The front door was locked and the key was not in it.
She went down to the kitchen again. He was standing bending over Jess, his hands on his knees, looking down at her. She went forward to ask him for the key and now she saw that Jess was already far worse than when she had left her only a few minutes ago—and for the first time it came to her that she might die. She was still alive, for though she seemed to be unconscious she was moving; but unless help came very soon it might well be too late. She asked for the key.
He would not let her go, he would arrange it all in his own time, he said. She did not stay to argue but went off upstairs again—it was dawn by now and growing light, perhaps some of the neighbours would be stirring. She threw open the shutters in the ground floor parlour looking over the back gardens, and flung up the window. But there was no one. She was hurrying through to the dining-room to try the front of the house when, at the head of the basement stairs, she suddenly stopped. A moment later she was running down them as fast as she could go.
She saw the upraised cleaver, dripping blood, and the poor blood-streaming, mutilated head, tumbled off the pillow to the stone of the kitchen floor; and even as she stood in a paralysis of horror, again and again the terrible weapon crashed down.
She gave one wild scream and ran forward into the kitchen; but the old man turned and looked at her and at that look she took to her heels and started to run back up the stairs again. He came after her and halfway up the stairs her terror-stricken heart betrayed her and she stood, violently palpitating, spread-eagled against the wall, powerless to move another step; and began to scream for help.
He came to the foot of the stairs. ‘Come down,’ he called. ‘I’m not going to meddle with you.’ But she saw the blood-dripping cleaver still in his hand and could only stand trembling and weeping, pressed against the wall, imploring, ‘Oh, let me away, let me go; for the love of God let me away.’
‘Come down,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll do you no harm.’
‘She’s dead,’ sobbed Jessie. ‘She’s killed. Oh, what shall I do?’ And she prayed again, ‘Let me away, let me away.’
He came up the stairs and caught her by the cloak. ‘I kent frae the first she cou’dna’ live; and if any doctor had come in I would ha’ had to have answered for her death, for she’d ha’ told.’ But she only sobbed and cried, ‘Oh, what shall I do?—out of my house all night, and Jessie killed!’
‘Aye,’ he said. ‘If you tell what you know, you’ll be taken for her death as well as I. But there’s no need to be feart. Come down; it need never be found out.’
Cowed and terrified, she crept back down the stairs. It was true—out of her house all night, and now here lay the murdered body of her friend. She looked at it and shuddered. He must have seen the look, for he said eagerly: ‘You see—my life’s in your power; and so is your life in my power.’ If she informed upon him, he said, he would deny the whole thing and charge her with the murder. But the fact was, it was as much as both their lives were worth that either should ever say a word about it. Let them both keep it secret, and it could never be found out who had done it. ‘Help me now,’ he said. ‘We must get her out of here and wash up the blood from the floor.…’
‘I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t. Not if I were never to move from here again.…’ And she besought him, ‘Let me go away, let me go.’
But he ignored her. He tore away the sheet and blankets and tossed them on to the kitchen table and took hold of the poor, terrible body by the shoulders and dragged it out through the passage and into the bedroom, and came back and took the sheet off the table and began to clean up the floor with it. But in disturbing the heap of bedclothes he revealed the bloody cleaver which he must have put down on the table; and at sight of it, her terrors redoubled and she began again to implore him to let her go. She would never reveal a word of it, never, never; even if she were charged with the murder as well as he, she would never say a word. Only, for God’s sake let her go!
‘We must pretend there was a burglary,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave the pantry window open and tell them I found the house robbed in the morning.’ And he went back into the dead woman’s room and came back with an armful of dresses. ‘Take these away. We can say her box was robbed.’
‘Take them away? What could I do with them?’
‘Buy a box somewhere, pack them up and take a train to some out-of-the-way place and get rid of them. Or send to box to some railway station or other, to lie till called for. Then it can never be found out what happened to the things.’
