Oddly enough, they seem to have liked her. There are no stories of her gaucherie. As she made no secret of her origin and did not claim to be one of them, they willingly gave her the position to which her rank would normally have entitled her.
Her aim was to fulfil her role as adequately as she could in the country. There was no town-house, though she hoped they would be able to afford one by the time Conrad was old enough to go to Eton. Cowes was financially out of reach, so they spent August at the Castle.
It was on an August morning in 1907—actually Bank Holiday—when there came the next crisis in her life. At exactly half-past twelve she went out, as she had a bit of a headache and intended to potter in the garden until lunchtime. But she was still on the terrace when she saw the station victoria coming up the drive.
Disentangling the facts from her own rather verbose account, we gather that she waited on the terrace until the cab was immediately below her. She then called out to the woman sitting in it:
“Hullo! Have you come to see me?” The woman seemed to be flustered by this informal greeting. She made no answer and let herself be driven on to the entrance. Here she hesitated, then walked along the terrace to where Molly was standing.
“Excuse me asking—but are you Lady Roucester?”
Molly had had a quick look at her and thought she might be an old-time acquaintance of the halls.
“Yes. And I know your face quite well, but since I’ve had the influenza my memory is something awful.”
“Excuse me. But the family name is Stranack, isn’t it? Your husband’s got a girl’s name, hasn’t he?—Jean-Marie. Charles Augustus Jean Marie Stranack? And he’s called—” she consulted a piece of paper—“the Marquis of Roucester and Jarrow. He was born in Roucester and he’s thirty-eight.”
Tears, Molly said, were running down the woman’s cheeks. She took a folded paper out of her purse and gave it to Molly.
“Perhaps you’ll look at this and tell me what we’d better do?”
It was, of course, the certificate of marriage between Charles Stranack and Phyllis Margaret, solemnised in St Seiriol’s Church, Toronto, on June 30th, 1900.
Toronto—June 30th, 1900—as against Brighton May 5th, 1901. The two women seem to have stood together for two or three minutes without speaking to each other. They were certainly there at twenty-five minutes to one when the youthful Lord Narley, heir to the Marquisate, passed within a hundred feet of them with his governess.
“Is that your little boy?” asked Phyllis Margaret. “Of course, it’s hard on him but—I really don’t know what’s to be done, I’m sure.”
Very hard on him, thought Molly! He had been known as a young lord who would one day be a marquis. They would laugh at him all his life. For, of course, wherever she went with him it would “get about.” Even at Brighton, where she had been nobody, it had “got about” that the name of Webster had been chosen at random. He would just be “Master Conrad”—if anything.
(“All right, dearie. I’ll help you! You shall have your chance in life no matter what happens to me.”)
By one o’clock Phyllis Margaret was dead.
***
Legally, it was a premeditated murder; but humanly speaking the whole thing was planned and carried out on the spur of the moment.
“I suppose we aren’t going to fly at each other’s throats,” said Molly. “We shall have to see Charles about this. He is pottering about after rabbits and won’t be in for ever so long, for he’s always late for luncheon, but I know where to find him.”
The two of them crossed the home-park together. Molly had kept the marriage certificate, which presently she put in her blouse. On the way their conversation seems to have been confined to an amicable agreement that the Marquis had always been untrustworthy with women, and probably always would be.
At a quarter to one they came upon the Marquis in a clearing in the copse. Joseph Ledbetter, a junior keeper, who was with the Marquis, testified to the time. He testified further that as the two ladies approached, the Marquis showed signs of an almost ludicrous agitation and that he actually said, “Good lord, Joe! I’m in the soup. You’d better mouch off.”
There follows one of those amazing little scenes that positively shock our preconceptions. We are compelled to imagine those two unhappy women turning upon the Marquis and denouncing him for the cruel little cad that he was. We imagine him faltering and cowering. But in fact he merely said:
“Hullo, Phyllis!”
