Still, something niggled. The timing of Maud’s confession that she had been on the stage was suspicious, coming as it did just after Kate’s retirement. Was she just weaving another tale, appropriating the background of her greatest rival when that rival could no longer fight back? But, if so, how did that explain the constant references to acting that she had made throughout her career?
I’d sensed from the beginning that there was something off in the relationship between Kate and Maud. At the time, I’d put it down to simple professional rivalry. London, after all, could only accommodate one leading lady detective. But now, I began to form a new theory and wondered if the one-upmanship they practised in their newspaper adverts was symptomatic of a deeper animosity.
How, exactly, had Maud got involved in detective work? It wasn’t through her solicitor uncle or any other relative in the legal profession, because they didn’t exist. So how had she learned what the job involved? It was possible that she’d just knuckled down and taught herself, as she claimed, but everything I’d learned about private detectives told me that wasn’t how things worked. Inquiry agents didn’t just dive in and make things up as they went along, however many criminology books they had read. They always served some form of apprenticeship, whether that was as a police officer or, like Kate and Matilda, as an assistant to a more experienced private detective. Even Maud admitted as much in an article she had written in 1928 about the secrets of her success:
Of course, at the very beginning, one must know one’s limitations if success is to be won! It is useless to imagine oneself a Napoleon or a Pinkerton; but it is equally fatal to lack courage to try. By beginning on small problems, whether of criminology or work, one must gain experience and graduate on to the big ones with some confidence.17
There wasn’t any evidence, after all, to support her repeated claim that she had established her agency in 1905; there was nothing before 1909. Kate had, though. Her agency had been up and running by October 1905. Had Maud, twenty-five years Kate’s junior, been her protégée?
It was a compelling theory. Kate Easton, Maud West. Easton, West. East and West. They even sounded like a double act. They could easily have worked together, whether Maud had been on the stage or not, with Kate passing on a few theatre tricks along the way. And if Maud then broke away to set up a rival agency right across the road? Such a betrayal, and her subsequent insistence on claiming all the credit of her success for herself, could easily have led to bad blood.
One thing was certain. Whether Maud got her first foot in the door of the detective profession through her own determination or by tap dancing down Shaftesbury Avenue arm in arm with Kate Easton, she was a self-made woman in every sense of the word. And now, in her fifties, she was reaping the rewards.
She was finally, and indisputably, London’s leading lady detective. Longevity alone had ensured that. Furthermore, with her business at its peak, she could prioritize the work that interested her. According to the interview she gave to Margaret Gilruth of the Hobart Mercury in 1938, that no longer included divorce investigations. She left that kind of work to her staff so she could focus on worthier causes. ‘She likes the humanitarian side of detecting,’ Gilruth explained. ‘She prefers the thought that, indirectly, she is doing good by stopping somebody doing harm. That spurs her on more than anything else.’18
For Maud, this meant blackmail and drugs investigations – ‘although I have collaborated on murder cases,’ she added. But it seemed to me that she had also found a new way of being.
During the 1930s, she became noticeably more political. There was her work on Holborn Council, of course, but she also started to comment more frequently on current affairs. In the early 1930s, for example, as the world was in the grip of the Great Depression, some had detected a rise in the number of women criminals. ‘The honesty of women always wanes in times of economic stress,’ Maud told one paper. ‘Whenever money is scarce there is a perfect epidemic of thefts by women who, deprived of spending money, will have clothes at any price.’19
Elsewhere, however, she hinted at more political reasons, in line with her Conservative views. ‘I cannot help thinking,’ she told the Daily Mail in 1931, ‘that our system of education is largely to blame. Girls and boys are taught little bits of this and that, and feel that they are too good for their own particular circle of life. Then they see girls and boys of their own age getting easy money by way of the “dole” and they jump at the suggestion that they, too, can get easy money if they will take a little risk and so they drift into criminal ways.’20
The following year, she turned her attention to the wider world after spending a month in America. The primary purpose of the trip was unclear – she had travelled with a friend from Finchley – but on her return she produced an article quite unlike anything she’d written before. It began with a lengthy scene in the back room of a Midwest precinct station, where a ‘crumpled specimen of humanity’ was receiving the attention of half a dozen detectives. She’d paid particular attention to the dialogue:
- Listen! I don’ wanna get rough with you. Just come across an be quick. You know you gotta talk!
- I dunno, boss. I dunno a darn thing … honest I don’t. I’d come clean if I did. I wasn’t there … I …
- All right. If you want it you can have it. Give him the works, boys!
It wasn’t for the squeamish – the use to which they put rubber tubing was enough to make anyone wince – but, having grabbed her readers’ attention, Maud continued:
The ‘Third Degree,’ as practised in America, has for a long time constituted a disgrace to civilisation … I had heard tales of it, but believed these to be exaggerated. On my last visit to America, however, I made up my mind to investigate the truth of some of the reports I had heard. They were not exaggerated. They erred on the side of understatement.21
This, it turned out, was the introduction to a comparative essay on American and European investigative techniques. The American methods, she said, ‘smack too much of the tortures of the Inquisition’ and were unproductive to boot. Austria, on the other hand, was making great progress with their use of criminal psychologists; ditto France, to whom she awarded bonus points for their experiments with murder-scene reconstructions, which sometimes involved the actual corpse: ‘A guilty person confronted with the corpse of the man he killed often gives himself away, but the same process, even if unpleasant, has little effect on the mind of an innocent person.’
