And the Band Played On (26 page)

The full story of Kate’s act of madness has never been fully told. Many of the more interesting details remained undiscovered in pre-trial statements and court notes held in the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh. From these and from family accounts, I have pieced together the whole tragic story, which, like everything that involves the Humes and the Costins, has its beginnings in the sinking of the
Titanic
.

In September 1914, Kate had neither seen her parents nor spoken to them for a year – not since her father had thrashed her with a riding crop and her stepmother had struck her with a silver-topped cane. That was the day she left home for good. Although she went to live in lodgings less than a mile away, they had made no attempt to contact her or to find out where she was living.

Kate’s unhappiness had its roots in her mother’s death, the sudden introduction into their lives of their stepmother and the death of her beloved brother, Jock. Within each of these traumatic events in her young life there were multiple grievances – or parental offences, as Kate chose to see them.

Kate, a ‘flighty, impetuous girl fond of the society of lads’ as she was later described by a psychiatrist, was an avid reader of newspapers and detective novels and these fed an already vivid imagination. Like the child heroine of Henry James’
What Maisie Knew
, Kate had seen ‘much more than she at first understood’. It had become quite clear to her, now that she had some experience of boys herself, that her father had been having an affair with their stepmother before her mother’s death. Far from introducing Alice Alston into their lives as a convenient housekeeper substitute for their mother, as he had claimed, he was marrying his mistress.

Kate had adored Jock and would never forgive her father for driving Jock away from home – to his death, as she saw it. That Jock loved the life and work on passenger liners did not absolve their father from blame. Now only young Andrew remained at home, Kate and her two sisters having also fled their father’s tyranny.

There were other grievances. Her father and stepmother had made no attempt to get in touch with her since she left home. She had been, she thought, a dutiful daughter, accompanying her father on the piano during his musical soirées, receiving no praise or thanks, simply criticism. The thrashing she received had been as humiliating as it was painful, not least because she had been beaten in front of her stepmother. And then there was his lying and cheating, which embarrassed all his children.

Kate’s days at Andersons dragged endlessly on. It was no life for a teenager, particularly one as troubled as Kate, and she often sneaked away from the office, sometimes spending an hour or two down by the river if it was a fine day. She found that if she left the door of the office unlocked and a pad and pencil with a half-written sentence on the desk, she could pretend she had just popped out to the post office if her employer Mr Campbell returned unexpectedly. But he rarely did. Most days she just read detective novels or the newspaper. She enjoyed the
Daily Sketch
, which she liked for its strong anti-German views and its dramatic pictures. She had started reading it two years earlier when Jock had died as she found its coverage of the
Titanic
the most dramatic of all the newspapers. Now the war had become a subject of fascination for her, particularly the reports of atrocities. One story in particular had gripped Kate’s imagination. A group of ‘Heinous Huns’, as the
Sketch
described them, were reported to have burned down a village in Belgium after raping and mutilating the women by cutting off their breasts with their bayonets. Kate cut out the article and put it under some invoices in her desk drawer. This would be her inspiration for the punishment she would mete out to her father and stepmother.

Her original plan had been to burn down their house in George Street but she had quickly dismissed this idea on the grounds that innocent people, such as her young brother Andrew, might be killed or injured. She had then warmed to the idea of destroying her father’s precious violins and his cello. This would certainly cause him a great deal of grief and expense. She thought about chopping them up with an axe, burning them or stealing them and dumping them in the River Nith, where they would be discovered but not in time to be saved or repaired. But Kate dismissed this last idea, too, as it wouldn’t satisfy her desire for revenge on her stepmother.

She wondered briefly about sending an anonymous letter to the authorities about their father’s claim that Jock had taken two expensive violins with him on the
Titanic
. Everyone in the family, Mary Costin included, knew that Jock had set off with one violin, the one he always used, and it certainly wasn’t a valuable eighteenth-century Guadagnini. But Kate doubted if they would take the word of a teenage girl against her father. And it wouldn’t bring Alice into the net, except indirectly, so she dismissed this option, too.

The only time Kate, or any of the children for that matter, had seen their father and stepmother seriously distressed was when they heard the news about Jock. Her mother’s death seemed to come as a relief to them both and neither, as far as Kate knew, had shed a tear. But when the
Titanic
went down, her father had been out of his mind with grief and even Alice had wept. When Alice pulled out a lace handkerchief from her sleeve to dry a tear on her alabaster-white cheek, Kate’s sister Grace had unkindly remarked later that it was like watching rainwater run down a marble statue.

