Heaven Knows Who (2 page)

It was in one such tenement—Clydesdale Buildings—that Jessie lived; opening out not on to a wynd, but on to Broomielaw Street itself, with only the cobbled road and the wharf-side buildings between her close-mouth and the Clyde. There was a walledin court at the back with a door to the streets. The building is gone but many like it still stand along the Broomielaw, and the streets she walked are all the same.
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Her ‘house' was on the second floor, or ‘stair' as she would call it—three rooms leading off a single passage, all on the same side of it. She had also the use of a cellar in the basement.

She was pitifully poor. Her husband, James M'Lachlan, was a sailor, and out of his pay of thirty shillings a week he must keep back twelve—ten for food, for he provided his own board when he was with his ship, which was for three or four days in each week, and a couple for himself—leaving her with only eighteen shillings for rent, heating, food, clothing and any further expenses for themselves and the child. The further expenses were heaviest of all for, it was explained at her trial, she was obliged to pay out ceaselessly for doctors and medicine and for help in the house. She suffered from a heart condition which since the birth of her baby had become very much worse—from palpitations and breathlessness, and often from a total weakness which kept her bedridden for many weeks at a time. She had been in bed four months after the birth, and the doctors had now warned them that, unless she had some sort of assistance with the work of her home, she might fall dead at any moment. So she got in a woman, a Mrs Adams, to do her washing and cleaning. ‘She might be able to wash a few things for herself,' said Mrs Adams, ‘but not a day's washing. She was a weakly woman and had often trouble.' She paid Mrs Adams a shilling a day and employed her twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah, to do odd chores at a further six or seven shillings a week. But how was she to pay for it all out of eighteen shillings? Her brother was very good to her, giving her constant gifts of money; all her friends were kind, even her landlords maintained a polite fiction as to the time she had to pay in. But you couldn't struggle against illness and helplessness. To try to make ends meet she let off two of her three rooms to lodgers. They can't have added
much to her income, for her total rent for the ‘house' was five shillings a week, but anyway they were mostly sailors like her husband, and not only did they sometimes bilk her of her rent altogether but they often went off to sea leaving money owing. Her only recourse was to pawn such possessions as they left in her keeping, hastily redeeming them before the owners got back. ‘They were left as a kind of pledge,' said the child, Sarah Adams, who knew all about it, ‘not to pawn,' and her mother confirms, ‘She was often compelled to pawn the clothes they had left with her. They were never pawned to raise money for intemperances or extravagance but to pay for medicine or the doctor, or me, or for what the house needed. In living she was very moderate. She was a very temperate woman. She did not drink unless by the doctor's orders—she would take one glass of spirits but she would take no more. She could not live more economically than she did.' She—Mrs Adams—and Sarah, were invariably employed upon these missions to the pawnshop. Jessie never went herself and she always instructed them to give false names. She evidently did not care to have too many people knowing about her business. They would not have far to go—every third shop in those days was a pawnshop (and every fourth a spirit shop).

So, all in all, she must have been thankful when a chance arose to let her rooms to a Mrs Campbell, who might be more regularly solvent or who at least wouldn't always be going off to sea. Mrs Campbell in turn sublet one room—still to a sailor—but now it was her responsibility to collect the rent. The sailor's name was John MacDonald, and Mrs Campbell had besides a young daughter who shared her room. It must have been something of a scrum—six people living in three small rooms.

On that night, then—the night of the murder—a couple of months after they had moved in, Mrs Campbell and her daughter were sleeping in what was in fact the kitchen, nearest to the front door of the apartment; her lodger was snoring away, from eleven o'clock on, in the middle room; and Mrs M'Lachlan's little boy was in the end room, ordinarily the parlour, to which he and his parents were now reduced. James M'Lachlan was away at sea. And Jessie—Jessie, alas, was not at home that night.

Jessie M'Lachlan's great friend was another Jessie, Jessie M'Pherson, more often called Jess. The names in this chronicle are not helpful to clear narrative. The two principals were called Jessie, there are two John Flemings, three Mr Flemings in all plus a Doctor Fleming, no relation. Two principal witnesses at the trial were called Paton, a detective was M'Laughlin—the list could go on for ever. To complicate matters—for the author at any rate—by the Scottish custom all married women are referred to by their maiden as well as their married names—‘Agnes Wardrope or Christie'. To avert a major muddle, Mrs M'Lachlan is always referred to as Jessie, the murdered woman as Jess.

Jess was about thirty-eight at the time of her death—a big, brawny woman though ‘of a genteel figure and generally tasteful in dress', who had once in a friendly trial put a policeman on the floor—he had asked for a kiss. She had been less on the defensive, apparently, with two other gentlemen similarly inclined, for she had suffered two ‘misfortunes', one of which had resulted in a stillborn child, the other in a boy who had thrived and who at the time of her death seems to have been in Australia. She was herself an illegitimate child; her name in fact, or her mother's name, was Richardson. The mother was now married, but Jess had been brought up by foster-parents and had taken their name. They remained devoted to her, and she does seem to have been a delightful person, kind and generous and ‘with a peculiar faculty for making and keeping friends'. She had been put out to service at the age of ten and had worked as a domestic servant ever since, retiring only for brief periods to allow for the ‘misfortunes' and for a break of one year, when she left the family with whom she was then employed—the Flemings, of Sandyford Place—and set up a little grocery stores with a friend and ex-fellow servant, Mary Downie. But the business failed. It was run on the ‘passbook system', that is to say on credit; times were hard in Glasgow, their hearts were too kind to allow them to pursue their debtors—though it was suggested when she died that she had been murdered by some enraged creditor whom she had got sent to prison—and after only a year they had to shut up shop. She went back to the Flemings and at the time of her death had, all in all, been with them—a much trusted and valued servant—for six or seven years. Jessie M'Lachlan before her marriage had worked for two years with the same family, in Sandyford Place, and it was thus that she
and Jess had become such friends. The friendship had lasted ever since.

