“Taken to hospital?” echoed Mr Dawes, ignoring the other’s last remark. “Why? What’s the matter with him?”
“Scarlet fever,” said Mr Budd, slowly; “an’ if he’d kept his thievin’ hands off them jewels he’d have been healthy and strong now instead of lyin’ as you might say at the point of death.”
Thoroughly alarmed Mr Dawes faced him.
“What have the jewels got to do with it?” he demanded.
“Everythin’,” said Mr Budd. “Scarlet fever’s very catchin’. The Duchess of Hillport’s maid died of it last week, and a few days before the robbery at Stirlin’s the Duchess sent her diamond necklace to be re-set. She’ll get into trouble for lettin’ contagious property come out of her house, but that won’t save poor Harry Snell.”
Mr Dawes, his face white and trembling, swallowed with difficulty.
“Do you mean that the diamonds were infected?” he muttered huskily.
Mr Budd nodded.
“I’m afraid they were,” he answered. “The diamonds and the cases had been handled by this unfortunate maid.”
Mr Dawes stared at him horrified. Harry Snell through handling those stones had gone down with the fever, and less than two hours ago he had himself…
“My God!” he cried hoarsely. “How awful.” In his fear he had almost forgotten Mr Budd’s presence and was staring fearfully at his beautifully manicured hands.
“What’s the matter?” asked the stout Superintendent, innocently. “You haven’t touched those jewels, Dawes—”
But Mr Dawes wasn’t listening. In two strides he was at the writing-table and snatched up the telephone. A second later he had given a Harley Street number and was talking wildly and incoherently to the man at the other end of the wire. Shakily he put the instrument down and turned a white, damp, face towards the detective. Mr Budd had risen to his feet and was surveying him calmly through half-closed eyes.
“Get your hat and coat, Dawes,” he said, “and come a little walk with me.”
“Don’t be a fool,” snarled Dawes irritably. “I’ve telephoned for the doctor—”
“I know that,” said Mr Budd, yawning, “but you won’t need him. What you need is a good solicitor, same as Harry Snell.”
“Harry Snell’s in hospital,” began Mr Dawes, and stopped as the fat man shook his head.
“Harry Snell’s in Cannon Row,” he corrected cheerfully; “and that’s where you’ll be in twenty minutes. I think I’ve got you at last, Dawes.”
A great light broke on Mr Dawes.
“Do you mean…that that was all lies…?” He gaped foolishly at the detective.
Mr Budd nodded.
“I think I did it rather well,” he said complacently.
A wave of rage replaced Mr Dawes’s previous fear.
“Well, what good’s it done you?” he snarled. “After all there are only two of us here and you’ve no witnesses—”
“Dear me,” said Mr Budd, “I’d forgotten all about him!” He clicked his teeth. “Fancy my leavin’ him out in the cold all this time.” He went across to the door, jerked it open, and the thin and melancholy Sergeant Leek entered. In his hand was a note-book and pencil. “Did you get all that down?” inquired the fat Superintendent, and the Sergeant nodded lugubriously.
“We found the stolen stuff in a concealed safe in his study,” said Mr Budd to the Assistant Commissioner that evening, “and I think that’s the end of Mr Simon Dawes, at least for ten years.”
Major Hemery pursed his lips.
“It was very irregular, Budd,” he said. “Very irregular indeed.”
“It was the only way,” answered the “Rose-bud.” “We had nothin’ against him, and until we were certain the jewels were on the premises it wasn’t much good gettin’ a search warrant.”
The Assistant Commissioner frowned and stroked his moustache.
“Sergeant Leek must have very sharp ears,” he remarked, “to have heard your conversation through a closed door.”
“He didn’t,” said Mr Budd calmly. “He heard nothin’! But when your dealin’ with a feller like Dawes you’ve got to use your imagination, and I’d given Leek his instructions before we arrived at the flat!”
The Man Who Married Too Often
Roy Vickers
William Edward Vickers (1889–1965) was generally known as Roy Vickers (and in his own circle, by his nickname, “Duff”). He was educated at Charterhouse, and attended Brasenose College, Oxford, but left without taking a degree. He studied law, with a view to becoming a barrister, but instead turned to journalism and court reporting. He started to publish short stories before the First World War, and his first book was a biography of the nineteenth century soldier Lord Roberts.
Vickers’ 1937 non-series novel The Girl in the News was filmed by Carol Reed, but his reputation today rests mainly on his stories about Scotland Yard’s Department of Dead Ends. These were “inverted mysteries”, which showed a criminal at work before explaining how the Department solved the case, and this story first appeared in Fiction Parade in 1936. The inverted mystery had been devised decades earlier by R. Austin Freeman, but in a foreword to a compilation of ten of the stories about the Department, Ellery Queen argued that in comparison, Vickers’ stories “are even more gripping in their psychological interest and they generate a suspense that Dr Freeman never achieved…The realism is neither drab nor prosaic: it is shot through with the credible fantasy which occurs repeatedly in real life—the peculiar touch of the unreal which somehow stamps all works of imagination with the very trademark of reality.”
