A Question of Guilt

19

Exactly a week after her lover was first brought into the same court-room, Ethel Le Neve faced the old gang reunited-Lord Alverstone, Mr Muir and Mr Travers Humphreys, his junior. Humphreys was winning double fame. At Fareham in Hampshire, he was simultaneously prosecuting Lieutenant Siegfried Helm from the 21st Battalion of the German Emperor's Nassau Regiment, for imperiling the State by sketching the forts at Portsmouth. The lieutenant was young and good-looking, the court crowded, mostly by ladies.

There was one newcomer. F E Smith, Member of Parliament, aged 38, who had been the youngest ever King's Counsel and was to be the youngest ever Lord Chancellor.

Ethel had avoided the debt-ridden solicitor Arthur Newton. She instructed the staid firm of Hopwood and Sons. Eliot wrote to them, passing on his father's suggestion. He never knew whether this was the cause of its implementation. F E Smith was tall, handsome, with thick eyebrows, a mouth turning down arrogantly, a pearl tiepin the size of a Muscat grape and a liking for long cigars. He and Ethel's case suited as man and wife.

He defended her with one speech and one argument. How could a simple typist, in her twenties, live blithely with Crippen on the run, had she the slightest suspicion he had recently dismembered his wife and buried most of her in the cellar? The prosecution had no stomach for the fight. Perhaps they were exhausted by their sustained indignation the previous week. Perhaps they saw their depiction of Crippen as too fiendish for another member of the human race to receive, comfort and maintain him, as Ethel was accused. She was freed in a day. F E Smith called no witnesses, not even his client. The judge later criticised him for it. 'I knew what she would say,' F E told him, 'you did not.' All day, the new Home Secretary sat in court, Winston Churchill.

As a drowning man gives a final shout, Crippen took his case to the Court of Appeal. In a few minutes, Mr Justice Darling threw it out. It was Guy Fawkes' Day. A fortnight later, on Saturday, November 19, Eliot and Nancy were married at Holloway Registry Office.

Nancy had a scheme for them to separate, and meet at the altar like any decent couple. Eliot objected that he was an atheist. Nancy consoled herself that his love was rooted in the soul he affected not to possess. Nancy's father neither crossed the ocean to see his younger daughter die nor to see his elder one wed. The Duke gave them a Lanchester motor-car. Eliot wondered desperately how the devil one worked it.

There was no honeymoon. The week after Crippen's conviction at the Old Bailey, Eliot had received a letter from the King's physician, forwarded in his father's hand from the ducal castle.

'Bernard Dawson apologizes for his mouldy bread remarks in the Bugle. He never knew the particular witch-doctor was me. A paper with their morals wouldn't hasten to enlighten him. He's atoning for making me the second most unpopular man in England.'

He tossed the letter to Nancy across their sitting-room, overlooking the Thames at the Savoy.

'He ran into Dr Pasquier, of all people,' Eliot continued. 'He's over from Champette for a meeting at the Brompton Chest Hospital about phthisis. Dawson's offering me a job in a free sanatorium for the poor, which he's opened on money raised in the City. At Bognor. The south coast, you know. Sea breezes. I suspect phthisis would kill me with boredom, but a step by Dawson can mean a leap to higher things. What do you think?'

'Take it.'

'I'm sure that's right. Oh, I'll have my plate up in Harley Street in no time,' he asserted. 'The rich shall provide my living and the hospital poor my reputation, just like everyone else. How much more sensible to use the familiar machine, rather than trying to dismantle it and make a different one from the worn parts.'

Eliot called on Dawson the following week at his home, No 32 Wimpole Street. He found himself obliged to be vetted by the London Hospital board of governors on the Monday morning after his wedding. He returned to the Savoy after the interview to find his bride with a telephone message from the medical officer at Pentonville jail. Would Eliot call that afternoon? He was puzzled. Crippen was in a condemned cell, to be hanged there two mornings later on Wednesday, November 23.

