by Nina Allan
* * *
When I was eighteen, I contracted leukaemia. I was very ill for about ten months and then I recovered. Against the odds, the doctors said, and only after the kind of clichéd regime of brutal chemo you read about in the colour supplements. And yes, there were times I wished they’d give up on me and let me die. I suspect – in fact I know – it was my brother Martin who persuaded me to stick around. His white face at my bedside, I can still see it now. His terror that I wasn’t going to pull through. I don’t think I’ve mattered like that to anyone, before or since, and that includes Ray. I hung on and hung on, until suddenly there I was, washed up on the shore of life once more and the tide of those months receding like some lurid sick joke.
But there were side effects. I’d been offered a place at Cambridge to read mathematics. Following my illness I found something was missing: the instinctive affinity for numbers I had taken for granted as an inseparable part of me was, if not vanished, then noticeably blunted. It was like thinking through gauze. My professor seemed confident that I was simply exhausted, that any diminution in my ability would soon be restored. Perhaps she was right. I’ll never know now, will I? The university offered me the option to defer my entry for a further year, but I refused.
I turned down my place, partly from the terror of failure and partly to match the drama that was playing out inside my head with something concrete that could be measured in the world outside. I was having a breakdown, in other words, and in the aftermath of that I switched to Law. I know it doesn’t sound like much, when you put it like that, but the decision hurt a lot at the time. It felt like the worst kind of defeat. I won’t say I ever got over the loss, but I learned to live with it, the same as you do with any bereavement. And in time I even came to enjoy my legal studies. There is a beauty in the law, in which the abstraction of numbers is countered by the wily and intricate compromises of philosophy. Call it compensation, if you like. An out-of-court settlement that if not generous has at least proved adequate.
I’m good at my job, I think, and it has provided me with a decent living in return. And whenever I find myself growing maudlin for what might have been, I remind myself that the law has also provided me with what Martin jokingly refers to as Dora’s file on the doomed: an interest that began as a tree branch of curiosity and grew into a passion.
* * *
If I am known to the public at all, it is for my articles and radio broadcasts on the subject of capital punishment, and the fatal miscarriages of justice that have been associated with this barbaric practice. For many years, the essays I wrote for various history and politics journals formed the limit of my ambition for my researches. It was Martin – of course it was! – who first suggested I should write a book, and the more I thought about the idea the more I liked it.
My first thought was to write a monograph on capital punishment in general: a philosophical treatise, to be accompanied by a thorough debunking. A literary bollocking, if you like. I soon came to realise how dull such a volume would be, unless you had an interest in the subject to begin with, which would make the whole thing pointless, a sermon to the converted. I came to the conclusion that a more personal approach would work better, an in-depth study of specific cases, of one specific case even. What better way to demonstrate the brutality of state-sanctioned murder than to tell the story of one of its victims? To show that murder is always murder, even when enshrined in law, with the same practical margin for error and moral depravity that murder entails?
* * *
My decision to write about Helen Bostall was made quickly and easily. As a story, her case had everything you might look for in a decent thriller. The condemned criminal was also a woman, which made the case a cause célèbre, even at the time. People are fascinated by women who kill in much the same way as they are fascinated by genetic freaks, and with the same mixture of self-righteous indignation and covert repulsion.
For my own part, I became interested in Helen because I admired her writing, and also because from the moment I first encountered what passed for the facts of her case, I found myself convinced she was not guilty. Not that I would have ceased to admire her, necessarily, if she had been a murderer – Edwin Dillon was an arrogant prick, if you ask me – but her innocence made her the perfect candidate for my thesis. I would do her justice, I decided, if not in deed then in word, at the very least.
I’ve read interviews with biographers in which they wax on about having a special kinship with their subjects, a personal relationship across time that could never have existed in reality. I would once have dismissed such speculation as sentimental codswallop.
Not any more, though.
* * *
Helen Bostall was born in 1895, in Addiscombe, Croydon. Her father, Winston Bostall, was a doctor and lay preacher. Her mother, Edith, had worked as a teacher, though she gave up her career entirely after she was married. The two were well-matched, forward-thinking people who gave their only daughter Helen every opportunity to develop her intellectual awareness of the world and her place within it.
I might have been content, Helen wrote in her 1923 pamphlet essay ‘On War, on Murder’, content to take up my place among the teachers, preachers, poets and painters I had learned to admire as a very young woman, to speak my protest, but timidly, from inside the very system I was protesting. It was the spectacle of war that made me a radical, that fired in me the conviction that the system I was protesting had to be broken.
The war, and more specifically the death on the Somme of her cousin, Peter Arnold Bostall, the son of her father’s brother Charles. Peter and Helen, both only children and of a similar age, had been close throughout their childhoods. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Peter had just graduated from Oxford and was considering whether to take up a junior fellowship offered to him by his college, or to embark on a research trip to Madagascar with his other uncle, his mother’s brother, the entomologist Rupert Paxton.
