Heaven Knows Who

by Christianna Brand

‘But you were seen. Miss Dykes and Mrs Walker saw you. What were you doing out?’

  ‘I hadna’ been in,’ said Jessie. ‘I was just arriving.’

  ‘You left Mrs Fraser at the Gushet house at ten past ten. What were you doing after that?’

  She wasn’t doing anything, said Jessie. She’d gone straight to Sandyford Place.

  ‘But it’s only a ten minutes walk from the Gushet House. It was after eleven when Mrs Walker saw you.’

  ‘I went straight there,’ insisted Jessie.

  That was just nonsense. Doubtful, incredulous, he began to test her. One thing at least he knew for certain—impossible to doubt the evidence of the milk-boy, Donald M’Quarrie, and George Paton, his master. ‘Mrs M’Lachlan—who opened the door to the milk-boy?’

  ‘I opened it to him myself,’ said Jessie.

  ‘You opened it yourself? Then where was Mr Fleming?’

  ‘I didna’ see Mr Fleming at a’. He’d be awa’ in his bed.’

  ‘But then … do you tell me that it was you who committed this murder?’

  ‘I dinna ken,’ said Jessie. ‘I ken naething about the murder.’

  ‘But if the old man didn’t do it—then it must have been you?’

  So she told him her story—positively the last story of Jessie M’Lachlan as to the events of that terrible night. She and Jess had been drinking. There was a good deal of drink going, and finally Jess became drunk and lay vomiting on the kitchen floor. So she, Jessie, herself somewhat the worse for wear, cleaned Jess up a bit and washed over the floor, and brought some bedclothes through and covered Jess with them as she lay on the floor by the fire. But Jess was only sick again and she had to wash the blankets too. By the time Jess recovered, what with nausea at her unlovely tasks and the drink she had taken, she herself was retching. So Jess, who was a great one for laudanum whenever she had anything wrong, made her take a large dose. The effect of laudanum was always ‘to take her in her head and make her delirious’—her husband and her sister would confirm that. Once when the doctor had given her a sleeping draught, instead of composing her, it made her start out of bed and go rushing round the room, and they had to hold her down. The laudanum that night had had the same effect, and from the time she took it she had no recollection of anything, of any quarrel, of any struggle—only a confused memory of Jess crying out, ‘Jessie, Jessie, what are you doing?’ And then she was creeping about on her hands and knees in the dark, but where she was or what she was doing she didn’t know. And then nothing. She awoke in the morning and found Jess dead.

  ‘And you never saw the old man at all?’

  Not at all. She repeated it over and over again. She hadn’t seen the old man at all that night.

  ‘And it was you who opened the door to the milk-boy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And if the milk-boy says, and his master says, and they both swear that it was Mr Fleming who opened the door—?’

  ‘I know they say that,’ said Jessie. ‘But I opened the door.’

  And then?

  And then she supposed she just hung about the house, too sick and dazed with the laudanum and drink to have the sense to escape. It was almost nine when she finally pulled herself together and went. She went by the back door.

  He did not know what to do. All Scotland and all England were in an uproar over this woman’s conviction, execution had been postponed, an official enquiry was pending. He said at last: ‘Well, I don’t know what to make of it all. But one thing I do know. It puts me in an awkward position, Mrs M’Lachlan. I’m not sure that I can go on acting for you.’

  ‘Not act for me?’

  ‘How can I—after what you’ve told me?’

  ‘But you don’t really believe it?’ said Jessie. ‘Of course, there’s not a word of truth in it—the whole thing’s just nonsense.’

  ‘Then why did you say it?’

  ‘I just wanted to see how you’d look,’ said Jessie. Mr Dixon’s narrative doesn’t tell us whether when she said it she was laughing or crying.

  But that was a bit too easy. She told him something and, when he threatened to desert her, then she contradicted it. ‘I shall have to think it over,’ he said.

  ‘But you won’t tell anyone?’ she begged him anxiously. Of course it was all nonsense, all lies—the statement she had given him to read out in court was the truth.

