Читать книгу The Anatomy of Murder - Helen Simpson - Страница 8

CRIME in Australia: those three words start, in the mind of the reader, a train of association which runs through the gold fields of Ballarat to end in the explosive sentiment of Rolf Boldrewood’s Robbery Under Arms. Crime in Australia puts on a red shirt, gallops gallantly, tackles its trackers in the open air. The kindly spaces of a new country afford the criminal a chance, if he escapes, to make good; finally if he should have the bad luck to encounter Sherlock Holmes during his retirement, that finely tempered instrument of justice will say: “God help us! Why does Fate play such tricks with poor helpless worms?”¹ and refrain from prosecution.

So much for the popular conception. Actually, crime in Australia follows much the same patterns as crime elsewhere. Murders are committed for the same motives, gain, elimination, and fear; and the more sensational of these are perpetrated by individuals whose surroundings would seem to guarantee their respectability.

Witness the case of that highly reputable chemist, John Tawell, of Hunter Street, Sydney, who having built a chapel for the Society of Friends, and publicly emptied six hundred gallons of rum into Sydney Harbour as an object lesson in temperance, in 1845 murdered his mistress with prussic acid and was hanged. Witness half a dozen other urban crimes, about which hangs no scent of the scrub or of saddle-leather; in particular, the murder of Henry Kinder, principal teller in the City Bank of Sydney, sufficiently well-to-do, living in a decent suburb on the North Shore of Sydney Harbour. This crime hath had elsewhere his setting; it is a domestic drama such as might have been played in any Acacia Avenue of the old world. True, the assassin had at one time some notion of dressing the part, and purchased a red Crimean shirt, on which bloodstains would not be conspicuous; but the crime itself was committed, so far as can be ascertained, in the ordinary sombre undress of a dentist.

II

On October 2, 1865, the news of Henry Kinder’s suicide startled his circle of respectable friends. His tendency to drink was known, but that he should have had le vin triste to this degree was unsuspected; the more so that he had no troubles about money, and seemed to be happy in his family life. The inexplicable suicide became a topic of conversation in Sydney. Nobody had realized that Kinder was the kind of man to drink himself into delirium or to utter violent threats against himself and his family; yet that he had done so his wife declared at the inquest, and her evidence was corroborated. The coroner directed his jury to bring in a verdict of suicide during temporary insanity, and Kinder was buried with every testimony of regret and respect. Mrs. Kinder retired to Bathurst, where she took up life again with her parents, who kept a small general shop. The talk, for a time, died down.

But not for long. The jury found that the deceased had met his death “by the discharge of a pistol with his own hand.” The How, thus was answered; the Why, despite evidence of his drinking, remained mysterious. It was this last question which worked in the minds of Henry Kinder’s fellow-citizens, and there were conjectures in the clubs that a certain Louis Bertrand, who had been heard making extravagant statements concerning his relations with the Kinder family, might be able to answer it. These statements the police investigated, with the result that six weeks after the inquest, on November 29th, Louis Bertrand and his wife Jane were charged before the magistrates at the Water Police Court, Sydney, with the wilful murder of Henry Kinder; Helen Mary Kinder, the dead man’s widow, appearing as accessory to the fact.

Bertrand was brought to court from gaol, where he had been serving a sentence for using threatening language. The warrant was read to him, it seems, in his cell. “Rather a heavy charge,” was his comment. The detective inquired if he should take that by way of answer. “Am I on my trial now?” the accused asked sardonically; and being told that the officer was only stating the charge, Bertrand answered emphatically: “Then my reply to it is—not guilty.” This he repeated in the dock. His wife echoed him. Mrs. Kinder, brought down in custody from Bathurst to Sydney, indignantly denied any knowledge of the crime. The magistrates heard these answers, refused bail, and at the request of the police remanded the prisoners until the Monday following, December 4th.

At that hearing nothing new was revealed, except the ages of the accused; Bertrand was 25 years old, his wife 21, and Mrs. Kinder, who refused to give the year of her birth, was stated to be apparently about 30 years of age. They were remanded again until December 7th.

III

On December 7th the case for the Crown was opened by Mr. Butler; and it at once became evident that Mrs. Kinder was on her trial, not as accessory to a murder, but as an adulteress. It was “morally impossible,” said counsel, to commit the other prisoners without committing her also. The evidence would consist, in the main, of admissions made by the Bertrands, with other circumstances, all of which were capable of proof. The motive was easily discoverable. Certain writings, now in the hands of the police, would afford evidence that a personal intimacy existed between Bertrand and Mrs. Kinder; and, said counsel, with the ripe conviction of all Sydney’s gossips behind him, “such an intimacy could not exist without furnishing a clue to the imputed crime.”

Counsel proposed to establish that there had been illicit intercourse between Louis Bertrand and Helen Kinder before the death of the latter’s husband; that it had been Bertrand’s design to divorce his own wife; and that Henry Kinder had been killed in order that Mrs. Kinder might be free to marry Bertrand.

Detective Richard Elliott was his first witness. This officer produced a packet containing letters found in a drawer in Bertrand’s house; they were unsigned, but appeared to be in the handwriting of Mrs. Kinder. He produced a diary found in an unlocked drawer in Bertrand’s bedroom. He produced a bottle labelled tincture of belladonna, and a phial labelled chloride of zinc; together with a pistol and powder flask, a box containing caps, a tomahawk, a screw such as might be used for the nipple of a pistol, a phial of white powder, unlabelled, and two books. There was a brief interlude while prisoners’ counsel elicited from the detectives concerned the fact that they had not been impeded or hindered in their search; Mrs. Kinder had even asked that a certain desk, to which she could not find the key, should be broken open. She told the officer that she kept none of Mr. Bertrand’s letters, but always burned them after she had read them. He found one, however, dated October 28th, signed by Bertrand. He also found, in a box which contained children’s clothing, a pistol; the pistol, Mrs. Kinder told him, with which her husband had shot himself. These cross-examinations over, Mr. Butler began to read from the letters of Helen Maria Kinder.

There were nine of them; and a more curious set of documents can seldom have been produced in evidence. There is not space to quote them fully. The picture they offer is of a woman alternately cautious and abandoned. News of her three children, of churchgoing, and of the life in a small country town make up the chief of their matter, but there are outbursts which leave no doubt as to her relationship with Bertrand. It is noticeable that these grow more frequent as she becomes more bored with the life of a small country town, unfriendly to a newcomer without money, inquisitive, uncharitable, and remote from the standards of a wider world. From first to last there is no mention of her husband, and no reference which would imply that she had any knowledge of how he came by his death.

The first letter, which begins: “My dear friend,” and ends: “Kindest regards to yourself and all the family, and believe me ever to remain truly yours, Ellen Kinder,” is by no means compromising. Fatigue—she had had two days’ coach journey, looking after her three children the while—may possibly account for the non-committal tone of it. “I do not think I was ever so tired in my life; I trust I may never again experience such utter prostration.” Bathurst appeared dreadfully dull, but she would not judge hastily. In the morning she intended going to church to have a look at “the natives”—not aborigines, but such society as the town offered. This is all, except that she sends her “kind love” to Jane, Bertrand’s wife.

The next letter, written just a week later, is the queerest mixture of passion and practicality.

MY DEAREST DARLING LOVE,

I have just received your dear, kind, and most welcome letter. Oh, darling, if you could but know how my heart was aching for a word of love from you. Dear, dear lover, your kind loving words seemed to have filled a void in my heart. I cannot convey to you in words the intense comfort your letter is to me. It has infused new life into my veins.…

I suppose you must not be ashamed of our poor home when you come up, darling, but I know that will make no difference to you. If I lived in a shanty it would be all the same, would it not? Now about your coming up, dear darling. How I should like to see your dear face, and to have a long talk with you about affairs in general. But, my own love, I fear if you were to come just now you would not find it pay you. Everything is so dull, and what I fear more is that people to whom you owe money would be down on you directly, thinking you were going to run away. Dear darling, all this advice goes sadly against the dictates of my own heart, for my spirit is fairly dying for you. A glimpse of you, oh dearest, dearest, what would I not give to be taken to your heart if only for a moment; I think it would content me.

