Did your brother go to the front door and ask Ivy Matthews to come to the front gate?—I do not know.
In your presence?—He did not.
Did Ivy Matthews come to the front gate and did you tell her if she went on with this case she would have her lights put out?—No; I did not.
You would admit it if you had done it?—Yes; I am here to tell the truth.
One brother was out of Court while the other was giving his evidence. It was again perfectly clear that neither brother had the slightest knowledge of any such interview. It would have been competent for the Crown to have called evidence to prove this conversation if it had taken place, but no application was made to call the evidence.
There is an importance—indeed a tremendous importance—about this series of questions which, as they led to nothing, may not be appreciated by the layman. According to the rules of cross-examination, Counsel may not ask random questions. His questions must have a basis of knowledge, or at least of information, to rest upon. Before the Crown Prosecutor could ask these questions, he must have had information to the effect indicated by his cross-examination. It is impossible to conjecture anyone who was in a position to give such information but Ivy Matthews. If that be so, then Matthews absolutely invented the stories. There is not a scintilla of truth in either of them.
But in still another way Matthews’ story can be shown to be, if not false, at least highly improbable. She said that at 3 o’clock on the Friday she was standing at the door of the wine saloon, talking to Stanley Ross. “I was at the wine cafe door,” she said, “but not in the saloon.” She came to the door, she said, because Stanley beckoned her up from lower down the Arcade, where she was talking to a friend. Stanley, of course, denies this absolutely. But if it were true, then Stanley, in order to see her standing down the Arcade, must himself have been standing flush with the building line of the cafe, and could not have been in the recess by which the door is entered. When she came to Stanley, she said she saw Ross come out of the cubicle, and as he did so she saw the little girl sitting on a chair in it. When Ross got the drink and went back, she says he must have spoken to the girl because “she parted the curtains and looked straight out.”
Now if Ross had taken that little girl into the room, one would have thought that he would have been very anxious not to reveal her presence unnecessarily. According to Matthews, he seems to have been at pains to disclose it.
But if the plan of the saloon[4] (on page 68) is looked at, it will be noticed that before Matthews could even see the curtains on the cubicle she would have to be standing right in the doorway of the saloon and not merely flush with the building line. There are two circumstances which make it improbable that she would be so standing. One is that if Stanley were standing clear of, or even flush with, the building line, the conversation, if any, would be likely to take place where he was standing. The other is that she was not likely to stand right in the doorway of the saloon, when she was not on speaking terms with the proprietor of it. But again, the child, in order to be seen at all, would have to have her chair almost blocking the 2ft. 7in. doorway of the cubicle. The whole room is only 6ft. by 5ft. 5in., and Ross must have placed her in the only portion of it in which she could be seen by a person standing right in the doorway. Yet Matthews’ glance was sufficient to enable her to describe the girl as wearing a little mushroom-shaped hat “coming round her face something like mine”—a white hat with a maroon sort of band like the one produced, pushed back a little from the face, but coming down around the face, a white blouse or jumper “with just straps over the shoulder; her hair was a sort of auburn shade, not particularly a ginger hair, but that pretty shade of auburn,” while as to her age “she struck me as being 12 or 13.” An excellent example of instantaneous mental photography in colours!