Heaven Knows Who

by Christianna Brand

  It was a formidable case to have to answer.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In the week following that of her committal William Wilson, a lawyer—variously called in Scotland a writer, a procurator, a law agent or simply an agent—visited Jessie M’Lachlan in prison, and from then on represented her as her legal adviser, together with Mr Dixon and Mr Strachan, also Glasgow solicitors. Immediately upon Jessie’s arrest she would be by law entitled to legal representation, but how this particular firm came to be chosen is not apparent. They were all three quite young men. Mr Wilson had been qualified only three years, Mr Dixon two, and Mr Strachan less than a year. Their average age was probably not more than thirty. Later many subscriptions were raised ‘for her defence and escape’—there is no record of how or whether the money was used to this purpose.

  Their consultations were held in a private room and Jessie’s friends in the prison therefore knew nothing of what took place, except what she told them. After the first interview she said she had explained to Mr Wilson all about old Fleming bringing her the silver to pawn; but later she grew less talkative and said her lawyers had advised her not to discuss her case; indeed, she said on one occasion they had told her that but for her declarations made at the County Buildings before the Sheriff she wouldn’t be still in prison. ‘I wish,’ added Jessie, ‘that the County Buildings would take fire and be burned up, books and declarations and all.’ She did not, in saying this, suggest that the declarations had been anything but the truth, but, said Agnes Christie and Catherine Fairley, she used to sit writing a great deal before the interviews, and she said she was trying to remember what she had said in the various statements. Agnes and Catherine were unable to say more positively what these anxious scribblings contained: like Sarah Adams, they couldn’t read writing.

  So things were a little less exciting for Agnes and Catherine till one day, about three weeks after Jessie’s commitment, something occurred to jolt her out of her reticence. She learned that old Mr Fleming had been set at liberty.

  Agnes Christie says it was she who gave Jessie this news, having learned of it herself that day on the exercise green. Jessie’s lawyers, Messrs Wilson, Dixon and Strachan, say it was they who told her.

  The position of these three gentlemen at the time was this: Mr Wilson was on the point of leaving the case and handing it over to his colleagues, and was already immersed in other business; Mr Strachan had only just come into it; Mr Dixon, when Jessie urgently wanted help, was the one she seems to have thought that she should turn to. Mr Dixon, alas! did not return this confidence; he had told her frankly that he did not believe her declarations before the Sheriff, and his general impression of the case had been that in fact she was guilty. Mr Wilson seems to have shared this opinion, for when later she wanted to ‘tell him all about it’ his immediate reaction was that she was going to make a confession.

  They had seen her two or three times already; twice, at least, reiterating that (a) her statements were true and (b) all would come right in the end, for old Mr Fleming ‘would surely clear her.’ She did not say how, and the three lawyers maintained what must have been a rather chilling silence.

  Why they had not told her long ago that the old man had been set free—for he had by now been at liberty for more than three weeks—one can’t imagine. It was not until August 7, however, that (so he says), on her saying once again that Mr Fleming would clear her, Mr Dixon repeated what was then a popular rumour, that old Fleming denied knowing her at all; and told her that anyway he had been released. He says she expressed the greatest astonishment and said, ‘Out, and left me here—I canna’ believe it!’ And Mr Wilson confirms this and adds that she questioned the prison matron, who, however, was prevented by the regulations from confirming or denying it.

  It seems likely that these three busy men—who were afterwards all a little hazy as to the sequence of events—were not strictly accurate and that Agnes Christie, who had less to occupy her, was correct. What in fact happened probably went something like this: Agnes heard the news through the grapevine and came back and told Jessie; Jessie could not believe it, tried to get the wardress to confirm it (Agnes, too, says she did) and, failing, turned to her lawyers—probably introducing her doubts tentatively by a reference to the old man instead of asking flat out. This sequence would account for her astonishment when Agnes gave her the news and for her still being surprised when Mr Dixon repeated it: she simply had not believed up to then that it could be true. When at last she was convinced, Agnes says and Catherine Fairley confirms, she burst into tears and remained for the next two days in a mood of bitter depression. James Fleming was an old rascal, she said; he was an old murderer. It was he who had killed poor Jess, and now he had set a trap for her, for Jessie, and so the guilty was set free from prison and the innocent kept in. If she had had money, she said, she too would have been let go; but she still maintained that she would be freed at last.

