Again, Edmund denied it. He had not seen Jane Clouson since the day she had left her place at the Pooks’ three weeks before. But then, he hesitated, turned to his father, whispered a few words the police could not catch, and corrected himself: “Yes, I did though, I saw her in the town, talking to a young gent, and I came home and mentioned it”—mentioned it to his brother, Thomas.
As for seeing the girl last week, he could account for his whereabouts every day. Monday he was with Thomas—the two were not apart for more than fifteen or twenty minutes. As usual, his family would not leave him alone because of the danger that he might have a fit. On Tuesday he left work at seven o’clock, as he usually did, and walked, alone, to Lewisham, to see a lady. “Is it necessary to mention her name?” he asked.
“Certainly not,” Mulvany and Griffin replied in unison.
Griffin asked him how he walked to Lewisham. Through Greenwich Park, he told them, across by the guns.
“That would bring you by Arthur’s House,” Griffin pointed out, “where the girl said she would meet you.”
Edmund denied arranging any meeting with her. At Lewisham, he told them, he had not actually seen the lady; rather, he had stood on a bridge next to the Plough tavern and simply watched the lady’s house for a good forty minutes. He had seen nobody he knew—nobody who could prove he was there. And then he reconsidered. To his father rather than the police, he said, “By-the-bye, I saw our boy delivering a parcel.” He had seen the shop’s errand-boy when he was returning from Lewisham, returning not via Greenwich Park, but by taking a more direct route through the streets. He had seen the boy, but he was certain the boy had not seen him.
It seemed an unverifiable alibi, and Edmund could see that Mulvany was doubtful. “Call up my brother,” he told the detective indignantly. “He will tell you where I was.”
Thomas Pook was fetched from the dining room, and Edmund snapped at him, “Tom, where was I on Monday night?”
“You were about the town with me, the whole evening.”
“Where was I on Tuesday night?”
“You went to Lewisham.”
“What time did I return?”
“About nine o’clock, as usual.”
Ebenezer then asked Thomas whether Edmund had told him he had seen Jane with somebody. Thomas instantly answered, “Yes, I remember his coming home, and saying he had seen her with a swell.”
Mulvany sat all this time near Edmund, staring at the lower legs of his trousers. Upon the left he discerned several tiny spots. “Are those the trousers you wore on that night?” he asked Edmund.
They were. And so Mulvany asked Edmund to produce other clothes he wore that night, item by item. First, the coat. Edmund considered; he had worn an overcoat that night, he said, and then corrected himself: he had worn a blue frock coat. He went and retrieved it, and Mulvany scrutinized it: there was no blood on it that he could see. Then the hat. Edmund left the room and brought back a short-crowned, short-brimmed “wideawake” hat. On it Mulvany discerned minute spots: three of them on the band and brim. At some point while running back and forth for the police, Edmund sarcastically asked them whether they wanted to see the waistcoat and tie he had worn that night. Surprisingly, they told him that they didn’t. Finally, Mulvany asked to see the shirt Pook had worn. Edmund left but returned without a shirt—it must have gone out with the wash, he said; his cousin Harriet would know for certain. He walked out and called her, and in a few moments returned and handed a shirt to Mulvany. Mulvany quickly spotted an obvious bloodstain on the right wristband—several spots in a pattern an inch long and three-quarters of an inch wide, clearly originating on the outside of the band, and copious enough to have soaked through two or even three folds. Mulvany handed the shirt to Griffin, who agreed it was blood. Mulvany asked Edmund how he had bloodied his shirt. Edmund looked at his hands and held up one to show a tiny scratch. That must have bled onto the cuff. But, Mulvany pointed out, the scratch is on your left hand. The bloodstain is on your right cuff.
Edmund for a moment was baffled and did not reply.
A moment later, he guessed that he must have stained the cuff while he was washing, or by crossing his hands and bleeding on his right wristband with his left hand. The police doubted that the little scratch on his wrist could have bled that much.
Mulvany looked, significantly, at Griffin. This was enough, he said, to take Edmund Pook into custody.
Griffin agreed: “Yes, there is blood on his things.”
