by Howard Engel
FOUR
Events moved swiftly after that first encounter with Graeme Lambert. Bell despatched me that very day to the free library to pore over the newspaper accounts of the double murder. In that atmosphere of old leather, polished wood and green lampshades, I read every word that had been written about the case and made notes that put to excellent use the training I had received from Bell and the rest of my teachers.
In bald outline, the case unfolded in this wise. At seven o’clock on the evening of Monday, 21st July, the celebrated soprano Hermione Clery and her lover, Gordon Eward, were savagely murdered as they sat in the first-floor drawing-room of the comfortable flat that had been leased to the singer by the opera company pursuant to the agreement the company had made with her. The address in Coates Crescent was an excellent one, only a short distance from the west end of Princes Street, and forming, with Atholl Crescent and the adjacent parkland, a most agreeable prospect, both prestigious and convenient.
Mlle Clery was of Irish origin, but she had studied in Germany with Liszt and had appeared in London, Paris, Berlin and New York in the works of Mozart, Meyerbeer, Donizetti and Gounod to audiences that applauded to the very echo the brilliance of her coloratura flights. Her high notes were unsurpassed by Jenny Lind herself. Her Donna Anna, her Norma, her Lucia were for a decade the talk of the musical world. The very year of her death, she sang before Queen Victoria at Stolzenfels, where Mlle Lind had earlier had one of her triumphs.
Naturally, upon her sudden removal from the scene, the newspapers both here and abroad followed the case avidly. Reporters from Chicago and New York arrived and were put up at great expense in the best hotels, while they fashioned daily stories despatched by the fastest available methods.
Gordon Eward was the most recent of a string of lovers the singer had taken in the course of her short peripatetic life. She had lived quite openly with the young painter Lafleur-Gérard in Paris, where eyebrows were raised even among the bohemians of Montmartre. Eward was not a well-known writer or painter. The dull truth is that he was a clerk in the Board of Works here in Edinburgh, where he audited the accounts of several departments. The newspapers tried to make a hero of romance out of him and failed. There was too much ink on his fingers even for the American press.
Still, Eward was a handsome young fellow, well-spoken by all accounts, and not without some social standing in Scotland. His great-great-grandfather, a Bible-thumping Covenanter, had perished with his flock in a hunger strike near Aberdeen in 1780. His father was a hydraulic engineer best remembered for keeping the Princes Street Gardens drained. Eward’s avocation was music, which he had studied privately with Mazzini until his voice proved to be too frail for the concert stage. Mlle Clery had met him in Menton, where both were vacationing. They arrived in Edinburgh separately at the beginning of the season and maintained their liaison with admirable propriety until their deaths made common knowledge of their intimate association.
The crime occurred shortly after Hélène André, the French maid employed by Mlle Clery, went out to buy a newspaper. She was away slightly more than ten minutes, during which time the two were savagely murdered in the drawing-room.
Mlle Clery possessed an estimated ten thousand pounds’ worth of jewels in her flat. She was morbidly afraid of robbers, having lost a fortune in gems once before, during her 1875 stay in Berlin. Along with the normal locks and chains, her front door was equipped with double bolts and two patent locks opened by separate keys. In addition to this door on the first floor, there was a street door, which was also kept locked. The ground-floor flat was occupied by a middle-aged couple named Osborne, who were on cordial terms with their illustrious upstairs neighbour.
That night, the Osbornes heard noises overhead; the falling of a heavy weight that made a cracking noise in the ceiling joists. Curious, and in his carpet slippers, William Osborne walked up the stairs to see what was the matter. He rang the bell, but received no answer. He returned to his own rooms to inform his wife and then went up again. Just then, the maid returned with her newspaper. Osborne explained to her what he had heard, which the maid dismissed as the falling of clothes from the indoor clothesline, an explanation which still left Osborne puzzled. Hélène entered the flat, leaving Osborne at the open door while she explored to see if anything was amiss. She went directly to the kitchen. Before she was out of sight, a man emerged from the bedroom. Hélène saw the man, but from behind.
