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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Skelton's Casebook
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
Shortlisted for the CWA Sapere Books Historical Dagger 2021. January 1929. When Arthur Skelton won the legal case of the century, he went from being an unremarkable barrister to front-page sensation. Now he faces a new challenge. Mary Dutton is accused of poisoning her husband and the police are utterly convinced she is guilty. Even her supporters think she did it. Skelton agrees to take on what many consider an unwinnable case, a decision wholly unconcerned with the defendant's resemblance to a beautiful actress. With an army of women set to vote for the first time in history, the fate of Mary Dutton will have a significant impact on Britain's political future. Skelton faces mounting pressure to find the truth, but will that be enough to save a young woman's life?
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SKELTON’S GUIDE TO DOMESTIC POISONS
David Stafford
CONTENTS
5
To Michael, Mary, Sue and John
6
PROLOGUE
December 1928
‘There’s somebody coming up the hill.’
Wilf had been told not to talk. Mary, his mother, shushed him. Still, everybody turned to look down the hill, even the vicar.
Two coppers, Briggs and Emerson, were coming up the lane towards the cemetery, looking as if they’d run all the way from the station in Collingford. They stopped when they got to the grave. Briggs, older and fatter, tried to say something but had no breath left. He nudged Emerson’s elbow.
‘You’ve got to stop,’ Emerson said.
‘What?’
Emerson cleared his throat and said, louder, ‘You’ve got to stop the funeral.’
The vicar looked at the undertaker, who shook his head. He didn’t know what they were talking about either.8
Briggs recovered his breath enough to say, ‘Perhaps we could have a quiet word.’ He took the vicar and the undertaker to one side and they whispered.
Emerson stayed with the mourners. He knew them. Mary Dutton used to come into his dad’s shop. Doris, her eldest, was at the same school as his little brother. They nodded embarrassed hellos. Mrs Fellows, Mary Dutton’s friend, asked him, ‘What’s all this about, then?’ He said he was ever so sorry, but he wasn’t at liberty to say.
The undertaker told the men to put the coffin back on the cart and the vicar braced himself to break the news to Mary.
‘This is all very distressing but I’m afraid the police are saying that Dr Willoughby may have made a mistake. There’s going to have to be an autopsy.’
‘What sort of mistake?’
‘I’m sure it’s no more than a formality, although I must say that to leave it to the eleventh hour like this shows an inhuman lack of compassion, but rest assured …’
Mary wasn’t listening. The cart had started back down the hill. She followed it.
‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’
The undertaker turned. ‘Somebody’s said he was poisoned.’
CHAPTER ONE
January 1929
On the train into Paddington, Arthur Skelton stared at a picture of himself. It was on page four of the Daily Mail being read by the man opposite. The same picture, or variations of it, showing him smiling, serious, standing, walking, had haunted him all weekend, in the Daily Herald, the News of the World, the Express, the Mirror, the Graphic and the Sketch. Bloody things.
His wife, Mila, had teased him remorselessly. For a moment he’d thought she was serious when she suggested getting the children to cut all the photographs out and paste them in a scrapbook. For years she’d said that barristers were people who had wanted to be actors but weren’t brave enough to stand up against their parents, and here, she said, was the proof. Her husband, the barrister, was a matinee idol. People in the street recognised him. A 10shy young woman had even asked for his autograph at the bacon counter in Mason’s. Mila accused him of loving the attention, of being a slave to fame.
‘Look at this one. You’re posing,’ she’d said, brandishing the News of the World.
‘I am not posing.’
‘You’ve got your distinguished face on.’
‘Is it my fault if my face, in repose, can sometimes appear distinguished?’
Mila laughed so much she ended up dancing.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been so conspicuous, but he was six foot three, with a face like a horse and round glasses with lenses so thick that his eyes filled them like moons. And he had a limp. Even though most of the photographs showed him wearing his barrister’s wig, he was still horribly recognisable. Some boys had shouted something at him as he’d walked to the station that morning. Not knowing how to react, he’d waved and grinned. Afterwards he wondered whether they might have been saying something insulting or obscene.
The Dryden case – the cause of it all – was already being called the scandal of 1929 and they weren’t yet halfway through January. It was a grubby little tale.
A year earlier, Hannah Dryden, rich and glamorous, had divorced her husband, Maurice Dryden, the popular novelist, on the grounds of adultery and desertion. Maurice’s next book, Mistress of Mayfair, charted the adventures of Helena, an opium-smoking sex-tigress, in London, Paris, Rome, New York and Marrakesh. When he spoke to the papers about the book, Maurice dropped 11heavy hints that Helena’s exploits were based closely on those of his ex-wife, Hannah, who sued for defamation and engaged Skelton to represent her in court.
The usual defence in such cases might have been to point out the dissimilarities between the fictional Helena and the real Hannah: age, appearance, background and so on. But, instead of doing that, Maurice Dryden chose the more difficult but far more vindictive course of claiming that Helena was indeed Hannah and the book a true-to-life account of Hannah’s supposed debaucheries.
The trial was an Aldwych farce. Maurice’s key witnesses were a grubby private detective who claimed to have kept tabs on Hannah over the course of several weeks, a cashiered colonel in a bad wig and Alejandro Zabala, a self-proclaimed Argentinian fencing champion. Worst of all was a French chambermaid who squeaked, simpered and zut alorsed her way through elaborate accounts of Hannah’s exploits while flirting outrageously with the judge.
