I admitted the possibility.
The telephone bell rang and Miss West left the directory to answer it, but even as she talked in short, vague sentences, I could see her eyes straying back towards the columns of Smiths, where lay the enigma of Mister (?) Smith of Fulham, the problem that would surely have defied all Holmes’s powers of deduction.
The unheard speaker at the other end of the line was obviously one of Miss West’s staff – she has a second office for her under-sleuths close by – who, I thought, must be making a sensational report.
Miss West’s replies were maddeningly non-committal, and I found myself supplying the unheard voice.
‘That you, Chiefess?’ it began.
‘Yes, speaking,’ she said.
‘We’ve tracked the Slinker’s death gang,’ said my imaginary voice. ‘They’re on the job all right.’
‘What time do you expect—?’ asked Miss West.
‘The killing is scheduled for midnight,’ came the voice. ‘Shall we call the Yard in?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’
‘You think they’d muss it all up?’
‘Probably, yes.’
‘You want ’em bumped off?’
‘Yes, I think I should. You know where the place is?’
‘Sure. Down under Fan-chu’s dope joint.’
‘That’s right. You can walk straight in.’
‘Okay by me, Chiefess.’
Miss West hung up.
‘Was that a crime case?’ I asked.
‘Hardly that,’ she smiled, returning to the directory. ‘Only an eloped couple. Smith, W. E., Smith W. E.’
I came down to earth again.
‘Was that taxi episode the only thrill of your professional life?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Miss West, ‘except when a man came into this office one day and stood just about where you are sitting, and when I glanced up I found myself looking down the barrel of a revolver.
‘There is always an automatic in this drawer,’ she went on, ‘but, of course I could not get at it. The only thing to do was to reason with the man and try to calm him down – he was talking excitedly about killing me. It seemed hopeless to try to calm him. The eyes staring at me about the revolver barrel had a strange gleam in them – they were mad. I saw the knuckles whiten as his finger pressed. Smith, W. E., Smith, W. E. D.’
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘Oh, a member of my staff, my right-hand man, in fact, is always here or hereabouts. He came in—’
‘And hurled himself at the madman!’ I exclaimed.
‘No,’ said Miss West. ‘He said, “Did you ring?” And I said, “Yes. Will you please show this gentleman out?” And the man went out quite quietly.’
‘What made you go in for such a dull occupation?’ I asked.
‘I was quite an anxiety to my people,’ said Miss West, ‘because I always wanted to do something out of the ordinary. Nearly all my family were either solicitors or barristers, and they didn’t know what to make of me. Eventually I, well, almost pestered a solicitor uncle into giving me an inquiry to carry out in Paris. It was a case of petty thefts in a hotel, and I went there as a still-room maid. I had no idea what a still-room was, and still less how to be a maid in one; but I did my job quite efficiently and that led to more and more jobs, until I was in a position to start business on my own. But I do not think I should ever have been able to do so without my family’s influence. Smith, Walter.’
As I rose and reached for my hat, ‘Won’t you try a deduction?’ I asked.
She looked at me speculatively. Then, ‘You owe your dentist money,’ she said.
‘Well, of course,’ I concurred, ‘but—’
‘You have just had a new dental plate,’ she explained.
‘Dash it,’ I cried, nettled, ‘I’ve never even had an old one yet.’
‘Well, I did my best,’ she said. ‘I’ll try again.’
Her eye fell on my hat, a good hat, but it has lost some of its first time careless rapture.
‘No, not that!’ I said hastily, putting it behind me.
‘We had better not go on,’ said Miss West. ‘I might say something uncomplimentary. Deductions aren’t in my line – only inquiries.’
And as I slunk out, I heard behind me London’s lady sleuth still persisting in the investigation of her insoluble mystery. ‘Smith, Walter, Smith, W. A., Smith, V …’38
Chapter Fifteen
A Case of Identity
Well, well, a lady detective has, after all, to be something of an actress occasionally.
Maud West, 19131
Business Maud, Action Maud, Undercover Maud, Maternal Maud, Avenging Maud, Civic Maud. Maud came in many variations with accessories to match: magnifying glass, flat cap, garish earrings, revolver, gavel. Collect them all! I thought I had, but here was a new one: Grumpy Maud.
Armed only with a telephone directory and an air of mild irritation, Grumpy Maud could dispatch journalists to deadline hell in fifteen minutes flat. It didn’t matter what paper they represented. The exclusive Daily Mail Atlantic Edition, printed onboard transatlantic liners full of wealthy people heading for London, some possibly with dark secrets and blackmailers in tow? Whatever. Grumpy Maud didn’t give a damn.
