Classic Scottish Murder Stories (10 page)

Lurking and running in the heather, some bands of Jacobites, remnants of the Rising of 1745, survivors of Culloden or sympathisers who feared reprisals, still posed a sufficient threat to the nervous government for the maintenance of garrisons stationed throughout the suspected districts. Apart from their role of encouraging the others, the duty of the military was to enforce (as far as they could) the two Disarming Acts and the banning of the bagpipes as an ‘instrument of war'. Additionally by the Dress Act, the wearing of the kilt, plaid, or any tartan garment was proscribed.

Sergeant Davies was a career soldier, anxious to become a sergeant-major, and he was popular with officers and other ranks. The neighbouring Highlanders would have known, to be sure, if he had been tarnished with recent atrocities, and he was
regarded as a fair man and well enough accepted considering the equipoise demanded of his charge. A genial personage, he had two characteristics which led inevitably, as it seemed to those who warned him, to his demise. Bluff and fearless, convinced that it would never happen to him, that, as it were, flying was safer than crossing the road, he was a keen sportsman and he would insist on striking off on expeditions of his own with rod and gun, deep into the peopled heather.

As if this were not adequate challenge to fate, he chose to array himself in swellish clothes and to port his valuables dangling from his person. In short, he moved about the wild hills like a royal 12-pointer waiting for the rifle. His wife of twelve months, Jean, who shared his billet and loved him dearly, was proud of his appearance, and he glittered like a Christmas tree indeed with silver baubles.

His ordinary dress was a blue surtout coat, with a striped silk vest, and a silver-laced hat with a silver button. His dark, mouse-coloured hair was tied behind with a black silk ribbon. Large silver shoe-buckles ornamented his brogues, and he had silver buckles at his knees, a silver watch and seal at his fob, two dozen silver buttons on his waistcoat, and two gold rings on his fingers. Lacking the kist or chest of the crofters, he carried a green silk purse which contained his capital of fifteen and a half guineas in gold, and a leather purse with silver for current expenses. The green silk purse was no secret in the district, because he used to jingle it to amuse the local children. An unusual penknife, and a gun with a peculiar barrel given to him by a comrade, comprised his personal armoury.

On Thursday September 28th, the sergeant was out on patrol as usual, combining sport with duty. He left the farm before sunrise, in advance of his men, as he had done before, unorthodox as it sounds. Four of his men followed later. On his way, in Glen Clunie, he reprimanded, but did not arrest, a man named John Growar, who was wearing a tartan coat. Marching to the rendezvous with the corporal's guard from Glenshee, his
four men had a distant sighting of their sergeant hunting on the hills, and they heard him fire a shot. They did not see him again. The Glenshee party had encountered him half a mile from the rendezvous, at the Water of Benow. He said that he was going to the hill to get a shot at the deer, and the corporal thought it ‘very unreasonable in him' as he himself was nervous even when accompanied by his men. Nonsense, said the sergeant, in characteristic form, when he had his arms and ammunition about him; he feared no-one. Off he went, striding through the heather, silver jewellery glinting, and green silk purse jingling.

Two eye-witnesses saw what happened to Sergeant Davies, but they were fugitives, who had taken to the high ground for political reasons, and they deemed it prudent to move on and say nothing. Angus Cameron, from Rannoch, and Duncan Cameron were waiting for Donald Cameron (who was afterwards hanged) and some other friends from Lochaber. They had spent the previous night on Glenbruar Braes, and they had been hiding all day in a little hollow on the side of the Hill of Galcharn. About noon, they kept quiet as two men with guns passed close by the spot where they were lying. Angus Cameron recognised one of them, wearing a grey plaid with some red in it, as Duncan Terig, alias Clerk, a reputed thief who lived with his father in the village of Inverey, where the sergeant was billeted.

The other man with the gun, not known to the watchers in the heather, was, in fact, Alexander Bain Macdonald, forester to Lord Braco of Kilbryde, first Earl of Fife, and he came from Allanaquoich, a village situated a couple of miles from Inverey. His reputation was none too good either, and the point is that both were local men, who knew things that mattered to them. Five men were on the hill where only one should have been.

