The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne (24 page)

“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.

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.

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?”