Classic Scottish Murder Stories Read online

  Imbued with some vestige of super-ego, unless the intention was concealment, the assailant had partly covered the body with a sheet. The glass door in the hall had been blocked out by tying the curtains in a certain way with a length of common (gardening?) twine. All the murderer’s tools were improvisations, not imported as by malice, but borrowed from the immediate domestic environment. Miss Milne was surely still alive when her ankles were tightly bound together with a curtain-cord. The telephone wire had been cut. Professional criminals did that, but not generally with a pair of garden shears. These lay, still in situ, in the hall accompanied by a rake and a hoe. She had not necessarily been gardening. With Miss Milne all things were possible, and she might have kept her tools in the hall as a matter of course. The improviser had not stooped to wrench from the fingers of the dead or dying woman those seven precious rings which now ornamented the hands of a corpse. Her gold watch and chain lay openly on the toilet-table in the bedroom, and her silver was untouched. The sum of £17 in gold was found in a purse or handbag in a drawer. She had drawn £20 in gold from her bank at the end of September, and this was assumed to be the balance.

  The Mary Celeste scene in the living or dining-room was a clue in itself. The table was laid for high tea for two people, with a two-penny meat pie as its centre-piece. This must have been at that time a handsome pork-pie, and not so miserly as it sounds, especially since Miss Milne had not stinted on the liquid refreshments. All fingerprints were soon lost, as the police flailed about in their unsophisticated search.

  A post-mortem was very soon carried out. It disclosed that the body was marked all over with many blows inflicted by a heavy instrument such as the poker. Death was caused by cerebral haemorrhage due to blows to the head which, although numerous, were relatively slight, no-one injury would have killed: it was the totality, and the shock, which ended the life of Miss Jean Milne, Undigested food found in the stomach indicated that she had not long survived the attack.

  The hall at Elmgrove in November must have been cold, with the body lying very possibly on tiles, and therefore better preserved than in a warmer environment. Any miscalculation by those performing the post-mortem would have, notionally, put the real date of death further back in time, and would not favour Troup’s sighting, which was too recent.

  On Monday November 4th, Detective Lieutenant Trench, of the Glasgow City Police was called in for his known expertise in difficult cases. The resemblance to the case of Miss Gilchrist, in which he was later to play an important part, was not lost on him. The Chief Constable of Broughty Ferry, Howard Sempill, escorted him to Elmgrove, where he made some new findings. The local force could hardly have missed the bloodstained towel lying near the kitchen sink, positively saturated with DNA – perhaps some from the killer – if these things had been known, but Trench also found the imprint of three fingers on a piece of paper in the same area. Sent off to New Scotland Yard, (where the Fingerprint Branch had been set up in 1901) they proved to be too blurred to be of any use.

  A half-smoked cigar butt – more DNA! – was found by Trench in the ashes of the grate in the dining-room. This was thought to be a very significant clue, but in fact, it is an ambiguous object. We are told that Miss Milne used gas for heating, but we cannot know for sure if gas was laid to a heater in the dining-room, so that we do not know how often she lit a coal fire in that room. Neighbours did notice that no smoke came from the chimneys of Elmgrove during the ‘missing period’. Common sense tells us that she lit a fire when she expected company. We can have no confidence in her assiduity in regularly cleaning out the grate. The ashes could have been the remains of a fire which pre-dated the murder. We know that the German tea-planter was present in the room on September 19th, and the cigar could have fallen from him on that occasion. The point is that the cigar did not necessarily come from the lips of the murderer, nor from the gentleman caller expected to supper (keeping the two personages separate for the time being). It could even have come to rest in the cold ashes after the murder. A member of the investigating and cleaning-up party could have been the culprit.

  The cigar was also thought to clinch the gender of the murderer (unless an invader from The Well of Loneliness). Troup’s woman at the window, and the comparative lightness of the killing blows, had been imagined to betray a female hand, but this was merely fanciful. Probably the inadequacy of the weapons available was relevant in this context; the poker was not a large one, and, indeed, it broke.

