The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne (3 page)

DURING THE FORENOON Dr Sturrock arrived and had an examination of the body. Dr Sturrock is an unusually short man who favours a soft hat. He had been interrupted on his way to morning services and, not being a very diligent attender, he pleaded an emergency and left Mrs Sturrock at the door of the kirk and came away. Of course he had not thought to take his medical bag with him on such an outing, so he was forced to return to his home, gather such things as were needful and make his way – none too hurriedly I may say – to Elmgrove.

Dr Sturrock stopped in the vestibule and had private conversation with Chief Constable Sempill before joining me in the hall, where I stood guarding the body.

“Has she been moved?” he asked me.

“No, sir.”

“Nothing has been touched or disturbed?”

“Nothing whatever, sir.”

“Sergeant Fraser knows his duties, Doctor.” Mr Sempill sounded very ill-mannered and not at all like himself, but I imagine the strains of the horrible discovery and the responsibilities weighing on his shoulders must have affected his temper. “Now, what can you tell me about this lady?”

Dr Sturrock got down on his hands and knees and turned his head. He was looking Miss Milne right in the face, which is a task I would not have envied him, and then, with a grunt and a loud exhaling of breath, he sat up again. “I identify this as the body of Miss Jean Milne of this address and I am prepared to certify death,” he said.

The Chief Constable was furious. “Is that an attempt at humour, man?”

“What else would you have me say? The woman is clearly dead. At first glance it appears she died as a result of blunt force trauma to the skull – that is to say somebody beat her head in, likely with that bloodstained poker . . .”

“Not this bit of rock?” Chief Constable Sempill pointed to a large stone that was sitting on the tiled floor. Part of it had broken off and the broken corner was lying there beside it, the two wounds fresh and clean and new.

“It’s a doorstop,” said Dr Sturrock. “There’s not a drop of blood on it. I cannot conjecture as to how it was broken, but it was definitely not the weapon in this case.”

“Was there unpleasantness?”

Dr Sturrock got to his feet with a look of indulgent bafflement on his face and stood making notes in a little book with a silver pencil. “Unpleasantness? Unpleasantness? Look about you, man. The unpleasantness is before your very eyes. Speak Scotch or whistle, Chief Constable. You mean ‘was she raped?’ I can’t tell that either, not without disturbing the body. We need to get her into the mortuary for a proper examination and even then it might not be easy. This poor soul needs to be got into a decent grave.”

“How long has she been lying?”

“I can’t tell. This time of year, not too warm, indoors, not too cool either, not exposed to the weather, not disturbed by animals, a couple, three weeks. But I can tell you one thing for sure and certain: it wasn’t a robbery.”

Mr Sempill snorted at him. “Do me the courtesy of not teaching me my trade, Doctor, and I will do my best not to teach you yours. Observe the open boxes, the travel cases, the handbags. There has obviously been a rough and frantic search for valuables.”

But Dr Sturrock simply pointed with a flick of his pencil and said: “I count, one, two . . . six gold rings on the lady’s fingers. The search for valuables may have been rough and frantic as you suggest, but it was none too diligent.” He finished making his notes and said: “I’m sending for Templeman from Dundee. He knows his business and if the body’s to be lifted to the mortuary then, by rights, it’ll be under his jurisdiction.”

“But this is a matter of great urgency!”

“Havers, man. This poor lady has been waiting for a good fortnight. She’s in no rush. I’ll away home for dinner – Mrs Sturrock has a choice bit of beef. I will return later with Dr Templeman. My best advice to you is to ensure that the photographer is finished with his work before we get back and disturb the scene any further.”

And, with that, he snapped down the little brass catches in his portmanteau and went out the door again. But no sooner was he out the door than he opened it again and returned for a moment. “If it’s any help to you, I can tell you this,” he said. “She was definitely alive on October 16th. It was a Wednesday about dinner time, I’d say between half past twelve and one. I was on the tramcar, going along Strathern Road. Just before we got to Fairfield Road I looked up from my newspaper and saw Miss Milne.”

