Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (23 page)

At last on 27 March Mrs Merrett died. The immediate cause of death was basal meningitis. She had never learned why she was in the hospital. She must have passed many painful and distressing hours wondering what had happened, for certainly she had no recollection of having herself fired a shot or accidentally dislodged the pistol. She can hardly have failed to suffer from the horrid fear which Mrs Penn ascribed to her, whether she in fact uttered it or not, for her last memory was of Donald standing over her, while she wrote a letter to her friend, Miss Anderson. And then the bang. (Donald said she had put the wrong address on the envelope, which he was waiting to take to the Post.)

Her death brought his madcap career to a temporary halt. Even Donald could see that he could not continue to forge the cheques of a dead woman. His uncle and aunt temporarily took him in hand. In theory he continued his studies at the university, while they all took up residence together at Buckingham Terrace. It seemed as if the affair slept. Mrs Penn still probed and questioned, but the police had accepted the case as one of suicide. That was that. Donald, perhaps in response to his aunt’s questioning, perhaps simply for a lark, set off to London with Miss Christie and Scott ostensibly to consult a famous detective. Predictably they returned without one, their money exhausted, having had to hitch a lift on a lorry. Coldness prevailed in Buckingham Terrace. The summer wore on. The university indicated a preference for Donald’s absence the next year. What was to be done with the boy?

Fortunately, that was not the Penns’ problem. Mrs Merrett’s will had entrusted the management of her estate and the guardianship of her son to the Public Trustee, an action which has attracted curiously little attention. Yet surely it was unusual enough? Mrs Merrett had family, two sisters at least. It might have been thought that these would prove more suitable guardians than a necessarily remote civil servant. Her choice suggests therefore either that her relations with her sisters had hitherto been bad, just as Donald said they were, or that she had some secret reason. This could only have been a distrust of Donald. On the face of it simply a doting mother, Mrs Merrett yet showed by her actions in several respects that she had, doubtless reluctantly, come to understand that Donald, though possibly brilliant, might not be altogether normal; that he was certainly not absolutely reliable. The Malvern experience had opened her eyes. Her decision to come to Edinburgh and the comparatively small allowance she gave Donald were evidence. It may be that she had for some time now realised that Donald might need careful attention. Hence the Public Trustee. In short Mrs Merrett may not have been altogether a fool with regard to her son.

The Public Trustee soon had his doubts also. In the summer, preparatory to a decision as to the boy’s future, he had him medically examined. The report was reassuring, up to a point. `The lad is exceptionally developed physically for his age (in later life Merrett was to weigh twenty-two stone) and looks at least over twenty years. He talks intelligently and confidently, and is clear and lucid in his statements on general topics … mentally he is perfectly sane… .’ The last observation suggests that doubts had arisen. It is possible that these had been shared by Mrs Merrett; and what of his emotional condition? Still the examination was sufficiently reassuring for the Public Trustee to decide to revive the old Oxford plan. Donald was therefore sent south to prepare for entry.

Circumstances, the march of events, over which Donald had by his own actions abandoned any control, so that, thinking himself free, he was actually caught in a web of his own spinning, forestalled the proposal. Investigation of Mrs Merrett’s finances, necessary for Probate, revealed the irregularities of the spring months, sufficiently at variance with her normal practice to give birth to doubts. What had been happening? Why should so careful and prudent a woman have embarked on a course of unprecedented extravagance? And then there were the dates on the cheques, suggesting that Mrs Merrett had run through a hundred and fifty odd pounds - to say nothing of buying a motorbike - while she lay virtually a prisoner, fighting for her life in Ward 3 of Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. It would not do; obviously there was something fishy, and obviously, Donald, to whom most of the cheques were payable, was the villain. The police interest revived. Evidence of Donald’s forgery put a new complexion on his mother’s death. Here was motive. A warrant was issued on 29 November, executed by the local police a few days later, and Donald was committed on 9 December charged with murder and forgery. He was indicted on 14 January, and the trial began on 1 February almost a year after his mother’s death.

