Classic Scottish Murder Stories
Page 1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My special thanks to Hilary Bailey, Glenn Chandler,
Stewart Evans, Max Falconer, Robert Gilbert,
Melvin Harris, Dr Marc Hinchliffe, Carole Hopkins,
John Linklater, Lewis MacDonald, Andy Melbourne,
Jerry Mullaney and Richard Whittington-Egan
CONTENTS
1 The Misted Mountain
The Arran Case, 1889
2 The German Tea-Planter
The Broughty Ferry Case, 1912
3 The Late Mr Toad
The Musselburgh Case, 1911
4 ‘Oh! Loch Maree!’
William Laurie King, 1924
5 The Running Girl
Christina Gilmour, 1843
6 The Travelling Man
Hugh Macleod, 1830
7 The Naked Ghost
Sergeant Davies, 1749
8 The Cinderella Syndrome
Bertie Willox, 1929
9 ‘Holy Willie’
William Bennison, 1850
10 A Tryst with Dr Smith
The St Fergus Case, 1853
11 The Wild Geese
The Saunders Case, 1913
12 The French Schoolmaster’s Wife
Eugène Marie Chantrelle, 1878
13 The Ice-Field
The Arran Stowaways, 1868
14 The Toad in the Tunnel
The Garvie Case, 1968
15 Bible John
The Barrowland Ballroom Killings, 1968-9
16 Jock the Ripper
William Henry Bury, 1889
17 The Quest for Norah
The Fornario Case, 1929
18 The Stockbridge Baby-Farmer
Jessie King, 1888
19 ‘I am Gall’
Peter Queen, 1931
20 The Half-Mutchkin
Edinburgh Brothel Case, 1823
21 To the Lighthouse
Robert Dickson, 1960
22 Mr Kello’s Sunday Morning Service
John Kello, 1570
23 The Whiteinch Atrocities
The McArthur Murder, 1904. William and Helen Harkness, 1921
24 Death of a Hermit
George Shaw and George Dunn, 1952
25 The Light-Headed Cutty
Mary Smith, 1826
26 The Postman Only Knocked Once
Stanislaw Myszka, 1947
27 Brutality
James Keenan, 1969
28 Rurality
James Robb, 1849 George Christie, 1852
29 The Northfield Mystery
Helen and William Watt, 1756
30 Blue Vitriol
Kate Humphrey, 1830 Anne Inglis, 1795
31 The Battered Bride
John Adam, 1835
32 The Babes in the Quarry
Patrick Higgins, 1911
33 The Poisonous Puddocks
George Thom, 1821
34 The Tram Ride
Alexander Edmonstone, 1909
35 The Tooth-Fiend
Gordon Hay, 1967
36 The Icing on the Shortbread
Thomas Brown, 1906
CHAPTER 1
THE MISTED MOUNTAIN
The essence of the Arran murder lies (to invoke in one breath the song and Wordsworth’s poem) in the conundrum that two men went to climb, went to climb a mountain, one came down and the other stayed up, ‘rolled round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks, and stones, and trees’.
An act of murder committed high up in the mists so that the island is, as it were, crowned with the old burst of devilry, does produce a special atmosphere. These perceptions are always subjective, but the Isle of Skye, however grand the Cuillins, with their well-remembered peaky silhouette and torrents of scree, seems a kindlier place than the Isle of Arran. Imagine a murder staged under the Cioch, that fine bossed rock, and the whole spirit of the locus would be changed.
Before it happened, just before it happened, an expedition to Arran was, in 1889, the year after Jack the Ripper, a real adventure for a clerkly person from Tooting. Edwin Robert Rose was normally resident in the very stronghold of Pooterdom, deep in the suburbs of south-west London, with their wooded commons and grids of speculative villas.
Here, at Wisset Lodge, Hendham Road, Upper Tooting, with its inspiring view of the red Tudor-style battlements of Springfield, the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum, at the top of the street, Rose lived in comfort and harmony with his father, four sisters and one brother. The mother was missing, presumably dead. Still a bachelor, at 32, he was employed as clerk in the office of James Goodman, builder, of Mostyn Road, Brixton.
