The Man who Would be Sherlock

by Christopher Sandford

  Beginning with the semi-mythical ‘Mam’, his confidant from the time he was sent to boarding school in 1867 until her death fifty-three years later, Doyle’s relations with women would be consistently deferential and respectful, if perhaps more a matter of chivalry than real affection. He was known to defend female virtue to an almost unnatural degree, as when his 18-year-old son Adrian once incautiously described a girlfriend as ‘ugly’, and received his father’s ‘vicious back-hander across his face’ by way of rebuke. But Doyle, even so, came to first question and eventually to mock the reputation of a key witness in the Slater case, the maid Helen Lambie.

  Not only had she displayed ‘great want of intelligence’ on the night of the murder. There were subsequent grounds for believing that Lambie had lied repeatedly, under oath or not, and in her later years, having moved to America, she seemed to routinely give interviews that contradicted at least part of her sworn testimony, only to then retract what she had said and revert to her original story. Among other small but telling details, Doyle – in a move Holmes would have appreciated – pointed out that Lambie had once told the authorities that she recognised Slater at an identity parade because he was wearing his ‘own coat’. It was later established that he was not then wearing his own coat, but one supplied to him out of a police lost-and-found storage locker.

  The extraordinary thing that emerges in Conan Doyle’s pursuit of justice, even more pronounced in the case of Slater than Edalji, is the sheer tenacity he exhibited once roused to action. Despite profound changes in his own circumstances in the years 1912–30, including his full-scale religious conversion, he never wavered from what he called his ‘unshakable belief in the fact that [a] serious scandal had arisen’, and that ‘a full and unstinting pardon [was] due the convicted man’ as a result. To most of Slater’s supporters, such a prospect must have seemed a remote one once the initial furore of the trial had died down and he was shut up in Scotland’s notorious Peterhead Prison to serve his whole-life sentence. Yet, despite the fact that the Great War intervened, that the public and press inevitably found other causes for concern, and that many of the key witnesses died or emigrated or simply lost interest, Doyle himself showed no signs of doubt that justice would eventually prevail.

  Meanwhile, Slater was left to smuggle out a series of scribbled notes that sought desperately to identify the real killer or killers, such as the one he wrote in 1910:

  My firm opinion is that the murder was one of [the family] or a other sweethearth of Lambie … A[n] old story and allwise true, is when murder is committed and the reason was robbery, and a servant was staying in the house like Lambie, knowing so many boys, the murder is most times the sweethearth, or a friend of the sweethearth.

  Slater’s pathetic note, which contained more than a grain of both common sense and insight into the criminal mind, did him no good. It was the last word anyone on the outside would hear from him for over four years.

  8

  ‘AS BRUTAL AND CALLOUS A CRIME AS HAS EVER BEEN RECORDED’

  ‘The creator of “Sherlock Holmes” may be excused if he now and then turns away from the literature of invention and directs his detective talent upon real crimes and real problems of criminality,’ The Times reported on 21 August 1912. ‘Some time ago he did this in the Edalji case, and to-day Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton publish a little sixpenny book from his hand under the title “The Case of Oscar Slater”.’

  As we’ve seen, Conan Doyle entered the fray only after some hesitation. Although it’s true that he signed off on The Lost World in March 1912, he was far from idle that spring and early summer. Among other duties, Doyle found himself in a spirited public correspondence on everything from the continuing question of Irish Home Rule to the desirability of finishing Khartoum cathedral, before entering the thicket of his long and vitriolic exchange with George Bernard Shaw on the loss of the Titanic.

  So Doyle’s first contribution to the renewed Slater debate was neither inevitable nor planned in detail in advance. If anything, he seems to have reacted poorly when initially approached at the time William Roughead’s book was published. ‘Very soon after my marriage, having just got clear of the Edalji case, I became entangled in that of Oscar Slater,’ Doyle later wrote, not exactly seething with enthusiasm at the memory:

  I went into the matter most reluctantly, but when I glanced at the facts, I saw that it was an even worse case than the Edalji one, and that this unhappy man had in all probability no more to do with the murder than I had. I am convinced that when on being convicted he cried out to the judge that he never knew that such a woman as the murdered woman existed he was speaking the literal truth.

