Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

Eliot decided against returning. The trial was bear-baiting a donkey, fox-hunting a lap-dog. Thick crowds crammed round the brand new granite court, Justice without her blindfold atop its copper dome, stones from Dickens' Newgate prison in its foundations. The police had been on duty since seven in the morning. There had been five thousand applications to the Sheriff for seats.

Eliot pushed into the _Magpie and Stump_ public house opposite. The landlord would remember him as a student at St Bartholomew's up the road. A pink-faced young man with a fringe of ginger beard, in shiny blue suit and bowler, asked cheerfully, 'Dr Beckett, isn't it? A chum on the _Mail_ pointed you out. I'm at the _Bugle. _I hear that you're acquainted with Crippen?'

'Slightly. I had dinner at his house.'

'At Hilldrop Crescent?' The reporter looked as though Eliot had supped with the Devil in Hell. 'Go on! What was it like?'

'I refuse to discuss my personal affairs.'

'The public would like to know.'

'Then the public is a prying nuisance, and deserves disappointment.'

'Any views on the trial?' he persisted.

'Yes, I have,' Eliot said forcefully. 'It should be held in the Drury Lane Theatre. It's perfectly disgusting, men and women who wear the airs of leaders in our society, hastening to gloat over another poor human in his agony. I'm equally repulsed by the mass of ordinary British people, who assume this man guilty as unthinkingly as that the sun will rise and the public houses open every morning. They would like him hanged from Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, on a Saturday afternoon so they could take a picnic and enjoy it.'

'That's coming a bit strong, doctor,' the reporter complained amiably. 'From one who stood as a Labour candidate.'

'Truth is a distant relative of politics and newspapers, I fear. Every man Jack of you on Fleet Street knows your proud columns about this trial 'showing British justice at its best' are humbug, for which the public has an insatiable appetite. Look how they've made a hero of plodding Inspector Dew, who let the pair slip from under his nose and gain a fortnight's lead on him, then spent three days searching at Hilldrop Crescent before showing enough intelligence to dig up the loose bricks of the cellar floor. Look at the ridiculously melodramatic Captain Kendall, with his amazing discovery that a boy with wide hips and large breasts might be a girl. By the wits of their pursuers, Dr Crippen and Miss Le Neve deserve to be living peacefully in California by now. Yet the fuddled British public sees the voyage to Father Point as the most spectacular stroke of revenge since Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane.'

'What wood was that, doctor?'

'Birnam. No "h".'

The reporter nodded, busy with his notebook. 'But wouldn't you agree with everyone doctor, the Crippen case has shown how the law has new weapons?'

'Wireless simply caught the imagination of the feckless public like a new show at the fairground.'

'Against Marconi, are you, doctor?' asked the reporter encouragingly.

'I'm against no one except-if I may be frank-your editors and proprietors, who hope to see fortunes and titles sprout from fields so assiduously spread with manure.'

'How about a photo?' He indicated a cloth-capped youth beside him with a glass of gin-and-water and a camera.

'As you like,' Eliot agreed off-handedly.

Eliot learned in the _Magpie and Stump_ a principle which twenty years later assisted him to worldly success-never address the most insignificant representative of the press without care, caution and cunning. He sent Laura the parlourmaid for a copy of the _Bugle_ before breakfast. She returned with eyes sparkling excitedly. 'You're all over the front page, sir, photograph and everything.'

Eliot stood before the freshly-lit fire in the dining-room. CRIPPEN'S FRIEND, said the headline. 'THE STUPID BRITISH PUBLIC,' he was quoted below.

_The most amazing statement of Crippen Week was made outside the Old Bailey by Dr Eliot Beckett, self-appointed 'People's Doctor' of Holloway,_ it began.

Eliot ran his eye through the column. From his censure of Inspector Dew, he might have attacked Wellington the morning after Waterloo. From his acquaintance with Crippen, he might have played surgical assistant disembowelling Belle and second gravedigger in the cellar.

_Dr Beckett, who pretends to be the people's friend, gives free treatment in a greengrocer's shop round the corner from Hilldrop Crescent,_ Eliot read. _'Very strange treatment! Mouldy bread!! The _Bugle_ asked the King's physician, Dr Bernard Dawson of the London Hospital, if mouldy bread ever did anyone any good. 'None whatever,' said the King's doctor. 'It seems a cranky notion to me.'

Perhaps Dr Beckett is obliging the neighbours, by getting rid of their old loaves?

Dr Beckett stood for Parliament in the election as Labour candidate for Holloway-at which he dismally failed-while despising those he urged to vote for him. Perhaps he wants a seat in Parliament at all costs? The doctor is moons away from the working man he claims to represent. He does not lack money. He enjoys with a wealthy American lady the same relationship our readers will have read about elsewhere in Holloway._

Eliot handed the paper silently to Nancy, who came downstairs in her nurse's uniform. She read it calmly. 'Is it libellous?'

'Only infuriating, I'm afraid. Robert Knox had to tolerate the same sort of thing at Edinburgh in the 1820s. He taught anatomy, and after the Burke and Hare murders the newspapers whipped up feeling against him. He was as upright as I am, and traded with body-snatchers only for the sake of his students, just like any other surgeon.'

'You're taking it very calmly.'

'How else can I? If I wrote complaining, they'd make me look a bigger fool than ever.'

'How do they find all this about us?'

'The patients. Perhaps our servants. In Holloway, you can learn a lot about a man for sixpence.'

Laura threw open the door without knocking. 'Oh sir-' She looked frightened. 'The baker's boy's just said that something terrible's happening down at the surgery, sir. They're breaking the windows, sir.'

Eliot jumped up. He told Nancy to stay in the house, seized his hat and muffler, and strode in the bright autumn morning to the corner of Brecknock Road. He stopped. A crowd of men and women were shouting and gesticulating in the street outside the surgery. Two policemen separated them from the smashed-in shopfront, urging everyone to move along. Heads stuck from windows. The pavements were choked with those who preferred to be spectators rather than perpetrators, and some fifty excited children.

Eliot strode on angrily. The mob outside were the same who had sat inside, the slaughtermen, market porters and their families. They had come from the pubs, Eliot knew, and in a mood of mindless bellicosity. He wondered how many were literate enough to spell out the front page of _the Bugle. _He supposed its story had run round the neighbourhood, gaining strength as it passed from mouth to mouth, like the germs men were continually breathing over each other.

'I'm Dr Beckett.' A third policeman was regarding the affray from the corner. 'That's my premises they're damaging.' The policeman held out an arm. 'Shouldn't go down there, if I were you, sir.'

'I'm not frightened of people who attack nothing more dangerous than plate-glass.'

A grey-haired woman in a shawl pointed at Eliot from the edge of the crowd. 'There 'e is! That's the doctor. That's 'im. Friend o' Crippen.'

Eliot found himself suddenly the centre of a jeering, jostling circle. 'Mouldy bread!' they shouted at him. 'Murderer!' screamed another woman. 'Crippen! Crippen!' yelled the rest. It was the fashionable malediction. Eliot remembered Belle on the stage at the Metropolitan.