Heaven Knows Who (27 page)

A juror now rose to ask—with odd irrelevance—if he and his companions might have the plans of the house in Sandyford Place laid before them, and Mr Gifford said he was most willing to oblige. But the next witness was Andrew Darnley, whose evidence would seem to necessitate blueprints as little as Elizabeth Brown-lie's. He described his visits to Sandyford Place on the Saturday and Sunday following the murder, when the old man had simply told him that Jess was ‘out'. He had commented sarcastically on the second occasion that she was often out just now. Mr Fleming had made no reply.

However, perhaps the juror had after all been possessed of some second sight, for the next witness was the architect who had made plans of the house in Sandyford Place—a dismal job for a
layman, for the body still lay on the floor in the bedroom and had now lain there for several days. And all in vain; for, Mr Gifford requesting permission for copies of the plans to be passed to the jury, His Lordship expressed the opinion that according to his experience the less they confused themselves with plans the better. The jury finally decided not to benefit by this remarkable advice and plan number I was handed over to them. Mr O'Neill gave evidence of the blood-stained trail leading from near to the kitchen cupboard, through the passage outside and into the bedroom. Part of the kitchen floor and part of the bedroom floor appeared to have been washed. All the floors were dry when he saw them.

The quartermaster aboard the steamer
Pladda
swore to James M'Lachlan having been with his ship for a week from the Thursday before the murder.

Thomas Railton, clerk and cashier in charge of the rent collecting for the property in the Broomielaw, gave evidence that on Friday, July 4, Mrs M'Lachlan was in arrears to the tune of
£
4 19
s
. On the following morning she had come into his office and paid
£
4. She came in between eleven and twelve o'clock; he was sure it was not later, for they had to bank their takings on Saturdays by twelve. (It will be recalled that the silver was not pawned till after twelve.)

It would take a quarter of an hour to walk between their office and Lundie's pawn, where the silver was pledged.

And another clerk described how the prisoner, always in arrears, had still been given a month or more to pay—had not been pressed in any way, had been told that she wouldn't be pressed.

And finally—in the case for the prosecution—expert evidence was given of the presence of blood-stains on the cleaver found in the kitchen at Sandyford Place, on the crinoline wires, on the articles of clothing found in the fields outside Hamilton; the brown coburg dress was in several pieces and much torn, and in certain parts appeared to have been washed with some strong chemical agent (such as soda), for the colour was sensibly changed and the fibre of both cloth and lining very tender and rotten. In no case was it possible to identify the blood as human but it was all definitely mammalian blood.

That ended the evidence for the prosecution. The Court settled back to listen to the reading of the three Declarations made by the
accused—the first upon her apprehension on July 14, the second and third from prison in the course of the following week.

Counsel for the defence leapt up to object.

Mr Clark's submission was that these three declarations were inadmissible, and he based his argument upon the case of
Agnes Kelly
, tried twenty years earlier before Lord Justice Clerk Hope, ‘than whom I am sure no greater criminal lawyer ever sat upon the bench.' That case was one of wilful fire-raising on a farm, and the accused a ‘common farm servant'. As in the case of
M'Lachlan
, three long declarations were extracted from the prisoner; nor were these simple statements, but were obtained by skilful questioning based, in the case of the second and third declarations, upon additional evidence which emerged when the first was being checked. Lord Justice Clerk Hope considered this procedure most unsatisfactory and an abuse of the objects for which the party accused was brought before a magistrate for a declaration. It was pretty plain, said the judge, that the declarations had been taken, not with the purpose of allowing the party to give any explanation but with the direct object of rearing up evidence against her: of tricking her in fact—though he did not use so positive a word—into giving incriminating answers over matters which she might think unimportant, and upon which the authorities had obtained information between the declarations. There was no equality, he suggested, between a procurator-fiscal, ‘with all the alarm of imprisonment and the authority of a magistrate and the terrors of an accusation to back him—and a poor countrywoman of fifty-five years of age, uneducated and illiterate; if such an encounter of wits was to be permitted, he thought the whole purposes and objects of taking a declaration from the accused had been overlooked.…

