Free Classic Scottish Murder Stories by Molly Whittington-Egan Page A

you have given me anything, tell me before I die!’ The doctor’s son, who assisted his father, found the patient ‘very low’ on Wednesday the 11th, and bled him – a further insult to his system.
    John Gilmour passed away on that day, January 11th, 1843, and he was buried in the churchyard at Dunlop on the 16th, a childless man in his prime, his fields unworked. Christina was a widow in a house which she had never cherished. John Anderson wrote to her. After a couple of months, she went home to her parents, surely hopeful of the attentions of the right John, but he was as laggardly as ever. Gossip followed her likea snuffling hound. Servants talked. After family conferences, Alexander Cochran again intervened with a heavy hand and his customary poor judgement, and arranged to ship his daughter to America, against her will. She objected, saying that flight would be seen as guilt.
    On April 21st, the Sheriff granted a warrant for the apprehension of Christina Gilmour, and the exhumation of her husband’s body. On the 22nd, the coffin was lifted and a postmortem was performed immediately, followed by a chemical analysis. Professor Christison later confirmed their findings: there was arsenic in the stomach and in the liver (which was only the second instance at that time of arsenic being detected in the liver). A striking feature of the examination was the fact that the intestines were stained with spots and streaks of a bright yellow colour and the internal surface of the stomach was thickly sprinkled with small yellow particles. On a sweep through six comparable cases, the author has not found a report of yellow colouring, but there clearly is no mystery, because Taylor states that white arsenic can be seen converted into the yellow sulphide of arsenic in the stomach and small intestine, especially when decomposition has begun.
    The police arrived at the Cochran farm on April 24th, to execute the warrant, but Christina was already on her way to being smuggled out of the country. The family stoutly denied all knowledge of her whereabouts, themselves committing all manner of auxiliary criminal acts, which were never brought home to them. On the 28th, she wrote to John Anderson from Liverpool. Her family destroyed the letter, and denied the Laodicean lover’s recollection that she told him that she would confess to having bought arsenic to take herself, but that she would not admit to having given any to her husband.
    Christina Gilmour’s escape has the dramatic, episodic quality of an 18th-century picaresque novel. She did not even know her destination, virtually kidnapped, like some beleaguered Clarissa, if not so pure in heart. She left homesecretly on foot, banished, although embraced, in the charge of a man whom she did not know, and at a given place was handed over to another stranger, who drove her in a gig to a safe-house, where she was transferred to a third man, with whom she travelled by rail to Liverpool. She may have known the third man, named Simpson, who was a gardener or a shoemaker, and she did not like him at all. He was going to America and had agreed to take Christina with him under the assumed personae of Mr and Mrs John Spiers. The comparison with Crippen and Ethel le Neve is almost too obvious to state. Simpson proved, unlike John Anderson, to be anything but a perfect gentleman, for, intoxicated by the excitement of the situation, he sought to take advantage of his supposed wife (a dangerous ambition) and she had to appeal to the captain for protection. That was Christina’s story, and it does not entirely ring true other than in its psycho-sexual sense: she would not have wished to reveal to the captain the sham of her identity.
    It did not matter, anyway, because as their packet-ship
Excel
bounced and dipped across the Atlantic, Superintendent McKay, armed with a new warrant was in pursuit aboard the much faster, picturesque, Cunard paddle-steamer
Arcadia,
and