A Question of Guilt

13

'Well, Belle dear, I forgive you, though I daresay hundreds wouldn't,' said Clara Martinetti amiably.

'Oh, gee, don't go on about it,' Belle told her curtly.

'I shan't dear, I promise I'll not utter another word, now I've had my say. But you are Honorary Treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies' Guild, aren't you, dear? And to go strike-breaking-'

'Wasn't Belle punished enough on the night?' Paul Martinetti asked charitably.

'Getting the bird is the worst punishment in the whole world,' Clara agreed. 'I'm sure Peter could see that.'

'Oh, yes, I'd much rather be hanged,' Crippen assented mildly.

'But Clara sweetie, don't you see? I only got hissed because I was a blackleg. There were folk planted in the house for no other purpose than to wreck my act. I'm not downhearted, no sir!' Belle's voice rose. 'I've had offers last week from the Euston, from Collins's across in Islington, even from the Hippodrome. And I could take my pick of the provincial touring companies tomorrow. Couldn't I, Peter?'

Clara's expression indicated sour disbelief sugared with politeness.

It was a week later, just before ten on the evening of Monday, January 31, 1910. The four sat in the downstairs breakfast room at Hilldrop Crescent. They had just finished dinner-loin of pork with jacket potatoes, followed by blancmange with strawberry jam. Eliot and Nancy had been asked, too.

Crippen had called at the surgery with the invitation the morning after the fiasco. Eliot had politely declined it-he had stomached enough of the grotesque Crippens-but asked sympathetically after Belle.

'Not in bad shape. Mr Atherstone was wonderful last night, you know, comforting her. She bounced back, she's like a rubber ball.' He paused. 'Sometimes she's like a tiger.' He looked round the bleak consulting room, sitting in the spoke-backed chair. 'Do you use henbane in your practice, Dr Beckett?'

'Luckily, I have no maniacal patients.'

'I first learned of it at the Royal Bethlem Hospital for the Insane,' Crippen continued quietly. 'It's given a good deal in America, you know, in asylums. I've prescribed it as a nerve remedy, in a homoeopathic preparation. Very diluted, in sugared discs. Naturally, in its pure form, which the chemists call 'hyoscine'. The dose would equal l/3600ths of a grain.'

'Extremely minute.'

'As demanded by the laws of homoeopathy,' he asserted. 'I bought five, grains from Lewis and Burrows' chemist shop in Oxford Street last Friday.'

'Five grains!' Eliot exclaimed. 'That's enough to kill a platoon of guardsmen.'

'I also find it useful for spasmodic coughs and asthma,' he explained. 'And I am persuading Belle to take it.' He hesitated again. 'I can satisfy her demands in the way of clothes and jewellery. Others I cannot. You understand, Dr Beckett? I'm not a young man like you. And it is Ethel and I who are proper hub and wife.' He continued solemnly, 'Our wedding day was December 6, 1906. Seven years had passed since Ethel and I first met. It's a date I can never forget. It was a Thursday. It was the time Belle finally got rid of the Germans. It was rainy, but it was all sunshine in our hearts.'

His colleague's double life seemed to Eliot more sickly than exciting, and he had a roomful of waiting patients.

'Since then, we have had one long, lovely honeymoon. We have an absolute communion of spirit. It is not a love of a debased or degraded character, it is a wonderful good, pure love,' Crippen continued with muted passion. 'Her mind is so beautiful to me. Ethel will always be my wifie, not even death can come between us. We meet in the afternoon, once or twice a week, at King's Cross station, and go to one of the little hotels for railway travellers.'

Crippen fell silent. Eliot began to look upon him more kindly, as a patient. To share a man's secrets was to fractionize his mental tension.

'We were to have had a little one, you know, Ethel and I,' Crippen divulged in his flat voice, 'in the early part of last year. But poor Ethel suffered a miscarriage. No one knew at the office. Ethel was so often away from work because of her health. Her parents did not know. Only Mrs Jackson, her landlady. Ethel went to her aunt in Hove for recuperation. We so wanted the child to live. It would have been part of us both. That was something Belle could never give me, not after her operation. Belle has a gentleman, you know.'

Eliot was not surprised. 'An American, in the real estate business at Chicago.' Crippen's bulgy eyes fixed Eliot's. 'He was an actor, on the music-hall, called Bruce Miller. He met her when I was visiting America, I'd left Belle in rooms at Guildford Street, over the river in Lambeth. He was across the herring pond for some business with the Paris Exhibition, so it must be ten years ago. He's often here, he writes almost every month. "Love and kisses to Brown Eyes," I've seen some of the letters. I've never met him. He calls when I'm out, I stay away from his path. I'm easygoing. I don't care for fuss. I'm sure that one fine morning I'll find Belle has disappeared, gone to join him in America.'

