The Poisonous Solicitor by Stephen Bates

Author:Stephen Bates [Bates, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785788185
Publisher: Icon
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

‘She was very anxious to get better.’

Nurse Eve Allen

The third day of the trial, Wednesday 5th April, brought the first key witnesses, Nurse Eve Allen and, later in the day, the start of Oswald Martin’s testimony. Eve Allen, who had arrived on 27th January the previous year in response to a telegram from the major, was a trained nurse and apparently able to cope with Katharine’s psychiatric condition. She would stay with Mrs Armstrong for the next four weeks until her death, and so was the closest medical professional to her throughout her final decline.

The press photographs show Allen, full-figured, middle-aged and well dressed in what may have been a fur coat, posing with a friend outside the court. Despite the low-brimmed hat hiding her eyes she does not seem unduly distressed, perhaps rather thrilled to be giving evidence at such a famous trial.

That evidence had changed somewhat since she had testified at the committal proceedings earlier, when she had struck Tom Matthews, Armstrong’s solicitor, as a particularly truthful witness. Then she had suggested that Katharine had only become bedridden on the Sunday two days before her death. She had said then: ‘At times she would get up and walk round the house, thinking there was something about during the night and I got up to bring her back. Mrs Armstrong never went out of the room without my knowledge because I was a very light sleeper and I used to follow her about and watch her because she … required observation.’

This was potentially crucial evidence, because it was the prosecution’s central contention that Katharine could not move for at least the last week of her life, when she was bedridden, and so could not have dosed herself with arsenic, and would have had to be poisoned by a person who had access to her. Their allegation was that Armstrong had given her a large dose of arsenic in the last 24 hours of her life when she was helpless.

At the trial however, Nurse Allen’s testimony was different to what she had told the magistrates. Now she said that Katharine had been confined to bed from a week earlier, Sunday 13th February: ‘After Sunday 13th when she was taken with vomiting she did not get out of bed even for natural purposes … Her strength was not very good. I mean she was helpless in many ways. She could not use her hands to feed herself … she seemed to be more or less paralysed.’114 She was asked by Vachell whether she had been anxious to eat and the nurse replied: ‘Yes, she was very anxious to get better. She made attempts to keep the food down.’ But she kept vomiting throughout the last week of her life.

Martin Beales, in his book Dead Not Buried, suggests the nurse must have been turned: ‘There is no escaping the conclusion that Nurse Allen must have been “got at” by the prosecution.’115 A simpler explanation must be that she got her dates mixed up and was confused by the intimidating atmosphere of one or both of the courts.

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