It is no use, dear. Your love is food—nourishment to me. I cannot do without it. I tried to advise you for the best, but I cannot. I cry out in very bitterness. If I could only be near you, only see you at a distance once again, I think I could bear myself. I believe, darling, if our separation is for long, I shall go out of my mind.…

How is Jane? What is the matter? It is of no use to say that I am grieved at her being laid up; that would be a mere farce between you and I. As to her assertions with regard to Mr. Jackson, I shall not answer them; for if I am to be taken to task about all she may choose to say about me I shall have enough to do.… I know her, and you ought to by this time. If you allow everything she may say to influence you against me, I have done, but, darling, I am yours. I leave my conduct to be judged by you as you think fit. There let the matter rest. It ought never to have been broached.

Mr. Jackson, at the time this letter was written, was serving a sentence of twelve months’ imprisonment for attempting to extort money from Bertrand by threats. (He had written to Bertrand saying that his association with Kinder’s wife was known, and could be proved if Jackson chose to say what he knew.) He was sentenced on the day—October 23rd—that Mrs. Kinder first wrote to Bertrand from Bathurst. He was to be an important witness at the trial, and Mrs. Kinder’s airy “It ought never to have been broached” covers the consciousness that she had in fact lived with Jackson as his mistress. The document ends with an account of her family’s money affairs. Her father’s shop did not prosper, her mother had only £50 coming in yearly from some small property in New Zealand. They were not very easily able to keep four extra persons for an indefinite time. Could Bertrand discover some opening for the family in Sydney? An hotel perhaps? “I am always well when I get a letter to strengthen me.” She ends: “God bless you. Good night, darling love, and plenty kisses from your own darling Child.” In the third letter, dated November 9th, she is, as ever, preoccupied equally with the future and the present. She has tried for a governess’s situation, but times are bad. The clergyman has come to call. Her youngest child, Nelly, would soon be walking. She would like to get into a dressmaking business in Sydney. The thought of seeing him again sends her blood “gurgling” in her veins. “God for ever bless you and preserve you from harm, and preserve your dear children.”

But Mrs. Kinder’s mother was becoming suspicious, and, it would seem, not only of the relationship between her daughter and the Sydney dentist.

She advises me to be careful what we write, as she says there are many reports with regard to us in Sydney, and that the detectives have power, and might use it if they thought to find out anything by opening our letters. I was not aware they had that power; it is only in case of there being anything suspicious with regard to people.

Mamma, in fact, read her daughter a lecture, refusing to countenance “anything wrong”. With all this, there was no question of turning away Mrs. Kinder and her children. “As far as anything in the shape of love and affectionate welcome goes, to the last crust they have I can depend.” But the takings of the shop were never more than five shillings a day, and sometimes not sixpence. She could not go on being a burden; “I would rather be a common servant.” Upon this situation she reflects:

How black everything looks, Lovey, does it not? Our good fortune seems to be deserting us.

Was this a reference to the death of Kinder, an affair surely of management rather than luck? If so, it is the only reference in the letters, which run to some ten thousand words. They keep their pattern of lamentations, shrewd planning, passion, and where her family is concerned a kind of affectionate independence, together with one or two items of actual news. She had become a seamstress to help the family finances; her father was off to New Zealand again; her brother Llewellyn was staying in Bertrand’s house; she was determined to come to Sydney. The last letter, dated November 21st, ends:

When I think I shall be with you in less than a week—oh, this meeting, love, oh, I shall go mad; it is too delicious to dream of; oh, let it be in reality, darling, do, do. My feelings will burst, but still, dear one, I trust you will do what is best for us in the end, I would say——

The newspaper report says: “Remainder illegible.”

IV

These were the first documents read by Mr. Butler, the Crown counsel. It is odd to picture the scene. The Water Police Court is not an impressive or a roomy building. The month was December, when Sydney is beginning to feel the weight of summer. There is great humidity, heat lies upon the town like a blanket, and all the distances dance. To Bertrand, even the stuffy court must have seemed spacious compared with his cell in Darlinghurst Gaol. Mrs. Kinder, brought down from the greater heats of Bathurst, may have found the air of Sydney grateful. Only Mrs. Bertrand, poor Jane, coming to the box from her pleasant house in Wynyard Square, must have felt bitterly the confinement and the heat. Mr. Butler, who had already spoken and read for some hours, returned to the charge in the afternoon; and when the diary’s handwriting had been identified by Bertrand’s assistant, Alfred Burne, he began, in the passionless tones congruous with his duty, to read aloud the diary of Louis Bertrand.

October 26th. Thursday.

Lonely! Lonely! Lonely! She is gone—I am alone. Oh, my God, did I ever dream or think of such agony? I am bound to appear calm, so much the worse. I do so hate mankind. I feel as if every kindly feeling had gone with her. Ellen, dearest Ellen, I thank, I dare to thank God, for the happiness of our last few moments. Surely He could not forsake us, and yet favour us as He has done. Tears stream from my eyes, they relieve the burning anguish of my bursting heart. Oh, how shall I outlive twelve long months! Child, I love thee passionately—aye, madly. I knew not how much until thou wert gone. And yet I am calm. ’Tis the dead silence which precedes the tempest.…

Do not rouse the demon that I know lies dormant in me. Beware how you trifle with my love. I am no base slave to be played with or cast off as a toy. I am terrible in my vengeance; terrible, because I call on the powers of hell to aid their master in his vengeance. God, what am I saying? Do not fear me, darling love. I would not harm thee, not thy dear self, but only sweep away as with a scimitar my enemies or those who step between my love and me. Think kindly of me—of my great failings. See what I have done for thee, for my, for our love.

Such were the first paragraphs of this document in madness. The diary was faithfully kept, reflecting Bertrand’s love, his fantasies, his finances, and his health. In itself it would be enough, nowadays, to support a defence of insanity. But the magistrates of 1865 took it seriously, and Sydney shuddered as the newspapers reported it piecemeal. The journal covers only twenty-four days, from the date on which he parted from Mrs. Kinder to that on which he was summoned on the charge of writing a threatening letter to a woman, Mrs. Robertson. His triumph over Jackson makes odd reading, when it is considered that three weeks later both were serving sentences for a parallel offence.

In the train I borrowed half the Empire, which contained this paragraph: “Francis Arthur Jackson, convicted of sending a threatening letter to Henry L. Bertrand with the intent to extort money, sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour in Parramatta Gaol.” It pleased me. I am satisfied. Thus once more perish my enemies. He is disposed of for the present.

On the same page:

I feel that I love you as mother, sister, husband, brother, all combined. What work I have before me, God only knows, but I will call His love to help me, and strive to do right. I feel I shall. Thy dear devoted love will save me. I know it will, and we may yet be good and happy together.

An echo of the gossip which was alive concerning him may be found in the brief statement which follows: “Am doing no business whatever.” He was ill, too, with some internal trouble, concerning which he makes this reflection:

I am now, by my own agonies, paying a debt to retributive justice; how and what I have made others suffer, God only knows; but if I have, I richly deserve all I now feel; and you, my love, have you not done the same?

’Tis strange our two natures are so much alike. I love a companion who can understand my sentiments, respond to the very beating of my heart, help me to think, to plan, and by clear judgment advise me on worldly affairs. A woman is not a toy. Women are as men make them. I have found, from experience, that half the trouble women give their husbands is caused by the husbands themselves—sometimes directly, but often from some indirect cause that might have been avoided if the man had used even moderate care in the guidance of the being sacredly entrusted to his charge.… One more day stolen from fate.

This was Friday, October 27th. Two days later he was up and about, spending an artistic rather than a conventional Sunday.

I awoke this morning too late for church—I did not dress or shave. I fear, my dear Nelly, that not having you to fascinate I shall become slovenly and untidy, for if I consulted my own feelings I should not dress at all.