'Which would be a solution to your difficulties?'

'I cannot give Belle what he does,' Crippen said simply. 'Do you know why I was attracted to her? I expected Belle to be a great favourite on the stage, thunderous applause, flowers across the footlights, delightful suppers…That's a vanished dream. Mind, I enjoy the company of stage people, like the Martinettis. But they're so excitable, so emotional. They're not cultivated like Miss Grange and yourself.'

The dinner which Eliot declined ended with the two men going upstairs to prepare for whist, and Clara following Belle with the dishes into the kitchen.

'Put the bones in the sack under the sink,' Belle directed. 'Peter takes them to Poupart's in the Cattle Market. What's the point, missing a few pennies which are there for the taking?'

'How Peter does look after you,' Clara said admiringly. She touched Belle's rising sun brooch, adding playfully, 'If you're ever tired of that lovely thing he bought you, you can just pass it on to me.'

'Ain't there more to a husband's job than keeping his wife dressed?'

'A whole world more, dear.'

'Peter and me have had our own bedrooms since we moved in here.'

'Oh, I know that.'

Belle carefully gathered the four bottles of stout, with a farthing returnable on each. 'Peter ain't no good to any woman. You can't blame me, can you, for looking around?'

Clara said sharply, 'I don't think that relieves a woman of her duty to her husband.' She set her load of plates on the greasy wooden draining-board, beside a sink already piled with dirty crockery-some smeared with egg, she noticed, unwashed since breakfast.

'Peter doesn't mind,' Belle said casually. 'But what's the good of a home and a husband if you've got talent? If the stage is in your blood, you don't care much for the washtub and the dustpan.'

'That's true, Belle,' Clara agreed, though sounding sad that she had to.

They found Crippen alone in the parlour, adjusting the gas-fire. 'Where's Paul?' Belle demanded.

'Gone to the smallest room.'

'What, by himself? Why didn't you take him?'

Crippen straightened, blinking. 'He knows the way. The light it always on.'

'I'm sure Paul doesn't mind,' Clara said. 'Why, this house is like our second home.'

'It's common politeness.' Belle sat in a pink armchair by the fire. 'Peter's taken to leaving the light on all night, because he has to get up,' she explained unkindly. 'Perhaps he's the same trouble as Paul? Peter, I'm cold. Fetch my shawl. And pass round the chocolates,' she commanded, as Paul slipped back to the parlour. The box was a condolence from the Martinettis. Belle took three of four, holding them in her palm and gobbling them one after the other.

They all turned, hearing Paul gasp. He had idly picked up a large book and flicked the pages.

'What is it, Paul?' Clara was puzzled.

'Things not for the eyes of ordinary men.'

'Gray's Anatomy,' Crippen remarked. He helped himself to a chocolate. 'Dr Beckett loaned it me.'

'You shouldn't leave an awful book like that lying about,' Belle complained. 'You've upset Paul.'

'No, it's interesting.' Clara had her fingers in the pages. 'Oh, what a spooky picture!' she exclaimed. 'What is it?'

Crippen leaned between the Martinetti's. 'That's your lungs and your heart, with the great blood-vessels rising beside your windpipe.'

'It looks like some ship with two billowing sails,' observed Paul more discriminatively.

'Oh, mercy! Is that my leg?' Clara cried.

'Those are the muscles,' Crippen explained. 'Separated very prettily in the picture, aren't they? Like the petals of a flower.'

Clara turned more pages. 'And that?'_

'The womb.'

'Peter!' snapped Belle. 'What language.'

Crippen took the book from the Martinettis, snapping it shut with unusual assertiveness.

'Weren't we playing whist?' Belle asked sarcastically. 'Set up the table and bring the cards, Peter.'

They played until one in the morning. To theatrical people, night is the working-man's afternoon. None needed be up in the morning-except Crippen, at seven. At half past one, Belle opened the front door. Paul was in overcoat, silk muffler and top hat, Clara wrapped in furs. 'Gee, it's freezing,' Belle announced. 'Sure you wouldn't care to pass the night?'

'We'd best get back to Shaftesbury Avenue, Belle. Paul's better sleeping at home. He's not at all well, you know.'

'Peter, fetch them a cab. There'll be one on the rank round the corner in York Road.'

