Heaven Knows Who

by Christianna Brand

  And then: ‘Who was in the house that night?’ The circumstances of old Mr Fleming’s conduct during the three days that the maid was missing—was in fact lying dead in her room—he acknowledged to be extraordinary; but the discrepancy in his statements and those of the milk-boy he thought not very surprising. After all, said counsel, he was a very odd old man, a man of peculiar habits, great curiosity, inquisitive—‘to the annoyance and distress, apparently, of his family, who got out of all patience with him.’ (Where Mr Gifford got this bit of comment from it is difficult to see. It emerged nowhere from the evidence.) You could not found the same observations on his actions as you might on those of a more ordinary man. But, anyway, all that sank into insignificance compared with the evidence against the prisoner.

  As to this, he drew attention first to the acknowledged intimacy of the prisoner with the dead woman, to her intimate knowledge of her ways and her habits and of the place where she lived. She knew, for example, of the back garden door into the lane running behind Sandyford Place. Having regard to old Mr Fleming’s tiresome curiosity, it was probable that this door was frequently used.

  He then came to the prisoner herself: to her movements on the evening of the murder and the fact that she was certainly out all night. As to her starting out so late in order to avoid the old man, ‘the reason is a very justifiable one and, so far as we have gone, not an unnatural reason, and it is an evidence of innocence—frankly, I admit—that she asks Mrs Adams to keep her child and says where she is going. That goes against premeditation of murder certainly. But it does not go much further, for it leads you to suppose—naturally to suppose—that the person does do what she says she intended to do: go and visit Jess.’

  And she had returned home next morning with a bundle, and later pawned the plate—‘the first flash of lurid light that is thrown upon the murder’—and handed in her own cloak for cleaning and a dress to be dyed: a cinnamon-brown merino which she herself had worn that morning, but which was proved to have belonged to the dead woman. And then there came the purchase of the japanned tin box, the adventures of that box and the identification of the clothes it contained as having belonged also to deceased. The prisoner had made statements as to how she came into possession of the dresses—conflicting statements in some parts.

  And then the trunk and the adventures of the trunk, the discovery of the torn and blood-stained garments up at Hamilton. One petticoat had belonged not to the prisoner but to the dead woman. ‘We thus have the blood-stained clothing of the prisoner and of the murdered woman. You will judge by the evidence if they had been placed there by the prisoner. Why? She was with the deceased that night. Jessie M’Pherson lay upon her face when found, and while she was in that position the iron chopper, or an instrument like that, was wielded upon her body with fearful effect by a person standing over her, so that blood flowed in torrents—clothes were blood-stained and it was necessary to dispose of the bloody clothes.’ As to the blood-stained crinoline wires, she had thought ‘the fire would purify them. But, gentlemen of the jury, it takes a hot fire to purge a crime. The wires told what they saw of this deed.’

  So much for the stolen things. ‘Was there a louder, shriller, more dreadful tale ever told by clothes?’ But then, said counsel, all our actions did tell a tale. It was no poetical fancy, it was a wonderful fact that the neighbourhood of a murdered body did retain the impress of the murderer. Crimes had always left their footprints—and in Jessie M’Pherson’s bedroom there were indeed footprints: bloody footprints. They were not those of the deceased, nor were they James Fleming’s. ‘The prisoner—the party who had all the bloody clothes in her possession—the party who had the plate in her possession—the party who came away that Saturday morning wearing Jessie M’Pherson’s gown—it must have been her foot that made these impressions. It is circumstantial evidence, gentlemen, but strong, you see, when you put the several circumstances together.’

  And then it might be only a detail, but it was a fact that the prisoner bought some rum on the Friday night, and a bottle was missing from her home in the Broomielaw. A bottle smelling of rum was found in the basement at Sandyford Place.

