The Secret Life and Curious Death of Miss Jean Milne (9 page)

Finger Print Department

New Scotland Yard

London, S.W.

Sir,

Re. Finger Marks

    In reply to your communication dated 19th inst, I have to inform you that the finger marks do not possess any clearly defined characteristic detail. Consequently they are useless for the purposes of comparison with the fingerprints of any person.

I am,

    Sir,

        Your obedient servant

        (Signed) M L Macnaghten

The Chief Constable

Burgh Police

Broughty Ferry

I WASTED THE rest of that day warming myself at the fire and dozing in a chair. I seem to recall waking suddenly as the book fell from between my fingers. I seem to recall stooping to retrieve it and beginning again. I seem to recall filling the kettle and making a pot of tea, but the exhaustion was seeping from my bones and before long I gave in to sleep.

But part of my mind watched and waited, and when the bells of St Aidan’s Kirk struck three, I rose from my chair, took a little tea and polished my boots. The rain had eased and the wind turned to the south, which brought the mist rolling in off the river so it lay in beads and cobwebs on my coat as I walked, westwards this time, towards Elmgrove.

By four o’clock I was there. Quietly, so as not to disturb the family, I opened the gate of Westlea and stood in the shelter of its deep shadows. The gaslights down the hill were blurred and softened by the mist, and the wind rising from the river brought gentle wave sighs with it. Sleep had almost caught me again when I heard the slow sound of hoof beats and wheels on the road, coming from the top of the hill, and a cart rolled to a stop on the other side of the street, under Elmgrove’s dripping boughs.

“James,” I whispered. “James Don.”

The carter looked about himself in terror.

“Here. Over here, James.”

He was a big man and not one to be easily frightened, but he seemed relieved to see me step out of the gate.

“You know me,” he said, “but who the Hell are you?” He wore a heavy coat, with a sack tied across his shoulders and a fisherman’s oilskin sou’wester that flopped down over his eyes and hung in a tail over his neck.

“John Fraser, Burgh Constabulary.”

“I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Now, we both know that’s a lie.”

“No since the last time. Whatever they’re sayin it’s a damned lie.”

“Nobody’s accusing you. I need your help.”

James Don nodded towards the locked gate. “The business in there.”

“That. What do you know?”

“I saw him, sure as daith.”

A cold shiver ran down my neck. No more than a dribble of mist. “Tell me what you saw.”

“It was the Monday, three, four weeks ago.”

“When, James? The dates are important.”

“Och, Ah dinnae ken. Ask at the depot, they keep aa the books. But I’m sure and certain it was a Monday, just this day and just this time, half past four of the clock. I was working in Albany Road and working alang this way towards Grove Road, lifting ashes and soil and ribbish from fowk’s bins as usual.”

“Aye, James, but what did you see?”

“Ah was jist past the wee gate intae thon big hoose, Netherby, in Albany Road, not more than a matter o yairds in this direction, when I saw a man by the light o the lamp, this verra lamp, at the gates o Elmgrove.

“The man came out by the wee gate,” James pointed with his whip, “and he cam forrit twa three steps and stood there, in the middle o the path like he’d been cock o the midden. He lookit tae the sooth,” he pointed with his whip down the hill towards the river, “an he lookit tae the north,” a flick of his whip over his shoulder to Strathern Road. “Then he took a step backwards, back tae the Elmgrove gates. Then he stood there for a good half minute, gave a wee cough and off he went doon the hill at a smart pace.”

“What sort of a cough?”

“What sort of a cough? A cough. He coughed, that was all. Like as if he had the cauld.”

“Was there anybody else about?”

“At that hour?”

“Would you know him again?”

“Ah couldna say. It was a queer thing what wi Miss Milne being a wumman on her ain an he was undoubtedly a stranger. There’s damned few folk in the Ferry Ah dinnae ken.”

“Can you not even tell me his age?”

“Verra few men in Broughty Ferry that ah dinnae ken. Verra few. Aa mah days Ah’ve bin here. Ah’d say he wis atween thirty and forty, no tall, five foot eight or nine, slight, awfy white in the face, a wee thin moustache, dressed like a gentleman wi a dark coat doon past his knees.”

“Hat?”

“Oh aye, he had a hat. What like a hat Ah couldnae say.”

“Cane?”

“Naw.”

“Umbrella?”

“Naw, naw, nithin at all like that.”

“And what then?”

“He went his ways.” Another flick of the whip down the hill.

I took a note of his details and we parted, the cart rolling gently down the hill and James Don grunting as he got down to do his work. But there was nothing there for me, so I turned north, up to the car route, and waited. The street was silent, as it should be at that hour, when honest folk are still in their beds, but before long I heard the ringing of the rails and the great yellow lamp of the tramcar appeared through the mist, glowing like a monstrous eye, blue-white sparks spitting from the overhead lines as it turned the last corner.