Osborne thought it was a visitor. Having neglected to wear his spectacles, he saw him none too clearly. The man walked towards the front door as Hélène entered the kitchen. He approached Osborne “quite pleasantly,” but, on reaching the landing, he bolted down the stairs and out the front door to the street, slamming the door after him. By this time, the maid had come out of the kitchen and gone into the bedroom. Not until Osborne asked, “Where is Mlle Clery?” did Hélène enter the drawing-room. Here Hélène encountered a sight that was quite outside her experience. Gordon Eward was lying in a stuffed chair, his head thrown back, and his throat opened up with a gash that had cut through all the soft tissues in front of the cervical vertebrae. All of the major blood vessels in the area had been severed. Blood had pooled below his chair, after the first jets had marked the wall and curtains behind him. Curiously, there was very little blood on the body itself. The female victim, dressed in a green negligée, was stretched out on the floor in the middle of the room, as though she was murdered while making for the door. Her wound was similar to the first victim’s, without being quite so extensive. The jugular vein was cut, but the other soft tissues remained intact. Her lifeblood had drained from her white neck and soaked through to the carpet. There was no sign of a weapon, nor were there bootmarks in the gore.
Immediately on finding the bodies, Hélène began to scream. Osborne followed the sound and also took in the horror of what could only have been a most outrageous double murder. On recovering from his shock sufficiently, Osborne ran downstairs and out into the street. Nothing was moving. There was no one in sight. He sent his wife for the doctor who lived a few houses down the crescent. Properly shod, he went out again and returned to the scene of the crime with the first constable he encountered on his way along Shandwick Place.
Dr Mathison examined the bodies to be satisfied that both were in fact dead. Meanwhile, the constable found that a jewel box had been opened and that the floor of the bedroom was strewn with precious gems. With the consent of the policeman, the maid stepped out to inform Mr Thomas Prentice, Mlle Clery’s agent, who lived in nearby Canning Street, what had occurred. It was later alleged that she told Mr Prentice that the visitor who left the flat so hurriedly was known to her.
The police took statements from Osborne and Hélène and issued a description of the wanted man as follows:
A man between thirty-five and forty years of age, 5 feet 7 or 8 inches in height, thick-set, dark hair, with side whiskers; dressed in a light grey overcoat, and dark cloth cap. Cannot be further described.
The information that Hélène knew the visitor did not appear in her statement or in the published description of the suspect.
The following Wednesday the authorities were able to amplify this description when a fourteen-year-old messenger girl came forward saying that she had seen a man run out of the house in Coates Crescent and along towards Princes Street. In fact, the man bumped into her as he ran off in an easterly direction. She added further details to the description, some of which proved at odds with what was known. There was confusion about the colour, style and material of both hat and coat. This led to the police theory that there were two assassins, not one.
After collecting the spilled jewellery from the bedroom floor, Hélène André discovered that a crescent-shaped diamond brooch was missing. It proved to be the only valuable piece that had been taken. If the motive for the crime was robbery, few of the papers commented upon the fact that much blood had been shed for very little return. A sketch of the missing piece was circulated along with a revise
d description of two suspects wanted for questioning.
On the Friday after the murders, a bicycle dealer named Tobias M’Leod visited the Central Police Station. He told a story that led to the arrest of Alan Lambert for the crime. M’Leod stated that a man he knew as Lambert or Lamport had been trying to dispose of a pawn-ticket for a diamond brooch resembling the one described in the circular. A visit by the police to the pawnshop found the article and confirmed the name of the man who had pledged it. Immediately, a circular with Lambert’s name on it was placed on view in public places. His name appeared in the press as: someone the police sought for questioning in connection with the murders. On calling around at the man’s rooms in Howe Street, the police discovered that the suspect had decamped. He had sold his furnishings, leased his third-floor flat and fled to Liverpool. In Liverpool it was further learned that the man had booked passage for New York, and had indeed left on a steamer for America not long after the crime was committed.