The signs had been there for a while. Increasingly, she had been talking about the hardships of her job at the expense of the excitement. In 1926, for example, she’d said:
I must admit that my life is full of thrills and interest. Yet it is extremely exhausting and tedious; it requires a large amount of physical strength, plus tenacity and a firm will that makes one say: ‘I won’t give in; I will succeed.’ This takes some doing, when a case proves obstinate beyond all expectation.2
In her interview with the Sunday Chronicle that same year, in which she introduced the young Vera as head of the next generation of crime-fighting ingénues, Maud seemed to be distancing herself from the glamorous image she’d worked so hard to create. She didn’t need to show off anymore – she’d made it – but there was also a sense that she was looking back over her lost youth:
Maude West sat back in her office chair with a smile. ‘You wouldn’t think I could run very much now,’ she said, ‘but I wasn’t bad at a sprint in those days. To be able to run was often as good a weapon in my armoury as my revolver.’3
Everything pointed towards a woman who was getting tired of the grind and of the pretence. She wasn’t that old – only forty-five when she gave that interview – but it was understandable. Her counterparts in the police were pensioned off after twenty-five years’ service, and she was edging towards that. She’d been walking her own bizarre beat for over twenty years and had also borne six children, raised seven, lost one, and intermittently supported a sickly husband, all whilst building a public persona to capture the eye of the press.
In one curious interview, however, she seemed to let the mask slip altogether. I’d come across it whilst pitting my poor language skills – and the limits of online translation software – against the myriad of tongues contained in European newspaper databases. The majority of pieces I found were variations of those published in the English-speaking press, but this one stood out. It was an exclusive interview Maud had given in March 1930 to a Dutch colonial newspaper published in Jakarta. Scanning through the text, one word caught my eye: Selfridges. I sent it off to be professionally translated.
When it came back a few days later, the translation said that Maud had started her career ‘as one of the many girls who were eking out a living, working at Selfridges, the large department store.’4 There were two reasons this couldn’t be true: firstly, Selfridges didn’t open until March 1909, which was just four months before Maud’s first adverts appeared in The Times, and, secondly, it didn’t employ married women. Still, it was closer to the truth than anything else I’d seen about her early career. Maybe she, or the paper, was using the world-famous name as shorthand for any London department store. Who in Jakarta, after all, would
have heard of Pyne Brothers, Bland & Phillips or Chiesmans, where the women of Deptford did most of their shoplifting?
Intrigued by this new, semi-truthful Maud, I read on: ‘There was a period in which she was drawn to the stage and during that time she honed the art of make-up.’ What? ‘Very soon she became famous for being a talented impersonator.’ WHAT?
How had I been so blind?
… One has to be a good many things in this profession … above all an actress …
… I am able to imitate the tones of the majority of women, and many men …
… I can alter my face quite easily by simply adopting another expression for the time being …5
The clues had been there all along. Even her choice of office at Albion House was a giveaway, so close to theatreland and with the Music Hall Ladies Guild and all those theatrical agents on her doorstep. Her publicity photographs were just like the theatrical cards circulated by performers, and she could weave a story like a pro. Hadn’t I even thought that ‘Maud West’ was akin to a stage name?
Others had noticed, too. When the French Police magazine showcased some of her disguise photographs in 1931, for example, it said that should she ever decide to pack away her magnifying glass she was assured of a career in theatre or film: ‘For what inanimate photos cannot render is the ease with which she passes from one disguise to another … she modifies her size, her approach and her pace – stroll, fatigue or businesslike fever – at will!’6
The theatre was a gathering place for misfits and dreamers. Taboos in polite society could be enacted on the stage to laughter or tears, and often played out again in dressing rooms and boarding houses once the curtain had fallen. It was a refuge for those, like Willy Clarkson, who would have floundered in the wider world, and a route to independence and autonomy for working-class girls seeking to escape a life of drudgery. It gave them power and freedom.
Of course Maud had been on the stage. Proving it, however, was another matter.
In Victorian theatre, ‘impersonator’ invariably meant one thing: cross-dressing. The best-known impersonator was Vesta Tilley, who had been strutting her stuff on stage in male clothing since 1869, when she was five years old. As an adult, her music-hall characters were always impeccably dressed gentlemen, the most famous being Burlington Bertie, the fading West End dandy with ‘a Hyde Park drawl’ and ‘a Bond Street crawl’.7
Other big names were Hetty King, Ella Shields and Bessie Bonehill, but there were many more. Some played it straight, especially if they had boyish figures, whilst others made the most of their curves and hammed it up in a mishmash of corset, fishnets, top hat and tails. Either way, it was risqué stuff.
Whether consciously or not, these acts were loaded with meaning, music hall being one of the few outlets in which the broad range of human sexuality could be explored in public. Male impersonators would have been a sensational sight, but they also provided a service to society that went beyond entertainment, as the historian Anthony Slide has pointed out:
An entire generation of sexually repressed men could live out their homosexual fantasies by watching one of the great male impersonators such as Vesta Tilley or Ella Shields perform. The natty clothes and the tight trousers, the bobbed hair and the masculine swagger were what the males in the audience desired and what they could watch and enjoy in a darkened theatre without fear of retribution.8
The same, I assumed, could be said for some female members of the audience. Of course, none of this went down well in more refined venues. Rumour had it that when Vesta Tilley brought her ‘Algy, the Piccadilly Johnny’ to the first Royal Variety Performance (then called the Royal Command Performance) in July 1912, Queen Mary hid behind her theatre programme until Algy had left the stage.