And so had they been, insisted Mr Clark, in the case of the prisoner Jessie M'Lachlan: and with this aggravation, that she had been catechised like a witness by the Prosecutor-Fiscal upon information elicited from her husband. But her husband could not have been precognosced as a witness nor examined in court, and it was Mr Clark's submission that this information had been got from him under what amounted to false pretences—by the simple expedient of charging and apprehending him when the authorities knew perfectly well that he had been far away from the scene of the crime when it was committed and could be in no way involved
in it. Having got what they needed from him, they had discharged him, and then used the information to trick—once again this was not the actual word used—incriminating admissions from his wife. Taken under such circumstances, her declarations did not serve their proper purpose as declarations, and statements had been taken from her which should not have been taken and which therefore should not be used as evidence against her.

Even to the layman the submission—whether justified or not—seems sufficiently clear. Lord Deas, however, professed to be as muddled as poor Mr Dunlop with his marked boxes. ‘As far as I can follow the eloquent speech which has just now been made, it rests upon three grounds.…' He enumerated them, all three. If there were any others involved in the speech of his friend, Mr Clark, he would be glad to be informed of them.

Mr Clark immediately obliged. ‘Then there is a fourth reason,' said Lord Deas placidly. These objections, he continued, he could only dispose of upon the evidence before him, which had been recorded in cross-examination of the Sheriff-Substitute and Fiscal—

‘The declarations themselves?' suggested Mr Clark.

But Lord Deas would have nothing to say to the declarations themselves.

‘The evidence, I say, consists of the cross-examination of those two gentlemen, for Mr Hart was not asked questions in regard to this point.' (Mr Hart was joint Procurator-Fiscal—with Jno. Gemmel—and had merely given evidence that the third statement had been taken in his presence, the prisoner making it freely and voluntarily and having been in her sound and sober senses at the time.) And, looking to that evidence and taking all the declarations, said the Judge, he could find no ground for holding that when the prisoner's husband was examined and his declarations taken he was known to be innocent and that his declaration was taken from him as a precognition. Both the gentlemen (Jno. Gemmel, the Procurator-Fiscal, and Mr Strathern, Sheriff-Substitute) had sworn expressly, had sworn distinctly, that they did not know at the time that James M'Lachlan had been absent from town and could not have been implicated in the crime.

Mr Clark: ‘My lord, the Procurator—'

Lord Deas: ‘Will you wait till I have done?'

Mr Clark: ‘The Procurator-Fiscal said he had no reason to doubt—'

Jno. Gemmel's evidence may be found in the very early stages of the trial, immediately preceding old Fleming's appearance in the witness-box—page 128. The reader may care to glance back and judge for himself how positive had been his denial that he could have known before James M'Lachlan was questioned that he almost certainly was innocent of the crime. Lord Deas, however, would have none of it. He thought the authorities had been perfectly right to apprehend M'Lachlan at that stage and to take a statement from him. So that finished that.

And the second ground of complaint, he said, was that a great many questions had been put to the prisoner in the course of her declarations. Well, that was nothing more than was done in every declaration. And as to the length of the statements, their length must depend on the nature of the case: in fact it was quite right that she should have the fullest opportunity of explaining everything that she could explain—and he thought they would find the declarations full of explanations which his friend Mr Clark would not willingly throw aside when he came to address the Court. (His friend Mr Clark must have rolled up his eyes to high heaven.) The fourth objection was that the prisoner was asked about certain articles before the articles were shown to her. But the Sheriff had said that, though there were some preliminary questions before the articles were produced, these did not occupy above two minutes.… How true this was, at any rate in the spirit, may be judged by a reference to Jessie's second declaration, (commencing on page 96.) Lord Deas, at any rate, was satisfied with it, Lord Justice Clerk Hope and poor fire-raising Agnes Kelly notwithstanding. ‘Gentlemen of the jury, you will now hear the declarations read.'

