Hell! said the Duchess

by Michael Arlen

  The Fulham Road Murder, so called from the fact that it took place in Redcliffe Road, was discovered early on the morning of April 17th. The Shepherd Market Murder came to light early on the morning of May 10th. Both victims were young men, the one a shop assistant and the other a bank clerk, who lived alone in lodgings. In each case the youth was discovered naked on his bed, naturally much disarranged, and with the head almost severed from the body by an inhuman slash across the throat from ear to ear. There were other mutilations of a fanci­ful nature which it will serve no purpose to describe. No weapon was found in either lodging. There were further similarities: a faint perfume, agreeable rather than sickly, much to the surprise of the detectives, who had been brought up to believe that all per­fumes were sickly: and cigarette ends with the clearly-defined marks of lip rouge.

  It was, therefore, impossible not to sup­pose that a woman was responsible for these inhuman crimes. Against this there had to be set the medical experts’ view that the murders and mutilations had been com­mitted not only with the same knife but with a special type of short and narrow surgical knife commonly sold only to members of the surgical profession.

  Exhaustive enquiries had given the police no clue as to the young men’s movements or companions during the hours before they met their deaths. Neither had been seen returning to his lodgings. The police had, therefore, to come to the conclusion that these two unfortunate young men had fallen victims to the unspeakable lusts of a mad­woman, who had accosted them or had been accosted by them in the streets. Since it was, of course, obvious that this female fiend could not be an Englishwoman, there was much discussion as to her probable nationality. Opinion finally settled on Ger­many or Japan as her land of origin, both of those countries being at that time on strained commercial terms with England. The popular newspapers lost no time in labelling these crimes as the “Jane the Ripper Murders.”

  In almost every major particular the third hideous outrage of the Jane the Ripper series was identical with the two preceding ones. The abominations of sexual depravity were again evident. The young man, a book­maker’s clerk and a member of the British Fascist Party, lived alone in lodgings. Once again the murderess had been at pains to leave behind her the faint and agreeable odour of her perfume and the rouge-tipped cigarette ends, which were of a kind largely smoked by the less fastidious sort—in England, it should be added, rather than in Germany and Japan. Once again the police were puzzled by the discrepancy between the perfume, which an expert in odours had pronounced to be that of an expensive French scent made by Monsieur Coty of Paris, and therefore unlikely to be that of a woman of the streets, and the cigarette ends of a type commonly smoked by such un­fortunates. Moreover, there was again the probability that the third crazy murder, like the previous two, had been committed by someone not unfamiliar with the practical uses of a surgical knife.

  But it is the date of the third Jane the Ripper atrocity—known as the Percy Street Murder from the fact that it happened a few hundred yards away in Charlotte Street—which must command our attention. It was discovered by the woman who “did” for the unfortunate young man at half-past seven in the morning of Friday, June 12th.

  Now it will be remembered that it was on the night of Thursday the 11th that the conscientious Mr. Fancy had seen the Duchess of Dove slip unseen—or so she must have thought—out of her house and ride away in a hired limousine towards Oxford Street.

  But he had not seen her return, though he had watched the house until dawn. Yet of the fact that she had returned in the course of the night there could be no doubt, for Mrs. Nautigale had telephoned to her and spoken with her at half-past eight in the morning, when the Duchess had com­plained of a slight headache from having slept too heavily.

  There were no other entrances to the house than the front door and the area door, both of which had been under Mr. Fancy’s conscientious eye throughout the night. Then how had she managed to get back without having been spotted by him? And exactly the same thing happened again on the following Wednesday night, June 17th. The question as to how the Duchess returned to her house unseen by him under his very nose upset and irritated Mr. Fancy to such a degree that his passion for putting two and two together was, if possible, increased.

  But when he had made the addition even this incorruptible man was appalled by the conclusion to which it appeared to lead him.

