Oh dear!
Mr Stirling was not the only person concerned with possible injustice to Mr Fleming. Mr Dixon, the great Champion, brooded over that last interview with his client—‘I may as weel tell ye that the auld man wasna there at a’.’ Really, how dreadful if that had after all been true! After all, the reprieve had now been granted, she was serving a life sentence, nothing worse could befall her, she had nothing to lose.… Of course, he had promised that he would never tell anyone; of course she had said it to him under the seal of professional secrecy.… But all the same.…
Mr Dixon sat down and wrote a note to Mr Fleming’s solicitors.
He must have been far more impressed by the incident than, at this distance, it is possible for us to be. He had recognised at the time that she was hysterical, alternately laughing and crying; she had now been three months in custody following the appalling shock that the murder—however and by whomsoever committed—must have been to her. She had endured the four very long, bewildering, frightening days of the trial, her evident confidence falling lower and lower each day; had since then existed—this woman alleged to be extremely delicate, with a faulty heart condition—in a condemned cell, on a diet, for some time at least, of bread and water, waiting to die. The threat of public execution still hung over her, not three weeks away; she had been expressly warned that if the enquiry being conducted under Mr Young didn’t bear out her statement, she would be hanged. Under these circumstances Mr Dixon comes and begins to question her all over again. She tries to get out of it, she refuses to answer, she giggles, she weeps, she talks of other things; and when he persists she bursts out into what surely is an hysterical farrago of nonsense, divided between laughter and tears.
For the story was like her first three stories—and in complete contrast with the famous fourth statement read after the verdict—in many places at least, palpably false. She couldn’t have taken an hour to walk from the Gushet house straight to Sandyford Place (she insists she walked straight there, and if she didn’t then what was she doing?). She says she went in by the garden entrance but she would have no key and there was no means of attracting attention—the gate in the wall is a considerable distance from the house; when she went for the whisky she took a key with her. Nor would she have been coming down Elderslie Street to get to the gate—as she was when Mrs Walker and Miss Dykes saw her. She would come that way from the spirits shop, because it was at the top of North Street, she would turn left into Sauchiehall Street and left again into Elderslie Street and so make a round, or square, walk of it—but not if she were simply coming up by way of North Street to the back gate of Sandyford Place. She gives no account of the stealing of the clothes and silver—and how can she have come by the silver if she ‘never went upstairs at a’ ’? (Mr Dixon confided elsewhere as will be seen that ‘the silver was too bulky for her to carry’, that was why she took as little as she did; but this is not mentioned in the account of the interview which he himself carefully edited. He further suggested that she had hidden in the cupboard in the basement lobby when the old man came down in the morning and remained concealed from him there; but this again is not in his account of their interview.)
And she says she washed the kitchen floor—(she does not account for the washing of the bedroom floor)—‘not because of bloodstains at all’ but because Jess had been sick there; but there was no sign of vomit and the floors had been cleansed after blood had been shed there. There was no sign of vomit on the bedclothes, nor does she account for the naked footprints or a hundred other details all covered by the statement read in court. Of course a great deal is blanketed by her claim to have known nothing of what she was doing for most of the night; but Mr Dixon had checked with James M’Lachlan and her sister and both denied that laudanum had any untoward effect on her whatever, or that there had ever been an incident when they had to restrain her from rushing about the room. Finally, of course, she in no way accounts for the old man’s astonishing complacency in the matter of his missing favourite or for the fact that the floors had been washed long after she can have washed them; or, above all, for the fact that while she says she opened the door to the milk-boy, he and his master and—eventually—old Mr Fleming himself, all swear that he did. Yet as Mr Roughead says, among all the doubtful and elusive elements of the case, this one fact at least was established beyond dispute.
False self-accusation is of course no uncommon phenomenon, especially under conditions of stress such as Mrs M’Lachlan had endured for so long a time. Mr Roughead suggests that she was a liar of the neurasthenic type ‘and it may be doubtful whether at any time she told the whole truth’. Why he should say this of the statement read in court—unless of course we regard it as altogether untrue—it is rather hard to see; indeed it seems to contradict his later opinion quoted on page 231. For if the statement was substantially true, where lay any necessity for lies? Of course if she was a psychopathic liar, no reason would be necessary: we all know of otherwise normal people who just simply and literally prefer to tell untruths. But even so, where in the statement are detectable lies? Everywhere that proof was possible, the proof bore out its truth. In one particular only does there seem solid room for doubt, and that rather in an omission than an actual lie—an omission based on no neurasthenic vagaries but on sound common sense. Before ever Jessie pawned the silver on the Saturday following the murder, she paid off four pounds of her rent, she gave Mrs Rainny a ‘paper note’, she bought the box and perhaps, a bonnet. Yet she is known to have been quite penniless herself the evening before; and James M’Lachlan gave evidence at the enquiry that he had no money put by.