But where was Maud hiding? I started to look through the Stage and the Era in the British Newspaper Archive, searching for male impersonators active between 1893, when Maud would have been thirteen, and 1905, when she said she became a detective full-time. By the time I’d finished, I had a list of over 200 names, and those were just the ones looking for work or successful enough to be performing in the main London and regional theatres.
Maud West wasn’t one of them, nor was Edith Barber or Edith Elliott, but that didn’t surprise me. There were over 350 music halls in London alone, each hosting up to twenty acts per night, and hundreds more in towns and cities elsewhere. For every star performer, there were a thousand others who barely made an impression. Besides, if she had employed a stage name, I doubted it was Maud West. Music hall was entertainment for the masses; the audiences were overwhelmingly working class, with a smattering of bawdy young aristocrats out for a laugh. If Maud wanted to establish herself as a respectable lady detective, she would have been wise to choose a new pseudonym that had no association with that world.
Over the next few weeks, I managed to eliminate some of the names on my list through online photographs and biographies, but that still left a great mass of women hiding behind stage names. My only chance was to find a picture of her. I contacted the British Music Hall Society and scrolled through endless rolls of microfilm and pages of online images, but, eventually, I had to admit defeat.
It wasn’t a complete dead end, however. Whilst searching for a booted and suited Maud, I’d come across another actress with a very familiar name: Kate Easton.
It couldn’t be, could it?
Everything I knew about Kate Easton had come from the information contained in the 1911 census, in which she refused to participate, and the summary she gave of her progression from warehouse clerk to sleuth in an interview from 1910.9 As I began to explore further, one of the first things I discovered was that the census enumerator had been generous with her age. He had guessed she was forty-five, whereas she was actually fifty-four. This was evidenced by her death certificate, which wasn’t hard to track down as, refreshingly, she worked under her real name. From there, I was able to uncover more of her story.
Kate had been born in Lambeth in 1856, the youngest of four children. Her father was a tobacconist, but the performing arts clearly played a part in family life: her brother William would become a music teacher, and by the time Kate was twenty-one she had found success on the stage. A concert programme from 1877 listed her amongst the cast of a series of plays directed by the famous actor-manager Charles Wyndham at the Crystal Palace, and various reviews over the following years mentioned her skill as a vocalist.10 She was still performing at the time of the 1901 census when, coincidentally, she was living with her widowed mother opposite the British Museum, just a few doors down from Great Russell Mansions.
Kate made her first appearance in the press as an assistant detective in 1904, when she was forty-eight, giving evidence at a divorce hearing in Dublin about how she had watched a Lady McConnell meet her lover at a private hotel in Brighton the previous year.11 She would soon branch out on her own.12 When a journalist from Lloyd’s Weekly News visited her in her ‘snug’ Shaftesbury Avenue office a couple of years later, he reported:
Miss Easton considers her profession a splendid one for women, but a candidate should be a first-rate actress, be able to efface self, possess indomitable pluck, an unshaken nerve, unlimited patience, powers of physical endurance, and excellent eyesight, hearing, and memory.13
It was practically a checklist for those wishing to tread the boards, although she never mentioned her previous career. Instead, she just quietly slogged away as a detective for the next twenty-four years until she retired at the age of seventy-three. She never married. At the time of her retirement in 1929, she was living in Notting Hill at what seemed to be a boarding house for women of slender means: ‘Use of geyser bath,’ promised one listing for two unfurnished rooms at the property. ‘One or two ladies only.’14 Within two years she would be dead, having seen out her last days at a hospital in Kensington after a fall.15
Out of curiosity, I decided to check out the other big-name female detective of the time. The official profile of Matilda Mitchell’s
work as head of Selfridges’ secret service stated that she had worked as a railway detective and for the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons before taking up the post, but it hadn’t been clear as to how she got those positions. An interview she gave to a Sunday newspaper after her retirement in January 1914, however, filled in the gaps. Once again, the velvet curtain was drawn back: Matilda, too, had been on the stage.
Like Kate, she came from Lambeth. She had been born in 1873 and had first performed at the Royal Opera House at the age of fifteen before adopting the stage name Ethel Chester and moving into pantomime at the Drury Lane Theatre under the direction of the father of modern pantomime himself, Sir Augustus Harris. ‘It was during this period,’ Matilda said, ‘that I frequently attended fancy dress balls at Covent Garden in all sorts and conditions of disguises, winning many first prizes. These successes, I may say, led to my first engagement as a lady detective.’16
Although she didn’t say when this happened, she did mention the then-famous Hartopp divorce, a veritable mud bath of scandal involving a baronet, his wife, an earl and a society hostess, which had gone to trial in December 1902. By my reckoning, she’d had around fifteen years on the stage and at least seven as a private detective before joining Selfridges in 1909.
Had I stumbled across a secret cabal of actress-detectives looking to take down London’s underworld with their crime-fighting prowess? Probably not. It was doubtful that they’d even met before entering the detective profession. Kate and Matilda may have both come from Lambeth, but there were fifteen years between them. Besides, each of the trio had her own theatrical discipline: Kate in traditional theatre, Matilda in opera and pantomime, and Maud, perhaps, in music hall. But after they became detectives? They must have known each other.
The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Page 27
