Gillespie and I

by Jane Harris

  ‘Well, like I said, she denied it.’

  ‘Denied?’

  ‘That she’d even been in the room. Then when I said I’d seen her crouching down, she said that she remembered.’

  ‘What did she remember?’

  ‘She said she’d seen the picture on the wall and kneeled down to try and clean it away, with her hand, but it wouldnae come off.’

  ‘With her hand?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Did she seem angry, that you had accused her?’

  ‘No really, sir, not on the surface, but she was always very nicey-nicey.’

  ‘And, moving on—as you told my learned friend, the Advocate Depute—you were dismissed a few weeks later, for stealing a brooch.’

  ‘I never stole it.’

  ‘As you told the Advocate Depute—’ The lamps had been lit, long since, and MacDonald had to peer down as he consulted his notes. ‘You said: Miss Baxter must have stole it and then went and put it under my mattress, so I’d get the blame. She wanted shot of me, in case I told about what I’d seen.’

  Now, I knew that Jessie had never been terribly keen on me, because I was from ‘down south’ and so on, but I had no idea that she harboured such a low opinion of me that she would give voice, on the stand, to such terrible falsehoods. As if I would even conceive of doing anything that might result in Sibyl getting into trouble: the notion was preposterous. Of course, my lawyers had hoped that we could discredit Jessie’s testimony with the revelation that she was a thief, but we little expected Aitchison to preempt us, rather cleverly, by introducing the subject of the stolen brooch himself, along with this far-fetched allegation that it was me who had hidden it in Jessie’s room, deliberately, in order that she would lose her job. Pringle, in cross-examination, had fortified this picture of me as some sort of malign mischief-maker, and Kinbervie did nothing to stop this specious line of evidence.

  MacDonald did his best to demonstrate that Jessie was motivated by ill will. Alas, her artless, couthy manner and lack of sophistication tickled the crowd, with the result that he was hard pressed to undo the damage that she had wrought.

  ‘Miss MacKenzie, what did you think of Miss Baxter?’

  Jessie gave a shrug of her shoulders.

  ‘Did you like her?’

  ‘She was fine—a bit stuck-up, I suppose, that’s what I thought anyway, until she done that drawing and dropped me right in the skink with thon brooch.’

  The laughter which greeted this remark was immediately suppressed by His Lordship. MacDonald continued:

  ‘What about folk from England, in general—the English—do you like them?’

  Jessie thought about this for a moment, and then resolutely shook her head. ‘No really, sir.’

  This delighted so many of the spectators that Kinbervie threatened to clear the court, following which he turned to address my advocate.

  ‘Tempus fugit, Mr MacDonald. If you’d be so kind as to make haste.’

  ‘Certainly, my lord.’ MacDonald turned back to the witness. ‘Miss McKenzie, if I might summarise, then: in your mind, this English lady—whom you admit to having disliked—drew an obscene picture on the wall, for which she knew Sibyl Gillespie would get the blame.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And then, later, after you had confronted her, she engineered your dismissal, by stealing a brooch, and hiding it in your room, where she ensured that it was found by your employers. Would that be an accurate summary of what you believe to be the case?’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  MacDonald cast a disbelieving glance in the direction of the jurymen.

  ‘Is it not true that you’re simply jealous of Miss Baxter, particularly her relationship with the Gillespie children whom you liked and who were fond of her?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I put it to you, Miss McKenzie, that there is nothing behind these claims and stories of yours.’

  ‘Oh, but there is, sir.’

  ‘I put it to you that they are nothing but a fiction: they are simply the product of your imagination.’

  ‘No, sir,’ protested Jessie. ‘They cannae be the product of my imagination, because, you see, sir, I havenae got an imagination.’

  Even His Lordship was seen to chuckle as he gathered his papers, preparatory to adjourning the proceedings for the day.

