Heaven Knows Who (13 page)

She must have known what was coming; she must have known that Sarah had broken her undertaking ‘to tell no person that she had been to the station.' She admitted that Mrs Adams had a daughter, Sarah.

‘And did you on that Saturday send her with a trunk to the Hamilton railway?'

Jessie, who had blankly denied other undeniable facts, admitted this one.

‘How was it addressed?'

‘I addressed it with the name, “Mrs Bain, Hamilton; to lie till called for”.'

‘What was in it?'

Ah, that they couldn't know! And in fact they didn't. It was not till the following Thursday that P.C.s Stewart and Cooper collected the blood-stained clothes from the Tommy Linn park. The trunk had been empty, she said. She had intended to go up to. Hamilton on the Saturday and stay for a day or two with a Mrs Shaw there, ‘but who I, through mistake, understood was called Mrs Bain.' (Only Jessie, with her disposition to make use of kindly strangers, would have contemplated a day or two's visit to someone whose name she did not even know; and anyway, Mrs Shaw or Bain, by whatever name would have awaited her in vain, for she did not turn up on the Saturday as arranged, but went on the Tuesday instead ‘and called at Mrs Shaw's house but found she was not within': enquiring the way, if we remember, of Master James Chassels; after having learnt from his mother—no doubt for the first time—of the existence of a Mrs Shaw.)

What then of said empty trunk?

She had got said trunk from Hamilton station on said day and returned home with it, reaching Glasgow about six o'clock that evening. Said trunk was now in her house—a leather trunk with a glazed cover (how did Jessie propose to produce said trunk?—we know that it was with Mr Cherry, the saddler, having its straps and hinges attended to. In fact Superintendent M'Call collected it from him the following day. It was certainly empty by then).

But why send an empty trunk to Hamilton, anyway?

‘I meant the empty trunk to lie at the Glasgow station; but through some mistake of Sarah's—'

‘That is the little girl, Adams?'

‘The little girl, Adams—through some mistake of the little girl Adams, it had been sent on to Hamilton.'

‘What was the use to you of an empty trunk?'

‘I meant to have put my clothes in the trunk at the station,' said Jessie, ‘because the little girl couldn't have carried the trunk and the clothes together.' That was a neat one!

‘How then were you going to get your clothes to the trunk?'

‘I carried them to the Glasgow station in a bag: a black leather bag.…'

‘But the trunk had gone on to Hamilton?'

‘Yes, so I took them in the black bag to Hamilton.'

The police at this time, as we have noted, did not know what had happened to the contents of the trunk. They dropped that line of enquiry for the moment and for some reason confronted her with two sheets: ‘I am shown and identify as my property two sheets to which a sealed label is attached and which is docquetted and subscribed as relative hereto. My attention is called to the mark or impression of a key appearing on one of said sheets. I declare that the impression was made upwards of a twelvemonth ago, and while I resided in a house in Stobcross Street.…' If anything be needed to contradict an impression of a sustained narrative statement on the prisoner's part, it is these rolling sentences, so obviously police reported and compressed. They conclude rather touchingly: ‘The impression is of the check key of the outer door of that house and was made by my child making water on it as it lay on the sheet, which left an impression of iron-mould on the sheet.' (The princess who had a pea put under her seven mattresses never thought of this form of reprisal.) Jessie's sister, Ann M'Intosh, could testify to the occurrence, she added. It seems unlikely that she was called on to do so, however, for the iron-mould impression played no part in the trial after all.

After this diversion, they returned to the empty trunk and to Mrs Shaw in Hamilton. The trunk, Jessie said, she had taken downstairs from her ‘house' on the second floor to the cellar door at the foot of the stair, intending to send a boy with it to the station; but at that moment ‘the girl Adams' had turned up and
she had sent it with her. The trunk had not been in the cellar that day (whether it had or not seems of little significance). As to Mrs Shaw, her husband was cutter to a tailor in Hamilton and lived, Jessie thought, in Castle Street (unfortunately Mrs Chassels, when innocently supplying her with the name, had not added an address).