Mulvany turned to Edmund. “I shall have to take you into custody on suspicion of murdering Jane Maria Clouson.”
“Very well,” said Edmund. “I shall go anywhere you like with you.” His calmness was uncanny, and, to the police, grounds in itself for suspicion.
They arrested him. But in doing so, the Pooks noticed, and the police later admitted, they did not give him the usual caution against self-incrimination.*5
Edmund asked the police whether he could bring a book with him, something to read in his cell. The police had no objection, and so he snatched up Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. Then the police and Edmund formed a procession, Mulvany by Edmund’s side, and Griffin behind, and marched downstairs, through the shop. There they paused to wrap hat and shirt into a paper parcel. (Edmund wore the coat.) The Pooks all protested the arrest. Edmund could only repeat that he knew nothing of the girl; she was nothing to him, and it was ridiculous to assert that she was. He never thought of her; he certainly never “sweet-hearted” with her. Mulvany and Griffin marched Edmund up Royal Hill to Blackheath Road Station.
At the station, Inspector Mulvany signed the sheet charging Edmund Walter Pook of London Street, Greenwich, with the willful murder of Jane Maria Clouson, at Eltham, and then they placed Edmund in a little room off of the central chamber. Five minutes later, they could hear him reading aloud his favorite passages from the Pickwick Papers.
Later, the metropolitan police would be attacked for their many blunders, from the beginning of their investigation of the death of Jane Clouson to the end. They would be pilloried for their ineptitude by press and public, by lawyers, magistrates, and judges, and even in Parliament. But of all the blunders committed by the police, Superintendent Griffin and Inspector Mulvany’s decision to arrest Edmund Pook and charge him with murder on this first day of May was by far their greatest.
*1 A copy of a photograph of Jane Maria Clouson—almost certainly the same image that the Trotts brought to the police—exists today in the archives at the Greenwich Heritage Centre, Woolwich. Newspaper advertisements of 1870 demonstrate that at the time, cabinet cards were generally sold in bulk and at relatively low cost: for example, six for 10 shillings, or 12 shillings a dozen. [LC 11 June 1870, 4; NE 4 June 1870, 1.]
*2 “Yesterday” only in terms of the time this statement was published, on May 2; the reports of Alice and Sarah actually first appeared on May 1, the same day William Trott spoke with the press.
*3 Prince Arthur’s House was known before and after the 1860s and 1870s as the Ranger’s House, because it generally served as the residence of the ranger of Greenwich Park. Between 1862 and 1873, however, Queen Victoria’s third son resided here: hence Prince Arthur’s House. Prince Arthur, incidentally, was not in residence at his house on May 1, the day Jane Clouson’s body was identified; he was, rather, at Windsor, celebrating his coming of age—his twenty-first birthday—with his family.
*4 Search warrants had been required in England for home searches without consent since the precedent-setting decision in the case of Entick v. Carrington, handed down in 1765. [Law Reform Commission, 10.]
*5 Although the police caution against self-incrimination upon the arrest of a suspect was not codified as a legal requirement in England until 1912, by 1871 such a caution was customary and expected police practice, and the existence or non-existence of a police caution, as well as the wording of that caution, could affect the admissibility of a suspect’s evidence at trial. [Hostettler 241; “Confessions”.]
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Tittle-Tattle
With every instinct, and with the benefit of forty-eight years of investigative experience between them, James Griffin and John Mulvany were convinced that the oddly calm and confident young man they had jailed was a killer. He had seduced and impregnated Jane Clouson. He had bought a plasterer’s hammer at Samuel Thomas’s shop. He had enticed her away from her lodgings and into the countryside with the promise of marriage. And at Kidbrooke Lane, he had smashed and battered her head beyond recognition, and had left her to die in her blood and in the mud.