  Then as to the motive for the murder. On July 4 she must have had no money; she had to pawn a mirror to redeem her cloak before she could go out. All her things and many of her husband’s had been pledged—to the tune of forty-one pawn tickets. But the day after the murder—she had money. ‘She had money before she was in Lundie’s pawn—she paid £4 of rent before twelve o’clock. What I have to say is—is it not likely that Jessie M’Pherson, a saving, industrious woman, had money in her trunk? I do not charge the pannel with having stolen money—’

  Mr Clark: ‘She is not charged with stealing money.’

  ‘—I do not charge her with it, but I say this is an element which you must take into account if you found there was any probability that Jessie M’Pherson had money besides dresses.’

  So he came to his peroration. ‘I will not dwell upon the contradictions of the prisoner’s declarations. I do not ask you to convict upon lying declarations. You have the story told by the facts, by the articles produced, which need not the lies of the prisoner to enforce belief upon you.… I say nothing of the peculiar manner in which this murder has been attempted to be explained. You will weigh everything upon the evidence and leave nothing to be determined without proof. I make no appeal to your feelings. May the Omniscient and Almighty God give you grace and wisdom to return according to your oaths a true verdict upon the evidence.’

  Mr Gifford sat down.

  Andrew Rutherfurd Clark rose to open his speech for the defence.

  It was half-past seven in the evening—the end of the third eleven-hour day. It seems inconceivable that with this natural break the court should not have adjourned; they sat on, however, except for a ten-minute interval, and indeed, as has been related, when an hour and a half later counsel closed his address the judge went so far as to offer to begin his summing-up. Mr Clark must already by this time have been both physically and mentally exhausted: that he was terribly anxious, weighed down by a sense of responsibility, he freely confessed to the jury. They could not then know of the doubly heavy burden he laboured under—the secret knowledge of the prisoner’s statement whose suppression, against her own wishes, was ultimately his own responsibility. It had hampered him greatly in cross-examination; now it must hamper him equally in his address. If the verdict proved to be in her favour—well and good and she would go totally free. If not, then a new story altogether must be put before the Court, and it had been important throughout, was doubly important now that he came to address the jury, that nothing should be brought out that would prejudice that story. That the prisoner had in fact been in the house some time that night the jury might sufficiently suspect by now: that it could not be proved that she had been there was the burden of his defence. Yet his defence must not be inconsistent with that other story when, or if, it ultimately came to be told.

  He began with what the reader may agree was the likeliest argument of all. Here was not an ordinary murder—not a murder caused by a blow given in the heat of passion, not a murder committed in a struggle between two people who had been hostile to one another before. No. The charge was that poor dead Jess M’Pherson had been murdered by ‘her own most intimate, most kind, most dear friend’, that upon that night this weak and delicate woman, who for long years had been ailing, had stood over her friend and wielded against her the instrument by which she met her death. Was it possible to credit so fearful a story? Was it possible to believe that the prisoner’s motive for committing such a crime was to obtain possession of a few old dresses and some plate to raise money on—that for this she forgot her love and friendship for the murdered woman?

  It might be that circumstantial evidence was sufficient in some cases—but in this case could the evidence brought forward be relied upon when it had failed to develop and explain the whole mystery of the dark cloud which hung over the tragedy enact
ed at Sandyford Place? He instanced a recent case where a man had been sentenced by the unanimous verdict of the jury to twenty-one years’ penal servitude for rape. A month or two later it had emerged that he was absolutely innocent. If the case had been one of murder, that innocent man, by the time proof came, would have perished on the gallows.

  The case for the prosecution was that the woman was proved to be poor but had raised the money she needed by pawning the plate. But then it was proved by the defence that she had paid off her rent before pawning the plate. He had been amazed when the Advocate-Depute had got himself out of this difficulty by suggesting that the dead woman had had money in her trunk. There was no proof whatsoever of this, nor had the prisoner been charged with the theft of money. Such a proposition should never have been put forward.