An hour or so before sunset, the watchers in the heather, still lying low, saw, in relief against the sky on a mound opposite, about a gunshot away, the bright figure of a man in a blue coat,
his hat edged with white or silver lace and a gun in his hand. Coming up the hill towards the stranger, were the two men with guns who had been there in the forenoon. They met at the top and there was some kind of parley. Then Clerk, the thief in the grey and red plaid, struck the man in blue upon the breast, and he, the sergeant, cried out, clapped his hand to his breast, turned his back on the two men and strode away. Brave and tragic, he was outnumbered, and saw for the last time the wild hills of Scotland as the two men shot him in the back. There were two separate reports. They stooped down and ‘handled' the body of the fallen sergeant.

That night, the hunter came not home, and the tidings spread throughout the district. A party of men were sent out from the garrison at Braemar Castle to help with the search, but after four days it was abandoned. The wife, Jean, was convinced that the sergeant had been murdered for his money. There was a rumour that he had deserted, but her fine words denied it, ‘for that he and she lived together in as great amity and love as any couple could do that ever was married, and that he never was in use to stay away a night from her, and that it was not possible he could be under any temptation to desert, as he was much esteemed and beloved'.

Time passed. It was June of the following year. A young shepherd, Alexander McPherson, was guarding his master's flock by night, asleep, actually, in a sheiling apart from the main farmhouse at Glen Clunie. He woke. An apparition of a man clad in blue, whom he at first took to be a real living man, was standing over him. It drew Alexander outside, away from the other sleepers within. ‘I am the ghost of Sergeant Davies,' it intoned, and the lad believed him. They spoke in Gaelic, which was wonderful indeed, since the sergeant had never learnt the language of the people whom he controlled.

The ghost, this fluently Gaelic-speaking ghost, communicated a message and enjoined a mission. It seemed that he had been murdered on the Hill of Christie, and he wanted his bones
to be buried in decency. At first Alexander, frightened out of his wits, refused to comply, and the ghost suggested that Donald Farquharson, the son of Michael, with whom the sergeant had lodged, would be willing to help him out. Emboldened, the shepherd enquired who had done the deed, but the ghost made gnomic reply that if he had not asked, he might have told him, and vanished ‘in the twinkling of an eye'.

To the Hill of Christie, the shepherd presently made his way, and at the very spot designated by the spectre, found the pitiful bones under a bank, practically reduced to a skeleton. He drew them out with his crook and deposited them in a peat-bog. The mouse-coloured hair was still tied in its black silk ribbon. Fragments of blue cloth and striped silk, and a pair of brogues from which the silver buckles had been cut completed the picture. And there Alexander left the matter, under the maxim of doing nothing if in doubt.

Thwarted, the insistent ghost made a revisitation, one week later, and this time, for greater impact, presumably, it was stark naked although modesty impelled it to bend over. It was night, again, and all should have been sleeping, but Isobel McHardie awoke in the communal hut and saw something naked come in at the door in a bowing posture. She drew the clothes over her head and saw, or heard, no more. Alexander awoke and the naked ghost repeated his request. When pressed again for the name of the murderer, it abandoned its previous reticence and supplied two names – Duncan Clerk and Alexander Macdonald.

Then, at last, the shepherd summoned the chosen one, Donald Farquharson, to the sheiling, told him about the visitation, dealt with his scepticism, and led him to view the sergeant's remains. Convinced, now, Farquharson asked solemnly, or perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, if the ghost had given any orders about conveying the bones to a churchyard. Since no preference had been indicated, they buried all the remains in the peat-bog there and then.

What story the ghost had told was ‘clattered' about the
district, and local inhabitants were drawn to the Hill of Christie as if for treasure trove. The sergeant's gun with its distinctive barrel was found, and a girl named Isobel Ego, who was possessed of a remarkable id, came upon his silver-laced hat. She had been sent to the hills to look for some grazing horses, and took home her find, saying that she had come in richer than when she went out. The farmer's wife, however, confiscated it and had no peace of mind until her husband hid it under a stone by the burnside, where children found it and took it to the village. It passed through several hands until it rested with the barrack-master at Braemar Castle.

Yet nothing happened for four years. These were not normal times. No-one wanted to be an informer. There was fear of terrible reprisals. A gallant English soldier serving far from home had been done to death.

