One moment, please, Mr Farquharson. This Court is, as you know, purely a Court of Inquiry …
Quite, quite. I am merely putting the rational, as opposed to the official, point of view. But in whatever words anyone may cloak the fact of Violet Burrage’s evidence yesterday, there is only one logical inference to draw from it until such time as evidence can be produced that my client did not, and, moreover, could not, have killed Maxwell Brunton. And I ask, Mr Coroner, that you will exercise your jurisdiction of this Court in such a way as to permit this terribly grave point to be cleared up to the least possible detail.
Are both Doctor Crosby and Sir Philip Fennimore in court?
Yes, Mr Coroner.
Very well, Mr Farquharson, I will recall Dr Crosby. I would like to ask first, however, whether you will wish to put any questions to these witnesses?
That, Mr Coroner, I am perfectly certain will not be necessary, since Dr Crosby and Sir Philip Fennimore are here to tell you one thing and one thing only. And that is that when Dr Crosby examined the body of Maxwell Brunton at 3.30 a.m. upon the night of Thursday last, that body was in such a state as to prove conclusively to a medical man that death must have occurred not less than three hours earlier. And my client, Mr Coroner and gentlemen, did not go into the study, as Violet Burrage’s evidence will show and as my client corroborates, until 1.30—by which time Maxwell Brunton’s life must have been extinct for at least an hour.
Recall Dr Richard Crosby.
DR RICHARD CROSBY (RECALLED)
Dr Crosby, I expect you are aware of the point we have recalled you upon?
Yes.
I will come straight to the point then. Looking up my notes I find that when I asked you, on the occasion of your first giving evidence, how long life had been extinct when you examined the body of the deceased, you said that it had taken place not more than six hours previously. I assume that you now have something to add to this statement?
I have. First I have an apology to make to the Court, and, I have no doubt, to Miss—
Please, Dr Crosby, confine your statement to—
I beg your pardon. When I examined the body of Maxwell Brunton, it was definitely clear that—although it is impossible to fix the exact time of death in such a case—death must have transpired at least three hours earlier. As I examined the body at 3.30 a.m. this places the latest possible time of death at 12.30 a.m.
I see. You are certain of this, Dr Crosby?
Absolutely and entirely certain! If I were to explain—
One moment, Dr Crosby. If, as I expect, the explanation is a long and technical one, and we are also going to hear the evidence of so renowned an expert as Sir Philip Fennimore, I think we can dispense with your professional reasons for arriving at your decision … Do you agree with me, gentlemen? … Thank you.
Very well, Dr Crosby, thank you very much. You may stand down.
Call Sir Philip Fennimore.
SIR PHILIP FENNIMORE, M.D., B.M., D.Sc., ETC., ETC.
What is your full name?
Philip August Fennimore.
Will you please take the oath, Sir Philip?
I swear by Almighty God that what I shall say in evidence in this Court shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
You were in Court, Sir Philip, during the evidence given just now by Dr Crosby?
Yes. I heard Dr Crosby’s evidence.
Do I understand, Sir Philip, that Dr Crosby has consulted you upon this matter?
Yes.
And that Dr Crosby provided you with the necessary … ah, how shall I put it? … data, etcetera, upon which to base an opinion as to when the death of Maxwell Brunton must have occurred?
Yes.
And you are prepared to corroborate Dr Crosby’s dictum?—that the death must have occurred at 12.30 a.m. at the latest?
Definitely. There can be no doubt whatsoever that Dr Crosby is right. It is really a simple point, although perhaps it might be difficult to explain it to laymen. I have, however, at the request of Mr Farquharson, prepared a short written statement which Mr Farquharson can hand to you for the use of yourself and the jury should you wish to study it.
Thank you very much, Sir Philip. I don’t think we need trouble you further.
THE CORONER AND THE JURY
I hope, gentlemen, that you have all taken careful note of the bearing of the evidence of the last witness.
We have now concluded the primary examination of all the witnesses, and have recalled one or two. I now propose to recall Sidney Harrison. We have, I fear, to go over our ground again.
Recall Sidney Harrison.
NOTE ATTACHED TO DOCUMENTS AS SENT BY SIR EGBERT LUCAS TO COLONEL GETHRYN
A. R. G.,—I am not bothering to send you the verbatim report of the re-examination of the witnesses. The Coroner is sound enough but a prolix old fuss-head. There is, you can take it from me, absolutely nothing new in any of the rest of the proceedings. I have been over it; Charters has been over it; Pike has been over it; Jordan has been over it. So, not wishing to frighten you too much with bulk, I have taken it all out, leaving the summing up.
THE CORONER
It is a curious coincidence, gentlemen, that this morning is the sixteenth anniversary of my introduction to the duty which I am now performing. Sixteen years is a long time. Even the coroner of a quiet rural district will find that in sixteen years he has had many, many inquests over which to preside. How much more, then, if for sixteen years one has been a coroner to a large and very densely populated area of London?