The prison was only half a mile from Hilldrop Crescent, across the Cattle Market. It was a wheel of radiating blocks, on which the spirits of 1000 prisoners were painstakingly broken by solitude and silence. Eliot left his cab at the Balmoral Castle public house, on the corner of Brewery Road, opposite the facade of untidy classical columns rising among terraces of small, neat, law-abiding houses. A dozen plane trees fronted the high wall, behind it rose the grey, barred, slate-roofed blocks, in the middle poked a fat square chimney. The visitors' entrance was to the right of the vast oak Gothic door.

Eliot gave his name to the warder in high-necked tunic and shako, key-chain dangling against his thigh. He signed a ledger on the counter inside the gate-house, which had a good fire and a singing kettle, two other warders brewing their tea in a brown metal pot. Eliot was led across the courtyard, to a block with stylish columns between the windows of the first floor. A stone corridor with gates at each end, which his cicerone unlocked and locked behind them, led to the prison hospital.

There had been little room for Crippen in Eliot's head. He thought of him as the 26 sailors in the French submersible Pluvoise, hit by a cross-Channel paddle-steamer earlier that year, her bows above the surface but her crew doomed to die under the eyes of the world. He was shown into a small, green-painted gas-lit office, with a desk opposite the fire. On a horsehair sofa sat a woman in a serge suit, who rose as the warder left. It was Ethel.

'Dr Beckett!' She was as surprised as himself. Her large velour hat was shrouded in a motoring-veil. She looked pale. A smile flickered on her lips. Later, Eliot saw kings and queens stark naked, but never again felt as awkward.

'How is he?'

'Bearing up. Sometimes, he seems his usual self. Others, he cries.'

'I'm here to see the prison doctor. I don't know the reason.'

'He's ever so kind to Peter. So's Major Mytton-Davies. He's the governor. He's quite convinced that Peter's innocent, you know. That a man like Peter could _never _commit a murder, not in all his born days. And he's not the only one-just think, _fifteen thousand_ people signed the petition to spare Peter's life. The prison doctor's with Peter now. That's why I'm waiting.'

'Give him my-' Eliot stopped. What greeting could anyone send a man due to hang in 40 hours' time? 'Assurance that he is ever in my thoughts.'

'He's written me some lovely letters.'

She felt in her large handbag. Eliot wondered if she had the inexpressible, almost unthinkable, pride of a woman who drives a man to terrible deeds which drive himself to destruction. Delilah behind a typewriter.

'Would you like to see one?'

As she seemed eager, Eliot took the lined buff sheet, stamped with the Royal Arms and _H M Prison, Pentonville._ It was a pathetic mixture, protestations of innocence, references to a God so bafflingly reluctant to establish it, directions to Ethel about his own past business affairs and her future ones, impregnated with sentiment towards 'my own wifie dear'.

_I see ourselves in those days of courtship, having our dinner together after our day of work together was done, or sitting sometimes in our favourite corner of Frascati's by the stairway, all the evening listening to the music. I sometimes thought that a little corner of Heaven on earth.

And now my prison dinner is just waiting, and I must eat it while it is hot. Have just had a nice dinner-roast mutton, vegetables, soup, and fruit-and now back to my wifie again._

Eliot handed the letter back. A man who could write of roast mutton in the condemned cell would feel gemьtlich in the grave.

'How are you?' he asked kindly.

'Always so tired. Life's difficult in silly little ways. I have to go about in a closed cab. If people saw me in the street there'd be a riot. Mrs Jackson was very good-my old landlady, you know.' Eliot nodded. 'Of course! You met her at the house that Sunday afternoon, just after the old King died.'

Ethel stopped suddenly. Eliot had a vision of Belle's clothes. Ethel said quietly, 'But I don't want to see any of the old crowd, none of them. Never again.'

'How will you manage after-' He hesitated. 'In the future?'

