A Tale of Two Murders

“...hot blood begets hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love.’

‘Is this the generation of love? hot blood, hot thoughts, and hot deeds?’

From Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

THE QUESTION OF what was meant by the ‘wrong porridge’ was raised on the first day of the trial of Thompson and Bywaters, 6 December 1922, in the opening speech for the prosecution. The Solicitor General, Sir Thomas Inskip, quoted the relevant paragraph from Edith’s letter then said to the jury:

The unexpectedness of the passage, the inappropriateness of the passage as it stands, is startling. It will be for you to say whether the line of thought that was in Mrs Thompson’s mind was that the existence of her husband was a bar to the happiness she thought she could attain.

When her own counsel, Walter Frampton, quoted the passage at Edith and asked to what it referred, she replied: ‘I really cannot explain.’

The damage was instant and very deep. Frampton attempted to mitigate it with further questions, which did not improve matters particularly.

‘The suggestion here is that you had from time to time put things into your husband’s porridge, glass for instance?’

‘I had not done so.’

‘Can you give us any explanation of what you had in your mind when you said you had the wrong porridge?’

‘Except we [she and Bywaters] had suggested or talked about that sort of thing and I had previously said, “Oh yes, I will give him something one of these days”.’

At this point Mr Justice Shearman intervened, for once with good cause. ‘Do you mean’, he asked Edith, ‘that you had talked about poison?’ She replied: ‘I did not mean anything in particular.’ To Frampton she said: ‘We had talked about making my husband ill,’ and he resumed:

‘How had you come to talk about making your husband ill?’

‘We were discussing my unhappiness.’

‘Did that include your husband’s treatment of you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now you say you probably said that you would give him something?’

‘I did.’

‘Did you ever give him anything?’

‘Nothing whatever.’

But one can see, reading this exchange, why Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett had done everything in his power to try to stop Edith Thompson from testifying in her own defence.

There is no way of knowing the truth about the ‘wrong porridge’. But the point is that Edith could have explained it away, if she could have admitted to the attempts at self-abortion. She could have explained a great deal away – not quite everything – by saying that she was trying to end a pregnancy, or possibly to avoid one. Instead she had to answer as above.

Whether she did, in fact, put an abortifacient in the porridge then give it to Percy by mistake is open to question. For a start, the defence proved that Mrs Lester made the porridge at 41 Kensington Gardens. ‘I never knew Mrs Thompson make it,’ she said. She had been specifically recalled in order to emphasize that point. Before her husband died in May 1922, she made breakfast for him ‘and Mr Thompson used to have a plate of porridge out of it. One time he took a fancy to porridge and I said to Mrs Thompson, “don’t you trouble to make it; I will make enough for the two” and I made it with Mr Lester’s.’

She added: ‘Sometimes Mrs Thompson would have it as well as Mr Thompson.’ The defence was showing that Edith had scant opportunity to poison a substance under Mrs Lester’s charge; a point that was naturally ignored, but that also makes it less likely that Edith should have dosed the porridge, and furthermore managed to mix up the bowls. It is not impossible. Putting a drug into the stuff was just feasible. Putting glass into it, as the prosecution would allege, was out of the question; which the defence, in its tip-toeing and nervous way, made clear; but nothing like clear enough.

Most likely of all, one would say, the entire episode had been invented by Edith. This was the contention of Curtis-Bennett. Yet it does not quite account for her answers, in which she seems both to deny and not deny that something had happened. She had not tried to poison her husband’s porridge, but she could not explain what she had done. Which brings one back to the attempts to miscarry: the thing that must not be told.

The fact is, however, that this paragraph about the porridge was the first of many of its kind in Edith’s letters, not all of which could have related to the need to terminate a pregnancy. Even after the miscarriage in January – soon after it – the letters were full of such references, punctuating the text like a litany, breaking through with the gentle insistence of waves. ‘Darlint – You must do something this time – I’m not really impatient – but opportunities come and go by – they have to – because I’m helpless and I think and think and think – perhaps – it will never come again.’ Even if the miscarriage could have been admitted to in court, that would not have been the end of the matter; the lie about it was the first twist of the rope that made all the others feel inevitable, but in that courtroom they probably were inevitable. If there could have been openness about that one event – if the letter detailing the miscarriage had been put in evidence, instead of being anxiously pushed to one side by Curtis-Bennett – then a kind of maturity and understanding might have permeated the whole business. But that was precisely what was never going to happen.

All the complexity of Edith Thompson was poured into those letters, and over the course of eleven months – between November 1921 and October 1922 – the pattern that she wove of facts, fantasy and falsehoods still defies disentanglement. Nobody knows what she meant by much of what she wrote. Her gift – a writer’s gift – for creating alternative scenarios means that the letters float forever in a beautiful occlusion, striped occasionally with clarity. Their mystery, as well as their loveliness, is enduring. Certainly there was no elucidation at the Old Bailey. ‘What is your meaning here?’ the solicitor general asked their creator, quoting yet another sentence, but the context of the trial was too far removed from the one in which the letters had been written; no real answer could be given within that limited sphere.

She tried to obfuscate, but her questioners too were fundamentally in the dark. They worked backwards from the fact that a murder had been committed, which was only right, but their line of travel did not lead to enlightenment: it swerved and circumvented and lurched about as if in a London fog. In the case of the defence, its desperate manoeuvres were intended to dodge the multiplicity of incriminating remarks that Edith had made – to find explanations, to assemble little theories, to nudge her by any means possible on to a grass verge of safety – whereas the prosecution did the opposite, doggedly picking up every scattered phrase and sentence, gathering them together until they accumulated into a sign marked Guilty.

None of it had much to do with truth, but then what is truth? A man had died, justice was required. The letters, which formed almost the entirety of the evidence against Edith Thompson, made something else as well: a narrative that could be followed, as long as one knew what to look for: a countdown to murder.

‘Darlingest boy, its Wednesday now,’ wrote Edith on 25 January 1922, ‘the last for posting to Marseilles.

‘I’ll be thinking & thinking, wishing such a lot of things tomorrow – late – when I shall know you have arrived. You will help me darlint you won’t fail me this time.’

She was feeling ‘bucked’ as she put it; recalling Freddy’s last leave, in which they had spent Saturday the 14th playing with snowballs in the slushy grey streets, having drinks in a ‘low common place’ in the City and buying sweets – ‘I know you called me “fast” & the man in the confectioners thought I was terrible spending all your money & darlint I will be terrible, when you have a lot of money for me to spend.’ How innocent she sounded, like a grown-up child; as she did a couple of days later, when she sent one of her ‘birthday’ greetings on the 27th.

This letter was not put in evidence. It referred to Percy only once, directly, mentioning that they had gone out to the Birnages a few streets away – ‘for a hand of cards. They were very nice, but the strain of keeping out family matters (owing to the rift with Lily) was rather trying.’ That was her ordinary life with her husband, the tamely enjoyable evenings with other couples, the silly niggling friction with in-laws: the façade, as one might say, although it was a little more than that. It was a life, this chain of events that she took part in with Percy. It was not leading anywhere or up to anything, but was simply the circular round of marriage; this chain never broke, it was still in place on the night of the murder, which happened after just such another outing to the theatre, where the Thompsons were described – as they always were by those who saw them – as a happy couple, a normal couple.

Yet a couple of weeks later there was this, in a letter sent to Aden dated 10 February: evidence again.

... we had words – in bed – Oh you know darlint – over that same old subject and he said – it was all through you I’d altered.

I told him if he ever again blamed you to me for any difference there might be in me, I’d leave the house that minute and this is not an idle threat.

She may not have actually said this. The noble stance was not quite Edith; although what followed must be true, in some measure at least.

About 2am. he woke me up and asked for water as he felt ill I got it for him and asked him what the matter was and this is what he told me – whether its the truth I dont know or whether he did it to frighten me, anyway it didnt He said – someone he knows in town... had given him a prescription for a draught for insomnia and he’d had it made up and taken it and it made him ill. He certainly looked ill and his eyes were glassy. I’ve hunted for the said prescription everywhere and cant find it and asked him what he had done with it and he said the chemist kept it

I told Avis about the incident only I told her as if it frightened and worried me as I thought perhaps it might be useful at some future time that I had told somebody

What do you think, darlint His sister Maggie came in last night and he told her, so now there are two witnesses, altho’ I wish he hadn’t told her – but left me to do it

It would be so easy darlint – if I had things – I do hope I shall

How about cigarettes?

Have enclosed cuttings of Dr Wallis’s case It might prove interesting darlint, I want to have you only I love you so much try and help me

PEIDI

Dr Wallis was the man whose lover’s husband was found poisoned; the coincidence of somebody, whom Edith knew quite well, becoming involved in a situation so like her own was inevitably exciting to her. As for Percy: she did not show an excess of sympathy for her husband, but then why would she? She thought him a hypochondriac, and the post-mortem on his body (fatty deposits aside) confirmed her opinion. She probably also thought that he was trying to frighten her. He had an array of tricks, poor man, designed to get her attention if nothing else. The reference to Avis, however... Mr Justice Shearman read it out in his summing-up on Monday 11 December, thus:

‘“I told Avis about the incident only I told her” (look at these words) – “as if it frightened and worried me” – not that it had frightened her, but she pretended it to convey that, and you will have to consider in a good many of these things whether she was genuine or acting.’

Along with the Daily Sketch about Dr Wallis, Edith had sent a couple of other newspaper cuttings; for instance an extract from the Sunday Pictorial headlined ‘Poison Chocolates for University Chief’. In a case straight out of early Golden Age detective fiction – not Edith’s style, she preferred romance – the vice-chancellor of Oxford University was sent chocolates ‘filled with ground glass and what is believed to be an insidious form of Indian poison’.

The judge cited the headline from this cutting, then said, in his scrupulous little way: ‘I only allude to it because somebody else alluded to it.’ The ‘somebody else’ was the prosecution: far fewer allusions were made to any point raised by the defence.

In fact, as Detective Sergeant John Hancock told the Old Bailey, there were ‘some fifty enclosures’ sent by Edith, ‘referring to a variety of subjects. Of these cuttings about ten referred to cases which were more or less in the public eye at the time.’ So the extracts relating to ‘The Poisoned Curate’ and ‘Poisoned Chocolates’, to ‘Drugs for Brother in Hospital’ and ‘Girl’s Drug Injection’, were outnumbered around four to one by those such as ‘Battle of Calves and Ankles’, ‘The Wedding Season’ and ‘Do Women Fail as Friends’; these latter cuttings, the lifestyle or women’s page extracts, what the judge referred to as ‘scraps’, were listed by DS Hancock but not put in as evidence: only the scraps about poison made it that far.

A week later, in a letter dated 22 February, she wrote that she was ill again: ‘only with a cold tho... I caught it from him.’ Oh, him – ! the inevitable and immutable him, who refused to sleep in the spare bedroom because that meant giving way, and thus gave her his cold. Then – because his moods were so variable, and because he did care for the wife whom he also sort of hated – ‘you mustn’t laugh I was given my breakfast in bed’. And then, another mood: he cornered Miss Prior at Edith’s place of business and asked what time they finished work each day.

During this visit Percy had seen a little bronze monkey that Edith kept on her desk, a gift from Freddy. Now in full-blown officious mood, he asked for Freddy’s address – wrote it in his ‘note book’ like a policeman – ‘he also said “Have you anything whatever belonging to him – anything mind you” (I knew he meant our monkey).’ Naturally Edith denied this:

it wasn’t a lie was it, because the monkey belongs to us doesn’t it and not to you or to me, and if it was a lie I dont care, I’d tell heaps and heaps and heaps to help you even tho I know you don’t like them...

Darlint, do you think I like telling them, do you think I don’t hate it, darlint I do hate this life I lead...

Darlingest boy, the thing I am going to do for both of us will it ever – at all, make any difference between us, darlint, do you understand what I mean Will you ever think any the less of me – not now, I know darlint – but later on – perhaps some years hence – do you think you will feel any different – because of this thing that I shall do...

Im not hesitating darlint – through fear of any consequences of the action, dont think that but I’d sooner go on in the old way for years and years and years and retain your love and respect.

Evidence again.

Sorry that Ive got to remain inactive for more than another whole month, and I had thought by that time I should be seeing you for just as long and every time you wanted me However, for that glorious state of existence I suppose we must wait for another three or four months Darlint, I am glad you succeeded Oh so glad I cant explain, when your note came I didn’t know how to work at all – all I kept thinking of was of your success – and my ultimate success I hope.

I suppose it isnt possible for you to send it to me – not at all possible, I do so chafe at wasting time darlint...

Obviously, this time, Edith was not pregnant.

Therefore this letter was not easily susceptible to explanation.

‘The meaning of that is for you to judge,’ said Mr Justice Shearman to the jury; ‘you will fully understand it is not for me to tell you what the letters mean; you are the judges of that, not I; there is no law about it whatever.’ A remarkable statement, the last one. What on earth did it mean? What were they all doing there, analysing these barely comprehensible letters, if there was no law to guide them? There was, however, legal opinion – or at any rate opinion from a legal brain. The judge had plenty of it, as for instance in reference to Edith’s line about ‘the thing I am going to do for both of us’. He told the jury: ‘It is said that the meaning of that is, “If I poison him is it going to make any difference to you afterwards”; that is what is suggested is the plain meaning of the words.’

There was no plain meaning to the words whatsoever: the judge had interpreted them, that was all. But in the absence of plain meaning, and in that courtroom, he had been pretty much bound to do so.

