The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne

by Andrew Nicoll

  All those weeks I watched and waited for any chance she might want me. Every minute of waiting was agony. Every moment spent wiping those windows I was reliving in my mind the moments before when we had been together, everything over and over, every kiss, every touch, the parting of her flesh, the soft cries and – I remember once coming unexpectedly on a pair of doves pecking at the bare earth under the shade of a tree and they rose up together, suddenly, in terror – that, that feeling like a hurried rush of feathers, over and over in my mind, again and again until, with no notice at all, she would find me in the palm house or crook her finger from the other side of the garden and I would go running, like a puppy with my tail in the air and wagging.

  “You mustn’t tell, John Fraser. Promise you won’t tell. Say it and then you can kiss me. Say it.”

  “I won’t. I’ll never tell. I promise.”

  I never told a soul. When old Mr Milne died I would have comforted her. It was my duty as her beau, but she put on black and walked behind the hearse and shot me such looks as I doffed my cap when she passed. I knew enough to stay away until I was bid.

  And then, some days later, after a fit period of mourning, when the tobacconist’s shop had opened again and young Mr Milne was running the business up in Dundee, and Miss Milne was alone in the house, she found me scrubbing flowerpots under the outside tap.

  I looked up from my work – my fingers were frozen around that rough scrubbing brush – and saw her standing there. There was a stream of water curling along the brick floor and forming itself into a silver question mark around the toe of her boot. “I can’t open the window in my bedroom. It’s stuck. I need you to go and open it. Now.” And she turned on her heel and left me there. I heard the grit crunch under her boot as she went. The tap squeaked, the water hissed and bubbled in the pipe as I turned it off, oh, how suddenly sharp everything had become. I wiped my hands on my trousers. I followed her to the house. She was standing on the stairs.

  “Take your filthy boots off at the door.”

  I did as she said. I was wearing the thick green socks my mother had knitted for me. There was no sound as I went up the stairs. Nothing. Only a clock ticking somewhere deep in the house. Upstairs, every door on the corridor was shut except for the room at the end, the room she lay in on that last night. I stopped at the top of the stairs, breathless.

  “Come along. Hurry.”

  I looked round the door and she was standing at the window. It was open.

  “Get on the bed, John. Lie down.”

  She was unbuttoning her dress where she stood. She wouldn’t let me do it. “Never a word, John Fraser, or I’ll say you forced yourself on me.”

  I said: “Yes, Miss Milne.”

  “Yes, Miss Milne,” she said, mocking me. “Oh, yes, Miss Milne.”

  “I love you, Miss Milne.”

  “That’s what I want, John. Love me.”

  I said: “Miss Milne, would you do me the honour of becoming my wife?” But she only laughed.

  “My father is dead,” she said. “Who would give me away?”

  49

  JEAN MADE FUN of me for loving an old crone in her twenties. “You should be chasing lassies down at the beach, not wasting your time on the likes of me,” but I never gave it a thought. She and I were as we were. There was no purpose in wishing it otherwise. The sun rose in the east and Jean Milne was ten years older than me and it would have been as foolish to repine that accident of birth as it would any other, the colour of her eyes or the size of her feet.

  I have noticed that men, both when they are very old and when they are very young, have no skill in judging the age of a woman. An old man nearing seventy will look at a matron in her forties or fifties and think her no more than a lassie. A young lad might look at some prim school ma’am in her twenties and think her a dried-out old maid of forty. So I forgive myself for believing Jean Milne, though she harped constantly on her great age. I remember one day she read to me from a book, something written by Benjamin Franklin. It was no more than a long list of reasons why a young man should choose to consort with an older woman and I remember nothing of it now but for the end, which was: “They are so grateful.” Jean told me that Franklin had been a figure in the American Revolution and the inventor of the rocking chair. That made a great impression on me, as I had never before considered that someone must have first contrived a rocking chair, any more than there must have been an inventor of the table. But I believed her. Jean Milne was my teacher in so many things.

