As the night wore on, more people, official and unofficial, started to arrive at the quiet house in usually sedate West Princes Street.

The Procurator-fiscal, James Neil Hart, bustled up the steps of No. 49 and vanished into its dark maw.

The bulky, imperial wax-mustachioed and impressive person of another arrival, Superintendent Ord, most adequately embodied the full majesty and dignity of the law. Tall, corpulent, round face, shrewd, darkly undershadowed eyes, well-groomed, glossy black hair, and exuding a sub-militaristic air of invincible authority, he looked, and was, a top-brass policeman to the tips of his pudgy fingers. Smartly tailored and crisply linened – clerical-grey suit, well-brushed and boated bowler, black tie discreetly asserted by a simple gold ring – he seemed the rubber-stamped epitome of sober, middle-class success. Actually, nothing, certainly not rank and station, had come easily to John Ord. The son of an Aberdeenshire stableman, he had only reached one of the pinnacles of his profession – Detective Chief Superintendent in charge of the whole of Glasgow’s Detective Department – after a long and tortuous climb through every grade of the service.

Ord, accompanied by Detective Lieutenant William Gordon of Central District, had arrived at West Princes Street at about 8.45pm, and had been greeted at the door of No. 49 by Superintendent William Miller Douglas, Detective Inspector John Pyper and Detective Constable Duncan MacVicar, all of the Western District.

Pyper, tallish, on the spare side, usually puffing away at an outsize pipe, was made unforgettable by the fierce black beard, which lent him the aspect of an old-fashioned, fire-and-brimstone preacher. Now, with practised eye – more than 30 years since he, a crofter’s son, left New Deer, Aberdeenshire, to don the blue tunic – he was astutely observing, calculating, deducing.

First, the murder room. Well furnished. Good, solid stuff. Walls hung with fine big pictures. Obviously originals. Everything of excellent quality. Money and taste. Then … all else receded … the corpse became the focus of his every strained attention. In his intensity of concentration it ceased to be the sad and broken remains of a fellow human being; it became for him, just as a cadaver does for a medical student, nothing more than a subject of exquisite fascination and challenge. Coldly, clinically, his mind registered the details. He would repeat them meticulously, like a student doing a viva, first to Superintendent Ord, and many, many times thereafter.

Pyper’s superior, Superintendent Douglas – described as tall, slim, small beady eyes, small clipped moustache, somewhat pimpled about the chin, eye-catchingly smart in his heavily-braided dress uniform – had, on his arrival at about five minutes past eight, after viewing the body made his way to the so-called spare bedroom and there saw the only other signs anywhere in the flat of the terrible visitant’s incursion. Three boxes, all broken open, were lying on the floor. One of them was a lady’s wooden work-box. It had contained private papers, chiefly letters and receipted accounts. Its lid had been wrenched off. The papers were scattered about the floor. Another was a brush box, containing a brush and comb. The third was a lady’s glove box. In it were one or two pairs of gloves. Nellie Lambie told him that these boxes were normally kept on the dressing-table, beside another brush box which still lay, seemingly untouched, in situ.

What Douglas did find that was of interest, was a box of matches and a spent match, which had obviously come from that box and had been used by the intruder to light the gas. With an uncanny appropriateness, the matchbox was labelled ‘The Runaway Match’. Manufactured by Bryant and May, this was a brand which was not in wide general use; it had never been used in Miss Gilchrist’s household. Not only were the matches of a large, old-fashioned kind, but they were generally sold, not in single boxes, but in packages of a dozen or a half-dozen boxes, and were usually purchased from grocers’ shops rather than tobacconists’. Douglas was quick to note that there was no blood on either the matchbox or the matchstick.

Indeed, and this is perhaps remarkable, outside the confines of the sanguineous dining-room, not a drop or smudge of blood was found anywhere in Miss Gilchrist’s neat and clean apartment.

Ord’s henchman, Lieutenant Gordon, was the next to apply his expertise to the riddle. Having noted ‘two or three round spots of blood’ on the tongs inside the dining-room fender, his attention was particularly attracted by the coal-scuttle –

It was lying outside the fender on the same end as the tongs, and it occurred to me, as there was no blood on the scuttle, the lid of which was broken, that the deceased’s head had struck the coal-scuttle and probably spurted blood on the tongs.

