The shape of Monday, 21 December 1908, seemed no more sinister than that of any of the precedent Mondays, some 4,326 of them, in the 82-year life of Miss Marion Gilchrist. No sign, no portent of disaster arose to mar the smooth features of the showery day that lay ahead.

At 8am as the soft Glasgow rain beaded and dropleted the bedroom window of her comfortable, middle-class flat on the first floor of the solid, dark stone house on comfortable, middle-class West Princes Street, Miss Gilchrist stirred in her best quality sheeted, blanketed and eiderdowned cocoon as her maid, little Nellie Lambie, tapped on her chamber door, bearing a fine bone china cup of fragrantly steaming tea to add a refined taste of pleasure to her mistress’ matutinal greeting of the new day – her 30,288th, and last, on earth.

At 82 years of age – and eleven months, to be exact – you do not tumble out of bed in any splendid frenzy to salute another dawn filched from the eternal dark: you compose and comport yourself with staid and steady gravura. Miss Gilchrist accordingly tarried abed until rising midday. Pacing herself, she attended to her toilette, dressed – slightly creakily – with her customary meticulousness, then, not forgetting the three finger rings she always liked to wear – the mourning-ring in memory of her mother, the gold ring that had belonged to her father, and her own favourite gold ring with the two diamonds, three rubies, and her name inscribed on it – selected a trinket or two for discreet embellishment, and crossed the hall, stately, to the dining-room for luncheon.

Thereafter, between half past one and two o’clock, having carefully apparelled herself in her outdoor clothes, and telling Nellie that she was going to pay a couple of small outstanding accounts, Miss Gilchrist sallied in dignity forth from her house.

Some two and a half hours later, the First-Day-of-Winter’s darkness closing about her heels, Miss Gilchrist returned home. Less than three hours’ measure of sand now remained in the upturned glass of her life. Time ticked her dwindling minutes sonorously away on the heavy-breathing grandfather’s clock in the hall.

Shortly before the chimes of seven, Miss Gilchrist sent Nellie out to fetch her her usual copy of the Glasgow Evening Citizen. Actually there were some other errands also to be run. For one thing, more milk was needed. Miss Gilchrist handed Nellie a half-sovereign and a single penny. Deciding that she would go for the paper first, Nellie put the milk jug and the half-sovereign down on the dining-room table. She left her mistress sitting there in the dining-room looking at a magazine. Carefully locking the flat door and shutting the downstairs close-door behind her, clutching the penny that she had been given, Nellie trudged off through the rain. Macready’s, the newsagent’s at 190a St George’s Road, was barely a hundred yards away. The errand would take less than ten minutes.

Let us leave Miss Gilchrist peacably there, as Nellie left her, an old lady, cosy beside the orange glow of the sea-coal fire, spectacles on the tip of her nose, mercifully all oblivious of the import of the approaching footsteps on the stone stairs, placidly reading on the edge of eternity.

The ground-floor flat, immediately below Miss Gilchrist’s, was what is described in Scotland as a ‘maindoor house’, that is to say it had its own private entrance – a separate front-door giving access to the street. This door, numbered both 51 West Princes Street and 14 Queen’s Terrace – Queen’s Terrace being the name given to a section forming the south side of the east end of West Princes Street – shared a pediment, at the top of five wide, shallow steps leading up from the pavement, with another door set on its left. This second street-door – numbered 49 West Princes Street and 15 Queen’s Terrace – opened into a small passage, lobby, or (Scots) close, apart from, and running behind which, the maindoor house occupied the whole ground floor. From this close, three short flights of common stair led up to the first-floor flat, where Miss Gilchrist had lived for the past 30-odd years.

The tenants of the ground-floor flat were the seven members of the Adams family. Although her neighbours for the better part of 27 years, Miss Gilchrist’s relationship with them had not progressed beyond amiable, weather-chatting acquaintance. The Adams household was virtually a matriarchy, its titular head, Mrs Rowena Sophia Adams, a venerable 76-year-old widow.

