Here Lies Gloria Mundy

17

A Letter from Dame Beatrice

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Dame Beatrice’s answer came a few days later. She wrote that, acting upon what I had written, together with what she had already known or had surmised, she had been very busy. The rest of her letter bore this out. She seemed to have accomplished a very great deal in a very short time. She wrote:

When I received your letter Laura and I turned out our collection of cuttings and found details of the Earls Court case. The regular letters and postal orders which the deceased had received hinted plainly at blackmail. This was also the opinion of the police.

I visited the landlady, but she could tell me nothing useful except that among the dead woman’s effects had been an expensive camera. From what your letter told me, I formed a theory that this could have been the camera with which the compromising photograph of Mr Wotton, Miss Mundy and the baby had been taken.

The police impounded the camera and all other effects belonging to the murdered American woman and I am told that they made every possible effort to trace any relatives she may have had (apart, of course, from her child) either in this country or in America, but had no success until quite recently. The camera contained no film, so there was no help to be obtained from it.

Acting on your information, but without mentioning your name, I have interviewed Mr Wotton. I asked him point-blank whether Miss Mundy had come to Beeches Lawn that day in order to blackmail him. He knew that I had talked with Miss Brockworth and he appeared to take it for granted that all my theories, instead of only some of them, were based on what she had told me.

He was extremely frank. He said that Miss Mundy had made one or two attempts, early on, to blackmail him on the strength of the photograph, but he had told her that her threats were useless, since his father and (later on) his wife knew the whole story and believed his version of it. It was not true that either of them knew anything of the kind, but she appears to have believed him and he heard no more from her and was greatly surprised and discomfited when she turned up at Beeches Lawn.

Well, now, it seems that she came to beg for money, not to demand it with menaces. She told Mr Wotton that all she wanted was to get out of the country. She promised that, if he would help her on this one occasion, she would never trouble him again. He refused to assist her in any way and was taken aback when his wife invited her to stay to lunch.

What follows is part theory, part fact. The fact that the murdered American woman received regularly letters containing English postal orders, plus the fact that she was murdered, give rise to the theory that when she had taken back her baby from Miss Mundy, she also made off with the camera, promising to give it and the film back when the payments had reached a certain amount. I do not think she kept her word.

This, of course, I cannot prove, but the payments could not have been very large if they could be covered by a weekly postal order. However, either Miss Mundy grew tired of being so consistently bled, or else, the agreed sum having been reached (and over a period of years, remember), the woman persisted in her demands and did not release the camera and the film. At any rate, there is no doubt in my own mind that Miss Mundy enticed the woman into a meeting with her and then killed her.

The Earls Court landlady’s story that she was lured by the promise of a post in a hotel sounds to me very unlikely. Far more likely, I think, is that Miss Mundy, when she sent her last remittance, one which she fully intended should be final, suggested a meeting and a full settlement so that the woman could return to America.

The landlady told me that she had often expressed a wish to do so.

That in meeting her victim she might be placing herself in great danger appears never to have occurred to the woman. I suppose she thought that, after years of unquestioning payments, Miss Mundy was as a lamb for the slaughter. The slaughterer, however, was the lamb.

The Metropolitan Police have not yet closed the file on the case, and by piecing together bits of evidence gathered on both sides of the Atlantic they were already on Miss Mundy’s trail before the murder at Mr Wotton’s old house took place, and I am sure she knew that she was in danger. However, she must have thought she was safe as soon as the body found in the old house was identified by you and by Mr Wotton as her own. Then came the shock of realising that Mr McMaster had recognised her as the black-haired, white-faced assistant at Trends when she had thought that her disguise was impenetrable to those who had known her in the past when she had that striking head of red and black hair.

Certain that Mr McMaster would make known his discovery to the police — which, from a mistaken sense of chivalry he appears not to have done — she lost no time in getting away from Trends, but the police are busy searching for her. As you point out in your letter, Mr McMaster’s evidence would not have been necessary to prove that she is still alive. The detailed autopsy proved that the dead woman at Beeches Lawn could not have been Miss Mundy.

When I had gained what I could from Mr Wotton, from the police and from the landlady, I wanted to establish a connection between Miss Mundy and this body found in the old house. It is you, my dear Corin Stratford, not I, who connected the two murders, although the police, with their relentless perseverance and patience, would have reached the conclusion you came to. From the American end they have established that Miss Mundy and the murdered girl were cousins.

Much is now in Mr Coberley’s favour. For one thing, although both murders were stabbings, his dagger could not have been used for the murder of the American woman. Another pointer is that neither woman was murdered in her own home, but was decoyed and then killed. These, however, are nothing more than straws blowing in the wind. It was the autopsy which gave the police a clear lead in the chase after Miss Mundy.