Lambie was asked to search the house to see if anything was missing. She declared that a brooch, which was usually kept with a diamond ring and two others in a little open dish on the spare bedroom dressing-table, had vanished. It was a gold brooch, crescent-shaped, about the size of a half-crown, and set with diamonds. She had seen it lying in the dish on the Sunday, the day before the murder. Nothing else appeared to be missing.

Ord, viewing the body, had noticed that Miss Gilchrist’s dress was open at the neck. This was an important observation, and may provide the answer to the riddle of the missing brooch. Ord suggested that Miss Gilchrist had actually been wearing the brooch, to fasten the neck of her dress, and that when her assailant seized hold of her, the brooch came away in his hand and he unthinkingly pocketed it and bore it away with him. Unfortunately, Ord failed to examine the broken work-box in the spare bedroom sufficiently carefully, and did not therefore spot what appeared to be a finger-mark on it.

The time had now come to question the two vital witnesses as to precisely what they had seen.

Helen Lambie first.

The man held his head down and I didn’t get a look at his face. I think he might be five feet eight or nine inches in height. I couldn’t say whether he had a beard, moustache or whiskers, or was bare-faced. He had a light-coloured overcoat, like fawn-coloured, about three-quarter length. He wore a cloth cap, I think. I can’t tell whether it had a scoop [peak] or brim or not. I don’t remember having seen anyone in the house who in the least resembled the man I saw coming out of the house.

Mark well the terms of this, the first description that Lambie gave. She was later to improve, or improvise, upon it most startlingly – and worryingly. He would become a dark man with a dark-coloured cap, wearing a fawn-coloured waterproof coat; not, she would insist, a rainproof cloth coat. She did not get a view of his full face, but did see the side of it. She noticed nothing peculiar about it. The peculiarity that she did notice was that when he walked he shook his shoulders a little and carried his head forward. Later still, she would add such refinements as that his coat was open, he had carried nothing in his hands, and the ‘cap’ was ‘something of the shape of a Donegal hat’. She would also reduce his height to 5 ft 7 or 8 in. So much for Nellie’s vision – and revision.

Arthur Montague Adams’ description of the stranger in the hall corresponded in some respects with Nellie’s, but in other ways differed substantially. He maintained that, from where he was standing, on the threshold of the flat door, he had had a better opportunity of seeing the man than had Lambie, who, he insisted, was well into the hall when the man appeared. According to Adams:

The man wore a light-grey overcoat – it might be fawn-coloured – coming down to his knees. I cannot say what kind of cap he wore, but I think it was a felt hat. He was clean-shaven and very dark. He was like the type of a clerk or commercial traveller. I thought from appearance that he might be a man of twenty-five to thirty years old.

Adams, too, indulged in subsequent amplification:

He was a sharp-featured man. He wore dark trousers and a light-coloured overcoat reaching down past his knees. I do not think it was a macintosh. I cannot say whether he had brown boots or black boots. I am not certain whether the man wore a hard bowler hat or a cap.

And later:

Just an ordinary face … nothing special about him. Not a well-built man, but well-featured. I cannot exactly swear to his moustache, but if he had any it was very little. I saw nothing special about his nose. I did not notice anything about his way of walking at all. He had nothing in his hand as far as I could tell.

Neither Lambie nor Adams had seen any bloodstains on the stranger. Would they know the man again? Lambie did not think that she would be able to identify him. Adams said that he had seen the man’s face quite distinctly, and thought that he would know it again. Adding, characteristically, honestly, ‘But I could not be sure’.

Putting their heads together, Ord and Gordon, Douglas and Pyper, cobbled up a description of sorts of the wanted man, and, at 9.40pm, the following notice was issued to the Glasgow Police:

An old lady was murdered in her home at 15 Queen’s Terrace between 7 and 7.10pm today by a man from 25 to 30, 5 feet 7 or 8, think clean-shaven. Wore a long grey overcoat and dark cap. Robbery appears to have been the object of the murder, as a number of boxes in a bedroom were opened and left lying on the floor. A large-sized, crescent-shaped gold brooch, set with diamonds, large diamonds in centre, graduating towards the points, is missing and may be in the possession of the murderer. The diamonds are set in silver. No trace of the murderer has been got. Constables will please warn booking-clerks and railway stations, as the murderer will have bloodstains on his clothing. Also warn pawns on opening regarding brooch, and keep a sharp look-out.