On this December evening, her 40-year-old bachelor son, Arthur Montague Adams, a professional musician, and five of his sisters – Selina Lucy Jane, Laura Emma, Adela Florence, Octavia Emily and Alice Maud – all of them music teachers, were in the house. The music of time had arranged that this tranquil and melodious ensemble were, all unknowingly, about to give ear to one of the most terrible and discordant, not to say misterioso, criminous passages ever played out in their city.

There was another apartment above Miss Gilchrist’s on the top – third – storey. It was unoccupied. The old lady was severally reported as being unhappy about the empty flat upstairs, as it meant that there was no one other than herself in occupancy of the building: too much of an invitation to undesirable visitors. And the advent of undesirable visitors was precisely her most disturbing recurrent nightmare. Miss Gilchrist, it must be explained, suffered from a positively morbid dread of burglars, which manifested itself right down to the extreme man-under-the-bed syndrome.

To be fair, this was no idle, irrational phobia, for Miss Gilchrist nurtured a passion for precious stones and a keen appetite for gold. Over the years, she had amassed a large quantity of valuable jewellery. Her collection may have been her pride, but her joy was heavily alloyed by her continual worry about it; an eminently reasonable fear that intruders might relieve her of the £3000’s worth of choice pieces, some of which it was one of her little foibles to hide away in a hanging pocket among the folds of dresses at the back of her wardrobe, and to conceal about her bed, as well as, it is said, in a number of other carefully selected secret places.

To foil these would-be robbers, whose imagined depredations were the disproportionate tax which the poor old lady paid on her harmless, jackdawish fascination with the golden and glittery, she generally kept her back windows claustrophobically tight-locked, and had the door of her apartment fitted with, in addition to a normal heavy-duty lock and chain, a stout bolt and two patent locks, one a Chubb, opened from within by two separate catches complicatedly requiring turning in opposite directions, and from without by two different keys, similarly requiring to be turned clockwise and anti-clockwise, respectively.

The close-door downstairs was usually kept shut on an ordinary check-lock, and was opened from the outside with a latchkey. It could also be opened from both of the flats above by means of a long chain attached to the latching mechanism and operated by a hand-lever – not unlike that activated by a hangman – one of which was situated, large and conspicuous, inside the entrance doors of both of the upstairs apartments. Bear in mind, therefore, that any caller would have to negotiate two barriers. He would ring at the street-door. If this were opened for him from aloft, he would still have to pass muster upstairs at the heavily barricaded entrance door of Miss Gilchrist’s apartment. He would be likely, too, to be the subject of intermediate covert scrutiny, for it was her frequent habit, having manipulated the hand-lever to unlatch the main street-door, to creep quietly out to take a peep over the banisters to see who was coming up. And if for any reason she did not like the look of the visitor, she would dart lizard-swift back to remain incommunicado behind the vast ironmongery of locks and bolts.

The territory beyond that formidable brace of barriers was one of good, sound, middle-class comfort rather than luxury; comfort trimmed at the edges by the deckled scissors of parsimony, for of her domestic economy it was said that Miss Gilchrist was one who would share a kipper – best quality, of course – between two. The apartment door opened on to a fair-sized hall, about 18 ft long by 10 ft wide. Immediately on your left as you entered this hallway, just beyond the hand-lever for opening the close-door, was the door to the dining-room, a large room, 21 ft 6 in long by 15 ft 9 in wide, illumined by two tall windows, fitted with Venetian blinds, and looking out on to West Princes Street. Over to the right-hand side of the hall was the drawing-room, equally spacious and high-ceilinged in the best Edinburgh–Glasgow tradition. Its twin windows also overlooked West Princes Street, and a door situated on the right, down at the windows’ end, led into a much smaller apartment, opening off the drawing-room. It, too, had a tall window on to West Princes Street. Both of the main rooms were in atmosphere and décor adamantly Victorian; walls hung with many oil-paintings in heavy ornate frames, furniture ponderous and well-polished, a towering folding screen to protect against ubiquitous Glasgow draughts in the cluttered drawing-room, large and ugly ornaments distributed in legions over mantelshelves and all exposed and vulnerable surfaces.

