The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

by Michael Sims

  I saw her features as she passed me, for she had not then lowered her veil, and they seemed familiar to me.

  “Who do you think that was?” said Mr.——mysteriously, as the door closed behind his visitor.

  “I don’t know,” I said; “but I think I’ve seen her before somewhere. Who is she?”

  “That, my dear fellow, is Dorcas Dene, the famous lady detective. You may not have heard of her; but with our profession and with the police, she has a great reputation.”

  “Oh! Is she a private inquiry agent, or a female member of the Criminal Investigation Department?”

  “She holds no official position,” replied my friend, “but works entirely on her own account. She has been mixed up in some of the most remarkable cases of the day—cases that sometimes come into court, but which are far more frequently settled in a solicitor’s office.”

  “If it isn’t an indiscreet question, what is she doing for you? You are not in the criminal business.”

  “No, I am only an old-fashioned, humdrum family solicitor, but I have a very peculiar case in hand just now for one of my clients. I am not revealing a professional secret when I tell you that young Lord Helsham, who has recently come of age, has mysteriously disappeared. The matter has already been guardedly referred to in the gossip column of the society papers. His mother, Lady Helsham, who is a client of mine, has been to me in the greatest distress of mind. She is satisfied that her boy is alive and well. The poor lady is convinced that it is a case of cherchez la femme, and she is desperately afraid that her son, perhaps in the toils of some unprincipled woman, may be induced to contract a disastrous mésalliance. That is the only reason she can suggest to me for his extraordinary conduct.”

  “And the famous lady detective who has just left your office is to unravel the mystery—is that it?”

  “Yes. All our own inquiries having failed, I yesterday decided to place the case in her hands, as it was Lady Helsham’s earnest desire that no communication should be made to the police. She is most anxious that the scandal shall not be made a public one. To-day Dorcas Dene has all the facts in her possession, and she has just gone to see Lady Helsham. And now, my dear fellow, what can I do for you?”

  My business was a very trifling matter. It was soon discussed and settled, and then Mr.——invited me to lunch with him at a neighbouring restaurant. After lunch I strolled back with him as far as his office. As we approached, a cab drove up to the door and a lady alighted.

  “By Jove! it’s your lady detective again,” I exclaimed.

  The lady detective saw us, and came towards us.

  “Excuse me,” she said to Mr.——, “I want just a word or two with you.”

  Something in her voice struck me then, and suddenly I remembered where I had seen her before.

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, “but are we not old friends?”

  “Oh, yes,” replied the lady detective with a smile; “I knew you at once, but thought you had forgotten me. I have changed a good deal since I left the theatre.”

  “You have changed your name and your profession, but hardly your appearance—I ought to have known you at once. May I wait for you here while you discuss your business with Mr.——? I should like to have a few minutes’ chat with you about old times.”

  Dorcas Lester—or rather Dorcas Dene, as I must call her now—gave a little nod of assent, and I walked up and down the street smoking my cigar for fully a quarter of an hour before she reappeared.

  “I’m afraid I’ve kept you waiting a long time,” she said pleasantly, “and now if you want to talk to me you will have to come home with me. I’ll introduce you to my husband. You needn’t hesitate or think you’ll be in the way, because, as a matter of fact, directly I saw you I made up my mind you could be exceedingly useful to me.”

  She raised her umbrella and stopped a taxi, and before I quite appreciated the situation, we were making our way to St. John’s Wood.

  On the journey Dorcas Dene was confidential. She told me that she had taken to the stage because her father, an artist, had died suddenly and left her and her mother nothing but a few unmarketable pictures.

  “Poor dad!” she said. “He was very clever, and he loved us very dearly, but he was only a great big boy to the last. When he was doing well he spent everything he made, and enjoyed life—when he was doing badly he did bills and pawned things, and thought it was rather fun. At one time he would be treating us to dinner at the Café Royal and the theatre afterwards, and at another time he would be showing us how to live as cheaply as he used to do in his old Paris days in the Quartier Latin, and cooking our meals himself at the studio fire.

  “Well, when he died I got on to the stage, and at last—as I dare-say you remember—I was earning two guineas a week. On that my mother and I lived in two rooms in St. Paul’s Road, Camden Town.

  “Then a young artist, a Mr. Paul Dene, who had been our friend and constant visitor in my father’s lifetime, fell in love with me. He had risen rapidly in his profession, and was making money. He had no relatives, and his income was seven or eight hundred a year, and promised to be much larger. Paul proposed to me, and I accepted him. He insisted that I should leave the stage, and he would take a pretty little house, and mother should come and live with us, and we could all be happy together.

  “We took the house we are going to now—a sweet little place with a lovely garden in Elm Tree Road, St. John’s Wood—and for two years we were very happy. Then a terrible misfortune happened. Paul had an illness and became blind. He would never be able to paint again.

  “When I had nursed him back to health I found that the interest of what we had saved would barely pay the rent of our house. I did not want to break up our home—what was to be done? I thought of the stage again, and I had just made up my mind to see if I could not get an engagement, when chance settled my future for me and gave me a start in a very different profession.