  And then.…

  ‘What my learned friend says is this, that the person who had stood over the body of a friend, mangling it with that weapon, having committed the bloody deed by the infliction of upwards of forty wounds, and having done that in a house where she knew that a person (old Mr Fleming) was living, and after a severe conflict between herself and the deceased—that instead of going away from the house as fast as she could get … she stayed apparently in that house until a little before nine o’clock in the morning, washing at the floor and washing the dead body.…’ Was it a conceivable proposition?—that she should remain for what must have been hours, since she was said not to have got home till nine o’clock, washing out the traces of the crime from the kitchen, from the lobby, even from the bedroom. But this was the prosecution’s case: they did not suggest that old Mr Fleming had been elsewhere than in his bed throughout.

  And if she were going to stay so late—why not have spent her time in gathering together more plunder than the few pieces she was accused of having taken? For plunder was put forward as the only motive for the murder.

  As to the facts upon which the prosecution relied—the Advocate-Depute had said candidly that the frankness of the prisoner as to her intention of visiting the deceased that night would not sustain the theory of premeditated murder. That she had visited her had in no way been proved. She had not been seen anywhere near the house—not nearer than the Gushet house, ten minutes walk away. A bottle was relied upon to prove her presence there—a common pint bottle with a little rum in it, found in a cupboard among a lot of other bottles; a similar bottle having been found missing from her home. Moreover, she was said to have returned home at nine o’clock in the morning—but this was on the unsupported evidence of one witness only; and it was possible that the prisoner had a key to the house which this witness knew nothing about. Then there were the footprints to which his friend Mr Gifford had referred in a rather poetical way. There were said to be three footprints—only two had been produced in court; and all that anyone could say was that they could have been made by the prisoner. Dr Macleod said so—but Dr Macleod was not infallible nor could his evidence receive the same weight when he was found to have omitted from his report any mention of the remarkable bruise which Dr Watson had observed upon the dead body. And in the absence of any clear proof that these footmarks were absolutely identical with the prisoner’s, it was impossible to rely upon them to prove that she was in the house that night.

  As to the plate—it had been in the house on the Friday morning (when John Fleming left for Dunoon), but the only proof that she had taken it lay in the fact that her story of how she came by it was contradicted by old Mr Fleming. There was nothing in her pawning the plate to prove that she got it from the house that night. She said she got it from Fleming and, ‘even accused as she is, I would believe her word sooner than the word of Fleming.’

  And then the dresses. There was no proof that they had been in the house up to the time of the murder; the prisoner had an explanation of their having come earlier into her possession. Mrs Campbell said the prisoner had come home that morning wearing the dead woman’s cinnamon-coloured dress—but confronted with this dress later, it having meanwhile been dyed, she said that the trimming was different from that on the dress the prisoner wore that morning. Nor was there clear proof that the black box which had gone back and forth had been the one the prisoner purchased—and none at all that it had meanwhile contained these particular dresses. All the prosecution could do was to confront her with her own declaration—obtained from her when she was ignorant that the police already had these articles in their possession—and then accuse her of contradicting herself.

  Then as to the rags picked up around Hamilton. These were not proved to have been in the prisoner’s custody at any time, and were not found in her custody. What proof was there that they had belonged to her? Identification meant not that they were likely to be but that they were in fact the prisoner’s clothes. But her own lodger declined to identify them. Mrs Adams and Sarah offered to identify them—but Sarah Adams had before this given false witness; and her mother was a woman who, having quarrelled with the prisoner in that case, had then got her child examined as to the truth of her evidence. (This does seem very hard on Mrs Adams, who, in fact, appears to have spotted the plot only when Sarah was rewarded, thrashed her daughter soundly, which she would hardly have done had she been party to the arrangements, and sent her off to confess; and then quarrelled with her friend—for having bribed the child.)