  The Case of Oscar Slater was not only a popular success, but strengthened that identification with lost causes that had begun as long ago as Doyle’s support of the kleptomaniac Ella Castle in 1896. It was as much a searing indictment of the Slater investigation as it was a triumphant vindication of the convicted man. Doyle’s central complaint was that the Glasgow Police had moved, like an institutional Inspector Lestrade, straight from suspicion to conclusion, without any intervening process of objective reasoning. What was needed was to step back and reflect on the case from a more detached perspective. There was the ‘not unimportant’ matter of the criminal’s motive, for instance. ‘One question which has to be asked was whether the assassin was after the jewels at all,’ Doyle wrote:

  It might be urged that the type of man described by the spectators was by no means that of the ordinary thief … Why did he go straight into the spare bedroom where [the family papers] were kept? Any knowledge gathered from outside (by a watcher in the back-yard, for example) would go to the length of ascertaining which was the old lady’s room. One would expect a robber who had gained his information thus, to go straight to that chamber. But this man did not do so. He went straight to the unlikely room in which [the papers] were kept. Is not this remarkably suggestive? Does it not presuppose a previous acquaintance with the inside of the flat and the ways of its owner?

  Here Conan Doyle spoke in the authentic voice of Sherlock Holmes. It was all a matter of perspective. The police had spent so much time confirming their suspicions of Slater that they never stopped to ask a basic question: how did the murderer get in to Marion Gilchrist’s flat in the first place, if Helen Lambie was right in insisting that she had shut both the doors, and there was no sign of a forced entry? The conclusion (obvious now, but not at the time) was that he had had a duplicate key. ‘In that case all becomes comprehensible,’ Doyle reasoned:

  … for the old lady – whose faculties were quite normal – would hear the lock go and would not be alarmed, thinking that Lambie had returned before her time. Thus, she would only know her danger when the murderer rushed into the room, and would hardly have time to rise, receive the first blow, and fall, as she was found, beside the chair upon which she had been sitting.

  Doyle wrote contemptuously of the narrative the Glasgow Police put forward to explain the crime. He was particularly unimpressed by the theory that the killer had simply rung the downstairs door bell, that Marion Gilchrist had used the lever in her front parlour to let him in, and then, without checking who was coming up the stairs, had obligingly opened her own front door and returned to her chair and her magazine, calmly awaiting her caller. ‘This is possible,’ Doyle wrote:

  … but is it not in the highest degree improbable? Miss Gilchrist was nervous of robbery and would not neglect obvious precautions. The ring came immediately after the maid’s departure. She could hardly have thought that it was her returning, the less so as the girl had the keys and would not need to ring. If she went as far as the hall door to open it, she only had to take another step to see who was ascending the stair. Would she not have taken it if it were only to say: ‘What, have you forgotten your keys?’ That a nervous old lady should throw open both doors, never look to see who her visitor was, and return to her dining-room is very hard to believe.

  But either way, whether the mur
derer was admitted by his victim or already had a key, there was the troubling matter of how, exactly, he had then killed Marion Gilchrist.

  Doyle might never have created Holmes at all were it not for his own medical background – time and again, he has the detective assessing the clues in a case before objectively concluding what had happened, much like any prudent doctor noting a patient’s symptoms as an aid to diagnosis. Some of the same spirit of rational inquiry applied here. Doyle called on fifteen years as a ‘struggling and actual medic’, as he put it, in coming to address the physical characteristics of the murder weapon. ‘My first choice would be a burglar’s jemmy, bifurcated at one end,’ he wrote:

  … while the blow which pushed the poor woman’s eye into her brain would represent a thrust from the other end. Failing a jemmy, I should choose a hammer, but a very different one from the toy thing from a half-crown set of tools which was exhibited in court. Surely commonsense would say that such an instrument could burst an eyeball, but could not possibly drive it deep into the brain, since the short head could not penetrate nearly so far. The hammer which I would reconstruct from the injuries would be what they call, I believe, a plasterer’s hammer, short in the handle, long and strong in the head, with a broad fork behind.