Lambert, it was learned, was a man of good family fallen upon evil days. He was known to have debts with the shopkeepers on the High Street and to have regularly visited a gambling club in India Street. While the police understood him to be a man of no fixed income and something of a good-for-nothing, he had never been brought to book successfully even for petty crimes or misdemeanours. Drunkenness in a public place was the most severe crime for which he had ever been charged.
The police were sure they had their man. The New York police were contacted by trans-Atlantic cable and the man travelling as Alan Lambert was detained in the cells of the Tombs until Inspector Palmer of the Edinburgh police arrived by the next ship with Mr Osborne, Hélène André and Gladys Smith, the little messenger girl. The three witnesses identified Lambert as “the man.” Lambert retained an American lawyer, who believed that his client would never be extradited on the evidence provided. Like many a good man before him, and after him, Lambert did not heed counsel. He voluntarily returned to Scotland under arrest, and now faced trial for the double murder in the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh.
FIVE
Under instructions from Dr Bell, I attended the trial on each of its four days. Outside in the High Street, throughout the proceedings, news-vendors had set up makeshift kiosks. Knots of interested citizens quickly exchanged copper coins for the latest news of what was happening on the inside. Placards in large black letters screamed their messages in ghastly hyperbole:
EDINBURGH HORROR
CLERY MURDER SENSATION
TRIAL OF DECADE BEGINS TODAY
The largest courtroom in the old Parliament House was stuffed with sensation-seekers, reporters and the curious. This was the High Court of Justiciary, the highest court north of the border. Every true-blooded Scot recalled, on crossing the threshold, that this building once housed an independent Scottish parliament until the Act of Union rendered it superfluous.
As the jury of fifteen men was empanelled, a thunderstorm outside darkened the chamber and added its own sense of foreboding and dread about the man standing isolated and pale in the dock.
The trial afforded me a chance to see displayed all of the pageantry of the law. With the periwigs and gowns, the white tabs and the bits of ermine, the mise en scène was calculated to inspire one with awe, reverence and, yes, fear of the majesty of the legal system. I must confess that it had the expected effect on me. Here matters of life and death were to be debated. Here a man’s life was in hazard. Yet when I first saw the Lord Advocate in conversation with the Procurator-Fiscal, fussing with his tabs; Adam Veitch, the silk representing Lambert, being instructed by his junior and muffling a secret yawn; the judge in his scarlet robes with dark crosses raised high upon the bench, I quite forgot myself and almost called out, echoing Lewis Carroll: “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” Happily, I did not.
In the corridor outside, witnesses were sitting, talking to their friends or solicitors, some of them quite at ease, others impressed by the height of the ceiling with its hanging chandeliers and the stripes of sunlight crossing the floor and mounting the wall opposite the tall windows. One man, a tall, heavily built fellow with dark wavy hair and a blue chin, stood by the door like a major-domo. He, I was told, was one of the chief prosecution witnesses, a policeman named Webb. During a recess Webb paced the hall outside the courtroom, as one impatient with the slowness of the law. He had the air of being a shepherd to the remaining witnesses. They consulted him from time to time; he dispensed help with authority. Now and then he whispered in the ears of other officials who hurried self-importantly up and down the corridors, with papers in their hands. Of these, I recognized the broad, sweaty face of Keir M’Sween, the deputy chief constable. M’Sween was famous for regularly cleaning out squatters from the narrow, twisting back lanes, wynds and closes of the Old Town.
When I first saw the accused, my immediate thought was: “They have the wrong fellow!” For Lambert in no way resembled the circulated description of either of the wanted men. In my foolishness, I supposed that the trial would quickly exonerate him, since he stood at least six feet in height, was as lean as a post rather than heavy-set, was clean-shaven and rejoiced in abundant dazzling red hair. In no particular did he resemble the descriptions made public by the police or rehearsed time after time in the newspapers. In spite of this, he was the only prisoner in the dock. While the courtroom held its breath, young Lambert stood and in a clear, brittle voice answered the charges levelled at him: “Not guilty!” he said.
