Heaven Knows Who (8 page)

Mr Fleming was in the act of closing the front door on admitting the returning policeman, but true to his craving for company at this time, he opened it again and welcomed her in. To her joy she found quite a little crowd there—old Mr Fleming, young Mr
John Fleming, Chrystal the grocer and a gentleman she did not know—all standing in the lobby. Mr Fleming said that this was a fearful thing and she asked the particulars. He told her, adding that, strange to say, when he put the pantry key into the lock of the room door the key of the room door had fallen out inside the room. Her impression at this time was that Jess had committed suicide. She heard old Mr Fleming say that the last time he had seen her had been on the Friday night, about half-past nine, and that he had found her door locked on the Saturday morning. She asked him, seeing that Jess had stopped so long away, if he had never thought of looking for the girl. He said no. She said but hadn't he thought of getting the door opened and looking whether her trunk was away or whether the house had been robbed? The old man did not answer. Mr Fleming said, ‘Mrs Walker is asking you—' and repeated the question. ‘No,' said the old man, ‘I never thought.' ‘Did you hear no noise?' persisted Mrs Walker. ‘Oh, ay,' said the old gentleman, ‘I heard some moans.'

What must have been the feelings of Mrs Walker and all the company? He had never thought of harm having come to Jess, and yet he had ‘heard some moans'. He had heard them in the early hours of the morning, he further explained. ‘I rose on ma elbow and looked at ma watch and it was just four.'

Astonishment upon astonishment. ‘When you were upon your elbow,' cried Mrs Walker, ‘could you no have got up and cried down what was the matter?'

Once again the old man remained silent and once again Mr Fleming repeated the question. Grandpa then replied that no, he hadna' thought of it. ‘Are you sure of the time—Saturday morning at four o'clock?' said Mr Fleming. ‘It would not be the Sabbath morning,' protested Mrs Walker, who evidently thought that to be committing suicide or murder on a Sunday would really be going too far. ‘No, no,' said the old man, ‘I was twice at the kirk on the Sabbath.' So perhaps she was just checking the day.

Mrs Walker thought about it. Surely she had seen Jess M'Pherson in her shop on the Saturday?—about six o'clock, or seven. ‘Na,' said old Fleming, ‘it would be the Friday night, Mrs Walker; it couldna be the Saturday—for I did not see her that day.' But it certainly hadn't been the Friday, for Mrs Walker had been at the coast (it must have been a lovely summer; no one
seems to have been able to keep away from the seaside). However, she agreed, it might have been the Thursday.…

Mrs Walker was later in trouble with the Press, and went before the Fiscal to deny that she had ever said to anyone that, when she had suggested she'd seen Jess on the Saturday, the old man had said, ‘Na, Mrs Walker, it must have been Friday afternoon,' and when she asked him ‘Why Friday?' had made no reply but ‘given a look which flashed conviction on my mind that he knew too well that neither I nor anyone else had seen Jess alive on Saturday; a feeling which every succeeding day had served to strengthen.' Nor had she said that when she went down to the basement the floors were quite damp and bore evident signs of washing, though she had learned that two hours later they were quite dry. In fact she had noticed no signs of blood nor of dampness: the stone floors were so dark that you couldn't have told without touching them whether they were damp or not. The kitchen had appeared quite tidy and there was a good fire in it.

Jess M'Pherson had never said anything to her about old Mr Fleming. ‘I make it a point never to speak to servants concerning what takes place in their masters' houses,' said Mrs Walker righteously. The shop doubtless served many families in and about Sandyford Place, and she had their future custom still to consider.

After this testimony Mrs Walker, alas, is heard of no more. She retired to bed and hoped she would be troubled no further, for she ‘was not able to rise from her bed let alone go into any court.' Another little Walker had in fact arrived to create an excuse for enquiry any time a policeman might be seen hurrying about his sensational business.

