Heaven Knows Who (9 page)

The dates of Jessie's movements for the rest of the week are confused and confusing, most of the witnesses being satisfied with ‘it was the Tuesday or the Wednesday or the Thursday, but I can't be certain.' But certain it is that on one of those days she took a little trip to Hamilton; and since all agree that it
may
have been the Tuesday and she herself says that it
was
the Tuesday, we may
assume that it probably was so. And from that the rest follows. In any case the dates are of no importance'. Without wearisome ifs and ans, therefore, we will assume that they happened in the following sequence.…

On the Tuesday—that we do know—David Barclay, the clerk at the station who on Saturday had received the trunk from the little girl, Sarah Adams, and sent it on to Hamilton, noticed a woman walking up and down past his office. She came in at last and asked him if the box had been despatched. He told her it had been. So Jessie went to Hamilton.

A Mrs Chassels, wife of a carter, lived in Almada Street, Hamilton, close by to the station. On the Tuesday afternoon at half-past two a strange woman presented herself at the door and asked if they had a boy to go over to the station and carry a box for her; it wasn't a heavy one. (It weighed, as we know, twenty-one pounds: Sarah Adams, twelve years old, had staggered with it up the cellar stairs and to the station in Glasgow.) So Master James Chassels, the same age as Sarah, went with the lady to the station and she sent him in to ask for a box addressed to Mrs Bain. The lady came in later and signed for the box, ‘Mrs M'Lachlan'. She asked the child to carry it back to his mother's house, and she went with him.

Jessie had presumably gone to the house because the people there were carters, but she was soon, as usual, throwing herself upon the kindness of strangers. Could she come in for a while? And might she have a cup of tea? And could the boy next take the box to a saddler's shop and get it mended? Oh, and did they know of a tailor of the name of Fraser?

Mrs Chassels knew no tailor called Fraser but she knew of one called Shaw. She said that James should take the trunk to Mr Cherry's, and meanwhile to come away in and she would make a pot of tea. While she was out of the room—all unsuspecting that her visitor might have a motive other than tea in wishing her absent a few minutes—the lady must have opened the box and taken out a bundle, for she had one when Mrs Chassels returned which she hadn't had when she arrived. It was tied up in a printed cotton kerchief and, as it was ‘a pretty large bundle', it is perhaps not surprising that some of its contents were escaping—Mrs Chassels especially noted part of a dress and the bottom of a flounce bound with its own material. The lady explained that it
was a merino wrapper. Mrs Chassels had brought half a glass of spirits with the tea—realising, no doubt, that though she showed no agitation, this frail-looking creature was nervously and physically exhausted—and the woman drank both and paid for them and for James's services and departed, taking the bundle with her. James walked along with her a little and she asked him the way to Mr Shaw, the tailor's, but she did not say whether or not she was going there.

An hour later a woman entered a public-house in the small village of Low Waters, a mile out of Hamilton, and asked for half a glass of whisky. She looked so exhausted that the proprietress, Mrs Gibson, brought her a whole glass. She was not precisely appropriately dressed for a long country walk, for she wore a black watered silk dress, a black shawl and a bonnet with blue and black ribbons, and she was carrying a large bundle under her arm. She paid a penny for her drink and started off again.

Was this the bonnet spotted by Miss Sarah Adams on the table during her exploratory visit to the Broomielaw? It must surely have been; and yet it is curious that Jessie, who subsequently admitted so much, steadily denied this harmless visit to the pub at Low Waters.

It was a hot, dry, dusty day. She dragged herself wearily on through the straggling village street, out into the country again with hardly any buildings in sight and only long fields of grazing land, divided off by hedges from the road, and came at about half-past four to a fork where a road, branching off, led to Meikle Earnock and the Tommy Linn Park. Here she met some children, two small girls of eleven, Marion Farley and her friend Margaret Gibson. She stopped and questioned them. ‘Could you tell us a burn where to get a drink of water? For all the lang road that I've travelled I havna' seen a burn or a sheugh [a stream or an irrigational canal] whaur a person might wat their lips.'