At the end of each of my days in court, I repaired to the surgery of Dr Bell and gave him an account of what I had seen and heard. “Be my eyes and ears, Doyle,” he had said. “Omit nothing, any more than the eye censors the scene in front of it. Colour what you say, if you must, with your impressions. These are often the findings of the combined senses and must not be ignored. I’m sure you are an excellent observer.” Thus he had instructed me, and I went forth with my notebook and pencils each day. After the first long day, I found Dr Bell waiting for me in his office adjoining the surgery. He got up excitedly as I came in and indicated a chair. As he returned to his own, he rubbed his long hands together, interlacing his virtuoso fingers into a comfortable knot. When I had settled myself, he leaned his head over the back in his chair and shut his eyes.
“Tell me about the judge, Lambert’s counsel and the Crown prosecutor.”
“The judge is a sleepy drone, but not to be disregarded. Lord Cameron is a judge of the lists. I have not seen enough of him to say aught against the man.”
“He will defend the values of property and our rather narrow Scots morality, I am sure. Go on.”
“The Lord Advocate is a—”
“The Lord Advocate? The Lord Advocate is conducting the case for the Crown? Very interesting! Paint me a picture of him.”
“He’s a speech-maker, something of a spellbinder. His challenge to a juror sounded like Sir Henry Irving doing Mark Antony; a call for a brief recess was Henry V before Harfleur.”
“Excellent! Such a one will trample on the facts to make a rhetorical effect. What’s his name?”
“Sir George Currie, QC, LLD.”
“Ah! I know the man! From Glasgow. He may be somewhat enamoured of his eloquence, but he’s no fool; he’s not a bullfrog: full of hot air with no substance. We must watch him. I remember him from years ago. He was ambitious then. He married an iron-merchant’s daughter in a shipbuilding town. Aye, he’s a canny one. Wanted to be a law lord before he was fifty. He did it too, not at all impeded by his peptic ulcer. Lambert’s counsel had better keep his ears open. What do we know about him?”
“Mr Adam James Veitch, BL, LLB, is an able man—”
“You say that like a fishmonger discovered in the act of giving fair weights. Come to judgment!”
“He’s a small terrier barking at the gate, while the thieves come around him laughing into the house. He is well learned in the law, shows up well in cross-examination, but he lacks the experience as well as the authority and eloque
nce of Currie. This morning, he suppressed a yawn. He may be bored by the case already or he could have been up all night going over the brief.”
“Well said. He won’t have the starch to interrupt the great man even if he says that the murderer was found concealing a broadsword up one sleeve and a phial of strychnine up the other.”
“What’s to be done?” I asked.
“Go back to the courtroom tomorrow.”
“But, the clinic? Your patients?”
“Doyle, I can dragoon young Biggar to do your work, while you do mine at the Parliament House.”
“Oh, there’s one thing I forgot. The Procurator-Fiscal was there.”
“Ah! Sir William Burnham. His purple face was in full bloom, I suppose?”
“Not at that hour. Perhaps pink from a hot bath.”
“Such ostentation!”
“What exactly is a procurator-fiscal? I know vaguely—”
“And ‘vaguely’ isn’t good enough. Right. The Procurator-Fiscal is a public prosecutor. There’s one for every shire. He acts as a chief coroner, taking the initiative in cases of sudden or suspicious death. It’s a powerful office and Sir William is not a man to be trifled with.”
I attended the second as well as the remaining two days of the trial. All of the characters I had discussed with Bell stood out from the others, as though in relief. Inspector Webb and his superior, Deputy Chief M’Sween, were always about in the corridor outside the courtroom or standing up in the back row. Once, I saw Webb with a camera on a tripod outside the Parliament House, making a study of people sheltering from the sudden treat of noonday sun.