Past the dining-room door, past a narrow stretch of wall where a grandfather’s clock ticked stolidly away, was another door; the last on the left-hand side. This led into what might be called the servants’ quarters. It opened on to a small lobby, the furthest portion of which, partitioned off, constituted the ‘bed alcove’ – an institution shared by Scotland and France. Here, with its own separate door giving direct access from this stifling, windowless cubby-hole to the kitchen, the maid-servant slept. No nonsense about equality or the common humanity of slaveys and suchlike inferiors in those halcyon days.

Unlike the bed alcove, the kitchen was roomy and had a window with a pleasing enough view on to the back green. Here was the sink (jaw-box in Glaswegian parlance), the range, and the pulleys, for indoor drying of the washing.

Across on the right-hand side of the hall, exactly opposite the lobby door to the servants’ quarters, was an identical lobby door leading to what may be termed the bedroom complex; for, opening off the lobby on to which it gave, were the main bedroom, a second, smaller bedroom, and the bathroom, together with, as the house-agents euphemise, the usual offices. Presumably the maid-servant was permitted to trespass into this ‘western wing’ for hygienic purposes, as these were seemingly unprovided for in any other discriminatory out-of-the-way corner.

Rather confusingly, Miss Gilchrist generally slept in the so-called spare bedroom. This was in fact the larger of the two rooms and was furnished with a suite of the finest figured walnut. It was here that her jewels were kept. Both bedrooms had a back-garden outlook, as did the bathroom.

The demesne was completed by two further rooms – or, rather, one and a ‘roomlet’. The parlour, in which was located Miss Gilchrist’s small, but sturdy and surprisingly heavy, safe – used not for the safe-keeping of jewels, but the stowing away of her private papers – also had a view over the back court. It was entered by a door situated towards the left-hand corner of the rear wall of the entrance hall – the fifth of the six doors therein. The sixth, that of a roomlet described as a pantry, was set on the right of, adjacent to, and on the same wall as, the front entrance to the apartment.

Such then, was the extent of the Gilchristean estate and messuage. Here, in this fortress-like stronghold, this carefully reinforced terrain, the timorous Miss Gilchrist felt reasonably secure, but like the pessimist – he of the belt and braces – she had arranged as long-stop, additional insurance in case of emergency, with the Adams family that if at any time she should require urgent assistance, she would knock three times on the floor.

Now, at a few minutes after seven o’clock on this Monday evening, the summons was to come.

Down in the Adams’ dining-room, which was directly below that of Miss Gilchrist, Christmas preparations were rustling the air. Arthur Adams was, in fact, struggling with paper and string, wrapping up a parcel of seasonable groceries for ‘a young lady friend who is very delicate’. With Arthur and the innominate delicate one, was his sister, Laura, who was expecting pupils that evening, one of whom, due for a music lesson at seven, had been unable to come. Laura was standing by the fireside, flicking through the evening paper.

Suddenly, the quiet of this innocent domestic vignette was brutally shattered by a tremendous thud on the ceiling, exactly above where Laura stood.

The time was between seven o’clock and three minutes past.

‘That sounds as if Miss Gilchrist has fallen,’ said Laura Adams in some alarm. As she spoke, the door opened and her sister Rowena1 came in. ‘There was a very funny noise upstairs like a heavy fall,’ Laura told her. ‘Don’t you think Arthur should go up and see?’

Before Rowena had a chance to reply, they all heard what Arthur Adams was later to describe as ‘three distinct knocks on the floor’.

Laura’s first thought was that Miss Gilchrist must have had a fit and fallen down. Then, remembering how they had some time previously told the old lady upstairs that if she ever wanted anything she was to knock on the floor and they would go up to her, Laura turned to her brother and said: ‘Miss Gilchrist evidently wants something. You’d better go up and see.’

Adams found the close-door of No. 49 ajar. Strange, it should have been on the check-lock. He ran directly up the three flights to Miss Gilchrist’s landing. He saw that the front-door of the apartment was safely closed and apparently locked. Let into the wall on either side of the big wooden door were panels of frosted glass, and through these he could see that the gas was lit in the hall. He pulled the brass knob of the door-bell. Waited. No response. He rang twice more. Still no response. He listened for any sounds inside the flat. Heard nothing.

