Classic Scottish Murder Stories Read Free Page B

judicial hanging, after murdering her lover’s wife and baby] a full confession would be circulated far and wide. This is always done to justify carrying out the last operation of the law’.

CHAPTER 2
THE GERMAN TEA-PLANTER
    T he victim in the Broughty Ferry case was universally described as an elderly, rich, eccentric recluse. This is a stereotype. The author is no fierce feminist, but has always thought that contemporary writers diminished Miss Jean Milne’s posthumous dignity. Let us look at each element of the labelling in turn. Her age was 65, not ancient, and William Roughead, who should have known better and himself lived to a good old, productive age, would persist in calling her a ‘little frail old woman’. This was no wispy, gossamer person, but sprightly, and she lived with hope.
    Rich she certainly was, on her income of £1,000 per year in 1912. Her main expense, or extravagance, was to spend months at a time on holiday in London hotels. She also bought clothes and she gave unknown sums to charity. Her money came to her upon the death, nine years previously, of her brother, who was a tobacco manufacturer of Dundee. She had lived on, alone, in the substantial house which they had shared.
    Now we come to the eremitical element. No woman who had really given up the world would regularly go away on sprees to the capital, staying at smartish hotels such as the Bonnington and the Strand Palace. No real hermit is seen every Sunday on show in church, attends Home Mission meetings, and tours the Highlands. Hermits do not have telephones. It is surprising, moreover, how many people came forward with gossip and called themselves friends of a woman supposedly so isolated.
    Finally, and the last two elements merge, she was stampedwith the seal of eccentricity. If only we knew more of her private history, there could be a solid explanation of her circumstances. She might always have been a little different. Whatever the hereditary factors, past events, old frustrations or sadnesses, she was still interested, very interested, in the company of men.
    Her choice of living without companion or servant was eccentric. This must be conceded. There were ample funds for a married couple to be engaged to keep her large Victorian property, Elmgrove House, and its two-acre garden in a decent state of equilibrium, although, as we now recognise, the most respectable-seeming butler can become seized with jealous rapacity. There is a certain type of religious woman who trusts that God will watch over her, and closes her mind to the evil in the world. Miss Milne may very well have been of this disposition. It is not fearlessness, but innocence.
    Perhaps, too, she reasoned that the city was dangerous, and her decorous suburb was safe. She could hardly have been unaware of the fate of Miss Marion Gilchrist, aged 82, who had been murdered in her own home in Glasgow in 1908, in spite of impressive security apparata and a living-in servant. The truth is that both women were magnets to malefactors. A dog would have been a good idea. Miss Gilchrist’s red Irish terrier would have made her killer think twice when the moment came, but he had been poisoned.
    The most eccentric element of Miss Milne’s life-style must be her neglect of the house. No doubt she calculated that it would see her out, and would survive, as indeed it did, even if most of the 14 rooms were never used nor touched. She had carved out for herself a capsule of one bedroom upstairs, one living-room downstairs, and a kitchen and bathroom. Did she sometimes wander those closed and cobwebbed rooms with candle in hand in the mode of Miss Faversham? One feels that she would have known her Dickens and her Scott, but her favourite reading was of the devotional kind. Candlelight flickered as she read with undrawn blinds late into the evening, for it was a personalquirk that she used gas only for cooking and heating. Did she look under the bed at night, and lock