HARDING’S COCK-AND-BULL STORY.
Turning now to the alleged confession to Harding, it will be seen that it will bear analysis no better than Matthews’s. The questions supposed to have been put by Harding bear their own refutation.
Take the words near the opening:—“I said: ‘Did you see the girl?’ He said: ‘Yes!’” What would have happened had the conversation reached that interesting stage? All eagerness, Harding would have followed it up by asking what happened. But what does he do? He inquires weakly, like a lady of fashion: “How was she dressed?” With great minuteness Ross described her dress, down to her shoes and stockings, and with great accuracy Harding remembered it all. Then Harding inquired, still curbing his curiosity: “Did you tell the detectives that you saw her?” And Ross replied: “Yes; but I told them that she had black boots”—a little touch not borne out by Ross’s written statement, but clearly designed to furnish corroboration of Harding’s story that Ross had confessed. Then a little later on we have Harding interposing with the unreal inquiry: “What time was this?” as if time were, at that stage of the inquiry, either important or interesting. There are many other questions equally unreal. The purpose of all of them is quite clear. They are plainly detective questions, devised to establish at the outset, as he had no doubt been instructed to establish, or as he knew by experience detectives are wont to establish, the identity of the girl Ross was talking about. There was to be left no room for misunderstanding, such as Brophy left in his bungled interview of the 16th.
Again, take the question supposed to have been put by Harding when the conversation was resumed on the second day. It is on a different footing from the others. “I asked him,” said Harding, “did you always have a screen up in that cubicle?” and Ross is supposed to have replied: “No; I used the one in the parlour—the red screen.” The reference, apparently, was to the screen which hung in the arched doorway between the two main rooms of the saloon. Can any earthly reason be suggested why Harding should have put such a question to Ross? The only possible answer is: “None whatever.” But a reason can be suggested why, if his story were an invention, he should have invented that particular part of it. Harding had been in the saloon, and he could not have missed the conspicuous screen that hung between the two rooms. He would probably not have remembered clearly whether there was a curtain over the cubicle door or not. For aught he knew, he might have been confronted by fifty witnesses who could swear truly that there never had been a curtain there. He tried to rise to the occasion, and invented the ludicrous story of Ross having said that he removed the large curtain and hung it over the cubicle door to hide the little girl from the public gaze—the same little girl as, according to Matthews, Ross got deliberately to reveal herself when Matthews took her hasty glance over Stanley Ross’s shoulder. The idea of Ross removing the large curtain from between the rooms and hanging it over the cubicle door (all in the presence of Stanley), in order to prevent Stanley, amongst others, from seeing the girl, would be laughable if anything about this terrible case could be laughable.
Being reticent up to a certain stage, Ross, according to Harding, then determined to speak, for what reason no one can suggest, seeing that he knew Harding’s reputation as a “shelf,” and seeing that he had been warned by his solicitor to “keep his mouth closed.” That much Harding admitted, but in fact Ross was warned that the remand yard would be full of pimps. The Harding touch was made apparent by another little incident. He makes Ross throughout speak of the small compartment at the end of the bar as “the cubicle.” It is a most fitting name, and it has stuck to the room throughout the trial, but it had never been called that by the Rosses. They had never even heard the word, and prior to the trial did not know what it meant. But Harding, during his inglorious war service, had been employed on a hospital ship, and that is the expression used in hospitals to denote a little room with a couch in it such as this. Then Ross is made to say that none of the customers could see the girl because they were in the parlour, whereas, according to Matthews, the little girl thrust her head out as if in order to be seen, and, indeed, thrust it out in pursuance of Ross’s suggestion, and, according to Maddox, she was in the beaded room with two of the customers, and was seen by Maddox herself, who was an excellent customer. But, furthermore, if the Maddox story is true, the customers would have had to be in the parlour in order to see her, for the beaded room is part of the parlour. Then Ross offered this quiet, bashful little girl a glass of wine, and she took three, and fell off into a stupor in the cubicle, though, according to Matthews, he gave her a glass of lemonade, and afterwards sent her over to the beaded room, where she was seen by Olive Maddox, bright and alert, sitting up with an empty glass before her, at 5 o’clock.
The idea that Stanley should have seen, and been a party to, his brother’s lust, was too much even for the credibility of a Harding, so Ross is made to say that Stanley couldn’t see the girl when he went behind the counter, because the screen was down, “and when the screen was down no one dared to go into the cubicle.” The absurdity of the story of the screen in one aspect has already been referred to, but a glance at the plan will show its absurdity in another aspect. But even the plan does not show that the cubicle walls were only 6 ft. 4 in. in height, the lower 3 ft. being thin lining boards, and the upper 3 ft. 4 in. being glass. There was no top or ceiling to it. A girl could scarcely breathe in that cubicle without its being noticed by a man squeezing in and out at the end of the bar counter. Everything, according to Harding, took place in the cubicle, and the girl never left it from the time she went in at 3 o’clock until she was carried out, dead and nude, between 1 and 2 o’clock next morning. There are none of the perambulations by the child when alive, or by Ross when the child was dead, backwards and forwards with the body to and from the cubicle of which Matthews speaks.
According to the Harding confession, the crime was consummated soon after 6, and the girl was dead. The fact that no trace of blood was ever known to have been seen in the room had to be accounted for, so Harding makes Ross first wash out the cubicle, and then the whole bar. The washing of the cubicle would suggest itself to a much cruder imagination than Harding’s, but the little touch about the rest of the bar was worthy of him. Even Piggott and Brophy, when they had the matter so “well in hand” on the morning of the 31st, that they did not think to go into the cubicle, might be expected to notice that one part of the bar was cleaner than the other, for Harding would not have dreamt that the detectives would neglect the elementary step of looking into the cubicle. And so Harding put in the touch of verisimilitude about the washing of the whole bar.
If Harding’s story be true, then it was while Ross was engaged in this labour of scrubbing out the bar, with the dead body of an outraged and murdered child keeping vigil over him, that he went out into the Arcade to borrow a lead pencil from the vaudeville artist, Alberts, who just happened to have reason, at the psychological moment, to walk half-way through the Arcade and back again, like a famous character in history. Of course Mr. Alberts may have been mistaken in his identification, but at least he, too, as has been said, has shared in the reward for the information he gave.
Having finished his task of scrubbing out the bar, Ross had time on his hands—still accepting the Harding narrative—to clean himself up and go for a walk before meeting his girl. Having honoured his appointment, and met his girl at 9 o’clock—though, as a tragedy had occurred in the meantime which might have been expected to, and did, in fact, cost him his life, he would have been excused for breaking it—one would have thought that he would have suggested a walk in the park, or about the streets—anywhere but back to where the stark body of the little girl was awaiting him. Had he walked down Bourke Street the alibi that he was so anxious, according to Harding, to establish would have been much better established, for he might have been seen by a dozen acquaintances, and the risk which even Harding saw he was taking would have been avoided. But no! Ross must go and sit for an hour and a half with his lady love a few yards away from the child he had foully murdered so recently, and whose body he must dispose of within the next few hours, under pain of death.