There were plenty among those who had heard this succession of forensic pioneers who now considered the case all but settled. Even if one accepted that it was theoretically possible for the victim to have had a hand in his own death, here was the most famous forensic expert in the country and an esteemed band of his colleagues telling the court – after their extensive examination of all the available evidence – that Cecil Hambrough had died at the hands of another. Who were the ordinary folk of the jury to doubt their conclusions? Yet by the admission of each of the witnesses, there was still an element of doubt. The life-or-death question was, did it amount to reasonable doubt?