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the defence and prosecution). Miao was taken to the local police station for further questioning.
Miao's trial at the Carlisle Assizes lasted three days October 22-24, 1928.88 The prosecution's case was purely circumstantial (as it so often is in murder trials), but nonetheless a strong one. The presiding judge was Sir Travers Humphreys, an experienced criminal lawyer recently raised to the Bench.34 No attempt will be made here to reconstruct the three-day trial in detail, only a few salient points will be discussed.
When Miao's wife was found, her left hand was gloveless; the glove had been torn off and lay by her side. The two rings she wore that day had been removed. When Miao's hotel room was searched, two spools of film were found in cartons. The police decided to have them developed. On doing so, out popped the missing rings from the cassettes. Who could have hidden them but the murderer? The keys to Mrs. Miao's jewel-case were also found hidden in Miao's rolled-up dress-shirt. The jewel-case contained jewellery valued at over £3,000. Why were the keys concealed in that way? A point that also told strongly against Miao was his behaviour when his wife did not return promptly from her shopping expedition to Keswick. Would a recently married man calmly go to bed when his wife was missing in a strange town, in a strange country? (He was asleep, or at least in bed, when the police came to his bedroom at around 11 p.m.).
An enigmatic piece of evidence was obtained from Scotland. The couple had stayed at an Edinburgh hotel before they arrived in the Lake District. After they vacated the hotel, a chambermaid cleaned up their room, as is the custom, and found on top of a wardrobe three slips of paper with Chinese characters on each. For some reason, she did not dispose of the slips but kept them, which was providential. The characters, when translated, read:
Be sure to do it on the ship
Don't do it on the ship
Again consider on arrival in Europe
Miao did not deny writing these words but claimed he did not now remember to what they referred. Mr. Justice Humphreys