Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

'He'll be dreadfully shocked we're not married.'

'Less than your father would. In ducal circles, fornication is thought an occupation as healthily natural as hunting. Only the middle class disapprove. I suppose because of their everlasting suspicion of paying full price for slightly shop-soiled goods.'

Major Beckett was waiting on the broad marble chessboard of the Imperial Club's hall floor. Eliot found his hand seized with startling enthusiasm. The major usually greeted his son far more casually than his friends.

'You know him. You've met him,' the major exclaimed. 'By jove! Living just round the corner from Hilldrop Crescent. What's he like? A fish-eyed monster, as the servants say? A smooth-tongued Bluebeard?' He stopped two clubmen. 'May I introduce my son, Dr Eliot Beckett? He is a neighbour of the Crippens, on intimate terms with Belle Elmore and Ethel Le Neve.'

The pair instantly afforded Eliot an interest never given the son of a duke's man of business.

'It's so shockingly unfair,' Eliot repeated as they sat down to lunch. 'Crippen and Miss Le Neve have only this morning been faced with, and had the right to reply to, the charges which have already entered our folk-lore.'

'Yes, I saw they were due in the police court,' said the major absently, ordering the club's famous hors-d'oeuvre, which included relishes from India, China, Malay and Borneo.

At quarter-to-eleven, Ethel and Crippen had shared the well-shone wooden bench within the unassuming black cast-iron railings of the Bow Street dock. He appeared from the cells below first, politely standing aside for her, whispering something. He was in frock coat with wide lapels of grey silk, a high starched collar and striped shirt with a bright print tie. She wore a navy coat and skirt and a large blue hat with a motoring veil, which she raised to face Sir Albert de Rutzen, the magistrate. She kept twisting her black gloves.

Crippen was charged with murder, Ethel with being an accessory after the fact. The booing crowd still filled the street outside. A man from Madame Tussaud's waxworks took their photograph with a camera hidden in his bowler. In court was Sir William Gilbert, librettist of _Trial By Jury._

'Meanwhile, the inquest on Belle Elmore stands adjourned in the Holloway Central Library,' Eliot continued. 'With PC Gooch lugubriously telling Coroner Shroeder of five hours' hard digging in the cellar, as though it was his potato bed. The inquest will certainly return a verdict of wilful murder against Crippen. That's enough to commit him for trial at the Old Bailey, if the Bow Street magistrate hasn't obliged already. For a man to be effectively twice on trial for his life, in the same London postal district simultaneously, is something overlooked in Magna Carta.'

'Come, Eliot,' his father said impatiently. 'It's all open and shut, as if Inspector Dew had burst upon the wretch with the bloodstained chopper in his hand.'

'May I disagree, sir? Why, some tramp may have intruded into the house while Crippen was out at work.'

'Cutting up a man's wife is a procedure demanding more forethought than stealing his gold watch.'

'I cannot believe that one as mild, agreeable and loving as Crippen could live six months with Ethel Le Neve while the wife he had killed-or about half of her-was a foot under his boots every time he went to replenish the kitchen fire,' Eliot said firmly. 'And I think I know as much of the human mind as anyone. Crippen's only peculiarity was a taste for younger women-Belle 13 years his junior, Ethel 24. That's a failing he shares with a few men in this room, I daresay. I'm sorry for Crippen, I'm determined to help him as best I can.'

'You'll make yourself dreadfully unpopular.'

'Among whom? Not the people who matter to me, the working men, the labourers, the poor.'

'Listen to some advice which has stuck in my mind. 'Remember, never to make yourself the busybody of the lower classes, for they are cowardly, selfish and ungrateful. The least trifle will intimidate them, and him whom they have exalted one moment as their demagogue, the next they will not scruple to exalt upon the gallows'.'

Eliot smiled. 'Who said that? It's shrewd enough for either Charles I or Cromwell.'

'A sailor called Parker, just before he was hanged after the Nore mutiny of 1797.'

'As innocence is useless without a good lawyer,' Eliot resumed, 'I'm trying to get Marshall Hall for Crippen. I expect he'll take the brief cheap. The advertisement's worth a thousand times as much.'

'No. Get F E Smith.'

'Who's he?'

'The cleverest man in the Kingdom,' his father told him. Eliot shrugged. 'Did you see about me in the _Daily Mail?'_

'I do not read the yellow press.'

'It gave me quite a reputation as a medical missionary. Where one's most needed. Here in London.'

'How much longer are you going to throw your talents at the poor? You're like some _nouveau riche_ speculator courting popularity by tossing shillings to his tenants,' his father reprimanded him. He continued more pleadingly, 'Settle down. Make yourself a proper living. The Duke will still help you, I'm sure of that. His concern for myself has increased, as the father of a son with such peculiarities.'

'As a matter of fact sir, I am thinking of chucking the free surgery,' Eliot confessed. 'The trade unions have stopped supporting me. I suppose they feel their money is buying glory for myself, rather than their officials. So has the Church. It finds that relieving humanity of its pains in the next world is less expensive than in this one. Perhaps I'll go back to Switzerland and open my own sanatorium? Though that's like running a luxurious hotel, in which closest attention to the welfare of your guests cannot prevent your regularly losing a good many customers for ever.'

'That would be the end of your political ambitions.' His father sounded hopeful.

'I did badly in the last election, I might do worse in the next. What if I became a Labour MP? I'd have to be as respectable as a family solicitor. Look at our dashing, brilliant Victor Grayson. In the House of Commons at my own age, too independent a spirit for the burnt-out firebrands running the Labour Party. He's taken to the bottle in frustration. I'm chucking politics into the bargain. Medicine is far too important a human activity to be complicated by idealism. This club claret is excellent, sir.'

His father asked slyly, 'May I suppose there is a woman behind this welcome change of heart?'

'Yes. I'm living out of wedlock with an American lady.'

'Well, it's among a young man's amusements, _faire la bкte а deux dos._ Is she respectable?'

'Entirely.'

'No money, I suppose?'

'Oh, yes. About five million dollars.'

The colonel dropped his knife and fork. 'Good God, Eliot. And I was beginning to think you a bit of a fool.'

'How's mother?'

'She has discovered a new sort of climbing rose.'

'So he filleted her?' suggested Eliot.

Dr Bernard Spilsbury nodded. He was tall, straight-backed, handsome, his thick dark hair brilliantined, a red carnation in the lapel of his grey suit. Eliot thought him solemn, aloof and self-opinionated. He thought Eliot cynical and flippant. Both were young doctors of exceptional intelligence with energy as limitless as their ambition.

'If the remains are Belle Elmore's,' Eliot said.

'Oh, I'm sure of that.' Spilsbury was always precise, brief and confident. Eliot had a lingering feeling that he treated his acquaintances as interesting subjects on which he was performing the post-mortem.

It was mid-September. The trial at the Old Bailey was fixed for the eighteenth of the following month. Spilsbury unlocked a cupboard on the wall of his small laboratory at St Mary's Hospital, near Paddington Station. It contained five large glass jars, covered like homemade pickles by glazed white paper tied with tape. Spilsbury's finger indicated the blue-edged labels which might have read 'Onions' or 'Tomato Chutney'.