Legendary Women Detectives Read online

  Presently he returned with the message: “Miss Marvell says there is no answer.”

  Whereupon I asked for pen and paper at the office, and wrote the following brief note on my own responsibility, using my wits as my dear lady had bidden me to do.

  Please, madam, I wrote, will you send just a line to Miss Rosie Campbell? She seems very upset and frightened at some news she has had.

  Once more the waiter ran upstairs, and returned with a sealed envelope, which I slipped into my reticule.

  Time was slipping by very slowly. I did not know how long I should have to wait about outside in the cold, when, to my horror, I heard a hard voice, with a marked Scotch accent, saying:

  “I am going out, waiter, and shan’t be back to dinner. Tell them to lay a little cold supper upstairs in my room.”

  The next moment Miss Marvell, with coat, hat, and veil, was descending the stairs.

  My plight was awkward. I certainly did not think it safe to present myself before the lady; she would undoubtedly recollect my face. Yet I had orders to detain her until the appearance of Lady Molly.

  Miss Marvell seemed in no hurry. She was putting on her gloves as she came downstairs. In the hall she gave a few more instructions to the porter, whilst I, in a dark corner in the background, was vaguely planning an assault or an alarm of fire.

  Suddenly, at the hotel entrance, where the porter was obsequiously holding open the door for Miss Marvell to pass through, I saw the latter’s figure stiffen; she took one step back as if involuntarily, then, equally quickly, attempted to dart across the threshold, on which a group – composed of my dear lady, of Saunders, and of two or three people scarcely distinguishable in the gloom beyond – had suddenly made its appearance.

  Miss Marvell was forced to retreat into the hall; already I had heard Saunders’s hurriedly whispered words:

  “Try and not make a fuss in this place, now. Everything can go off quietly, you know.”

  Danvers and Cotton, whom I knew well, were already standing one each side of Miss Marvell, whilst suddenly amongst this group I recognized Fanny, the wife of Danvers, who is one of our female searchers at the Yard.

  “Shall we go up to your own room?” suggested Saunders.

  “I think that is quite unnecessary,” interposed Lady Molly. “I feel convinced that Mr. Leonard Marvell will yield to the inevitable quietly, and follow you without giving any trouble.”

  Marvell, however, did make a bold dash for liberty. As Lady Molly had said previously, he was far too clever to allow himself to be captured easily. But my dear lady had been cleverer. As she told me subsequently, she had from the first suspected that the trio who lodged at the Scotia Hotel were really only a duo – namely, Leonard Marvell and his wife, Rosie Campbell. The latter impersonated a maid most of the time; but among these two clever people the three characters were interchangeable. Of course, there was no Miss Marvell at all! Leonard was alternately dressed up as man or woman, according to the requirements of his villainies.

  “As soon as I heard that Miss Marvell was very tall and bony,” said Lady Molly, “I thought that there might be a possibility of her being merely a man in disguise. Then there was the extraordinarily suggestive fact – but little dwelt on by either the police or public – that no one seems ever to have seen brother and sister together, nor was the entire trio ever seen at one and the same time.

  “On that 3rd of February Leonard Marvell went out. No doubt he changed his attire in a lady’s waiting-room at one of the railway stations; subsequently he came home, now dressed as Miss Marvell, and had dinner in the table d’hote room so as to set up a fairly plausible alibi. But ultimately it was his wife, Rosie Campbell, who stayed indoors that night, whilst he, Leonard Marvell, when going out after dinner, impersonated the maid until he was clear of the hotel; then he reassumed his male clothes once more, no doubt in the deserted waiting-room of some railway station, and met Miss Lulu Fay at supper, subsequently returning to the hotel in the guise of the maid.

  “You see the game of crisscross, don’t you? This interchanging of characters was bound to baffle every one. Many clever scoundrels have assumed disguises, sometimes impersonating members of the opposite sex, but never before have I known two people play the part of three! Thus, endless contradictions followed as to the hour when Campbell the maid went out and when she came in, for at one time it was she herself who was seen by the valet, and at another it was Leonard Marvell dressed in her clothes.”