  All in all, however, it is a reasonable view that the cigar came with the murderer. The fact that it was only half-smoked may be a clue. Although it is usual to light up after a meal, the timing is not written in stone. Addiction, as it were, could outweigh polite custom. A foreigner might have different habits. Could anyone draw on a cigar after committing murder? Miss Milne does not appear to have sat down with her visitor to demolish the pie. Information as to the state of the bottles of wine and whisky is sadly lacking. The inference is that (unless he was trying to give them up!) the pre-prandial smoker threw away the cigar half-consumed because he was distracted or interrupted. The meal was announced. Something happened. There was a change of plan. Or all hell let loose.

  The significance of the carving fork had been missed by previous investigators. It had been found in the hall, half-hidden beneath a chest. A sharpish, two-pronged implement, it belonged to the carving set from the sideboard in the dining-room. It could actually have been laid on the table ready for use on that notable pork pie. Trench examined Miss Milne’s last clothes, and discerned in the blouse and under-garments a number of double punctures which matched the fork. He applied without success for the exhumation of the body, which had been swiftly buried on November 5th in the Western Cemetery, Dundee. It seems incalculable that the post-mortem report had made no mention of puncture wounds. Either they had been missed, or the fork had not penetrated the layers of clothing.

  William Roughead was content to stay with the official theory that there had been no theft from Elmgrove, but it appears that he was not familiar with Detective Trench’s feature on the case which appeared in the Weekly News on May 1st 1915. Here Trench stated that in addition to the handbag containing £17 in gold, he had also found three more handbags which were devoid of money – two small ones on the dining-room table and another one in the bedroom. ‘It is remarkable’, the article reads, ‘that a lady who was travelling on the [tram] cars and who made small purchases on the last occasion she was seen alive should not have had some silver or gold about her... I believe that the person who committed the crime probably got a considerable sum of money from Miss Milne’s handbag.’ Well, maybe, but there could be simple reasons why she had no loose change about her.

  Was Trench, then, adverting to, in Roughead’s words, ‘the theory of the casual tramp or peripatetic burglar, so dear to the official mind’? Indeed he was: ‘In my own mind I have reconstructed the crime, and have come to the conclusion that the murderer had slipped into the house by the front-door while Miss Milne was in the grounds collecting flowers and pieces of holly to decorate the dining-room table, and also gathering some apples, for a number of apples which had been taken from the orchard were found in the house.’ Trench remarked, incidentally, that the large dining-room table was littered with books and papers of every description (with a dell hewed out for the feast, presumably, unless, it is to be hoped, that was set out on a side-table). It is not recorded that dried-up holly and flowers were found in disarray in the hall or dining-rown!.

  However, Trench does not address the problem of the missing gentleman caller. Common sense tells us that he was the German tea-planter. He had already been a welcome visitor. Miss Milne would not have harboured high hopes of more than one man. It is very, very suspicious that he vanished from the face of the earth. Any decent man of good character, knowing that Miss Milne lived alone, and finding her house locked, silent and dark, when he arrived for a meal by pre-arrangement, would have run for help. His first, or even second, thought would n
ot have been for his own situation.

  A reward of £100 was put up. Margaret Campbell, a maid at the house next door, which had a good view of Miss Milne’s wilderness, came forward to say that one morning in the second week of October, at about 10.30, she was surprised to see a gentleman in those previously virgin grounds. He paced up and down a garden-path, slowly, with bent head and his hands in his pockets. His hair seemed to be fair and his features round, and we may in all reason take this to be the German tea-planter waiting to call upon Miss Milne at a respectable hour. It matters not at all that the maid estimated his height to be six feet. The fact that she thought he was wearing evening-dress (as if he had come straight from the flesh-pots of Dundee and had not seen his bed that night) is stranger to explain, but it may well be that the maid had mistaken his elaborate calling uniform of continental cut!

