by Andrew Rose
Marshall Hall, the great opportunist, took his cue. ‘Come, Madame Fahmy,’ he said softly, ‘take hold of the pistol. It is harmless now.’ Marguerite ‘attempted to pull open the [sliding cover of the] magazine, but without success and, rising to her feet, said she was unable to open it’. This was a delicate moment for Marguerite. She had admittedly been in possession of a lethal firearm, apparently for some time (though Marshall Hall was keeping this aspect deliberately vague). Did she know how to use it? There had to be an explanation of why, in the early hours of 10 July 1923, Marguerite’s pistol was loaded and capable of being fired. Marguerite’s story was that Ali had himself cleaned and loaded his wife’s gun in Paris, saying that she ought to have something with which to protect her jewellery. ‘It’s all ready to fire,’ he had told her, before leaving for his short visit to Stuttgart in mid-June. Marguerite maintained that she had never known how the pistol worked: ‘I know nothing of the mechanism.’
MARSHALL HALL: Had you ever fired a pistol in your life before 9 July?
MARGUERITE: No.
Probably mindful of the inherent improbability of this evidence (bearing in mind that Marguerite had owned a pistol for years and that two rounds were unaccounted for), Marshall Hall quickly changed tack to resume allegations about Ali’s sexual habits: ‘Several times … she put her hand to her forehead and once she almost broke down and applied her handkerchief to her eyes…’ She could not escape Fahmy, she said, even in Paris. Marguerite spoke emotionally of the man ‘Costa’, otherwise ‘Le Costaud’ or ‘Hercules’, who ‘owed his life and his liberty’ to Ali and ‘would carry out any orders given him’, including, it was said, Fahmy’s threat to disfigure Marguerite with ‘sand in a bottle and acid from accumulators’. ‘Costa’ was an Algerian who had been expelled from Egypt and a ‘horrible man’. At this point, ‘Madame Fahmy rested her head on the front of the witness-box and sobbed loudly. Counsel paused for some moments until she had composed herself…’456
Yet another strange document was read out to the court by Marshall Hall. Written in Marguerite’s hand, over Ali’s signature, this was a product of bitter marital feuding and purported to be an agreement between the couple providing that Marguerite could live as she pleased, even commit adultery, without fear of divorce, but that, if she did so, Ali would feel himself free to call her a ‘filthy name’, which the newspaper reports did not reveal. When Marshall Hall read certain ‘improper phrases … Madame Fahmy covered her face with her black gloved hands’ in a show of modesty, presumably the object of this forensic exercise.457
Marguerite had consulted the private detective in Paris because of Ali’s behaviour, though not, it seems, the police, even though one day, as she was being driven with Said Enani and ‘Hercules’ to Neuilly, a western suburb of Paris, Fahmy had said that he was looking for a house in which to imprison her. She had agreed to come to London only because her daughter, Raymonde, was at school there. Marguerite had not seen her for nine months. Tears welled up.
MARSHALL HALL: Did you think you would be safe in London?
MARGUERITE: I passed from despair to hope and from hope to despair.
Rigby Swift asked if she would like to pause, but Marguerite dried her eyes and went on to describe the incidents at the Riviera Club and the Molesey Casino. Appearing to speak of the Sunday night before the shooting, she told how ‘Fahmy came to her room…’ (the Daily Telegraph’s cryptic report breaks off here), where, it seems, he sodomised her yet again. ‘I told him that I preferred to die rather than go on living in the way I was doing. He said, “You have a revolver”, and pointed to the open window [of the suite], saying, “It’s quite easy. There are four floors.”’ Marguerite could either take her own life or jump to her death.
It was now one o’clock and, as Marguerite left the witness-box at the start of the lunchtime adjournment, reported the Daily Telegraph, ‘she almost swooned and a second wardress ran to her assistance and, with the marks of tears on her face, the prisoner was half carried into the dock’. There would be a good deal more swooning before Marguerite had finished her lengthy testimony.
