LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

if she wished, seat herself near the bench.

      He was not the only one in court that day concerned for her comfort. Her lawyer, E. A. S. Wagner, also had her sensitivities in mind when he complained that most of those in the public gallery were Malays and Chinese – what the Mail called ‘the native element’.

      ‘There are a lot of persons in the court who have no business here,’ Wagner said, ‘and I think this would tend to affect the prisoner.’

      As a person who knew the law, Wagner surely would have known that seeing justice done was everyone’s business. Clearly, the presence of non-Europeans made him uncomfortable for another reason: the realization that the trial of Ethel Proudlock had the potential to compromise British prestige. (Wagner was, incidentally, a curious choice to defend Mrs Proudlock. An able lawyer, he and Steward were friends, having often played rugby together. He also seems to have known that his client was guilty. When Somerset Maugham visited Malaya in 1921, it was Wagner who told him of the Proudlock case, even suggesting he write a story about it.)

      The police wanted the public excluded, too, but for a different reason. The case involved ‘a certain amount of indecency’, the magistrate was told. The court was being warned that the evidence to be presented was likely to prove embarrassing, not just to Mrs Proudlock, but to the British generally, and the fewer ears it reached the better for all concerned.

      Mr Hereford, the lawyer representing the police, opened the proceedings by summarizing ‘the facts in so far as we have been able to ascertain them’. On the night of 23 April, William Steward, he told the court, was dining with two friends in the Empire Hotel when, hearing the clock in the Secretariat building strike nine, he rose suddenly and asked to be excused. He had, he said, an appointment. Then, leaving the hotel in some haste, he flagged down a rickshaw and went directly to the home of the accused.

      Besides Mrs Proudlock, the only person in the house when he got there was a cook. Her husband had gone out to dine, and both the ayah (nanny) and the ‘boy’ had the evening off. The cook said he was smoking opium in his room when he heard a man shout, ‘Hey! Hey!’ This was followed by gunshots, but he took little notice until he heard Mrs Proudlock, from somewhere in the garden and sounding much distressed, telling him to fetch her husband.

      When Mr Proudlock returned, he found his wife ‘in a very agitated state’ and speaking in ‘a most unintelligible manner’. She told him that Steward had molested her and made improper proposals. There was gunpowder on her right hand, Hereford continued. ‘There is no question that it was she who shot the deceased.’

      Hereford then challenged Ethel’s claim that Steward’s visit was unexpected: ‘The deceased stated that he had an appointment. This showed that he must have been aware that he would find the accused in the house by herself… It is difficult to see how he could have known this unless the accused had told him. At some point, there was some communication between them.’

      He also challenged her claim that Steward had tried to rape her. When the police found Steward, he was fully dressed, and his trousers – what the Mail called ‘his nether garments’ – were buttoned. ‘The medical evidence did not show any accomplishment of violation.’ Nor was there evidence of a struggle. A teapoy had been overturned but, aside from that, nothing else had been disturbed.

      ‘This,’ he added ominously, ‘makes her story not very easy to believe.’

      Continuing his attack on Mrs Proudlock’s probity, Hereford now turned to the matter of her attire. Though she was dining by herself, the accused wore an evening dress which, he had been told, ‘is cut very low’. According to her husband, Mrs Proudlock always dressed like this in the evenings, even when she dined alone. But Hereford was sceptical. Allowing that this was not beyond the realm of possibility, it was, he said, ‘a question which has to be considered as to whether it does not point to the expectation of a visit from the deceased’.

      The evidence had begun to look damning and when the court rose that day, the magistrate, no longer feeling chivalrous, refused to grant an application for bail. For the first time since the shooting, Mrs Proudlock was deprived of her liberty and removed to Pudu gaol, a mile from the courtroom. But old habits die hard. To spare her the indignity of riding to prison in a police van, Detective-Inspector Wyatt drove her there himself in his private car.

      It must have been an uncomfortable drive for both of them. What could they possibly have found to say to one another? Wyatt, in charge of the police investigation, could hardly have offered his sympathy. Like many in KL, he did not doubt she was a killer, but there were other obligations on him – obligations of gallantry and the respect due to one’s own. A solidarity existed between them – and would do so until such time as the court found her guilty.

      Pudu gaol would be Mrs Proudlock’s home for the next two-and-a-half months. The prison, completed just six years earlier, covered an area of 7 acres and could accommodate as many as 600 prisoners. Separate from the main building was the female wing which comprised six cells, each containing a plank bed and a wooden pillow. When not locked up, women prisoners were allowed to congregate in a common room where they could knit or even do a little sewing. For their refreshment, the prison provided a pail of weak tea.

      In September 1909, the Mail had run a long story about Pudu gaol, a story that Mrs Proudlock is almost certain to have read. As well as a daily rice ration, the Mail reported, each prisoner received meat or eggs and two kinds of vegetables. Meals were served twice a day – one at 10.15; the other at 4 – and porridge was provided in the early morning. Meals were taken in two large, open-sided sheds to the right of the prison proper. ‘All is scrupulously clean and neat,’ the story went on. ‘There is not a speck of dirt anywhere … In the cooking area, there is a marked absence of the somewhat unsavory smells which so often hover over Oriental culinary preparations.’

      The regime as reported does not sound especially harsh but, that said, Mrs Proudlock cannot have found it very pleasant. Separated from her husband and her young daughter, she was alone, incarcerated, and facing an uncertain future. As she contemplated that plank bed and wooden pillow, one can imagine her terror.

      On the stand the next day, William Proudlock told the court that, on 23 April, he and his wife took a nap after lunch, rose at 4, had tea on the verandah and then put in some target practice, using a revolver she had given him just five days earlier as a birthday present. At 5.25, he had handed the gun to Ethel and told her to put it ‘in a safe place’. Both of them then left for church, after which they briefly visited the Selangor Club and went home, where he changed clothes and left for his dinner appointment.

      Asked if he and his wife were on good terms, Proudlock said, ‘Oh, yes.’

      Had he ever had occasion to complain about her moral conduct?

      ‘No,’ he said.

      What about her conduct in respect to other men: did he ever have cause to complain about that?

      ‘Never.’

      Asked why his wife had given him a gun for his birthday, he said that their home in Brickfields Road – the one now occupied by Goodman Ambler – had been broken into the previous August, and they had talked several times since about buying a revolver.

      On the day before the shooting, he said, his wife had run into Steward at the Selangor Club and had been forced to talk to him when, passing his chair, he had looked up at her and said hello. In the course of a short conversation, his wife had remarked on how long it was since Steward had been to see them and mentioned that she and her husband had moved to another house. When Steward asked where, she felt she had no choice but to tell him.

      Proudlock said he had known Steward for almost two years and considered him a friend. ‘He’s always behaved as a gentleman towards my wife.’

      Summoned home the night Steward died, he found his wife ‘in a state of disorder’. Her face was very white, and she was sobbing violently. ‘I saw at once that there had been a struggle of some description.’ The next day, he saw bruises on her shoulders and on her legs. (The prosecution claimed that these were self-inflicted. A doctor who examined Ethel

Скачать книгу