  I believed everything she told me. I believed her when she said I would be ruined if we were discovered. When I longed to run through the Ferry screaming her name and boasting of all that we had done together, when I longed to tell the world, or as much as fitted in my tiny corner of it, that I had discovered love as Livingstone discovered the Victoria Falls, that I knew things nobody else had ever known, that I had seen things and done things that nobody else could ever comprehend, fear of exposure was all that held me in check. I was convinced I would face imprisonment and ruin when a fool might have seen that the catastrophe would be all on her head and not on mine. I was a fool.

  I was fool enough to ask her to marry me again.

  One day in the garden at the corner of the palm house I asked her again to be my wife. “You’re just a boy,” she said.

  I told her that would pass. She laughed.

  I told her that the work of a husband was to guard and look after, and that by marrying me our love would be recognised as pure, her honour would be restored and nobody in the Ferry would dare to mock her when she was my wife.

  She only laughed again, all the harder. “Come with me,” she said. I followed her across the lawns to the big cedar, a little apart and a little behind, respectfully and decently so that anyone looking over the walls of Elmgrove would see only the mistress of the house about to set a laddie to some task, and then, when we stood under its branches in that great, arching, tented cathedral, standing on a soft, silken carpet of needles with the scent rising up like perfume, with the branches swooping down like roof timbers – “Kiss me, John.”

  That was how she would order me about, even when we were hidden away together, even though I was already half a head taller than her with a lot of growing still to do, and while I stood there, kissing her, she began unbuckling the belt on my trousers and tugging away at my shirt tails.

  “You like this, don’t you, John? Don’t you?”

  “Yes, Miss Milne.”

  “Yes, Miss Milne. Do you want me to stop? You only have to say.” She took her hands away just for a second and it was all I could do not to cry out. “Do you?”

  “No, Miss Milne. No.”

  “Then I won’t stop. We will go on just as we are, with no more silly talk of marriage. I can’t marry you, John. You must see that. I’m a lady. I have a position. And you are a gardener’s laddie. But we will always have this.”

  “I love you, Miss Milne.”

  “I know. I know.”

  Afterwards, when I was weeding the big flower bed at the side of the house, I heard the window of the drawing room go up and she sat down at the organ and played “Rock of Ages”. She had a lovely singing voice.

  50

  WHEN I WAS a child, I understood as a child, but when I became a man I put aside childish things and understood as a man. I understood why Jean and I could never marry. There was a time, after her brother died, when I entertained those same childish hopes, but that quickly ended. Our stations were too distant. She was too wealthy. Jean Milne could not leave Elmgrove and live in a policeman’s cottage. A lowly policeman could not spend his days and his nights doing what policemen do and then come home to Elmgrove to eat cake with the neighbour ladies of Caenlochan Villas. Even the Chief Constable would have been abashed. Jean was right. We could not marry.

  She was right about the other thing too. “We will always have this,” she said, and we did. If I passed on my night patrols and the gate was standing open, well, natur
ally I would have to investigate and sometimes those investigations might take half an hour or more before I was able to resume my beat.

  But Jean changed over the years. She became strange. She withered like the gardens of Elmgrove. It was as if they were a mirror of one another, the lady and her grand old house, slowly collapsing into shadows and neglect together. Little by little, Jean withdrew from life. She no longer saw visitors. Her mother’s elaborate tea sets gathered dust in the cupboards, the pictures were hung with sheets and she retreated into those one or two rooms on the ground floor, like an animal preparing for the long sleep of winter. One day, after one of those terrifying summer storms when the sky suddenly turns boiling black and towering clouds throw down rain and thunder, after all the rain had passed and the wind had died to nothing, I was walking down Grove Road with a warm mist rising from the wet pavements – rainbows on their way to being born – and I looked through the gates of Elmgrove and the roof of the palm house had fallen in. The place where Jean first touched me. It was collapsed utterly, like a shipwreck. I took it for a sign.

