Mr. Wilberforce is a newspaper proprietor in a Scottish town. He is appointed to the jury for the town's most notorious trial in years; the prosecution of Margaret Sampson for the murder of her friend Bessie McIntosh. Sampson, a domestic servant in the Aitken household, has been found hacked to death on a Monday morning. The only people known to have been in the house over the weekend were Sampson and the 'Dear Old Gentleman' - eighty-seven-year-old Angus Aitken.
We are taken through the intricacies of a Scottish murder trial. Evidence is presented, and the judge sums up; the jury deliberates and returns a verdict of Not Proven. With Sampson free, attention turns to old Aitken: but could a man of his age commit such a dreadful crime?
One of Wilberforce's reporters, Donald Kirkwall, takes up the case. He pursues Sampson, at the risk of his own life; he enrages the unstable Aitken. At last a confession is obtained, and Wilberforce's paper is on the brink of the scoop of a lifetime -- but it is the Dear Old Gentleman who has the last laugh.
What begins as a fairly conventional detective story broadens out into a thriller and even takes on a moral dimension towards the end. Aitken, for all his senility, is a genuinely frightening villain. How did the writers collaborate, I wonder? -- did Roberts take on the role of the pious conservative Wilberforce and Goodchild that of the crusading Kirkwall? And did they argue about the ending? However it was constructed, this is a book with little detection but a good deal of interest and depth.
And is eighty-seven the record age for a murder suspect?
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