The Dawn of Reckoning (25 page)

Counsel for the defence began by taking Mrs. Monsell rapidly over the
ground of the trial. He induced her to describe the finding of the body, and
then questioned her about her late husband’s health, private circumstances,
etc. She replied carefully and without hesitation.

Her manner changed, however, as soon as Sir Theydon rose. “His first
question, like a champion boxer’s first blow, sent her staggering to the
ropes.”

“What,” began Sir Theydon, “were your relations with the prisoner?”

Witness replied very softly and nervously: “We were friends.”

“Was that all?”

“Yes.”

“Are you quite sure that was all?”

“Yes.”

Sir Theydon then began to read from a sheet of foolscap paper. It was a
copy of a letter written, apparently, from Mrs. Monsell to the prisoner, but
never delivered because Mr. Monsell intercepted it.

At the conclusion he asked: “Would you regard that letter as the letter of
a friend to a friend?”

Witness’s almost inaudible reply was: “I wanted him to help me.”

Sir Theydon then read out other letters, asking at the end of each one the
same question. There were five letters altogether and during the reading of
them the witness gradually lost her calmness. At the finish she exclaimed
shrilly: “I was hall-mad with worry when I wrote those letters! It is not
fair to read them and try to prove things from them!”

“Never mind what is fair and what is not fair, Mrs. Monsell. I want you to
tell me whether you think that your husband, reading those letters, was
justified in suspecting you of infidelity with the prisoner?”

“He may have been. I ought not to have written them.”

“Were you happy with your husband?”

“I was—sometimes.”

“But not always?”

“No, not always.”

“I put it to you that for some time before the tragedy you were anything
but happy with him—in fact, that you had as little to do with him as
possible?”

“I worked with him a good deal during the election.”

“Ah, yes, I am coming to that. As a matter of fact, it is not quite
correct to say that you worked for him a good deal during the whole of the
election campaign.”

His lordship here remarked: “I think Mrs. Monsell did not say that, Sir
Theydon.”

Sir Theydon: “I thank your Lordship for correcting me. Now, Mrs. Monsell,
it is a fact, I believe, that you did no work in your husband’s election
campaign until a few days before the poll?”

“Yes.”

“‘Why was this?”

“I made up my mind that I would do all I could to help him.”

“
You
made up your mind?”

“Yes.”

“You visited the prisoner at Bethnal Green on the 22nd?”

“Yes.”

“I suggest to you that at that meeting he gave you particular instructions
that you were to help your husband all you could?”

“I admit that he advised me to. After all, why shouldn’t he?”

“I think the question is rather: ‘Why should he?’ I suggest to you that
the prisoner wished you to help your husband in order to further his own
particular plan.”

“I don’t think he did at all.”

“Very well…Now let us turn to another side of the question. What were
you intending to do on the night of the election?”

“I was going home to tell my husband that he had won.”

“And after that?”

Witness was silent.

“I put it to you that you had your luggage all packed and were going to
follow the prisoner by a later boat and meet him in Norway?”

Here Mrs. Monsell covered her face with her hands. After a very long
silence, she said, almost inaudibly: “That is so. But he did not know
anything about it. I swear he did not know anything about it!”

“Whether he did or not, that was what you intended to do. Do you think
that is the sort of thing that could happen between two people who were
merely friends?”

“I was driven to it.”

“Ah I Now what do you mean by that?”

“I was unhappy.”

“Had you no other friends besides the prisoner?”

“Not so much a friend.”

“A curious phrase, that. ‘Not so much a friend!’ You are a Hungarian, I
believe?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you lived in England?”

“Since I was fifteen.”

“So that you know the people fairly well?”

“I think so.”

“Do you know that English custom is against a wife having as her greatest
friend a man other than her husband?”

Witness did not answer.

“I put it to you that your ‘great friend’ could have been described far
more accurately as your lover?”

Again witness was silent.

“To put the matter quite plainly, Mrs. Monsell, I suggest that the
prisoner murdered your husband, and that you were and are more or less in the
secret.”

The witness here startled the court by a shrill protest. “That is not
true,” she cried, covering her face with her hands. “I swear before God that
is not true!”