  You remember what I said about young men and old men and how they cannot tell a woman’s age? I am a man in his middle years, the prime of life, and yet Jean remained ten years older than me because Jean had always been ten years older than me. “A lady in her fifties.” That’s what I told Mr Trench. Love makes us blind. But it cannot protect us from suffering.

  Jean was, as the papers said, “a woman of a romantic disposition”. My attentions were not enough. They were never enough. That was why she made those “periodical journeys” to London for “the gratification of her whims”.

  Think what I felt every time she arrived in the police office to hand over her keys. Every time she left the Ferry, I knew why she was going. She was going to London to whore herself, and I knew it and she knew that I knew it. It was in her eyes. I felt it in the tips of her gloved fingers when she laid the keys in my hands. “Now, you will take good care, Sergeant Fraser, won’t you?” and she stood there waiting, her hand resting in mine like a little leather bird, waiting until I said it. Waiting.

  “Yes, Miss Milne,” I said. There was something less than a smile, a dark little curl of triumph in the corners of her mouth.

  I bore it. I had no choice. Love is like that.

  I knew about the young man with the yellow moustache, with all his money and his fancy plans. Of course I knew. How could I not know when she whispered to me about him in the night, how young he was, how handsome, such a man of the world, what a success he was, how different things might have been if only I had been more like him, goading me, belittling me, boasting of her whoredoms.

  I put my trousers on in the dark. I sat on the edge of the bed and tied my boots. She trailed her fingers up my spine, little electric shocks of pleasure at every touch. “How you’ve grown, John. How you’ve grown.”

  I made no reply. I tied a double knot in my bootlace and tugged it tight.

  “I said!” she repeated. “How you’ve grown, John. If a young lady makes a remark, it is considered polite to reply.”

  The bed squeaked in its familiar way as I stood up. “Yes, Miss Milne.”

  She rolled over in the bed and said: “Goodnight, John.”

  I bore it all because I loved her and because we all have our little ways. None of us is perfect. I bore it when he came to stay. I bore it when the smell of his cigars lingered long after he was gone.

  “I like the smell of a cigar,” she said. “It’s manly. It puts me in mind of my father.”

  I bore it when she went off with him cruising in the Highlands. I bore it even when she made no mention of the trip to me. Not a word. She loved to boast of “the gratification of her whims”. She spared me no detail. She revelled in it. But she said nothing of the cruise on the Cavalier. Could she have thought to keep it a secret from me? I am the sergeant of Broughty Ferry Burgh Police – of course I knew. Did she think, when Postie Slidders delivered the tickets, he would not gossip about an envelope from the Caledonian Steam Packet Company? Did she think the laundry man would keep it a secret that he had been told not to call? And yet she said not one word to me, and the keys for Elmgrove never arrived at the police office. Then I knew this was more than a whim and I began to fear, but it was only when she returned – a ring on her finger and showing it off to anybody who wanted to look – that my fears turned to a black, burning fury that raged in my chest. I waited and I watched.

  51

  OF COURSE THE Chief Constable was right: it is well nigh impossible to hunt down a random killer. It’s always the connection that betrays them. Murder is a weighty business. We do not kill those who mean nothing to us – there’s no reason to do it. But those we love, there might be a thousand reasons to kill them. The connection, that’s the thing.

  That was why I listened to the pedlar Andy Hay when he said I had to seek out the people of no account, the maidservants and street sweepers, those that go unnoticed. I had to find out what they had seen. As it turned out, they had seen nothing. They go about unseen because they count for nothing and they do not see their own kind. They are invisible, even to themselves. Their eyes were on the fine young gentleman with the yellow moustache, and his fine coat and his fine suit and his fine boots, not quite properly polished.

  A fine young gentleman might easily beguile Miss Milne, but a grand lady like that would never take any interest in a lowly police sergeant. No, there could be no possible connection between one so high and one so low, and if the sergeant were to call in, once a week at least, whenever Miss Milne was at home, that could only be to hand back her house keys or to offer some word of comfort to the poor old soul and surely not to bend her over the kitchen table, fling her skirts over her head, unbutton his police trousers and set about her withered old haunches while she grunted and shuddered like an old sow, singing out the old refrain: “Not a word, John Fraser! Not a word or I’ll say you forced me.”