It is a great credit to the management of the Dundee, Broughty Ferry and District Tramways that their service is available to members of the public even at that early hour, for, by that means, working men can easily and cheaply reach their employment, even though it be at a great distance. Persons of quality are by no means too proud to use the cars, but if I wanted to find Andy’s little people they would be here, riding to another day of hard labour to earn their daily bread.

The car clanged and juddered to a halt beside me and the conductor rattled the sliding doors back. Inside it was bright with electric light while the windows shone back, black and blank and gleaming with a chill silvering of November mist.

The car was almost empty – just a handful of hunched figures under worn-out work clothes, bowed down with tiredness and the awful thought of another day of labour. They barely had the energy to look up when I came in, but I stood up to as much of my height as the wooden ceiling would allow and I called out: “I am Sergeant John Fraser of the Broughty Ferry Burgh Police. Is there anybody on this car who has any information about Miss Jean Milne?”

I had no plan for what I might do if no one answered – get off and wait for the next car, I suppose – and there were no signs of stirring from all those grey, exhausted heaps of clothes, but, from up the stairs, a voice cried out: “Aye. Up here.”

I climbed the stair and there, with his back to the wind, was a strongly built man smoking a pipe.

“Are you not freezing up here?” I said.

“I’ll be out all day in it. There’s no escaping it and I like my pipe.” He held out his hand. “James Urquhart.”

“John Fraser. I know your face. Is it St Vincent Street you bide?”

“The same. It’s a great tragedy about Miss Milne.”

“Did you know her?”

“Must be getting on for thirty years.”

“When did you see her last?”

“I’ll tell you to an exactitude.” He reached into his jacket and brought out a battered notebook in a paper cover. “It was the 14th of October – the Monday. The way I know is I got a position working at the Eastern Wharf, unloading a cargo of jute. Now, that was the first day I was working there and I have my National Insurance card stamped and I make a note in this wee book of all the hours I work. So I can tell you we got done just shortly before the stroke of six o’clock.”

“And then?”

“Then I walked up from the harbour to the Stannergate and I took the car from the burgh boundary home to Fort Street. When we got to Ellieslea Road, there was Miss Milne, running back and forth along the pavement alongside the car and peering in the windows as if she was looking for somebody. She was trying to keep up with the car as we moved off and shading her eyes to look through the glass, searching among the passengers.”

“And that’s the last you saw of her?”

“The very last.”

“Did you ever see a strange man about Elmgrove?”

“About Elmgrove? I never had cause to be at Elmgrove, but –” he stopped for a second and pulled on his pipe, “– there was a man. It was a couple of days later – the day that cargo got finished. The Wednesday. We were later getting started that day and I went up to my work at the jute by the 7.30 car from Gray Street. I was sitting on the top on the back seat, much as we are now. There was one other man up top with me, sitting on the front seat. Then at Ellieslea Road a man came up on to the top and sat with his back towards Dundee just about there, about the third seat from the back. He dropped down in the seat like he was completely worn out and done and he threw his feet up on the next bench. I thought to myself: ‘Aye, you’ve been out on the randan. You’ve been a night in the tiles.’ ”

“Did he speak?”

“He did not. He neither looked nor spoke. But I had a good look at him and he looked queer – he seemed scared, excited and nervous-like; his eyes never halted, but he was constantly looking down to the floor of the car or at the trees at the side of the road. He minded me of a man with the horrors – have you ever seen that?”

“Oh, I’ve seen that more than once or twice.”

“Well that’s what he was like, but he was quite sober. And I said to myself: ‘The house you have come out of, the servant has not been very particular with your shoes.’ They looked as though they had been blackened but not polished. He kept his right hand in his overcoat pocket.”

“He wore an overcoat?”

“Oh aye, he wore an overcoat.”

“And what like a coat was it?”

“A dark, slate-coloured waterproof coat, down to his knees and buttoned to his throat. And he kept his right hand in his pocket all the way up the road and sat with his head laid on his left hand.”

“Was he dirty or bloodied?”

“Never a bit. Clean and tidy, well washed but awful flushed about the face, like a man blushing, as if he had been working hard. I mind that because he had this thin, fair moustache and it quite stood out against his face.”

“What happened then?”

“Nothing. I got off at the burgh boundary as usual and walked to my work. So far as I know, he sat there all the way to Dundee.”

“Would you know him again?”

He took a couple of puffs on his pipe. “I wouldn’t want to swear. I saw him for as long as we’ve been speaking now, but I can say this, he was a stranger to the burgh. It was a face I had never seen before – and nor have I seen it again. He was just an ordinary-looking chap. About thirty I should say, ordinary height, ordinary size, what you’d call a common face, but he was every inch the dapper gentleman, fine shoes and, man, he even had a wee white stripe down the sides of his socks! Would you credit that?”