'I can't stay here, can I? I'm going to America. I'm booked on the Majestic from Southampton on Wednesday, under the name of Miss Allen.'

The most loving relatives of patients _in extremis_ at Champette, Eliot reflected, had to plan beyond their release from the sick room.

'Then I shall go to Toronto. Peter talked so much about it on the boat. I'll start a new life.'

'I wish you all the luck in the world, Miss Le Neve.' Her interview with a new employer for the position of his lady typist was a scene beyond Eliot's imagination.

'Thank you.' She ran her tongue over her full lips. 'There's something-' She stopped.

'Yes?'

'There's something no one knows. It never came out at the trials, Peter's or mine. I can't bear keeping it locked in me, it wakes me at night. It's worse than any memory I've had of these awful four months.'

'Keeping secrets is as much second nature to a doctor as staunching blood.'

'I know that. I'd always trust you, Dr Beckett. Peter did, more than anyone he knew. The hatbox…you remember I told you that same Sunday afternoon, the doctor's hatbox was stolen on the boat? On our way across to fetch little Valentine from Boulogne-'

To Eliot's annoyance, the door was opened by a pink faced man with grey hair cut like a brush and a grey stubby moustache, wearing a blue serge suit. After him came a warder.

'It wasn't stolen,' Ethel Finished breathlessly. 'It was dropped over the ship's rail.'

She turned, nodded at the intruder, and followed the warder.

'Dr Beckett? I'm Dr Campion,' said the grey-haired man. 'Most kind of you to come. I hope that didn't embarrass you? I'd no idea Miss Le Neve was here.'

'Not at all. I've been acquainted with Miss Le Neve for a whole year.' Eliot sat facing the doctor across the desk. Ex-medical officer in the army or navy, he supposed. A good job for a man expended of ambition. He wondered what it was paid-Ј500 a year, he speculated, two-thirds the governor's salary.

'You were almost a neighbour at Hilldrop Crescent, I believe?' Campion continued in a friendly way. 'The prisoner talks sometimes as though you were close colleagues.'

'Why did you want to see me?' Eliot demanded. His thoughts were still on the hatbox. So she did know Belle was dismembered and beheaded. Before they ran away.

The doctor stared at the ceiling, rubbed his large red hands, and returned his eyes to Eliot.

'I face an awkward choice, Dr Beckett. Crippen himself is a model prisoner. Indeed, everyone has grown very fond of him. Not only the guards who must watch him day and night, but the chaplain and certainly the governor. Though he did attempt suicide,' he revealed. 'Strangely enough, I've never seen that before in condemned men.'

'I suppose they grasp at hope to the end? Like the sick the miraculous finger-tips of Jesus.'

'Last night he managed to break off the steel side of his glasses. The warder noticed it, and searched him. He'd slipped it up the seam of his, trouser-leg. He must have intended to divide his radial artery with it, under cover of his blanket.'

'He wouldn't be the first medical man. Horace Wells-the American who discovered anaesthesia-killed himself by severing a femoral artery with his razor, in the Toombs Prison one January night of 1848. He'd been run in for throwing vitriol in prostitutes' faces.'

Dr Campion paid little heed. Eliot reflected that the occupation of prison doctor gave little encouragement to the intellectual embellishment of the profession.

'My choice is between defying the Home Secretary, and possibly loosing my position, or honouring my professional principles and keeping my good name. Mr Winston Churchill is a busybody. He suddenly wants to know about the smallest items for which he nominally carries responsibility. His personal secretary sent a stiff note to Major Mytton-Davies about the procedure for executions. Everything's in Home Office Regulations, of course, but Mr Churchill demanded a simple description of a single sheet of paper the same day. He particularly wished to know if the man had anything to help him face the ordeal, more substantial than the ministration of the chaplain. He gets half a mug of rum, of course. Some refuse it. They say they want to meet their God with a clean breath. That's usually the drunkards. Mr Churchill is always straining to bring in something new-so we hear from the Home Office. I suppose he wants to appear a progressive young politician. Now he's demanding that some drug be administered, so that the prisoner may be hanged in a merciful state of coma.'