“You’re certain sure it was her,” said Mr Sempill, “definitely on the 16th?”

“No doubt. You know yourself she was . . .” He hesitated. “Well, speak only good of the dead, but she was odd and she went about dressed, how to say it kindly . . . dressed awful young for her years.” And then he said: “I’m away to my beef dinner. Good morning,” and rattled the door shut behind himself.

I suppose that left the Chief Constable at something of a loose end, and because Dr Sturrock had spoken to him in a less than respectful manner, he decided to take it out on me and the constables.

He had us chasing round the place, beating the bushes in the garden, catching our uniforms on thorns, getting our knees muddy all in the hopes of finding some forgotten clue, another poker that the killer had chosen to discard in the undergrowth or, well I don’t know what, and the worst part is neither did Mr Sempill. He was simply casting about for things to do because he had no idea what to do and, I’m sure, because he feared that he might be held to account for having failed to do something.

He ordered me to break Miss Milne’s postbox and take out all her letters and sort them into three heaps: one for circulars, advertising materials, newsletters from the church or any societies she may have attended, another for bills and such like, and the last for personal and private correspondence, all arranged by date, all piled up on the kitchen table. I sat there with a wee butter knife from the drawer slicing the envelopes, taking out the letters, glancing through them, piling them up, each with its envelope, each in order. Miss Milne had a wide circle of correspondence. We knew she liked to travel because she would stop at the police office with the key to the small gate and tell us she was away here and there, off to London for weeks and months at a time or on wee trips to the Highlands, and there were letters from the folk she met on her travels. Letters from men.

“Have you not finished that, Fraser? Well stop anyway. I need you out there with me, knocking on doors. Some of the neighbours must have a notion of what’s gone on here. Some of them must have noticed something or other.”

I scraped the kitchen chair back from the table and put on my hat. I was following, loyally, I knew well enough my duty and yet the Chief Constable’s bruised feelings were still chaffing and he urged me: “Come along, man, keep up. What are you waiting for?” in a tone that was neither respectful nor called for.

I AM SORRY to have to report that the Chief Constable’s energetic plans came to nothing. We hurried down the path, Mr Sempill striding out in front with me coming behind like his wee terrier out for a walk, my hat not even properly on my head yet – and respectable dress is something an officer of the police must give a due and proper regard – but he had no sooner flung open the gate than we found our way blocked.

There was a sturdy man in a long grey coat standing right in the middle of the gateway, as if his hand had been on the handle the minute before the door opened. I knew him at once for Norval Scrymgeour, a reporter from the
Courier
up in Dundee. I’ve often seen him, hanging about or pushing in whenever there’s a fire or a lost child or some other tragedy. I’ve even spoken to him once or twice up at the Sheriff Court when I’ve been called to give evidence. I don’t say he’s a bad man. He has a job to do and children to feed.

But there he was, standing like a mushroom under his brown bowler hat, and if Mr Sempill did not know him at once for a newspaper man, the photographer standing behind him, wrestling with a camera on a spider-leg frame, must surely have given it away.

I cannot say which of them, the Chief Constable or the reporter, got the biggest fright when that door swung open, but I can tell you who was the first to recover.

Have you ever seen a magic show where the conjurer boasts that “the hand is quicker than the eye”? Well, to this day I don’t know how it happened, but it seemed in a single movement the reporter had tipped his hat and produced a card, which he held out to Mr Sempill as a sign of his authority.

“Norval Scrymgeour,” he said, “the
Courier
,” as if that simple recitation was enough in itself to open the doors of Buckingham Palace. “Is Miss Milne dead?”

