A Train of Powder (30 page)

There was no doubt that Hume was in grave danger. Though Mrs. Stride had made it almost impossible to believe that the prosecution could prove that Hume, singlehanded, had stabbed and dismembered Setty in his apartment, the jury might well be persuaded to believe that it had an alternative proof in the assumption that Hume would hardly have taken so much trouble to dispose of a corpse unless he had had something to do with the murder. This was the more likely because Hume’s story of the financial inducements which had led him to take on the responsibility for the parcels was quite incredible. He said that the three men had promised him a hundred pounds on their first visit, which they had raised by fifty pounds when they left the third parcel; that is, about four hundred and twenty dollars in all. Of that he must have spent more than a third on the hire of automobiles and the plane, to say nothing of tips to attendants and the cost of dyeing the carpet and staining the floor. But Setty had had a thousand and five pounds on him, mostly in five-pound notes, of which two were traced back to Hume. One he had given to the taxidriver who brought him back from Southend, the other he had paid across the counter of the Stationery Department in Fortnum and Mason’s for an address book. None of the other notes were traced, but those two were enough.

So they were saying gravely, the policemen and the reporters and the people in the streets, “He’ll be topped, he’ll be topped right enough”; and during that day the thought of death began to fill the court. It is strange how a man looks when that threat overhangs him. His fife withdraws from the skin, leaving it blue, and seeks the concentrated shelter of the heart, so that the strong fluttering of the pulses disturbs the calmness of his hands and makes his head shift from side to side on the uncomfortable pillar of the throat. His eyes were fixed on the court in something more than attention, as if he were thinking that what he saw had a new and ultimate value, because it might be the last thing he would ever see. But his grasp of experience failed as the hours went by. Presently it was plain that he wanted the day to end with an exhaustion that had the intensity of appetite, that was as painful as hunger and thirst. It was a relief to all of us when four o’clock came, and he rose from his carved chair and gathered his red robe about him and, clutching the black cap which the judge must carry when he tries a murder case, walked out past the bowing aldermen. For the man we had been watching as death threatened him was Mr. Justice Lewis, not the man whom he was trying on a capital charge. A serious operation was performed on him a few hours after he left the court, and another was performed a week or two later. He died about the time that Hume would have been hanged had he been convicted and his appeal disallowed. This murder trial, which was doing nothing in order, which had the air of a morality play in its presentation of contrasting types of good and evil, was directing attention to the cruelty, not of capital punishment, but of natural death.

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Because Mr. Justice Lewis had been taken with a fatal illness during the first day of the Hume trial a new judge had to take the case. Instead of Sir Wilfrid Lewis, sixty-eight years old, a Fellow of Eton College and of University College, Oxford, a passionate Churchman, slender and refined, like the statue of a bishop in a French cathedral, we now had Sir Frederick Sellers, fifty-seven years of age, a Northcountryman, educated at a grammar school and Liverpool University, a fine soldier in the First World War, with the unusual distinction of two bars to his Military Cross, a Liberal politician, handsome and hearty. That, of course, made a difference to Hume’s fate. In the English system the tone of a trial is set by the judge, no matter how brilliant the advocates be. To let Mr. Justice Sellers get the reins in his hand, most of the witnesses who had given evidence on the first day were required to repeat their evidence. This was a great hardship to them. Mr. Setty’s sister was still perfectly dressed, but the smoothness of her face was dishevelled. The manageress of the dyeing and cleaning establishment was still smiling and moving at a leisurely pace that was a kind of courtesy towards time; she would let every moment have its chance, would do nothing to push it out of the present into the past sooner than need be. But it would not have been surprising if she had wept. The person most likely to resent this lengthy recapitulation, Hume himself, showed no displeasure. He sat in the dock showing the heartiest appetite for events, this repetitive event, any event at all.

