Heaven Knows Who by Christianna Brand Page B

answered readily, ‘Each foot’, though the prints were only of the left foot). It fell to him also to compare the prints with James Fleming’s foot; but the old man had flat feet whereas the print showed a high instep, and the two were so perfectly different that he did not think it necessary to compare them minutely. His impression was—before any suspicion attached to the prisoner, he hastened to add—that the prints had been made by a female foot, a well-formed female foot with a high instep; and what had been his impression then, had by the time he came into court become his opinion.
    By this time also, it was his opinion that the footprints could have been made by the left foot of the prisoner, Jessie M’Lachlan.
    Here—all honour to him—he had been to even more pains to make no mistake. After several experiments with his own foot, soaked in various agents, he decided that nothing but blood would given an accurate effect and he accordingly got hold of a small phial of bullock’s blood. From his experiments it would appear that the bedroom had a wooden floor, partly covered with‘waxcloth’, a kind of linoleum, the footprints having been found on the wooden part. He therefore smeared some blood on a piece of waxcloth and, Mrs M’Lachlan then being in custody, invited her to put her left foot in the blood and then step on to a plank of wood. The prisoner showed no objection, indeed, said the witness, she seemed quite to court the test; though, bullock’s blood and all, and especially in the distressing circumstances, it can hardly have been agreeable. But it was all no good: the prints on the plank were quite useless. It then proved that the plank had previously been oiled ‘for some other purpose’; and one can almost hear Dr Macleod saying testily that if you wanted a thing done you had to do it yourself and wasn’t it possible, for heaven’s sake, to produce an ordinary piece of dry wood? One was found at last resembling in age and condition the flooring at Sandyford Place, and this was put on one side, a piece of waxcloth next to it and beyond the waxcloth a fresh pool of blood. Poor Jessie again paddled in the blood and stepped on to the plank. This time all went splendidly, and Dr Macleod was able to report: ‘two impressions were got which corresponded with a degree of accuracy which was quite marvellous with the marks taken from the house. In the minutest detail of measurement and outline did they tally with the original, and, in fact, each of them was, if possible, closer to the Sandyford footmark than they were to one another.’
    It was but a short step from Dr Macleod’s ‘could have been made by the prisoner’ to ‘were made’. From this time on, Jessie’s presence at Sandyford Place that night was held to be conclusively established.
    (There is in the Police Museum in Glasgow, a piece of board with an impression of a woman’s foot, said to be that cut from the floor in Sandyford Place. It is extraordinarily clear, a small foot with a narrow heel, high arch, and every toe distinct. From the fact that it appears to be outlined in some agent other than the original blood which forms the impression—as though a thick paint brush had been drawn around it—the author can’t help wondering whether it is not more likely to be the footprint in bullock’s blood made by the prisoner for Dr Macleod—it is so remarkably clear. Either way, it is a strangely poignant relic of that long-ago, terrible night.)

CHAPTER NINE
    The evidence for the prosecution at her trial opened with two declarations of the prisoner, dated Monday, July 14—the day after her apprehension: Wednesday, the 16th, and Monday week, the 21st. These, declared Alexander Strathern, the Sheriff-Substitute of Lanarkshire, ‘were emitted by her in his presence, freely and voluntary, in her sound and sober senses, and after