And suddenly it was Christmas.

Miss Gilchrist had been tidied away in the ground yesterday, but it was far from being a case of out of sight, out of mind; she was in the minds of a great many people. As in some pantomime noir, the broker’s men – Macdonald the lawyer and Dick the auctioneer and valuer, each in his different way charged with the disposal of her worldly goods and chattels – would, this Christmas morning, move into old maid Marion’s whilom stronghold in search of her hidden treasure: her jewels.

Meanwhile, unseen but universally hissed, the Demon King, red of hand and free of foot, moved through the enchanted stone forest of the city.

The gallant Douglas and his brave band, watched over by Ord, gave chase – in all directions. That ‘all directions’ was, in a Christmas nutshell, the trouble; for by now, the clues, such as they had been, were gathered, sifted, and found drastically wanting. It looked for all the world as if the police’s Christmas stocking would remain empty. Then, seemingly right out of nowhere, along came the best present that they could ever have hoped for. The unlikely Santa Claus was a 27-year-old bicycle maker and dealer, Allan McLean.

Earlier that day, Ord, in his office at Police Headquarters in St Andrew’s Square, had been arranging the distribution of a notice authorised by Chief Constable Stevenson to police forces everywhere. It contained the following descriptions of two men: ‘The man first described, leaving the house, and about the same time another man, second described, was seen descending the steps leading to house and running away.’ The statement went on to elaborate: first, ‘A man from twenty-five to thirty years of age, five feet seven or eight inches in height, thought to be clean-shaven; wore a long grey overcoat and dark cap.’ This was clearly an amalgam of Lambie and Adams’ descriptions. The ‘long grey overcoat’ has been adopted from Adams’ description. Lambie, it will be recalled, spoke of ‘a light-coloured overcoat, like fawncoloured, about three-quarter length.’ The ‘clean-shaven’ was also Adams’ contribution, as Lambie had specifically said that she ‘couldn’t say whether he had a beard, moustache or whiskers, or was bare-faced’. Second, ‘A man from twenty-eight to thirty years of age, tall and thin, clean-shaven, nose slightly turned to one side (thought to be the right side); wore a fawn-coloured overcoat (believed to be a waterproof), dark trousers, tweed cloth hat of the latest make, and believed to be dark in colour, and brown boots.’

Ord had also, having first consulted with Chief Constable Stevenson and obtained his fiat in the matter, issued, with the air of a fisherman laying out his lines, for publication in the evening papers, a description of the (singular) wanted man; this one being based on Mary Barrowman’s testimony.

The early editions of the evening papers were on the streets by about two o’clock in the afternoon. At 6.10pm a bite. Allan McLean arrived at the Central Police Office bearing his Yuletide gift of information. A German Jew, known to him only by the forename of Oscar, had been offering for sale at a gambling club of which they were both members – the Sloper Club, No. 24 India Street – a pawn-ticket for a valuable diamond brooch. It had been pledged, so he had been told, for £60 on the day of the murder. McLean described this man Oscar as being about 30 years of age, standing 5 ft 8 or 9 in, of sallow complexion, clean-shaven, or with a very small growth of moustache, and with a twisted or broken nose, the slight twist being, he thought, to the right. He wore a dark suit and a fawn overcoat – McLean thought that it was a waterproof – and a dark cap. McLean further recounted:

About a fortnight before December twenty-first, I joined the Sloper Club. I think Mr Oscar was a member before me. For about a fortnight or three weeks after I joined, I had been down every night, and I think I would meet Mr Oscar there every night. I only missed him twice. Either the Saturday night [19 December], or the Sunday night [20 December], or the Monday morning before the twenty-first December [night], was the last time I saw Mr Oscar at the club. We all left the club together. Mr Oscar left us at the corner of St George’s Road and walked across the street to his own house.

So, although McLean knew neither Mr Oscar’s surname nor his address, he could, he said, point out the place where he lived.

