Heaven Knows Who (17 page)

Mr Gordon Smith's advice was that, as they couldn't be sure of getting corroboration of the particulars of the statement, it would for the present be dangerous to adopt it as a line of defence. (When, later, they found corroboration he was all for their going ahead and using it.) Still not content, Mr Strachan further canvassed the opinion of a Mr Galbraith, a procurator of the Court, ‘standing high in his profession'. Mr Galbraith supported his own contention, that it would be hazardous to use the statement until they were much more sure than they could be at present, that it was true. So Mr Dixon was in a minority of one: and Mr Rutherfurd Clark, whom they now briefed as counsel for Mrs M'Lachlan's defence, left him still alone on the side of ‘publish and be damned'.

Or perhaps it would be truer to say a minority of two: for the prisoner throughout was anxious and urgent that in some way or other the statement should be brought before the Court; and indeed on the last day of her trial, sent for Counsel and begged him whatever the outcome of the trial, to put her statement before the Court.

Andrew Rutherfurd Clark, Sheriff of Inverness, Senior Counsel for the defence in the case of Her Majesty's Advocate against Jessie M'Lachlan, was at that time still a young man, thirty-four
years of age, keen, clever and conscientious, an accomplished scholar and conversationalist and a most able lawyer who was to become Solicitor-General and in due course be raised to the bench; and under a certain affectation of manner there was, we may deduce from a something about his whole conduct of the case, a true integrity and tenderness of heart. He entered with enthusiasm into the rising excitement of the two solicitors from Glasgow who arrived for their first consultation bearing the increasingly precious notes of their client's latest statement. It must have seemed to all of them that out of the mire of a sordid and brutish murder with gain as its object and with the verdict a foregone conclusion, had sprung a new and thrilling promise: that their client was after all quite possibly just what she seemed—a frightened and innocent woman with no knights to ride to her defence but their three selves. As the days and weeks passed, it becomes more and more apparently their passionate determination to see that the victim, trapped and helpless, should be recognised for what she was, and set forth free.

Mr Rutherfurd Clark will no doubt have been acquainted by the time the three met, with the outlines of the case against the accused. Mr Strachan read aloud from Mr Dixon's notes Jessie's answer to that case.

Mr Clark's first reaction was to insist on a thorough and immediate investigation all round, to try to get the facts of the statement corroborated.

Mr Dixon and Mr Strachan concentrated on the information offered by Donald M'Quarrie—of whom they had heard nothing up till now, except for a rumour in one of the papers that a milk-boy was declaring that he had seen old Fleming at the door of Sandyford Place early on the morning of the murder; and on enquiries of Mr Littlejohn who kept the liquor shop in North Street. Had Mr Littlejohn heard a knocking at his door on the Friday evening at a little past eleven, after he had closed the shop? Unfortunately Mr Littlejohn couldn't oblige; and by the very nature of the story she had told there could be no other witnesses in their client's defence. Only ‘the heroic milk-boy' remained to stand in staunch support of Messrs Clark, Strachan and Dixon to the end.

So it had to be faced: they had the statement but it must stand almost totally uncorroborated.

Rutherfurd Clark grasped the nettle.

It was not until 1898 that a prisoner was permitted to give evidence in his own defence. This reform in the law has not necessarily proved a blessing to all so privileged. The witness box is a strangely revealing place—and yet to avoid it is to subject the accused to adverse comment; for if he be innocent, why not give evidence, what has he got to fear? In 1862, however, this doubtful benefit was not open to Jessie M'Lachlan. To use the statement, it would be necessary either to declare it in advance before the Sheriff and put it in with the earlier statements, or to read it after the verdict—if it was then necessary—when the prisoner was allowed, at last, to speak.

To put it in with the other statements must, of course, be to base the defence upon its contents. To keep it to the end meant simply a last-ditch appeal which would have to be dealt with by higher authorities; once it was declared, the verdict of the Court could not be altered by anything the prisoner might say.

