The Supernatural Murders

by Jonathan Goodman

  Reoch, who doubtless had his own reasons for declining to testify concerning the ring with the knob on it, having failed to obey his citation as a witness, was fined one hundred merks, the Court inflicting a similar penalty upon another absenting witness. The jury were then enclosed, and the Court adjourned at four o’clock in the morning of 12 June, having sat for twenty-one consecutive hours. At six o’clock the same afternoon, the jury, ‘all in one voice’, found the panels not guilty of the crime libelled! The Court then ‘assoilized’ Clerk and Macdonald, and dismissed them from the bar.

  This amazing conclusion was, one would think, more likely to offend the sergeant’s ‘perturbed spirit’ than the disrespect previously shown to his bones; but whether or not he resented the verdict and troubled in consequence the peace of the jury, we have no means of knowing. It is highly probable that he had already, by his well-meant intervention, done much to frustrate the ends of justice and bring about his murderers’ acquittal; for the supernatural element thus introduced was seized upon by the defence to cast ridicule on the Crown case, and so obscure the very material evidence of the panels’ guilt. Robert M’Intosh, one of their counsel, told Scott that M’Pherson, in cross-examination, swore that the phantom spoke ‘as good Gaelic as ever he heard in Lochaber’. ‘Pretty well,’ said M’Intosh, ‘for the ghost of an English sergeant!’ But this fact was surely less marvellous than the appearance of the spectre at all; in such matters c’est le premier pas qui coûte.

  It was Sir Walter’s opinion that M’Pherson arrived at his knowledge of the murder ‘by ordinary means’, and invented the machinery of the vision to obviate the odium attaching to informers. Such also was the view of Hill Burton, who thought Farquharson a party to the fraud.

  But this theory ignores the testimony of Isobel M’Hardie, and, as we shall find from contemporary evidence, neither of these men did in fact give the information upon which the prisoners were charged. Unless they had themselves seen the deed done or heard Angus Cameron’s account of its doing, they knew no more than any of their neighbours, and it does not appear that Angus had then spoken. They certainly displayed little zeal to discover the authors of the crime, for M’Pherson, despite the revelation, took service with the murderer and remained a year in his employment, while Farquharson did nothing whatever in the matter.

  The reader will recollect that upon the spirit’s first appearance M’Pherson took it for ‘a real living man, a brother of Donald Farquharson’. It would be interesting to learn more of this person; where, for instance, he was that night, what were his relations with the accused, and whether he had not himself discovered the remains. For it is much more likely that someone, either with a knowledge of the facts or from a desire to fix public suspicion upon Clerk and Macdonald, the reputed murderers, assumed the spectral rôle and successfully imposed upon the credulous shepherd lad, than that the latter would, in the circumstances, invent and swear to so ridiculous a tale. Mrs M’Hardie, on the second visitation, saw a naked figure enter the low door of the hut ‘in a bowing posture’, which is more suggestive of a physical than a psychic intruder. Whatever the Lord Advocate may have thought of M’Pherson’s good faith, it is difficult to see how he could ever have expected the jury to swallow the ghost, but it may be (for the records of these old trials are confusing) that the spirit was judicially evoked by Lockhart in cross-examination. Probably, had M’Pherson and Farquharson confined themselves to the bones and left the murderers to be named by Cameron, who saw and knew them, a conviction would have been secured, for M’Intosh admitted to Scott that both the counsel and agent of the accused were convinced of their guilt.

  It has been conjectured, in explanation of the inexplicable verdict, that the jury were Jacobites, and as such would be indisposed to deal very strictly in so trifling a matter as the removal of a superfluous English sergeant, but the fact that they were all Edinburgh tradesmen hardly encourages the supposition. ‘The whole affair,’ writes Mr Andrew Lang, ‘is thoroughly characteristic of the Highlanders and of Scottish jurisprudence after Culloden, while the verdict of “Not Guilty” (when “Not Proven” would have been stretching a point) is evidence to the “common sense” of the eighteenth century.’