Taken straight through in the monotonous drone of some court official—how quick and glib they must have sounded, how compact, considered, specious and deliberate: those poor muddled, desperate wrigglings on the hook of provocative interrogation, of a woman alone and abandoned and sick with dread. Well indeed for Jessie if the County Buildings could have burned up, as she had said to her fellow-prisoners she wished they would—before ever those foolish, frantic ‘explanations' were published to the incredulous ears of the listening Court.

Mr Clark called the first witness for the defence.

The first witness for the defence was George Paton, the milkman, to be followed by Donald M'Quarrie, his boy. A comparison between their evidence and that given under cross-examination by old Mr Fleming at the beginning of the trial (pages 144 onward) may well prove a rewarding, not to say a convincing, study. George Paton appears to have been an alert young man of twenty-five. He was in the habit, he said, of supplying milk to the houses in Sandyford Place. He had heard of the death of the servant at No. 17 on Tuesday the 8th, the day following its discovery. He then remembered having been at the house on the previous Saturday morning, arriving there between half-past seven and twenty minutes to eight. He was quite sure of the time. He came off the cart but did not go up to the house—the boy Donald went up, and he rang the bell. ‘It was answered immediately.'

Mr Clark, for the defence: ‘Did you see who answered it?'

‘No.'

‘But you saw the door opened?'

‘I saw the door opened a small bit but I did not see who was at it.'

‘How much delay was there in opening the door?'

‘Very little delay. I could not pay much attention, in serving other people, but there was not much delay.'

‘Was the bell rung a second time?'

‘I couldn't say.'

‘Was any milk taken on that occasion?'

‘No, none was taken.'

‘Were you there on the following day, Sunday; and the Monday? Was milk taken then?'

‘I was there both days and no milk was taken.'

The only time he had actually seen old Mr Fleming was on the afternoon of Monday.

Cross-examined by Mr Gifford, he agreed that he served fifteen or sixteen families in Sandyford Place. He called upon them every morning and had called on that Saturday morning. At that time of the year, however, a great many families were out of town.

‘Does it frequently happen at that time of the year that milk is not required?'

‘They all get milk that are at home. Some of them do not get it.'

The judge: ‘Do some of the houses which remain inhabited not take in milk at that season?'

Paton evidently understood this question; at any rate he answered yes.

Mr Clark, re-examining: ‘Did the Flemings always take milk?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you remember any instances, except Saturday, Sunday and Monday, when the milk was not taken in at their house?'

‘Never to my knowledge,' said George Paton.

And so to M'Quarrie, Mr Roughead's ‘historic milk-boy', key witness, star witness—for the defence—in this historic case; unless you count the old gentleman himself, whose evidence was, however, supposed at any rate to have contributed to the other side. Short, sharp and very much to the point. Yes, last July he had been with George Paton as usual helping to take round the milk, calling as usual at Sandyford Place. ‘I know old Mr Fleming, who lives there. I mind of hearing of the death of the servant in that house. I heard of it on the Tuesday morning. I mind the Saturday before that Tuesday morning.…'

‘What happened on that morning?'

‘I went up and rang the bell. Old Mr Fleming answered it.'

‘Did you ring more than once?'

‘No, I only rang once. I hadn't to wait any time before it was answered.'

‘Was the door shut?'

‘Yes.'

‘Did you hear anything before Mr Fleming opened the door?'

‘The first thing I heard after ringing the bell was the chain coming off the door.'

‘Are you quite sure of that?'

‘Yes.'

‘And after the chain came off the door, the door was opened?'

‘Yes; by old Mr Fleming.'

‘You saw him?'

‘Yes.'

‘Was he dressed?'

‘Yes, he was dressed. He had on black clothes.'

‘Did he say anything?'

‘He said he was for nae milk.'

‘Did he say anything more?'