I want fame, as well as wealth and power, and as usual little Bertrand must have his way. You know he is a spoilt child, spoilt in more ways than one. So as I was saying, I must have fame, fortune and power, as well as the most ardent, pure, passionate, and devoted love of the most fascinating, amiable and best of women that the world at present contains. There, if this is not flattery I do not know what is; but it is the truth—at least, I think it is the truth to the best of my belief, as we say in court. Oh, I must not speak of courts; we have had enough of them, at least for the present.

At this time he set to work to model two salt-cellars for the third Victorian exhibition of 1866; Fijians, “kneeling in a graceful attitude”, holding pearl shells, upon stands “emblematical of the sea shore”; the spoons to consist of paddles, “formed of some sort of shell, small of course”; all to be cast in solid silver, frosted. “Dearest, it is for thee that I toil.” He turned from this work to conversations with his sister, who recommended a divorce as being the kindest thing that he could do for poor Jane; and to his diary, intended for Ellen’s reading later on, when the period of separation was over. Certain further passages of this were read with emphasis by Mr. Butler.

I should feel ashamed of my love, of what I have done for it, if it were no different from that of others. That is our only excuse, whether on earth or Heaven, for what we have accomplished.… Let us not be cowed or terrified at aught that besets us. I warned you what to expect, and, dearest, for the greatness of our love for one another, surely we can bear fifty times more than we have to bear. I do not fear the result. To me the end is clear and palpable, I am sure of it; I never yet failed in my life.

November 8th.

Thank God, another day gone. However will a twelvemonth pass? God only knows. My heart grows sick and faint when I look into the future. Oh, God, is this Thy retribution for our sins? Did I flatter myself that the Almighty would let me—a wretch like me—go unpunished; but I tell thee, fate, I defy thee. I feel as though my heart were rent in pieces, and then dark thoughts obtrude themselves before me, fiends rise and mock me; they point to a gate, a portal through which I feel half inclined to go; but not yet.. What would my love do without me? … No matter what thou hast been, my child, I hold thee as a true, virtuous wife to me, for you have been true to me, my dearest love.

Bertrand went on this day, Wednesday to see one of the directors of the City Bank, Kinder’s employers, who gave him news. A temporary cross was to be put on “poor Harry’s grave” in New Zealand (whence the Kinders had come to New South Wales); “they think that Harry did not intend to kill himself, but only to frighten his wife.” When Bertrand suggested that possibly Mrs. Kinder might come to Sydney to find work, the director was evasive and recommended that “old affairs should blow over”. Next day Mrs. Kinder’s father, Mr. Wood, came to see him, and they walked down together to the ferry wharf, and travelled over to the North Shore to see a mutual friend, De Fries.

I felt very strange. This is the first time I have been to the Shore since poor Harry’s funeral. I am standing on the deck, my face turned towards the little house with the two chimneys, as I used to do when on wings of love I flew to my beloved.… How horribly jealous I was, I was mad … surely there can be no worse hell than our own conscience.

Mr. De Fries it was who gave Bertrand the first warning that all was not well, and that Sydney, unlike New Zealand, was beginning to be suspicious of Kinder’s suicide. De Fries spoke reasonably; said that he had watched the affair growing, and that he had a high regard for Jane. He told Bertrand that Mrs. Kinder cared nothing for him, that she was a calculating woman, while Jane was an affectionate and true one. He felt for Bertrand, he told him, like a brother, and exhorted him, if he cared for his happiness in this world and his welfare in the next, not to yield to temptation. The diarist listened attentively, but coming home, broke Jane’s fan in a passion. That he believed, or rather, that he knew De Fries to be speaking the truth, is shown in a paragraph which ends the entry for this day:

November 12th.

Be she as wicked as Satan, as vile and wily as the serpent, I, even I, will save her, will raise her from the depth of hell. I, Ellen, even I, thy lover, wicked as I am, will be a Saviour to thee. Dear, sweet, loved Ellen, the more they oppose us the greater will be my power of resistance. Poor fools, to try and thwart my will. Indeed, if thou hast me for an enemy—I who value human life as I value weapons, to be used when required and thrown away or destroyed; some, of course, kept for future use if necessary. Beware! If I have my way in this, if I obtain this sole object of my being I feel that I shall be reclaimed; but if not, no matter from what cause, Heaven help the world, oh! I shall indeed be revenged.

Next, Mrs. Robertson, a friend to both parties, issued her warning. She advised Bertrand to have no more to do with Mrs. Kinder; and told him frankly that she would not have Ellen in her house, were she to come to Sydney. Again he listened patiently, and again there followed an outburst, a frantic act of faith.

DEAR, DEAR CHILD,

I trust that she is truly penitent for what she has done, and that with me she will be in future a truly good and virtuous woman. Why do people try to torture me thus? God knows I have misery and wretchedness enough. I am prepared for the worst and God help the world if this my forlorn hope fails. To hear her [Ellen] spoken of as bad, is sufficient to upset my intellect.…

Ellen, my dear love, I must be near you. I want to look into those dear wicked eyes and I know they cannot, will not, deceive me. If I have, like others, cause to repent what I have done—I must drop this painful subject or I shall be ill—it will unman me—unfit me for the battle I am fighting. Enough excitement of mind for one day. Adieu, my thoughts. Adieu, my own Ellen.

Louis.

It is not quite the last entry, but it is the most revealing of all. The exaltation was fading; the way to happiness, which had seemed so clear and sure, was obscured. Bertrand knew that Mrs. Kinder had been the mistress of at least one of his acquaintances; that there had been other men in New Zealand he conjectured. He was tormented; the journal plainly shows him twisting away from inescapable conclusions, and so towards madness. When Mr. Butler laid down the notebook which gave such an intimate picture of Bertrand’s mind, he had proved to the public’s satisfaction that Bertrand had good reason to wish Kinder out of his way.

V

But Kinder met his death by the firing of a pistol close to his ear. Whose finger pulled the trigger of that pistol? Mr. Butler recalled Bertrand’s assistant, Alfred Burne, who, after telling how he delivered letters from Bertrand to Mrs. Kinder, and how she had often stayed in the surgery at night, gave the following account of some remarkable expeditions:

About six weeks previous to Kinder’s death he [Bertrand] asked me where I could get a boat to hire. I mentioned Buckley’s among others. We went rowing the following night about 12 o’clock, to the North Shore as far as Kinder’s house, opposite to the bedroom window on which the moon was shining. He said: That is his bedroom. He did not then say what was the purpose of his visit. He did not go in. He said the moon was too strong, he had come too early.… We went back again three nights after, taking a boat from the same place, and went up to the house. As we went over he said it was very likely that next morning Kinder would be found dead in his bed, having committed suicide, and that letters from Jackson would be found in his hand.

They arrived at Kinder’s house about one in the morning. Bertrand took off his boots, gave them to Burne to hold, and climbed into the house by the dining-room window. He came back much later—Burne fell asleep meanwhile—angry because Kinder would not drink his beer, and consequently was awake. “We had drugged it,” said Bertrand.

Some days, about a week later, Bertrand produced in his surgery a hatchet, and asked Burne to bore a hole in the handle so that he might tie it under his coat by a string. A young man, Ranclaud, who was staying in the house, asked what he meant to do with it. Bertrand answered abruptly, and with no care for probabilities, that he was going fishing, and went out with Burne to their hired boat. On the way, he said that Kinder had insulted him; that he was going to knock Kinder’s brains out first, and then get a divorce from Mrs. Bertrand.

I remarked what object could he have in putting Mr. Kinder out of the way when Mrs. Kinder was as good as a wife to him. He said he wished to have Mrs. Kinder all to himself.

On this occasion Bertrand entered the house by the same window, but returned soon, saying that Jackson and Mrs. Kinder’s brother Llewellyn were sleeping in the house, and as the boards creaked he did not think it safe.

COUNSEL: Safe to do what?

BURNE: To murder Mr. Kinder, as I understood.

A week later the expedition was repeated, but in remarkable conditions. Bertrand shaved himself at midnight; then blacked his face, donned a mask and the red Crimean shirt, topped this disguise with a slouch hat, took off his boots, drank some brandy, and set out in the boat at about 1.30 in the morning. Burne went with him. Why he should have done so is inexplicable. True, he was in Bertrand’s employ; true, he may not have taken seriously Bertrand’s boasts and threats against Kinder. But he was sufficiently well aware of danger when his own skin was in question.

