And the Band Played On (27 page)

Kate, meanwhile, remained at home with her roommate and old school friend, Robina and Robina’s parents. Having hatched such an elaborate and imaginative plot, she still had no strategy for delivering the news of Grace’s death to her father and stepmother. Then she remembered that Robina was friends with Edward Whitehead, a twenty-two-year-old cub reporter on the newspaper. It was only Saturday so there would be plenty of time for him to place it for the Wednesday edition.

Young Whitehead was about to land what he felt certain would be one of the greatest scoops in newspaper history.

23

Grace Hume ‘Murdered’

16 September 1914

A few days before the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
published its report of Grace’s murder, it fell to Mrs Robertson, a plasterer’s wife from Dockhead and well-known local gossip and busybody, to break the news to Andrew and Alice Hume that their daughter had been murdered and mutilated. A loud knocking on the door of 42 George Street, followed one minute later by a persistent jangling of the bell, pre-empted the announcement.

Alice Hume, alone in the house was on the top floor looking for a hat to wear at a wedding the following Saturday. She was not pleased to be summoned downstairs. The arthritis in her knees had made the ascent painful and a rapid descent to open the front door would take a double toll. She wondered if she should bother at all. But curiosity got the better of her and, grasping the mahogany handrail of the handsome Georgian staircase, she made the descent sideways, one painful step at a time, to the ground floor. When she opened the front door, she was particularly annoyed to see Mrs Robertson standing there. She disliked people who called without an invitation and, anyway, Alice could not conceive of any situation that might lead her to invite Mrs Robertson into her home. They were at best on nodding terms, attending the same congregation at St Michael’s Episcopal Church, and they had sat next to each other at one of those interminable Burns Night dinners; that was the extent of their acquaintance. But as Mrs Robertson was holding a lace handkerchief to her face and had obviously been crying, Alice felt obliged to let her in.

‘Oh, my dear, what is the matter?’ said Alice, trying to sound and look concerned. ‘Please come in, Mrs Robertson.’ Alice closed the door behind her uninvited guest, determined to contain her in the hall where Mrs Robertson would be forced to stand, rather than invite her into the drawing room where Alice would be expected to serve tea and biscuits.

‘It’s about your stepdaughter, Grace,’ said Mrs Robertson. ‘Everyone is talking about her, I just wanted to say . . .’

‘Talking about what, exactly?’ said Alice, now sounding distinctly irritated.

‘About the dreadful business in Belgium.’

‘What dreadful business, may I ask?’

‘You mean you haven’t heard?’ asked Mrs Robertson, trying to look aghast but secretly thrilled that she was breaking such important news. Her hands shot back up to her face in mock horror. ‘Grace has been mutilated and murdered by the Germans.’

‘Grace? Mutilated? Murdered?’ For a brief moment Alice considered how often she herself had wished to murder Grace. Indeed, there were occasions when she had felt like murdering all three of her stepdaughters, in particular Kate, although they had yet to provoke her so much that she had contemplated mutilation.

‘I thought you knew, otherwise I would never have called,’ said Mrs Robertson, who enjoyed nothing more in life than announcing bad news to those who had yet to hear it. ‘A nurse – Nurse Mullard was her name, I think – has told your stepdaughter Kate all about it and given her a letter from Grace. Apparently Grace was a heroine, attending wounded soldiers at the Front in Belgium, when the Germans attacked. Before killing her, they cut off her . . .’ Mrs Robertson started sobbing convulsively.

‘Please don’t distress yourself any more,’ said Alice, maintaining her own composure while skilfully turning Mrs Robertson around and guiding her back to the front door. ‘When my husband returns we will speak to Kate as a matter of urgency and get to the bottom of this matter. Good day, Mrs Robertson, and thank you very much indeed for bringing it to our attention.’

Alice sat on the chaise longue in the drawing room and watched Mrs Robertson through the window walking away from the house. When the busybody was out of sight, Alice considered calmly what she had just heard. She realised that she had no immediate way of getting in touch with Kate to ask her what had happened, as they had no idea where she was living. She was glad she hadn’t revealed that to Mrs Robertson, who swapped gossip like children traded marbles. Alice recalled the last time she had seen Kate. She would never forget Kate’s defiant face as she had swept out, slamming the front door. At least her father had given her a good hiding before she left and for once he hadn’t blamed her – Alice – for driving his daughters away.

As for Grace, they had neither seen nor spoken to Grace for more than a year, although until now, anyway, they thought they knew where she lived. Bradford, wasn’t it? Or perhaps it was Huddersfield. She really couldn’t remember.

Alice must have considered the effect that this new catastrophe would have on their lives, whatever the truth of it. The family had suffered enough already with Jock’s death and a year of courtroom battles with Mary Costin. It hadn’t been easy being a stepmother to Andrew’s five children before Jock died, but there was no doubt that his death had magnified the difficulties, in particular her relationship with her stepdaughters.

But was it true? In one sense, Alice probably wished it were. Grace and Kate hunted in a pack and it would at least halve her stepdaughter problem if one of them was dead. But Alice was suspicious. For a start, Kate was a pathological liar like her father. Even Alice had been forced to accept this uncomfortable truth about her husband. And Grace had never struck her as either a heroine or a victim. She was a timid girl with no nursing qualifications and no initiative. The idea of her being in the front line in the war in Belgium seemed improbable to Alice, to say the least. She often wondered how she had travelled unassisted all the way from Dumfries to wherever it was she went. But Alice could hardly present the news this way to Grace’s father when he returned home. She would try to sound more sympathetic.