  Even now she fought against the facts. Ignorant and bewildered, chilled perhaps by their lack of genuine sympathy—for they privately believed her a cruel and violent murderer—she may have been suspicious even of her own counsellors. At all events, she now asked to see her husband and besought him to go and find out exactly what had happened. He confirmed the truth and on August 11, four days after Mr Dixon had told her of Mr Fleming’s release, he called round at Mr Wilson’s office and said that his wife would like to see Mr Dixon.

  Mr Dixon and Mr Strachan were both out of town; one may think it was with something of a sigh that Mr Wilson went round late the next afternoon to the prison. (As has been said, he was at the point of retiring from active interest in the case.) In these unpromising circumstances she explained that she had not fully realised that old Mr Fleming was really exonerated and set free; but now that she knew it she could not rest till she had told her lawyers all her story. Mr Wilson, afraid that she was going to prejudice her case yet more by making a confession to him, told her outright that she had better not do so; if she did, she put her advisers in a very difficult position. She protested that she was not going to incriminate herself, and suggested that he should write down what she told him as he ‘wouldn’t be able to remember it all.’ Mr Wilson preferred to rely upon his memory, and must have regretted it, for he got into something of a tangle when, six weeks later, it became urgently necessary for his credit as well as everyone else’s that he should recollect exactly what had passed.

  So Jessie settled down and recounted to him what has been described as one of the most extraordinary stories ever to be told in a court of law: the story of that night of July 4 at 17 Sandyford Place.

  Mr Wilson was considerably shaken. The more he thought of it, the more circumstantial the story seemed and the more he thought that some of it at least must be true. In a state of ‘suspense and perplexity’ he went back to his office, and must have been thankful to discover that Mr Dixon had returned to town. He told Dixon what had happened; some of it sounded like lies, he said, but some of it sounded like the truth—he thought Mr Dixon ought to go and see the woman and get something down in writing. After all, it was he she had asked for in the first place. We can see Mr Wilson with another sigh, this time of relief, washing his hands from now on of Mrs M’Lachlan. If this was his intention, however, he was a bit previous; Jessie was to rise up again one day and make him look a bit of a muddler.

  Mr Dixon whizzed off to the prison, probably in some small excitement, for here was a case which must have seemed pretty dead showing signs of life after all. Jessie once again recounted her story; as far as he could recall, it differed from what she had told Mr Wilson only in being rather more detailed. He scribbled it all down in pencil, in his tiny, close handwriting, on a folded double sheet of blue foolscap. He was to say later that, from the way she told it, he had every reason to believe it a spontaneous narrative and in no way made up of information derived from others. Neither he nor his co-agents, he solemnly affirmed, had given her advance information which might have he
lped her.

  Nor could they have done so. The indictment had not yet been served, was not to be served till almost three weeks later; no one knew what evidence would be brought against her. They had so far examined very few witnesses in the case, and those mostly concerned with the leather trunk and the discovery of the bloodstained clothes. There seems to have been some attempt to identify Mary Adams, the washerwoman, as the woman who had been up in Hamilton. It was her child who had presented herself at the station with the leather trunk; she had been concerned with much of the pawning and redeeming of articles, she was in possession of the blood-stained crinoline hoops, and she and Sarah were in and out of the house in the Broomielaw and familiar with Mrs M’Lachlan’s friends and affairs generally. She knew Jess M’Pherson well and had probably seen old Mr Fleming when he visited Jessie, as he now and again had done, at the Broomielaw; so she might quite conceivably have gained entry to Sandyford Place. Some more or less delicate probing and fencing went on. She was confronted with Mr Dunlop, who had sold the black bonnet-box, and by Aaron Wharton, who had handed over the box at Hamilton station to the woman and the boy, James Chassels; and finally with Mr and Mrs Gibson from the public-house at Low Waters. Mr Wilson and Mr Strachan, having heard a description of Mrs Adams and the description given by the Gibsons of the poor wanderer who had applied to them for half a glass of whisky on that hot afternoon in early July, had persuaded themselves that the Gibsons ‘had Adams in their eye’. (But of course they hadn’t; and, as has been said, Jessie, though she later admitted her peregrinations in Hamilton, always denied that this visit to the public-house had ever taken place.) They also had up Sarah Adams and questioned both mother and daughter, though Mr Dixon is careful to make the distinction that this was a skirmish to try to prove something against the Adams’s and not a formal examination of them in regard to the prisoner; that is to say, they were not then asked for evidence as to Jessie’s movements. Mrs Adams seems to have borne it all with fortitude, even consenting to having her foot measured, with a view to comparison with the bloody print in dead Jessie’s room; but when Mr Wilson touched on the earlier case of M’Kay, where ten-year-old Sarah had told her tarradiddles, then the affronted mother ‘got up in a passion’ and refused thenceforward to answer any more questions.

