Richard Gordon: A QUESTION OF GUILT

'None 'o that,' the policeman directed, adding urgently, 'Run along, sir, while the going's good.'

'I refuse to be intimidated by a mob.'

'Go on, sir! Crippen's a strong word.'

Eliot felt a flick against his cheek. He raised his fingertips. Someone had spat at him. 'Contempt is impossible from the contemptible,' he snapped. He turned and strode away, pursued by boos.

He had sat almost quarter of an hour glaring into the fire, legs stretched, arms folded, unspeaking, Nancy on the arm of his chair.

'I'm never going back to the surgery,' he announced.

She said in her practical way, 'Then you'd better get the window boarded up, or you'll have the place looted.'

'They can help themselves to as much mouldy bread as they please.' He added despondently, 'It doesn't work, anyway. The Bugle was right.'

There was a timid tap, Laura reappeared, looking more frightened than ever. A policeman was at the door. Eliot found an inspector, in cape and shako. He warned gravely that the inflamed people of Holloway would find Eliot's address, fill the street outside, break his own windows. The inspector advised him to lie low somewhere. There was the safety of the American lady to consider. He's been reading the Bugle too, Eliot thought.

'Lie low? For how long?' Eliot asked.

'Just till they've hanged Crippen,' the inspector assured him blandly.

Eliot returned to the dining room. 'We're moving this morning.'

'Where to?'

'The Savoy.'

'But we can't!' Nancy objected.

'Why not?'

'We're not married,' she pointed out.

'Oh, very well! We'll get married. We'll use a registry office. They're quite fashionable.'

She put her arms around him. 'Oh, Eliot! You are so romantic.'

He smiled. 'I suppose your father would have loved a show in New York?'

'He's reconciled that his daughter's an oddity. He bears me no rancour. I'm just a business bid which failed, I guess.' She kissed him. 'You're really as romantic as Romeo, aren't you, dearest? But you always want to seem absolutely different from everyone else.'

'From now on, I'm going to be absolutely the same as everyone else. But I'm going to be better at it.'

Eliot took a Savoy suite with two bedrooms. Guests however wealthy were not permitted by the management to sleep there with ladies other than their wives, or who allowed themselves to be passed as such. At 2.15 the following afternoon, the Old Bailey jury retired. Twenty-seven minutes later, they returned. Barely a minute afterwards, everyone stood except the judge. His elderly clerk, in his best morning coat, laid on his Lordship's wig a square of black silk. The judge reminded the prisoner that he had cruelly poisoned his wife, concealed his crime, mutilated her body, disposed piecemeal of her remains, possessed himself of her property and fled from justice. On the ghastly and wicked nature of the crime, the judge would not dwell. He assured its convicted perpetrator that he had no hope of escaping its consequences and recommended making peace with Almighty God.

'I have now to pass upon you the sentence of the Court,' continued Lord Alverstone. 'Which is that you be taken from hence to a lawful prison,' he spelt out with the law's ghoulish relish, 'from thence to a place of execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead, and that your body be buried in the precincts of the prison where you shall have last been confined after your conviction.' Implying that his judicial exhortation extended further, he ended his grisly catalogue, 'And may the Lord have mercy on your soul.'

_The prisoner was removed in the charge of the warders,_ Eliot read in his _Times_ on Monday morning. Crippen's amen, he thought.

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.