Heaven Knows Who (36 page)

We may surely accept it as a fact, therefore, that shortly after eleven on the night of the murder Jess was heard moaning.

And at four o'clock in the morning there is the sound of screaming. Whichever was guilty, both Jessie and Mr Fleming separately agree that there were screams at four in the morning. Mr Fleming, if he were guilty, would admit this much, in case others had heard the ‘squealing' and think it strange that he, in his room just above the kitchen, should have slept right through it; he would surely never make it up if there hadn't in fact been any ‘squealing'. Jessie, actually, doesn't specifically mention screaming; she says that when she was up on the ground floor trying to get out to go for the doctor she heard ‘a noise' from the kitchen; but if Jess did scream, of course that is what the noise was. It
doesn't matter very much; the point is that an attack was certainly made at four in the morning.

Mr Stewart next door also heard someone screaming—though he heard only one scream. His evidence is rather odd, for he says it was then ‘very dark, as dark as when I went to bed.' It can't have been very dark when he went to bed, for that was just before eleven, and at that time Mrs Walker and Miss Dykes could see well enough to be able to describe the clothes of a woman who passed on the opposite side of the street. His impression was that it was not very late, not after one o'clock. He had said to his wife when he heard about the murder and began to put two and two together that, whatever Mr Fleming might say about hearing screams at four in the morning, they would find that the murder had been committed nearer midnight. He was confused about the whole thing, he acknowledged. He might have been asleep a quarter of an hour or two hours.

Our guess is that it was a quarter of an hour. However dark it may or may not have been, it was ‘as dark as when he went to bed.' That is probably just exactly what it was. He went to bed round about eleven and he fell asleep at once, so quickly that he had not even time to settle down but was still half sitting up against the headboard. And just as quickly he was woken up again—by a single scream.

In other words, what Mr Stewart heard, he heard at a few minutes after eleven. And what he heard was the first attack on Jess.

For at this time it seems reasonable to accept that there were indeed two separate attacks. At eleven Jess is moaning. At four in the morning she is still alive, for she is heard screaming.

Or, if there were not two attacks, then the single attack can only have been made at or before eleven o'clock—because soon after eleven Jess is heard moaning.

And the whole long, complicated business resolves itself at last into a single question: could Jessie have attacked Jess M'Pherson at somewhere round eleven o'clock on that Friday night?

Not after her return from trying to buy the mutchkin. She and Miss M'Intyre would have had about the same distance to walk, she along the lane to the gate of the No. 17 back garden, Miss M'Intyre parallel with her along Sandyford Place to the front of the house. Miss M'Intyre was hurrying, Jessie was ‘skliffling along'.
Even had she been running, even had she been able to get through the garden gate and up to the house, and rush in and strike Jess down then and there—she still could not have raced Miss M'Intyre to the corner; and when Miss M'Intyre got to the corner, already there were people there discussing the moaning.

She could not, therefore, have made the attack after she came back.

Before she left, then?

The judge's contention was that Jessie waited till her victim was asleep before attacking. She arrived not earlier than twenty past ten, and it makes the time limit rather narrow—to allay suspicion by the customary greetings, to dispense the rum (with which to stupefy the victim), to make some excuse for remaining in the house itself, to induce Jess to go to bed (clad in a vest, a chemise and a dressing-gown, by the way!), and to allow time for her to fall into a drunken slumber—all within forty minutes. Moreover, if as the judge suggested, Jessie had arranged to sleep the night, and was therefore presumably sharing her friend's bed, it seems odd that her
outer
garments should have become bloodstained. Did she, taking a leaf from Mrs Campbell's book, go to bed fully dressed—boots and all? Or did she get up and dress before she attacked? There are cases, notably the
Wallace
case, where the assailant is supposed to have stripped before the crime so as to avoid incriminating blood-stains on his clothes. Here we have an allegedly cunning murderess doing just the reverse.

But of course this was admittedly only the judge's theory. She might have attacked Jess in much the same way as she says the old man attacked her (why she should afterwards have got her to bed and bathed the wounds is beside the point for the moment). In whatever circumstances—did she attack Jess before she left the house?

The old man is in a room at the top of the stairs, having by his own account gone to bed only an hour ago; and his room looks out over the back garden and the gate into the lane. She attacks Jess and fells her to the ground—hardly a noiseless proceeding, for, apart from anything else, Jess was a big woman and would fall heavily on the wooden floor. If our theory about Mr Stewart is correct, Jess screams loudly enough to be heard next door. In any event, she lies, gravely injured but still alive to tell the tale, in a lighted room, its windows looking out to a sufficiently populous
street where, if she makes any sound, it will be easily audible. (To anyone inside the railings that divide that part of Sandyford Place from Sauchiehall Street the interior of much of the bedroom is plainly visible.)