The Chief Constable was lost for words and he could think of no better reply than to shake his whiskers and say: “What? What?” before he turned and yelled back up the path for Constable Suttie to “get back here and secure this damned gate, as I ordered!” which was unfair as I had been present when he ordered both Broon and Suttie to search the gardens. Still, a moment or two of glowering and raging and a moment or two more spent filling the gate with his broad back gave the Chief Constable time to gather his thoughts, so when he turned back to face the reporter he had something to say.

“Now then,” he glanced down at the pasteboard card in his glove, “Scrimshank.”

“Scrymgeour.”

“As you like. What are you doing here?”

“Simply investigating a report of a murder, Chief Constable. Have you anything to say?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Have you absolutely no clue as to what happened? Not the slightest indication of the culprit?”

“Investigations are at an early stage.”

“But you do have definite lines of inquiry, can I say that much?”

The Chief Constable simply glared at him.

“Can you at least confirm that the victim is Miss Jean Milne?”

“Who gave you that name?”

“We have our sources.”

I looked at him and shook my head. “You mean the General Post Office Directory. Is that the height of your investigative powers?”

“Sergeant, that will do.” I am sorry to say the Chief Constable was very short-tempered that day, but with a sort of defeated sigh he said: “You may write this. You may say that concerns having been raised for Miss Jean Milne, a spinster lady of this address, who has not been seen for some time, entry was effected by the police this morning. The body of Miss Milne was discovered in the house at about . . .” He looked at me.

“About 9.20.”

“At about 9.20 a.m. and there is every appearance that the unfortunate lady has been the victim of a cruel and brutal murder. Investigations are continuing. Anyone with any information helpful to the inquiry is asked to communicate same to Chief Constable Sempill of Broughty Ferry Burgh Police at the police office in Brook Street.”

Scrymgeour looked up from his notebook and said: “It’s a damned shame. I saw her just the other day.”

“You saw her? When did you see her? Think carefully, now, this could be vital.”

“It’s simple enough. It was Trafalgar Day, the 21st of October. Easy enough to remember. It was the day before my birthday. I saw her at the top of Reform Street. She was crossing over Meadowside as if she was going to the
Courier
office, but I don’t know whether she went there or not.”

“Are you sure it was her? How do you know her?”

“Well, I don’t know her at all really. She’s just one of those folk you see about the place, what you might call an eccentric. They increase the gaiety of the nation. Harmless enough. She was wearing a light dust-cloth cloak and a hat with some feathers in it. I was staying in St Andrews, and that date was the day before my birthday. That’s what fixed the date in my mind, since I came to Dundee to get a few things for a celebration.”

“A few things?”

“Aye, a few things. For a celebration. And I said to my wife: ‘That’s Miss Milne that lives all by herself in that big house in the Ferry. Would you take a look at her?’ and she did and we had a wee laugh.”

That offended me. “You laughed at her? And what was so amusing?”

“She was just . . . She stood out, you know what I mean. She always, you know, she dressed far too young. And not for the season. Not for the season at all. Far too light-coloured. And girlish. Like a young lassie.”

The Chief Constable said: “You’ll be required to swear a statement.”

“Can we take a picture?”

“As you well know, if you do it from the street I am powerless to prevent it.”

“Thank you, Chief Constable.” He sounded a bit more humble now. “And will there be any further statement?”

Mr Sempill said: “You’ll be kept informed.” He nodded at Suttie as if to tell him to shut the gate and keep it shut, and that was just exactly what he did.

IT IS THE case – and I know this to be true because I have made enquiry at the public library – that the seasonal variations of every passing sunset will lengthen or shorten the day by three minutes. Three minutes. It seems so little, but those little amounts of minutes mount up. Half an hour every ten days. An hour every three weeks. In the summer the sky is barely darkened in the far north-west before it begins to glim again in the east, and in the winter it almost seems as if it’s never light. I feel that sorely and I am conscious of those three minutes, every day that passes after June. Ere long it is the equinox and then I give myself up to darkness.

It was dark by five o’clock that Sunday afternoon and I was glad of that. When we carried her out of the house there was a decent blanket of darkness to cover our work.