All of them had been carefully primed and rehearsed by Maurice Dryden. They told terrific stories. The Herald and the Mail published every suffering detail. Woman’s Weekly put Hannah on its front cover and nearly doubled its circulation. The directors of the Tempolux watch company of Luton made a fortune by producing a cheap copy of the rectangular wristwatch that Hannah had allegedly left behind at the Hotel Negresco, in Nice.
Skelton led the prosecution and found the main obstacle he had to overcome was naivety. Although he was a thirty-six-year-old married man with two children, the witness statements frequently alluded to sexual practices of which he was entirely ignorant. His Latin – 12fello, lingua and so on – led him to make some educated guesses, but French – never his strong subject at school – led him to translate Maitresse de la Douleur as ‘Our Lady of the Sorrows’, a misapprehension that was thankfully cleared up before the trial began. Edgar, his clerk, a man much better versed in the ways of the world than he was, helped where he could, although neither of them ever learnt the exact use of the ‘haunted mitten’, nor why the delivery of eight baskets of fresh peaches to a hotel room might be taken as evidence of lewdness. To help, Edgar tracked down, at a specialist bookshop off the Charing Cross Road, a small but useful library on the subject of sexual deviance.
Marie Stopes’ Married Love told Skelton that the ‘bodily union’ of a man and woman ‘is the solid nucleus of an immense fabric of interwoven strands reaching to the uttermost ends of the earth; some lighter than the filmiest cobweb, or than the softest waves of music; iridescent with the colours not only of the visible rainbow but of all the invisible glories of the wavelengths of the souls’, but made no mention of the strap-on. The works of Havelock Ellis brought revelations about inversion and autoeroticism, while Krafft-Ebing was good on necrophilia, masochism and satyriasis. A less academic approach to the subject came from Emil Rouxel’s Daphne, or the Seven Temples of Rapture which had been bundled into the bag with the other books.
As it turned out, the success of his defence owed more to his naivety – or at least his naive curiosity – than it did to this lewd scholarship. His first little triumph came entirely without preparation when the grubby private detective 13claimed, during the depths of a Parisian winter, to have kept a twenty-four-hour vigil standing on the street opposite a hotel in which Hannah was staying. In cross-examination, he claimed to have sustained himself with ‘cold, sweet tea from a half-gallon flask and the occasional nip of brandy’. Then, because it had just occurred to him, Skelton asked, ‘Where did you go to the lavatory?’ The question, and more importantly the detective’s stuttering claim to have held it in (a middle-aged man with half a gallon of tea inside him) for the entire vigil, made the following morning’s headlines.
A second triumph came when the cashiered colonel swore that he was the model for ‘Major Tomkins’, the Lothario who, in the novel, spends seven nights of ecstasy with Helena in a shepherd’s hut on a mountain in Andalusia. Skelton asked what they ate. The colonel first tried to claim they lived off the land but stumbled over technical questions about the flora and fauna of the Sierra Nevada, so hastily invented some sacks of tinned soup and meat. When Skelton idly hoped they remembered to bring a tin opener, the colonel seemed to crumble. He stared at his feet. His wig slipped. Banality had brought his flight of fancy – for a moment he had believed that he could truly have been the passionate Major Tomkins – crashing to earth.
Skelton’s summing-up lasted more than two hours. The Express, Mail and Herald quoted it in full over several pages. The Illustrated London News’ account was accompanied by ink and wash drawings, showing Skelton in full flow, stern and dignified. The Times described his performance as a ‘masterpiece of forensic eloquence’.
It was not a showy speech. His voice rarely rose from his quiet Yorkshire rumble, the flat vowels making the 14grandeur of the defence barrister – and even the judge – seem so much tinsel.
Instead of attacking the defence case, he praised it. Rather than abusing its inconsistencies, he tried his best to make sense of them. He congratulated Maurice Dryden on his literary invention and his cast of witnesses on their ability to tell spellbinding stories. He apologised for his clay-footed pedantry as he exposed the implausibility of those stories and concluded by repeating the lesson that some of those present had clearly failed to learn in childhood – that we must never let our imaginations run away with us.
The jury was gone for no more time than it took to walk to the their room, go through the formalities, take an initial vote and walk back. Maurice was found guilty and ordered to pay substantial damages and costs.
Crowds had gathered outside the courtroom. They shouted insults at Maurice and cheered when Hannah Dryden appeared on the steps with Skelton at her side. Skelton lurked in the shadows to allow Mrs Dryden her moment of triumph, but she took his hand and held it aloft, like a boxing referee declaring the winner. She called him ‘Her Latter-Day Galahad’, as if she’d been a damsel in distress and he her gallant saviour.
Then she took a step back and Skelton found himself – God knows what came over him – beaming and bowing like Gerald du Maurier on an opening night at Wyndham’s.
The papers had a field day with the ‘Latter-Day Galahad’ tag. The name Skelton was forgotten. He was ‘Every Gal’s Galahad’. He was the ‘The Knight in Shining Specs’. They did ‘profiles’ of him and turned the ‘facts’ of his life into ‘good copy’. 15
According to the Herald, he was a labourer’s son, a slum kid from a back-to-back in Leeds. His mum had hated that. His dad was a foreman at Trevis and Nash, the chemical works. A foreman, not a labourer. Corlton Road was a respectable neighbourhood. Their house had a bit of front garden, a bay window and a tiled step.
