The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne

by Andrew Nicoll

  “Scrymgeour.”

  “As you like. What are you doing here?”

  “Simply investigating a report of a murder, Chief Constable. Have you anything to say?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Have you absolutely no clue as to what happened? Not the slightest indication of the culprit?”

  “Investigations are at an early stage.”

  “But you do have definite lines of inquiry, can I say that much?”

  The Chief Constable simply glared at him.

  “Can you at least confirm that the victim is Miss Jean Milne?”

  “Who gave you that name?”

  “We have our sources.”

  I looked at him and shook my head. “You mean the General Post Office Directory. Is that the height of your investigative powers?”

  “Sergeant, that will do.” I am sorry to say the Chief Constable was very short-tempered that day, but with a sort of defeated sigh he said: “You may write this. You may say that concerns having been raised for Miss Jean Milne, a spinster lady of this address, who has not been seen for some time, entry was effected by the police this morning. The body of Miss Milne was discovered in the house at about . . .” He looked at me.

  “About 9.20.”

  “At about 9.20 a.m. and there is every appearance that the unfortunate lady has been the victim of a cruel and brutal murder. Investigations are continuing. Anyone with any information helpful to the inquiry is asked to communicate same to Chief Constable Sempill of Broughty Ferry Burgh Police at the police office in Brook Street.”

  Scrymgeour looked up from his notebook and said: “It’s a damned shame. I saw her just the other day.”

  “You saw her? When did you see her? Think carefully, now, this could be vital.”

  “It’s simple enough. It was Trafalgar Day, the 21st of October. Easy enough to remember. It was the day before my birthday. I saw her at the top of Reform Street. She was crossing over Meadowside as if she was going to the Courier office, but I don’t know whether she went there or not.”

  “Are you sure it was her? How do you know her?”

  “Well, I don’t know her at all really. She’s just one of those folk you see about the place, what you might call an eccentric. They increase the gaiety of the nation. Harmless enough. She was wearing a light dust-cloth cloak and a hat with some feathers in it. I was staying in St Andrews, and that date was the day before my birthday. That’s what fixed the date in my mind, since I came to Dundee to get a few things for a celebration.”

  “A few things?”

  “Aye, a few things. For a celebration. And I said to my wife: ‘That’s Miss Milne that lives all by herself in that big house in the Ferry. Would you take a look at her?’ and she did and we had a wee laugh.”

  That offended me. “You laughed at her? And what was so amusing?”

  “She was just . . . She stood out, you know what I mean. She always, you know, she dressed far too young. And not for the season. Not for the season at all. Far too light-coloured. And girlish. Like a young lassie.”

  The Chief Constable said: “You’ll be required to swear a statement.”

  “Can we take a picture?”

  “As you well know, if you do it from the street I am powerless to prevent it.”

  “Thank you, Chief Constable.” He sounded a bit more humble now. “And will there be any further statement?”

  Mr Sempill said: “You’ll be kept informed.” He nodded at Suttie as if to tell him to shut the gate and keep it shut, and that was just exactly what he did.

  7

  IT IS THE case – and I know this to be true because I have made enquiry at the public library – that the seasonal variations of every passing sunset will lengthen or shorten the day by three minutes. Three minutes. It seems so little, but those little amounts of minutes mount up. Half an hour every ten days. An hour every three weeks. In the summer the sky is barely darkened in the far north-west before it begins to glim again in the east, and in the winter it almost seems as if it’s never light. I feel that sorely and I am conscious of those three minutes, every day that passes after June. Ere long it is the equinox and then I give myself up to darkness.

  It was dark by five o’clock that Sunday afternoon and I was glad of that. When we carried her out of the house there was a decent blanket of darkness to cover our work.

  The joiner Coullie came back with his cart and a coffin – not a proper coffin, you understand, as might have been seen in public at a funeral, not the sort of thing befitting the dignity of a lady like Jean Milne but what they call a “shell”.

