A Late-Autumn mist hung over the hills round Byworth in the Cotswolds. The village was silent: its stone houses seemed to be huddling closer together in the hollow where it lay, as if for warmth against the coming winter. Smoke rose up straight from the chimneys, and a few lights already showed in the windows. Walking slowly down the hill, past the dun fields which she remembered from childhood as yellow with charlock, Daisy felt like a ghost returning. The events of the last fortnight washed aimlessly to and fro across her mind, circling and jostling together like flotsam in a back-eddy: she could see no pattern or sense in them: she was a piece of driftwood herself, at the mercy of currents, pushed for the time being out of the main stream into a deadwater creek where all activity was suspended.
And indeed there was nothing more she could do now till the trial. Seventeen days to go still. She did not know whether she wanted them to crawl or to gallop. In retrospect, the first ten days after her visit to Bruce Rogers seemed to have flicked past so quickly that her impressions of them had run together into a blur. There had been further meetings with Bruce and his uncle; a change of lodgings; visits to a new doctor; several attempts by the Press to interview her; lonely walks on the sea front at Southbourne, during which she was followed by curious gazes, neither hostile nor sympathetic but speculative and almost timid, as though she were a walking riddle, an animal of some unknown species. And then there were the journeys to see Hugo.
Three times Bruce Rogers had taken her to Oakhurst Jail. They were memories she found difficult now to face with equanimity. Her passionate longing to see Hugo had become an obsession with her during the period after they had parted. Bruce had tried to prepare her mind for the physical conditions she would meet—the cheerless room, the grille, the warder attentive in the background. But it was not these which, looking back on it now, Daisy was desolated to remember. Something in Hugo himself had come between them far more effectively than any grille: he had looked at her and spoken to her tenderly; but each time she visited him she received a stronger impression, accentuated by his prison pallor, that he was living in a world which she could not, with all her love for him, enter. He was like a mortally sick man who was training himself to renounce all claims upon her, upon life itself. He talked in a quiet, subdued way, as a sick child might or an old man, seldom taking his eyes from her face, sitting very still and self-contained. His attitude towards the coming trial seemed quite fatalistic; and had Bruce not expressed to her several times his admiration for Hugo’s courage, Daisy might have interpreted this fatalism as a cowardly resignation. She soon found out that Hugo wanted her to talk about herself, the coming baby, what she had been doing, the projected visit to her mother and the memories of her own childhood which this evoked—anything rather than the trial.
On one occasion only did he show a flash of his old spirit. Daisy had received a letter from Jacko, inquiring most solicitously whether he could do anything to help Hugo and expressing mild sorrow that she had not got in touch with him since leaving London. When she told Hugo about this, his face darkened and he said, “If I had Jacko alone for a few minutes, I’d give them something to hang me for.” The chill anger in his voice startled Daisy, who was not yet altogether aware of the vileness of Jacko’s conduct. She began to defend him, but Hugo cut in harshly, “Don’t talk to me about that—He put the police on to me. He helped them find the revolver. He bounced you into telling that story in Court. I suppose he never even gave you my letter.”
“Your letter, darling? Did you write me one? I felt sure you would.”
“I wrote to say I’d marry you—asking you to make the arrangements—just as soon as we could. The little—must have been laughing up his sleeve all right, knowing he’d got the police lined up outside waiting to nab me.”
“But he could have given me the letter. It’d have made such a difference.” It was Jacko’s wanton destroying of the letter, not his betrayal of Hugo, which struck Daisy for a moment as the worst infamy of all.
“He gave you no message at all from me that day?”
“He said you wanted me to—” Daisy glanced uneasily round towards the warder—“to give that evidence in Court. Otherwise I’d never have—”
“I know, love. Rogers has told me about that. You mustn’t ever blame yourself for it. Promise?” He said it so kindly that her heart overflowed with gratitude and she could not speak. Yet there was something remote, abstracted in his kindness which made him a stranger: the old Hugo, selfish sometimes and brusque and thoughtless, would have been preferable. When Daisy’s mother wrote, asking her to come home, Hugo thoroughly approved the plan.
“But then I shan’t be able to come and see you any more,” Daisy had said.
“Well, it isn’t very cosy here, is it? What do we get out of it? Two people trying to keep up a conversation through a grille.”