The Express even went on about his limp – the result of his being born with a displaced hip – and tried to claim it was a war wound when in fact it had made him medically unfit for active service. He’d sent them a stiff letter about that, and they’d published an apology.
Most unsettling of all was the way in which the papers turned his life into a well-crafted story with a beginning, a middle and an end: as if his progress from grammar school to university to the Bar had been executed according to a prearranged plan. It never was. Nothing like it. It was as a series of lurches and accidents conducted in a fog of doubts and worries. He’d never once known what he was doing. Not properly. He’d gone from elementary to grammar. His teachers had gone to a lot of trouble to find him bursaries and scholarships so it would have been ungrateful not to go to Cambridge. He did law because it seemed real. His dad knew what it was. You didn’t run into many philosophers or classicists on the Hunslet Road but there was a solicitor’s office on Church Street. It never occurred to him that he could – or should – make a choice about these matters, and, even if it had, he wouldn’t have had a clue how to go about making it. There was just doing what came next and being glad because it didn’t involve sweat or grime.
He found himself wishing he had half the substance 16and certainty that the Galahad chap in the paper had. He seemed, somehow, so much more authentic.
The woman standing next to him on the platform at Paddington Underground station was looking at him. Not wanting to be impolite, he smiled and nodded.
‘I know you, don’t I?’ she said.
‘Well, I’m glad one of us does.’
CHAPTER TWO
‘I don’t know what the problem is,’ Edgar said. ‘It all adds to your prestige, your reputation. Reputation is exactly what you’re supposed to be building; it attracts a better quality of work and much higher fees.’
‘I just wish I could have earned it properly,’ Skelton said.
‘You did earn it properly.’
‘No, I didn’t. It was a squabble between a privileged woman and her vindictive ex-husband. I don’t think there’s much prestige going on there. I’m famous, that’s all. “Prestige” is what politicians and generals have. Asquith and Haig, they’ve got prestige. I’m just famous for a bit of fiddle-faddle, same as – I don’t know – Dolores del Rio.’
‘Dolores del Rio is very good,’ Edgar said. ‘Have you seen Ramona?’ 18
‘I’m being serious.’
‘I bet she makes a great deal more money than either of them.’
‘I don’t care about money.’
‘Liar.’
Edgar was a dapper, barrel-chested man with a voice that had been compared to that of an outraged duchess. The voice, along with the clothes and the manners, had been carefully acquired and curated for he, like Skelton, was a bootstraps boy, in his case from Stepney. At thirteen, he’d been making a good living in juvenile crime. The police nabbed him, but he argued his case so coherently in court that the magistrate took a shine to him and fixed him up with an errand boy’s job at a chambers in Lincoln’s Inn. By the time he was eighteen, he was a junior clerk for a ‘local’ in Birmingham. He returned to London just after the war as a senior and became the genius loci of 8 Foxton Row, Skelton’s chambers: a calming presence smelling of new suits and pencil shavings.
He and Skelton sat on the easy chairs in chambers, one either side of the low table. Edgar was examining the morning’s Daily Sketch.
‘The resemblance to Dolores del Rio is actually quite striking.’ He held up the paper to show yet another awful picture. Skelton remembered it being taken. The photographer had poked the camera into his face and he, because it’s what you do when people poke cameras in your face, had grinned.
‘D’you think they’ve painted extra teeth in?’ Skelton asked.
‘There does seem an unnatural number of them.’
‘They’re not really that long, are they? It’s the angle.’ 19
‘Anyway, you are already reaping the rewards.’
The lads, as well as the morning tea, had brought in two hefty document boxes.
‘Six cases from Birmingham alone.’
Edgar still had good contacts with Birmingham solicitors and had tipped them off that the Dryden case would thrust his chief into the limelight.
‘Three from William Allen, two from Simons and Tinniswood, and one from somebody I’ve never heard of. They all know your star is rising. They’re eager to secure your services before you become too important and too expensive. Although, having said that …’ With a flourish, Edgar lifted a thick file from one of the document boxes, ‘I give you … The Matlock and Ripley Textile Bank versus The Imperial Bauxite Trading Company. I’ve had a word with William Allen’s managing clerk, and he did not baulk at the suggestion of a thousand guineas.’
The fee was five times Skelton’s previous best. Six months earlier, he’d got rid of his old Austin and bought a Wolseley 12-32 saloon for £425. At the time, it had felt like an unwarranted extravagance.
He untied the ribbons and turned the pages of The Matlock and Ripley Textile Bank versus The Imperial Bauxite Trading Company brief. The word ‘debentures’ seemed to crop up five or six times on every page. It made him think of false teeth. He’d never had a head for business law. The doubts began to clamour. Wouldn’t they be expecting somebody far better than him for their moneys? Was he worth that much?
‘The other big one is Rex versus Dutton,’ Edgar said.
‘Should I have heard of it?’ Skelton asked. 20
‘Mary Dutton, the Collingford Poisoner. The Daily Herald has been making a dreadful stink about it for the last week or so. Here …’
Edgar had shoved that morning’s Herald in the document box. He passed it over.