On these occasions I always carried the hatchet myself; I also used to get him to sit in front of me in the boat for fear of accidents. I made him pull the stroke oar, while I pulled the bow oar, fearing that, taking me by surprise while my back was turned, he might throw me into the water.

That night Bertrand asked Burne to help him when he got inside the house. If Kinder, he said, were to be killed that night, suspicion would inevitably fall on Jackson, who was leaving Sydney next day. The young man answered that it was all too romantic for him, that he had no share in Mrs. Kinder and intended to run no risk. Bertrand at this seemed to abandon his plan, whatever it may have been, and they rowed home. This was the last expedition in the boat.

But not the end of Bertrand’s fantastic preparations. His next act was to cut off his moustache, dress as a woman, and go with Burne to buy two pistols at a pawnshop in Lower George Street, then a fairly tough locality. On the day following this purchase he acquired a sheep’s head, and began to practise shooting at it in his surgery with bullets he had made himself in a mould. His wife and her mother ran in at the first shot, alarmed, naturally enough, by the noise and smell of smoke. This was on a Saturday. On Monday morning Burne was told to destroy the broken skull in the furnace, and did so. That afternoon he heard that Kinder was dying.

At this point we get Bertrand’s own version of the tragedy as he told it to Burne on his return from Kinder’s house. Kinder, he said, had actually shot himself as the result of a practical joke. The two men had left the house and their wives in search of a pub and a drink. On their way back Bertrand had suggested that the women should be given a fright, and produced a pistol, which he said had no bullet in it, but only powder and a wad. Kinder, who was drunk, agreed to put it against his head and fire; and when they came to the room where the women were, actually did so, with the result that the charge of powder drove the wad into his ear and jaw. Proof of this, said Bertrand, was that no bullet could be found.

It was a fantastic story, but Bertrand’s counsel seized upon it, and later there was great argument about it and about when the doctors came upon the scene. Unfortunately, Bertrand, forgetting this sketch of a possible defence, later admitted to Burne that his wife had found a bullet, and produced from his pocket a flattened scrap of lead which he said was the bullet in question. Burne secreted one of those that had been made in the surgery to fire at the sheep’s head, and gave it to the detectives; this bullet fitted the second of the pawnshop pistols.

Defence counsel could not do a great deal with Burne. They could prove him a poltroon, but by no means could they prove him a liar. The butcher who had sold the sheep’s head, the pawnbroker who had sold the pistols, Buckley the boatman, Mrs. Bertrand’s mother who had witnessed the pistol practice—all these in turn corroborated his story. Asked why he did not attend the inquest and there tell what he knew, he answered that he had not been subpœnaed. Asked why he had gone to the detective office afterwards with information, he gave the following answer:

It was slightly for the sake of public justice, and by way of protecting my life that I went there, the object being self-preservation in particular, the other in a slight degree.

This naïve statement virtually ended his evidence. His last admission was to the effect that he, Burne, had read part of Bertrand’s diary before the detectives came; then he was told to stand down, having proved himself a useful though contemptible witness for the Crown.

VI

After certain corroborating witnesses came one Alexander Bell-house, employed in the Government Service, who had known Bertrand for some years. He repeated an extraordinary statement made to him by Bertrand a month before the trial. After a game of cards at the house in Wynyard Square, Bertrand had accompanied him to the door as he was leaving, and told him that he was responsible for the death of Kinder. “He said that he was sorry for Kinder but wanted him out of his way.” He also told Bellhouse that he was a powerful mesmerist, and could do anything he liked with people. His wife knew of his attachment to Mrs. Kinder. He stated that he had put the pistol in Kinder’s way, not that he had shot him. The witness was so greatly shocked by Bertrand’s statement and manner that he “could not sleep that night because of it”. The impression left on his mind was that Bertrand had somehow compelled Kinder to shoot himself.

Harriet Kerr, Bertrand’s sister, followed Bellhouse with an even more remarkable story.

Early in the morning Bertrand came into my bedroom as I was washing the baby. He said, “Stay a minute, I have something to say to you.” He told me to sit on the side of the bed and asked if I had read of the death of Kinder. I said I had. He paused a little, then said, “Kinder did not shoot himself. I shot him.” I replied, “You must be mad to say such a thing!” He said, “No, I am not mad. I tell you I did shoot him.” I said, “But how cruel of you to do so,” and put my hands up to my face. He pulled them down again. I was crying, and he said, “Don’t cry. I don’t regret what I have done.” He said when he had shot Kinder he put the pistol in his hand and a pipe in his mouth.

Three weeks later Mrs. Kerr had another talk with her brother. This time his wife was present, but asleep. “She used,” said Mrs. Kerr, “to sleep a great deal. It was more like stupor.” Bertrand said that he did not want to have to kill Jane, and that a divorce would be better, if he could get up “an adultery case with a respectable married woman”. His sister took him to task bravely about his behaviour in general and this plan in particular. Jane had done him no harm, she told him, and Mrs. Kinder was a wicked woman. He knew that, he said. She was wicked already, and he would make of her a second Lucrezia Borgia. It was very likely, he intimated, that before his sister went to Brisbane she would find herself attending his wife’s funeral. Mrs. Kerr went on to describe an attempt upon Jane’s life. At one o’clock in the morning there was an argument, and Bertrand, taking up a life-preserver, threatened his wife, who cried out in terror the strange words: “Don’t kill me. You promised on your word of honour you would not kill me.” Mrs. Kerr went to the top of the kitchen stairs and called the servant, then went up again to the first landing, having heard the parlour door open. Her brother was saying: “Now Jane, I want you to go into the surgery. I want you to write on this piece of paper that you are tired of your life.” She refused, saying that he might pour poison down her throat, but she would write nothing. He seemed to abandon his intention, gave her a glass of brandy and water, and sent her to bed in Mrs. Kerr’s room. Poor Jane sat down upon a chair, and there and then, to her sister-in-law’s astonishment, fell fast asleep.

Now comes an account of the death of Kinder. It is necessarily second-hand; the three persons who took part in the scene were in the dock, and so unable to give direct evidence. But Mrs. Kerr’s recollection of what she had been told was very exact, and there is no reason to suppose that Mrs. Bertrand’s story was fabricated.

On the morning of the first Monday in October Mrs. Bertrand was told by her husband to take the baby and accompany him to the Kinder’s house on the North Shore. It was a rainy morning, and she was reluctant that the baby should go out; however, as always, she yielded. When they arrived at the house Bertrand seemed more serious than usual, and more gentle with Mr. Kinder. He walked up and down the room very fast, gloved, and with one hand in his pocket. Jane and Mrs. Kinder were looking out of the window when they heard the report of a pistol. They turned, to see a pistol dropping from Kinder’s hand as he sat in his chair, and Bertrand taking a pipe from the table which he stuck in Kinder’s mouth. Mrs. Kinder ran from the room in terror; Bertrand followed, and forced her to return. He then took his wife’s arm in a terrible grip, and made her face the shot man, from whose head blood was flowing. “Look at him well,” said Bertrand, “I wish you to see him always before you.”

Jane bathed the wound, while Mrs. Kinder and Bertrand walked up and down the verandah embracing. She found a bullet, flattened, which had dropped against the wainscot, and showed it to her husband when he next entered the room. Bertrand took it from her, saying it was just what he wanted, and she never saw it again.

But Kinder did not die of the wound in his head. A doctor was called, with whose help Jane got him to bed; she then took up her abode in the house and nursed him faithfully for four days, at the end of which time he appeared to be recovering. When she told her husband so, Bertrand in rage said that he must not live; poison should end him if a bullet could not. He made Jane “mix the poison”; and Mrs. Kinder gave it in milk to Kinder, who died soon afterwards.

This was Jane Bertrand’s story of the crime. It was told to and recounted by her sister-in-law, Harriet, to whose presence in the house in Wynyard Square Jane may have owed her life.