  He was also clever enough to accost Lord Mountnewte in the open street, thus bringing further complications into this strange case.

  After the successful robbery of Miss Fay’s diamonds, Leonard Marvell and his wife parted for a while. They were waiting for an opportunity to get across the Channel and there turn their booty into solid cash. Whilst Mrs. Marvell, alias Rosie Campbell, led a retired life in Findlater Terrace, Leonard kept his hand in with West End shop robberies.

  Then Lady Molly entered the lists. As usual, her scheme was bold and daring; she trusted her own intuition and acted accordingly.

  When she brought home the false news that the author of the shop robberies had been spotted by the police, Rosie Campbell’s obvious terror confirmed her suspicions. The note written by the latter to the so-called Miss Marvell, though it contained nothing in any way incriminating, was the crowning certitude that my dear lady was right, as usual, in all her surmises.

  And now Mr. Leonard Marvell will be living for two years at the tax-payers’ expense; he has “disappeared” temporarily from the public eye.

  * * *

  THE PROBLEM OF THE SECOND BULLET

  ANNA KATHERINE GREEN

  (Sleuth: Violet Strange)

  Even if she hadn’t penned one of the very first detective novels, The Levenworth Case (1878), Anna Katherine Green would have earned her place to detective immortality with her creation of Violet Strange. Violet made her debut in a collection of her cases titled The Golden Slipper (1915). Violet is a daughter of wealth and privilege, who turns her talents to crime detection solely for the mercenary motive of making money – money she needs to pay off he family’s debts. She is also very young, and though she often succeeds where the police are stumped, she often doubts her ability to handle the cases brought to her.

  “You must see her.”

  “No.”

  “She’s a most unhappy woman. Husband and child both taken from her in a moment; and now, all means of living as well, unless some happy thought of yours – some inspiration of your genius – shows us a way of re-establishing her claims to the policy voided by this cry of suicide.”

  But the small head of Violet Strange continued its slow shake of decided refusal. “I’m sorry, but it’s quite out of my province. I’m too young to meddle with so serious a matter.”

  “Not when you can save a bereaved woman the only possible compensation left her by untoward fate?”

  “Let the police try their hand at that.”

  “They have had no success with the case.”

  “Or you?”

  “Nor I either.”

  “And you expect–”

  “Yes, Miss Strange. I expect you to find the missing bullet which will settle the fact that murder and not suicide ended George Hammond’s life. If you cannot, then a long litigation awaits this poor widow, ending, as such litigation usually does, in favour of the stronger party. There’s the alternative. If you once you saw her–”

  “But that’s what I’m not willing to do. If I once saw her I should yield to her importunities and attempt the seemingly impossible. My instincts bid me say no. Give me something easier.”

  “Easier things are not so remunerative. There’s money in this affair, if the insurance company is forced to pay up. I can offer you–”

  “What?”

  There was eagerness in the tone despite her effort at nonchalance. The other smiled imperceptibly, and briefly named the sum.

  It was larger than she had expected. This her visitor
saw by the way her eyelids fell and the peculiar stillness which, for an instant, held her vivacity in check.

  “And you think I can earn that?” She looked up, her eyes fixed on his in eagerness as honest as it was unrestrained.

  He could hardly conceal his amazement, her desire was so evident and the cause of it so difficult to understand. He knew she wanted money – that was her avowed reason for entering into this uncongenial work. But to want it so much! He glanced at her person; it was simply clad but very expensively – how expensively it was his business to know. Then he took in the room in which they sat. Simplicity again, but the simplicity of high art – the drawing-room of one rich enough to indulge in the final luxury of a highly cultivated taste, viz.: unostentatious elegance and the subjection of each carefully chosen ornament to the general effect.

