‘The cunning dog has covered his tracks.’
Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’
There was much to recommend the Ardlamont affair to a public hungry for a good murder-mystery – not least the tragic victim and a mode of death that fascinated not only for its gruesomeness but also for its rarity. Even Littlejohn, witness to so much of the most serious crime that Scotland saw in the second half of the nineteenth century, could recall just two cases of homicide involving shotguns. Then there was the frisson created by the prestigious bloodlines of both the victim and his alleged killer. That the Hambroughs carried the taint of impecuniosity only served to further spark the popular imagination. Even the setting – a remote estate in one of the most beautiful corners of Scotland – added to the mystique. To newspaper editors, the heady cocktail of tragedy and melodrama made it seem like the story that had everything. But it was also a saga that kept on giving.
One particular twist turned an intriguing case into a full-blown sensation – the disappearance of the man who was presumed to hold the key to the truth, the enigmatic Mr Scott. After it became clear to the Procurator-Fiscal that there were rather more questions surrounding Cecil’s death than first believed, all attempts to track down Scott ran into dead end after dead end. The authorities were fatally hindered by the fact that no one seemed to have the slightest idea about his real identity. Mr Scott, who drifted on to the scene at Ardlamont two days before Cecil’s death and exited stage left a few hours after it, had apparently disappeared without trace.
So, just who was he? According to Monson, he was an engineer employed to inspect the boilers of the yacht, Alert, that Cecil was hoping to buy. Moreover, Monson claimed to know nothing of his background, since it had been Cecil who had hired him. In a statement to the police on 27 August, Monson furnished only these scant details: ‘I am informed that Edward Scott started business as an engineer in Glasgow, and that he failed; that he was afterwards working in connection with yachts; and that he was well known in Greenock.’ To Mr M’Lean of the Mutual Life, he suggested that the engineer actually came from Stockton-on-Tees.
Nor were the staff at Ardlamont able to shed much more light. James Wright, the butler, noted that there was ‘nothing unusual’ about him and that he was unable to hazard a guess as to his line of work. ‘He might have been anything,’ Wright said. Edith Hiron, the governess, was meanwhile unconvinced of his pedigree – ‘I should not have called him a gentleman,’ she opined – but offered little in the way of solid intelligence.
The last positive sighting of Scott during the investigation into Cecil’s death was on the pier at Tighnabruaich on the afternoon of 10 August. Hugh Carmichael, the groom, had taken him there after Dr Macmillan had suggested there was no need for him to stay at Ardlamont. Yet even at the time, Constable M’Calman of the Argyllshire police force was uneasy to see a key witness leave so precipitously. M’Calman happened to be at the pier when Scott arrived and asked him to stay until the enquiry was complete but Scott said he could not wait, instead assuring the policeman that he could be contacted at Glasgow’s Central Station Hotel. M’Calman suggested several times that he ought not to go but made no effort to physically restrain him, so that when his steamer docked Scott was able to board it unhindered.
In response to Major Hambrough’s questions about the ‘third man’ who had been present at his son’s death, Monson told him that the engineer had returned to Glasgow because he had been too affected by events to remain at Ardlamont. He even suggested that the Major and his wife might call on him on their way back to England, which they duly tried to do on the evening of Monday 14 August. However, none of their interviews with various hotel staff in Glasgow provided further information about Scott or his whereabouts. He most certainly was no longer at the hotel he had left as his forwarding address, if he had ever been there at all.
When the Procurator-Fiscal met with Monson the following week, Monson told him that he did not know Scott’s address, had had no communication with him since he had left Ardlamont, and that he knew nothing of him except a few details furnished by Cecil. In his letter to the Fiscal after their frosty meeting at the hotel in Tighnabruaich, Monson also claimed to have made efforts to trace the engineer but so far without success. He had nonetheless instructed his lawyers to persevere with the search, he said.
