‘Poor girl! The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand.’
Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger’
It is not impossible that Alfred Monson was, as he claimed, innocent of the murder of Cecil Hambrough. Accidental deaths involving shotguns were, after all, far more common than homicides. Maybe Cecil – a little hazy from the previous night’s misadventure on the water, not to mention the drinks that flowed freely afterwards – lost his footing in the woods at Ardlamont, catching his gun on a bush or tree stump and inadvertently setting it off. As the prosecution and the newspapers showed, such freakish occurrences happened more than one might think.
And yet. Such a view of the events of 10 August 1893 demand the setting aside of a vast bank of suspicious circumstances. We are forced to accept as just coincidence that Monson had only days earlier secured life insurance upon the victim, that only the night before the non-swimmer Cecil had been thrown from a boat in which a hole had been purposefully gorged, that one of his hunting companions was masquerading behind an assumed identity and subsequently went to ground for entirely innocent reasons, that Cecil was carrying a gun that was normally in the possession of Alfred Monson, and that the shot which killed him should have hit him in the head from behind. Away from the strictures of a judicial system that demands the prosecution prove its case beyond doubt, it is difficult rationally to avoid the conclusion that Cecil died at his tutor’s hand. Furthermore, there is other suggestive evidence of which the jury was unaware – beyond even Bell’s revelation that, according to George Sweeney, Edward Sweeney had witnessed the slaying.
From the outset, the problem faced by those who suspected Monson’s involvement was how to explain various anomalous aspects of the case. With the forensics disputed – although experts as eminent as Robert Churchill in due course suggested it should not have been – the prosecution had to establish an inviolable motive. They hit, naturally enough, upon financial gain – specifically, £20,000 of life insurance. Yet several lingering questions undermined the assertion. Why would a man apparently skilled in insurance fraud take out a policy on his victim that was legally invalid? If murder was always the intention, why not wait until Cecil turned twenty-one and the insurance could be legitimately activated? Moreover, why kill him anyway if there was the prospect of greater profit in keeping him alive?
To take the last of those questions first, the truth was that no one seemed quite sure just how valuable an asset Cecil’s life might prove to be. The press had spoken of clauses in his grandfather’s will that would see him inherit something approaching a quarter of a million pounds on reaching his majority, although this would never have been the case in reality – there was never such an explicit guarantee. Then, during the course of the trial, a value was put on Steephill and his father’s other property in Middlesex that was confidently in the region of six figures. Yet this was also a misrepresentation of the wealth that Cecil might have expected to come into anytime soon. In fact, he would have been entitled to nothing automatically on turning twenty-one. Only when his father died – and the Major was just forty-four at the time of Cecil’s death – would he inherit the right to the family estates. On his next birthday, Cecil might have sought to limit the succession on Steephill with his father’s permission – that is to say, they could have removed the legal provisions to pass the property on to the next generation – and then they could have sold the estate as a freehold. Equally, Cecil could have taken a mortgage on his prospective inheritance, although any responsible mortgager would have demanded a sizable life insurance against his predeceasing his father. Neither strategy was straightforward or a guarantee of riches.
All of which is to say that Cecil was not the easy meal-ticket he might once have seemed to Monson. In October 1893, Mr Kime, a solicitor who had acted for several members of the Hambrough family over a period of years, went public to say that the Hambrough estates had been considerably overvalued. In Kime’s opinion, on coming of age Cecil would have been in little better financial position than he was as a minor. He believed that if Cecil had mortgaged his prospective interest he would have raised a sum amounting only to a few years’ purchase of his birthright – especially since the solicitor did not believe the boy to qualify medically as a first-class risk. On the other hand, if father and son chose to cut off the entail and sell the estates as freeholds, the obviously forced nature of such a sale would ensure they received a price much lower than the paper value. They would then need to settle the various debts accrued by both father and son, leaving little in the pot for their futures or, indeed, to pay commission to Monson and Tot. Kime went so far as to suggest that any attempt by Cecil to raise money on turning twenty-one would likely prove ruinous. Once it became clear that the Cecil–Monson–Tot axis was not going to be able to remortgage Steephill – and whatever the defence suggested at trial, it was obvious by the early summer of 1893 that that particular opportunity was dead and buried once the Eagle Insurance Company had expressed their preference for a proposed deal with the Major – Cecil was suddenly a much less attractive financial prospect. Furthermore, Monson likely realized that any new scheme would probably need the cooperation of Cecil’s father, which was by then in very short supply.
Under such circumstances, it is easy to see why Monson might have been tempted by a quick cash-in via an insurance claim on Cecil’s life. Except that the policy was not valid while Cecil remained a minor. Monson, Tot and several other witnesses testified that they clearly understood this at the time the policy was taken, and so could not have possibly killed in the expectation of gaining financially from it. This, though, was an argument flawed at many levels. Firstly, if they knew it to be invalid, why go to the effort of purchasing the policy and then having Cecil go through the motions of reassigning it unless they thought that such actions might suffice in the eyes of the law? Even more pertinently, why put in a claim on that insurance if they knew there was no entitlement?