  What did this favoured child of fortune lack that she could be reached by such a plea, when her whole being revolted from the nature of the task he offered her? It was a question not new to him; but one he had never heard answered and was not likely to hear answered now. But the fact remained that the consent he had thought dependent upon sympathetic interest could be reached much more readily by the promise of large emolument – and he owned to a feeling of secret disappointment even while he recognized the value of the discovery.

  But his satisfaction in the latter was of very short duration. Almost immediately he observed a change in her. The sparkle that had shone in the eye whose depths he had never been able to penetrate, had dissipated itself in something like a tear and she spoke up in that vigorous tone no one but himself had ever heard, as she said: “No. The sum is a good one and I could use it; but I will not waste my energy on a case I do not believe in. The man shot himself. He was a speculator, and probably had good reason for his act. Even his wife acknowledges that he has lately had more losses than gains.”

  “See her. She has something to tell you which never got into the papers.”

  “You say that? You know that?”

  “On my honour, Miss Strange.”

  Violet pondered; then suddenly succumbed. “Let her come, then. Prompt to the hour. I will receive her at three. Later I have a tea and two party calls to make.”

  Her visitor rose to leave. He had been able to subdue all evidence of his extreme gratification, and now took on a formal air. In dismissing a guest, Miss Strange was invariably the society belle and that only. This he had come to recognize.

  ***

  The case was, in the fewest possible words, as follows: On a sultry night in September, a young couple living in one of the large apartment houses in the extreme upper portion of Manhattan were so annoyed by the incessant crying of a child in the adjoining suite, that they got up, he to smoke, and she to sit in the window for a possible breath of cool air. They were congratulating themselves upon the wisdom they had shown in thus giving up all thought of sleep – for the child’s crying had not ceased – when (it may have been two o’clock and it may have been a little later) there came from somewhere near, the sharp and somewhat peculiar detonation of a pistol-shot.

  He thought it came from above; she, from the rear, and they were staring at each other in the helpless wonder of the moment, when they were struck by the silence. The baby had ceased to cry. All was as still in the adjoining apartment as in their own – too still – much too still. Their mutual stare turned to one of horror. “It came from there!” whispered the wife. “Some accident has occurred to Mr. or Mrs. Hammond – we ought to go–”

  Her words – very tremulous ones – were broken by a shout from below. They were standing in their window and had evidently been seen by a passing policeman. “Anything wrong up there?” they heard him cry. Mr. Saunders immediately looked out. “Nothing wrong here,” he called down. (They were but two stories from the pavement.) “But I’m not so sure about the rear apartment. We thought we heard a shot. Hadn’t you better come up, officer? My wife is nervous about it. I’ll meet you at the stair-head and show you the way.”

  The officer nodded and stepped in. The young couple hastily donned some wraps, and, by the time he appeared on their floor, they were ready to accompany him.

  Meanwhile, no disturbance was apparent anywhere else in the house, until the policeman rang the bell of the Hammond apartment. Then, voices began to be heard, and doors to open above and below, but not the one before which the policeman stood.

  Another ring, and this time an insistent one – and still no response. The officer’s hand was rising for the third time when there came a sound of fluttering from behind the panels against which he had laid his ear, and finally a choked voice uttering unintelligible words. Then a hand began to struggle with the lock, and the door, slowly opening, disclosed a woman clad in a hastily donned wrapper and giving every evidence of extreme fright.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, seeing only the compassionate faces of her neighbours. “You heard it, too! A pistol-shot from there – there – my husband’s room. I have not dared to go – I – I – Oh, have mercy and see if anything is wrong! It is so still – so still, and only a moment ago the baby was crying. Mrs. Saunders, Mrs. Saunders, why is it so still?”

  She had fallen into her neighbour’s arms. The hand with which she had pointed out a certain door had sunk to her side and she appeared to be on the verge of collapse.

  The officer eyed her sternly, while noting her appearance, which was that of a woman hastily risen from bed.