***
If the Marchioness of Roucester and Jarrow had been an educated woman she might have been alive today. And so, of course, might the Marquis. But it was not through her lack of education that she was caught. The crime, as a crime, was wholly successful and it was only discovered inadvertently by the Department of Dead Ends. The tragic truth is that if she had known only as much law as the ordinary middle-class woman knows she would never have committed murder.
In spite of the crude melodrama of her life and death—ideal stuff for newspaper headlines in normal circumstances—she never “made the front page.” This was because she was arrested two days after England had gone to war with Germany, with the result that she got about ten lines in two of the London papers.
She married the Marquis on May 5th, 1901, when she was twenty-three. It was a manipulated marriage and the manipulator was her own mother—an altogether objectionable person who let lodgings at Brighton, and indulged in various other activities with which we need not distress ourselves. But—curiously enough, as we are talking of a murderess—they distressed Molly Webster very much indeed.
The name Webster, by the way, is quite arbitrary, though Molly acquired legal right to it through the fact that she had used it all her life. She did not know who her father was; nor, one is bound to believe, did her mother.
Early in her life something seems to have weaned Molly from the influence of her mother. We need not be mystical about it. At various times the house would tend to fill itself with respectable people. There was an elderly artist, the late Trelawney Samson, who painted Molly when she was a lovely little thing of five. He remained her friend throughout childhood and must have taught her a great deal, though he could not eradicate an unexpected tendency to be much too careful with small sums of money. Probably from him she derived her love of respectability which later became an obsession.
Presumably through Samson’s influence, she was sent to the local High School where for a time she was a model pupil. Except for one mention of her parsimonious tendencies she earned consistently good reports and won three prizes, each for arithmetic. The record of a dull little plodder—until we suddenly find that in her second year in the upper school and actually on her fifteenth birthday she was expelled for striking a mistress.
&nbs
p; For three years she tried various jobs, beginning with domestic service. She had a number of situations, leaving each of her own accord, and in each case being given an excellent character. There was a brief period in various shops, including, of all things, an undertaker’s.
The next we hear of her is at twenty-two, making fairly regular appearances in provincial music-halls. She was a good-looking girl but not a ravishing beauty, being too tall and bony for her generation. Her photographs are disappointing, though one can detect a certain grace and beauty that must have been appealing. We must infer that her physical lure lay in her vitality, which was considerable. Both before and after marriage she had a number of ardent admirers—none of whom, we may believe, ever touched her lips.
On the halls she was able to support herself without her mother’s assistance and to dress quite reasonably. All those who knew her at this time have agreed that she led a life of almost puritanical respectability. In those days puritanism was not a helpful quality in a comedienne. Her strong line was Cockney characterisation, but she never allowed the slightest risquerie in her songs or her patter.
At the end of April 1901 she had an engagement in her home town—at the then newly opened Hippodrome. Here an unknown admirer sent her an elaborate bouquet and, as was her custom, she sent it back.
On the following night, immediately after her turn, the manager brought two men to her dressing-room. One was an elderly man with white hair, bear-leader to the second man, who was thirty-one but behaved as if he were sixteen.
The elder man was a Colonel Boyce. He introduced the younger as “Mr Stranack.” Because there were two of them, one of them white-headed, Molly was reasonably polite.
The next day they turned up at her lodgings in Station Road. The younger man, it appeared, was very smitten and the Colonel was giving him disinterested moral support.
For some reason Molly seems to have made investigations. She found that the names were genuine—as far as they went; that Stranack’s full name was Charles Augustus Jean Marie Stranack and that when he was not paying court to comediennes he was more commonly known as the Marquis of Roucester and Jarrow.
This knowledge seems to have produced in Molly the same kind of violent storm that had changed the smug little pupil into the Apache who had smashed her mistress’ jaw. We may say that by the same storm the puritan temperament was blown out like a candle. In fact, she went to her mother, whom she had not seen for seven years, and positively asked for a helping hand.
“All right, dearie! I’ll help you. You shall have your chance in life no matter what happens to me.”
Under instructions Molly separated the young Marquis from the Colonel and enticed him to her mother’s house. The details become a trifle coarse, for they were stage-managed by her mother—from the moment when the young man entered the house to the moment when a shabby lawyer was put on to blackmail him.
The Marquis succumbed to threats and nine days later married Molly at the Brighton registrar’s office.
After the ceremony Molly came to herself—the rather queer self that she had created out of the half-understood teachings of the artist and her own violent reactions from her mother’s mode of life. One imagines her looking round a little vaguely to see where this temperamental leap in the dark had landed her. There was, among other things, her husband.
In the whirl of what we may by courtesy call her engagement, she had had little time to make his acquaintance. She now found that she had tied herself to an amiable, irresponsible, reasonably good-looking young man, with the mental outlook of a schoolboy who has broken bounds. She extracted his history, which was an uninspiring affair. He seemed to be uncertain whether he had any relations but fancied that a man who had been awfully nice to him was his second cousin. He had spent a short time at Oxford and a still shorter time in the Army, after which his father had handed him over to Colonel Boyce.