  ‘I am your lawyer,’ he said. ‘I’m bound to secrecy. Of course I shan’t tell anyone.’ And for her part, as long as her fate was in suspense, she had better be very careful herself and not go repeating to anyone, not to her visitors or to anyone else, what she had just said to him. She had better not enter into the subject at all.…

  She went on entreating him—don’t tell anyone, not anyone, not even Mr Wilson or Mr Strachan.…

  Mr Dixon did not tell his associates, but he did feel the need to consult somebody, and he finally took into his confidence two non-legal friends—it seems a very odd choice—and asked their advice as to the propriety of his continuing to act for Mrs M’Lachlan; and made up his mind at last that he couldn’t at this stage desert her—he was known to have had a private interview with her and it would look too pointed.

  Only, as it happened, on the way home from the prison, full of thoughts upon this extraordinary interview, Mr Dixon ran into two detectives whom he knew to speak to, Audley Thomson and William Smith, popularly known as ‘Black Will’. They all three stopped and had a cosy little chat.

  The Home Secretary didn’t take his choice either way—he sat on the fence in the middle. Mr Waddington, Chief Under Secretary in the Criminal Department of the Home Office, received a long memorial from Sir Archibald Alison, who had originated the initial enquiry after the trial, and who as Sheriff of Lanarkshire had been concerned with the case throughout. Sir Archibald’s submissions, Mr Waddington reported, were unanswerable. (As we know, Sir Archibald was now himself convinced of the prisoner’s innocence.) ‘The prisoner was an accidental and constrained witness of the murder but not an actor in it. She can never be hanged.’ (It was being said in Edinburgh that ‘it would take a regiment of soldiers to hang Mrs M’Lachlan’) But, ‘having concealed and adopted it’ advised Mr Waddington, she would have to be punished.

  Lord Grey accordingly wrote off to the Lord Provost of Glasgow. The Lord Provost had requested the Post Office to forward immediately any official letter addressed to himself and, all honour to him, the moment he received the letter, though it was after eleven at night, he hurried round to the jail. There was a glorious mix-up when he hammered at the locked gates—dogs barked, voices demanded to know who he was, and only when that information finally filtered through were the doors hastily thrown open to the great man. Everyone was in bed, but the Governor hastily got up again, and as the clock struck the midnight hour he was conducted down the endless corridors, through the innumerable locked doors, to the condemned cell. He had arranged for a message to be sent off at once to James M’Lachlan. He enquired of the prison wardresses how the prisoner had been. She had been very much distressed after the trial, but now she seemed more composed again. He went into the cell and there read the letter to her. It was November 6—five months since the murder, five weeks since the trial had ended; five days before Jessie was due to die. She said: ‘Will there be naething done on Saturday, then?’

  Not on Saturday or ever. That was all over. She was ‘respited until further significance of Her Majesty’s pleasure.’

  Her Majesty’s pleasure was made known to her nine days later. A conditional pardon—the condition being that she be kept in penal servitude for the term of her natural life. Such was the Home Secretary’s conception of a suitable punishment for an accidental witness to a crime who had subsequently, having taken an oath on the Bible and being threatened with her life, kept silence. Penal servitude for life.

  How sad, how bitter, how hopeless, is the cry that comes down to us from that interview over the long, slow lapse of a hundred years! ‘And I’m tae be kept in
jail a’ my days?’

  For so it was to be.

  No one, of course, was made happy by this decision, Mr James Fleming least of all. The old gentleman had had a rough time of it lately. He had been hooted and hissed as he left the court after giving his evidence, pelted with mud and stones, and might even have been set upon had he not been hustled away in a cab; and for a long time no elderly gentleman was safe in the streets of Glasgow if he had a bald head and a stoop. Mr Fleming himself had sought sanctuary at his son’s summer house on the coast, all to no avail, for his fame had long gone before him and there were hostile demonstrations even in quiet little Dunoon. On one occasion, it was reported in the press, he was recognised when he went to the barber to be shaved and was actually stoned; and the poor barber had to throw all his tackle into the sea—no one wanted to share so much as a shaving brush with old Mr Fleming.

