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SIMON IFF
The Marsden Mysteries
Dick Ffoulks was in good practice at the Criminal Bar, and his envied dinner-parties, given to few and well-chosen friends, were nearly always held in his chambers in Lincoln's Inn. They looked out on one of the pleasantest green spots in London.
There was a brooding of fog on the first December night of 1911, when Ffoulkes gave a supper to celebrate his victory over the Crown in the matter of the Marsden murders. Marsden was a wealthy man, and had no enemies. The police suspected a mere protégé of his unmarried sister, and only heir he might thus benefit indirectly; no other motive could be found. The boy—for he was barely 20—had dined with Marsden on the night of the murder, and of course the police had fingerprints by the dozen. Ffoulkes had torn their flimsy web to rags, and tossed them in the air with a laugh.
All his guests had gone but one, his oldest friend, Jack Flynn, They dated from Rugby, and had continued their inseparability at Balliol. They had read together for the Bar, But Flynn after being called had wandered off into the _____ journalism.
The Marsden case had stirred England profoundly. Slight as was the motive attributed to Ezra Robinson, the suspected boy, there was no other person with any motive at all; faint as were the clues which pointed to him, there were none at all to point elsewhere.
Besides these considerations, there were apparently no physical possibility of any other murderer. Marsden had unquestionably died of a common carving-knife which was identified as the one which had been sent up with the dinner. Unobserved access to the suite was impossible, a floor clerk being continuously seated in full view of the only door to the whole apartment! The only person known to have been in the room, after the table had been cleared by the hotel servants, was the accused. And even Ffoulkes had not dared to suggest that the—straight drive from above and behind—would might have been self-inflicted. Nor was there any motive of robbery, or any trace of a search for papers. But there was an undoubted thumb-print of Robinson's in blood on the handle of the carving-knife, and there was a cut on his left hand. He had explained this, and the presence of the knife itself, by saying that it had slipped as he was carving, and that he had run into the bathroom to wash and bind the cut, leaving the knife on the wash-stand. The only point clear for the defence was the medical evidence, which put the time of death some two hours later than the departure of Robinson. This coincided with a momentary failure of the electricity, all current through the hotel. Ffoulkes suggested that the old man, who had drunk a good deal of wine had gone to take a bath before retiring, seen the knife, remembered his old skill as an amateur juggler (ample testimony to which was forthcoming), and started to play at casting[?] the knife. The light had gone out while he was throwing; he had dodged maladroitly, and the blade had chanced to catch him between the shoulders.
The opposite theory was that Robinson had returned to fetch his cigarette-case, which was in fact found in the room by the police, passed the floor clerk and slipped into the suite in the short spell of darkness, seen his opportunity and seized it, making off before the light was restored. He had not been able to give a satisfactory account of his movements—his story was that—he had left Marsden early on account of a severe headache, and had wandered about the streets trying to obtain relief. On the other hand, no one in the hotel would swear to having seen him after this ostensible departure. The floor clerk had testified to a considerable commotion just at the time of the failure of the electric supply; she had heard noises, apparently in several rooms; but this might well have been the normal confusion caused by the sudden darkness.
Flynn had been of the utmost service to Ffoulkes in the case. He had performed a weekly miracle in avoiding a spell of prison for contempt of court; for every week he had returned to the charge. There were long article on miscarriages of justice; others on the weakness of circumstantial evidence where no strong motive was evident; others again on strange accidental deaths. He quoted the case of Professor Milnes Marshall, who slipped and fell while setting up his camera in Deep Ghyll on Scawfell. He was on a gentle slope of snow, yet he made no effort to recover himself, and rolled over and over to the edge of a precipice, at whose foot he was found dead, smashed to a pulp. This happened in full view of several other climbers. This accident was contrasted with that of Arthur Welkman on the Trifthorn. He fell eight hundred feet, and yet only hurt himself by cutting his leg slightly with his ice axe. A hundred such parallels were at the service of Flynn, and he hammered them into the head of the public week by week, while scrupulously avoiding any reference to Marsden. As the courts had no idea, officially of the line of defense, they could say nothing. But Flynn moulded the opinion of the public soundly and shrewdly, and in the end the jury had acquitted Robinson after a bare quarter of an hour deliberation.
Ffoulke's guests had complimented him on the ingenuity of his theory of an accident, but the lawyer had not been pleased. “That was a frill,” he ha replied; “the real defence was Absence of Motive. Grant the police their theory of Robinson's movements; put the knife in his hand, and a certain get-away—which he had not got, mind you; the light might have come on at any second—but allow every thing, and then ask yourselves: “Why should he stab the man?” There was no quarrel; his marriage with Miss Marsden was not opposed; on the contrary, he risked that marriage by a mix-up of this sort; yet we are to suppose that he did it on the mere chance that there would be no fuss, and that his fiancée would have twelve thousand a year instead of four. Why, a san man would hardly kill a rabbit on such motive!”
But now the guests were gone; |