A DAY WITH WILLIAM PALMER
By BERNARD DARWIN
"MURDER," says the admirable Mr. Roughead, "has a magic of its own, its peculiar alchemy . . . Dull streets become fraught with mystery, commonplace dwellings assume a sinister aspect. Everyone concerned, however plain and ordinary, is invested with a new value and importance as the red light falls upon each." It was that magic that touched me two months ago when i broke a drive from Wales at the ' Raven ' at Shrewsbury for a glass of excellent beer. In my mind's eye I penetrated beyond the spick and span bar to a passage upstairs, where I saw the great William Palmer, of Rugeley, standing by a table. He had a glass in his hand with something in it of the colour of water ; he was holding it up to the light once or twice, looking at it intently and then shaking it. He had just prepared the first dose of antimony for his bosom friend, John Parsons Cook.
He has fascinated me ever since I first read of him at Cambridge in Stephen's Criminal Law. " No more horrible villain than Palmer ever stood in the dock," wrote Mr. Justice Stephen, and it is a satisfying sentence. Later I used sometimes to creep up a little iron staircase in the Inner Temple Library, where dwell old trials and broadsheets, and spend a secret, delicious hour or two in his company. He was in frilly drawers, playing with his little brother, whom he afterwards undoubtedly murdered for his insurance money. He was an evil figure in black, with a betting book in his hand and a shadowy racehorse in the background. Time was however always too short, the long drawn out trial (" I have had a weary trial of it," he said when he got back to Stafford) could only be read piece-meal. Now by a stroke of fortune I have hit upon a little cache of these treasures : he is in my own room and I have at last indulged myself to the full. Mary Blandy, James Blomfield Rush and William Palmer—those are the names inscribed on these precious volumes and incomparably the greatest of the three is Palmer. There came a cold, wet day, with nothing that insisted on being done. I had the house to myself and a blazing fire. I began him just before lunch and took him down to be the companion of my solitary meal. I read him from lunch to tea, from tea to dinner. It was past ten o'clock when Jerry Smith, the rascally little attorney, the sweat pouring from his brow and the papers rustling in his hands, had been reduced to pulp. Midnight had struck before Cockburn had swept the medical witnesses for the defence out of court with his splendid scorn, the jury had returned their verdict and I went gratefully but a little uneasily to bed.
This book of mine is not a broadsheet. It is The Times verbatim report of the trial " unabridged and illustrated," and the illustrations are enchanting. Here is " Rugeley from the south, looking towards the railway," a quiet rustic scene with a haystack in the foreground, and in the distance the little town with a church tower and one tall smoking chimney. I have often strained my eyes for a glimpse of it as I sped by on that very railway. Here is the Maypole and the busy High Street, with the gentlemen in tall hats on horseback and women with shawls over their heads and the ' Talbot Arms,' where Cook died, with Palmer's house over the way, whence he could come at a moment's notice to give him his broth and his strychnine. Here is the back of the house with a little garden of curlywig flower beds. Murder has touched them all with her wand. And then there are the witnesses—poor old Dr. Bamford, lantern- jawed and whiskered, with the air of a respectable old family butler, who signed with such perfect docility everything that Palmer told him. There is Sir Benjamin Brodie, a picture of woe, and Mr. William Stevens, Cook's stepfather, look- ing over his spectacles, with a shrewd resolute face. He, a stranger in Rugeley, at last had the courage to say what all the town must have been whispering, that Palmer was a poisoner. Best of all I like Mrs. Ann Brooks, " a lady who attends races," all in black, rather handsome in a forbidding way, very tight-lipped with slits of eyes. It was she who had seen Palmer, holding and stirring that glass at the ' Raven.' She was a brave woman for he gave her a glass of brandy and water and she drank it. " It produced no unpleasant conse- quences." If Palmer could have seen into the future, Shrews- bury Races might have been the last that Mrs. Brooks ever attended.
The only figure to which these pictures do no kind of justice is the central one, very dim and colourless, in the dock at the Old Bailey. Perhaps justice could not be done to him. Palmer ought to have been like Edward Hyde who " alone in the ranks of mankind was pure evil," but Hyde was light and small, giving a sense of deformity ; there was about him " something that gave a man a turn," whereas Palmer was big and bluff and healthy, and had a jovial way with him. That is presumably why he lived till he was thirty-one, and even so it is one of the mysteries of human stupidity or timidity that he was allowed to go on so long. His wife died, his brother died, stray creditors who came to his house died ; his brandy and water was a passport to the halls of death. Even poor Cook himself said that " he believed that damned Palmer had dosed him." And yet till Mr. Stevens came on the scene almost the only man to put two and two together was a local doctor, who wrote very secretly and confidentially to an insurance company, " He insured his late wife's life for many thousands, and after first payment she died. Be cautious."
Palmer's fame is so prodigious that one can only write of him as part of history. Every murderous schoolboy knows how Cook's mare Polestar won at Shrewsbury Races ; how Palmer, tottering under an avalanche of debt, with money- lenders pressing him for the payment of forged bills, with insurance companies refusing to pay on his brother's death, poisoned a friend in order to steal stakes and bets and so administer a tiny sop to his pursuers. The story is too old to retell, but there is one little scene, perhaps not too well known. Mr. Stevens had come down to Rugeley. He had found the dead man's hands strangely clenched, his betting book strangely missing, Palmer strangely anxious to fasten up the coffin. He had then gone back to London to consult his lawyer, and on his way back, at Euston, had met Palmer, who was travelling by the same train. They met again in the refreshment room at Wolverton, where Mr. Stevens opened his attack. He said, casually, that he wanted a post-mortem ; Palmer remained calm. They met a third time in the refreshment room at Rugby, each watch- ing the other and thinking his own thoughts. This time Mr. Stevens, on returning to his carriage, found Palmer there, but said nothing to him. When at length they reached Rugeley, Mr. Stevens thought the time had come for a shock. " Altering my tone and manner, I said, Mr. Palmer, if I should call in a solicitor to give me advice, suppose you will have no objection to answer any ques- tions he may put to you?' I altered my tone purposely ; I looked steadily at him, but although the moon was shining, I could not see his features distinctly. He said, with a spasmodic convulsion of the throat, which was perfectly apparent, ' Oh, no, certainly not. ' After I asked him that question there was a pause of three or four minutes."
What was passing through Palmer's mind during those minutes? Was the almost insane confidence of the poisoner shaken at last by this determined stranger, who gazed at him so fixedly over his spectacles? Did something say to him for the first time, " You can't get out "? To think that only two nights before he and this meddlesome old fool had dined together at the Talbot Arms '1 Why hadn't he given him a glass of brandy and water?
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