His reply had hurt her bitterly at the time, though she knew she must make allowances for him in his present state. But to-day, walking down the hill towards her mother’s cottage, Daisy felt light breaking in on her: Hugo had only been trying to spare her: the withdrawal which she had sensed in him was deliberate—he would not let her share his own suffering or his forebodings, would say nothing to increase her agitation. It was almost as if he had been gently loosening the bonds between them, doing what he could to soften for her the ordeal of their final parting.
“You’re a good man, my Hugo,” she muttered. “You couldn’t have done it. You didn’t do it, did you, my dear?”
She often asked him in her mind this question which she had never dared ask to his face, and the lover in her mind always answered No. Not even to her mother would she admit the possibility that Hugo might be guilty.
Mrs. Bland had turned out a good refuge in trouble. She offered no recriminations, received Daisy as if she had only left home a month or two ago, and was evidently looking forward to the baby’s arrival. Daisy was not to know it, but her featuring in the Press had on the whole proved no disadvantage to her mother. The whole village had been agog about it, of course: but Daisy had always been popular with the villagers, never committing the one sin they considered unforgivable—that of becoming stuck-up. The Chesterman case provided them with drama, a source of endless gossip, and a vicarious sense of being front-page news themselves. Mrs. Bland, so the general opinion went, was taking it very well: she was neither defiant about it, nor cowed. And when Daisy arrived, looking so sad and frightened and appealing, so entirely different from what might have been expected of a girl who’d gone wrong in the big city, it silenced all but the most censorious gossips. That she was going to bear a child out of wedlock meant little in a community where such events were quite traditional. For the first few days, she kept herself to herself, which was considered right and proper under the circumstances. Then one or two neighbours, compelled by ungovernable curiosity, dropped in at Mrs. Bland’s cottage. Once the ball had been set rolling thus, any fears Daisy might have had that she would be treated as an outcast were set at rest: her demeanour satisfied the sternest critics, while her predicament—however much the village may have gloated over it privately—gained her much kindness from those she met.
Daisy was determined to work her passage. She spent the mornings, while her mother was out at work, dusting and polishing in the cottage: she gave her two youngest brothers midday dinner when they returned from school: and in the afternoons she took her little solitary walks, for Hugo had told her she must have plenty of exercise, and during these walks she could think about him without interruption. She walked slowly and carefully, since her most immediate fear was lest the baby, due to be born only a week after the trial opened, should arrive prematurely and prevent her from giving evidence. Every day the neighbours saw the girl stepping with her heavy, somnambulist gait along the road which led out of the village: the older ones recalled how, as a child, she had skipped along that road with her companions, bringing back armfuls of cowslips in the summer, returning in autumn wreathed with berries and the cobweb trails of Old-Man’s-Beard. She had been a wonderful pretty child, they remembered—a proper little Queen of the May.
And for Daisy, too, these days meant a return to childhood. Her mother, with a countrywoman’s instinctive tact and emotional reticence, never referred to Daisy’s life in London or to Hugo. They talked instead about the remoter past, about village affairs—anything but what was most on Daisy’s mind. Mrs. Bland, having made it up with her daughter, was determined to put the cause of their break out of her mind for ever: her manner implied that Daisy Had learnt her lesson and finished with Hugo, and the girl did not mind keeping up this polite fiction; for she sensed it as part of a healing process, which was strengthening her for the ordeal to come—the two ordeals.
On the afternoon before the trial, Bruce Rogers met Daisy at the station at Oakhurst and drove her to a small hotel on the outskirts of the old country town. A sleepy, genteel place normally, Oakhurst presented to-day an indefinable atmosphere of excitement, anticipation: people lingered in the main street, talking, forming groups which dispersed only with reluctance, as it might be on the eve of some civil disturbance; and there was a noticeable influx of strangers into the town.
