by Q. Patrick
The newspapers and their readers, however, enjoyed this interval to the full. It offered an opportunity for hysterical last-minute speculations and the most complicated wagers. Gallows fever was at such a pitch that by eleven o’clock Sunday morning crowds had started to line up outside the Old Bailey. It was a cold December day, turning to a gelid December night, but the enthusiasm was not chilled. A flourishing black market sprang up, in which places in the queue were sold and resold for fantastic sums, for almost certainly Monday would see the end of the trial—and the kill.
When the court reassembled, the atmosphere was clogged with excitement. For the last time, Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters were conducted to the square dock, where they sat almost touching each other. Freddie Bywaters was stolidly, impassively the same. He had, it seemed, found some inner core of strength on which to draw. But Edith Thompson was little more than a bundle of black clothes tossed down at random. The closeness of her “darlingest boy” could no longer comfort her. It is doubtful whether she was even aware that he was there. Edith Thompson had only one neighbor now—and the neighbor was Fear.
If Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett shared any of his client’s fear, it certainly was not apparent as he rose to continue his interrupted address. His manner was as glossy, as masterful as ever, and he seemed serenely indifferent to his red-robed antagonist on the bench. But when the golden voice began once again to coax the jury’s attention, it soon became clear that Sir Henry had profited from the humiliating setback of Saturday. The overblown rhetoric that had incensed Mr. Justice Shearman had this time been left at home, and, its place was taken by a simple and far more effective eloquence that made up in sincerity and logic for what it had lost in fire.
He returned, of course, to the letters, but he did not spend much time on a detailed analysis. He merely stressed the dangers of judging them from disconnected fragments viewed through the murk of prejudice.
“Start at the end of the story, with the death, and work back to that, and you can make what is an absolutely innocent expression in a letter appear to be a guilty one. Work back, as the prosecution have done, from the tragedy and come to a letter written a fortnight before, and because in that letter there is this phrase, ‘Do something desperate,’ that means that the woman was trying to make the man return to England to murder her husband. Surely, if you look at the letters and all these references, they are absolutely Consistent with the story that both Mrs. Thompson and Bywaters have told. They are consistent with ‘Take me away, I care not where.’ Are you, because of the prejudice created by the reading of the extracts from these letters, going to say there is any evidence from them that this woman was a principal a fortnight afterwards in the murder of her husband?”
With skill and conviction, Sir Henry then took up the all-important matter of Edith Thompson’s final letter, written the day before the crime—the letter on which Mr. Inskip’s case for conspiracy had to stand or fall. “‘Until we have those [funds] we can do nothing!’” quoted Sir Henry. “‘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.’” Were these the phrases of a woman dedicated to murdering her husband in a handful of hours?
“The next passage in the letter is ‘Don’t forget what we talked in the Tea Room, I’ll still risk and try if you will.’ The suggestion of the prosecution—and they have no evidence at all of it—is that in that tearoom in Aldersgate Street these two people were plotting murder. There is not one scrap of evidence. But having put all those letters before you, and having created the prejudice those letters must create when first read without an explanation, the prosecution then say, ‘The night of third October Thompson dies’; and ‘Don’t forget what we talked about in the tearoom’—and you, members of the jury, are urged to believe that they were talking about murder. Both the prisoners have been in the witness box and have told you how the conversation was the same old story as to taking Mrs. Thompson away, as to her leaving her husband and risking all her future with Bywaters. Is it not shown that that is the way to look at the sentence when the last words of the letter read, ‘We only have three and three-quarters years left darlingest. Try help Peidi’? It is almost inconceivable that it can be suggested on that letter, or to think that seriously the prosecution can say, that it shows that these two people were plotting murder. The words show quite the contrary. Do you imagine that a woman who at that time, according to the prosecution, had got to the degree of having incited this man to the extent that the murder is imminent would be writing, ‘We have only three and three-quarters years left?’ If the story put before you by the prosecution be true, do you not think that you would find in these letters some references egging him on, inciting, soliciting Bywaters to commit this murder? Yet you find, in my submission, exactly the opposite. There is not one reference in those letters which anyone in this country dare say shows that the suggestion made by the prosecution is true.”
