The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (38 page)

Edwin’s father arrived. He had long been making not very thickly veiled suggestions that his daughter-in-law was trying to poison her husband and he now kissed his dead son and at the same time sniffed at his lips: and announced that there must be a post mortem. The Rev. George, on the other hand, was concerned only and immediately with Number One. He began to panic about that chloroform and—on his way to chapel to take a service—disposed of the original three small bottles under separate bushes on Wandsworth Common. He then rushed to Adelaide and demanded the return of My Birdie; and receiving no satisfaction from her, proceeded to unburden his heart to friends.

Adelaide, betrayed, sought out the doctor and unburdened hers. She had really wanted the chloroform, she now declared, because Edwin, in his brief moments of returning spirits showed signs of wishing to claim rights which he had never demanded before. Feeling herself to have been almost officially handed over to the Rev. Dyson, she had felt this to be not quite decent. She could hardly explain it to a clergyman, so she had told him a tarradiddle to persuade him to get her the chloroform, privately proposing to sprinkle it on a handkerchief, wave it in her husband’s face and so subdue his unwelcome passions. She had had no occasion to use it, but on that night, the evening of his death, she had felt so bad about keeping a secret from him that she had broken down and confessed it all and handed over the bottle. They had had a talk, “serious but amicable” and he had put the bottle on the mantelpiece by the bedside, turned over and gone to sleep—or to sulk, she rather unexpectedly amended. Next morning she had taken the bottle, not observing whether or not any of the contents was missing, and put it in a drawer of her dressing table. There the police had—somewhat unaccountably, it must be confessed—overlooked it in their search and when she left the house for ever she had taken it with her and thrown it from the window of the train into a pond. It must be added in Adelaide’s disfavour that at this time the pond in question is said to have been frozen over.

A simple little story—allowing for Adelaide’s undoubted tendency to embroider the truth. It had only one drawback: nobody believed it.

On the other hand . . .

On the other hand, thundered the medical witnesses at her subsequent trial, it was impossible to administer chloroform to a conscious person without an agonised struggle and outcry: and in this case there had been demonstrably been none. And it was equally impossible for anyone unskilled to administer chloroform to an unconscious person, without leaving signs of burning in the throat; and in this case there were none. No attempt at murder by this means had ever been recorded.

So with all the bad will in the world—how could Adelaide have got the chloroform down her husband’s throat?

Suicide and accident were of course canvassed. She had left him for some little time while she went into the next room to prepare herself for the night’s vigil—which for some reason she appears to have spent fully dressed. But if he had then accidentally—or for that matter, purposely—drunk from the bottle, he must have cried out in pain and she must have heard him through the partitioning doors which were all that divided the two rooms. At any rate, she would not have found him when she came back, apparently peacefully at rest. There seemed no alternative to murder. Only—how?

By first rendering him partially insensible by inhalation of the chloroform, suggested the Crown, either while he was asleep (extremely difficult, protested the medical witnesses) or by some sort of persuasion; and then pouring the fatal dose down his throat. But, declared a specialist in such matters, though in a person losing consciousness there might be a moment between the time they were still able to swallow and the failure of that reflex—“the most careful doctor could not measure or predict its existence”.

Very well, said the Crown (in essence)
you
know that: but Adelaide didn’t, did she? Suppose she just had a bash and struck the lucky moment?

Or, it has since been suggested, might she not easily have persuaded him to take a dose?—trusting her implicitly as he did and with his deep respect for her “learning”. He had been suffering from sleeplessness and nothing else so far had done him any good. (It is put forward in a recent book on the case that Adelaide was in fact a thoroughly wicked woman who all along had been poisoning her husband; that she had borrowed the lumbricoid worm from one of the Newfoundland dogs—not a very charming idea—and introduced it deliberately, further to cast gloom and despondency; and that finally
under
hypnotism
she induced him, to take the dose.)

