Heaven Knows Who by Christianna Brand Page A

been blood’. And Mrs Adams nosed round and finally dug up a sleeve torn out of a dress and handedthat also over to the police—a sleeve from Mrs M’Lachlan’s familiar brown coburg dress with the flounces. Mrs Adams had last seen her wearing it on that fatal Friday, before she went out to see Jess. And Mrs Campbell explained about the bottle which Jessie had borrowed to go out for her sevenpence ha’porth of rum, to stand treat to her visitor, Mrs Fraser, and later to Jess; and lo!—there in the cupboard in the basement at Sandyford Place was a bottle with no cork in it, smelling of rum.
    In her room at the Broomielaw, despite her extravagance in ‘lifting’ pawned articles on the Monday following the murder, there were still to be found forty-one pawn-tickets, old and new: all in the name of Fraser, with various Christian names.
    And away up in Hamilton, while the lady who had asked about the sheugh or burn to quench her thirst was undergoing such tribulations, Margaret Gibson, one of the two little girls, was making a horrid discovery. Wandering that Sunday near the Tommy Linn park, towards which she and Marion Fairley had directed the lady, she noticed some pieces of flannel thrust in under the roots of a hedge. She pulled out a piece and saw that it was ‘all blood’.
    The child was scared and ran off. But she told her friend Marion and next day they returned to the spot and found the flannel still lying there. They had another fascinated look and then went off and left it. Further on, however, in Templeton Park, they came across another prize: bundled under a hedge was a brown coburg dress, torn but entire—except for one sleeve.
    Meanwhile, Jessie languished in the Glasgow prison. She had been examined upon entry, and the exciting discovery was made that on her left hand were the marks of a cut and also of a bite or bites. Any hopes that these might have held out, however, were deflated by the decided opinion given by the police surgeon at the trial, that the incisions were too small and close together to have been caused by human teeth, and were probably exactly what she said they were—the scars of a bite from her own small dog.
    The footprints, however, were a different matter.
    There had been three footprints, all of a naked left foot, marked in blood in one corner of Jess M’Pherson’s room. The board containing two of these had been cut away—the third was indistinct and not thought worthy of much notice. As we know, AssistantSuperintendent Alexander M’Call had got busy with a small piece of stick, ‘a thin spale’, with which he measured the length of the footprints and which he then applied to the sole of the dead woman’s foot. Such considerations as the difference between a foot supporting nothing and a foot with the full weight of the body on it, seem to have been of no importance to him. Jess M’Pherson’s foot was longer—half an inch longer, and there was no sign in the footprint of her bunion. It was all so convincing that he thought it not worth while to bother with a footrule. He had measured with the stick, ‘keeping my finger and thumb at the place’—what more could you want? Detective Officer Donald Campbell was of the same opinion. He too had dispensed with a footrule. Still, he cut his piece of spale exactly to the length of the mark on the floor, before applying it to the dead woman’s foot which was something, and he measured length and breadth. He too was satisfied that ‘the foot of the deceased was rather longer’.
    Dr Macleod seems to have been much more exact. He compared the prints with the dead woman’s foot, ‘contour, size and everything’ and found her feet longer, broader—larger in every way (though quite in what other way they could have shown larger it is difficult to see. Moreover, under examination at the trial, when asked, ‘Each foot?’ he