All this mounting tension seemed to tower up like a wave and break into absolute silence when, the next morning, after Counsel for the Crown had outlined the case against Chesterman, Daisy Bland was at once called to the witness-box. Her evidence, owing to her delicate state of health, would be taken out of order. The purity of her features, the beauty and transparent candour which emanated from them, strangely contrasting with the girl’s blurting, countrified accents as she took the oath, made an extraordinary impression in the Court. It often happens in criminal trials that the prisoner, after the spectators’ first curiosity about his appearance is satisfied, becomes almost a lay figure, all attention being concentrated upon the Counsel who are dressing him in the robes of guilt or innocence. But Daisy’s appearance had the effect of turning attention as much upon Hugo as upon herself. It was not only the look of love which passed visibly between them when she stood up in the box: Bruce Rogers could feel a, stir amongst the spectators, could almost hear them thinking “How could a girl like that get mixed up with a burglar, a murderer?” He saw the jurymen’s eyes move back to the figure in the dock, as if seeking there an answer to the riddle: and he guessed that Hugo, looking so calm, so manly, so gentlemanly indeed, was appearing to them in a new light—a light reflected, as it were, from Daisy.
But, if the girl’s beauty made a strong impression, her first words rocked the Court to its foundations. Mr. Brownleigh, leading for the Crown, had made it quite clear in his opening remarks that the prosecution’s case would rest very largely upon Daisy Bland’s statement. He had even asked the Court to extend towards her the greatest possible indulgence, in view of her condition and her relationship with the prisoner. So her reply to his first question gave the unfortunate Mr. Brownleigh the sensation of walking through a familiar door and finding a completely unknown room beyond it. Gripping the edge of the witness-box, and speaking in her clearest, most forthright tones, Daisy said:
“I’m sorry, sir. I can say nothing. I can’t give evidence. I don’t know anything about the murder at all.”
The whole Court buzzed and rustled, and there was a restless flashing everywhere, like the stir of silver-poplar leaves in a wind, as faces turned this way and that to observe the Judge, the prisoner, Counsel, the witness, and the reactions of other spectators. Mr. Brownleigh’s mouth hung open for an instant; then he recovered self-command.
“Are you feeling quite yourself, madam?”
“Oh yes, sir, thank you.”
“Do I understand that you wish to retract the statement you made in the Magistrates’ Court?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Brownleigh at once asked the Judge’s leave to examine Miss Bland on the deposition made before the magistrates. There was nothing for it but to treat her as a hostile witness, now. Point by point he took her through the deposition: in every case she admitted that this was what she had said, but claimed that every word she had said was untrue. Mr. Brownleigh paused; then, regarding her sternly, said:
“Will you please tell the Court why you made this statement, which you now claim to be a complete fabrication.”
“I was forced to make it.”
“Are you suggesting that the police put pressure upon you?”
“No, sir. It was Dr. Jaques. He told me that unless I made that statement, I should be charged with the murder.”
“You believed him?”
“Yes. I was ill. I couldn’t think straight.”
“I suggest to you that your original statement was the truth, and you made up this new story about being at a cinema with the prisoner at the time of the murder—made it up when you realised what harm your deposition had done him.”
“No, sir,” replied Daisy, with a sob.
Mr. Brownleigh’s voice remained polite and dispassionate—to bully this witness would infallibly alienate the jury—while he probed all along the line of her new evidence. She could neither be shaken nor tripped up about her movements on the night of the murder: she and the prisoner had been at a cinema from 5.15 to about 7.45 o’clock: they returned to their lodgings, and went to another picture house a quarter of an hour later.
Daisy, to the disappointment of the more ghoulish section of the spectators, maintained her composure throughout this examination. But when Mr. Brownleigh began questioning her about the visit to Southbourne with Dr. Jaques, it was evident that the girl became deeply distressed.
“Will you tell the Court why you paid this visit?”
“Dr. Jaques said the police would start looking for the revolver on the beach, and it must be hidden in some safer place.”
“In fact you knew the revolver was incriminating evidence against the prisoner?”
“I beg your pardon?” For a moment there was a stupid, groping expression on Daisy’s face.
“I will put it this way,” said Counsel patiently. “If the prisoner had not used the revolver recently—used it to shoot Inspector Stone, how could its discovery do him any harm? What, otherwise, was the point of your plan to hide it in a ‘safer’ place?”
Daisy’s lips trembled. “You’re trying to catch me out,” she cried.
“I’m trying to get at the truth.”
Daisy burst out sobbing. “I won’t say anything more to anybody—only the truth.”
The crime reporters scribbled busily. This was more like it. Scene in Court. Woman Breaks Down in Witness-Box. I Only Want to Tell the Truth.
When Daisy had recovered, Mr. Brownleigh pressed the matter no further. He went on to the arrest of the witness and Dr. Jaques, obtaining from her an admission that, during her subsequent questioning at the police station, no undue pressure had been exercised, and sat down.
