The Girl on the Gallows by Q. Patrick

Author:Q. Patrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2018-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The newspapers, of course, had followed noisily, day by day, the progress of the trial. Freddie’s moral collapse in the witness box was common knowledge in the remotest shires, and there was hardly a person in England who was not acutely aware that the time had come for That Woman to take the stand. The British Isles, after months of journalistic pressure, were in a lynching mood, and inside the stately shabbiness of Court Number One at the Old Bailey the galleryites awaited the great moment with sadistic excitement.

It is hard to comprehend the enormous need in the Great Britain of that time to destroy Edith Thompson. We can understand that, as an adulteress who had been found out, she infuriated both the chaste and the unchaste. We can understand that, as a woman of twenty-eight who had managed to find an attractive twenty-year-old lover, she had incurred the righteous jealousy of less fortunate females. We can understand too that the scent of sex and murder, floating as it were in the air, can disturb and infect the human climate.

But, even so, it is difficult to grasp the fact that when Edith Thompson, broken, sick, bewildered, and exhausted, tottered into the witness box, there was scarcely a single pair of eyes that watched her with pity.

However, we must not forget that this final ordeal was one of her own choosing. It is certain that, after Freddie’s disaster, Sir Henry repeated his urgent entreaties for her to keep silent. But, even so, Edith Thompson took the stand.

We will never know why, for, almost from the first moment of her examination, it was obvious that she was as incapable of explaining herself as a corpse. She could listen to questions and answer them and even, on occasion, show a little synthetic spirit. But the thread had already been lost. She didn’t really know what she was trying to prove or even what they were trying to prove against her. We can only assume that she went into the witness box because that was the decision she had made earlier and now she lacked the will to change anything.

There were no climaxes in her testimony, no thrilling moments when the spectators could ask themselves: Will she save herself? Will she break down? She answered in a dream that made her seem more exasperatingly stupid even than Freddie. Oddly enough, the trait that took the longest to die in her was her gentility. Sometimes, as she sat there answering questions, her phrases and her choice of words became affected, almost mincing, as if she felt she were at a tea party with people above her walk of life, who had to be convinced that she was not a common person, but a lady of station.

It was not Sir Henry that conducted her examination. He was saving his energies for his final address to the jury. The task was taken on by his aide, Mr. Walter Frampton, who treated the broken woman on the stand with consistent kindness and gentleness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.