Heaven Knows Who

by Christianna Brand

  Mrs Walker thought about it. Surely she had seen Jess M’Pherson in her shop on the Saturday?—about six o’clock, or seven. ‘Na,’ said old Fleming, ‘it would be the Friday night, Mrs Walker; it couldna be the Saturday—for I did not see her that day.’ But it certainly hadn’t been the Friday, for Mrs Walker had been at the coast (it must have been a lovely summer; no one seems to have been able to keep away from the seaside). However, she agreed, it might have been the Thursday.…

  Mrs Walker was later in trouble with the Press, and went before the Fiscal to deny that she had ever said to anyone that, when she had suggested she’d seen Jess on the Saturday, the old man had said, ‘Na, Mrs Walker, it must have been Friday afternoon,’ and when she asked him ‘Why Friday?’ had made no reply but ‘given a look which flashed conviction on my mind that he knew too well that neither I nor anyone else had seen Jess alive on Saturday; a feeling which every succeeding day had served to strengthen.’ Nor had she said that when she went down to the basement the floors were quite damp and bore evident signs of washing, though she had learned that two hours later they were quite dry. In fact she had noticed no signs of blood nor of dampness: the stone floors were so dark that you couldn’t have told without touching them whether they were damp or not. The kitchen had appeared quite tidy and there was a good fire in it.

  Jess M’Pherson had never said anything to her about old Mr Fleming. ‘I make it a point never to speak to servants concerning what takes place in their masters’ houses,’ said Mrs Walker righteously. The shop doubtless served many families in and about Sandyford Place, and she had their future custom still to consider.

  After this testimony Mrs Walker, alas, is heard of no more. She retired to bed and hoped she would be troubled no further, for she ‘was not able to rise from her bed let alone go into any court.’ Another little Walker had in fact arrived to create an excuse for enquiry any time a policeman might be seen hurrying about his sensational business.

  At about half-past five Dr Fleming (no relation), the police surgeon, turned up (he said in court that it was half-past four, and this seems to have gone through unchallenged even by the keen eye of Mr Roughead; but this would have brought him to the house before the Flemings, père et fils, got home, and he is obviously mistaken). After him came a detective officer, Donald Campbell, and at about half-past nine Alexander M’Call, Assistant Superintendent in the Glasgow Police. Robert Jeffrey, a third police officer, arrived to assist in examining the scene and searching the house generally, and at eleven o’clock yet another doctor was sent for to pronounce upon the body. This was George Macleod, who the following day was to make the post-mortem and, with Dr Fleming, compile the official report.

  A detailed account of their findings will be given later. Suffice to say for the moment that poor Jess had quite obviously been murdered. She lay on her face near the foot of the bed, which was to the right as you came through the door. Her body was half clad in a semmet, a shift and a woollen polka—a sort of knitted vest, a chemise or short petticoat and a short woollen dressing-gown—but these had been pulled up over her head and shoulders, leaving the lower half of her body bare. A piece of carpet had been thrown down over the upper part. About her head, face and hands there were forty wounds.

  An iron cleaver was found in a drawer of the kitchen dresser.

  The bedroom was in confusion. The bed appeared to have been slept in; the bedclothes were stained with blood and had been pulled down into a heap at the foot of the bed. A blood-stained sheet which looked as though it had been taken off the bed was rolled up under the washstand; it was rather damp. Under one of the tables near the body was rolled the silver cruet stand from the dining-room upstairs, minus its bottles. There was blood all about the room, and close to the window wall three bloody prints of a naked left foot. And a chest that had held Jess M’Pherson’s clothes stood open—the few remaining contents thrown back, all stained with blood, as though, said Dr Fleming at the trial, some bloody hand had been at work among them.…

  All Jess’s best clothes had disappeared, and her everyday dress was gone from its hook—a cinnamon-coloured dress trimmed with blue velvet, but with no flounces.

  In the lobby between the bedroom and the kitchen there were smears of blood. There was blood on the kitchen sink, and in a chest of drawers in old Fleming’s wardrobe-room across the passage were two shirts, newly dressed, spotted with blood.