All this information I carefully recorded, typed up into statements and had duly sworn and signed by the witnesses. I even checked with the foreman of the Cleansing Department and had him swear a statement that James Don was working on Monday the 14th and his duties would have taken him to be in Albany Road and Grove Road about 4.30 a.m. All these things I presented to Detective Lieutenant Trench.

There was one other thing. James Don the rubbish picker told me that about twenty minutes after his meeting with the handsome young gentleman under the lamp post, he was working in Edward Street – that bit of road north of Grove Road they have renamed now – do you remember?

He told me he was lifting ashes at Mr Bulloch’s house in Edward Street when he looked back to Strathern Road and saw the figure of a man passing, walking towards the Ferry. The man was about a hundred yards off, so they did not speak, but one thing was clear: he was a police officer.

IT WAS REMARKABLE to me how the advice of Andy Hay had proved itself to be both wise and good. Nobody sees a servant. It is a necessity to believe that they do not exist. How could a man who called himself a man lie abed until eight while some wee scrap of a lassie carried coals up and down the stairs to get his fires going at five o’clock in the morning? How could any mother see another mother’s lassie work herself grey and ragged so her own daughters might keep their hands soft and smooth for nothing more than embroidery and piano playing? Only by pretending that it was not so.

Respectable people had learned to blind themselves to the very presence of their servants. A mountain of washing would transform itself into crisp, clean laundry, starched and ironed and snowy white every Monday, but nobody knew how that happened, because the mistress was eating cake and taking tea up in Dundee.

Every morning shoes were standing at the bedroom door, gleaming black and polished, but nobody knew how that happened because they had all been asleep in their beds.

Breakfast, dinner and tea, plates of hot food arrived on the table, but nobody had any idea how that happened – although the mistress was awful unhappy that the butcher’s bill had gone up by nearly two shillings this week and something would have to be done.

In every room of the house, fires were lit, fires were fed, ashes were emptied and grates were swept, but nobody ever saw it done. An invisible army swarmed amongst the grand houses of Broughty Ferry unseen and all unheard, unnoticed, unregarded and ignored. But they had ears to hear and eyes to see. And some of the things they told me made my heart sink.

Jean Milne would never have noticed Ina McIntosh. She lived along the road from me at Links Cottages and she worked in the bleachfield alongside the Dighty Water, lifting great heavy loads of newly spun, wet, stinking linen cloth on her back and spreading them out on the grass to whiten. Jean Milne never worked like that a day in her life.

That was Ina, a lassie of seventeen years, and there’s her sister Jessie, a full three years older, who rises at God knows what hour to labour in a mill in Dundee for a pittance of pay, day and daily. These places are a kind of Hell with the noise and the dust so a body can neither breathe nor hear – far less speak or think.

And yet they had love, those two lassies, love enough to walk a good mile and a half up to Caenlochan Villas on a Monday night and take a cup of tea with their sister in service in Mr Potter’s big house. Not tea of their own, you understand. Oh no. If a lassie takes tea with her sister, she makes a brew with the leaves she has saved from the mistress’s pot.

And then, when those two girls came out again into the night, ready for the walk home, cooried in together against the October winds, walking home to bed and a few hours of fitful sleep before rising again to another day of work, what should they see but a man with a yellow moustache. Poor Ina.

“We keeked through the gate into the grounds of Elmgrove and, just then, a man came out of the grounds and opened the small gate and stepped out on to the footway as if he owned the place. He was sweating and flushed in the face and he gave us a stare as we passed and walked down Grove Road – a right gentlemanly-looking sort, with a fair moustache and a long dark overcoat.

“Jessie thought he was after us. He stood staring after us, but he never followed us, though I had my hatpin ready.”

John Wood the gardener, who lives in Chapel Lane, he saw the man with the thin moustache too. In fact, he opened the door to him.

I found John along at St Aidan’s churchyard, tending the ground around a tiny block of marble no more than a foot square. It had “Mother” written on it in letters of lead. There was no name and no dates.

“All we could afford,” he said. “She used to say we were her monument. Damned shame. She should have had more.” He gathered up his tools and rubbed each in turn on a rough bit of oiled cloth. They gleamed. There was no spot of earth or mud on any of them, not the slightest trace of rust anywhere. “I’m surprised you’ve taken so long to find me,” he said, “since I did her garden for years – or as much of it as she would let me do.”

“Most of it is away to rack and ruin,” I said.

“Aye. It would break your heart to look at it.”

“But if you did her garden for years, why did you not come forward?”

