by Bob Biderman
But what would they lose? Somewhere in the ghetto resided the heart and soul of his people. What it was – what one would call it –was still a mystery to him. Yet it was a mystery he needed to explore. And somehow, in a strange way, this trial of Israel Lipski, with all its horror and grotesqueness, seemed to be related to this quest.
CHAPTER 18
MAGGIE ARRIVED AT the courthouse early but still not early enough to avoid the crowds of mainly Jews who had taken advantage of their single day of rest coming in their hundreds to witness this extraordinary event which was evolving in theatrical form as an East End saga played out by characters they had seen in their everyday lives; neighbourhood people like themselves, who had been given a part in this highest of dramas which would climax with a final and sublime moment of decision whereby a single word spoken by one of twelve anonymous men meant an ending of either life or death.
The previous day she had been crushed near the back of the courtroom lost in the swell of the crowd but today she was noticed by one of the guards who immediately saw by her appearance, her costume and, most of all, her demeanour, that she was not like the rest of what he thought of as ‘the smelly mob’, but a fragrant English lady; therefore he pushed his way through the rabble so as to escort her to a seat reserved for special guests of the court – that is to say, those ladies and gentlemen who, for some strange reason, wanted to observe this bizarre ritual of the uncultured versus the unwashed.
Maggie knew she was receiving special treatment by being given a preferential seat in the crowded courtroom while others who had arrived there before her were forced to wait in the disordered queue. But she didn’t object. Why would she? Although she had democratic instincts and wrote powerfully about women’s rights, she accepted the meagre privileges her class and sex would allow, not so much because she thought it her due but rather as a way of gaining whatever tiny advantage she might accrue to help overcome the massive deficit of being a very clever woman alone in a world dominated by thick-headed men.
The first day of the trial had left her somewhat bewildered. Though she was familiar with the types who had paraded before the witness box, she still had a clichéd notion of them. Many of the men looked the same to her – their clothing, their build, their unshaven and shabby appearance. But mostly it was the way they talked in a language she barely understood even though she had a smattering of words and terms picked up from her time in the East End; there was an intonation and rhythm of speech that made them all sound, to her, like one another.
Still, she was able to tell the protagonists well enough apart – Lipski, Rosenbloom and Schmuss. She was impressed with Lipski’s calm demeanour (though she detected a sign of nervousness by the twitching of his hands) and his boyish look of bewilderment. Rosenbloom appeared to her as a scoundrel but not a murderer (though she had no idea what a murderer might look like). But if, on the basis of appearance, she was forced to choose the one who could have possibly done that unspeakable act of pure barbarity she would have selected Schmuss because of his great hulking presence. Yet that look was not unfamiliar to her in her work with the unemployed labourers of the East End. And she had found more than once that outward appearance often belied the workings within. The lowest of labourers might look fearsome but they were not necessarily base of heart – even though they were assumed to be so by many of their ‘betters.’
The first witness called that morning was Inspector David Final of the Metropolitan Police who was at the Leman Street police station when Lipski was brought in. Maggie’s feeling about the police had always been similar to most of the British middle class who saw them as fine and worthy upholders of law and virtue – occasionally a bit dim though generally incorruptible. But over the last few years her opinion about the police had begun to shift. Initially as a reporter witnessing the sheer brutality that occurred during protests organised by the Social Democrats where several demonstrators were nearly clubbed to death. Then, of late, having followed the case of a woman who had been hounded and harassed by several constables who had arrested her on a charge of soliciting simply because she had been walking alone on Regent Street. This particular case – of a certain Miss Cass who was employed as a shop assistant in the area – had been taken up by the Pall Mall Gazette claiming a blatant disregard for natural justice as the police seemed to have gone after that poor woman with a vengeance, becoming a law unto themselves. So even though Inspector David Final’s evidence was generally straightforward, Maggie felt a lingering sense of doubt.
Inspector Final confirmed that when Lipski was brought to the Leman Street Police Station he was still partially insensible and was seen by the divisional surgeon who gave him some mustard and warm water as an emetic for the acid Lipski had ingested, though it failed in its intended effect of making him sick. His clothing was then searched and some coins – three silver shillings and some coppers – were found along with a pawn ticket which, according to Final, were all replaced in his pocket before Lipski was then transported to London Hospital.
After disposing of Lipski, Final then went to Batty Street where he entered the room and examined the lock, stating that the appearance of the screws jutting out from the wood indicated that the door had been forced open, though the lock itself seemed to be in perfect order except that the bolt was shot.
He also confirmed that one of the constables who had been at the scene had brought him the coat and hat which had belonged to the prisoner. Final had searched the pockets and had found a card from the United Stick and Cane Dressers Protection Society in the name of J. Lipski along with a pawn ticket for a silver Geneva watch made out to John Lipski for the amount of six shillings from a broker on Merdle Street.
So, thought Maggie, the name he used to conduct his business wasn’t Israel at all, but John. How very strange she thought. For that was the name she had selected for her own male self. Was that to be his English persona, she wondered?