He had been standing, poised irresolutely, ear cocked, for, he calculated, about half a minute, when an odd noise started up inside the flat. ‘It seemed to me to be the sound as if it was someone chopping sticks – not heavy blows.’ Perplexed, he lingered on for fully a further minute, or perhaps a minute and a half, hearing the noise of stick-cracking once, or it might be twice, more. It must, he thought, be the maid chopping sticks for the morning fires. ‘I formed the opinion that the girl was doing up her kitchen and that she was not going to open the door.’ Pretty well satisfied in his own mind, he retreated down the stairs and, leaving the close-door ajar as he had found it, returned to his sisters. He had been absent about three minutes in all.

But during her brother’s absence Laura had heard more puzzling sounds coming from above, sounds as of ‘something going on’. She could not, she said, describe it. ‘It might have been the moving of furniture, or of some person moving about in the dining-room.’

‘I’ll go up again, if you like,’ offered brother Arthur. Both trepidant sisters said that they liked … so, immediately, up he went again.

It was about six or seven minutes after seven.

The seventh and last chime of a nearby clock was just fading on the damp air as Nellie Lambie set off through the rain and darkness to Macready’s, the newsagent’s. It was less than three minutes’ walk away. As she reached the corner, she met a policeman whom she knew, Constable John Harrison. He was off duty, in plain clothes, and they had a little chat ‘for about five minutes’. Then, across the street, she spotted P.C. William Neill, whom she also knew. She did not, however, have any conversation with him. She bought a copy of the Evening Citizen, pocketed the halfpenny change, and made her way straight back to No. 49. There, she found the close-door, which she had carefully shut when she went out, open, and, sharp-eyed, noticed a wet footmark on the first step of the stone stairs. On the second, there was another. She had been out for ten minutes at the most.

Arriving at the first floor, she was astonished to see Mr Adams standing outside Miss Gilchrist’s door. He was never a visitor at their house.

Arthur Adams had, in fact, been standing there for only a minute or two, for this was his second visit. This time there had been no sound of any kind coming from the flat. He had given the bell a good strong pull and was just about to tug again when he heard the distinct tapping of footsteps in the close …then coming up the stair …and Nellie Lambie appeared, holding the evening paper in her hand.

Without polite preliminaries, Adams, now knowing for the first time that the old lady had been left alone in the house, greeted her immediately with his anxieties. ‘There must be something wrong in your house.’ No beating about the bush with him. ‘Perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘your mistress has fallen down. There was a terrible crash on the ceiling below.’ He emphasised it: ‘Our ceiling was like to crack.’

But Nellie did not seem particularly perturbed. She did not think that Miss Gilchrist had fallen down. She looked at him askance, a bit old-fashioned, as they say. ‘Oh, no. It must be the pulleys,’ she said. She explained that the kitchen pulleys, the clothes’ poles on which the washing was hung up to dry suspended from the ceiling and raised and lowered by an arrangement of ropes and wheels, had been giving trouble, and had recently fallen clattering to the kitchen floor. The rope had since been repaired, but, as a portion of it had frayed, she thought it might well have given way again.

Mr Adams heard. But, commendably cautious, characteristically conscientious, he told her: ‘I’ll wait and see that everything’s all right.’

Nellie unlocked the door with her brace of keys. The hall lamp, a single jet caged in an open-ended cylinder of thick blue glass set within a wrought-iron frame, was lit, but not really bright, the gas being only half on. She stepped into the hall and started to walk to the lobby door leading to the kitchen. She was going to check the pulleys. Adams remained hovering uneasily at the threshold, half in, half out, one foot on the door-mat on the landing.

It was then that something very strange – totally unexpected and to this day totally unexplained – happened. From the direction of a bedroom a well-dressed man appeared. He walked calmly and coolly as if the house belonged to him. But instead of coming directly across the hall to the front-door, he kept in close to the wall until he came up to where Adams was standing. The man did not seem excited in any way, his demeanour was more that of a visitor who was thoroughly familiar with the place. It never occurred to Adams to stop him.