Superintendent Ord was quietly jubilant. Now, with the cycle dealer’s tip to add to the message-girl’s tale, it was at last starting to look as though they were beginning to get somewhere.

In the wee small hours of what was technically 26 December, the police went a’calling on the Moudie.

In order for that opaque statement to make crystal-clear, and rather exciting, sense, it is necessary to go back to seven o’clock on Christmas night, at which time Superintendent Ord packed Detective Inspector William Powell smartly off with that impresario of the bicycle, Mr Allan McLean, to identify the house wherein the promising-sounding Mr Oscar had his mysterious being.

The Superintendent’s final, strict instruction to Powell was that under no circumstances should he talk to, question, or make any contact of any kind with anyone, for fear of alerting and scaring Mr Oscar away. Thus stringently briefed, Powell and McLean padded off into the dark and emptyish streets of Christmas night, up and along Sauchiehall Street to Charing Cross. There they paused. McLean pointed across to a close near the junction of Woodlands Road and St George’s Road. The premises which he indicated were No. 69 St George’s Road; a mansion block situated less than 400 yards, three minutes’ walk, from Miss Gilchrist’s.

Powell, having thanked and dismissed McLean, went into the close and up the stair – and proceeded to disregard Ord’s strictures. He paid a call at a second-floor flat occupied by a Mrs Bertha Bernstein, whom, by odd coincidence, he happened to know well. From her, or rather from her loquacious maid, Ruby Russell, he learned that she frequently encountered a man answering the description of Mr Oscar coming down the stair from the flat of Mr Adolf Anderson, a dentist, who lived on the floor above.

Extremely pleased with himself, Powell returned hotfoot to St Andrew’s Square.

It was getting on for midnight when, accompanied by Detective Sergeant David Lyon and Detective Constable John Millican, Powell paid his second visit that night to St George’s Road. The three police officers made their way quietly up the dim-lit stair and rang at Anderson’s door. A long wait, then the sound of locks and fastenings being manipulated, and there, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, stood a dressing-gowned Katharina Schmalz. A German, her English was by no means good, but she understood Powell’s questions well enough to tell him that no man named Oscar lived there, that she was the maid-servant, and that Madame was away with a gentleman. That the gentleman in question was in fact Oscar Slater sheltering behind the nom de guerre of Adolf Anderson, she did not volunteer.

Having been assured that she had no objection to their having a look inside the flat, the trio trooped in and began to poke around. It was Millican who chanced upon the vital clue. In the main bedroom, strewn about the floor, were sheets of paper and pieces of torn newspaper, obvious indications that some packing had been going on. Rooting among this detritus, his eye was caught by a piece of paper with some red sealing-wax on it. It turned out to be a label addressed: ‘Oscar Slater, Esq. c/o A. Anderson, Esq. 69, St George’s Road, Glasgow.’

‘What about that man?’ Millican asked the German girl.

‘A friend of Madame’s,’ she said. ‘He is away for a holiday with Madame.’ She did not know where they had gone.

Having searched the entire flat and found no one else there, no dentist’s instruments, and nothing of an incriminatory nature, the detectives descended to the flat immediately below Anderson’s, that of Mrs Catherine White. The maid-servant there, 17-year-old Kennethina Mackenzie, told them that between eight o’clock and half-past that night, luggage had been carried downstairs, and she had seen Anderson leaving in the company of a tall, dark-haired young woman.

It was at this point that Powell despatched Lyon and Millican to the Sloper Club to enquire after Mr Oscar. The club-master there, George Sabin, informed them that for a period of about four weeks prior to 20 December, a man known to him as Oscar Slater had been frequenting the club. He had been introduced there by Hugh Cameron, a member who lived in Cambridge Street.

Christmas night had by now well shaded into Boxing Day morning as the detectives tramped off to Cambridge Street, where, arriving at No. 140 at approximately 2am they awoke with their insistent knocking a thoroughly bewildered and alarmed Moudie,1 who had come blinking forth from his bed to join his wife at the front-door.