It was after 11pm when, at last, Adams returned to his own house. Nellie Lambie had gone off to stay the night with her aunt, Mrs Helen Robertson, at 15 South Kinning Place.

One by one, those who had business in, or came in grief to, the house in West Princes Street slipped quietly away. Ord stayed on longer, later, than most, listening to what his officers had to tell him. They had searched the flat carefully for any implement or weapon. They had found nothing. Conclusion: either the murderer took the weapon away with him, or he had used something that came to hand in the house, something they had as yet failed to identify. Except for a box of Runaway Matches, not a single clue, nothing, had emerged to throw any light on this singular affair. There was no trace of house-breaking. Pyper had examined the windows. Apart from the kitchen window, unsnibbed and open two or three inches at the top – which is how Lambie said that she had left it – and presenting no signs of having been tampered with, all the windows had been firmly closed, and none of them seemed to have been interfered with in any way. Gordon had paid particular attention to the front-door and its various locks. They were all untouched.

What kind of burglar was it anyway who took a solitary brooch (if it had been taken – even that was not certain in this extraordinary case) and left lying around untouched gold and diamond rings, gold watches and chains, and even ready cash?

The more he thought about it, the more certain Ord felt that whoever it was who had come to the flat that evening had been let in by Miss Gilchrist herself. The murderer had gained admission by ringing the bell and having the door opened to him. There was no sign of any struggle. Surely that meant that the killer was someone known to Miss Gilchrist. A friend? A relative? Someone whom she knew and trusted and would not be afraid to let into the house when she was there on her own. Well, that should narrow the field a bit.

Issuing a last instruction that the body was to be left lying untouched where it was until the next day, Chief Superintendent Ord departed, leaving alone in that dark and now empty and silent house, the luckless Constable Brien, to keep, spike-haired and bolt-eyed, the lonely watches of the night with the hideously mangled dead.

When the good burghers of Glasgow, stout and otherwise, opened their morning papers on Tuesday, 22 December, they received a severe matutinal shock over their salt porridge and marmaladed baps. ‘Brutal Crime in Glasgow’ ran the headlines. And the second and third deckers: ‘Defenceless Old Lady Murdered. Girl’s Ghastly Discovery. A Mysterious Visitor. Supposed Assailant Met on Stair’. Then, in finer print and finer detail … ‘Particulars of one of the most revolting tragedies of which the city has ever been the scene.’ Readers were told that ‘throughout the night the detective force maintained a vigilant search. All the likely haunts of the criminal classes were visited. The inmates of all lodging-houses and most of the hotels were systematically examined’.

The first tentative theories were advanced. From the fact that only a brooch of no great value was taken away, it was thought that jewellery might not have been the quest of the man. The circumstance that a number of papers had been removed from a box and thrown upon the floor seemed to suggest the possibility that he might have been looking for some particular document. There was also, in the police view, the likelihood that the man had been foiled in getting the jewellery, or whatever it was that he was after, owing to want of time.

Adams was quoted as thinking that robbery was clearly the motive, and that the intruder had probably climbed the rone pipe at the back of the house and found the bedroom window unfastened. While he was ransacking the room, the old lady, hearing the noise, had risen from her chair, but before she could reach the hall the man had rushed upon her.

There was also the story of the silent watcher. Dr Perry’s wife, who lived at No. 11 Queen’s Terrace, said that for four or five evenings previous to the murder she had noticed a man standing at the corner of Queen’s Crescent, opposite Miss Gilchrist’s house, which he was evidently watching. She described him as young and athletic-looking. He gave the impression of being fairly well-dressed. He was wearing a light overcoat. The presence of this same man on the same spot at the same hour each evening had impressed her so much that she had mentioned it to her maids, who had also observed the young man. In view of what had happened, she had no doubt now that the watcher was someone who had heard about the old lady’s jewellery and was simply waiting for a chance to get into the house.

