On the following morning Mr. Justice Ball kept his court waiting. This was unusual. He was normally punctual to the minute. When he did appear, it was evident that he was not himself. His eyes were bloodshot, and the dark shadows underneath them suggested that he had not slept well, if at all, on the previous night. He had also apparently cut himself whilst shaving, for there was a broad strip of sticking-plaster down the side of his jaw.
His judgment was short and to the point. He upheld the view that the reference in the will to ‘my Siamese cat, Sunny’ was equally apt as a description of the second cat, and that the relatives, therefore, would have to wait until the death of the last of the four kittens before claiming any share in the estate.
Even now, fifteen years later, Mr. Rumbold had no idea how this happy and entirely unexpected result had been achieved.
In wilder countries, in earlier and less civilised times, he might have supposed that severe pressures had been brought to bear upon Mr. Justice Ball; that he had been subjected to some form of intimidation or blackmail which, in the course of a single night, had forced him to change his mind. But in England, in that day and age, such an explanation was inconceivable. And even if it had been conceivable, the very last person who would have yielded to such pressure would certainly have been Mr. Justice Ball. The only other explanation which occurred to Mr. Rumbold was that he had had some form of stroke or brainstorm. But this had been conclusively disproved in the Judge’s very next case, an exceedingly complicated affair dealing with Bills of Exchange which he had handled with all his accustomed mastery; managing, in the course of it, to be rude to the solicitors on both sides.
“It’s a mystery,” said Mr. Rumbold.
Mr. Silverlight, who appeared to divine what he was thinking about, coughed discreetly. He said, “Previously I have never ventured to disclose something which was said to me, on that occasion, by Mr. Justice Ball’s clerk, Mr. Henry. He and I were very old friends and he told me something, under the seal of strict secrecy. It may have had some bearing on the matter.”
“Oh?” said Mr. Rumbold.
“Now that the last of the protagonists in the case is dead, I feel absolved from my undertaking. I cannot, of course, vouch for the truth of this. It is only what Mr. Henry told me.”
“Go on,” said Mr. Rumbold.
“Apparently when Mr. Justice Ball returned home that night, he was astonished not to be greeted, in the usual friendly fashion, by his own Siamese cat, a fine animal – I cannot recollect the name in the original Siamese, but in translation it was Cultivated Tigress. Not only did she fail to greet him. She actually turned her back on him. He was astounded. Such a thing had never occurred before. But worse was to follow. When he settled down after dinner to write his judgment – and you may surmise that it was not the judgment he eventually delivered – Cultivated Tigress came quietly into the room, and buried her claws in his ankle. By this time, he was thoroughly upset, and it occurred to him to ring up Mr. Henry, who was also a cat-lover. Mr. Henry was so alarmed that he hurried round. He found the Judge in a state of disarray and bleeding from a long scratch down the side of his jaw, incurred when he had incautiously tried to pick up and soothe his pet.
“It was then that Mr. Henry ventured to suggest that what they had encountered was an example of that extra-sensory perception for which Siamese cats were noted. The Judge at first pooh-poohed the idea, but Mr. Henry persuaded him to try an experiment. He said, ‘Sit down, and start to rewrite your judgment in a manner favourable to Sunny and her offspring.’ To humour his clerk, the Judge did so. The effect was electric and instantaneous. Cultivated Tigress became her own friendly self again—”
“Silverlight,” said Mr. Rumbold sternly. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“On the contrary, I had the story from Mr. Henry, who witnessed it himself.”
“Then he was pulling your leg,” said Mr. Rumbold. “All the same,” he added, “I feel glad that I have always stuck to bullterriers myself.”
Murder by Jury
(i)
“Possibly you could describe the snake,” said Counsel.
“Certainly. It was grey, a grey background with a mottling of red. Not crimson, darker than that. A sort of plum-coloured red.”
“Yes.”
“The underbelly, which was towards me, as it reared its head to strike, was also grey but lighter. Toning down almost to white in the centre.”
“Was there anything else about it?”
“Yes – its size. It was as thick as two of my wrists together.”
“I see. What happened next?”
“I seized it, just below its head, with both my hands together. My hands were turned inwards. I squeezed with my fingers and dug in my thumbs, and I felt the snake twist and squirm and batter its head from side to side as it tried to escape.”
“And then?”
“Then I woke up. I was kneeling beside the bed. It was my wife’s neck which was between my hands and her throat that I was squeezing. She was dead.”
“That’s an extract,” said Chief Inspector Hazlerigg, “from the examination-in-chief of Edward Mason, on trial for the murder of his wife, Freda Mason. In my studied opinion he was one of the most thoughtful, cold-blooded, successful murderers we ever failed to hang.”
“I read about it,” I said.
“He got a lot of publicity,” agreed Hazlerigg. “Acquitted murderers always do. It was my case, you know. And I can see, now, that I was outmanoeuvred from start to finish. In the very end, of course – however—”
(ii)
The case really started at six o’clock in the morning in the Caledonian Hotel at Chaffham-on-Sea, a small health resort on the Norfolk coast.