The children pointed out the Tommy Linn burn further up the Meikle Earnock road and watched her till she passed the first oak tree, and then lost sight of her.

When, creeping back to the station that evening, she ran into a Master Mirrilees, a big boy of ‘nine past', she was carrying no bundle. But she gave him a big square of cotton, saying, ‘Here, boy, I found this handkerchief. Take it home and hem it.' Mirrilees, not being too handy with his needle, took it home and
got his mother to hem it instead; and so the printed cotton kerchief she had noted earlier found its way straight back to Mrs Chassels.

That evening Robert Lundie, the pawnbroker, returned to Glasgow, having been absent since the Saturday, and, for the first time learning of the murder and of the plate missing from the house, looked at the silver that had been pawned on the Saturday; and, finding it all marked with an ‘F', took it straight away to the police.

And the following day, Wednesday, July 9, old James Fleming was arrested as being concerned with the murder of Jess M'Pherson, questioned for four hours and committed to prison. In Scotland, unlike England, there is no public inquest—the preliminary investigation into a criminal case is conducted by the Procurator-Fiscal, as Crown Prosecutor, and the result kept secret.

All this time the black japanned bonnet box, locked and with the key in Mrs M'Lachlan's possession, had remained at the ironmonger's where she had bought it—an hour after getting home on the Saturday morning. But on the Wednesday she appeared and asked for it. She explained that she had changed her mind about collecting it on the Saturday afternoon as she hadn't had to go away after all; and she now asked the assistant, Nish (he who at the time of the trial was in Antigua), to alter the address he had written on the label (which the other assistants later remembered as having had something to do with Edinburgh) and to put instead: ‘Mrs Darnley, Ayr; lie till called for'. The box was to be sent to the station, and off trotted someone upon yet another of Jessie's errands, though afterwards no one could remember who it was that went.

So the box was despatched to Ayr station, to lie to be called for, and
was
called for in due course—not at Ayr but back at Glasgow, and not by any Mrs Darnley but by Jessie's husband, James M'Lachlan.

M'Lachlan had got home from his ship in the early hours of Thursday morning. What must have been his wife's feelings as she waited for him to arrive? And what must have been his feelings when he came? His ship had been in Ireland, he can have
heard nothing of the murder; she docked at midnight and he had come straight home.

Exactly what was the character of James M'Lachlan it is difficult, from his brief appearances in his wife's story, to fathom. He was a nice-looking fellow, aged about thirty, and looked a typical sailor, bred to the sea and having been as far abroad as Australia. His employers thought highly of him. He came of a large and respectable family from round about Greenock and three of his sisters were married and living there. He does seem to have been very fond of his wife. Their friend, Mrs Fraser, gave evidence that they ‘lived together very comfortably', and he himself said that he had ‘the utmost confidence in her' and that he ‘never saw anything to give him reason to doubt her.' She seems to have had less than the utmost confidence in
him
, however (and, as it would seem from later events, with perhaps some reason), for it is pretty certain that she did not tell him all the truth about her present troubles. On seeing in the newspapers a description of a woman wanted in connection with the murder, he remarked to Jessie, ‘That's unco' like you.'

‘It's ower like me,' said poor Jessie.

It must have been with some trumped-up explanation, therefore, that she persuaded him to get back the black japanned box from Ayr and somehow dispose of it: he had a sister in Greenock with whom he was on particularly good terms—couldn't he take it and leave it in her safe keeping? She told him, possibly, the story she later told the legal authorities: that Jess had sent her some clothes, asking her to get them dyed and altered, and now the police were seeking them and she was afraid of their being found in her possession. She had bought a box and sent them off to Ayr to be out of the way, but after all the box would remain at the station and might at any time be opened and examined, and things would look worse than ever. He begged her to tell the police the whole truth and be done with it; and she was to say later that they agreed that she would wait till the Monday and tell them then. He was due to sail again with his ship on Saturday but he arranged to stay at home. Meanwhile, at her anxious desire, he went off to the railway station and there bribed or cajoled a porter into sending a private note by the guard of the next train to the clerk at Ayr station. The clerk got the note and sent back the box by the morning train to Glasgow, still addressed to Mrs Darnley. James M'Lachlan
collected it and took it back to his sister's house in Greenock.

