The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne

by Andrew Nicoll

“The same. It’s a great tragedy about Miss Milne.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Must be getting on for thirty years.”

  “When did you see her last?”

  “I’ll tell you to an exactitude.” He reached into his jacket and brought out a battered notebook in a paper cover. “It was the 14th of October – the Monday. The way I know is I got a position working at the Eastern Wharf, unloading a cargo of jute. Now, that was the first day I was working there and I have my National Insurance card stamped and I make a note in this wee book of all the hours I work. So I can tell you we got done just shortly before the stroke of six o’clock.”

  “And then?”

  “Then I walked up from the harbour to the Stannergate and I took the car from the burgh boundary home to Fort Street. When we got to Ellieslea Road, there was Miss Milne, running back and forth along the pavement alongside the car and peering in the windows as if she was looking for somebody. She was trying to keep up with the car as we moved off and shading her eyes to look through the glass, searching among the passengers.”

  “And that’s the last you saw of her?”

  “The very last.”

  “Did you ever see a strange man about Elmgrove?”

  “About Elmgrove? I never had cause to be at Elmgrove, but –” he stopped for a second and pulled on his pipe, “– there was a man. It was a couple of days later – the day that cargo got finished. The Wednesday. We were later getting started that day and I went up to my work at the jute by the 7.30 car from Gray Street. I was sitting on the top on the back seat, much as we are now. There was one other man up top with me, sitting on the front seat. Then at Ellieslea Road a man came up on to the top and sat with his back towards Dundee just about there, about the third seat from the back. He dropped down in the seat like he was completely worn out and done and he threw his feet up on the next bench. I thought to myself: ‘Aye, you’ve been out on the randan. You’ve been a night in the tiles.’ ”

  “Did he speak?”

  “He did not. He neither looked nor spoke. But I had a good look at him and he looked queer – he seemed scared, excited and nervous-like; his eyes never halted, but he was constantly looking down to the floor of the car or at the trees at the side of the road. He minded me of a man with the horrors – have you ever seen that?”

  “Oh, I’ve seen that more than once or twice.”

  “Well that’s what he was like, but he was quite sober. And I said to myself: ‘The house you have come out of, the servant has not been very particular with your shoes.’ They looked as though they had been blackened but not polished. He kept his right hand in his overcoat pocket.”

  “He wore an overcoat?”

  “Oh aye, he wore an overcoat.”

  “And what like a coat was it?”

  “A dark, slate-coloured waterproof coat, down to his knees and buttoned to his throat. And he kept his right hand in his pocket all the way up the road and sat with his head laid on his left hand.”

  “Was he dirty or bloodied?”

  “Never a bit. Clean and tidy, well washed but awful flushed about the face, like a man blushing, as if he had been working hard. I mind that because he had this thin, fair moustache and it quite stood out against his face.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Nothing. I got off at the burgh boundary as usual and walked to my work. So far as I know, he sat there all the way to Dundee.”

  “Would you know him again?”

  He took a couple of puffs on his pipe. “I wouldn’t want to swear. I saw him for as long as we’ve been speaking now, but I can say this, he was a stranger to the burgh. It was a face I had never seen before – and nor have I seen it again. He was just an ordinary-looking chap. About thirty I should say, ordinary height, ordinary size, what you’d call a common face, but he was every inch the dapper gentleman, fine shoes and, man, he even had a wee white stripe down the sides of his socks! Would you credit that?”

  All this information I carefully recorded, typed up into statements and had duly sworn and signed by the witnesses. I even checked with the foreman of the Cleansing Department and had him swear a statement that James Don was working on Monday the 14th and his duties would have taken him to be in Albany Road and Grove Road about 4.30 a.m. All these things I presented to Detective Lieutenant Trench.

  There was one other thing. James Don the rubbish picker told me that about twenty minutes after his meeting with the handsome young gentleman under the lamp post, he was working in Edward Street – that bit of road north of Grove Road they have renamed now – do you remember?

