Classic Scottish Murder Stories

by Molly Whittington-Egan

  It must not be thought that the unjoined couple lived in frigid isolation. Christina’s sisters visited by relay to cheer and assist. By some quaint old custom, the guest dined in the kitchen while her host and hostess ate their meal in uncomfortable gloom in the parlour. There was one living-in maid, Mary Paterson, an old family servant of the Gilmours, who soon found herself the confidante of Christina’s lament that she had married John Gilmour against her will, and only because it was the wish of her father: she had intended to take John Anderson. Outside, several men were employed about the farm, and they were loyal to their master.

  The first Christmas at Town of Inchinnan was a mere counterfeit of goodwill as Christina presided over the festive fare and Yule logs crackled in the family hearth. Christmas causes emotional upset, confrontation, divorce. People resolve, reject, and scheme. On Boxing Day, all cooking done, Mary Paterson was given leave to visit her sister in Dunlop. Christina gave her some complicated instructions for an unusual errand: on her way, she was to call in at a certain house in Paisley and ask the people there to send out a boy with twopence (supplied) to buy arsenic for rats.

  The subterfuge went wrong, however, because the maid forgot the address of the house in Paisley (and would they really have done what was to be asked of them?) and on her way back on December 27th, obligingly bought the arsenic direct from Dr Vessey’s chemist’s shop in Paisley. She had to say that it was expressly for Mrs Gilmour of Inchinnan. The following afternoon, Christina enacted a charade, a damage limitation, in the outside boiling-house. While she had the attention of Mary Paterson, she threw a paper into the fire, which looked exactly like the arsenic package, saying that it was no use to her, and that she was afraid that she would not be able to use it properly.

  Sharp and sudden the next evening, Thursday December 29th, John Gilmour’s illness began, and dragged on, with remissions, until January 11th. His symptoms were of a repeated ‘throwing’ of a ‘kind of brownish stuff’, pains in the chest and abdomen, and a swelling of the face. Yet he lived, a strong young farmer of 30, and staggered from barn to byre, in and out of bed.

  At the New Year, the sick man was hoisted into a gig for a visit to his parents and parents-in-law. While away from home, he vomited, more than once, and was ill in bed back at his farm on January 3rd. The next day, a farm-hand, John Muir, saw him in the stables, his face swollen and his eyes watering. That was the last day on which he walked his land and saw to his men and beasts. Yet still he lived.

  On January 6th, Christina Gilmour (who is becoming, as we proceed, a character less and less sympathetic) left home early, telling Mary Paterson that she was going to Renfrew to fetch something for her husband. The farm workers were not to be told. She returned soon after breakfast. As she went into the house, she deposited, or accidentally lost, by reason of unconscious motivation, an incriminating object which John Muir noticed at the corner of the boiling-house, as he came out from breakfast. It had not been there when he went in, and it was not carefully hidden. The strange find was a black silk bag containing a small phial of dark-brownish liquid with a sweet smell, like perfume, and a small paper parcel labelled POISON.

  This incident is inexplicable unless seen as another message of distress from inside the mind of Christina Gilmour. You do not lightly lose something which you have obtained secretly, and which fills your thoughts. The farmhouse would have offered safer nooks and crannies for concealment. John Muir took the bag to Mary Paterson (who, incidentally, could not read) and she, in turn, offered it to her mistress. Christina said that she had got some turpentine to rub John with, and went off with the bag.

  There was, later, no organised search of modern type for the supplying chemist of the contents of the black silk bag and he was never traced. The packet may be presumed to have been arsenic for rats. Mary Paterson said that it looked like the previous one which she had bought in Paisley. The phial has aroused little comment. There can be only speculation about it. John Muir said that the liquid did not smell like turpentine. Oil of turpentine is colourless, anyway. It could have been genuine perfume bought as a cover and a reassurance to the chemist. Cyanide, with its well-known odour of bitter almonds springs to mind, but prussic acid, too, is like water in appearance. The suspicion must be that Christina obtained a small amount of some other unidentified deadly poison, as much as she could get, on some pretext, in order to top up the arsenic.

