Heaven Knows Who (35 page)

There was much scandal and a deputation of villagers waited upon Mr Fleming. The old gentleman became all of a sudden verra deef though he was not known to have been deaf before, but when he could be got to hear, he said that aye, a window had been found open and thieves had been in and robbed him. (Could this incident—if true—later have given Mr Fleming the idea—if guilty—of the allegedly open pantry window at Sandyford Place and the pretence of robbery?)

These last witnesses did not show up at the official enquiries, but Mrs M'Kinnon, a foster-sister of Jess M'Pherson, put in an indignant appearance to say that if old Mr Fleming had said in court that when he heard the screams he had thought she might be spending the night with Jess, then that was a very strange remark indeed. There was a woman she ca'd her sister, he had said, and it bood to be her. There was only one woman in the world, declared Mrs M'Kinnon, that Jess called her sister, and that was herself. But she had never in her life spent a night at Sandyford Place and there was no reason on earth for Mr Fleming to suppose she was there. She repeated the same thing in several forms, and seems mysteriously to have considered herself insulted by the bare suggestion. Perhaps she wondered, as we ourselves can't help wondering, what on earth he supposed they were up to, anyway.

And then there emerged a very interesting piece of confirmation; for Alexander Blair, a brewer, came forward to say that on the Friday three weeks before the murder, he had indeed had a few drinks with old Mr Fleming and when he had seen Mr Fleming into a cab and paid the driver to take him home, Mr Fleming had been ‘not tipsy, but hearty; in good spirits'. He must have worsened very rapidly for the cab driver found him on arrival, sitting forward with his head hanging down, very drowsy; and decided that he was under the influence of liquor. He had to be assisted up the steps where he was handed over to a middle-aged female ‘of rather dark aspect'—though whether this referred to Jess M'Pherson's complexion or to her reception of erring Grandpa is not apparent. The cabby was by this time ‘satisfied that he had got drink'.

Both gentlemen thought it would be soon after six that Mr Fleming arrived home on this occasion; so Jessie is wrong if she says it was eleven. At risk of over-partiality one must concede that it would not necessarily be a very damaging error. Jess had told her the story under circumstances of extreme stress, and may easily have been misunderstood. If the old man went straight to bed, as she says, he may have slept several hours before waking up and going down to the basement; and not just an hour.

An interesting scrap of testimony was added during the course of the enquiries by the sixteen-year-old girl, Mary Black, who
said she had gone to Sandyford Place on the morning after the murder, and scrubbed part of the ground floor hall. Mary was much discredited by the
Daily Herald
and several discrepancies do appear in her evidence; but they are not such as to effect Jessie's story—Mary is accused for example of having named a false address as her place of employment. She was further alleged by the
Herald
to have given out a whole tarradiddle of nonsense: that on her way to Sandyford Place she had met Mrs M'Lachlan, carrying a large bundle, that Mr Fleming had had blood on his shirt sleeves, that he had led her down to the basement where she had seen another woman, a stout woman with ‘the bloody mark of a hand on her cheek'; that this woman had shown her a bundle with blood dripping from it, informed her that one of the servants had just been delivered of a child and offered her a pound to get rid of the bundle. The
Herald
rightly poured ridicule on it all; but did not pause to consider whether Mary had really said it. In the existing state of rumour and conjecture it would be quite enough for the girl to let slip that she had visited the house, for all the rest to be added by others. She certainly suggested nothing of the sort when officially questioned. The
Herald
gets quite ecstatic over her having testified that Mr Fleming had fetched a pail from a water closet on the ground floor, when in fact there wasn't one there, but Mary simply reminded the enquiry that she hadn't said a water closet, she'd said a closet, meaning a cupboard; and a ground floor cupboard does appear in the isometrical plan.

Her official story does certainly seem faintly suspect and yet there is no real reason to disbelieve it. True, she did not tell it till after the trial, but she had told her mother and a neighbour (she couldn't name the neighbour) soon after the murder was discovered and it was her mother who had told her to say nothing lest she get into a hobble. When she did at last repeat it, it was in confidence to her friend Bella Beveridge; and it was the faithless Beveridge who told a policeman, in consequence of which Mary was hunted out and made to come forward. There is no evidence, therefore, of publicity seeking on her part and the mother seems to have been anxious to avoid it. Nevertheless, such are the oddities to her evidence that it probably would not be wise to give it more than a fifty per cent credence.