Sir Henry Jervoise, a tall, lanky man with a monocle and quizzical eyes which could set suddenly into a pebbly and incredulous stare, vastly discomposing to opposition witnesses, rose to his feet. His first words sent another frisson through the Court.
“Miss Bland, forgive me if I ask you a personal question. You are deeply in love with the prisoner?”
“Yes.” She said it in a low voice, bowing her head, but it sounded thrilling and clear as a distant trumpet call.
“You are soon to become the mother of his child.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You would do nothing, willingly, to incriminate this man you love so deeply?” Sir Henry’s slight emphasis on the fifth word of this question indicated the line his questioning would take. He was going, not merely to grasp the nettle boldly, but turn it against the prosecution.
“Indeed I wouldn’t,” was Daisy’s answer; and again a tenderness breathed from her voice which for a moment turned the Court, the wigs and gowns, all the paraphernalia of the Law into an insubstantial pageant.
“I’m sure you wouldn’t. What is puzzling us all”—Sir Henry ran a confiding eye along the jury—“is how you came to make your statement to the police and the deposition before the magistrates—a statement so much more damaging to the man you love than the truth would have been.”
“You must not make speeches, Sir Henry,” interrupted Mr. Justice Prentiss with a dyspeptic primming of the lips.
“I am coming to the question, m’lord,” Sir Henry blandly remarked. Then, turning back to Daisy, “Would it be fair to say that you were trapped into making that statement?”
Mr. Brownleigh was on his feet, protesting.
“I will rephrase the question. When you made the statement you have since retracted, was it because you had been led to believe it was in the prisoner’s interests to do so?”
“He told me to.”
Sir Henry’s monocle dropped from his eye. “I beg your pardon? Who told you?”
“Dr. Jaques gave me a message from Hugo—from the prisoner—saying I was to tell that story.”
“Ah. I see.” Sir Henry gave a strong rendering of a man to whom abundant light has at last been vouchsafed. “And naturally you would do anything which Mr. Chesterman asked you to?”
“Yes.”
“You trusted Dr. Jaques implicitly?”
“Yes. He was our closest friend.”
“Would it surprise you to hear that Mr. Chesterman gave him no such message to pass on to you?” asked Sir Henry, after a pregnant pause to warn the jury that something important was coming.
“Yes. Well, perhaps not now.”
Sir Henry laboured the point no further. And just as well, thought Bruce Rogers, knowing how thin was the ice upon which Sir Henry had been cutting these fancy figures.
“Now, Miss Bland. After you and Dr. Jaques had failed to find the revolver, and been arrested, you made this statement to the police. Entirely of your own free will?”
“I was frightened. The Inspector said I’d be charged as an accomplice if I didn’t make a full confession which satisfied the police.”
“So it wasn’t altogether of your own free will?”
“Well, of course, I’d had that message from Hugo—”
“Yes, yes,” Sir Henry broke in swiftly. “And what happened next? After you’d signed the statement?”
“The Inspector said he’d make arrangements for me to stay at Southbourne. I had hardly any money.”
“To stay with Mrs. Chance?”
“Yes.”
“You knew that she had been till recently a Police Matron?”
“Yes. They told me so.”
Sir Henry’s eye twinkled. “Made you feel as if you were still under arrest?”
“Don’t lead the witness, Sir Henry,” said the Judge sternly.
“I apologise, m’Lud,” Counsel replied, in a far from apologetic tone. “Did you ask to see Mr. Chesterman?”
“Oh yes, sir. Several times. But they wouldn’t let me.”
“Did you try to get in touch with any of your relations, or friends?”
“No, sir. I wasn’t well. I didn’t want to see anyone except Hugo.”
“But the police doctor visited you?” Sir Henry faintly emphasised the word “police.” In these questions to Daisy, and later in his cross-examination of Crown witnesses, one line of the defence became clear. Sir Henry, using all the latitude which is commonly allowed to Defence Counsel in a capital trial, was aiming to suggest to the jury that, apart from her retracting of the deposition, Daisy Bland had given it under duress. The picture he wanted them to see was of a sick, desperate and innocent girl forced to make a false confession and incriminate her lover in order to escape being charged with murder; and then an unseemly scramble by the authorities to get an indictment before the girl retracted her statement, as well she might. Miss Bland had been virtually held incommunicado, under supervision of a police doctor and a retired police matron, thus cutting her off effectively from outside influence. Chesterman had been brought at once before the magistrates, in spite of the failure of any witness to identify him; and instead of formal evidence of arrest alone being given, as is normal, Miss Bland was hustled into Court the first moment her health permitted it, and taken through her statement by Treasury Counsel.