  Thus ended the case for the prosecution. Christina’s failure to appear was certainly fortuitous, as was the prohibition of the bank evidence, but so much else had gone wrong that I was in no mood for rejoicing. Back in the gloomy depths of the Parliament House, I sat, numb, and close to despair. Jessie’s final comment had endeared her to the crowd. The only person who did not seem at all amused was Ned’s sister. She had frowned as she stood up to fasten her coat, and I found it impossible to catch her eye before she turned and hurried out of the chamber. As far as I was aware, Mabel had heard all about Jessie’s various accusations at the time of her dismissal but, presumably, she had scuttled off to tell her brother everything anew. My fear was that Jessie’s words would now carry more weight, having been spoken from the witness box. In truth, the incident that she described never happened; or rather, it did happen, but Jessie misinterpreted what she saw.

  The notion (as put forward by Kemp, in his pamphlet) that Jessie’s testimony illustrated something profound about my nature—and therefore merited inclusion in the trial—is erroneous. Kinbervie should have interrupted Aitchison’s examination, and dismissed the witness, since her evidence did not refer, in the least, to the abduction of Rose. As it was, the Crown was able to use the girl—her muddled mind and mistaken conclusions—to blacken my character, pure and simple.

  But would Ned and Annie now be persuaded that I had, in fact, done something to victimise Sibyl?

  21

  The prosecution having taken two days over their case, Messrs Pringle and MacDonald were obliged to share the last day of the trial. The morning began badly, in the holding cell, when Caskie arrived with the startling news that MacDonald might call Sibyl Gillespie to the stand. This had not been part of my lawyers’ original strategy. However, they were keen to counter Aitchison’s suggestions that I was the veiled lady who had sent Sibyl running to the shop.

  I could not help but be alarmed.

  ‘Is she well enough?’ I asked Caskie. ‘I thought you said she was volatile?’

  ‘Aye,’ said he. ‘It’s a risk, but if we can get her to positively identify Belle instead of you, then that’ll be a real feather in our case.’

  How I wished that he had said ‘cap’. It seemed a terrible omen that he would have so mangled a cliché on the most important day of my life.

  Upstairs, the courtroom was crammed to suffocation. I scanned the gallery as I took my place in the dock and found Ned, in one of the back rows. He was staring at the floor, his pale face betraying the traces of acute mental suffering. There was no sign of Annie, and I was unsure what to deduce from this fact, for surely his wife could have joined him, had she wished. Mabel was also absent.

  At long last, Kinbervie took his place at the bench. It was after ten o’clock, and I was already impatient, acutely aware of the shortage of time remaining. Thankfully, Pringle called comparatively few witnesses. According to Caskie, the situation was not looking good for Schlutterhose and Belle. Pringle seemed to have persuaded them that their only hope was to try and evade the murder charge, because he addressed his efforts, in the main, to demonstrating that Rose had died as a result of injuries sustained in the tram accident in St George’s Road.

  John Wheatley, the driver of the vehicle involved, said that on the afternoon in question his tram had been proceeding along St George’s Road at the normal pace, when he noticed a man with a girl in his arms, attempting to board the tram in front. After this tram failed to stop for him, the man had turned to look down the street, apparently startled by the sound of a wagon dumping its cargo of stones. Then, seeming to forget where he was, the fellow stepped forwards, without warning, dir
ectly into the path of Wheatley’s horses. The driver claimed to have applied his brakes, at once, and hauled the reins, but it was too late: one of the horses reared up, and its collar caught the man’s shoulder, knocking him to the ground, and causing him to drop his little girl. When Wheatley jumped down from his platform, the man was already on his feet, scooping up the child, and saying: ‘All is good, all is good.’ His accent sounded foreign to the driver’s ears, possibly Italian, but Wheatley could not be certain. According to him, the man in question was a tall, powerfully built fellow, with a beard and whiskers. The driver verified that the man had seemed intoxicated, saying that he ‘stank like Dundashill’. When asked if he was able to identify the man, that day, in court, Wheatley stared long and hard at Hans, before replying: ‘The prisoner is about the same size and build. He looks neater, but that might be because he’s cleaned himself up. I’d say the prisoner is very like the man I saw.’

  In cross-examination, Aitchison was keen to emphasise any shred of doubt.