On 6 March, a letter not put in at the trial referred again to the miscarriage. ‘I suppose I have been ill probably more so than I thought but I wouldnt give way because I wanted to keep that illness all to ourselves thinking that helped to keep me up.’ She alluded to her periods, which had started again on 26 February: ‘I did feel really ill darlint, I think it was worse than before what happened... I didnt stop away from 168 [work] because I thought of your letters and I knew they would forward them to 41 [home] if I was not there so I managed to get in every morning & went early...’ It can’t have been easy, making that journey to Aldersgate Street – not long, but complicated and gruelling, like most commutes – making herself attractive as both she and the world demanded of her, pushing her body, depleted and anaemic as it now was, through the cold (1922 was a cold year – snow in April), smiling on and dancing through. Somebody to talk to would have made it better. As much as anything, that was what Freddy Bywaters was all about, yet it was because of him that she could not talk to anybody else – particularly her sister. And was she, really, talking to Freddy Bywaters? Yes and no. She was expressing herself, through writing; his response was important to her but it was not the whole of the matter; she had no idea, much of the time, what his response could possibly be. What she wanted was a response identical to her own. But Freddy was an interpreter, like the judge.

And what he also read was that her life went on: she went to a show at the Palace Theatre, to a dance with friends at Shoreditch Town Hall (‘he came too’), to Percy’s office to help with his accounts, to other friends in Tulse Hill with the Graydons for a hand of whist. All this normality and competence and a certain amount of fun – ‘I enjoyed it dancing with Reg and Mr. Philpot’ – and at the same time, all this other: ‘darlint longing much more for you to be here to see you, for you to hold me so tight I cant breathe.’

It was not long until another leave. ‘Oh darlint, even the looking forward hurts,’ she wrote on 14 March – ‘does it you? every time I think of Friday and onwards my inside keeps turning over and over – all my nerves seems like wires continually quivering.’ By this time the Morea was at Plymouth, the man was imminent: no feeling quite like that one. Edith told her husband that she had written to Freddy, asking him not to try to see her during this leave. A lie, naturally. On Friday 17 March the lovers met for the first time, then intermittently over the next fortnight. There is the faintest sense that this leave was disappointing to Edith – how could it not be, when the Freddy of her imaginings was now a creation some seven months old, and had acquired such substance? She had forgotten, for instance, that he had a life beyond her control. Again she asked to see the letters sent by the ‘Australian girl’: ‘I did not look at them – except at a small slip of paper...’ This unknown girl on the other side of the world became a pawn in their game, a means to keep their desire for each other topped up to the brim. Freddy wielded the weapon, Edith reacted; Freddy laid down his arms, Edith relaxed; and for a moment equilibrium was achieved.

‘I do like to hear you reassure me,’ she wrote at the end of March, while he was actually in England. ‘I like you to write it – so that I can see it in black and white... its just a vain feeling I have to hear you say things to me – nice things – ‘

She had read his letter – the one that reassured her – at quarter to six that morning. She had slept on it unopened. Edith, Percy and Freddy’s words, all in the same bed.

Then the leave suddenly bloomed, on the very last night – Thursday 30 March – and in a letter dated 1 April Edith wrote as if in raging disbelief, that what had suddenly become magical again had been snatched away from her. As ever there was no attempt to hide what she felt, to play it cool. She was above that.

‘I was fighting all night long to keep your thoughts with me darlint I felt all the time you were not with me – didnt want to be... I cried and cried and cried, until I eventually went to sleep, but I had heard the clock strike five before I did so...’

Percy was beside her throughout this sleepless night of longing for Freddy. It is hard not to think that he was aware of Edith’s restless, voluptuous misery, and it was directly afterwards that Lily Vellender, her friend at work, told her of a dream in which Percy wanted to murder her: ‘as he had found out that I had been away from home for a night with a fair man (her expression).’ As Lily must have suspected, this was what had happened – very nearly – on the last night of Freddy’s leave. Nearly but not quite. Something had held Edith back – the proscriptions of her class, the fear of entering reality – and had held Freddy back also; it was almost as though he too had become addicted to frustration. But the hours of passionate unsated congress were still heaving through her body as she wrote:

About that Thursday – had there been anywhere to stop in Ilford – I should have said, “Take me there, I won’t go home”, and you would have said, “Yes I will” but darlint before we had arrived at the Hotel, I should have thought about things and so would you and I can hear you say just when we reach the door “Peidi, you’re going home” pour moi just this once darlint and I should have gone.

Darlint you’re not and never will be satisfied with half and I don’t ever want to give half – all of every ounce of me that lives to you...

Darlingest boy you said to me “Say no Peidi, say No” on Thursday didn’t you – but at that very moment you didn’t wish me to say “No” did you? You felt you wanted all me in exchange for all you. I knew this – felt this – and wouldn’t say “No” for that very reason.

Half an hour afterwards or perhaps even ten minutes afterwards you’d really have wanted me to say “No” but not at that especiall moment.

Darlint I feel that I never want to withhold anything from you if you really want it and one of these days youre going to teach me to give all and everything quite voluntarily arent you? Please darlint.

What erotic power this woman had – ! and how fearsomely strong this lack of fulfilment made it. Freddy could never get enough of Edith because, quite simply, he never got enough of her. It was all very well to cavort in seaport brothels with prostitutes who knew every trick in the book, to have sex like a heedless pagan; but with Edith, whose sensual gift gleamed like jet from beneath veils of inexperience, innocence, conventionality, residual shame – who had to be uncovered, trapped, instructed in how to enjoy her gift to the full, and who could so seldom be any of those things... At times the sheer difficulty of the whole affair made Freddy Bywaters want to chuck it, but more often the desire to win this particular game was uppermost. He was full of self-love, taut with masculinity, and everything that he felt was charged to the height. Whereas Edith’s emotions were modulated, his were not. He was sharp and keen as a weapon. She seems never to have feared her ability to handle him, and in a way his youth made him malleable, but at the same time it was a little like owning a pet wolf. Thrilling, of course.

And then there was the other man: him. He too was dangerous in his heavier, more ponderous, bear-like way.

‘He knows or guesses something,’ she wrote, in a letter not used in evidence dated 4 April,

how much or how little I cant find out. When I got home & went upstairs I found him not there.

As I was getting into bed a car drew up outside & he came in looking, well you know how with that injured air of mystery on his face attempted to kiss me and then moved away with the expression “Phew – drink”. He had been to a Theatre – he had a programme – what I imagine is – waited for me on the 11.30 found I wasn’t on it & caught the next – of course was surprised to find me home. If he has any sense he could easily put 2 and 2 together. Your last night last time & your last night this time – I went to a theatre on both occasions.

By which she meant that she had pretended to go to the theatre on 30 March, and had in fact spent the evening with Freddy Bywaters. Which Percy knew only too well. He had put two and two together. He also made a good guess at where his wife had gone that Thursday night; having pretended to be at the theatre with her school friend Bessie Akam, whose husband was away, she most likely spent part of the evening with Freddy at Bessie’s house. Whether or not Bessie was there too, whether or not their sexual fumblings took place there or outdoors, another person was in on their secret. Bessie could be trusted – she was a friend to Edith up to the end – but still the network of deception was growing, as it always does.

I said “A remark you passed at tea time about Bess what do you mean by it I want to know.” He “You want to know do you – well you shant you can just imagine how much I know & how much I dont & I hope you’ll feel uncomfortable about it”

I’m afraid I let go then & said several things in haste perhaps it would have been better had I held my tongue & finished up with “Go to Hell” – you can only keep good tempered when you – getting what you want a case of sugar for the bird & he sings. I was told I was the vilest tempered girl living & “you used not to be, but you’re under a very good tutor”...

‘Oh,’ she wrote of her husband, ‘it’s a rotten spirit.’

This was the first weekend in April: ‘how I got through Sunday I dont know living with banging doors & sour silent faces will turn me grey.’ A couple of days earlier Freddy had returned to Norwood before sailing, and had his almighty row with his mother. The people around the pair were becoming obstacles at every turn. Mr Graydon was asking tentatively if Freddy had fallen out with Percy, Avis was prodding crudely, hinting that Freddy saw other women (‘he was always knocking about with some girl or other before he knew me, and now he doesn’t see me and he probably does the same’), Mrs Bywaters was telling Freddy to cut ‘that woman’ out of his life, Percy was using all his limited resources to make Edith a facsimile, at least, of a proper wife. But opposition is a friend to love, just as prohibition is a friend to passion. The idea that people can be persuaded out of an attachment is simply absurd. The only thing that really works is allowing it to run its course. And in this case, where constant separation meant that the affair never became everyday, its spark might drop to a smoulder but it would not go out; because dreams of what their lives could be, which Edith Thompson experienced so intensely, and communicated with such intensity to Frederick Bywaters, would always re-ignite it.

And Edith, that virtuoso of the imagination, had many tunes to play on this particular theme.

‘Don’t keep this piece,’ she wrote, in her letter of 1 April.

‘About the Marconigram, do you mean one saying Yes or No, because I shant send it darlint I’m not going to try any more until you come back.

‘I made up my mind about this last Thursday’

Then she described a visit to Percy’s mother in Manor Park: ‘he puts great stress,’ she wrote,

on the fact of the tea tasting bitter “as if something had been put in it” he says. Now I think whatever else I try it in again will still taste bitter he will recognize it and be more suspicious still and if the quantity is still not successful it will injure any chance I have of trying when you come home

Do you understand?

There followed a passage in reply to Freddy’s last letter, in which he mentioned a man called Dan:

Darlint, don’t trust him. I don’t mean don’t tell him anything because I know you never would. What I mean is don’t let him be suspicious of you regarding that – because if we were successful in the action – darlint circumstances may afterwards make us want many friends or helpers and we must have no enemies – or even people that know a little too much. Remember the saying, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”.

What this referred to is unclear.

I wish we had not got electric light. It would be easy.

I’m going to try the glass again occasionally when it is safe I’ve got an electric light globe this time.

In the closing speech for the prosecution, the solicitor general stated: ‘I am bound to say to you that this letter of 1st April is one that deals entirely with this idea now occupying so much of her attention, that her husband must be got rid of. The passage is full of crime.’

During questioning about the letter, Exhibit 17, Freddy Bywaters testified to the Old Bailey that he had given quinine to Edith during his leave in March 1922. ‘It was in the form of 5 gram tabloids, white.’ It is possible that ‘Dan’ was involved in obtaining this quinine; if of course the statement was true. Asked why he had given the drug to Edith, he replied that she had talked frequently of wanting to commit suicide and had badgered him for some means. He chose quinine because, with that particular substance, ‘I knew she could not hurt herself.’

It has been suggested that this quinine was really wanted as an abortifacient – which is scarcely possible, given that Edith had only recently miscarried – or possibly as a contraceptive; also unlikely, given Freddy’s nervousness about having full sex (‘say no, Peidi’) during that March leave. In fact there was another explanation for the ‘quinine’, offered by Freddy a couple of weeks before his death.

During his cross-examination by the solicitor general, he was asked about Edith’s reference to the tea tasting bitter. ‘What did you understand by the passage?’

‘That she had taken quinine and it had tasted bitter.’

The solicitor general, exaggeratedly patient, read the sentence again and said as to a recalcitrant child: ‘To whom did it taste bitter?’

‘Mrs Thompson.’

‘Do you suggest that, Bywaters?’

‘I do.’

Walter Frampton, asking Edith about the incident, asked simply:

‘Was there ever any time when your husband complained to his mother about the tea tasting bitter?

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Was this an imaginary incident then that you were recording?’

‘Yes.’

On 5 April Edith replied to a letter received on Saturday 1st, her half-day at work, which must have been written just before Freddy sailed:

I was prepared to wait till next Monday to hear from my own man, but at 12.15 just as I was going to leave your letter came. It bucked me up such a lot I thought to myself well it will help me to get thro the ‘inevitable weekend’ & it did help me darlint...

Darlint that ache which you and I share & you speak about – not a sharp stabbing pain that lets you know it is there & then gone – but just a numb feeling a feeling of inactivity like a blind that is never more than half raised just enough to torment you with the sight of a tiny bit of light & sunshine.

Freddy had described the row with his mother and sister, and asked if it worried Edith, which it did: ‘after all darlint – but for me it never would have happened I’m always the cause of pain to you & perhaps to myself as well but always to you ever since you knew me you’ve never really been happy & perhaps had you known me less you might have been.’

She was surely hoping for a denial when she wrote this, and she probably got one. Nevertheless it was true, and they probably both knew it.

I’d like you to tell me darlint just how you feel when you move out of dock – what are your thoughts when you begin to move when you must realise that you’re not on England... You told me you were sailing about 2 & about that time I began thinking how you were feeling if you were hopeful and not too downhearted & I thought about everything connected with the last fortnight, some things I was sorry about & some things pleased. How did you feel?

It was a pity that this letter was not part of the evidence. There was no ‘crime’ in it. It was devoid of crime. Instead there was Browning – ‘What poet was it who wrote “Oh to be in England now Spring is here” I wish he were alive and feeling as miserable as f – the snow was falling as she wrote, ‘thick lumps’. There was talk of leaving the country: ‘you know I could do practically anything to earn just enough to keep myself for a little while.’ There were books, The Shulamite and The Woman Deborah – ‘I await your remarks’ – there was Turkish Delight, ‘much better than the last lot’, there was a woman who came into Carlton & Prior who told Edith that she hadn’t aged in five years, ‘but I’m sure by the way she said it, she doesn’t think it.’ It was an ordinary letter, or as ordinary as Edith could be. So too was the one dated 12 April, written at speed before the firm closed for the Easter break. ‘We’re fearfully busy here – I was here till 7 the last 2 nights & still we have such a lot to do before the holidays.’ It was a love letter; nothing more.

But what was read at the Old Bailey was this, from the 24th:

‘I used the “light bulb” three times but the third time – he found a piece – so I’ve given up – until you come home.’

The solicitor general, cross-examining Freddy Bywaters, asked:

‘What did you understand by that passage?’

He answered: ‘She had been lying to me again.’

‘She had been what?’

‘Lying to me, lying.’

‘What did you understand the lie was?’

‘It was melodrama on her part, trying to persuade me that she had taken broken glass.’