  A curious incident, unnoticed by Scott and Hill Burton, which arose out of the trial, throws some light on the former proceedings, and is in itself sufficiently quaint to be recorded. On Friday, 14 June, two days after the accuseds’ acquittal, Alexander Lockhart, their counsel, presented in his own behalf to the Lords of Justiciary a petition and complaint against James Small, late ensign of the Earl of Loudon’s regiment, and then factor upon the forfeited estate of Strowan, whose name, it will be recalled, had been mentioned during the trial. According to the petition, Small was ‘the person upon whose instigation’ Clerk and Macdonald had been prosecuted. He had been ‘extremely industrious in searching out witnesses against them’, and it was alleged that not only did he examine and take declarations from the witnesses in private, but after they were cited to give evidence in Court he ‘dealt with’ some of them not to appear, and endeavoured to intimidate others who did not say ‘such strong things’ as he expected. These matters, said Lockhart, he had thought it his duty to bring to the notice of the Court and jury at the trial, which he had accordingly done. Small, resenting his observations, had, armed with a sword and attended by two men ‘of very suspicious appearances’, lain in wait for Lockhart in the Parliament Close that Friday morning. Upon the arrival of the advocate at his usual hour for attending court, Small rushed upon him, ‘made a claught at the petitioner’s nose’, and raising his stick, ‘which he shaked over the petitioner’s head’, made the somewhat superfluous remark that his action was intended as a public affront, which if Lockhart proposed to resent, ‘he would be at no loss to find out where the said James Small lived’. The petitioner pointed out that no words of his could adequately represent ‘the atrociousness of the injury’ to the dignity of the Senators of the College of Justice and the Faculty of Advocates in general and to himself in particular resulting from such scandalous behaviour, and that in these circumstances he was induced to seek redress by summary complaint to the Court ‘rather than in the way and manner suggested by James Small’. The Court granted warrant for the apprehension of the militant factor, and ordered his committal to the Tolbooth till the next sederunt [sitting].

  Answers to Lockhart’s petition were lodged by Small, who stated that he did not receive any information that Clerk and Macdonald were reputed the murderers until he was instructed to inquire into the case and, if possible, discover the criminals. In December 1753 he assisted the Sheriff-Substitute in making such an inquiry, when it appeared from the precognitions then taken that the accused were the guilty parties, and they were charged accordingly. Had he been called as a witness upon their trial, the objection might validly have been made ‘that he had given partial counsel in the cause’, but though his name was included in the Crown list, the point did not arise. Mr Lockhart, however, in his address, had gratuitously attacked him, with a view to ‘blacken the petitioner in the most public manner and to fix upon him for ever the basest and worst of characters’. He (Small) had been actuated throughout solely by his duty as a good subject and his desire to see justice done, and the strictures of Lockhart upon his conduct, which were well and widely known, so ‘grieved, vexed, and confounded him by turns’ that he was provoked to treat his traducer in the manner set forth in the petition. He protested that in so doing he had intended no disrespect either to the Court or to the Faculty, and though his behaviour ‘had not perhaps been altogether legal’, he hoped the Court would consider his ‘great and just provocation’.

  Next day Small was brought to the bar of the High Court of Justiciary. The proceedings took place behind closed doors, and the parties were heard by their procurators. The Lords found that the prisoner had been guilty ‘of a high contempt of this Court, and of a high injury to the Faculty of Advocates and to the complainer, Mr Alexander Lockhart’, a
nd approved of the means taken by the complainer to obtain redress. They ordained Small to be imprisoned in the Tolbooth till Wednesday the 19th, when he must apologise in Court to the injured parties, and find caution to keep the peace for one year, under a penalty of fifty pounds sterling. Lockhart was ordered ‘not to resent the injury done to him in any other manner’.

  On 19 June, Small again appeared in custody before the Lords, gave in his bond of caution, and having publicly begged the pardon of the Court, of the Dean and Faculty of Advocates, and of Mr Alexander Lockhart, was thereafter dismissed from the bar.

