Burke and Hare Read Free Page A

her, with another girl. A furious row ensued, with Nelly shrieking abuse at Janet Brown and threatening violence. Elizabeth Burke left hurriedly, though not before explaining to Janet, somewhat needlessly perhaps, that the screaming woman was Mr Burke’s wife. Janet said she had not known that Burke was a married man. Nelly’s wrath then turned on her husband, and Burke threw a glass tumbler at her, cutting her forehead above one eye. He pushed her out of the room and locked the door. Nelly had accused Janet of seducing her husband, but Burke was the seducer, with lust in his loins taking temporary priority over murder in his mind. Janet, however, was not to be coaxed into bed by Burke’s Irish charm, and insisted on leaving. This was doubtless because of Nelly McDougal’s fearsome presence on the other side of the door. Burke escorted Janet safely past his wife into the street, and she went back to Mrs Lawrie’s house.
    Elizabeth Burke, meanwhile, had gone to fetch the Hares. When they arrived, Burke and Hare manoeuvred their three female relatives into waiting outside the room. Then they laid the stupefied Mary Paterson onto one of the beds and had no trouble in snuffing out her short, sad life.
    Burke went at once to Surgeons’ Square to arrange another delivery. While he was gone, Janet Brown turned up again. She had a servant girl with her, sent urgently by Mrs Lawrie to help Janet bring Mary Paterson back. But Janet, half drunk herself, had taken twenty minutes to find the place again, having to ask directions from neighbours and the spirit-dealer Swanston. Nelly McDougal’s rage at Brown had not subsided, and Maggie Laird had been told the tale, for she flew at Janet and had to be restrained by her husband. Hare told Janet that Burke had gone out for a walk with Mary. Janet accepted Hare’s offer of a drink while she waited for them to come back, and sent the girl back to tell Mrs Lawrie that she would not be long.
    We can only guess how close to death Janet Brown was during those few minutes. She was drinking whisky in the company of Hare and three possible accomplices – his wife, McDougal and Eliza Burke – with her friend Mary lying dead a few feet away, hidden by the bed-curtains, and Burke due back at any moment to pack up Mary’s corpse and get it to Dr Knox. But Mrs Lawrie sent the maidservant back for Janet and the two girls then left together. Nelly and Maggie went home to Tanner’s Close, and when Burke came back, he and Hare stuffed Mary Paterson’s doubled-up corpse into a tea-chest.
    However much Burke’s sister-in-law may have known or suspected about these goings-on, it is clear that Burke was not keen to leave the tea-chest there until dark, when Con would be home from work. So Burke and Hare carried the box straight to Surgeons’ Square in broad daylight. When they got to High School Yards, some schoolboys followed them, chanting ‘They’re carrying a corpse!’ Burke and Hare were admitted to Dr Knox’s rooms by ‘Mr Ferguson and a tall lad’ and paid, according to Burke’s Courant confession, £8.
    There are several contradictory statements about what happened at 10 Surgeons’ Square that afternoon, but it is certain that someone immediately recognised the dead girl. Burke’s prison statement makes it sound as if it was the ‘tall lad’, who ‘seemed to have known the woman by sight’, and he and Fergusson asked where they had got the body. Burke told them that he had bought it from an old woman at the back of the Canongate.
    In the Courant confession, Burke said, ‘One of the students said she was like a girl he had seen in the Canongate as one pea is like to another.’ At the end of this dictated statement Burke added in his own hand, ‘Mr. fergeson was the only man that ever mentioned any thing about the bodies He inquired where we got that yong woman paterson.’
    There are, however, other versions of this transaction. Knox’s biographer, his former pupil Henry