He was not at all bad-looking, slight, dark, with deep-set, soulful eyes and a dense moustache. He could have been a doomed young poet of the 1890s, or even, perhaps, the loved special friend of some great Poet Laureate. There was no hint of a girl-friend, and his hobbies were of a manly nature – tennis and cricket, walking and running.
That July, at the start of his fortnight’s summer holiday, he booked in first at the Glenburn Hydropathic, in Rothesay, where, by previous arrangement, he joined his friend, the Reverend Gustavus James Goodman, Minister of the Presbyterian Church at Walker-on-Tyne. The cleric was the son of Rose’s employer, who, incidentally, knew nothing of the holiday plan. Rose soon made friends with other young men, and, on July 12 th, having joined up with a picnic-party from the Hydro, he took the Clyde steamer Ivanhoe bound for Arran. He was excited, chatty, approachable, released from the office in Brixton, and stimulated by the sky, and the sea and the impact of the scenery.
The conjuncture of killer with victim is always interesting and sometimes instructive. In this case, the life of the clerk should have been safe enough when he struck up a spontaneous holiday acquaintance with a person of lower social class – a skilled artisan. Victim approached killer on the Ivanhoe, mistaking him, it was said, for a member of the picnic-party.
John Watson Laurie – for that was his real name, although he was going under the alias of John Annandale and had a visiting card to prove it – was slightly disreputable, with a touch of ‘form’ for theft, but not for violence, and his respectable family in Coatbridge were not at all proud of him. On holiday, he was secretive, elusive, determined to conceal the fact that he was a pattern-maker, working at the Atlas Locomotive Works in Springburn, and lodging at 106 North Frederick Street, Glasgow. Snobbery was the background to the unfolding events.
The basically ill-assorted pair got along famously. Rose did most of the talking. Laurie, at 26 somewhat younger than Rose, was fair against the older man’s darkness. In physiognomy, he was less refined. Perhaps Rose was drawn to his air of worldliness, a whiff of raffishness, and Laurie appreciated the clerk’s touch of class. Rose was a natty dresser, always well turned out for the occasion, and his clothes are a part of the picture. His holiday apparel included a chocolate-brown and white striped tennis jacket, and a white serge yachting cap, rakish beyond the general. Laurie, who could not compete with Rose’s finery, was notoriously vain, and the contrast is thought to have irked him. His best effort was a brown knickerbocker suit and stylish stockings.
At this stage, from any normal vantage point, Rose was at risk only of being a victim of theft. The two ‘chums’ enjoyed their trip to Arran, and arranged to return the following day for a longer stay. It was the Glasgow Fair week and most rooms were taken, but lodgings of a sort had been found by Laurie at Mrs Esther Walker’s, in the village of Invercloy, Brodick. A Mrs Shaw had brought him to her. She could offer them a wooden outhouse, a ‘lie-to’ attached, but with no access to the main house, and with its own door. There was one bed. Very probably they were genuinely lucky to find this roof over their heads and there
was no hidden agenda on either side.
Laurie booked to stay from Saturday July 13th, for one week, but Rose was to leave on the following Wednesday. In fact, Laurie sprang Rose on Mrs Walker when he turned up on the Saturday, but she agreed to the terms of 17 shillings for Laurie, and three shillings extra for his friend. Thus discriminated against, Rose was to eat out at Mrs Isabella Wooley’s Tea Room, while Laurie was catered for in his own room.
Two other holiday acquaintances, met at the Hydro, and now sleeping, faute de mieux, on a friend’s yacht in the bay, did not like what they saw of the misalliance. Francis Ord Mickel, a wood-merchant of Linlithgow, and William Thom, a commercial traveller, also of Linlithgow, being Scotsmen will have been quicker to spot that Laurie was not quite the thing, while Rose will have been bamboozled by his accent. Unless, of course, he did not care or rather liked what he intuited.
Anyway, Mickel and Thom were thoroughly suspicious of ‘Annandale’ and his closely-guarded origins, remarking on his habit of ‘coming and going’ during a conversation, presumably when the topic was too close to home. Or perhaps he sensed their dislike, and resented their intrusion, and his restless behaviour mirrored his unease. Rose and Laurie announced their intention to climb Goatfell, the highest peak on the island, on Monday July 15th. Laurie had abrogated the role of ‘guide’.