But they knew as well they had next to no proof for any of this: nothing, certainly, that would ensure Edmund Pook’s conviction for murder at trial. The witnesses with whom they had spoken over the past night and day had certainly told them a great deal, enough to suggest that Edmund Pook had had a powerful motive for killing the girl. Aunt Elizabeth Trott, her daughter, Charlotte, and Fanny Hamilton all claimed that the two were lovers. Charlotte further claimed that Edmund had given Jane gifts and had proposed to her; she knew that the two were to meet around the time Jane disappeared to discuss their impending elopement. Fanny Hamilton claimed that on the night of April 25, Jane had left her in Deptford to meet Edmund Pook on Crooms Hill. All of these claims, compounded with evidence that Edmund was romantically involved with another woman—possibly two other women—strongly indicated that his deeply inconvenient attachment to Jane had, most likely with her announcement that she was pregnant, reached the point of crisis. He had a strong reason to want her out of the way, and he had formulated a plan to accomplish exactly that.
But all of this evidence had been heard, not seen. And each claim had originally been made by Jane Clouson herself. Jane was now dead; she could never verify, or correct, or explain any of the statements these witnesses attributed to her. All of this evidence, in other words, was hearsay, and would quite possibly not be admitted in court if the case came to trial. What these witnesses actually had seen amounted to very little. William Clark had seen Edmund Pook in a friendly conversation with Jane and another servant. Emily Wolledge had seen Jane open a letter, read and then burn it, and write and send an apparent reply—to whom, Wolledge could not say. And Fanny Hamilton had seen Jane walk away from her on the evening she was attacked in the general direction of Greenwich and Kidbrooke Lane—or in the general direction of a thousand other places.
Besides this, there was Edmund’s stained clothing. But that evidence, too, amounted to little at this point. It might be blood or it might not; answering that question would take expert analysis. But even if it was blood, it might well be Edmund’s and not Jane’s blood—from a scratch, as Edmund claimed, or from his tongue, bitten during an epileptic seizure.
Griffin and Mulvany had hoped, in surprising Edmund Pook at home that afternoon, to parlay all of the evidence they had into something much more substantial and much more likely to lead to a conviction: to an incriminating admission from Edmund, if not an outright confession. And in that, they had failed utterly. The young man from the start had declared his innocence. Worse, they had destroyed any chance of enlisting Ebenezer Pook’s cooperation in obtaining an admission from Edmund. Their descending upon his home and hauling away his protesting son had only convinced him of Edmund’s innocence, and of Griffin’s and Mulvany’s malevolence: they, and not his son, were the criminals, as far as Ebenezer Pook was concerned.
Superintendent Griffin and Detective Inspector Mulvany, in short, had rushed to judgment. They had placed themselves and all of R Division in a legally awkward position; they would have to assemble their entire case against Edmund Pook after they had arrested him. And as they assembled that case, they would at each step now be subject to the scrutiny of the press, the public, and to any lawyer Edmund Pook might engage, who, if he was worth his salt, would do his best to attack, discredit—to destroy—every aspect of their theory, and every untested witness they brought forward to support it.
And that lawyer would have an opportunity to challenge the police’s case against Edmund not in one but in two courts. The first was the tiny magistrate’s court within Greenwich police station. There, the next morning, magistrate Daniel Maude would commence his examination of Edmund Pook to determine whether the evidence warranted committal to Newgate for a trial at the Old Bailey. In the second court would be held the inquest upon Jane’s suspicious death. Inquests took place within the jurisdiction of a death and generally in proximity to it: Southwark and not Kidbrooke in Jane’s case. And so this court met in a room set aside for the purpose at Guy’s Hospital. Soon after Jane died, the deputy coroner for Southwark had begun to assemble a coroner’s jury; they would assemble in three days’ time.*1 The jury’s first responsibility would be to determine the cause of Jane’s death. If they determined she had been murdered, and further determined that Edmund Pook was her murderer, they could commit him for trial on that charge. Edmund, therefore, could be committed for trial twice for the one crime.
But since, as it stood, the evidence the police had very likely would not warrant Edmund’s indictment, the police needed time to find more. They could give themselves that time by obtaining remands in both courts, on the strength of promises to come up with further and stronger evidence. That would work for a while—but only for a while. Griffin and Mulvany had given the police over as hostages to the limited patience of the magistrate, and to the deputy-coroner and his jury.
