The scent of Christmas is in the air – aroma of oranges and silver-bedded tangerines, turkey and roast chestnuts; sparkle, ice-sharp, of sugar-frosted mince pies.
The short December afternoon has died early into winter darkness. Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street is vibrantly alive, a sound and fury of clash and colour.
Four shopping days to Christmas. Hogmanay looming.
Great waves of shoppers surge and eddy through gaudily hollied and tinselled stores. Jostling crowds spill into the roadway. Jingle of harness and clatter of hooves. Clang of tram-cars – ‘high-built glittering galleons of the street’, AE1 called them – ablaze with light, grinding up and down, shuttling back and forth, between the front lines of prosperously embattled shops.
Lost trams of Glasgow. Dead and vanished as clumsy, rumblesome dinosaurs. Skeletal in tramway museums. Sepia photographs in chichi shops, preserved, maple-framed, for kitsch remembrance, mounted on modish walls.
Ghost trams of Glasgow, clanking now only through the ever-thinning avenues of old folk’s memories. And that is where we can still – but only just – hail them. We can stay the clock. We have a purpose – a destination.
Hold tight. Ding-ding. ‘Fares, please.’
We are on a time machine with a trolley, travelling back along the fixed iron rails of time.
Back over 100 years … until the iron rail dwindles to a slender organic thread, stretching from a limbo-lost Glasgow. It is the vanished world of Oscar Slater and Miss Marion Gilchrist; a place of tall hats, frock-coats and button boots, of beehive toques and parasols and pavement-sweeping skirts. A city of purse-proud merchants and masters, of copperplate clerks stranded on high, counting-house stools, and of nights of a thousand and one muttering, sputtering gas-lamps.
Materially, much of that old world survives. The houses wherein the once-upon-a-time joys and sorrows, splendours and miseries, set the air dancing, or sinking with heavy melancholy, still stand. But they shelter now a tenantry that knows nothing of the dreams and dramas for which their homes were once the stage.
In some respects the view from the plate-glass window of our time tram is little changed. The thin blue line of the City of Glasgow Police was drawn then. The same old war between law and disorder was – and is – being engaged.
We see our fellow-passengers, the witnesses we need to question, clamber aboard – Lieutenant Trench, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, William Roughead, Ewing Speirs, Alex Shaughnessy, David Cook, William Park, Craigie Aitchison. Each plays out his allotted part in the grand Slater drama. We see each alight at his appointed stop, turn … and walk off into the great silence.
Ding-ding.
We who remain are carried inexorably on to the all-change-please terminus.
Arrived, we, too, will, in our turn, disappear from the well-worn track; but we shall have travelled on through new scenes, new vistas, denied to those who were forced to descend before us.
Away at the upper reaches of Sauchiehall Street, by Charing Cross, with screech and groan of metal, our tram sways and curves to the right, heads down sparse-lit St George’s Road. A little way along on the left-hand side, the crude yellow radiance of another passing tram brightens for one yielding moment the gloomy corners of West Princes Street.
The rude, festive spirit of the city centre seems left far behind.
Here, we are into the territory of the Edwardianly genteel. Here, Christmas will be celebrated sedately, in sober Calvinistic style, with decent Scots enjoyment; douce and decorous. Here, are dark streets of tall, well-kept, stone-built tenements, foursquare behind stout railings; clean-limbed, oblong windows, lace-curtained; the chaste frivolity of an occasional adventurous fanlight. Here, in old-fashioned thoroughfares – long rows and short terraces and gentle crescents – is respectability regimented, good taste made richly manifest.
The gleam of rain, drowned out in Sauchiehall Street by the opulence of golden light, is here reflected on empty pavement; solitary pools in the nimbuses of spaced street-lamps.
And here, in that early part of West Princes Street which is known also as Queen’s Terrace, up there behind the first-floor set of blank-eyed windows, alone except for a maid-servant, Helen or Nellie Lambie, aged 21, old Miss Gilchrist has her being.
We have reached our destination.
We are in the Gilchristean presence.
This is where the Slater case begins.
For this is the rainy Edwardian evening of 21 December 1908. With an oblatory bow in the direction of the late Sacheverell Sitwell, one might, adjusting his words from another Scottish criminous context, dub it the night when blood fell on the antimacassar.
1 George William Russell (1867-1935), Irish poet and artist.