After his father’s death, some nine years previously, the Colonel had taken him, she gathered, first to Paris and Vienna, then to Canada and later to the East, and they had had a perfectly gorgeous time. He had never been to the House of Lords—he even inclined to the belief that it was an Elective Assembly—and but rarely visited the family estate at Roucester in Gloucester.
The Marquis bore curiously little resentment for the means by which he had been married. It is even possible that he regarded the whole thing as the more or less normal procedure; for his conception of sexual morality was, as will presently be seen, elementary. Moreover, under the Colonel’s tutelage his social experience had been almost limited to chance acquaintances in hotels.
Molly let him take her to Paris for the honeymoon, where she made the discovery that her husband was infatuated with her. It is unlikely that she was at all deeply stirred in response; but if she was not, it is quite certain that the Marquis never knew it. To her, marriage was a new job and she did it well. Paradoxical as it may sound, Molly was, in many respects, an excellent wife.
As well as a husband, there was an income of something under three thousand a year—which she was to take in hand a little later. And then, of course, there was the fact that she had changed a very doubtful name for a quite indisputable title. For the first year she was very sensitive about the title. It would be clumsy to say that she was a snob. The title was to her the symbol of her emancipation from the sordid conditions of her birth and childhood and her quite natural pride in it led to an incident on the first day of their honeymoon—which cast, one might say, the shadow of the tragedy of six years later.
They put up at the Hotel des Anglais where he astonished and offended her by signing the register as “Mr and Mrs Stranack.” And in this connection we hear her voice for the first time. One imagines the words being very clearly enunciated (thanks to her training in the halls) while the new consciousness of rank struggles with the Cockney idiom.
“I felt myself going hot and cold all over, though I didn’t say anything until we were in our room. And then I said: ‘This is a nice thing, Charles,’ I said, ‘if you’re ashamed of me already. And if you’re not, why did you sign Mr and Mrs Stranack?’ And then he laughed and said: ‘Well, you see the fact is that jolly old manager-fellow recognised me and that’s how we signed it before. Must be careful, what!’ And I said: ‘Do you mean to say you’ve brought me to the very hotel where you’ve stayed before with some woman? I never knew men treated their wives like that,’ I said. And he laughed again and said: ‘That’s all right, kiddie. She was my wife, too. Married her at the place they call the Mairie.’”
Molly was taking no risks. She walked out of the room, called an interpreter and made him take her to the Mairie. Here she obtained the marriage certificate of Marthe Celeste Stranack, née Frasinier, dated February 15th, 1897—which she did not want. And the death certificate of the same—dated January 22nd, 1901—which enabled her to return to the Hotel des Anglais without menace to her technical respectability.
After leaving Paris they went to Bournemouth and spent the summer drifting about English watering-places. In those days Roucester Castle had not been thrown open to the public. It was let until the following September. As soon as the tenancy expired Molly insisted on going to live at the Castle. So there, in the following April (1902) her son was born.
Again it was probably the reaction from her mother that made Molly take her own motherhood with fanatical zeal. It might almost be said that the baby changed the very contours of the countryside. Roucester, which perhaps you know as a noisy little town, was then hardly more than a village. That town was called into being by Molly’s discovery that it was impossible to live in the Castle on three thousand a year. The knowledge made her angry and she wanted to hurt somebody, so she hurt Colonel Boyce.
The Colonel had combined with the duty of tutor those of absentee overseer of the estate. He was an honest, stupid man with the class-morality of a Victorian gentleman. After the debacle he returned as gua
rdian of Molly’s child and with the boy was killed in an air-raid on London in 1917. Only a few days before his death he gave evidence to the Court of Chancery.
“I was aware that the Marchioness had called in a firm of London accountants to examine my books. And I think I may say, without fear of being accused of malice to the dead, that Lady Roucester was disappointed when no defalcation was discovered. In a subsequent interview she asked me a number of questions, particularly in regard to the leases. At the end of our conversation I found myself virtually discharged as an incompetent servant. Thereafter, I understand, the Marchioness managed the estate herself.”
She did. Molly, the ex-music-hall hack and unscrupulous adventuress, took over that rambling, difficult estate and in five years was squeezing out of it a trifle under eleven thousand a year net. If you have driven through this part, you may regret the big factory of the Meat Extract people whose coal barges have spoilt that bit of the river, while Cauldean Hill, of course, has been utterly ruined by the quarry. But you should remember in charity that they are the indirect result of Molly’s conscientious motherhood.
She even made a partially successful attempt to build up her husband, who had now taken on the tremendous importance of being the father of her son. Even that first year she raised enough to attend the Coronation—dragged along with her the reluctant Marquis, protesting, not without truth, that he looked a most frightful ass in miniver and a coronet. She made him attend some of the debates, but neither threats nor tears would induce him to make a speech. He was an indifferent horseman but she soon had money enough to put him back in the traditional position of M.F.H.
Out of it all she took no more than four hundred a year for herself of which nearly three hundred was spent on dress.
In their third year that handful of prosperous and for the most part idle persons who are commonly called “the County” began to approve of what she had done with the Marquis, and in the fourth year they “called.”
The Long Arm of the Law Page 7