The answer, surely, is there in the evidence of Tottenham. Asked why he had made the claim on Mrs Monson’s behalf, having been told by her husband that the assignment was no good, he replied: ‘I thought I might possibly get the money paid by “bluffing” the insurance office.’ This was the basis upon which Monson and Tot had based their careers – trying it on. Often enough, it had worked. There was a long line of, on the one hand, unpaid creditors and, on the other, indebted clients to prove that. And what was there to lose? The doctor had signed off the death as an accident and Cecil was safely in the ground at Ventnor. Given all that followed, it is easy to forget that the story might have been very different if only the perturbed Procurator-Fiscal had not ordered an exhumation. Even if the insurance company baulked at paying, the worse that Monson might have expected is an undignified retreat from the claim. Once Cecil’s funeral was complete, he would surely have calculated that the chance of being accused of killing him as very low. We know from Monson’s previous brushes with the law that he did not fear the finger of suspicion. As long as there was insufficient evidence to actually ensnare him, he could brush off accusations and insinuations quite happily. Build trust, defraud, move on – that had long been the Monson way.
Next, the apparently perplexing question of why Monson would ever have inveigled a character as flaky as Scott/Sweeney into proceedings at all? Sweeney, a man much less physically imposing than Cecil, was an odd choice of henchman. All the evidence suggests he was just what he seemed to be – a bookie’s clerk operating on the fringes of society. Not a thug and certainly not a murderer. The idea that he was at Ardlamont to assist Monson in killing Cecil lacks credibility. So why was he there? Most probably, Monson invited him ostensibly to serve as a bookie with a view to sharing the profits. Cecil’s army friends were due on the estate ahead of the Glorious Twelfth, and military men with money in their pockets and a little free time offered rich pickings. Sweeney would surely have jumped at the invitation. But what of taking on the identity of Scott the engineer? According to Sweeney, it was not a persona he assumed but one that was thrust upon him by Monson, on the grounds that the presence of a man of such an undistinguished profession might raise eyebrows. If we take this at face value, Sweeney was thus coerced into playing a role.
But for what purpose? If Monson intended to kill Cecil, he must have known that suspicion would fall immediately upon him if Cecil were to die while alone in his company. But if there might be a third-party witness to testify that there had been an accident … Sweeney, a youngish man of poorish health and lacking social graces, was just the sort of chap that Monson would feel confident of being able to manipulate. Imagine Sweeney’s dilemma as he stood over the body of Cecil Hambrough. There he is, up from London to make a little oof, swanning around pretending he is someone he isn’t. Monson tells him that Hambrough has shot himself. What should Sweeney do? Go along with it? He may not have seen the fatal shot fired, in which case maybe he convinces himself that Monson is telling the truth. But what if he has seen a murder? Who is to believe him? Over Monson, a man of manners and breeding? Best just to go along with things and then get away from there as quickly as possible.
For his part, Monson has his alibi. Sweeney can back him up with the doctor and then go on his merry way. And should the bookie go rogue and implicate him, it will be easy enough to unmask him. To say, ‘Here is a fellow who is not at all whom he claims to be. Here must be the real killer.’ Out among the rowan trees that morning, Sweeney is doubtless already fearing for his neck. And so Monson’s scheme plays out beautifully. Dr Macmillan is persuaded that Cecil’s death is but a terrible accident, and assures the men that there will be no need for a more formal enquiry. Sweeney leaves the scene just after lunch, a little earlier than Monson hopes. He is heard to exclaim his disappointment that Scott is going so soon. No need to arouse suspicions by being too hasty, surely. But no matter, the job has been done. All is on track.
Even Scott/Sweeney’s subsequent disappearance didn’t hamper Monson’s cause. It merely added to the sense of confusion that Monson has been careful to cultivate. At the time of going to trial, nothing of substance was known for sure about Scott. Even as his retreat raised suspicions against Monson, it was all but impossible for the prosecution to make much of it. Again, Monson’s accusers were left to make insinuations but unable to deliver hard proof. Moreover, Monson’s actions in removing and cleaning the guns, suggesting that he and Cecil had swapped guns, and claiming that Cecil’s body had been moved from where it fell all helped to create the uncertainty upon which his defence would rely. Even the life insurance evidence, which had seemed the prosecution’s trump card, became so blurred over the question of who knew what about its validity that it ended up playing into the hands of Monson and his team. It is possible to see Monson as a bank robber who lets off a smoke bomb that allows him calmly to go about his business amid the pandemonium he has initiated. If Monson was the murderer that Bell and Littlejohn believed him to be, his conduct was a masterclass in obfuscation. After a career of fairly crude get-rich-quick schemes, it seems possible that Monson had brought to bear a hitherto well disguised level of criminal sophistication. This was an exhibition of misdirection more astounding than anything Charles Morritt might have devised. Or perhaps he had simply got lucky, circumstances conspiring to veil the truth in uncertainty and contradiction. Monson could not claim to have committed the perfect crime but he did, nonetheless, walk away from the affair with his freedom intact.