She also approved of the ‘special department’ in Berlin devoted to checking the veracity of suspects and witnesses, resulting in an unusually high clear-up rate for murders. As for the ‘meek and mild’ Brits, they were efficient but hampered by suspects’ right to remain silent. ‘This, in my opinion, places our police in an unfortunate position,’ she wrote. ‘Close questioning, immediately on arrest, before the suspect has time to prepare a story or alibi, may result in important clues.’
Pragmatic or ruthless? I couldn’t decide, but it was refreshing to see her emerge from behind the fog of all the exploding safes and screeching tyres to comment on the broader issues associated with her work.
She hadn’t completely abandoned her love of drama, however. She was still capable of making a grand entrance, as she did in 1936 when she chugged up to an event in Mayfair, ostensibly straight from a job. The Daily Mirror reported:
A woman drove up to magnificent Sunderland House yesterday, having come from West Ham, in a dilapidated two-seater. From the back seat, where it lay hidden, she removed a fur coat. Putting this on, she swept into Sunderland House for the opening of the Exhibition of Women’s Progress. She had a stall there. She was Maud West, detective, one of the most vivid characters in London.22
Nor had her scruples changed when it came to accepting clients. The article from the Dutch East Indies had confirmed one of my earliest assumptions, that none of Maud’s stories could be true in the strictest sense of the word: ‘In all of London,’ it said, ‘there is probably no other woman who k
nows more tragic secrets than Maud West, but they are absolutely safe with her. She never even alludes to them, not even to her husband.’23
In 1938, she made an exception. Jimmy Brantley, a wealthy American manufacturer from Savannah, Georgia, was depicted in the international press as one of the world’s greatest romantics, although to my eyes his actions were more akin to stalking. After being jilted in 1932 by his fiancée, an eighteen-year-old Southern belle called Constance Ryland, he refused to take no for an answer. ‘I will wait until she says yes,’ he said. ‘I have the time.’ In the meantime, he decided to send her a single Maréchal-Niel rose every day, wherever she was. Six years later, he was still at it.24
Constance didn’t seem to mind. One photograph of her circulated by a press agency in 1937 showed her sniffing a rose delivered in London with an air of glamorous indifference worthy of the Hollywood career she was trying to cultivate. ‘Postman and express messengers, porters on Pullman trains, hotel pageboys and ships’ stewards have all played their part in delivering the daily reminder to Miss Ryland,’ explained the caption.25 Maud’s somewhat dubious role in all this was to keep Mr Brantley informed of Constance’s whereabouts, a task she delegated to her staff. The promised $10,000 bonus if the romance was ever rekindled was presumably never paid out, as Constance eventually, and sensibly, married someone else.
For the most part, however, Maud was slowing down. Harry was keen for her to retire, according to Margaret Gilruth, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so: ‘She tries, then somebody implores her to tackle some baffling case; she can’t refuse, and back she comes to her offices.’26 But, in September 1939, her hand was forced.
She’d known it was coming. The first Home Office instructions for air-raid precautions had arrived at Holborn Council in 1935; air-raid wardens had been recruited in 1937, gas masks issued in 1938, blackout curtains hung in the summer of 1939. She’d worked through one war. Now, with her sixtieth birthday on the horizon, could she face another?
It was time for Maud West to exit the stage. She made one last trip to Albion House to clear out her office, locked the door and, without so much as a final bow, disappeared. She was never seen again.
As for Edith Elliott, she was taking no chances. When asked for her occupation for the 1939 Register, a special census to gather information for identity cards, rationing and war work, she put ‘Secretary’.27 The message was clear. Look elsewhere. Maud West was no more, and Edith Elliott was unavailable – unless, that is, MI5 needed an elderly typist, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine how she’d ham that one up. Then Edith, too, vanished. She packed her bags and went – where?
I had no idea. I’d lost her.
Chapter Sixteen
Farewell, My Lovely
If variety is the spice of life, then mine has been more than ordinarily spicy.
Maud West, 19261
I stood nervously outside the station, looking out for a red Saab convertible. Brian had recovered from his surgery and was on his way to pick me up. When I first came across Maud West, I’d never considered that one day I might be waiting to meet her grandson with some of the family’s most intimate secrets smouldering away in my bag. It felt wrong. Almost creepy.
Hello, I’m your grandmother’s stalker.
Doubt rippled through me. Had I got carried away? Were the dead fair game? And, if so, just how dead did they have to be to make it okay? Was Maud dead enough?
Every day it was becoming easier to scoot past the grand old men in their gilded carriages and observe the common folk as they trudged along. Archive catalogues, digitized newspapers, books, photographs, diaries and more were now only a Google search away; private lives made public with the click of a mouse. But these people hadn’t invited scrutiny. Even Maud, for all her appreciation of publicity, had made it clear by her actions that her personal life was off-limits.
