Heaven Knows Who (38 page)

How sad, how bitter, how hopeless, is the cry that comes down to us from that interview over the long, slow lapse of a hundred years! ‘And I'm tae be kept in jail a' my days?'

For so it was to be.

No one, of course, was made happy by this decision, Mr James Fleming least of all. The old gentleman had had a rough time of it lately. He had been hooted and hissed as he left the court after giving his evidence, pelted with mud and stones, and might even have been set upon had he not been hustled away in a cab; and for a long time no elderly gentleman was safe in the streets of Glasgow if he had a bald head and a stoop. Mr Fleming himself had sought sanctuary at his son's summer house on the coast, all to no avail, for his fame had long gone before him and there were hostile demonstrations even in quiet little Dunoon. On one occasion, it was reported in the press, he was recognised when he went to the barber to be shaved and was actually stoned; and the poor barber had to throw all his tackle into the sea—no one wanted to share so much as a shaving brush with old Mr Fleming.

The reprieve was received with screams of rage by the Flemingite press. ‘The unreasoning public have been taught that,
if they only cry loud enough, they can snatch a convicted murderess out of the hands of the High Court Justiciary and of the British Executive.' And the judge had been denounced, cried the
Herald
, as a hard-hearted, bloodthirsty wretch, an ogre thirsting for blood, execrated ‘as though by the enraged associates of convicted felons'; and the jury stigmatised as idiots and savages, cursed in the streets and spat upon in omnibuses. So, poor old jury, they seem to have paid dearly for those bouquets from the bench—the most attentive and intelligent the judge had ever seen in any box. (Mr Roughead points out that the very few signs of any particular intelligence or attention manifested by them had in fact been by no means appreciated by Lord Deas; i.e. when they called attention to his dear Mr Fleming's little slip in stating his age as seventy-eight, when they asked to see the plans, and when, on one occasion, a misguided member preferred the accuracy of Mr Rutherford Clark's notes to the Judge's. His lordship's reaction to this last had been such as to cause the offending juror to ‘sit back with a very red face.') Perhaps now they wished that after all they had taken a little longer than fifteen minutes to consider the evidence and argument of four very long days, with a woman's life and an old man's reputation at stake. Their method of arriving at their conclusion was proudly described by the
Herald
. Upon arrival in their room, their foreman had retired to a corner and invited the rest to file up and whisper their conclusions to him, one by one. When the last murmur died away he had only to announce that their verdict was so far unanimous, add his own, and lead them all trooping back into court without wasting any more time on futile discussion.

And now, with the prisoner reprieved, it would be worse than ever for ‘the maligned old man'. His lawyers wrote off to the Home Secretary—would he, in view of his decision, state that it was not intended to imply that in his judgement Mr Fleming was otherwise than innocent of the murder. The Home Secretary, unfortunately, didn't feel able to do this. He ‘must decline to express any opinion on the point'. The lawyers wrote again. It really wasn't fair. It had been said that Mrs M'Lachlan's sentence would not be commuted unless the enquiry following the trial substantiated the truth of her statement: the public were drawing the inference that it had done so. And Mr Fleming hadn't been represented at that enquiry. The reply to this was that the enquiry was in respect of
the prisoner and not of Mr Fleming, and that, though no witness could be compelled to come, anyone who wished to
could
have. If Mr Fleming's advisers had wanted to send witnesses, why hadn't they done so? As to their request for a further enquiry still, in the interest of Mr Fleming—you couldn't institute an enquiry upon someone who was not charged with any offence, and Mr Fleming not only wasn't charged with any offence in this matter but, having been a witness at the trial, couldn't be. There is a general air about the letter of ‘so now pipe down'. Mr Fleming's lawyers did not quite pipe down, but wrote once more to complain that the enquiry had ‘brought suspicion upon the hitherto unblemished character of Mr Fleming, in a manner most injurious to himself and his family', and renewing their demand for publication of the evidence taken at the enquiry—which as he knew had been held
in camera
—and the appointment of a Royal Commission to look' into it all. The Home Secretary wrote back and told them to read his letter again, and that for the moment was the end of that.