In these sixteen years, gentlemen, I have presided over a very large number of inquests indeed, so large a number that if I were to tell you the total you would probably not believe me. In that large total have been many of a most complex and delicate character—many! But never, gentlemen, have I at the end of any other inquest had to confess myself so completely and utterly at sea as I am at the present moment.
We all know—indeed, I expect some of you know only too well—that we have held daily sessions in this one Court for not less than ten days. During these ten days we have minutely sifted—by means of the examination and re-examination of witnesses, some of whom we have had in the witness chair half a dozen or more times—all the circumstances, however trivial, surrounding the reason for inquest: the death of Maxwell Brunton.
I am sure that you will all agree—I say with the fullest confidence that nobody on earth could fail to agree—that we have left no stone, however small, unturned in our efforts to arrive at the truth of this tangled and vital and, I fear, in some of its aspects, sordid matter. For days we have striven. And yet what have we to show for that striving? What? …
I never thought, even up to a time as recent as two days ago, to get such an answer to this question, but now I must say that that answer is: ‘We have nothing to show.’
You may not, of course, agree with me, gentlemen, but if you do not agree I shall be very, very much surprised. It seems to me that you and I are like men who have been wandering about a maze; not idly wandering, but wandering willynilly; wandering because, although we have been trying with all our might to reach the centre of the maze, we have never succeeded in finding its key and thereby been able to reach the centre.
It is not often that I preface my summing up with such vague generalities. But in this case I cannot help myself. I find that we are no farther, really, than we were at the beginning of the second day of this Court, when we had for the first time taken evidence of all those persons who were under the roof of 44 Rajah Gardens on the night of the death of Maxwell Brunton.
Although it is my personal opinion that each one of you is as fully posted in the evidential details of this extraordinary affair as I am myself, I nevertheless have my duty to do. I have to address you with the equivalent of a judge’s summing up. I have to lay before you in brief the whole of the matters which have been engaging our attention in these fruitless days of labour. I am going to be Horatian, gentlemen; I am goin
g to plunge in medias res. I am going to start somewhere near the middle and then go back to the beginning again. I am going to say to you, as the first point in this necessary but I fear quite useless speech, that I want you first to consider the relation to this crime of Mary Elizabeth Lamort. After the first evidence of the girl Violet Burrage it appeared to me, as it must have appeared to all of you, that at last we had, so to speak, something which we could catch hold of. We had, after much groping in the dark, a definite piece of circumstantial evidence: Miss Lamort, it appeared, had lied in telling us what she did tell us. Miss Lamort, it appeared, had entered the study at approximately one-thirty a.m. For the first time we had evidence of someone entering that room where Maxwell Brunton was afterward found dead at a time after his withdrawal to it at a few minutes after 11 p.m. But we were doomed to find another blind alley when the police surgeon, Dr Crosby, and Sir Philip Tennimore, the great expert, sat in that witness chair and told us, from their specialised knowledge, that Maxwell Brunton must have met his death at a time at least an hour earlier than one-thirty a.m. It then became evident that, however much she may have prejudiced you against her, Mary Lamort was no more to be suspected than other members of the household. Although she may have entered the study at one-thirty a.m., Maxwell Brunton had met his death at some time prior to that. Therefore she could not have killed him; and it seems to me most highly improbable that, if she had killed him at such an earlier time that night as her previous visit—at a time within the possibilities set for us by the men of science—she would have thus revisited the scene of her crime. But, whether you regard that as improbable or the reverse, makes really no matter. Probable or improbable, there is nothing for us, now that she has been acquitted of the possibility of having caused Maxwell Brunton’s death at the time she was seen by Violet Burrage entering the study, upon which to base a finding against her. Or if not ‘nothing,’ at least no more than there is against any other member of the household.
And that last sentence, gentlemen, brings me to what really, I suppose, should be my opening remarks. That is, the prevalence—the extraordinary prevalence—of possible motives for killing the deceased.
It is most highly unusual in my experience—more, it is unprecedented—to find a plethora of motive. Usually, all those concerned with sifting out the truth lying behind a crime of this nature are faced with the one main difficulty of ascertaining motive. In a case where motive is immediately apparent we may be fairly certain that the pinning down of the crime to the actual source is a simple enough matter; and, conversely, in a case where motive is not apparent, we may be absolutely certain that the discovery and eventual punishment of the criminal will be a difficult, tedious, and heartbreaking task.
In other words, gentlemen, motive can in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand—or perhaps even a larger percentage than this—be considered the key to the cipher which, translated, is the criminal. And this is where this extraordinary affair first shows its extraordinariness. Instead of having to search for motive, we have motive thrust upon us. If you will go over in your minds the mass of evidence that we have heard in this Court throughout these last ten days, you will find that with the exception of Sydney Harrison, the dead man’s secretary; Claire Bayford, the dead man’s daughter; and Violet Burrage, the kitchenmaid, every other soul of the house’s inhabitants—six in all—had a motive, and a powerful motive, for killing this man.