22
A Frail Hand
A glance at the public gallery, where all the seats were filled, would have revealed a substantial majority of women, among whom were ‘girls who did not appear to have been more than 18 … Some seemed to have come with their mothers…’,458 each eager to hear these unsavoury tales of Franco-Egyptian married life. After lunch, the first three rows, it seems, were filled with ‘shop assistants released from their counters for the weekly half-holiday…’
Arthur Wiggin, 2nd Secretary at the British High Commission in Cairo and now on leave from Egypt, somehow managed to secure a seat in the crowded court. Part of a small coterie at the Commission with knowledge of the Prince’s wartime affair, Wiggin wrote to Archie Clark Kerr, secure in his Scottish fastness, giving his impressions of the trial:
My Dear Archie …
I spent three hours at the Old Bailey during Marshall Hall’s defence of Madame Fahmy. It was the most hair- and gorge-raising experience of my life. Nothing of what really took place has appeared in the press. It simply couldn’t! Rows of fashionably-dressed young women sat with flushed cheeks and glittering eyes as Hall detailed monstrosity after monstrosity. Her acquittal was certain after the first speech.
… Yours ever, Arthur459
The delicate problem of Marguerite’s haemorrhoids began the afternoon’s evidence. Ali had told her to ‘go to the devil’ and ‘take a lover’ when she had asked him for money to pay for the operation in London. That was why, she said, she had decided to return to Paris, but Ali had furiously told her, ‘You will not escape me. I swear to you that in twenty-four hours you will be dead.’
These uncorroborated assertions paved the way for the pivotal evidence – the shooting itself. ‘I took the pistol from the drawer,’ Marguerite told a hushed, expectant court. ‘I knew that it was loaded. He had told me so and I had not touched it since the day he went away [to Stuttgart]. I tried to look into it to see if there was a bullet … I tried to do as I had seen him do to get the cartridge out of it … I had not the strength to pull sufficiently to make the cartridge fall out.’
MARSHALL HALL: Why did you want to get the cartridge out of the barrel?
MARGUERITE: Because he said he was going to kill me and I thought I would frighten him with it … I was shaking it in front of the window when the shot went off.
MARSHALL HALL: What did you think was the condition of the pistol after it had been fired?
MARGUERITE: The cartridge having been fired, I thought the pistol was not dangerous.
Marguerite was now claiming that the pistol had been fired out of the window, not during the thunderstorm, immediately before killing her husband (as she had told Dr Gordon at Bow Street police station), but earlier the previous evening, before the party had left to see The Merry Widow at Daly’s Theatre.
She had been alarmed by Fahmy’s threats, made at about 7.30 p.m., after he had seen her luggage packed up and ready for her return to Paris. He had taken his photograph from her dressing-table, torn it up and flung the pieces at her. ‘Pale and aggressive’, he handed back a tie-pin she had given him before their marriage. ‘As you are going away,’ he had said, contemptuously, ‘do not forget your presents to me,’ adding, ‘You will see; you will see.’
At the theatre, Ali had said, ‘Even if you manage to escape from London and get to Paris, Costa will be waiting for you,’ and at supper had again threatened to disfigure her. In a disturbed state of mind, and frightened of the storm, Marguerite had not gone to bed, but had just written ‘a letter or two’ (including the one discharging Dr Gordon) when there was a loud knock at her bedroom door. ‘Sobbing and occasionally throwing back her head and shutting her eyes, [Madame Fahmy] described the tragedy.’460
Fahmy had banged on the door, shouting, ‘You are not alone, then. Open. Open.’ She let him in and saw that he was wearing a djellaba and dressing-go
wn, his night clothes. Ali asked her what she was doing. ‘I said I had sent a cheque to the doctor and asked him, “Are you going to give me any money to leave tomorrow?” He said, “Come into my room and see if I have any money there for you.”’461
In terms that resembled the more purple moments of Robert Hichens and E. M. Hull, Marguerite described the drama that took place in her Egyptian husband’s bedroom. He had produced some pound notes and about 2,000 francs, which he held sneeringly before her. The Times reported that when Marguerite asked him for the French money to cover her travelling expenses, Fahmy said, ‘I will give it to you if you earn it’, and started to tear off her dress. The unreported suggestion was that, unless Marguerite submitted yet again to his unorthodox sexual demands, despite her painfully inflamed condition, she had no hope of escaping to Paris.