Confronted with the chemise and flannel petticoat she had been wearing on admission to prison, she identified them as her own and made the following rather muddling statement: ‘I put on said chemise and petticoat on the evening of July the third. I had two chemises, but one of which I have since put on; that now shown me I have torn up, having been destroyed by my child. I had no flannel petticoat except that now shown me. I washed it on Wednesday, the day before I put it on. All which,' she adds abruptly, ‘I declare to be the truth.' It may have been the truth, but it is difficult to follow. She presumably meant that she had washed her chemise and petticoat and put them on clean on the Thursday, and worn the same until now, the following Monday week (from the amount of time Mary Adams spent at the Broomielaw washing, however, Jessie was particular about cleanliness). How the chemise ‘now shown me' can have been ‘the one I have torn up, having been destroyed by my child', one doesn't quite see. Master M'Lachlan seems to have been a destructive small boy in the matter of his mother's clothing. But perhaps it all happened in the one apocryphal holocaust where the crinolined petticoat was also destroyed.

She adds, further, that she had still owed Jess M'Pherson the sum of twenty-five shillings for groceries, a debt hanging over from the time two years ago when Jess had had her shop; but Jess had said not to return it, because she had always meant to give a present to the baby—so to buy something for him with it instead. (Had Jessie remembered this when she bought the little bonnet for him that Mrs Campbell had seen the day after Jess died?)

And now the confrontations came thick and fast. ‘On being shown a black shawl or plaid—that shawl or plaid is not my property and I never had it in my possession and I did not leave it at Murray's (the dyer) before mentioned, to be dipped in black dye, on Monday last, the seventh July current, nor did I send it.' Well, that seems true enough; in court Miss M'Crone of Murray's testified only to a grey cloak for cleaning and a brown dress to
be dyed—Jessie had gone away after arranging for the cloak to be dyed, and returned wearing a black plaid and handed over the cloak; and that evening showed a black plaid to Mrs Campbell and told her she had bought it for three or four shillings. Was there some confusion here? The grey cloak, now cleaned, she acknowledged, though it had not been in two pieces when she left it at Murray's—this also was true, for she had gone there wearing it. And she admitted the brown dress, now dyed black, but ‘its flounces were wanting'. She denied giving a false name—M'Donald—to the dyer. She had received a ticket for the garments which she supposed was somewhere about the house. And finally, ‘I dyed said dress black to get further use out of it as, in its brown state, it was a good deal soiled and faded. And this I also declare to be truth.'

CHAPTER TEN

So the first long, frightening day was over. She had heard, very likely, of her husband having been set free; but with what an anxious heart for the safety of her delicate boy, with what terrors for her own predicament, must she have dragged herself wearily to her prison cell. It was a new cell to her: she arrived there—it was almost seven o'clock—to find herself sharing it with two women, thieves, who were to be her companions day and night for the next eight weeks. These were Agnes Christie (or Ward-rope) and Catherine Fairley, and they seem to have liked Jessie, as everyone always did—very different in character and station though she doubtless was. She looked very sad, Agnes Christie said, and very depressed. ‘According to custom among the prisoners', they asked her what she had been committed for. ‘You've heard about the murder in Sandyford Place?' she said, ‘about the old man killing his servant? It's on the same matter.' ‘Are you in for that?' asked Agnes Christie, astonished. Jessie doubtless looked to her, as she must have looked to anyone, an unlikely person to have literally hacked another woman to death. ‘Oh no, Mr Fleming's in for that,' said Jessie. She had been a servant in the house for two years, she explained, and went on to tell the story of the old man having come round with the silver for her to pawn—adding, however, that he had kept the whole of the six pounds fifteen and given her nothing to recompense her for her trouble—a departure from the story she had earlier that day told the Sheriff Substitute, which perhaps in retrospect seemed to her to have sounded pretty fishy. But now, she said, old Fleming was denying having given her the plate or, indeed, ever having known her at all; he had set a trap for her and so she had been sent to prison. She declared herself innocent of the murder; she had been nowhere near Sandyford Place that night. She neither suggested nor denied in these conversations that old Fleming had killed poor Jess; she said only that she herself had not. ‘She was not very communicative,' added Miss Christie; but there doesn't
really seem much to complain of in that respect, at any rate at this stage.