After this effective onslaught upon the prosecution’s position with regard to the letters, Sir Henry tackled the murder itself. Here he was on even more solid ground, for no one had ever been able to produce the slightest shred of evidence to hint that Edith Thompson had had any foreknowledge of the crime whatever. Everything, said Sir Henry, pointed to the fact that Freddie Bywaters’ act had been an utterly unpremeditated one, and in a crystal-clear review of all the testimony concerning Mrs. Thompson’s behavior both before and after the murder, he presented an incontestable picture of a woman taken completely by surprise, a woman who had been plunged into a state of confusion, hysteria, terror, and grief.
Sir Henry rolled on to his finale.
“As far as Mrs. Thompson is concerned, you do not have to consider the case against her until you are satisfied beyond all reasonable doubt that Bywaters is guilty of murder, a decision which, in my submission to you, you will never come to when you consider your verdict. I am loath to leave this discussion, because I am anxious to feel and know that I have dealt with the whole case as it is put against Mrs. Thompson. I know I have risked your displeasure in taking up your time at such length, but you do not grudge a few hours one way or the other spent on something which means eternity. Of course, I cannot see what is in your minds because I cannot tell whether the matters I have been discussing are matters that you don’t want to discuss because you have made up your mind. But in asking this question, I know one thing: I shall get your answer, and the answer to the question I have put is the answer that Mrs. Thompson is not guilty.”
With a suggested bow to the jury, Sir Henry withdrew from the battlefield and proceeded back to his seat—the champion sublimely confident of victory. He had dragged the prosecution’s case against Mrs. Thompson out of the mists that had enveloped it and had revealed it for what it was—a shoddy, patched-up scarecrow that wouldn’t have intimidated a sparrow.
For the first time, the sympathy of the court was changing direction. To the junior barristers, wise in the ways of juries, it seemed as if Sir Henry had done it again. The British public had chosen to make a monster out of Edith Thompson, but even the most hostile of juries had to have some evidence on which to base a conviction. Thanks to Sir Henry, there no longer seemed to be any evidence at all.
If the Solicitor General was to rehabilitate the case for the prosecution, he would need the craft and persuasiveness of Ulysses. And, judging by his performance so far, it was difficult to see where he was going to find them.
Chapter Sixteen
The trial had now reached that exquisite pitch of suspense where the defense, after lagging behind for furlong after furlong, had suddenly, with a dramatic sprint, nosed its way ahead of the prosecution. In the crowded courtroom, even Mrs. Thompson’s bitterest enemies were being infected by the new excitement of a last-minute reversal. When the Solicitor General rose and moved to address the court, even the jury had lost some of its air of puddingish conviction and was watching Mr. Inskip with uneasy alertness. Had they, then, been mistaken? Had
Mrs. Thompson, all along, been one of the most striking personalities of the time, instead of a shameless slut? The Solicitor General would explain it all. The Solicitor General would allay these uncomfortable doubts that Sir Henry had stirred up.
But the Solicitor General, as might have been expected, told them no such thing. His final speech, attempting to re-establish the guilt of Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters, was one of the most feeble on court record. In a voice that after Sir Henry’s sounded like the piping of some marsh bird, Mr. Inskip presented a version of the two conspiring murderers in the tearoom so impossible, so awkward, so apologetic that it turned out virtually to be a speech for the defense.
“… The whole of the circumstances in which Bywaters attacked Thompson suggest, at first sight, a case of deliberate murder.… What I ask you to consider is the progress of the idea found in the letters and to see how it was pressed by Mrs. Thompson on Bywaters, and how the idea continued right up to the very last moment … Right up to the very end the proposal in the letters is that her husband should be removed by poison.…”
Mr. Whiteley had deplored the fact that the law gave the prosecution the right to the final address. He need not have worried. Thanks to Mr. Inskip’s clumsiness, the address for the prosecution might almost have not been delivered at all, and at its close Sir Henry’s clarion call to logic still rang as clearly as when he had first uttered it.
