I arose from my chair. A strange idea had struck me. I lit my candle and went down through the silent house. I entered the drawing-room. When I got there I quickly examined the exact places where Haldane and his sister had stood. From the place where Miss Haldane stood her eyes by means of a big mirror could be seen by Haldane. As I thought over this fact the dim outline of a terrible plot began to reveal itself. The human eyes are always naturally winking. Only a code, such as the Morse Telegraphic Code, was necessary. A long closing of the lids for a dash, a short one for a dot, and any communication was possible and could not be detected by the closest observer.
I left the drawing-room, and crossing over to the library took down a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and carefully copied the letter signs of the Morse Telegraphic Code. I then returned to my room.
During breakfast I watched Miss Haldane, and as I did so the simplicity of the wicked scheme, evidently evolved both by her brother and herself, was borne in upon me. She looked particularly handsome this morning, but also nervous and anxious.
The guests who were still staying in the house took their departure after breakfast, amongst those to leave being Karl Haldane. I saw him go up to his sister and kiss her. As he was leaving the room she turned very white, so white that I wondered if she were going to faint.
‘Are you ill?’ I said. ‘Does it trouble you so much to part from your brother?’
‘We are very much attached,’ she said, her lips quivering.
‘I have remarked that,’ I answered.
She flashed an excited glance at me.
‘Who would not be?’ she continued. ‘Has he not fascinated you? There is no woman who comes in contact with him who does not love him.’
At that instant Sir Penn came into the room. He went up to her, and laid his hand affectionately on her shoulder.
‘We are due on the Downs at eleven,’ he said. ‘Miss Marburg is coming with us.’
‘Are you?’ asked Miss Haldane.
The information certainly gave her no pleasure.
‘I should like to see the horses,’ was my answer.
Nothing more was said. Mrs Percival came into the room, the conversation became general, and at about a quarter to eleven we four started for our walk. It was a glorious morning, sunny and warm. Nevertheless, our conversation flagged, and we walked on for some time in silence.
At length we reached the racing ground, and Sir Penn showed us a good position to witness the trial, in which some dozen horses were to take part. Mr Martin, the trainer, and our four selves took up our position at the intended winning post on a little rise amongst some furze bushes. Sir Penn drew out his watch.
‘It is exactly midday,’ he said.
‘Here they come!’ cried Miss Haldane excitedly, and in a few moments, with a thunder of hoofs, the animals galloped past.
‘Just what I thought, Martin,’ said the baronet. ‘If Fritz doesn’t bring home the Blue Riband this year he is certain to be in the first three.’
‘And if he is, you will be richer than ever,’ said Miss Haldane, laying her hand on his arm. ‘Do go, Miss Marburg, to look at the probable winner of the Derby. Take Miss Marburg to see Fritz, won’t you, Penn?’
Sir Penn and the trainer moved up to where the horses were being pulled up. As Sir Penn did so he turned to me.
‘Will you come?’ he asked. ‘Won’t you come too, Esther?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I am feeling tired. I will stay with Mrs Percival.’
‘Do, my dear,’ said the elder lady. ‘We will both sit down on this knoll of grass and wait for you, Penn, and for Miss Marburg.’
I slowly followed Sir Penn, but when I had gone a few steps, I turned aside and pretended to be plucking some small flowers that grew on the edge of the common. My heart was beating almost to suffocation. I feared that Miss Haldane would observe me, and that I should lose a possible opportunity. But she had evidently forgotten my existence. Mrs Percival had opened a newspaper and was beginning to read. Sir Penn and the trainer were more than a hundred yards away. I stood on her left. She rose slowly to her feet and gazed out steadily across the Down in the direction of an old ruined barn some six hundred yards off. I quickly took out pencil and paper and, keeping my eyes fixed on hers, marked the movement of the long and short closure of her lids. That slip of paper I have still, and this is the copy as I took it down:
F R I T Z W O N T R I A L
Without a moment’s pause or giving myself time to think I rushed up to her side.