  That night, Christina went out again, on a public relations exercise, taking with her as witness to her solicitude a farmhand named Sandy Muir. She informed him that, as the master refused to see a doctor (a proposition dubious in itself) she was going to consult her uncle, Robert Robertson, at Paisley. Since that gentleman had not seen his niece for four years, and scarcely recognised her, her choice of adviser was somewhat artificial. She did not turn to her own parents, but to someone removed, not likely to interfere. He did offer to send over his own medical man, Dr McKechnie, but she temporised, saying that she would be happier if her uncle would make a visit first, to see if her husband would agree. She did confide in him the unhappy truth (as she had done to her maid) that she was in a situation not of her own choosing, and that she had really preferred John Anderson. The uncle launched like a parson into a mini-homily on the sacred duties of marriage, concluding with the realistic reflection that many folk had not got the one they liked best. Christina received this wisdom meekly.

  Meanwhile, back at the Town of Inchinnan, John Muir was feeling suspicious about the black silk bag, and he went in cautiously to see his master, who was alone and in great pain. ‘Jock,’ said he to John Muir, ‘this is an unco thing!’ These words would appear to be the very epitome of the plight of the poisoned husband on his death-bed. With permission, John Muir, and a lad, set off to fetch a Dr McLaws, of Renfrew, but it was a poor choice of medico, because, not to put too fine a point on it, he was drunk. They met him by chance at Inchinnan Tollhouse at nearly midnight. Christina, returned from her uncle to find the doctor’s horse at the door, attended the bibulous consultation, which was singularly ineffectual. No-one (he said) told him that there had been vomiting, and he diagnosed ‘inflammation’, bleeding the patient with an unsteady hand, horribly to relate, and ordering him to be rubbed with turpentine, as so cleverly prognosticated by the attentive wife.

  Next morning, a Saturday, early again, after a bad night, at 8 o’clock, Christina acquired a third remedy for her unhappiness. This time, as she must have done on her second sortie, she proceeded under a false name, telling Alexander Wylie, druggist of Renfrew, that she required arsenic for rats in the field. She was ‘Miss Robertson’ acting on behalf of a farmer named John Ferguson, but as she was a newcomer to the district, she regretfully could not remember the name of his farm. The oldest local inhabitant, brought in to advise on all possible farms by the slightly suspicious chemist nearly scuppered her, but her mild and fetching manner prevailed.

  On the Sunday, Dr Robert McKechnie, the uncle’s choice, was called in, and found the patient very feverish, with a pulse of 112, and extremely thirsty. As so often in these poison cases, his diagnosis was of a bilious condition, and he prescribed accordingly – calomel, tartaric acid, soda powders, and a blister. John Muir kept quiet about the black silk bag. The uncle, making up for four years’ distance, acted as night-nurse to relieve the exhausted wife. Christina again confided in him her aversion to her marriage, and seemed to be ‘brooding’ about it. It is as if she would have relented (although it was surely too late) if the uncle – a relative in a position of authority – had said that he understood her pain, and released her.

  The doctor asked for vomit and excreta to be preserved for his inspection, but Christina evaded his request. By now, John Gilmour was fast slipping away, and relatives and servants were constantly at his bedside. His wife helped to administer the prescribed powders. He begged to be ‘opened’ – an ambiguous request. They heard him utter two statements, almost dying declarations: ‘Oh, that woman! If you have given me anything...
‘and ‘Oh, if you have given me anything, tell me before I die!’ The doctor’s son, who assisted his father, found the patient ‘very low’ on Wednesday the 11th, and bled him – a further insult to his system.

  John Gilmour passed away on that day, January 11th, 1843, and he was buried in the churchyard at Dunlop on the 16th, a childless man in his prime, his fields unworked. Christina was a widow in a house which she had never cherished. John Anderson wrote to her. After a couple of months, she went home to her parents, surely hopeful of the attentions of the right John, but he was as laggardly as ever. Gossip followed her like a snuffling hound. Servants talked. After family conferences, Alexander Cochran again intervened with a heavy hand and his customary poor judgement, and arranged to ship his daughter to America, against her will. She objected, saying that flight would be seen as guilt.