The joiner Coullie came back with his cart and a coffin – not a proper coffin, you understand, as might have been seen in public at a funeral, not the sort of thing befitting the dignity of a lady like Jean Milne but what they call a “shell”.

And it was a grim business lifting her into it I may tell you. Mr Procurator Fiscal was there to see it done, as was proper since he would be directing the inquiry and the prosecution, and Dr Templeman, the police surgeon of Dundee, who had come at the invitation of our own Dr Sturrock, was present to give his opinion on anything that might require an opinion, but he had no part in the work of it. That was down to the joiner Coullie, who made a profession of putting the dead in boxes, but it was more than one man could manage. Suttie and Broon tossed a coin for it out on the front step and Suttie must have lost since it was Suttie who came in to do the lifting. Miss Milne’s head lay pointing to the front door, but Suttie was too wise for that and he made sure to take his stance at her feet.

With the shell lying close at her right-hand side, Coullie laid a towel across her head and bent to lift her by the shoulders, but she did not come easily. They had almost to prise her from the hall carpet, her hair, thick and matted with blood, her face glued to the floor, her clothes, starched and stiff with blood, set like plaster and that hideous sound of something being gently ripped apart as she came up.

They had no distance to lift her, perhaps eighteen inches, which was all it took to bring her clothing free of the mess of blood on the carpet, but her bloody clothes trailed down and her loose hair and her arms dragged, and with Suttie at her feet and Coullie at her head, her middle parts sagged, and the whole business was just, well, it wasn’t bonny.

With the coffin at her right-hand side, they lifted her onto a long plank at her left.

“Down,” Coullie said and then, “Lift,” and they picked up the plank and carried her across the blackened carpet to the coffin, and Coullie, with a jerk of his head to indicate the direction, said: “Quick-smart now, tilt,” and they tipped her into the coffin with a thump. Bits of her clothing stuck out of the top and over the sides, but Coullie tucked them in with a careless flick of the fingers and dropped the lid.

With the remains removed, Dr Sturrock stepped forward to take a look at the carpet, all covered in scabs as if the carpet itself had bled, and tufts and hanks of hair still sticking out if it.

“It would appear from this that the source of the bleeding is all at the head. All this,” he pointed with his silver pencil at the lakes of blood soaked into the carpet, “it’s all flowing from the same spot. I doubt we’ll find other injury when we get her on the table.”

Mr Mackintosh, the Fiscal, said: “This carpet is evidentiary,” which we all very well understood without any advice from him, and the Chief Constable said: “Make sure this carpet is rolled carefully and labelled and numbered as a production,” very briskly, which we also very well knew, but I suppose saying it made him feel better. I must admit, I was astonished at the Chief Constable’s failure of nerve, as if he was afraid to go about his business and get on with doing something, lest folk should see him doing it and attack him for leaving something else undone. So I had been obliged to leave off going through the letters in order to begin inquiries with the neighbours, but that came to nothing when he was confronted with the newspaperman, and Broon and Suttie, who had been sent to beat the bushes, were, instead, made to do nothing more productive than securing the entrance.

Mr Mackintosh said: “Now that’s done with, Sempill, I’d be glad if you would assist me in an examination of the premises.”

Mr Sempill led him upstairs and we could hear them moving about quickly, from room to room, their footsteps echoing across the bare boards. “Quite abandoned,” Mr Sempill said, coming back down the stairs, “as you can see for yourself. It seems she kept herself to these few rooms, the kitchen, the dining room, which she used as her sitting room, her bedroom and, well, the usual necessary facilities.”

Mr Mackintosh put his head in at the dining room door. “A pie,” he observed.

“Indeed,” said Mr Sempill.

“The sideboard drawers have been rifled.”

“They have been opened. I cannot say categorically ‘rifled’ nor can I say by whom.”

Mr Mackintosh looked into the uppermost of the open drawers. “A carving set,” he observed again.