‘What are you doing?’ I cried.
My voice startled her. She flashed round, fury in her eyes.
‘Fritz won trial,’ I said, as I deciphered the dots and dashes from the code.
She stared wildly at me for one moment, then suddenly falling on her knees she burst into a passion of tears. At this instant Sir Penn came up.
‘Esther!’ he cried. ‘Miss Marburg, whatever is the matter?’
I turned to him.
‘This is the matter,’ I answered. ‘The plot is discovered. Send a couple of stable lads to prevent anyone from leaving that barn, and bring whoever is there here at once.’
In a moment the word was given, and Sir Penn turned to Miss Haldane. She still knelt on the grass, her face covered, the tears flowing between her fingers. Sir Penn’s face turned white as death. I saw that he guessed the worst. The girl to whom he was engaged, and whom he loved with all his heart, had betrayed him. Nothing else greatly mattered at that moment.
‘Look!’ I cried.
Two boys on their horses had just headed off the figure of a man who was running with all his might towards the railway station. It was, I could see at a glance, Mr Karl Haldane. A moment later he was brought to the spot where we stood. His face was also white, but very hard and determined-looking.
‘Come, Esther, old girl,’ he said, speaking in an almost rough tone, and pulling the weeping girl to her feet. ‘You did your best. We must all fail at times. I presume,’ he added, ‘that Esther and I have failed, but will you explain why you sent two men to interfere with my liberty, Sir Penn?’
‘I think I can best explain,’ was my answer.
I then proceeded, in the presence of Esther and Karl Haldane, to give step by step the means I had taken to discover their secret. When I had finished speaking there was silence. After a pause, which was the most impressive I ever endured, Esther Haldane approached Sir Penn.
‘You can, of course, arrest both me and my husband,’ she said.
‘Good heavens!’ he exclaimed. ‘Your husband?’
‘Yes, Karl Haldane is my husband. I have played you the meanest trick a woman can play a man. I tried first to win your love, secondly to win your money. I succeeded in the first. I failed in the latter. All that I have done I have done for my husband, the only man on God’s earth whom I really love. I love him so well that I can even go under for him. You can take what steps you please to punish us both. Come, Karl, our game is up.’
LADY MOLLY
Created by Baroness Emma Orczy (1865-1947)
The daughter of a Hungarian aristocrat, Baroness Emma Orczy was born on the family estate in Tarnaörs, northern Hungary. A peasant uprising in 1868 forced her parents to move to Budapest and she was later educated in Paris and Brussels. The family settled in London when she was in her teens and she studied art at Heatherley’s School of Art in Chelsea. It was there that she met her husband Montague Barstow and her first published work was a collection of Hungarian folk tales which he illustrated. Her first historical novel was published in 1899. Her most famous character, Sir Percy Blakeney aka ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’, a daring English adventurer who rescues people from the guillotine in Revolutionary France, made his debut in a play in 1903 and went on to appear in a long series of novels and short stories. Baroness Orczy created two very distinctive detectives in the Edwa
rdian era. One was ‘The Old Man in the Corner’ who solves seemingly insoluble mysteries whilst barely stirring from his seat in a London teashop. He and the lady journalist Polly Burton, who records the mysteries on which the old man throws light, first appeared in The Royal Magazine in 1901 and later in three collections of short stories. Baroness Orczy’s other detective creation was Lady Molly Robertson-Kirk, a young woman who has reached a position of authority in Scotland Yard nearly a decade before women in real life were even allowed to join the police. As narrated by her adoring sidekick, Mary Granard, Lady Molly’s adventures are very much of their time but they are still great fun to read.
THE WOMAN IN THE BIG HAT
1
Lady Molly always had the idea that if the finger of Fate had pointed to Mathis’ in Regent Street, rather than to Lyons’, as the most advisable place for us to have a cup of tea that afternoon, Mr Culledon would be alive at the present moment.