She made no attempt at any rational explanation of where the money came from. Two alternatives are possible. Jess M’Pherson had been paid her half-yearly wages, £7, shortly before her death. She was to have bought ‘a filled plaid’ with part of the money, but it rained and she didn’t go out to the shops. Some money was found in her room, but we don’t know how much; and it was positively suggested by the prosecution at the trial that Jessie took money as well as the dresses and silver. The suggestion was improperly brought forward since no evidence had been offered upon this point—yet it remains a possibility. On the other hand, it does seem likely that if in her extremity she had brought herself to take any money, she would have taken it all. The more likely alternative—suppose any of it to be true—is that Mr Fleming gave her something in advance on condition of her keeping her mouth shut. He had promised she should never want. She says he first suggested her pawning the silver and then changed his mind. May he not then have turned out his pockets and given her all he could raise ‘to be going on with’ including the twenty-seven shillings which she admits he gave her towards the cost of the tin box and her proposed junketings with it? It can’t have been more than four or five pounds, for, despite his advice, she is still found on the Saturday morning resorting to the very dangerous expedient of pawning the silver. It is noteworthy that though he went into the office on the Saturday morning he didn’t pay in his takings till first thing on Monday. It does seem quite possible that he scraped around and added this sum—two pounds odd—to what he had on him, and handed it all over to Jessie; raising the money somewhere in the meantime, to be paid in on the Monday. If either conjecture be true—if she stole her dead friend’s money, or received money further than the twenty-seven shillings ‘expenses’ on condition of her silence—then it would need no quirks of the psyche to suggest she keep quiet about it.
However, Mr Dixon took the statement sufficiently seriously to inform the Fleming faction—now about nine months later—of its existence. Then, at last, the counsel of legal advisers was resorted to. He and Mr Fleming’s lawyers together put the matter before certain members of the Law Faculty and it was finally ruled by the Dean, unanimously supported by his colleagues, that without his client’s consent, Mr Dixon could not make the ‘confession’ public. Mr Dixon, who seems all of a sudden to have become very tender of old Mr Fleming’s reputation, hur
ried round to the prison to press Jessie to give him her sanction.
The Governor, the prison doctor and the matron were present at the interview. She was led to the Governor’s office and once more—and for the last time—faced her one-time friend and champion.
He began by explaining to her that nothing she could now say could have any effect upon her sentence. And nothing in the case could ever again put her in danger of execution.
She said, no: she quite understood that.
All right. Now, did she recall a conversation she had had with him long ago—almost a year ago—about having taken some laudanum?
She had never said a word to him about laudanum in her life, said Jessie.
Well, about her having had laudanum administered to her?
She had never mentioned laudanum to him in her life.
But when he had seen her—that last time, after the trial—
She had seen him once only after the trial and that for a very short time. She had never mentioned laudanum to him in her life. And she was as innocent of the murder of Jess as he was, Mr Dixon himself.
‘In that case—Mr Fleming is guilty?’
‘He did the act,’ said Jessie.
‘So you now say. But, you know, his friends believe him innocent.’
‘How can his friends know anything about it?’ said Jessie. ‘They weren’t there.’ And she—who now had no friends, for even Mr Dixon had apparently deserted her—burst out that it was a terrible thing that she should be kept here, while her delicate child—
‘Your child is all right, he’s with your relations, he’ll be taken good care of. But the Flemings are ruined, every one of them; they’re going to have to leave the country.’
It was hard on those who were innocent, no doubt; but she would not move an inch from her resolution. She also was innocent—the old man was guilty.
‘This case has actually twice been debated in Parliament.’
It meant nothing to Jessie. She was innocent; the old man was guilty. She absolutely refused to have the confession made public. She absolutely denied ever having made it.
Mr Dixon gave up and went away.
All this while, the Glasgow Herald had never given up its championship of old James Fleming; and for some time had been throwing out hints that they had knowledge of a confession by Mrs M’Lachlan. In the third week of June, nearly a year after the murder, they wrote to Mr Dixon and told him of a statement made to them by the two detectives, Audley Thomson and William Smith. These two men had been concerned with the original investigation; it was they who had tried the keys of Jessie’s front door, had discovered the bottle smelling of rum and had received from Mrs Adams the sleeve of the brown coburg dress and the blood-stained wires of the crinoline; it was to Thomson that James M’Lachlan had sent the black japanned box. They announced that a few days after the temporary respite of the execution—which would, indeed, coincide with the date of Mr Dixon’s fantastic interview with Jessie—he met them in West Street; and told them that Mrs M’Lachlan had confessed to him that she had ‘done the deed herself, without the aid or knowledge of Mr Fleming.’
Immediately upon publication of this letter, Mr Dixon replied. The story was absolutely false, he had never stated to the detectives that the prisoner had made such a confession as they specified, or in fact that she had made any confession of guilt whatsoever. ‘In their whole concoction’ there was only one item that was true—namely that Jessie had said to him that when she left the house there was a man mixing lime in the lane and she was afraid of his seeing her. Otherwise the whole thing was untrue.