Fleshing out the persona of the victim, the papers said that the deceased lady came of an old Glasgow family. Her father, the late James Taylor Gilchrist, had been a successful supervisory and consulting engineer. Described as ‘an attractive, tall, erect person, healthy for her age, and looking more like sixty-five than the fourscore years which she had exceeded,’ Miss Gilchrist was said to have been well-known in the district in which she resided, and regarded by her friends and neighbours as exceedingly well-off. She owned considerable property throughout the city. She was known to be fond of jewellery, and to possess many valuable pieces. She had long been a member of St John’s United Free Church, in George Street, and took a great interest in religious and philanthropic work. She had a wide reputation among the poor for her benevolence.

According to Lambie, Miss Gilchrist received comparatively few visitors, and seldom had male callers. Certainly there had been no man at the house recently. Her mistress was, she said, most timid. She was easily upset by any unusual noise, had a wholesome dread of burglars, and was very loth to be left alone in the house. For the past year she had had apprehensive fears that she was not safe in her flat. So nervous was she on some occasions that Nellie had been obliged to share her bed with her. Arthur Adams confirmed that Miss Gilchrist had harboured a mortal terror of finding a man in the house, and on several occasions had asked him to search her flat to allay her fears. Indeed, it was thus that the arrangement came into being that, by tapping on the floor, she would let him know that his presence was urgently wanted upstairs.

It was the Daily Record that opined that: ‘A rather significant feature of the tragedy lies in the fact that some time ago the old lady’s dog was mysteriously poisoned, and the surmise is that the deed was premeditated.’ The circumstances, as related by Lambie, were that when she and her mistress returned from a holiday at Girvan, on the Ayrshire coast, at the end of August 1908, the dog was allowed out from half past one to a quarter past six on the first Sunday in September (6 September).

I took it out again for a walk that same evening. It could not walk and I had to carry it home. It looked peculiar and it got worse. It died that same night. I carried it down to the washing-house the next day, and it was taken away by a dustman. Its tongue was hanging out before it died, but it was not vomiting. Miss Gilchrist told Dr Perry of the affair, and he thought by the symptoms it had been poisoned. Its hind legs seemed to be useless. Miss Gilchrist had had it for two years. She got it as a present from Dr Charteris.

Lambie thought that the dog had eaten something disagreeable, but Miss Gilchrist was convinced that Barney had been deliberately poisoned.

Following tight on the heels of a long and hectically unproductive night, the Glasgow police, tired, frustrated, faced the dawn of Tuesday, 22 December, coming up grey, cold and uninviting over the Clyde, without exuberance. As soon as the watery – of course it was still raining – winter morning light creaked down, Inspector Alexander Rankin, of Western District, found himself poking wetly about the soaking back greens of No. 15 Queen’s Terrace, and properties adjacent thereto. ‘Go’, Inspector Pyper had told him, while the lamps yet burned yellow in the office, ‘go and see if you can’t come up with the murder weapon – or at least a footmark.’ And Inspector Rankin had gone, and taken with dedication and a sense of purpose to the quartering of the greens. By 10am, with the sun now high though hidden behind suffusing clouds of moisture, Inspector Rankin’s patient fossicking was rewarded. It had yielded, from almost directly below the kitchen window of Miss Gilchrist’s house, a large iron auger or screw-bit, lifting which, he had seen a mixture of brown and grey human hairs adhering to its underside. From their length he judged the hairs to have come from a woman. There was also what appeared to be rust on the auger, but it might just as easily be blood. Nor could the auger, he decided, have lain long where he found it, for the grass beneath it was not etiolated, but quite green. Rankin bore auger and hair off in triumph to the Western Police Office. Sadly, it was to prove a damp squib.

Interestingly, the Edinburgh Evening Dispatch representative had elicited some fresh facts in the course of an interview with Miss Laura Adams. She told him that one of her sisters, who was somewhat of an invalid, was expecting a parcel on the night of the murder. She kept looking out of the window for the postman, and saw, walking up and down the pavement outside as if waiting on something, a young man. He was wearing a light overcoat, and she thought that he had answered to the description of the individual wanted. It seemed likely that he was waiting till Lambie left the house.