'Who's going to prescribe it?' Eliot asked immediately.

'Exactly. For any doctor, that would be contributing to the extinction of life, and against our principles.'

'And against the law.'

Dr Campion nodded. 'There is a difference in assisting a man to die on the end of a rope and in bed. We can perhaps allow ourselves sometimes to be part of the natural process, but never of the unnatural one. Otherwise, we should become executioners ourselves. But Mr Churchill is most wilful. He cannot understand these ethical niceties are so important to us. He imagines that we are being pig-headed.'

'You asked me here to sign the prescription?'

'You have saved me a deal of unhappy explanation, Dr Beckett. Crippen was known to you, as to no other medical man-'

'Give me the sheet of paper,' said Eliot at once.

'You realize, Dr Beckett, that the General Medical Council could be sticky about this? Should some enemy in the profession learn of your action-'

'I'd be struck off?' Eliot added thoughtfully, 'I'll risk that, for Crippen.'

'What drug will you give?'

'There's only one powerful enough. Hyoscine.'

Dusk comes early to London in mid-November, but the night is short for the man who knows he will not see the end of another day. The condemned cell was fifteen feet square, with a high-up barred arched window. Crippen wore a rough grey jacket and trousers, and a white calico shirt. He had no tie, and tapes instead of buttons, lest he swallowed them and forestalled his execution, or awkwardly deferred it with an operation for obstruction of the intestines. Several others had worn the same outfit, but the authorities fumigated it in between, as though they had died undramatically from smallpox.

The clocks untidily struck away the hours with terrible unconcern. At midnight, Major Mytton-Davies brought his last word from Ethel, an opened telegram just delivered by a boy on a scarlet bicycle. At seven, the governor was back. There were two hours to go. Crippen was hunched on the black-painted bedstead like a prison hospital cot. Two warders sat with practised stolidity under the gas, at the two-foot square table where he wrote his daily letters to Ethel, the blotches on its greasy surface as fixed in his mind's eye as a map to a treasure-hunter. The warders enjoyed three days' special leave from that morning. They had played cribbage and snakes-and-ladders with Crippen, to divert his mind. It was in the regulations.

The governor had the dose in a mug of cocoa. 'Something to buck you up,' he explained. Crippen drank it, grimacing at the bitterness. The governor wondered if the doctor knew he was poisoned near to death.

At his customary three minutes to the hour, hangman Ellis entered the cell. He wore a blue suit, a high starched white collar and a black tie. Folded in his jacket pocket was an Order to Hang, half a dozen lines penned in clerk's copperplate and signed by Charles Johnston, Sheriff of London, which spared Ellis being as black a murderer as his victim. Behind came assistant hangman Willis.

The two warders had already been joined by the chaplain, robed for a funeral, lost at ministering to a prisoner comatose beyond confession or repentance. Crippen lay on the grey blanket, breath faint, cheeks dusky. With his gold-rimmed glasses on the table was the half-mug of brandy, inexorably provided by the regulations. The warders eyed it, having agreed to share.

Though Crippen was nearer corpse than man, rules required following. Ellis carried a foot-wide buckled black-leather body-belt with four pairs of straps across the front. He slid it round Crippen's waist, securing it at the back, strapping wrists and elbows across his midriff. He took from Willis a short black strap which he loosely secured below Crippen's knees, and a conical linen cap to stick on his head like a dunce.

_'I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,'_ began the chaplain. Had Belle had Crippen converted, he would have got it in Latin.

A hanging was a singular legal-ecclesiastic ceremony. Outside the cell, a procession had assembled. The chief warder led, followed by the chaplain, who had reached, _'Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery,'_ by skipping. Next came Crippen, limp between two warders. Then Ellis and Willis, Major Mytton-Davies, under-sheriff Rupert Smythe in frock coat and black cravat, Dr Campion and the deputy chief warder for the rear.