Meanwhile, Clerk's circumstances had unaccountably bucked up: he had taken two farms on lease and married Elizabeth Downie, who displayed an unusual gold ring with a little heart bossed upon the bezel which bore a remarkable resemblance to the ring previously worn by Sergeant Davies. Clerk also carried a long green silk purse. He attempted to suborn the shepherd lad, Alexander McPherson, or perhaps that is too strong a term, but he certainly did, after much persuasion, tempt him to enter his employment. One day, when they were up on the hills together, Clerk, ‘spying a young cow' told his new shepherd to shoot it. What cruelty, sadism or sport was this? McPherson reacted angrily, saying that it was such thoughts as these that were in his master's mind when he murdered Sergeant Davies. If he had dared, Clerk might have killed him then, but he ‘fell calm', begged him to keep the secret, said that he would be as a brother, offered to stock a farm for him, and gave him a promissory note for £20, to hold his tongue. Some time later, when the shepherd approached him, he refused to honour the note, and McPherson left his service, where he could never have been comfortable. After
Clerk's ultimate arrest, his brother Donald solicited the shepherd to leave the country and in the alternative offered him half of what he, Donald, was worth if the shepherd would bear false witness.

It was not until September, 1753, that Clerk and Macdonald were at last accused by the voice of the country, as the Lord Advocate put it, and committed to the Castle of Braemar. Each made contradictory declarations: Clerk, that he and Macdonald were upon another hill at the relevant time, both armed (that he admitted) and that Macdonald fired one shot only at some deer before they parted at 10 o'clock that morning and he himself returned to his father's house. Alexander Macdonald's version was that, after they had separated, he had spent the following night at home in Allanaquoich, and not, as Clerk had said, at Clerk's home. This fundamental discrepancy would have appeared fatal to the accomplices, but we shall see...

On June 11th, 1754, at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, a jury composed of tradesmen was empanelled. Macdonald was allowed to amend the discrepancy and now remembered that he had spent the night with Clerk in Inverey. It was to be a most peculiar trial. What the naked ghost had said to the shepherd was allowed in evidence by some exception to the general rule against hearsay. The case for the Crown was very strong and included the eye-witness testimony of the two hiders in the heather.

The widow Jean testified that while the search-party for her missing husband was being assembled, she had asked the prisoner Clerk, whom she took to be a particular friend, to try hard to find the body. No doubt she mistook his conspicuous show of concern. Isobel Ego's find, the silver-laced hat, was produced and she identified it by the initials, wrongly placed, as it happened, which she had seen him cut on the outside of the crown. She knew his gun by the cross rent in the middle of the barrel, caused by firing a shot when the gun was overloaded. It
emerged that she had been widowed before. David Holland, a paymaster of the same regiment, the sergeant's predecessor, had given her a plain gold ring engraved on the inside with the letters D.H., and the trist motto, ‘When this you see, Remember me'. With a typical hearty attitude to life, Sergeant Davies had had no compunction about wearing his comrade's ring, nor yet his silver shoe-buckles, also bearing the initials D.H. The plain ring had long vanished, but the embossed and cordiform one was an important part of the prosecution case. Elizabeth Downie, Clerk's wife, an incompetent witness at his trial, had told varying stories about her rings. Examined by Colonel Forbes, Justice of the Peace, she had said that, before her marriage, she had possessed a
copper
ring, with a round knot of the same material on it, and that she had given it away to a herdsman named Reoch.

Donald Farquharson, who had helped the shepherd to bury the bones, seemed to have a finger in every pie. He had actually been present when the sergeant had overloaded his gun and cracked the barrel. He had seen a gold ring with a knob on it adorning the hand of Elizabeth Downie, and he had questioned her about it. She said that it had belonged to her mother. It was within his personal knowledge that Alexander Macdonald, as forester to Lord Braco, was the only local man who held a warrant for carrying a gun for purposes of shooting deer. He also knew that Clerk usually went with him on shooting trips, and, moreover, Clerk was reputed to be a sheep-stealer. He knew nothing against Alexander Macdonald except that he once broke into the kist of a man called Corbie, and stole his money. He considered the shepherd to be an honest lad, but, he said, it was the general opinion that everything he said could not be relied on. That is, he is repudiating the naked ghost.