It is not known whether Peter and Helen had plans to marry, although judging by the letters the two exchanged while Peter was at Oxford it is certainly a possibility. There is no doubt that Helen was devastated by her cousin’s death, locking herself away in her room for several weeks afterwards and ultimately falling ill with pneumonia. She emerged from her illness a different person, determined to play her part in creating a more just society, a society in which a death such as her cousin’s would not be possible. When the war ended she took up lodgings in Hampstead, close to the house where John Keats once lived, and began taking in private pupils. During the hours she was not teaching, she was studying and writing. She also joined a suffragist group. Her parents, though initially upset by her abrupt departure from the family home and concerned for her health, were tentatively supportive of her aims.
Until she met Edwin Dillon. Then everything changed.
* * *
Edwin Dillon was thirty years old, a journalist on the Manchester Guardian who had written a number of inflammatory articles on the employment conditions of factory workers in the north of England. He had lost three fingers of his left hand in an unspecified industrial accident, although there was some talk that he had inflicted the injury himself, to avoid conscription.
He came south to London in 1919, quickly establishing links with the community of Russian anarchists and dissident Marxists living there in exile from the Bolshevik revolution. It was likely to have been Dillon’s views on free love that set Helen’s parents so thoroughly against him, although it could simply have been that they didn’t much like him.
Hector Dubois, the proprietor of the Liberty Bookshop in Camden and a former associate of Dillon’s, testified in support of Helen Bostall at her trial. He described Edwin Dillon as ‘a man you needed to be careful around, a man who held a grudge’. There were also rumours that Dillon’s original motive for coming to London had to do with a woman he had made pregnant in Manchester and later abandoned. Attempts to trace this woman ended in failure and so the rumours remained unsubstan
tiated.
Whatever the reason, Winston and Edith Bostall were determined that their daughter should have nothing more to do with Edwin Dillon. When Helen announced that she was intending to move into Dillon’s rooms in Camden, her parents threatened to cut all ties with her. Perhaps they hoped to call her bluff. If so, it was a gamble that backfired. In the February of 1927, Helen gave up her Hampstead lodgings and moved into the basement flat at 112 Milliver Road.
I soon found myself accruing vast amounts of information, not just on Helen Bostall but on her whole family. I can imagine many editors dismissing most of it as irrelevant – who cared about Winston Bostall’s run-in with a colleague in 1907 (over the involuntary committal of an unmarried mother to a mental asylum, if you’re interested) when the incident had zero connection to the case in hand? But the more I dug into the private lives of the Bostalls and their circle, the more I became convinced they were important. Crime does not arise in a vacuum. A murder is simply the flash point in a gradual accretion of narrative. The various strands that make up that narrative – Winston Bostall’s mortal hatred of violence, Edith Bostall’s inability to conceive another child, Peter Bostall’s ambiguous relationship with his uncle, Rupert Paxton – may all be contributing factors in its final outcome.
And besides that, I was interested. The Bostalls were an unremarkable family, on the face of it, and yet their lives provided a snapshot of an entire era. In the conflicts and setbacks they encountered, it was possible to discern the birth of the modern age and the decline of empire, the fireworks and anxieties that occurred when the two collided. Was it any wonder that a woman like Helen Bostall – educated, resourceful and unwilling to settle for the life that society had preordained for her –ended up finding herself directly in the firing line?
The shadow side of my researches was the strange vacuity surrounding the person of Edwin Dillon. Information about the Bostalls was plentiful, and easy to come by. This was partly because of the crime, of course – call someone a murderer, and suddenly every detail of their life becomes interesting, becomes evidence – but that was not the only reason. The Bostalls – Helen herself, but also Winston, Edith, Peter, Rupert, and especially Rupert’s wife Marina, who was Russian and embraced the literary arts as her birthright – were all copious, inveterate letter writers and journal keepers. Their histories remained bright, remained present.
Searching for information about Edwin Dillon came to seem like staring into a black hole. I became convinced that if Dillon hadn’t been murdered, he would have disappeared from history altogether. I turned up odd pieces of his journalism here and there, but finding images of the man himself was another matter. Aside from the blurry photograph that was so often in the newspapers at the time of Helen’s trial, Edwin Dillon might as well have been invisible.
In the end I decided it would be better to set all the background material aside for the moment and concentrate on the timeline of the case itself. It was like working on a proof, in a way – carry one distinct line of enquiry through to its logical conclusion and the rest will follow.
The actual order of events was easy enough to assemble from the trial records. A little before eight o’clock on the evening of the 20th of January 1928, a Mrs Irene Wilbur, a widow who lived in the ground floor apartment of 112 Milliver Road, was disturbed by what she called a ‘furious altercation’ in the flat below. Concerned by what she heard – “It sounded like they were bashing each others’ brains out,” was what she said on the witness stand – she left her flat and hurried to the Red Lion public house, approximately a minute’s walk away, hoping to enlist the aid of the publican in locating a police constable. When asked why she did not call at Dillon’s apartment herself, she insisted she was afraid to. “The noise they were making,” she said. “It was as if the devil had got into them.”
The publican of the Red Lion, Gerald Honeyshot, confirmed that Irene Wilbur came into the pub soon after eight o’clock. He left with her more or less immediately and they walked together to Camden Town Underground Station, where they were able to secure the services of PC Robert Greystowe, who passed by the station regularly on his beat.