Is it conceivable that Jessie should leave her there and hurry round the corner to a liquor shop; should go and return by way of the long, bare garden just under Mr Fleming's window, on a light summer's evening with a good many people still about?—we know that the Stewart household next door, for example, were only just going to bed. If she needed spirits to bolster her flagging energy—well, she had lived in the house, she would know of Mr John Fleming's decanters in the ground-floor parlour. But it is nonsense of course; no imaginable need could have been great enough or urgent enough to have driven her to quit the house—with her dreadful task only half finished and the old man in his room upstairs.

Jess M'Pherson was attacked before Jessie went out for the mutchkin—or while she was out for it—or after she came back. But it couldn't have been after Jessie came back; and if it had been earlier, she would never have gone. There is only one alternative. It was done while she was out, and her statement is true.

What it has taken all these pages to consider, Lord Deas digested in a flash. After the breathless hush in which the reading of the statement had been heard, a murmur of excitement broke out. It was immediately interrupted by the judge.

‘Jessie M'Lachlan.' She stood there calm and still, hopefully expectant, looking up at him through her veil. ‘According to the evidence led before us, the position in which you now stand is this …' And, coldly and clearly, he went through it once again. Respectable family—one time servant in the Fleming household—good husband, who freely gave her the use of his wages, thirty shillings a week (whittled down to eighteen, as we know, but the judge did not remark that). What she did with the money he could not imagine—she had only herself and her child to keep (and her husband for half the week, but that wasn't mentioned either. His lordship's salary, by the way, would be something over £3,500 a year. Jessie's money works out at under £50). She was not in good health, true, but had her habits and conduct been what they ought, she should not have had much difficulty in maintaining herself and
the child on that account—especially as she often got presents of money from her brother. But whatever she did with it, at the time of the murder she was very much in want of more and was in debt to Jess M'Pherson, her most intimate friend, a friend always kind and affectionate to wards her, who trusted her, whose last thought it would be that her life might be in danger at Jessie's hands. In that state of matters she went to the house on that Friday, and she would have no difficulty in producing some plausible excuse for sleeping with her friend all night. ‘It is now stated upon your own confession that you did remain there all night. In the course of that night, probably when she was asleep, you did attack her with that cleaver we saw here, or some other deadly instrument, and did disable her; and though she apparently recovered to some extent from the first blow, you did repeat the blows till you made on her body all the numerous wounds spoken to by the medical witnesses, the result of which was her death. Whether you did that in bed or in the kitchen—whether partly in the one or partly in the other—whether, after you had disabled her in bed when she was asleep, she had so far recovered as to struggle into the kitchen and there you continued your bloody work and dragged her body back to that room after she was disabled in the kitchen—all these particulars we do not know. But we know this, if we go by the evidence that has been adduced, that upon that night you did most barbarously and most cruelly murder that unsuspecting woman, who believed you up to that hour to be the best friend she had in the world.…'

She had had the privilege of as attentive and intelligent a jury as his lordship had ever seen in the box, her case had been investigated with all possible care and presented by the ablest imaginable counsel, and at the end of it all she had been found guilty by a unanimous verdict ‘with which I entirely concur'. She had chosen to put in a defence to the effect that a gentleman whose character up to this time had been
quite unstained
was the murderer, and now had repeated that statement with all the details to which they had just listened—

For the second time in all those long, long days, Jessie spoke. ‘Well, my lord—'

But she was hushed immediately, and immediately was silent.

‘I sit here,' said Lord Deas, ‘primarily to do my duty in the trial and conviction of those who are guilty.' But he sat there also to
protect the innocent; and it was his imperative duty to say now that there was not upon his mind a shadow of suspicion that the old gentleman had anything whatever to do with the murder. If anything were wanting to show the danger to the lives and liberties of the people of Scotland, if the statements of prisoners were listened to who were capable of committing such crimes as Jessie had committed—of giving such statements the least credibility, then he thought the example they had just heard would be quite sufficient to satisfy them of that danger. He had been counsel on both sides in such cases, it had been his misfortune to sit upon trial in many such cases, and ‘I am bound to say that I never knew an instance in which the statements made by prisoners after conviction were anything else than in their substance falsehoods. Your statement does not convey to my mind the slightest impression—it conveys to my mind the impression of a tissue of as wicked falsehoods as any to which I have ever listened.' Indeed, if anything were a-wanting to satisfy the public mind of Mr Fleming's innocence, the judge thought that this most incredible statement was just the thing to do it. Be that as it may, he must go upon the evidence and the verdict.… And so …

The prison wardress gave her a sharp tap on the back. She stood. Lord Death picked up the black triangle of cloth and held it above his head.

And so to the sentence.