But the fuse was lit and now, more than a year after that ‘deed of darkness’, the last firework of poor Jessie’s story soared up into the night of the long mystery and blazed for a little moment—and fizzled out. On July 6, the Mail published a statement by Audley Thomson and ‘Black Will’ of exactly what Mr Dixon was alleged to have said to them. Running into them in West Street he had said, ‘Well, you see we’ve beaten you and got her off’—this referred, of course, to the reprieve. They had replied, ‘Yes, but you yourself know that she shouldn’t have got off—no one had anything to do with it but herself, and Mr Fleming is innocent.’ Mr Dixon said, ‘That’s my own opinion—that the old man is innocent, for she’s a damnable woman, she was ranging up and down that house all night for what answered her. When he came downstairs she hid in the cupboard in the basement lobby. It was she who answered the door to the milk-boy, and then she went off by the garden way; she left the back door open, and threw away the key.’ They asked him why she hadn’t taken more valuable plate and he said it was too bulky to carry. The only thing she had been afraid of was that a man mixing lime in the lane might have seen her leave; he, Mr Dixon had sought out this man, and he had indeed been there but he did not remember seeing her. The detectives had quite clearly understood Mr Dixon to have been quoting what Mrs M’Lachlan herself had told him. All this they most solemnly swore to and both appended their names.
The firework might be only a rather short-lived little squib, but it pretty severely burned Mr Dixon in the handling of it. Faced with this letter, he was obliged to retreat: who was going to believe that two well-known and established policemen had concocted a pure fabrication? In his extremity, he turned to the Herald which now held out welcoming arms to the former black sheep. On July 8, they published a new letter from him. In justice to the detectives, he wrote, who were being branded as liars, he hastened to say that it was perfectly true that he had met them as stated and had talked with them. It was only that they had misunderstood him. What happened was that they asked him what he really thought of the case. He replied that in his private opinion Mr Fleming was innocent and added the other ‘somewhat emphatic expressions’ of his opinion of the woman. He did mention the business of the man mixing lime, but the rest was all purely hypothetical, he was interested to see what these two clever detectives would make of his theories and put a suppositious case to them. As to his saying in the earlier letter that their statement was false, this was the version of Messrs Smith and Wright, Mr Fleming’s solicitors; all he had meant was that it wasn’t correct that what he had told the detectives was by Mrs M’Lachlan’s confession. He extended his apologies to them.
And so anxious was Mr Dixon that Jessie’s last statement to him should not be incorrectly reported that he now issued it as edited by himself. There is nothing of her having hidden in the cupboard in the basement (we cannot but recall that there were bloody marks on the inside of the door which looked to one doctor as though they were the marks of hands, though he later said they might have been made by a bloody cloth, or of her having left the back door open—in fact the old man had given evidence that in the morning he found it locked as usual). But there is also nothing of the man mixing lime—and this both Dixon and the detectives say he did in fact mention. So the whole thing is very odd, to say the least of it; but then so was the whole of Mr Dixon’s behaviour. Jessie seems to have been possessed of some peculiar magic of infecting with strangeness everyone and everything that at this time came within her aura.
So now the whole story was out; how she had confessed that the old man had not been there at a’ that night, how she and Jess had been drunk, how Jess had given her laudanum and she had woken from a coma to find Jess dead.… Mr Dixon, her own agent, publicly testified to it all.
But it was, as has been said, a dampish squib; the world was growing weary of Jessie M’Lachlan and her woes. The newspapers gave the statement little credit, their insight into feminine psychology being, perhaps, somewhat deeper than young Mr Dixon’s. The confession was ‘worthless’; a statement obtained from a woman in the last stages of mystery and hysteria, ‘labouring under an uterine disease which frequently leads to temporary insanity’ by ‘an agent by some misery pressure turned informer’. Mr Dixon indeed, came under heavy fire. The English journals thought he might consider himself fortunate in finding himself on that side of the border where he was not ans
werable for breach of professional confidence and liable to be disbarred, the Morning Journal called it an unparalleled breach of honour, ‘blackening a little more the already dark enough fame of his poor and miserable client’. Only the Herald, who once had rendered themselves liable to libel action in their execration of him, now rose up in defence of Mr Dixon’s moral courage in bringing this new light upon the innocence of ‘this venerable old man’, and burst into ink in what was to be their last great leader on the subject of Mrs M’Lachlan. It is a splendid affair, more than two columns in length and heavy with journalistic irony. When ‘this convicted murderer’ declares her innocence, she is sane; but when in a rare burst of honesty she declares her guilt, why then she is mad, she doesn’t know what she is saying. You could believe a liar, concluded the Herald, when and only when he admitted something that criminated himself; and they for their part were quite ready in this instance to believe ‘the heroine of the cleaver’. And Mr Dixon, who while he fought for his client had been the worst of men, now that he had betrayed the confidence placed in him while he was still acting as her agent, and in conflict with the ruling of the Dean of the Law Faculty and the expressed opinion of literally every member thereof, found himself clutched to the Heraldic bosom. He became their trusted correspondent and indeed is suspected of having written the laudatory article himself.
Heaven Knows Who Page 30