“It’s the match of the big fork in the lobby.”

“What can that mean, I wonder.”

And then they went into the lady’s bedroom. There was the creak of a door opening. “Her wardrobe,” Mr Mackintosh observed. “Has this been searched?”

“Certainly not!”

“Why not?”

“To what purpose? It’s quite obvious that her clothes are in it.”

“And what if the murderer had been in it too?”

“Hiding here amongst the mothballs for weeks while she rotted away in the lobby? I don’t think that’s likely.”

“Something might have been removed.”

“In which case, my men are unlikely to stumble upon it.”

We heard the sound of a drawer sliding open and a few moments of muffled movement. “A purse,” said Mr Mackintosh “and . . . seventeen gold sovereigns. Seventeen! A desperate man might think it worth risking the rope for seventeen pounds in good gold.”

“Except the gold is still here,” said Mr Sempill.

“But we cannot know how much more he took on his escape.”

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” said Mr Sempill. Returning to the lobby, he handed me the purse. “Seventeen gold sovereigns,” he said. “Make sure they are recorded and numbered.”

“They also are evidentiary,” Mr Mackintosh said. “I suggest you begin again with a thorough and complete search of the premises as the next stage of your investigation.”

But Mr Sempill said that would have to wait since, to him at any rate, the next step in the investigation was clear and that was to take the body of poor Miss Milne for proper examination in Dundee.

We got it on our shoulders, Suttie, Broon, Coullie and I, and we made our way down the short path to the gate, the light from the lanterns throwing up wild shadows everywhere, the wind sighing in the branches just as it had been the night before, the last leaves of autumn flying past our faces. We must have made a mournful sight. But then things became a little awkward, for the carriage gate was still locked and we had not yet found a key and the gate for foot passengers was not so broad as to admit two men walking side by side with a coffin between them, so we were obliged to ship her between us, as if she had been no more than an awkward parcel, and into the back of Coullie’s cart, where the coffin could be decently covered with a tarpaulin.

Constable Suttie and I went in the cart to Dundee, he in the back with the coffin, sitting with his knees drawn up and his hands drawn in, careful not to touch it with even the toe of his boot though it had rested on his shoulder only a moment before, and I sat on the bench at the front alongside Coullie.

The Fiscal and the other gentlemen went ahead together in a conveyance of their own and we followed, going by Strathern Road, which is mostly flat, so as not to trouble the horse with going over the brae at the Harecraigs. All around us were the ordinary signs of a Sabbath evening, lights in houses, the sound of a piano from a distant parlour, folk going about on their way to evening observances or to visit friends. Everything was peaceable and respectable, all as it should be, and behind us, under that sheet of sailcloth, we carried the body of Jean Milne with its head cracked open and its jaws all agape.

Coullie’s cart rolled quietly over the hammered roads of Broughty Ferry, but before long we were in Dundee, with its black mill chimneys, its public houses on every corner – roaring even on the Sabbath – and its stinking courts and vennels and tenements packed to the gunnels, rattling and bumping over the granite cobbles all way through the town to Bell Street. You know it well enough, I’m sure, with the fine court building in the square at the west end and, next to that, the jail and the police offices and, a little further along, the new burial ground. That was where Coullie stopped the cart.

“We’ll be needing the key.” It was the first thing he’d said to me all the journey.

I suppose, as the senior man, I could have sent Suttie, but on the other hand, as the senior man, it was fitting and appropriate that I should go to the Dundee Police offices and sign for the key, and when the choice was walk a few yards or sit under the flaring gas lamps with that tragic cargo, I was not sorry to leave my place in that cart.

When I returned with the key, the gentlemen were waiting at the gates of the burial ground and there was another with them who was not introduced to me, but I recognised him for Professor Sutherland from the Medical School, who is quite a figure in the town and, as it turned out, not so much of a scientist and a seeker after truth as Broughty Ferry’s own Dr Sturrock.