  But more fantastic still, the floors of the kitchen and the bedroom and the stone flags of the lobby had recently been washed. The kitchen floor was the drier, but it still looked damp. The lobby flagstones were absolutely moist. On the wooden floor of the bedroom, outside the part that had been washed, there were three bloody imprints of a small naked foot.

  And most fantastic of all—the face, neck and chest of the corpse appeared to have been washed.

  This is not fiction; this all happened—on a Monday evening, July 7, 1862.

  Later that evening the police asked Mr Fleming if anything more was missing than the clothes from the chest downstairs. He had not thought of looking and would hardly know, for he was not sure what had been taken to the summer residence at Dunoon. They went into the dining-room—that room where, at four o’clock on the Saturday morning, the three merry wedding guests had seen the gasolier alight—and there found the sideboard standing open. The day-to-day silver spoons and forks were gone: all that remained was a single silver teaspoon which was found in a cup on a shelf in the kitchen. The silver teapot and stand and the silver cream jug were still in the sideboard (there were two other silver tea services in the house), and so were the glass bottles from the cruet which lay tumbled under the table in the murdered woman’s room below. Mr Fleming indicated the tea-set. ‘They might have gotten away with that,’ he said, ‘if they had been wanting plunder,’ and the detectives agreed that ‘an old thief, an accustomed thief, would have taken away more than was taken. One not practised in thieving might leave something behind.’ On the other hand, to have left a plated thing like the empty cruet-stand seemed to Police Officer Jeffrey like the trick of an old thief, and altogether the whole thing was a mystery that they could not see the bottom of. He had not, he candidly admitted at the trial, seen the bottom of it even yet.

  However, certain articles, both silver and silver plated, were missing after all: six silver toddy ladles, a silver fish slice, a silver soup divider, a plated sauce spoon.…

  Etcetera, etcetera; the full list lay already in the keeping of Mr Lundie’s pawn. Two days earlier ‘Mrs M’Donald’ had raised six pounds fifteen on it.

  So the night dragged on. Under the yellow-blue light of the gas lamps or holding their candles close, the doctors and policemen crouched over the dead body or padded with probing fingers and eager eyes about the house. Police Officer Campbell had got hold of a little bit of stick and was measuring the bloody footprints on the bedroom floor. He compared their length by putting his bit of stick against the soles of the dead woman’s feet. The stick was quite appreciably shorter. So the footprints had not been made by Jess M’Pherson, but he thought they were those of a woman.

  In the early hours of the morning Mr Fleming took his father and son with him and sought refuge elsewhere, turning over his home to the authorities. One by one the doctors and policemen packed away their instruments and snapped shut their notebooks and crawled home to take a few hours’ rest before it all began again next day. A uniformed man or two left in charge of the closed and shuttered house, dawn breaking and the birds beginning to sing in the trees along Sauchiehall Street.

  And alone in her bedroom, lying there half naked, with her secrets still held close in her wounded hands, poor jess M’Pherson lay as she had lain for three full days and three full nights, and would lie at least two days more till they had done with her.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Tuesday, July 8. A great day in the lives of the newspaper editors of Glasgow had they but known it, and indeed of all Scotland and England too. All they needed was o
ne Jessie M’Lachlan a month, one of them was to say a few weeks later, to make them all millionaires.

  But today there was time for only a very brief notice. ‘Suspected Murder’—and a few lines about the discoveries at Sandyford Place. It sounded not very promising—a mere servant maid done to death by some horrid burglar, or perhaps by a ‘follower’ clandestinely introduced to the bedroom—and interesting only in its having occurred in the home of the gentry in the West End. There was much to report of more interest. A monster pineapple was on exhibition in a Glasgow shop window, weighing ten pounds, twelve inches long and twenty-two in girth. The introduction of iron vessels into the royal and mercantile navies was causing strikes among the Lower Strata of Society, led by the iron boiler-makers and the wooden shipbuilders. The High Sheriff of Leicestershire had mysteriously disappeared. There had been an amusing Deception in the Canadian courts of the International Exhibition in Hyde Park—a man had stood so still that he was thought to be a waxwork and was praised as a very masterpiece of the art of Madame Tussaud; every trick was tried in endeavours to discover the truth until some bold spirit thought of moving the wheel against which the figure negligently leaned, when the man fell over and all was discovered. The Glasgow Herald opined that he would not lack for hospitality for many a day to come. You could visit the Exhibition and see for yourself for only twenty-five shillings, cabin class, and six shillings steerage; servants in cabins, however, Full Fees.