The essence of the earlier statements had been that Jessie had not been to Sandyford Place at all on the night of the murder. The reader may deduce in advance that the new statement acknowledged it to be untrue. To base any defence upon such an admission, however, was fraught with danger. It would resolve itself simply into a struggle between Jessie and the old man—which had committed the murder? But she would by her own present admission be known to have made lying statements:
his
story had been accepted by the authorities, and so thoroughly as to have induced them to release him and put him outside further reach by the law. Her new version was impossible of corroboration: James Fleming was now free to testify that it was yet another pack of lies—had been set free for this very purpose. To succeed must entail over-setting this verdict-in-advance in the old man's favour: and even then, to lay the prisoner open to a charge of accessory before or after the fact. To fail would be to fail absolutely and utterly.

The only alternative was to go all out for a total acquittal on the score that it could not, on the evidence, be proved that the accused had been in the house that night.

But the statement, the wonderful statement?—which, after all, had convinced
them
—had shaken their presupposition of guilt,
three hard-headed solicitors and now Andrew Rutherfurd Clark himself.…

We must keep it for the end, said Rutherfurd Clark, in case things go against us. And meanwhile, we must slant our whole case, our speeches, our examinations of witnesses, so as to lend support to it, if it has to be used at last.

Only Jessie herself, who knew nothing about the complications of the law, was clamorous to the end that the statement should be used. She had told so many frantic fibs which no one could be expected to believe: now here was the truth—or so magnificent a lie that she seemed to think everyone simply must believe it. But either way, she never lost faith. She discussed her case much less nowadays with her prison companions and never to either of them mentioned the statement or hinted for a moment that she hadn't told the truth when she said she was not at Sandy-ford Place that night. But she spent a lot of time writing on a slate and learning something by heart—she said it was a chapter of the Bible which she was going to recite at her trial—which chapter it was she did not say, nor what good such a course was supposed to be likely to do her; in all probability it was her statement, which she then thought she might have to speak to the Court herself. She said her agents had assured her that all would be well; that she was to keep herself very calm, and that when old Fleming was giving evidence against her, she was to rise up and confront him, saying, ‘Mr Fleming, was it me that did the deed?' There would be no doubt, her agents had told her (said Jessie) that the old man would shudder at it and that it would be seen that he had done it.

But when the time came Mr Fleming was not so dramatically put to the test; and Jessie rather more prosaically concluded her forecast by inviting Agnes Christie to tea at the Broomielaw when they should both be seeing happier days.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The trial of Jessie M'Lachlan opened in the Old Court, Jail Square, during the Glasgow Autumn Circuit, on Wednesday, September 7, 1862, before the Honourable Lord Deas, one of the Lords Commissioners of Justiciary. The venue was highly prejudicial to the accused. There was enormous local excitement about the crime; it must be impossible to empanel an unbiased jury; such a trial should by every right of justice have been held in Edinburgh where it would have been presided over by the Lord Justice-Clerk and two Lords of Justiciary. As it was it was dealt with by a single, and hostile, judge. British justice blushes for the conduct both before and during the trial of the Jessie M'Lachlan case.

Lord Deas was at this time fifty-eight years of age: a man of ‘dry looks and air'. Keen, cold, clever, ‘incapable of display himself and a great enemy of all forms of judicial sham', he is described by a contemporary as the most striking personality in Scotland. Mr Roughead records a story of Lord Young who once remarked on the over-long prayer of the minister at the opening of the Court, ‘I suppose when Deas is on circuit they think it right to call the Almighty's attention to the fact.' He had a very broad Doric accent which he made no attempt to soften. He called an issue an ‘ishy', for example, and it is told of him that on one occasion after something of a turn-up with counsel, he asked irritably, ‘Di ye ca' that an ishy?' ‘No, I don't,' said counsel, ‘I call it an issue.' His conduct of the case of Jessie M'Lachlan was to be described later by the leading English legal journal as ‘putting his foot fiercely into one scale and kicking against the other.' At the receiving end was Mrs M'Lachlan. It was during her trial that his nickname became ‘Lord Death'.

Counsel for the Crown were Mr Adam Gifford, Advocate Depute, and Mr Andrew Mure; Counsel for the Pannel (as the accused is called in Scotland) Mr Andrew Rutherfurd Clark, Mr Robert MacLean and Mr Adam Bannantyne. Her solicitors as we
know were Mr Joseph Anthony Dixon, Champion of Champions, Mr John Strachan, second only to Mr Dixon, and Mr William M'Whirter Wilson—also ran.