McIntyre’s cross examination had been rather pathetic, she had felt. He had simply focused on having the Inspector review Lipski’s condition when he had arrived at the Leman Street police station and tried to get Final to clarify his assertion that Lipski was only partially insensible whereas on his oath before the magistrate he swore that Lipski had appeared insensible without any such qualification. It was, she thought, a minor point of semantics and only served to get the judge into a tizzy, causing him more than once to admonish the hapless attorney for the defence.
What interested her more, however, was how it seemed clear that the police had assumed from the beginning Lipski had been the murderer and treated him as such from the moment he was discovered underneath that poor woman’s bed. Their job, as she suspected they saw it, was to build a case for conviction rather than investigate if there wasn’t a possible alternative. So when the interpreter – a man with the unlikely name of Smedge – accompanied Inspector Final to the hospital that evening after Lipski’s fiancé had come to say that her man had wished to give a statement, he was obliged to issue Lipski with a translation of the official caution, ‘You are not bound to say anything, but what you do say may be used as evidence against you…’, before accepting to take down his version of the tragic event. (Though McIntyre made it seem that this mandatory caution may have been stated incorrectly – opening up the possibility of some technical defect.)
In court the transcript of this statement was read out sentence by sentence, by Inspector Final stopping after each line so that the words could be translated by Karameli into Yiddish for the benefit of the prisoner. It was strange and arduous, Maggie thought. But then she realised how curious it was that prior to this, Karameli had translated nothing into Lipski’s tongue – only the reverse – Yiddish into English, for the purposes of the judge and jurors. Lipski, she suspected, hadn’t understood most of the testimony that was issued against him, the questioning of the attorneys nor the judge’s intrusions, because of his poor knowledge of the English la
nguage.
But, in the end, Lipski had been firm. When the charge was later read to him at the Lehman Street Police Station, translated by Smedge, he had looked the interpreter in the eye and said, ‘Ich habe nicht gehalhret, ich habe nicht getahren’ – ‘I have not murdered her, I have not done it.’
Maggie stared up at the figure standing at the dock. The boyish face had been transformed over those two days of trial, she thought, and had aged as if two days were two years or even two decades. She tried to imagine his look when he was being questioned that day at the Lehman Street police station, when he was being formally charged and had spoken those words – ‘Ich habe nicht getahern.’ Who believed him then? The police? Inspector Final? And who believed him now? She glanced over at the jury – those twelve men good and true. Dressed in dark and sombre clothes, they looked the very model of the straight and proper burgher celebrating the Queen this year in Jubilee England. But who were they? Who were they really? Each of those men had a life, a job or a profession, and, perhaps, a wife and children waiting for them at home. Each one, alone, was an individual with his own trials and tribulations. Yet together, in court, they looked so much the same. They looked so … what was the word she was searching for? Respectable! Yes, that was it – respectable! And that was the problem, wasn’t it? They were blinkered with respectability! What did they see when they looked up at the dock? Did they see a frightened young man (for Lipski must certainly be frightened, she thought) on trial for his very existence? Or did they simply see a murderer who the police, in their efficiency, had quickly identified and charged, thereby launching the mechanism of which they were now a part – like the chorus in a drama by some ancient Greek tragedian.
After Inspector Final came Dr. Kay whose surgery was on Batty Street at the corner of Commercial Road, just a stone’s throw from number 16. Maggie had seen him before at the inquest and had taken an immediate dislike to the man as he reminded her so much of those stiff and starched, impossibly pompous men of the medical profession she had the misfortune to have known during her years of training as a nurse. Most of the hospital doctors she had become acquainted with were little more than butchers, she thought, unconcerned with the feelings of their patients and prescribing cures that were often more terrible than the disease. Neighbourhood surgeries were little better, separated from the community by deep chasms of class with swaggering doctors looking down on their filthy flock like feudal lords. There were exceptions, of course, but Maggie’s intuition told her that Dr Kay wasn’t one of those saintly figures she had come across occasionally – those selfless ones whose mission brought them to the depths of human suffering and who ministered to the body as an enlightened priest might tend the soul. Kay was more a pay-as-you-go man; pay a shilling, pop a pill and out you go. His function was more bureaucratic than medicinal – a private adjunct of the State making sure his little patch was free of weeds. He was, in that way, part of the magnificently intricate apparatus of control that allowed the Queen to look upon her England with the benign tenderness of one who is secure in the knowledge that hereditary privilege and power would always be hers.
Kay was led by the prosecuting attorney, step by step, to describe his observations when he first had been called to the Batty Street room by his assistant: how he saw the woman lying on her back, dead, with her hair dishevelled. Her mouth had a stream of yellow coming from the corner on the left-hand side. Her neck had two or three splashes of nitric acid as did her breast. And her hands were covered with stains of that dreadful substance called, in deference to its terrible corrosiveness, ‘aqua fortis.’
