Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (24 page)

If you believed Professor Robertson … that was the problem, for the learned Professor was only one expert in a case as crammed with. sages as a tin with sardines. The whole question of the pistol, the distance from which it had been fired, and the nature of the wound, as well as Mrs Merrett’s mental condition, was in the hand of experts. The courtroom became like the lists of a medieval tournament, as heavily armoured expert clashed mightily with counter-expert.

First, for the Crown, was Professor Harvey Littlejohn, Police Surgeon, the latest in that remarkable dynasty. He was supported byDr Bell and by Professor Glaister of Glasgow University, and he needed that support. For Littlejohn was in an awkward spot. Like Rita Sutherland he had changed his mind and his story with it, and this invariably induces discomfort in an expert; far easier for mere housemaids to accommodate such contradiction. Littlejohn had made the original post-mortem examination. At that time he had felt, and, worse, stated, that, `there was nothing to indicate the distance at which the discharge took place, whether from a few inches or a greater distance’. Accordingly there was nothing in the nature of the wound incompatible with suicide. That was lucidity indeed, and at the time perfectly satisfactory, since it agreed with the police interpretation of the case. Now however things had changed. The Crown had determined to prosecute. Professor Littlejohn was a Crown witness and suicide had become out of the question. Had it been a case of suicide, they would have found evidence of blackening around the wound, but there was none. The absence of blackening, immaterial a few months before, had now taken on vast significance; Professor Glaister agreed that blackening was a sine qua non of suicide. Clearly therefore the discharge had been at a distance greater than a few inches. It was perhaps a pity that Professor Littlejohn had not at once come to this conclusion; still he had got there now, and found himself reinforced by the other experts.

Then there was the position of the wound. At one time he had said, `so far as the position of the wound is concerned the case is consistent with suicide’. Now he found that, `the hand and arm would be in a strained position’. `All in all therefore I am of the opinion that suicide was in the highest degree improbable. The direction of the bullet, the position of the wound, and the distance at which the discharge took place, all point to the weapon having been fired by a third party. To my mind suicide is is inconceivable from the facts I know. Yet the same facts had existed at the time of the post-mortem; no new medical evidence had been produced. It was all a matter of interpretation and judgement. Mr Aitchison pursued him hard: `if the evidence of Dr Holcombe be right that he had to cleanse the wound thoroughly, can you be certain that it would not remove blackening or tattooing if they were there?’ He had driven him to the point of admitting that the theory he now put forward depended on the distance of the discharge; if that were displaced then neither suicide not accident could be discounted. (In fact accident did not depend on the question of the distance.) Professor Littlejohn was forced to yield ground, but still proclaimed that, even so, suicide had become inconceivable to him. It was dogged at least; he had changed his mind once, he was not going to do so again. He showed the same obstinacy with regard to Mrs Merrett’s mental condition: `If a person shows no signs of abnormality and then becomes wandered in the mind, surely up to the time that she shows signs of wandering she is normal.’ It might not be much to set against theories of altered consciousness, but it showed common sense at least. All Mr Aitchison could do was throw up his hands and exclaim, `If experts differ, what are we to do in the matter? I don’t know.’ And that was fair enough too, besides being good theatre.

The Defence experts were mostly imported from the South. The famous London gunsmith, Robert Churchill, was the first of these. The Crown had already produced an Edinburgh gunsmith, one Macnaghten, who had ridiculed the pistol itself. This had been bought by Donald - there was no doubt about, no denial of, that - though his reasons for the purchase varied. In one version it had been bought for shooting rabbits on the Braid Hills, in another because he was going on holiday in France, as if everyone knew that a weapon was necessary if you intended to make so dangerous a tour. (Perhaps he had been reading too much Dornford Yates.) In Macnaghten’s view the pistol was quite useless for shooting rabbits, far too short in the barrel; only of some use for selfdefence. Such strictures were actually irrelevant. They proved nothing beyond the fact that Donald was a rotten judge of firearms and had no idea what to buy; that he had been illadvised by the shop where he bought it. Nobody had suggested that the murder was premeditated, that he had bought the pistol with the intention of shooting his mother. And if he had, it was still a poor choice, since Mrs Merrett had lingered ten days after the shooting, mothers being at least as hard to kill as rabbits.