  He told me he was lifting ashes at Mr Bulloch’s house in Edward Street when he looked back to Strathern Road and saw the figure of a man passing, walking towards the Ferry. The man was about a hundred yards off, so they did not speak, but one thing was clear: he was a police officer.

  16

  IT WAS REMARKABLE to me how the advice of Andy Hay had proved itself to be both wise and good. Nobody sees a servant. It is a necessity to believe that they do not exist. How could a man who called himself a man lie abed until eight while some wee scrap of a lassie carried coals up and down the stairs to get his fires going at five o’clock in the morning? How could any mother see another mother’s lassie work herself grey and ragged so her own daughters might keep their hands soft and smooth for nothing more than embroidery and piano playing? Only by pretending that it was not so.

  Respectable people had learned to blind themselves to the very presence of their servants. A mountain of washing would transform itself into crisp, clean laundry, starched and ironed and snowy white every Monday, but nobody knew how that happened, because the mistress was eating cake and taking tea up in Dundee.

  Every morning shoes were standing at the bedroom door, gleaming black and polished, but nobody knew how that happened because they had all been asleep in their beds.

  Breakfast, dinner and tea, plates of hot food arrived on the table, but nobody had any idea how that happened – although the mistress was awful unhappy that the butcher’s bill had gone up by nearly two shillings this week and something would have to be done.

  In every room of the house, fires were lit, fires were fed, ashes were emptied and grates were swept, but nobody ever saw it done. An invisible army swarmed amongst the grand houses of Broughty Ferry unseen and all unheard, unnoticed, unregarded and ignored. But they had ears to hear and eyes to see. And some of the things they told me made my heart sink.

  Jean Milne would never have noticed Ina McIntosh. She lived along the road from me at Links Cottages and she worked in the bleachfield alongside the Dighty Water, lifting great heavy loads of newly spun, wet, stinking linen cloth on her back and spreading them out on the grass to whiten. Jean Milne never worked like that a day in her life.

  That was Ina, a lassie of seventeen years, and there’s her sister Jessie, a full three years older, who rises at God knows what hour to labour in a mill in Dundee for a pittance of pay, day and daily. These places are a kind of Hell with the noise and the dust so a body can neither breathe nor hear – far less speak or think.

  And yet they had love, those two lassies, love enough to walk a good mile and a half up to Caenlochan Villas on a Monday night and take a cup of tea with their sister in service in Mr Potter’s big house. Not tea of their own, you understand. Oh no. If a lassie takes tea with her sister, she makes a brew with the leaves she has saved from the mistress’s pot.

  And then, when those two girls came out again into the night, ready for the walk home, cooried in together against the October winds, walking home to bed and a few hours of fitful sleep before rising again to another day of work, what should they see but a man with a yellow moustache. Poor Ina.

  “We keeked through the gate into the grounds of Elmgrove and, just then, a man came out of the grounds and opened the small gate and stepped out on to the footway as if he owned the place. He was sweating and flushed in the face and he gave us a stare as we passed
and walked down Grove Road – a right gentlemanly-looking sort, with a fair moustache and a long dark overcoat.

  “Jessie thought he was after us. He stood staring after us, but he never followed us, though I had my hatpin ready.”

  John Wood the gardener, who lives in Chapel Lane, he saw the man with the thin moustache too. In fact, he opened the door to him.

  I found John along at St Aidan’s churchyard, tending the ground around a tiny block of marble no more than a foot square. It had “Mother” written on it in letters of lead. There was no name and no dates.

  “All we could afford,” he said. “She used to say we were her monument. Damned shame. She should have had more.” He gathered up his tools and rubbed each in turn on a rough bit of oiled cloth. They gleamed. There was no spot of earth or mud on any of them, not the slightest trace of rust anywhere. “I’m surprised you’ve taken so long to find me,” he said, “since I did her garden for years – or as much of it as she would let me do.”

  “Most of it is away to rack and ruin,” I said.

  “Aye. It would break your heart to look at it.”

