Nothing was made of this—except to render it evident that no reliable dates could be got from the witness; and, with the positiveness displayed on previous occasions, she repudiated any knowledge of the letters found near Bannercross after the murder.
The journey to Mansfield, on the occasion when Peace followed her there, next came under notice, and the gift of a ring by the prisoner. Then the visits to Sheffield public-houses with Peace—she had been once with him to the “Marquis of Waterford,” Russell-street, she said, and might have been twice, but she could not say positively.
The keepers of several of these houses were called and confronted with Mrs. Dyson, but she knew them not, nor did she know (though she avoided positively swearing it) that she had ever had drink at the “Halfway House,” Darnall, charged to the prisoner.
Mr. Lockwood was equally unsuccessful in his attempts to extract confessions as to the transmission of notes between herself and Peace. As before the Stipendiary, so now Mrs. Dyson was subjected to a trial in caligraphy, and it may be assumed that the results were not very encouraging to Mr. Lockwood, since he did not pursue the subject further. But the incident elicited a curious example of Mrs. Dyson’s composure.
She was passing to Mr. Lockwood the paper on which she had written, with the ink wet. It had actually left her hands, when she took it back and calmly rubbed a piece of blotting paper over it.
Coming down to the day before the murder new points of much interest were opened up. The witness admitted that she was on that day at the “Stag” Hotel, Sharrow. A little boy was with her—not her own child.
A man followed her in and sat beside her—she would almost swear that the prisoner was not the man—upon which a sort of laugh ran through the court.
She was cross-examined as to her other movements that night, and as to going to a friend’s named Muddiman on leaving the “Stag.” She swore that she did not tell Peace that she was going there—for she did not see him.
A laugh was caused when Mrs. Dyson pleaded guilty to the soft impeachment of having been “slightly inebriated” at the “Halfway House,” but she denied that she had ever been turned out of that house either for being drunk or for being “slightly inebriated.”
This concluded Mrs. Dyson’s cross-examination, which had lasted exactly two hours, her examination in chief having previously lasted half an hour.