Читать книгу The Gun Alley Tragedy: Record of the Trial of Colin Campbell Ross онлайн

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Again, the little girl had been seen near Ross’s wine shop in the afternoon. Her dead body was found about 115 yards from it. The police had been 12 days making enquiries about the case before Ross was arrested. They had followed clues, and abandoned them when they led nowhere; they had suspected individuals and questioned them, only to reach a dead-end; they had formed theories, and dropped them because they could not get the facts to fit them. But the public, from which a jury is drawn, knew nothing of all this. Indeed, Detective Piggott said, in his cross-examination: “We had the case well in hand on the 31st.” This may be dismissed as a little bit of puff. It excited the smiles of Piggott’s brothers in the force, who knew the dead-end the detectives were at after the first week. If it were strictly accurate, it would show that Piggott’s conduct of the investigations was disfigured by a colossal blunder, for the detectives, although they were in Ross’s saloon on the first day, did not even go into the little room off the bar from which came the incriminating blanket, though they knew that the whole place was about to be abandoned and dismantled. Once Ross was put upon his trial nothing was, or indeed could be, said which did not appear to point to his guilt. The result was that the searchlight was thrown directly on to him. Other suspected people were in the shadows. Everything, therefore, appeared, superficially at least, to point to his guilt. The crime called for vengeance, and in all these circumstances it is not wonderful that the jurors were unable to divest themselves of the preconceptions with which they had gone into the jury-box.