  “But if you did her garden for years, why did you not come forward?”

  “Because I did her garden for years – that’s why. I have no wish to say anything about poor Miss Milne, but, if you ask me, I’ll speak.”

  “Tell me what you can,” I said.

  “The poor soul was man daft. She was an unmarried woman of a certain age. Those things should all have been past with her, and if they were not, she had no business speaking about them with me. The way she carried on, it would not have been respectable in a lassie, and in a woman of her age and position it was just – well, it wasn’t right.

  “She was never done talking about meeting nice gentlemen; that was always her particular theme, about getting acquainted with French and German gentlemen. That was all her conversation. It was a daily occurrence every afternoon I was working at Elmgrove and she was at home and, ach, she would spend hours in frivolous talk about the nice gentleman or gentlemen she had made acquaintance of.

  “After she came home in August she said she had had a good lot of travelling with a German gentleman who was living in a hotel in the Strand – a tea planter. She said he was to come and visit her at Elmgrove. She had a letter from him while I was working there and she was always talking about this gentleman in particular or about other nice gentlemen she had met.”

  I leaned back on one of the larger gravestones, an enormous lump of red granite sacred to the memory of a long-gone minister, “a faithful servant of Christ and beloved of this congregation”, though not, perhaps, as well beloved as John Wood’s mother. “Did you ever see any of them at the house?” I said.

  “It grieves me sorely, but I have to tell you that I did. The day before Miss Milne left for her last holiday – now that was the 19th of September; I have it in my account book, I was working there. It was getting near finishing time, about half five, and she came out. I thought we were going to get more of this silly chatter about her gentlemen friends and, I’m telling you, I was sick of it, but, no, out she came and asked me back into the house to help her lock the different doors of rooms and shut the windows, and she said she was going away the following day. Near all the windows is painted shut or screwed down, but I closed the dining room window and her bedroom window and I took the keys to her in the hall.

  “I was in the hall when the front door bell rang, and for some reason she asked me to go to the door. I went and found a gentleman there, a proper toff, in a claw-hammer coat, a man I’d say getting on for forty, with a thin, yellow moustache.

  “He asked if Miss Milne was in. I said she was and I went back to the kitchen and told her: ‘Miss Milne, there is a gentleman at the door.’ Well, she fairly skipped to the door to meet him, skipped like a lassie, and they took each other by the hands – both hands – very affectionately and Miss Milne said: ‘I am so glad to see you here,’ and asked him in. They both came in the vestibule and they passed me at the foot of the stair, where I was standing, without a glance. I might just as well not have been there.

  “After they passed me, I made to go out, but she called me back and she put two shillings in my hand.”

  “What was that for?”

  “She said it was ‘for my trouble’. But we both knew fine it was to shut me up. She planned to stop my mouth with silver.”

  “But you don’t feel bound to that?”

  “I agreed to nothing. My duty is to tell the truth. I did not seek you out, Sergeant Fraser, you came to me.”

  He was hurt and humiliated. He was only the gardener, only a servant. He was meant to see nothing, and if by chance he should find a respectable single woman admitting a strange man to her home at the close of the day, then it would take no more than twenty-four bright little pennies to shut him up. We both of us looked down at the grass for a minute or two, John Wood sucking hard on his pipe while I counted daisies until the moment had passed.

  “What happened then?” I said.

  “The man in the claw-hammer coat walked right into the dining room as if he was no stranger to the place and I left the house. You may know where the gentleman passed the night, but I do not.”

  I did not know where the gentleman with the thin yellow moustache passed the night, but I knew this much: there was no more than one bed in Elmgrove.

  “I bitterly regret I let him in,” said poor John Wood. “I have chided myself that I opened the door to the man that killed her. Pity me now when the only service I can do for her is to ruin her reputation.”

  I tried to comfort him. “It may be that no one need know. We have our ways. We are not without delicacy.”

  John Wood shook his head, laid his tools on his shoulder and began to walk. “It’s too late for that. You know.”

  But I knew already.

