‘His final argument had nothing to do with the case at all. He said, “Anyway, she killed her daughter, so we ought to get her for that”.’
‘Whatever made him think so? I remember reading something about it in the paper, now that you mention it,’ said the barrister, ‘but there was never any suggestion …’
‘Mrs Schumann’s photograph was published at the time of her daughter’s death, and he recognised her when she stood in the dock. It appears that he had followed up the series of stranglings very closely, chiefly because of a sob-stuff article which had appeared in the press, giving a most moving account of the dog which had mounted guard over the daughter’s body. Something about the story made him suspicious, he told me.
‘“I traced the dog’s history,” he said. “You can always do that with these pedigree things. It was a very young dog and couldn’t have been more than half-trained. It was reported that the body must have been dead for some hours when the dog found it, so it didn’t find it on its own. It was taken there.”
‘“But not necessarily by Mrs Schumann,” I argued. I was interested to hear what he would say to that.
‘“Oh, I’m sure of it,” he said. “The dead girl couldn’t have whistled him up, and his new owner had only had him a few months, certainly not long enough to make him forget one call and learn another.”
‘“But that doesn’t prove that Mrs Schumann killed her daughter,” I said, anxious to pursue the argument.
‘“Doesn’t it?” he retorted. “Not if the daughter was in her way? Mrs Schumann wanted to marry that clot James, who was called for the prosecution and made such a mess of it!”
‘I said that that was beside the point. Mrs Schumann had been tried for the murder of her husband, not for that of her daughter.’
‘“Yes,” he said, “but I don’t like the name Schumann. They played him at my wedding, and I divorced my wife two years later. Anyway, that business of the dog-whistle damns her. The dog wouldn’t have left his owner like that, unless he had recognised the call. Mrs Schumann had bred him – I found that out, of course – and the rest follows.”
‘I reminded him that the dead husband and dead daughter had also been called Schumann.
‘“That’s right,” he said, “and if we hadn’t abolished the law about hanging, this beauty would have been near enough dead, too, by now.” I thought it better not to remind him that Otto was still alive.’
‘Very odd, the way juries go about the business,’ said the barrister. ‘Very interesting, too.’
‘There will be no appeal, I take it,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘The defence can hardly claim that the jury was misdirected.’
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Copyright © The Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1968
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First published in Great Britain by
Michael Joseph Ltd in 1968
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ISBN 9780099584025