  He did not follow the Duchess on this second occasion, intent only on solving the mystery of her return and fearing that she might give him the slip while he followed her and re-enter the house before he could get back to his post. She was not this time in evening dress but in a dark coat of some light clinging material and a small dark hat with a narrow brim coming low down over her eyes. He saw her walk swiftly across Grosvenor Square towards Carlos Place.

  Now Carlos Place is not far from the historic and once secluded defile known as Lansdowne Passage. And it was on that night, Wednesday, June 17, that there took place the fourth and only unsuccessful Jane the Ripper crime.

  At two o’clock in the morning a young man of the Jewish persuasion entered Lans­downe Passage from the Berkeley Street end. While that fashionable thoroughfare was not without the movement of motor-cars flirting with the two entrances of the May Fair Hotel, Lansdowne Passage lay deserted before young Mr. A. Candlenose, for it was under that name he preferred to be known in the exercise of his profession, which was that of a ventriloquist.

  He hastened his walk, not from timidity, but because he was sleepy and wished to get home to his room in Ducking Pond Mews, near Hertford Street. Half-way down the Passage, and just past that point in one high wall of the narrow defile which, once the boundary of the spacious Devonshire House estate, is now broken by the kitchen entrance of the May Fair Hotel, his ears noted a faint echo of his own ringing footsteps.

  Mr. A. Candlenose’s recollection of the immediately subsequent events was clouded. He had no more than just noted that the light hurrying footsteps behind him were growing fainter as they approached, as is the case when people start to run on their toes, and he was in the act of turning his head to glance over his shoulder, when a woman’s gloved and scented hand was clapped very strictly over his mouth from behind, his head was wrenched back with ferocious sudden­ness, so that he must have lost his balance and fallen but for the soft lithe body of his assailant behind him, and a knife was slashed sharply across his throat.

  Mr. A. Candlenose could remember no more. He was positive that the attack could not have lasted as long as two seconds in all. He saw the flash of the knife—a short one, he fancied—almost at the same instant as his head was wrenched back by the cruelly tight hand over his mouth. He admitted, in point of fact, that the perfumed hand had given him such a turn that he had closed his eyes tight and given himself up for lost. This was understandable, for perfume had been much on men’s minds since the first Jane the Ripper crime, and more than one wretched woman had recently been assaulted for using scent. And rightly.

  Thus the Semitic but unfortunate ven­triloquist saw nothing of his assailant. But he was positive, from the pressure of his back and shoulder-blades against the sup­porting body behind, that he had been attacked by a tall skinny sort of woman with firm girlish breasts. Mr. A. Candlenose said this with a certain relish, for he had frequently been mocked by his friends on his preference for the more ample ladies of their acquaintance. In the future this preference was to become an obsession.

  It was fortunately a policeman, returning to the police-station at Vine Street from his beat in the neighbourhood of Curzon Street, who found the unconscious young man lying face-downwards against a wall of the deserted Passage. While the victim had lost a great deal of blood from the terrible gash across his throat, and his condition was pre­carious, he owed his life to the fact that he was that day wearing a hard collar instead of a soft one. Jane the Ripper had been in too great a hurry to note that her knife, after severing the left-side veins of the throat, had been deflected by the collar, which
had been cleanly cut across.

  Mr. Fancy read the reports of this brutal and senseless attempt on Mr. A. Candlenose’s life in the evening papers of that Friday. There was one significant addition to what has been related above. The policeman who found the ventriloquist had, on his approach towards the blind end of Curzon Street which gives only to the narrow aperture of Lansdowne Passage, noted but one person coming from that direction. This was a tall and slender woman walking with great haste who, on passing him, had turned left into Bolton Street. Her features had been con­cealed not only by the brim of her black hat but by the fact that she kept her head down, as though preoccupied only with her haste to get home. She had worn a long black coat of some flimsy material which could have “afforded,” so the constable reported, “a suitable place of concealment for the alleged weapon with which the assault was com­mitted.”