‘He struggled with me. I ran to the telephone, but he tore it out of my hand and twisted my arm. I hit him and ran towards the door. He struck me and spat in my face. I rushed to the corridor, where there were several people…’
It had, of course, been Ali who had first emerged from the suite, closely followed by his wife, and both had accosted the long-suffering night porter, showering him with mutual recriminations. Beattie’s evidence suggested that it had been Ali who was more frightened of Marguerite’s temper, rather than the other way round, but that was not what Marguerite was saying from the witness-box.
She had been ordered back to her room. There she saw the pistol on top of a suitcase, where she had left it some hours before. Ali banged on the door again: ‘I was very frightened and felt weak,’ she recalled. She was now sobbing convulsively, tears running down her cheeks, as she told how Ali had come towards her, saying, ‘I will revenge myself.’ Marguerite picked up the pistol. Ali shouted, ‘I’ll say that you threatened me,’ and by some unexplained means Marguerite managed to slip out from her room, through the lobby of the suite, and into the hotel corridor.
‘He seized me suddenly and brutally by my throat. His thumb was on my windpipe and his fingers were pressing in my neck. I pushed him away and he crouched to spring at me, saying “I will kill you.”’
At this point, ‘her voice broke into a moan, and between her sobs she lifted her left hand and tapped excitedly on her black hat, as if this movement helped her to get through this ordeal. She stretched a frail hand across the witness-box and, closing her eyes, sobbed out, “I now lifted my arm in front of me and without looking, pulled the trigger. The next moment, I saw him on the ground before me … I do not know how many times the pistol went off.”’462
Marguerite’s examination-in-chief ended on an impressive note:
MARSHALL HALL: When you threw your arm out when the pistol was fired, what were you afraid of?
MARGUERITE: That he was going to jump on me. It was terrible. I had escaped once. He said, ‘I will kill you. I will kill you.’ It was so terrible.
Marguerite had already spent some four hours in the witness-box before Percival Clarke rose to cross-examine. Experienced counsel can often sense the unspoken mood of a court and it is likely that Clarke was aware of a distinct change in the atmosphere since his opening speech on Monday morning. The case was beginning to develop a momentum of its own; a mist of unreality was gradually befogging the courtroom.
There were a number of improbabilities and inconsistencies in Marguerite’s story. She had, for example, just given a very wobbly account of escaping into the hotel corridor from a murder-bent Ali. Could he really have been about to jump on her in so public a place? Clarke had the material for some very awkward questions, but this was to be a lacklustre cross-examination. Indeed his first question could only have served to strengthen the defence case:
CLARKE: Were you afraid he was going to kill you on that night?
MARGUERITE: Yes, I was very afraid.
Yet a little later it seemed that Clarke was beginning to make progress:
CLARKE: How long have you possessed a pistol?
MARGUERITE: I had a pistol during the War in 1914. A second one was given me two years ago …
CLARKE: What did you have a pistol for if you did not know how it worked?
MARGUERITE: It is the usual thing in France to have a pistol.
Clarke then made a major tactical blunder and, seeming to go behind the judge’s firm ruling about Marguerite’s character, clumsily started to ask personal questions about her family background. Marguerite proudly told the court that Raymonde, her only and much loved daughter, had been legitimised by her marriage to Charles Laurent. Her defiant answers to this insensitive probing probably enlisted the jury’s sympathy, as did this foolish, unanswered question:
CLARKE: Was your father a cab driver in Paris?
Rigby Swift was very angry. ‘Does it matter whether he was a cab driver or a millionaire? I do not want a long inquiry into the lady’s ancestry…’ but Clarke, treading a delicate path, seemed not to take the hint. After Marguerite had told him, a little riskily, that she had a number of friends in Paris of ‘wealth and position’, he asked:
CLARKE: Can I correctly describe you as a woman of the world?
INTERPRETER: The meaning is not the same in French.
CLARKE: A woman with experience of the world?
MARGUERITE: I have had experience of life.
This world-weary answer did much for Marguerite and probably impressed the jury, who might have been surprised to know just how extensive Marguerite’s experience of life had been. Clarke’s cross-examination was foundering, but before the court rose for the day, he managed to score a rare success:
CLARKE: Would it be right to say that this black valet my friend has spoken of is a boy of eighteen?
