The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne

by Andrew Nicoll

  “Precisely!” Mr Sempill was triumphant.

  “But the evening paper lying on the table tells us she died on . . .” Another flurry of notes.

  Mr Trench cleared his throat and said: “The 14th, sir.”

  “Well that’s obviously wrong. Clearly. We’ve got that wrong. The paper was left lying about for a few days. Maybe she set it aside to light the fire. Maybe he sat down to read it, after the killing. Maybe he ate that pie. We don’t know. But we do know this: he’s a foreigner. He is definitely a foreigner. Trench will bear me out on this, won’t you, Trench? Foreign, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir.” That was all Mr Trench said.

  But Mr Mackintosh would not bend. “I know the law, Sempill, believe me. There is no part of Scots law which makes it an offence to be foreign. Nothing. Anyway, I’ve had that journalist in my office today, that Norval Scrymgeour, demanding to make a statement insisting that he saw Miss Milne alive and well in Dundee on the 21st.”

  “Surely you don’t believe him?”

  “Of course I don’t believe him. She was dead on the 14th, that’s why I don’t believe him. He is confused. But he has offered himself as a witness for the defence. Sempill, I want this wrapped up. You’ve made a mess of it. Just get it finished with. I’m signing the papers to have Warner released in the morning.”

  I thought Mr Sempill was going to have a stroke. He turned grey where he sat, then he stood up from his chair and his face turned purple and he bellowed across the desk like a bull. “No! You won’t land me with this midden! I have a name and a reputation. My name is in print across the Empire because of this case. Do you think you’re going to ruin me and keep me here in Broughty bloody Ferry for the rest of my days? I’ll have you know I have considerably bigger fish to fry. I’ll have you know—”

  “Bermuda,” said Mr Mackintosh, calmly. “Everybody knows. Everybody in Dundee, anyway. Everybody who is anybody. We all know. We all know how you’ve worked your way into the papers. We all know you’ve been leaking information, making yourself out to be a dogged detective, hounding your man across the globe. Sempill, all you’ve done is piss God knows how much of the ratepayers’ money up the wall to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’ve got the wrong man and your only suspect is as innocent as a babe. But don’t worry, you can expect a glowing reference from me. You can write it yourself, if you like, and I’ll sign it. Anything. Whatever it takes to get you out of town.”

  The Fiscal turned to Mr Trench. “I expect you to clean this up,” he said. “You are not blameless in this.”

  “No, Trench. Not blameless at all.” Mr Sempill’s voice had risen to a squeak. “It was him. He told me it was a foreigner.” And then the Chief Constable collapsed in his chair with his head in his hands.

  There was a moment of embarrassed silence before the Fiscal continued. “We need a version. I’m relying on you to come up with some sort of explanation for this disaster. Something that will let us get out of this with a bit of dignity. Do it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr Fiscal Mackintosh stood up and took his hat from the hook on the wall, so we all stood up, except for Mr Sempill, who sat where he was with the look of a felled ox. Mr Mackintosh straightened his hat in the mirror. “Well, have a good trip, Sempill. I think you’ll like Hamilton. Barely three thousand souls in the whole town and not half of them white men. You’ll look back on Broughty Ferry as the very pinnacle of your policing career.”

  We left Mr Sempill then and he never emerged from his room for the rest of the day. Not that it mattered, for Mr Trench had me sit with him at a desk in the front office and I typed while he dictated his story. It took quite a time and he smoked a remarkable number of cigarettes, but we got it done.

  “I am inclined to believe,” said Mr Trench, “that robbery was the motive of the crime and that the person who committed the crime probably got a considerable sum of money in the deceased lady’s handbag.

  “I have investigated numerous clues; an enormous mass of correspondence has been received from all over the country from all sorts and conditions of people; letters containing ideas, suggestions and theories have all had close attention, but all have come to nothing. I have personally interviewed the numerous witnesses who speak to having seen various men in the grounds or leaving the grounds surrounding Elmgrove and whose statements have been supplied to the Procurator Fiscal. In conjunction with Deputy Chief Constable Davidson of the Dundee Police, I have made many inquiries in Dundee, but all without definite result.”