It started with a succession of loud screams from a bedroom on the first floor. ‘Horrible and unforgettable’ was how one witness described them.
The manager jumped from his bed, and, with one of the servants and two other guests, ran along to the room. The door was opened by Mr. Mason, who was apparently in a state of complete breakdown. He was in pyjamas, dishevelled and wild-looking, the pyjama jacket being torn. He kept staring at his hands and the only words he spoke, according to different accounts, were “I killed her” or “I strangled her.”
The manager forced his way past into the room and found Mrs. Mason’s body lying half in, half out of the bed. He sent for the police and a doctor.
When Mr. Mason was fit to talk he made a statement, and at no time afterwards did he substantially vary this statement at all. He said that he had had a dream. He was fighting with a large snake. He took the snake in his hands and throttled it. He woke up and found that he had strangled his wife. The dream was one which he had had before, but never with fatal results.
He added that he had loved his wife very dearly.
The local police could make nothing of this. Mr. Mason was not a local man. The fact that he had happened to kill his wife whilst staying at Chaffham was, they implied, entirely fortuitous. They handed the matter over, with some relief, to London and the case was given to Inspector Hazlerigg for consideration. A local coroner’s jury returned an open verdict.
Hazlerigg disliked the case from the first. The essential information, as he appreciated, was locked up inside Mr. Mason’s mind and provided he kept his head under cross-examination it was going to stay locked up.
“The way I look at it is this,” said Hazlerigg. He was holding an off the record discussion with the Director of Public Prosecutions. “Supposing we had one of those hidden witnesses you read about – I’ve never struck one personally, but you know the sort of chap I mean – he’s up on a cliff with a telescope and he happens to be looking in at the bedroom window. He sees Mason get out of bed, walk round, bend over the bed and strangle his wife. So what? What would it prove? How would we know if Mason was sleep-walking, or if he had all his wits about him?”
“I agree,” said the Director of Public Prosecutions. “As it stands at the moment there’s much less than a fifty-fifty chance
of a conviction. If anything else turns up, well, we’ll have to think again.”
The next thing that turned up was Mrs. Mason’s brother, Hector. He was a great big, hefty person, with a bull neck and hands like a pair of warming pans covered with red fur.
He said, “Did the police know that Mason had insured his wife’s life for ten thousand pounds?”
Hazlerigg said, “Yes. That has come to light. In fact they had both insured each other’s lives – not an uncommon arrangement with married people. Also the insurance was by no means recent. It was first taken out when they married and had been successively increased. The last increase – a big one, it was true, from five to ten thousand – had been made more than three years ago.”
“If you’d known Ted Mason as I did,” said the brother, “you’d have realised that that was just like him. A far-seeing, cold-blooded fish. And another thing – that business about loving his wife was the most arrant flap-jack. The two of them were hardly on speaking terms.”
“Can you bring evidence of that?”
“Certainly,” said the brother. “And plenty more. For instance, there was another woman.” He gave details.
“The fact of the killing’s undenied,” said the brother. “There’s your motive. If you don’t prosecute I’ll raise such merry hell in the press that you’ll find a new commissioner at Scotland Yard before the year’s out.”
“The threat didn’t bother us,” said Hazlerigg. “Our hides are so thick by this time that little private darts like that don’t stick. But when we put the new facts up to the D.P.P. he came down on the side of the prosecution. Indeed, it might be said that in fairness to Mason himself we could hardly not prosecute. There was a lot of talk going round. The thing had to be cleared up.
“I may say straightaway, that the evidence about the other woman turned out to be quite inconclusive. The brother swore that she was Mason’s mistress. She swore that she had never even seen him.
“Macrea was defending when the case came up at the Central Criminal Court, and, my goodness, his handling of that brother was masterly. He went into the box looking like a cross between Bulldog Drummond and the Angel Gabriel and when he came out there was hardly enough left of him to cover a sixpence.
“Macrea took the obvious line, that he was a nasty-minded, prurient busybody, who had never liked his brother-in-law and had never lost any opportunity of blackening his character. How did he know about these alleged passages between his brother-in-law and this other woman? Had he been hiding behind the curtains? Or under the bed? And so on. The art of the thing was the way he got the chap admitting to the most absurd prejudices – he convicted him time and time again out of his own mouth.
“Nevertheless, making a fool out of a witness is a two-edged weapon, and when the prosecution closed I could set what was in the jury’s mind as clearly as if they had said it out loud.
“‘This chap Hector may be a fool,’ they were thinking. ‘He didn’t show up too well in the box. But that doesn’t mean that everything he said is untrue. There’s no smoke without a fire. And there have been one or two other witnesses who gave evidence that things were not entirely happy between Mr. and Mrs. Mason. No open quarrels, but of course if Mason is the deep-dyed villain the prosecution are making him out to be, he would have taken good care to avoid open quarrels. Perhaps it isn’t true about the other woman – we didn’t much like that part of the evidence. But you can’t argue away the insurance. Mason does stand to collect ten thousand pounds. If he didn’t murder her, then undeniably she died as the result of an accident, and the insurance company will have to pay and look pretty. That’s not disputed. But did he murder her? That’s the simple point. Really when you get down to it, most of the evidence is practically irrelevant. That’s the question we’ve got to answer. We are rather inclined to think that he may have done, but that, of course, is not enough. We’ll have to wait and see how he shapes in the box.’”