It was not until the end of August that the police intensified their own efforts to track him down. James Fraser, chief constable of Argyllshire, took on the challenge around 28 or 29 August but, based on the evidence available to him, he confined his search to the relatively localized area of Greenock, Gourock, Glasgow and Paisley. His efforts yielded precious little. The disappearance, naturally, played badly for Monson but it was possible to make a reasonable case for Scott’s flight. With Cecil dead, he would surely have presumed there was to be no purchase of the vessel that he was ostensibly there to inspect. Furthermore, he may well have been distressed by events and uncomfortable impinging on his hosts any longer than necessary, especially since Dr Macmillan had given his blessing to the departure. Yet to provide an address for a hotel rather than his permanent residence and then to go to ground, as it seemed he had done, was suspicious to say the least. If there was nothing to hide, the authorities were justifiably left to ponder, then why hide at all. Moreover, any defence would only work if Scott really was an engineer as claimed.
At the beginning of September, it was decided by the local police to seek the assistance of Scotland Yard. Inspector Thomas Greet was put in charge of the investigation in London, where he was assisted by Sergeant Thomas Brockwell. Greet would rise to greater public prominence a couple of years later when, in 1895, he arrested the Marquis of Queensberry in relation to the libelling of Oscar Wilde. With Wilde having taken the aristocrat’s son, Alfred Lord Douglas, as his lover, the Marquis left a calling card for Wilde at the Albemarle Club in London in which he notoriously described him as ‘posing as a Somdomite [sic]’. Greet was called upon to give evidence to the Old Bailey about the arrest of Queensberry at Carter’s Hotel on Albemarle Street, so binding the policeman into the story of the sorry demise of Oscar Wilde.
Although it was this case that brought him most attention, he was already a highly respected officer by the time the Argyllshire police called upon his services. Even Bell, whose attitude to the police was memorably equivocal, acknowledged his abilities. ‘I ought to say that I believe there are several very fine police officers in this country,’ he said in an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette. ‘I met Inspector Greet, of London, for instance … and I must say he struck me as being a very smart officer.’ Yet for all his abilities, Greet faced a tough task in finding a character as elusive as Scott. Around 2 September, Greet and Brockwell met with the Procurator-Fiscal and his deputy, along with Dr Macmillan, Major Hambrough and Dr Hambleton at the Hotel Metropole, on the corner of Northumberland Avenue and Whitehall Place in London. There they received a description of Scott, a man of thin build but broad shoulders, a pale complexion, steely grey eyes, a long thin face with high cheekbones, dark wavy hair and a moustache (which may or may not have been shaved off by then). Within a few days, the police had their first serious lead. There was a man who went by the name of Edward Sweeney who fitted the description of Scott in its chief respects. Furthermore, there was rumour that he had sometimes adopted the name Scott in his business dealings.
Edward Sweeney, it turned out, was not averse to assuming multiple identities. In his day-to-day business as clerk to the bookmaker Sidney Russell, he was commonly known as Edward Davis (and sometimes ‘Long Ted’). He would regularly receive post to that name at 35 Sutherland Street in Pimlico, where he resided with his mother and father. However, when Brockwell went to the house, Sweeney was not there, and none of his associates could – or at least, would – provide any information as to his whereabouts. His brother, George, a hall porter at the Westminster Palace Hotel, was particularly vague. He said that he had last seen his older brother in the middle of September, when Edward was very unwell – he suffered badly with asthma – and planning to go to Bournemouth. He hoped the coastal air would improve his health, George explained. He also speculated that Edward had probably then decided to board a ship to Australia, since he had previously undertaken a similar voyage for the benefit of his asthma. However, there had apparently been no word to confirm whether he was indeed at sea.
The Sweeney family’s claims to honesty appeared fragile to say the least. Edward’s choice to adopt at least one pseudonym hardly inspired confidence in his probity and it turned out that he was not alone in assuming aliases. As recently as August, George had been introduced to an Eton tailor as George Hunt, for reasons that were never entirely clear. Nor was he keen to make the job of the police any easier than it need be. When they had first called for him at the Westminster Palace Hotel, George refused to expand on the details of a trip he had made to Scotland in August, including whether it had been intended that he should travel with Edward. Nor did he tell them where his mother and father went after leaving their Pimlico address on 12 October. ‘The police asked me two days after where he [father] had gone,’ George Sweeney would say, ‘but I did not know at that time and could not tell them. I was not asked again. Afterwards, I was going home to my father’s new address every evening, so that if the police had wanted to find out they could easily have followed me to the new address.’