The Moudie, a 38-year-old bookmaker’s clerk and self-described dealer in jewellery, showed his night callers into the kitchen, and the questioning began. Yes, he knew Oscar Slater. Last saw him at about six o’clock on Thursday evening (24 December) in Sauchiehall Street. Slater had given him a pawn-ticket on the Tuesday (22 December), or perhaps it was on the Wednesday, for a diamond brooch, asking him to find a buyer for it. The brooch had been pledged with Mr Liddell, the pawnbroker in Sauchiehall Street. Cameron had returned the unsold ticket to Slater on 24 December. They had met that afternoon and gone to the Cunard Line shipping offices in Jamaica Street. ‘I had heard from him a fortnight previously that he was going to America. He had received a letter from a friend in San Francisco asking him to come out, as things were going well there.’

The hectic night of 25-26 December had yet space for the prosecution of one last inquiry. At 4.30am a messenger was sent from the Western Police Office to the home, at 1109 Argyle Street, of the manager of Liddell’s pawnshop, Peter Crawford McLaren, to root him out of bed and get him to go to his business premises at once. He found two police officers awaiting him there. They wished to take possession of a diamond brooch pawned on 21 December. McLaren refused to open the premises and told the detectives that the brooch in question had been in his continuous possession since 18 November. Inspector Powell was fetched to lend his weight to the confrontation. McLaren still refused, and, faced with such intractability, there was nothing, beyond a display of displeasure, that the thwarted Powell could do about it. Peter McLaren went off, back to his interrupted night’s rest. The Inspector, tight-lipped, vanished into the watery light of the official dawn.

At a more civilised hour of Boxing Day morning, Lieutenant William Gordon was sitting in the vanished Mr Anderson’s flat at No. 69 St George’s Road, attempting, not without sundry linguistic difficulties, to amplify the testimony of Miss Katharina Schmalz – and he was not doing at all badly.

Making his way up the stair, Gordon had passed two women coming down, and had had a sort of intuition that they had emerged from the Anderson house. Having succeeded in eliciting from the now more forthcoming Schmalz that Mr Anderson and Madame had in fact gone to London, and learning that Schmalz herself intended returning to London that night, Gordon asked, ‘Are those two ladies who went downstairs living in the house?’ ‘Yes,’ she told him. And at that precise moment the women came back into the flat.

They introduced themselves as Mrs Luise Freedman and Mrs Elsa Hoppe, and explained that they had taken over the tenancy of Mr Anderson’s flat. Mrs Freedman said that she had known Mr Anderson, otherwise Oscar Slater, for some six years, and that she was a half-sister of Madame Andrée Junio Antoine or Keibrow, with whom he was living. She and her step-sister, Mrs Hoppe, in England on a visit from Thale, in Germany, had heard while staying in London that Oscar and Andrée were in Glasgow. They had arrived on Weihnachten Eve, only to find Slater and Keibrow packing. He said that he had received a wire and must go to Monte Carlo at once. The sisters intended to stay in Glasgow for a further fortnight.

Somewhere about eleven o’clock that same morning, another police officer of the name of Gordon called, together with his fellow inspector, Allan Campbell, at Liddell’s pawnbroking office. Peter McLaren still refused to give up the gold and diamond crescent brooch of Slater’s pledging, but agreed to go with Gordon and Campbell to the shop of William Sorley, who had sold Miss Gilchrist’s brooch to her, taking the pawned brooch with him for Sorley’s inspection. Sorley and his assistant examined it. Both stated categorically that it was not Miss Gilchrist’s brooch.

And that is where the case against Oscar Slater should have finished … before it began.

But it didn’t.