I did not suspect him – and the girl Lambie said nothing. I just imagined him to be a friend of Miss Gilchrist or of the servant. A rather gentlemanly-looking fellow, he certainly did not look like a burglar. He came up to me quite pleasantly. Our eyes met. I thought he was going to speak, but he passed without a word, almost brushing clothes with me. Directly he passed me, he ran downstairs like greased lightning and banged the door at the foot of the close. I knew he was a thief then.

What exactly Lambie did immediately after opening the door of the apartment is a crucial question. Adams consistently stated that she stepped into the hall and began to walk towards the kitchen. She had been, he said, eight or ten steps – perhaps a little more – into the hall when the man appeared. She stood and stared. She turned round and looked after him – and never said a word.

Nellie, on the other hand, said in her first statement: ‘I stepped into the hall and at once saw a man about the middle of the hall. He seemed coming towards the door from the direction of the spare bedroom.’ In her final statement she said:

When I opened the door I was standing on the mat. As soon as I had opened the door, I saw a man in the lobby. The man was a few paces from me in the hall, walking as if he had come out of the spare bedroom. He walked quite slowly and passed me on the mat.

The discrepancies between Adams’ and Lambie’s statements are important because of their bearing upon the question of how good an opportunity Lambie was afforded to see, and therefore afterwards reliably to identify, the man in the blue gaslight.

Adams went on to say that, without a word or glance in his direction, Nellie proceeded, first, into the kitchen. She found there the pulleys sound and in situ and called out to Adams: ‘All’s right!’ She went next across the hall and into the spare bedroom, thinking that, as the gas in the room was alight, which it had not been when she went out, Miss Gilchrist might be in there. But the room was empty. Finally, and only after Mr Adams had shouted to her, in tone both vexed and anxious, ‘Where is your mistress?’, she made her way to the dining-room. She went only as far as the door of the room, expecting to see Miss Gilchrist sitting as she had left her. ‘I looked about but couldn’t see her in her chair.’ She moved further into the room. Stood rooted … horrified. She saw not Miss Gilchrist, but a pair of legs and what looked like Miss Gilchrist’s clothing bundled on the floor. For a second or two she could not believe her senses. She could not see the face of the alien thing huddled on the familiar dining-room hearth-rug, for, most eerily, its head, torso, and the greater part of the lower limbs were covered by a hairy skin rug, glistening with blood drops. Surely those stiff marionette legs and that crumpled heap of clothes were not her spry, imperious mistress. Lambie’s mind could not comprehend this sudden indignity conferred by brutish death. She reacted in the only way she knew how. She screamed, once, piercingly, then raced out of the room, across the blue-shadowed hall to the outer door and the protective presence of the attendant and transfixed Mr Adams.

‘Oh, come and see … my mistress … she’s lying on the floor. There’s something wrong. That man has done something to Miss Gilchrist.’ It came jerking out in a sort of breathless staccato. She began to weep. Gently. Then bitterly, her thin shoulders shaking.

Adams bounded across the hall and peered into the dining-room. He saw Miss Gilchrist lying on her back, diagonally, head towards the left end of the fender, feet towards the table and the door. ‘A horrible spectacle,’ was how he described it. He did his best to blot out the blood, the brain tissue on mat and mantel; the horrid dark bundle humped slackly on the rug, atavistically reminiscent of the shapeless shadow bundle of nameless dreads on the nursery floor. He felt sick. He realised that unwittingly, witlessly, he had allowed Miss Gilchrist’s assailant to escape. That made him feel stupid – guilty. ‘I thought my best plan was to make after the man as quickly as possible. I wasn’t in the house more than half a minute after the man passed me at the door and I started after him.’

Shouting a warning to the girl – ‘Go to the close-mouth and stand there till I get back’ – whey-faced and battling the surges and spasms of his own stomach, Adams flung himself down the stairs with such horror-spurred alacrity that ‘I nearly fell down.’ He found the close-door tight-shut. He feverishly pulled back the snib and ran out into West Princes Street.