But the question always seems to come back to this—why should she? They all three believed that Edwin had not long to live—or why the arrangement, which undoubtedly existed, about handing her over to the Rev. Dyson? Dyson, by the rules of his church, could not marry for some little time to come, and meanwhile she was free, indeed encouraged, by her husband to spend most of her time with him—curtains drawn, head on knee, My Birdie and all the rest of it. Moreover, no one was ever found to say that to the end she had been anything but an affectionate, tenderly careful and much loved wife. So why take so appalling a risk?—why with so little care or concealment court a death-sentence for murder? Adelaide was a clever creature, the very readiness and glibness of her innumerable fibs proves that: would she for a moment have trusted George Dyson—a man of God, after all—to keep silent when his purchase of the chloroform became known?—nor had she ever asked him to keep the matter secret. Then—just to tip the stuff down her husband’s throat, leaving no possible alternative to her own guilt when, as must inevitably happen, the cause of his death was proved. No attempt to set the stage for accident or suicide: why the removal of the chloroform bottle which made either impossible? And she was already aware that the embittered old father-in-law was accusing her of causing his son’s illness.

The consensus of opinion is probably that Adelaide Barlett murdered her husband. This is to some extent on account of her lies—but we are nowadays sufficiently familiar with the phenomenon of the self-dramatist, the compulsive liar?—and the monotony and uselessness of her life would have conduced to both. Mostly, however, it is for lack of any alternative. And yet . . .

That Adelaide really cared two hoots for the Rev. Dyson, it is impossible to believe—except as a diversion from the tedium of her friendless life. But here was Edwin, however much she may have been devoted to him—with his toothless gums, sloughing and sponging and all the rest of it, with worms imaginary or otherwise crawling up and down his throat, with his crumbling jaw and that ominously suggestive blue line . . . Not exactly a proposition for a fastidious young woman, already sentimentally inclined elsewhere. And yet how to avoid wounding his feelings in his present extremely manic-depressive condition? She has been used, perhaps, to employing chloroform in her work with the dogs? At any rate, she sets about obtaining some. And sure enough, on New Year’s Eve, after his supper of aphrodisiac oysters, the mango chutney and cake—Edwin shows signs of rising uxorious desires.

Who can say what was done or spoken that night? She genuinely believed, perhaps, that she could quieten him down?—and he detected something and so she confessed it all? Or she had thought of a better plan: she would simply explain to him that her spiritual betrothal to George Dyson—which Edwin himself had promoted—forbade marital relations between them. Either way, she handed over the bottle, left it standing there unused on the mantel-shelf—they had a good talk and Edwin turned over and went to sleep.

Or
to
sulk
, Adelaide had said.

Of course it was all nonsense about Edwin and his platonic relations with his wife: another of those tarradiddles so pointless as to suggest a guiltless, pathological cause for all Adelaide’s untruths. The famous “single act” on a Sunday afternoon which had resulted in the stillborn baby, was reduced to commonplace by the testimony of the midwife: “On all other occasions a preventative was used.” Edwin, in his fitful feelings of well-being, was simply asking for his customary cuddle. And for the first time, Adelaide was saying no.

Poor man! He is hateful to himself with his upset stomach and his gums and his necrosis and his lumbricoid worm; and now it seems he is hateful to Adelaide also. She has withdrawn her favours from him; she and George, the admired and beloved friend, appear to be calmly anticipating a near future when he, the obstructive husband, shall be out of the way . . .

A bottle of chloroform within reach. A glass of brandy to hand. He tips a large dose of the one into the other. The chloroform hangs in the brandy
¹¹
, suspended at its centre like a yolk in the white of an egg. Wrapped within its cocoon, the dose passes without pain or burning, all at one gulp—down the throat of the suicide.

Adelaide comes back from the other room. Edwin lies doggo. She settles herself for the night.

In the early hours of the morning she awakes; and he is dead.

