Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 12, No. 59, November 1948

The Man Who Married Too Often by Roy Vickers

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.

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 characterization, 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 recognized 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, nee 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 guardian 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,”

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 lunch time. 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, solemnized 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 realized 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 I knew that it was no good, and that he couldn’t keep his head and tell the tale I’d already thought of. And l 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 again).

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 laborers 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 organization).

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 Jar-row.”

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.”

We imagine a little gasp as the gun, with the garter looped round one of the triggers, was held before Molly’s eyes.

“You swung it on the coroner that the Marquis looped the garter round the trigger — then put the two barrels in his mouth — like this — then put his foot in the loop — like this — and blew his own head off.”

“He did... he did I tell you! I saw him.”

“I know you said you saw him. Now I’m going to show you something... Open the window, Norris.” He broke the gun, took a single cartridge from his pocket and inserted it. “Now hold the gun, Norris. Point it high. Now — watch this, Molly. Here’s the Marquis putting his foot through the loop. See?”

Tarrant pulled the garter. There came a report as the gun discharged itself harmlessly through the open window. Then Tarrant swung the gun round and held the muzzle of the twin barrels close under the nose of the Marchioness of Roucester and Jarrow.

“Keep still — I’m not going to hurt you. Smell those barrels. Which one has just carried the charge? The right barrel! Go on — smell it! Put your finger in and you’ll find it’s warm — and dirty.”

“What’re you doing to me? Take that gun away!”

“The garter fired the right barrel,” said Tarrant. “But it was proved by the position of the wound that the Marquis was killed by the left barrel.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then I’ll tell you. You killed that woman yourself. Then by some trick of your own you got the Marquis to put the barrel in his own mouth as if he were going to shoot himself. But it was you who pressed the trigger and killed him. And when he was dead you wiped the triggers for fingerprints and then you took the garter from the dead man’s leg and looped it round the wrong trigger. And then you—”

“Oh, all right! I did it for my kid’s sake — God help me! And now it’s all for nothing I don’t care what happens to me.”

They arrested her and took her away. And then a rather dreadful little thing happened — while they were charging her.

“Name?” asked the Charge-Sergeant.

“No good asking me,” said Molly. “Ask this gentleman here — he knows all about the law. I was Molly Webster before that dirty little skunk married me.”

“The name is Molly Stranack, Marchioness of Roucester and Jar-row,” said Tarrant and then: “I asked you to look at the certificates, Lady Roucester. Perhaps you’d like to look at them now. Date of marriage between Phyllis Margaret and Stranack, the Marquis — June 30th, 1900. Death of Marthe Celeste Jan. 22nd, 1901. Marthe being alive at the time, the marriage to Phyllis Margaret was not a marriage at all. She could have prosecuted the Marquis for bigamy. But she couldn’t have shaken your title — or your son’s succession.”

“Then, after all, there was no need to—”

“None whatever — my lady,” said Tarrant and then Molly burst into tears, probably the first she had shed since babyhood. Tarrant, he said afterwards, could not stand the sight of her grief and bolted back to his office where Norris was waiting for him — a flushed and very nearly indignant young Norris.

“I say, sir! That garter — in the photo of the gun taken at the time it’s looped round the left trigger. Look here!”

“Is it!” said Tarrant. “Then it must be my fault. I remember unfastening it in the train going down. I must have put it back on the wrong trigger. Very careless of me, Norris. Always replace things exactly as you find them. But, after all, it doesn’t alter the fact that she murdered her husband and that woman. And I’m afraid she’ll be hanged.”

But here Tarrant was wrong. Molly, the indisputably genuine Marchioness, was also the hereditary gamine who knew a trick or two for evading the vigilance of the cops. She had smuggled in a phial of medinal tablets, harmless enough if taken one at a time but fatal if swallowed en masse.