She looked at poor Jess’s treasured ‘best clothes’ and, her own terror a little abated, gave way to a purer grief. ‘How could you do such a thing?’
‘I couldna’ help ma’sel’,’ he said. ‘Ye ken verra weel that I liked Jess fine; but I kent frae the first she couldna’ live.’
‘But what could ever tempt you in the first place—to strike the poor girl like that?’
‘Ay, weel,’ he said, ‘ye ken, Jessie, she had a most provoking tongue. She’d been casting things up at me and I was mad at her. When she was at me I seemed to have nae powers of speaking, and I just struck out at her in a passion.’ He had been on the brink of doing it a week ago, he said, and had only just stopped himself.
The hours passed. Dawn broke, a new morning was born, ‘a lovely morning, still and calm.’ She sat sick, shivering, appalled with care, in the blood-splashed kitchen while the old man ‘dichted up’ the floor and took the cloth out to the lobby and rubbed over the bloody trail where he had dragged the body through. He came back for the blankets and sheets and returned with some things and stuffed them on to the fire—she thought they were clothes belonging to Jess. He had taken off his coat and was working in his shirt sleeves, but even the shirt was saturated with blood and he took it off and put that on the fire also, and filled a tin basin with water and washed himself, and put on a clean shirt from the airing screen. Then he went off upstairs and changed his trousers and waistcoat and came back again and fetched more coal from the outside shed and made up the fire. Six o’clock, seven.…
And then a bell rang.
It must have turned cold their hearts, the sound of that bell shrilling through the deathly silence of the house. But he pulled himself together. ‘Go and answer it.’
She utterly refused. ‘No, I’ll not go to the door—go you.’ So he went up, still in his shirt sleeves. When he came down again, he had on a coat. It was the milk-boy, he said; but he had taken no jug up with him and returned with no milk. The open dining-room door, however, had perhaps given him a new idea; for he went off again and came back with a collection of silver. She had better take this too. It would lend colour to the idea of a burglary. ‘Take it to Lundie’s and pawn it in some false name—Mary M’Donald or M’Kay or something like that, and give a false address, give No. 5 St Vincent Street, then no one can ever trace where it came from.’ But he thought better of it. After all, perhaps it would be unwise to pawn it. ‘Put it in with the other things and get rid of it.’
‘Get rid of it?’ she said dully.
He had told her already. She could buy a tin box at any ironmongers, it needn’t cost her more than five shillings—and he fished out his purse and gave her twenty-seven shillings. Pack the things in the box and take the box to somewhere where she wasn’t known. Was she known in Edinburgh? No?—then take them to Edinburgh, and go where there was some water and drop the box in. And once again he swore her to secrecy—promise never to breathe one syllable of what has happened here tonight! For if you do, he reminded her, it will be your life as well as mine.
She swore; not a word, she would never breathe a word of it.
‘I’ll look after you,’ he said. ‘I’ll set you up in a shop, Jessie, you shall never want again.…’
It was after eight o’clock and the world was astir. She had better get home. She lifted the big bundle of clothes and silver and hid it beneath the grey cloak and together they crept down to the end of the gard
en and he unlocked the door into the lane and let her through. It closed behind her and she heard the key turn in the lock again. With her burden of terror, she was all alone.
She went along the lane, westward, and home by a roundabout route by way of Kelvingrove Street, and turned at last into Broomielaw Street. But the people were coming out on their way home from night work and she dodged up Washington Street to avoid them and down James Watt Street and slipped in at the back door of the ‘close’ and up the stair and rang at her own front door. Mrs Campbell let her in.
Over the blood-stained, bedraggled skirts, she still wore the cinnamon dress.
Throughout the court there was no sound, no movement as, in his clear, cool, unemotional voice, Mr Clark read the concluding lines of the statement. ‘I never had any quarrel with Jess. On every occasion we were most affectionate and friendly. I was not pressed for money. I paid my rent on Saturday, July 4, before I pawned the plate. I paid £4.’