Again, therefore, Freddy was insisting upon Edith’s declared desire to kill herself, as an explanation for her words. Again, as one restraining his formidable incredulity, the solicitor general read out the sentence about the light bulb, then said:

‘You understand she meant her husband had detected her in an attempt to commit suicide?’

He was unfazed, prepared to push his own lack of logic to a logical end.

‘Yes.’

‘ “So I have given up till you come home.” Do you suggest that she was going to wait for your arrival home in order that you might cooperate with her in committing suicide?’

‘I might give her something more, more quinine.’

‘That would be a strange idea to you, Bywaters, if that is right?’

‘Yes; I do not know her idea.’

And that, at least, was the truth, unlike everything else that he had said.

The Easter holiday was not as bad as Edith had been fearing, or pretending to fear; mainly because of the presence of her parents, with whom she always felt safe, and Avis, whose enduring interest in Freddy both irritated her and piqued her vanity. She related the events in the letter of 24 April: tea dancing at the Waldorf on Thursday the 13th, then clothes shopping with Avis; spring cleaning on Good Friday followed by a concert at the East Ham Palace, Mr Graydon’s treat; Edith’s repayment on Saturday at the Ilford Hippodrome, where the ghost of Freddy hovered like Banquo. His ex-girlfriend Molly sat behind her and a music hall song entitled ‘He makes me all fussed up’ put him into her mind – was it part of his repertoire? ‘Of course Avis remarked about you and the song...’ Avis, poor handmaiden Avis, stayed in Ilford for the rest of Easter – sleeping with Edith in the marital bed, where Percy brought them both a cup of tea...

Also, this happened.

Bye the way – what is “Aromatic Tincture of Opium” – Avis drew my attention to a bottle sealed in the medicine chest in your room [that is to say, the spare bedroom].

I took possession of it and when he missed it and asked me for it – I refused to give it him – he refuses to tell me where he got it and for what reason he wants it – so I shall keep it till I hear from you.

The incident, which took place on Easter Monday, was described more fully by Avis at the Old Bailey. Percy had hit his finger with a hammer when the two of them were out in the garden, knocking apart the case of the grand piano; he asked his sister-in-law to go upstairs and find a bottle of what he called ‘New Skin’. That was when she saw the opium, about half a pint of it. She went down to tell Edith, advised her sister to ‘nip up and get it’, and on returning the New Skin found that the opium had been removed by Edith from the chest. It was standing on the sideboard in the drawing-room. Avis told the court:

‘I said, “I will do away with this, so there can be no more trouble”, and I took the bottle and went to the scullery and poured the contents of the bottle down the sink. I then put the bottle in the fire in the morning room.’

Opium was taken for heart problems, which Percy believed himself to suffer from, and it may be that this bottle of medicine was what had caused the episode in February, when he woke his wife complaining of illness. If Avis did indeed pour the stuff away, perhaps she had thought to avoid a repeat of this event (which Edith had told her about). Perhaps she believed that opium was in part responsible for Percy’s erratic behaviour towards her sister. She knew that something was wrong in the marriage – why, for instance, was she helping the man to smash up a piano case, while Edith sat indoors by the fire? – and her opinion of Percy was not high; at the same time she knew that something was going on between her sister and Freddy Bywaters, that Percy had cause to sulk or be angry; that the situation was, in fact, extremely loaded. To imagine that she feared the presence of opium in the house, that either of the Thompsons might use it against the other, sounds absurd. Yet the newspapers were full of tales of domestic poisonings – the solicitor Herbert Armstrong had just gone on trial for dosing his wife with arsenic – and of deaths from drug use, as Edith’s collection of cuttings went to show. In some vague, unacknowledged way, Avis may have felt that it was simply better to get rid of the opium. Her instincts were right, although – as so often with these things – she would not really have believed them to be.

Incidentally if Avis’s evidence was true, that she poured the opium away, then Edith’s claim – that she ‘took possession of it’ – was a lie, a piece of fantasy. Written for Freddy.

In her letter of 1 May, Edith described being ill yet again. It was as though the miscarriage, and the absence of recovery time, had removed her resilience. This time she had a sore throat and Tve got practically no voice at all – just a little very high up, squeak.’

Then she wrote: About those fainting fits darlint, I don’t really know what to say to you.’ This was her menstrual cycle once again, obstinately refusing to give her peace.

I’m beginning to think it’s the same as before – they always happen 1st thing in the morning – when I’m getting up and I wasn’t as ill as I should have been last time [her period in April], altho’ I was a little – but not as usual.

What shall I do about it darlint, if it is the same this month – please write and tell me I want to do just what you would like.

I still have the herbs.

These, of course, were the remainder of whatever Edith had used to induce a miscarriage (not quinine, therefore). The trial was not told this, although it was almost impossible not to infer it. But if Edith really believed that she had fallen pregnant again on the evening of 30 March, her ignorance was surely remarkable. From her description it is clear that the sexual act was incomplete; it was not unusual that her cycle should have been disrupted, and the fainting fits so typical of endometriosis had happened before, for example in November 1921. It was almost as though she wanted Freddy to think that she was carrying a baby – his baby – or perhaps she did indeed believe it. If so, she seems also to have believed, with that odd inconsequence she could display, that the herbs would work as before. Later in the letter she told Freddy about the Bournemouth holiday being planned for 8 July, during which she presumably did not expect to be nearly four months pregnant.

While Avis was over last night he asked her to come with us. The suggestion was nothing to do with me – it was his entirely and altho’ I wouldn’t have suggested such a thing for the world – I’m glad – because if things are still the same and we do go – a third party helps to make you forget that you always lead the existence we do.

But this letter was hopping with plans for things not to be the same.

I don’t think we’re failures in other things and we mustn’t be in this. We mustn’t give up as we said. No, we shall have to wait if we fail again. Darlint, Fate can’t always turn against us and if it is we must fight it – You and I are strong now We must be stronger. We must learn to be patient.

It was the language of Lady Macbeth – we fail? – but she, after all, had only been urging her husband to do something he already wanted to do. And here? What had Freddy Bywaters written, to make Edith respond in this geeing-up, screw your courage to the sticking point manner?

‘Why was it so emphatically said “She incited Bywaters”?’ it is obvious her letters were answers to questions.’ So wrote Avis Graydon to the prime minister, Andrew Bonar Law, on 30 December 1922.

This, on 1 May, was not exactly an answer to a question, but it was plain enough that it was a reply of sorts.

You said it was enough for an elephant. Perhaps it was. But you don’t allow for the taste making only a small quantity to be taken. It sounded like a reproach was it meant to be?

Darlint I tried hard – you won’t know how hard – because you weren’t there to see and I can t tell you all – but I did – I do want you to believe I did for both of us.

The following day she received another letter, and resumed her own, again in part-reply.

I was buoyed up with the hope of the “light bulb” and I used a lot – big pieces too – not powdered – and it has no effect – I quite expected to be able to send that cable – but no – nothing has happened from it and now your letter tells me about the bitter taste again. Oh darlint, I do feel so down and unhappy.

Wouldn’t the stuff make small pills coated together with soap and dipped in liquorice powder – like Beechams – try while you’re away. Our Boy had to have his thumb operated on because he had a piece of glass in it that’s what made me try that method again – but I suppose as you say he’s not normal, I know I shall never get him to take a sufficient quantity of anything bitter...

‘Have you,’ the solicitor general asked Bywaters, ‘any doubt that you understand that to mean the husband?’

To which he replied firmly: T did not understand that.’

‘To whom did you understand it referred?’

‘Perhaps she had made a mistake in the words.’

‘And meant “me”?’

‘Yes.’

‘ “I know I shall never get ‘myself to take a sufficient quantity of anything bitter”. Is that how you read it?’

‘Yes; she did not like the taste of quinine.’

It was a valiant defence, and it did neither of them any good. As much as anything, it was this very valour that helped to convince people that Freddy Bywaters was Edith’s plaything, not a pet wolf but a bright-eyed retriever, following at her unworthy heels.

On 15 May Edith wrote again, a very different kind of letter. She told Freddy about her racing bets; about Percy being made a commission agent for the Sun Life insurance company by his friend Sidney Birnage; about trying on mourning hats at Carlton & Prior, breaking the cheval glass on her dressing table, the swinging pendulum of luck. She wrote, as usual, of the books that they had been reading, discussing the characters as if they were not merely real but she had entered their reality: ‘I love Maria and I admired Deborah.’ Then, in a delicious sisterly snap:

I don’t know whether Avis liked the books or not – but if you asked her why she did or did not she couldn’t say, could she do you think – she couldn’t discuss each character as we do – she wouldn’t remember enough about them – she would only remember the general theme of the book – so why ask?

Edith would never feel herself inferior to Avis – she knew that she was not – but Avis had the one thing that she did not: freedom. It was her sister’s sole card in the game that they still played over Freddy Bywaters, but it was a trump, and Edith could never quite forgive that she held it.

As an exhibit, this letter had little to offer the prosecution case. More useful was the one dated 18 May, which introduced the novel Bella Donna by Robert Hichens. Edith began by quoting a passage from the book about ‘digitalin, a cumulative poison’. In a letter dated five days later she returned to the subject: having sent two novels to Freddy she wrote Td like you to read “Bella Donna” first you may learn something from it to help us.’

The book had at its centre an eponymous heroine aged forty-two, older than her husband by six years, who falls beneath the spell of a seductive Greek-Egyptian (‘she felt cruelty in him, and it attracted her, it lured her’). Although written by a respected author it belonged to the same genre as Edith Maude Hull’s The Sheikh, which became the film that made Rudolph Valentino a star; it was a just-about acceptable form of fictional pornography, set in what would have been called ‘far-off climes’, despised by the literati and of course enormously popular. So what, asked the solicitor general, did Edith think that Bywaters would learn from Bella Donna that would help them?

She replied: ‘The book was really about Egypt, and I thought he might learn something in it about Egypt.’

At this early point in the discussion Mr Justice Shearman, apparently unable to contain himself, intervened: ‘I should like to clear this up. Is not the main point of it that the lady killed her husband with slow poisoning?’

Edith said: ‘Do you ask me that question?’

‘Yes,’ the judge replied. ‘It is plain to me – ‘

‘I was going to deal with it in cross-examination,’ said the solicitor general, but the judge was not to be stopped: ‘Although I never like to take part in it you know it must come out... Possibly some of the jury might not know it, and I thought it ought to be cleared up.’

Later, as it were in his own time, the solicitor general would revert to this point. ‘There is a plot,’ he stated, ‘which is really the plot of the story, to poison her husband, without anybody finding out what she was doing?’ Edith, who despite her terror had not lost all her wits, answered:

‘It is a matter of opinion whether that is absolutely the plot, is it not?’

‘Anyway, that is an important incident in the book?’

‘At the end, yes.’

The defence had earlier quoted Edith’s critical opinion of Bella Donna – ‘I hate her – hate to think of her... Yes she was clever – I admire the cleverness – but she was cunning, there is a difference darlint, I don’t admire that’ – and now, at the end of her evidence, Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett attempted to shore up at least this part of the wreckage. He reminded the court that Bella Donna resembled Edith in no way whatever, that she had loved money whereas Edith loved a man who had very little, that Edith had described the character as ‘abnormal – a monster’. But the judge, who had a gift for timing his interpolations, had done his work. He had appeared to cut to the heart of the matter in a way that seemed helpful, that the jury would remember, for which they would be grateful.

‘I’m counting the days now darlint,’ Edith wrote on 18 May: there were eight of them left until she saw Freddy Bywaters again, wearing perhaps the new cream gabardine skirt that she described to him (not the new navy costume, he wouldn’t like the longer coat). It doesnt matter where we meet... we mustn’t think of other people being there we must just live for each other in that first minute Dont forget darlint Dont just say how are you “Chere”. It so prosaic and were not are we?’

For sure, Freddy knew no other girl quite like that. And to have such a girl so deep in love with him... he had a good opinion of himself, especially when it came to attracting women, but this was something else altogether. He knew that other men would have envied him in ways that went beyond walking down the street with a stunner, a head-turner, a twenty-year-old typist with a clear young eye. Edith was in a different league; he knew that. She was under his skin, even if he didn’t always want her there. And at the same time she was doing the rounds with that lumbering piece of pseudo-masculinity, Percy Thompson... Again the lovers saw little of each other until the end of the leave. Edith said that she would ask for the 31st as a holiday. This was Derby Day – the race was then run on a Wednesday – and she had backed the eventual third, each-way; a day with the crowds at Epsom would have been a delight to them both, in the magnificent weather that had suddenly taken a hold; yet this does not seem to have happened. She may not even have been given the time off. Then came the Whitsun weekend, which again was spent apart: Percy was at home. Freddy meanwhile was visiting his mother, the Graydons, Avis. But after this enforced and as it seemed fateful separation, with the knowledge pressing upon her that only three days were left before the Morea sailed for more than three months, Edith seized control. A couple of telegrams – Exhibits 66 and 67 – were sent to Tilbury. On Tuesday 6 June, the day after the Bank Holiday, she wrote ‘Failed again perhaps 5 o’clock tonight’ and on the following day ‘Have already said not going 231 see you and talk six’.

On the 6th, therefore – having ‘failed’ to arrange a rendezvous at lunchtime (presumably) – the couple met at Fenchurch Street. Subsequently Percy would try to catch Edith out about this, claiming that a friend had seen her at the station with a man fitting Freddy’s description: ‘That’s an awful lie darlint’. But Percy was alert as a fox that week. He had observed his wife’s fractious boredom over Whitsun and known precisely what its source was. On Thursday the 8th he went to Shakespeare Crescent, where he was told that Freddy had gone out for his last night of leave with a ‘pal’ – naturally he had his own ideas as to who that pal might be. According to Edith – who was quoting Avis – Percy then remarked to the Graydons: ‘I thought he was keen on you (Avis) – but now I can see it was a blind to cover his infatuation with Edie.’

‘Darlint its not an infatuation is it? Tell me it isnt.’