‘Defendant’s a woman in her thirties, Mary Dutton. Six children. Husband, Ted Dutton, ran a smallholding. Sheep mostly. Some chickens. Ted died, supposedly of gastroenteritis, at the end of last year. The funeral was interrupted, just before the body was interred, by two jolly policemen because allegations had been made that the man had been poisoned and thus the body must be removed for autopsy. The pathologist found substantial amounts of arsenic administered in small doses over a period, possibly of months. Police searched the house, found rat poison containing arsenic hidden in Mary Dutton’s pantry. She told the police, and various friends and neighbours have confirmed, that the husband regularly beat her and the children, and generally treated them with immeasurable cruelty. The coroner’s court found enough evidence of wilful murder to have Mary arrested and charged. So, means, motive and opportunity. Bang to rights. But the Herald’s convinced she’s innocent.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘Mostly, her photograph.’
The photograph was on the front page of the Herald.
‘She looks like Lillian Gish,’ Skelton said.
‘Doesn’t she just? Del Rio and Gish, together at last.’
‘Looking like a film star isn’t a line of defence that’s been tested in a court of law as yet, but I’ve no doubt it’d play well with a jury,’ Skelton said.21
‘Of course it would. Lillian Gish could not commit murder. Marlene Dietrich, Gloria Swanson, Anna May Wong, on the other hand, any one of them could have poisoned a husband. Louise Brooks probably keeps a jar of strychnine in her handbag just on the off chance of waking up married.’
‘Where is Collingford?’
‘A small town that can’t make up its mind whether or not it’s a part of Birmingham.’
Skelton glanced at the Herald. The headline was as big as, if not bigger than, the ones they’d given to the Dryden case. It didn’t surprise him. Arsenic was the craze of the moment. A couple of months earlier, there had been reports of a midwife in Hungary who’d been selling arsenic-tainted jams and preserves to women who needed to get rid of husbands, lovers and overbearing male relatives. Thirty-eight corpses had so far emerged in an area about the size of Wiltshire.
This was followed by tales of an American beauty who travelled from town to town marrying in haste, taking out huge life insurance policies and administering bootleg liquor mixed with arsenic.
And now, at last, the British had an arsenic killer all of their own. And she looked like Lillian Gish.
‘Where did the police get the tip-off that he’d been poisoned?’
‘The woman who laid him out spotted keratoses on his hands and feet.’
‘Remind me.’
‘A sort of blackening of the hands you get with arsenic poisoning.’ 22
‘Why hadn’t the doctor spotted this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And the laying-out woman reported it to the police?’
‘Yes, but not until the day of the funeral.’
‘Why did she wait so long?’
‘I don’t know; perhaps she was shy.’
‘So, the police stopped the funeral, sent the body away for autopsy and arrested the wife as soon as they had the results.’
Edgar nodded.
‘No other suspects?’
‘The Herald claims that Mary Dutton was subjected to a thirteen-hour interrogation without food or water.’
‘Thirteen hours?’
‘I know. Inhuman. The difficulty is that the deceased’s late father was himself a policeman.’
‘On the local force?’
‘A much-loved inspector on the local force.’
‘When did he die?’
‘Two or three years ago. She killed their favourite boss’s son, so they weren’t inclined to be gentle. The Herald has compared them to Chicago cops – third degree, bright light in the eyes, lead-lined coshes. The Mail profoundly disagrees, of course, on the grounds that our boys in blue are the bravest and most scrupulous men who’ve ever drawn breath and would never mistreat a lady. The Mail and Express both think that the Herald should be charged with contempt for publishing details likely to prejudice a pending trial, but with both of them it’s sour grapes because the Herald gleaned the dirty details before they did.’
‘How dirty are the details?’
‘Nothing Marie Stopes or Havelock Ellis would be 23interested in – except the husband once tied her to the bed and left her there all day.’
‘Why?’
‘He was afraid she’d run away. He also beat her with fists, sticks and kitchen utensils; made a pile of the children’s bedclothes, soaked them in petrol and set them on fire; and frequently threatened her with a razor and a hatchet.’
‘Love’s young dream.’
Skelton glanced at the brief, then wandered over to the window and saw Clarendon-Gow, Head of Chambers, turn into Foxton Row.
‘He’s always ever so nicely turned out, isn’t he?’ Skelton said.
Edgar joined him at the window.
‘Clarendon-Gow?’
‘Yes.’
‘He has a valet.’
‘Should I get a valet?’
‘Good ones are terribly hard to come by. I expect Mr Clarendon-Gow inherited his.’
‘Have you got a valet?’
‘I have a sponge, an electric iron and a knack for folding.’
‘You do your own ironing?’
‘If I trusted Mrs Westing with it, I’d look like a ragamuffin.’ Mrs Westing was Edgar’s landlady. He’d never married.
‘Mrs Bartram does mine. She’s not very skilled.’
‘I did wonder whether the rumpled look was how trousers were being worn these days.’
‘How many children did you say she has?’ Skelton asked.
‘The poison woman? Six.’
‘Terrorised by Dad, then Mum dragged off to prison. Was this before Christmas?’24
‘She was arrested two days after Boxing Day.’