Sharp and bright on the morning of Wednesday, 23 December, in the balneal, white-tiled, disinfectant-edged mortuary of Glasgow Royal Infirmary, medical jurisprudentialists Professor John Glaister and Dr Hugh Galt set to work to put together an impersonal sort of inventory of the awfulnesses visited upon the living body of the late Marion Gilchrist.

Their report began in the time-honoured low key of such reports: ‘The body was that of a well-nourished elderly woman. Death-stiffening had disappeared from the body. The skin was markedly pallid in appearance.’

Then, an end to the mildness, it moved brutally swiftly into its recording of the atrocious. It was indeed an appalling catalogue of savageries. They itemised each of the dreadful injuries to the head and face. Several bones forming the right temple and back of the head were shattered, and pieces driven in upon the brain. Parts of both upper and lower left eyelids had been forced into the brain cavity. On dissecting the chest cavity, the breast-bone was found to be completely fractured, throughout its entire thickness, about the middle. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth ribs on the right side of the chest were badly fractured. Examining the thoracic organs, the pathologists found both lungs healthy, and the heart very healthy for that of a woman of Marion Gilchrist’s age. Examination of the abdominal organs revealed a normal stomach, containing some partially digested food, both kidneys were granular as the result of chronic affection, and where were small tumours of the womb and its appendages. The remainder of the organs were normal.

The conclusion. The doctors testified on soul and conscience that they were:

of opinion that the cause of death of the said Marion Gilchrist was extensive wounds and fractures of bones of face and skull, and fractures of breast-bone and ribs, together with shock and bleeding therefrom, that the said injuries were produced by forcible contact with a blunt weapon, and that the violence was applied with considerable force.

A little later that same Wednesday, Superintendent Ord received a letter which had been addressed to the Chief Constable of Glasgow, James Verdier Stevenson, by Captain J Lumsdane, commander of the Anchor Line vessel, S.S. Furnessia. Writing, on 22 December, from 46 Park Drive South, Whiteinch, Captain Lumsdane had this to say:

Re. the murder of the old lady in Queen’s Terrace. The manner in which it was perpetrated is typically American. Similar deeds are of almost daily occurrence in New York. Burglars kill their victims to prevent the probability of future recognition, and battering their heads in is the usual method.

In consequence of this communication, the official attitude of the Glasgow police underwent a change, and Ord, who was inclined to think it improbable that the murder had been committed by a Scotsman, considered that it might well have been the act of someone acquainted with the theory and practice of violence ‘over there’, and gave orders that thought and inquiries should be particularly directed to foreigners in Glasgow.

It was neither lack of enthusiasm nor want of energy, but absence of that vital additional ingredient – which the former cannot conjure up or the latter manufacture – luck, which denied the beavering police success. Then, on that Wednesday afternoon, it seemed that the missing ingredient was in sudden and most unexpected manner generously supplied.

Shortly after 4pm the telephone rang in Ord’s office. It was a Northern District detective, John McGimpsey. He told the Superintendent that, emerging around four o’clock that afternoon from his flat at 9 Seamore Street, he had been chance hailed by a neighbour, Mrs Barbara Barrowman, who was coming up the stair. She lived with her husband, Robert, an iron moulder, and daughters, Barbara and Mary, on the stair above McGimpsey, in the same tenement. ‘Have you got any word of the West Princes Street murderer yet?’ she asked him. And when he told her no, she had intimated that her 14-year-old daughter, Mary, could a tale unfold. And she had gone on to explain that the girl had seen a man running away from Miss Gilchrist’s house. ‘If all’s true that our Mary says,’ she added, ‘you’ll know him by a crooked nose.’

Ord lost no time. Detectives were despatched to Seamore Street forthwith. Mary Barrowman told her story. She was employed as a message-girl by Malcolm Maccallum & Son, Boot and Shoe Makers, at 333 Great Western Road.

About 7pm on Monday, 21 December, or it might be shortly after it, I left my employer’s shop with a parcel to be delivered to 36 Cleveland Street, off St Vincent Street. I went from Great Western Road into West Princes Street, and when almost opposite a close there, which I have since learned is No. 15 Queen’s Terrace, I saw a man coming hurriedly out of that close and come down the five or six steps therefrom to the pavement. I think he came down two steps at a time. He was running when he came out and he continued to run along West Princes Street to West Cumberland Street. Then I returned and went straight along West Princes Street and delivered my parcel. There is a street-lamp quite near the close and it was lit. The man was tall, about 28 or 30 years old and not broad made. Clean-shaven, he had a slight twist on his nose. He was pale-faced. He wore a fawn overcoat, I think a waterproof. He wore a dark suit, which appeared either blue or black. He had nothing in his hands, which were bare. He had on what I think is known as a Donegal hat1 – it seemed of light grey tweed.

