A Train of Powder (29 page)

Hume had started the morning, it appeared, between ten and eleven by going to the local branch of the Midland Bank and paying seventy pounds in five-pound notes into his account, which was about two hundred and fifteen pounds overdrawn. Then he went home, and sometime that morning the family doctor called and looked at the baby, whose stomach was out of order, and prescribed some medicine for it and advised Mrs. Hume to take it to the Children’s Hospital in Great Ormond Street. Hume listened to his instructions as to how he was to get his wife and child there, and asked for a prescription for sleeping tablets. Then he went out and had these two prescriptions made up at a drugstore. Later, not long before one o’clock, he went to the dyeing and cleaning establishment, which was a few doors away from his apartment, presided over by Mrs. Linda Hearnden. This was a middle-aged woman with a delightful smile, unfussed over good looks, and perfect manners. She had a peculiar horror of the crime which had been committed, and had never become used to the thought of it, as most witnesses do during the preliminary proceedings in the lower court. She was still taut with disgust, but she took time to be fair to Hume. She told how he had come in and asked if she could accept a carpet for cleaning and dyeing, and how, when she said she could, he had brought down the light carpet from his sitting room, rolled up and tied with rope, and asked her to get it dyed a darker green, and how she gave an estimate without having it unrolled; and she would not accept the prosecution’s suggestion that she had judged this by guesswork because he had not wanted to unroll it. The prosecution was hoping to prove that he had tried to prevent her from seeing a stain on the carpet which had, since the carpet was cleaned, been identified as the result of a flow of some human secretion, probably blood. But she would not have it so. If the carpet was not unrolled, it was a matter of her unwillingness to have it spread out over the shop, not of Hume’s reluctance.

After he had handed over the carpet he went upstairs again and soon came down with a carving knife, which he took to a garage round the corner and handed to one of the mechanics, asking him to sharpen it. The mechanic had the impression that he said to him, “The joint is on the table, and I want to get back quickly.” But he did not give the mechanic time to sharpen it properly. He took it away as soon as the mechanic had given it a rough edge and would not let him finish it on the oilstone. This irritated the mechanic, and when Hume offered him half a crown he would not take it, saying he had not been allowed to make a thorough job of it. He was a proud and tetchy man, and was extremely annoyed by the process of cross-examination, refusing to play, and regarding it as he might have regarded an attack by any stranger on his truthfulness. He stood crossly answering questions about times and Hume’s words and manner, knitting his brows in peevish concentration, while without his knowledge his hands calmly played with the carving knife, noting its properties, bending back the blade, testing the edge, feeling how it lay in the handle, balancing it to see if the proportion of blade to handle was right. Matter was having a highly intelligent conversation with matter, while his and the lawyers’ minds were having a much less brilliant exchange. But he got it plain that he felt sure that Hume had spoken of a joint on the table; and for all he knew this might not have been an exceptional occurrence, for though Hume had never asked him to sharpen a carving knife he might have asked other mechanics at the garage to do it; and that if there was an urgency in Hume’s manner it was nothing more than his habit. “It’s his nature,” he said, in a phrase which sounded sinister when used of a man on trial for his life, “that he’s here today and gone tomorrow.”

Hume went back to his apartment, and he and his wife ate lunch and washed up the dishes. Then, a few minutes before two o’clock, there arrived Mrs. Ethel Stride, the charwoman. Under a little round hat she had the prim small face of a kindly cat, and she looked ahead of her with the still integrity, the dedication to exact vision, that shines in the eyes of a cat. She knew the truth, and she told it. Why? Because she had sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and she believed in keeping oaths; but even if she had taken no oath she would still have told the truth, because she believed that to he was wrong. Simply she told the truth.

When she entered the apartment, a few minutes before her regular time, Hume met her and asked her to go out and buy a floor cloth because he had ruined one by trying to wash a stained carpet. Casting an eye round the apartment, she saw that the carpet was missing, and also a floral rug in the lobby. He also talked to her about the floor round the carpet, saying that he was going to have it stained again. He then gave her the money for the floor cloth, and she went down the street to buy it, and then remembered that the shop which kept the best kitchen articles was still shut for the lunch hour. So she turned about and went back to the apartment. Again Hume met her, for Mrs. Hume was upstairs feeding the baby before she took it out for the afternoon, and he told Mrs. Stride that she was to go up and work there, because he wanted to tidy up a cupboard in the kitchen to make room for coal to be stored in the winter, and he said that he did not want to be disturbed while he was doing it, “on no account and in no circumstances.” If the telephone rang she was to answer it and say that he was not at home.