  And it was a grim business lifting her into it I may tell you. Mr Procurator Fiscal was there to see it done, as was proper since he would be directing the inquiry and the prosecution, and Dr Templeman, the police surgeon of Dundee, who had come at the invitation of our own Dr Sturrock, was present to give his opinion on anything that might require an opinion, but he had no part in the work of it. That was down to the joiner Coullie, who made a profession of putting the dead in boxes, but it was more than one man could manage. Suttie and Broon tossed a coin for it out on the front step and Suttie must have lost since it was Suttie who came in to do the lifting. Miss Milne’s head lay pointing to the front door, but Suttie was too wise for that and he made sure to take his stance at her feet.

  With the shell lying close at her right-hand side, Coullie laid a towel across her head and bent to lift her by the shoulders, but she did not come easily. They had almost to prise her from the hall carpet, her hair, thick and matted with blood, her face glued to the floor, her clothes, starched and stiff with blood, set like plaster and that hideous sound of something being gently ripped apart as she came up.

  They had no distance to lift her, perhaps eighteen inches, which was all it took to bring her clothing free of the mess of blood on the carpet, but her bloody clothes trailed down and her loose hair and her arms dragged, and with Suttie at her feet and Coullie at her head, her middle parts sagged, and the whole business was just, well, it wasn’t bonny.

  With the coffin at her right-hand side, they lifted her onto a long plank at her left.

  “Down,” Coullie said and then, “Lift,” and they picked up the plank and carried her across the blackened carpet to the coffin, and Coullie, with a jerk of his head to indicate the direction, said: “Quick-smart now, tilt,” and they tipped her into the coffin with a thump. Bits of her clothing stuck out of the top and over the sides, but Coullie tucked them in with a careless flick of the fingers and dropped the lid.

  With the remains removed, Dr Sturrock stepped forward to take a look at the carpet, all covered in scabs as if the carpet itself had bled, and tufts and hanks of hair still sticking out if it.

  “It would appear from this that the source of the bleeding is all at the head. All this,” he pointed with his silver pencil at the lakes of blood soaked into the carpet, “it’s all flowing from the same spot. I doubt we’ll find other injury when we get her on the table.”

  Mr Mackintosh, the Fiscal, said: “This carpet is evidentiary,” which we all very well understood without any advice from him, and the Chief Constable said: “Make sure this carpet is rolled carefully and labelled and numbered as a production,” very briskly, which we also very well knew, but I suppose saying it made him feel better. I must admit, I was astonished at the Chief Constable’s failure of nerve, as if he was afraid to go about his business and get on with doing something, lest folk should see him doing it and attack him for leaving something else undone. So I had been obliged to leave off going through the letters in order to begin inquiries with the neighbours, but that came to nothing when he was confronted with the newspaperman, and Broon and Suttie, who had been sent to beat the bushes, were, instead, made to do nothing more productive than securing the entrance.

  Mr Mackintosh said: “Now that’s done with, Sempill, I’d be glad if you would assist me in an examination of the premises.”

  Mr Sempill led him upstairs and
we could hear them moving about quickly, from room to room, their footsteps echoing across the bare boards. “Quite abandoned,” Mr Sempill said, coming back down the stairs, “as you can see for yourself. It seems she kept herself to these few rooms, the kitchen, the dining room, which she used as her sitting room, her bedroom and, well, the usual necessary facilities.”

  Mr Mackintosh put his head in at the dining room door. “A pie,” he observed.

  “Indeed,” said Mr Sempill.

  “The sideboard drawers have been rifled.”

  “They have been opened. I cannot say categorically ‘rifled’ nor can I say by whom.”

  Mr Mackintosh looked into the uppermost of the open drawers. “A carving set,” he observed again.

  “It’s the match of the big fork in the lobby.”

  “What can that mean, I wonder.”

  And then they went into the lady’s bedroom. There was the creak of a door opening. “Her wardrobe,” Mr Mackintosh observed. “Has this been searched?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “Why not?”

  “To what purpose? It’s quite obvious that her clothes are in it.”