I did not observe whether he wore a [watch] chain at his breast. He wore brown boots. I thereafter went back to the shop by St George’s Road and West Princes Street. I think it would take about half an hour to go from the part of West Princes Street where I saw the man first to Cleveland Street and back, and I imagine it was about a quarter to eight when I reached West Princes Street again, and I saw two or three people standing about near the close. I did not then speak to anyone or hear anything as to the murder. I got back to my employer’s shop, and, at about eight o’clock, it was closed. My father has a shop in St Vincent Street,² and I think I went there after eight o’clock.

I was again at West Princes Street about nine o’clock on my way home for the night when I saw a crowd near the said close. I spoke to someone in the crowd and asked what was wrong, and she told me there had been a murder of a woman there. When I got home I told my mother. I did not see anyone come out of the close after the man. There was no one at or near the close at the time when the man came running out, and while he was in my sight he did not join, nor was he joined by, anyone. There were one or two persons coming east along West Princes Street while he was running west, but I did not know any of them.

Although no clue had as yet proved concrete enough to warrant the arrest for which all Glasgow was clamouring, McGimpsey’s gift had gone a wondrous way towards lightening the hearts of Superintendents Ord and Douglas, who, as the head man of the Western District, bore the actual executive responsibility of the case.

But there was a snag: no matter what allowances you made for mistakes and malobservations, there was simply no way that you could equate the figure of Mary Barrowman’s elaborate description with the man in the hall described, admittedly more sketchily, by Adams and Lambie. Did this, the police began to wonder, mean that there were perhaps two men involved?

In the course of the last couple of days the detectives had lost no time in making careful and widespread inquiries of the late Miss Gilchrist’s relatives. They had questioned her niece, Miss Margaret Dawson Birrell, closely, and Superintendent Douglas had had a long consultation with Miss Gilchrist’s solicitor, Mr James Macdonald. They had discovered that Miss Gilchrist had three sisters living. Two of them resided in Glasgow – Mrs Jane Gilchrist or Birrell, aged 68, lived with her husband, Dawson Birrell, at 23 Blythswood Drive; and 70-year-old, widowed, Mrs Elizabeth Lawrie lived at 7 Ashton Terrace, Partickhill. Neither of them had any children. Mrs Birrell last saw her sister Marion about 1893. Mrs Lawrie had never visited her. The third sister, Mrs Christina Gilchrist or Lee, aged 75, had never visited Marion either. A widow, she was living at Minard Villa, 20 Craigie Road, Ayr. She had four sons and three daughters.

A fourth sister, Mrs Janet Gilchrist or Birrell, married to Walter Birrell (Dawson Birrell’s brother), had died aged 67, in 1896. She had three surviving sons and one daughter.

Apart from the Lee and Birrell families, there was of, course, the Charteris family, which was, as we have seen, related more remotely to Miss Gilchrist. Its members included Mrs Elizabeth Charteris (née Greer), her daughter Mary by James Gilchrist, and the three children of her second marriage – Archibald, Francis and John Charteris. The whereabouts of all these at the time of the murder were meticulously checked by the police. The legions of the Lees were in Glasgow, Ayr, Liverpool, Maidenhead, and Sydney, New South Wales. Mary Greer Gilchrist, now married to Dr Anthony McCall, lived in Bournemouth. The Charteris ‘nephews’ were in Glasgow and India. The Birrell offspring, James, George and Margaret, were in Glasgow, except for the third son, Wingate Birrell, who had not been heard of for some years, but the police traced him to Woolwich, London.

