Guilty Bonds

by William Le Queux

As perfect quietude was restored in the stifling Court with its long tiers of white expectant faces, Mr Ayrton gave his gown a twitch, and with a preliminary cough, rose.

The warder handed me a chair, and, seating myself, I concentrated my attention upon the clear, concise utterances of the man who was doing his utmost to fix the awful stigma upon me.

Turning to the judge, he said: “May it please your lordship, I appear on behalf of the Crown to prosecute the prisoner at the bar. The case which your lordship and gentlemen of the jury have before you to-day is one of an abnormal and extraordinary nature. It will be within the recollection of the Court that during the last three years a series of mysterious and diabolical murders have been committed, absolutely, as far as at present known, without motive. What may have been the motive of these, however, is not the point to which I desire to call your attention, but to one utterly unaccountable crime, as it then appeared, which took place on the night of August the fifteenth, two years ago. On that occasion a lady named Mrs Ethel Inglewood, residing at 67, Bedford Place, Bloomsbury, was discovered murdered, and the connecting link between that tragic occurrence and six of a similar character which had preceded it was the circumstance that a seal of peculiar design, fixed to a blank paper, was found pinned upon the breast of that lady. Of the seal, and the mysteries surrounding it, I shall be in a position to give your lordship and the gentlemen of the jury some further information at a later stage in these proceedings.

“It is sufficient for my purpose at the present moment simply to indicate the fact that the seal, connected in such a peculiar manner with the previous outrages, was also a conspicuous object in this, and undoubtedly proved that the crime, if not the work of the same hand, emanated at any rate from the same source. The prisoner at the bar was the principal witness in the discovery of the murder of Mrs Inglewood, and gave evidence before the Coroner, when a verdict of wilful murder against some person unknown was returned. He professed, in the assistance which he then gave, to have been animated simply and solely by the desire to bring the offender to justice. Considerable doubt was entertained by the police with regard to the veracity of that statement, and I believe, my lord, it will be in my power to prove, by most conclusive evidence, that the prisoner then committed the crime of perjury in addition to the greater and more hideous one for which he stands here indicted.”

Counsel then paused and examined the first folio of his brief.

To my disordered imagination it seemed as if I already stood convicted.

Again the eminent Queen’s Counsel gave a preliminary cough, and resumed:—

“If I shall be in a position to establish beyond any shadow of doubt that the prisoner really committed the murder in Bloomsbury, the evidence which can be adduced against him in regard to a second count, which, however, is not on the present indictment, is even still more indubitable. On the night of March the fourth last, the body of a woman, which has never yet been identified, was discovered lying in a blind alley, called Angel Court, leading from Drury Lane. She was quite dead when discovered, having been stabbed in the throat, and on her breast, as in the previous tragedy, was a piece of paper from which the larger portion had evidently been roughly torn. The small piece adhering was pinned in exactly the same fashion as upon the deceased Mrs Inglewood, and no one could doubt that the murder which had been committed formed one of that series of horrifying outrages of which it formed the eighth.

“From that day till the present no clue whatever has been obtained as to the identity of the poor woman who was then discovered, but events have so conspired, and the police have been so vigilant, that a strange finale has been brought about. There is an old truism, gentlemen, that ‘Murder will out,’ and though that expression is worn almost threadbare by constant repetition, its force is recognised, and its truth is applicable as much now as ever. ‘Murder,’ in this case ‘did out,’ by a most fortuitous circumstance which I will briefly narrate, although the story has been freely circulated in the public Press.”

In a few terse sentences counsel explained my arrest, and the discovery of the seal in my wallet.