129
-17. 18.
the aliases of the accused, the accused wrote that letter.
The Crown don't mind whether he wrote it or not, but what they do say and are entitled to say is that it is obvious from the
obvious
-
fact that the accused has seen fit to keep them in his basket
for a period of six months, that is the period between the
date of the letter 7-C and the date we are considering, that
accused had seen fit to include them in his basket when he
left Swatow for Singapore, he must reasonably be held to have
autached considerable importance to them that is all the
Crown say.
The defence on the other hand say, no lock on this
basket. 19 employees in the Swatow Drawn Workshop all having
access to the cockloft in which this basket was placed. At
any time after the accused went out sometime in the morning
of 22nd, any one of these 19 employees, or any other evilly disposed person might have walked in there, opened the basket and carefully inserted in it seven blank sheets of note paper
and three sheets on which these were written. There is one
thing that must occur to us. If the letters are not the accused's why has he not told us so why has he not said "I want
to tell you about those letters. I never had any such thing
-
in my basket". Why not come along and say some enemy has done
this thing, but not a word. It is possible that some evilly disposed person may have planted these things in the accused's basket, going even to the length of dating one of them and
putting the three characters on them. It is equally possible that the accused may have attached some importance to them some time ago and may have outlived these indiscretions. What the Crown ask you to do is to believe that he attached some importance to them because he still had them with him.
Let me remind you as to what these letters really say,
remembering always that they are lettered 7-A, 7-B, and 7-C, there is no means of saying which came first and which came