The ticking of the grandfather clock seemed to get louder and slower as Alice counted the minutes until Andrew arrived home shortly before 4 p.m. He still had his key in the door when Alice blurted out, word for word, what she had been told by Mrs Robertson. To Alice’s relief, Andrew also found the story improbable, agreeing that they had to speak to Kate as a matter of urgency. But where was she? Andrew and Alice went to bed on Saturday night still not knowing what had happened to Grace. It seems extraordinary that the whole of Sunday passed without any contact between Kate and her parents. The Humes went to church as normal and in the afternoon Andrew wrote a polite letter to the War Office in London, asking if they could furnish him with information that would confirm or contradict the report of his daughter’s death.

On Sunday night, Kate gave the letters to Robina and asked her to pass them on to her reporter friend Edward. Realising he had a scoop, the young Edward immediately took the letters to his editor, Mr Dickie, who decided to lead Wednesday’s edition of the newspaper with the sensational story. Even as the
Standard
was preparing the story, Andrew and Alice Hume were still none the wiser. No one from the newspaper had been to see them and no reply had yet been received from the War Office. Andrew and Alice seemed peculiarly unconcerned about the fate of Grace and it is extraordinary that they apparently made no attempt to contact Kate. On the Monday, Andrew went, as he did every Monday, to the nearby Wallace Hall Academy where he taught the violin. On the Tuesday he took an early train to Annan to conduct a lunchtime concert.

Alice was waiting anxiously for him at the barrier on his return. Andrew’s niece, who had seen Kate the previous day, had persuaded Kate to allow her to make a pencil copy of the letters and Andrew’s sister, Mrs Irving, had brought the transcript round to George Street. What Andrew read alarmed him and he went immediately from Dumfries station to the
Standard
’s offices and asked to see the editor. He demanded that Dickie postpone publication, at least until after he had received a reply from the War Office. The editor declined on the grounds that he believed the story and that it was in the national interest, at a time of war, to publish it. What he didn’t tell Andrew Hume was that Grace Hume’s scribbled dying note had already been sent for engraving. He also failed to tell him that in his top left desk drawer he had the original letter from ‘Nurse Mullard’, a letter that Andrew Hume had never seen. If the editor had shown him even a page of it, Andrew would immediately have recognised the writing as Kate’s. But Dickie was not about to allow Andrew Hume to spoil a good story.

Although Dickie had worked for the
Standard
for forty-four years, he had been editor of the newspaper for only five months, since the unexpected death of his predecessor, Thomas Watson. Dickie had joined the
Standard
aged fifteen, serving his apprenticeship as a compositor before becoming a member of the reporting staff some years later. A series of promotions over the years, mostly prompted by the death or retirement of a colleague, had eventually led to his appointment as deputy editor, a position he considered the pinnacle of his career. He was, in truth, one of life’s natural deputies. But Mr Watson’s death had changed all that and handed him an opportunity he had never dreamed of having.

William Dickie’s hero was the man who had edited the
Standard
for forty-two years, William McDowall, on whom he had modelled his life and, so far as it was possible, even his appearance – both men having full beards and moustaches. McDowall had been appointed editor aged thirty-one in 1846, three years after the
Standard
was founded ‘to promote the views of the Evangelical majority in the Church’ and to support the causes of liberalism and social reform. Apart from a brief spell in 1854, when he left to edit a newspaper in Sunderland, McDowall held the position until his death in 1888.

Dickie walked doggedly in the footsteps of McDowall, under whom he served for sixteen years. Whatever McDowall had done, Dickie would do it, too. McDowall was a founding member of the Dumfries and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society; Dickie later became its vice-president. McDowall wrote the definitive
History of Dumfries
; Dickie wrote a similar booklet called
Dumfries and Round About
. McDowall was the driving force behind the movement to build a statue to Robert Burns in the High Street; Dickie became president of Dumfries Burns Club. McDowall lived in Maxwelltown; the Dickies bought a house in a neighbouring street. McDowall made a point of always walking to work so that he could pass the time of day with his readers; so did Dickie. Both men shared an enthusiasm for carboniferous fossils. Even their manner of dying would be the same, both men ‘dying in harness’ as the
Standard
described it. But there was one important difference between the two men: McDowall would never have allowed Kate Hume’s story to get into print.

In the annals of journalistic blunders there can be few greater cock-ups than the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard & Advertiser
’s world exclusive about the murder and mutilation of Grace Hume. Nor can there be many stories that have been proved to be so completely wrong so soon after publication.

Like all newspaper editors who destroy their careers and become the laughing stock of their colleagues through a momentary misjudgement, Dickie wanted the story to be true, abandoning years of experience and caution in pursuit of a moment of personal and professional glory. The story ought to have rung all the usual warning bells. No one on the
Standard
’s staff had spoken to Kate Hume. Nurses in war are
not
armed. The girl’s father, who was clearly not grieving, sat opposite him urging him to wait for confirmation from the War Office before rushing into print. At least one trusted colleague in the office had read a galley proof while drawing air through his teeth, shaking his head and saying, ‘I don’t like the look of this, Mr Dickie. Something about it isn’t quite right.’ But Dickie wasn’t listening.