But what if the prosecution had it wrong as to why Monson killed Cecil? Suppose that financial gain was not the motive – or at least, not the main motive. Could this have been instead a crime passionnel? While the defence stretched their case to suggest that Cecil was worth more to Monson alive than dead, the timing was nonetheless curious. In less than a year, Cecil could have legally reassigned the life insurance policies, ensuring the matter of getting a payout on his death was a much simpler one. True, Monson was always in need of a quick buck but if the killing was an insurance job, it had the hallmarks of being over hasty. But what if the insurance was only ever meant to be a secondary benefit to Cecil’s death, on the off-chance that Tot could chivvy through the claim? Or what if the insurance was always supposed to serve as a diversion – suggestive of a motive that might be discredited when the policy was exposed as invalid. More smoke and mirrors.
Agnes Monson is an enigmatic figure in the story of Cecil Hambrough’s death. She is the veiled beauty who might occasionally show herself for a moment before retreating back into the shadows. She was, we may assume, a free spirit in her youth – the fearless risk-taker prepared to take off around the world in pursuit of love. She was devoted, too, standing by her man even as their hopes of a happy and settled life faded. No matter what trouble her husband found himself in, what new depths he plumbed, what indignity she faced, she remained constant. Where he went, she followed. Whether she turned a blind eye to his criminal schemes or became actively embroiled in them, we cannot know for sure. She did, though, allow her name to be used by him as required in his financial dealings. And even as her husband faced public denunciation, she was there, striding across the deck of the Lord of the Isles, proclaiming his innocence to all who would listen – just as she would be present at the back of the court for the duration of his trial.
Yet if she expected her devotion to be repaid even in small part, she was to be savagely disappointed. Virtually as soon as the trial ended, the Monsons were living separate lives – she trying to raise a large family as he embarked on money-making schemes that were either madcap or dodgy, and often both. The little money that came his way generally went out again to support his gentleman’s lifestyle, rather than his family. Eventually she was compelled to turn to the courts in a last, desperate bid to make him face up to his responsibilities. Even then, the judgments in her favour went unheeded. Had Monson simply grown tired of his wife? Had the trauma of the Ardlamont affair extinguished the feelings they once had for each other? Or was he perhaps harbouring a longer-term resentment? On 20 June 1898, Monson petitioned his wife for divorce. In the petition, he alleged that on 24 July 1891 Agnes had committed adultery with an unknown person at Riseley Hall. Furthermore, in October and November 1891 she had ‘committed adultery with one Cecil Hambrough at the Hotel Metropole, Whitehall in the County of London’.
The divorce was never formalized, probably because Monson started his five-year sentence for fraud before it could be completed. The petition did, however, cast a new light on the events of 1893. But was his claim true? By 1898 relations were so poor between husband and wife that he was doubtless happy to throw enough mud at her in the hope that some might stick. If she was intent on taking him through the courts for maintenance, he might at least take what remained of her reputation. He may even have thought that there may be some money to be had by reigniting memories of the events at Ardlamont. But for all that, his claim is not without some credibility.
From her various cameo appearances, a picture begins to build. Agnes herself told a journalist in 1898 that by the time the Monsons were living at Riseley Hall, the family home had become ‘unbearable’ and that she had relied upon Cecil to protect her from ‘brutal violence’. Then there was the evidence given at the trial by Alexandra Shand, the family’s nursemaid. In an incidental aside, she described seeing Cecil and Agnes walking together along the cliffs below Ardlamont Point, while her husband and the man Shand knew as Scott were out boating. How often did the pair go for walks together, and how might their relations have developed during those periods in each other’s company. In the parlour rooms of Victorian Britain, it took less than a walk along the romantic Scottish coastline to set tongues wagging. Meanwhile, the Aberdeen Weekly Journal in September 1893 alluded to local gossip concerning ‘certain relations of a rather peculiar nature’ that were ‘supposed to have existed between the late Lieutenant Hambrough and the Monson family’. As was surely intended by the journalist responsible, the mind boggles and the suspicion of untoward sexual relations is unavoidable. After all, Cecil was young and handsome, and Agnes beguiling. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they may have found sanctuary in one another, especially if, as Agnes implied, her marriage was already in the doldrums.
