Quite an interesting point was made by a woman writing to the papers over the signature ‘A Housewife’—doubtless the precursor of ‘Another Housewife’ who wrote about the washing of the floors. This woman reminded readers that it was common usage to keep the kitchen fire in at night with a ‘gathering coal’, a large lump of coal placed in the centre of the grate—all it needs is to be broken up next morning, and it was indeed the custom in the Fleming household, for the servant next door could often hear the coal being broken. But, she points out, both the old man and Jessie speak of the fire in the kitchen being ‘mended’ between seven and eight in the morning. If Jessie were the murderer, there would be no reason to keep the fire stoked up: the only need might be so that incriminating garments might be burned there, but Jessie did not burn her bloody clothes but took them all home. Only in the light of her story, is this fact, that the fire was kept stoked up in the kitchen, explicable—that the old man was in and out all night, at one time making tea: that Jess lay there for some time between the two attacks, to try to get warm, and that subsequently he destroyed his blood-stained clothes there.
And so to the hours which followed the second, and fatal attack. Here there does seem a possible discrepancy in Jessie’s story, and if it was a mistake it was a strange one to have made. But it was made also by the two doctors who, with all the advantage of long and dispassionate examination of the position of the murdered body, could still announce it as their final ‘conclusion’ that ‘the body was drawn by the head with the face downwards, along the lobby from the kitchen to the bedroom.’ For Jessie’s statement says, in the vernacular, ‘He took the body by the oxters and drew it ben into the laundry’—‘he took the body by the shoulders and dragged it through into Jess’s room.’
But the corpse was found in the bedroom lying between the bed and the centre table—a passage about two-feet wide—the head towards the door; the clothes being pulled up over the top part leaving the lower part bare, the face lying inside the sort of sack made by the pulled-up skirts. If it had been dragged into the room head first, the feet must have been left nearest the door. It would be impossible to turn the body in the narrow space between bed and table; and anyway, why on earth do so? The rucking-up of the clothes also suggests very strongly that the body was pulled through by the feet. This method would be much easier than lifting the dead weight of the head and shoulders and then tugging the body along, moving backwards; and the terrible condition of the head, with mangled flesh and blood-clotted hair, would make it an almost impossibly ghastly task, besides adding to the risks by covering the murderer with blood. Why the doctors came to so extraordinary a conclusion it is difficult to imagine. Dr Macleod based it upon the dirt on the front of the legs, the ruffling of the skin of the knees and the fact that the streaks of blood on the face were not disturbed as they would have been if the woman had been dragged with her face along the floor. He did not see her, however, till after the enveloping skirts had been removed, which might surely have protected her face to a very great extent.
Dr Watson who also saw the body in situ thought it had been dragged through by someone who had stood between the legs, got hold of them by the ankles and, facing forward, pulled the body along like a cart, the face protected by the clothes.
Why then should Jessie say that old Fleming had ‘taken the body by the oxters’? Could this be the one slip in a carefully fabricated story?
A realistic explanation would be that in fact at first he did do so. The body lay, according to her story which is supported by the fact that that part of the kitchen floor was washed—between the table and the corner of the kitchen cupboard, the head towards the door. It could not be turned in that space any more easily than it could have been in the bedroom. He would take it by the shoulders and start dragging it back towards the door and then, finding this method too exhausting, turn it in the larger space between the cupboard and the sink—very possibly clutching with a bloody hand at the sink, as he did so—and then take hold of it by the legs. (This would also account for the ‘ruffling of the skin’ and soiling of the knees and shins noted by Dr Macleod.) Whether Jessie thought it not necessary to describe all this in detail, or whether in her horror and distress she hid her face and refused to see what was going on, needn’t really matter. The point is that it does seem possible to reconcile her statement with the truth when she says simply that he ‘took her by the oxters’.
There are marks of blood in the kitchen, in the lobby, on the stairs. They prove nothing but they are in no way inconsistent with the statement. Her skirts were blood-stained after the first attack on Jess and she further says that she ran forward into the kitchen when she saw the second attack; the marks may equally have been made by her, by the old man, or, in some cases, by the dragging of the body with its trailing, blood-stained garments. And there is the blood-stained piece of carpet thrown down on top of the body as it lay in the bedroom; she says that Jess lay by the kitchen fire with just such a piece of carpet under her.
