In Muffled Night, page 1
This edition published in 2021 by Moonstone Press
www.moonstonepress.co.uk
Introduction © 2021 Curtis Evans
Originally published in 1933 by Methuen & Co. Ltd, London
In Muffled Night © 1933 The Estate of D. Erskine Muir
The right of Dorothy Erskine Muir to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
ISBN 978-1-899000-40-1
eISBN 978-1-899000-41-8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Text design, typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London
Cover illustration by Jason Anscomb
Contents
Introduction by Curtis Evans
Characters
I. The Persons
II. The Night
III. The Body
IV. The Police
V. The Problem
VI. The Footprints
VII. The Suspect
VIII. The Blue Box
IX. The Arrest
X. The Trial
XI. The Statement
XII. The Clue
XIII. The Pursuit
XIV. The Truth
XV. The Reason
Introduction
“Has anyone ever heard of the Sandyford Place mystery?”
—Detective Sir Henry Merrivale in John Dickson Carr’s Seeing Is Believing (1941)
“Now we have no wish to impugn the justice of either the Scotch jury or Lord Deas… It is impossible, however, for us to believe, on the evidence before us, that the prisoner left her home with the deliberate intention of killing Jessie M’Pherson, and almost as difficult to credit that the crime was committed by her, alone and unassisted. An awful mystery still hangs over this strange tragedy…”
—editorial in the (Dublin) Freeman’s Journal, 25 September 1862
“Every writer has a favorite child—Dickens has told us that his was David Copperfield—and of all my naughty progeny there is none I prefer to the much wronged heroine of the Sandyford Mystery. Old Fleming, too, is another of my choicest characters… With his piety, his cunning and his cleaver, to say nothing of his singular good luck, even the exclusive Lizzie Borden might have been proud to have numbered him among her respected ancestors.”
—Famed criminologist William Roughead in Tales of the Criminous (1956)
Nearly 160 years ago, on 7 July 1862, in the city of Glasgow, servant Jessie McPherson was discovered dead at her master’s home at 17 Sandyford Place in a ghastly welter of her own gore, the victim of a deadly rain of forty vicious blows upon her head, face and hands, which had been administered with an iron cleaver. Like Abby Borden, the step-mother of notorious American accused axe murderess Lizzie Borden, who was found brutally slain at her home in the city of Fall River, Massachusetts, three decades later, on 4 August 1892, Jessie McPherson had died from the proverbial “forty whacks”. (Lizzie Borden’s slain father, so the famous morbid children’s jingle would have it, got one extra, making it “forty-one” in his case.) In Glasgow the terrible crime at Sandyford Place quickly became the talk of the town, just as the dreadful double murder at Fall River soon set local tongues wagging. While in Fall River it was the respectable elder daughter of the house, Lizzie Borden, who was arrested and brought to trial, in Glasgow it was another servant upon whom the police alighted, a heretofore unoffending young married woman named Jessie McLachlan, the murder victim’s closest friend. Both women were destined to become permanent denizens in the rogue’s gallery of classic murder cases.
The chief witness against Jessie McLachlan at her murder trial in 1862 was James Fleming, the venerable patriarch of the Fleming household, where the late Jessie McPherson had been employed. Old Fleming, as he was dubbed to distinguish him from his son John, was, by his own account, eighty-seven years old—although others claimed he was merely seventy-eight. In either case, he was, judging by his familiar behaviour with his women servants, still a virile, if not a randy, old man. He had been alone in the house with the dead woman over that fatal weekend in July, but claimed he had not realized she was actually there, murdered. (The rest of the Flemings retired to the family’s country house over the summer months, with John Fleming and his son, John, Jr., trekking to Glasgow to carry on business.) It proved that Jessie McLachlan had been present at the house too, although she lied about this at the trial, as well as about numerous other points, to her grave legal peril.