The three then returned to 112 Milliver Road, where on entry into the hallway they found the house silent, and the door leading to Dillon’s apartment standing ajar.
I knew straight away there’d been a murder done, Irene Wilbur claimed in her statement. You could feel it in the air. Something about the silence. It wasn’t right.
At this point, Greystowe gave instructions for Wilbur and Honeyshot to remain upstairs in the hallway while he entered the basement apartment alone. He called out to ‘Mr and Mrs Dillon’ as he entered, but there was no reply. A short time later he re-emerged, and informed Wilbur and Honeyshot that they would need to report to the police station on Highgate Road immediately, in order to give their witness statements. He did not offer them any further information at this point, but by the end of the evening both Wilbur and Honeyshot knew that Edwin Dillon had been murdered. According to PC Greystowe, he had discovered Dillon within moments of entering the flat. He was in the kitchen. His clothes were soaked with blood, and more blood was spreading in a large puddle across the kitchen tiles.
Edwin Dillon was pronounced dead where he lay. He had been stabbed five times. Two of the wounds were serious enough to have killed him.
* * *
There was no sign, anywhere, of Helen Bostall. An officer was left on duty outside the house, and when Helen eventually returned home at around eleven o’clock, she was taken immediately into police custody. On being asked where she had spent the evening, she said she had been at the house of a friend, Daphne Evans, who lived in Highgate. Daphne quickly confirmed Helen’s alibi, but when officers asked if they might search her flat, according to PC Greystowe she seemed to become agitated.
“I suppose you have to come in,” she said in the end. She had been about to go to bed. When asked why she was reluctant to let police officers enter her apartment, she said it was because she was in her dressing gown.
The apartment was tidy, with no signs of disturbance, let alone the murder weapon. Two porcelain teacups – according to Daphne Evans they were the same teacups she and Helen had been drinking from earlier that evening – stood drying in the drainer beside the sink. It was only after half an hour’s searching that officers discovered the small valise on top of the wardrobe in Evans’s bedroom. The valise contained clothes that were later positively identified as belonging to Helen Bostall, together with a forward-dated ticket for the boat train from Victoria and a number of notebooks and letters, either addressed to Helen Bostall or filled with her handwriting.
It was clear that Helen Bostall had been planning her getaway, that she had been keeping her plans hidden from Dillon, that she had not intended for him to accompany her on her journey. When asked why this was, she stated that she had decided to break with Dillon permanently and was determined not to get into an argument with him. “Edwin’s temper had become unreliable. I didn’t want him to cause a scene.”
When the prosecuting counsel pressed her on whether she was, in fact, afraid of Dillon, she hesitated and then said no. “Edwin was domineering, but I was used to that,” she said. “He would never have done me physical harm.”
When questioned about the row she’d had with Dillon on the evening of his death, Helen Bostall seemed completely bemused. “I barely saw Edwin all day,” she said. “I was working in the library for most of the morning, then in the afternoon I saw three of my private pupils, at Milliver Road. I have no idea where Edwin was at that time. He came back to the flat at around six o’clock. He seemed tired and irritable, but no more so than usual. I told him I was going to Daphne’s, that I would be back around eleven. Those were the last words I spoke to him. I left the flat soon afterwards.” She hesitated. “We really didn’t have much to say to each other any more.”
* * *
The police seemed determined right from the start that Helen was the kill
er. She had a motive – Dillon’s coercive behaviour – and she had her escape already planned. A further breakthrough came the following day, when the murder weapon – a serrated steel kitchen knife with a scratched wooden handle – was discovered jammed into a crack in the wall separating the back garden of 112 Milliver Road from the garden of 114. The blade was caked in dried blood, later proved to be of the same blood type as Edwin Dillon’s. Three clear fingerprints were found on the handle – all Helen’s.
Helen freely admitted that the knife was hers, that it had come from her kitchen. She strongly denied that she had used it to murder Dillon. When asked who she thought had killed her lover, she said she didn’t know. “Edwin was always falling in and out of love with people. He thrived on dissent. He didn’t have friends so much as sparring partners, political cronies most of them, people he knew from before we met. I gave up having anything to do with them a long time ago.”
When asked why that was, Helen Bostall stated that she no longer cared for their company. “They were all men, obsessed with themselves and their own self-importance. They barely knew I existed. I’m sure some of them hated Edwin – he could be obnoxious. Whether any of them hated him enough to want to kill him I have no idea.”
For two or three days, attention veered away from Helen as the police went in search of Dillon’s political associates, many of whom, as Helen had suggested, turned out to have grievances against him. Then on February 5th, just as things were starting to get interesting, officers received an anonymous tip-off concerning a Louise Tichener of Highgate Village. This person – or persons – insisted that Miss Tichener had been conducting an affair with Edwin Dillon, and that Helen Bostall had known about it. When found and questioned, Tichener, who belonged to one of the suffragist groups also attended by Bostall, readily confessed to the affair, with the additional information that Dillon had been planning to leave Bostall, and marry her.