* Here for almost the only time, I desert the actual wording of the text; but everything is in substance exactly authentic, including of course what was said.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
This then was the statement that Mrs M’Lachlan had made to Mr Wilson—the statement Mr Dixon had carried round with him, stuffed into his pocket—the statement that had lifted those legal hearts to a sudden enthusiasm of interest and hope. As has been said, we may accept it at this distance, as exactly what it purported to be: ‘all her own work’ and made at a time when neither she nor her advisers knew more than the broadest outline of the case against her.
Sound and movement returned to the stunned and silent Court. The jury, hitherto so cocksure, now looked ill at ease, some shaken, some unconvinced, but all utterly taken aback. A policeman, unnerved, broke into tears. The prisoner who had sat weeping during much of the reading, especially where Jess M’Pherson was mentioned, pulled herself together and—her strength of will was amazing—returned to her former outward calm.
There were at this stage two courses open to the judge. He might defer sentence until the statement could be examined and investigated; or he might question her on it then and there.
If we place ourselves for a moment (he himself spent only a moment on it) in the position of Lord Deas, faced with this most extraordinary volte face, we shall see that there were three aspects of the statement open to examination. First the character of the prisoner and the circumstances of its making. Second the external evidence. Third, the internal evidence, the mute witness of the murdered body and the scene of the crime.
As to the first, two points do seem very greatly in favour of the truth of the statement. One is that the prisoner had till the moment of Mr Fleming’s release from custody evinced a calm conviction that of course he would ‘clear her’. (When asked by her fellow prisoners if she could really be ‘in’ for the murder, she replied innocently, ‘Oh, no, Mr Fleming’s in for that.’) But why, if she were guilty, should she suppose for one moment that he would defend her? Either he was an innocent witness to her guilt or he knew nothing whatsoever about it. He swore that the latter was true: why then, or why in either case, should she expect him to protect her from justice? Why her utter astonishment, her subsequent despair, when the old man was released? Was she so cunning, let alone such an actress, that she could evolve such a plan of behaviour in advance and so carry it through as to deceive prison officers, cell mates and lawyers alike? And then, having spoken never a word against him, reiterating only that he would explain everything and make a’ right—the moment she knows for certain that he has gone off and left her to carry her burden alone, she begins to speak: she feels free—free to accuse; feels absolved, she would claim, from that oath taken on the Bible, an oath which this religiously-minded Scotswoman would doubtless hold sacredly binding; might well be also superstitiously binding; and she launches into this long, circumstantial, connected story.
And the second point is that it is a long, circumstantial and connected story. She had proved herself in her three earlier statements and indeed throughout the days that followed the murder, to be an extremely bad liar—contradictory, unconvincing, easily startled into recklessness. Now she comes forth with this sustained narrative, impossible of contradiction at any save one unimportant point and covering every detail in the long, long tally of the indictment against her—and before she can possibly have known what any of them were.
And secondly, where there were outside witnesses their evidence is nowhere in conflict with her story. In some cases indeed, it supplies supporting proof which seems absolutely unassailable; but this was not forthcoming until after the trial, when extra evidence was taken in investigation of the statement; and though most of it was covered in our earlier chapters, sitting here as we do for the moment in his lordship’s place, we are as yet unaware of it. We must judge upon the facts that when Jessie says she went out at eleven for a mutchkin of whisky, she is supported by the two gossiping women who saw her go out and return; when she says that the old man answered the door to the milk-boy’s ring—that the door was locked—that he took ‘nae milk’—and, gratuitous detail, that though he went up in his shirt sleeves he returned wearing a coat—she is in each instance supported by M’Quarrie. And though they are small points, unimportant and not at all conclusive, the fact that the three sisters saw lights burning in the dining-room in the early hours of the morning, does lend colour to her story of having heard the old man moving about the house. If (as is our judicial opinion) the murder was committed at four in the morning, it would not have been necessary for her to light the gas in her search for the silver; it was quite light by then. Nor, surely, would she have dared to light it at any time—with the old man asleep on the same floor. And even the mysterious gentleman who did or did not admit to having seen old Fleming on the steps of the house that night, adds his crumb of support: if only to her implication that Mr Fleming went up at some time in the early hours and removed the key from the door so that she shouldn’t go out and call a doctor. He need not have gone outside for that, certainly, but being there, it is by no means impossible that he poked out his head to see if anyone was stirring who might have heard poor Jess screaming. It would be a foolish but a very natural thing to do.