The case for the Prosecution, conducted by the Lord Advocate, depended first on the evidence of Donald’s financial misdemeanours, then on the evidence offered by Rita Sutherland. Mrs Merrett’s state of mind was also germane, for it was necessary to pre-empt a Defence line which would adhere to the original police theory of suicide; embarrassing in the circumstances. Beyond that, it was deemed necessary for the Crown to show that the circumstances of the shooting were inconsistent with either suicide or accident. If the nature of the wound ruled these out, then it followed that Mrs Merrett had been shot by someone else, and there could be no candidate but Donald, who was admittedly and incontestably alone in the room with his mother when the shot was heard. If, on the other hand, the Crown failed to establish these points, if Rita’s evidence could be shaken, or the Crown’s expert witnesses proved unconvincing, then it was clear that the Crown would have failed to produce arguments sufficiently powerful to outweigh the prejudice caused by the long delay in bringing the case, and the natural repugnance on the part of any jury to convict a personable young man of such an unnatural crime. There could be little doubt that the clumsy and impercipient police handling of the case had made conviction very much more difficult.

On the first point, Donald’s financial transactions, there was little problem in making the case.Certainly the bank clerks who had cashed the cheques still obstinately refused to see anything wrong with them, but the authority of the handwriting expert was hard to contest. Moreover, even if Donald had been a forger of the most exquisite skill nothing could have explained away the £156 obtained while his mother lay confined and powerless in the infirmary. The Defence put forward the argument that Mrs Merrett could have signed cheques with some assistance - but they did not push it hard. Wisely enough, for common sense would have been offended at the notion that the dying woman should have written cheques for motor-bicycles. That granted, any suggestion that Donald had perhaps commenced forgery only after the shooting was too ludicrous to advance. On the fact of forgery the Defence barely existed. Whether Mrs Merrett discovered it and whether such discovery afforded sufficient motive were however other matters, and more debatable ones.

Rita Sutherland’s evidence was a good deal less satisfactory, for it could not be denied that she had told two separate and conflicting stories. The first of these, that she had been in the kitchen at the time of the shot, left the issue open. The second that she had actually `seen Mrs Merrett fall off the chair and on to the floor and a pistol falling out of her hand’ would of course have acquitted Donald. It was this story which had fixed the idea of suicide in Inspector Fleming’s mind. The fact that she now denied this second story absolutely and had returned to her first could not wholly eradicate the impression that it made. A jury is always in difficulties with a witness who has changed his story. Inconsistency equals unreliability at the least. One story, being untrue, may be a deliberate lie. When do you believe a liar? If not a lie, it is evidence of confusion. How can one determine just where the witness is confused and where he or she is clear? It is a question to which there is rarely a certain answer. Either Rita’s original statement to which she had now returned, was false, or the one she had offered to Inspector Fleming was a lie. The Defence was able to produce a witness, a certain Dr Rosa, who was ready to swear that Rita had come to him, with the eye witness story also, on the evening of the shooting. He added that she had said that she had seen Mrs Merrett remove her false teeth just before the shot. That was a remarkable detail, even if not one that was necessarily convincing. Rita now dismissed Dr Rosa’s story as `a downright lie’, and it is easy enough to invent a motive for his coming forward. All the same her change of story is hard to explain. She herself said she was confused when she spoke to Fleming; she never said what had happened to confuse her between the morning and evening of 17 March. Perhaps she told the eye witness story merely to make herself seem more important, and then retracted it when she saw where it was leading. Had her original version not been reinforced by what Donald said that same day to Miss Christie and Scott, her credibility as a witness would have been slight indeed.

