Whether or not this explained the ‘Harriet’ letters, his premise rang true. A few years earlier, the Belfast Evening Telegraph had run an article which described how both professional and amateur lady detectives, often recruited from within society itself, were employed ‘with the object of elucidating matters of the first importance to financiers, promoters of trusts, and concessionnaries [sic] of all kinds.’29 This could involve anything from upcoming political moves that might affect the stock exchange to the stable secrets of leading racehorse owners.
Private detectives were sitting on a goldmine. All that gossip overheard whilst undercover at parties or playing cards, not to mention information gathered during other routine investigations, was valuable currency. Why keep it locked away if there were buyers ready and waiting?
Of course, none of that precluded them selling some of that information to journalists as well. Although I had no evidence that any money had changed hands, one of Maud’s own appearances in the American press seemed to be just the kind of thing ‘Harriet’ was after. The story in question appeared in both the Washington Post and the New York Tribune on 16 June 1914, having arrived by special cable the previous day: 30
The Duchess and Princess of Teck were both sisters-in-law to the Queen, so not the sort one gossiped about, but Maud didn’t stop there:
I am reliably informed that several other royalties besides the Duchess and the Princess have contributed subscriptions, in many cases as high as $5,000. It is simply a form of blackmail. Royalty is paying merely to escape molestation.31
Maud’s allegations piggybacked on the news that police had seized the list of contributors to militant funds during a raid on the WSPU headquarters on 23 May. There was jubilation in Parliament and the press at this coup, although as one organizer of the WSPU pointed out, the list appeared in their annual report ‘and may be bought by anyone for 3d.’32 Nevertheless, the government announced that it would seek to prosecute those who had contributed funds.33
When the story bounced back to the British press, Maud’s name had been removed along with any mention of the royal family. She did, however, speak anonymously about ‘two foreign royalties now in London’ and ‘several well-known hosts and hostesses’:
Some of my clients who have told me that they have paid money to the militant funds I know are certainly not in sympathy with the militant movement, and now that the subscribers are threatened with prosecution they are rather wishing that they had not done so.34
As it happened, the government was forced to back-pedal quickly on its stated intent to prosecute after it took a closer look at the subscriber list and realized that it included a good number of Britain’s elite.
I decided to take a look myself and spent a day in the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics going through the WSPU annual reports and subscription lists in the Suffragette newspaper. There was no mention of the Duchess or Princess of Teck. It was possible that their contributions were buried amongst the hundreds of anonymous donations, but, if so, they hadn’t paid very much. Certainly no one had given anywhere near $5,000.
The two ‘foreign royalties’ were easier to spot, although one of those, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh, was a known suffragette and the other, Her Highness the Ranee of Sarawak, was an old friend of Oscar Wilde, so hardly a shocking addition to the list. Not having an intimate knowledge of high society at the time, it was impossible to know how many ‘society hostesses’ were included. There were dozens of titled subscribers, but the majority had also collected funds from others on top of their personal donations, so presumably were supportive of the cause.
I was left with two theories. Either Maud had access to financial information not included in the official WSPU accounts and had decided to leak that to the press, or she was selling secrets that weren’t true. I didn’t know which was worse.
Could one ever trust a private detective? The correspondent in The Times didn’t seem to think so, nor did Sir Richard Muir, the famous barrister who had said that the calling ‘stank in the nostrils of every honest man’. Common adjectives used in court included ‘sordid’, ‘dirty’ and ‘dishonest’.
Others, however, were more sanguine. The Belfast Evening Telegraph had concluded its article about lady detectives with the statement: ‘So long as espionage is not employed for the purpose of harassing private people or of carrying out some improper scheme, it is not likely to give any offence or do any mischief.’35
The problem was that it was often employed for those very purposes. With no system of regulation in place, setting oneself up as a private detective was the perfect cover for all manner of swindles and frauds. Take the case of David Watson, an inquiry agent who specialized in the recovery of stolen property. In 1913, it emerged that he had been arranging many of the thefts himself. His downfall came after he ‘recovered’ a jade ornament stolen from Liberty a little too swiftly.36
There were worse crooks to be found – those detectives dabbling in blackmail and extortion, for example – but what caught my eye about Watson’s case was a statement that he made in court. In a bid to put a final nail in the coffin of his respectability, the prosecution had raised the fact, or possibly fiction, that he had once lived in sin with a countess. In response, Watson said:
Is there anything marvellous in that? I called myself an inquiry agent, and I don’t set myself up as an emblem of moral rectitude. The necessary stock-in-trade of an inquiry agent is that he should be a man who has seen something in the world and has known something about it.37
This was, in a nutshell, the problem with private detectives. They had to be willing to act in an underhand manner and understand the baser elements of human nature; they had to know how to cheat at cards, dig up dirt and bury secrets – and the fact that they had that knowledge, with all the attendant questions of how they acquired it, made them inherently suspect.
It also made them eminently employable. When clients found themselves in a tight corner, it was useful to have someone on hand who would be willing to bring matters to a neat resolution – whatever it took.