  Apart, therefore, from these brief encounters and from newspaper reports and general talk among the police, the lawyers at this stage knew next to nothing themselves; so, the inference went, even had they wanted to, they couldn’t have prompted Jessie. And, indeed, why should they want to? Till she made her statement, they believed her in their hearts to be guilty of atrocious murder; and though they were, as her advisers, concerned to present her case in the best light possible, this is a different matter from seeking by fraudulent means to pervert the ends of justice on her behalf. In the prevailing spirit of the times regarding the case they were obliged to protest their honesty; but at this distance we may almost certainly simply and absolutely accept their word, backed up as it was by the facts. The prisoner made her statement in such a way as to convince them—prejudiced as they were—that she made it untaught and spontaneously; and they themselves contributed nothing to it, if only because they could not.

  So for the second time Jessie told her story; and we can picture Mr Dixon sitting when she was done staring down at those tiny scribbled, close lines on the blue fold of paper, staring into the face of the woman before him, and staring at the paper again. He had perhaps been sceptical of Mr Wilson’s report—Mr Wilson was, in part at least, sceptical himself. Now—he had heard Jessie herself tell the story. He had arrived still believing her guilty; now he was confounded—he did not know what to think.

  He left her and went back to Mr Wilson. Mr Wilson, as we know, had washed his hands of M’Lachlan, and he was very busy—with other affairs. Mr Dixon began to read out the statement, but it seemed to Mr Wilson very long and minute, and when there came a merciful interruption he said just to leave it and he’d read it over some time for himself. But when he and his clerk came to look at the pencilled notes they found the writing so small and so close that really, said the clerk, it looked as though it were the Lord’s Prayer written on a sixpence. But it was only Jessie M’Lachlan’s prayer, written in a prison; and Mr Wilson never did get around to reading it, but was content to have it collected by Mr Strachan the next day—or it may have been Mr Dixon, he couldn’t remember—and in future just to hear snatches of their ceaseless discussions on the subject. And anyway they—Strachan and Dixon—were all for dashing here, there and everywhere making enquiries, while he was for refraining from interference till the Fiscal had concluded his own investigations.

  It was Mr Strachan, in fact, who had collected the notes from Mr Wilson’s office. Mr Dixon had gone round to see him the morning after his interview with Jessie and had told him of her latest ‘extraordinary statement’. Mr Strachan read through the notes with the greatest care; but now a division arose in turn between him and Mr Dixon. Dixon thought they should place the statement immediately as a fourth Declaration before the Sheriff; Mr Strachan thought they should probe about first and see how vulnerable it might prove to investigation. Mr Dixon had so far been the Doubting Thomas; now all was changed. But then Mr Strachan hadn’t, like Mr Dixon, had the advantage of hearing Jessie herself tell the story.

  By this time, however, Mr Strachan whether he believed in Jessie or not, was infected with Dixon’s new-born enthusiasm. They had another long consultation next day, but still couldn’t agree. Strachan was going to the theatre that night, but he made up his mind to call round on Dixon afterwards and go on with the argument and, meeting Mr Gordon Smith, a fellow lawyer, at the theatre, he confided the whole story and persuaded him to come along too. Mr Dixon was out but they walked about the streets for two hours talking and talking, and at midnight tried again. This time Mr Dixon was at home and they all sat up till four o’clock in the morning in deep consultation. Mr Dixon had by now laboriously traced over his pencilled notes in ink. One would have thought it less trouble to have simply made a fresh copy of them, and so at least have had two—the first remained for a long time the only one, and for a fortnight at least was just carried round in Mr Dixon’s pocket; nor was it so valuable as an original but that he chucked it away when at last they did get a copy.