'Not at this hour,' Crippen said doubtfully.

'Surely you can pick one up in the street?' Crippen hurried into the sparsely gaslit night, without overcoat or hat. The three waited in the hall, chatting until hooves clattered up the Crescent. The hansom stopped, lamps like bleary eyes over its pair of wheels, horse snorting, muffled bowler-hatted cabby with whip on his perch, breath of man and animal a cloud in the still, frosty air. The knee-doors flew open, Crippen stepped out and politely waited to help his guests in. Clara noticed him shivering.

'Goodnight, Belle.' She kissed her hostess fondly at the top of the front steps.

'I'll come down to see you off.'

'No, don't come down, Belle. You'll catch your death.'

The driver cracked his whip. The Crippens stood waving in their lighted doorway as the hansom drove towards the Camden Road, from where they could hear the lowing of cattle gathering for sale and slaughter in the Metropolitan Market.

Crippen shut the front door. Belle returned to the armchair by the fire. He reached to dim the gas-globe.

'Why are you turning the gas down?' she demanded.

'Economy. The company's left. The curtain falls.'

He remained standing in the middle of the room. She pulled her shawl round her, looking at him curiously. 'That's a strange thing for you to say.'

'Is it? But a social performance is like one on the stage. We all play our parts. We can generally tell the others' lines before they speak them. With the Martinettis, I feel like the manager of a theatre.'

'I don't play a part, not in my own home.' He said nothing. 'Aren't you getting me another glass of brandy? Or don't you want me to have a wink of sleep?'

Crippen descended the stone steps to the kitchen. The brandy was in a cupboard with the bottles of stout, all bought from the grocer's in Brecknock Road. He reappeared with a squat glass containing over an inch of dark spirit. Belle took it without a word. She sat sipping while he folded the green-baize cloth, collected the cards, and moved the square table against the wall.

'This brandy's scented, I guess.'

'It's a new bottle. I got it on my way home. It's cheaper, which accounts for the stronger taste. The grocer told me the best brandy is almost tasteless, like drinking liquid fire.'

She held the empty glass out. Crippen disappeared. She heard him knock over something in the kitchen below, which smashed on the floor. 'It was the gravy boat,' he announced, reappearing with more brandy. 'It was cracked anyway.'

'There's something funny about you. You don't usually break things.'

'If we had a housemaid, I suppose she'd break much more.' He stood facing her, back to the gas-fire, hands under the tails of his grey frock-coat. 'Why did you talk to the Martinettis tonight of engagements offered you at the Euston and Collins's? You knew they were lies.'

'Don't dare call me a liar,' she said stridently. Crippen kept his impassiveness. 'You have been lying much worse to yourself. You never had the slightest prospect of being a success on the stage. Not from the moment I first set eyes on you. When you came into my office, while I worked for Dr Jeffery in New York. When you'd just had a miscarriage.'

She opened her mouth, but instead of speaking screwed her eyes up. 'You're sort of shimmering.'

'You've drunk a lot of brandy. It's slurring your speech. I paid for your voice training. With a proper coach, right after we were married, till the hard times came in the winter of '92 and the money ran out. I paid for your gowns. I paid for your jewels. I paid for that show you were in, back in '99. As Cora Motzi in Vio and Mitzki's Bright Lights,' he derided her daringly. 'Bright lights! You never dazzled anyone in the world, except me. Last week at the Met I saw what you were worth. Nothing.'

Her only response was to say in a dreamy voice, 'Gee, I'm kind of dry. My throat's burning. Get me a glass of water, Peter.'

When he returned from the kitchen with a tumbler she was asleep. He stood staring at her. She opened her eyes suddenly. 'Where you been?'

'To fetch you a drink.'

She took the glass. Crippen resumed his stance by the fire. 'When are you going to see Bruce Miller again?'

She choked, unable to swallow. 'Shut your mouth about Bruce Miller.'

'What about Richard Ehrlich? The German student who was your lover under this very roof. Did you ever see him again?'

'What if I did? You're no use to any woman.'

'I am to any normal woman.'

'What are you saying? I'm not normal?'

'You suffer from nymphomania.' Belle started to laugh. It became wilder, then uncontrollable. She swung about in the chair, gripping the arms. Crippen watched her. 'I intend to treat you for it.'

'Treat me?' She stopped laughing, staring at him fixedly. 'I like that! How, I'll ask?'

'With henbane.'

'That's a poison!' she shouted.

'All drugs are poisons, unless taken in the right doses.'