In 1905, for example, the Hon. Mrs Chetwynd found herself alone and living in Paris following a divorce. In a series of legal rulings, she had lost custody of her two young daughters, first to her husband and then, due to his subsequent death and that of his mother, to the horticulturist Christopher Leyland (of leylandii fame), who lived at Haggerston Castle in Northumberland. Quite naturally, she wanted them back. She hired Thomas Duguid, a sixty-year-old inquiry agent, to make this happen. Duguid had got as far as buying off the housekeeper at the castle and making the acquaintance of the coastguard on Holy Island (his intention being to whisk the girls away by boat to Spain) when the police knocked on the door of his lodgings and caught him with a notebook outlining his plans.38
When it came to the trial, the press was conflicted. Here was a rogue private detective of the sort it instinctively despised, yet he had gone rogue for a cause that many considered justifiable. As the Bystander put it: ‘That a mother should desire possession of her children and that, if usual means fail her, she should have resource to the unusual, is easily understood …’39 The pressure of public opinion meant that when Duguid was sentenced, he received a lenient nine months.
Did Maud kidnap children or deal in stolen goods? Probably not, although she undoubtedly broke the law in other ways on behalf of clients. Alongside committing perjury by fabricating evidence in the divorce court, it seemed to be part of the job. She would never admit to such behaviour in print, of course. Who would? If anything, she seemed to be trying to distance herself from it. Her story of turning away the fortune teller who wanted her to dig up society secrets took on a new significance in light of my recent discoveries.
But who was she trying to impress? Her articles, in all their gossipy glory, still seemed a risk to her reputation, and a pointless one at that. Everything I had read suggested that the upper classes would have chosen a private detective through word of mouth. At
a pinch, they might have selected one of the established agencies via the classified ads, but they certainly wouldn’t have flicked through their cook’s weekend paper to find out which lady detectives seemed au fait with the ways of their fellow aristocrats. The same went for business clients or financial speculators.
Rereading the stories I had collected so far, I noticed one thing they had in common. However outlandish they got, the majority started from one of three scenarios: an investigation into suspected infidelity, an attempt to track down a missing person, or an allegation of blackmail. These weren’t exclusively upper-class problems; anyone with a bit of money might seek help in such distressing situations.
Maybe, through her writing, Maud West the ‘society’ detective was courting an altogether different client group: the middle classes. They were, after all, the people most likely to be impressed, rather than appalled, by her tales of working for Lady This or the Honourable That. Nor did they widely enjoy the type of social connections that allowed for discreet personal recommendations when it came to hiring help.
Somehow, Maud had to make her agency stand out amidst the multitude scattered throughout London and provincial towns. Yes, she was a woman, but was that an advantage or a disadvantage? At least through her stories she could control that particular narrative and argue that she was as good – better, even – than a man. By using glamour and humour, and playing with the tropes of detective fiction, she could lodge herself in the minds of prospective clients, all the while repeating the message that she was available for divorce, missing persons and blackmail investigations.
This theory also made sense of a sleight of hand I had noticed in one of her early advertisements, which had appeared for a few years below her usual offering on the back page of the Daily Telegraph:40
I’d eagerly looked in Vanity Fair to find the article which would surely cement Maud’s position as the favoured lady detective amongst the upper classes. But there was only a small filler item at the bottom of a page about the centenary of Darwin’s birth, which gave her office address and the statement ‘Readers can rely upon absolute secrecy and exceptional ability.’41 It was essentially another advertisement; presumably she had come to some arrangement, by whatever means, with the editor for its inclusion. When I had first come across it, it had seemed a half-hearted effort for a detective trying to boost her credentials amongst the well-to-do subscribers of Vanity Fair. But now, viewed as a ruse to secure a society ‘endorsement’ with which to impress the middle-class readers of the Daily Telegraph? Genius.
Could one ever trust a private detective? Probably not.
One morning, wondering whether my investigation was even ‘worth the candle’, as Maud would put it, my inbox pinged. The scan of the photograph from Manchester Archives, the description of which had started my whole quest, had arrived. I perked up.
Going by the clothes and slight sagging along her cheek and jawline, Maud must have been in her forties or early fifties when it was taken. As the caption indicated, she was sitting at her desk, examining a piece of handwriting through a magnifying glass. I enlarged the photo on my screen, taking it all in.
I couldn’t tell what she was looking at – a forged document or just a laundry bill she had lying around? – but I was satisfied. The photograph seemed a genuine portrait of a woman at work, in a rather ordinary office. There was no evidence of the overflowing vases of flowers or New Art statuettes that some journalists had mentioned, just plain walls and a glass-panelled door.
As for the detective herself, she was well turned out – her nails were neatly manicured – but she didn’t look as though she’d made any special effort for the occasion. She’d recently had a cigarette; the ashtray peeked out between the papers on the desk, of which there were just enough to suggest a busy workload whilst hinting at a neat filing system elsewhere. She was clearly a woman in command.