He looked to the right, east, towards St George’s Road, but could see no one. The empty stretch of wet road and pavement shone static as the untroubled surface of a reflectionless mirror. He looked to the left, west, towards Park Road. In the middle distance were several people. He dashed up the street like a baffled beagle, looking into Queen’s Crescent on his right as he went. But of the running man there was no sign. Puffing now, Adams reached the end of the block; a matter of 140 yards. He could see no one in the least resembling the man in the blue gaslight. The Glasgow night had enfolded him. So there, at the corner of West Princes Street and West Cumberland Street,2 the hot pursuit ended.

Meanwhile, Nellie, near to the tether’s end of her nerves, had slipped over the road to the house of the doctor at No. 1 Queen’s Crescent. Her friend, 19-year-old Lizzie McIntosh, was a servant there. She went to pluck at her sleeve for moral support as much as anything, but unfortunately Lizzie was not able to get away to accompany her back to No. 49. Returning forlorn, Nellie gratefully espied the figure of her beat-trudging acquaintance whom she had seen from over the street earlier that evening, Constable William Neill. She was about to rush across and pour into his startled ear the whole ghastly story of the terrible thing that had happened since they last waved cheery greetings to each other barely ten minutes before, when a breathless Adams appeared; so, instead, she and Adams together gasped out to Neill their joint tale of horror.

As Adams and Neill headed up the stair to Miss Gilchrist’s flat, Nellie, whose jangling nerves and liberal adrenalin release would not let her stay still, sped off to break the news of the tragedy to Miss Gilchrist’s 44-year-old spinster niece, Margaret Dawson Birrell, who lived at 19 Blythswood Drive,³ about a quarter of a mile away. What Helen Lambie then said – or did not say – to Miss Birrell is, as we shall later see, a matter of supreme importance.

Thus at approximately 7.15pm did the law, in the modest person of P.C. William Neill, make its official entry into the case of the wanton and felonious killing of Marion Gilchrist.

A manifestly agitated Arthur Adams tremulously led the way into the oppressively still dining-room. The fire crackled. The gasolier blazed. Constable Neill crossed over to the fireplace, lifted the rug from Miss Gilchrist’s head, and was appalled. Her face had been beaten in. There was a deep hole on the left side between the eye socket and the left ear, the lobe of which had been completely torn away from the cheek. The left eye-ball was entirely missing; it had been burst and driven into the brain. The right eye was partially torn from its socket. There was a gaping, ragged wound on the right cheek, extending from the mouth, together with a kind of bloody maze of red gaps and pink bone splinterings across the right forehead and right-hand side of the head. The grey hair was darkly matted with blood. Parts of the brain were escaping. Yet, incredibly, and most horrible of all, the mercilessly battered Miss Gilchrist was still alive, still faintly breathing. Neill had difficulty in accepting the horrid tenacity of life. He saw the pathetic, barely perceptible flutterings of breath, but a kindly censor in his mind brought the shutter down. ‘I thought she just breathed her last at that moment.’ But, just in case, ‘I sent Mr. Adams for a doctor’.

Not sorry to have an excuse to flee the deathly claustrophobia of that room, Adams went swiftly across West Princes Street to No. 1 Queen’s Crescent to summon Lizzie’s employer, Dr John Adams, a namesake but no relative.

P.C. Neill, also glad to breathe an air less fraught than that of the Gilchrist dining-room, descended for a brief break to the close-door, about which a crowd, somehow getting wind that something was interestingly amiss, had begun to gather. He saw, too, a welcome sight: marching measuredly towards him was his fellow-constable on the West Princes Street beat, Frank Brien.

Next to arrive was Dr Adams. He examined the battered remnants of his elderly neighbour. The last flutterings of the life force had by now been eternally extinguished. He was careful, in the circumstances, not to interfere with the body, but that did not prevent him from darting a number of very shrewd glances about the room, and making certain observations which led him to form a definite opinion as to how the injuries had been inflicted. Silently, he picked up his bag. Silently, he left the house. That he, the first medical man on the scene, was never subsequently called to give evidence, nor even precognosced, is so remarkable as to impart a most disagreeable feeling of unease.