  “Yes! Miss! Milne!”

  I think I must have known that the young man with the yellow moustache had arrived in the Ferry only minutes after he got off the train from Dundee. He went into the paper shop across the street and tried to pay for a box of matches with a gold sovereign. They were still talking about it when I went in for my tobacco not half an hour later and, foolishly, they had let him have the matches for nothing, trusting him to return the money because, after all, he was a gentleman.

  In very truth, I knew he was here before that. Something sang in my blood. There was a feeling in the air, that crackling heaviness that comes before lightning. Still, I should have done nothing. Love cannot protect us from hurt, but that’s no reason to seek out more misery. I might have sat at my own fireside, imagining the two of them together and that would have been misery enough but, no, nothing would do but that I went there to see for myself. Sometimes the only thing that can take the pain away is more pain.

  That night as I stood in the darkness of the old, familiar trees that had once been my friends, I had no idea who might have seen me come but, the truth is, I cared little. I stood well back amongst the tangled branches, my uniform as black as the shadows that wrapped me, and I looked into the one lit room, there on the ground floor at the other side of the lawn.

  It was like watching a play, or maybe more like a picture show, for there were no words. Still, the scene was clear to anyone who cared to watch: the lovers. Domestic bliss.

  There was a good fire going in the grate and the remains of a meal on the table. A lady of Jean’s station and standing should have had a lassie to clear her things away and wash the dishes, but there was none and it was clear enough why not, for how could she entertain her gentlemen caller with a lassie in the house to carry the gossip all round the Ferry?

  Jean did all she could to make him feel welcome. I watched as she went out and returned in a moment with a big cut-glass decanter and she poured him out a fearsome whisky. Never in all the years I knew her did she do as much for me. Great was the merriment
, and soon enough she went back to the bottle and poured him another, but this time she took one for herself.

  And there was worse to come. Off she went to the sideboard and she brought out a box of cigars and then she stood there in front of the fire, lit one and got it going, rolling it around in her lips, watching herself in the mirror over the fireplace as she did it, standing there, legs apart, a fist on her hip like a caricature of a man and then, the bitch, she went and sat on his knee and took the cigar from her own lips and placed it between his, but it was not there long before she took it out and kissed him full on the mouth, one hand at the back of his head, the other waving that damned cigar like a trophy. After that, you might be assured, one thing quickly led to another.

  There was an oblong of lamplight shining across the damp grass and they were shining in it, laughing and pawing at one another like apes. I might have stood right at that window and they would never have noticed, but I took care to stay in the shadows. I left my place amongst the trees and went and stood in a gap of darkness between the two downstairs windows, listening because watching was more than I could bear.

  “And everything is fixed, isn’t it, dear.”

  “Everything’s ready. Just a few loose ends to tie up. I’ll catch the early train tomorrow. I’ll be back in no time.”

  “And then?”

  “Canada. You and I, man and wife in charge of the sweetest, richest gold mine in the territories. Together forever.”

  And then more laughter and the sounds of glasses being filled and Jean’s bright giggles and the savouring of kisses and “Come on. Hurry. Hurry,” and more laughter but a different, hungrier kind this time and then the sound of them moved from the room on my right, where she sat and took her meals, to the room on my left, where she had her bed. They left the lamp to burn itself dry on the table and they did not bother to light one in her bedroom, but I saw through the darkness as if it had been noontime. That room, all its familiar furniture, the breathless little gasps, boots dropped on the floor, shirts, corsets, underwear flung across the room, the rattle of buttons as trousers were draped on the bed end, the sighs and groans, the slap of flesh on flesh, that same squeak, squeak, squeak of the bed sawing at my brain, the cries wilder and yet more fevered every moment and – this was the worst of all – not once did she say, “Not a word, or I’ll say you forced me.” Not once. Never.