Free Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders by Allan Massie Page B

naturally pushed her questioning further, she seemed satisfied with his new explanation that the dead girl was `his sister in the lord’. She wasn’t, likely enough, that naive. Still Helen’s version may equally well be the result of spite working on memory. One should never underestimate the human capacity for credulity, and Bennison was already so firmly in the grip of the religious enthusiasm that was to lead a witness at his trial to say that, `his conversation was wholly confined to religious subjects’, that Jean may indeed have found his explanation genuinely satisfactory. She herself was to be described as `a very religious person’.
    As to the decision to wear mourning, one can only conclude that Bennison felt a deep-seated respect for convention; it was the right thing to do and he would have been failing in his duty to himself if he had not. If this was hypocrisy, it was wellengrained.
    About this time they removed to Edinburgh. For some years they lived at the bottom of Leith Walk, that natural starting point for immigrants. A daughter, named Helen after her aunt, was born in 1843. Around 1847 Bennison found work with the Shotts’ Iron Company and they moved a little up the Walk to Stead’s Place, a dismal row of gaunt tenements.
    Their dwelling consisted of two rooms and a closet. It was on the level of the street with a sunk area below, this basement flat being inhabited by a widow, Elizabeth Wilkie. At some point in 1849 a Mrs Moffat came to live with the Bennisons, presumably as a lodger. How they were disposed is difficult to determine. Bennison and his wife slept in different rooms, Jean being evidently in the kitchen where there was probably a box bed, or rather two, for one assumes that Mrs Moffat slept there also. Across the landing was another flat, occupied by an old man, Alexander Milne, and his dog. He was to testify to the good relations between Bennison and Jean. `I never heard angry words between him and his wife, and never heard them speak unkindly to the other.’
    There was to be much argument at the trial as to the condition of the block, in particular as to whether it was infested with rats or not. The general opinion inclined to the absence of rats, at least by the time the Bennisons came to live there. Alexander Marr, one of the neighbours, certainly claimed that there had been a good many at one time, but asserted that he had smoked them out with brimstone and filled up their holes. They had come, in his opinion, from the common sewer in Leith Walk, from which there was a grating opposite Bennison’s house. For good measure he added that there was another sewer at the back of the house also. Elizabeth Wilkie produced the argument that was held to settle the matter: she kept live fowls in her cellar and maintained that that would have been impossible if there had been any rats about at all. Though Alex Macmurray, a wire-worker who lived nineteen yards from the Bennisons, contradicted this, and declared that he had himself killed eleven, his dead rats had no chance in the minds of the jury against Mrs Wilkie’s live fowls. The dearth of rats undoubtedly helped to hang Bennison.
    Bennison worked hard at Shotts’ foundry, though his habit of incessantly singing hymns and psalms failed to endear him to his fellow-workmen. He joined the local Wesleyan Church, which was not at that time considered incompatible with membership of other churches, the Wesleyans regarding themselves as a ginger-group of enthusiasts, with a consequent attraction for, zealots like Bennison. It was affirmed later that he had been a lay preacher and had taught in the Sunday School. The Minister, the Rev John Hay, was quick to deny this, and to dissociate the Church from him to some degree. `His manner was always peculiar’, he said, `he was a man excited in religious feelings.’ The fact that Mr Hay’s oratory had contributed to this excitement was something better ignored.
    It is a minor irritation that