  Now this is not the place in which to fol­low in detail the processes of Mr. Fancy’s upright mind after he had digested these and similar reports. He very properly tried to put away from him every consideration but that of his duty to his fellow-citizens. It should be added that he took no pride what­soever in being the first man to be able to point the finger of evidence against the lady—if so hideous a criminal, whether duchess or queen, could be called a lady—who had committed these murders. His duty first and foremost was to prevent any more such crimes, and therefore it lay not in reporting his conclusions to Mrs. Nautigale but to the proper authorities. And so, with his match­less flair for making himself a confounded nuisance to his betters, Henry James Fancy went with his report to Scotland Yard.

  CHAPTER SIX

  At this time Major-General Sir Giles Prest-Olive was Commissioner of Metro­politan Police and the Hon. Basil Icelin was Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department. Since all the crisp mumbo-jumbo of the detective writer’s craft must be as boring for the reader to read as it is for the chronicler to write, we shall call them Prest-Olive and Icelin. We shall also try to refer to Scotland Yard, the Big Five, the dictaphone, the radio patrol, the Maxim silencer, the ballistics ex­pert, the Flying Squad, finger-prints, and the crime reporter as seldom as may be, though of course you can’t keep a good man down.

  Sir Giles Prest-Olive’s was entirely a political appointment on the formation of the Conservative-Fascist Cabinet after the fall of the National Government, and was never intended to be anything but tem­porary, though it turned out to be even more temporary than was anticipated, as we shall see. He was a very good chap, and Basil Icelin was, of course, an excellent chap—the Icelin who won the Amateur in 192– and was runner-up in the Open in 193–.

  Prest-Olive’s iron-grey appearance was so very distinguished that even when seen full-face he appeared to be a clean-cut profile largely made up of a fine aristocratic nose. It was no doubt this fine nose that had steered him so comfortably through the sedentary life of a successful soldier, for in England it is wisely recognised that to a Staff Officer good looks must matter very much more than they should to a mere actor with a painted face. It was of General Prest-Olive that Maréchal Foch was reported to have said: “It is soldiers like Prest-Olive who almost unite the English and French armies in affection for the Belgians.” His wife was one of the Leicestershire ffox-Vermins, and he had to like it.

  Basil Icelin, who had won his position by merit—although of course he was a good chap, too—was a dark, lean fellow with a somewhat sardonic expression. Unlike Prest-Olive he did not look at all “typically” English, which was surprising, since he was also an Irishman. Had Icelin not been so very good at games—he had also played cricket for Oxford and Kent—he might sometimes have been suspected of sarcasm. Even as it was, some thought that his views on cricket and war were unsound.

  While Superintendent Crust was making his call on the Duchess of Dove, these two men sat in Prest-Olive’s office and stared at one another across a wide table stacked high with all the papers (usually known in crisp English as dossier) relating to the Jane the Ripper series of crimes. On the very top was Henry James Fancy’s report, which had been read with respectful attention, for Fancy had always been known in the depart­ment as a conscientious headache. Moreover, his report had since been supplemented by routine police investigations. The motor-car hiring company owning the limousine in which the Duchess was seen on the night of Thursday the 11th reported that the car had been hired over the telephone by a man’s voice: that the lady who had entered the car at the corner of Davies Street had instructed the driver to drop her at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road: that he had done so and been paid his fee and that he knew no more about his fare.

  But much more than that had been done by the C.I.D. under Icelin’s capable direc­tion, and they now knew almost as much about certain aspects of the case as the public did. For example, the police had established that during the last four months the Duchess’s mode of life had changed in the most peculiar way, but only at night. Her first appearance as a high-flier had been traced to a night two weeks before the first Jane the Ripper murder near the Fulham Road. Detectives had interviewed the pro­prietors of the mean night resorts at which she was said to have been seen. These men, whose eagerness to help the police was a touching tribute to the laws of England, had immediately identified the Duchess from snapshots recently taken when she was walk­ing with her Sealyham in Hyde Park. Of course they had not known she was the Duchess of Dove and had placed her as a classy tart and hot number. Moreover, two of them and the keeper of a coffee-stall had identified a photograph of the victim of the second Jane the Ripper crime, known as the Shepherd Market Murder, as that of a young man who had been seen on two occasions with the hot number and who had made no concealment of the fact that he had been “gone on” her. The police had hitherto been unable to establish any such direct connec­tion between the Duchess and the other two murdered young men.

