Heaven Knows Who (11 page)

Now the hunt was up. With Jessie out of the way, the bonfire of scandal really got going.

The police within the next few days were very active indeed around the Broomielaw. There was a good deal of juggling over keys—which amounted to this, that there proved to be no existing ‘check key' to the front door of her ‘house', and that no other key in the place could be found to fit it. Mary Adams must have told about the allegedly burnt crinoline, for a detective went off round to their house and there took possession of the wires that had been given her to cut down for Sarah. On part of these wires he ‘considered there had been blood'. And Mrs Adams nosed round and finally dug up a sleeve torn out of a dress and handed
that also over to the police—a sleeve from Mrs M'Lachlan's familiar brown coburg dress with the flounces. Mrs Adams had last seen her wearing it on that fatal Friday, before she went out to see Jess. And Mrs Campbell explained about the bottle which Jessie had borrowed to go out for her sevenpence ha'porth of rum, to stand treat to her visitor, Mrs Fraser, and later to Jess; and lo!—there in the cupboard in the basement at Sandyford Place was a bottle with no cork in it, smelling of rum.

In her room at the Broomielaw, despite her extravagance in ‘lifting' pawned articles on the Monday following the murder, there were still to be found forty-one pawn-tickets, old and new: all in the name of Fraser, with various Christian names.

And away up in Hamilton, while the lady who had asked about the sheugh or burn to quench her thirst was undergoing such tribulations, Margaret Gibson, one of the two little girls, was making a horrid discovery. Wandering that Sunday near the Tommy Linn park, towards which she and Marion Fairley had directed the lady, she noticed some pieces of flannel thrust in under the roots of a hedge. She pulled out a piece and saw that it was ‘all blood'.

The child was scared and ran off. But she told her friend Marion and next day they returned to the spot and found the flannel still lying there. They had another fascinated look and then went off and left it. Further on, however, in Templeton Park, they came across another prize: bundled under a hedge was a brown coburg dress, torn but entire—except for one sleeve.

Meanwhile, Jessie languished in the Glasgow prison. She had been examined upon entry, and the exciting discovery was made that on her left hand were the marks of a cut and also of a bite or bites. Any hopes that these might have held out, however, were deflated by the decided opinion given by the police surgeon at the trial, that the incisions were too small and close together to have been caused by human teeth, and were probably exactly what she said they were—the scars of a bite from her own small dog.

The footprints, however, were a different matter.

There had been three footprints, all of a naked left foot, marked in blood in one corner of Jess M'Pherson's room. The board containing two of these had been cut away—the third was indistinct and not thought worthy of much notice. As we know, Assistant
Superintendent Alexander M'Call had got busy with a small piece of stick, ‘a thin spale', with which he measured the length of the footprints and which he then applied to the sole of the dead woman's foot. Such considerations as the difference between a foot supporting nothing and a foot with the full weight of the body on it, seem to have been of no importance to him. Jess M'Pherson's foot was longer—half an inch longer, and there was no sign in the footprint of her bunion. It was all so convincing that he thought it not worth while to bother with a footrule. He had measured with the stick, ‘keeping my finger and thumb at the place'—what more could you want? Detective Officer Donald Campbell was of the same opinion. He too had dispensed with a footrule. Still, he cut his piece of spale exactly to the length of the mark on the floor, before applying it to the dead woman's foot which was something, and he measured length
and
breadth. He too was satisfied that ‘the foot of the deceased was rather longer'.

Dr Macleod seems to have been much more exact. He compared the prints with the dead woman's foot, ‘contour, size and everything' and found her feet longer, broader—larger in every way (though quite in what other way they could have shown larger it is difficult to see. Moreover, under examination at the trial, when asked, ‘Each foot?' he answered readily, ‘Each foot', though the prints were only of the left foot). It fell to him also to compare the prints with James Fleming's foot; but the old man had flat feet whereas the print showed a high instep, and the two were so perfectly different that he did not think it necessary to compare them minutely. His impression was—before any suspicion attached to the prisoner, he hastened to add—that the prints had been made by a female foot, a well-formed female foot with a high instep; and what had been his impression then, had by the time he came into court become his opinion.