  We may confidently discount, as did the police, the sinister passenger from the South train at Dundee who hailed a taxi at 1am on the calculated day of the murder, Tuesday October 15th, and ordered the driver, Frederick Ewing, to drive him to Broughty Ferry. He had a fierce demeanour, and a piercing eye, and, like Jack the Ripper in person, he carried a small handbag. He asked to be dropped ‘in the vicinity of Elmgrove’. He was of the requisite good build and height – about five feet nine inches – and Aryan colouring with a pale complexion and ‘slight fair moustache’. Unfortunately, he spoke with an English accent.

  The dustman’s sighting is a different matter entirely. At 4.30am on the morning after the murder, Wednesday October 16th, the day when Elder Kinnaird called after sunset, James Don was working his way along Grove Road. The morning was not a dark one, and there was a gas-lamp near the entrance to Elmgrove. At the gate, the dustman saw a stranger trying to leave the property without being seen (although one would have thought that he would have heard the noise that Don must have been making). The furtive man drew back, but realising that he had been spotted, decided to bluff it out, and left at a smart pace. From a distance of ten yards, the dustman noted that he was between 30 and 40 years of age, five feet eight or nine inches in height, weighing 11 to 12 stones, with sharp (not cheery) features, a very pale complexion, and slight fair moustache. He did not speak. He wore a bowler hat and dark overcoat, with the collar turned up, and he looked like a gentleman.

  It is very tempting to identify this ghastly-pale figure (if everything was as it was said to be) as the German, a murderer, who had lingered overnight in the house, pondering his options, and sneaked out when he, wrongly, calculated that the coast was clear. The other possibility which springs to the mind is that the wilderness at Elmgrove was used for clandestine purposes such as homosexual activity.

  The murder was not premeditated. Perhaps the German tea-planter said or did something that betrayed his ultimate venal intentions. Miss Milne suddenly became frightened, and, realising her compromising situation, sought to escape, to run up the stairs to lock herself into her bedroom. Perhaps, in a panic, she attacked him first and there was some terrible preliminary duel, she armed with the poker, he with the carving fork. The reason why, unmasked, he should have resorted to extreme violence, lies in unknown regions of his mind. When he realised that he had gone too far, although she was not dead, he disabled her by tying her up, and cut the telephone wire so that he could make his getaway. He did not care that no-one was likely to arrive in time to save her. Then he saw that she had died. We can only hope that there were not two attacks – the second in cold blood.

  The fire went out of the investigation after Trench managed to avert a miscarriage of justice. Quite a number of witnesses, in the grip of some form of mass hysteria, confidently identified a Canadian rolling-stone, named Charles Warner, as the suspicious character seen in the vicinity of Elmgrove. In a practice now beyond the pale, they were shown photographs of Warner before picking him out on identification parade. The poor fellow was a sitting target, held at Maidstone prison for fraudulently obtaining bed and board at the Rose and Crown, at Tonbridge. Trench went to Antwerp to confirm his alibi, which he had almost forgotten, his waistcoat pawned at the time of the murder.

  If he survived World War 1, the German tea-planter may be imagined, not very robust, exiled on some rickety verandah in a jungly colony not even German any longer. Grey now, grim not cheery, reaching for his bottle of quinine and wedded to his cigars, he would try very hard not to remember the nightmare in Scotland.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE LATE MR TOAD

  Was Mr Toad a harmless eccentric or was he slightly crazed, as, ea gerly embracing each new passion, he roared off – ‘Poop! Poop!’ in his latest automobile? John James Hutchison was of that ilk: photography consumed him, roller-skating when the new craze hit Edinburgh, and a fine 15-horsepower motor-car, ‘readily distinguished even before its actual appearance, by the peculiar sound of its warning horn, which Hutchison, who usually acted as his own chauffeur, applied with the utmost freedom.’ Quite so. ‘Poop! Poop!’

  His general mien belied the dashing outward show of the vehicle. We have an unusually precise description, down to the state of his dentition: ‘John James Hutchison, a chemist, about 24 years of age, but looks older, about six feet in height, medium build, brown hair, clean shaven, sharp features, fresh complexion, false teeth (both sets), gentlemanly appearance, and of good address, stoops forward when walking, native of Dalkeith. Dressed when last seen in dark brown tweed suit, heavy brown motor coat, light green felt hat, white stand-up collar, with turned-down peaks, and tie. Was wearing gold watch and chain and two gold signet rings, one of which is set with diamonds on clasped hands.’