Once it was shown that you and Mr Wotton had been misled in your identification of the body, added to the number of witnesses who were able to swear that Miss Mundy had been at Beeches Lawn shortly before the discovery of the body which had been furnished with that red and black wig — what a mistake that was on Miss Mundy’s part, as matters turned out, although one can appreciate the difficulty she was in, of course! She had to make the features of the corpse unrecognisable, while, at the same time, finding some means of making sure that the body would be accepted as her own.

Imogen was with me when I received the letter. I handed it to her when I had read it so far, and asked for her views and comments. When she handed the pages back, she said, ‘I wonder whether the American girl was told that the whole business of the baby and the photograph was intended as a joke?’

‘Likely enough she was talked into it that way, but she soon seems to have realised its possibilities so far as she herself was concerned. She must have been relying on Gloria to give her a home and get her a job and then found out, when she had kept her part of the bargain and taken the photograph, that Gloria was going to ditch her. The rest, it seems to me, follows on naturally.’

‘Yes. Without the photograph, Gloria was in no position to put pressure on Anthony Wotton, although it seems she did try to call his bluff once or twice. When, in the end, she went to Beeches Lawn, it looks as though she managed to get a short private talk with him, doesn’t it?’

‘And that, I think, is where my naughty old Madame Eglantine comes in. I have no doubt she was intrigued by the visitor, speculated upon the purpose of the unheralded visit, listened behind the door and collected an earful of what may be termed ‘baby-talk’. She doesn’t like Anthony, so she told the tale to me and possibly to others.’

‘She really is a dreadful old thing. Why do you like her?’

‘She’s amusing and stimulating, if only you can keep her off the Malleus; but, to go back to Dame B’s letter, it’s now clear why Gloria wanted money from Anthony to get herself out of the country before the net closed in on her. The police were hot enough on her trail — must have been, you know — to cause her to fake her own death.’

‘And in case Anthony refused to sub up, all that had been worked out before she ever went to Beeches Lawn. I wonder how she managed to find a victim who, apparently, would never be missed.’

‘Perhaps the rest of Dame Beatrice’s letter will supply the answer to that. All the same, London must be full of people who wouldn’t be missed — lonely spinsters, friendless widows, people who have been in gaol and are living under assumed names, immigrants who haven’t yet put down any roots. It would be easy enough to find somebody about whom there would be no hue and cry.’

‘Your picture, although touching, is not convincing,’ said Imogen. She handed Dame Beatrice’s letter back to me and I read the rest of it, but, before I did so, I said, ‘I wonder what happened to that roll of film with Anthony, Gloria and the baby on it?’

‘I expect the girl turned it over to Gloria when she received the promise of full payment.’

‘She probably received the payment but Gloria took it back after she had killed her.’ We read on:

My next visit was to Trends. I went armed with my full credentials and applied not to the department you and Mr McMaster visited, but to the office, where I asked to see the manager.

A suave individual took me into his own small sanctum and sent his secretary to bring us coffee. When she had gone for this, he asked me whether his firm was in any trouble, as he knew of no circumstances which could lead to a visit from a representative of the Home Office. I reassured him and added that I was interested in one matter only. I was anxious to know whether any elderly woman on his staff had retired during the past few weeks.

He mentioned the summary dismissal of Miss Mundy, to whom he referred under another name, but not her shop-floor title of Violetta, and admitted he had already been questioned by the police as to her whereabouts but he added that she was anything but elderly. I mentioned that the age I had in mind was round about sixty. He could not help me, but when the secretary came back with the coffee he sent her out again with instructions to ask Personnel to spare him a few moments.

A grey-haired, pleasant, but businesslike woman appeared and to her I put my question. She replied that one of the cleaners who had reached what she termed ‘senior citizen status’ had retired within the past few weeks and that Personnel had enquired about her future prospects and had asked whether she would be able to manage on the state pension.

The answer was satisfactory, she thought. One of the girls in the gowns department had promised to get her work as a cleaner in a block of flats where a trustworthy charwoman was required, as most of the tenants were out at work all day, so that the cleaner would be given keys and would be alone in the various apartments. The personnel officer could not supply the address of the flats, but she gave me the cleaner’s own address, which, of course, she had on her books.

I have given this address to the police, but first I visited the place myself. It turned out to be a council flat in a large block. The cleaner had occupied a bed-sitting room in the home of a middle-aged, respectable couple who lived in Wapping. She had told them that she had found part-time employment which necessitated her giving up her room in their flat, but had left no address ‘as she never got any letters, anyway,’ and they ‘could do with the extra room’, so I could not follow up my enquiries. No doubt the police will do better and I shall be very much surprised if this cleaner does not turn out to be the victim found in Mr Wotton’s old house. Gloria would have found out all about the poor, friendless thing.

‘Well, that seems to tie that up very neatly,’ said Imogen. ‘When am I going to meet your Dame Beatrice?’

‘Soon, I hope. I’m not sure which of my old ladies I love more, her or Madame Eglantine.’