The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective

by Susannah Stapleton

  Next day at twelve-thirty, Moquelain arrived. The porter was asked to call a taxi to take the pair to lunch, and as instructed, telephoned to my office the name of the restaurant to which they had gone.

  I did a little telephoning myself, then went to the restaurant, securing a table in the corner from which I could see and not be seen. At a table for two sat Moquelain and Violet L., their heads together in deep conversation …

  I watched discreetly, and had not long to wait! As the orchestra finished a soft melody, an over-dressed and over-painted woman who had been sitting at another table rose to her feet … She pushed her way between the tables towards the pair, attracting the eyes of everyone in the place, for she had obviously once been beautiful.

  Then she stopped, and in a voice which everyone could hear, addressed the ‘Prince of Lovers.’ ‘So I’ve found you at last, my beauty, have I?’ she began. ‘And now I have found you I intend to keep you. What are you doing here with this girl … ?’

  Her voice rose higher and higher.

  Moquelain got to his feet.

  ‘I do not know you, madame,’ he began, in French.

  ‘What?’ shrieked the other woman in the same language. ‘You don’t know me – your own wife? That’s pretty good!’ Then she proceeded to call the gigolo everything possible, and it was only after the maître d’hôtel had summoned two waiters and removed her that peace reigned again.

  My plot had succeeded, and long before the woman had finished her harangue, Violet L. had picked up her fur and left the place disdainfully …

  The ‘Prince of Lovers’ did not appear again, as I suppose he thought it hopeless after the episode; and that if he ever reads this he will at least appreciate the acting of his supposed ‘wife’, who was really an actress, and certainly earned the fee I paid her for the dramatic scene!42

  Chapter Six

  To Love and Be Wise

  It is wonderful how easy it is to vanish in London. Often-times it is round a corner and out of sight.

  Maud West, 19131

  So Maud was married. It was an unexpected development. Nothing I’d read had even hinted at there being a man on the scene. If anything, I’d expected her partner to be a woman, someone with a career of her own who would understand Maud’s need for freedom and not be overly concerned when she headed off to the office and didn’t return for three months (at one point Maud said she owned forty pairs of shoes and nineteen toothbrushes, all collected on such impromptu travels).2 But no, the someone who put up with Maud forever haring off in unsuitable footwear was a man.

  The home address in the Gazette notice was also a surprise, although for an entirely different reason. Great Russell Mansions was an ornate block of flats directly opposite the British Museum, one of my favourite teenage haunts. I knew the block well and had once planned to live there myself. It wasn’t a particularly realistic plan as I was only sixteen at the time; nonetheless, I’d spent many hours idly sorting out the decor as I sat on the museum steps eating hot roast chestnuts, nursing a crush on Tiglath Pileser III and plotting all the adventures I’d have in the Mesopotamian desert to fund it all. If only I’d known, not only about the impending Gulf War, but about Maud. Back then, I’d have found some way to get into Flat 8 to have a nose around.

  It was just the type of building I imagined Maud inhabiting: a magnificent six-storey confection of red brick iced with ivory stone architraves; the kind of place that had a rickety cage lift and a corpse in the stairwell. As for the flat itself, I’d envisioned a chaotic crash pad with discarded moustaches stuck to the bathroom mirror and a revolver stashed in the teapot. Evidently, I’d got that wrong. There had to be at least some level of domesticity to match her new status as a married woman. Did the Elliotts have a maid? It seemed likely, so I tasked her with tidying up the image in my mind. Before long, the disorderly gloom was transformed into a stylish, sunlit apartment in which the happy couple could share witty breakfast repartee over the morning papers.