I wished to protect Mrs. Bertrand, in fact that was what I stayed in the house for, and I must also add, I stayed partly in fear of my life. We were always in dread of our lives. He [Bertrand] did not appear to wish me out of the house, but quite the contrary.… I was his favourite sister, though he did not show it by his manner. He was often very eccentric. Even in gaping he would imitate the roar of a tiger and had done it in the street.… Bertrand often told me, at that time, that he had a great mind to murder Mrs. Bertrand and say I had done it.

VII

This evidence concerning poison was something quite unexpected by the public. The verdict at the inquest had been death by shooting, and the possibility that Kinder might have died from any other cause had not been considered. The Crown witnesses were elusive on this point. A chemist who had analysed the contents of the stomach found no traces of poison, but stated that, since certain vegetable poisons rapidly decomposed in the stomach, this analysis did not rule out the possibility that they had been employed. He was asked if aconite or belladonna came within this category of untraceable substances. (Aconite and belladonna were found in Bertrand’s surgery.) He replied that they did; that one or the other might have been administered, as was asserted, on October 6th; but that now, two months later, it was a matter impossible to be proved.

The Crown accordingly let this point go, and called up the surgeons who had performed the post-mortem. They agreed as to the nature and direction of the wound. The shot had blown off the ear and broken the lower jaw; the brain itself was not touched. In short, of such a wound a man in good health and of temperate habits need not have died. But Kinder was not in good health, and he had been drinking heavily for months. He had lost a good deal of blood, and to this haemorrhage, with the shock and subsequent exhaustion, all three doctors attributed his death.

On one matter they disagreed, and here was a point eagerly caught at by the defence, since it seemed to square with what Bertrand had told Burne on the evening of the murder. Bertrand’s story then was, that the whole affair was an accident, and that the pistol had been charged with powder and a wad only. No bullet had, in fact, been found in the skull by the doctors who conducted the post-mortem examination. Was it possible, asked Mr. Robberds, for the defence, that Kinder might have done as was suggested, pulled the trigger of a pistol charged but not loaded, and that the wound, which extended from the top of the ear to the lower angle of the jaw, could have been caused by gunpowder and wadding only?

Dr. Alloway, who had served in the Crimea, and had seen many gunshot wounds during his service in India as an army surgeon, gave it as his opinion that such a thing was not possible. He maintained that the external condyle of the lower jaw showed marks of having been struck by some hard substance at the point of fracture; and that wadding from a pistol could never have broken so thick a bone, no matter how great the charge of powder behind it.

Dr. Allayne did not see “anything to indicate that the injury was caused by a round substance such as a bullet”. The force of the explosion alone, he declared, was sufficient to cause such a wound—that is, if the pistol were held close to the head.

Dr. Eichler came to the conclusion that the wound had been self-inflicted, but would not give an opinion as to whether or no it was a bullet that had caused the damage to the jawbone.

If the description of the direction of the wound is correct, it is difficult to see how it could have been self-inflicted. The bullet, or wad, whichever caused the damage, had entered behind the right ear, detaching the ear itself from the scalp, and continued its course forward and downward to break the jawbone on the right side. It is quite extraordinarily difficult for a man to hold a pistol so as to inflict such a wound upon himself; the trigger must be pulled with the thumb, and the head must be turned down and to the left at a painful angle. On the other hand, if the shot were fired by a right-handed man standing behind a seated man, the direction of the wound is easily accounted for. (According to Jane Bertrand’s story, Kinder was seated, and Bertrand standing or strolling, at the time when she heard the shot fired.) There is the possibility that a suicide might point the barrel of his weapon at his jaw; but the doctors were agreed, from the evidences of powder blackening, that the missile, whatever it may have been, entered behind the ear.

It might be supposed that the case for the Crown was by this time strong enough; but there were two more witnesses to come. Francis Arthur Jackson was brought to Sydney from Parramatta Gaol to give evidence concerning the triangular relationship between Kinder, his wife, and Bertrand. Agnes Mary Robertson, whose charge of using threatening language had brought Bertrand to Darlinghurst, appeared to testify to the dentist’s frantic and unreasonable rages.

VIII

Jackson had an unsavoury story to tell. He had known the Kinders in New Zealand, where he had been intimate with the woman; this intimacy was resumed when, six months before the date of Kinder’s death, he came to live in their house on the North Shore. Bertrand was a frequent and difficult visitor, who showed his feeling for Ellen Kinder very plainly, and made it clear to Jackson that he would not tolerate a rival.

During a conversation with Mrs. Kinder, as she saw Bertrand coming in she said I had better go. I said no, I thought not. I asked her when Bertrand was there which of the two men she preferred. Bertrand would not speak to me at first.… He asked Mrs. Kinder if she cared for him, and she bowed her head. He said he wished to remove any thought from my mind that Mrs. Kinder had cared for me from the moment she saw him.

On another occasion while I was lying in bed and he was standing at the foot of it he reiterated how very fond he was of Mrs. Kinder, that he would do anything for her, and I must not be surprised at anything I might hear after I went away. He had given me some money to go away, and said: “You would not like to be implicated in a charge for the murder of Kinder?” I said: “No, I should think it impossible.” He said if I stayed in Sydney I might be implicated. I said it was impossible, and he said there were many stranger things in the country than that. He said in a year of two he would marry Mrs. Kinder. I said it was impossible, her husband being alive. He said: “All things are possible, and time will show.”

Bertrand offered to pay my passage to Melbourne, and held the threat over me that if I did not go I might be implicated in Kinder’s death, and remarked about the Devil having a strong will.

Jackson went to West Maitland, apparently moved by this threat. It is odd to see with what assurance Bertrand shifted about the pieces in his lunatic game, and difficult to account for their docility. Jane’s submissiveness came from terror, or possibly from the administration of drugs; her stupors and dozings, which were observed not only by her sister-in-law but by visitors to the house, seem to lend colour to this explanation. She was wholly in Bertrand’s power, and so maintained by his occasional and mysterious threats against the children. Not so Burne, an employee, who could leave his service when he chose; a young man with his wits about him, and over whose head Bertrand held no threat, so far as the evidence goes. And not so Jackson, another free agent.

Yet Burne did errands which he must have known were dangerous, and escorted his employer on expeditions whose confessed object was murder. Jackson, who was in a strong position to defy him, established as he was in the Kinder’s house, and the lover of Mrs. Kinder; Jackson who had only to report these threats to the police to be rid of his rival; Jackson took himself out of the way obediently, and for a time held his tongue. True, he wrote a blackmailing letter later, when he learned of the coroner’s verdict on Kinder; but he was not a subtle man, and there is no reason to suppose that he took himself off in order to leave Bertrand free to commit a murder from which he thus might draw some profit. Nor was it a fact that he was tired of Mrs. Kinder. He was still intent upon her, and took such steps as he might to see her alone.

After my intimacy with Mrs. Kinder commenced I had an object in getting him [Kinder] to drink to excess. That was, to get him stupid so as to afford me opportunities for interviews or intimacy with Mrs. Kinder. The human mind is very base. I was base enough for that. By constant drinking with him I thought it would shorten his days. It would shorten anybody’s days.

That Mrs. Kinder had anything to do with the murder he refused to believe. She had constantly tried to prevent Kinder from drinking in New Zealand and after they came to Sydney. She was not present at any of the conversations when Bertrand hinted that Kinder might die. She had tried to do her duty as a wife.

I remember her saying that she would rather not have anything to do with either of us, that she intended to do her duty as a wife. At that time she requested me to leave her, and never to come near her again. Any interviews I had with her were of my own seeking. She told me she feared Bertrand. She said: “He seems to be a perfect devil,” and spoke of him as being able to make her do things against her will, having a sort of clairvoyance [sic] over her, or mesmeric influence. There is nothing that I know of to incriminate her in this charge beyond intimacy with Bertrand.

He did the best he could for the accused woman, but the fact of the confessed relationship between her and Bertrand deprived his testimony of weight. A jury was not likely to be much impressed by his picture of practical Ellen Kinder as the helpless victim of a mesmerist, even though this theory found corroboration in the recollections of the witness who followed him.