  On April 21st, the Sheriff granted a warrant for the apprehension of Christina Gilmour, and the exhumation of her husband’s body. On the 22nd, the coffin was lifted and a postmortem was performed immediately, followed by a chemical analysis. Professor Christison later confirmed their findings: there was arsenic in the stomach and in the liver (which was only the second instance at that time of arsenic being detected in the liver). A striking feature of the examination was the fact that the intestines were stained with spots and streaks of a bright yellow colour and the internal surface of the stomach was thickly sprinkled with small yellow particles. On a sweep through six comparable cases, the author has not found a report of yellow colouring, but there clearly is no mystery, because Taylor states that white arsenic can be seen converted into the yellow sulphide of arsenic in the stomach and small intestine, especially when decomposition has begun.

  The police arrived at the Cochran farm on April 24th, to execute the warrant, but Christina was already on her way to being smuggled out of the country. The family stoutly denied all knowledge of her whereabouts, themselves committing all manner of auxiliary criminal acts, which were never brought home to them. On the 28th, she wrote to John Anderson from Liverpool. Her family destroyed the letter, and denied the Laodicean lover’s recollection that she told him that she would confess to having bought arsenic to take herself, but that she would not admit to having given any to her husband.

  Christina Gilmour’s escape has the dramatic, episodic quality of an 18th-century picaresque novel. She did not even know her destination, virtually kidnapped, like some beleaguered Clarissa, if not so pure in heart. She left home secretly on foot, banished, although embraced, in the charge of a man whom she did not know, and at a given place was handed over to another stranger, who drove her in a gig to a safe-house, where she was transferred to a third man, with whom she travelled by rail to Liverpool. She may have known the third man, named Simpson, who was a gardener or a shoemaker, and she did not like him at all. He was going to America and had agreed to take Christina with him under the assumed personae of Mr and Mrs John Spiers. The comparison with Crippen and Ethel le Neve is almost too obvious to state. Simpson proved, unlike John Anderson, to be anything but a perfect gentleman, for, intoxicated by the excitement of the situation, he sought to take advantage of his supposed wife (a dangerous ambition) and she had to appeal to the captain for protection. That was Christina’s story, and it does not entirely ring true other than in its psycho-sexual sense: she would not have wished to reveal to the captain the sham of her identity.

  It did not matter, anyway, because as their packet-ship Excel bounced and dipped across the Atlantic, Superintendent McKay, armed with a new warrant was in pursuit aboard the much faster, picturesque, Cunard paddle-steamer Arcadia, and Christina was arrested off Staten Island. McKay recognised her from a previous encounter, depleted and ravaged as she was by sea-sickness and the strain of fighting off the advances of Simpson the shoemaker. A treaty for extradition in such cases was just in place, and proceedings were brought in June before United States Commissioner, named Sylvanus Rapalyea. Thomas Warner, of the New York Bar, tried every angle to defeat the treaty. Christina was quite sane enough to feign insanity, but she had led a sheltered life and her play-acting would not have fooled any doctor worth his salt. She sat on the floor like a pixie, cut her hands with scissors, said that she liked to see the flies licking up the blood, and saw her grandmother lying on her bed in her holding-cell. She also expressed a preference for going home in a coach, rather than a ship, but perhaps she intended an irony.

  All pleas having failed, Christina’s passage to Scotland on the packet Liverpool was not a smooth one, and there was time for reflection. At night, she was locked in her cabin with an unofficial wardress (just as a real lunatic would have been) while McKay kept guard outside. Back at Paisley, she made a judicial declaration before the Sheriff, and what she said was wily and to the point, with lies and distortions. There was an implication that her husband might have committed suicide: ‘He said to me shortly before his death that I had broken his heart. I suppose that he said this because I told him often before that he had broken mine and that I could not be to him as a wife.’

