On the night of the eighteenth of April last, when most of us were peacefully asleep in our beds, a human life was ended under circumstances so brutal that they stun the normal mind.
A woman named Sarah Gittings, a nurse, devoted solely to a career of service, was atrociously murdered.”
There followed certain details, dramatically presented, and after that:
“Through the efforts of the police department an array of facts has been discovered, which point to a certain individual as the guilty man.
These facts will now be presented to you by certain witnesses, and it is for you to decide whether a true bill shall be presented against this prisoner, or not. “Shall we proceed, Mr. Foreman?”
From that until the end the mounting testimony against Jim was appalling.
The District Attorney grew more and more unctuous, and his secret satisfaction was evident.
When all was over he made, I believe, a dramatic gesture with his hands, and standing by the table, ran his eyes along the half circle of chairs.
“Gentlemen,” he said, in a low voice. “I have done my duty.
Now must you do yours.”
As he closed the door behind him and stepped into the hall, Dick says that he was still acting for the benefit of the press men and the crowd.
He stood still, half leaning against the door like an exhausted man, and mopped his forehead with a fine handkerchief, faintly scented. Then he drew himself up, justice personified, and marched along the corridor.
But in between those two dramatic moments were two days of sheer horror for us.
The secrecy of the procedure, the oaths of silence, the occasional cheerful amusement of the twenty-three men who sat in that semicircle of chairs, the terrified or determined faces of the witnesses, the avid crowd of reporters outside studying these faces as they came and went, and then rushing to their typewriters:
“It is reported that Miss Bell stated—”
Building a case that might send a man to the chair, out of staircase gossip, a look, a gesture, or such information as was refused by the District Attorney but managed somehow to reach them via his office.
Experts came and went. The heap of exhibits on the long table grew; poor Sarah’s stained and pierced clothing, the ghastly fragments of Florence Gunther’s checked dress and blue coat, for although Jim was only charged with Sarah’s murder, there were no legal limits, no laws of testimony, to be considered before the Grand Jury.
The sword-stick was brought in, its ancient mechanism arousing a sort of childlike interest among the jurymen; and small boxes of earth, each duly ticketed and bearing the impress of the stick as Jim had touched the ground with it.
And Dick telephoned once to say that there was a story among the newspaper men that something had been carried in, carefully covered with a cloth, and that the story was that a letter Jim had burned had been restored, and had been introduced as incriminating.
We were all in the library, and I thought Katherine started when Judy repeated this.
But she said nothing.
She sat staring at her emerald ring, and made no comment.
The list of exhibits grew.
Sarah’s uniform, with a mirror so that the writing on the sleeve might be read; the plaster casts of the foot marks Inspector Harrison had made in my garden; the snaps from the carpet which had been rescued from my furnace; even the pencil which Wallie had found in the airshaft, the fragments of broken glass from my drawing room door, the rope which had once tied the dogs, and had later on been used to drag poor Sarah’s body down the hill; and certain pages in Sarah’s own hand of her sick-room records, designed to show that the reversed writing on Sarah’s sleeve was authentic.
There were photographs, also.
Showing the sewer structure, showing poor Sarah within it, showing the well-marked spot where the body had lain near the tree, and that room of hers as it was discovered the next day.
Florence’s room was there too, and Sarah’s, in the disorder in which we had found it on the morning of the nineteenth of April. It must have been like sitting through a crime play to those jurymen, lifted out of their humdrum lives into that welter of crime and clues and blood.
And against all that, what had we?
My own testimony, received with evident scepticism, that the man on my stairs the night of Sarah’s murder had not worn light golf knickers, but conventional trousers!
At no time was it brought out that the stains in Jim’s car had been put there later; were not there when the police examined it the following day. It was sufficient that I had burned the carpet.
And when I suggested that any juryman over forty was welcome to try to hang in the light shaft by his hands, and then to try to pull himself out of it, there was general laughter.
There was also one other development which left us in little doubt of the final outcome. This was the introduction on the second day of the colored woman, Clarissa, from the Bassett house on Halkett Street.
It was Dick too who reported this to us.
He had seen her taken in, uneasy and yet somehow deadly.
A big woman, powerful and determined but frightened.
When she came out her relief was manifest, and Dick took advantage of that relief.
He followed her, caught her at a corner, and brought us what he had learned.
Briefly this woman, Clarissa, having positively identified Jim at the jail, stated that on the night of Sarah’s murder he had spent some time at the Halkett Street house with Florence Gunther.
He had sat in the parlor with her for an hour or more, and she remembered that he had a stick.
That we already knew.
But she had further testified that, going forward to lock the front door before leaving for the night, she had heard Jim speaking and that she remembered distinctly what he had said. “He said:
‘I’d better start, then.
I may meet her on the way back.’”
Some little hope however we had on the second day.
The jury sent out for copies of the two wills, and they were duly produced.
It looked for a time as though they might be looking for a larger picture; that the clause referring to the fifty thousand dollars might lead elsewhere.
But to offset that the District Attorney produced those two exhibits which he had held for the psychological moment.
He brought in Jim’s walking suit and his golf shoes, to prove that by laboratory test there was blood in minute quantities on both.
And he re-introduced the sword-stick.
The blade of the weapon had been carefully washed, but from inside the sheath, when it had been soaked in the laboratory, there had come a pine needle of the same variety as had been found on Sarah’s clothing; and unmistakable traces of blood.