  Doyle’s working hypothesis was that someone had gone out equipped with this weapon in order to extract the personal papers from their hiding place in Miss Gilchrist’s spare bedroom, and had then been forced to improvise horribly with it when she intervened, either before or during the actual burglary. ‘But how such a thing could be used without the user bearing [blood] marks is more than I can say,’ he admitted:

  It has never been explained why a rug was laid over the murdered woman. The murderer, as his conduct before Lambie and Adams showed, was a perfectly cool person. It is at least possible that he used the rug as a shield between him and his victim while he battered her with his weapon. His clothes, if not his hands, would in this way be preserved.

  Doyle’s public broadside on behalf of Slater proved to be both successful and divisive. It was successful in that it led directly to a high-level inquiry, if not to a retrial; and divisive because it further polarised opinion about the man now known officially as ‘Inmate 1992’ in Peterhead Prison.

  The most obvious rift was between those who believed Slater to be a scapegoat, and others who thought him guilty not only of murdering Marion Gilchrist but of a whole series of other violent crimes. In September 1912, for instance, a ‘J. Buyers Black’, describing himself as a ‘technical expert of the Scottish Insurance Bureau’, wrote to tell Doyle that there was apparently irrefutable proof pointing to ‘the Jew’ being the real killer in the case known as the Whiteinch Murder, in which, as we’ve seen, Patrick Leggett was convicted of fatally stabbing his wife Sarah. Other correspondents in turn leapt to Slater’s defence. The Glasgow Daily Record published an open letter to Doyle from a member of the original 1909 jury, who said he had not been convinced by the evidence: ‘I had the feeling all through the trial that there was a missing link somewhere.’ The paper added that many local people believed that Miss Gilchrist’s murderer was still among them, ‘walking the streets, perhaps tortured by his conscience’.

  Over the years, Doyle rarely complained about his unpaid duties as a de facto court of last appeal, and apparently enjoyed corresponding with a wide range of people around the world, replying sympathetically when they wrote to tell him about their various lines of investigation, their resulting deductions, and even sometimes their slightly dotty criminal conspiracy theories. Even so, he admitted, his postbag in the weeks and months following publication of The Case of Oscar Slater was:

  … rich stuff, [with] a wide array of offences laid at the wretched man’s door … If Slater, as an adolescent, had not actually committed the Whitechapel Murders, that must have been the sole outrage of the past 25 years he had failed to perpetrate.

  It would be hard to exaggerate the impact Conan Doyle’s intervention of 1912 had on the Oscar Slater case, and, more especially, in helping launch a concerted campaign for Slater’s release. It’s often been said that he took broadly the same role as Émile Zola, a generation earlier in the Dreyfus affair. Doyle, it’s true, avoided both the more heated tone and direct accusations of Zola’s rhetorical blast, and stopped short of publicly naming those responsible for the conspiracy against the convicted man. Nor was he himself put on trial, or forced into exile, for his views. But Doyle nonetheless spoke persuasively about the shortcomings and contradictions of Slater’s prosecution, and ended with a lofty moral appeal both to the police and the public at large that justice be allowed to prevail.

  Doyle wrote:

  I am aware that it is easier to theorise at a distance than to work a case out in practice whether as detective or as counsel. I leave the matter now with the hope that, even after many days, some sudden flash may be sent which will throw a light upon as brutal and callous a crime as has ever been recorded in those black annals in which the criminologist finds the materials for his study. Meanwhile it is on the conscience of the authorities, and in the last resort on that of the community that this verdict obtained under the circumstances I have indicated, shall now be reconsidered.

  Among those apparently moved by Doyle’s appeal was 44-year-old Glasgow Police Detective Lieutenant John Trench. Trench, who joined the force in 1893, had played a significant part in the original investigation of Marion Gilchrist’s death, and appeared as a witness for the prosecution at Slater’s trial. He had shown a Holmesian attention to detail in describing to the court the way in which a lookout might have familiarised himself with Miss Gilchrist’s flat.

