Free Heaven Knows Who by Christianna Brand Page A

lay already in the keeping of Mr Lundie’s pawn. Two days earlier ‘Mrs M’Donald’ had raised six pounds fifteen on it.
    So the night dragged on. Under the yellow-blue light of the gas lamps or holding their candles close, the doctors and policemen crouched over the dead body or padded with probing fingers and eager eyes about the house. Police Officer Campbell had got hold of a little bit of stick and was measuring the bloody footprints on the bedroom floor. He compared their length by putting his bit of stick against the soles of the dead woman’s feet. Thestick was quite appreciably shorter. So the footprints had not been made by Jess M’Pherson, but he thought they were those of a woman.
    In the early hours of the morning Mr Fleming took his father and son with him and sought refuge elsewhere, turning over his home to the authorities. One by one the doctors and policemen packed away their instruments and snapped shut their notebooks and crawled home to take a few hours’ rest before it all began again next day. A uniformed man or two left in charge of the closed and shuttered house, dawn breaking and the birds beginning to sing in the trees along Sauchiehall Street.
    And alone in her bedroom, lying there half naked, with her secrets still held close in her wounded hands, poor jess M’Pherson lay as she had lain for three full days and three full nights, and would lie at least two days more till they had done with her.

CHAPTER SIX
    Tuesday, July 8. A great day in the lives of the newspaper editors of Glasgow had they but known it, and indeed of all Scotland and England too. All they needed was one Jessie M’Lachlan a month, one of them was to say a few weeks later, to make them all millionaires.
    But today there was time for only a very brief notice. ‘Suspected Murder’—and a few lines about the discoveries at Sandyford Place. It sounded not very promising—a mere servant maid done to death by some horrid burglar, or perhaps by a ‘follower’ clandestinely introduced to the bedroom—and interesting only in its having occurred in the home of the gentry in the West End. There was much to report of more interest. A monster pineapple was on exhibition in a Glasgow shop window, weighing ten pounds, twelve inches long and twenty-two in girth. The introduction of iron vessels into the royal and mercantile navies was causing strikes among the Lower Strata of Society, led by the iron boiler-makers and the wooden shipbuilders. The High Sheriff of Leicestershire had mysteriously disappeared. There had been an amusing Deception in the Canadian courts of the International Exhibition in Hyde Park—a man had stood so still that he was thought to be a waxwork and was praised as a very masterpiece of the art of Madame Tussaud; every trick was tried in endeavours to discover the truth until some bold spirit thought of moving the wheel against which the figure negligently leaned, when the man fell over and all was discovered. The Glasgow Herald opined that he would not lack for hospitality for many a day to come. You could visit the Exhibition and see for yourself for only twenty-five shillings, cabin class, and six shillings steerage; servants in cabins, however, Full Fees.
    And a Minister of the Gospel, working in Northumberland, had preached a fine sermon, here reproduced in full, against the seduction of virgins, a misdemeanour ‘carried on chiefly among the poor.’ In America, though New Orleans and the whole line ofthe Mississippi had fallen and the great naval station at Norfolk had passed into Northern hands, though Tennessee was overrun and the Northern powers had never yet been pushed back from any point once attained, yet the Glasgow Herald was still confident of a Southern victory (it must have greatly comforted General Lee could he have known). And a lady living in a Salubrious Part would welcome a Small Boy as Companion to her own. All parties having