We are left, then, with six persons: Enid Brunton, the dead man’s wife; Adrian, his son; Peter Hargreaves, his guest; Jeannette Bokay, his wife’s servant; and Arthur Jennings and his wife, the nucleus of the household staff.
These six persons have each an ostensible motive for killing the man who was killed. Examine them and the motives of which I spoke.
Take, first, Enid Brunton. She has, we know, adored this man; she is his wife; she is, for year upon year, persistently harrowed by the knowledge of his intimacy with other women—and other women drawn from every class of life. Her motive would be primarily jealousy—an emotion all the more intense through having been successfully—how shall I put it?—‘bottled up’ for so long. Secondarily, her motive would be—though this is not so near the surface as the first—fear for the future livelihood, comfort, and environment of her children and herself.
Next we come to Adrian Brunton, the son. His apparent motive is a threefold one. It is love—because he wishes to marry a certain woman of whom his father cannot or will not approve. It is anger—furious anger—because of this disapproval, and it is an intense desire for money—which he knows he will get in abundance on the death of his father—in order that he may get married.
Next is Peter Hargreaves, the guest. Until after the evidence of the young woman Bokay it seemed that Hargreaves could have no reason for wishing Maxwell Brunton’s death; after Bokay’s evidence, however, a reason became abundantly obvious. Mr Hargreaves, sitting in that chair, has told you not once but many times that he was completely unaware that his mother had even so much as known Maxwell Brunton, much less that her death might be considered as due to Maxwell Brunton. We have no evidence upon this point.
Next we have the young woman, Jeannette Bokay. She is a Latin; she is, I should say, considerably oversexed, and she is a discarded mistress of Maxwell Brunton. In that word ‘discarded’ lies the possible motive in this instance. I will not insult you, gentlemen, by pointing out that the crime passionel is a constant occurrence among all the Latin races. I will merely remind you of this fact and all its implications in this instance. That will give us motive and to spare in the case of Jeannette Bokay.
Next, we have two persons who must count, for reasons of motive at least, as one, Arthur Jennings and his wife Sarah. Here we have motive, and a much more easily comprehensible—though I do not mean to say more powerful—motive than in any of the other instances. Jennings is an escaped convict. Whatever his previous reputation and record may have been, he seems to have been a good and faithful servant to Maxwell Brunton until just before Brunton’s death, when the old Adam stirred in him. His theft—a petty one, it is true, but a theft nevertheless—is made known to Maxwell Brunton, but he already knows Jennings’s past history. Suppose that Brunton, some days after that interview following the theft of which we have heard almost innumerable times from Jennings and his wife; suppose that he, instead of saying no word regarding his judgment, as the Jenningses have told us, actually stated that in view of Jennings’s record he must, for the sake of himself and his household, at once inform the police. What then? Jennings, a man escaped from prison; Jennings, knowing the extra sentence which awaits an escaped convict; Jennings has, has he not? plenteous reason for wishing Brunton’s mouth closed in the only permanent way in which a mouth can be closed. But here again we have not one tittle of evidence. We have only what Bokay and the Jenningses have told us, and we have therefore no option but to accept the Jenningses’ version of what Brunton said. And if we accept this version—which it is impossible for men to disprove—we destroy practically the Jenningses’ motive.
I have now given a survey of the entire household, and in that survey have shown that, out of the total of ten other souls resident in that Rajah Gardens house at the time of Brunton’s death, three—Sydney Harrison, Claire Bayford, and Violet Burrage—have no apparent motive whatsoever for causing the death of Maxwell Brunton.
In the second place, I have shown you that Enid Brunton, Adrian Brunton, Peter Hargreaves, Jeannette Bokay, and Arthur Jennings and his wife have easily discernible motive for causing the death of Maxwell Brunton.
In the third place—Yes, sir? If you will let me go on, I think you will find that I am about to deal with the point which I imagine you are thinking of raising. In the third place, we have a person resident in the house to whom I have so far made no reference in this part of my speech. I mean, of course, Mary Elizabeth Lamort.
I do not include Mary Lamort in my list of persons without a motive, and I do not include Mary Lamort in my list of
persons with a motive. The reason for my omission, I am afraid, may sound paradoxical, but I cannot help that. I do not include Mary Lamort in either of these lists because, in my opinion, gentlemen, Mary Lamort must go down in both these lists. As I have already explained, she is—in spite of evidence which at first seemed black against her—now, by reason of the expert medical testimony in her favour, reduced primarily to an equal level with the other persons in the household. I say that Mary Lamort must go both upon our ‘motive’ list and our ‘non-motive’ list. She was Brunton’s mistress by her own admission. She went to visit Brunton on the night of his death, and by her method of approach to him and her demeanour and apparel equally possibly to enjoy illicit and amorous relations with him, or to quarrel with him. We are not clairvoyant; we cannot see into people’s minds. A neurotic woman entangled in a liaison with the husband of her friend might have a thousand motives for killing or none whatsoever. We cannot tell. She must, therefore, be both, so to speak, one of our ‘probables’ and one of our ‘non-starters.’
The Maze Page 12