  “And what if the murderer had been in it too?”

  “Hiding here amongst the mothballs for weeks while she rotted away in the lobby? I don’t think that’s likely.”

  “Something might have been removed.”

  “In which case, my men are unlikely to stumble upon it.”

  We heard the sound of a drawer sliding open and a few moments of muffled movement. “A purse,” said Mr Mackintosh “and . . . seventeen gold sovereigns. Seventeen! A desperate man might think it worth risking the rope for seventeen pounds in good gold.”

  “Except the gold is still here,” said Mr Sempill.

  “But we cannot know how much more he took on his escape.”

  “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” said Mr Sempill. Returning to the lobby, he handed me the purse. “Seventeen gold sovereigns,” he said. “Make sure they are recorded and numbered.”

  “They also are evidentiary,” Mr Mackintosh said. “I suggest you begin again with a thorough and complete search of the premises as the next stage of your investigation.”

  But Mr Sempill said that would have to wait since, to him at any rate, the next step in the investigation was clear and that was to take the body of poor Miss Milne for proper examination in Dundee.

  We got it on our shoulders, Suttie, Broon, Coullie and I, and we made our way down the short path to the gate, the light from the lanterns throwing up wild shadows everywhere, the wind sighing in the branches just as it had been the night before, the last leaves of autumn flying past our faces. We must have made a mournful sight. But then things became a little awkward, for the carriage gate was still locked and we had not yet found a key and the gate for foot passengers was not so broad as to admit two men walking side by side with a coffin between them, so we were obliged to ship her between us, as if she had been no more than an awkward parcel, and into the back of Coullie’s cart, where the coffin could be decently covered with a tarpaulin.

  Constable Suttie and I went in the cart to Dundee, he in the back with the coffin, sitting with his knees drawn up and his hands drawn in, careful not to touch it with even the toe of his boot though it had rested on his shoulder only a moment before, and I sat on the bench at the front alongside Coullie.

  The Fiscal and the other gentlemen went ahead together in a conveyance of their own and we followed, going by Strathern Road, which is mostly flat, so as not to trouble the horse with going over the brae at the Harecraigs. All around us were the ordinary signs of a Sabbath evening, lights in houses, the sound of a piano from a distant parlour, folk going about on their way to evening observances or to visit friends. Everything was peaceable and respectable, all as it should be, and behind us, under that sheet of sailcloth, we carried the body of Jean Milne with its head cracked open and its jaws all agape.

  Coullie’s cart rolled quietly over the hammered roads of Broughty Ferry, but before long we were in Dundee, with its black mill chimneys, its public houses on every corner – roaring even on the Sabbath – and its stinking courts and vennels and tenements packed to the gunnels, rattling and bumping over the granite cobbles all way through the town to Bell Street. You know it well enough, I’m sure, with the fine court building in the square at the west end and, next to that, the jail and the police offices and, a little further along, the new burial ground. That was where Coullie stopped the cart.

  “We’ll be needing the key.” It was the first thing he’d said to me all the journey.

  I suppose, as the senior man, I could have sent Suttie, but on the other hand, as the senior man, it was fitting and appropriate that I should go to the Dundee Police offices and sign for the key, and when the choice was walk a few yards or sit under the flaring gas lamps with that tragic cargo, I was not sorry to leave my place in that cart.

  When I returned with the key, the gentlemen were waiting at the gates of the burial ground and there was another with them who was not introduced to me, but I recognised him for Professor Sutherland from the Medical School, who is quite a figure in the town and, as it turned out, not so much of a scientist and a seeker after truth as Broughty Ferry’s own Dr Sturrock.

