The British press had reported the murder as that of a lady detective, but as I read further, there was much more to the case than first met the eye. According to the two historians who spent eight years unravelling Laetitia’s story, she had indeed worked for a Parisian detective agency, undertaking surveillance in cases of adultery and doing routine background checks, but had also infiltrated a brutal fascist organization as a police informer. The Cagoule, as they were known, had been responsible for a number of atrocities in France, including two bombings, several murders and the attempted assassination of the prime minister. Crucially, Laetitia had been reporting on their activities not only to the French police but, it was rumoured, to Mussolini and his secret service as well. For complex political reasons, no one was ever charged with her murder, although suspicion fell heavily on the Cagoule’s top assassin, Jean Filliol.13
It was a fascinating story and, although her situation was far removed from Maud’s, it did highlight the dangers of messing with the underworld. Maud may not have been toying with continental terrorists, but, if my research into blackmail and the excesses of the West End was anything to go by, London had its fair share of vipers. On balance, I decided to allow her those occasional ‘moments’ when only quick wits and the reassurance of a revolver in her pocket could guarantee her safe return home.
One thing that set Maud apart from Laetitia Toureaux and Kate Easton, not to mention every male private detective in London and elsewhere, was what awaited her when she arrived home: maternal responsibilities. She wasn’t the only female detective I had found who was also a mother – at the society palmists’ trial, it had emerged that Amy Betts had a child – but she was certainly an unusual mother figure for the times.
With few exceptions, women from affluent middle-class families were expected to leave their employment when they got married, so the majority were far removed from the workplace by the time motherhood beckoned. There were many arguments against the employment of married women. Some were moral: marriage and motherhood went hand in hand, and the fabric of society would disintegrate if women neglected their primary duties of tending to the needs of their husbands and children. Others were economic: the country was in recession and they were stealing food from the mouths of unemployed men with families by unnecessarily crowding the job market and driving down wages.
Married women who ran their own businesses or worked in a freelance capacity had more of a choice whether to work or not, but rarely talked about their home lives. It was hard enough competing with men without opening themselves up to criticism about their domestic arrangements. Disapproval was always there, simmering away. A woman’s place was in the home.
Occasionally, the disapproval erupted into an outright attack on their life choices. In 1922, for example, the bestselling author A. S. M. Hutchinson published a divisive novel called This Freedom. The story charted the life of Rosalie Aubyn from her Victorian childhood, in which men did ‘mysterious and extraordinary things’ and women ‘ordinary and unexciting and generally rather tiresome things’,14 to her groundbreaking career as a banker and the ‘mutually free and independent partnership’ she enjoyed with her barrister husband.15 Hutchinson gave a sympathetic view of the desire for equality and freedom which brought Rosalie to this point, and her capabilities as a businesswoman. But the final chapters of the book showed his real purpose, which was to paint a devastating picture of the consequences of a woman attempting to combine a professional career, marriage and motherhood.
Readers saw Rosalie give birth to three children and return to work after handing each one over to a nurse. ‘I will not sacrifice myself for the children’,16 Rosalie says at one point, words by which she is damned as, one by one, her emotionally detached offspring fall by the wayside: her eldest son is expelled from school, court-martialled during the war, and imprisoned for fraud; her daughter dies from a backstreet abortion; and her youngest son commits suicide by throwing himself under a train. All this was blamed on her refusal to create a proper home for her family.
The book raised a storm of protest from within feminist circles, and the discussion spilled over into the mainstream press. That summer, the Pall Mall Gazette approached two professional women for their opinions.17 The actress Sybil Thorndike, who had four children with her actor-director husband Lewis Casson, said:
If a woman is by nature a good mother, she will be a good mother, and her children will want for no impetus for good which she can impart. If she is endowed with a good business capacity she will be a good businesswoman; and there is no reason why she should not combine the two roles with the greatest success, provided she has sufficient vitality.
Helena Normanton, married but childless, gave a slightly different response:
Perhaps the motherhood of such women may be of a less fostering type than of the women devoted solely to maternity, but it may be much better from the point of giving a dual heritage of power, talent, and tradition to the children. What they lose in cotton wool they gain in courage and self-reliance …
How, I wondered, had Maud’s children turned out?
I started with Vera and Evelyn. The evidence certainly suggested that they had inherited their mother’s independence and spirit. For a start, they weren’t afraid of the divorce courts. They had five marriages between them: Vera three and Evelyn two. Nor was Evelyn the only one to work as a detective. The Mrs Langford mentioned in the Inverclyde case in 1933 was, in fact, Vera. By then, she was twenty-nine and on her second marriage, but I had three articles in my files that suggested she’d been assisting her mother for some time. All were from the summer of 1921 and concerned ‘a pretty fair-haired girl of 17’ who had just started working for Maud West.18 One said that she was actually called Miss West. At the time, I’d dismissed that as a mistake on the part of the reporter, but now I was sure this was Vera.