I must have made an awful sight, like something from a penny dreadful, as I stood under the yellow gaslight, struggling with the padlock on a graveyard under a waning moon, but eventually the chains rattled free and the iron gates opened. I waited for Coullie’s cart and locked the gate behind it, and by the time I had caught up, walking alone through the lines of graves, Professor Sutherland had opened the doors of the mortuary. It was dark in the burial ground and yet not unaccountably so. We had a half-moon that rolled out from behind the ragged clouds, dim street lamps along the cemetery edge that showed the shadowed railings or the glint of polished marble, weeping angels, broken pillars, half-draped urns carved in stone all of the most fashionable design, but the open door of that squat little brick building held a different kind of darkness. Professor Sutherland stepped into that open doorway and it consumed him utterly until, a second or two later, there came the scratch and flare of a match and the hiss of the gas lamps lighting.

Coullie stood at the back of the cart. At the front, Suttie bent over double and heaved and scraped the coffin towards him until there was enough of it protruding to let us drag it off the cart and into the building. We laid it on the brick floor beside a contraption that was halfway between a bed and a bath, made of enamel-glazed stoneware and raised on a pedestal to bring it to the height of a table, but with a deep lip on it, so it might be hosed down if need be.

The professor and Dr Templeman hung up their hats and coats on pegs at the back wall and took down long rubber aprons and red rubber gloves that came up past their elbows, and the rest of us hung back at a respectful distance, including Dr Sturrock, who carried no authority while the body lay in Dundee. Even Coullie was not any longer wanted since Dr Templeman had sent for an attendant of his own from the Royal Infirmary.

For my part, I was more than content to leave them to deal with the business of lifting the body and I stayed well back, close to the door. If it had been permitted, I would have remained in the graveyard or begun the long tramp back to the Ferry, where the air at least was clean. I cannot describe what it was like in that mortuary, with the light of the flaring gas lamps shining back from the white tiled walls and those men, though they worked in silence, grunting and gasping as they heaved that poor woman’s body around. The stench was beyond belief. From the moment they lifted the lid on the coffin, the stink of death began to creep out into the room and, once they had her lifted on the table, Dr Templeman turned to the Procurator Fiscal and said: “Gentlemen, normally it would not be permissible, but, in the circumstances, you may smoke.”

Mr Mackintosh the Fiscal had his pipe going in no time and Mr Sempill wasn’t far behind. Suttie and Coullie both sparked up, but, I don’t know, I hadn’t the stomach for it. It felt disrespectful. I simply stood there through it all, watching, saying nothing but breathing deep of the scented smoke.

They took off her clothes, but they were not gentle. They were cold towards her. They kept their faces turned from her. They took deep, gasping gulps of air and breathed through their mouths. Every item, as it was removed, was listed and described and dropped in a hamper.

“The body of this lady is tied at the ankles by green curtain cord, which I remove by cutting, taking care not disturb the knot. I remove a pair of shoes.

“A new cloak, bloodstained.

“A linen blouse with lace attached, ditto.

“A camisole or slip body.”

They pulled her arms up and twisted them to get her clothes off, and at every move her poor, blackened, battered head lolled and flopped about so she seemed to be looking for comfort in each of their faces in turn, but none of them would look at her.

“Three knitted spencers.

“A pair of corsets.

“A linen chemise.

“A flannelette chemise.

“A blue serge skirt.”

Dr Templeman’s assistant went down to her feet and hauled it off her.

“A knitted petticoat.”

They had to lift her up by the hips.

“A pair of linen drawers.”

She was as good as naked. Girlish. Like a young lassie.

“A pair of stockings and a pair of garters.”

The worst of it was done. Dr Templeman’s assistant stood with his notebook ready and the great man said: “Gentleman, the discolouration of the skin clearly shows that she has lain on her face since death. The bodily fluids sink downwards due to the effects of gravity, so the skin is pale and blanched on her back and it has taken on this bruised appearance on the front.”