'Why don't you treat Ethel Le Neve?' Belle asked thickly. 'Le Neve,' she sneered. 'She was born plain Neve, her father's a coals canvasser, who gets drunk in the pubs and gets arrested.'

'You're drunk yourself.'

Belle half-rose, gasping. 'That table! The one we played cards on. It moved. Look!' She gave a hoarse cry. 'There's something under it. A dog, a huge black dog-'

'I can't see anything,' Crippen said mildly.

Belle slumped back, holding her forehead in both hands. 'My face is burning. I'm sick, I guess. Help me to bed.'

Crippen suddenly leant over her, gripping her arms.

'How many times have you threatened to leave me?' he said with unknown venom. 'Threatened! It would be the happiest release for me and Ethel. You could take your jewels. You could take our whole Ј600 in the Charing Cross Bank. You could go off to America to Bruce Miller, to whoever you cared. But you wouldn't. You found me too useful here, working my heart out at Munyon's, the Drouet Institute, the Tooth Specialists. Providing you with clothes and comfort, a slave for anything you fancied. You've your own friends. Your own pleasures. You leave me here lonely and miserable. The only sympathy and affection I've ever had in the world is from Ethel.'

He straightened up. She sat looking dazed, slowly rubbing her arms. 'All right. All right, I'll go,' she mumbled.

'It's too late now.'

'What d'you mean?'

'I don't know. My head is full of bees,' he told her abruptly.

She half rose, face shot with terror. She screamed, 'It ain't a dog, it's a bear-'

He glanced quickly at the drawn curtains of pink velvet. They were thick enough to muffle the sound. The neighbours were anyway used to Belle's outbursts. 'There's nothing there. You're seeing things.'

'Oh, Peter…' She looked at him piteously, clutching her breast. 'My heart…my heart…it's flying from my body.'

'You're drunk. You had three glasses playing cards. Maybe that brandy's not only stronger in taste?'

She rose unsteadily from the chair. Her mouth opened, no words came. She staggered, clutching the mantelpiece, pulling the pink cloth, smashing a china cat against the gas-fire.

'Peter!' she screamed. Crippen continued staring, hands under coat-tails. 'I'm dying…' He did not move. 'I'm going next door, to Mrs Harrison…' She tried to walk, knocked over the small table, clattering the framed photographs on the floor. She crumpled. She lay face down on the carpet, giving a huge gasp. Crippen stayed immobile.

'Belle,' he said quietly.

He hesitated.

'Belle-'

He crouched and turned her half-over. Her face was dusky, her mouth slack, her eyes partly open. He stood up. 'So,' he said. He gave her chest a gentle kick, partly inquisitive, partly insolent. 'Belle has left me,' he murmured. He sounded unbelieving. He walked quickly round the room, hands in pockets. He stopped suddenly, righted the overturned table and carefully replaced the photographs. He rearranged the pink mantelpiece cover, picking up the fragments of china from the carpet, cupping them delicately in his left hand, leaving the room for the kitchen and tipping them into the round bin under the sink where Belle had scraped the leavings from their dinner plates.

He returned to the parlour, strode straight past Belle, crouched and switched off the gas-fire. Then he turned Belle on her back with his foot. He raised her eyelids, revealing pupils like black full moons. He felt her wrist for a pulse, noticing the forearms drawn in spasm, the fingers clawed. 'So Belle shall vanish,' he said. He began to undress her.

He unbuttoned her yellow silk gown down the back, unlaced the waist, pulled the bodice from her crooked arms and tugged the skirts from her feet. The cotton underskirt was soaked with urine. He remembered that Belle had not visited a certain room since dinner. He tugged off the black ankle boots with pearl buttons up the side, and unbuckled the black lisle stockings from suspenders stretching half-way down her fat thighs. He loosed the tape of her cotton knickers, which ended in six-inch frills over the knee. He unknotted the lacing of her stays, ripping them off her wobbling buttocks. She had only an undervest with six buttons, which he loosed from wallowing breasts. He had not seen her naked for five years or so. She always had him come to her in the dark, like an animal. He noticed the scar running from navel to pubic hair, the incision for the ovariotomy which turned her barren.

He unpinned the rising sun brooch, unclasped the gold chain of a lozenge-shaped diamond pendant from the fleshy, blue-tinged base of her neck, slipped off her gold wrist-watch, pulled the two diamond rings from her right hand and the ruby from her left, placed them among the photographs. Her broad gold wedding ring would not budge with determined tugs. He noticed a sticky thick smear of vomit on the carpet, noting to mop it with the kitchen dishcloth later.