Francis Mickel, whose prescience is a curiosity of the events, strongly advised Rose to get rid of his unsuitable companion, even if it meant leaving his lodgings, and he expressly urged him to abandon the plan to climb Goatfell with Laurie. Anxious to please, Rose promised to try, but he obviously did not try very hard, inhibited perhaps by good manners, kindness, or sheer enthusiasm for the project, because when, with Laurie, he saw Mickel and Thom at the pier, he was kitted out from head to foot as a gentleman climber, swathed like a toff in a tailor-made tweed suit with matching tweed cap, leather leggings and leather boots. Ancillary equipment was a waterproof which was black outside and white inside, and naturally he carried a walking-stick.
If Rose had known then that on the Sunday night before, his guide, Laurie, had been seen acting strangely in the lane behind Wooley’s Tea Room, he might not have been so confident. The story is that an old Arran woman who lived in one of the cottages nearby watched Laurie walking up and down, talking to himself and looking very odd. ‘The De’il’s busy with that young chap!’ she thought.
Theoretically, this could have been agitation caused by something that had happened, or was about to happen, or it was the outward sign of the hatching of a terrible plan. There is also another factor to take into account: Laurie had toothache.
Unalleviated toothache can affect a man’s judgement to a certain level, but not, surely, trigger a homicidal act. We do know that on the Monday, at lunch at 2pm, he complained that he could not eat for toothache. Earlier that morning, he had gone off to get quinine powder as a remedy, but evidently it had not worked.
Laurie was, therefore, a man with toothache as, rather late, soon after 3.30pm, he and Rose set off at a fair pace to climb their mountain. Laurie was the leader, silent with his pain, and, possibly, wicked thoughts. Rose must himself have been uncomfortable in his tweed outfit over brown merino drawers and socks, white linen shirt and white knitted semmit (vest).
At first, after passing through the Castle woods, the foothills to Goatfell were green and mossy moor, the air sultry and buzzing with insects. The terrain was peppered with other holiday-makers (one of them was going at a tremendous rate, trying to break the speed record for the ascent) and seven men in all encountered the couple, one fair, the other dark, as they ascended steadily. The fair one self-contained in front said not a word, but the dark one was happy to exchange pleasantries, as was his disposition.
The climb to the summit at 2,866 feet is a stiff walk by well-defined tracks along the ridges, not a feat of mountaineering, but it is not recommended for those suffering from any degree of vertigo, nor for those sensitive beings who become depressed as they contemplate the insignificance of man against the jagged vastness of nature. The grey granite peaks and deep ravines can make some people long for home.
Surely it was just such a place as this that was in Tennyson’s mind when he wrote in The Passing of Arthur how Sir Bedivere
‘swiftly strode from ridge to ridge’
and
‘The bare black cliff clang’d round him, as he based
His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang,
Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels.’
Rose and Laurie were last seen at the top around 6pm, standing on a big boulder, apparently discussing and pointing out a different, more difficult route for their descent. Exactly what came next, what was said and done, or done, or merely happened, could have been known only to a golden eagle as it soared.
Three hours later, a shepherd, David McKenzie, sighted Laurie, very tired and on his own, coming down the lonely route of Glen Sannox, but thought no more of it at the time. At about 10pm, Laurie ordered beer and whisky at the Corrie Hotel and said that he was going to walk the six miles to Brodick. He was innocent of bloodstains. The next morning at 11am, Mrs Walker discovered that her two lodgers had disappeared without payment. She had been bilked before, and did not bother to report her loss to the police.
Laurie had, in fact made himself scarce by the early boat, carrying his own yellowish-brown bag, and Rose’s black one. Rose was supposed to be on holiday until the 18th, and therefore, at first, he was not missed. Two collie dogs belonging to a farmer named Davidson knew precisely where he lay, but their master did not believe them. When Rose should have alighted from his train in London, fit and hearty after his holiday adventures, his brother, Benjamin, who was there to meet him, was very worried indeed, and the investigation began.