A coda of sublime and childlike selfishness... Avis’s unhappiness was a bagatelle at this time to Edith. That is the solipsism of romantic love. But it was dangerous to be so slighting of Avis, so trusting of her good nature.

The truth of what Edith wrote is always debatable; it does seem, however, that the other triangle in this story – the one between Freddy and the two sisters – was particularly evident in the first week of June 1922. On Wednesday the 7th a neighbour from Manor Park had seen Edith and Freddy together and reported the sighting back to Avis. What spies they all were in east London! Avis confronted Edith, in her passive way: ‘of course I denied it – but she described my frock... Avis said she was upset because you had gone for good – she said she could hardly realise it.’ These words sound true, dreadfully so. Avis had continued to hope, all through the year since the Isle of Wight holiday. She had surely known what Edith was like, but this was very hard to take. And still, she did not quite take it. Still she hoped, that in the end she would win the battle, which was as much about Edith as about Freddy.

Meanwhile Edith – the blithely dismissive holder of the spoils – hastened to reassure her boy. They had been seen on the Wednesday, she wrote, so that ‘was all right’. Had they been seen the following day, goes the implication, it would not have been all right. Thursday 8 June was their last night, the one on which Freddy’s leave – which could never quite fulfil what had been imagined of it – again acquired an urgent, clutching and clinging significance; they must have kissed, or something of that kind, in a place where they could have been overlooked. Madness, of course, but this was part of the thrill for Edith. She rather relished this sense of being spied upon – an audience – however much it was sometimes on her nerves.

They had sex that night of the 8th, when it was warm enough to do so outside, probably in Wanstead Park: the skies were light until late, but the gossips would have been in their beds by that time. ‘Im so glad youre not sorry this time, no Im not a bit,’ she wrote. Then she indulged in a piece of masochistic playacting, asking Freddy to leave on his ship the next day and forget all about her. She knew full well that at such a moment, when he was high on possession, he would refuse her ‘request’. It was good advice, all the same.

What happened after that was described in a letter of 13 June:

Darlingest Boy,

I’m trying very hard – very very hard to B.B. [be brave]. I know my pal wants me to.

On Thursday – he was on the ottoman at the foot of the bed and said he was dying and wanted to – he had another heart attack – thro me.

Darlint I had to laugh because I knew it couldn’t be a heart attack.

When he saw this had no effect he got up and stormed – I said exactly what you told me to and he knew thats what I wanted and he wasnt going to give it to me – it would make things too easy for both of you (meaning you and me) especially for you he said.

Yes: Percy could take out his anger on Edith, to a degree, but to Freddy he could not, and his anger against the young man had become immense by this time. He was not a fool, although he was behaving like one; he surely recognized the glow on Edith as she drifted into the bedroom, even if he had never been the cause of it.

And it was awful, just as it was for Avis, to know that one was the less desirable option – people can rarely delude themselves about that particular thing – and that there was really nothing to be done about it. Having tried pleas, threats, violence, being nice, being foul, Percy now reached for straightforward male dominance (which unfortunately Freddy did rather better): ‘he told me he was going to break me in somehow – I have always had too much of my own way and he was a model husband – and in future on Thursdays the bedroom was to be cleaned out.’ Even in 1922, this was really not something to say to a woman who earned more than he did.

Later in the letter, Edith described how Percy had gone to the Graydons’ house in a rage and ‘told Dad everything’: the episode refuted at the Old Bailey as ‘pure imagination’. Her letter claimed that she had heard the story from Avis. So it is not completely impossible that Avis – rather than Edith – invented the incident. She might have done it, in an attempt to force Edith to give up Freddy – she knew that Edith hated the idea of upsetting her parents – the fact that she never worried about upsetting her sister must have been intensely annoying. So too was the fact that the Graydons remained as fond as ever of their errant daughter, who turned up with presents every Friday and created a starburst of glamour in their parlour. Psychologically, therefore, it is convincing that Avis might have done this; although it was a risk, because Edith might then have confronted Percy, who would have denied it – and so on. Probably it did not happen that way. Nevertheless Avis’s staunch, almost fanatical defence of her sister after the murder – when she said things that were not true, for instance that Edith was quiet and docile (!) – may have had its origins in a kind of guilt, that she had not understood Edith well enough at the time, that she had been one of those who worked against her. She had had grounds, of course. But her conscience would not have thought that good enough.

Assuming, however, that the episode was indeed Edith’s invention; does that mean that the rest of the letter was imaginary also? No, because she testified openly to her defence counsel that Percy had claimed that night to be having a heart attack, and even at the Old Bailey she was unable to keep a note of contempt out of her reply: ‘I knew when he had a heart attack; it was entirely different. The scene which took place on the night before Bywaters sailed was entirely due to the fact that I had been out that night and did not return till late.’

It sounded honest, decidedly so; although it may not have been the best way of putting things, when one was on trial for the man’s murder.

Now began a separation of almost sixteen weeks and, in the letters, the pattern of yearning and urging gradually tightened, sharpened, as this absence – far longer than anything they had previously experienced – worked differently upon Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters.

On 14 June she wrote to Marseilles, reminding him of how, a year ago that day, they had taken a charabanc ride around the Isle of Wight: ‘do you remember? Last night when I went to bed I kissed you goodnight in my mind because that was the first time you kissed me.’ The contrast was almost funny, almost hysterically so, between that lush memory and the previous evening spent at Richard Thompson’s house in Seymour Gardens.

‘Darlint,’ she wrote en passant, ‘how can you get ptomaine poisoning from a tin of salmon?’

On 20 June she wrote to Australia, again reminding him of the year before, the day on which he had said ‘I love you’.

From then onwards everything has gone wrong with our lives – I don’t mean to say it was right before – at least mine wasn’t right – but I was quite indifferent to it being either right or wrong and you darlint – you hadn’t any of the troubles – or the worries you have now... darlint I am sorry I shouldn’t mind if I could feel that some day I should be able to make up to you for all the unhappiness I have caused in your life – but I can’t feel that darlint – I keep on saying to myself that “it will – it shall come right” – but there is no conviction behind it – why can’t we see into the future?

Then she reminded him of the day, in 1921, when he took her to lunch at the King’s Hall: ‘do you remember?’

She wrote of a visit to the doctor. ‘Are you enceinte?’ he asked: ‘to which I replied “No, I think not”.’ In truth she was not sure, such was her ignorance. She had not mentioned a period in May; but if she was pregnant in June it was by Percy, not Freddy. And why should she be, having almost certainly avoided this eventuality for more than six years? She had sex with Freddy on 8 June, but there were no means available in 1922 to know, a mere nine days later, whether this had resulted in conception. The constant talk about conception was more like another game, an intimate hold over her lover. As for the doctor: he clearly had a shrewd idea of what had gone on five months earlier, particularly when Edith refused to let him examine her. He diagnosed anaemia, asking pointedly if she had had ‘an accident’ and lost a lot of blood. ‘I said “No” because it wasn’t really an accident and I didn’t want to tell him everything – he might have wanted to see my husband.’ She was advised to drink Burgundy, that blood-like substance, with every meal – ‘I hate the stuff – and given pills to take until her next period. Doubtless these were the ‘menstrual regulatives’ advertised so coyly in the press, whose efficacy may well have been that of the placebo, inducing sufficient relief to restore the cycle.

‘Darlint are you disappointed it is only that? tell me please?’

This was a ridiculous question, really – how could either of them want the complication of a pregnancy at that time? – and its silliness was underscored the following day, when she went to pick up her letters. Freddy had already put her off with a note sent from Dover, saying that he would write from Marseilles. Now she found another note, saying that he would write from Port Said.

At this point, she could have let the whole thing go and lived to be an old woman.

What an utterly absurd thing to say to me “Don’t be too disappointed”.

You cant possibly know what it feels like to want and want each day – every little hour – or something – something that means ‘life’ to you and then not to get it...

You force me to conclude that the life you lead away from England is all absorbing that you havn t time nor inclination to remember England or anything England holds...

If I am unjust – I am sorry – but I can’t feel anything at present – only just as if I have had a blow on the head and I am stunned – the disappointment – no, more than that – the utter despair is too much to bear – I would sooner go under today than anything.

For the first time, Edith felt herself to be in the position that her husband inhabited every day: the one who is breezily left behind, without whom the other can live quite happily. And, like Percy, she was incapable of responding in kind. It seems never to have occurred to her to stop writing to Freddy, to give the arrogant wretch a jolt, to see how he fared without his glorious older woman. Such was her investment in the relationship – because love is about a person’s own capacity to feel, not how much the recipient deserves it – that she literally could not cope with this sudden shutdown: it was not something to be ameliorated by tricks, such as flirting with another man. The very next day she would be doing exactly that, standing on the roof of a car (having been lifted up there by her admirer Mr Dunsford) to see the Prince of Wales lead a procession through London. Yet despite this life, the social round and the demanding job, she had poured everything that she valued in herself into the vessel of this affair.

So she tugged upon him: she exerted her submissive force.

Ive been thinking & thinking such a lot & feeling so awful about it... I am sorry darlint – but I wrote how I felt & it was awful...

Please forgive me & try to excuse your pal. She did feel so awfully down in the world when she found that or felt that the best pal a girl ever had had forgotten or neglected her.

She’ll try hard not to transgress again.

This letter was not put in evidence. Nor was the next, with its rather joyful tales of the garden party in Wanstead that ended at the fried fish shop, and the works party at Eastcote where Edith ran in the races and compered the cricket. None of this was of use, or interest, to the Old Bailey, for all that it formed the greater part of what Edith wrote.

On 27 June, the day that their love affair had begun, and on which Freddy turned twenty, Edith sent a note to celebrate ‘the birthday of the best pal a girl ever had’.

But on 4 July she was again knocked down. She wanted to hit Freddy’s mother, who had cut her in the street; she had trouble again at the post office, with a man who refused to give her Freddy’s letter from Port Said, saying that the GPO could not be used by anybody who had a London address. And when she finally got the letter: ‘I didnt feel very satisfied darlint it didn’t seem worth waiting all that time for – 24 days – however I wont talk about it’; which she proceeded to do. ‘In one part of it you say you are still going to write to me because it will help, in another part you say – “Perhaps I shant write to you from some ports – because I want to help you” I don’t understand...’ Nor, it would seem, did Freddy himself. He was palpably torn as to what to do about this love affair, which gave him so much and so little.

Mr Carlton, wrote Edith, was the only person ‘in this world’ who was nice to her; and one wonders just what the boss thought about it all, when he was drinking a late morning brandy and soda with the enchanting Mrs Thompson; probably he thought that she was managing her lover just as capably as she did his business.

But in the letter, that other world, it was back to conjuring the past within the calendar of the present, here by reference to a film they had seen together: ‘Last Friday last year – we went to see “Romance” – then we were pals.’

And, rather desperately, it was back to this: ‘Why arent you sending me something... If I don’t mind the risk why should you?’

‘Will you tell me,’ she ended, ‘if youd rather I didn’t write?’ Then the postscript: ‘Have you studied “Bichloride of Mercury”.’

‘Does a laundry steward in a ship,’ asked the solicitor general in his closing speech, ‘even one interested in chemistry, study bichloride of mercury?’

On 12 July, in a letter not put in evidence, Edith strove for intimacy again, telling Freddy that her period had come – thanks to the doctor’s pills, as she believed – but that she had ‘felt terribly bad & could not have gone to business had I had to do so... It wasnt the same sort of ill feeling that it was that time before tho.’ By that, presumably, she meant that she had not miscarried; as indeed had never been very likely.

Then she began to plead, with the dignity of the abject, singing her lover’s refrain – ‘only you see me as I really am’ – and pulling again on the ties that bound them.

Darlingest Boy – I cant bear to think of you being in England and not seeing me – must we be so very strict and stern – cant you imagine what your only pal – (no, not pal – Im talking to you darlint as the girl that loves you, Im talking to my veriest own lover not as & to a pal) will feel like knowing youre in London... Must you be so cruel darlint? See me once... I cant bear it if you go away without seeing me again – nearly 4 months after September – that makes it January 1923 its too long to wait...

So Freddy had not just said that he would write to her less often, but that he would not see her when he returned to England at the end of September. It is hard to understand, therefore, why she believed that he would see her the following January; and again the fact that she did not leave it, let him go, ensured a very different outcome for that month.

What had changed him is impossible to know. Avis Graydon may have said something, if – as is likely – he stayed at Shakespeare Crescent on his last night in England. Naturally it would be nothing direct. She need only have said, for instance, that she knew her parents to be ‘worried about Edie’. Again this makes psychological sense, although it is mere speculation. Alternatively one might say that Freddy had become interested in another girl, although that does not fit the immediacy with which he stopped writing. Unless that girl was Avis... Was he, perhaps, trying to persuade himself that he should shift allegiance back to her? Easier said than done, however; for he had not lost his attachment to Edith. It was more that he was trying to do so. And in this attempt he was wise. He may indeed have realized that giving her up was for the best; that they could never be happy together, despite the power of their dreams, in a society that would be ranged so completely and lethally against them. He may have wanted to rid himself of the frustration and sheer oddity of the whole business, the pathetic husband with whom she went about so placidly, even as she wrote about leaving him, asking him for a divorce, poisoning him... It was a year since the addiction first caught Freddy Bywaters in its hot grasp, and over the next few weeks he sought to cure himself. It was a great pity that he did not succeed.

‘When Bywaters was away from 9 June until 23 September this year,’ said Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett to Edith, ‘were you getting as many letters from him as previously?’

‘No.’

‘What did you think from that?’

‘I thought he was gradually drifting away from me.’

‘Did you still love him very much?’

‘Yes.’

On 14 July Edith wrote to reproach Freddy for something that she called silly, which was in fact very sensible. He had written: ‘Try a little bit every day not to think about me.’ She was overriding him, wearing him down, trying to win the power struggle between them. At the same time she wrote about the age difference – ‘8 years is such a long time’ – but her willingness to display vulnerability was always at the heart of Edith’s strength.