‘That you be removed from the bar to the prison of Glasgow, therein to be detained and fed upon bread and water only, until the eleventh day of October next, and upon that day, between the hours of eight and ten o'clock of the forenoon, to be taken from the said prison to the common place of execution in the burgh of Glasgow and there by the hands of the common executioner to be hanged upon the gibbet till you be dead; and ordains your body to be thereafter buried within the precincts of the said prison; and ordains your moveable goods and gear to be escheat and inbrought for Her Majesty's use.

‘Which is pronounced for doom.'

He added, as the custom is: ‘And may God Almighty have mercy on your soul.'

You could hardly hear her voice, but she whispered out into the terrible silence of the stunned court: ‘Mercy! Aye, He'll hae mercy, for I'm innocent.'

¹
See plan, page 31.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The public outcry was loud and long and largely in favour of the condemned woman, only the
Glasgow Herald
wholeheartedly triumphing. Crowds milled round the newspaper offices, as the days and weeks went by it was reported that several people had become insane through brooding over the wrongs of Mrs M'Lachlan, and that doctors were treating cases of extreme nervous irritability from the same cause. The steps of the house in Sandyford Place were being whittled down by the chisels of the morbid collecting souvenirs. The first consideration to come under fire from the Flemingite faction was the authenticity of the now famous statement, and Jessie's agents were obliged to publish a long letter setting out the exact conditions under which it had been made—Mr Wilson got into a bit of a tangle about exactly what she had said to him in that first interview, which must have made him wish that he had written it down at the time as she had suggested. In every street little knots of people were to be seen in eager discussion, every lamp-post had someone under it, holding up the latest edition to the light, not able to wait till he got home to read it. Old Fleming and Jessie were saints or sinners according to the bias of the speaker, the judge and jury were deified or execrated in special articles, leaders and innumerable letters in the papers. ‘Vindex', ‘Sigma', ‘One who Balances Probabilities' and dozens more seized up their pens; ‘Candidus', ‘Microscope', ‘A Sympathising Sister', wrote off in reply. ‘A Lady who Admires Disinterested Truth Wherever it is to be Found' sent a pound for Mrs M'Lachlan, small factories and businesses got up little subscriptions, a few pounds here, a few shillings there. ‘A Poor Servant Girl' from a small hamlet in the remote country sent a shilling out of her wages of fifty shillings a year, ‘for Jessy M'Lachlan, who has the sympathy of allmost the whole community here.' ‘A Working Man' wrote that any poor person could be accused of murder; if you had a hundred and eighty pounds in the bank you had nothing to fear. ‘An Inquirer' wondered if steps had been
taken to ascertain whether Jess M'Pherson had been pregnant; there was a good letter asking why old Fleming, who had been famous for his curiosity and inquisitiveness, should suddenly have become exactly the reverse when the servant ‘disappeared', and another very good one remarking upon the judge's assertion that he had never known the statement of a convicted prisoner to be true: what had this to do, the letter most pertinently asked, with the case of Jessie M'Lachlan?—the laws of chance hardly entered into the matter; if the judge had heard a hundred false statements it did not make the hundred and first any less or more likely to be false or true. A lady archly styling herself ‘Mis-rule' was tremendously ironical. The judge was a stupid old man, of course, trial by jury antiquated and out of date, and the only way of ascertaining truth was to hoot at a man and call him names, etcetera, etcetera. ‘Precaution' wrote ‘A Hint about Servants'—let this case be a lesson to the gentry now that they had had a glimpse of what went on below-stairs. Not all servants, she conceded, were untrustworthy, but masters and mistresses should be untiring in checking over their property and locking doors and windows at night, especially those in the basements—no respectable servant could take exception: the more honest, the more they would welcome it. Did not this case show what perils might arise from the continued existence of ‘previous servants whose own abodes formed receptacles for plunder'. Above all, no member of the household who remained alone in the house with a servant could be really safe. To this ‘A Domestic Servant' replied with a touching and dignified, indeed a magnificent, letter. She quoted the reply of a mother to her child, who had asked the difference between itself and a servant, ‘My dear, you know the difference between china and earthenware.' That was the way the domestic servant was looked upon: no more than a machine to do the drudgery. Even the poor prisoner in jail had rules whereby he might now and again see those he loved, but servants were forbidden to have their friends to visit them, must live in solitude except on their rare days off. A servant might be honest or dishonest, true: so might anyone. (She did not dwell on the disparity in temptation.) As to the danger to the gentry of remaining in the house alone with a servant, let her assure ‘Precaution' that here the boot was indeed upon the other foot. ‘Oblivio' wrote ‘a word anent forgetfulness,' and a humble joiner contributed a very temperate
and delicate letter saying what in fact could well be true—that no woman, or no woman of Jessie's temperament, would have left poor dead Jess lying there stripped to the waist; her instinct would have been to pull down the clothes and cover her nakedness.