So much for Jackson. Mrs. Robertson, on whose account Bertrand was undergoing imprisonment, spoke of Bertrand’s mesmeric influence, which she had felt upon more than one occasion.

When I felt a dizziness in my eyes I ran out of the room. I know he has tried to mesmerize me by following me about the house, and looking at me. He compelled me that night to kiss him in the presence of Mrs. Kinder, and made me feel very unwell. Since then I have kissed him to save his wife from violence. He said: “Do you intend to do as I bid you?” I said no. He then called his wife so that he might flog her unless I kissed him, and to save her from violence I did so.

Mrs. Robertson too had been obliged to listen to threats against Kinder, and to confidences concerning the murder. Bertrand had been at her house on Thursday, the night before Kinder died; he fell on the floor there in a kind of fit, calling: “Bring the milk and mix the poison.” He declared that he must go next day and confess that it was he who fired the shot. He told a fantastic story of having bought pistols at Kinder’s request, that he might fight a duel with Jackson. He maintained that it was Mrs. Kinder’s suggestion that her husband should be shot while Jackson was in the house, in order that the blame might fall on him.

A chemist was recalled, there was a question or two concerning the poisons generally used in the practice of dentistry, and the case for the Crown, at this first hearing before the magistrates, closed. The magistrates refused to dismiss Mrs. Bertrand, refused bail all round, and committed all three prisoners for trial at the next sitting of the Criminal Court, to be held on Monday, December 18th.

IX

Before the prisoners came to trial, Jane Bertrand was set free. There was no evidence that she knew anything of Bertrand’s preparations, and although she was, by her own confession, in the room at the time when the murder was committed, nobody could suppose that she had had any hand in it. Motive lacked wholly. She was aware of the relationship between her husband and Kinder’s wife; it was not to be credited that she should connive at a crime whose sole object was to bring them together, or that she should not do all in her power to hinder a death by which, as she might have suspected, her own was foreshadowed.

Nor could a sufficient case be made out against Mrs. Kinder. Her letters, though they showed her to be infatuated with Bertrand, nowhere gave any least hint that she shared his guilt as a murderer. Bertrand’s accusations against her, made to Mrs. Robertson, were unsupported; and though she showed some callousness (if Jane’s account is to be believed), walking up and down with Bertrand’s arm round her waist while her husband lay bleeding, and also, according to Mrs. Robertson, driving with Bertrand in a ‘patent safety’ hansom on the Friday that he died, there was no actual proof of her complicity. Jackson’s statement—“there is nothing that I know of to incriminate her in this charge beyond intimacy with Bertrand”—eventually was echoed by the Crown.

Thus, Bertrand went into the dock of the Central Criminal Court alone.

Two new facts were brought forward at the trial, and Bert-rand’s counsel, Mr. Dalley, made the very most of both. It was proved that Bertrand, in the three hours which elapsed before a doctor could be found and brought to the wounded man, had staunched the bleeding and bound up Kinder’s head skilfully and carefully; also that Kinder, during the days before his death, asked constantly for Bertrand, saying that he would rather have his services than those of any doctor. It was revealed, also, that Kinder supposed his wife to have shot him. Not for a moment did he behave like a suicide who has been baulked of his purpose, or like a man who knows himself to be the victim of accident; which theory the defence continued to put forward.

The Lord Chief Justice dealt with these points in his summing up. He warned the jury; told them that there could not be conceived a case which demanded a more entire absence of prejudice, if justice were to be done. After the manner of judges, even those most nearly in touch with common life, he bade the jurymen expunge from their minds all recollection of anything they might have read or heard concerning the prisoner, other than such written or spoken statements as had been offered in evidence in that court. This evidence itself, said he, they must weigh; certain parts of it, such as those which “exhibited a state of almost unparalleled wickedness”, must not be allowed undue importance. Unless they vigorously strove against preconceptions, the prisoner might be deprived of that justice to which as a citizen he was entitled. He then proceeded in these words:

Regarding him [the prisoner] as the author of the diary, and if you believe this contains the outpourings of his mind, you must not take the picture of this man’s mental state as portrayed by the counsel for the defence; for there is before you, not a man, but a fiend, a monster in human shape. Against this conception you will have to struggle; for though steeped in wickedness and malignity scarcely equalled by the Tempter of mankind, the question to be decided by the evidence is, Did he murder Kinder?

Having thus made clear his own opinion of the prisoner, the Lord Chief Justice went on to consider, and dispose of, the accident theory. Supposing, said he, that Kinder did himself press the trigger of the pistol at Bertrand’s suggestion; could it be denied that the object and the criminality were the same—the compassing of Kinder’s death? Too many circumstances led to the belief that Bertrand wished him to die; it was difficult to assume, in face of these circumstances, that the result of Kinder pulling the trigger was both unexpected and undesired.

The staunching of the blood might be allowed to throw a favourable light upon the prisoner; on the other hand, “had he allowed the man who so wounded himself in his presence to bleed to death, he, as a dentist acquainted with the means to stop haemorrhage, might conceive that he ran some risk.” The staunching of the blood, therefore, though inconsistent with the idea of guilt, was not conclusive of innocence.

The defence pleaded that only an innocent man could have prosecuted Jackson for threats which it was in Jackson’s power to execute. His Honour disagreed; a man not in full possession of his senses equally might do so, or a man to whom the gratification of revenge meant more than his own safety might do so. “This point, like that of the staunching of the blood, rests on the threshold of your deliberations, and you must get rid of it before proceeding to other matters.”

After dealing with the evidence of Jackson, His Honour delivered a further expression of opinion. “There is perhaps nothing so revolting in this case as the fact that this woman [Mrs. Kinder], whilst living with her husband, should be challenged to express her preference for one of two paramours in their presence.”

He then passed to the diary, from which he read extracts. “Those passages in which he speaks of what the power of love can perform are pure nonsense, befitting only a madman.” His Honour, in fact, laid no great stress upon the evidence offered by the diary, except in so far as it clearly depicted the state of mind of the writer, which was not that of a normal person.

In conclusion, he urged the jury to decide whether Bertrand’s own confession (alleged to have been made to his sister) was to be believed, and warned them that confessions were rarely to be relied on. They must set this confession beside other circumstances offered in evidence; and only if they found that these circumstances corroborated the confession, should they allow it any weight. With the usual adjuration to allow the prisoner the benefit of any doubts they might have, His Honour dismissed the jury at one o’clock.

At two o’clock the foreman reappeared, to announce that there was no likelihood of any agreement being reached. His Honour adjourned the court for three hours. At five, and again at six, they were still undecided. An hour later they were locked up for the night. At ten next morning, after a night of argument, the position of the two opposing parties was unchanged. His Honour had no alternative; he dismissed the twelve men who had taken his warnings too closely to heart, and announced that the matter must be re-tried with another jury.

On Friday, just a week after the first trial began, proceedings were recommenced before the same judge. The evidence was heard again, summed up again, and the jury again dismissed to consider it at six in the evening. Two hours later they returned with the unanimous verdict: Guilty.

The prisoner, asked in the usual formula if he had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed on him, uttered a long and coherent protest; his voice, the newspapers thought, “betrayed no trepidation, and perhaps only a natural weakness.” This statement was so long and circumstantial that the Judge, in his final address, felt called upon to reply to it point by point. Said His Honour:

It is no infrequent thing for me to hear protestations of innocence after conviction; but I have never found it consistent with duty, truth, or the interests of society to accord them any serious consideration. Even under the gallows I have known their innocence protested by men of whose guilt I have felt as certain as of anything I have known personally myself, and whose guilt was demonstrated by evidence so clear that no human being possessed of the power of reason could doubt for an instant that the result arrived at had been right. Of course these protestations with many persons go for much, but by those with more experience, equal feeling, more responsibility, who desire to see justice and nothing more, they really pass unheeded.

You are evidently a person of great ability, acuteness, and considerable cunning, with sufficient cleverness to seize upon weak points and make them appear an excuse, which to reflecting persons could be no palliation whatsoever.