Cecil and the Monsons were also known to visit the Hotel Metropole on occasion. Having opened in 1885 at the corner of Northumberland Avenue and Whitehall Place in London, the Metropole quickly established itself as a favourite with the capital’s smart set. Boasting ‘every possible convenience and comfort’, it was said to regularly host parties for the Prince of Wales and it is even thought to have been featured in a Sherlock Holmes story, as the ‘select London hotel’ where Francis H. Moulton stayed in ‘The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor’. In January 1893, an irate Major Hambrough had tracked Cecil down there, where he found him in the company of Alfred and Agnes.
During Monson’s trial there was also an extraordinary exchange between the opposing lawyers and John Campbell Shairp, the Sheriff-Substitute of Argyllshire. On 30 August 1893 – the day of Monson’s arrest – Shairp supervised a search of Ardlamont House for any relevant papers, which in the event included letters, pawn tickets and Monson’s diary. ‘When the search was being made that day, did you see Mrs Monson?’ Shairp was asked.
‘I did,’ he replied.
‘Did you ask her about any documents?’
At this point, Comrie Thomson for the defence objected, and the judge expressed his doubts as to it being a ‘competent question’. The witness then continued his testimony: ‘I saw a small bundle of documents in a sliding drawer in the wardrobe in Mrs Monson’s room. I glanced at them, but did not take possession of them. There were two letters, but I cannot say what their contents were. I cannot explain why I did not take possession of the letters without saying what Mrs Monson said to me.’
The judge then interjected, ‘In consequence of what she said you did not think it necessary to take possession of them?’
Shairp: ‘I did not.’
Comrie Thomson then objected to any further questioning as to the contents of the letters on the grounds that they had not been entered into evidence – they could not have been, since Agnes had squirrelled them away.
There is no way of knowing what was in these letters, nor is it clear why the witness could not reveal what Agnes had said to him to persuade him to leave them as they were. However, it does not take a huge leap of imagination to think that she may have implied that the correspondence was of such a sensitive and personal nature – love letters, say – that she must be allowed to retain them. Faced with an alluring damsel in distress, how could a noble sheriff-substitute deny her. It was the sort of evidence-gathering failure that would have driven Holmes, Littlejohn and Bell to despair. But were these missives perhaps evidence of the affair between his student and his wife that Monson suspected?
As to Cecil’s fate, it probably mattered less whether he was indeed Agnes’s lover than whether Monson truly believed him to be so. Alternatively, if Monson considered that Cecil and Agnes had a developing bond, might he have feared her telling Cecil something about the schemes Monson and Tot had been plotting for so long? Cecil’s correspondence with his father revealed an innocent’s faith in Monson’s good intentions. But should Agnes warn him that their plans were not as virtuous as he believed, Monson’s house of cards risked toppling.
We might then speculate that by early August 1893, Monson had concluded Cecil was expendable: he offered no guarantee of a financial bonanza anymore and he also posed an existential threat to Monson’s marriage. Monson could perhaps just about stomach the thought of a flirtation, perhaps even a fully formed liaison, between Agnes and Cecil while Cecil might still deliver a financial windfall. But with that hope dissipated, did two years’ worth of suspicions of infidelity at last boil over? Furthermore, if Agnes’s loyalty extended to warning Cecil against Monson and Tot, there may be legal repercussions, too. Major Hambrough was convinced that Monson was fraudulently after his family’s rightful wealth and, if Cecil provided any corroborating evidence, Monson could be in danger. In short, Cecil had become a problem that needed removing. Throw in a last-minute life insurance policy and his elimination might even bring monetary reward. Those few days in the relative solitude of Ardlamont before Cecil’s friends arrived on 11 August provided the ideal window of opportunity to enact a plan.
This is, of course, merely hypothesis. To paraphrase the words of Heron Watson, I will grant that we are in the region of conjecture. Nonetheless, by entertaining the idea – as perhaps the prosecution ought to have done – that Cecil’s death was motivated by more than a hoped-for insurance scam, it is possible to explain some of the apparent oddities in the evidence against Monson. Indeed, the Sketch raised the spectre of adultery while the trial was still ongoing:
Of course, there have been cynics who, adopting the maxim of ‘Cherchez la femme’, have suggested that it is a case of a crime coming from jealousy, well or ill-founded; and others, more cruel still, who pretend that there ought to have been a third name in the ‘indication’; but, however strong the rumours may be, nothing has been published of a character to justify these suggestions and, therefore, they may be put aside. Notwithstanding this, they lend an air of romance to the many mysterious circumstances that surround this striking case.
It would be another five years before Monson gave public voice to his suspicions that Agnes and Cecil had been lovers. As Sherlock Holmes noted in ‘The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor’ – published just over a year before Cecil’s death – ‘Jealousy is a strange transformer of characters.’