Next morning the box was unpacked and the contents spread out on the bed. James M'Lachlan appears to have told his sister the whole story—or as much as he knew. Jessie would confess to pawning the silver, he said, but these clothes had nothing to do with it—she had told him that Jess had sent them, asking her to get them cleaned and altered. So they put them away in a drawer. (‘You did not put them into the bed?' enquired Lord Deas at the trial: a new low, one might think, in judicial irony), where they remained till the Wednesday. On that day they were packed back into the box and sent off, addressed this time to ‘Mr Thomson, County Buildings: to lie till called for.'

County Buildings is the Sheriffs' Court of the City of Glasgow, and Mr Thomson was Sub-Inspector Audley Thompson of the Glasgow Police.

CHAPTER SEVEN

We must now consider in more detail the state of the body and the scene where it was found. It was not, alas, a sight for the chicken-hearted.

The bedroom was in fact, as has been said, the laundry of the house. It measured fourteen feet by fourteen, with a four-foot square table in the centre. The door was towards one end of the east wall—to your right as you came in; the windows, looking out on to Sandyford Place were in the north wall. The bed was placed rather oddly, sideways against the wall, midway between the door and the window wall, its head not up against anything: it was a large fourposter, probably five or six feet wide. Opposite was the hearth and the mangle, and along the south wall, to your left as you entered, and facing the windows, were two wash-stands and the trunk or chest which held the dead woman's best clothes. In the corner opposite the door was a built-in cupboard. (See plan, p. 27 and ground plan at end of book.)

The body was found lying face downwards in the entrance to the narrow space—about two feet wide—between the bed and the central table: its feet towards the windows, its head towards the door—its position was afterwards to be significant. It was naked up as far as the waist. The clothes (the knitted jacket-vest, the chemise and the woollen dressing gown) were rucked up from the waist round the shoulders and head, the head enveloped in them, and they were damp when the body was found, and much stained with blood. A small mat or piece of carpet covered the upper part of the body as though it had been thrown down carelessly on top of it.

The full and official description of the injuries is so dreadful as to make nightmarish reading for the layman. We will confine ourselves therefore to such details as may be necessary to any solution of the mystery.

There was little cadaveric rigidity—rigor mortis—a state which sets in (and also passes off) after a space of time varying with the
conditions under which the corpse remains. There were no signs whatsoever of decomposition.

There were forty wounds about the head, neck, face, hands and arms.

First, there were three deep, incised wounds, one across the middle of the forehead, two across the bridge of the nose; and these, alone among the wounds, ran transversely, straight across the face. Any of these three wounds would probably have caused stupor; but, except possibly eventually from loss of blood, even together they would not have caused death. The lethal injuries were to the right side of the head. There were three major cuts, midway between the ear and the top of the head, cleaving right into the skull, and three other severe scalp wounds a little further back. On the left side of the head there were ten more wounds, less severe in character; and there were a few shallow cuts on the back of the neck.

With the exception of the three cuts across the forehead and the bridge of the nose, all the wounds sloped from above downwards, and from behind forwards. Of the deep cuts, several grew more shallow towards the back of the head.

On the right temple was a further small wound which had not injured the bone beneath.

There was a large bruise on the top of the right shoulder and another on the back of the right upper arm. Dr Watson, who was first to examine the body, noted one ‘remarkable' bruise in the small of the back; but none of the other doctors observed, or at any rate could later recollect it.

There were flesh wounds of greater or less extent on both arms, both wrists and both hands; the right hand being ‘dreadfully mutilated'.

And finally there were some small abrasions of the knees and shins, which were also soiled. The feet and legs were extended to their uttermost.