“He did not say that he would do anything short of it. Of all the—”
“Then my memory is at fault,” remarked Mr. Farr blandly. “It was certainly my impression that such was the substance of his remarks. If it gives offense I withdraw it, and state simply that the person who has fixed the hour of the murder for you is Mrs. Patrick Ives’s brother, Mr. Douglas Thorne. There is not a shred of evidence save his as to the moment at which the murder took place—not a shred. You are entirely at liberty to draw your own conclusions from that. If you decide that he was telling the absolute truth, I will concede even that possibility.
“Mr. Thorne simply tells you that at about nine-thirty on the evening of the he heard a woman scream and a man laugh somewhere in the neighbourhood of the gardener’s cottage at Orchards. He adds that at the time he attached no particular importance to it, as he thought that it may have been young people skylarking in the neighbourhood—and he may have been perfectly right. It no more establishes the hour of Madeleine Bellamy’s murder than it establishes the hour of the deluge.
“It is, in fact, perfectly possible that the murder took place after ten o’clock, after the visit to the Bellamy home and the alleged search along the road to the Conroys. Only one thing is certain: If it was nine-thirty when Mr. Thorne walked up those cottage steps, and if at that time there was no car in sight, then the hour of the murder was not nine-thirty. It may have been before that hour, it may have been after it. It was not then.
“So much for Mr. Lambert’s trump cards, the laugh and the car. There remains the theft of the note, which he claims Mrs. Ives had no interest in denying. Of course she had every interest in denying it. If she admitted that she had found the note, then she would be forced to admit to the jury that she knew positively that Mimi was waiting in the cottage, and that did not fit in with her story at all. So she simply denies that she took it. And there goes their last trump.
“Stripped of glamour, of emotion, of eloquence, it is the barest, the simplest, the most appallingly obvious of cases, you see. There is not one single link in the chain missing—not one.
“Unless someone came to you here and said, ‘I saw the knife in Susan Ives’s hand, I saw it rise, I saw it fall, I heard the crash of that girl’s body and saw the white lace of her frock turn red’—unless you heard that with your own ears, you could not have a clearer picture of what happened in that room. Not once in a thousand murder cases is there an eyewitness to the crime. Not once in five hundred is there forged so strong a chain of evidence as now lies before you.
“There was only one person in all the world to whom the death of Madeleine Bellamy was a vital, urgent, and imperative necessity. The woman to whom it was all of this—and more, far more, since words are poor substitutes for passions—has told you with her own lips that at ten o’clock on that night she stood over the body of that slain girl and saw her eyes wide in the dreadful and unseeing stare of death. When Susan Ives told you that, she told you the truth; and she told you the truth again when she said that when you knew that she had stood there, she did not believe that it would be possible for you to credit that the one fact had no connection with the other. Nor do I believe it, gentlemen—nor do I believe it.
“By her side, in that room, stood Stephen Bellamy. By his own confession it was he who closed the eyes of that slain girl, he who touched her hand. By his own confession he has told you that he did not believe it possible that you would credit that he stood there at that time and yet had no knowledge of her death. Nor do I believe it, gentlemen—nor do I believe it.
“Mr. Lambert has told you that to him has fallen the most solemn task that can fall to the lot of any man—that of pleading for the gift of human life. There is a still more solemn task, I believe, and that task has fallen to me. I must ask you not for life but for death.
“The law does not exact the penalty of a life for a life in the spirit of vengeance or of malice. It asks it because the flame of human life is so sacred a thing that it is business of the law to see that no hand, however powerful, shall be blasphemously lifted to extinguish that flame. It is in order that your wives and daughters and sisters may sleep sweet and safe at night that I stand before you now and tell you that because they lifted that hand, the lives of Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives are forfeit.
“These two believed that behind the bulwarks of power, of privilege, of wealth, and of position, they were safe. They were not safe; they have discovered that. And if those barriers can protect them now, if still behind them they can find shelter and security and a wall to shield them as they creep back to their ruined hearthstones, then I say to you that the majesty of the law is a mockery and the sacredness of human life is a mockery, and the death penalty in this great state is a mockery.
“There was never in this state a more wicked, brutal, and cold-blooded murder than that of Madeleine Bellamy. For Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy, the two who now stand before you accused of that murder, I