  Recently, in 1911, Hutchison had shown signs of going off the rails. He had abandoned his perfectly decent job as chemist at his uncle’s firm in Musselburgh and taken to speculation on the Stock Exchange. During the rubber boom, he claimed, he had made the sum of £17,000. Other investments, however, in copper, oils, and South African shares had proved inadvisable, although he had recommended them to friends as a good thing. He had taken to tearing around the streets of Dalkeith, where, at Bridgend, he lived with his parents, as if the speed of his car relieved the anxiety of his financial status. There was talk about him.

  The fact that he was engaged to be married appears to have given him no comfort. His fiancée was extraneous to his real problems. Meanwhile, with what might have appeared to him to be callous indifference to their only son’s debts – his precious motor-car had been seized in part satisfaction of an account due to a firm of Edinburgh stockbrokers and was standing forlornly in a Dalkeith garage – his parents were stolidly making preparations for their silver wedding party. Charles Hutchison, paterfamilias, was a solid man of good report, a Freemason, and employed on the estates of the Duke of Buccleuch, at Dalkeith. The refreshments were to be of the finest, and the coffee was purchased specially, on the day of the party, in order to be fresh, from a Musselburgh grocer named Clapperton.

  That evening, Friday February 3rd, 1911, after supper, John Hutchison, lanky, stooping son of the house, politely handed round coffee to the well-fed, grateful guests. Three abstained, but fifteen drank deep. All too soon, the scene disintegrated into a groaning battlefield, with vomiting, purging figures in panic and disarray. Some ran out into the freezing garden, and lay where they fell. Others writhed on sofas and on the floors of the bespattered house. Of those who administered relief to the sufferers, none was more attentive with bowl and cloth than John Hutchison, himself unaffected by the sudden malady. His fiancee was among those stricken. Two local doctors were summoned to the disaster and they called in a consultant physician from Edinburgh, but they failed to save Charles Hutchison, who, hearty on his celebration day, had quaffed down a full cup of coffee, nor Clapperton, the grocer, appreciative of his own product. Both died within a few hours. In due course, everyone else recovered, although Mrs Hutchison’s case was touch-and-go.

  Professor Harvey Littlejohn, who held the chair of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh University, conducted the double
post-mortem on Sunday February 5th, with the doctors who had tried to save the two victims in attendance. He found no natural cause of death, and his suspicion of arsenical poisoning was soon confirmed by chemical analysis of certain portions of the intestines. Freemasonry was very well represented at Mr Hutchison’s funeral. The chief mourner at Eskbank Cemetery was John Hutchison, and none saw anything save grief in his demeanour. Many of those present, including the last-named, moved on that same afternoon to attend the Clapperton funeral at Musselburgh. There was an assemblage of some five hundred, among whom, no doubt, were a few shaken silver wedding guests.

  On February 10th, it was officially announced that arsenic had been found in the remains of the party coffee. It was not present in Mr Clapperton’s stock in his shop, to which no suspicion was attached, nor in the portion of ground coffee left unused at the house. It was not present in either the milk or the sugar served with the coffee. In other words, arsenic was found in the coffee pot or pots, or in the discarded cups which had still contained coffee, or in both. Therefore, a hand must have doctored the pots, or slipped arsenic into each and every cup somewhere on its way from pot to recipient, which would seem to be a tricky manoeuvre to perform 15 times.

  Shock and bewilderment informed Dalkeith. Some inexplicable accident was the subject of discussion. John Hutchison was not at first a suspect, although it was no secret that he had been the bearer of the poisoned coffee. He must have proffered an excuse for his own immunity. His person was not searched until it was too late. His concern for the victims was very convincing. The realisation that he had dispensed drugs from his uncle’s shop did, however, eventually concentrate the minds of the police investigators. Going over to Musselburgh, they found that a bottle of arsenic had disappeared from the shelves, with no record of sale in the poisons register.