Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (22 page)

Other girls might be found there, the professional hostesses or dancing partners. Not necessarily tarts, they were nevertheless a good deal more tarty than the girls most of their customers were likely ever to have encountered elsewhere. Donald’s fancy was called Helen or Betty Christie. Knowing nobody in Edinburgh, indifferent to (perhaps shy of, perhaps despising) his fellow students, whom anyway he had hardly seen, he made her his closest friend. Probably she did not represent anything very important to him, but she was a playmate. He soon made a habit of booking her out. This cost him thirty, shillings for an evening session, fifteen for the afternoon, the sum paid in lieu of the dances she was missing. He gave her presents, nothing very lavish, a couple of rings valued at £2 and £2.5.0. He took her out on the motorbike with which he had provided himself by putting down a deposit of £28. (He was to tell the police his mother had bought it for him; a thoroughly improbable tale.) As for Miss Christie, she regarded Donald as `a big romping boy’. They were `good pals’ - an expression with an exquisitively period flavour, conjuring up an image of short skirts, cloche hats and a young man dressed in the manner of Harold Lloyd. (Donald had in fact some resemblance to that comedian.) Donald made another friend at the Palais also, a young man called Scott, who doubled as clerk and dancing instructor. Scott’s shallow worldliness - he owned a motor car impressed young Donald. Flanked by Scott and Miss Christie, he was a match for anyone, the very picture of a man of the world.

He financed this chosen life in the simplest way. In those days, before credit cards, when bankers liked to know their customers and were yet, in a curious way, more trusting, Mrs Merrett had made financial arrangements for her stay in Edinburgh which sound slightly complicated and rather strange now, but which were then simple and usual enough. Her main account was with the Midland Bank at Boscombe in Oxfordshire, to which by long-standing arrangement the cheques from her father’s trust, which represented the great part of her income, were paid. In Edinburgh. she had now opened another account with the Clydesdale Bank, which she financed by cheques drawn on her Midland Bank account; it was agreed that she could draw on this new account to a limit of £30. The arrangement suited her staid, regular and careful way of life.

Donald found it satisfactory too. Between 2 February and 17 March 1926 he contrived to milch his mother of £205, not far short of a third of her year’s income. His method was simple. He would draw money on forged cheques made out to himself from the Clydesdale Bank, and replace this money with Midland Bank cheques. As long as his mother’s credit in Boscombe remained good, and he was careful not to overdraw at the Clydesdale, he was safe. No doubt the day would come when the first of these conditions no longer could be satisfied, but that did not immediately worry Donald; a lily of the field, he was not given to projection. Meanwhile, he sought to forestall any possible suspicions his mother might come to entertain first by removing cheques from the back of her book and later by taking away the book altogether and letting her suppose it had been mislaid in the removal to Buckingham Terrace. It was hardly a brilliant manoeuvre, but it was, in the short run, surprisingly effective. Months later one of these cheque books was discovered in the boiler room of the Palais de Danse. The little matter of forgery came simply to him too. He merely traced his mother’s signature in light pencil and then carefully inked it in. No doubt it was not a device to deceive an expert, but he had only bank clerks to deal with, and they were unlikely to suspect a university sudent, the only son of a respectable widow, domicilied in Buckingham Terrace, of so gross an offence as forgery. They had seen mother and son together, and had been impressed by their evident devotion to each other.

Clearly Donald was happy and insouciant, living in and for the moment, shinning down the tree out of his bedroom window and courting, or larking with, Miss Christie. If the thought of consequences ever touched his mind, he dismissed it; there was no place in his vocabulary for Nemesis. He had more immediate concerns and they were sufficient. However he was soon overtaken by events. A couple of days after they moved into the flat, the landlord called on Mrs Merrett.He asked her if she could now pay the balance of her rent, though this was not in fact due till later in the tenancy. However, being of an obliging nature, and conscious of the security of her financial state, she readily assented; she was by temperament one of those who prefer to be forward in payments due. Donald however remained ignorant of this transaction, which put his calculations out, for by chance Mrs Merrett paid the landlord with a Clydesdale cheque.