At about half-past five Dr Fleming (no relation), the police surgeon, turned up (he said in court that it was half-past four, and this seems to have gone through unchallenged even by the keen eye of Mr Roughead; but this would have brought him to the house before the Flemings,
père et fils
, got home, and he is obviously mistaken). After him came a detective officer, Donald Campbell, and at about half-past nine Alexander M'Call, Assistant Superintendent in the Glasgow Police. Robert Jeffrey, a third police officer, arrived to assist in examining the scene and searching the house generally, and at eleven o'clock yet another doctor was sent for to pronounce upon the body. This was George
Macleod, who the following day was to make the post-mortem and, with Dr Fleming, compile the official report.

A detailed account of their findings will be given later. Suffice to say for the moment that poor Jess had quite obviously been murdered. She lay on her face near the foot of the bed, which was to the right as you came through the door. Her body was half clad in a semmet, a shift and a woollen polka—a sort of knitted vest, a chemise or short petticoat and a short woollen dressing-gown—but these had been pulled up over her head and shoulders, leaving the lower half of her body bare. A piece of carpet had been thrown down over the upper part. About her head, face and hands there were forty wounds.

An iron cleaver was found in a drawer of the kitchen dresser.

The bedroom was in confusion. The bed appeared to have been slept in; the bedclothes were stained with blood and had been pulled down into a heap at the foot of the bed. A blood-stained sheet which looked as though it had been taken off the bed was rolled up under the washstand; it was rather damp. Under one of the tables near the body was rolled the silver cruet stand from the dining-room upstairs, minus its bottles. There was blood all about the room, and close to the window wall three bloody prints of a naked left foot. And a chest that had held Jess M'Pherson's clothes stood open—the few remaining contents thrown back, all stained with blood, as though, said Dr Fleming at the trial, some bloody hand had been at work among them.…

All Jess's best clothes had disappeared, and her everyday dress was gone from its hook—a cinnamon-coloured dress trimmed with blue velvet, but with no flounces.

In the lobby between the bedroom and the kitchen there were smears of blood. There was blood on the kitchen sink, and in a chest of drawers in old Fleming's wardrobe-room across the passage were two shirts, newly dressed, spotted with blood.

But more fantastic still, the floors of the kitchen and the bedroom and the stone flags of the lobby had recently been washed. The kitchen floor was the drier, but it still looked damp. The lobby flagstones were absolutely moist. On the wooden floor of the bedroom, outside the part that had been washed, there were three bloody imprints of a small naked foot.

And most fantastic of all—the face, neck and chest of the corpse appeared to have been washed.

This is not fiction; this all happened—on a Monday evening, July 7, 1862.

Later that evening the police asked Mr Fleming if anything more was missing than the clothes from the chest downstairs. He had not thought of looking and would hardly know, for he was not sure what had been taken to the summer residence at Dunoon. They went into the dining-room—that room where, at four o'clock on the Saturday morning, the three merry wedding guests had seen the gasolier alight—and there found the sideboard standing open. The day-to-day silver spoons and forks were gone: all that remained was a single silver teaspoon which was found in a cup on a shelf in the kitchen. The silver teapot and stand and the silver cream jug were still in the sideboard (there were two other silver tea services in the house), and so were the glass bottles from the cruet which lay tumbled under the table in the murdered woman's room below. Mr Fleming indicated the tea-set. ‘They might have gotten away with that,' he said, ‘if they had been wanting plunder,' and the detectives agreed that ‘an old thief, an accustomed thief, would have taken away more than was taken. One not practised in thieving might leave something behind.' On the other hand, to have left a plated thing like the empty cruet-stand seemed to Police Officer Jeffrey like the trick of an old thief, and altogether the whole thing was a mystery that they could not see the bottom of. He had not, he candidly admitted at the trial, seen the bottom of it even yet.

However, certain articles, both silver and silver plated, were missing after all: six silver toddy ladles, a silver fish slice, a silver soup divider, a plated sauce spoon.…

Etcetera, etcetera; the full list lay already in the keeping of Mr Lundie's pawn. Two days earlier ‘Mrs M'Donald' had raised six pounds fifteen on it.

So the night dragged on. Under the yellow-blue light of the gas lamps or holding their candles close, the doctors and policemen crouched over the dead body or padded with probing fingers and eager eyes about the house. Police Officer Campbell had got hold of a little bit of stick and was measuring the bloody footprints on the bedroom floor. He compared their length by putting his bit of stick against the soles of the dead woman's feet. The
stick was quite appreciably shorter. So the footprints had not been made by Jess M'Pherson, but he thought they were those of a woman.