On November 10, Mrs M'Lachlan had been removed to Perth Penitentiary to begin her commuted life sentence. She had so far been considerately treated in prison. On account of her health some rules were relaxed; she was not for long confined to the bread-and-water diet of the convicted felon—they had to keep her strength up, of course, for the execution. At the close of her trial, the prison authorities reported, her extraordinary fortitude had given way; she had to be kept in bed, and lay there ‘all courage lost'. (She told her sister that during the trial she couldn't weep in court, but that in the quiet of her cell she cried all night.) A ‘dull, moping state succeeded her resolute bearing', and seems to have lasted throughout the long weeks while the petition for her reprieve was under consideration. She was bombarded with tracts, pamphlets and letters from the public which, after scrutiny, were shown to her; and much bothered by the solicitations of clergymen offering ghostly counsel, and of ‘charitably-minded ladies' wishing to express their sympathy in person—we may with like charity believe them innocent of sensation seeking at the expense of their miserable sister. However, she refused them all and suffered only the attentions of the Reverend Mr Doran—a gentleman who was later reported to have believed throughout in her guilt and depravity. Her close relatives were allowed to visit her
to take their harrowing farewells. She had persuaded James M'Lachlan to let her own family have the care of the little boy—perhaps James had already decided to emigrate (leaving Jessie all alone, engulfed in Perth Prison) and he could hardly be burdened with a three-year-old child. James brought the boy once to see her, and then her sister, who was taking him back to their brother in Inverness, brought him for the last heart-breaking good-byes; the poor mother was terribly overcome. Her father came also and saw her. To them all she reiterated her innocence. They told her that the people all believed her statement, and she said, ‘Well they may, for it's true.'

No one says what became of her poor little dog.

A description headed ‘Female Life in Prison', by a woman officer, appeared at about this time in the London
Times
. It shows something of the type of woman Jessie was now to be thrown amongst—she who, whether we believe her innocent or guilty, was not in the ordinary sense a ‘criminal', certainly was far removed by her background and temperament from such a company. The female convict, says the writer, is more depraved than the male, a class desperately wicked, deceitful, crafty, lewd and malicious. Punishment may bring them to death's door but improves them not at all. They are satanically proud of their crimes—mostly theft with violence—and vain and mischievous beyond belief. The most terrible punishment of all to them is the fact that on admission to prison their hair is cut off: brutally insensible to other privations, yet faced with this invariable rule they without exception struggle against it—weep, pray, fight, implore on their knees, are overcome by shivering fits. A prisoner re-admitted will often plead that in the meantime she has married, and ‘it's my husband's hair now, you can't cut it off.' One prisoner in the writer's experience became ‘delirious', broke away from her captors and ran screaming down the deserted corridors. ‘The cry of “Dinna cut my hair!” still rings in my ears.'

They were fantastically destructive. Bed-linen was so inevitably torn apart that eventually it was decided to use string for the sewing; but it was still destroyed. The most common punishment was that prisoners should ‘go to the Dark'—bare, unlit cells where they remained for long periods in solitary confinement. They would be dragged off, undaunted, and revenge themselves
by ceaselessly stamping, thumping and screaming so as to disturb the warders. ‘The cry wells up from the ceiling like the defiant song of the caged tigress.'

Among these caged tigresses, Jessie M'Lachlan was to spend ‘a' my days.'

She was taken to Perth by train, her head and face muffled in a shawl, but despite all precautions the truth had leaked out and there was a little rush of people to see her hustled into the railway carriage. It was to be fifteen years before she saw Glasgow again.

But still the controversy continued to rage. If she was guilty—why wasn't she hanged? If she was innocent, why was she sent to penal servitude for life? The Home Secretary's decision that, though she was now believed to have been an accidental witness after the crime and to have kept silence under coercion, she must nevertheless be severely punished, satisfied no one. On Friday, June 26, when she had been already seven months in prison, Mr Stirling of Kier, member for Perthshire, raised a question in the House of Commons. As a result the evidence given in secret at the enquiries following her trial was made public. In the debate following this move, Mr Stirling spoke at length on the injustice to Mr Fleming of the course pursued by the Government; Mr Dunlop, the member for Greenock, claimed that there had been a miscarriage of justice and Mr Fleming should have been in the dock. There was argument as to the law in Scotland by which a person could or could not be put on his trial who had given evidence in a case in which he was supposed to have been an accomplice, as old Fleming had done.