My main concern whilst I waited for Brian, however, was the effect such scrutiny could have on the living. The millions of genealogy enthusiasts building up their family trees knew the power of ancestry, of how the stories handed down or hidden over generations inform our sense of self. A noble lineage, centuries of hard graft, even a renegade skeleton or two, can shape how we see ourselves and the world around us.
Digging up the past could also lead to more disturbing discoveries: broken genetic links, unexpected siblings, a worrying pattern of premature mental decay. To root around in one’s own family tree knowing these risks was one thing – I’d done it myself – but to do so in someone else’s and then present them with the results? That seemed to hover somewhere between rude and dangerous.
But it was too late to back out now. The red Saab had arrived. I’d already alerted Brian to his grandmother’s double life as Maud West, and now I had to tell him the rest.
We chatted about the weather and trains as he manoeuvred the car through the town towards the sea. I caught a glimpse of a harbour ahead as we pulled into a driveway next to a small Georgian building where his wife Shirley was waiting in the flat upstairs.
Whilst Brian went into the kitchen to make some coffee, I took out a folder of photographs to show Shirley. The buck-toothed Salvation Army lass, the plump Charlie Chaplin and the aristocratic gent were each greeted with a gracious nod, but when we came to a picture of Maud disguised as a crotchety old woman, her eyes twinkled.
‘That’s just how I remember her,’ she said.
When Brian returned with the drinks, we danced around the subject a little more. ‘She was very good at getting people to fetch things for her,’ he said. Edith, it seemed, had spent most of her retirement firmly plonked in an armchair, refusing to get up unless absolutely necessary.
‘Perhaps she’d had enough of running?’ I suggested. Shirley’s polite smile suggested otherwise.
Any residual nerves I had were dispelled as the day went on. Brian was unfazed by the story I put before him about the life Edith – Edie – had created for herself as London’s most famous lady detective. I left nothing out – her illegitimacy, Harry’s gonorrhoea, Keith’s suicide – and he took it all with the equanimity one would expect of a man who had spent a lifetime calmly sawing through people’s bones day after day.
But what could he tell me about her life before retirement? Very little, it turned out. In the 1930s, when Maud West was still stalking the streets of London, Brian had been too young to take much notice of what the grown-ups were doing. To him, Edie was just his grandmother: she liked sitting down, disapproved of swearing and smoked Dr Blosser’s herbal cigarettes because they were ‘good for the lungs’.
Could she sing? Brian had never heard her do so. Was there anything else to suggest she might have once been on the stage? No. What about all the languages she claimed to speak? Was she a talented linguist? He didn’t think so. Nor could he explain why she was the only one listed on the electoral roll at Great Russell Mansions in 1933 and 1934, or why she might have chosen to change her name by deed poll around that time. Perhaps it was related to her political career? To all my other questions, the answer was the same: she never talked about the past.
The conversation turned to Harry. History can be cruel to the common man – too often, the only surviving records are those connected with a person’s lowest moments – and it soon became clear that Harry had been affected more than most. His health issues, juvenile crime record and debts had been mere blips in an otherwise healthy and happy life. Brian had been very fond of him, his abiding memory being of a crossword fiend who never went anywhere without a stubby pencil tucked into his waistcoat pocket.
I’d got Harry wrong. He wasn’t just another encumbrance to Edith’s peace of mind, dripping with germs and neuroses and blowing all her money on bad investments. He was a solid and supportive partner who cheered her on whilst quietly pursuing his own varied interests: motorbikes, advertising, the temporary storage of hats and coats. At one point between the wars, Brian said, he’d also worked as a tea taster. I’d been right about one thing, though: H
arry was a shed man, although his shed was a bit larger than I had imagined. All those gentlemen’s tricycles from the classified ads were bound for the successful bicycle-parts business he operated off the A3 near New Malden.
What about 1939 and beyond? Where had Edith and Harry gone? Brian knew the answer to that one because he’d been with them. His father had been drafted into the RAF as a flying instructor. Not wanting to stay in London, Edith and Harry, along with five-year-old Brian and his mother Mollie, had packed up their belongings and formed a little band of camp followers, trailing after Cecil as he moved from base to base.
I had another question. I’d recently discovered that when she left London Edith had put her business in the hands of her solicitors in Chancery Lane. She evidently had no intention of returning to it herself, but had she hoped that Evelyn or Vera would pick up where she left off? Did that happen? No. After being discharged from the SOE, Evelyn retrained as a chiropodist; Vera bought a pig farm in Scotland.
It struck me that both had chosen the reassuring honesty of flesh (whether porcine or human) over the ever-shifting moral sands of private detective work – as had Neville, who moved to New Zealand to try his luck as a sheep farmer. Cecil, of course, had his teeth. As for Denis, I had some more uncomfortable news for Brian: after the war, he had moved with his wife to a remote cottage near Ashford in Kent, where he died just eight years later at the age of forty-seven. His death certificate held uneasy echoes of another incident almost thirty years earlier:
Laceration of brain owing to gunshot wound of the head. Killed himself whilst balance of mind was disturbed.2
The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective Page 28