“I should have thought your work would fetch a good price.”

  “Alas, no. As a matter of fact, the only substantial sum I’ve ever been offered is for the bust you’re standing next to. But I couldn’t bring myself to sell it. You may have guessed the reason, which is also the reason why I was offered so much.”

  “Because it’s your sister?” I hadn’t guessed till that moment. And then it wasn’t so much obvious as inevitable.

  “Yes. It’s Ann, as she was only a few months before her death. And now as she will always be.”

  “A remarkable woman,” I said to Lucy as we drove back towards Rutland Water later that afternoon. “And not at all reluctant to discuss the past.”

  “That’s what you think, is it?”

  “She made it clear enough.”

  “I suppose she did. But I ought to warn you, Tony. It’s partly a pose. The murder affected Daisy more profoundly than she’s willing to admit. She didn’t just lose her sister.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “James Milner had a brother, Cedric. Daisy was engaged to him. But they never married.”

  “Because of the murder?”

  “Presumably. She never talks about it. In fact, she’s never mentioned him to me.”

  “Then how do you know?”

  “It’s in that article I found. Cedric Milner’s quite a famous man. Or perhaps I should say infamous.”

  “I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Sure?”

  “I think so. Cedric Milner? Means nothing.” But as I repeated the name it did begin to mean something. Not much, but something. “Hold on…”

  “Light dawning, is it?”

  “I can’t place him, but now you ask…” I snapped my fingers. “A spy of some kind.”

  “You’ve got him. A physicist. Betrayed atom-bomb secrets to Russia just after the war. What’s more—”

  “Yes?”

  “At his trial, James Milner said he killed his wife because he believed she was having an affair…with his brother.”

  Matt was already home when we reached Otherways. Complaining good-naturedly that Lucy had been monopolizing me, he proposed that the two of us visit the local pub before dinner. It was a soft June evening of gentle lakeside air. The Finches Arms was busying up for Friday night. We sat outside, where a boules match was underway, and drank our beer to the accompanying click of the boules and the sleepy cooing of doves.

  “What did you make of Daisy?” he asked.

  “Feisty old girl,” I replied. “And a talented sculptress.”

  “Lucy certainly likes her.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Oh, I like her well enough. It’s just…well, the murder’s something we could do without. You know? I don’t want Lucy…dwelling on it.”

  “What’s there to dwell on?”

  “A lot of people wouldn’t like living in a house where somebody had been murdered.”

  “But you don’t mind, do you?”

  “I don’t let it affect me.”

  “Neither does Lucy, as far as I can see.”

  “No. That’s right. As far as you can see.” He frowned. “I don’t know. It’s nothing definite, Tony, nothing concrete. Lucy gets on with Daisy. That’s all there is to it. At least, well, it would be, but…I have this feeling”—he shrugged—“that slowly, bit by bit…” Then came a dismissive shake of the head. “No. It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”

  “You don’t look very sure about that.”

  “Sorry. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He gave a half-hearted laugh. “Old house. Murder most foul. You can imagine anything if you try hard enough.”

  “What kind of anything?”

  “Oh, the supernatural kind, I suppose.”

  “You’re saying Otherways is haunted?”

  “Good God, no.” He looked aghast at the suggestion. “Absolutely not. I’ve seen nothing, heard nothing, the least bit spooky. But Lucy…”

  “She has?”

  “No. Well…” He lowered his voice and leaned closer. “I’m not sure, Tony, to be honest. She spends a lot of time alone there. Probably too much. My fault, I dare say. She loves the place. She really does. She told me only recently that she couldn’t bear to leave it. I suppose there’s nothing wrong in that. But I worry that the…attachment…is too strong. Unnaturally strong. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Not really, Matt, no.”

  “That’s understandable.” He smiled ruefully. “I’m not sure I do myself.” He looked into the middle distance for a moment, then said, “I don’t want to burden you at a time like this, but, while you’re here, I’d be really grateful if you’d keep an eye on her for me.” He stared on past me for another moment, then added, “Just in case.”

