"Blast All of You!"

A big, hearty Briton was 55-year-old James Melville Cox, who liked the Japanese, spent 34 years in the Far East as a correspondent for Britain's Reuters News Agency. When Jimmy's body, battered, bloodstained, dying, was found on the sidewalk under a window of Tokyo's Police Headquarters last July, the Japanese Foreign Office announced that Jimmy had committed suicide (TIME Aug. 5), Jimmy's friends did not believe it. They had no evidence, but they knew Jimmy and they knew the cruelty and deceit of Japanese officialdom.

In Vancouver, B. C. one day last week, a plump little Belgian lady in her 405 boarded a train bound east across the prairie toward Montreal. She was Anne Franc,oise Cox, Jimmy's bride of four years, on her way to Britain with Jimmy's ashes. To the wall of her compartment she had clipped Jimmy's picture. Jimmy's big Afghan dog was curled up on the berth.

At a wayside station on the shore of Lake Superior Reporter R. G. Anglin of the Toronto Star swung aboard. To him, for the first time since she left Tokyo, Anne Franc,oise Cox told her story. She had not dared to go to their house after Jimmy died. While friends packed her trunks and shipped them ahead, she went into hiding at the British Consulate until her ship sailed.

On the day he was arrested as a spy (with nine other notable Britons in Tokyo), Jimmy was at breakfast in their seaside house, an hour's ride from the city. Two Japanese major generals and an interpreter came to get them. They took him to police headquarters, held him virtually incommunicado for three days. He was allowed to send his wife five guarded letters. She sent him pajamas, shirts and socks, soap, fruit, cigarets. None was ever delivered.

Jimmy was shut up in a dark, airless cell in the prison's cellar, with a ceiling so low that he could not stand upright. They showed his wife the cell later. They kept him drugged, presumably to make him talk: she counted 36 hypodermic punctures on his body.

When he lay dying, Japanese officials called Mrs. Cox, took her to the room where Jimmy lay, fresh-scrubbed and bandaged, on a hard bench at headquarters. They showed her a photograph of a "suicide note" he had supposedly written, would not let her have the original. Two lines were copied from letters she had already received; the rest was in a strange handwriting. They said the note was found in one of Jimmy's trouser pockets. Jimmy's trousers, which they gave her, were soaked with blood. There was no blood on the note.

That Jimmy Cox had been fighting his inquisitors when he was hurled from a window was proved, said Mrs. Cox, by his last words. As she held him in her arms, he kept struggling, yelled over & over: "Hell! Hell! Let me go! . . . What do you want? Blast all of you! . . ."

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