It is all too easy to put up the thought that the way in which the police stayed with Oscar Slater after the clue of the brooch had failed is one of the enduring ‘mysteries’ of the case. However, it is in fact all too clear. With their minds arranged in his direction, even if the brooch did have to be jettisoned, here was a gift under pressure, a likely suspect. He was a foreigner – hadn’t they been told to look out for a foreigner? – out of place in the good or goodish parts of Glasgow, living in the locality of the crime, a man of glaringly bad character, violent, a gambler and a pimp. And hadn’t Mary Barrowman’s arresting crooked-nose identification provided just about the ultimate detail? Finally, as they saw it, he had precipitately fled from Glasgow on the heels of the murder.

Accordingly, their first priority must be to discover Slater’s present whereabouts. Schmalz had said London. Mrs Freedman had said Monte Carlo, via London. The Metropolitan Police had therefore been contacted. Schmalz was being shadowed in the hope that she might lead the detectives to Slater’s hideout. Meanwhile, in Mr Asquith’s celebrated phrase, they could only ‘wait and see’.

And while they were waiting and not seeing, the Glasgow detective force got down to the dull, routine grind of trying to put together a sort of diary-cum-timetable of Slater’s last week before his so-sudden disappearance. They succeeded well enough – but it yielded nothing of any real help in their quest for damnatory circumstances. On the contrary, Duncan MacBrayne, a young assistant at John Wilson’s, the Sauchiehall Street grocer’s, who knew ‘Mr Anderson’ well, whilst making his way home at 8.15pm on the evening of 21 December – just about an hour after the murder – had met Anderson/Slater in St George’s Road, a few yards from No. 69. ‘He was dressed in a grey suit of clothes and a grey cap. He had no overcoat on. I noticed nothing peculiar about his manner. He seemed quite cool and unconcerned.’

Shifting and sifting through great bundles of papers – reports, observations, ruminations, statements, precognitions and all the other intimidating ancillary apparatus of ongoing stone-walled investigation – Superintendents Ord and Douglas were to spend months struggling to put at least the framework of a case against Slater together; but even now, at this early stage, blizzards of ‘facts’ were blowing in, and, like snowflakes, melting away as one tried to grasp and assemble them into a meaningful pattern. But, whatever, burning like a beacon before them, was the utter conviction that Oscar Slater was their man.

To sum up: Slater had been shown to have been in possession of clothes similar to those worn by the unknown suspect. He was known to have had an interest in jewellery and actually to have done some dealing in it. That he happened to have pawned a brooch that was his – or his woman’s – was just a red herring. Albeit, a useful one so far as the police were concerned, in that, by pure chance, almost an act of God you might say, it had put them on his trail.

One official view was that Slater had quite genuinely decided a good while before the date of the West End Murder to leave Glasgow, but when he had heard by chance of Miss Gilchrist’s treasure-trove, he had made up his mind that the latter would leave with him. He had laid his carefully thought-out plans cunningly, preparing his friends and acquaintances for his sudden departure, telling all and sundry that he would be leaving. Fully three weeks prior to 25 December, Slater was speaking quite freely to the Moudie and various members at the Sloper Club of his going back to the United States shortly, and quite openly giving his address there as c/o Caesar Café, 544 Broadway, San Francisco.

On 26 December, Slater had sent a letter to his friend Max Rattmann, who had handed it over to Inspector Pyper. It had been written from the North Western Hotel, Liverpool.

Dear Max,

Surprisingly leaving Glasgow. Forgot
to say good-bye. Let me hear from you as
you have my address. Freedman’s girl
took over my flat; keep yourself as well
as your wife well, and remain –

Your friend,

O. Slater.

The vital information provided by the Rattmann letter was that Slater was in Liverpool. Before this there had been every reason to think that Oscar and Andrée had run off to London. The truth was that they had arrived at the North Western Hotel, at Lime Street Station, Liverpool, in the early hours of the morning of 26 December, and left later that afternoon on board the Lusitania, bound for New York.