But soon an incident occurred which would have diverted anybody. There was suddenly a fluttering conference between Hume’s solicitor and his counsel, into which the prosecuting counsel was drawn. Then Hume’s counsel, Mr. Levy, rose and complained to the judge that Hume’s solicitor had intercepted a telegram addressed to Mrs. Hume by the representative of a national newspaper which showed that he was trying to prevent her from giving evidence for her husband. At this a shudder ran through the court. The lawyers were genuinely shocked, and the newspapermen and women thought that one of their craft must have temporarily gone out of his senses. To interfere with a witness is a misdemeanour in English Common Law and carries such heavy penalties that, in fact, it is rarer in England than in other countries for witnesses, even in the gangster world, to be spirited away and intimidated. It is contempt of court of the worst kind, and the judge in the case can, if he be so minded, stretch forth his hand and say to the offender, “Here you go to jail, now,” and he goes to jail there and then, and stays there until the judge decides he has purged his contempt or he makes a successful application against the judge’s decision under the Habeas Corpus Act. Mr. Justice Sellers read the telegram, looked astonished, and told the officers of the court to go and find the writer and bring him to the court forthwith. In imagination one saw a surprised man taking off his eyeshade in a room of clattering typewriters, and one’s heart bled for him.

The tide of recapitulated evidence flowed on, and then Mr. Levy rose again and said that a further communication from the same representative of a national newspaper had arrived in the form of a letter addressed to Mrs. Hume, care of Mrs. Hume’s solicitors, and that they had got her permission to open it and had found that it was a letter on the same lines as the telegram. The judge read it, and looked more astonished, and directed that the sender of the letter and the telegram, who had meanwhile been brought from his office to the Old Bailey and was standing under guard outside in the corridor, should be brought into court. There then appeared, to the wonder of all the press, the crime reporter of a sensational but serious-minded Sunday newspaper, which likes torsos but supports labour.

This crime reporter was a man in his thirties who was supremely good at his job. He had been in the Navy during the war and found himself in command of a small boat that was continually attacked from the surface of the water and the depths of the water and the sky above, and had to attack as continually other craft and bring trouble on itself. He has a feeling that some criminals, and the relatives of accused persons, are much in the same position. Consequently he appears among the cast of every criminal drama not wholly damnable, proffering sympathy and doing odd chores. He gets news for his paper out of his process, but that is only because he is a loquacious man and has to express himself by speaking or writing; and if he were a millionaire and never wrote another line he would still be found getting the best out of the National Health Service for the murderers’ baby, running errands for the corpse’s grandmother. But he had a respect for the law. It seemed impossible that he could have interfered with a witness in a case under trial.

The judge remarked tremendously that there was such a thing as the Common Law of England, and Mr. Webb explained politely that he knew Mrs. Hume apart from this case, having met her a year before. He had often seen her since the arrest of Hume and had promised her mother to be her escort if she came down to the Old Bailey to give evidence, but he had understood that she was not going to do so. The letter and the telegram, however, had nothing to do with that. They had been sent in order to dissuade her from writing an article a certain newspaper had wanted from her, which was to be called “I Was a Murderer’s Wife.”

At this point the judge said, “Perhaps you had better not say too much about that.” Everybody in court knew that a Sunday newspaper was paying the expenses of Hume’s defence. It might or might not be the newspaper which had tried to commission this article from Mrs. Hume. The situation obviously had its delicacies. The judge then read the letter and the telegram again and said, “On that explanation I will say nothing more about this; but you should be reminded that to interfere with a witness is a Common Law misdemeanour.” This was manifestly not quite logical. If Mr. Webb’s explanation was accepted, then it was unnecessary to warn him of the danger of committing a misdemeanour which, according to that explanation, he had never had the slightest intention of committing. But the step the judge had taken was better than logical; it was eminently sensible. It would be disagreeable to have a discussion before a man on trial for his life concerning an invitation to his wife to write an article which would plainly be useless unless he were hanged, particularly if it might distress him to know who had made the offer. Moreover, the whole business of having a murderer’s defence paid for by a newspaper which wants the inside story of the murder in order to increase its circulation, matter of established custom though it be, cannot well be presented in a way which adds to the dignity of the legal profession. Best to pass over the incident as smoothly as possible, while giving the defence lawyers no chance to feel aggrieved and raise these delicate points again. Nobody can say that these thoughts passed through the judge’s mind. But they passed through a number of other people’s minds, and the situation suddenly and beautifully disappeared. We found ourselves out in the street, looking for lunch.