At the conclusion of the presentation of the cases of the prosecution and defence, the presiding judge, Lord Deas, inveighed against the defendant for no fewer than four hours. After the judge had concluded his damning summing-up, the jury retired for just fifteen minutes before delivering a verdict of guilty. But things were just getting started. At the pronouncement of the verdict, Jessie McLachlan had her counsel read a remarkable statement on her behalf, in which she implicated none other than Old Fleming as the murderer of Jessie McPherson. Evincing no hesitation in categorically dismissing the defendant’s story as “wicked falsehoods”, Lord Deas sentenced the unfortunate young woman to death by hanging. The resulting public outcry, however, led, seven weeks later, to the commutation of her sentence to a term of life imprisonment. As in the case of another notorious accused Victorian-era murderess, Florence Maybrick, a judicial system unable or unwilling to admit that a terrible mistake quite possibly had been made, settled upon ruining a woman’s life rather than killing her outright as an acceptable expedient.
Jessie McLachlan was released from prison in 1877 and, like Florence Maybrick after her, left the United Kingdom for the United States, that haven of the tired, poor and arguably unjustly convicted, where she died in her sixties in 1899. Like Florence Maybrick and Lizzie Borden, Jessie’s infamy lived after her, and for nearly 120 years after her death people have debated whether she really was guilty of murder, or whether the culprit might really have been that plausible old devil James Fleming. In 1911 forty-year-old Scottish lawyer William Roughead, who would become arguably the twentieth century’s premier criminologist, edited Trial of Mrs. M’Lachlan for the Notable British Trials series. The case, which he dubbed “an ideal murder”, obsessed him for the rest of his life, just as the Lizzie Borden mystery in Fall River bewitched his brilliant American counterpart, Edmund Lester Pearson. By the Golden Age of detective fiction the bloody killing at Sandyford Place had become one of the stars in the constellation of classic murders, with passing mentions of it being made in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon (1937), Gladys Mitchell’s When Last I Died (1941) and John Dickson Carr’s Seeing Is Believing (1941). Even more significantly it served as the basis for two thirties mystery novels, George Goodchild and Bechhofer Roberts’ The Dear Old Gentleman, which appeared in 1935, and the novel that you have before you now, In Muffled Night, which was first published in 1933 by Dorothy Agnes Sheepshanks Muir (1889–1977), under her pseudonym D. Erskine Muir.
The author turned to writing professionally after the unexpected death in 1932 of her husband, Thomas Arthur Erskine Muir, leaving her with the onerous task of raising two young children alone in Depression-era England. Under her deliberately sexually ambiguous pen name, the Oxford-educated writer (she graduated from Somerville College, like Dorothy L. Sayers, who was four years her junior) published both works of European history, like Prussian Eagle (1940) and Machiavelli and His Times (1936)—the latter of which, on its publication in the United States, was favourably critiqued on the full front page of the New York Times Book Review—and a trio of accomplished detective novels: In Muffled Night (1933), which was possibly inspired by her late husband’s Scottish ancestry, Five to Five (1934) and In Memory of Charles (1941). In all three of these detective novels, Muir ingeniously employed true crimes as the basis for her plots, artfully spinning original solutions to some of the most baffling conundrums in the history of human slaughter. Unfortunately, her creative essays in crime fiction were never published in the United States and memory of them soon faded in the United Kingdom, despite the critical praise which they had garnered from such authorities on the fine art of murder as Dorothy L. Sayers. We owe Moonstone Press a great debt of gratitude for wiping the obscuring dust from these finely wrought jewels of crime fiction.
When you read In Muffled Night, will you beat Detective-Inspector Woods—“a man of about 36, not at all resembling the stolid matter-of-fact man of routine”, but rather “highly intelligent, and of the imaginative, introspective type”—to the solution of the brutal murder of Helen Bailey, housekeeper at “The Towers” to the well-off, highly respectable Murrays of London, headed by “old” James Murray, that imperious widower of sixty-eight? Who done it, you ask? I’ll no’ be tellin’! As the great mystery writer Christianna Brand put it in the title of her Edgar-nominated 1960 study of the bizarre McPherson murder, Heaven Knows Who.