  Thus was vindicated the outraged majesty of the law, which, if it had signally failed to avenge the slaying of the sergeant, despite the co-operation of his unquiet spirit, could at least see justice done to an advocate’s nose.

  Devils in the Flesh

  RAYNER HEPPENSTALL

  ON 1 MAY 1954, at a dance in Rennes, a typist who worked two hundred miles away in Paris, home for the weekend, made the acquaintance of Jacques Algarron, a cadet from the Army school at Coëtquidan. The following weekend, they became lovers. Neither was a novice. Denise Labbé had an illegitimate child, a daughter aged two, Catherine, by a house-doctor at Lorient, with whom she had lived until his departure for Indo-China and whom she had refused to marry on his return. The child was farmed out with entirely respectable foster-parents, a retired nurse and her husband, in the western outer suburbs of Paris, where her mother visited her quite regularly on Sunday afternoons. Algarron had two illegitimate children, whose mothers seem to have borne him no ill will, though he had refused to marry either.

  He was himself the illegitimate son of an elderly Army officer, and a much older half-brother of his had at the Liberation been sentenced to death as a collaborator but reprieved. He was twenty-four. Denise Labbé was four years older. Her father had been a postman, who committed suicide in August 1940, throwing himself in the canal one Sunday morning when his daughter was fourteen. Her mother was still alive and lived in Rennes, where Denise still had friends. An intelligent and an industrious girl, she had received little formal education, and the only ‘intellectual’ connections she had were those she had made by promiscuous frequentation of university circles in Rennes. Despite his illegitimacy, Algarron’s background was bourgeois, and for a while he had attended a very good school indeed, Louis-le-Grand. Frequenting the bars and cellars of St Germain des Prés, he had picked up the jargon and read some of the fashionable ‘anti-morality’ books, particulary those by André Gide and would philosophise in a pretentiously half-baked manner which no doubt impressed his girls. It impressed Denise, that is certain. She was not at all bad-looking; round-faced, with a nice figure. Both were fair in colouring, he the more so. He had green eyes and was faunlike, with a nasty slit of a mouth.

  He clawed and bit her, and she liked it. They even bought a penknife. On her summer holidays, with her mother and little Cathy, she proudly paraded her scars on the beach. He kissed the blood he drew and particularly enjoyed making love to her during her periods. He made her sleep with other men, though she did not want to. He thought that the human couple, to become a super-couple, ought to be united by something more than the pleasure of the senses, even with such sado-masochistic refinements. On 7 August, the day on which he passed out as an officer, as they rode in a taxi, he suggested killing the driver. But that would be a meaningless sacrifice. Her surest way of showing that she belonged wholly to him would be to kill her child. The suggestion was made and somewhat insisted on. By then, he had been posted to garrison duty with the gunners at Châlons-sur-Marne, and they met infrequently in Paris. She became pregnant, and he ordered her to have an abortion, which she did on the cheap and badly, so that curettage was needed.

  On 22 September, she held Catherine over the balcony of her mother’s second-floor premises in Rennes, but had not the heart to force the clinging fingers loose. A week later, she dropped the child into the canal from an iron bridge, but the child’s clothes kept her afloat and she was rescued. On Saturday, 16 October, Cathy was found blue with cold in a stream near the foster-parents’ home. In early November, Denise Labbé took her daughter to stay in Vendôme with her sister and brother-in-law, a shady lawyer called Dusser. On the 8th, she held Cathy head-down in a vessel kept for washing clothes in the yard. At the funeral, suspicions were voiced by the foster-mother, but not until 6 December was Denise Labbé arrested.

  Presently, Jacques Algarron joined her at Blois, about a hundred miles south-west of Paris, charged under Article 60 of the Code Pénal, which deals with what we call accessories before the fact, ‘those who, by gifts, promises, threats, abuse of authority or power, machinations or culpable artifices, shall have provoked the act or given instructions for it to be committed’. The original charge against Denise Labbé had, it may be noted, been under Article 63, for ‘non-assistance to a person in danger’. Under our law, this is not a criminal offence. We may think it should be. That it is not may, at least, cause us to miss the point of such literary works, well-known and greatly admired in translation, as The Fall by Albert Camus. The lawyer in that book is guilty of a criminal offence under French law. It is not mere self-contempt which has led him to take refuge in Amsterdam.

