Free Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder by Kate Colquhoun

that time of a new chain – a chain which John Death had given him in exchange for one wrenched from the unconscious body of Mr Briggs.
    Matthews might, Collier conceded, be motivated by the reward – but that was, after all, the point of rewards. The jury had seen the walking stick and they had examined the tailor’s shears but he felt himself under no obligation to prove the murder weapon. Müller was young and strong while Thomas Briggs had been recovering from illness and was elderly. As for Lee’s evidence, Collier suggested that the man was not trustworthy enough to take the stand. Ultimately, he now believed that the evidence, circumstantial though it was, turned out to beeven stronger than he had suggested in his opening speech. The words fact and proved punctuated his argument, overwriting the possibilities of suspicion and probability. The hats were – he said – at the centre of it all and the hats proclaimed Müller guilty.
    Most damaging, Collier then turned the evidence intended to prove Müller’s alibi to the prosecution’s advantage. Since Eldred was such an unreliable timekeeper, he posited, was it not possible that she had gone out on Saturday the 9th at half-past eight, or even a quarter to nine? If Müller had arrived soon after, and left within minutes, it would have allowed him time to take an earlier omnibus (he declined to remind the jury that only one ’bus ran between seven and ten o’clock at night) and his arrival at King William Street or Fenchurch Street Station would then have coincided almost exactly with the arrival of Thomas Briggs on his journey home.
    After breaking for an hour, the judge Lord Chief Baron Pollock began his summation to the jury at two o’clock. Müller rose from his seat, leaning against the front of the dock, motionless. Several reporters now noticed that, while Parry had described him as puny, the prisoner in fact had an expanded chest. They would later leave the court to describe to their readers his large, massive, sinewy hands folded on the dock and the peculiar determination of … his closely compressed lips .
    Judge Pollock’s summation began by focusing on the hat found in the carriage and the watch and chain . These, he intoned, are the three links in the chain of evidence for the prosecution, each distinctly apart from each other . It would be for the jury to say whether [Müller] had given a satisfactory account for them.
    Although Parry had been at pains to establish with the jury that the law cast the burden of proof on the prosecution and that the case against Müller was, at worst, inconclusive, Pollock’s own advice differed. In effect, he now diluted the standard of proof as he had famously done at the Mannings trial in the late forties bydirecting the jury that they need not be as certain as if they had seen events with their own eyes. They must simply exercise, he advised, as much caution as they would in their ordinary, everyday business dealings. In effect, the judge ruled that the jury’s decision could be based on probability rather than on certainty.
    Pollock reminded the twelve men of the jury that Müller was said to have been lame but that his lameness had not affected his ability to take a walk on Sunday with the Blyths for three hours from six o’clock. Then he demolished Müller’s alibi, believing that the assembly must feel great compassion for the situation in life which [Eldred] has filled. Her evidence consisted, certainly, very much more in saying what she could not than to saying what she did recollect . Pollock’s vitriol was reserved instead for Mrs Jones: a madam about whom it was impossible to speak … with the same degree of forbearance .
    Listening to the venerable judge, Müller must have suspected that Pollock was shivering the theories of his defence to atoms. After an hour’s solemn summation, at almost three o’clock, the jury retired to consider. Müller sat quietly as whispers rose to hearty