To all this information the ladies Christie and Fairley appended ‘their mark'.

James M'Lachlan, while his sad wife slept uneasily in her close prison cell, was thinking things over. Their joint apprehension had doubtless been a fearful shock to him; he could not know that the authorities had every intention of immediately releasing him again. That he must eventually be safe, of course, was certain—he could produce any amount of proof that he had been far away across the seas at the time of the murder—and indeed upon this proof he had now been set free. But as we know, Jessie had certainly been less than frank with him, and he must have been staggered to find her—let alone himself—so deeply involved. And there remained the matter of the black japanned box. He had, as we also know, got back the box from Ayr station, where she had sent it ‘to lie till called for', and taken it to his sister, Mrs Reid, in Greenock. He said later and Jessie also said that she had told him that Jess had sent her some things to get cleaned and altered for her, and she was afraid of these being found in her possession, but we can't know just how clear she had really made it all, and it may well be that, when he opened the box and spread the contents on his sister's bed, this was the first he knew of all it really contained. He must at any rate have been bewildered by the whole menacing business and very much frightened—for Jessie, no doubt, but for himself as well and for his child and for all concerned with them. He had got his sister to pack the stuff away in a drawer, and there it remained till he was released from prison, having so far said nothing about it. He arrived at Mrs Reid's that night in a state of ‘dreadful agitation' and they talked it all over—she said afterwards, and it isn't hard to believe, that her own advice was that he should give the things up to the police. He had three other sisters living in Greenock, all of whom must by now have known about Jessie, and they probably didn't sit back either in companionable silence. At any rate, he spent ‘a night of agonising suspense', torn, he said, between love and pity for his wife and his sense of duty—he said nothing about his sense of personal preservation. Next morning he arose with his mind decided: he would give the box up, he said to his sister, and give himself up too. The
clothes were packed back, a porter named Donald Laurie was summoned, and the box went off on its travels again. It was addressed this time to ‘Mr Thomson, County Buildings, Glasgow'. But before it ever got to County Buildings it was collected—there was fourpence to pay on it—from Bridge Street Station.

It was collected, as we know, by Superintendent M'Call; for James M'Lachlan had decided to put duty first.

The box contained—not at all to the astonishment of the authorities—a black watered silk gown, a black silk polka, a ‘changing-coloured' silk dress, a black silk velvet cloak and a broadcloth cloak. Counsel at the trial got a little tied up with the changing-coloured dress; it just looked brown to him. But Superintendent M'Call said firmly that it had been described as changing-coloured to him; and anyway, that was the dress. Counsel, however, continued to refer to it bleakly as brown.

All the dresses in the box had belonged to Jess M'Pherson. A former fellow-servant who, just to complicate matters, was also called Mrs M'Lachlan, recognised them; and another, Mary Downie, who had been a close friend of Jess for nine years, the same friend who had opened the grocery shop with her, knew them all well. She had been with Jess when she bought the black watered silk, she knew when and where the others had been purchased. (Sad little echo of those happy shopping expeditions with the savings from £25 a year to be spent!) Jess M'Pherson, we know, had been ‘tasteful in dress'.

All the clothes had been kept in the chest in the dead woman's, room: the chest that had been found almost empty, ‘raked through with a bloody hand.'

The Fiscal had Jessie up for questioning again.

She was brought from the prison to the County Buildings by cab, and a struggling mob jostled to peer in at the pale face, suddenly grown so careworn and thin. It was said that when these crowds gathered James M'Lachlan wandered among them to catch a glimpse of his wife and to hear the arguments for and against her: he would be on the spot, he had just come out of County Buildings himself, having informed against her. What must his feelings have been, watching the slender figure hustled in to be questioned for hours over those stolen clothes which he himself had delivered into the hands of her accusers? It is impossible
to believe that there was not some anxiety for his own safety in whatever mixture of emotions impelled him to this act. Yet—who can judge the human heart? We can't know what pressure was brought to bear on him by that large, rather oppressive family of his. The family conclaves must have been pretty formidable.