What all this implied, as Sir Henry would bring out in his closing speech, was that—since the authorities had made such extraordinary (and at times dubious) efforts to get the girl’s deposition, the Crown case, apart from her evidence, must self-admittedly be of the flimsiest. And it was Sir Henry’s contention that the jury were not entitled to treat as evidence one word of a deposition which had now been retracted.
Although he well knew that the verdict would depend upon the Judge’s direction on this point, Sir Henry contested every other one that offered him the least purchase. He got little change from the two Inspectors, who were old hands in the witness-box and flatly denied putting any undue pressure on Daisy Bland: he did, however, obtain an admission from Inspector Thorne that, after his arrest, the accused had stated he was in a cinema at the time of the murder. Sir Henry made great play with the failure of any Crown witness to identify Chesterman; but he had more trouble with a new witness—a holiday-maker who believed he could identify Daisy Bland as a woman he had seen under a lamp on the esplanade just at the time of the murder. When the medical evidence had been given, Sir Henry cross-examined the police doctor on Daisy’s condition in the Magistrates’ Court. He was seeking to impress upon the jury that Daisy had given her evidence there in a dazed, mechanical way suggestive of utter mental exhaustion, the result of pressure applied by the police. The doctor agreed she had been extremely agitated, and said he had recommended a rest owing to her condition: he, cautiously admitted that Daisy’s demeanour before the magistrates would not be inconsistent with the theory that her “confession” was in fact a false one. Re-examining the doctor, Mr. Brownleigh asked:
“Have you any reason to think that Miss Bland had actually undergone, as my learned friend seems to suggest, a brain-washing process?”
There was a small diversion while Counsel explained to the Judge the meaning of “brain-washing,” a phrase which Mr. Justice Prentiss professed himself unfamilar with. Then Mr. Brownleigh repeated the question, and the doctor replied:
“No. She was agitated. But in my opinion she knew perfectly well what she was saying.”
On the second day of the trial, after a few minor witnesses had been called, Dr. Jaques’s evidence was taken. Mr. Brownleigh took him through the events from his arrival in Southbourne with Mark Amberley, the day after the murder, to his second visit there and the search for the revolver. Mr. Brownleigh’s examination was puzzling to the general public, who knew nothing of the role Dr. Jaques had played in this affair: Sir Henry had leisure to admire the skill with which Mr. Brownleigh picked his way through what was a positive minefield; but he himself was in a difficult enough position, for if he attacked this witness on character, it would allow the prosecution to bring evidence proving Chesterman’s criminal record.
Discussing the case afterwards, Sir Henry said he had never, in a long acquaintance with the seamy side of life, come across a more utterly despicable human being than Dr. Jaques. When he rose to cross-examine, he fixed the witness with a long, cold stare which sufficiently indicated his contempt. Dr. Jaques met it in his own way—that look in his brown eyes, at once servile and impudent, masking a mind warped by its lust for power, for destruction. A deeper silence fell upon the Court, and it was noticed that the two warders in the dock moved closer to the prisoner.
“The accused man is your dearest friend, I believe?” Sir Henry began.
“I have known him well for some years.”
“And Miss Bland—she is a very dear friend of yours too?”
“Certainly.”
“You have been in communication with her fairly recently?”
“Yes.”
“Did you write to say, ‘I’m doing my best to help Hugo in everything’?”
“I don’t think I said quite that. I wrote that, if I could in any way assist him, I should be pleased to do so.”
“When you communicated to the police a confidential statement alleged to have been made to you by Miss Bland, was that for the purpose of assisting her and the accused?”
“I considered it my duty as a citizen to help the police when a murder had been committed.”
“Your duty as a citizen. I see. And did your conscience also direct you to tell the prisoner or Miss Bland, your dearest friends, that you had given the police this information?”
“I did not tell them. No.”