The standing joke between Jessie and Jess was ‘Grandpa'. Grandpa was Mr Fleming senior, and the joke was that he wanted to marry Jess. The house belonged to his son, John Fleming, an accountant, respectable and prosperous, who lived there with his son, also John, who was about twenty, and two daughters. He was evidently a widower, for his sister, Margaret Fleming, kept house for him. His father lived with them, having a room on the ground floor and, especially when the rest of the family were away, haunting the servants' quarters in the basement and making a nuisance of himself. They were away a good deal, for they had a cottage by the sea, near Dunoon, and Miss Fleming and the girls spent most of the summer there, taking one of the two maids and leaving the other to run the house in town. John Fleming and John junior joined them at the week-ends. They appear not to have loved Grandpa so dearly that they often took him with them. More commonly he was left at home in Sandyford Place with Jess.

Jessie, of course, knew the old gentleman well. She called him ‘Grandpa', and after she was married he now and again dropped in to see her in her own home and have a cup or ‘a dram'. They seemed quite intimate and friendly, said a witness who was once present when he called, ‘like familiar acquaintances'. He was affable to her husband also, and on two occasions at least there are accounts of James M'Lachlan going round with his wife to Sandyford Place and having a drink with the old man—though of course in the basement, with Jess. The Fleming family were at this time on the way up socially; and it may well be that the grandfather, who had started life as a hand-loom weaver, was more easy in the company of these humble people than his son and his grandson would have been. On the other hand, he was considered a little eccentric, and one of his oddities may have lain in this disposition to be friendly with their domestic staff.

On Friday night, July 4, 1862, Jessie had arranged to go round to Sandyford Place and see her friend. They met very frequently: they were as affectionate and easily intimate as two devoted sisters. Jess M'Pherson earned about fourteen pounds a year, but she had her keep above that, and she was always kind and generous to poor ailing and harassed Jessie. She was always giving her things
that ‘she would require to buy for herself straight after'; and once when a friend suggested that she should summon Jessie for money still owing for goods from her grocery shop she said ‘never to heed, for Jessie had been to great expense on account of her illness and she'd pay when she got better.' Jess had stayed three weeks with the M'Lachlans at the time she opened her shop with no question of payment between them; and on one occasion—it would doubtless be while she was working on her own—when she couldn't pay her baker's bill, Jessie had pawned some clothes and her husband's watch to help her; it can't have been much of a watch, the whole bill was four shillings. Jess, spent much of her meagre off time at the Broomielaw, and Jessie was always in and out of the basement at Sandyford Place. She knew it well, of course; she had lived there herself for two years, and many an evening, especially when the family were away and Jess therefore not so busy, she would go round and spend an hour talking over old times, confiding her own troubles and listening to Jess's complaints about the old gentleman.

For the joke about Grandpa courting Jess was now growing exceedingly thin. Jess herself had never for one instant entertained the idea, the whole thing had at first amused and now disgusted her; but James Fleming was apparently quite serious, and had been for a long time, and was becoming worse than a nuisance. He half lived in the kitchen and, in her own word, ‘tormented' her with his attentions. Only a week before she died, when she was walking in the street, a friend, a Mrs Smith, had met her and thought her looking ill and depressed. She confessed that she was both. ‘You don't know how I'm situated; I have a miserable life of it.' She couldn't get rid of the old man, she said, he made excuses to come down to the basement with the newspapers or ‘to make up the sugar and tea', and she couldn't be bothered with him any longer; it was making her ill. It wasn't so bad when the family was at home, but as soon as they left her alone with him it was misery. He wouldn't let her out of his sight, no one else was allowed into the house, and sooner than let her run round and buy so much as a cabbage he'd go out and get it himself. And she burst out suddenly and violently that he was an old wretch and an old devil.… ‘Why, what has he done to you?' asked Mrs Smith, horrified and curious. But Jess wouldn't tell. That there was something to tell she did not conceal, but she couldn't speak of it
in front of Mrs Smith's husband. She promised to come round the following Sunday and confide it all to her, over a cup of tea.

Several people testified later to the same sort of thing. Though half a dozen ex-servants were found to say they had never seen any signs in the old gentleman of ‘indecency', most of them agreed that he was interfering and inquisitive and not seldom ‘tipsy'. One young lady who refrained from coming forward could have gone even further; for in the spring of 1852, he being then rising eighty by his present reckoning, he had been suddenly smitten by his conscience and made a voluntary confession to the Moderator and elders of his kirk that he had been guilty of the sin of fornication and had an illegitimate child by one Janet Dunsmore, a domestic servant. He was rebuked and admonished and then all was forgiven; for never had the witnesses seen so striking and edifying a display of remorse.

Miss Dunsmore did not come forward at Jessie's trial or at the subsequent enquiry, but Mary M'Kinnon, foster-sister of Jess, said again that Jess was tormented by the old man, that he was an old devil; the doorbell couldn't ring without his poking his head out of his bedroom window, or coming downstairs, to find out what it was about and he was for ever hanging about her kitchen; her heart was broken with him, and when she'd completed this six months' service she'd give in her notice. And to Elizabeth Halliday, at that time a fellow-servant with her at the house in Dunoon, she had said—as much as three years ago—that he was ‘a nasty body or a dirty body'; she had been left alone with him recently at Dunoon, and Elizabeth got the impression, though it was not openly stated, that he had been behaving indecently. She was surprised when Jess, having left to open her shop and the venture having failed, went back into the service of the Fleming family.