This gave Kate the idea for the form that her vengeance on her father and stepmother would take. She would make them think that one of her other siblings had died. Like Jock’s death, it would have to be a heroic death. The war provided the perfect setting. Grace was in Huddersfield training to be a nurse. Her father and stepmother hadn’t been in touch with her for more than a year, and had no idea where she was. Kate would contrive a letter that would lead them to believe that Grace had become the latest victim of the villainous ‘Bosch’; there were plenty of such stories in the
Daily Sketch
. Her father and stepmother would be grief-stricken, just as they had been by Jock’s death, horrified at the manner of her murder and consumed by guilt at having indirectly led to it by driving her away from home.

She didn’t – at least not at this moment – consider what they would think, say or do when they discovered that Grace was alive and well. Neither did she consider what other people might think. Taking a blank sheet of paper from one of the twenty compartments in Mr Campbell’s roll-top desk, Kate started to put her plan into action. She would write a letter to herself, purporting to come from someone – another brave nurse – who was with Grace at the Front when she died. ‘Nurse Mullard’ had a nice ring to it. And she would give Grace a heroic death, like Jock’s. Using Mr Campbell’s best pen and sitting at his desk, she began to write:

Vilvorde, near Brussels

To Miss Hume,

I have been asked by your sister, Nurse Grace Hume, to hand the enclosed letter to you. My name is Nurse Mullard, and I was with your sister when she died. Our camp hospital at Vilvorde was burned to the ground and out of 1,517 men and 23 nurses only 19 nurses were saved, but 149 men managed to get clear away. I expect to pass through Dumfries about the 15th September, but am writing this in case I should not see you. Your sister gave me your address, so, as I know Dumfries well, I shall send it to your office, if I do not see you.

As there is a shortage of nurses in Inverness, 15 of us are to be sent there. Grace requested me to tell you that her last thoughts were of Andrew and you, and that you were not to worry over her as she would be going to meet “her Jock”. These were her words.

She endured great agony in her last hour. One of the soldiers (our men) caught two German soldiers in the act of cutting off her left breast, her right one having been already cut off. They were killed instantly by our soldier.

Grace managed to scrawl this enclosed note before I found her. We can all say that your sister was a heroine. She was a “loose nurse” – that is, she was out on the fields looking for wounded soldiers – and on one occasion when bringing in a wounded soldier a German attacked her. She threw the soldier’s gun at him and shot him with her rifle. Of course, all nurses here are armed.

I have just received word this moment to pack for Scotland, so will try and get this handed to you as there is no post from here, and we are making the best of a broken down wagon truck for a shelter. Will give you fuller details when I see you. We are all quite safe here now, as there have been reinforcements.

I am, yours sincerely,

J. M. MULLARD

Nurse, Royal Irish Troop

(am not allowed to say which special troop)

Kate wrote the letter out three times before she was satisfied with it, eliminating spelling and grammatical mistakes while trying to write it in a hand that did not look like her own. In this she was not successful. However, she was pleased with the letter, which she thought had an authentic air about it provided no one asked who Nurse Mullard was. Then, using her left hand in order to disguise her own handwriting, she set about writing a note supposedly from Grace in her dying moments. This would deliver the looked-for revenge to her neglectful and unkind father and stepmother. Dated 6 September, it said:

Dear Kate

This is to say Goodbye. Have not long to live. Hospital has been set on fire. Germans cruel. A man here has had head cut off. And my right breast taken away.

Give my love to . . .

Goodbye,

Grac X

When Kate had finished forging the letters she crumpled the note from Grace so that it looked as if it had been taken, as she said later, ‘from Grace’s dying grasp’. She also frayed the edges to give it a war-torn effect. Then, putting both letters in one of the envelopes from Mr Campbell’s roll-top desk, she went home to her lodgings shortly before noon. Her landlady, Mrs McMinn, surprised to see Kate home so early, asked if she was all right. Kate said at first that she had a headache but then almost immediately burst into tears, flinging her arms round Mrs McMinn, and telling her that her sister Grace was dead. She showed her the letters ‘brought to her office that morning by an unexpected visitor’.

Mrs McMinn, a kindly soul, found some smelling salts and made Kate a cup of tea. An hour later, Kate said she felt well enough to go back to work and, an hour later, Mr Campbell arrived. Kate gave a repeat performance for Mr Campbell’s benefit, showing him the letters and assuring him that she had told her parents the terrible news. Mr Campbell’s hug of consolation was slightly longer and closer than she would have liked.

By the following morning – Saturday – Grace Hume’s murder and mutilation was the talk of Dumfries, having spread like wildfire. It seems that everyone knew except Andrew and Alice Hume. It had come to the attention of the Chief of Police, who decided that no action was called for, the crime having been committed outside the immediate environs of the Dumfries and Galloway area. Mr William Dickie, the editor of the
Dumfries & Galloway Standard
,
had also heard about it but, as it was the weekend and his newspaper would not be published again until next Wednesday, he spent the afternoon editing the minutes of the previous week’s meeting of the Dumfries and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society.