Yet on one point he was firm with the police – Edward Sweeney alias Edward Davis could in no way be responsible for the death of Cecil Hambrough. ‘He was a very gentle, kind, young fellow,’ the younger brother insisted. ‘I do not believe he could hurt anyone if he tried.’ The police, though, remained convinced that they had identified their mystery man even if they could not locate him. His description was circulated to Metropolitan Police stations in September but yielded no results, so a public appeal followed in November. The original description was now supplemented by some additional details: ‘suffers from asthma, has a habit of putting his right hand to his side when coughing; in delicate health; dresses well, and generally wears a low, hard felt hat.’ But still there were no positive sightings, nor even when a £200 reward for information was offered on 1 December. Officers from Tighnabruaich joined the search in London for fully six weeks but never so much as laid eyes on their suspect. As Sergeant Brockwell would note: ‘All the police methods for discovering persons wanted were resorted to, without success.’
The press, meanwhile, engaged in ferocious speculation. There was talk that he was the scion of a noble family, a man of privilege able to call upon Establishment powers to secrete him away until the horrors of Ardlamont receded from the public consciousness. Even more wildly, it was suggested that Mr Scott was in fact a woman whose mastery of disguise had propelled the police on to the ultimate wild goose chase. The truth, though, was rather more mundane. Edward Sweeney, or Edward Davis as many knew him, was indeed Mr Scott of Ardlamont, although it would be months before the facts – which were scant – started to emerge. As of December 1893, with Monson in custody, Scott still missing and preparations for the trial forging ahead, the police remained unable to convert their suspicions about Scott’s identity into hard proof. Nonetheless, it came to be accepted by all the major parties involved in the case that Edward Sweeney alias Davis was almost without doubt the man who had gone hunting with Cecil and Monson on the day of the shooting.
Beyond that, Sweeney’s life, and particularly his movements in the second half of 1893, were shrouded in doubt and rumour. According to some sources, he had once been employed by the Post Office and had spent time at sea before growing disillusioned with life on the waves. Someone claiming to be a former maritime colleague told a journalist from the Sun newspaper in December 1893 that when Sweeney was discharged from the ship upon which he had been working in October 1890, he had alluded to plans for a more lucrative life back on terra firma. ‘I never saw Sweeney till May last year,’ the journalist’s source told him, ‘when I accidentally ran against him at Piccadilly Circus. He was then quite “the toff”, being well-dressed in a light grey suit, a brown bowler hat, and wearing a diamond cluster ring, a diamond pin, and a heavy gold chain. We recognized each other, and he invited me to drink … He said he was doing well, and had made £600 the year before … He was as cool and determined a card as I ever met, with enough cheek for six, very artful and insinuating, and quiet and inoffensive enough when it suited him, but a demon when roused.’ The reliability of such recollections are doubtless questionable, although the story in its fundamentals was feasible.
While Scott’s identity remained in doubt, Monson continued to say that he knew virtually nothing of the man and that Hambrough had been the one who had engaged him. Monson, though, was being disingenuous to say the least, since he had certainly done business with Sweeney on a number of occasions in London. In fact, in a private letter to Lord Galway, Monson’s own mother claimed that two of her other sons had seen ‘this man Scott’ in the company of Alfred and Agnes in England. (The senior Mrs Monson, incidentally, seemed to have little time for her daughter-in-law, telling Lord Galway that she had spoken to tradesmen who had previously had dealing with Alfred’s household and that they ‘have a very low opinion’ of Agnes.)