  And a Minister of the Gospel, working in Northumberland, had preached a fine sermon, here reproduced in full, against the seduction of virgins, a misdemeanour ‘carried on chiefly among the poor.’ In America, though New Orleans and the whole line of the Mississippi had fallen and the great naval station at Norfolk had passed into Northern hands, though Tennessee was overrun and the Northern powers had never yet been pushed back from any point once attained, yet the Glasgow Herald was still confident of a Southern victory (it must have greatly comforted General Lee could he have known). And a lady living in a Salubrious Part would welcome a Small Boy as Companion to her own. All parties having claims against the Argyle Gunpowder Co. should lodge them within eleven days; a quantity of old Hair Bagging was advertised for, also a cast-iron water tank. Alexander Friedlander has always a supply of FINE HEALTHY LEECHES on hand; James Fullerton of Argyle Street has fine Japanned tin Travelling Boxes.…

  And the beautiful, very fast sailing clipper ship Edouard et Julie, newly coppered, is now actively loading and will soon say when she will sail.

  Meanwhile—‘Suspected Murder’. We learn that yesterday afternoon a horrid discovery took place at the residence of Mr John Fleming, No. 17 Sandyford Place.…

  That morning Sarah Adams went round again to the Broomielaw. How she got the time off we don’t know—she was nowadays employed elsewhere and her free day was Saturday; and she had no time due to her, for she had been to see Jessie on the previous Saturday. Nor do we know why she came; but by now ‘the murder had been heard about’ and she and her mother both knew of Mrs M’Lachlan’s close friendship with the dead woman—and knew, moreover, that on the very night of the murder she had been planning a visit to Sandyford Place. So maybe Miss Adams just sneaked a few minutes off and popped round out of curiosity. Or maybe her mother, or even her employer, sent her.

  All she got out of the visit, however, was that she observed on the table a straw bonnet ‘trimmed with a blue or other ribbon’ and a black plaid, neither of which she had ever seen before.

  The dates of Jessie’s movements for the rest of the week are confused and confusing, most of the witnesses being satisfied with ‘it was the Tuesday or the Wednesday or the Thursday, but I can’t be certain.’ But certain it is that on one of those days she took a little trip to Hamilton; and since all agree that it may have been the Tuesday and she herself says that it was the Tuesday, we may assume that it probably was so. And from that the rest follows. In any case the dates are of no importance’. Without wearisome ifs and ans, therefore, we will assume that they happened in the following sequence.…

  On the Tuesday—that we do know—David Barclay, the clerk at the station who on Saturday had received the trunk from the little girl, Sarah Adams, and sent it on to Hamilton, noticed a woman walking up and down past his office. She came in at last and asked him if the box had been despatched. He told her it had been. So Jessie went to Hamilton.

  A Mrs Chassels, wife of a carter, lived in Almada Street, Hamilton, close by to the station. On the Tuesday afternoon at half-past two a strange woman presented herself at the door and asked if they had a boy to go over to the station and carry a box for her; it wasn’t a heavy one. (It weighed, as we know, twenty-one pounds: Sarah Adams, twelve years old, had staggered with it up the cellar stairs and to the station in Glasgow.) So Master James Chassels, the same age as Sarah, went with the lady to the station and she sent him in to ask for a box addressed to Mrs Bain. The lady came in later and signed for the box, ‘Mrs M’Lachlan’. She asked the child to carry it back to his mother’s house, and she went with him.

  Jessie had presumably gone to the house because the people there were carters, but she was soon, as usual, throwing herself upon the kindness of strangers. Could she come in for a while? And might she have a cup of tea? And could the boy next take the box to a saddler’s shop and get it mended? Oh, and did they know of a tailor of the name of Fraser?