And Phyllis Margaret said:
“Hullo, Charles! I’ve just had a word with Lady Roucester.” (This was very civil of her since she believed the title was justly her own.) “And I saw your little boy, only it was too far off and I couldn’t speak to him.”
“Ha! Jolly kid, what! Only Molly runs him on a tight rein. I suppose we’d better be mouching back! Must be nearly lunchtime.”
Molly took out the certificate and showed it to him.
“I only want to know one thing, Charles. Is that a forgery?”
He just glanced at it, then looked away and she knew it was not a forgery. She folded it and put it back in her blouse.
“Bit awkward, what!” said the Marquis. “I suppose we can fix something?”
But Phyllis Margaret was not very helpful.
“I don’t know what we can do, Charles. It seems it’s going to be hard on one of us. And it wouldn’t surprise me if this lady was to refuse and have you sent to prison.”
That told Molly that the woman did not want to fix anything. Of course, there was no need for her to do so, reasoned Molly. She had only to make her claim to be sure of the title and at least a substantial alimony. But the fool ought to have realised this before she came to Roucester.
“That’s quite right, Charles! You can’t fix anything—you’ll have to go to prison—unless I save you.” (“All right, dearie, I’ll help you!”)
Molly grabbed the shot-gun from his hand, wheeled round and shot Phyllis Margaret through the head at a range of about four inches.
(“When she fell down dead looking all horrible, Charles was sick. And then l knew that it was no good, and that he couldn’t keep his head and tell the tale I’d already thought of. And I thought of Conrad and I didn’t love Charles at all, because I think he was a worm. But Conrad takes after me and I always meant him to have his chance.”)
Molly was holding the shot-gun while the Marquis babbled in terror. By checking up on other events we are able to work out that she gave him some seven minutes before she tackled him.
“I’m going to say that she was one of your cast-off loves and when you wouldn’t do anything for her she snatched your gun and shot herself. You must remember to tell the same tale. Otherwise we shall both be hanged because they’ll say we murdered her together.”
“Yes—yes, that’s what we’ll say! That’s a fine idea! Let’s go,” dithered the Marquis.
(“But his teeth were chattering and I was afraid he would run away. So I knew I’d have to do it quickly—or he would let some slut look after Conrad if I were taken.”)
“Wait a minute, Charles. We’ve got to get the tale right before we move from this spot. We’ve got to rehearse it. You play Phyllis. Go on—take the gun. Put it up as if you were going to shoot yourself…No, you can’t do it like that or you won’t be able to reach the trigger…You’ll have to put your mouth right on the muzzles. Go on—be a man!”
She saw that he could doubtfully reach the trigger. Anyhow, Molly’s finger got there first—and virtually blew her husband’s head off with the left barrel.
Molly had read all about fingerprints. She tore a strip of lace from her clothing—in those days they wore a gathered frill tacked inside the skirt-hem—and wiped the gun from muzzle to butt, including both triggers. She put the lace under her blouse beside the marriage certificate (and later washed it herself and wore it a
gain).
Even when the muzzle had been in his mouth the Marquis could barely have reached the triggers. He was wearing a golf suit (precursor of plus-fours). She rolled back the dead man’s stocking, unbuckled his leather strap-garter, looped the garter round the trigger, then fastened the buckle. By such a device—by putting his toe in the loop of the garter—a man could blow his own head off with a shotgun.
Then she ran to Ledbetter’s cottage, which was nearer than the Castle and in the opposite direction.
“Get on your bicycle at once and go for Dr Turner and the police. There has been an accident.”
“Did you say go for the police, my lady?”
“Dr Turner and the police, Ledbetter. You’ll all have to know soon, so I may as well tell you now. His lordship shot a woman who was blackmailing him and then committed suicide.”
She turned back, walked through the copse past the two dead bodies to the Castle, where she summoned the housekeeper and the butler and gave them her version of the affair.