The Lord Advocate summed up. The Secretary of State had not said that the prisoner was innocent or that Fleming was guilty; he simply said that in the doubt and mystery which attended this case it was ‘better not to break into the house of life' but to commute the sentence to the next highest punishment and leave it to time to unravel a mystery which all his care and patience had not enabled him to unveil.

Meanwhile Convict No. 389/21 ate out her heart in jail.

And meanwhile, also, a Dr Buchanan decided that the time had come when he was entitled at last to contribute
his
mite to the letters in the papers. While the woman's fate was in the balance, he wrote, he had held his peace, but he really couldn't allow this suggestion of overwhelming medical charges to go unrefuted. It
showed him in a dreadful light which was entirely unwarranted. He had attended Mrs M'Lachlan as—so her husband himself had informed him—her sole medical adviser. At the time of her confinement he had sent in a total bill of £1 12
s
, and this was all his medical attention had ever cost her. As to her heart, she had never complained to him about it, there had never been mention of palpitations or of any other cardiac sympton; to his personal and certain knowledge she had been in bed after her baby was born for three weeks, and not four months as was stated in court. He quite certainly had ‘never said that if she did not take care of herself she might drop dead.'

Oh dear!

Mr Stirling was not the only person concerned with possible injustice to Mr Fleming. Mr Dixon, the great Champion, brooded over that last interview with his client—‘I may as weel tell ye that the auld man wasna there at a'.' Really, how dreadful if that had after all been true! After all, the reprieve had now been granted, she was serving a life sentence, nothing worse could befall her, she had nothing to lose.… Of course, he had promised that he would never tell anyone; of course she had said it to him under the seal of professional secrecy.… But all the same.…

Mr Dixon sat down and wrote a note to Mr Fleming's solicitors.

He must have been far more impressed by the incident than, at this distance, it is possible for us to be. He had recognised at the time that she was hysterical, alternately laughing and crying; she had now been three months in custody following the appalling shock that the murder—however and by whomsoever committed—must have been to her. She had endured the four very long, bewildering, frightening days of the trial, her evident confidence falling lower and lower each day; had since then existed—this woman alleged to be extremely delicate, with a faulty heart condition—in a condemned cell, on a diet, for some time at least, of bread and water, waiting to die. The threat of public execution still hung over her, not three weeks away; she had been expressly warned that if the enquiry being conducted under Mr Young didn't bear out her statement, she would be hanged. Under these circumstances Mr Dixon comes and begins to question her all over again. She tries to get out of it, she refuses to answer, she giggles, she weeps, she talks of other things; and when he persists
she bursts out into what surely is an hysterical farrago of nonsense, divided between laughter and tears.

For the story was like her first three stories—and in complete contrast with the famous fourth statement read after the verdict—in many places at least, palpably false. She couldn't have taken an hour to walk from the Gushet house straight to Sandyford Place (she insists she walked straight there, and if she didn't then what was she doing?). She says she went in by the garden entrance but she would have no key and there was no means of attracting attention—the gate in the wall is a considerable distance from the house; when she went for the whisky she took a key with her. Nor would she have been coming
down
Elderslie Street to get to the gate—as she was when Mrs Walker and Miss Dykes saw her. She would come that way from the spirits shop, because it was at the top of North Street, she would turn left into Sauchiehall Street and left again into Elderslie Street and so make a round, or square, walk of it—but not if she were simply coming up by way of North Street to the back gate of Sandyford Place. She gives no account of the stealing of the clothes and silver—and how can she have come by the silver if she ‘never went upstairs at a' '? (Mr Dixon confided elsewhere as will be seen that ‘the silver was too bulky for her to carry', that was why she took as little as she did; but this is not mentioned in the account of the interview which he himself carefully edited. He further suggested that she had hidden in the cupboard in the basement lobby when the old man came down in the morning and remained concealed from him there; but this again is not in his account of their interview.)