  So, within a day of my arrival at Otherways, I’d become a confidant for Matt and Lucy in a way I’d never been before. The friendship we’d had while you were alive was the friendship of two married couples. We’d always been at ease together, joking and relaxed. But I was beginning to see the superficiality of that now. It had left me unprepared for the insights into the ambivalence of their relationship that both Matt and Lucy seemed determined to give me. Just as it had left me unprepared for almost everything that was happening to me.

  There was an obvious explanation for my failure to have appreciated how turbulent Matt and Lucy’s outwardly placid life in the Midlands countryside was, of course: Otherways. A bank of clouds had moved across the sun as we walked back towards the house that evening. The stonework had turned a flat, cold grey in the altered light, the convex windows throwing back at us faintly distorted reflections of the pallid skyline. The building suddenly looked hostile in its weirdness, keeplike and sullen. Had I really been so unobservant over the years? I wondered. Or had their move to Otherways been the catalyst for changes you and I had simply been too busy to notice?

  Nothing more was said about the murder over dinner. Nor did Lucy refer, even obliquely, to the magazine article she’d promised to show me. I began to think she might have forgotten, though I could hardly remind her in Matt’s presence. Nor did I much want to. Some instinct deterred me from seeming overeager.

  Lucy hadn’t forgotten, of course. As she went up to bed, leaving Matt and me to our whiskies, she airily remarked, “I put that history of Stamford you asked about in your room, Tony.”

  “Thanks.” I glanced across at Matt, but it was as if he hadn’t even heard her.

  “Good night, then.” She looked back at me as she closed the door behind her. Her expression was unreadable, amused almost, though at whose expense I couldn’t imagine.

  It was a Sunday Times Magazine dating from the summer of 1972. The heavy print, the fashions of my teens and a back- cover advertisement for Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes shocked me into realizing just how long ago that really was. The front-cover photograph was of the surrounding countryside as it had been before the excavation of what was referred to as Empingham Reservoir. Nobody seemed to have thought of Rutland Water as a name then. An article about the excavation and the impact on the lives of people moved out to make way for it filled several pages. What I was looking for was a less-prominent piece, tacked on as an after-thought it seemed, under the title reservoir claims scene of forgotten murder.

  There was a photograph of what I took to be the sunken garden—an inevitably circular lawn, with a pond in the centre and a surrounding cluster of rose bushes, with larger rhododendrons above them on a bank. At the edge of the lawn, bowered in roses, stood the gazebo, a sort of wooden maquette of Otherways, in terms of shape and proportion, though it was open-fronted, of course, with a bench visible inside, which ran round the internal wall.

  The photograph of the garden was in grainy black and white. It clearly wasn’t contemporary. Though the caption didn’t say so, I imagined it was an archive shot, dating from the time of the murder. What the caption did say was that Ann Milner was sitting in the gazebo on the evening of Saturday, 2 September 1939, when her husband, James Milner, shot her dead.

  My attention was drawn to the writer of the article, Martin Fisher, by the simple fact that someone had underlined his name in red where it appeared beneath the title. Why I couldn’t imagine. I assumed he was just a reporter assigned to the case. He certainly wrote as if he was. I lay on the bed and read the piece through.

  They still talk about the Milner murder in Rutland, even though more than 30 years have passed since 27-year-old junior diplomat James Milner walked into the garden of his family home near Oakham and shot dead his beautiful 26-year-old wife, Ann, as she sat in a gazebo enjoying the evening sunshine. They talk about it not because there was any doubt about James Milner’s guilt. He telephoned the police straight afterwards and admitted what he had done. They talk about it because circumstances have conspired to prevent them forgetting.

  The latest of those circumstances is the destruction of the garden where the murder took place. It, along with 3,000 acres of surrounding farmland, is being bulldozed to create a huge new reservoir. The Milners’ old home, Otherways, a strange circular moated house, built just before the First World War by an equally strange Anglo-French architect called Emile Posnan, now perches like some inland lighthouse over a muddy wasteland criss-crossed by the trackways of gigantic earth-moving equipment. The past has been swept away. But that seems only to have sharpened the memories of those who lived near by at the time.