The short December afternoon’s light was already on the wane when, a little before three o’clock on Thursday, 24 December, small knots of people began to gather near the premises of Messrs Wylie & Lochhead, undertakers, in that gloomy thoroughfare of dark coaches, Berkeley Street. Miss Gilchrist’s body had been quietly removed from the Royal Infirmary to the undertakers’ premises the previous evening. Everything had been done to keep the occasion as private as possible. Indeed, Mr Adams, who had been invited to join the mourners, knowing that his appearance would be a signal for the curious watchers, waiting for the hearse outside the house in West Princes Street, to follow him, did not dare to leave by his own front-door, but slipped unobtrusively out by the back. And yet, in the strange, inexplicable way of such things, the intelligence had spread from lip to ear, ‘They’re burying her from Wylie’s.’

Before the quarter had struck, the first tentative nodes of the Berkeley Street crowd had accreted about them large numbers of frustrated hearse-watchers, arrived from their speculative stations outside No. 49 and the Royal Infirmary, augmenting the count to some three or four hundred bystanders.

While, at three o’clock, the spectators waited, and the body, encoffined in polished oak, with finest brass mountings, and bowered in white flowers, four wreaths on top – one of white lilies entwined with evergreens, two bouquets of white lilies, and a bouquet of white chrysanthemums – lay, also waiting, in the hearse station in the courtyard, a short service was conducted in a little side-room by the Reverend Dr John Carroll, who had been Miss Gilchrist’s minister at St John’s.

Then, at about 20 minutes past three, the hearse, followed by six two-horse carriages and watched by the crowds thronging the pavements and pressing forward now for a glimpse of the coffin behind its glass walls, moved at a snail’s pace smoothly out of the undertakers’ yard. The horses, strapped by sweating stable-lads to shiny ebony, the black ostrich plumes on their heads nodding to the measured tune of slow-jingling harness, manes and tails exquisitely pulled and brushed and combed, hooves oiled to within the last gleaming inch, the cortège started inexorably forth on Marion Gilchrist’s last earthly journey.

Out into Berkeley Street. On to Bath Street, which bore the shrinking mourners gratefully out of the public gaze, into the labyrinthine anonymity of the busier streets. The shops were beginning to light up as the simple funeral procession wound through the city. A brief farewell flirtation with the things of this world in the warm, living flow of Renfield Street, encountering the last rush of present-buying Christmas Eve shoppers, too intent all upon their own absorbing affairs to spare glance or thought for the dark cavalcade wending its way to the eternal shadows. On, out of the perimeter of light, into the quieter streets – Cathedral Street, High Street – unrolling a sombre stone carpet to the gate of the Necropolis, that high hill or mound of Glasgow’s long-slumbering dead.

The approach to the gates was thinly lined with a loiter of onlookers. The coaches swung along the outward carriage-way to the Eta section of the graveyard that lies above the picturesque quarter of Ladywell. Prompted by curiosity, attracted by the newly-upturned soil, a group of women, most of them with wreaths for other graves in their arms, had gathered among the tombs on the steeply-rising ground above, so as to look down upon Miss Gilchrist’s open grave.

The smell of the earth was strong. The mourners debouched; between 25 and 30 of them; difficult to make an accurate count in the gloom. But quite a respectable turn-out. Mr Adams was there. So were solicitor Macdonald and ex-bailie, Councillor William Sorley, of Partick, the jeweller who had sold to the decedent so many of her treasured pieces. Also present were a number of ladies and a little girl.

The interment took place in the grave belonging to the Gilchrist family; No. 34, marked by a large, grey pedestal tombstone, topped with a carved stone funerary urn, from which fall the petrified drapes of a mourning cloth or veil. After the coffin had been lowered into the ground, the Reverend Dr Carroll offered a final short prayer for the repose of the startled soul of the old lady who had made so hasty and horrendous an exit from a cosily familiar life. The filling up of the grave began. The mourners, leaving Marion Gilchrist in her lair, returned to their coaches and the world of twinkling lights below the hill. There was a scraping and a whickering. The muffled noise of horses’ hooves sounded in the deepening dusk. A little night breeze rustled the quilt of dry and withered leaves whispering over the patted-down grave.

1 That is a soft, round cloth hat, with a soft brim all round. It did not have any peak such as an ordinary cloth cap.

2 No. 480. This was a newsagent and tobacconist’s shop, variously described by Mary Barrowman as her father’s and her brother’s shop.