‘Doesn’t bear thinking about. Any evidence of adultery?’
‘None suspected or alleged. The husband, by all accounts, treated the wife so abominably because he was a brute. No other reason. The Herald is making an immense hoo-ha out of the failure of the law to deal with such acts of marital brutality, demanding sweeping and immediate changes. Do you know a man called Norman Bearcroft?’
‘No. Should I?’
‘He’s the local Labour Party candidate for Birmingham East, which includes Collingford. He’s taken up the cudgels in Mary Dutton’s defence.’
‘He’s convinced she’s innocent?’
‘He’s convinced the Herald thinks she’s innocent, and he knows a lot of his constituents read the Herald, and he knows there’s a general election coming up this year and the Tory incumbent has got a very slim majority. So, he’s started a defence fund to buy poor Mary Dutton the best legal representation available. Which obviously is you, the “Latter-Day Galahad”.’
‘Don’t ever say those words.’
‘It’s going to be a landmark case. Win it and we’ll have people queuing up in Foxton Row all desperate for Mr Skelton to take their brief, and every brief they beg you to take will be marked at a thousand guineas. Silk for you by the time you’re forty. The only drawback is that the whole thing’s a complete mare’s nest.’
‘The case?’
‘Yes.’
‘A complete mare’s nest?’
‘Yes.’ 25
‘In what way?’
‘This is what will happen. Norman Bearcroft has persuaded hundreds of people to chip in sixpences and shillings to pay for the best legal representation money can buy. You’re it. You’ll do your best, of course, but there’s a formidable case to answer. Means, motive, opportunity all sewn up. And when Mary Dutton is found guilty, all those people who paid their sixpences and shillings, they’ll feel cheated. They’ll blame you. They’ll throw cabbages. All the prestige you earned on the Dryden case will go down the drain. It takes a long time to build a reputation. Terrible thing to squander it.’
‘And what if I win?’
Edgar pulled a face.
Skelton turned back to the front of the brief to read the name of the solicitor who had prepared it. ‘Critchlow and Benedict. Who are Critchlow and Benedict?’
‘No idea. I thought I knew all the Birmingham men. The address isn’t even in town. It’s in Yardley.’
‘Where’s Yardley?’
‘East Birmingham. I went there once. On a tram. There’s nothing wrong with it. Perfectly ordinary sort of place. But you wouldn’t want to be a solicitor there. Not if you had any spirit in you. People might pop in from time to time for a chat about voidable dispositions or the meaning of statutory trusts, but you’d never get near a juicy murder. The brief is absolutely useless. No indication at all of a possible line of defence.’
‘So why has Bearcroft hired him? Why not William Allen? Or even Aubrey Duncan.’ Aubrey Duncan was the top criminal solicitor in London. ‘Why Yardley?’26
‘I’ve no idea. As I said, the whole thing’s a complete mare’s nest and we should have nothing to do with it.’
Skelton filled his pipe and lit it. ‘We’re up Birmingham way next week, aren’t we?’
‘On Tuesday. The dog case.’
A wealthy Great Dane owner from Solihull was being sued by a Pekingese owner who claimed that the Great Dane had attacked and killed her Peke. She had hired Skelton to defend the dog. To make the case go away, Edgar had asked for two hundred and fifty guineas, got it and wished he’d asked for more.
‘Do you think we could find time, while we’re up there, to see Messrs Critchlow and Benedict?’
‘If you’re sure it’s not a waste of time.’
‘Just to look into it.’
‘Oh dear,’ Edgar said.
‘What?’
‘The look on your face.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve started caring again. You know what I said about caring.’
CHAPTER THREE
On Saturday mornings Mila, Skelton’s wife, taught an archery class at the Lambourn Ladies’ Academy. It was not rewarding work.
Before she had started, she had seen in her mind’s eye the girls of the academy, under her tutelage, carrying forward the values of the Sauromatians, daughters of the Amazons, observing their ancient customs, taking up arms and hunting on horseback with menfolk. According to Herodotus, no Sauromatian woman was allowed to marry until she had killed a man in battle.
The daughters of Berkshire gentry were not natural warriors. That morning one of the girls had told her she wouldn’t be coming any more because her mother feared that archery would give her an unattractive squint, so she’d switched to lawn tennis. Another four had been lost to folk dancing.28
Physical exercise, she realised, was regarded by most young gentlewomen, and all their teachers, as having purely cosmetic benefits: gymnastics for grace, PE for the wasp waist, lacrosse for vitality and archery for posture. When Mila tried to point out that the bow and arrow were instruments of death, the girls – rather than facing the target with steely intent knowing that the gold bullseye could one day be the heart of an enemy – giggled.
After the lesson that morning, Mila had been to see Miss Bright, who took charge of Saturday morning activities, and suggested she should teach the girls a little fencing, because there is nothing like lunging and parrying to make the blood run hot. Miss Bright reacted as if she’d been told an unsuitable joke. She reminded Mila that fighting was not ladylike.
Mila replied that the last thing anybody should want twentieth-century women to be ‘like’ is ‘ladies’.