In the early hours of the morning Mr Fleming took his father and son with him and sought refuge elsewhere, turning over his home to the authorities. One by one the doctors and policemen packed away their instruments and snapped shut their notebooks and crawled home to take a few hours' rest before it all began again next day. A uniformed man or two left in charge of the closed and shuttered house, dawn breaking and the birds beginning to sing in the trees along Sauchiehall Street.

And alone in her bedroom, lying there half naked, with her secrets still held close in her wounded hands, poor jess M'Pherson lay as she had lain for three full days and three full nights, and would lie at least two days more till they had done with her.

CHAPTER SIX

Tuesday, July 8. A great day in the lives of the newspaper editors of Glasgow had they but known it, and indeed of all Scotland and England too. All they needed was one Jessie M'Lachlan a month, one of them was to say a few weeks later, to make them all millionaires.

But today there was time for only a very brief notice. ‘Suspected Murder'—and a few lines about the discoveries at Sandyford Place. It sounded not very promising—a mere servant maid done to death by some horrid burglar, or perhaps by a ‘follower' clandestinely introduced to the bedroom—and interesting only in its having occurred in the home of the gentry in the West End. There was much to report of more interest. A monster pineapple was on exhibition in a Glasgow shop window, weighing ten pounds, twelve inches long and twenty-two in girth. The introduction of iron vessels into the royal and mercantile navies was causing strikes among the Lower Strata of Society, led by the iron boiler-makers and the wooden shipbuilders. The High Sheriff of Leicestershire had mysteriously disappeared. There had been an amusing Deception in the Canadian courts of the International Exhibition in Hyde Park—a man had stood so still that he was thought to be a waxwork and was praised as a very masterpiece of the art of Madame Tussaud; every trick was tried in endeavours to discover the truth until some bold spirit thought of moving the wheel against which the figure negligently leaned, when the man fell over and all was discovered. The
Glasgow Herald
opined that he would not lack for hospitality for many a day to come. You could visit the Exhibition and see for yourself for only twenty-five shillings, cabin class, and six shillings steerage; servants in cabins, however, Full Fees.

And a Minister of the Gospel, working in Northumberland, had preached a fine sermon, here reproduced in full, against the seduction of virgins, a misdemeanour ‘carried on chiefly among the poor.' In America, though New Orleans and the whole line of
the Mississippi had fallen and the great naval station at Norfolk had passed into Northern hands, though Tennessee was overrun and the Northern powers had never yet been pushed back from any point once attained, yet the
Glasgow Herald
was still confident of a Southern victory (it must have greatly comforted General Lee could he have known). And a lady living in a Salubrious Part would welcome a Small Boy as Companion to her own. All parties having claims against the Argyle Gunpowder Co. should lodge them within eleven days; a quantity of old Hair Bagging was advertised for, also a cast-iron water tank. Alexander Friedlander has always a supply of
FINE HEALTHY LEECHES
on hand; James Fullerton of Argyle Street has fine Japanned tin Travelling Boxes.…

And the beautiful, very fast sailing clipper ship
Edouard et Julie
, newly coppered, is now actively loading and will soon say when she will sail.

Meanwhile—‘Suspected Murder'. We learn that yesterday afternoon a horrid discovery took place at the residence of Mr John Fleming, No. 17 Sandyford Place.…

That morning Sarah Adams went round again to the Broomielaw. How she got the time off we don't know—she was nowadays employed elsewhere and her free day was Saturday; and she had no time due to her, for she had been to see Jessie on the previous Saturday. Nor do we know why she came; but by now ‘the murder had been heard about' and she and her mother both knew of Mrs M'Lachlan's close friendship with the dead woman—and knew, moreover, that on the very night of the murder she had been planning a visit to Sandyford Place. So maybe Miss Adams just sneaked a few minutes off and popped round out of curiosity. Or maybe her mother, or even her employer, sent her.

All she got out of the visit, however, was that she observed on the table a straw bonnet ‘trimmed with a blue or other ribbon' and a black plaid, neither of which she had ever seen before.