Several months after the trial, in a series of newspaper and book exposés, it would emerge that Monson had, after all, invited Sweeney (alias Davis alias Scott) to Ardlamont, knowing very well his business. His motive was, however, never conclusively proven. There was the suggestion that the invitation was issued in a fit of largesse (perhaps after a particularly fruitful day of betting). Alternatively, a party of Cecil’s military colleagues were due to arrive at Ardlamont for the Glorious 12th – the first day of the grouse-shooting season. An onsite bookie would have been a well-received source of entertainment, not to mention a means by which Monson might relieve his guests of a portion of their pay. Or was the reason much baser – was Scott to serve as an accomplice in the murder of Cecil?
The decision to present Sweeney as Scott did little to stem the suspicions that later emerged concerning the shooting. But might there have been some sort of innocent explanation? Sweeney in due course would attempt to suggest there was. He said that Monson had first been introduced to him in May 1893 ‘as a young swell with plenty of money and a great liking for horse racing and betting … one from whom I desired and hoped to benefit considerably’. He said he saw Monson perhaps half a dozen times before his trip to Ardlamont on 8 August, when he travelled on the steamer to Kames Pier from Greenock with him. It was on this leg of the trip that he was introduced to James Donald, the man who expected to sell a yacht to Cecil – it was seemingly a chance meeting, during which Monson referred to his travelling companion simply as a ‘person from the estate office’. Donald was supposed to have invited the pair to ‘inspect the boilers’ – apparently engineer’s shorthand for taking a glass of Scotch. It was then, as Sweeney remembered it, that Monson introduced him as Mr Scott. ‘Look here, old fellow,’ Monson was said to have later commented, ‘it will never do for me to introduce you to my wife as Ted Davis the bookmaker, so you mustn’t mind if I say you are something else, for I feel sure she would make a fuss about it. Not that she herself would care; but you know some people are funny about the turf, and think anyone connected with it must be a wrong ’un.’
Sweeney was quite sanguine about it: ‘It don’t matter a jot to me what you call me, so long as you don’t make a fool of me. You can call me Juggins or Muggins if you like, but it is no use my trying to be a toff, you know, and it’s no use my saying I am a sport, for though I know as much about racing as most men that’s about all I know of sport. Can’t you say I’ve come up on business and you have asked me to stay?’ So was born Scott the engineer.
Under normal circumstances, this might have been accepted as a highly credible version of events. Gambling was regarded as a real threat to the social fabric of late-Victorian Britain. While predominantly feared as an uncontrollable vice of the working classes (a vice, as one contemporary commentator put it, that played upon the ‘ignorance of servants and others of the least intelligent class’), it also had a reputation for laying low the great and the good too. Squire Osbaldeston, for example, was for a while a household name not for his work as a Member of Parliament or even for his excellence at sport (he was a first-class jockey, rower and cricketer) but because he racked up gambling debts in excess of £200,000 (some £2 million in modern money). As a result, he was forced to sell his estates and died in poverty in 1866. Gambling pushed the buttons of the age’s social guardians because in virtually no other walk of life were the highest and lowest classes of society brought so close together. The Gaming Act of 1845 even legislated that a wager was an unenforceable legal contract in a bid to free up the courts from the all-too-common sight of eminent figures feuding over gambling debts. By the 1890s the bookmaker was perceived as an illicit figure in society. Bookies such as Sweeney were regarded as particularly heinous, not least for their alleged role in corrupting the ‘sport of kings’. It was no stretch of the imagination to think that Agnes Monson might regard him, if she were to know his true vocation, as a ‘bad hat’ – a swindler. But then if Monson’s mother was correct and Agnes knew of Sweeney all along, that story falls apart.
According to Sweeney’s account of events, given to a journalist some while after the trial had played itself out, he found the Monsons very hospitable on arriving at Ardlamont, although he remained nervous of the impending sport since he was not comfortable with a gun. Then, on the 10th, events began to overtake him. Recalling the scene in the woods, he said, ‘I am not an old soldier or a doctor, and the sight of this fine young gentleman lying dead before me almost took away my sacred senses. I am told I helped lift him up, and if I was asked to, I have no doubt I assisted to the best of my ability; but if my life was staked upon my answer I could not tell you with any minuteness what did or did not happen, or what was or was not said, during the few seconds we were standing by the lifeless body of Cecil Hambrough.’