‘It is our duty to teach them to fight,’ she said. ‘I see these girls coming back from a hockey match unmuddied, unbloodied and unbruised, and I despair. When I was their age, the stretcher was never off the field. In Russia, women work and fight alongside the men, comrades together. They load the cannons and pilot the aeroplanes. They are stevedores and stokers. They drive the oxen in the fields and, when there are no oxen, they pull the ploughs themselves.’
Under normal circumstances, at the first mention of Russia, Miss Bright would have telephoned the police, but the girls, she knew, adored Mrs Skelton, not because she was an unpleasantly aggressive Bolshevist but because she was slim and blonde, and had skin like the woman in the Pears Soap advert, and didn’t talk to them as if they were 29nine. Some of them had worrying crushes on her. If she were to be taken away from them, Miss Bright feared there would be complaints, possibly even from parents. So, she did not telephone the police. All the same, feeling a defence of British decency was called for, she tried to make a point about the Russian famine but couldn’t remember the details and eventually lost confidence that the famine had in fact been in Russia at all.
Mila walked home in anger, seething with class hatred and cursing the Berkshire bourgeoisie. Why did they have to live in Berkshire? She’d been happy in their little flat in Manchester. She’d been happy in their little house in Clapham. But of course, she had no one to blame but herself. When the children were tiny, she’d read an article in the Lancet about the effects of soot, smog and fog on little lungs. The day after, she’d had lunch with a friend who was up in town from Lambourn. The friend said all the usual things that people living in the countryside say to people living in town.
‘From Lambourn, I can actually be in the West End quicker than I could when I lived in Chelsea.’
And, ‘I always said I had to live in London for the theatres and restaurants, but I never went. Silly, isn’t it?’
And, ‘You could not believe, when you get off the train at Lambourn station the feeling of peace that positively overwhelms you. You realise that all the time you were in London, your shoulders were up by your ears with the tension.’
And, ‘We have two acres at the back. The children spend all day out there, building dens and, you know, having a proper childhood.’
Not long after Mila and Arthur had given in and moved 30to Lambourn, the friend had gone back to London. Said she couldn’t stand it any more.
It was a crisp January day and the air was diamond clear. From the hill, Mila looked back at the academy and saw Miss Bright giving some instruction to the caretaker at the school gates – a range of just over 200 yards. The archers at Agincourt were reckoned to be effective at 240. A sudden gust of wind from the west introduced a note of uncertainty, but she would need only a second of stillness. As the only archer in the county who could make such a shot, she would, of course, be arrested immediately, but, then again, her husband was the best barrister in the country. The News of the World had said so just the previous Sunday. Her Galahad would, with one bound, set her free.
Miss Bright finished her business with the caretaker and moved into the quad, behind the wall. Mila consoled herself with the knowledge that there would be other opportunities. At 200 yards, she wondered, would she hear the thunk of the arrow hitting its fleshy target?
Dorothy, who looked after the children, had taken Lawrence off to his piano class and Elizabeth to her ballet. Mrs Bartram, in the kitchen preparing lunch, offered a cup of tea, but Mila poured herself a glass of barley water from the jug in the pantry and took it through to the conservatory.
When Skelton came in from his Saturday morning walk, she was sitting at the rattan table, reading the Daily Mail. She had always read at least two newspapers a day. Since the Dryden case, she’d started taking several, the better to tease her husband with his new-found celebrity.
Skelton kissed the top of her head.
‘Does Mrs Bartram know you’re here?’ she asked.31
‘She said lunch would be about half an hour.’
Calling dinner ‘lunch’ still made him feel a swank.
He sniffed.
‘Is there a smell?’
‘You always think there’s a smell.’
‘I think there might be a smell. There’s been a lot of rain.’
‘Yesterday there was a light drizzle.’
‘Have you checked the Maw of Hell?’
‘There isn’t a smell.’
Their house – which had been called The Beeches until Skelton and Mila replaced the sign with one that said ‘24’ – was not connected to a main sewer. The Maw of Hell was a manhole cover that gave access to an underground, brick-lined chamber that, in theory, ‘digested’ waste and allowed the remaining cleanish water to soak away and fertilise the meadows down the hill. Once, after a heavy rainstorm, the tank had overflowed. The smell had been strong.
Wondering if the problem could easily be solved, Skelton had made the mistake of lifting the manhole cover. Some freak of hydraulics had caused it to spurt and he’d had a persecution mania about the thing ever since.
There were in fact three Maws of Hell next to each other, at the bottom of the garden, behind the sheds and the trelliswork that hid the compost heaps. All seemed secure. There was no leakage and no smell other than the usual rot and creosote.
Reassured, he returned to Mila.
‘Is there a smell?’ she said without looking up from the Daily Mail.
‘No.’
‘I told you so. The Mail thinks they’ll turn us into Russia.’ 32
‘Who?’
‘The flappers.’
Skelton considered the words carefully. He worried that sometimes Mila was deliberately obtuse like this simply to see how long it took him to catch up. She liked fast things: hares, sprints, weirs. One day his brain wouldn’t come up to her exacting standards and she’d laugh over her shoulder as she ran off with Albert Einstein.
He puzzled it through like a crossword clue. The Mail thinks the flappers will turn us into Russia.
‘Oh, the general election,’ he said, and she smiled. He’d passed the test.