  ‘And, in your opinion, the man you saw that day was an Italian?’

  ‘Well, he sounded Italian to me.’

  ‘Not German?’

  ‘Well, sir, I don’t know much about it, but I thought he was Italian.’

  Aitchison avoided asking Wheatley about whether or not the child had been bleeding, and for good reason: examined by Pringle, the driver had been absolutely certain on one point: that he had seen blood on the little girl’s head.

  ‘She was definitely bleeding,’ he told Pringle. ‘I reckon she gave her skull a crack when she fell. The blood was at the back of her head.’

  Several other witnesses who had seen the incident also attested to having noticed blood on the child’s head immediately afterwards. All but one of them identified Schlutterhose as the man who had picked her up, after the collision, and hurried away. Each witness was shown one of Ned’s paintings of Rose, and all were unanimous in stating that the girl in the picture resembled the child that they had seen that day. Most of the spectators craned forwards in their seats to get a glimpse of Rose’s portrait, but Ned’s gaze dropped to the floor, as though he could not bear to contemplate the image of his daughter, painted by his own hand. For the rest of the time, he kept his eyes fixed on the witnesses.

  Miss Celia Stewart was a neat, well-gloved little person of about sixty years of age, with wispy white hair and a dry, precise manner.

  ‘The prisoner was clearly in a state of inebriation,’ she told the court. ‘He stepped onto the tramlines without checking that there was nothing approaching, as one does, or should do, almost by instinct, these days.’

  ‘And—eh—where was the—eh—the tram at that stage?’ asked Pringle.

  ‘The horses were about eight feet away from him, coming on at a fair clip—not too fast, mind you, but the usual speed. They were on him in an instant. The child was knocked out of his arms as he fell.’

  ‘Did he let the—eh—the child go in order to save himself?’

  Miss Stewart shook her head.

  ‘No, it was unavoidable. He couldn’t have saved her from falling. He was sent flying and she was knocked from his arms and landed several feet away.’

  ‘You are saying that he couldn’t help dropping the girl?’

  ‘No—he had no time to react—although he could have had the good sense not to step in front of the tram in the first place.’

  ‘But when all’s said and done, it was, in your opinion, an accident?’

  ‘Without a doubt.’

  During cross-examination, Aitchison was keen to quash any notion that Rose might have perished as the result of this collision. Despite a lack of evidence to the contrary, he wanted us to believe that Rose had been ‘done away with’, at some point following her arrival at Coalhill Street. Yes, there might well have been an accident in Woodside on the afternoon in question, but the prosecutor was determined to dispel any belief that Hans and Rose could have been the man and child involved or, at any rate, that the child could have been hurt by such a fall. I found Aitchison’s manner with the defence witnesses uniformly supercilious, and his attitude to Miss Stewart, in particular, was sneering. He seemed almost affronted that he was obliged to question an ageing biddy whose opinions he clearly considered to be irrelevant. For her part, the witness refused to be bullied, and lost not a feather.

  ‘Miss Stewart, you said you were forty feet away at the time of this accident. And you are asking us to believe that you can identify this prisoner, this stranger, when you were at such a distance from the tram?’

  ‘Oh, I was only that far away at the moment of the accident. As soon as it happened, I hurried over and, when he stood up, I was as close to him as you are now, only a few feet away. The prisoner is definitely the man I saw that afternoon.’

  Perhaps wisely, the prosecutor dropped this angle and moved on.

  ‘And what happened to the child when she fell?’

  ‘She hit the ground; her head hit the ground first. I saw it clearly.’

  Aitchison gave her his most disbelieving look.

  ‘From forty feet away—you’re sure of that, are you?’

  ‘Yes, I am, because I remember being quite horrified at the time. Had she fallen another way, on her behind, for instance, she might have fared better, you see. But as it was, her head took the impact. The road is cobbled there, and cobblestones are extremely hard. I thought, at the time, that it would be a wonder if she did not sustain a severe fracture of the skull, if not some trauma to the brain.’

  The Advocate Depute widened his eyes and turned slightly, so that the jury would be able to appreciate his mocking smile.