Crippen hung his frock-coat over the back of a chair. He pulled Belle by her feet across the carpet into the bare-boarded hall. The clocks chimed half-past. It was only an hour since the Martinettis had left. Gripping her ankles, he pulled her up the stairs, her head bouncing from step to step, tortoiseshell combs spilling from her hair. He was sweating. He tugged her across the lino into the bathroom. Grunting, he bundled her into the bath. There was a gurgle, and faeces oozed through her flaccid anal sphincter. He wrinkled his nose, turned on the cold tap, used the rose-patterned pitcher from the marble-topped washstand to swill it down the plughole. He went downstairs, felt for his leather-covered case of instruments behind the books, and stuck Gray's Anatomy under his arm.

Belle filled the bath, breasts slid sideways, her stomach slack rolls of fat, her face blue. Crippen loosened his cufflinks and turned up his sleeves. As he moved her head, long muscle-scalpel in hand, she made a low groan. He jerked up, shocked. Was she still alive? He decided it was a post-mortem effect. He dug the scalpel into her neck to the left of her windpipe, trying to sever the tendinous end of the sternomastoid muscle from the top of the breastbone.

He pulled the knife out. It was ridiculously blunt. He inspected the edge, noticed his razor-strop on its hook below the window, and honed it for some minutes. He was delighted to find that it cut flesh like the tenderest chicken. He severed the big carotid arteries and jugular veins, blood stickying his fingers as he slit through her windpipe and gullet. He must decide the next step. He opened Gray's Anatomy on the cork-seated white bathroom chair, seeking the section Osteology, bloodying the pages as he turned them.

Crippen's anatomical knowledge was skimpy, but principles learned in the dissecting room remain in the mind, like the principles of Christianity to the theological student long left the seminary. He found the subsection _Vertebrae Cervicales_ under _Columna Vertebralis._ He dug the knife through the skin and fat of the neck, severing the elastic ligaments which join one vertebral bone and the next, like the segments of ox-tail in a stew. As he lifted Belle's head into the air, something clattered against the enamel of the bath. A circular metal Hinde's curler, with three or four inches of bleached brown hair twined in it. Belle had overlooked unclipping it with the others when she dressed. He wondered if the Martinettis had noticed it.

Reaching for a pair of long pointed scissors from the instrument case he cut the curler free, clanging to the bottom of the bath, where the headless body had trapped pools of blood. He decided to take the hair off, snipping into the rose-patterned wash-basin until the head was as bare as a nun's. He would burn the hair in the kitchen stove, with his shirt and _Gray. _Hair did not rot. The teeth, too could be an obstacle. He could extract them and drop them into the bin at Albion House, unnoticeable among the day's crop.

Osteotomy forceps, like a stout pair of nail-clippers, severed the ribs. As though pulling apart the picked carcass of a chicken to boil for soup, he tugged the severed gullet and windpipe from the hollow of the corpse. He cut the flat muscle of the diaphragm which separated chest from belly. He slit the guts from the filmy, blood-gorged, fatty mesentry, which secured them to the trunk like a string of sausages in a paper bag. He had blood to the elbows, and leaning over the bath was backbreaking. He freed the sloppy, brownish, gleaming liver, the kidneys dangling from their springy arteries, the spleen like a huge red mushroom, the bag of Belle's stomach still containing her roast pork, her potatoes in their jackets and her blancmange, the brandy stinking like an uncorked bottle.

He severed the top of the rectum, where it joined the big pipe of the gut. Gripping the joined organs by the gullet and windpipe, he pulled them with a glug and a squelch from the husk. He wondered what to do with them. He dropped them between Belle's legs. He rinsed hands and forearms under the cold tap. From the hook on the door hung his green-striped flannel pyjama jacket, forgotten that morning after shaving. He wrapped it round the organs like pastry round the meat of a Cornish pastie. He remembered Belle's womb. It would never do, leaving that._

He clutched it in the basin of her pelvis. Her bladder squirted the last of the urine between her legs. With one cut, he had her womb and most of her vagina. Her ovaries had gone to another knife, seventeen years before. The clocks chimed four. Completing the job could wait until tomorrow. It was cold, Belle would not go 'off' any sooner than a joint freshly bought from the butcher's. Would the neighbours be curious over the bathroom light? They were familiar with the gas burning in the smallest room next door. He had forgotten the wedding-ring on her third finger. Reaching for the scalpel, he adroitly severed the finger through the little joint at its base, pulled off the ring and tossed the digit into the empty body.