Curtis Evans
Germantown, TN
26 May 2021
Characters
James Murray. Aged 68. Born 1865. Married 1885.
John Murray, his son. Aged 47. Born 1886. Married 1914.
Alan Murray, son of John. Aged 18.
Glenda Murray, daughter of John. Aged 17.
Helen Bailey, housekeeper to the Murrays.
Mary Spens.
Jack Spens, husband of Mary.
Eleanor Spens, sister to Jack.
Superintendent Gowing, of Scotland Yard.
Detective-Inspector Woods.
Mrs. Hughes.
Note
All the above characters are fictitious and have no reference to any living person or persons.
Chapter I
The Persons
“Mere mischance and plots and errors happen”
Hamlet.
It was not at all a suitable house for a murder. Of course there have been murders in the houses of the good and great. But “The Towers” seemed the embodiment of everything peaceful, sober, and respectable. It was a large house, on the Highstead Heights, above London, surrounded with big gardens, with glass-houses, a carriage-drive, a shrubbery, a small wood, and every appurtenance of the rich, solid, middle-class. The mid-Victorians who built it, furnished it and lived in it, would always have felt that anything in the nature of a brutal bloodstained crime could not, in conformity with divine and natural law, be associated with such a house. Even in the present day it had, owing to a series of rather peculiar circumstances, retained the atmosphere with which it had been impregnated by its first owners.
Still furnished in the style of the eighteen-eighties, the scheme of decoration seemed almost incredible to the modern young. A specimen of the modern girl might, and in fact did, feel extremely out of her element on entering this house. Diana Ford was of this species, and staying in the house for the first time, as a totally unprepared visitor, she came down to breakfast and entered the dining-room feeling akin to ‘stout Cortez when with eagle eyes he star’d’, and had she but had a companion they would have emulated that famous band and ‘looked at each other with a wild surmise’. As it was, she could only gaze round the room with a feeling of complete stupefaction. Never had she seen such a room, or thought it possible that so complete a relic could remain unspoilt and untouched, and she stood looking about her and taking in its details with much amusement. She had read, in common with everyone else, reconstructions of the mid-Victorian scene. She had even visited a model museum whose period-rooms included one with the setting of the eighteen-eighties. Nothing, however, had forewarned her that she could one day actually sit down in a room still used for ordinary daily life and yet in itself an exact survival of those past days.
It was rather a dark room. The heavy sash windows had their lower frames filled with squares of coloured glass. The buff blinds were neatly drawn down about a foot. Even such light as could enter through the restricted space thus left, had first to filter through deep cream lace curtains, hanging from the top of the high windows in billowing folds to the floor. Completing this stout resistance against the sunlight were long thick curtains in a sort of rep material and of a deep-red tone, with vast red ropes catching in their swelling waists.
The carpet, also red, was very thick and soft, and stretched across the floor right up to the wainscot of the walls. Those walls were papered in the same slightly ominous shade of crimson. ‘Flock-paper’ thought Diana, with vague ideas of her readings floating through her mind, “that, I think, must be flock”.
Large oil paintings, mostly landscapes, but including also scenes with fishing-boats, ducks on a pond, a village street, all heavily framed in gold, loomed from the walls. In one corner a full-sized statue of a woman in white marble leaned out into the room. In another a marble child lay asleep on a frilled marble cushion, ‘brought from Rome on a wedding trip’.
A sofa and two large arm-chairs and the heavy mahogany set of dining-room chairs were covered with what Diana mentally described as ‘carpet material’, by which term she meant a kind of velvet plush with a geometrical pattern in shades of drab, dark blue, and maroon.
The mantelpiece was of heavy black marble, grained with white. At either end of it stood a tall Doric column in buff marble, copies of some pillars in a famous Grecian temple. In the middle stood a large black marble clock, inlaid with malachite, and with the bronze figure of a draped woman sprawling across the top. Two Satsuma vases, one on either side of the clock, completed the array.