All that was rather pointless, Churchill’s evidence for the Defence being a good deal more formidable. He dealt arrogantly enough with the Crown case. His whole pose, well justified of course, was that of the man of infinite experience. He had no difficulty in believing in the possibility of either suicide or accident. He could explain anything away. Take the absence of blackening for example. He, Churchill, taught shooting and he had found that women generally flinched when firing weapons. It was `an instinctive aversion’. The result might easily be to jerk the head away so that the bullet might, even in a case of suicide, be fired quite far from the head. It was unfortunate of course that this premonitory jerk had not taken the wretched Mrs Merrett’s head altogether out of the line of fire; but, though this point wasn’t made, the fact that death had not been instantaneous, that the shot had been in a sense botched, might be held to support Churchill’s argument. What was more, there were all sorts of conceivable ways in which her death could have been the result of an accident. The fact that the trigger required a pull of five pounds was not conclusive. She could easily have knocked the pistol off the bureau, with fatal consequences. Accidents were extremely various.Then again, the position of the wound proved nothing, even apart from the premonitory jerk. Churchill had known of a case where a woman had shot herself behind the ear. Finally, asked whether he had ever heard of a woman shooting herself in the presence of a near relative, he was up to that improbability too. Yes, he had known of a woman who had shot herself sitting in an armchair by the fireside while her husband slept in his chair on the other side of the hearth. In short Churchill’s evidence offered a masterly exhibition of scepticism.

He was followed by the most celebrated and impressive of the Defence witnesses, no less a person, even a personage, than Sir Bernard Spilsbury, famed in the popular press and known to every aficionado of murder as the Home Office pathologist. Spilsbury was indeed the creme de la creme, the expert of experts. Normally of course he appeared for the Crown, being retained by the Home Office. His appearance in this unfamiliar role, possible only because the trial was taking place in Scotland, added new drama and piquancy. Securing his services had been an undoubted coup. Spilsbury, who always gave the impression of not thinking too badly of himself, clearly relished his new part. Courtrooms were his theatre. Now he set to work to demolish the Crown’s theories. Like Churchill his line was one of an infinitely experienced and wordly scepticism. Yes, indeed, one would normally expect blackening around a wound when a pistol had been held close to the head. Dr Bell, `who had looked for any sign of blackening but found none’, was certainly correct, as far as he went. Only, said Spilsbury, `the bleeding from and rubbing of the wound might have removed blackening’. Morever, he had tested a pistol of the same calibre against cardboard from contact to a distance of six inches away and found very little blackening. Pistols differed in their effect. Then, when he had repeated the test against pieces of skin, the blackening had been still less distinct than on cardboard and had been more easily washed away. It was impossible to rely on blackening.

The nature of the wound was equally inconclusive. In the first place, `almost any suicidal wound may be imitated by a homicidal wound’. Then, and he demonstrated this, it was perfectly possible for someone to shoot themselves when holding the pistol in a quite extraordinary position. He himself could recall the case of a man who had shot himself from half an inch behind his right ear, and the bullet passed out immediately above the left ear. That showed what could happen. Moreover, `it would be easy for a woman, who would have considerable shoulder joint movement owing to her doing up her hair’ to shoot herself from an unusual angle. Accident could not be ruled out either. `In my own experience’ he said, `most extraordinary positions sometimes result from the accidental discharge’. Who could ignore such authority?

Finally, turning to what Mrs Merrett had said, or was reported to have said, in hospital, he aligned himself firmly with Professor Robertson. `I think that any such statements must be accepted with great caution’, he said. `May such statement’, Mr Aitchison asked, `appear to be made by a person of normal mentality, whose mentality is in fact abnormal’. Sir Bernard’s reply was simple and certain: `Yes.’ The effect of his scepticism was great. There was no reason to exclude anything. He, Spilsbury, with the authority of a lifetime, found `nothing inconsistent with suicide or accident’.