  Mrs Chassels knew no tailor called Fraser but she knew of one called Shaw. She said that James should take the trunk to Mr Cherry’s, and meanwhile to come away in and she would make a pot of tea. While she was out of the room—all unsuspecting that her visitor might have a motive other than tea in wishing her absent a few minutes—the lady must have opened the box and taken out a bundle, for she had one when Mrs Chassels returned which she hadn’t had when she arrived. It was tied up in a printed cotton kerchief and, as it was ‘a pretty large bundle’, it is perhaps not surprising that some of its contents were escaping—Mrs Chassels especially noted part of a dress and the bottom of a flounce bound with its own material. The lady explained that it was a merino wrapper. Mrs Chassels had brought half a glass of spirits with the tea—realising, no doubt, that though she showed no agitation, this frail-looking creature was nervously and physically exhausted—and the woman drank both and paid for them and for James’s services and departed, taking the bundle with her. James walked along with her a little and she asked him the way to Mr Shaw, the tailor’s, but she did not say whether or not she was going there.

  An hour later a woman entered a public-house in the small village of Low Waters, a mile out of Hamilton, and asked for half a glass of whisky. She looked so exhausted that the proprietress, Mrs Gibson, brought her a whole glass. She was not precisely appropriately dressed for a long country walk, for she wore a black watered silk dress, a black shawl and a bonnet with blue and black ribbons, and she was carrying a large bundle under her arm. She paid a penny for her drink and started off again.

  Was this the bonnet spotted by Miss Sarah Adams on the table during her exploratory visit to the Broomielaw? It must surely have been; and yet it is curious that Jessie, who subsequently admitted so much, steadily denied this harmless visit to the pub at Low Waters.

  It was a hot, dry, dusty day. She dragged herself wearily on through the straggling village street, out into the country again with hardly any buildings in sight and only long fields of grazing land, divided off by hedges from the road, and came at about half-past four to a fork where a road, branching off, led to Meikle Earnock and the Tommy Linn Park. Here she met some children, two small girls of eleven, Marion Farley and her friend Margaret Gibson. She stopped and questioned them. ‘Could you tell us a burn where to get a drink of water? For all the lang road that I’ve travelled I havna’ seen a burn or a sheugh [a stream or an irrigational canal] whaur a person might wat their lips.’

  The children pointed out the Tommy Linn burn further up the Meikle Earnock road and watched her till she passed the first oak tree, and then lost sigh
t of her.

  When, creeping back to the station that evening, she ran into a Master Mirrilees, a big boy of ‘nine past’, she was carrying no bundle. But she gave him a big square of cotton, saying, ‘Here, boy, I found this handkerchief. Take it home and hem it.’ Mirrilees, not being too handy with his needle, took it home and got his mother to hem it instead; and so the printed cotton kerchief she had noted earlier found its way straight back to Mrs Chassels.

  That evening Robert Lundie, the pawnbroker, returned to Glasgow, having been absent since the Saturday, and, for the first time learning of the murder and of the plate missing from the house, looked at the silver that had been pawned on the Saturday; and, finding it all marked with an ‘F’, took it straight away to the police.

  And the following day, Wednesday, July 9, old James Fleming was arrested as being concerned with the murder of Jess M’Pherson, questioned for four hours and committed to prison. In Scotland, unlike England, there is no public inquest—the preliminary investigation into a criminal case is conducted by the Procurator-Fiscal, as Crown Prosecutor, and the result kept secret.

  All this time the black japanned bonnet box, locked and with the key in Mrs M’Lachlan’s possession, had remained at the ironmonger’s where she had bought it—an hour after getting home on the Saturday morning. But on the Wednesday she appeared and asked for it. She explained that she had changed her mind about collecting it on the Saturday afternoon as she hadn’t had to go away after all; and she now asked the assistant, Nish (he who at the time of the trial was in Antigua), to alter the address he had written on the label (which the other assistants later remembered as having had something to do with Edinburgh) and to put instead: ‘Mrs Darnley, Ayr; lie till called for’. The box was to be sent to the station, and off trotted someone upon yet another of Jessie’s errands, though afterwards no one could remember who it was that went.