  It seemed half the Ferry knew.

  James Urquhart the docker knew. He told me he sat on the tram one Wednesday afternoon in October while Jean Milne disported herself with “a stout gentleman aged about sixty with an English accent.”

  “I was surprised at the way Miss Milne was carrying on with the gentleman, by her talk to him. I could not make out all their talk, but Miss Milne was always addressing the gentleman: ‘Yes, dear’ and ‘Yes, pet.’ It was that, those endearments over and over, oft repeated, that was what drew my attention. Miss Milne was always looking at him.” He said that. A man who sat there on that tramcar, his face black with dirt and stinking of sweat after a day of hauling jute bales about with his bare hands. A rough working man, and he was horror-struck at what he saw of that woman.

  She rubbed it in their faces. She didn’t care who saw. But they were only little people. What could it matter what they thought? It was disgusting. Disgusting!

  17

  THERE IS NO secret to the success of the Bonnington Hotel. Discretion, that’s all. Nothing flashy. Nothing grand. Nothing pretentious. The Bonnington is not the Ritz. The Bonnington is not the Savoy. At the Bonnington Hotel, they invariably offer a poached egg for breakfast, never une oeuf poché.

  At the heart of fashionable Bloomsbury, a stone’s throw from the British Museum, the Bonnington is the last word in modernity: an elegant, fashionable hotel offering every facility expected by ladies and gentlemen of quality but all of it set within the facade of a much older building. The Bonnington offers everything to be expected in these first years of a new Georgian era, when flying machines now dart almost daily across the Channel and communications encircle the globe, quite literally, with lightning speed. The Bonnington is a jewel of modern design and convenience, but all within the setting of the elegance of a bygone age. Quality and service are the watchwords but with a proper restraint. Nothing Frenchified or foreign. Modesty. Discretion.

  But there is nothing discreet about a policeman. Still less about two policemen, one of them all frogged and belted and braided, with his little pillbox kepi and his patent shoes, and the other a bull of a man
in a dark-blue coat with silver buttons, a chain across his chest for his whistle and a tread that shook the china in the breakfast room.

  The one with the frogging down his tunic walked up to the front counter and rang the brass bell, which was totally needless since Miss Minnie Gibbons was in her usual place at the desk dealing with a guest. The guest gave the police officer a look. Miss Minnie Gibbons felt she could spare him no more than an arched eyebrow. She moved the brass bell to one side. The police officer was suitably abashed.

  When the guest had been satisfactorily dealt with, Miss Minnie Gibbons turned her gaze on the police officer with the frogging and the braid. “Good morning,” she said. “How may I help you?”

  He cleared his throat. “Good morning. I am Chief Constable Sempill of Broughty Ferry Burgh Police. Here to see Mr Clarence Wray. He is expecting us.”

  “Of course. Have you a card?”

  He took one from his pocket and handed it over. Miss Minnie Gibbons considered it briefly, moved the brass bell back to the middle of the counter and gave it a sharp ‘ping ping’. “The dreadful business with Miss Milne, of course. Dreadful. Simply dreadful. She was quite a favourite at the Bonnington.”

  A boy came running up in answer to the bell and Miss Minnie Gibbons said: “Jack, show these gentlemen into the large parlour and take this card,” she handed it to him by the corner, “to Mr Wray in 209.”

  The boy, who was also wearing a kepi, though his was red and he kept it on his head at all times, said: “Yes, Miss Gibbons,” and “This way, please, gentlemen,” and he set off at a quick-smart pace down a brown corridor with a thick blue carpet.

  By the time the two policemen had caught up, the boy was standing, holding open the door of the large parlour. “If you’d care to wait here a moment, sirs, I’ll just run up and enquire after our Mr 209.”

  The two policemen, Chief Constable Sempill and the large sergeant whom Scotland Yard had assigned as a courtesy to be his guide and assistant, went into the room and waited. It was the hour when ladies and gentlemen went to attend to their letters, so, though the writing room was no doubt very busy, the large parlour was deserted.