The dead woman was under a duvet which covered her up to her breasts. Kay had turned it down to see if ‘any violence had been offered to her’ (a phrase Maggie copied verbatim onto her notepad because of its extraordinary euphemism. What did it mean to ‘offer’ violence to a woman? Why couldn’t they just say what they meant?). The dead woman’s chemise was pulled up to the breast and the body was exposed. He noticed blood on the duvet – splashes of blood mixed with acid, suggesting that the effect of its administration would have been to make the woman cough quite violently. However, there were no marks of violence on the lower part of the body, he confirmed.
From the temperature of the corpse, which was growing cold though rigor mortis hadn’t yet set in, he estimated that the woman had been dead for about three hours more or less, taking into account the size of the woman – for she was quite stout – and the warm weather.
After inspecting the body a search was begun for the bottle from which the acid had come. It was during this search that the prisoner had been discovered lying on his back underneath the bed. He was in his shirt sleeves, Kay said. He looked pale and his eyes were partially open so Kay could observe the whites and part of the pupil. Kay then felt his pulse and, confirming that the man was alive, put his finger on his cornea to see if he was unconscious. Deciding that he was insensible, Kay slapped him on the face, whereupon the prisoner opened his eyes wider.
Kay now instructed the police to help him get the man to his feet and accordingly Lipski was pulled across the floor toward the window and then lifted and propped up against the corner where the two walls met. As the police held him aloft, Kay tried questioning the man and gaining no response, shook him and tried questioning him again – in English – to which he received no response and then in German, again receiving no reply. The police then took charge of him and carried him away.
The next day, on the 29th, Kay carried out a post mortem on the corpse, finding it to be a body of a well-developed young woman about six months pregnant showing no sign of having had recent intercourse. He noted several violent blows to the head, with the right eye discoloured and swollen. The right temple was also injured with the muscle underneath pulped and bloody from what he could only conclude were very violent blows, though the brain, itself, was not congested. However, in his opinion, the force of these blows would have been sufficient to render her unconscious.
It was also Kay’s opinion that the acid was administered after the woman was beaten unconscious; the greater portion appeared to have gone down the windpipe so that the actual cause of death would have been suffocation. He estimated the amount of acid ingested would have been about half an ounce.
Cross examined by McIntyre, Kay confirmed that there had been no evidence of recent intercourse. McIntyre also questioned him about Lipski’s state when discovered. Could that have been from the effect of the poison? Not simply from the poison, Kay agreed, Lipski hadn’t ingested enough of it. Kay thought it was due to the prisoner’s mental perturbation. Wouldn’t that have been rare, for a man to have gone unconscious from mental causes? But suppose Lipski had been seized by two men who had knelt on his chest and forced poison down his throat by prying open his mouth – could that have not more easily caused his state of insensibility?
These were good and proper questions, Maggie thought. But they seemed to be lost, evaporating into the air with all the other good and proper questions the defence had so hesitantly brought out.
William Calvert, the house surgeon at London Hospital who had examined Lipski shortly after he had arrived found that the fingers of his left hand had been stained with nitric acid. Also he noticed scratches on the backs of both hands and on the right wrist as well as the forearms. The skin, he noted, had been rubbed off both elbows.
Was Lipski left or right handed? Maggie wondered. Did the stains on his finger-tips come from pouring acid down the woman’s throat or from fighting off the attackers who had tried to force the substance down his own? And the skin abrasions on the elbows – did they come from dragging Lipski out from underneath the bed or were they the consequence of two strong men throwing him onto the ground and roughing him up whilst he lay on his back?
Calvert indicated there were no significant marks of violence on Lipski’s person other than the scratches and abrasions. But what about his throat? McIntyre had asked. Wasn’t ther
e evidence of injury inside the mouth such as might have been caused by a piece of wood used to pry it open as Lipski had stated? Yes, Calvert admitted, there was certainly evidence that a foreign substance had been thrust inside his mouth.
Then Thomas Redmayne, another of the house physicians, was called to testify that he had used a stomach pump on Lipski and that the injuries noted in his throat could well have come from this procedure – especially as a tube needed to be forcibly inserted down through his oesophagus.
But could the injuries in Lipski’s mouth and throat have been caused by violence of another sort? McIntyre didn’t pursue this question and Maggie was left to write a simple note to herself regarding the nature of fact and circumstance. Authorities always presented fact as if they alone had a God-given right to determine the nature of occurrences. For these fine and upright gentlemen, everything eventually fit together neat and tidy and it was their job to make sure it remained like that.
But it was the vial of nitric acid, aqua fortis, the contents of which had been forced down the throat of two victims (for, in Maggie’s eyes, Lipski was a victim even if he was a casualty of himself), splattered on clothing, hands, bed and floor in a never-ending stream, that the prosecution focused on. All that corrosive acid, what seemed like oceans of the stuff when the resulting damage was surveyed, had come from one tiny vial containing a single ounce. And where did that vial come from?