By this time also, it was his opinion that the footprints could have been made by the left foot of the prisoner, Jessie M'Lachlan.

Here—all honour to him—he had been to even more pains to make no mistake. After several experiments with his own foot, soaked in various agents, he decided that nothing but blood would given an accurate effect and he accordingly got hold of a small phial of bullock's blood. From his experiments it would appear that the bedroom had a wooden floor, partly covered with
‘waxcloth', a kind of linoleum, the footprints having been found on the wooden part. He therefore smeared some blood on a piece of waxcloth and, Mrs M'Lachlan then being in custody, invited her to put her left foot in the blood and then step on to a plank of wood. The prisoner showed no objection, indeed, said the witness, she seemed quite to court the test; though, bullock's blood and all, and especially in the distressing circumstances, it can hardly have been agreeable. But it was all no good: the prints on the plank were quite useless. It then proved that the plank had previously been oiled ‘for some other purpose'; and one can almost hear Dr Macleod saying testily that if you wanted a thing done you had to do it yourself and wasn't it possible, for heaven's sake, to produce an ordinary piece of dry wood? One was found at last resembling in age and condition the flooring at Sandyford Place, and this was put on one side, a piece of waxcloth next to it and beyond the waxcloth a fresh pool of blood. Poor Jessie again paddled in the blood and stepped on to the plank. This time all went splendidly, and Dr Macleod was able to report: ‘two impressions were got which corresponded with a degree of accuracy which was quite marvellous with the marks taken from the house. In the minutest detail of measurement and outline did they tally with the original, and, in fact, each of them was, if possible, closer to the Sandyford footmark than they were to one another.'

It was but a short step from Dr Macleod's ‘could have been made by the prisoner' to ‘were made'. From this time on, Jessie's presence at Sandyford Place that night was held to be conclusively established.

(There is in the Police Museum in Glasgow, a piece of board with an impression of a woman's foot, said to be that cut from the floor in Sandyford Place. It is extraordinarily clear, a small foot with a narrow heel, high arch, and every toe distinct. From the fact that it appears to be outlined in some agent other than the original blood which forms the impression—as though a thick paint brush had been drawn around it—the author can't help wondering whether it is not more likely to be the footprint in bullock's blood made by the prisoner for Dr Macleod—it is so remarkably clear. Either way, it is a strangely poignant relic of that long-ago, terrible night.)

CHAPTER NINE

The evidence for the prosecution at her trial opened with two declarations of the prisoner, dated Monday, July 14—the day after her apprehension: Wednesday, the 16th, and Monday week, the 21st. These, declared Alexander Strathern, the Sheriff-Substitute of Lanarkshire, ‘were emitted by her in his presence, freely and voluntary, in her sound and sober senses, and after receiving the usual warning.'

Her first examination lasted four hours—so though in her sound and sober senses, a woman of her physique must also have been somewhat at the end of her nervous tether by the time she was done. At the end of that time, she made a very long first statement. Before that, however, her husband had been questioned and she was in ignorance of the information he had given. James M'Lachlan had been arrested with her, and thus made liable to questioning—at a time when the authorities were perfectly aware that he had in all probability been far away with his ship when the crime was committed and was therefore beyond suspicion. The newspapers on that day, the Tuesday, were proclaiming their entire conviction of his innocence, since he had clearly been absent with his ship: and since these articles will have been written on the previous day, one would think the police might have arrived by Tuesday at the same—quite correct—conclusion. The fact is that it suited their book a lot better to close their eyes to these inconvenient facts, get his statement out of him and then suddenly see the light and let him go.