The Old Court no longer stands and nowadays Jail Square is called Jocelyn Square. It had originally been intended as the Glasgow Municipal Buildings but was subsequently taken over, and housed not only the criminal courts but a prison as well. Built in 1814, it was in the Doric style with a double row of fluted columns with frieze and pediment over the splendid entrance. The court room itself was ‘laid with great taste', lighted by seven great windows; like the present court it was built in the shape of a horseshoe, with a large circular table below the bench, where counsel sit, moving to a spot between the jury and the box to examine witnesses—the jury sits facing the box. The bench and table are of fine pale mahogany and a huge goblet of engraved glass stands in the centre of the table, holding, by tradition, the names of jurors to be picked out at random. The walls were ornamented with Ionic columns with appropriate frieze and cornice, ‘the ceiling in stucco handsomely executed'—it must all have been a great comfort to Jessie. However, much attention had also been paid to the care and convenience of the prisoners in the jail which was housed behind the splendid façade. The authorities had visited the principal prisons in England and ‘received many useful hints'. The cells were ten feet square, each with a window, and on every floor there was a
W.C.
which ‘tends much to the accommodation and cleanliness of the prisoners'. The condemned cells, however, in one of which Jessie would be housed if she were convicted, faced inward on to a court and received their only light from its well. Let us hope she need not know that the court was paved with the flagstones, initialled and dated, which covered the graves of all those hanged in the square beyond. Still, she would see little of it. The cells were in the basement, made entirely of cast iron built round with stone, lit by a tiny barred window in the three-foot-thick wall and with no fourth wall but only heavy open iron bars. Much attention, however, the records assure us, was paid to the health and comfort of the Unfortunate. But their entrance in the West front was indescribably gloomy, compared with the lovely columned portico on Jail Square, with only ‘a frieze executed in droved rustic work'—whatever that may have been. (The
author was shown a short flight of steps and small doorway, said to be a remaining part of the old building, where the condemned were led out to execution. In the street outside, where this door, now half built up, was visible, a flight of starlings chittered and chattered as they do all over Glasgow: and a woman appeared, not very old and rather pretty, with a round, rosy face, and began to feed the birds. It was an odd and touching little incident, directly outside this terrible doorway that had known so much torment of terror and pain; until suddenly the little woman lifted up her head and began to sing, hopping about with a grotesque little dancing step. She was mad.)

In the great square beyond, nearly seventy men and women had so far been publicly hanged: and here Jessie M'Lachlan—it is incredible, but it is true—if she is found guilty will also be publicly hanged. For it is only 1862; and the last to die there in public was to be the infamous Dr Pritchard who was not executed till 1865. The gallows, or the ‘wuddie' as it was familiarly called, were dismantled and kept handy in the vaults below the prison. (‘Gang along up the wuddie, Donal',' an old woman is said to have urged her reluctant husband, ‘and be hanged like a man and no anger the laird.') The hangings, of course, were the principal entertainment of the day; but Jail Square, or Jail Green, housed also the Bird and Dog Market, and the Glasgow July Fair was for a long time held there each summer. It had been prophesied by Alexander Peden that in the nineteenth century ‘lions would be whelped on Glasgow Green' and when a lioness in Wombwell's Wild Beast Show did in fact give birth to twins, every auld wife in the city, it is said, paid her sixpence to see them.

There was something not very far removed from a wild beast show in Jail Square on each of the four days of Jessie M'Lachlan's trial. A wild mob surged, fought and struggled for entrance or for only a glimpse of the great ones going out and coming in. The court was crowded to bursting point. In the galleries was ‘a preponderance of the fair sex' representing the inevitable fashionably dressed women inseparable from any newspaper account of a sensational trial; ‘numberless gay bonnets nod' and the few gentlemen present are there possibly less from curiosity than from the need to protect their ladies (reports a gentleman). The newspapers held their breath in anticipation: even the advertisements that day are rather dull, though there is an agreeable
propinquity in ‘An experienced girl wanted', following very closely upon ‘Two experienced Vice Men needed immediately'. But there are some splendid sailings, for Ceylon, San Francisco, Demerara, the Cape of Good Hope … The Carra Linn, Knight Templar, Henrietta, Maid of Orleans, Wolverine, Mountain Ash, Berbice, Alhambra spread wings of sail or are newly coppered and actively loading.…