“You say that your husband’s death and manner of death was a great
surprise to you?”

“Yes.”

“You had had no conversation with the prisoner on the question of getting
rid of your husband?”

“Most certainly we had neither of us ever dreamed of it.”

“You had better answer for yourself only. You say you hadn’t the slightest
idea that the prisoner was contemplating such a crime?”

“I hadn’t, because he
never
contemplated it!”

“Very well. Now I will read to you a letter which was found in the
prisoner’s possession when he was arrested. It is signed ‘Stella’ and was
written apparently on the Saturday preceding the crime. It runs as
follows:

My Dear,
Dear
Man
,—
(the second ‘dear’ is underlined) Your letter has made me the most miserable
woman on earth. I only read it once hastily, because I heard Philip’s
footsteps outside the room, and I got in such a panic that I threw the whole
letter into the fire. Oh, why,
why
(the second ‘why’ underlined) are
you going to do this dreadful thing? Is there no other way at all? I feel
blind, deaf, and dumb with misery, now that I know what you are going to do,
Oh, my man, think of the danger I It frightens me—I’m too absolutely
scared to write any more. If you do come here, for God’s sake don’t have
anything to do with me, for at the first sight of you I should go raving mad
and give the whole game away. I shall help Philip till the polling is over,
but after that—God help me, and you too I I feel disaster all about
you, but then, you won’t take heed of my warning. Oh, if I had known
you
when I was a girl, all these terrible things would never have
happened. Good-bye, dearest—goodbye.—Your own always, whatever
you do—

“Stella
.”

During the reading of this, the witness sobbed convulsively.

“Now,” said Sir Theydon, “do you admit writing that letter?”

After a long pause Mrs. Monsell answered: “Yes, I wrote it.”

“Now be very careful how you reply to the questions I am going to ask you.
What had the prisoner written in the letter you were so quick to
destroy?”

“He had said he would go on another expedition to the South Pole.”

“Then, if that was all that was in the letter, why were you so anxious to
conceal it from your husband?”

Witness did not reply.

“What did you mean by writing to the prisoner: ‘Why are you going to do
this dreadful tiling?’ What was this dreadful thing?”

“His going on the expedition was dreadful to me.”

“Well, then, if that is so, what did you mean by telling him not to have
anything to do with you if he visited Chassingford, lest you should give the
whole game away? Come, come, Mrs. Monsell, what was this game that you were
afraid to give away? ‘Going to the South Pole’ will not quite do for an
answer, will it?”

Witness did not reply.

“You wrote to the prisoner: ‘Is there no other way at all?’ What did that
mean?”

Witness was still silent.

“I suggest to you that the question you asked the prisoner had nothing at
all to do with the South Pole. I suggest that it meant: Is there no other way
of continuing our guilty relationship than by murdering my husband!”

Sir Theydon paused a long while for an answer, and when none was
forthcoming, continued: “Will you, in the face of the letter I have just
read, persist in your assertion that your relations with the prisoner were no
more than friendly?”

After a tense silence witness slowly shook her head. Then, in hardly more
than a whisper, she said: “It is true. I love him.”

“Then the statements you made a little while ago were untrue?”

“I suppose so.”

“Deliberately untrue?”

Mrs. Monsell seemed here to summon up the last fragments of control she
possessed. She lifted her face for a moment and looked at Sir Theydon.

“You have tried to trap me,” she said quietly, “and you have
succeeded.”

Sir Theydon retorted sharply. “You have no right to say that. My aim is
not to trap you, but to get the truth out of you. You have deliberately
sought to mislead the court as to your relations with this man. I hope his
lordship will take note—”

“You may rest assured, Sir Theydon,” interposed the judge, “that I am
perfectly aware of the duties appertaining to my office.”

Sir Theydon bowed, and, with a curt inclination of the head towards the
witness-box, added: “That is all I have to ask, my lord.”