For all the pressure they had brought upon themselves by arresting Edmund Pook prematurely, however, Griffin and Mulvany had helped their investigation in at least one way. They had given a name to both the victim and her likely murderer. As the news of their identities spread across town, anyone in southeast London who knew anything about Pook and Clouson was now much more likely to come forward. More than this, they now had a suspect in custody to be identified and two witnesses who might be able to identify him. They were sure that either Samuel or Jane Thomas had sold the plasterer’s hammer to Jane’s killer. And so James Griffin lost no time in dispatching officers to Deptford to retrieve the two, and in setting up a formal identification.
The procedure that Griffin followed had been established long before the Metropolitan Police existed and dated back to more than a century before, to the heyday of London’s early detectives, the Bow Street Runners. In a room in the station Griffin placed Edmund Pook among a couple dozen men, officers in plain clothes for the most part. (If he needed more men, he had many to choose from in the angry crowd that had been growing outside the station since Edmund’s arrest.) Their ages and their general appearance weren’t very important. When Jane and Samuel Thomas arrived, Mulvany and Griffin both watched while one and then the other walked among the men, instructed to scrutinize every face, and then, if they could, to touch the man who had been in their shop, to make their positive identification tangible. A terrified Jane Thomas walked into the room, stared into each face, touched no one, walked out, and immediately collapsed in a faint.
Her husband bore the ordeal more resolutely, but he, too, recognized no one.
*
As soon as the shock of seeing the police drag his son away had passed, Ebenezer Pook sought out a lawyer. He rushed from his home on London Street to adjoining Greenwich Road and knocked on the door of Tudor House, home and office of solicitor Henry Pook. Henry Pook, in spite of his name, was not related in any way to Ebenezer Pook and his family—although, as he declared emotionally in court the next day, he would be proud to be connected to such a respectable tradesman’s family. The son of an innkeeper, Henry Pook had come to practice law later in life, and had at first found little success in that profession, having suffered bankruptcy at least twice. When he had moved to Greenwich a few years before, however, his business and to some extent his reputation improved. He performed every duty a solicitor could. He handled bankruptcies—with, one assumes, a sensitivity born of experience. He argued the odd divorce case. He once pleaded for the life of a condemned man, and failed. Most of his time, h
owever, he spent in and about Greenwich police court, defending and, more rarely, prosecuting men and women charged with a variety of petty crimes. Henry Pook was a shaggy-haired, bulky bear of a man, and he was a bear in the practice of law: ferocious, reckless, predatory. He defended by offending, lashing out at anyone—witness, opposing counsel, magistrate—whom he saw as acting against his client’s interests, with a passionate bluster that made up for any ignorance of legal subtleties.
After Ebenezer Pook angrily related what the police had done that day—invading his home, bullying his son, accusing the son of a crime his father was certain he could not have committed, spiriting him off to jail—Henry Pook agreed to take on the case. He knew it was the legal opportunity of a lifetime. But more than this, Henry Pook took on this case as a sort of moral crusade. From the start, the two older Pooks united to save Edmund, forming a bond that could easily be mistaken for the familial one that their surnames suggested. For from that moment until the final verdict—and beyond—the elder Pooks appeared to the world as seemingly inseparable brothers in arms, united not only in their commitment to save Edmund Pook from the gallows but also in their opposition to the police malevolently set upon putting him there. The Pook party had come into being.
*
On May 2, the day after Edmund’s arrest, Greenwich police court was crowded beyond capacity; hundreds had come to catch a glimpse of the handsome young monster in their midst. The crowd spilled into the corridors of the police station, out into the yard and into the street. Henry Pook blamed the police for creating this “sensational drama,” which, he complained to the magistrate Daniel Maude, they could have avoided altogether by bringing Edmund Pook to Woolwich Police Court, where Maude also sat as magistrate, the day before. “The prisoner was now before him, and that was sufficient,” Maude replied. Edmund Pook was far less disturbed at this menacing assembly than his solicitor; he stood in the dock, according to one reporter, with “utmost composure,” and as the examination proceeded, listened calmly to each witness with genuine interest. This was, after all, his first opportunity to learn what evidence the police had gathered against him. And what he heard must surely have perplexed and then relieved him: the police had, it seemed, next to nothing.
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrooke Lane Page 6