Richard Dehan - The Dop Doctor

"You see, sir, this Case has been fully considered by the authorities, and it has an ugly look; and it has therefore been decided to charge you with causing the death of the woman Bough by an illegal act, performed here, in your consulting-room, on the twentieth instant, when she visited you …"

"For the first time," put in Saxham quietly.

"That may be or may not be," said the Superintendent. "You were often at her husband's place of business, you know, and may have seen her or not seen her."

"As she used to be in Bough's shop, it is possible that a great many of the man's customers besides myself did see her," Saxham went on, eating his breakfast.

"One of my men out there in the hall – I've noticed you looking towards the door – " began the Superintendent.

"Wondering what the shuffling and breathing at the keyhole meant?" said Saxham quietly. "Thank you for explaining."

"One of my men will fetch a cab when you have finished breakfast, and then, sir," said the Superintendent, "I am afraid I must trouble you to come with me to Paddington Police Station."

"Very well," said Saxham, frowning, "unless you object to using my brougham, which will be at the door" – he looked at his silver table-clock, a present from a grateful patient – "in ten minutes' time."

"I don't at all mind that, sir," agreed the obliging Superintendent; "and the men can follow in the cab. Any objection?"

Saxham had winced and flushed scarlet to the hair.

"For God's sake, don't make a procession of it! Let things be kept as quiet as possible for the sake of my – family – and – my friends." He thought with agony of Mildred. They were to be married in July, unless —

The Superintendent coughed behind his glove. "The question of Bail will rest with the magistrate, of course," he said. "But I should expect that it would be admitted, upon responsible persons entering into the customary recognisances."

Saxham rose. He had drunk the coffee, but he could not eat. "Like all the rest of them, in spite of his show of coolness," thought the Superintendent.

"I will ask you for time to telephone to some friends who will, I have no doubt, be willing to give the required undertaking, and arrange for a colleague to visit my patients. You will take a glass of wine while I step into the next room? The telephone is there, on the writing-table."

"And a loaded revolver in the drawer underneath, and poisons of all kinds handy on the shelves of a neat little cabinet," thought the Superintendent. But he said: "With pleasure, sir, only I must trouble you to put up with my company."

A tingling thrill of revulsion ran through Saxham. He set his teeth, and conquered the furious, momentary impulse to knock down this big, burly, smooth-spoken blue-uniformed official.

"Ah, very well. The usual procedure in cases of this kind. Please come this way. But take a glass of wine first. There are glasses on the sideboard there, and claret and port in those decanters."

"To your very good health, Dr. Saxham, sir, and a speedy and favourable ending to – the present – difficulty." The Superintendent emptied a bumper neatly, and with discreet relish, and followed Saxham into the consulting-room, and once more, at the sound of the measured footfall padding behind him over the thick carpet, the suspect's blood surged madly to his temples, and his hands clenched until the nails drove deep into the palms. For from that moment began the long, slow torture of watching and following, and dogging by the suspicious, vigilant, observant Man In Blue.

A Treasury Prosecution succeeded the Police-Court Inquiry, and the accused was formally arrested upon the criminal charge, and committed to Holloway pending the Trial. The Trial took place before Mr. Justice Bodmin in the following July, occupying five days of oppressive heat in the thrashing out of that vexed question, the guilt or innocence of Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S. who for airless, stifling years of weeks had eaten and drunk and slept and waked in the Valley of the Shadow of Penal Servitude. Who was conveyed from the dock to the cell and from the cell to the dock by warders and policemen, rumbling through back streets and unfrequented ways in a shiny prison-van. Who came at last to look upon the Owen Saxham of this hideous prison nightmare, the man of whom the Counsel for the Crown reared up, day by day, a monstrously-distorted figure, as quite a different person from the other innocent man whom the defending advocate described in flowery, pathetic sentences as a martyr and the victim of an unheard-of combination of adverse circumstances.

Things went badly. The case against the prisoner looked extremely black. That monstrous figure of Owen Saxham, based upon an ingenious hypothesis of guilt, and plastered over with a marvellous mixture of truths and falsities, facts and conjectures, grew uglier and more sinister every day.

The principal witness, the bereaved husband of the hapless victim, dressed in deep mourning and neatly handled by Counsel, evoked a display of handkerchiefs upon his every appearance in the witness-box, from the smart Society women seated near the Bench. Many of them had been Saxham's patients. Several had made love to him, nearly all of them had made much of him, and quite an appreciable number of them had asked him to be accommodating, and render them temporarily immune against the menace of Maternity. These had received a curt refusal, accompanied with wholesome advice, for which they revenged themselves now, in graceful womanly fashion, by being quite sure the wretched man was guilty. More than possible, was it not? they whispered behind their palm-leaf fans: it was sultry weather, and the vendors of these made little fortunes, hawking them outside. Was it not more than possible that he had been the dead woman's lover? The Crown Counsel improved on this idea. Wretched little Mrs. Bough, of infinitesimal account in Life, had become through Death a person of importance. Much was made out of the fact that she had gone to Chilworth Street some days previously to her deplorable ending, and remained closeted with Dr. Saxham for some time. He had supplied her with a bottle of medicine upon her leaving – medicine of which no memorandum was to be found in his notes for the day. She had taken the first dose then and there. According to the testimony of the Accused, the bottle had contained a harmless bromide sedative. Upon the oath of the Public Analyst, the same bottle, handed by the husband of the deceased woman to the Police upon the night of her death, and now produced in Court with two or three doses of dark liquid remaining in it, contained a powerful solution of ergotoxine – a much less innocent drug. Who should presume to doubt its administration by the Prisoner, when the label bore directions in his own characteristic handwriting? Who should dare to affirm his innocence, seeing that to him his victim had hastened, almost in the act of death, begging him, with her expiring breath, "not to be hard on a woman," who had ignorantly trusted him, Gentlemen of the Jury! only to find, too late, the deceptive nature of his specious promises? A whip, cried the Bard of Avon, England's glorious, immortal Shakespeare, should be placed in every honest hand to lash such scoundrels naked through the world! Let that whip, in the honest hands of twelve good Britons, be – the verdict of guilt! The Counsel for the Crown, red-hot and perspiring, sat down mopping his streaming face, for it was tropical weather, with the white handkerchief of a blameless life. Irrepressible applause followed, round upon round thudding against the dingy yellow-white walls, beating against the dirty barred skylight of the stifling, close-packed Court. Then the Judge interposed, and the clapping of hands and thumping of stick and sunshade ferrules upon the dirty floor died down, and the Counsel for the Defence got up to plead for his man, who, by the way, he firmly believed to be guilty.