  ‘I take it, dear lady, you are an expert in skull fractures and brain trauma?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ replied Miss Stewart. ‘My speciality is midwifery, which I’ve practised all my life but, as a younger woman, I did study medicine in Pennsylvania, when I lived in America.’

  Aitchison turned a deep shade of pink, and his eyes glazed over.

  ‘Indeed, so you did, indeed,’ he muttered, looking down and leafing, busily, through his notes. Such a slip was unusual for the prosecutor. Whether he had been aware of Miss Stewart’s medical background, and simply forgotten it, or whether the subject had never come up during her precognition, I have no idea; at any rate, this was a noticeable error and I believe that it betrayed how much he had been rattled by Christina Smith’s failure to appear, the previous day.

  Following Miss Stewart, we heard extensive testimony from Pringle’s three physicians: Dr Heron Watson, Dr Charles McGillivray and Dr Alexis Thomson, all of whom were highly regarded experts in the fields of medicine and surgery. Various gruesome experiments had been carried out on animals and skulls, and the doctors reported the results, which suggested that the head fracture was caused by an accidental fall onto a hard surface, probably stone.

  Shown the flat stone from the evidence table, all three physicians agreed that it was probably too light to have inflicted the wound on Rose’s head. Mr Pringle asked Dr Heron Watson about the dark red stain on the stone.

  ‘These marks here—eh—resemble blood, do they not?’

  ‘There’s no blood on that stone,’ said Heron Watson. ‘I tested it myself.’

  Pringle affected surprise. ‘Indeed? And if it’s not blood, then what is it?’

  ‘Rust, sir. Just rust. This stone, at some point in its history, must have lain up against a piece of metal—a chain, or perhaps a nail was sat upon it, or an old buckle. You add the Scottish weather to metal, sir, and what do you get, but rust?’

  All this went in our favour, showing the supposed ‘murder weapon’ for what it was: a damp squib. Realising this, Aitchison changed tack, in cross-examination. He compelled each doctor to admit that—although they preferred the notion that Rose had been hurt as the result of an accidental fall—her fatal injury could have been caused had she been deliberately flung down onto a hard floor or hearth, or had her head been bashed against something solid.
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  I felt terrible that Ned was subjected to all these grisly details, particularly since it was a pointless waste of time: not one of the physicians, either for the Crown or for the defence, had been able to rule out the opposite view.

  Pringle went on to wheel out a number of witnesses who claimed to be friends and neighbours of the accused couple. In a stark contrast to what we had heard two days previously, these persons testified that Hans and Belle were nothing but good, simple, kind-hearted folk who lived a quiet and abstemious life in the poor but respectable district of Camlachie. One could not help but wonder where all these accommodating acquaintances could have been dredged up: in the Moray Arms, no doubt! As the time dragged on, and one bosom friend after the other took the stand, it was almost impossible not to lose patience. The morning was almost over; Pringle was just wasting the court’s time with flim-flam. I was beside myself, particularly at the thought of Sibyl’s impending appearance. Whenever I glanced at the clock, the hands appeared to be moving around its face at an accelerated rate.

  At one point, Nelly Smith, Belle’s mother, was called to the stand. She assured Pringle that Belle and Hans had been with her, in her home, from morning until night, on the day in question. Despite Pringle’s meaning looks at the jury, I doubt that any one of them took her testimony seriously, for she was not a terribly convincing liar, and one tends to assume that a mother will do anything to protect her offspring. Moreover, what she said was in contradiction to Schultterhose’s declaration.

  MacDonald elicited the sole inescapable fact of her testimony.

  ‘You have another daughter, do you not, Mrs Smith?’

  ‘Aye—Christina.’

  ‘Christina Smith. And can you tell me where Christina—Belle’s sister—worked, during 1888, from about February to October?’

  ‘Aye, sir, she worked in Woodside, for Mr and Mrs Gillespie.’

  There was a murmur in the crowd.

  ‘Your daughter Christina, Belle’s sister, worked for a period of several months, for the Gillespies, the parents of Rose, the child who went missing.’