She’d been given a backstory designed to highlight her youth and glamour: as a keen cinema-goer, she’d been inspired by a film called The Clutching Hand to give up her job as a shorthand typist and move into detective work.19 She was also keen to point out that she didn’t look like a detective: ‘If I did … half my effectiveness would be lost,’ she said. ‘I look upon it as a great compliment when people say to me: “Good gracious! Fancy you being a detective. I should never have imagined it.”’20
Her mother’s influence was also evident in her statement that ‘I never disguise myself, except to wear old clothes, but I hope that will come later.’21 She explained that she had only been in the job for a few months and was still in training. ‘Most of the cases I have been engaged in so far have been thefts,’ she said, before adding, without the benefit of hindsight, ‘I have not had much to do with divorce, and I don’t want to.’
She made another brief appearance in the introduction to an exclusive interview Maud gave to the Sunday Chronicle in 1926. Few writers of detective fiction, it began, had dared to pit a middle-aged woman and her daughter against the ‘Moriartys of crime’:
Yet from a well-appointed office in New Oxford-street, London, there operates such a pair who are acknowledged experts in the unmasking of crime and the disentanglement of love intrigues. They are Maude West [sic], London’s lady detective, and her daughter, who already has proved herself such a worthy antagonist of rogues and scoundrels that she has been dubbed ‘Miss Sherlock Holmes’.22
How committed Vera was to this career in the long run was debatable. By 1937, it was Evelyn who was tipped to take over the agency. But, as I discovered on a trip to the National Archives in Kew, that never happened. The Second World War intervened, sweeping Evelyn into more clandestine work. Her personnel file had only recently been declassified and contained just five sheets of paper – but one of those was an extract of the Official Secrets Act that she had signed in September 1943.23 That July, she’d been ordered to return to London from her postal-censorship job in Scotland for an interview with a top-secret organization based in Baker Street. She wouldn’t have known who they were
until she’d passed their strict vetting, but this was the Special Operations Executive (SOE), otherwise known as the ‘Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.’24
Any hopes I’d had of her being parachuted into Nazi-occupied France or hacking her way through the Burmese jungle were short-lived, however. As far as I could tell, she had never been more than a clerk: for the first year, she was based at the Baker Street HQ, but then was sent to the SOE mission in India where she stayed until she was signed-off in June 1946. Still, it said something that she’d been recruited at all. The SOE needed people they could trust and therefore relied upon personal recommendations, connections and pedigree, even for the lowliest positions. Evelyn’s file said she’d been a ‘confidential secretary’ for Maud West. Although this brought into question how much actual detective work she’d done for her mother, it did resurrect the idea that the name Maud West held some sway in security circles: first the Thyssen pamphlet in the First World War, and now this.
Before leaving the National Archives, I decided to have a quick look at the documents they held relating to Vera’s first divorce. I didn’t expect to find anything of interest, but one small fragment leapt out at me:
… and there is one child living issue of the said marriage namely Rea Eugene Axford born on the 5th day of September 1925.25
I hadn’t even considered that there might be people still alive – traceable people – who had known Maud. But Vera’s daughter Rea had been born in 1925, so it was within the bounds of possibility. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I preferred my sources to be dead and buried, their lives scattered to the wind on yellowing scraps of paper. It was the whole point of the game. Besides, did I want to know the things they might tell me? I’d only ever wanted to find a nice, simple lady detective, and the story had got messy enough as it was. Bringing living people into the equation could only complicate matters further. Was I ready to finally let go of the narrative I’d been weaving for Maud West and allow Edith Elliott to come to the fore? Was I ready for the truth?
I peeked over my desk at the other researchers in the reading room. Nobody knew that I knew there was a grandchild – if I was honest, there was probably more than one – and, if this fact happened to come to light later on, I could always plead incompetence. And they’re all dead now, you say? But this was the impulse that had led rogue historians to burn letters and misfile inconvenient evidence. I had to make some effort to find them.
Back at home, it didn’t take long to trace Rea. She’d married a popular BBC newsreader, and both had been conveniently dead for over a decade. But she also had a half-brother, Vera’s son from her second marriage, and he was very much alive and living in London. Furthermore, there was an address for him hiding in plain sight on the internet. Damn.
I put off writing at first, but soon the thought of one of Maud’s grandchildren, infused with memories and just a phone call away, became too much to resist. What would he be able to tell me? Had tales of Maud’s real adventures been passed down through the family? What would he recall of her and Harry? I wrote the letter.
Weeks rolled by. I’d given up all hope of hearing back when an email arrived from his daughter Silvia. Her father might once have been brimming with memories, she explained, but they were now lost in the depths of dementia. Even in his younger days, he had never spoken about his parents, let alone his grandparents. She thought there had been some sort of rift. But, she said, there was a cousin somewhere on the south coast who might be able to help. She gave me a phone number for a man called Brian.