This decision—to haul James M'Lachlan in quickly and get in their questions before the probability of his innocence should be absolutely proven—was widely held at the time to have been a disingenuous and deliberately unfair proceeding. ‘The object of the examinations (of the prisoner, Jessie M'Lachlan)' says the
Journal of Jurisprudence
, 1862, Vol. VI, p. 513, ‘appear to have been two. Lord Deas (the judge at the trial) explains one of them, which is common to all such examinations. “One great object,”
said his Lordship, “is to allow the prisoner an opportunity, if the prisoner thinks proper, to make some explanation of the circumstances which seem to weigh against her.” This,' continues the journal, ‘we had hitherto understood to be the only object of such examinations; but in this case at least there would appear to have been another great object. What this was, Lord Deas failed to explain, but it may be easily gathered from the circumstances. We regret to say that it appears to have been nothing else but to lead the prisoner into falsehoods with the effect, if not for the purpose, of destroying her credit on every point.…' A vicious practice in a matter of criminal investigation, it goes on, was certainly a fair subject for criticism by the superior wisdom of the principal Court of the Judicature.

In this case the superior wisdom failed.

The declarations were made in the presence of Alexander Strathern, Esq., Sheriff-Substitute of Lanarkshire—Glasgow is in the county of Lanarkshire—the Procurator-Fiscal, signing himself Jno. Gemmel, the curious current abbreviation of John: Peter Morton, clerk in the Sheriff-Substitute's office and Bernard M'Laughlin, Sheriff-officer in Glasgow. Jno. Gemmel was to rise to great heights in his profession—a round-faced man with a great fringe of curly fair whiskers ringing his face from his ears down under his chin, like a fiery halo worn in the wrong place; with thick lips and pale, prominent eyes. It was said of him that no criminal great or small ever escaped punishment with his goodwill. It was further said of him at the time of the trial that he was a close personal friend of the Flemings.

Before this formidable galaxy, weary and frightened, unaware of much that the police already knew and tormented by four hours of questioning which revealed terrifying glimpses of how much they did know—Jessie embarked upon the first of her statements. It began with a flat denial that she had seen Jess M'Pherson at all on the Friday night.

Taken straight through, in a series of (rather jerky) declarations, these statements by suspects make misleading reading. We find ourselves confronted with a close-woven web of lies, truths and evasions, apparently thought out in advance and deliberately put forward; the mind boggles at the guile which could prepare and carry through so complicated a manœuvre, countering every foreseen exigency with unlovely cunning. To understand their
true import, one must abandon this notion of a preconceived explanation put forward in one piece; and visualise instead the slow, harrowing, mounting tension of question and answer, question and answer—a covering lie or two thought up in advance perhaps, a frantic effort to mix lies in with the provable truth—but on the whole an impromptu effort to meet each question as it comes with an answer which will not cancel out other answers, which in itself is not open to be disproved. No terror so dreadful to witness as the turning, twisting terror of the hunted hare; no ordeal more harrowing than the turning and twisting under these first revealing questionings, of the suspect who has something to hide.

Jessie M'Lachlan had a great deal to hide.

She admitted, of course, that she had known Jess M'Pherson well; they had been close friends for the past six or seven years. But, she said, she had not seen her since the Saturday evening six days before the murder: June 28. She, Jessie, had been at Sandyford Place the night before that, going round by the back garden gate, and had talked over Jess M'Pherson's plan for emigrating—to New Zealand, Jessie said in her statement; elsewhere, Australia is mentioned. Jessie had promised to get a schedule from the emigration society in Jamaica Street and next evening Jess came round to see if she had got it—which, in fact, she hadn't.

This was plain enough sailing (though not to the Antipodes); and Elizabeth Brownlie next door could confirm having seen Jess admit a woman at the back door of Sandyford Place one night some time before the murder—she thought it was more like a fortnight before and that she had a man with her, but it is not of importance. Jess had remarked to Elizabeth that that auld deevil was jist awa' tae his bed. (‘Did you understand the “old devil” to refer to old Mr Fleming?' asked Jessie's counsel at the trial. ‘I suppose we all understand that,' remarked the judge, sourly. His Lordship was notably ‘for' old Mr Fleming.)

Anyway, Jess had come round to the Broomielaw on that Saturday, June 28; and that was the last time Jessie had seen her.