  In the days before the contraceptive pill, it was one of the disabilities of women that only the chaste, the careful, the undesired and the abnormal could be sure of avoiding unwanted pregnancy, the abrupt termination of which, whether by miscarriage, abortion or parturition, might induce a state of emotional disturbance verging, if not on madness, at least on diminished responsibility. This has sometimes been recognised in English law, in cases of infanticide by the mother. No doubt, among other factors, Denise Labbé’s personality had been somewhat disturbed by her bungled abortion and its after-effects.

  The trial of Denise Labbé and Jacques Algarron opened at Blois on Wednesday, 30 May 1956, in a thunderstorm, which rose to its height while the clerk to the court was reading the indictment, and briefly extinguished the lights, so that for a while the courtroom was illuminated only by flashes of lightning at the windows.

  The president of the court was M. Lecocq, bespectacled, white-moustached, gentle in manner. Of the two assessors, M. Sorlin, on his left, seemed too young for his place, and on his right sat a good-looking woman in her thirties, Mme Kopenski. Before them, on a broad dais, stood Exhibit A, the lessiveuse in which, eighteen months previously, Catherine Labbé, then aged two and a half, had been held head downward till she died. On to the dais from the wall to their right projected the little box in which sat M. Gay, avocat-général, for the prosecution. Beyond him was the dock and, in front of it, the bench and long desk for counsel for the defence, among whom were two very eminent Parisian barristers indeed: for Algarron, René Floriot; for Denise Labbé, a man of even greater if quieter distinction, Maurice Garçon, a member of the Académie Française, known as a writer on subjects commonly thought remote from jurisprudence and case-law, demonology for instance, which in fact did not seem remote that sultry afternoon.

  Maître Floriot had two juniors. With Maître Garçon, a man of unusually narrow, clean-shaven face, his short grey hair parted in the middle, sat the leader of the Loir-et-Cher bar association, M. le Bâtonnier Simon, venerably white-bearded. The jury was all male, seven farmers. There was no shortage of journalists from Paris; but there were few distinguished visitors, at best a couple of actresses (resting at the height of the season) and two singers from the existentialist basements of St Germain des Prés, probably there less from general interest than to lend moral support to later witnesses, of whom several had been Algarron’s girl-friends in those Left-Bank surroundings. Yet all France was interested in the case, none more so than such eminent writers as François Mauriac, Jean Cocteau, Jules Romains, André Breton, Jean Schlumberger and Marcel Jouhandeau, all of whom would have their say when it was over, Cocteau describing it as the case of the century.

  Maître Garçon’s first intervention was to ask whether his client could
be moved to the end of the dock, just behind himself and thus farther away from Algarron, at which Maître Floriot was heard to ask sarcastically whether the latter was expected to hypnotise Labbé in open court, with the solid figure of a gendarme between them, and two others in the dock. After consultation with his assessors, M. Lecocq allowed counsel’s request.

  It is not uncommon for accomplices on trial together to be found making every effort to place the main burden of guilt on each other. Here, the cases against and for the two defendants were at once of a different nature and diametrically opposed. Even in an English court, it seems unlikely that Denise Labbé would have pleaded guilty, but she admitted all the facts with which she was charged, claiming only that she had acted under improper influence strongly and persistently exerted, so that her guilt, if not indeed her responsibility, was diminished. Jacques Algarron admitted no more than a few idle words, not intended to lead to any practical result. It would be Maître Floriot’s aim to show that there was really no case for his client to answer, the only evidence that could be brought against him being the allegations of his former mistress, a proven liar, and some few scraps of letters of ambiguous import. Maître Garçon, on the other hand, since nothing alleged against his client could be disproved, must go all out for the case against Algarron. M. Gay could play it which way he pleased, but, since the case against Labbé presented no difficulty, he might be expected to concentrate on that against Algarron.