  It was a charming scene, but something was still wrong. What type of man would sit there merrily tucking into his devilled kidneys as he read about the various people his wife had seduced in the course of her work? Maud was quite open about this: ‘I’ve made love to crooks before now,’ she said cheerfully in 1926,3 and so far I’d counted two waiters, an unspecified number of army officers and a woman in a nightclub. Mr Elliott, whoever he was, had to be self-assured and admire pluck and courage in a woman above any notions of convention and respectability. Not a buttoned-up Lord Peter Wimsey, then, but maybe a Raffles? Or was he more of a Tommy to her Tuppence?

  Whoever he was, I couldn’t wait to meet him. How that was to happen, however, remained unclear. It should have been simple. A wedding ring, a surname, an address, a year: such things send a researcher straight to the electoral roll. But the list of registered voters at Great Russell Mansions in 1933 was of no help:

  In one respect, it was a pleasing picture of how the long fight for women’s suffrage would pay off – the ‘Ow’ next to Edith’s name meant that the voting rights in Flat 8 were hers and hers alone, and the ‘J’ meant she was eligible for jury service – but where was her husband? Her change of name notice had appeared in the Gazette months after the roll for 1933 had been completed, so he can’t have died or she would have described herself as a widow. She’d also moved in quite recently, as she wasn’t there at all in 1932. Had Mr Elliott found out about the woman in the nightclub, cast his eyes over the piles of shoes and toothbrushes and packed his bags? Had there been a final straw? Or was this just Edith’s personal crash pad after all? Did they have another home elsewhere?

  Matters of the heart had also kept Maud and her fellow detectives busy. As one anonymous female detective wrote in May 1911, ‘Love claims a lot of the lady detective’s attention. Why not? There is no territory in which a woman’s tact is more successful.’4 The voice and tone were wrong for Maud, but they matched what I’d seen of another detective’s writing. Kate Easton? I scrawled. If I was correct, for once the two women agreed on something, because two years later Maud wrote in the Pittsburgh Press:

  It is surprising how many engaged or about to be engaged persons – both men and girls – commission me to make inquiries about their fiancés. It is quite a common thing. Occasionally I have to administer motherly advice, but I have managed to help in several emergencies of a delicate nature, and I have frustrated some nefarious designs. I am rather in favour of inquiries of this kind – it is better to be sure before marriage than sorry afterward.5

  In April of the same year, she gave three examples of this type of work in Pearson’s Weekly, although in each case her client was not the person about to be married but a concerned parent.6 The practice of chaperoning had all but ended with the invention of bicycles that could outrun any maiden aunt, but few parents were willing to give their offspring complete freedom when it came to choosing a life partner. The first example involved a fiancée who, it was rumoured, had a conviction for shoplifting. Miss M— was the daughter of a naval officer and a few rungs below her husband-to-be on the social ladder. Her prospective father-in-law was unconcerned about this aspect of the relationship, but wanted Maud to lift the cloud of suspicion over Miss M—’s past before he would allow the marriage to go ahead.

  After checking with other detective agencies and doing a bit of hunting of her own, Maud identified one case of a shoplifter who had given a false name and address after stealing a handbag from a department store a few years previously. The woman had subsequently served two months in prison, so Maud visited the gaol to look through the photographs of prisoners they held. One was an indisputable match with the picture she had of Miss M—.

  ‘I had now found out all I had been commissioned to do by my client,’ she wrote, ‘but the case interested me strangely, and I determined to pursue my investigations a little further.’ She shadowed Miss M— and eventually struck up a friendship with her at a library in Kensington where the woman was a regular visitor.
Maud soon became convinced that the conviction had been a mistake:

  Her own story in the dock had been that she had taken the bag inadvertently without meaning to do so, but her story, a common one of the professional shoplifter, was not believed. I believed it however and anyone who knew the girl, I am sure, would have done the same thing.

  Her client had only briefly met Miss M—, so Maud advised him to get to know her so he might form his own opinion about the incident. The wedding bells soon rang out.