  Mr Gordon Smith’s advice was that, as they couldn’t be sure of getting corroboration of the particulars of the statement, it would for the present be dangerous to adopt it as a line of defence. (When, later, they found corroboration he was all for their going ahead and using it.) Still not content, Mr Strachan further canvassed the opinion of a Mr Galbraith, a procurator of the Court, ‘standing high in his profession’. Mr Galbraith supported his own contention, that it would be hazardous to use the statement until they were much more sure than they could be at present, that it was true. So Mr Dixon was in a minority of one: and Mr Rutherfurd Clark, whom they now briefed as counsel for Mrs M’Lachlan’s defence, left him still alone on the side of ‘publish and be damned’.

  Or perhaps it would be truer to say a minority of two: for the prisoner throughout was anxious and urgent that in some way or other the statement should be brought before the Court; and indeed on the last day of her trial, sent for Counsel and begged him whatever the outcome of the trial, to put her statement before the Court.

  Andrew Rutherfurd Clark, Sheriff of Inverness, Senior Counsel for the defence in the case of Her Majesty’s Advocate against Jessie M’Lachlan, was at that time still a young man, thirty-four years of age, keen, clever and conscientious, an accomplished scholar and conversationalist and a most able lawyer who was to become Solicitor-General and in due course be raised to the bench; and under a certain affectation of manner there was, we may deduce from a something about his whole conduct of the case, a true integrity and tenderness of heart. He entered with enthusiasm into the rising excitement of the two solicitors from Glasgow who arrived for their first consultation bearing the increasingly precious notes o
f their client’s latest statement. It must have seemed to all of them that out of the mire of a sordid and brutish murder with gain as its object and with the verdict a foregone conclusion, had sprung a new and thrilling promise: that their client was after all quite possibly just what she seemed—a frightened and innocent woman with no knights to ride to her defence but their three selves. As the days and weeks passed, it becomes more and more apparently their passionate determination to see that the victim, trapped and helpless, should be recognised for what she was, and set forth free.

  Mr Rutherfurd Clark will no doubt have been acquainted by the time the three met, with the outlines of the case against the accused. Mr Strachan read aloud from Mr Dixon’s notes Jessie’s answer to that case.

  Mr Clark’s first reaction was to insist on a thorough and immediate investigation all round, to try to get the facts of the statement corroborated.

  Mr Dixon and Mr Strachan concentrated on the information offered by Donald M’Quarrie—of whom they had heard nothing up till now, except for a rumour in one of the papers that a milk-boy was declaring that he had seen old Fleming at the door of Sandyford Place early on the morning of the murder; and on enquiries of Mr Littlejohn who kept the liquor shop in North Street. Had Mr Littlejohn heard a knocking at his door on the Friday evening at a little past eleven, after he had closed the shop? Unfortunately Mr Littlejohn couldn’t oblige; and by the very nature of the story she had told there could be no other witnesses in their client’s defence. Only ‘the heroic milk-boy’ remained to stand in staunch support of Messrs Clark, Strachan and Dixon to the end.

  So it had to be faced: they had the statement but it must stand almost totally uncorroborated.

  Rutherfurd Clark grasped the nettle.

  It was not until 1898 that a prisoner was permitted to give evidence in his own defence. This reform in the law has not necessarily proved a blessing to all so privileged. The witness box is a strangely revealing place—and yet to avoid it is to subject the accused to adverse comment; for if he be innocent, why not give evidence, what has he got to fear? In 1862, however, this doubtful benefit was not open to Jessie M’Lachlan. To use the statement, it would be necessary either to declare it in advance before the Sheriff and put it in with the earlier statements, or to read it after the verdict—if it was then necessary—when the prisoner was allowed, at last, to speak.