  “But what we’ve got,” Icelin summed up, “seems to be quite enough.”

  Icelin’s sardonic expression was very much in evidence that morning. Trained as he had been by such highly capable Com­missioners of Police as Trenchard and his successor Waldo-Huish, he was heartily sick of his present chief’s gentlemanly anxiety to do the pukka thing. But Icelin was an under­standing kind of man and forgave much to a poor devil who had had the courage to marry one of the Leicestershire ffox-Ver­mins, teeth and all.

  Prest-Olive was looking extremely worried, as well he might. Crime was one thing, and a duchess was another. Stood England where it did? Poor Prest-Olive thought it extremely unlikely, and he knew jolly well he didn’t, for this Jane the Ripper business was forcing his resignation.

  “What a stink,” he sighed, “this will make.”

  “Has made,” said Icelin the precise.

  “You got nothing from the servants at the Grosvenor Square house?”

  “They quite obviously know nothing. Her personal maid, who left some days ago, is being traced. But I fancy that won’t help us. The servants all combine in loving their mistress and loathing Miss Gool.”

  “Perhaps,” said Prest-Olive hopefully, “this Gool person, out of hatred for the Duchess, has been impersonating her. Worth looking into, Icelin.”

  “Is it?” said Icelin. “No amount of dis­guise could make Miss Gool either resemble the Duchess, look like a hot number, or help her to lure young men into her clutches. Un­less, that is, young men have changed a lot since my time.”

  Prest-Olive, almost whimpering with exasperation, said: “But where’s the motive, Icelin? How could a woman like that change into such a fiend?”

  “Don’t ask me, sir. I’m not married.”

  Then his chief, remembering himself, be­came a forceful Kipling character.

  “Damn it, Icelin,” said he, “this is as nasty a case as we’ve ever had. You’ll agree it isn’t one of plain murder?”

  “These killings,” said Icelin sourly, “have certainly not been done by someone with a respect for good form a
nd the dear old Alma Mater, if that’s what you mean, sir.”

  “You know very well what I mean,” snapped Prest-Olive, who very properly deplored all jokes about serious subjects like public schools. “These,” he said severely, “are maniacal murders——”

  “And sexual,” said Icelin.

  “Oh, come—that’s only theory.”

  “Better read the doctors’ reports, sir. There is no doubt about it being business after pleasure with Jane the Ripper.”

  “Then that is why,” snapped Prest-Olive, “it is quite impossible to connect the Duchess with these crimes.”

  “Quite,” said Icelin. After all, the ffox-Vermin kind of mind was often right. “Quite. She might have murdered the poor wretches but could never, never have tucked up with them. It’s quite a point, sir.”

  “It’s a big point,” said Prest-Olive.

  “If you say so. Though one has heard of a queen having a rough-and-tumble with corporals.”

  “Not an English queen, Icelin.”

  “Of course not, sir. We have always had a sense of proportion.”

  “May I ask what that means?”

  “The corporal is promoted.”

  “I fancy you must be a little off-colour to-day, Icelin. Where is this discussion lead­ing us?”

  “Well,” smiled Icelin, “to the House of Lords. No psychological flummery can get us away from the fact that what evidence we have got about Jane the Ripper points directly at the Duchess of Dove.”

  Prest-Olive said: “It might be faked. It must be faked. Icelin, here is one of the best-bred and loveliest women in the world——”

  “So was Messalina.”