You say you are not afraid to die, and I trust you are not, but believe me that in the opinion of the majority of thinking men, wherever this evidence will go, you ought not to hope for forgiveness here.

You say you desire only to clear your character. For whose sake? For the sake of your wife and children. Can it be possible that any human being that has heard what has passed at this trial, who has read the diary, who knows your intercourse with that abandoned woman, supposes that you attempt to clear your character for the sake of your wife and children? How can you, who in the same breath utter a falsehood, be believed in this?

The jury having now pronounced their verdict, I am now at liberty to look at other matters I did not think proper to refer to before. I did not read one line of that to which I am now going to allude. I was informed that Mrs. Kinder might possibly have been tried upon evidence to be given by your wife. Upon inquiry I then made I found that she had indeed given some information that she was stated to have given to your sister in a confession, but having been permitted to see you, I believe she has receded from it.

BERTRAND: I have never seen my wife since I have been in gaol.

HIS LORDSHIP: Then it may be possible she has not receded from it. I shall feel myself called upon after your addresses to lay before the public that statement. If she was not called as a witness with the intelligence that you possess you must have known that she could not be called. She has made a statement which, unless your sister is perjured, positively confirms the verdict of the jury.

BERTRAND: My sister is perjured.

HIS LORDSHIP: Then the case displays unparalleled wickedness, but this, the deepest in dye—that a sister, for no object of her own, should falsely state that your wife admitted to her that you had shot Kinder. She may have some remains of affection for your children, and even for the character of their father, but can I doubt that your sister spoke the truth when she said she heard this extraordinary statement from you?

I do not believe you are an insane man, but a perfectly sane man would never have made the declaration you have made; and I thoroughly believe your sister when she related this: “I said to his wife, Good God, has Henry really shot him”; and she answered, “Yes, he has.” Her details, too, are consistent with my idea of the mode in which the deed was done.

Can anyone doubt the guilt when a man is accused by his wife and sister, and their statement sustains and accords with all the probabilities of the case? I hear your declaration with sorrow and with pain, but I place not the slightest dependence upon it.

I have a greater responsibility than the jury and I declare to you now, before God, I believe you thoroughly guilty, and I have no more doubt of it than that you are before me at this moment; When I first heard the case I did entertain doubts, and I have lain awake hours thinking over the various points involved, and determined if those doubts were not moved not to try you again. But now I have not the slightest doubt of your guilt, and I believe I can demonstrate to any man that you are guilty.

I think it utterly impossible for a rational person to believe that that man shot himself. You say he had intentions. I have had great experience in criminal trials, extending over thirty-two years, and have tried perhaps more cases than any judge in any country, and I have never known a case clearer than your own; nor have I known a single case in which a man who was really determined to kill himself talked about it to his friends. If a man talks of committing suicide, it is almost a proof that he never intends to take his life. Is there the slightest probability that without any temptation and with his pipe in his mouth—having only half an hour before been playing with his child, and just bought oysters for his wife and given them to the servant to prepare for supper—this unfortunate man should, no pistol having been seen in his possession about that time, go into the drawing-room in your presence, in the presence of your wife and his own, and commit a bungling attempt at suicide like that described by you? No person ever heard of such a thing in the annals of crime.

He might have been embarrassed and addicted to drinking.

Had he not been a drunkard his wife probably would not have been seduced by Jackson, and you would not have debauched her. If drink did not give the temptation to crime by him, it afforded opportunities for crime in others. All the records of Criminal Courts show repeated instances of crime being committed through the agency of drunkenness—the victim being a drunkard, and affording opportunities for crime against himself. I do not think Kinder was drunk on that day, but whether drunk or sober it is inconceivable that he could have intended to take his life in that bungling, stupid, incredible manner. I find you had every temptation, every motive, for destroying him. You were madly in love with this woman, with a passion eating into your vitals, and you would have committed any crime to have her as your own. Half mad I believe you to be, for you never could have talked as you did, unless there was a partial disturbance of your mind—wild, eccentric, strange, to an utterly unprecedented degree, your mind was overshadowed by the influence this unhappy woman had acquired over you.

I hear you say that at the time of writing the impassioned sentences to her, burning with love, you had no other intent than to satisfy the cravings of her romantic feelings. Why, you admit you wrote them as a deep and abandoned hypocrite. I do not believe it. I believe that, maddened by the passion of your attachment to her, you did this terrible deed, and your statements previous were to be accounted for by the idea that in saying his death was likely to occur, when it eventually took place you as his friend would not be looked on with suspicion. I do not make any excuses for Jackson; his conduct was extremely bad. But I feel some sympathy for him, believing that he spoke the truth. I think he deserves punishment, but the law was never meant for a case like his, but for persons who wrote threatening to accuse persons of crimes they never committed, I am satisfied that he believed what he said you did to him in uttering dark, mysterious, dangerous hints, and used expressions justifying him in the belief that you intended to commit the murder; and, therefore, I think the man should be pardoned. He has had sufficient punishment for writing that imprudent letter. But he did not demand money by threatening to accuse you of crime without having grounds for believing you committed it.

You allude to what you call a prejudice against you, yet you must see that it arises in an abhorrence of your proved crimes, and which is the most universal feeling of the country, and this verdict will, I believe, be received with perfect approval.

Nothing can pain a Judge so much as the assumption that a verdict is unjust. I believe you to be guilty, and I shall feel deeper pain than I express if I thought there were anything wrong in the verdict, because I am satisfied you will suffer death. I am sure you deserve the verdict and I am certain in my mind that it is true.

And when you talk about idle words and complain of being spoken of as a fiend, surely when one reads your journal, hears what is said by your sister, by Mrs. Robertson, by Burne, by Bell-house, and knows why you invited this man to your house, all their testimony uniting and tending the same way, you cannot but be regarded as a fiend. You are not a human being in feeling.

I can speak of you with compassion, because I do not think that you are fully possessed of the mind that God has been pleased to give to almost all of us. On that account alone I feel some sympathy. It is distressing and sad that any father of a family, a man that might be useful in his generation, should die on the scaffold for a crime that makes human nature shudder.

The sentence is that you be taken hence to the place whence you came, and thence, on a day to be named by the Governor in Council, to the place of execution, and at that place to be hanged till your body be dead. If you are to find mercy, as I hope you will, seek it elsewhere, but from no human tribunal.

But His Honour’s certainty of the prisoner’s guilt, and his desire to save time, led him into an impropriety. To avoid calling again every witness who had spoken at the first trial, the Chief Justice, during the course of the second trial, read to the jury from his own notes certain items of evidence. This had been done, in fact, at the instance of the prisoner himself, who, weary with repetitions, had pleaded that His Honour should take every means to bring his ordeal soon to an end. But the Supreme Court, to which appeal was immediately made, found this a point of great significance, and the four judges’ opinions were equally divided as to whether or no there had been a mistrial. It was argued for four days; the result of a similar inquiry in England, which might afford a precedent, was ascertained by letter and telegram; and as a result the Court ordered that the verdict should be vacated the record; the prisoner meanwhile being held in custody to await his third trial at the next sittings of the Supreme Court in its criminal jurisdiction, to be held in the following May.

The Legislative Assembly of New South Wales then took up the affair. The behaviour and competence of the Chief Justice, with one of the other judges of the Supreme Court, offered matter for questions. The Government was implored, on the one hand to appeal to the Privy Council, and, alternatively, begged not to bring the judicature of the colony into disrepute by so doing. A magnificent public quarrel was blowing up, when Bertrand himself, to use one of his own phrases, cut the knot. The doctors at long last gave him a certificate of madness, and he was removed from Darlinghurst to the prison for criminal lunatics at Parramatta.