Sir Henry, replacing his monocle, stared distastefully at the witness. “On the day Chesterman was arrested, you had arranged to meet him in the buffet at Charing Cross station?”
“Yes.”
“It was your arrangement, not his?”
“Yes.”
“Was it to assist him?”
“Well, no.”
“Did anyone except him and yourself know about this rendezvous?”
“Yes, Inspector Thorne.”
“When you went to Charing Cross station, were you surprised to find the police turning up?”
“No.”
“Did the prisoner give you a letter to pass on to Miss Bland?”
For a moment, Dr. Jaques’s glib effrontery deserted him. This was clearly a question he had not expected. He glanced at the man in the dock; then, with an extraordinary quiver of the mouth which made him look, for an instant, like a torturer gloating, he replied:
“Yes, he did.”
“And what did you do with this letter.”
“I destroyed it.”
“Did you indeed? May I ask why?”
“Miss Bland was then under my medical care. She was in poor health, and I considered that the contents of the letter would be dangerously disturbing.”
“You read this private letter, then, before destroying it?”
“That is so.”
“And you formed the professional opinion that a proposal of marriage, made by the man she loved and whose child she was carrying, would endanger Miss Bland’s health?”
Dr. Jaques shrugged his shoulders.
“Answer my question,” said Sir Henry, scowling at him.
“It would have over-excited her, and raised false hopes.”
Sir Henry gave the jury an eloquent look. “Your solicitude for your patient was remarkable indeed, was it not?”
“Does that require an answer, too?”
“Your whole evidence so far has provided the answer. Now then: when the police arrested Chesterman at Charing Cross, did they go through the form of arresting you as well?”
“Yes.”
“Did that alarm you very much?”
“I had no reason to be alarmed.”
“Quite so. And when you went down to Southbourne with Miss Bland, you knew that you were going to show the police where the revolver was hidden?”
“No, I thought that she would unintentionally show the police where it had been hidden.”
“A fine distinction, Dr. Jaques. So you were not surprised to find the police were watching you both when you went down on to the beach?”
“No, I was not. When we couldn’t find the revolver, I thought she’d been fooling me.”
“At the station, the police went through a form of arrest?”
“I don’t know whether you could call it arrest.”
“Whatever term we apply to it, it came as a great shock to this poor girl?”
“Possibly.”
“A shock which, as her friend and medical adviser, you might have considered extremely dangerous to her health?”
Dr. Jaques was silent.
“You did not have time to break to this unhappy girl the news that she might be arrested?”
Looking full at Sir Henry, the witness deliberately replied, in the voice which Bruce Rogers was later to compare with barbed-wire hidden in a saucer of cream:
“I had the time, but no intention.”
Sir Henry indicated that he had no more questions to ask. Seldom has any witness left the box as thoroughly discredited as was Dr. Jaques now. It was clear that, on his evidence alone, the prisoner could never be convicted. But, though Jaques had been shown up in all his wellnigh incredible baseness, Daisy’s deposition before the magistrates remained intact: and, as Jaques, bowing to the Judge, left the witness-box, Sir Henry was aware of something damnable in his face and bearing—an expression he hardly troubled to conceal now, one of triumph, as if, mercilessly though he had been exposed, his real object was finally and irrefutably achieved.
After these exchanges, the trial ran its course less dramatically. The Prosecution closed its case that afternoon, and Sir Henry intimating that he would call no witness except the prisoner, the trial was adjourned till next day.
Hugo Chesterman was in the witness-box for three hours the following morning. His demeanour throughout remained calm, subdued, frank. While Sir Henry was taking him through his story, Hugo never faltered, and it was evident that he was making an unexpectedly good impression on the jury: from time to time now the jurymen allowed their eyes to dwell upon him, instead of, as heretofore, merely glancing at him in a furtive and flinching way. Sir Henry’s final question was, “I am going to ask you one thing more. Are you the man who murdered Inspector Stone on that night?”
“I am not,” Hugo emphatically replied.
