Classic Scottish Murder Stories Read Free

‘Annandale’, and Laurie should have feared him and avoided him at all costs. He was a grain merchant from 3 Lansdowne Place, Shawlands, Glasgow, and he knew Laurie under his real name from having met him in Rothesay the previous year. This year, he was actually on the
Ivanhoe
when Rose made the fatal connection with Laurie. He saw them together. And when, back at Rothesay, he met Laurie again, he could not help noticing that he was wearing a cap very similar to his new friend’s. It was on the tip of his tongue to say so.
    When they were both home in Glasgow, they met by chance in Hope Street, and Laurie tried to bluff it out. By that time (July 31st) the disappearance of Edwin Rose was in all the newspapers. ‘What do you know about the Arran mystery?’ Aitken asked, blunt and suspicious. Was not Rose the name of the tourist he had intended to go to Brodick with?
    Laurie ‘hummed and hawed’. The man a’missing, he lied like a schoolboy, ‘Must be a different Mr Rose from the Mr Rose who was with me, for he returned with me and then proceeded to Leeds.’
    Persisting, Aitken ‘twitted’ him about the yachting cap: ‘Whose cap were you wearing on yon Friday night?’ ‘Surely you don’t think I am a...’ (He did not finish the sentence, but Aitken thought that the word hovering could have been ‘thief’ not ‘murderer’). Laurie’s luck had now evaporated and once the body had been found, he decamped and went on the run – always prone to flee, a great if ultimately unsuccessful escapee – increasingly losing his grip, rootless, but not over troubled with his conscience. Alerted by Aitken, the police followed his trail to Liverpool, where, at 10 Greek Street, he had abandoned some white shirts which had belonged to Rose and upon which,with a rubber stamp, he had impressed ‘John W. Laurie’.
    From Liverpool, he had written on August 10th to the
North British Daily Mail
an egregious letter, not at all insane, in which he sought, rather childishly, to give the impression that he was about to commit suicide. Should that fail, he was also rehearsing his defence. Written in a fair, board school hand, in the style of a Marie Corelli romance, salient passages read: ‘I rather smile when I read that my arrest is hourly expected. If things go as I have designed them, I will soon have arrived at that country from whose bourne no traveller returns...
    As regards Mr Rose, poor fellow, no-one who knows me will believe for one moment that I had any complicity in his death... We went to the top of Goatfell, where I left him in the company of two men who came from Loch Ranza, and were going to Brodick.’
    Some content of the letter can be taken as a proclamation of Laurie’s heterosexuality. It can, too, if we wish, be taken to show anti-social conduct, morbid jealousy, with a paranoid flavour:
    â€˜Three years ago I became very much attached to Miss –, a teacher, – School, and residing at –. My affection for this girl was at first returned ... until I discovered that she was encouraging the attentions of another man, –, teacher, –, who took every opportunity to depreciate me in her estimation. Since then I have been perfectly careless about what I did, and my one thought was how to punish her enough for the cruel wrong she had done me; and it was to watch her audacious behaviour that I went to Rothesay this and last year.’
    Was it thoughts of the perfidious teacher which tormented Laurie’s mind as he paced the lane behind Wooley’s Tea Rooms? Was she lucky, perhaps not to have been subjected to some murderous assault by his hands – pushed from the pier to drown without pity? We may feel that the superior social class of the teacher, and the usurper, together with that of Edwin Rose, was a part of the darkness in Laurie’s mind.
    A second letter, this time to the editor of