The way was short. The execution shed stood open beyond the facing oaken doors of half a dozen condemned cells. A stout beam ran from one whitewashed wall to another, with three shiny hooks like a butcher's. From one hook, a brand-new rope two inches thick hung by a brass eyelet. Attached to its end by a clip, like dog-collar to lead, was a yard of soft rolled leather, tapering to a small brass eyelet which created the noose. This hung precisely over the trap, a thread drawing a loop of rope towards the cross-beam. The scaffold was well-tried, designed for the Home Office in 1885 by Lieut-Col Alten Beamish of the Royal Engineers. The thread was Ellis' own idea, of which he was proud. Hanging does not invite much innovation.

The sides of the trap always underran two planks. The public imagined the objects of its retribution standing a few remorseful seconds awaiting the drop, but a man can seldom support the weight of a body from which life will be shordy squeezed. Two warders held every prisoner by the armpits, as they were obliged with Crippen. The obligatory onlookers made the shed crowded. Willis pulled cap over face, Ellis applied the noose by snapping the cotton, securing it with a stiff leather washer behind the right ear. He pulled the iron lever, shifting an unseen pair of well greased steel bolts under the twin trap-doors of three-inch thick oak, which crashed into their hooks on the whitewashed brick walls of the pit below. Crippen disappeared.

A faint slap came from the stone floor of the pit, as one of his slippers fell off. _'Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God in his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed,'_ said the chaplain. The violently twisting rope slowed. The body needed stay an hour, before delivery to Mr Shroeder, the coroner who had 'sat on' Belle half a mile away. By noon, Crippen would end in quicklime, and they were letting him have Ethel's letters dropped in. Ellis got Ј5, Willis Ј2 10s. On October 10, five miles to the north, they had buried in Finchley Cemetery all they had left of Belle.

The black-framed notice on the prison gate was signed by the governor, the under-sheriff and the chaplain. The customary bell was not tolled, from official tenderness towards three other men inside shortly to undergo the same procedure.

It was uncharacteristic of Eliot to take a cab from the Savoy that misty morning. He had always shunned the carnivals of the people, especially the macabre ones. He felt impelled to see the end of the drama he had watched before it began. And he was anyway the executioner's assistant, as last intended with the German Emperor.

The crowd at nine o'clock was thinner than Eliot expected. Perhaps the public was growing either tired of Crippen or ashamed over him. As he strode away afterwards, a touch came to his elbow.

'Mouldy bread!' Bill Edmonton stood grinning. It had become a Holloway catch-phrase.

'Hello, Bill! How's your boils?'

'Gorn, doctor. I changed me job.' But not your habits, Eliot thought, catching the reek of beer. 'I'm on the railway nah.'

Eliot found half-a-crown in his pocket.

'Thank you, doctor. Always said you was a proper gen'man.' Bill pointed his short clay pipe towards the prison across the Caledonian Road. 'Remember when I met 'im? In the free medicine shop.' Eliot nodded. 'I got ter know 'im pretty well,' Bill continued proudly. 'Used ter come to the cattle market regular, in the mornin's, on 'is way ter work. 'E'd bring scraps, bones, wot Mrs Crippen 'ad left over, or cadged orf of the other ladies rahnd 'illdrop Crescent. Mind, 'e stopped coming' abaht the middle o' last February. Then o' course he 'adn't a wife no more to do 'is shoppin', 'ad 'e?'

'What did you do with these bones?' Eliot asked, horrified.

'They all went in the boiler,' Bill told him amiably.

'"Poupart's Piccadilly Potted Meat",' observed Nancy, when Eliot hurried back to the Savoy. '"Londoners Love It".'

'Well, Belle always wanted them to, didn't she?' Eliot pointed out.