  “In the next house to us there lived a gentleman, a Mr. Johnson, who was a retired superintendent of police. Since his retirement he had been conducting a high-class private inquiry business, and was employed in many delicate family matters by a well-known firm of solicitors who are supposed to have the secrets of half the aristocracy locked away in their strong room.

  “Mr. Johnson had been a frequent visitor of ours, and there was nothing which delighted Paul more in our quiet evenings than a chat and a pipe with the genial, good-hearted ex-superintendent of police. Many a time have I and my husband sat till the small hours by our cosy fireside listening to the strange tales of crime, and the unravelling of mysteries which our kind neighbour had to tell. There was something fascinating to us in following the slow and cautious steps with which our friend—who looked more like a jolly sea captain than a detective—had threaded his way through the Hampton Court maze in the centre of which lay the truth which it was his business to discover.

  “He must have thought a good deal of Paul’s opinion, for after a time he would come in and talk over cases which he had in hand—without mentioning names when the business was confidential—and the view which Paul took of the mystery more than once turned out to be the correct one. From this constant association with a private detective we began to take a kind of interest in his work, and when there was a great case in the papers which seemed to defy the efforts of Scotland Yard, Paul and I would talk it over together, and discuss it and build up our own theories around it.

  “After my poor Paul lost his sight Mr. Johnson, who was a widower, would come in whenever he was at home—many of his cases took him out of London for weeks together—and help to cheer my poor boy up by telling him all about the latest romance or scandal in which he had been engaged.

  “On these occasions my mother, who is a dear, old-fashioned, simple-minded woman, would soon make an excuse to leave us. She declared that to listen to Mr. Johnson’s stories made her nervous. She would soon begin to believe that every man and woman she met had a guilty secret, and the world was
one great Chamber of Horrors with living figures instead of waxwork ones like those of Madame Tussaud’s.

  “I had told Mr. Johnson of our position when I found that it would be necessary for me to do something to supplement the hundred a year which was all that Paul’s money would bring us in, and he had agreed with me that the stage afforded the best opening.

  “One morning I made up my mind to go to the agent’s. I had dressed myself in my best and had anxiously consulted my looking-glass. I was afraid that my worries and the long strain of my husband’s illness might have left their mark upon my features and spoilt my ‘market value’ in the managerial eye.

  “I had taken such pains with myself, and my mind was so concentrated upon the object I had in view, that when I was quite satisfied with my appearance I ran into our little sitting-room, and, without thinking, said to my husband, ‘Now I’m off! How do you think I look, dear?’”

  “My poor Paul turned his sightless eyes towards me, and his lip quivered. Instantly I saw what my thoughtlessness had done. I flung my arms round him and kissed him, and then, the tears in my eyes, I ran out of the room and went down the front garden. When I opened the door Mr. Johnson was outside with his hand on the bell.

  “ ‘Where are you going?’ he said.

  “ ‘To the agent, to see about an engagement.’

  “ ‘Come back; I want to talk to you.’

  “I led the way into the house, and we went into the dining-room, which was empty.

  “ ‘What do you think you could get on the stage?’ he said.

  “ ‘Oh, if I’m lucky I may get what I had before—two guineas a week.’

  “ ‘Well, then, put off the stage for a little and I can give you something that will pay you a great deal better. I’ve just got a case in which I must have the assistance of a lady. The lady who has worked for me the last two years has been idiot enough to get married, with the usual consequences, and I’m in a fix.’

  “ ‘You—you want me to be a lady detective—to watch people?’ I gasped. ‘Oh, I couldn’t!’

  “‘My dear Mrs. Dene,’ Mr. Johnson said gently, ‘I have too much respect for you and your husband to offer you anything that you need be afraid of accepting. I want you to help me to rescue an unhappy man who is being so brutally blackmailed that he has run away from his broken-hearted wife and his sorrowing children. That is surely a business transaction in which an angel could engage without soiling its wings.’

  “ ‘But I’m not clever at—at that sort of thing!’

  “ ‘You are cleverer than you think. I have formed a very high opinion of your qualifications for our business. You have plenty of shrewd common sense, you are a keen observer, and you have been an actress. Come, the wife’s family are rich, and I am to have a good round sum if I save the poor fellow and get him home again. I can give you a guinea a day and your expenses, and you have only to do what I tell you.’

  “I thought everything over, and then I accepted—on one condition. I was to see how I got on before Paul was told anything about it. If I found that being a lady detective was repugnant to me—if I found that it involved any sacrifice of my womanly instincts—I should resign, and my husband would never know that I had done anything of the sort.

  “Mr. Johnson agreed, and we left together for his office.

  “That was how I first became a lady detective. I found that the work interested me, and that I was not so awkward as I had expected to be. I was successful in my first undertaking, and Mr. Johnson insisted on my remaining with him and eventually we became partners. A year ago he retired, strongly recommending me to all his clients, and that is how you find me to-day a professional lady detective.”

  “And one of the best in England,” I said, with a bow. “My friend Mr.——has told me of your great reputation.”

  Dorcas Dene smiled.