In 1918 women had won the vote, but only those over the age of thirty. The move seemed to have done the Conservative Party no harm at all, and their triumph – or partial triumph – at three subsequent general elections gave them the confidence to extend the franchise to everybody over the age of twenty-one who wasn’t in prison or a lunatic asylum, adding five million young women – ‘flappers’ – to the electoral roll. This, according to Winston Churchill, Lord Birkenhead, the Daily Mail and practically every fuddled colonel, drunk major and senile brigadier in the Home Counties, was an outrage to human decency. The ‘flappers’, with their short skirts, bobbed hair and sexual degeneracy, would bring the country to moral and economic collapse and ‘usher in the end of civilisation as we know it’.
‘If only I shared their optimism,’ Mila said. ‘If only one – just one – of the girls at the academy would show a scrap of interest in ushering in the end of civilisation as we know it, I would be happy. But from what I can see, they’ll all vote Conservative 33like their mothers, their headmistresses, their vicars and their sweethearts from the tennis club with their little green sports cars and protruding teeth.’
‘Ronnie Bunn.’
Mila laughed. Ronnie Bunn was a would-be artist they’d known in Manchester who had a fascinating collection of teeth and an aristocratic squeak.
‘He wanted to paint you in the nude,’ Skelton said.
‘He wanted to paint everybody in the nude.’
Skelton and Mila had met in Manchester, in a room filled with maimed men. This was at the hospital on Whitworth Street where Mila, working with the Almeric Paget Massage Corps, brought war-damaged soldiers back to some semblance of life with her regime of medical exercises.
Skelton, just graduated from Cambridge and serving his pupillage at chambers on St John Street, had volunteered at the hospital, helping the soldiers fill in the endless forms required to ensure their families would be able to make ends meet while they were convalescing and ensuring they’d have a pension when they were invalided out. This had led to a misunderstanding. Mila, having seen him do paperwork with the men, got the wrong end of the stick, assumed he was some official from the War Office and had subjected him to a stern lecture about the adverse effects of petty bureaucracy on the well-being of wounded soldiers. A week later, when she learnt the truth – that Skelton was helping the patients overcome the petty bureaucracy – she sought him out and apologised for haranguing him. Then she harangued him again, this time about the second-rate vegetables her patients were supposed to eat. She’d never lost her passionate advocacy of high-quality vegetables.34
The following week, by way of further apology, she offered to take him to see an awful play at the Palace Theatre, her treat. During the interval she criticised the Labour Party’s policy on conscription while he ate chocolate creams.
They took bus rides out to Holcombe Moor and up Worsley Woods. Eventually they held hands and went in for a bit of kissing. Neither of them was very good at that sort of thing but they’d always muddled through, well enough to have two children, anyway.
‘Are there any biscuits?’ Skelton said.
‘No.’ Mila disapproved of biscuits.
Skelton remembered he had a bag of toffees in his waistcoat pocket. He’d show her what he thought of her biscuit prejudice. Ostentatiously, he took the bag from his pocket, peeled a toffee from the paper and popped it in his mouth. Mila smiled at his mock defiance and picked up the Herald.
‘This is an obscenity. Why is she accused of murder?’
Skelton looked over and saw she was reading about the Mary Dutton case.
‘Oh, that. They’ve offered me the brief.’
‘Have you taken it?’
‘Edgar’s advising against it.’
‘You must take it. She killed him in self-defence and in defence of her children. It cannot possibly be described as murder.’
‘If she’d had the good sense to bludgeon him with an axe or stab him with a carving knife in the heat of the moment before she could have a second thought, that could indeed have mitigated the charge from murder to manslaughter. 35But, unfortunately, the poison was administered in small doses over a period of weeks or possibly months.’
‘He tied her up when he went out.’
‘That’s what she says.’
‘Who was the other woman?’
‘I don’t think there’s any suggestion that he had another woman.’
‘No. The other woman who was tied up and the judge said the husband had the right to do so.’
‘You’ll have to be more specific.’
‘It’s a case from a few years ago. You told me about it when we took the children to the zoo.’
‘Oh, that one.’
It was a celebrated case. Skelton mugged it up before every exam. Rex versus Jackson, 1891. The defendant, Edmund Jackson, cruelly mistreated his wife, Emily, so she left him. In response, he forcibly abducted and imprisoned her – the defence preferred ‘confined her’ – in the home. His contention was that ‘if a wife refuses to live with her husband, he has a right by law to take possession of her by force and keep her confined till she consents to do so in order to prevent her from permanently withdrawing her society from him’. The court agreed and found him not guilty of cruelty.
‘That has no bearing on Mary Dutton’s case,’ Skelton said. ‘Apart from anything else, it was nearly forty years ago, and the judgement was overturned on appeal.’
‘And things have changed since then?’
‘I should hope so.’
‘So, if Mary Dutton had spoken to the police about her husband’s cruelty, they would have stepped in, arrested him and she would have been granted a divorce?’36
‘Well, obviously not, but …’
‘So, there is the true nature of your task, Sir Galahad. Shout it from the rooftops, this woman was treated abominably by her husband and had no recourse to either criminal or civil law.’
‘The difficulty is, you see, that, in court, it would be more diplomatic to soft pedal on the cruelty. Going on about the husband’s cruelty would be playing into the hands of the prosecution: emphasising that she had a powerful motive for killing him.’
‘But she did have a powerful motive for killing him.’