He was in Australia when she went for her holiday to Bournemouth with Percy and Avis – for two weeks from Saturday 15th – and Australia always frightened her because of the mysterious girl there; did he ever discuss Edith with her? It is possible, although he would not have been ungallant. Edith had worried in the past when Freddy and her brother Bill met up abroad, what they might say to each other; but Bill – who himself eventually got out and moved to Australia – never showed any signs of knowing anything he should not. So she went to Bournemouth, which she described with much of her old spirit although she fairly hated it: ‘the Boarding house was terrible – “Ladies are requested not to smoke in the house” – no drink allowed indoors and not too much grub... I think Avis & I managed to liven them up a bit.’ The other guests, she wrote, could not believe that she was twenty-eight: ‘they said I only seemed a child I felt glad they thought this pour vous – altho I really felt very old & miserable & lonely all the time I was away.’

But she showed off and climbed trees, surging with the sheer animal life that should have been powering her, while instead she languished in a life trapped by men. With Avis she took a boat and sailed around the sacred idyll of the Isle of Wight; when they landed at Ventnor they were told’ “you can walk around naked if you like” Thats the place for us we said...’ This was the ordinary Edith in full flight, taking Avis with her as it seemed, having girl fun as she loved to do. And yet, in the middle of it all, off she scuttled to send a postcard to Freddy in Sri Lanka, telling him that they must holiday together in Ventnor in 1923: ‘please take me’.

And on 15 August she was back in London, haunting the GPO again, where she found a letter from India and a note from Sri Lanka: ‘I wonder if you have written to me since...’ Now she pulled the favoured old trick of reminding Freddy just how many other men fancied her, telling the story of the lonely heart at the Waldorf who asked ‘Are you Romance?’ She described another row with Percy: before going on holiday she had asked for ‘Rosie’s’ private address (also Mr Dunsford’s, which was the real issue) ‘& he made ever such a fuss about it – said I was too familiar & deceitful – because I couldnt say what I wanted to on a post card to him (Mr D) at 168. We had a right royal battle about it & I was told I was impudent & all sorts of things bad & that I must have had a good tutor – that is quite a favourite phrase and is often used.

‘Anyway he sulked for 2 days…’ At which point Avis came to the rescue. Relations between the sisters were very good on their holiday, which may be another reason to suspect that Avis had said something pertinent to Freddy before he left. Certainly she was feeling more like Edith’s equal. Now she informed Percy that he, the wronged husband and amateur spy, had himself ‘been seen’ in Bishopsgate with a girl. Oh yes, he said, Miss Tucknott, I took her for dinner because I wouldn’t be at work for the next two weeks.

This letter did not form part of the evidence; although, in the climate of sanctimony that sheltered Percy, it is highly doubtful that anything would have been made of it.

Then Edith, who had become aware that Freddy had ‘already started home’ and would be in Aden by the time he received her letter, wrote a passage in which she seemed to feel the forces of destiny, or what she would call fate, moving towards her with the gigantic indifference of the SS Morea.

Ever since I’ve been back in Ilford Ive had most awful nights rest, I havent been able to sleep for more than an hour together & even when I do that I dream – sometimes theyre not very nice dreams. They are nearly always about you One night I dreamed that you had married Avis... another night I dreamed I had been to a theatre with a man I know – I had told you about him & you came home unexpectedly & when you found me you just threw me over a very deep precipice & I was killed.

And again one thinks: leave it now, Edith.

On 18 August she wrote to Freddy a whole letter about the book that they had both been reading, The Fruitful Vine by Robert Hichens. She used the heroine, Dolores, as a means to explain herself, in a way that would both flatter and lure.

You ask if it is sufficient reason that a good woman knows she is wanted, that she sins... a good woman who had a husband or a lover who really loved him & whom she really loved – would never sin with another man

... she makes the supreme sacrifice – (darlint it is the supreme sacrifice to give yourself to someone you dont love).

I can feel with her & live with her darlint & I did.

This was not part of the trial evidence, although Mr Justice Shearman managed to allude to it in his summing-up, comparing it with Edith’s analysis of Hichens’ Bella Donna. ‘No doubt the letter about “The Fruitful Vine” was something similar; they write chiefly about so-called heroes and heroines, probably wicked people, which no doubt accounts for a great many of these tragedies.’

The next letter, dated 23 August, was also not put in as evidence, although after the tales of bets and books Edith wrote this:

Its rather funny sometimes at 41 [Kensington Gardens]: The attacks continue so I am told of course I know differently – but I say nothing & laugh all to myself right deep down inside. They always happen after ‘words’ or ‘unpleasantness’.

A Phrenologist at Boscome told him he would live to be quite an old man.

It was the first time since early July that Edith had written anything of this kind. Five days later, in a short letter that became exhibit 63 and that was sent to commemorate the ‘birthday’ of the 27th, she returned to another theme, that of the suicide pact:

‘Fourteen whole months have gone by now, darlint, its so terribly long. Neither you nor I thought we should have to wait all that long time did we? although I said I would wait 5 years – and I will darlint – its only 3 years and ten months now.’

On 29 August she wrote in reply to a letter from Freddy, which by inference was so ambivalent as to make clear his raging confusion. ‘You say you are longing for that letter from me,’ followed by ‘You say I shant see you, just to know you are in London will be good.’ He also suggested that he might not even come to England but would stay in India.

Then, on 7 September, Edith received a short note addressed to ‘Miss P Graydon’:

‘If you wish to remain the friend of F Bywaters, be careful. Do not attempt to see him or communicate with him, when he is in England.

‘Believe this to be a genuine warning from

‘A WELLWISHER‘

Here, indeed, was a conundrum. ‘I had rather a shock this morning,’ she wrote, in a letter dated 11 September that enclosed the anonymous note.

Do you know anything about it? I dont suppose you do darlint, but Im just asking Im sure if you had reasons for not wanting to see me, you’d tell me and tell me the reasons – you couldnt resort to letters of this description. I dont think it will be from anybody I know – or from any relations of mine, because I am addressed as “P” you will notice – & no one knows you call me anything but “Edie”. Also darlint I cant help noticing that it is posted in the West End on a Wednesday. Write and tell me what you think about it...

By her last remark, Edith meant that the letter had been posted by Lilian Bywaters, who went ‘up west’ once a week. And she was suggesting that Lilian, by some means, had discovered that her son called his lover ‘Peidi’ and had written the note herself.

There was another possibility, of course, which was that Freddy had written it, and sent the note to his mother to post. If so, the deliberate use of the letter ‘P’ was designed to let Edith know exactly that: to underline his guilt, to make sure that she could not avoid it.

Yet she did. And the explanation for her apparent astonishing willingness to ignore, to overlook, to forgive her lover for this expression of crudity, may lie elsewhere.

Around a month later, Edith’s boss Herbert Carlton made a statement in which he said: ‘The paper of the anonymous letter shown to me by the Police appears identical with the paper which is known as “Manifold Paper” which we have in use. I do not recognize the envelope.’ Mr Carlton had been shown some of Edith’s letters in order to identify the handwriting; the ‘wellwisher’ letter was not put in evidence, so there is no particular reason why he would have seen that. Therefore this reference in his statement to an ‘anonymous letter’ is not entirely clear. However: if it was the one that Edith received on 7 September, then the inference – that she herself wrote it – is intriguing; and, bizarre as it sounds, not unconvincing. It is reminiscent of the remark made by Mr Carlton’s son, that she sent telegrams to herself at the office. It also has a flavour of the ‘Miss P. Fisher’ episode, in which Edith gleefully invented for herself an alter ego. It was drama; but drama with a purpose. This note – sent to herself, then to Freddy – would have been a way to implicate Lilian Bywaters as chief suspect, to maintain the breach between mother and son that Edith pretended to lament. It would also, more importantly, have been a means of provoking her lover: his temperament was such that he would defy any warning to leave Edith alone.

This is speculation. The letter may well have been written by Freddy. If she suspected as much and chose to pretend that it had not happened, more fool Edith. The rest of her letter chatted away as usual. Avis had visited and was displaying her superior knowledge of Freddy’s movements, informing Edith that he was not staying in India, he was indeed coming to London (more fool Freddy): ‘she said “Oh that was a lot of rot he was talking. I expect he has thought better of it.”‘ Mrs Lester was resenting the attempts to evict her. Its awfully awkward – I have to rush home on Friday nights & do all my own shopping, carry potatoes etc – because if I ordered them & had them sent she wouldnt open the door when they came... She’s done some very petty things this last fortnight...’ Edith was trying again to employ Ethel, the maid, who arrived the day after Percy’s murder. ‘I shant be able to stand this state of things much longer Darlint. I hope I havent bored you with all this –I have just thought perhaps I have... Forgive me if I have, I didnt intend to – I just tried to make you live in my life.’

‘Now you are nearing England,’ she wrote in a letter dated 12 September –

I keep contrasting this home coming with the previous ones. I have been buoyed up with hope, bubbling with excitement Just existing with an intense strung up feeling of seeing you and feeling you holding me in your two arms so tightly but this time everything seems different. I don’t hear from you much you don’t talk to me by letter and help me and I don’t even know if I am going to see you.

... if you say “No I won’t see you” then it shall be so, I’m quite reconciled to whatever verdict you bring forth and shall say to myself “It is for the best and it must be so.”

Darlint you do love me still tho’ don’t you? and you will go on loving me even if we don’t meet. Things are going smoothly with me – I am giving all – and accepting everything and I think am looked up as “The Dutiful Wife” whose spirit is at last bent to the will of her husband.

This was a new line, presenting an image of herself as not fighting with Percy but acquiescing to him, sleeping with him. It was a good trick, for it would have aroused Freddy’s jealousy, the emotion that demanded satisfaction and made indifference impossible.

Nevertheless two letters, written at around the same time – 20 September, three days before the Morea arrived at Tilbury – begin in the same way: Tm fearfully disappointed’. In the first letter, not given in evidence, the disappointment was because no mail had arrived for her from Marseilles. Then at the end came an uplifted coda: she had just received a long letter from the post office, not without some difficulty as the question of her permanent address had again been raised. That particular outlet had had its day – another obstacle was raising itself in front of her – although at that moment Edith could not have cared less. She skimmed the letter briefly (it was Statement day’ at Carlton & Prior, which meant ‘tons of work’) before writing: ‘Darlint darlint pal – Im so happy Ive heard from you... Must it be pals only darlint? If you say “Yes” it shall be.’

But she was not going to accept pals. She was going to drive on until Freddy Bywaters accepted what she knew to be the truth, that he loved her. She was going to throw everything that she had at him.

The next letter, Exhibit 28, was clearly written in response to his from Marseilles. The disappointment was because Freddy was not arriving in London on Friday 22 September, as she had thought. This disrupted her arrangements – she would not go to the hairdresser as planned on Saturday, but would spend the time with him instead – ‘do you mind me having a dirty head for a week darlint – its very very dirty’. Extraordinary: most women would have planned their appearance down to the last detail before encountering a man they had not seen for some sixteen weeks, and they would certainly be sure to have their hair clean – but Edith’s allure was of a different order – as was her female confidence; although at the same time she could write: ‘Why are you so late this time – oh I hate this journey, I hate Australia...’

And Freddy’s next journey, she had been told by Avis, would be longer still: to China and Japan. There was absolutely no sense, at this point, of anything changing. She would endure the separation, as she had before, and eventually her darlingest boy would come back to her.

Avis – the woman in the know – had told her something else: that Freddy had missed the ship at Sydney – ‘she said “Oh I suppose he was drunk”. Darlint, thats a lie isn’t it – you promised me once that it would never be “too much’” (the same promise that she had once extracted from Percy). It is, indeed, very unlikely that he had been drunk. The incident was overlooked by the Morea, which he must have re-embarked at another Australian port, but it was reminiscent of when he had jumped ship altogether at the start of 1921. That time had possibly been connected with Edith. This time may have been to do with his Australian girl. Both times, really, were to do with his latent wildness.

‘Im worrying about it – 231 have made me worry – by putting things into my head.’

She was also worried because Avis knew so damn much of what was going on – how did she, and why did she not give up the fight for Freddy Bywaters? In her way she was as tenacious as Percy. Furthermore she had become so cocky of late, as if this new shore leave had dealt her a new hand to play.

Did Freddy want Avis instead? Or did he, at least, realize that choosing her made more sense? Edith’s fear – that her sister would win the game because she was free to do so – had never quite left her; and now, as her lover neared his journey’s end, he was again writing that they should be ‘pals’ when they saw each other in London. ‘Darlingest boy – I don’t quite understand about “Pals”. You say “Can we be Pals only, Peidi, it will make it easier”.’

Do you mean for always? because if you do, No, no, a thousand times. We can’t be “pals” only for always darlint – its impossible physically and mentally.

Last time we had a long talk – I said, “Go away this time and forget all about me, forget you ever knew me, it will be easier – and better for you.”

Do you remember – and you refused, as I’m refusing darlint – it must be still “the hope of all” or “the finish of all”...

Please don’t let what I have written deter you from any decision darlint –I don’t want to do that – truly I’d like to do what you think best.

Nevertheless hope was glimmering inside her, because she was still able to make him jealous. ‘No, I dont think the man who mistook me for “Romance” was decent darlint, but I do think he was quite genuine in mistaking me, I dont think it was a ruse on his part.’

That was in reply to a remark about the man who had chanced his luck at the Waldorf. This, however, was nearer the heart of the matter.

‘Yes, darlint you are jealous of him – but I want you to be – he has the right by law to all that you have the right to by nature and love – yes darlint be jealous, so much that you will do something desperate.’

Then she sent a newspaper cutting – something that she had not done for a while – headlined: ‘Chicken Broth Death’. A last throw of the dice.

‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale,’ wrote D. H. Lawrence, and as the story of Thompson and Bywaters reached its last chapters it became clear that it had acquired its own momentum, a logic that existed apart from the volition of its narrator-in-chief, Edith. In cases of murder it is natural to look for motivation – ‘motive’ – and here, in this classic example of a triangular relationship, it seemed simple enough; except that it was nothing of the kind. The perpetrator himself had no real explanation for what he had done. It was what he wanted to do at that moment, and it was the culmination of what had gone before. It was both irrational and inevitable. If his co-defendant could be loosely compared with Madame Bovary then he, at the moment of the murderous confrontation, bore a certain resemblance to Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir, whose attack upon the woman that he loved was similarly defiant of analysis: rather it was as if the story itself had compelled the event.

So the Morea sailed into dock at Tilbury, and the lovers – soon to be lovers once more, as Edith had intended, as had always been going to happen – moved towards their endgame.

She was still unsure, although for the last time, when he did not turn up to the meeting on Saturday 23 September that she had arranged by telegram: ‘Can you meet Peidi Broadway 4 pm’. She had come back from work as usual and cooked lunch for her husband and father. Then she went out at about 3.00, while the men were working in the garden, raking leaves that had begun to turn a poignant flaring red, taking in the very last of the heatless sun. She left them, giving who knows what explanation, and she did not return until after 8.00. According to Mrs Lester, Percy ‘had words with her over being out so long’.

The husband was on his guard again, despite the Stepford Wife guise that Edith had been wearing. He had never bought the story – which no doubt Edith had casually offered up – that Freddy might remain in India rather than come home for his leave. Mr Graydon may, on that penultimate Saturday in Ilford, have mentioned the young man’s imminent return, doing so in a hesitant, faux-normal way that could only arouse suspicion. And Edith’s mood would have been odd, distracted, when she returned. Freddy’s ship had arrived late at Tilbury, but would she have known that? Would she have thought, instead, that her darlingest boy had stood her up? It seems that she wandered for hours around the ‘Broadway’, through the old familiar area of East Ham and Manor Park, returning to Kensington Gardens only when the sky had finally closed its curtains. Perhaps she had her hair done, after all.

The next day was Avis’s twenty-sixth birthday, so would have been spent at Shakespeare Crescent. Again the ghost of Freddy danced between the sisters. Again Edith’s mood was probably somewhat febrile, although she seems always to have put on a show for her parents. On Monday morning she sent another telegram to Tilbury: ‘Must catch 5.49 Fenchurch Reply if can manage.’ So Percy was laying down the law about train times, making sure that there was no time for dalliance after work.

Nevertheless Freddy was outside Carlton & Prior by around 4.30 on the afternoon of 25 September.

Lily Vellender, in her statement to the police, recalled that Edith suggested she might have a cup of coffee with him in the Fullers tearoom across the road. Lily knew Freddy, from the Isle of Wight holiday; she also knew all about him, but nothing of this would have been mentioned at tea. Meanwhile Edith finished her work, in a state that may be imagined. Then she entered the cafe in her hat and coat, at which point Lily left. The waitress at Fullers, Edith Brown, gave a statement to this effect, and made identifications from a line of photographs.

Edith caught the 5.49 train as instructed, but so did Freddy.

‘I had no intention of doing that,’ he wrote –

it just happened thats all – I’m glad now chere – darlint when you suggested the occupied carriage, I didn’t want to go in it – did you think that perhaps I did – so that there would have been an opportunity for me, to break the conditions that I had stipulated – darlint I felt quite confident that I would be able to keep my feelings down – I was wrong Peidi...

Peidi you are my magnet – I cannot resist darlint...

Darlint Peidi Mia Idol mine – I love you – always – always Ma Chere...

In the blink of an eye they were back as they had been; except that so much more, in the interim, had been added to the fire. Freddy wrote this letter when he was alone, back in his old bedroom at his mother’s house, trying to calm his flesh; at the end he referred to Edith’s long anxious letter of a few days earlier, which now belonged to an irrelevant past: ‘Last night when I read your questions I didn’t know how to answer them – I have now Peidi?’

He must have given her the letter the next day, Tuesday, when they met again.

‘Darlint,’ she replied the following morning, ‘I didnt think you wanted to go into the other carriage – but I suggested it because I felt there would be less temptation there – not only for you but for me too – do you think it is less pleasure to me, for you to kiss me & hold me, than it is for you to do so?... I was strong enough in spirit, until I was tempted in the flesh & the result – a mutual tumble from the pedestal of “Pals only”...

Please please lover of mine, dont use that word [idol] I dont like it – I feel that Im on a pedestal & that I shall always have to strive to remain there & I dont ever want to strive to do anything anything with or for you – thats not being natural...

Darlingest – what would have happened had I refused – when you asked me to kiss you? I want to know.

They had met at Fullers on Tuesday 26 September. Another journey from Fenchurch Street, hoping for an empty carriage, bumping against each other and experiencing the peculiar pleasure of being together within a heedless crowd. For the time being they were contented, enthralled with their reunion, but it could not possibly stay that way: frustration would cease to be delirious and become merely unbearable.

Edith’s letter, written on Wednesday, would have reached Freddy on Thursday. They met in the same way, at around quarter to six, on both those days. On Friday they met for lunch and then Freddy, having mooched around the City for a couple of hours, went again to Fuller’s. At around 4.30 Edith wrote a note telling him to call for her in half an hour, and asked Rose Jacobs to take it to him. It is unlikely that Rose reacted any differently from most women to Freddy Bywaters. And if she found him attractive, as so many did, then that is surely one of the reasons why she resented Edith – for the carelessness (as she thought) with which she kept him waiting, and despatched other women to tell him to wait. Lily went next, at about ten to five. Edith was not worried about Lily, she was not worried about any girl. She held her darlingest boy in her hand once more, and the semi-secret knowledge was flooding her with bliss.

First, however, she finished her work; never once did she slacken at her job on account of Freddy Bywaters.

She sent Lily to him because he had come back to Carlton & Prior ahead of the hour, straining on the bit, in search of her.

‘I saw him,’ Herbert Carlton told the police, ‘on 29th September in the porchway of my premises about 4.45. A few minutes later prisoner Thompson asked if she might leave and she left. I cannot say whether she joined Bywaters.’

They had a little more time that day. Edith went to Shakespeare Crescent as usual in the evening, where she met Percy; but before that the two figures of Thompson and Bywaters, enmeshed within an eroticized haze, moved free and futureless through the streets of the City, as the bells of St Botolph-without-Aldersgate and St Mary Woolnoth tolled six, then seven.

Darlingest lover of mine, thank you, thank you, oh thank you a thousand times for Friday – it was lovely – its always lovely to go out with you.

And then Saturday – yes I did feel happy – I didn t think a teeny bit about anything in this world, except being with you – and all Saturday evening I was thinking about you – I was just with you in a big arm chair in front of a great big fire feeling all the time how much I had won...

She had won, yes. On Saturday 30 September they had been together again, in the new autumn air, among the rich crisp falling leaves of Wanstead Park.

‘Prisoner Thompson was away from business on 30th with my permission,’ Herbert Carlton told the police. ‘She gave no reason for being absent.’ That was the closest that Edith ever came to jumping ship, a half-day off agreed by her boss. Mrs Lester, in her statement, said:

she left the house as usual to go to business with Mr Thompson. She returned however about 10.30, she had some shopping with her. She brought this into the house and left immediately afterwards, returning about 1.30 and cooked the dinner. Mr Thompson arrived home about 2pm. After dinner they dressed and went out together and returned home together, it was past midnight.

So Edith spent the morning with her lover and the evening with her husband. Freddy had left home at 8am, according to his mother, and made the long journey from Norwood to the Essex border. If Lilian suspected where he was going, she knew better than to try and stop him. She was simply relieved to have him at home again. For her part, Edith had been surprised when Freddy told her where he was spending his leave: ‘You ask me if Im glad or sorry – darlint I dont know how I feel about it – Im glad for you darlint – because you know I always felt responsible for the break, I dont think Im glad for myself tho’, I think I’m harbouring just a small petty feeling of resentment against them – I’ve tried so hard not to...’

But that was written some ten days earlier, as it were in another life. By Saturday 30th all was different; and they were having sex with each other, for the first time in three months; also, as it happened, for the last time.

Darlint we’ve said we’ll always be Pals haven’t we, shall we say we’ll always be lovers – even tho’ secret ones, or is it (this great big love) a thing we can’t control – dare we say that – I think I will dare Yes I will ‘I’ll always love you’ – if you are dead – if you have left me even if you don’t still love me, I always shall you

Your love to me is now, it is something different, it is my life and if things should go badly with us, I shall always have this past year to look back upon and feel that “Then I lived” I never did before and I never shall again.

In the evening she was out with Percy at the Birnages’.

‘My wife and I have visited them [the Thompsons] about six times,’ Sidney Birnage told the police,

sometimes by invitation, sometimes casually. The last time I saw them together was on Saturday evening 30th September. They came with Mr and Mr Graydon and Avis... they came about 5pm. My wife had written to Mrs Thompson a day or two previously asking her to fix a date...

I have heard no quarrels or cross words between Mr and Mrs Thompson. They have appeared most affectionate towards each other and I have described them as such. I have never met Bywaters or heard his name mentioned.

Amid all these anodyne statements Mr Birnage mentioned something that interested the police a little more: Percy had asked him to ‘effect an insurance on his life. I did so, the account being for £250 at death.’

On Sunday 1 October Edith and Freddy did not meet. ‘He was at home all day,’ Mrs Bywaters told the police. Edith and Percy went out in the evening. Mrs Lester stated: ‘they both left home together about 7pm, returning home together about 10.30pm and went straight to bed.’ Where they went is not known. It was not to the Graydons, the Birnages, or the Chamberses, because these people all gave evidence; it may have been to Percy’s mother, or to Edith’s friends the Akams. While they were there, Freddy wrote the letter that began: ‘Peidi Darlint, Sunday evening...

‘Darlint in the park – our Park on Saturday, you were my “little devil” – I was happy then Peidi – were you?’

He referred back to her long letter of 20 September, in which she wrote that she had kept hold of his watch – having had it mended – because reclaiming it would be a reason for him to come and see her.

I cant understand you thinking that the watch would draw me to you – where you yourself wouldnt... The way you have written looks to me as though you think that I think more of the watch than I do of you darlint – Tell me Peidi Mia that I misunderstood your meaning...

What have I found darlint? The darlingest little sweetheart girl in the whole world and “The Only Pal” Now darlint pal – Im anxious about Avis – I hope you have found out all there is to know of the other night – I want you to tell me. Supposing she did stay with some fellow and she tells you and asks you not to tell anybody – are you going to tell me Peidi?

The meaning of this is obscure (sometimes only Freddy and Edith knew their own meaning). Was he asking if Edith would be prepared to keep a secret for her sister, as a way of asking if Avis would do the same for Edith? Was he showing interest, concern? Was he teasing out a small strand of jealousy, for old times’ sake? Given the rest of the letter, which swoons and sickens with passion, it is frankly impossible to think that he was wavering in any meaningful way towards the younger sister.

‘Good night now darlingest – dearest little sweetheart and big pal.’ In her reply, produced in fits and starts on Monday 2 October, Edith completely ignored the reference to Avis. Instead she wrote about the happiness of the meetings on Friday and Saturday, about being pals and lovers.

Saturday, it may be inferred, was something different for her: it was the first and only time that she truly understood how sex could be with this man; she gave herself to him, lost her perpetual awareness, and either climaxed or came very close. Even now, it is possible to feel, through words written on a breath of self-expression almost one hundred years ago, Edith Thompson’s last shuddering sensations of pleasure.

I only know how I felt – no not really how I felt but how I could feel – if time and circumstances were different.

It seems like a great welling up of love – of feeling – of inertia, just as if I am wax in your hands – to do with as you will and I feel that if you do as you wish I shall be happy, its physical purely and I can't really describe it – but you will understand darlint wont you? You said you knew it would be like this one day – if it hadn’t would you have been disappointed. Darlingest when you are rough, I go dead – try not to be please.

To read this on Monday, after a day away from her with his nerves alight – this intimate womanly voice, schooling him yet willing to learn – the promise that it held, of what had only just been achieved and was soon to be snatched out of reach again – for the Morea sailed again on Thursday... No, not easy.

‘I tried so hard to find a way out of tonight darlingest boy but he was suspicious and still is’ – Edith had to spend the evening with, of all people, her brother-in-law Richard –

I suppose we must make a study of this deceit for some time longer. I hate it. I hate every lie I have to tell to see you – because lies seem such small mean things to attain such an object as ours... I’d love to be able to say “I’m going to see my lover tonight.” If I did he would prevent me – there would be scenes and he would come to 168 and interfere and I couldn’t bear that – I could be beaten all over at home and still be defiant – but at 168 it’s different. It’s my living – you wouldn’t let me live on him would you and I shouldn’t want to – darlint its funds that are our stumbling block – until we have those we can do nothing. Darlingest find me a job abroad I’ll go tomorrow and not say I was going to a soul and not have one little regret. I said I wouldn’t think – that I’d try to forget – circumstances – Pal, help me to forget again – I have succeeded up to now – but its thinking of tonight and tomorrow when I can’t see you and feel you holding me

Darlint – do something tomorrow night will you? something to make you forget. I’ll be hurt I know, but I want you to hurt me – I do really – the bargain now, seems so one sided – so unfair – but how can I alter it?

Then she wrote about the recently-mended watch that she had given him.

‘How I thought you would feel about the watch, I would feel about something I have.’

Freddy had given her presents also, including some exotic beads (much admired; she joked of offering to leave them to various people in her will) and the bronze monkey that sat on her office desk. Of this she wrote:

‘He’s still well ^* – he’s going to gaze all day long at you in your temporary home – after Wednesday.’

The ‘temporary home’ referred to a sketch of the Morea, which was being framed in readiness for its collection on 4 October, when Edith intended to hang it in her office.

‘Don’t forget what we talked in the Tea Room, I’ll still risk and try if you will – we only have 3% years left darlingest.