MARGUERITE: Yes, he was fairly young.
CLARKE: Is he only five feet high?
MARGUERITE: Yes, he is very small.
And she agreed that it was customary for wives of Egyptians to be attended by servants. The long day was near its end. Clarke tried a last attempt to impress the jury, asking sternly:
CLARKE: Madame, were you not very ambitious to become his wife?
MARGUERITE: Ambitious, no. [Here she wiped her cheek] I loved him so very much and wished to be with him.
CLARKE:… What did you do while he was being so cruel? Sit down quietly?
MARGUERITE: Only once I boxed his ears when he had beaten me very much … He beat me so much when I did so that I never dared do it again. I never boxed his ears in public.
Clarke’s last question of the day seemed callously worded and Marguerite’s answer, in contrast, was consistent with the poignant response of an abused widow. In keeping with her role, she again appeared to faint before leaving the witness-box and had to be almost carried down the stairs to the cells by a wardress and a male prison officer.
Barely three hours after Court Number One had adjourned for the day at 4.30 p.m. on Wednesday 12 September, people again began to congregate around the public entrance to the Old Bailey. By 11 p.m. there were about fifty, and an hour later that number had doubled. By 2 a.m. several hundred people had gathered in Newgate Street, defying the persistent attempts of police to move them on. In one of the side streets, pretty girls, smartly dressed, were seen sitting on rubber cushions, ‘bivouacking’ on sandwiches and oranges. One man, asked by the Pall Mall Gazette why he had come, responded, ‘Well mister, it’s life, ain’t it?’463 The trial of Madame Fahmy was now the acknowledged sensation of the year.
When the case resumed on Thursday morning, Marshall Hall used another diversionary tactic, aiming a blow at Clarke’s faltering cross-examination. Madame Fahmy, he told the judge, found it very difficult to understand Ashton-Wolfe’s French, as he spoke in a low voice. Counsel asked if Maître Odette Simon, a 24-year-old French barrister, might be allowed to sit near the witness-box and ‘hear if the questions were translated properly’.
The judge agreed, but before Percival Clarke had posed more than a question or two to Marguerite, Marshall Hall was again on his feet, this time
objecting to Ashton-Wolfe’s translation. ‘I very much deprecate these difficulties about the interpreter,’ said Rigby Swift testily. ‘He seems to me to have been performing his difficult duties very well…’
Ashton-Wolfe was discharged with thanks and Mlle Simon took the interpreter’s oath. She was staying with relatives in England after the French courts had adjourned for their vacation at the end of July and had been eager to see an English trial. Odette, one of 80 women barristers in France, had practised law for some four years. Wearing, ‘a navy blue costume with a white collar and a large-brimmed dark hat, trimmed with bluish-green brocade’,464 she gave her translation from the well of the court, standing between the judge and the witness-box.
There had been a strategic dimension to Marshall Hall’s request. The previous day, Helena Normanton, Mlle Simon’s English barrister colleague, had sent counsel a note in which she wrote that Mlle Simon was anxious to ‘offer you her aid as witness or otherwise, if you care to avail yourself of it…’ After the court rose, Marshall Hall invited Mlle Simon to tea in the Bar Mess, soon realising the advantage that would accrue to the defence by presenting ‘the romantic situation … of one gifted young Frenchwoman helping another in her hour of extreme peril in a foreign country…’465 Helena Normanton, the first woman to practise at the English Bar, had been a suffragette, a pacifist during the Great War, and was active in feminist causes. Normanton was not easily ignored (‘she was enormous’, recalled one contemporary466) and, despite obvious differences in their political standpoints, Marshall Hall was only too glad to have had her help in setting up this clever tactical exercise.
Marguerite was reported to be ‘more composed than she had been the previous day’467 and was able to step into the witness-box unaided. At first, during Clarke’s resumed cross-examination, she sat very still in her black marocain dress and hat, which, the Evening Standard reported, accentuated ‘the olive tints of throat and face’,468 delivering answers almost too calmly, as Clarke investigated how far her complaints about Ali derived from the divorce dossier. Rightly, prosecuting counsel was concerned to know why Marguerite had stayed with so brutal a husband, regularly appearing with him in public places.