  I must have made an awful sight, like something from a penny dreadful, as I stood under the yellow gaslight, struggling with the padlock on a graveyard under a waning moon, but eventually the chains rattled free and the iron gates opened. I waited for Coullie’s cart and locked the gate behind it, and by the time I had caught up, walking alone through the lines of graves, Professor Sutherland had opened the doors of the mortuary. It was dark in the burial ground and yet not unaccountably so. We had a half-moon that rolled out from behind the ragged clouds, dim street lamps along the cemetery edge that showed the shadowed railings or the glint of polished marble, weeping angels, broken pillars, half-draped urns carved in stone all of the most fashionable design, but the open door of that squat little brick building held a different kind of darkness. Professor Sutherland stepped into that open doorway and it consumed him utterly until, a second or two later, there came the scratch and flare of a match and the hiss of the gas lamps lighting.

  Coullie stood at the back of the cart. At the front, Suttie bent over double and heaved and scraped the coffin towards him until there was enough of it protruding to let us drag it off the cart and into the building. We laid it on the brick floor beside a contraption that was halfway between a bed and a bath, made of enamel-glazed stoneware and raised on a pedestal to bring it to the height of a table, but with a deep lip on it, so it might be hosed down if need be.

  The professor and Dr Templeman hung up their hats and coats on pegs at the back wall and took down long rubber aprons and red rubber gloves that came up past their elbows, and the rest of us hung back at a respectful distance, including Dr Sturrock, who carried no authority while the body lay in Dundee. Even Coullie was not any longer wanted since Dr Templeman had sent for an attendant of his own from the Royal Infirmary.

  For my part, I was more than content to leave them to deal with the business of lifting the body and I stayed well back, close to the door. If it had been permitted, I would have remained in the graveyard or begun the long tramp back to the Ferry, where the air at least was clean. I cannot describe what it was like in that mortuary, with the light of the flaring gas lamps shining back from the white tiled walls and those men, though they worked in silence, grunting and gasping as they heaved that poor woman’s body around. The stench was beyond belief. From the moment they lifted the lid on the coffin, the stink of death began to creep out into the room and, once they had her lifted on the table, Dr Templeman turned to the Procurator Fiscal and said: “Gentlemen, normally it would not be permissible, but, in the circumstances, you may smoke.”

  Mr Mackintosh the Fiscal had his pipe going in no time and Mr Sempill wasn’t far behind. Suttie and Coullie both sparked up, but, I don’t kno
w, I hadn’t the stomach for it. It felt disrespectful. I simply stood there through it all, watching, saying nothing but breathing deep of the scented smoke.

  They took off her clothes, but they were not gentle. They were cold towards her. They kept their faces turned from her. They took deep, gasping gulps of air and breathed through their mouths. Every item, as it was removed, was listed and described and dropped in a hamper.

  “The body of this lady is tied at the ankles by green curtain cord, which I remove by cutting, taking care not disturb the knot. I remove a pair of shoes.

  “A new cloak, bloodstained.

  “A linen blouse with lace attached, ditto.

  “A camisole or slip body.”

  They pulled her arms up and twisted them to get her clothes off, and at every move her poor, blackened, battered head lolled and flopped about so she seemed to be looking for comfort in each of their faces in turn, but none of them would look at her.

  “Three knitted spencers.

  “A pair of corsets.

  “A linen chemise.

  “A flannelette chemise.

  “A blue serge skirt.”

  Dr Templeman’s assistant went down to her feet and hauled it off her.

  “A knitted petticoat.”

  They had to lift her up by the hips.

  “A pair of linen drawers.”

  She was as good as naked. Girlish. Like a young lassie.

  “A pair of stockings and a pair of garters.”

  The worst of it was done. Dr Templeman’s assistant stood with his notebook ready and the great man said: “Gentleman, the discolouration of the skin clearly shows that she has lain on her face since death. The bodily fluids sink downwards due to the effects of gravity, so the skin is pale and blanched on her back and it has taken on this bruised appearance on the front.”

  He lifted her arms, each in turn. “There are no visible cuts or wounds on the hands or forearms, no signs of a struggle or an attempt at self-defence.”

  The professor nodded. “I concur.” And then he lifted up a knife and he cut her throat. He cut her throat. He cut her throat and he pushed his fingers into the wound.