‘Try & help

‘PEIDI.’

This was Exhibit 60, the last letter that Edith wrote before the murder.

‘On the 2nd Oct at 8.30am I answered a telephone call,’ Lilian Bywaters told the police. ‘It was a woman’s voice and I called my son and he answered it. My son left the house shortly before 11am.’

So Edith was willing to ring Freddy at the Norwood house, despite the froideur between her and his mother. The rendezvous was for lunch that day. A simple enough arrangement; until Percy, yet again on a spying mission, turned up at Carlton & Prior at around 12.30.

Charles Higgins, the warehouse boy at the firm, who had previously seen Edith with Freddy in the spring of 1922, told the police: ‘Miss Graydon called me into her office which is on the ground floor, she was alone, she was in the act of wrapping up an order form with some writing on it, I could see there were only a few words, I should think about five or six. After she had wrapped it up she placed it in a white envelope, sealed it and said “Take this... to Aldersgate Street Station and give it to the gentleman who is wearing a blue overcoat and a trilby hat.’” Higgins recognized Freddy as ‘the young man who I had seen with Mrs Thompson. I gave him the letter and ran back to the shop. He did not speak to me or I to him. There were two words I noticed... it was “come” and “Peidi”.’

The message was: ‘Wait till one he’s come PEIDI.’

In another statement Higgins said: ‘I delivered two notes to the same man at the same place within five minutes of each other the same day between 12.30 and 12.45. They were both in envelopes, no address being written. The second letter I delivered ten yards from Osman’s shop.’

Osman’s stood at 165-6 Aldersgate Street, the other side of the alley in which Edith and Freddy must surely have embraced in part-privacy; it was a shop that sold knives.

Edith’s second note was slightly panicked, what with Percy’s sudden arrival and all. ‘Mr Carlton has gone out to lunch now & I must wait until he comes back – Miss P. is not back yet – do you mind waiting there – I am sorry to ask you to wait such a lot but its awkward today – I had a terrible half hour.’

He waited. They had lunch. Later they had tea at Fullers. Then they separated: Edith went to 49 Seymour Gardens, where she hugged her secret knowledge in the respectable chill of Richard Thompson’s drawing-room, and Freddy went to 231 Shakespeare Crescent, where he was greeted with pleasure by the Graydons and stayed until around 10.30pm. ‘I was on very friendly terms with that family,’ he told the Old Bailey. ‘I asked Mr Graydon if he would get me some tobacco, and he said that he would.’

That day, as promised, Edith had bought him a new tobacco pouch.

Two days later, Richard Thompson told the police that he had seen his brother ‘at my house on Monday evening the 2nd about 9pm. His health and spirits were then quite normal.’

On the morning of 3 October, stated Lilian Bywaters, ‘the ‘phone went and my son answered it. He did not tell me what the message was. He left the house somewhere before 12 o’clock but did not say where he was going.’

In fact he had gone as usual to the City, and took Edith to lunch in Cheapside. Later, once more, they met at Fullers. The waitress Edith Brown told the police: ‘I again saw Bywaters in the shop about 4pm. He came in alone and sat there until 5.10pm when he was joined by the female prisoner... Bywaters asked her to have some coffee, and she refused. They left together about 5.15pm.’

To the Old Bailey, in reply to a question about what they had talked about in the couple of minutes spent at the tea room, Freddy said:

‘The conversation I had with her was making arrangements for the following day. She asked me if I would be in town the following day as usual.’

They parted at Aldersgate station at around 5.30. Did they touch? Did they kiss? Surely yes. They looked like any young couple, parting with reluctance in a way that was commonplace for lovers; although their looks, their physical glamour, the intensity of their absorption in each other did set them apart: people noticed them. They remembered them.

Edith went down into the underground, on her way to Piccadilly station, where she would meet Percy, together with her aunt Lily and uncle John, for an evening at the Criterion Theatre. Freddy travelled in the opposite direction to the Graydons’ house, where he would again spend the evening. The knife was in his inside coat pocket. Later he would say that he always carried a knife.

These evenings in the little parlour at Shakespeare Crescent would seem strange today, when the time would almost certainly be eased by the blessed company of the television. In 1922 evenings were long: this one in particular, perhaps, to Freddy Bywaters, although Mr Graydon testified that there was ‘nothing unusual whatever’ about his behaviour. They might have played whist, they would have had some supper and a couple of drinks, but mainly they talked. Well-meaning, sometimes slightly effortful, good-natured talk – a bit of chaff, a bit of a joke – a different conversational universe from the highly-charged whisperings with Edith about you, me, us, what we did before and what we must, will, shall do after. The men might discuss sport: the Cesarewitch at Newmarket, the recent defeat of the light-heavyweight champion Georges Carpentier, who had once paid a celebrity visit to the sports shop on Aldersgate Street. The women would smile indulgently and ‘let them get on with it’, then would bring the chat round to something more personal, such as the new pouch that Freddy was now filling with the tobacco supplied by Mr Graydon (a clerk with Imperial Tobacco).

‘Both Mrs and Miss Graydon noticed it,’ he testified to his counsel at the trial. ‘Mrs Graydon said to me, “You have got a new pouch, Freddy. Was it a present?” and I said “Yes”. She said, “From a girl, I expect?” and I said “Yes”. She said, “I expect the same girl gave you that as gave you the watch?” I said, “Yes, the same girl gave it me,” and she said, “I know who it is, but I am not going to say. Never mind, we won’t argue about it. She is one of the best.” I said, “There is none better.”‘

So here was acquiescence from Ethel Graydon. It was a head-in-the-sand attitude – foolish, perhaps, but what was the alternative? Ethel was not a weak woman, but nor was she combative like Lilian Bywaters. She took the view that there was nothing to be done, and it is impossible to say whether this was right or wrong. Might she have been able to stop Edith? It is hard to think that anything could, not least because there was no real solution to Edith’s situation. Percy would not divorce her, she would not leave him; in a way that defies analysis she was addicted to having it both ways and neither way. As for trying to stop Freddy: that moment had passed.

Avis had given it her best shot, over the past few months; and what she thought now, about the provenance of the tobacco pouch and her mother’s gentle affectionate teasing, can only be imagined. She may have been accepting, she may have been angry. It was certainly quite something to hear Mrs Graydon effectively giving her benediction to this ‘flirtation’ – as everybody still prayed that it was – between her married daughter and the man that her other daughter had hoped to marry.

Later Avis would claim that she had been invited to the Criterion Theatre that evening, and cancelled only on the day itself. In her letter to Andrew Bonar Law she wrote:

I can assure you Sir that my sister had no idea that her husband was going to be murdered, as it had been arranged a fortnight before that, I should accompany them to the Theatre, & spend the night with her in Kensington Gardens, & she had no idea until she met her husband in the evening that I was not going to be of the party. Her husband telephoned me late in the afternoon & I told him that I had already made arrangements to go out for mother.

She did not, of course, ‘go out’ for her mother, she stayed in for Freddy Bywaters; it might well have been that she changed her mind about trekking into the West End when she heard that he was spending the evening at Shakespeare Crescent. It is by no means sure, however, that she was ever a member of the theatre party. Freddy’s evidence on the subject is also contradictory. In his statement to the police, some of which he later refuted, he said:

‘I remember Mrs Graydon’s daughter Avis saying that Percy had phoned her up, and I gathered from the observations she made that he was taking his wife to a theatre that night and that there were other members of the family going.’

This was confirmed by Mr Graydon, who told the police:

‘A short time after he arrived my daughter Avis came home from business, and whilst we were having tea (Bywaters included) said that she had received a telephone message from Percy informing her that he and his wife were going to the Criterion Theatre that night. I am sure Bywaters heard her saying it.’

The implication is that Freddy only found out at the last minute that Edith was out with her husband – she herself had not told him she would be gallivanting round Piccadilly Circus with the despised cuckold Percy – and that the shock of hearing this, the realization that Edith had lied, was the lethal drop of petrol upon the carefully laid fire. Against this, however, is the evidence that he gave at the trial. Asked about the remark quoted above, which suggested that he had not already known about the theatre visit, he replied: ‘I did not say that.’

‘Do you agree with me,’ said the solicitor general, ‘that the meaning of that paragraph is that you gathered it for the first time from conversation?’

‘No.’

By the time of the trial Freddy would have realized, or been advised, that he should disengage himself from what he said at the police station. He told the Old Bailey that he had not wanted the police to think that he knew Edith’s movements, which was fair enough. But if he really hadn’t known, that raises two more questions: firstly, had Edith deliberately kept it from him? Secondly, did Avis tell him about it – oh yes, they’re out on the town together, didn’t you know – in order to make trouble? There is a story, not corroborated, that Freddy and Avis left the Graydon house on the night of the 3rd and went for a drink at the nearby Avenue Hotel. Such an interlude would have given Avis time to say any number of things. These need not have been about the theatre trip in particular, but about the Thompsons’ marriage in general: that it was nothing like as unbearable as Edith sometimes made out, that Edith moaned about Percy but was fond enough of him really, that she had been looking forward to tonight even if she said she was dreading it... Avis, after all, had a motive for doing this, and it was sitting right opposite her.

A pub outing would also bring the rogue factor of alcohol into the mix, although Mr Graydon told the police that Freddy had no more than two glasses of ale at the house. But four drinks – say – is enough, when the blood is already up.

Against this theory, that the decision to attack was made on impulse during the evening of the 3rd: he had the knife with him already. Soon the police would take a statement from a director of Osman’s, the shop across the alleyway from Carlton & Prior, who in September 1922 had sold a six-shilling hunting knife, the same make as the murder weapon, to a man resembling Freddy Bywaters (with ‘the appearance of a young scout master’). This was not clear evidence – the salesman failed to identify the right photograph from a line-up – but then, no more so was Freddy’s own statement that he had bought the knife a year earlier, and carried it much of the time because ‘it was handy’.

‘A knife of that size and character?’ asked the solicitor general. The blade, which was double-edged, measured five and a half inches. Despite the sheath it was not an easy thing to carry, even in an inside overcoat pocket. One would be aware of its presence. Its appearance was said to have shocked the jury.

‘Yes, handy at sea.’

‘Handy at sea, but was it handy at home?’

‘Yes.’

Also against this theory is that Edith would, almost beyond a doubt, have told Freddy that she was going to the theatre with Percy. After the trial, in a letter to the home secretary, he said that she had told him at lunchtime that day. Her last letter, written during Monday 2 October, referred to ‘tonight and tomorrow when I can’t see you and feel you holding me...’: in other words, she was going out with Percy on both the 2nd and the 3rd. She did not want to do these things, she wrote, but ‘we must make a study of this deceit for some time longer’.

Some time longer? That does not suggest that she was expecting Freddy to kill Percy the very next night. Nor does: ‘Darlingest find me a job abroad I’ll go tomorrow and not say I was going to a soul and not have one little regret.’

But then there was this:

‘Darlint – do something tomorrow night will you? something to make you forget. I’ll be hurt I know, but I want you to hurt me – I do really – the bargain now, seems so one sided – so unfair – but how can I alter it?’

The lines resonated, reverberated: they were beautiful, and they were perceived to be an incitement to evil.

‘What had Bywaters to forget?’ The solicitor general again.

‘That I was going somewhere with my husband.’

‘What was he to do to make him forget that?’

‘I wanted him to take my sister Avis out.’

‘You say “I will be hurt, I know.” What did that mean?’

‘I should have been hurt by Bywaters being with a lady other than myself.’

Well, that was the truth all right; and what Edith suggested was indeed a way to make the bargain less one-sided. Its masochism was characteristic, as was the kindly cruelty that it inflicted upon Avis. It was, moreover, an unlikely thing to have invented.

Yet Edith’s testimony was noted by the Home Office civil servant who made neat, sceptical comments upon her sister’s letter to the prime minister, in which Avis wrote that she herself had been expected at the theatre that night. This was ‘quite inconsistent with Mrs Thompson’s explanation of a passage in her letter of 2nd October. “Do something tomorrow night.” She said this meant “Take my sister Avis out”!’

Which was also true. Although Freddy did ask Avis out that night; as she told the Old Bailey.

‘As I was letting him out of the door he said to me, “I will be down to take you to the pictures tomorrow evening.” That arrangement was made by him just as I was letting him out the front door.’

She watched him walk down the dark crescent, at about 11pm, and probably went to sleep very happy.

Edith and Percy Thompson had met up with the Laxtons at 6.45. Her aunt Lily had written to Edith a couple of weeks earlier, suggesting an outing to the Ben Travers farce, The Dippers. It was a romp, a hoot, it had an Ivor Novello song in the middle; there is no reason to think but that all four of them had a very jolly time watching it, that they laughed merrily and exchanged glances with each other in the affirming little human way that says, yes, we’re all enjoying ourselves, we’re all sharing our moment of fun, God bless us all. ‘During the whole of the evening we had a most enjoyable time,’ John Laxton told the police.

And Edith had always loved being part of the London evening, emerging into streets as the electric gleam took custody of the sky, feeling her elegant silhouette trace itself against the backcloth of the city. She was in love with Freddy Bywaters, but she still wanted that quick hard glance of admiration from other men, even her husband, and no doubt she got it that night. She wore grey crepe de chine under her musquash coat, and she carried a red cloth bag, large enough to contain her opera glasses, gloves and her husband’s gloves. Percy, doing her perfectly proud, was dressed in a three-piece blue suit, which within six hours would be criss-crossed with slashes and cuts, his tie severed close to the knot he had remade in the gents’ before leaving work.

After a pre-theatre supper, the couples went in to the show. ‘On one occasion during the interval,’ stated John Laxton, ‘we Percy and I went into the buffett and had one Bass each.’ The women probably had a cigarette and a chat: how was work, how was family? They were fond of each other; they saw each other quite often; a part of Edith was very much like this sensible, good-looking, apparently contented aunt. A part of her enjoyed this evening out with Percy.

