LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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