I surveyed my own desk. Was I a woman in command, a worthy match for the slippery Maud West? My own filing system comprised various unstable ziggurats of loose papers, a sprawling database into which everything digital got dumped, countless sticky notes and a jumble of tea-stained notebooks. From where I sat, still in my pyjamas, it seemed doubtful.
Whilst making an effort to tidy up, I picked up the printout from the London Gazette that I’d made a few weeks earlier. I hadn’t paid any attention to it since then and just added it to one of the piles as I chased other leads. But now, taking a closer look, I realized what a mistake that had been. Legalese may be dull, but it has its purpose. I turned back to the photograph and, yes, I’d missed it there, too: a small detail, but suddenly glaringly – gleamingly – obvious. You see what you expect to see.
Elliott nose or not, Maud was unlikely to be George Elliott KC’s daughter – or any blood relative, for that matter – because Elliott wasn’t the name that she’d been assigned at birth. There was no getting away from it:
Edith Elliott, aka Miss Maud West, was married.
The Prince of Lovers
BY MAUD WEST
Some time ago I received a visit from a M. Dupont, a well-to-do merchant in Marseilles. I had acted for him in one or two matters and was glad to renew our friendship.
‘Well, Miss West,’ he began, as he planted his portly form in the office arm-chair. ‘I have come to see you on behalf of my good friend L. and his wife. They are compatriots of yours, and well blessed with the goods of this world. L. is a successful merchant with branches in Paris and Tours. He has a charming wife, but is afflicted with a little devil of a daughter.
‘She is nineteen and has just left a finishing school. She is a head-strong, determined, and romantic little idiot, who possesses a certain amount of brains and a wonderful face and figure … She means to travel and see the world, and unless they agree she will get a job abroad.
‘Unfortunately she has control over a certain annual allowance, and her parents fear that unless they accede to her request she will run off and land herself in trouble.’
‘That is not an unusual thing for a young woman to threaten, Monsieur Dupont,’ I said. ‘All young women feel like that at some time or other. I did. I ran off when I was nineteen …’
‘I know … I know …’ interrupted my friend. ‘And you made a success of it, because you are cautious and not a fool. But Violet is not like that. She is madly romantic and would be easy prey for an adventurer.’
‘What do you propose to do about it?’ I asked.
He smiled. ‘Rather it is what you propose to do, Miss West,’ he said. ‘… I have suggested to L. that he consents to his daughter’s request. She is keen to visit England …’
We eventually arranged a plan, and M. Dupont went back to France … I had my own ideas regarding this young woman. I had seen her photograph, and besides being extremely good-looking there was a determined cut to her pretty mouth … I arranged with my agent in Paris, Jules Darracquer, that when the girl left home she should be shadowed until she arrived in London.
Now our young lady, instead of travelling from her home near Tours to Le Havre, and taking the boat to Southampton, as arranged, broke her journey at Paris, where she engaged rooms at an hotel on the Boulevarde Montmartre. Three days later I received this alarming report from Darracquer:
Re. V. L. Seems have no intention of continuing journey. Frequenting restaurants and dance clubs in Montmartre district. Has made acquaintance of Prince of Lovers. Hotel office reports several large cheques cashed. Advise action. Darracquer
Darracquer must have known I would be alarmed when I read the words ‘Prince of Lovers,’ for this nickname disguised the identity of an individual who has caused a great deal of trouble to lots of people – invariably women! He was the son of a Marseilles waterfront tough, a member of the gang of apaches. The man, whom we will call Moquelain, had discovered that there were safer ways of earning money than by gangster methods. He was good-looking, tall and lithe. A professional gigolo and blackmailer, he was just the sort of person to cast a spell
over the romantic mind of Violet L.
There was no good to be done by getting in touch with the French police, because Moquelain was too clever to have laid himself open to a charge. To warn the girl against his overtures would have been simply foolish, for he had probably told her some romantic tale about himself. There seemed to be only one course, and as I had been instructed that money was no object, I took it. I wired Darracquer:
Buy off Prince of Lovers. West.
Unfortunately, Darracquer made a false move. Instead of paying Moquelain for some ostensible business which would take him to the other end of France, he was foolish enough to tell the gigolo that the money was being paid provided he did not see the girl again. This was playing straight into Moquelain’s hands, although Darracquer believed that all was well …
In the meantime the girl had arrived in London and occupied a small flat her parents had secured for her in a block of mansions, in which one of her women relatives also lived. I promptly made arrangements with the hall-porter that I should be given particulars of all Miss L.’s callers. I took an empty flat in the building and installed therein a pretty and charming girl, a member of my staff …
Events moved swiftly. Within two days, my assistant had become friendly with Violet. Within a week of her arrival I was invited to tea with the two girls, as my assistant’s ‘aunt’. This state of peace did not last long, however, as next day the hall-porter telephoned me that a ‘Monsieur Moquelain’ had arrived to see Miss L.
That evening Moquelain called again and took Violet L. to a theatre. When the couple returned my assistant met them ‘accidentally’ outside the flat. Violet introduced Moquelain to her and, when he had gone, after promising to call next day to take the girl to lunch, told my assistant that she was engaged to Moquelain and they intended to marry secretly.
The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Page 9