  The reprieve was received with screams of rage by the Flemingite press. ‘The unreasoning public have been taught that, if they only cry loud enough, they can snatch a convicted murderess out of the hands of the High Court Justiciary and of the British Executive.’ And the judge had been denounced, cried the Herald, as a hard-hearted, bloodthirsty wretch, an ogre thirsting for blood, execrated ‘as though by the enraged associates of convicted felons’; and the jury stigmatised as idiots and savages, cursed in the streets and spat upon in omnibuses. So, poor old jury, they seem to have paid dearly for those bouquets from the bench—the most attentive and intelligent the judge had ever seen in any box. (Mr Roughead points out that the very few signs of any particular intelligence or attention manifested by them had in fact been by no means appreciated by Lord Deas; i.e. when they called attention to his dear Mr Fleming’s little slip in stating his age as seventy-eight, when they asked to see the plans, and when, on one occasion, a misguided member preferred the accuracy of Mr Rutherford Clark’s notes to the Judge’s. His lordship’s reaction to this last had been such as to cause the offending juror to ‘sit back with a very red face.’) Perhaps now they wished that after all they had taken a little longer than fifteen minutes to consider the evidence and argument of four very long days, with a woman’s life and an old man’s reputation at stake. Their method of arriving at their conclusion was proudly described by the Herald. Upon arrival in their room, their foreman had retired to a corner and invited the rest to file up and whisper their conclusions to him, one by one. When the last murmur died away he had only to announce that their verdict was so far unanimous, add his own, and lead them all trooping back into court without wasting any more time on futile discussion.

  And now, with the prisoner reprieved, it would be worse than ever for ‘the maligned old man’. His lawyers wrote off to the Home Secretary—would he, in view of his decision, state that it was not intended to imply that in his judgement Mr Fleming was otherwise than innocent of the murder. The Home Secretary, unfortunately, didn’t feel able to do this. He ‘must decline to express any opinion on the point’. The lawyers wrote again. It really wasn’t fair. It had been said that Mrs M’Lachlan’s sentence would not be commuted unless the enquiry following the trial substantiated the truth of her statement: the public were drawing the inference that it had done so. And Mr Fleming hadn’t been represented at that enquiry. The reply to this was that the enquiry was in respect of the prisoner and not of Mr Fleming, and that, though no witness could be compelled to come, anyone who wished to could have. If Mr Fleming’s advisers had wanted to send witnesses, why hadn’t they done so? As to their request for a further enquiry still, in the interest of Mr Fleming—you couldn’t institute an enquiry upon someone who was not charged with any offence, and Mr Fleming not only wasn’t charged with any offence in this matter but, having been a witness at the trial, couldn’t be. There is a general air about the letter of ‘so now pipe down’. Mr Fleming’s lawyers did not quite pipe down, but wrote once more to complain that the enquiry had ‘brought suspicion upon the hitherto unblemished character of Mr Fleming, in a manner most injurious to himself and his family’, and renewing their demand for publication of the evidence taken at the enquiry—which as he knew had been held in camera—and the appointment of a Royal Commission to look’ into it all. The Home Secretary wrote back and told them to read his letter again, and that for the moment was the end of that.

  On November 10, Mrs M’Lachlan had been removed to Perth Penitentiary to begin her commuted life sentence. She had so far been considerately treated in prison. On account of her health some rules were relaxed; she was not for long confined to the bread-and-water diet of the convicted felon—they had to keep her strength up, of course, for the execution. At the close of her trial, the prison authorities reported, her extraordinary fortitude had given way; she had to be kept in bed, and lay there ‘all courage lost’. (She told her sister that during the trial she couldn’t weep in court, but that in the quiet of her cell she cried all night.) A ‘dull, moping state succeeded her resolute bearing’, and seems to have lasted throughout the long weeks while the petition for her reprieve was under consideration. She was bombarded with tracts, pamphlets and letters from the public which, after scrutiny, were shown to her; and much bothered by the solicitations of clergymen offering ghostly counsel, and of ‘charitably-minded ladies’ wishing to express their sympathy in person—we may with like charity believe them innocent of sensation seeking at the expense of their miserable sister. However, she refused them all and suffered only the attentions of the Reverend Mr Doran—a gentleman who was later reported to have believed throughout in her guilt and depravity. Her close relatives were allowed to visit her to take their harrowing farewells. She had persuaded James M’Lachlan to let her own family have the care of the little boy—perhaps James had already decided to emigrate (leaving Jessie all alone, engulfed in Perth Prison) and he could hardly be burdened with a three-year-old child. James brought the boy once to see her, and then her sister, who was taking him back to their brother in Inverness, brought him for the last heart-breaking good-byes; the poor mother was terribly overcome. Her father came also and saw her. To them all she reiterated her innocence. They told her that the people all believed her statement, and she said, ‘Well they may, for it’s true.’