  Here Mr Trench rehearsed the long catalogue of injuries inflicted upon Miss Milne’s body, paying particular attention to the discovery of the wounds caused by the carving fork and the many times and different locations where she was stabbed. I prefer not to record that here, as it is too distressing.

  “Keeping an open mind on the murder, I incline strongly to the theory that robbery was the motive of the crime, and that probably the person who committed it had slipped into the house by the front door while Miss Milne was in the grounds collecting roses and pieces of holly to decorate the dining room table, as numerous dishes on the table contained roses and other flowers, and that probably Miss Milne, on coming into the house, discovered the person in the dining room and threatened to telephone for the police, when her assailant seized the carving fork, which may have been lying or the drawer may have been open a little, showing the weapon. He drove it repeatedly into her back and as she spun round drove it into her body, as shown by the various punctures in her clothing, finishing his ghastly work by battering her head with the poker.

  “The two curtain cords with which the deceased lady’s legs were tied undoubtedly came from the curtains hanging in the lobby leading to the hall. I examined the whole of the house but could find nothing like them in any of the various apartments.

  “The explanation: One of the curtain cords being found halfway up the stairs may be explained by assuming that the deceased had run partly up the stairs, pursued by her assailant, whose intention may have been to tie her up, and that, in the struggle with her assailant, he may have dropped one of the cords where it was found on the stair. There is no doubt that the deceased lady had made a desperate fight with her assailant, and that her murder was of a particularly brutal nature, such as might have been committed by a maniac or a foreigner.”

  I never in my life heard anything so courageous as that. Mr Trench must have known that his story was ridiculous and, what was worse, that it would make him ridiculous. All the reputation he had made as the hero of the Oscar Slater case would be destroyed in a moment by the writing of such nonsense, but he chose to do that rather than take any part in putting the life of an innocent in danger again. I was genuinely pained when we said goodbye on the platform of Broughty Ferry station.

  I suppose that Mr Trench wanted to take a share of responsibility for the whole sorry affair on himself because he knew there was some truth in what Chief Constable Sempill had to say. If he had never put the blame for the murder on a foreigner, we would not have wasted so much time chasing Warner across half of Europe while the real killer got clean away.

  And I knew, of course, that I let Mr Trench down. I was no more than a sergeant of Broughty Ferry Burgh Police, but he ordered me to speak my mind with no thought for rank and to share my thoughts with him, almost as an equal. I should have done that. If I had, then things might have been very different.

  You must have raged, as I did, when so many people at the Bonnington Hotel saw Miss Milne in company with the young man with the yellow moustache, the young man who made such efforts to persuade her to invest in his Canadian mine, and yet nothing was done to trace him. Look through the records. There is no mention of a search of the hotel register. No effort at all to find who that young man might have been. Mr Sempill had his eye on poor, stupid Clarence Wray with his ghastly poems on purple paper and his hot, panting love letters that always hinted but never said just quite what it was he had in mind. And when Wray turned out to
be a dead end, then Mr Sempill went darting off to Maidstone jail, racing across the country like a cat chasing a feather on a string. He had Warner safely locked away, so he was not interested in finding the young man with the yellow moustache. I should have spoken up. I should have insisted.

  It was the same when we learned of Miss Milne’s entirely improper trip through the Highlands on board the Cavalier. More than one saw her emerge from the cabin with that young man, the same young man with the thin yellow moustache. More than one saw them go off together and return together. They are all listed there in our records, passengers and ship’s officers, all telling the same story about the same young man. Will you find a single word from the company listing the names of those who booked passage on the Cavalier? You will not. Is there a complete list of passengers, with their names and addresses? There is not. Was any attempt made to match the passenger list against the registers of the Bonnington Hotel? There was not. Once again, I have no one to blame but myself. I should have spoken.