It was even harder to determine Mrs Merrett’s state of mind. The Crown had to show that she was not suicidal. Character evidence was uniformly favourable, though Mrs Hill’s assertion that Mrs Merrett was `highly strung, emotional’, was open to an interpretation that differed from hers. Mr Aitchison asked Mrs Penn whether there was no madness in the family. That was not a line likely to be very potent; for one thing it might equally well lead to Donald. Mrs Penn’s reply was firm enough; there was a case of madness, but it was not of a hereditary sort. In any case there was no evidence that could have led anyone to question Mrs Merrett’s sanity, apart from the shooting itself. The fact that she had been engaged in writing a letter to an old friend at the moment the shot was heard was surely powerful evidence that she had not killed herself wilfully. Moreover the contents of the letter were hardly a preliminary to sucide. She told her old friend, Mrs Anderson, that she had at last found a flat and a maid; then presumably, bang. It is, to say the least, unusual for someone to break off such a letter in order to put a pistol to the temple. Curiously, the letter disappeared. Donald told the police that he had thrown it away because it was bloodstained; the police constables had seen no such stains, but the jury could not be blamed if they had come to the conclusion that Izatt and Middlemiss could have waded ankle deep in blood without noticing its presence. The inference to be drawn from Donald’s act was that he realised that the letter was hardly that of a suicide and so decided it should disappear. There was though something else odd about the letter which seems to have escaped comment. The theory of murder rests on the presumption that the Bank’s letter had caused Mrs Merrett to question Donald and that this questioning had disclosed his guilty secret. All this must have happened in quite a short time, for Rita Sutherland heard no quarrel or angry words. Instead she saw Donald settling down to read a book, and his mother to write letters; a calm domestic scene; but hardly perhaps a satisfactory prelude to murder. It is possible, that the matter had not yet been broached; that would mean that Donald shot his mother to forestall any inquiry. What happened between them rests entirely on Donald’s statement that, `he had been wasting his mother’s money and thought she was worried about that.’ But it is hard to base credence on anything he said.

What was recorded of Mrs Merrett’s conversation in the infirmary all tended to confirm the Crown’s case. She had been sitting writing letters, Donald had come and stood over her in a manner she found irritating. She had asked him to move away and then heard a bang in her head. It all pointed to a conclusion that she was naturally disinclined to draw; there could be no reason however for the jury to share her reluctance. To her question `Donald didn’t do it, did he? He is such a naughty boy’ they were likely to return an answer untainted by affection. It was necessary therefore for the Defence to try to discredit her memory, even though the Lord Justice-Clerk was to point out in his charge to the jury that no one at the time had thought her various observations made in the infirmary involved Donald’s guilt. The murder charge had been `an afterthought’.

Still the Defence could not rely on that. They called as an expert witness Dr George Robertson, Professor of Mental Diseases at the University of Edinburgh and Head of the Morningside Lunatic Asylum. Like many fellow-maestri Dr Robertson had come almost to believe that insanity was everywhere to be found. Roughead remarked, in a memorable phrase, that `his mastery of his art was such that he could have proved Solomon senile and Solon certifiable.’ Now he put forward the notion that Mrs Merrett might have been suffering, while in hospital, from what he termed `altered consciousness’, `Dissociation might be the correct term to use.’ Its effect might easily be to impair the memory. So Mrs Merrett would remember things clearly up to a few minutes before the accident and then experience an absolute obliteration of memory. She could easily in consequence omit incidents, telescope time or something of that sort. It was `quite possible that the interval of time that elapsed between when Mrs Merrett found her son beside her and the explosion took place was very much longer than is suspected’. Nothing could be more convenient than that for the Defence. Memory in such cases was frequently distorted also; Professor Robertson was happy to give instances … furthermore the fact that neither doctors nor nurses in the infirmary had noticed anything wrong with Mrs Merrett, could not, as far as Professor Robertson was concerned, be allowed to cut very much ice. Far from it: `these people’, said he, in a phrase reeking of the self-conscious superiority of the expert, `these people pay very little attention to mental symptoms. That is pointed out in the Report of the Royal Commission … how defective the training is in this subject.’ If you believed Professor Robertson then - and who could entirely discount such sublime assurance? - then no matter how lucid and sensible Mrs Merrett had seemed to nursing staff and physicians, to her sister and other visitors, no credence could be given to anything she had said in her condition. She might of course be quite correct Professor Robertson was too wily a bird to rule out that possibility completely - but, suffering from `altered consciousness’, she-could be quite, quite wrong. After this performance Mr Aitchison could confidently bid the jury ignore the evidence of what she had said, what she had remembered (evidence which he had tried and failed to have excluded) except where it was independently confirmed.