I wasn’t sure who Brian was or where he fitted into the family, but after a few missed phone calls, we were talking. I liked him immediately. He was in his eighties and enjoying retirement after a long career as an orthopaedic surgeon. Furthermore, he had a good sense of humour, which made the prospect of asking my list of weird and intrusive questions that much easier. Although slightly bemused that anyone would be interested in his family, he was happy to help. The only problem was his heart: he was due to undergo quadruple bypass surgery in a few days’ time and tired easily. Nevertheless, he suggested that we talk briefly there and then: ‘It’s only plumbing, but you never know …’
We got the basics out of the way first. His father was Cecil, Edith and Harry’s eldest son. He’d been born in 1934 and had lived with his grandparents on and off during his childhood. For a while in the 1930s, they were all packed into the flat opposite the British Museum until Brian’s parents took a place of their own around the corner. I realized that he must have known Fake Charles: he, too, had lived in Great Russell Mansions at one point. Did Brian remember him? He laughed. Of course he remembered him. That was his father. Fake Charles – he of the swimming trophies and pilot’s licence – and Cecil Elliott had been one and the same from the early twenties right up until Cecil’s death in 1970.
I braced myself for some shocking revelation. Was there some great scandal in the family, after all? Was Cecil in hiding? Had he done, or witnessed, something so heinous that he lived in constant fear of discovery? But the reason concerned, of all things, dentistry. New regulations under the Dentists Act 1921 had required all new entrants into the profession to pass an exam and then pay an annual fee for retention on the Dentist Register. Cecil had his heart set on a Harley Street career, but the new rules seemed somewhat bothersome. He was also too young to qualify. A plan was hatched. His uncle Charles was just a few years older than him and had no interest in teeth, so it was agreed that the most reasonable course of action was for Cecil to borrow Charles’s identity in order to secure a place on the Dentist Register before the new regulations came into force. Cecil maintained this pretence for the rest of his life.
And Brian wondered why I found his family interesting.
We moved on to the other shape-shifter in the family. What could he tell me, briefly, about Edith? For a start, he said, everyone called her Edie. She was very much the matriarch, and always had the final say. He thought that she might have been the first female mayor of Holborn. (I checked. She wasn’t.) As for how she earned her living, Brian had a vague idea that it involved ‘a bit of investigating, I think. Something to do with divorce?’ He had never heard of Maud West.
I could tell he was getting tired, so we whizzed through the family tree I’d drafted to check for any mistakes. Nellie Barber hovered uncertainly to one side of the chart. Where did she fit in? He explained that she was Edith’s sister and, in Brian’s words, ‘a bit simple.’ Another sister. I’d missed that. She’d never married, and he had no idea about their parents or any other members of that side of the family. I held my tongue. Illegitimacy could be a touchy subject and now was not the time.
As for his aunts and uncles, they all had ‘ridiculous 1930s nicknames’. I had to agree. They weren’t quite in Bertie Wooster territory, but edging that way. Neville, for example, was ‘Boy-Boy’ and Vera ‘Girlie’, whilst her third husband had to answer to ‘Old Cock’. Evelyn, the baby, was ‘Babs’. Denis was the black sheep and, being largely absent and/or in disgrace (it wasn’t clear which), was simply referred to as ‘Denis’. There had also been some sort of incident with Keith; the family evidently never spoke about him.
With that, we made plans to talk further once he had recovered from his surgery. In the meantime, he promised to send me some photographs.
When the photographs arrived, my favourite was one taken by a press agency in the 1930s, which offered me my first glimpse of Harry. Although dwarfed by Edith and her matronly bosom, he looked surprisingly debonair. They’d been captured standing in the dappled shade of a London street, dressed up for some smart event. A wedding, perhaps? It was the first time I’d seen Maud genuinely smile. They made a handsome couple.
Another was of Cecil and two boys sitting on a sand dune. Handwriting on the reverse identified one of the boys as a family friend and the other as ‘No idea!’, but the most eye-catching aspect of the photo was the large revolver Cecil was pointing at the camera.
It was an
odd toy to take to the beach, but then the Elliott family weren’t bound by convention. They seemed drawn to adventure. A case in point was something I’d discovered since speaking to Brian: in 1931, three years before he earned his aviator’s certificate, Cecil had been involved in the first fatal gliding accident in Britain.
Gliding as a sport was in its infancy at the time. German engineers had perfected the aeronautics and worked out how to land, but what hadn’t been determined was the best method of getting into the sky in the first place. And so it was that Cecil (masquerading as Charles) found himself with a group of friends on a farm in Hertfordshire one gusty Sunday afternoon, rigging up an experimental launching apparatus for a small Scud glider using a winding drum attached to the drive shaft of a car.
The pilot was thirty-six-year-old Thomas Eaton Lander, an ex-RAF officer and one of the founders of the British Gliding Association. The launch started well, with the glider being drawn towards the car, but then? As Cecil told a reporter, ‘I think the apparatus was more effective than we anticipated, for he was shipped skywards at a terrific rate, and before we realised what had happened the machine crashed to the ground.’26 Cecil and his friends pulled the unconscious Lander from the wreckage and carried him to a nearby house, but he died half an hour later.
The coroner’s verdict was ‘death by misadventure’.27 The line between adventure and misadventure was thin, but, still, I couldn’t help but wonder: if Cecil had been forgiven for identity theft and catapulting a friend into the air at eighty miles per hour, what on earth had Denis and Keith done to merit their status as the black sheep of the family?
The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Page 24