To be horrified by this close encounter with death was one thing, but why did he then choose to flee the scene? ‘Because neither Mr Monson nor myself had anything to fear,’ he said. ‘Because I had been told by Dr Macmillan I should not be wanted; because it was the most natural and respectful thing to do under the lamentable circumstances, not to intrude myself upon my host and hostess in their awful trouble.’ Thus he justified leaving Ardlamont on the afternoon of the 10th ‘without concealment or undue haste’. As to why he did not give his home address to M’Calman at Tighnabruaich Pier, but instead that of a hotel in Glasgow, he simply said he was not asked for it and ‘because I did not like to give cause for chatter to every busybody by revealing the truth I was so foolishly hiding – namely, my change of name and occupation; and because I did not think it was the right and proper thing to do to Mr and Mrs Monson after their kindness and hospitality to me.’
Having been back in London for a while, Sweeney would recount, he was shocked to read that Monson had fallen under suspicion for Cecil’s death. It was news that he said caused his moral courage to fail: ‘Charged with murder. Good God! I am no saint. I am a bookmaker but not a murderer – not quite so bad as that.’ So, he chose to disappear. By his own account, he packed a few belongings and hit upon a disguise, shaving off his moustache and dressing in old and shabby clothes. He first took a train to Bradford, then on to Halifax – where he assumed the name Mr White – then to Newcastle, back to Halifax and next to Birmingham. He then decided to sail to Ireland from Holyhead but there, he claimed, he spotted a London policeman with whom he was acquainted. Sure that the police were on to him, he decided to turn tail, throwing his bag from the gangplank into the water to cause a distraction while he disappeared into the shadows. From there, if his story is to be believed, he became an itinerant jewellery salesman driving a pony and trap while living hand-to-mouth. In December 1893 he returned to Newcastle before taking a job as a painter in Carlisle. Struck down by a nasty bout of asthma, he then found his way to Bournemouth before finally coming back home to London sometime in the early months of 1894.
This was the story that Scott told to a journalist and it may be true in its entirety or in parts. However, his former landlady at Sutherland Street, Mrs Keen, came forward several years later with a different version. According to her – and on this point, chiming with Sweeney’s own account – on 5 September she encountered Mrs Sweeney in the house in Pimlico crying. ‘Oh, Mrs Keen,’ Sweeney’s mother said, ‘Ted’s gone away, and we shall have to give up the rooms.’ They duly did so a few weeks later, although Mrs Keen struggled to believe that her mild-mannered former tenant could be mixed up with the Ardlamont affair. However, the next part of her narrative cast doubt on Sweeney’s thrilling account of his flight around the country: ‘there is one very interesting fact which the general public does not know and with which very few people have become acquainted,’ she revealed. ‘It is this – that during all the time the hue and cry was raised after Davis [Sweeney], when frantic efforts were being made to discover his whereabouts, and when not a trace of him could be discovered, he was hiding in the East End of London. He told my husband that he was in the East End all the time, and never left it.’
Whatever the truth, Sweeney’s disappearance left Monson in a precarious situation as he prepared to enter the courtroom in December 1893. While Scott could not be produced by the authorities – and if they had been able to, he would surely have been expected to corroborate Monson’s account of the fateful morning – the police were all but sure that they knew his real identity. To suggest that Scott and Sweeney might be two separate individuals both connected to Monson, both physically resembling each other to a remarkable degree and both disappearing at the same time but independently was a stretch too far. Monson had surely overplayed his hand by initially denying all but the barest knowledge of Scott. The overwhelming impression was that he had tried to pull the wool over the eyes of those investigating Cecil’s death. And why should he do that if the pair did not somehow have a hand in his death? Equally, why should Scott go into hiding if he was an innocent man? These would be key questions upon which a jury of Monson’s contemporaries would adjudicate at his much-anticipated trial, scheduled to start two weeks before Christmas of 1893.