When Mr. Brownleigh rose to cross-examine, however, the balance soon began tilting the other way. Patiently and dispassionately he drew the prisoner’s attention to the holes in his own defence, to small discrepancies and contradictions in his evidence, to the fantastic coincidences which it implied. Was it not an extraordinary thing, if he had really thrown away the parcel containing the rope on the night before the murder, that it should not have been discovered till the morning after it? Was it not strange that at the Magistrates’ Court he should not have mentioned his having been in a picture palace with his wife at the time of the murder? Was it not an extraordinary coincidence that a hat, purchased for him in Brighton, should have turned up near the scene of the crime? And that whoever shot Inspector Stone should have used a revolver of a pattern identical to Hugo’s? Was it not difficult to credit that an innocent man would, simply from fear of the police, take such trouble to remove fingerprints from his revolver and hide it?
So it went on, Mr. Brownleigh chipping away at Hugo’s story from this side and that, till it seemed like some plaster construction hollow and empty at the core. The impersonal way he went to work upon it was matched, almost throughout the cross-examination, by Hugo’s air of cool detachment: they might have been two experts discussing the merits of some abstract proposition, arguing keenly yet without personal animosity, politely agreeing to differ.
After lunch, Counsel made their closing speeches. Sir Henry arguing with all his skill and force that Daisy’s deposition at the Magistrates’ Court should be ruled as inadmissible at the present trial. Then Mr. Justice Prentiss summed up the evidence. He instructed the jury first in the legal definition of murder. It was very possible, he said, that the man who shot Inspector Stone had not intended to murder him: but if a person engaged in an unlawful enterprise fired at another person in order to facilitate his own escape, and the shot killed, the crime was murder. The judge pointed out the reasons why this should be so, and paid a tribute to the dead man’s devotion to duty. There was no direct evidence, he continued, that the prisoner was the man who had fired the fatal shot; but circumstantial rather than direct evidence was a feature of an overwhelming proportion of cases in which nevertheless the guilt of the accused had been sufficiently established. Whereas the Crown had produced no evidence of identification, the jury must equally bear in mind that the defence had brought forward no independent witnesses testifying to the prisoner’s alibi.
The prosecution had asked the jury to draw, from the prisoner’s conduct after the murder, the inference that such conduct was consistent only with his guilt. The prosecution’s case was based largely on the evidence of two witnesses, Daisy Bland and Dr. Jaques. Every citizen, said the Judge, who had knowledge of a crime, was in duty bound to inform the police: on the other hand, one could not extend approval to a man who had given the police information he had received as a trusted friend; and certainly Jaques should not have continued to take advantage of the prisoner’s confidence and Miss Bland’s, once he had communicated with the police. The defence had severely censured Dr. Jaques’s conduct, and also suggested that the police methods of obtaining evidence through him’ were improper: the Judge saw no justification for criticism of the police; and it was not Dr. Jaques, he reminded the jury, but Hugo Chesterman who was on trial. It was true that one could not have the same confidence in Dr. Jaques’s evidence which one would have had if it had been obtained in a different way. However, the jury were entitled to consider it in so far as it threw light upon the evidence of Miss Bland.
She had told two irreconcilable stories, one before the Magistrates, and the other in this Court. The original statement, made to the police, told against the prisoner. How the police had induced her to make it, was not clear. The jury would naturally dislike the idea of this young woman’s being in any way trapped—even into telling the truth: but they might well wonder what possible inducement or coercion the police could have employed which would make such a woman tell a false story against the man she loved. In this Court, Miss Bland had retracted her original statement, and given evidence supporting the prisoner’s alibi. It was for the jury to decide which of these two stories was the more credible.
Miss Bland had referred to the accused several times as her “husband,” though she was not in fact married. The Judge warned the jury to dismiss from their minds any prejudice they might have against the prisoner for leading an irregular life with Daisy Bland. On the other hand, they were entitled to take into consideration the letter which the accused had written to her, proposing marriage: bearing in mind that a wife must not give evidence against her husband, they might or might not draw certain conclusions from the prisoner’s having made this proposal when he did, a few days after the murder.
The Judge proceeded to remind the jury, at considerable length and with complete impartially, of the various other points of evidence. But, in Sir Henry’s view, the case was already lost; for Mr. Justice Prentiss had given no ruling that the jury must disregard Daisy’s deposition before the Magistrates: that he had not done so would give every justification for an appeal; and Sir Henry, detaching his mind from the Judge’s measured and droning exposition, applied it to the legal arguments he would bring up at the Court of Criminal Appeal.
The jury were out for only a quarter of an hour. They returned a verdict of Guilty. The prisoner once again protested his innocence. Then sentence of death was passed.