  ‘The close [entry] to No. 46 West Princes Street is on the opposite side of the street from the close leading into the deceased’s house,’ Trench testified in 1909:

  Directly opposite. The stair leading to the houses there begins immediately behind the close door, and takes a turn. It is a spiral one, and is continuous until the first flat is reached … Six steps down from that landing there is a staircase window fronting West Princes Street, and the sill of that window is six feet from the steps of the stair. By getting up to the landing at the first flat you can see through this window, and you can see to the door of the close of Miss Gilchrist’s house. When I went up [to] the second flat I found a staircase window there. That staircase window is only two-and-a-half to three feet above the stair. That window looks directly into the room of the house where Miss Gilchrist was murdered … The stair begins just immediately from the door, and if the door is pushed back there is a recess formed between the outside wall and the door. The recess is of considerable size. A man could quite easily stand behind it.

  Three years later, however, having read Conan Doyle’s account, Lieutenant Trench’s mind had fastened on another aspect of the investigation altogether. This was the visit he, Trench, had made two days after the murder to the home of Miss Gilchrist’s niece, Margaret Birrell. During the course of their interview, Miss Birrell had told him that on the night of the crime Helen Lambie had run to her house and, in her shock, had positively named the man she had seen fleeing her employer’s flat just a few minutes earlier. It was not Oscar Slater.

  According to Trench, in a statement he gave to the Slater inquiry in 1914:

  I say positively that Miss Birrell said to me that Helen Lambie on the night of the murder told her that the man she saw leaving the house was A.B. Notwithstanding I am told that both Miss Birrell and Helen Lambie emphatically deny the whole story and express astonishment at it, I adhere to my statement that that was what Miss Birrell told me.

  Conan Doyle could hardly have invented a more dramatic episode or startling revelation in his detective fiction. Although the libel laws prohibited Trench from publicly identifying ‘A.B.’, his name soon emerged in exchanges between Slater’s supporters. It was Francis James Charteris, who at the time of the murder was a 33-year-old family doctor and visiting lecturer at St Andrew’s University. Charteris was the
victim’s nephew by marriage. He was also familiar with the interior of Marion Gilchrist’s flat, and could conceivably have had an interest in the contents of the papers kept there.

  Charteris had actually visited the scene of the crime only minutes after the murder, apparently alerted by Margaret Birrell, and had offered to help the first police and medical orderlies to respond. Although his professional services weren’t required – Miss Gilchrist had already been pronounced dead – it raises the chilling image of a cold-blooded assassin returning to insinuate himself into the investigation of his victim’s death. Francis Charteris lived until 1964, when he was 88, having long since become aware of Trench’s allegations against him. He could hardly have avoided them, since by then several major newspapers had also drawn the same conclusion. At the very end of his life Charteris spoke to a journalist from the Scottish Daily Mail and told him:

  When I got to the [victim’s flat] the police superintendent was interviewing the servant-girl, Nellie Lambie. She was very excited, I remember. Her eyes were practically jumping out of her head. The police were trying to get a description from her of the man she had seen leaving the flat. She was very vague, almost incoherent, and I remember remarking to myself that they could hardly rely on anything she had to say. Then quite suddenly she blurted out, ‘He was like Dr Charteris there’.

  Although the elderly Francis Charteris dismissed this remark as ‘nonsense’, for once Lambie may not have been entirely wide of the mark in her description. In all probability, the man she saw hurriedly leave Marion Gilchrist’s flat following the murder was indeed ‘like’ Dr Charteris. He was in fact his elder brother, Archibald. We’ll return to the troubled relations between the members of the Gilchrist and Charteris families, and what precisely may have happened on the night of 21 December 1908 as a result. For the time being, it’s enough to note that Doyle’s involvement in the case proved to be the turning point for Lieutenant Trench, and that Trench’s statement in turn led to an extra-judicial inquiry (to which Slater wasn’t invited), held in Glasgow from 23–25 April 1914.