From the old-fashioned china bell-knob at the side dangled a placard, illuminated in heavy silver lettering, “Christ is the Head of this house, the Unseen Guest at every meal, the silent Listener to every conversation.”
“Well,” thought Diana, “I hope we all live up to that—though, after all,” she reflected, “I expect psycho-analysts think of our subconscious as a sort of listener to everything we say too.”
As far as she had seen, the whole house was the same. The staircase, which she had descended, was painted a deep brown, both walls and woodwork, and carpeted in brown of a lighter shade. The fat pillars which supported the roof of the hall were also painted dark brown. Brown velvet curtains hung from the great staircase window. More statues stood at the turn of the stairs, and one window was extended into a fernery.
Her bedroom had been chiefly filled with an immense bedroom suite, in walnut, every leg and possible support being a twirling spiral. The bed was a half-tester bed, with a canopy overshadowing the pillows, and both bed and window had dark-green damask curtains. The carpet was dark green, with bunches of pink and red roses. The dressing-table had white muslin petticoats over green, and the walls were hung with steel engravings after Poussin. The house seemed to be absolutely complete in the mid-Victorian style.
Hunger made Diana’s thoughts turn towards the breakfast-table, which nobly maintained the Victorian tradition of comfort without stint. The white damask cloth came down almost to the floor. A large fat silver tea-pot, coffee-pot, and two or three jugs for milk and cream shone and glittered at one end. Vast cups and saucers were ranged before them. Two plates showed by the napkins emerging from their covers that hot scones lay within. On the sideboard four massive silver entrée dishes, ranged on a gigantic chafing dish, were flanked by a vast ham, while the back of the sideboard showed an immense array of silver trays, and salvers, cruets, and other objects.
A coal fire sparkled and glowed in the fireplace, for, in spite of being early July, a very wet, cold spell had overtaken London, and the reeking damp without made the warmth within very acceptable.
Diana, in whose own modern home greater ease compensated for less comfort and dignity, wondered how long she would have to wait before her hostess and friend appeared. She had come down on hearing the gong, and wondered why none of the household were on the scene. At this moment the door opened, and two men came in together. Diana had arrived so late the previous night that she had scarcely seen any of the family. She had been taken up to her room by her friend, and had hardly grasped who were the other inmates of the house. The two men who now came in were clearly father and son—and the elder she knew must be old Mr. James Murray, her friend Glenda’s grandfather.
“Good morning, Miss Ford,” said the younger of the two. “I don’t think you saw my father last night? Father, this is Miss Ford, Glenda’s friend.” The older man came forward and shook Diana’s hand, and she was aware of a tall, thin, keen-faced old man, who scrutinized her swiftly out of an extraordinarily piercing pair of blue eyes. But, before she had much time in which to contemplate her host, the door opened again and her own friend and contemporary, Glenda Murray, came hurrying in, followed by her brother Alan.
Glenda Murray was an extremely charming girl. She had inherited her grandfather’s peculiar shade of blue eyes, but with her they were not piercing, but bright and sparkling. She was tall and fair, with rather an appealing face. Perhaps the restraint which old James Murray clearly imposed upon his family had checked her natural gaiety. Certainly she produced an effect of fragility and timidity, which is not very common nowadays. She was a girl who won the affections of others very easily, a characteristic which had some influence on forthcoming events. Her brother, Alan, resembled her, though he looked less delicate. His face showed intelligence, and the promise of character, but, at the moment, was spoilt by the sullen, downcast look with which he came up to the table. It was perfectly clear that he was not on good terms with his grandfather, and equally so that he was obliged to bear with the old man’s imperious ways. James favoured Alan with a hostile glare, but otherwise vouchsafed him no greeting in reply to the mumbled “’Morning, Grandfather” forced from reluctant lips. The whole group were aware of impending unpleasantness, and the girl tried hastily to avert it.