  There was no happily-ever-after for Maud’s second pair of lovers. Her client on that occasion had been a country squire who was convinced that his son, a curate, was secretly involved with a woman in London. Maud soon uncovered the curate’s regular visits to the house of a well-known society lady who had a very attractive daughter. Her client, however, was unimpressed:

  ‘Oh, I know all about that affair! No; there is someone else I am certain.’

  ‘Why are you certain?’ I asked.

  ‘Because,’ was the reply, ‘I believe my son would marry the young lady to whose house he goes so often only that there is someone else.’

  Maud resumed her searches. The other woman, it turned out, was the curate’s wife. The pair had married in Oxford when he was a student and she a barmaid, and he had kept this a close secret. Shortly after she reported her findings, Maud wrote without comment, the curate committed suicide.

  The final case involved ‘an officer from a Guards regiment’ which, as I was learning, was Maud-speak for ‘complete bastard’. Guardsmen were notorious. The breeding, uniform and military discipline of elite Guardsmen could mask all manner of deviant traits – and the only point in this particular suitor’s favour was that he would have turned up to the wedding with his boots polished to perfection. Maud’s inquiries revealed him to be ‘one of the greatest blackguards I have ever encountered in the whole of my professional career, and I have known some bad ones indeed.’ Not only had the officer left his regiment in disgrace and turned his hand to blackmail and swindling, but he’d been married before, to a governess he had picked up at a weekend house party: ‘The girl had £300, which he took after they had married; and then he deserted her, and she had died in great poverty in Brussels.’

  That alone would have been enough to put an end to the wedding preparations, but, Maud claimed, he added another black mark to his file when he made an unexpected appearance at Albion House one evening. She immediately knew he meant trouble, and discreetly reached for her revolver:

  ‘How dare you,’ I said, ‘come into my private office like this?’

  ‘I have just come to tell you,’ he said, making a step towards me, ‘that it is not safe for anyone – a girl especially – to go fooling around making inquiries about a man like me.’

  ‘I have found out quite enough about you,’ I said, ‘to stop all chance of your being able to marry Miss—.’

  His face went white; he raised his fist and made a quick step towards me, and then I brought the revolver to bear point-blank on his temple, and he stopped.

  ‘You are an infernal coward!’ I said. I was in such a rage with him that I could almost have shot him.

  She refrained, and instead marched him to the stairs and waited until she heard the entrance door below click shut. Needless to say, the marriage did not go ahead.

  Maud would come across all manner of relationships over the course of her career. As Pearson’s Weekly wrote in 1921, ‘Miss West has seen behind the scenes of hundreds of love affairs, strange and mysterious, tragic and comic.’7 Her articles on the subject certainly suggested she had seen it all, from the agony of childhood crushes (‘Oh mumsy, what is the matter with me, I feel so miserable?’) to jealous septuagenarians. She’d intervened in torrid romances and read letters between indifferent couples:

  MY DEAR C. – You must not run away with the idea that I am desperately in love with you. I am no more desperately in love with you than you are with me. But we are good friends, I believe, and it suits us both, I think, to marry. This is the plain fact … You are not a Venus any more than I am an Adonis – last night you seemed disappointed that I did not kiss you; how absurd it is; I don’t like kissing; I never did. Another thing, don’t call me ‘darling’ or ‘dear,’ I have a name, so have you and names were given to us to be addressed by.8

  As it happened, Maud seemed rather in favour of such alliances. ‘I am not sure indeed that matter of fact lovers don’t make the happiest marriages,’ she wrote. ‘They are not blind to one another’s faults and defects, and if they appreciate each other’s good qualities the chances are they will be happy.’

  What about her own marriage? Was it happy? Had it started from a similar practical basis, or was it a whirlwind romance? A possible clue lay in her story about the Prince of Lovers. Maud had defended Violet, the ‘romantic little idiot’ who wanted to travel the world in search of adventure, reminding her old friend Monsieur Dupont that she herself had run off when she was nineteen. Dupont had responded, ‘I know … I know … And you made a success of it, because you are cautious and not a fool.’9 On first reading, I had taken that to mean that she had simply left home in search of adventure when she was nineteen, but had she actually run off with a man? If so, and she had ‘made a success of it’, was that man Mr Elliott?