  The young man with the yellow moustache was seen in his fancy dinner jacket, strolling amongst the overgrown gardens of Elmgrove, taking the air, puffing on his fancy cigar – a cigar not unlike the one recovered from the fireplace, a cigar the likes of which Warner had never put to his lips. He was seen again in the street, emerging from the house both late and early. He was seen on the tramcar early in the morning, done up in a rainproof coat on the very day that Warner was selling his own coat for pennies hundreds of miles away and across the German Ocean in Antwerp. The young man with the yellow moustache, it was the young man with the yellow moustache. He was responsible for Jean Milne’s death and not Warner. Not Warner. It was never Warner.

  And yet, have you not seen, have you not noted how carefully we worked, how every piece of evidence is piled one upon another? Every single witness statement is recorded, down to the smallest detail, even when the witness has nothing more to say than that they have nothing to say. Look at them. All of them in the file. Have you not seen how, in the proud tradition of Scots law, every statement is corroborated, because without corroboration it is worthless gossip? It is not enough for Mr Vice Consul Cox to say that he paid out so much cash on such and such a day. The word of Mr Vice Consul Cox is not enough. But here is his ledger duly signed and noted and corroborating every word. It is not enough for a hotelkeeper in far-off Antwerp to say that he bought a coat from a starving scoundrel for two francs and fifty centimes – but here is his waiter, who says as much. And it is not enough for James Don to say that he was sweeping streets and lifting rubbish in this street or at that time, no, we must also have the word of his foreman, who can point to his daily records and say that it is so.

  So when James Don said that he saw a policeman going about alone in Strathern Road, all unaccompanied, at that uncommon hour of the morning, surely there could be nothing easier or more fitting than to investigate who that might have been. Surely there could be nothing simpler than to check the duty logs and establish which of the officers of Broughty Ferry Burgh Police were on duty that night, which of them would have been patrolling in Strathern Road, near its junction with Grove Road about that time, or to check the reports to see who might have been called from his usual patrols to an incident in that area at that hour. Surely nobody would be better acquainted with the daily duties of the force than its sergeant. That would be me. And yet it was not done.

  48

  THE PIERROTS AND the showmen have returned to our beach again, like swallows finding their way back for the summer. The songs are old and worn out, the jokes stale but somehow welcome for their familiarity; the sideshows are moth-eaten swindles; fortune tellers in spotted headscarves who will prophesy “a journey over water”; a man in a top hat who claims to be a professor of phrenology; hoopla stalls where no hoop could ever fit; coconut shies where the coconuts are nailed down; roll-the-penny boards where the pennies roll straight into the showman’s bucket; and an endless stream of white mice and goldfish to give away. We get only the third-rate showmen here, passing through on their way to someplace where the pickings are richer. But this year they are trying a little harder. One or two of them have invested in fancy new machinery – hand-me-downs from their better-off cousins, no doubt – meant to take a few coppers away from the donkey drivers on the beach. There is one who has installed a couple of “What the Butler Saw” machines in his shed, great metal beasts with brass goggles to look through and a handle to crank. He has repainted them in good red enamel and picked out their cast-iron details, the roaring lions and swirling foliage, in gold, and for a penny you can watch a flickering image of a girl dancing in her drawers – if you dare.

  In the hut next door, somebody has installed an electric-shock machine, the “Improved Patent Magneto-Electric Machine for Nervous Diseases”. It is an oak box, like a cupboard standing against the wall, decorated with painted pictures of eagles carrying jagged lightning bolts in their claws and there are two copper handles standing up from a shelf at the front. According to the framed notice written on the side in golden script, that machine is an effective cure for everything from rheumatism to gout, “including but not exclusively, nervousness, lameness, women’s troubles, deafness, hysteria, constipation and other bowel troubles, skin inflammation, dandruff, boils, impetigo, masculine deficiency, flat feet . . .” and ending with “hypochondria”.