As Mr. Inskip went unobtrusively back to his seat, bets were being offered among the junior barristers, twenty to one for conviction. There were no takers.
It is difficult to understand why some sporting young barrister didn’t remember Mr. Justice Shearman and pick up that bet. The trial was not yet over. The summing up from the bench still had to be made, and Mr. Justice Shearman, who was to have the last words, had already given a hint as to what kind of words they would be.
But excitement can confuse the clearest heads. For the few minutes before Mr. Justice Shearman began his address, Edith Thompson’s acquittal was celebrated as a fait accompli.
Then came the explosion. Sir Montague Shearman opened his mouth to speak and then, with one brief interruption to swear in bailiffs, continued to speak for several hours. He reviewed the case far more fully than anyone had yet reviewed it, studying every detail, peering here, peering there, building up this point, contemptuously cutting down that one—and, with every word he uttered, he added, added, and added again to a plausible and deadly picture of the two prisoners’ guilt.
It is hard to understand the ferocity of Sir Montague’s moral indignation until we realize that the courts of law in all countries are almost completely insulated from social change. Immutable laws exist there as to how “good” human beings should behave and how “bad” human beings do behave. That these laws bear little resemblance to reality does not matter, for when a real human being strays into the courts, he immediately gets squeezed, stretched, or twisted into one of the ready-made “good” or “bad” patterns, and the never-never-land atmosphere remains unaffected.
Sir Montague had been raised with the sincere upper-class Victorian conviction that all temptations of the flesh come from the Devil and can easily be overcome by a daily cold bath, a daily cross-country run, and frequent periods of prayer. Since this point of view happened to coincide with the archaic legal attitude toward sexual morality, there had been no compulsion for him, during the forty, years of his career, to alter his opinion in the slightest degree.
Improbable as he may sound to us, Sir Montague Shearman was dealing with the case in the only way he knew how. It is certain that, for him, Edith Thompson represented all that was contemptible in human frailty; it is equally certain that to him Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett represented all that was newfangled and caddish and not-at-all-the-thing in barristers. And Freddie Bywaters, too close to being the sixth-form prefect who had turned out to be a bounder, was no less distasteful to him. All three in their different ways were “bad” human beings, and Mr. Justice Shearman saw it as his duty to make this plain to the jury.
His long, brilliantly distorted version of the murder of Percy Thompson makes reading as fascinating as it is frightening. For all its air of tense, pungent common sense, it is as moonstruck as Edith Thompson’s letters. It is also one of the last fanatical stands of Victorian morality against the new postwar epoch that already was fated to supplant its rigid code of dignity, chastity, and rectitude with a tumultuous era of cocktail parties, companionate marriage, and dancing mothers, to which, in the Judge’s mind, at least, Edith Thompson belonged.
Mr. Justice Shearman began his summing up with a statement of the charge against the two prisoners and a solemn warning to the jury to do their duty, which was “to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent.” This case, he said, had been a particularly notorious one, and “… it is inevitable that you should have been surrounded by a different atmosphere from that which prevails in the ordinary humdrum of the courts; and you must throw that aside, try to escape from that, because this charge really is—I am not saying whether it is proved—a common or ordinary charge of a wife and an adulterer murdering the husband.”
Having firmly wedged Edith and Freddie’s strange romance into one of the law’s uncompromising molds, he went on to comment upon the handling of the case and took a couple of quick jabs at Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett.