So Mrs. Stride went upstairs and cleaned the Humes’ bedroom and the nursery and the bathroom. Presently Mrs. Hume went out with the baby, and Mrs. Stride went on with her work, using the vacuum cleaner from time to time but listening for the telephone bell. She never heard it. After Hume had been in the kitchen for about an hour he came out and asked her to make some tea for him. She brewed it in the scullery, and at the same time went into the kitchen, which she found quite orderly. Then Hume went out of the flat, carrying two parcels, one under each arm. One was square, a cube with sides of about eighteen inches, and this is presumed to have been Mr. Setty’s head; the other, which was a long, bent shape and considerably larger, is presumed to have contained his legs. Mrs. Stride had seen no joint of meat in the apartment that needed carving, not in the refrigerator nor in any cupboard. Nor had she seen anything unusual in the flat, no sign of a man’s body with the head and legs cut off, no blood. Nor had she heard any sounds like the sawing of bones. Nor had she smelled anything that might have been blood or a corpse.

Mrs. Stride told the truth; and she was very intelligent, she had keen perceptions, she had sound powers of deduction, and she handled her memory well. When she was asked whether she would have heard Hume if he had been sawing bones, she said that she thought she could, but it was so quiet that she almost thought Mr. Hume had gone out. When she was asked if she thought that she could have heard the doorbell ring when she was working upstairs, although she was using the vacuum cleaner, she deliberated and said that she believed she could, because the vacuum cleaner was a Hoover. Had it been an Electrolux, which made a different kind of noise, she might not have been able to hear a bell while it was working, but she could hear most things through the noise made by a Hoover.

When Mrs. Stride had left the witness box she had, by her measured and conscientious evidence, performed one of the most spectacular acts which have ever amazed a law court. She had, on the first day of the trial, wholly destroyed both the case for the prosecution (whose witness she was) and the case for the defence. For the prosecution claimed that Hume had enticed Setty into his apartment and had there stabbed him and cut up his body, and the prosecuting counsel laid stress on the fact that Hume went to the garage at lunchtime on that day and asked a mechanic to sharpen a carving knife, saying, “It may be that he had already blunted it by cutting up a body and maybe he wanted it to be sharpened for more cutting.” But it was abundantly clear from Mrs. Stride’s evidence that he had done nothing, in that eggshell of an apartment, of the hauling and pitching and dragging which would have been necessary if he were cutting up the body of a man weighing over a hundred and eighty pounds, and that he had certainly not been sawing through a spine and through thigh bones. If he had cut up anybody there the night before, there would have been some blood somewhere, which Mrs. Stride, who performed her duties with fervour, would certainly have noticed.

Another significant matter which was fatal to the prosecution was established when she was in the witness box. Hume was no fool, and he knew just what Mrs. Stride was. His face showed that he was following her evidence with the utmost appreciation of her character; and it was confirmed by his friends that he was in fact extremely fond of her and had often had long conversations with her about serious problems of conduct. He knew that she was intelligent and observant and honest, and he would certainly not have allowed her to come into the apartment had there been a body lying there still to be dismembered or only just dismembered. He would have met her at the door and made some excuse why she should not enter. One is glad to welcome a domestic worker arriving, but not so glad as all that.

But when the mind turned back towards Hume’s account of the three men who had come to his apartment and left parcels on him which they said and he believed were presses, it was evident that Mrs. Stride had killed that story too. She had heard nobody come to the flat. It was a Hoover, not an Electrolux; the apartment had been so quiet that she thought Mr. Hume had gone out; and Hume had declared in his statement that the men had come at the time when she was in his apartment.

They drank their cups of tea together, these two, and Hume went down the stairs with Mr. Setty’s head under one arm and Mr. Setty’s legs under the other, and his pet dog, Tony, a mongrel Alsatian, at his heels. He packed the parcels into the back seat of an automobile hired from the nearby garage where he had had the knife sharpened at lunchtime, and with the dog beside him he drove off to Elstree Airfield, the headquarters of his flying club, about eight miles away. That morning he had telephoned to ask for an Auster plane to be kept ready for him, and he and a groundsman took the parcels out of the automobile and put them in the plane, the head in the co-pilot’s seat, the legs in the passenger seat behind. Before he went up he paid the cashier of the flying club twenty pounds in payment of an outstanding account, in five-pound notes.