  “Where were you?” he asked. “Not with your husband and child, or you would know what had happened there.”

  “I was sleeping down the hall,” she managed to gasp out. “I’m not well – I – Oh, why do you all stand still and do nothing? My baby’s in there. Go! Go!” and, with sudden energy, she sprang upright, her eyes wide open and burning, her small well-featured face white as the linen she sought to hide.

  The officer demurred no longer. In another instant he was trying the door at which she was again pointing.

  It was locked.

  Glancing back at the woman, now cowering almost to the floor, he pounded at the door and asked the man inside to open.

  No answer came back.

  With a sharp turn he glanced again at the wife.

  “You say that your husband is in this room?”

  She nodded, gasping faintly, “And the child!”

  He turned back, listened, then beckoned to Mr. Saunders. “We shall have to break our way in,” said he. “Put your shoulder well to the door. Now!”

  The hinges of the door creaked; the lock gave way (this special officer weighed two hundred and seventy-five, as he found out, next day), and a prolonged and sweeping crash told the rest.

  Mrs. Hammond gave a low cry; and, straining forward from where she crouched in terror on the floor, searched the faces of the two men for some hint of what they saw in the dimly-lighted space beyond. Something dreadful, something which made Mr. Saunders come rushing back with a shout:

  “Take her away! Take her to our apartment, Jennie. She must not see–”

  Not see! He realized the futility of his words as his gaze fell on the young woman who had risen up at his approach and now stood gazing at him without speech, without movement, but with a glare of terror in her eyes, which gave him his first realization of human misery.

  His own glance fell before it. If he had followed his instinct he would have fled the house rather than answer the question of her look and the attitude of her whole frozen body.

  Perhaps in mercy to his speechless terror, perhaps in mercy to herself, she was the one who at last found the word which voiced their mutual anguish. “Dead?”

  No answer. None was needed.

  “And my baby?”

  That cry! It curdled the hearts of all who heard it. It shook the souls of men and women both inside and outside the apartment; then all was forgotten in the wild rush she made. The wife and mother had flung herself upon the scene, and, side by side with the not unmoved policeman, stood looking down upon the desolatio
n made in one fatal instant in her home and heart.

  They lay there together, both past help, both quite dead. The child had simply been strangled by the weight of his father’s arm which lay directly across the upturned little throat. But the father was a victim of the shot they had heard. There was blood on his breast, and a pistol in his hand.

  Suicide! The horrible truth was patent. No wonder they wanted to hold the young widow back. Her neighbour, Mrs. Saunders, crept in on tiptoe and put her arms about the swaying, fainting woman; but there was nothing to say – absolutely nothing.

  At least, they thought not. But when they saw her throw herself down, not by her husband, but by the child, and drag it out from under that strangling arm and hug and kiss it and call out wildly for a doctor, the officer endeavoured to interfere and yet could not find the heart to do so, though he knew the child was dead and should not, according to all the rules of the coroner’s office, be moved before that official arrived. Yet because no mother could be convinced of a fact like this, he let her sit with it on the floor and try all her little arts to revive it, while he gave orders to the janitor and waited himself for the arrival of doctor and coroner.

  She was still sitting there in wide-eyed misery, alternately fondling the little body and drawing back to consult its small set features for some sign of life, when the doctor came, and, after one look at the child, drew it softly from her arms and laid it quietly in the crib from which its father had evidently lifted it but a short time before. Then he turned back to her, and found her on her feet, upheld by her two friends. She had understood his action, and without a groan had accepted her fate. Indeed, she seemed incapable of any further speech or action. She was staring down at her husband’s body, which she, for the first time, seemed fully to see. Was her look one of grief or of resentment for the part he had played so unintentionally in her child’s death? It was hard to tell; and when, with slowly rising finger, she pointed to the pistol so tightly clutched in the other outstretched hand, no one there – and by this time the room was full – could foretell what her words would be when her tongue regained its usage and she could speak.