She says that she got to the house somewhere about a quarter
to nine. Questioned (presumably with reference to the rumoured statement) she answers that she doesn't think she met any woman on the way carrying a bundle; but that anyway she didn't know Mrs M'Lachlan and wouldn't have recognised her. (In fact, Jessie would have been well away by that time. It was a twenty-minutes walk direct to the Broomielaw and, by a very
in
direct route, she got there at nine.)

The old man took down the chain from the front door, says Mary, and admitted her. We know from the milk-boy that it had been replaced after Mr Fleming said they wanted nae milk. He now replaced it again.

One may suppose that Mr Fleming would be taken unawares by this sudden appearance on the doorstep of a girl declaring that she has an appointment to come and work there. Having been surprised into letting her in, he would cast about for some job she could do which need not take her down to the basement. As to the sooty patch at the top of the basement stairs which she says she was set to scrub, Mary gave evidence three, times before the two enquiries which followed the trial. The first two times she says that the floor was marked as though people had been trampling over it with soot on their feet and that she saw no signs of blood. The last time she has evidently volunteered information, bringing her mother (who was usually ‘in a decline') to support her story, which that lady did, adding that Mary was a very smart girl, which phrase she used not as to her appearance but in the American sense. Mary now says that her mother had that day reminded her that when she first told the story at home she said that she did see blood—the bloody mark of a footprint. She has ‘never had a bit mind of it till my mother told me today', but now she remembers it distinctly and that she thought at the time that the soot had been rubbed over the waxcloth to conceal the mark. (She adds that she ‘couldn't be sure it was a woman's footprint', but these reported statements are often misleading. She was probably answering a question, whether it could or could not have been a woman's footprint, and what she said really amounts to ‘I don't know.' The footprint appeared to be leading into old Mr Fleming's bedroom and, innocent or guilty, there would be no object in Jessie's going there.)

But whether or not Mary did see any footprint is of no great importance, except in testing her veracity; and though it seems
possible that this is a piece of embroidery, she will have become something of a heroine after two appearances at the enquiry, and a little wishful recollecting of a sensational nature need not, perhaps, shake our faith in her earlier statements. Moreover, it is all supported by her mother. If Jessie's statement is true, it is by no means unlikely that there were in fact sooty footmarks, or coal-dusty footmarks (though Mary says she recognised the smell of soot), at the top of the stairs. The old man was making up the fire, says Jessie, and burning things, and he went out to the shed and got in more coal. She herself went up after the first attack to try to go out and fetch a doctor, having pulled on the boots over which blood and water had been spilt—so there may have been a footmark after all—and which had been drying in the kitchen hearth; and she says the old man was up and down stairs all night, specifically to fetch the silver and open the door to the milk-boy. As far as Mr Fleming is concerned, there needn't have been anything incriminating about the soot marks. They simply furnished him with a job to give the girl to do which would not necessitate her going down to the basement.

And in this, if Mary's story is true, lies most of its interest; and how tremendously interesting it is! It bears out Elizabeth Brownlie's statement about borrowing the spade—she, too, was headed off from seeing into the kitchen. The basement was in no condition on that Saturday morning to be inspected by observant young women; and—especially in view of his claim to have noticed nothing unusual there—if the old man went out of his way to prevent these girls from seeing into it, it is a most significant point in favour of Jessie's story.

And here is yet another person—a girl actually arriving, commissioned to do work for Jess—to whom he fails to mention that the maid has disappeared.

And once more the low-set, stout young woman raises her fat red face, and P.C. Campbell takes time off from the chastening of the bothersome prostitutes to come and repeat with embellishments his story of having seen her with the woman in the white mutch and long white ties over her shoulders, at the door of No. 17 the night after the murder. He remembers the date by the fact that he posted a letter to his father that evening, and he produces his landlady to say that she saw him writing it. His friend Allan M'Lean, blacksmith, was with him that night and will say
how he waited, leaning against the railings of Sandyford Place, while he, P.C. Campbell, went up and examined the door of No. 18. But alas! M'Lean, though he agrees that he met Campbell that Saturday night, says nothing of the kind. He is certain Campbell couldn't have posted the letter in the Sandyford Toll as he says he did: he wouldn't have had time. And he doesn't remember leaning against any railings and doesn't remember Campbell going up to No. 18, and doesn't remember seeing a woman with a fat red face, or indeed any woman; in fact he doesn't remember having been in Sandyford Place at all—none of which is astonishing, for he has been in the ale-house since soon after five, and P.C. Campbell's vision didn't take place till between half-past eight and nine.…

And finally there comes one electrifying piece of evidence—the evidence of Miss M'Intyre, who, homeward hastening on the night of the murder, passed the two gossiping women and heard them remark on the woman in the grey cloak just turning into the lane that ran behind the houses in Sandyford Place.

