A Question of Guilt

'Come, Eliot,' his father said impatiently. 'It's all open and shut, as if Inspector Dew had burst upon the wretch with the bloodstained chopper in his hand.'

'May I disagree, sir? Why, some tramp may have intruded into the house while Crippen was out at work.'

'Cutting up a man's wife is a procedure demanding more forethought than stealing his gold watch.'

'I cannot believe that one as mild, agreeable and loving as Crippen could live six months with Ethel Le Neve while the wife he had killed-or about half of her-was a foot under his boots every time he went to replenish the kitchen fire,' Eliot said firmly. 'And I think I know as much of the human mind as anyone. Crippen's only peculiarity was a taste for younger women-Belle 13 years his junior, Ethel 24. That's a failing he shares with a few men in this room, I daresay. I'm sorry for Crippen, I'm determined to help him as best I can.'

'You'll make yourself dreadfully unpopular.'

'Among whom? Not the people who matter to me, the working men, the labourers, the poor.'

'Listen to some advice which has stuck in my mind. 'Remember, never to make yourself the busybody of the lower classes, for they are cowardly, selfish and ungrateful. The least trifle will intimidate them, and him whom they have exalted one moment as their demagogue, the next they will not scruple to exalt upon the gallows'.'

Eliot smiled. 'Who said that? It's shrewd enough for either Charles I or Cromwell.'

'A sailor called Parker, just before he was hanged after the Nore mutiny of 1797.'

'As innocence is useless without a good lawyer,' Eliot resumed, 'I'm trying to get Marshall Hall for Crippen. I expect he'll take the brief cheap. The advertisement's worth a thousand times as much.'

'No. Get F E Smith.'

'Who's he?'

'The cleverest man in the Kingdom,' his father told him. Eliot shrugged. 'Did you see about me in the _Daily Mail?'_

'I do not read the yellow press.'

'It gave me quite a reputation as a medical missionary. Where one's most needed. Here in London.'

'How much longer are you going to throw your talents at the poor? You're like some _nouveau riche_ speculator courting popularity by tossing shillings to his tenants,' his father reprimanded him. He continued more pleadingly, 'Settle down. Make yourself a proper living. The Duke will still help you, I'm sure of that. His concern for myself has increased, as the father of a son with such peculiarities.'

'As a matter of fact sir, I am thinking of chucking the free surgery,' Eliot confessed. 'The trade unions have stopped supporting me. I suppose they feel their money is buying glory for myself, rather than their officials. So has the Church. It finds that relieving humanity of its pains in the next world is less expensive than in this one. Perhaps I'll go back to Switzerland and open my own sanatorium? Though that's like running a luxurious hotel, in which closest attention to the welfare of your guests cannot prevent your regularly losing a good many customers for ever.'

'That would be the end of your political ambitions.' His father sounded hopeful.

'I did badly in the last election, I might do worse in the next. What if I became a Labour MP? I'd have to be as respectable as a family solicitor. Look at our dashing, brilliant Victor Grayson. In the House of Commons at my own age, too independent a spirit for the burnt-out firebrands running the Labour Party. He's taken to the bottle in frustration. I'm chucking politics into the bargain. Medicine is far too important a human activity to be complicated by idealism. This club claret is excellent, sir.'

His father asked slyly, 'May I suppose there is a woman behind this welcome change of heart?'

'Yes. I'm living out of wedlock with an American lady.'

'Well, it's among a young man's amusements, _faire la bкte а deux dos._ Is she respectable?'

'Entirely.'

'No money, I suppose?'

'Oh, yes. About five million dollars.'

The colonel dropped his knife and fork. 'Good God, Eliot. And I was beginning to think you a bit of a fool.'

'How's mother?'

'She has discovered a new sort of climbing rose.'

18

'So he filleted her?' suggested Eliot.

Dr Bernard Spilsbury nodded. He was tall, straight-backed, handsome, his thick dark hair brilliantined, a red carnation in the lapel of his grey suit. Eliot thought him solemn, aloof and self-opinionated. He thought Eliot cynical and flippant. Both were young doctors of exceptional intelligence with energy as limitless as their ambition.

'If the remains are Belle Elmore's,' Eliot said.

'Oh, I'm sure of that.' Spilsbury was always precise, brief and confident. Eliot had a lingering feeling that he treated his acquaintances as interesting subjects on which he was performing the post-mortem.

It was mid-September. The trial at the Old Bailey was fixed for the eighteenth of the following month. Spilsbury unlocked a cupboard on the wall of his small laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, near Paddington Station. It contained five large glass jars, covered like homemade pickles by glazed white paper tied with tape. Spilsbury's finger indicated the blue-edged labels which might have read 'Onions' or 'Tomato Chutney'.

'That's the stomach, with one kidney and the heart-fatty, obviously of a plump person-and part of the liver. The next contains a pair of female woollen combinations, found under the cellar floor with a female undervest. The next, small gut, more liver and some hair. The last more gut, some muscle and two lungs. When you savoured the Crippen's hospitality you may have observed this garment airing on a clothes-horse.'

Spilsbury untied the cover of the last bottle, removing with forceps a long strip of green and white flannel. 'The most damning specimen of the case. A piece of pyjamas, found with the organs. Note the curious arrangement of green lines. Exactly like those we know Mrs Crippen bought from the admirable Jones Brothers of Holloway, on January 5, 1909, for seventeen-and-ninepence, cash on delivery by the firm's cart.' His forceps reached for a metal clip with a six-inch tuft. 'A Hinde's curler, as used by Mrs. Crippen.

'Eliot nodded. 'I recognize the hair.'

'Luckily, hair is one of the last anatomical structures to decompose.' He dropped it back. 'If you remain unconvinced, Beckett, I can show you a strip of lower abdominal skin, with a longitudinal midline scar from umbilicus to pubis. The ovarotomy operation Mrs Crippen underwent at New York in 1893. Doubtless, the defence will try passing it off as a fold in the skin. But it's a scar, right enough, pure fibrous tissue without the sebaceous glands one would find in skin. I have examined it under the microscope, which I shall bring with me to the Old Bailey and invite the jury to see for themselves.'

'Isn't that rather _coup de thйвtre?' _murmured Eliot, feeling that the pathologist fitted the crime.

'Not at all. I am responsible for my own opinion, which has been formed on my own scientific knowledge. I can demonstrate to the jury exactly how I formed it.' He retied the jar. Eliot supposed that Spilsbury's professional attention to Crippen would make his reputation, like Bernard Dawson's to King Edward VII in his own inevitably final days.

'You believe that the hyoscine which killed Belle Elmore was administered inadvertently?' Spilsbury locked the cupboard.

'With good reason. Crippen confided in me that he was giving her hyoscine in homoeopathic doses to dampen her sexual demands.'

'The half grain I found in the body was hardly a homoeopathic dose,' Spilsbury said mockingly. 'It would slay a prize-fighter. Crippen was lying to you, as to everyone else. You know they slept in separate rooms?'

'So do our kings and queens, but we never lack heirs to the throne.'