All these details are, of course, not inconsistent with Jessie having committed the murder herself—they are all things she would have known and may simply have twisted to fit her own story. Their interest lies chiefly in the fact that they do in such minuteness and continuity fit her story—that in it every point brought forward by the prosecution is accounted for, and long before she could know what these points were to be. Was she capable—a woman who could have uttered those three other muddled, inconsistent, self-incriminating and wholly unsatisfactory statements—of setting up all these circumstances in advance like pins in a lace-making cushion, and weaving a fabrication that would leave literally nothing unaccounted for. The statement, says Mr Roughead, ‘fitted the proven facts so perfectly as to render its fabrication incredible. If it was false, then in Mrs M’Lachlan we have lost a fictionist more marvellous than Defoe; one so adroit as to foresee and account for facts and circumstances which it is humanly impossible she can have known she would be called upon to meet. And this masterpiece of mendacity, this feat of fraudulence, this dexterity in deceit was achieved by the illiterate authoress of those clumsy and idiotic declarations, concocted in her early efforts to escape from the meshes of the net wherein she had been so cunningly entangled—which, as Euclid would say, is absurd.’
But if all else is no more than ‘not inconsistent’ there still remains the fact that the floors had been washed.
Jessie says it was the old man who ‘dichted up’ the kitchen floor and the lobby. What other explanation, indeed, can there be?
For why on earth should Jessie herself, had she been guilty, have washed those floors? What possible consideration could have induced her to remain in that house, with the old man in the room just above the kitchen, and get down on her hands and knees and scrub the bloodstains away?
She has just battered a woman to death—a ‘wiry’ woman, taller and much stronger than herself, a woman capable of putting a policeman on the floor in a friendly trial of strength; and the woman has put up a long struggle, for in this case the evidence of the twisting footmarks is probably true, and her screams have been loud enough to be heard in the house next door and, according to his later statement, by the old man upstairs. Is it conceivable that she will not grab up her few poor ghastly, ill-gotten gains and get out of that house as fast as she can go?
She knows the house well, she has been an inmate of the house, she knows where keys are kept: there are two exits, she can easily get away. Why should she stay? To scrub up the floors. But why? The old man might do so to delay discovery, to make it credible that he saw nothing amiss: but what good could delay do to Jessie? And anyway, what delay would she accomplish? She could hardly foresee the remarkable forbearance of the old gentleman in regard to the missing woman—he who so perseveringly enquired into the affairs of the servants, and above all of Jess. So why? Why lug the body, so dreadfully heavy in the inertia of death, out of the kitchen through the lobby and into the bedroom? Why wash the bedroom floor?
The body is lying there for the first to see who enters the room. Why scrub away a few bloodstains? And if so, why leave her own naked, bloody footmarks?—clearly visible even later when the blood had dried and lost colour, far more so when newly made. (That the old man overlooked them is of course entirely explained by her story—they were made after he washed the floor in the bedroom, it was as he finished doing so that he spilt the water over her boots and obliged her to remove boots and stockings and go barefoot.) And then, the heavy task of scrubbing the stone floors of kitchen and lobby. Why? Why undertake such a thing now, at the end of this long night of tension and horror and exhaustion—the first attack, the (unexplained and otherwise inexplicable) lapse of time before the second attack, the final death struggle and murder. Her heart was weak, she had been warned that undue exertion might kill her. Would she not be afraid that at best her heart might give way and leave her palpitating and helpless to move—as indeed she says it did—at the scene of the crime?
Of course it is true that Jessie did in fact remain at the scene of the crime. Why she should have done so she does not explain. She may have felt too ill and exhausted to face the long walk home. They may have thought it best to wait till the streets were more busy so that she would not be remarked, so early in the morning, abroad with her bundle. The likeliest reason, perhaps, is that she dared not disturb Mrs Campbell at this hour and so impress it upon her memory that she had been out all night. If she rang the bell later, Mrs Campbell would assume that she had already gone out that morning and was now coming in again. Mrs Campbell does, in fact, seem to have done so, for she made no comment when she let Jessie in at nine—though we may well believe that she later had second thoughts. Alternatively, she had lived at the Broomielaw only a few weeks, she may have supposed a night’s absence to be part of her landlady’s routine and ‘no business of hers’.