X

From the point of view of a reader of detection stories, this is an unsatisfactory crime. The murderer was insane, and the purist in these matters prefers a murderer who is compos mentis; the chain of logical deduction should not, he thinks, clank to a madman’s fandango. It is a crime which defies all the canons. Premeditated, it yet was committed before a cloud of witness; even, one of these had been brought to the spot marked with a cross deliberately, and against her will, by the chief performer. Its object was to obtain sole possession of a woman who had already yielded to the criminal, and was, in the words of his associate, “as good as a wife to him”. It was discovered, not through any process of suspicion and inquiry, but owing to the indiscretion of the man who had actually bluffed a coroner’s jury into a verdict of suicide, but who, even to save his neck, could not hold his tongue. The police had only to listen, to search, and, when they had found Bertrand’s letters and diary, to present their case.

That Bertrand did kill Henry Kinder is indisputable. The amateur of crime, disgusted with the whole flamboyantly silly proceeding, finds a stimulus to curiosity at one point only. By what means was Henry Kinder killed? The coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of death by shooting. The post-mortem finding, death from haemorrhage and shock, was nothing more than a variation upon the jury’s theme. Nor is it easy to pick out the truth from Bertrand’s grimaces and boasts. Still, the puzzling facts may be compared with his fantasies to afford matter for a guess.

Kinder did not die until four days after he was wounded by the discharge of Bertrand’s pistol; was, indeed, in a fair way to recover from the wound which broke his jaw and tore off most of his ear. He died suddenly, after Jane Bertrand had given him a glass of milk. This, Jane’s own story, comes at second-hand; but Mrs. Robertson testified to hearing Bertrand crying out in his fit, the night before Kinder died: “Bring the milk and mix the poison.” In Bertrand’s possession were found two vegetable poisons, aconite and belladonna, both of a nature to defy the chemist who assisted at the investigation of Kinder’s exhumed body.

To quote Dr. Ainsworth Mitchell, editor of The Analyst: “Medical criminals have often banked upon difficulties likely to be experienced in detecting vegetable alkaloids.” The test for aconitine was not perfected until later, when Dr. Stevenson, by a series of experiments upon mice, established its presence in the body of Dr. Lamson’s victim. Even so, the defence in that famous case suggested the possibility that effects attributed to aconitine might also have been caused by some substance of an alkaloidal nature formed in the decomposition of animal matter. Belladonna, more familiar nowadays under the name of its active principle, atropine, was, and is, equally as elusive. Both these poisons were (quite legitimately) in Bertrand’s possession; and Bertrand was a dentist, with enough general medical knowledge to call for comment from the judge. He may be allowed, for purposes of argument, to rank as a medical criminal. It is, for the detection story reader, a problem incapable of solution; hardly a problem at all, but rather a question of looking upon this picture and on this, and making a choice of suspicions. On the one hand a man succumbs to the shock of a wound not necessarily fatal, as a result of previous known excesses in drink, by which his resistance has been weakened. “It would shorten anybody’s days.” On the other hand, a murderer, already over the edge of sanity, hears that the victim whose death has been for weeks the main concern of his imagination is about to recover. He has poisons at hand, and an instrument; his wife, dazed, frightened, unable to refuse to perform his will. He is aware, in some convolution of his uneasy brain, that vegetable alkaloids take a lot of tracing in a dead man’s body.

Penny plain, twopence coloured. There is, and can be now no proof; as young Osric says, nothing neither way. But to the writer, as to the reader of detection stories, the second alternative is the more acceptable of the two.

XI

The main interest of this trial, apart from those purely legal complications which eventually brought about an appeal to the Privy Council, lies in the picture it offers of a lunatic murderer going about his business unhampered by sane persons to whom he had confided his purpose. “People don’t do these things,” the citizens of Sydney told each other; men capable of earning a fair living and playing a good game of cards are not to be suspected of homicidal tendencies. They took no steps, therefore, to restrain the young dentist who roared like a tiger when yawning in the street, who strolled Sydney by night dressed as a woman, vowed he could raise ghosts, and in the midst of a rubber of whist announced, with appropriate gesture, that he was the personal devil.

De Fries, Jackson, and Burne seem to have made no effort to get a doctor to Bertrand, or, when Kinder died, to inform the police of what they knew. De Fries did indeed plead with Bertrand for better treatment of his wife, and told Mrs. Robertson that he must be insane to go on as he did. But “he said it in a jocular manner.” Burne, a party to all his employer’s plans, buying pistols for him, rowing with him while the murderous tomahawk swung under his coat, held his tongue, would not speak until he was subpoenaed, even after Bertrand had been gaoled on another charge. He was twenty years old, and by no means unsophisticated, having played ‘juvenile business ‘at the Victoria Theatre before he came to the dentist as assistant. It is inconceivable that, after the first expedition in the boat, he should not have perceived Bertrand’s mental condition. Having accompanied him on three of these ventures and bought the pistols, it is understandable that he should then be afraid to speak. But how came he to undertake such commissions? How came he to remain in that equivocal employment at all? Fear accounts for some part of his conduct; for the rest we must hold responsible the reluctance of the normal human being to suppose that a man with whom he is in daily contact, and from whom he takes orders, is not right in his mind.

It is evident from the behaviour of these people that in many ways Bertrand could tell a hawk from a handsaw still; he was but mad nor’-nor’-west. His journal speaks rationally of money matters, and gives a shrewd picture of Mr. Wood, Helen Kinder’s shiftless father, who, having been told how matters stood between his daughter and the dentist, attempted to make capital out of his knowledge. His brutalities to poor Jane were kept secret, though he thrashed her with a whip and assaulted her with a penknife, after which last incident Jane showed her sister-in-law a pair of corsets soaked with blood. His mother-in-law, who visited the house often, was able to swear in court that he was very kind to her daughter, and by no means a man of strange manners and habits. Bellhouse, told the facts of the murder by Bertrand, casually, after a game of cards, could not make up his mind to believe that what he had heard was the truth, and lay awake all night debating the question. It would seem that in general Bertrand’s manner was normal enough; so that it must have been shocking to hear him offer, over the whist-table, to raise the ghost of the man he had killed; or to look up from that most innocent of occupations, the bathing of a baby, and be told: “Kinder did not shoot himself, I shot him.”

The heroine of the story, Ellen Kinder, makes no such extraordinary impression upon the mind; her behaviour rouses no question. She was a hearty, handsome, practical woman, fond of her pleasures, combining promiscuity with a genuine affection and care for her children. It is easy enough to believe that she yielded to Bertrand from fear; yet her imagination was not of a quality to tell her that the threats he was for ever making against her husband might one day come to action. The passion in her letters has in it a tang of theatre and of the expected. Perhaps this is always so; perhaps the true language of persons moved by great excitement is that of melodrama. “I had rather see you dead at my feet”; “I cannot live without seeing you”; “I shall go mad at the thought of our meeting”—all these are stock phrases which may stand for the expression of genuine as of false emotion. But the voice of the real Ellen Kinder is not to be heard in them. Rather she comes alive in such phrases as these, taken at random from her letters to her lover:

“Papa quite expects me to make a good match one of these days. I tell him I would not give thanks for the best man living, if I could make my own living.”

“I feel my position very much, as I know how little we are able to afford the extra expense we must be at. If there were anything I could do to make it up I should not mind, but there is absolutely nothing. I do not know how things are to go on if it were not for the children.”

“We are almost decided to take an hotel here, but on second thought I do not care much for it. I should not mind a respectable house in Sydney, but this is such a bad place. This is, oh, dreadfully matter of fact, dear dear love, but it is necessary, therefore I hope you will not mind it.”

“You see, deary, an hotel is such a public affair, that my position would be noticeable directly. I should not like to be in a public, and I know that you would not like for me to be a disgrace to everyone connected with me.”

“I must not forget to thank you for seeing about my business. I should like to get into a first-rate establishment for a few weeks to learn dressmaking, as a really good one would do well here. In that case, there is no place like Sydney; but, darling, I leave myself entirely in your hands—feeling, love, you will do everything for the best.”

It is not surprising after all these protestations to note that the first employment found by Mrs. Kinder after her acquittal was in an hotel. She returned to New Zealand, whence she had come three years before; a public-house keeper with some sense of the value of advertisement engaged her as barmaid, in which position she was completely successful. Almost at once, however, she married again, and, for all anyone at this date can tell, died full of years and highly respected.