He took off from the airfield about half-past four and flew east, leaving London on his right and heading for the Thames estuary and the North Sea. He says that at a thousand feet up and four or five miles out to sea he opened the door, holding the controls with his knees, and threw both the parcels out of the plane into the water below. Then he came down at Southend Airfield, a mile or two inland from the Thames estuary, at half-past six. He could not take the plane back to Elstree because it was getting dark and he had no night-flying certificate, and he tried to get a member of his flying club whom he met on the airfield to fly him back, without success, since this man was staying down there with his family. As a result of this meeting the man had a good look at the plane and was able to give evidence that it was empty, that the parcels were not there.

As Hume could get nobody to fly him back to Elstree, he took a taxi back to London and paid the driver with a five-pound note. This turned out to be one of those which had been handed over to Setty by a friend named Isidore Rosenthal, an automobile dealer, who had got a cheque for a thousand pounds cashed for him on the morning of October 4. It was Hume’s story that when he got back the three men were waiting for him, and that they handed over a third parcel to him, promising to pay him more money if he would drop it into the sea from the plane as he had done the first, and after some haggling and coaxing he agreed.

Nothing is known as to what happened that night in Hume’s apartment. To Mrs. Hume it was, again, like any other night. But though October 5 must have been a very long day for Hume, he was out quite early on October 6. By nine o’clock he was being driven in another hired automobile to fetch the one he had left the previous day at Elstree, with the dog in it. The driver who took him there said that he had other parcels with him, which he moved into the automobile already at Elstree. This he denied, but the theory of the prosecution was that these contained the dagger with which Mr. Setty had been killed, the saw with which his bones had been cut up, the suit which Hume had worn during the murder and the butcher’s work, and such oddments. Hume drove back to his apartment and was in good time to send his wife and his baby off to their appointment at the Children’s Hospital.

Later he concerned himself again with interior decoration. He went to a painter who worked in the neighbouring garage and asked him to stain some boards in the living room and in the lobby, and this the man did in the lunch hour. When he had finished the job Hume asked him to lend him a hand with a parcel he had to carry down to his automobile, and produced what was in fact Mr. Setty’s torso, tied up in felt with rope. It was very heavy, and the painter could not lift it by himself. He was trying to make it an easier job by putting his hands underneath it, but Hume stopped him and told him to carry it by the rope, because it was valuable property. This was plainly nonsense, since it is safer to hug a parcel to one’s body than carry it by the rope which binds it. Holding the parcel up between them, the two men staggered down the staircase. At the awkward turn Hume lost his footing, and the two men slithered down the last few steps, with the parcel bumping about on top of them. It was at this point that Hume, according to his statement, heard a gurgling noise from the parcel and began to suspect that it might be part of a corpse, and even of Mr. Setty’s corpse. By this admission he convicted himself out of his own mouth of being an accessory after the fact of murder, a crime which can be punished by life imprisonment; for as soon as he formed this suspicion it became his duty to report it to the police. But he drove the parcel off to the airfield at Southend, where, with the aid of a groundsman, he manoeuvred the gross package into the plane he had abandoned there on the previous evening. Again he took it over the coast, and over a patch of water, which he believed to be deep sea but which was actually a mudflat flooded by the strong tide of the new moon, he prepared to tip out the torso. This time things went wrong when he opened the door, and the plane went into a vertical dive, during which the parcel fell out into the sea. He made a disorderly landing in a playing-field south of the river, in Kent, and though he went up again he did not succeed in getting back to his home airfield at Elstree but had to come down, still on the wrong side of the river, at Gravesend, at about a quarter to six. It was noted that he had brought nothing in his plane. He then crossed the Thames and got somehow to Southend Airfield, where he reclaimed the hired automobile, and got back to Golders Green the next morning. He must have been very tired. During the previous forty-eight hours he had made two flights, amounting to at least three hours, in bad weather and failing light, driven a hundred and fifty miles, attended to a large number of small commissions, and done more than many a father would in the way of aiding his little daughter to overcome her stomach ache.