The life of Oscar Slater, from the vantage point of hindsight, divides itself up very neatly into four distinct epochs or phases: the first 28 years, 1872-1900, the period of his youth and early days in Germany; the next eight years, 1901-09, encompass the date of his arrival in Britain to the time of his arrest for murder; then comes l909-27, the terrible 18 years of his trial and incarceration in the prison by Salthouse Head; and then the fourth, and final, period, 1928-48, the last 20 years, provides a sort of codicil, a tranquil coda, to all that has gone before.

The years flicked by. Oscar was living in lodgings at No. 357 Tantallon Road, in the Shawlands district of Glasgow, whence, at Christmas 1930, he sent a seasonal greetings card to William Roughead. From Tantallon Road, he moved to a flat of his own at No. 4 James Gray Street, just round the corner, and all the while, behind the seemingly monotonous frontage of the octennial since his release, something increasingly important, increasingly exciting, had been inexorably progressing. It had started very shortly after his emergence from Peterhead. That was when, introduced by a mutual friend, he had first met Miss Lina Wilhelmina Schad.

Born on 14 April 1903, in Thistle Street, Cowdenbeath, Fife, Lina was the daughter of a butcher, Charles Schad, who had arrived in Scotland from his native Germany, en route, as he thought, for Argentina. But instead, he had met a Miss Agnes Panton Whyte, whom he had married at Cupar, and thereafter remained in Schottland.

Oscar, the mutual friend, and 24-year-old Lina, had met for a drink at the old Charing Cross Hotel, in Glasgow. Oscar and Lina had got on well together; so well that they arranged to meet again – just the two of them this time – the next evening. They went to what used to be known in Glasgow as ‘the’ La Scala cinema, in Sauchiehall Street. ‘The film turned out to be about a murder. A son killed his father. I suddenly heard this sobbing beside me. It was Oscar. I’d never seen a man cry before,’ Lina told me. She led him out of the cinema.

As time went on, Oscar and I grew very fond of each other. It was because of him that I left Glasgow – where I had sisters, although my father and mother were dead. Actually, I left because of the Jewish connection. I wasn’t Jewish, you see. Oscar was – and proud of it. I remember his saying to me that he would never change his religion to marry anyone. And I said that I wouldn’t either. The point is that Oscar’s Jewish friends thought that, if he was going to get married, he ought to marry a Jewish girl, and, incidentally, invest the compensation money in a business. I liked Oscar’s Jewish friends fine, but I got fed up with all the ‘Jewishness’, and the sort of pressure. That’s why I went off to London.

When I arrived there first of all, I got a room at the YWCA and started to look round for a job. I was lucky. I got a position as cashier at the Turkish Baths at the Imperial Hotel, in Bloomsbury. I stayed at the Imperial until 1936. I used to go up to Glasgow every now and again, and stay with my sister. I didn’t even see Oscar every time I went up. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn’t. But Oscar kept in touch. He used to telephone me. We did talk of marriage from time to time, but it just stayed talk. By 1936, I was seeing someone else, and I think Oscar got afraid that if he didn’t do something about it he would lose me.

It was about this time that I received a box of Ferguson’s chocolates from him. They arrived by post, all squashed to bits, but packed in with them was a little cupid. When I was next in Glasgow I called at Ferguson’s. I knew the manager there. I told him: ‘You owe me a box of chocolates!’ I explained about their arriving all squashed. And he said: ‘That wasn’t our fault. The gentleman who bought them wouldn’t let us pack them up. He wanted to post them himself.’ Oscar was shy about enclosing the cupid.

Lina told me that it was shortly after that that: ‘We decided to get married.’

On 13 July 1936, seven years after their first meeting, 33-year-old Miss Lina Schad was married before the Sheriff in the County Buildings, Glasgow, to Mr Oscar Leschziner, aged 64, widower and bank bookkeeper. The honeymoon was at Ayr. On their return to Glasgow, the couple moved into Oscar’s redecorated flat, No. 4 James Gray Street.

We talked it over about having children, and Oscar said that he didn’t want any. He felt that the finger would always be pointed. ‘That’s Oscar Slater’s son – daughter.’ He was a very good husband. You couldn’t ask for better. He did have a very quick temper, though. I remember, right at the beginning he told me: ‘I flare up, but I soon calm down again. Just leave me alone and I recover.’ He never hit me or showed any violence. I was more like ‘an old man’s darling’. Mark you, although he was thirty-one years older than me, he seemed younger than me. He was very young in his ways.

Oscar was interviewed in Glasgow in April 1939, by a newspaper correspondent named Mea Allan.