“Because I did her garden for years – that’s why. I have no wish to say anything about poor Miss Milne, but, if you ask me, I’ll speak.”

“Tell me what you can,” I said.

“The poor soul was man daft. She was an unmarried woman of a certain age. Those things should all have been past with her, and if they were not, she had no business speaking about them with me. The way she carried on, it would not have been respectable in a lassie, and in a woman of her age and position it was just – well, it wasn’t right.

“She was never done talking about meeting nice gentlemen; that was always her particular theme, about getting acquainted with French and German gentlemen. That was all her conversation. It was a daily occurrence every afternoon I was working at Elmgrove and she was at home and, ach, she would spend hours in frivolous talk about the nice gentleman or gentlemen she had made acquaintance of.

“After she came home in August she said she had had a good lot of travelling with a German gentleman who was living in a hotel in the Strand – a tea planter. She said he was to come and visit her at Elmgrove. She had a letter from him while I was working there and she was always talking about this gentleman in particular or about other nice gentlemen she had met.”

I leaned back on one of the larger gravestones, an enormous lump of red granite sacred to the memory of a long-gone minister, “a faithful servant of Christ and beloved of this congregation”, though not, perhaps, as well beloved as John Wood’s mother. “Did you ever see any of them at the house?” I said.

“It grieves me sorely, but I have to tell you that I did. The day before Miss Milne left for her last holiday – now that was the 19th of September; I have it in my account book, I was working there. It was getting near finishing time, about half five, and she came out. I thought we were going to get more of this silly chatter about her gentlemen friends and, I’m telling you, I was sick of it, but, no, out she came and asked me back into the house to help her lock the different doors of rooms and shut the windows, and she said she was going away the following day. Near all the windows is painted shut or screwed down, but I closed the dining room window and her bedroom window and I took the keys to her in the hall.

“I was in the hall when the front door bell rang, and for some reason she asked me to go to the door. I went and found a gentleman there, a proper toff, in a claw-hammer coat, a man I’d say getting on for forty, with a thin, yellow moustache.

“He asked if Miss Milne was in. I said she was and I went back to the kitchen and told her: ‘Miss Milne, there is a gentleman at the door.’ Well, she fairly skipped to the door to meet him, skipped like a lassie, and they took each other by the hands – both hands – very affectionately and Miss Milne said: ‘I am so glad to see you here,’ and asked him in. They both came in the vestibule and they passed me at the foot of the stair, where I was standing, without a glance. I might just as well not have been there.

“After they passed me, I made to go out, but she called me back and she put two shillings in my hand.”

“What was that for?”

“She said it was ‘for my trouble’. But we both knew fine it was to shut me up. She planned to stop my mouth with silver.”

“But you don’t feel bound to that?”

“I agreed to nothing. My duty is to tell the truth. I did not seek you out, Sergeant Fraser, you came to me.”

He was hurt and humiliated. He was only the gardener, only a servant. He was meant to see nothing, and if by chance he should find a respectable single woman admitting a strange man to her home at the close of the day, then it would take no more than twenty-four bright little pennies to shut him up. We both of us looked down at the grass for a minute or two, John Wood sucking hard on his pipe while I counted daisies until the moment had passed.

“What happened then?” I said.

“The man in the claw-hammer coat walked right into the dining room as if he was no stranger to the place and I left the house. You may know where the gentleman passed the night, but I do not.”

I did not know where the gentleman with the thin yellow moustache passed the night, but I knew this much: there was no more than one bed in Elmgrove.

“I bitterly regret I let him in,” said poor John Wood. “I have chided myself that I opened the door to the man that killed her. Pity me now when the only service I can do for her is to ruin her reputation.”

I tried to comfort him. “It may be that no one need know. We have our ways. We are not without delicacy.”

John Wood shook his head, laid his tools on his shoulder and began to walk. “It’s too late for that. You know.”

But I knew already.

It seemed half the Ferry knew.

James Urquhart the docker knew. He told me he sat on the tram one Wednesday afternoon in October while Jean Milne disported herself with “a stout gentleman aged about sixty with an English accent.”

“I was surprised at the way Miss Milne was carrying on with the gentleman, by her talk to him. I could not make out all their talk, but Miss Milne was always addressing the gentleman: ‘Yes, dear’ and ‘Yes, pet.’ It was that, those endearments over and over, oft repeated, that was what drew my attention. Miss Milne was always looking at him.” He said that. A man who sat there on that tramcar, his face black with dirt and stinking of sweat after a day of hauling jute bales about with his bare hands. A rough working man, and he was horror-struck at what he saw of that woman.

She rubbed it in their faces. She didn’t care who saw. But they were only little people. What could it matter what they thought? It was disgusting. Disgusting!