This cheque, being presented and honoured, overdrew the account. On Saturday 13 March therefore the bank wrote to Mrs,.Merrett, stating that her account was overdrawn by some £22, and requesting her to put things right. Donald apparently intercepted this letter, for Mrs Merrett did not then receive it. Instead on Tuesday 16th he corrected matters with a £30 Midland Bank cheque, payable to himself. He took £5 in cash. However he had already, the previous day, presented a Clydesdale cheque for £22.10.6. Accordingly on 16 March the Bank wrote again, pointing out that the account was now overdrawn by £6.11.3. This letter arrived on the morning of 17 March.

What happened that morning cannot be known in detail or certainty. Rita Sutherland, the maid, was the only witness, and she did not arrive till about nine o’clock. She discovered that Donald and his mother had already breakfasted. Mrs Merrett was putting the silver away. Then they settled in the sitting-room. If the subject of Donald’s transgressions had come up at the breakfast table, it seems that it had already been resolved. Certainly Rita Sutherland was not conscious of any argument or coolness between mother and son. She came into the drawing-room to do the fire, but finding Donald settled in the armchair with a book, and his mother preparing to write letters at the table which she used in preference to the desk, decided to do this later, and retired to the kitchen again. That was just across the narrow hall. Donald and his mother were sitting about eleven feet apart from each other.

A few minutes later Rita was startled by a loud bang. She heard quick-moving feet. Then a sound as of falling books, and Donald was in the kitchen. `Rita’, he cried, `my mother has shot herself’. Either then, or a little later, she said that she had been quite all right when she herself arrived, and asked why she would do such a thing. He replied that, `he had been wasting his mother’s money and thought she was worried about that’. They found her lying on the floor, still breathing, between the table and the bureau. Rita `noticed upon the top corner of the bureau, a pistol’. She had never seen it before.

Or perhaps she noticed it there. Any attempt to reconstruct exactly what happened and what she saw, is bedevilled by inconsistencies in her story - she was to tell two incompatible ones - and by the fact that, on certain points, notably the position of the pistol, her evidence conflicts with what others had to say.

Donald now telephoned for the police and told them that his mother had shot herself. His tone carried authority, so that this interpretation was to pass unquestioned for a long time. Then, finding the sight of his mother (who was still not dead) distressing, he suggested to Rita that they should go down to the street and wait for the ambulance that would take his mother to the hospital.

The police arrived first, in the form of two constables, Middlemiss and Izatt, decent deferential men, suitably chastened by the tragedy they encountered. Their attitude was to be of the first importance. They arrived less as `investigators’ than as `the men come about the trouble’. Roughead, in his account of the trial, was to pour scorn upon them, suggesting that they might have been competent for a part in the Policemen’s Chorus in The Pirates of Penzance, But to elaborate on this - to dwell for instance on their inability to decide on the position of the pistol (one of them could not say, while the other stated that he saw his colleague lift it from the floor) - is to risk missing the point. No doubt they should have been brisk and inquisitive. That was not how they saw their job, not in a respectable place like Buckingham Terrace. Their attitude was quite different. Something very unfortunate had happened and they had better tidy it up. What else could have been expected of them, in a sitting-room where they would have considered it a solecism to take a chair? So they contented themselves with asking Donald, politely and modestly, if he had any idea why his mother should have shot herself. They nodded their heads at his airy reply -just money matters’. He could hardly have said anything more immediately convincing: everyone knew that money was serious business.

Mrs Merrett was taken off to the infirmary where she was confined in Ward 3, a security ward with barred windows, as a suspected suicide. Donald followed her there and inquired about her condition. `Oh’, he said, `so it’s still on the cards that she will recover?’ He told the nurse that his mother had no friends in Edinburgh, which was of course a lie, and, as for her sisters, there was no use calling them, as `they didn’t get on’. One ,sister, Mrs Penn, was to deny this firmly; all the same Donald’s counsel, Mr Aitchison, cast some doubt on what she said. Now, however, having done what he could to ensure that his mother would remain isolated in hospital, he betook himself to the Palais de Danse and Miss Christie. Popping her on the pillion of his motorbike, he went for a spin to Queensferry. Later in the afternoon they met their friend Scott. He told them what had happened and said Rita had been in the kitchen at the time of the shot.

All Donald’s words and actions display inconsistency. One can only assume that he spoke and acted merely on whim. For very soon, he was sending a telegram to a friend of his mother called Mrs Hill, to summon her from Brighton. Even his callousness to his mother was not maintained. He was seen to kiss her on one of his visits; `was it the kiss ofJudas?’ asked the Lord justice-Clerk.