  When I went past in the afternoon there were no invalids waiting to be cured, but some of the local boys were there, daring each other, taking turns to drop a ha’penny in the slot, crank up the machine and hold on to the copper handles. Idiots, all of them. But something drew me to them and I watched in a kind of fascination. One after another, afraid, not daring to show their fear, overcoming their fear, the pain, the contortion, the bravery that comes from being terrified of shame, the pain, the pain. It made me think of our boys as they queued to throw themselves into the war. They had to be killed because they could not face the shame of not being killed.

  I happened to be passing again that evening, out of uniform this time. It was very still. The oil lamps round the tents were flaring straight up in the air, children were laughing, young lassies with their best hats on, hanging on the arms of their chaps, there were snatched kisses in the gaps between the tents, the showmen barking out for custom. I went to that machine and I dropped my ha’penny in the slot and it fell with a thud like a hammer blow and I turned the crank and I gripped the copper handles and I felt it then, the power of life running through me, the same terrifying shock I felt in that summer of my fourteenth birthday when Miss Milne pressed me against a mossy wall in her father’s glasshouse and slid her hand down the front of my trousers and kissed me hard on the mouth.

  Everything about that moment came back to me then as if it had been stored up in the mechanism of the machine and only now was it free to pour out along the wires and into my skin, into my flesh, into my soul, but I knew, even then, in that instant, that was all untrue. All those things were waiting inside me, not lost at all, simply waiting to be revived by the electric jolt that made everything come alive in me again.

  I felt it all. The heat of that great glasshouse, the thickness of the air, the damp, the ferns, the palms, the moss growing over the bricks, the pond, raised up like a wishing well glistening and shining and moving with fish, the music of the water, all of it. I was just a boy. I was a boy. You know what a boy is at that age. Not a boy, not a man, just a boiling cauldron of anger and heat and lust.

  I had hopes that, one day, I might be a gardener, but then it was my job to wipe the windows of the glasshouse, keep the dust off the outside and sponge away the green growth on the inside. Such a care I took of everything. The paths were weeded clean, the lawns were edged sharp and those windows gleamed – how they gleamed – because it was only when the windows were clean that I could see Jean Milne passing.

  Jean Milne saw me watch. I thought she was all unawares, but, no, I know now she saw me watch. She knew I saw her when she was in the garden
all alone and she would stop and put the toe of her boot on a bench – a bench I had painted – and lift her skirts away far more than was needful and tie her laces. That was for my benefit.

  When she sat in the shade of the big cedar, pretending to read her book, the top button on her blouse undone, or maybe one button more so the lace of her corsets was peeking out, fanning herself, she well knew that I was watching from the other side of her father’s rose bed.

  And when she came upon me in the palm house and touched me in that way and put her finger on her lips to shush me and pulled my hair and kissed me and let her tongue wander inside my mouth, Jean Milne knew I would make no complaint.

  “A word, John Fraser, one word and you will lose your position,” she said. “I will destroy your character. You will never find employment for the rest of your days. Nobody would ever believe you – you, just a laddie of fourteen—”

  “I’m fifteen!”

  “Not yet awhile. A laddie of fifteen – let’s say – and a respectable lady of twenty-five. Who would believe that?”

  Twenty-five. She was nearer forty, but I had not the sense to see it. I believed her. I believed everything. I loved her. I believed she loved me. I was in a paradise. Any lad in the Ferry would have given his right arm to be in my place. A kiss up a lane with a fisher lassie who smelled of bait was beyond their most heated imaginings, but I was a man who had tasted love with a grown woman, a lady, whose hands were soft, whose dainty underpinnings would fall away at my touch, leaving trails of lavender in the air.

  And she need have had no fears that I would betray her confidence. It was clear enough that if we were discovered it would end, and why would I want that? Why would any laddie? I was deep in love, but I was wise enough to know which side my bread was buttered. And so I worked away quietly all the summer, climbing ladders to clean the mud and dead leaves from the gutters, bringing vegetables from the kitchen garden to the house, dragging the cast-iron roller over Elmgrove’s endless lawns and always, every day, wiping the windows of the glasshouses to keep them clean.