As the days of the voyage wore on, all Glasgow, all Britain for that matter, speculated about the anonymous man – the police had not disclosed Slater’s name – now on the high seas. The ongoing cliff-hanger gave an edge to Glaswegian ‘halves’, and lent spice to the mildest teetotaller’s fare. The excitement and tension mounted. From their armchairs in Glasgow, the citizens, with no wirelesses or television to enliven the dull evenings of their lives, were able to follow through their newspapers the thrilling chase across the Atlantic.

The winter weather was not being kind to the Lusitania. Her passage, a rough one, had been menaced by a blizzard, and she was delayed. Not until 7p.m. on Friday, 1 January, 1909, did she arrive off Sandy Hook. A revenue cutter, the Hudson, slipped away from the New York Battery and headed for the Ambrose Channel lightship. A considerable sea was running outside the bay, but the little cutter stood boldly out to the big Cunarder. The Hudson steamed aside, and six United States’ lawmen clambered over the side of the great liner.

A cablegram had been despatched on 30 December:

To Detective Bureau, Police, New York. Lady murdered here 21st current. Valuable diamond brooch stolen. Oscar Slater, nose slightly twisted, disappeared suddenly. Accompanied French woman. Sailed Saturday Lusitania, second cabin, as Otto Sando. Undesirable. Movements suspicious. Interrogate. Search. Shadow. – Chief Constable, Glasgow.

The passengers had been assembled in the second-class dining-saloon to undergo the normal questioning by immigration officials. A bulkily built, bronzed man with an unmistakably twisted nose was practically the first individual that Detective Lieutenant George T Leeson spotted. A steward told him the bronzed man’s name. Sando. ‘The tall, black-haired woman beside him is his wife.’

The six hunters thereupon moved in swiftly to surround and isolate the couple, and the interrogation began. Slater said that he was not a US citizen, but had taken out papers under the name of Anderson. ‘I am a dentist, having lived in New York and having had a business at 445 Sixth Avenue up till a few years ago,’ he explained. He was known in Scotland as Anderson, because a Scottish name was good for business.

Up to this moment Slater did not know about the charge against him and no mention had been made of the murder. Suddenly Leeson asked: ‘Do you know a young [sic] woman in Glasgow named Gilchrist?’ Slater said that he did not. Then called across to his ‘wife’, ‘Hilary, do you recall any Gilchrist?’ She replied that she had never heard the name.

‘Didn’t you read the papers before you left Liverpool?’ Leeson persisted.

Well, yes, come to think of it, he did remember the papers describing Miss Gilchrist’s murder, but he didn’t read all the particulars. He’d left Glasgow four days after the murder and gone straight to Liverpool.

The interrogators then invited the pair to a cabin below, where they were both searched. Nothing suspicious was found on Andrée. Oscar yielded up a pawn-ticket for a three-row diamond crescent brooch. At no time did he show the slightest nervousness. ‘Mrs Sando’ gave her maiden name as Andrée Hilary Antoine, and said that she was the daughter of Malone James Antoine, a Parisian merchant, and that she had lived in Paris. She had married Oscar Slater in Glasgow, on 12 July, 1901.

None of Mr Sando’s fellow-voyagers had the faintest inkling of the true identity of the glossy, beautifully-tailored and turned-out Mitteleuropean gentleman, moving with such well-mannered grace and charm among them, taking his meals in the second dining-room with his pretty young wife, gallantly saluting the ladies as, with expected regularity, he gravitated to the smoking-room – his natural habitat – where, fairly popular with its habitués, he spent a good deal of the trip playing cards.

When the ship docked, Slater was arrested by two United States deputy marshals. Told that he must accompany them as their prisoner to the Federal headquarters building in New York, he went deadly pale and bleakly muttered a refusal to answer any further questions. As he was led off, his ‘wife’ was firmly escorted away to be detained on Ellis Island, the immigration station in New York harbour.

Things were not looking good.

1 Moudie is Scots dialect for a mole or mole-catcher, but according to Hugh Cameron it meant in Australia a boundary rider, a man who rides round the fences of a sheep-shearing station at night – ‘I was in Australia for about six years, and it was sometimes part of my duty to do this.’