My dear lady is quite sure – and needless to say that I share her belief in herself – that she would have anticipated the murderer’s intentions, and thus prevented one of the most cruel and callous of crimes which were ever perpetrated in the heart of London.
She and I had been to a matinée of Trilby, and were having tea at Lyons’, which is exactly opposite Mathis’ Vienna café in Regent Street. From where we sat we commanded a view of the street and of the café, which had been very crowded during the last hour.
We had lingered over our toasted muffin until past six, when our attention was drawn to the unusual commotion which had arisen both outside and in the brilliantly lighted place over the road.
We saw two men run out of the doorway, and return a minute or two later in company with a policeman. You know what is the inevitable result of such a proceeding in London. Within three minutes a crowd had collected outside Mathis’. Two or three more constables had already assembled, and had some difficulty in keeping the entrance clear of intruders.
But already my dear lady, keen as a pointer on the scent, had hastily paid her bill, and, without waiting to see if I followed her or not, had quickly crossed the road, and the next moment her graceful form was lost in the crowd.
I went after her, impelled by curiosity, and presently caught sight of her in close conversation with one of our own men. I have always thought that Lady Molly must have eyes at the back of her head, otherwise how could she have known that I stood behind her now? Anyway, she beckoned to me, and together we entered Mathis’, much to the astonishment and anger of the less fortunate crowd.
The usually gay little place was indeed sadly transformed. In one corner the waitresses, in dainty caps and aprons, had put their heads together, and were eagerly whispering to one another whilst casting furtive looks at the small group assembled in front of one of those pretty alcoves, which, as you know, line the walls all round the big tea-room at Mathis’.
Here two of our men were busy with pencil and notebook, whilst one fair-haired waitress, dissolved in tears, was apparently giving them a great deal of irrelevant and confused information.
Chief Inspector Saunders had, I understood, been already sent for; the constables, confronted with this extraordinary tragedy, were casting anxious glances towards the main entrance, whilst putting the conventional questions to the young waitress. And in the alcove itself, raised from the floor of the room by a couple of carpeted steps, the cause of all this commotion, all this anxiety, and all these tears, sat huddled up on a chair, with arms lying straight across the marble-topped table, on which the usual paraphernalia of afternoon tea still lay scattered about. The upper part of the body, limp, backboneless, and awry, half propped up against the wall, half falling back upon the outstretched arms, told quite plainly its weird tale of death.
Before my dear lady and I had time to ask any questions, Saunders arrived in a taxicab. He was accompanied by the medical officer, Dr Townson, who at once busied himself with the dead man, whilst Saunders went up quickly to Lady Molly.
‘The chief suggested sending for you,’ he said quickly; ‘he was ’phoning you when I left. There’s a woman in this case, and we shall rely on you a good deal.’
‘What has happened?’ asked my dear lady, whose fine eyes were glowing with excitement at the mere suggestion of work.
‘I have only a few stray particulars,’ replied Saunders, ‘but the chief witness is that yellow-haired girl over there. We’ll find out what we can from her directly Dr Townson has given us his opinion.’
The medical officer, who had been kneeling beside the dead man, now rose and turned to Saunders. His face was very grave.
‘The whole matter is simple enough, so far as I am concerned,’ he said. ‘The man has been killed by a terrific dose of morphia – administered, no doubt, in this cup of chocolate,’ he added, pointing to a cup in which there still lingered the cold dregs of the thick beverage.
‘But when did this occur?’ asked Saunders, turning to the waitress.
‘I can’t say,’ she replied, speaking with obvious nervousness. ‘The gentleman came in very early with a lady, somewhere about four. They made straight for this alcove. The place was just beginning to fill, and the music had begun.’
‘And where is the lady now?’