I talked yesterday with Oscar Slater – still, at 67, a powerfully-built man, tall, with a close-shaven head. He has been married now for four and a half years. His interests are in people and the small day-to-day happenings from which he was shut off for nearly 19 years.

‘Lina and I are very happy,’ he told me. ‘I have many friends and good neighbours. But the best friend is Lina. Do you know why she married me?’ His sad face crinkled into a smile. ‘ “Because you are not yet a hundred, Oscar,” she said. But I shall live to be a hundred – yes. I want many more years of happiness, and Lina and I will always be happy.’

We were chatting in his flat, close to Bellahouston Park, where the Empire Exhibition was held. His comfortable, brown-carpeted sitting-room is a miniature museum, full of curios, among them a wastepaper-basket made from an elephant’s foot, a bronze stork, and a stuffed terrier dog. Oscar Slater collects everything – ‘so long as it is pretty.’ He has a wonderful collection of exquisite Chinese ivories.

He told me the romantic story of his meeting with his wife, Miss Schad, a Scottish-born girl of German parentage.

‘Her father interested himself in the case,’ he told me. ‘And from him Lina learned all the details. When I came out she was waiting for me. “Do you wish me to be friendly with you?” she asked, and I nodded gratefully. “Yes, I shall need a friend,” I told her. And so we went out together, to the pictures and places like that. Then Lina got a job as a bookkeeper in a London hotel. I missed her a great deal, but we wrote to one another. Love is a funny thing, you understand. One moment you are just friends, the next moment you know that you can settle down and be happy for the rest of time. It is of no use to marry unless you are quite, quite sure. It was like that with Lina and me. When I met her again I asked her, “Will you say Yes?” And very soon we were married. I think Lina does not regret. It is very wonderful for me. But you know …’ He leaned forward towards me, an ironical smile in his eyes. ‘If I had been Lina, I would not have married Oscar Slater! No, there was too much … too much that went before … ‘His voice faded out in a whisper.

Suddenly he crossed the room and brought back a wallet of photographs. ‘Look at this little boy. Is he not beautiful? We would wish to adopt him, Lina and I. But he is all his mother has left. He is a refugee.’ Since his release he has been in one job and another, moving from place to place. He is working as a clerk in a Glasgow hotel, his real identity is a close secret, known simply among his fellow workers as ‘Oscar’ – a kindly man whose face is scarred with tragedy, but who loves a joke. He has been in his present employment for nine months, and he hopes to remain for nine years. ‘Because I have a wife to support now. And Lina likes pretty clothes.’

This business of being a hotel bookkeeper and, on his marriage certificate, of being a bank bookkeeper, was all nonsense. His wife told me categorically:

Oscar never worked. He made a living buying and selling things – jewellery, ivories, things like that; small antiques. He would go round the junk shops, attend auctions. He was very clever with his hands. I remember his buying a lovely little ivory figure and finding that some of its toes were missing. He borrowed some finicky little instrument from a neighbour and friend of ours who was a dentist, and Oscar carved a perfect set of replacement toes on to the ivory. He seemed to have a wonderful knowledge, a sort of instinct, where jewellery was concerned. He told me that he had been taught all about it by an uncle of his when he was a boy.

Shortly before World War II, Oscar and his wife left Glasgow and moved to Ayr, where they purchased a smart little bungalow, Oslin,1 25 St Phillans Avenue. It was their dream home: but the dream was to be pathetically short-lived. Even though he had recently applied for naturalisation, it was not long after the outbreak of war that both Oscar and Lina were interned.

With the war over, a few golden years remained to Oscar, spent quietly but extremely happily in his earthly paradise at Ayr. So happy, indeed, that sometimes, for sheer joy of life, he would stand foursquare on Rabbie Burns’ Auld Brig and sing at the top of his lungs’ bent, the wind carrying his weird-accented song away across the melodious waves, to the slightly puzzled, head-cocking cormorants and bobbing gulls.

Life in Ayr was lived at leisure, Oscar busying himself at his own pace about the second-hand Aladdin’s caves of trinketry, and taking his collector’s eye, with profit, to sundry sale-rooms.

Possessed of a good singing voice, he much enjoyed listening to music. He went frequently, too, to the theatre and the cinema. He was, always had been, a great walker. He was also a great talker. After all the years of enforced silence, he liked nothing better than a good crack. A very generous man, he was forever giving his mite to charities – in particular those concerned with the plight of sick or homeless children.