  Murder is not, as it happens, the only crime associated with the Milner family. Arguably, James Milner’s brother, Cedric, who was living at Otherways in 1939, was guilty of something worse still. And he, unlike his brother, did not pay for it with his life. Cedric Milner would face a charge of treason if he ever returned to this country. But that is unlikely. He has lived in the Soviet Union since the summer of 1950, having fled there, fearing arrest as a spy. The value of information he passed to the Soviet Union while working as a physicist at the Harwell Atomic Energy Research Establishment in the 1940s has never been disclosed. Some believe it was every bit as significant as that passed by the other more famous Harwell traitor, Klaus Fuchs, whose arrest and trial early in 1950 is thought to have triggered Milner’s defection. It is probably just as well that James and Cedric Milner’s father, Sir Clarence Milner, died in 1936, a year after their mother, Olga, Lady Milner.

  Sir Clarence was a distinguished career diplomat, Lady Olga the Russian beauty he had met and married while serving at the British Embassy in St Petersburg during the last years of the Tsar. How they would have reacted to the execution of one son for the murder of his wife and the condemnation of another for betraying his country is hard to imagine.

  Lady Milner’s father was a prominent banker, assassinated by a revolutionary just before the outbreak of war in 1914. Naturally, she would have been no friend of the Bolshevik regime, which seized power in 1917. James Milner had been born in St Petersburg in 1912, and Lady Milner, plain Mrs Milner as she was then, was pregnant for a second time when the ambassador and most of his staff, along with their families, were evacuated from the country in January 1918. Cedric Milner was thus, by an apt irony, born in England, but conceived in Russia.

  After the war, Clarence Milner was posted first to Belgium, then to Portugal, where he served as ambassador for the last few years of his career. It was in Lisbon that he met Emile Posnan, who had lived there since leaving England in 1914. Posnan aroused his curiosity with a description of the house he had built in Rutland. Milner took the opportunity to visit it during his next home leave and, finding it on the market, he bought it for his retirement.

  Milner left the diplomatic service in 1933 with a knighthood and settled at Otherways. James Milner was by then an Oxford undergraduate. Cedric was a boarder at Harrow, already noted for his scientific brilliance. James followed his father into the diplomatic service in 1934 and married Ann Temple, daughter of a local doctor. He was soon posted to the British Embassy in Moscow—where the capital had moved since the Tsar’s days—because of his fluency in Russian. Initially, Ann accompanied him, but eventually returned to England alone, presumably because of the dangers and difficulties of life in Moscow under Stalin. There was no suggestion at this time of marital strain.

  The parting must have been hard on James, however. His parents were dead by then, but Ann had her own family to fall back on for company. She was especially close to her sister, Daisy, who still lives in the area but declined to discuss the murder with me. For James there was nothing but a tedious round of clerical work in a city where the local population lived in fear and the diplomatic community looked on helplessly as Stalin tightened his grip on society.

  Cedric went up to Cambridge in 1937, and there he came under the influence of J.D. Bernai, the Marxist physicist. He must have seen the other side of Marxism, however, when he visited his brother in Moscow during the Easter vacation of 1938. The Bukharin show trial, which James had attended in an official capacity, had just ended. How Cedric was able to overlook Stalin’s tyrannical excesses to the extent he obviously did is a mystery. But it is only one of several mysteries surrounding him and his brother.

  During his vacations from Cambridge Cedric lived mostly at Otherways with Ann. This was an inevitable but unnatural arrangement, throwing together the beautiful young grass widow and her handsome brother-in-law. Far away in Moscow, James must surely have feared the worst. If so, his fears would have been allayed by Cedric’s announcement in the spring of 1939 of his engagement to Ann’s younger sister, Daisy. James should have come home for an extended leave that summer in good spirits, but the extension had been granted because of nervous exhaustion. Perhaps the coming tragedy was already taking shape.

  Exactly what happened at Otherways during the weeks between James’s return from Moscow and the murder is unclear. Two of the four people who could tell us are dead, another is definitively unavailable for comment, and the fourth, Daisy Temple, declines to discuss the matter. All we are left with is what emerged at the trial.