As we have seen, Adelaide Bartlett was no fool. All along, the horrid old father-in-law has been making overt accusations and now his son is indeed dead, and it is she who has—apparently secretly, and giving false reasons—introduced the fatal dose. What to do? Get rid of the bottle of chloroform, at any rate, just get rid of it and trust to luck; nothing can be worse than leaving it here beside Edwin. Rinse out the glass, spill a bit of brandy around: but get rid of that bottle.

That she put it in her dressing-table drawer, we may take leave to doubt: laced into her corsets, more likely—no one went so far as to search her person. Then to send for the doctor (may he not, considering the patient’s long sickness, issue a death certificate without more ado?)—summon up the landlord, give way to a doubtless quite genuine grief. And when the Rev. George comes rushing round in a state about the chloroform, stamp your foot and cry out, “Oh, damn the chloroform!”—that none of it has been used and he had better just forget all about it and pipe down . . .

George on the contrary piped up and to such effect that he shortly afterwards found himself standing in the dock beside her, both of them charged with murder.

They let him go almost immediately—to testify against her with all the vehemence of his shocked and terrified heart. But then, after all, he believed her guilty.

The jury believed it too; but they couldn’t get round the doctors’ evidence in her defence and they brought in a verdict accordingly. “Although we think that grave suspicion attaches to the prisoner . . .” The court waited to hear no more: a huge burst of cheering rang out and for the only time in his long and brilliant career, her counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, put his head in his hands and wept.

“Now that Mrs Bartlett has been found not guilty of murdering her husband,” said the wits afterwards, “it seems only fair that in the interests of science, she should tell us how she did it.”

(Mrs Morrell and Mrs Hullett, 1957)

Eric Ambler

In the mid-1950s, a rumour began in the genteel resort of Eastbourne, on England’s south coast, that a local general practitioner, Dr John Bodkin Adams, was poisoning his patients and pocketing large legacies from them. Suspicion took root in 1950 with the death of an elderly and eccentric patient called Mrs Edith Morrell. Nurses observed Dr Adams dosing Mrs Morrell with various medications including barbiturates, doses that grew bigger as the stricken old woman sank deeper. After her death, Adams received a chest of silver, an antique cupboard and a Rolls-Royce motor car from Mrs Morrell’s estate. Tongues wagged. In July 1956, another elderly patient, Mrs Gertrude Hullett, died in the care of Dr Adams, leaving him another Rolls-Royce car in her will. Teacups in scandalized Eastbourne rattled louder than ever, and the town’s chief constable called in a team of detectives from Scotland Yard’s murder squad to investigate. Adams had treated hundreds of old and wealthy patients, but the police drew up a dossier focusing on nine suspicious deaths. Told that he was to be charged with murdering old Mrs Morrell, Dr Adams blinked owlishly and replied: “Murder? I do not think you could prove it was murder.” He was right. They could not.

Dr Adams, a church-going bachelor, had apparently lived a blameless life, but the case against him was strong. At his sensational Old Bailey trial in 1957, the doctor was said to have been a beneficiary in 132 wills, and to have amassed £45,000 in cash as well as silver, jewellery, antiques, pictures and the two Rolls-Royce cars. When the trial began, the assembled world’s press, believing almost to a man that Adams was guilty, reported the case recklessly. “Eastbourne’s frenzied gossip pushed Dr Adams’s alleged victims as high as 400”, trumpeted
Newsweek
magazine, which was promptly fined for contempt and banned from circulating for the remainder of the trial. Eric Ambler (b. 1909), the best-selling writer of spy thrillers, was commissioned to cover the case. When this account appeared in Eric Ambler’s 1963 murder anthology
The Ability To Kill,
Dr Adams made such a fuss that the book was pulped. It was eventually published without the Adams chapter, which appears here for the first time. Dr Adams himself died in 1984.

Even during the summer holiday season, when the visitors are down from London and the hotels and boarding houses become filled, Eastbourne remains a quiet, dignified town. A great many of its residents are well-to-do elderly persons who have gone there to end their days in retirement. To succeed in Eastbourne a doctor has to be more than a good physician. He also needs a good bedside manner.