This witness, a lady of ‘very retiring disposition', did not appear at the trial. She had to be persuaded by the minister of her church to come forward at all and offer her story at the official enquiry. Had she told it earlier, she could hardly have been ignored; it is very hard to see how the evidence can be otherwise than conclusive.

Miss M'Intyre was a needlewoman employed for the moment by a lady in Sandyford Place and temporarily sleeping there. Her story bears out the statement in an astonishing degree.

At eleven o'clock, says Jessie, or about that time, she went out for the mutchkin of whisky, and her story is confirmed by Mrs Walker, who saw her turn out of the lane into Elderslie Street, and by both Mrs Walker and Miss Dykes, who saw her return, this time coming down Elderslie Street from Sauchiehall Street. (The odious Mrs Walker volunteers the gratuitous piece of information that Robert Robin's shop in Elderslie Street was—she believes—still open: the implication being that, if she had really wanted spirits, Jessie needn't have been put off by the fact that the North Street shop was closed. One can't see what difference it makes—it is not suggested that she was out for any other reason than to buy whisky. All that matters is that she did go out, and Mrs Walker herself confirms that.) She furthermore fixes the time
pretty exactly. Her husband, for whom she was on the look out, arrived from the top of Elderslie Street, coming down it towards her.
¹
‘That's an odd direction to be coming from,' said his lady at once. But he had only walked back that way with a friend, and ‘It's no' so late,' said he defensively, taking out his watch. It was just a quarter past eleven. It was four or five minutes since the woman in the grey cloak had turned into Sandyford Lane.

At that moment Miss M'Intyre was going up Elderslie Street, so close to the two gossipers that she heard them comment on the woman going into the lane and wonder what she was doing there at that time of night, and whether it had any connection with a man who had just passed by her and glanced into her face. Afraid lest they set about her own reputation next, Miss M'Intyre hurried on, but as she turned the corner into Sandyford Place—which must have been about the same moment Jessie came to the garden door of No. 17, leading in from the lane—she was held up by a little group of people who were standing there discussing some strange sounds coming from ‘that house where the light is'.

Miss M'Intyre went on. The house in question had lights in the windows of the front basement room, and from this room came ‘the moans of a person in very great distress'. She was later quite certain that the house the moaning came from was No. 17.

The evidence of Miss M'Intyre is surely to be relied upon? The all-observant Mrs Walker saw her in Elderslie Street at the time she says she was there; and when on the Monday evening she learned of the murder—no one then knowing how long ago it had happened—she said to several witnesses, ‘If it had been on the Friday, I'd have thought that was what I heard.' She described the whole incident and seemed to be ‘put about' by what she had heard.

Two other witnesses support her story, though not officially—there was a pretty widespread rash of modesty in coming forward among those who really could have helped Jessie, perhaps because of the pretty widespread rush of those who had in fact nothing to tell. A young man, a very respectable young man, who lived just across Elderslie Street from the mouth of Sandyford Lane, was arriving home at exactly ten past eleven that night when, as he was closing his door, he heard two screams. He told his mother about it and said that he supposed they must come
from the waste ground, haunt of the bothersome prostitutes (no one seems to have thought it mattered if
they
screamed, poor things), but that it sounded much more muffled like, as though it came from inside one of the houses. And a servant, out with a gentleman friend, heard moans as she passed No. 17 Sandyford Place some time after midnight, and a woman's voice cried, ‘Oh dear—oh dear!' ‘One of the servants is catching it in that house,' remarked the gentleman humorously. She told her mistress next day but, despite that lady's anxious insistence at the time of the trial and the subsequent enquiries, was too much afraid of the notoriety to come forward. It may well be that the injured woman cried out at this time—perhaps when she was making the effort to struggle to the bed: Jessie says she sat for a long time on the floor with her before they got her to bed. It seems terrible that these two did not come forward in support of Miss M'Intyre; a patchwork of their three stories might well have turned the tide at the trial. For Jessie's story and Miss M'Intyre's dovetail with one another. Jessie says that on her return from the expedition to buy whisky she stood in the basement lobby and heard the sound of moans coming from the bedroom. This exactly coincides with the time Miss M'Intyre also heard them; indeed, it fits in quite perfectly—if moans could be heard from the street, so probably could any loud conversation also. Jessie says she went first into the kitchen and put the unspent money on the table. This would allow time for Miss M'Intyre to pause and stand listening. If she had stayed a minute longer she might well have heard Jessie cry out ‘What have you done to her?'