  “Never mind about my reputation,” she said. “Here we are at my house—now you’ve got to come in and be introduced to my husband and to my mother and to Toddlekins.”

  “Toddlekins—I beg pardon—that’s the baby, I suppose?”

  A shade crossed Dorcas Dene’s pretty womanly face, and I thought I saw her soft grey eyes grow moist.

  “No—we have no family. Toddlekins is a dog.”

  I had become a constant visitor at Elm Tree Road. I had conceived a great admiration for the brave and yet womanly woman who, when her artist husband was stricken with blindness, and the future looked dark for both of them, had gallantly made the best of her special gifts and opportunities and nobly undertaken a profession which was not only a harassing and exhausting one for a woman, but by no means free from grave personal risks.

  Dorcas Dene was always glad to welcome me for her husband’s sake. “Paul has taken to you immensely,” she said to me one afternoon, “and I hope you will call in and spend an hour or two with him whenever you can. My cases take me away from home so much—he cannot read, and my mother, with the best intentions in the world, can never converse with him for more than five minutes without irritating him. Her terribly matter of fact views of life are, to use his own expression, absolutely ‘rasping’ to his dreamy, artistic temperament.”

  I had plenty of spare time on my hands, and so it became my custom to drop in two or three times a week, and smoke a pipe, and chat with Paul. His conversation was always interesting, and the gentle resignation with which he bore his terrible affliction won my heart. But I am not ashamed to confess that my frequent journeys to Elm Tree Road were also largely influenced by my desire to see Dorcas Dene, and hear more of her strange adventures and experiences.

  From the moment she knew that her husband valued my companionship she treated me as one of the family, and when I was fortunate enough to find her at home, she discussed her professional affairs openly before me. I was grateful for this confidence, and I was sometimes able to assist her by going about with her in cases where the presence of a male companion was a material advantage to her. I had upon one occasion laughingly dubbed myself her “assistant,” and by that name I was afterwards generally known. There was only one drawback to the pleasure I felt at being associated with Dorcas Dene in her detective work. I saw that it would be quite impossible for me to avoid reproducing my experiences in some form or other. One day I broached the subject to her cautiously.

  “Are you not afraid of the assistant one day revealing the professional secrets of his chief?” I said.

  “Not at all,” replied Dorcas—everybody called her Dorcas, and I fell into the habit when I found that she and her husband preferred it to the formal “Mrs. Dene”—“I am quite sure that you will not be able to resist the temptation.”

  “And you don’t object?”

  “Oh, no, but with this stipulation, that you will use the material in such a way as not to identify any of the cases with the real parties concerned.”

  That lifted a great responsibility from my shoulders, and made me more eager than ever to prove myself a valuable “assistant” to the charming lady who honoured me with her confidence.

  We were sitting in the dining-room one evening after dinner. Mrs. Lester was looking contemptuously over the last number of the Tatler, and wondering out loud what on earth young women were coming to. Paul was smoking the old briar-root pipe which had been his constant companion in the studio when he was able to paint, poor fellow, and Dorcas was lying down on the sofa. Toddlekins, nestled up close to her, was snoring gently after the manner of his kind.

  Dorcas had had a hard and exciting week, and had not been ashamed to confess that she felt a little played out. She had just succeeded in rescuing a young lady of fortune from the toils of an unprincipled Russian adventurer, and stopping the marriage almost at the altar rails by the timely production of the record of the would-be bridegroom, which she obtained with the assistance of the head of the French detective police. It was a return compliment. Dorcas had only a short time previously undertaken for the Chef de la Sureté a delicate investigation, in which the
son of one of the noblest houses in France was involved, and had nipped in the bud a scandal which would have kept the Boulevards chattering for a month.

  Paul and I were conversing below our voices, for Dorcas’s measured breathing showed us that she had fallen into a doze.

  Suddenly Toddlekins opened his eyes and uttered an angry growl. He had heard the front gate bell.

  A minute later the servant entered and handed a card to her mistress, who, with her eyes still half closed, was sitting up on the sofa.

  “The gentleman says he must see you at once, ma’am, on business of the greatest importance.”

  Dorcas looked at the card. “Show the gentleman into the dining-room,” she said to the servant, “and say that I will be with him directly.”

  Then she went to the mantel-glass and smoothed away the evidence of her recent forty winks. “Do you know him at all?” she said, handing me the card.

  “Colonel Hargreaves, Orley Park, near Godalming.” I shook my head, and Dorcas, with a little tired sigh, went to see her visitor.

  A few minutes later the dining-room bell rang, and presently the servant came into the drawing-room. “Please, sir,” she said, addressing me, “mistress says will you kindly come to her at once?”

  When I entered the dining-room I was astonished to see an elderly, soldierly looking man lying back unconscious in the easy chair, and Dorcas Dene bending over him.

  “I don’t think it’s anything but a faint,” she said. “He’s very excited and overwrought, but if you’ll stay here I’ll go and get some brandy. You had better loosen his collar—or shall we send for a doctor?”

  “No, I don’t think it is anything serious,” I said, after a hasty glance at the invalid.