  The murder of Ann Milner, and the subsequent trial and execution of her husband, got little national coverage amidst the welter of war news. Great Britain declared war on Germany the day after the shooting at Otherways. The murder counted as sensational in Rutland, of course. Elsewhere, people had more important things to think about. Besides, James Milner was a member of the diplomatic service, a representative of his nation overseas. He had done a dreadful thing and must pay for it. To dwell upon the event could have been interpreted as unpatriotic.

  The trial itself was brief and anti-climactic. James pleaded guilty and gave no direct evidence. It was explained, on his behalf, by his barrister, that he had become convinced, erroneously as he now accepted, that his wife was conducting a clandestine affair with his brother. He had held her, as the elder party, more to blame. Having failed to obtain assurances from her that she would end the relationship—impossible to give, since it did not in fact exist—he had killed her, using a revolver issued to him by the embassy in Moscow for his personal protection. It was not explained why he had become suspicious of his wife, nor how he had subsequently been persuaded of her innocence. Cedric did not give evidence.

  Nor did Miss Temple. The only witnesses were, in fact, the senior police officer called to the scene and the pathologist who had conducted the post-mortem. No reference was made to James’s nervous state when sent home from Moscow. Nothing in the way of mitigation was even attempted. James Milner seems to have been intent on paying the ultimate penalty for his crime, and the court was content to oblige him. He was sentenced to death and hanged at Leicester Prison on 10 November 1939.

  It sounds like a straightforward if poignant tale of domestic disaster. As such, it is surprisingly well remembered in the locality, where it is referred to as a tragedy, about which the full truth can never be known. Perhaps that is just as well. For all concerned, it may be best to assume that James Milner’s suspicions of his wife and brother were groundless. Either way, by his own admission, he undoubtedly murdered Ann Milner. Except, of course, that admissions of guilt are often the hardest kind of evidence to test. Cedric Milner was present at Other ways on the day of the murder, even though he did not witness it. We must assume he did not witness it, anyway. The exact sequence of events at Otherways on 2 September 1939 did not emerge in court. In fact, very little emerged, apart from James Milner’s determination to bear full responsibility for what had happened.

  Whether he deserved to do so is not necessarily as impenetrable a mystery as it may seem. Although the national press was preoccupied with weightier issues, the Rutland Mercury found plenty of space for the Otherways Murder, as it was soon dubbed. The case was chronicled by its chief reporter, Donald Garvey, now retired. When I spoke to him at his home in Oakham recently, he told me why he still believed it had not been the simple matter implied at James Milner’s trial.

  “None of it ever made sense to me,” he said. “That young fellow just wasn’t the insanely jealous type. I’d met him at point-to-points and the like, along with his wife. They were as happy and relaxed a couple as you could wish to meet. I don’t know about Cedric. He kept himself to himself. According to my police contacts, he was out cycling when the murder took place. But he’d got back by the time they arrived. Well, that was his story, and his brother’s. He had no alibi, of course, but he didn’t need one. I’m not saying he killed Mrs Milner and his brother took the blame, but when you look at what a cool, calculating schemer he turned out to be, well, it’s possible, isn’t it? If he doesn’t like the idea, he can always come home and sue me for libel.”

  Small chance of that, of course, so Garvey can rest easy in his libellous retirement. But something still nags at him. “James Milner’s confession to the police didn’t include a word of explanation for his jealousy. I’ve seen it, so I know. Why not? Well, maybe because there was none to explain. It wasn’t his only confession, you see. Not his last, anyway. That was written in the condemned cell at Leicester Gaol. I have the man’s own word on that.”

  Mr Garvey showed me a letter written to him by James Milner from prison on 7 November 1939, three days before his execution. “I am aware of your continuing enquiries into my case,” it reads. “I would ask you to desist from troubling those close to me and my late wife. I have spent some of my time here writing a complete and honest account of what occurred at Otherways last summer, for the benefit of the person most clearly entitled to receive it. If that person wishes to share its contents with the wider world, which I doubt, then so be it. If not, then so be it also. Please be so good as to content yourself with their judgement in the matter.”

 

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