***
It is an axiom that the greater the risk taken by a murderer at the moment of murder, the greater are the chances of ultimate escape. Molly had taken an enormous risk at the moment of murder. Young Ledbetter might have hidden himself in the copse to see the fun. About four hundred yards away, part of the copse was being cleared by five labourers and a foreman. It was their dinner hour and any one of them might have passed the spot. It just happened that none of them did so.
There was no suspicion of Molly, partly because there was no perceptible motive. The Coroner, whose daughter Molly had presented at the last Court, confined his comments upon her actions to expressions of sympathy and admiration of her cool-headed courage. The local police toed the line. But the Treasury sent down Detective-Inspector Martleplug to have an unofficial look around.
From a close examination of the scene of the murder Martleplug picked up nothing. There was nothing in the footsteps to upset Molly’s story—and very little in the gun itself. Round one trigger was the garter which, in any case, would have blotted out fingerprints. On the other trigger there were no fingerprints—though there ought to have been, if the Marquis had shot Phyllis Margaret before looping the garter round the other trigger and shooting himself. But you couldn’t build anything on that.
Martleplug managed to take the gun back with him to the Yard. Molly neglected to claim it and in course of time it drifted to the Department of Dead Ends.
It was fifteen days before they found out anything about the dead woman. Her underclothing had been marked “Vanlessing” and eventually they found that she had stayed for three weeks in cheap lodgings off the Waterloo Road and had there called herself “Mrs Stranack.” The landlady, whether she knew anything or not, gave no information that was of any use in tracing her late lodger’s previous movements.
Molly shut up the Castle for a year and took her boy to the South of France. Early the following summer she spent a few weeks at Brighton. Her mother, whom she did not go to see, died during this visit and Molly created a mild situation by refusing to pay her funeral expenses. Eventually she backed out, and commissioned her former employers, obtaining a special discount. Shortly after Christmas she returned to the Castle.
She now entered upon the third phase of her paradoxical career. Although she was only twenty-nine her hair was beginning to go grey. (To dye one’s hair was socially impossible in 1907.) Her dress became severe. But her devotion to her son’s future forbade her to become a recluse. She took up archery and became president of the Gloucester Toxophilites.
She was still very close-fisted, ran the estate with a rather brutal economy and gave perilously little to charity. Nevertheless, she attained a certain popularity. She was willing and eager to open bazaars, to work for hospitals and the like, and once a year she would throw the Castle open to the Waifs and Strays, entertaining them with reasonable liberality. In short, she was systematically training herself for the role of grande dame which she intended to fill when her son was grown up.
In 1909 she sent the boy to a preparatory school. For a fortnight at the beginning of each term she was moody and even tearful. She disliked and secretly disapproved of boarding-schools as she did of hunting. But she believed both to be necessary for his welfare.
For five years she lived like this and we may assume that, in psychological jargon, she had transmuted the ego that had committed murder. We pick up a blurred record of the period through the news-cutting agencies—paragraphs in local papers about small activities and doubtful little anecdotes. Suddenly the spotlight falls on her again on July 10th, 1914, in the form of a letter from the management of the Hotel Cecil in the Strand (now the headquarters of a petrol organisation).
The letter informed her that a Mrs Vanlessing had contracted a liability of £34–15–0, that she had stated that she was sister “to” the Marchioness of Roucester and Jarrow and, further, that her ladyship would be only too pleased to pay the account.
Vanlessing! She remembered the name vaguely in connection with Phyllis Margaret. But she remembered too that Scotland Yard had done their best with the gun and the footprints and one thing and another. So she wired back:
“Never had a sister so cannot accept liability—Molly Roucester and Jarrow.”
The Vanlessing woman slipped away but was found by Scotland Yard a week later. On arrest she repeated her tale, but tearfully withdrew it when she was shown a photograph of Molly.