As in the Chantrelle case the conflicting testimony of the experts made things difficult for the jury. That must almost always be the case; indeed it may be questioned how much of such expert evidence a jury ever really follows. To put this point of view is not to denigrate the intelligence of jurymen. The fact is that evidence of this sort is usually hard enough to grasp even in printed form. Reading the accounts of trials, one has constantly to retrace one’s steps in an attempt to understand exactly what experts are saying.Jurymen probably rely on the trained intelligence of the Judge to make things clear to them, to cut a swathe through the web of words, or guide them through the labyrinth of technical language. But when one expert contradicts another, even Judges may be in difficulty.

In the end it may be that a good deal of expert evidence merely wastes time, the jury being impressed more by character as they perceive it than by argument. If this is so, and both common sense and experience suggest it is, much of the argument really turns not on what is possible, but on what seems probable. Yet possibilities are often discussed at greater length- in Court. That certainly happened in the Merrett case. Hours were spent arguing about the distance of the discharge and the position of the wound. Yet clearly enough inconsistencies of experience abound in such matters. The most extraordinary accidents do occur; one does not have to be a writer of detective stories of the ingenuity of a Michael Innes or Dorothy L. Sayers to see that. It is not of course surprising . that time should be consumed in this sort of argument, since those experts deal in what is apparently susceptible of scientific verification. Nevertheless, in the last resort, this case did not really turn on the presence or absence of blackening, whatever Mr Aitchison may have persuaded a reluctant Littlejohn to admit. Certainly if there was blackening, suicide, accident and murder were all possible, though the chances of suicide were somewhat improved. Equally certainly, the absence of blackening did not absolutely exclude suicide, though it made the chances of murder rather greater. But that was all there was to it. The technical evidence, offered by so glittering an array of experts, settled precisely nothing. (It may of course be objected that the technical evidence could have persuaded them one way or another, and that different technical evidence might have been decisive; that all I am saying is that here the technical evidence was too contradictory to be conclusive. But that is frequently the case; experts can always be recruited and their evidence is sometimes specious and rarely unimpeachable.)

It came down therefore to a question of what the jury believed about Donald and Mrs Merrett. Did they believe that Mrs Merrett, sitting writing that letter to an old friend, in which she told her that she had at last acquired a satisfactory flat and a maid, should suddenly, in the presence ofher only child, whip out a pistol, plant it against her head and pull the trigger? And what was the motive assigned? She was distressed and shocked that Donald, whose behaviour hitherto had not always been exemplary, but to whom she was devoted, should have been discovered to be a forger and utterly unreliable. A painful shock certainly, but sufficient to persuade the jury that it was cause to blow her brains out? They could hardly accept that proposition without abandoning the conviction that Mrs Merrett was a reasonable and sane person. It was hardly the act of `a cheerful and bright woman, a person of methodical habits, never seen in an excitable state’. Nothing that was learned of Mrs Merrett at the trial made suicide seem likely, whatever Sir Bernard Spilsbury might say was possible. Certainly not this sort of suicide; one could imagine her taking an overdose, but not blowing her brains out before her beloved son.

What of Donald and the case for murder? Nobody on the jury can have thought Donald anything other than a rather odd fish. The boisterous immaturity of his behaviour, his silly-clever duplicity, his callousness, all were evidence of a disturbed and thoroughly unreliable personality. He looked an odd fish too. A photograph taken of him as he arrived at the Court shows him peering out from under a huge brimmed felt hat, through horn-rimmed Harold Lloyd spectacles. The mouth is curiously long and flat, the mouth of a predatory fish, a pike for instance. A loose collar, with no tie, stands away from the neck. Nor was his behaviour any more prepossessing. The Evening Dispatch reporter said that he showed `a smiling unconcern’ on the first day of the trial, even as his lies were uncovered. And he had lied with a frequency and ease that spoke of long practice, and a total disregard for truth, amounting even to an inability to recognise it. He had lied about his reasons for buying the pistol. More seriously he had lied about his mother’s knowledge of the pistol, for he had first said she did not know he had it, then that she not only knew but had taken it away from him. This time the reason for the change of story was obvious: Mrs Merrett could hardly have killed herself with a pistol which she did not know to exist.