Mason made an excellent witness.
He avoided the prime fault of a prisoner who gives evidence in his own defence – he did not protest too much.
He admitted small quarrels between himself and his wife. Married life, he said, was like that. You had differences of opinion, and you made them up. The jury appreciated that. A lot of them were married themselves.
He dealt fully with the question of life insurance. The total amount of the benefit, he said, depended on the premiums you could afford to pay. When he was beginning in business, and his earnings were increasing slowly, he had added gradually to the annual premium. Three or four years ago he had made rather large profits and had been able to double the premium. In recent troublesome times his earnings had dropped – he was an importer – and he had not therefore been able to add to the premiums at all. He had not reduced them, because that would have been uneconomical,
(“You notice, incidentally,” said Hazlerigg, “how neatly he gave them a point and then took it away again. The prosecution would certainly have elicited, in cross-examination, that he had recently been losing money and this would have constituted an extra motive for murder. By announcing the fact in advance he robbed it of half its sting.”)
He denied flatly ever having seen or spoken to the other woman in the case.
Of the events which led up to the strangling of his wife he spoke calmly, almost objectively, without any undue display of emotion. He was always ready to give the fullest and most careful details and he never contradicted himself. And even so he avoided sounding too pat. He would remember some extra detail when questioned, or introduce some unimportant point, confessing that he had forgotten about it before. (“You can judge for yourself. I read you a bit of his evidence just now.”) If it was lying, people couldn’t help feeling that it was some of the most perfect and painstaking lying they had ever heard.
Even so, you could sense that the jury were still not quite happy about it.
Juries go more by instinct than people think. And as every additional fact pointed the other way, their instincts only told them more clearly that the man in the dock was a dangerous chap. Had they been forced to put their feelings into words the only sort of argument they could have put up was something like this: “The facts show that he did strangle her. He is plainly a quiet, controlled, sort of person – not, on the face of it, very likely to have nightmares and to run amok. We would like some positive evidence that what he says is true. That he did it in his sleep.”
Looking back on it, in the light of after-knowledge, one can see that this was precisely the point which Mason wished them to reach. The timing of his defence was meticulous. First he erected this thin screen of doubt; then he proceeded to demolish it.
The next witness was his sister.
She was two years older than he was. A grey-haired woman, a middle-class intellectual and a good witness.
She started by recalling when she had slept with her brother – at a time when such a practice was respectable and indeed normal, their ages being ten and eight respectively.
She remembered very well the night when her brother had had a dream and had tried to strangle her. She did not think that the dream, on that occasion, had been about a snake. So far as she recollected the incident it had occurred on the night after they had visited a matinée performance of Peter Pan. Her brother had been very alarmed by the crocodile in the last act but one – the jury would probably remember it – and he had dreamed that the crocodile was chasing him. He had turned on her and got a good grip of her throat. He was a strong boy for eight and if nurse hadn’t come running in she didn’t like to think what might not have happened.
Cross-examination could make very little headway against this. She agreed that it was a long time ago, but an experience like that was not a thing which one was likely to forget. She particularly remembered it because from then on – until Edward finally went to boarding school – she had not been allowed to sleep in the same room with him.
You could see that the jury were shaken.
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br /> The next two witnesses completed the job.
The first – I won’t give you her real name – we’ll call her Lulu.
Macrea, introducing the witness, indicated that there might be passages in her evidence which would give offence, but plainly where life and death were involved, certain reticences had to go by the board.
Lulu proved to be pleasant and extremely self-possessed woman in her middle thirties. She was now leading a life of extreme rectitude, but she admitted – as the dullest member of the jury had by now appreciated – that she had at one time been a prostitute. She was giving her evidence of her own free will and because she couldn’t stand by and see a man accused of something he obviously hadn’t done.
Three or four years ago she had spent the night with the prisoner. It was the only time she had ever set eyes on him, but it was not an occasion she was likely to forget. At about six in the morning she had woken up to find him throttling her.
She was a strong and active woman and she had managed to fight her way free.
He had produced some garbled story about a dream and a snake, to which she had not paid much attention, being at the time both frightened and extremely angry.
The prisoner, however, had behaved very handsomely. He had given her ten pounds to soothe her feelings, and – more – had appeared so genuinely anxious and upset that she hadn’t the heart to take the matter further. Her first intention had been to go to the police.
When Counsel for the Crown got up to cross-examine he found himself in a position of unexpected difficulty.
It is easy enough to throw ridicule on these poor women, and their evidence doesn’t often count for a great deal in a court of law. But the fact of the matter was that she was plainly risking a wounding cross-examination with the inevitable unpleasant notoriety which must attend it with no possible motive except to save an innocent man.
In a way, you see, the more he hurt her, the less good did he do to his own case.
Stay of Execution Page 3