At 10.45, around the time that Freddy Bywaters was thinking about leaving the Graydons, the Thompsons climbed the staircase up from the pit. Well, that was grand! Wasn’t it now? The Criterion foyer, with its walls lined in rich tiles, was the last London interior that Edith saw in her free life, and Percy in his life. Out into the air. No, not too cold! The taxis hovered by Eros as the crowds were disgorged from the theatres, putting on their hats and coats, lighting fags, moving off into the mellow autumn night. The lights of Piccadilly Circus blinked on-off, on-off, the very essence of vitality, of liberty, of the shiny world of the New Aspirant. Neither Edith nor Percy would have looked at them much. They were Londoners, they had seen it all before. This was just one evening out of others, no different from others.

‘They appeared a most affectionate couple,’ said John Laxton. ‘When leaving they appeared in the best of good health and spirits’

They descended into the underground. The men bought the tickets while Edith and Lily waited in their furs and little hats. Lily described their leave-taking to the police: ‘When they came up with the tickets Mrs Thompson said “You go that way” meaning towards Finsbury Park, “we go this way,” pointing towards the lift down to the trains for Liverpool Street. I kissed her goodbye and shook hands with Mr Thompson and we parted.’

It was that journey once more into the suburbs, not long, somewhat tedious – change at Holborn, 11.30 from Liverpool Street, the quarter-hour or so walk from Ilford station – but they were used to it; probably they hardly noticed it. They arrived at Ilford just before midnight, crossed the railway bridge and stepped out for the last time into the cloudy grey air. It was mild: Percy was not even wearing a coat. Neither put on their gloves. Edith carried her husband’s bowler hat. Ahead of them was the long straight Belgrave Road, with its regularly spaced intersections and its lamps on alternating corners, stretching into a distance whose end was not visible. They crossed York Road and began to walk down Belgrave. They may have talked of the play, although that would have been done on the train: easily, stiltedly, who knows. They may have discussed the maid, Ethel Vernon, who was arriving the next day at Paddington station. Edith said that she was trying to persuade Percy to take her to a dance a fortnight hence. There is no knowing what they talked about.

As it happened, another party of playgoers was on its way home from the station. They were Mr and Mrs Percy Cleveley of Mayfair Avenue, Mrs Jessie Secretan of Courtland Avenue and Miss Dora Pittard of Endsleigh Gardens: three of the near-identical streets that crossed Belgrave Road. From the stories told by these and other people it is clear enough what happened, although some of the timings conflict. This may just have been a matter of inaccurate memories. Anyway, not everything is explained.

Had somebody been able to hover and watch from above, it would have looked like another piece of theatre, open-air this time, as the various actors moved steadily through their roles. They walked, they stopped, they somehow avoided each other: it was a giant pavane, danced in the dark through this seemly grid of streets, with an ending – sprung by a character who emerged from the wings like a phantom – that would have left the audience stunned, almost disbelieving, atavistically thrilled.

The party of four must have walked behind the Thompsons along Belgrave Road, and at some remove. Even so their proximity makes what happened an act of still greater recklessness.

At around 12.10am the foursome separated at Mayfair Avenue, and Mr and Mrs Cleveley went into their home. Jessie Secretan said: ‘Miss Pittard and I proceeded along Belgrave Road to the corner of Courtland Avenue.’ This was the next street. The women were walking on the right-hand side of the road, given their direction of travel, and stood talking for a couple of minutes on the corner – outside a surgery, that of Dr Noel Maudsley – until about 12.12. Then Mrs Secretan saw a man, lurking inexplicably, on the same side of Belgrave Road as herself.

Dora Pittard told the police that she could not see this individual, as her eyesight was not good enough, but like Mrs Secretan she was unnerved. A man who did not seek to reassure ladies of his harmlessness was unusual in Ilford. The women returned to the Cleveleys’ house and, as Miss Pittard stated: ‘Mr Cleveley offered to escort us to our homes. We went to Courtland Avenue and saw Mrs Secretan enter her front gate. Then Mr Cleveley and I walked along Belgrave Road towards my home.’

Thus their movement through the streets was delayed by a few minutes. More separation was made between them and the Thompsons; and the events that would at any moment take place.

The unknown man passed Miss Pittard and Mr Cleveley on Belgrave Road. ‘He was walking towards us slowly,’ she said: ‘a short man about 5 feet 5, age about 40 perhaps a little younger, medium build, dressed dark suit soft hat, carrying an overcoat over his arm.’

This man, who (allowing for Miss Pittard’s short sight) resembled Frederick Bywaters, and who was behaving so oddly, was not in fact him. Nevertheless he was in the area. He had walked from Shakespeare Crescent to Ilford, a journey that took about half an hour. Mr Graydon told the police that he had stayed later at the house than usual: ‘His practice being to leave at about 10.30, to enable him to catch the proper connection of trains to Norwood.’ This, in itself, suggests intent.

Assuming that he arrived in Ilford at around 11.30, what he then did is unknown. But he had time to spare, which was dangerous: his thoughts could become less manageable. According to his own evidence he was at the station, then made his way as if towards Kensington Gardens. ‘I knew that Mr and Mrs Thompson would be together, and I thought perhaps if I were to see them it would make things a bit better.’

He continued: ‘When I got into Belgrave Road I walked for some time, and some distance ahead I saw Mr and Mrs Thompson, their backs turned to me.’ Given the number of other people around that night – a surprising number, one might say – it is unlikely that it happened quite that way. Indeed it is well-nigh impossible. Freddy’s evidence gave the impression that he had seen the Thompsons almost unexpectedly, as if they had suddenly materialized on a straight road. This was of a piece with his explanation as to why he walked to Ilford: ‘It kind of came across me all of a sudden.’ Nothing was planned, nothing foreseen. Nevertheless it is certain as can be that he took a different, less obvious route on his way to Kensington Gardens; probably up Cranbrook Road then on to The Drive, which runs essentially parallel to Belgrave Road. Also near-certain is that he did not follow the Thompsons, he was waiting for them.

He admitted this in his second statement to the police. Later he said that the words had been suggested to him: he was not a fool. But the houses on the corners of Belgrave Road have front gardens with small internal pathways, accessible from the pavement, shrouded by trees, within which a person could hide themselves, yet still see who was passing by. Most probable, therefore, is that he walked up The Drive, turned left into Endsleigh Gardens, walked along to the junction with Belgrave Road, and waited in the front garden of the house at the north corner, opposite Miss Pittard’s.

The man whom she had thought so suspicious was in fact a harmless accountant named Joseph Row, who had spent the evening in De Vere Gardens. To judge from his amblings and meanderings he was slightly drunk, although there is no reason to think him wholly unreliable. He had begun walking home at around 12.10am.

I reached Belgrave Road in about a minute; when I had turned from De Vere and had proceeded along Belgrave Road for a few paces in the direction of Ilford station I heard a voice as though from an excited female. This voice came from the back of me and from across Belgrave Road. I stopped, looked round. I believe I saw the form of a person (I think a woman) under a lamppost on the other side of Belgrave Road. I paused and heard noises as though someone was vomiting, in fact I am nearly certain that someone was vomiting and retching but I could not see that person. I lit a cigarette and thinking that a drunken man was being seen home by his wife, I walked away towards home.

The vomiting and retching was from Percy Thompson; the wife was Edith Thompson.

Mr Row then passed Mr Cleveley, escorting Miss Pittard back to her home in Endsleigh Gardens, which was the street beyond De Vere. As he walked on, he heard a woman’s voice behind him. She was saying: ‘For God’s sake help me. My husband has been taken ill and is lying on the pavement bleeding.’

Out of the darkness, Edith had run into Mr Cleveley and Miss Pittard; she threw herself at Miss Pittard and begged for a doctor to be brought. She said: ‘His blood is all over me.’ The three of them went back to Courtland Avenue, where they called for Dr Maudsley. Mr Row, who now stayed to watch, described Edith as sobbing and being supported by Miss Pittard. Then she ran back towards her husband. Percy was on the right side of the road; according to information supplied at the trial he was 154 yards from his home.

‘Mr Cleveley and I followed,’ said Miss Pittard. ‘Between Endsleigh Gardens and Kensington Gardens, I saw a man lying on the pavement with his head against the wall.’

This mid-point between the two intersecting streets, with their dim streetlamps on alternate corners, was the darkest part of the road. It was thirty-seven yards from the nearest light.

‘I struck a match,’ said Mr Cleveley, ‘and saw that he was saturated in blood.’

Observing this was a man named John Webber, who lived on the corner of De Vere Gardens. At about 12.30, by his own account, Mr Webber heard a woman screaming in what he described as a piteous voice: ‘Don’t, oh don’t.’ He came down from his bedroom to find out what was happening, and saw three people moving away from Courtland Avenue towards ‘the scene of the occurrence. The woman in grey was running.’ Mr Webber followed them.

I saw a man propped against the wall; the woman in grey was standing against him. The other two stood a short distance away. I went over and said to the woman in grey, ‘What’s the matter, has the man fallen down?’ She said ‘I don’t know’ I said ‘Can I do anything’ and she said ‘No don’t touch him, a lady and gentleman have gone for the doctor.’

According to his police statement, Mr Cleveley asked Edith how it had happened: ‘“Did anyone strike him?” She replied: “Don’t ask me, I cannot say; somebody flew (or brushed) passed me and he had fallen down on his head.” She seemed anxious for the Doctor to come, so Miss Pittard and I walked towards Courtland Avenue and met Dr Maudsley coming.’

The doctor told the police that he found ‘a man lying transversely across the pavement, and leaning against the wall with his head on his chest. His hands were cold and blood was welling out of his mouth. I formed the opinion the man had been dead about ten minutes.’

Edith, he said, ‘was in a hysterical condition, markedly so, and standing quite close to the body.’ Miss Pittard had similarly described her as ‘incoherent and hysterical’; as did Mr Cleveley, who also said that the whole time she was holding a bowler hat in her hand. To Dr Maudsley she said: ‘Why didn’t you come sooner and save him?’

At the scene, the doctor suggested that Percy had died from a natural haemorrhage. Nevertheless he straightaway informed Ilford police. The call for an ambulance came into the station at 12.40am. The doctor may have used the nearest telephone to hand – people by this time were starting to come out of their houses, to see what was going on – but still the timeframe is odd. Mr Row heard a woman’s ‘excited’ voice at around 12.15. Mr Webber claimed to have heard a scream at around 12.30. One assumes that the scream was followed, quite quickly, by the meeting in the street between Edith, Mr Cleveley and Miss Pittard; and that Mr Webber came downstairs in time to see Edith running back to Percy from Dr Maudsley’s surgery. The doctor’s estimate that Percy had been dead for ten minutes, and the logging of his call at 12.40, mean that Mr Row’s evidence is probably correct and Mr Webber’s timing slightly wrong. Indeed there were those, including the trial judge, who thought that Mr Webber’s entire evidence was wrong, and that it made no sense for him alone to have heard a scream. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that details are disputable. What is certain is that these events tumbled over each other in the most rapid succession: that all of this was happening as Freddy Bywaters ran at speed up Belgrave Road, past Kensington Gardens and into Seymour Gardens, where he dropped the knife down a drain; that he would have barely been absorbed into the darkness of Wanstead Park by the time – 12.50 – that the police ambulance arrived to take Percy Thompson to the mortuary in Ilford High Road.

His blue suit was found to be a zigzag of cuts. There were four on his waistcoat, three through his white linen collar, two on the neck of his shirt and three on his tie, which was severed below the knot. The suit jacket was sheared: fifteen cuts in all. When the clothes were stripped from his body, the following injuries were discovered and later detailed by the police surgeon: four slight cuts on the left of the torso; two slight cuts on the front of the chin; two slight cuts on the right of the jaw. These were the superficial wounds. There were also three deep cuts: on the inner side of the right forearm was a slash measuring 3¼ inches long, which had cut the sleeve of the jacket into two pieces. At the back of the neck was a stab wound, two inches deep, 1¼ inches wide, passing upward towards the right ear. On the right side of the throat was another stab, one inch long and about 2¼ inches deep. It penetrated the carotid artery and the jugular vein, thus opening the gullet, through which blood flowed into the stomach, later found to contain about a half-pint of blood. ‘This,’ wrote the surgeon, ‘was the wound that proved fatal’

At around 3am Sergeant Walter Mew, one of the officers who had been at the mortuary when these injuries were revealed, returned to Belgrave Road with a colleague, Sergeant Walter Grimes. It was Grimes who had taken the original message from Dr Maudsley, and directed two constables to what he believed was a case of natural death. Now – remarkably, for the first time – the officers saw the extent of the blood: on the pavement, the road, the high wall that stretched between Endsleigh and Kensington Gardens. The blood trailed north, forming a stop-start pattern along the pavement, pooling every two or three steps. At one point it spread into the middle of the road. It was there that the fatal stab had been given: a six-foot jet of blood sprayed towards the kerb. The place where Percy died, sitting on the pavement with his back to the wall, was stained with blood from the wounds and from vomiting. It was some forty-four feet from the site of the first injury.

In terms of actual minutes, it would not have taken long. Yet it was a prolonged attack: a struggle between the two men, like the one that had taken place around the corner at Kensington Gardens in August 1921. This time the outcome was different, but it easily might not have been. If Mr Row had not been hanging around that night, unwittingly alarming two women who had intended to walk directly to their homes, Dora Pittard would most likely have reached Endsleigh Gardens in time to frighten off Frederick Bywaters before he became a murderer. So contingent was this story, in the end.

A couple of hours before he returned to Belgrave Road, Sergeant Mew had escorted Edith to 41 Kensington Gardens. ‘Will he come back?’ she asked, to which the officer replied, soothingly and perhaps uncomprehendingly: ‘Yes.’ Then she said: ‘They will blame me for this.’

* At the trial, Mr Justice Shearman would suggest that this phrase referred to Percy Thompson; the implication being that ‘he’ would not be ‘well’ for much longer.