‘Exactly, so the jury will find the prosecution’s evidence all the more compelling, find her guilty and she will hang.’
‘They wouldn’t dare hang her.’
‘Oh, I think they would.’
‘But she is not the criminal.’
‘If the jury finds her guilty, I’m afraid she is.’
‘Then the true criminal is the law itself.’
‘One could say that about so many things.’
‘If the law leaves a woman no escape from a cruel husband other than murder, then the law itself is the murderer.’
‘I’d like to see you argue that in the House of Lords.’
‘Women are not allowed in the House of Lords.’
‘What you’re saying is that a wife, if treated cruelly by her husband, should have the legal right to murder him and get off scot-free.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You can’t actually mean that.’
Mila gave him a sly smile.
‘Try me.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Outside the Grand Hotel, Birmingham, there was an enormous burgundy Daimler with a liveried chauffeur standing to attention by the open passenger door.
Edgar, when he had ordered a car to take them to the solicitor’s offices in Yardley, had anticipated something a little more modest. He was about to apologise when he noticed that his chief’s eyes had lit up.
‘Is this for us?’ Skelton said.
‘I’m afraid so.’
In an accent thick enough to stop bullets, the chauffeur said, ‘Mr Skelton and Mr Hobbes?’ Skelton gave him a smile and extended a hand. The chauffeur looked at it suspiciously. People on the whole did not shake hands with their chauffeurs. Then he remembered reading in the paper that Skelton was from Leeds. Northerners were different.38
‘And you are?’ Skelton asked.
‘Keeling, sir.’
Skelton took a trip around the car, admiring the magnificent shine, the enormous headlights and the impressive suspension.
‘What is it, a Rolls Royce?’ he asked.
‘It’s a Daimler Double-Six 30 Brougham, sir.’
‘I bet the King hasn’t got a car as posh as this.’
‘Actually, the King’s car’s the exact same model, sir.’
‘Is it really?’
‘The Queen’s got one too.’
‘One each. That must be nice for them if she wants to go shopping and his team’s playing at home. Does it go fast?’
‘No sir.’
‘Could I have a go at driving it?’
‘I’m afraid you’d have to ask Mr Patterson about that, sir.’
‘It’s his car, is it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Is he on the telephone?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Maybe we could ring him up from somewhere if we get the chance later on and I could ask him. Do you want a go at driving it, Edgar?’
‘I don’t think so, no.’
Skelton got in the back and stretched his legs. They went all the way. He could, he reckoned, have garaged his old Austin on the back seat.
‘You don’t think people will think I’m a terrible swank, driving around in a thing like this, do you?’
‘Yes,’ Edgar said.39
‘You have to admire the workmanship, though. Look how they match the grain on that walnut.’
Keeling started the engine.
‘Feel that?’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. No vibration. The quiet purr of precision engineering. Are you all right?’
Edgar was perched on the edge of the seat, looking anxious.
‘It’s just that I do tend to get a little bilious sometimes in motor cars. I was hoping for something with an open top. I’m all right if there’s an open top but, as it is, we may have to stop suddenly.’
‘Well, give us as much warning as you can. I can’t see there’d be much chance of getting a smell out of this leather.’
‘Could we open the windows, do you think?’
The drive up Colmore Row to the law courts took no more than five minutes. Edgar came to no harm; he was a little wobbly but he bore it manfully.
The dog case did not go well. The prosecution produced no less than four witnesses who swore they’d seen the Great Dane make an unprovoked attack on the Peke, together with evidence that the dog had once eaten part of a window cleaner’s leg. All Skelton had was two witnesses, a housemaid and a gentleman friend, who attested to the dog’s good character.
The dog had not been brought to court, but the owner had brought photographs that, she hoped, gave evidence of its placid nature.
‘He’s playing with his toy rabbit,’ she’d said. ‘Can you see? The rabbit is barely chewed. You see how gentle he is. And here he is with my nephew.’ The nephew looked terrified.40
Skelton lost the case and the Great Dane owner was fined £20 plus costs. She could afford it.
The Daimler was waiting outside the law courts. Keeling told them that the journey to Yardley would take no more than twenty minutes or half an hour. Edgar looked queasily at the car.
‘I wonder if there’s a tram?’ he said. ‘I’m all right with a tram. You get a through-draught of air and a jaunty rattle.’
Skelton said he had heard of a man who cured himself of car sickness by sitting with his head out of the window.
‘I thought you weren’t supposed to do that.’
‘That’s trains. In cars it’s perfectly acceptable behaviour.’
So, all the way from the law courts to the Critchlow and Benedict offices in Yardley, Edgar kept his head poked out of the window. Skelton was right. The fresh breeze with only a hint of smog blowing in his face was just the job.
CHAPTER FIVE
They found the Critchlow and Benedict sign on an anonymous door between a shoe shop and a grocers. Edgar rang the doorbell. There was no answer. He rang again.
‘Waste of time,’ Edgar said. He turned to find Skelton had already moved on and was looking in the window of the grocers shop next door. After a moment, he went into the shop. Edgar followed.
A woman in a wrap-around pinny was rearranging tins of peas on a shelf behind the counter.
She straightened her tidied her hair when she saw Skelton. She didn’t often get gentlemen in nice overcoats and suits coming into the shop.