As Dr Adams was departing, Nellie Lambie arrived back from Blythswood Drive, closely followed by Miss Margaret Birrell, and it was at this point that a second medical man made his appearance. This was Dr Robert Perry, who, now 81, had been Miss Gilchrist’s doctor since 1892. One of his servants had told him that there was a crowd outside Miss Gilchrist’s house and that they were saying that she had been murdered. Concerned, Dr Perry called to see if the rumour was true, was shown the body of his patient, but did not touch it.

The third medic to arrive at No. 49 was Dr John Wright, casualty surgeon to the Western District, Glasgow police. He reported: ‘I found that nearly every bone in the skull was fractured … the head was practically smashed to a pulp.’

There was a fourth doctor who came to join the throng inside the second-storey flat at 15 Queen’s Terrace that night. His name was Francis James Charteris, and he has, quite unjustifiably, been cast by posterity to play a very sinister rôle in the death of Miss Gilchrist.

Born in 1875, Francis James Charteris was the son of Dr Mathew Charteris, who was to become Professor of Materia Medica and Therapeutics at the University of Glasgow. His mother, née Elizabeth Greer, had in fact been previously married to Marion Gilchrist’s younger brother, James. She had borne him a daughter, Mary Greer Gilchrist, before, after only five years of marriage, he had died. It was in April 1873, that his widow remarried.

Apart from his half-sister, Mary, Frank, as he was generally called, had two brothers: Archibald Hamilton, one year his senior, and John, who, born in 1877, was two years his junior.

Thus did Miss Marion Gilchrist acquire, in addition to her legitimate niece, Mary, three ‘honorary’ nephews.

The Charteris brothers all did well in their chosen careers – Archibald ending up as Professor of International Law at Sydney University, Frank as Professor of Materia Medica at the University of St Andrews, and John as a brigadier-general.

In 1907, Frank Charteris, who had duly qualified after studying medicine at the universities of Glasgow and Leipzig, married. His bride, 28-year-old Annie Fraser Kedie, was not only an MA, but also a rich young woman. Her father, Robert Kedie, having arrived in Glasgow from Hawick in the early 1860s, had entered the employment of Messrs Stewart & M’Donald, and risen to become a partner in that flourishing firm of warehousemen and manufacturers.

Young Dr Charteris had settled into private practice at 400 Great Western Road – only a short distance from where ‘Aunt’ Marion lived – where, somewhat unusually, he had a private laboratory. All available photographs of him seem to have been taken in later years, but, whatever the age, they show the austere, patrician features of the old Scottish law-giver or the old-style professor of medicine. There is no criminality in the face: it is the visage that looks down from the bench on the shivering miscreant ready to be sentenced.

These Charterises were of the upper echelons of the professional classes of Glasgow. There was, it is true, a touch of trade in the forebears, but no matter; especially as this was Glasgow and not Edinburgh.

Frank Charteris was a man of strong professional ambition, and a life of marked achievement lay ahead of him. It is typical of the moral tone of the man that he should adopt an attitude of discreet guardianship of his eccentric honorary aunt, whom he knew to be in a perilously unprotected position, but who was too stubborn to accept direct advice. That was why he pressed upon her the gift of a handy-sized watch or guard dog, an Irish terrier named Barney, to protect her person and her store of jewellery. Although he was far from being a regular caller, and she was not of the inner circle of his family, only a person who felt a real concern for his kinswoman would have bothered to select and supply the dog.

There was, to be sure, the odd social encounter. Miss Gilchrist had been invited, with her maid in attendance, to Frank Charteris’ fashionable wedding, at which his uncle, the Very Reverend Archibald Hamilton Charteris, DD, LLD, former Professor of Biblical Criticism at Edinburgh University, and one of His Majesty’s chaplains in Scotland, officiated.

Let there be no doubt about it: Dr Francis James Charteris was a man of duty as well as ambition.

1 Mrs Rowena Eliza Margaret Adams or Liddell, aged 48, Arthur Adams’ eldest sister, was married to George Liddell, a teacher, and resided at 63 Elmbank Street, Glasgow.

2 Now Ashley Street.

3 Now Woodlands Drive.