  A small spanner was thrown into the works of this theory when I came across an almost identical story called ‘Scoundrels in Love’, which Maud had written in 1930. It was the tiger-skin vs bear-skin rug debacle all over again. This story also ended with a showdown in a restaurant, although it involved two French girls and the Prince of Lovers had been split into two conniving suitors posing as doctors.10 There was no mention of M. Dupont or Maud running off at nineteen. Complete invention, or two sensationalized versions of a real-life case? It was impossible to tell.

  It did, however, lead to another clue about Maud’s marital affairs. I’d found ‘Scoundrels in Love’ by following a hint in an Australian newspaper, which in turn led to eight other articles that Maud had written for British regional newspapers in 1930. The first in the series was called ‘How I Took Up the Work’. There, she had given yet another account of her very first case. In this version, it was her solicitor uncle who suggested that she pose as a maid at a French hotel to investigate a robbery, as she was ‘the most innocent-looking person he knew.’ In return, she had a surprise for him:

  I jumped at his offer for two reasons. First of all I am inclined to like any sort of adventure, and, secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I had a short time before got married secretly. My husband was not at all strong, and we needed all the money we could get.11

  Was this when she was nineteen? And why was it a secret? Had she married the male equivalent of an Oxford barmaid, or was she the unsuitable one for some reason? And in what way was he ‘not at all strong’?

  As I pondered all this, somewhere in Australia an unseen hand was adding another clue to the Trove database, which I found a few days later. In December 1938, the journalist and soon-to-be war reporter Margaret Gilruth had written a profile of Maud in the Hobart Mercury, which included the statement, ‘Actually, she has a husband of independent means who asks her at intervals to give up her work.’12

  Was this the same man? As far as I could tell, Gilruth was a source to be trusted, so either Maud’s sickly, unsuitable husband had developed into a man of substance, or she had married more than once. Perhaps that first husband had slid into an early grave or into the mire of the divorce courts. Either way, I could find no notice of any such wedding, divorce or funeral in the papers, and searching the civil marriage registers for the right Edith marrying the right Elliott sometime between 1900-ish and 1933 was a daunting, if not impossible, task.

  As I let all this percolate, I decided to look at some of the methods Maud would have used in her own investigations. The most common appeared to be shadowing, surreptitiously following someone day in, day out, often in disguise, to see where they went and who they spoke to. The
anonymous lady detective – the one I thought might be Kate Easton – said that it took up three-quarters of her time, whilst Maud described the focus required:

  Shadowing is one of the most difficult and arduous of our duties. One must keep one’s eyes simply glued on the person one is following. If one allows one’s attention to be distracted, even for an instant, one’s quarry is liable to be lost.13

  Sometimes, the detective would stay still: a stake-out, although the term wouldn’t be used until the 1940s. Maud just called it observation and said it involved:

  Eyes glued to the doorway for hours on a stretch, never a blink through rain and cold lest in an instant of relaxation the quarry slip past.14

  Neither sounded much fun, requiring a great deal of time, patience and, presumably, a strong bladder. Fortunately, if Maud’s stories were anything to go by, there were shortcuts available. These included breaking and entering:

  … we heard the occupant … coming up the stairs. There was no time to be lost. My assistant scrambled into a cupboard, while I crept under the bed. As I am not the slimmest of mortals, it was rather a tight fit.15

  Bribery:

  … after a long conversation with each of them and a promise of financial assistance, I persuaded them to carry out my wishes.16

  Bluffing:

  My plan was what we call a ‘try-on,’ but it succeeded.17

  And mysterious, unspecified moves:

  How I succeeded in doing this is too valuable a professional secret to give away.18