  No one says what became of her poor little dog.

  A description headed ‘Female Life in Prison’, by a woman officer, appeared at about this time in the London Times. It shows something of the type of woman Jessie was now to be thrown amongst—she who, whether we believe her innocent or guilty, was not in the ordinary sense a ‘criminal’, certainly was far removed by her background and temperament from such a company. The female convict, says the writer, is more depraved than the male, a class desperately wicked, deceitful, crafty, lewd and malicious. Punishment may bring them to death’s door but improves them not at all. They are satanically proud of their crimes—mostly theft with violence—and vain and mischievous beyond belief. The most terrible punishment of all to them is the fact that on admission to prison their hair is cut off: brutally insensible to other privations, yet faced with this invariable rule they without exception struggle against it—weep, pray, fight, implore on their knees, are overcome by shivering fits. A prisoner re-admitted will often plead that in the meantime she has married, and ‘it’s my husband’s hair now, you can’t cut it off.’ One prisoner in the writer’s experience became ‘delirious’, broke away from her captors and ran screaming down the deserted corridors. ‘The cry of “Dinna cut my hair!” still rings in my ears.’

  They were fantastically destructive. Bed-linen was so inevitably torn apart that eventually it was decided to use string for the sewing; but it was still destroyed. The most common punishment was that prisoners should ‘go to the Dark’—bare, unlit cells where they remained for long periods in solitary confinement. They would be dragged off, undaunted, and revenge themselves by ceaselessly stamping, thumping and screaming so as to disturb the warders. ‘The cry wells up from the ceiling like the defiant song of the caged tigress.’

 
Among these caged tigresses, Jessie M’Lachlan was to spend ‘a’ my days.’

  She was taken to Perth by train, her head and face muffled in a shawl, but despite all precautions the truth had leaked out and there was a little rush of people to see her hustled into the railway carriage. It was to be fifteen years before she saw Glasgow again.

  But still the controversy continued to rage. If she was guilty—why wasn’t she hanged? If she was innocent, why was she sent to penal servitude for life? The Home Secretary’s decision that, though she was now believed to have been an accidental witness after the crime and to have kept silence under coercion, she must nevertheless be severely punished, satisfied no one. On Friday, June 26, when she had been already seven months in prison, Mr Stirling of Kier, member for Perthshire, raised a question in the House of Commons. As a result the evidence given in secret at the enquiries following her trial was made public. In the debate following this move, Mr Stirling spoke at length on the injustice to Mr Fleming of the course pursued by the Government; Mr Dunlop, the member for Greenock, claimed that there had been a miscarriage of justice and Mr Fleming should have been in the dock. There was argument as to the law in Scotland by which a person could or could not be put on his trial who had given evidence in a case in which he was supposed to have been an accomplice, as old Fleming had done.

  The Lord Advocate summed up. The Secretary of State had not said that the prisoner was innocent or that Fleming was guilty; he simply said that in the doubt and mystery which attended this case it was ‘better not to break into the house of life’ but to commute the sentence to the next highest punishment and leave it to time to unravel a mystery which all his care and patience had not enabled him to unveil.

  Meanwhile Convict No. 389/21 ate out her heart in jail.

  And meanwhile, also, a Dr Buchanan decided that the time had come when he was entitled at last to contribute his mite to the letters in the papers. While the woman’s fate was in the balance, he wrote, he had held his peace, but he really couldn’t allow this suggestion of overwhelming medical charges to go unrefuted. It showed him in a dreadful light which was entirely unwarranted. He had attended Mrs M’Lachlan as—so her husband himself had informed him—her sole medical adviser. At the time of her confinement he had sent in a total bill of £1 12s, and this was all his medical attention had ever cost her. As to her heart, she had never complained to him about it, there had never been mention of palpitations or of any other cardiac sympton; to his personal and certain knowledge she had been in bed after her baby was born for three weeks, and not four months as was stated in court. He quite certainly had ‘never said that if she did not take care of herself she might drop dead.’