Wet and misty weather defeated search-parties, until a dazzling sun broke through on Sunday August 4th, and a gathering of 200 searchers in divided groups set off at 9am. It was a fisherman from Corrie, Francis Logan, who made the discovery when he tracked an unpleasant smell to a large, granite boulder lying in a gully which led steeply down into Glen Sannox from the ridge of north Goatfell. Coire-na-fuhren – Gully of Fire – is the name of the desolate place where they found the remains of the clerk from Tooting. Wedged underneath the boulder and hidden by a man-made constructure of 42 separate stones plugged with heather (for was not Laurie a skilled pattern-maker?) was stretched, face down, fully clothed, the poor, slim body of Edwin Robert Rose. All the pockets of his jacket were empty, and one of them was turned inside out. The skirt of the jacket was turned back over the head, which, with the face, was frightfully smashed, shattered. There was a fracture on the top of the left shoulder blade, and the highest vertebra was lying loose. Strewn higher up the gully without attempt at concealment, possibly in a line of descent, lay Rose’s walking-stick, his knife, pencil, and a button and his waterproof, ripped in two parts. His tweed cap had been partly hidden, folded into four and flattened beneath a sizeable stone in the stream which trickled down the ravine.
‘John Annandale’ was a wanted man. At its coarsest polarity, the question was ‘Did he fall, or was he pushed?’ The permutations of the old tragedy are still hotly discussed. They go like this...
– The death was a pure accident: Rose fell and all the injuries were caused by that fall.
– Laurie pushed Rose down, and he died of the resultant injuries.
– Laurie pushed Rose down, and then finished him off with a stone.
– Laurie ascended Goatfell with the full, premeditated intention of killing Rose; i.e. he was a dangerous homicidal maniac, muttering, withdrawn and restless.
– Laurie, a known thief, ascended Goatfell with the full, premeditated intention of robbing Rose. Some violence to that end might have been in contemplation.
– In order to rob, and to escape, Laurie knew that only outright murder would succeed.
– At the summit, a sudden brainstorm overcame Laurie, a disturbed individual, and a town-r
at, as a result of the dizzy surroundings, the exertion, and the toothache. Thus inflamed, he turned on Rose and felled him.
– It began as an accident. On the tricky descent, Rose slipped and hurt himself. Looking down at the fallen man in his finery, helpless, the De’il entered into Laurie’s unstable mind, and he murdered for gain on sudden impulse.
– There was an argument or confrontation when they drew breath at the summit. Money could have been an issue. Sex, too. Suppose that Rose had made an approach to Laurie in the shared bed in which fate had placed them in such heady conditions of privacy. (Or vice versa.) Suppose that some covert sexual ambivalence lurked deep in Laurie, and confusing shame and recognition had overwhelmed him.
– If the death had been accidental, the concealment of the body was an act of panic, because Laurie feared that he would not be believed. The thefts from the body and its concealment were not necessarily a concomitant of murder.
And so the alternatives breed and multiply. Laurie gave them his full attention. As he escaped from the island, the intention, or effect, of the concealment of the body, whether an improvised endeavour, or pre-planned, was to allow ‘John Annandale’ to disappear, and John Laurie to revert unsuspected to his previous existence.
As a matter of fact, the concealment of the body may be a sign that murder was not premeditated. If the old photographs of the scene of the crime are studied, it can be seen that the ground is singularly bare of cover, treeless, with no hope of digging into the granite. Only rocks and boulders were available. Anything like a new cairn would have been conspicuous. There were other walkers around, and someone might have looked down from the ridge and seen what Laurie was about. The concealment was cunningly executed, and lasted for longer than he could have hoped.
Recklessly, he had not returned immediately to his life as John Laurie in Glasgow, but had retraced his steps to his previous lodgings at Port Bannatyne, Rothesay, where he was known as ‘John Annandale’, and coolly sat out the remains of the holiday which he had interrupted for his stay in Arran. He strutted around wearing Rose’s chocolate-brown striped tennis jacket and yachting cap.
James Gillon Aitken was the man who forged the link between Laurie and ‘Annandale’, and Laurie should have feared him and avoided him at all costs. He was a grain merchant from 3 Lansdowne Place, Shawlands, Glasgow, and he knew Laurie under his real name from having met him in Rothesay the previous year. This year, he was actually on the Ivanhoe when Rose made the fatal connection with Laurie. He saw them together. And when, back at Rothesay, he met Laurie again, he could not help noticing that he was wearing a cap very similar to his new friend’s. It was on the tip of his tongue to say so.