“Aw! I’ll take the rap,” we imagine her saying (for she was a Canadian). “Guess the whole thing was a plant and I’ve been made a sucker by my own sister. She married a guy called Stranack in Toronto on June 30th, 1900. She claimed she’d found out later—about 1907 it was—that he was an English lord. She was down and out at the time and I lent her the money and gave her the clothes to come over here. Never had a word from her since. So I thought I’d drift over and see if I could collect.”
Three weeks later—two days after we had entered the War—Superintendent Tarrant of Dead Ends took a young subordinate named Norris to Roucester Castle. Norris was carrying the shot-gun that had killed the Marquis, not as might be expected in a gun-case but in a cricket bag. In the train Tarrant opened the cricket-bag and, as Norris described it, started messing about with the gun and the garter that was still looped round one of the triggers.
“We have called, Lady Roucester, about the woman Vanlessing who recently pretended to be your sister. We’ve caught her.”
Molly was rather haughty about it. It was three in the afternoon and she had had them shown into the dining-room (now open to the public on any weekday except Mondays during the summer months between 12 a.m. and 4 p.m.).
“I am not interested,” she said. “I never had a sister. I read in the papers that you had caught her. And I don’t know why you have come all the way from London to tell me.”
“Quite so, Lady Roucester. We know she is not your sister. And I didn’t come all the way from London to tell you what you know already. I came all that way, Lady Roucester, to tell you something I think you don’t know. She is the sister of the woman who was shot on your estate.”
To which Molly made the rather unexpected answer: “What do I care?”
“Did you know that the woman who was shot on your estate seven years ago, Lady Roucester, had married your husband in Canada?”
“No.” That was what Molly said. But she must have said it very badly, for Tarrant was able to see that she was lying and this encouraged him.
“Perhaps you would like to look at this marriage certificate?”
Molly looked at it for a long time, racking her brains, no doubt, for something to say—making the uneducated mistake of believing that it was necessary to say something.
“Well, I still don’t see that this has got anything to do with me or my son. The woman is dead, isn’t she! She’s out of it. And I’m here. What’s it all about?”
The atmosphere had changed from that of a Marchioness giving audience to a couple of detectives to that of an hereditary harridan giving back-chat to the cops.
“Wait a minute!” said Tarrant. “Do you believe that if a man commits bigamy and the first woman dies the second becomes his legal wife?”
That was, of course, what poor Molly had believed and Tarrant saw it at once and was now sure of his ground.
“What do you mean by ‘legal wife’?” she shrilled. “Are you trying to say that I wasn’t the legal wife of the Marquis?”
Tarrant, we must suppose, was making the most of the atmosphere, stimulating her deep-rooted instinct to treat him and his kind as natural enemies. It sounds unsporting but you must remember that murder is very unsporting.
“The Marquis seems to have had a weakness for legal wives!” he remarked. “I’ve got another one here. Look. A Frenchie this time. Marthe Celeste—”
“She died before he married me. Next, please, as the saying is.”
“That’s right. But Phyllis Margaret was alive when he married you. Care to look at the dates on these certificates?”
More back-chat from Molly, then Tarrant again:
“We know Phyllis Margaret was alive when he married you. And take it from me that you’ve got your law all wrong, as your solicitor will tell you if you ask him. If the Marquis married you while he had a legal wife living it doesn’t matter whether she’s dead now or not. Living or dead, she would be his wife in law—and you wouldn’t. In fact, you wouldn’t have any right to the title.”
There was a sharp cry from Molly and she fell in a faint. The cry of agony was genuine. The faint may have been a fake to gain time.
Tarrant and Norris lifted her on to the long seat in the bow window (you will see the plain oak now, but it was upholstered in those days). Tarrant was standing over her when she opened her eyes.
“You wouldn’t have killed them both if you’d known that, would you, Molly?”
“What the hell d’you mean?”
“I’ll soon show you what I mean. Norris, give me that gun.”
The Long Arm of the Law Page 8