  She sought to reduce her acquisitions of arsenic from three to two, admitting the arsenic for rats, which she burnt in front of Mary Paterson, without, she said, ever opening the packet, and owning to the black silk bag incident, which she deliberately fused with the third, known purchase from Wylie the chemist. She ‘rather thought’ that she dropped the bag. The purpose of this poison was her own suicide, because she felt that they were all tired of her and would not let her have peace. She did not take it, but kept it in her pocket until the string came off the paper and some of the contents were spilt. There it stayed, until she discovered it after Gilmour’s death, when she had gone home to her parents. Her mother took possession of it.

  The trial of Christina Gilmour, in Edinburgh, began on January 12 th 1844. Like all those Victorian women accused of murdering their husbands, she provided an interesting spectacle in her black dress and veil, forbidden at that time to speak, and held to the words of her declaration. The defence freely conceded that John Gilmour had died of arsenical poisoning, but argued that, grieved by the state of the marriage, he had killed himself. In the alternative, he had poisoned himself by accident. His actual possession of arsenic, kept as a rodenticide, was neatly proved by the evidence of Mary Paterson that he had moved the ‘kist’ or chest which contained his stock of the poison into the bedroom, from the kitchen, on the occasion of his marriage. There it was, available for him to rifle when he felt the suicidal urge, or to use clumsily against the rats. No explanation was given for the transference from kitchen to bedroom. Perhaps he felt that with the kitchen in proper use, there might be a mistake. He must have kept the kist locked, or why would Christina have travelled for miles in search of arsenic? Why did she not, theoretically, ask him to dole out some rat poison for her to use?

  A broken heart, said Counsel for Christina, might lead to suicide, but not to murder and, in spite of the strong circumstantial evidence, the corporate mind of the jury revolted from the notion of the guilt of one of so ‘very gentle, mild, fine disposition’ (John Anderson’s words) who had held her husband’s head when he vomited. Arsenic is a cruel agent of death – and we now know that it is carcinogenic, should a person survive its administration – and Not Proven was, in the circumstances, a kind verdict.

  Christina Gilmour went home to her mother and father. John Anderson did not marry her. She had no taste for greater adventure, for those travels abroad so popular with beneficiaries of the Not Proven verdict, but lived quietly, and turned to the Church. She died on December 14th 1905, at the age of 87, and her last known place of residence was Stewarton, in Ayrshire, unless, of course, someone has better knowledge.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE TRAVELLING MAN

  In a drear, wast place, they found the body of the travelling man, hidden in the waters of the bleak tarn named Loch Tor-na-Eigin, in the parish of Assynt, a part of that highest north-west region, maritime on its serrated edges, which lies 30 miles below Ca
pe Wrath.

  The itinerant merchant, a strong man walking, burdened with a heavy pack of wares, his humped figure seen in silhouette toiling over passes to distant villages, was once a vital part of the economy of the Highlands. It was a calling of some antiquity. Scott’s character, Bryce Snailsfoot, a pedlar active in the Northern Isles in The Pirate, came from times around 1700. Romantic and colourful as these old trades seem to us now, they must have been arduous and uncomfortable in the extreme. One thinks of Hardy’s reddleman in The Return of the Native, saturated with red ochre in every pore. Men of solitary disposition may have been attracted to such ways of life.

  The peril for the packman, travelling alone with his stave like a pilgrim but with, it is to be hoped, some kind of weaponry to defend himself, was that the mere sight of him was an allurement to villainy. A moving target, he carried often valuable materials, and, as his pack lightened, a growing store of real money. Murdoch Grant’s pack contained linens, silk handkerchiefs, prints, cottons, and worsted stockings. These were goods of quality. Another traveller could just as well have peddled pots and pans, ribbons and beads, and pins and needles.

  A decent young man of 25, Murdoch Grant was based at Strathbeg, in Lochbroom, Ross-shire, and his beat covered parts of Sutherland, Ross and Cromarty. Who knows how many business rivals he had, but he was doing well, because when he left home for Assynt, in March, 1830, he valued his goods for sale at £40. He was a guest at the wedding of a girl called Betty Fraser on March 11th, and that occasion was good for trade. For one week before his disappearance on March 19th, he stayed in the Assynt district, being put up in the homes of several of his customers, which is a measure of his blameless character.