“The battle was over,” wrote Mr. Milner-White, “and with the cessation of
the cannonade the pent-up emotions swelled over and wrought chaos. Mrs.
Monsell gave a low cry and fell back into the arms of a
police-constable…Everybody in the well of the court craned forward to look;
the judge made some remark, obviously of a sympathetic kind, to one of the
ushers; and Sir Theydon glowered upon the scene and carefully moistened his
lips with a tumbler of water. Perhaps the most terrible thing of all was the
prisoner’s face. Outwardly it was unmoved, but there was a hint of fearful
struggle in the tightly closed lips and sunken eyes.”

All else after that was anti-climax, even the final speeches
and the summing-up. The next day was occupied by more examinations and
cross-examinations of witnesses for the defence, and by certain
re-examinations. The court was then adjourned till the following Monday.

On that day, exactly a week after the opening of the trial, Sir John
Hempidge began his closing speech for the defence. He wished the jury to
regard the whole case logically. It was obviously one of those cases where
the really important evidence was circumstantial. Mr. Monsell had been shot;
nobody had seen him being shot; therefore logic propounded three
solutions—suicide, accident, or murder. It was not their business to
suggest an alternative explanation of the tragedy; but it was still less
their business to send a man to the gallows because his guilt fitted in with
certain cunningly constructed theories of people whose business it was to
construct theories. In short, if they had the least doubt about the
prisoner’s guilt it was their duty to find the prisoner “not guilty.”

Sir John stressed the fact that though prisoner had made a good many
statements that he had unfortunately been unable to prove, the prosecution
had been equally unable to disprove them. They could only say that they were
improbable and extraordinary. Well, remarked Sir John, there were improbable
and extraordinary things in everybody’s life, and, to turn the thing into a
sort of paradox, it would be most improbable and extraordinary of all if
there weren’t. The prosecution, for example, had made much of the fact that
the prisoner motorcycled to Hull when he might have travelled by train. Well,
why shouldn’t he? Prisoner was a man who liked to do unusual and exciting
things; he loved adventure, and because in these pallid days so few of us
could sympathize with such a love, the prosecution were trying to make out
that it could not be sincere. “Granted,” said Sir John, “that neither you nor
I would greatly enjoy a two-hundred mile night-ride on a motor-cycle in
winter-time; what reason have we to doubt the prisoner’s statement that he
did it because he enjoyed it?” After all, perhaps there were other things in
the prisoner’s life that might seem to the average citizen both improbable
and extraordinary. That same species of madness that drove the prisoner on
his motorcycling escapade, drove him also almost to the South Pole. “It is a
madness,” added Sir John, “that England as a nation dare not lose.”

At this point there was an outburst of cheering, and the judge ordered one
person, a well-dressed woman, to be removed from the court.

The prosecution, continued Sir John, had made much play with the revolver
question. It was true that the prisoner could not prove his explanation, but
was it therefore not to be believed? That prisoner should destroy unimportant
letters as soon as they were received was quite to be expected in a man of
his character, and that Mr. Monsell should not have mentioned the loan of the
revolver to anybody was also quite in keeping with the state of mind of a
nervous man who is rather ashamed of his nervousness. On the face of it, the
receipt of threatening letters by Mr. Monsell was a matter that hardly needed
proof. Every public man received them; received them by every post and took
no notice of them. “I could show the jury scores of threatening letters
addressed to me on occasions when I have been contesting parliamentary
elections—I could show them, I say, if I were not addicted to the same
excellent habit as the prisoner—that of destroying unimportant letters
as soon as they are received.”

Sir John proceeded to discuss the relationship of prisoner and Mrs.
Monsell. This was not a court of morals, he declared, and the question of
Mrs. Monsell’s illicit affection was only germane to the issue so far as it
concerned the question of Mr. Monsell’s death. It was absurd to say that
because Mrs. Monsell had fallen in love with a man not her husband, that man
should be immediately presumed to wish to encompass her husband’s death. “In
these days,” said Sir John, “when the three parties to the triangle are
reasonable people, and when there is no financial problem attached, the
settlement of such an affair can be arranged without murder. Prisoner and
Mrs. Monsell were apparently running off to Norway. Well, if that were so,
where was the need for getting rid of Mr. Monsell? He had no power to fetch
them back. The prosecution’s theory of ‘motive’ was really no theory at all,
but a bundle of fallacies.