In the afternoon the stream of witnesses went on. The twenty-fifth was Mr. Tiffen, the fowler and fisherman from the Essex marshes who had found Mr. Setty’s torso. He had difficulty over taking the oath. The clerk gave him the printed card which he handed to all witnesses to read from, but he returned it to him; after some whispering the clerk spoke the oath and he repeated it after him. This man whose good manners and good sense and store of information were the wonder of everyone connected with this case could not read. Forty years ago, when he was a child living eight miles out of a village on the marshes, no education authority worried its head about him. It made one proud that in modern England such a child would be under no handicap at all. They would get it to school all right. If we can teach his kind, without spoiling its simplicity, we are safe. He gave evidence in language as strong and bare as the Bible. Met afterwards in the corridors, he was behaving much as if he were in church, but happiness was sparkling on his glasses, for he had just before Christmas been paid the thousand-pound reward which Mr. Setty’s relatives had offered for news of him. He had given, he said, a hundred pounds to his two grandsons, Peter Perrin, who was getting on for eighteen months, and Robert John Warner, who was six months. Then, with the tenderness of a lover speaking of the planned honeymoon, he spoke of a fishing boat. It wasn’t any use getting it now. To get one of the houses built by the rural district council he had had to become a farm labourer, but when he was fifty they wouldn’t bother him no more; at that age this controlled labour business had to let you go. Then he would go back to fishing. He had been out with the boats since he was eight. It would be two and a half years till he was fifty, but that was none too long to think about buying a boat. You had to turn it over well in your mind. As for the rest of the money, he would keep it to help anybody in the family that was in trouble and to look after himself when he got old. He spoke of age with prudence but without terror; nothing, it appeared, could really touch a man who was about to buy himself the perfect boat. Now he was going to visit his sister who lived down by the docks. A bus went from the corner and he would go straight there, and tomorrow he would be back in Essex.

There followed the expert witnesses for the prosecution, the chief of the Scotland Yard laboratory and a pathologist, who proved conclusively that a murder had been committed in a way which was completely impossible. On the living-room carpet there was a large stain caused by some human secretion, most probably blood, which they had talked about earlier; there were traces of blood on the linoleum in the lobby; and in the dining room there was human blood on the floorboards and on the lath and plaster ceiling below; and there were traces of blood, though it was not proved to be human, on the stairs leading to the upper floor. These stains evoked a perfect picture of Mr. Setty being stabbed in the chest with a dagger five times, as we knew he had been, while he sat or stood in the living room, and then staggering out of the room into the lobby, where he went through a door which he might have thought led out to the stairs and safety, but which in fact led into the dining room, where he slumped and died face downward on the boards. These bloodstains showed that a considerable amount had been spilled, perhaps a fifth of all the blood a man of Mr. Setty’s size might have in his body. Where it was proved to be human, it belonged to O group; and that was Mr. Setty’s group. This was not conclusive, for O is the largest blood group and includes about forty-two per cent of the population; but it would have been nicer for Hume if there had not been this coincidence.

The case was all sewed up, except that the murder could not have possibly been committed in this way. It is not to be believed that Mr. Setty, when someone began to stab him, refrained from uttering a loud cry; and that, when he had been stabbed five times in the chest, he would have refrained from putting his hand to the wound, or that, as he walked across the room with the faltering step of a dying man and crossed the lobby and went into another room, he would also have refrained from supporting himself by leaning on the furniture or against the walls. But there was not a single fingerprint of Mr. Setty’s to be found in the whole flat, nor any sign of blood on the furniture or on the walls, though these were of a substance which would have soaked up the stain and retained it indefinitely. But even if Mr. Setty had remained taciturn and erect while being murdered, Hume could not have counted beforehand on this unusual behaviour; and a single cry, a single lurch, might have been enough noise to be remembered and to hang him. If the noise had been loud enough it might have brought an inquiring policeman in at that very minute. But once Hume had taken these risks, why did he let a dying man, who could have been easily restrained, stagger from room to room, leaving a trail of blood behind him?