This reason, certainly, would equally apply if Jessie were the murderer. But would she in that case ever have remained in the house? Would she not rather have gone out and wandered about the streets till the time came when she could safely ring the bell at home? That she didn’t do so is clear from her knowledge of the old man’s answering the milk-boy’s ring. And by the same token, if she was there, wouldn’t he have seen her?—he was by his own admission up and dressed by twenty-to-eight, and had been downstairs to the basement looking for Jess. (This, of course, would be why he at first insisted that he hadn’t got up till nine?—by that time she would have left the house.) On the other hand, once again—it is true that there was a bloody mark inside the cupboard in the lobby which could have been made by a person hiding in there. Yet, how revealing—though Mr Clark, hampered by his line of defence could not remark upon it—is the old man’s famous reply under cross-examination, ‘We kent it was all ower wi’ Jessie’—elsewhere given as ‘We knew Jessie was dead and could not go to the door.’ In both cases ‘we’.
But—even if she did remain, even if the old man did see her: if she alone were guilty—why wash the floors?
And even if she did wash them—how account for their being still damp three days later?
Only Jessie’s statement can explain the newly-washed floors. The old man could not live with them as they were and still pretend that he had not suspected that harm might have come to Jess. Like Lady Macbeth he went on and on trying—but he couldn’t get rid of the blood. He must have gone on trying almost to the hour when discovery was at hand.
These were the considerations before Lord Deas at the end of the prisoner’s statement.
Two official enquiries held later, revealed nothing contradictory to her story—though of course the judge at this stage could know nothing of that. In some cases, true, medical opinion clashed but these cancel one another out; in the opinion of the great Lord Lister, then Professor Lister, the medical features were in remarkable accordance with the statement; he wrote to this effect to the still violently pro-Fleming Herald—the editor must have been delighted! A bevy of ex-servants gave evidence of the extreme propriety of old Mr Fleming’s conduct towards them, though one or two had seen him come home ‘tipsy’—always when the master of the house was away. But Elizabeth Halliday told how as much as two years ago Jess had complained to her that the old man was ‘a nasty body’ or ‘a dirty body’; she had understood Jess to mean that he had made improper attempts on her virtue (if you could call it virtue; there is always poor Jess’s son in Australia, and that other ‘misfortune’.) And several people knew that Mr Fleming would have liked to marry Jess, and was quite serious about it, though to her the idea was only by turns amusing or disgusting. From the moment she came to work there, he had haunted the kitchen and he was for ever talking about her and praising her. She had told her friend Mrs Smith that she was well enough when the family was at home, it was when she was left alone with him that her misery began.
Miss Janet Dunsmore, however, did not come forward to speak to Mr Fleming’s virtue—perhaps, to be fair, she couldn’t, since the newspapers reported that she had died some years previously. But Mr Gilchrist, an elder of the Anderston United Presbyterian Church, supported by the testimony of the rest of his session, felt obliged to relate how in the year 1852 Mr Fleming, already by his own account close to being an octogenarian, had confided in a very distressed state of mind that he had had a child by a girl who was a domestic servant: to wit, the above Miss Dunsmore—whether or not she actually worked in the Fleming household is not known. Later, said Mr Gilchrist, he and a fellow elder had the old gentleman up before them, whereupon he confessed his guilt and seemed, to Mr Gilchrist at any rate, so painfully conscious of the sin he had committed that he could hardly speak. So great was his repentance that he was let off with a caution and had only to suffer his name being put down (incorrectly) in the records. It must have been the wonder, not to say admiration—tinged with envy?—of all the reverend elders who beheld it there.
And a Mrs Samuel Grey was found to inform the anti-Fleming press that at the time of the birth of her own child, a girl baby was brought to her by a doctor who told her that the father was Mr James Fleming. She had brought up the child as her own, Mr Fleming appearing punctually once every two months to pay for its keep, at first at the rate of £1 a month, then 10s a month, then up to 12s again. She confidently expected him in a fortnight or so, when the next instalment fell due. Elizabeth, she said, who was now going to school, was not over-fond of her aged P., much preferring—naturally—Mr and Mrs Grey.
Thus encouraged, an inhabitant of Kilsyth likewise gave tongue. Among the lovely scenery of the village, he announced, via the press, was set a cottage tenanted by a respectable gentleman of Glasgow, Mr John Fleming. In the year 1854, two years that is to say after the confession to the elders of his kirk, old Mr Fleming was left alone in the cottage by the family and straightaway invited a kindred spirit to share his solitude. Not that solitude was quite the word, for two girls were smuggled in who were known to be ‘promenaders along Trongate and Argyle Street’ and the girls were seen (and recognised?) by a ploughman as they scrambled in through a window.
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.
Heaven Knows Who Page 26