“When one heard the statement made that never before in the history of crime had anybody been charged with a murder when it was not suggested that that person had taken a hand in actually inflicting the blow, I sat amazed. I do not say that cases like this are very usual, but there are cases of husbands who, in order to marry somebody else, want to get rid of a wife, and of wives who want to get rid of the husband. Let us say in the interest of the fair sex that they are more often on the other side, but such things are known and they are not unusual. Now I only have one other observation about Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett; he said, and, indeed, I am afraid it has become now a precedent in these courts, that he ‘thanked God that you are to decide, and he had not.’ If that remark is intended to frighten you, I hope it will not. We are dealing with law and justice here and I do not like invocations to the Deity.”
It is hard to see why Mr. Justice Shearman, who was on such intimate terms himself with the Deity, should resent reference to Him in a law court. What he meant, presumably, was that he didn’t like the name of the Deity being invoked by the “wrong side, the Devil’s side.” He moved on to a final annihilation of Sir Henry,
“You are told that this is a case of ‘great love’; I am only using it as a phrase. Take one of the letters as a test. We have had for days an atmosphere, both in speeches and in questions, of this kind. Just at the end of a letter I shall have to allude to again comes this: ‘He has the right by law to all that you have the right to by nature and love.’ Gentlemen, if that nonsense means anything it means that the love of a husband for his wife is something improper because marriage is acknowledged by the law, and that the love of a woman for her lover, illicit and clandestine, is something great and noble. I am certain that you, like any other right-minded persons, will be filled with disgust at such a notion. Let us get rid of all that atmosphere and try this case in an ordinary common-sense way.”
There Sir Montague had thrown to the floundering jury the lifeline that Mr. Inskip had been unable to find. They didn’t have to be Sir Henry’s “men and women of the world” after all. They could be Sir Montague’s “right-minded persons” and settle comfortably back once again into their cozy prejudices.
Mr. Justice Shearman then said that he would deal first with “the case of the man,” and began by reviewing the triangular relationship in the light of “plain common sense.” He made much of the point that both prisoners had obviously been lying about the actual date at which they became lovers. “They had their first kiss when they were on a charabanc ride in the Isle of Wight, so it is pretty obvious that there were relationships between them then.” Having cleared up this matter, he r
ead passages from the letters trying to show that the relationship had from its start always been clandestine. “Now, gentlemen”—Mr. Justice Shearman frequently ignored the female juror—“the first thing you have got to make up your mind about—because this has a direct bearing upon the case put by him as well as by the woman—if it was clandestine, how can you believe evidence that they were always talking to him [Percy] and saying, ‘Give her up,’ and he said, ‘No, I will not give her up.’”
Leaving the letters for the time being with the ominous phrase “You will hear more of that later,” Mr. Justice Shearman turned his attention to the day of the crime itself. He stressed the fact that Mrs. Thompson had been with Freddie only half an hour before she joined her husband and the theatre party. He emphasized the fact that Freddie had gone to the Graydons’ with a knife—a large deadly one—in his pocket. “He said he always carried it.… It is suggested by the prosecution that the only reasonable inference is that he put it in his pocket for the purpose he had in view.” He reminded the jury that Bywaters claimed he had gone to Ilford on a sudden impulse to force the issue for a divorce or separation. But he hastened to add: “It is said by the prosecution nothing of the sort; he went out to lie in wait for the husband, and knew where he was coming.”
Describing the murder itself, he asked the jury whether it was believeable that Freddie, as he had claimed, could have come up behind the Thompsons “on that quiet street at half past twelve at night” without their hearing him. He stressed the violence of the knife wounds inflicted on Percy Thompson “from behind,” and also stressed the fact that Freddie had run away. He branded Freddie’s statement to Superintendent Wensley as a “tissue of lies,” picking it to pieces, sentence by sentence. He scrutinized Freddie’s second statement and spotlighted the sentence “I only meant to injure him.” By law, he said, the intention to injure with a weapon as deadly as Freddie’s knife is identical with an intention to murder. He reviewed Freddie’s testimony on the stand, still keeping the knife in the foreground, and summed up the case against Freddie thus:
