Classic Scottish Murder Stories (9 page)

This is when he is supposed to have gone astray, to have been
corrupted by the rough farm lads, a wild lot, who introduced him to girls, whisky, gambling at cards, swearing, and, most heinously, training sheep-dogs on the Sabbath. So far, so good, none of this made him a psychopath, but a hint, a whisper of something that was to cause trouble shows in his excessive need for, in his own words, ‘pretty dress'. He began to incur debts, and angry, forsaken maidens pursued him, but, surprisingly, his reputation in general was still good and he was
persona grata,
an admired, improved and polished young man at all the social gatherings.

In 1828, he was appointed assistant-schoolmaster at Coigarth, in Lochbroom, an achievement in itself, but the salary did not provide the peacock with his feathers, and teacher turned burglar without a qualm. In the June of that year, he broke into a shop in Lochbroom, emptied the till, and stole a whole web of tweed, which he hid under a cairn of stones until the winter, when he had the good cloth made up into a new suit, explaining that he had bought it from a travelling merchant. No-one suspected the schoolmaster. He is beginning to earn the label of psychopath. One Sunday, he absented himself from church, saying that his shoes needed repairing, and coolly let himself into a neighbour's empty house, opened a chest with his own keys and stole his nest egg.

The peacock was insatiable in his desire for fresh plumage, and he began to ruminate in a bloodthirsty way about those peripatetic pedlars. By 1830, he was back living with his parents, and teaching at the school at Nedd. In the late afternoon, coming home from school with a pupil, Donald Wilson, he addressed him strangely.

‘We are poor, Donald,' said he, ‘and there are plenty of travelling merchants here about. Though we should kill one of them and take his money [note the scholarly syntax] there would be no harm.'

‘But we could not do that without being found out,' said Wilson.

‘Would you tell?' Hugh said. ‘For if you would not tell, we could do it easily enough.'

‘Oh, Hugh, Hugh! Though I should conceal it, God would not.' The schoolmaster changed the subject, but in his mind he had formed the resolution to kill Murdoch Grant, for they were probably already well acquainted and Grant carried the very treasures most desired: clothing and money.

On the road to Nedd, he lay in wait for his prey. It was Thursday March 18th. He had a plan. There was to be no risky scene where others might pass. It was a friendly meeting and first the two nice-looking young men, in the prime of life, went to Widow Mackay's house where the merchant bought some worsted stockings. Before they parted, they had arranged to meet again on the following day, when they would go to Hugh's home at Lynmeanach and Hugh would buy the entire contents of his pack. It was to be a secret.

Before breakfast, the next morning, the schoolmaster went out to the barn, and knelt down and prayed for God's blessing on his enterprise. Casting about for a weapon, he selected a large, wedge-shaped mason's hammer (of the type used, no doubt, by Hardy's Jude the Obscure) and shortened the handle, to make it more portable. This is all textbook premeditation, and it would be very difficult to gloss over, or, really, to mitigate in the modern sense, his horrendous actions. After supping his porridge, he put on his father's greatcoat to conceal the hammer, and set off for the road to Nedd.

The appointment was for noon and the weather was not good, so he sat in a cave, like the apocryphal anthropophagous Sawney Beane, and waited until the pedlar arrived. They walked in the direction of Nedd. When they reached a cemetery, Grant sat down on a grave to rest, his burden being heavy, but the symbolism of the scene was lost on the schoolmaster and he was in no mind to relent. Leaving the road, they struck off across moorland, Hugh sometimes helping out by carrying the pack. Several times he steeled himself to strike the fatal blow,
but he was afraid that someone might be watching from the hills.

‘At length we got near Loch Tor-na-Eigin,' he later confessed. ‘I was going first. I suddenly turned round, and with a violent blow under the ear felled him to the ground. I took the money out of his warm pocket, and put it into mine. There was about £9 in all. I dragged the body into the loch, as far as I could with safety to myself. It was evening, but not very dark. I then threw the hammer into the loch, and returned and rifled the pack. I took the most portable things, and sunk the heavy goods in a moss loch [peat bog] further into the moor. After taking the money from the pocket-book, I buried it on the edge of a bank near where the body was thrown.'

It was noticed in the following weeks that the schoolmaster, previously indigent, was shelling out freely from a red pocket-book. He paid up his debts, bought whisky and new clothes, a gun for 32 shillings, and was generous with his friends. Day after day, on his way to and from the school at Nedd, he passed the tainted loch without a shudder, concerned only to judge the water level as spring advanced. He was, as always, conducting his affairs with safety to himself.

The waters of the tarn were deep and the banks sloped steeply. Without a boat he had not been able to sink the body in the centre. The level receded a little, until he could actually see the body where it lay upon the moss beneath the bank. He was afraid to move it, even at night. One month after the murder, the once pure tarn managed to rid itself of its secret. Down in its glassy depths, unusually low and limpid, the sharp eyes of a boy, John Mackenzie, of Drumbeg, saw the shape, like a long, still, dark fish.

When the body was beached, it was found that the antiseptic properties of the cushioning moss had delayed decomposition. A group of 50 people drawn from the scattered crofts and hamlets gathered at the waterside, and one man present was able to identify Murdoch Grant. His pack, almost a part of him, was
suspiciously missing. His pockets were turned inside Sir. The schoolmaster was there, contributing to the speculation, and it was noticed that he alone did not acknowledge the ancient ordeal of
Bahr-recht
(Law of the Bier) which was founded on the belief that the corpse would bleed at the touch of the murderer. Detached, he stood back, as the others stooped, and they respected his better education.

It was put to him that he was the right messenger to undertake the six-mile walk to the manse to report the death to the minister and arrange a burial. The schoolmaster said that he did not like travelling alone in the dark, and a lad named Donald Graham was deputed to walk with him. Another of those pregnant conversations took place. Donald, revelling in the drama, remarked that he hoped that they would not be suspected, living, as they did, so near to the loch. Hugh halted and looked straight at his companion: ‘Do you think that I would do it?'

At the manse, the Reverend Mr Gordon asked some questions. Hugh said that it was a drowned body, and that it bore ‘scratches' from knocking against the rocks. It was an accident or a suicide. It was by now too late for any action, and back at Tor-na-Eigin, the body was re-consigned to the water, to keep it fresh overnight – like a salmon. Next morning, early, with the minister in attendance, a grave was dug beside the loch, the body was retrieved and buried in a coffin which had been carried to the scene. From the heights of a nearby hill, Hugh Macleod, who was supposed to have overslept, was observed, dodging about like a wary deer, to watch the obsequies.

These dubious proceedings pleased not the procurator fiscal, and the restless body of the travelling man was, on April 29th, exhumed for an alfresco post-mortem at the spot under the gaze of spectators. The schoolmaster gave all possible assistance towards the logistics of the event, having been warmly recommended to the Sheriff by the minister as a reliable figure of some authority in the district. He who had feared to
walk alone by night now watched the surgeons at their task without a quiver, although it did cross his mind, in a precognitive flash, that he himself might one day be the subject of a similar autopsy.

The examining doctors, both local surgeons, found that injuries to the head, inflicted probably by a hammer, were the cause of death. The schoolmaster acted as interpreter at the Sheriff's inquiry, knowing the Gaelic tongue and familiar with the ways of the local inhabitants. He was very plausible, and extremely well-dressed. Village gossip, however, betrayed him: the postmaster intimated to the Sheriff that his lay-helper, the eager schoolmaster, had, soon after the supposed date of the murder, asked him for change for a £10 Bank of England note which, by the postmaster's judgement, he had been in no position to hold. Enquiry was made of Hugh Macleod's financial circumstances, and he lied and blustered. Blood on his coat came, he said, from a bird which he had shot with his new gun.

Removed to Dornoch jail, he bought whisky through his cell window, and assured a visiting minister, the Reverend Mr Kennedy, that he was an innocent man. At night, though, his guilty mind played strange tricks: he dreamt that he stood in a cemetery which he had never seen before, watching an old man digging a grave, beside which lay an empty coffin. As the sexton turned towards him, he recognised his father's face. ‘Hugh,' said the sexton, ‘here is your grave: lie down in it now, for your time is come.' Seized with terror, he pleaded for more time, and the old man relented: ‘Well, Hugh, go for this time, but remember that in a year your coffin will meet you. Mark that. Do not forget.'

These were supernatural times; the pure tarn lapped at its banks, and prophesy was in the air. A young journeyman tailor, a friend of the schoolmaster, named Kenneth Fraser and known then or later as ‘Kenneth the Dreamer' was, in his turn, visited by a visionary dream. The search for the pedlar's pack had been given up as a hopeless task, but, being fast asleep, Kenneth
heard a voice ‘like a man's' which spoke to him in Gaelic: ‘The pack of the merchant is lying in a cairn of stones in a hollow near their house.' With the vatic words there came a clear vision of the south-west side of Loch Tor-na-Eigin (not then known to the dreamer) with the sun shining on the ground, and ‘the burn running beneath Macleod's house.' It was so vivid a dream that he could have been awake.

Nothing was found in the hollow which he had described, but, further up the burnside, certain articles identified as the pedlar's property were uncovered from a hole hidden by stones. In fact, Hugh had hidden the actual pack there, but had later disposed of it elsewhere, leaving those few articles for Kenneth to discover. Whether or not Kenneth had some real, earthly, knowledge, we do not know, but it is worth mentioning that psychic dreams are sometimes approximate in their details.

The trial of Hugh Macleod occupied twenty-four continuous hours at the Circuit Court of Justiciary at Inverness on September 27th 1831. Kenneth the Dreamer made an impressive witness, bardic, and his evidence was sympathetically received. No witnesses were called by the defence. Upon the unanimous verdict of Guilty, the schoolmaster started to his feet and cried, ‘The Lord Almighty knows that I am innocent. I didn't think anyone in this country would be condemned on mere opinion.' Unfortunately for him, the importance of circumstantial evidence had been well canvassed during the trial, Lord Moncrieff having referred to the fact that ‘cases of this occult and secret nature' were often more satisfactorily proved by indirect evidence than by direct evidence which might possibly be procured by perjury.

The same judge assumed the black cap and sentenced the prisoner to be executed at Inverness on October 24th, between the hours of two and four in the afternoon, and his body was to be given to the Professor of Anatomy in Edinburgh for dissection. Back in his cell, the schoolmaster confessed, and from then until the end his piety knew no bounds. On the day
of execution, they walked him in procession to the place called Longman's Grave. He was arrayed in the macabre costume appropriate for the occasion: a long, ground-length, black robe, a white nightcap and a halter round his neck, the end of which was carried behind him by the hangman. The spectacle was medieval and perhaps the 7,000 or 8,000 people who came to watch the execution saw it as a morality play.

Stationed on the scaffold, the schoolmaster surveyed his audience and launched into a long preachment until he dried up, or until they silenced him. ‘If I were to live for 100 years,' he vowed, ‘never would I put a glass to my head [sic], never would I hold a card in my hand.' And never again would he, in 100 years, open his mouth to a strange woman. Kenneth the Dreamer, he also declared, in a rush of altruism, was entirely innocent of any knowledge of the murder. It was, in fact, proved at the trial that Kenneth had had an alibi for the time of the crime – he was at work all that week – but there was a kind of explanation for the famous dream. He had joined the schoolmaster for drinking bouts, paid for out of the pedlar's red pocket-book, and something might have been let drop, for Hugh was prone to making mysterious remarks, which had lodged in Kenneth's mind.

William Roughead turns most poetically and unforcedly to Sir Thomas Browne for a commentary on dreams – ‘The phantasms of sleep do commonly walk in the great road of natural and animal dreams, wherein the thoughts or actions of the day are acted over and echoed in the night.' Let us deepen, or complicate, the idea by invoking Freud (who was certainly not Roughead's bedtime reading) and his distinguishing of the manifest and the latent aspect of dreams. He would have said that Kenneth's famous dream, in its latent meaning, pointed to an issue of a more distant past and of cardinal importance to Kenneth the Dreamer. ‘There are,' Freud said, ‘no indifferent dream instigators; hence, too, no innocent dreams.'

I
n the heart of the Grampians, in the month of September, 1749, a party of eight men of the 6th Regiment of Foot, which was commanded by Lieutenant General John Guise (described by Horace Walpole as a very brave soldier but a great romancer), were lodged at a small upland farm, Dubrach, near the village of Inverey west of Braemar, some ten miles from Balmoral. They had marched there in June from their regimental headquarters at Aberdeen, and they were under the charge of Sergeant Arthur Davies. Another party of the same regiment, under a corporal, guarded the Spittal of Glenshee, a hamlet at the head of Glenshee, about 12 miles to the south. Twice a week, during their regular patrols, the two sections met halfway, generally showed the flag, and exchanged information.