At home, when not doing a spot of wood-carving, or minute and painstaking restoration work on some small objet de vertu, rescued by his discriminatory taste from the rim of the scrap-heap, he would amuse himself perfecting in blueprint or working model, his latest invention. He was, too, immensely house-proud. Everything was spotless, superbly kept and in perfect working order. Oslin sparkled.

Lina told me:

We didn’t quarrel. Not really. Just occasionally we might have some absolutely silly, trivial disagreement, about something like going to the pictures, perhaps. He might want to go the local cinema. I might not fancy what was on. He would look cross, put on his hat and coat and stomp off. When he came home again he wouldn’t say a word. I’d know that he’d gone off to the cinema at Prestwick. He wouldn’t go to the one in Ayr without me, because we were always seen around together, and he wouldn’t want people to see him on his own.

Another thing with him was swimming. Oscar was a very keen swimmer. When we lived at Ayr, he did a lot of swimming. As spring came round he’d be watching the weather. ‘Here comes the sun,’ he’d say. And the first really nice day, off we’d go for a swim. And that was it! Once I’d been for a swim with him, I had to go every day – even if the weather-promise of that first good swimming day proved a false one. Once you’d been for a swim, you were expected to keep it up until the return of the really chill autumn days put a stop to it.

He loved the beach, he loved his modest garden at the bungalow, and longed to grow exotic flowers there. Bronzed by the sun and west-coast winds, athletic, always well-dressed, he was a familiar figure in the town, and looked considerably younger than his three score years and ten-plus.

Said his widow:

Of course everybody knew he was Oscar Slater, and I had to get used to people staring and nudging and whispering. They would go past you. Then you would hear their footsteps stop. You would look round and find that they had stopped and turned round to have a good look.

Usually, Oscar took all this in good part, but Mrs Leschziner told me:

I remember how upset he got when one day we were walking along the front at Ayr and a man came up and spoke to him. It was someone who had been in prison with him – a real rough type. Oscar said: ‘I don’t mind talking to him, but he shouldn’t come up like that when I’m with you.’ He used to tell me about the awful time he had in Peterhead. He hated anyone calling him Slater. I think that was because it reminded him of his time in prison when they would shout at him, ‘Slater … do this. Slater … do that.’

I asked about Oscar’s illness and death.

As a rule he was wonderfully fit. Never ailed. But that January of 1948, he’d been feeling a bit funny. He went to the doctor, but Oscar still felt there was something wrong. He would point to his chest and say, ‘In here. It’s not right.’ I managed in the end to get him to stay in bed for a couple of days. What a job that was!

The day he died, 31 January 1948, I remember it was a Saturday, I’d been out doing a little bit of shopping. Oscar was in bed. I wanted to do him a little boiled fish. He wanted to go to the toilet. I told him to stay in bed, but he wouldn’t. He insisted on getting up to go across to the lavatory. He got as far as the lavatory door, then fell to the floor. He was dead. It was just about four o’clock in the afternoon.

Dr Thomas Rutherford certified death as due to pulmonary embolism, phlebitis. The name of Oscar’s intimate friend and next-door neighbour, William McKay, of No. 27 St Phillans Avenue, appears on the certificate as present at the death.

The funeral was at the Crematorium, the Western Necropolis, at Maryhill, Glasgow, at 3.30pm on Tuesday, 3 February 1948.

Because Oscar was not officially attached to any particular religion, Councillor J. S. Clarke, who delivered the oration, recited verses from the Bhagavad-Gita, sacred book of the Hindus – the same as had been read over the body of Mahatma Gandhi a few days before – and read passages from the works of Krishna, the Hindu god. Only a small number of mourners, relatives of the widow, attended the funeral ceremony.

Oscar’s ashes were scattered.

He left £4,917 3s. Within a year, Oscar’s widow had sold the bungalow at Ayr – the little neat home in the west – and moved to a ground-floor flat at 46 Bellwood Street, back in Glasgow, within a stone’s throw of James Gray Street, where it had all begun.

Why did she leave Ayr?

People used to meet me in the street and say how sorry they were about Oscar’s death. It kept continually bringing it back to me. I remember the last straw was one day when I ran into a policeman who had known Oscar well, and, as he was offering his condolences, I burst into floods of tears in the street – yet again. I felt I must escape to somewhere where I could be more private, more anonymous.

So, rather like the way I had run away south from the living Oscar all those years before, I ran away from the dead Oscar, or, rather, from those perpetual, publicly distressing reminders of him.

Lina Leschziner was to live on, alone, in the flat in Bellwood Street, for 43 years. She died in her ninetieth year, on 21 October 1992.

To the end, she had no regrets.

To the end, she still missed Oscar.

1 Os (car) plus Lin (a) makes Oslin!