  And, said counsel, holding up to the jury the blood-stained rags of brown coburg, wincey and wool, could anyone tell with certainty that this had been a petticoat, a certain petticoat?—that this had been a certain dress? ‘Hearing of this case, they think they can be no other than the prisoner’s; hearing of this case, they proceed to their identification. Do you suppose that if these articles had been found in a place where the prisoner had never been, and which place she never was near, they could have identified these articles …?’ As for the flannel petticoat, the rags of a common flannel petticoat with no particular marks on it, the prosecution pathetically relied upon one unsupported witness, who said it had belonged to the dead woman, Jess M’Pherson. Moreover, in the trunk and on the kerchief that were said to have contained all these blood-stained articles—not a trace of blood. And anyway—was that really the way a guilty person would have gone about getting rid of such compromising matter?—making no secret of her presence in Hamilton, going to Mrs Chassel’s house, giving away the kerchief to the boy.…

  Mr Rutherfurd Clark turned next—and with some relief perhaps, for here he was on surer ground—to the matter of old Mr Fleming. The case for the prosecution was that Mr Fleming was wholly unconnected with the murder, and they relied upon his evidence, a man who had actually at one time been in custody over the murder. He was said—on insufficient proof—to be eighty-seven; he had himself slipped up and said he was seventy-eight—at any rate he was in full possession of his faculties. Unlike the prisoner at the bar, he was not on good terms with the dead woman—she had complained to many friends about him.

  He took the jury through the episode of the ‘squeals in the night’, through Mr Fleming’s declarations regarding the front door—that he had found it unbarred on the inside. Of course it was of importance to Mr Fleming to show that the murderer might have got out of the house—and so he said that the door was unbarred. But the milk-boy, calling there before eight o’clock, gave evidence that he heard the chain taken off the door before it was opened to him. All other exits were, by Mr Fleming’s own statement, locked from within.

  Thenceforward Mr Fleming continued to live two nights and three days in that house: having heard the screams in the night, found the airing screen knocked over and blood spots on the linen, having found the bedroom door locked and the woman missing—he had yet lived there and never thought of harm having come to the servant, never thought of mentioning to anyone, even casually, that she had disappeared. The kitchen was splashed with blood; yet, able as he was to read the newspapers without spectacles, to observe the servants next door, he never noticed those stains. But of course—in the meantime someone had wash
ed over the stains; even Mr Fleming must have acknowledged seeing them had they been as they originally were. Who, then, had washed the floors? And why? And when? Dr Fleming had found the lobby floor at seven o’clock quite moist. Other witnesses found at nine o’clock that it was dry. It had taken only two hours to finish drying out completely; could it possibly have been washed eighty or ninety hours before? The last time that the accused could be supposed to have been in the house had been the Saturday morning, three days ago.

  James Fleming had known of the woman’s death—it was proved by his having come to the door when the milk-boy called. ‘These matters cannot be explained consistently with his innocence: and surely that would be in itself sufficient to show that there is a case of far graver suspicion attaching to him than to the unfortunate woman at the bar …?’

  And—since Mr Fleming was admittedly alone with the dead woman from six o’clock that night, while the prisoner could not have been there before about half-past ten—let them suppose for one moment that she did go to the house: what awful deed might have been committed by that time? And she came there alone—and found herself in the presence of that crime.… Even supposing that it was the case that she had in fact gone to the house, were they to assume that she was the guilty person, or was concerned in the frightful murder of a person for whom she entertained the greatest friendship?—and who at the same time was in disagreement with James Fleming.

  All the Crown could show might be this—that the prisoner was with Mr Fleming in the house; and prosecuting counsel called upon the jury to select one of the two as being the guilty party. He asked them to select the prisoner at the bar as a woman who would destroy a friend in this savage manner. Was it not a more plausible theory that—accepting the suggestion that she did go to the house—she found the deed done and, being in terror at seeing it, took the things away after the deed was done, even though it would militate in favour of Mr Fleming and against herself. A weak woman, placed in such a position—what else could she do? And they must look to the washing of the wounds, which appeared to have been an act of kindness to the injured woman. ‘If there were not two people there, these wounds, which were not immediately fatal, were washed; but if two were at the committal of this crime, is the person likely to commit the crime who would befriend the other? If these wounds were given before the fatal blow, I think it is a man’s hand and not a woman’s. At all events, you have this cloud of witnesses here to say that the present has been proved by conclusive evidence to have been one of the most foul and atrocious murders ever committed.’