‘She went off almost directly. She had ordered tea for herself and a cup of chocolate for the gentleman, also muffins and cakes. About five minutes afterwards, as I went past their table, I heard her say to him. “I am afraid I must go now, or Jay’s will be closed, but I’ll be back in less than half an hour. You’ll wait for me, won’t you?”’
‘Did the gentleman seem all right then?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the waitress. ‘He had just begun to sip his chocolate, and merely said “S’long” as she gathered up her gloves and muff and then went out of the shop.’
‘And she has not returned since?’
‘No.’
‘When did you first notice there was anything wrong with this gentleman?’ asked Lady Molly.
‘Well,’ said the girl with some hesitation, ‘I looked at him once or twice as I went up and down, for he certainly seemed to have fallen all of a heap. Of course, I thought that he had gone to sleep, and I spoke to the manageress about him, but she thought that I ought to leave him alone for a bit. Then we got very busy, and I paid no more attention to him, until about six o’clock, when most afternoon tea customers had gone, and we were beginning to get the tables ready for dinners. Then I certainly did think there was something wrong with the man. I called to the manageress, and we sent for the police.’
‘And the lady who was with him at first, what was she like? Would you know her again?’ queried Saunders.
‘I don’t know,’ replied the girl; ‘you see, I have to attend to such crowds of people of an afternoon, I can’t notice each one. And she had on one of those enormous mushroom hats; no one could have seen her face – not more than her chin – unless they looked right under the hat.’
‘Would you know the hat again?’ asked Lady Molly.
‘Yes – I think I should,’ said the waitress. ‘It was black velvet and had a lot of plumes. It was enormous,’ she added, with a sigh of admiration and of longing for the monumental headgear.
During the girl’s narrative one of the constables had searched the dead man’s pockets. Among other items, he had found several letters addressed to Mark Culledon, Esq., some with an address in Lombard Street, others with one in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Hampstead. The initials MC, which appeared both in the hat and on the silver mount of a letter-case belonging to the unfortunate gentleman, proved his identity beyond a doubt.
A house in Fitzjohn’s Avenue does not, somehow, suggest a bachelor establishment. Even whilst Saunders and the other men were looking through the belongings of the deceased, Lady Molly had already thought of his family – children, perhaps a wife, a mother – who could tell?
What awful news to bri
ng to an unsuspecting, happy family, who might even now be expecting the return of father, husband, or son, at the very moment when he lay murdered in a public place, the victim of some hideous plot or feminine revenge!
As our amiable friends in Paris would say, it jumped to the eyes that there was a woman in the case – a woman who had worn a gargantuan hat for the obvious purpose of remaining unidentifiable when the question of the unfortunate victim’s companion that afternoon came up for solution. And all these facts to put before an expectant wife or an anxious mother!
As, no doubt, you have already foreseen, Lady Molly took the difficult task on her own kind shoulders. She and I drove together to Lorbury House, Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and on asking of the manservant who opened the door if his mistress were at home, we were told that Lady Irene Culledon was in the drawing-room.
Mine is not a story of sentiment, so I am not going to dwell on that interview, which was one of the most painful moments I recollect having lived through.
Lady Irene was young – not five-and-twenty, I should say – petite and frail-looking, but with a quiet dignity of manner which was most impressive. She was Irish, as you know, the daughter of the Earl of Athyville, and, it seems, had married Mr Mark Culledon in the teeth of strenuous opposition on the part of her family, which was as penniless as it was aristocratic, whilst Mr Culledon had great prospects and a splendid business, but possessed neither ancestors nor high connections. She had only been married six months, poor little soul, and from all accounts must have idolised her husband.
Lady Molly broke the news to her with infinite tact, but there it was! It was a terrific blow – wasn’t it? – to deal to a young wife – now a widow; and there was so little that a stranger could say in these circumstances. Even my dear lady’s gentle voice, her persuasive eloquence, her kindly words, sounded empty and conventional in the face of such appalling grief.
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