As for the internal evidence, this does explain to an extraordinary degree many things which remained unaccounted for by the prosecution. The two sets of wounds, the second set all on one side of the head, inflicted while the victim was lying down. All three doctors agreed that it was at least possible for the wounds across the face to have been inflicted while the woman was standing. One thought it unlikely but Dr Hamilton roundly declared that it was ‘an absurdity’ to question it. He had studied a great number of murders during his work in South Africa and he knew what he was talking about; he did not actually add ‘if others didn’t’. The fact that there was blood on two different weapons, the hammer and the cleaver. The fact that the face of the injured woman appeared at some stage to have been bathed (there was rather confused evidence later about the neck also having been washed, and the doctor thought this had happened after the second lot of injuries had been inflicted, that is to say, after death. This seems so inexplicable and unlikely that it is easier to suppose the doctor mistaken. The other doctors did not concur. In any case, it does nothing to discredit Jessie’s story). The fact that the bed had at some stage been slept in, that the pillows and bedclothes had been pulled off and later thrown back again on to the bed. The fact that the pillows were blood-stained, but not nearly so much as if the second attack had been made while the head was lying on them: Jessie says that when she saw the old man attacking her, Jess was lying with her head no longer on the pillows but on the kitchen floor. The fact that one sheet, damp and much blood-stained, was rolled up and thrown under a wash-stand—she says the old man mopped up the kitchen floor with it. The fact that part of the bedroom floor had been washed—a detail inexplicable except in the light of her story, for though the kitchen and the lobby might have been cl
eaned up to postpone discovery, this would not apply to the bedroom where behind the locked door the body was openly lying. The fact that she says the old man spilt soap and water on her skirts and shoes—and her skirt was found to show patches of bleaching from some such chemical as soda, and marks of her naked foot were found in the bedroom and (though not proven hers) in the kitchen.
In the kitchen are the famous ‘marks of a severe struggle’, number three in the list of Conclusions drawn up by Doctors Fleming and Macleod (of which list Lord Deas said that there were matters in it—and he later specified this evidence of a struggle—not proper to a medical report; in which remark, just for once we must heartily agree with him). Their ‘conclusion’ does certainly, as was earlier observed, seem based on very meagre evidence—‘confused footprints, the marks of twisting heels, of the ball of a foot’, some of the footprints being of bare feet. (No bits of wood seem to have been produced to measure these.) There was also the mark of a bloody hand on the sink, as though someone had clutched at the sink in falling. It was later put to the doctors that these marks were not inconsistent with Jessie’s story of how she and the old man had assisted the injured woman into the kitchen and later, without raising her from the ground, moved her to a place further from the fire; that lying there she had been attacked, and the corpse had been subsequently dragged away. One doctor held out but the others acknowledged that the marks were equally consistent with either theory. A third was put forward in a letter published in the papers by a lady signing herself ‘Another Housewife’. It reaches a double-edged conclusion. When a woman washes a floor, the writer says, she gets down on her hands and knees to it. A man just stoops down or squats and the turning heel marks on the kitchen flagstones might well be those not of any ‘struggle’ but of a man trying to wash the floor. In contradiction to this quite interesting suggestion, one must recall Jessie’s own evidence that in the bedroom at any rate, Mr Fleming ‘went down on his hands and knees’ and began to mop up the blood, wringing the cloth out into a basin.
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