Similar inconsistency was to be shown by Rita Sutherland. That evening she was interviewed by Detective-Inspector Fleming, who had taken over the case. The story she told him was quite different. She now said `she had been in the kitchen about 9.30 and heard a shot, and, going into the lobby, she saw Mrs Merrett fall off her chair and on to the floor and a pistol falling out of her hand.’ Donald himself told Fleming that, `he went over to the corner of the room and the next he heard was a shot, and that he looked round and saw his mother falling to the ground, with a revolver falling from her hand.’ These two pieces of evidence corroborated each other. With the evident respectability of the setting, they were enough for Fleming. He had no doubts. Mrs Merrett had shot herself and he had two eye witnesses to prove it. Accordingly Sergeant Ross wrote to the hospital authorities asking that they should let the police know when Mrs Merrett was fit to leave hospital, that she might be taken into custody and charged with attempted suicide.

The wretched woman had meanwhile come round in Ward 3 to find herself almost in prison already. Barred windows, a locked door and an atmosphere of mystery and obfuscation oppressed her. Nobody would tell her what had happened, and she could not remember. There had been a little accident, they said, and would go no further. She said at different times, `I was sitting writing at the table when suddenly a bang went off in my head like a pistol….’ and `I was sitting down writing letters, and my son Donald was standing beside me. I said, “Go away, Donald, and don’t annoy me”, and the next I heard was a kind of explosion, and I don’t remember any more.’ Dr Holcombe of the Infirmary passed this report on to Inspect Fleming; he however, already certain of the facts, secure in his possession of eye witnesses’ accounts, was not sufficiently impressed to interview her himself. As a result no deposition was ever taken from her.

Mrs Hill arrived and found her friend’s condition distressing and puzzling. She could not believe in the suicide theory. She was to say that Mrs Merrett `was highly strung, emotional, with a keen grip on life and everything it contained, but never a suggestion of doing away with herself.’. That was in no sense a conclusive judgement, and it was also one which offered hitherto unmentioned aspects of Mrs Merrett’s character, but it was enough to convince Mrs Hill that something was wrong. Since she herself could not remain in Edinburgh, she summoned one of Mrs Merrett’s sisters, a Mrs Penn. She duly arrived with her husband, a deaf and irascible painter, on 24 March, a week after the shooting. By her account, her sister repeated the same story of her last memory, and described the bang as seeming, `as if Donald had shot me’. She then sought reassurance that he had not, and added, `he is such a naughty boy’. Mrs Penn then aked Donald what had happened. Could he explain matters? His reply was flippant in the extreme: `No, auntie, I did not do it, but if you like I will confess.’ That raised an alarming interpretation of the affair that Mrs Penn was not at the time ready to accept. `Nobody wants you. to do that’, she replied, and remained puzzled.

Such was the gist of Mrs Penn’s evidence. If true, it certainly indicated that Mrs Merrett must have been tortured by the most horrible suspicion. But Mrs Penn was not an entirely disinterested witness. It was natural enough that she should have developed some animus against Donald. Moreover, Mr Aitchison elicited from her the interesting fact that, while Donald was the heir to his grandfather’s property, her own son stood next in succession. He suggested to her that she herself had in fact asked Mrs Merrett whether Donald had shot her. She denied this vehemently, but since he was able to show that both she and her husband had been most reluctant to co-operate with the Defence, her denial was not wholly convincing.

Donald himself had not allowed his mother’s condition to affect his way of life, except that he had for the moment moved out of the flat and taken a room in a hotel in Lothian Road; all his life he was to delight in hotel life; it satisfied his immature craving for make-believe. Otherwise he had continued on his merry way. The cheque book was now freely available, and, while his mother lived, he made the most of it, drawing £156 in the nine days he had the use of it. This included the down payment on an HRD racing motorbike, valued at £139. He could of course have bought it outright with one Midland Bank cheque, but that was not his way. Credit was to his taste; the day of reckoning might be as far removed or even mythical as God’s judgement. On the bike, or in company with Mis Christie or his friend Scott, he had a few jolly days. Calling at the hospital on one occasion, he was pressed by the nurse to give her a telephone number where he could be reached should his mother’s condition deteriorate. He asked her to wait a moment, while he stepped into the waiting-room to consult Miss Christie. He returned with a number which was in fact that of the Dunedin.