The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime

by Michael Sims

  At Ostend the Count made a second gallant attempt to capture the jewel-case, which Lady Georgina automatically repulsed. She had a fixed habit, I believe, of sticking fast to that jewel-case; for she was too overpowered by the Count’s urbanity, I feel sure, to suspect for a moment his honesty of purpose. But whenever she travelled, I fancy, she clung to her case as if her life depended upon it; it contained the whole of her valuable diamonds.

  We had twenty minutes for refreshments at Ostend, during which interval my old lady declared with warmth that I must look after her registered luggage; though, as it was booked through to Cologne, I could not even see it till we crossed the German frontier; for the Belgian douaniers seal up the van as soon as the through baggage for Germany is unloaded. To satisfy her, however, I went through the formality of pretending to inspect it, and rendered myself hateful to the head of the douane by asking various foolish and inept questions, on which Lady Georgina insisted. When I had finished this silly and uncongenial task—for I am not by nature fussy, and it is hard to assume fussiness as another person’s proxy—I returned to our coupé which I had arranged for in London. To my great amazement, I found the Cantankerous Old Lady and the egregious Count comfortably seated there. “Monsieur has been good enough to accept a place in our carriage,” she observed, as I entered.

  He bowed and smiled. “Or, rather, madame has been so kind as to offer me one,” he corrected.

  “Would you like some lunch, Lady Georgina?” I asked, in my chilliest voice. “There are ten minutes to spare, and the buffet is excellent.”

  “An admirable inspiration,” the Count murmured. “Permit me to escort you, miladi.”

  “You will come, Lois?” Lady Georgina asked.

  “No, thank you,” I answered, for I had an idea. “I am a capital sailor, but the sea takes away my appetite.”

  “Then you’ll keep our places,” she said, turning to me. “I hope you won’t allow them to stick in any horrid foreigners! They will try to force them on you unless you insist. I know their tricky ways. You have the tickets, I trust? And the bulletin for the coupé? Well, mind you don’t lose the paper for the registered luggage. Don’t let those dreadful porters touch my cloaks. And if anybody attempts to get in, be sure you stand in front of the door as they mount to prevent them.”

  The Count handed her out; he was all high courtly politeness. As Lady Georgina descended, he made yet another dexterous effort to relieve her of the jewel-case. I don’t think she noticed it, but automatically once more she waved him aside. Then she turned to me. “Here, my dear,” she said, handing it to me, “you’d better take care of it. If I lay it down in the buffet while I am eating my soup, some rogue may run away with it. But mind, don’t let it out of your hands on any account. Hold it so, on your knee; and, for Heaven’s sake, don’t part with it.”

  By this time my suspicions of the Count were profound. From the first I had doubted him; he was so blandly plausible. But as we landed at Ostend I had accidentally overheard a low whispered conversation when he passed a shabby-looking man, who had travelled in a second-class carriage from London. “That succeeds?” the shabby-looking man had muttered under his breath in French, as the haughty nobleman with the waxed moustache brushed by him.

  “That succeeds admirably,” the Count had answered, in the same soft undertone. “Ça réussit à merveille!”

  I understood him to mean that he had prospered in his attempt to impose on Lady Georgina.

  They had been gone five minutes at the buffet, when the Count came back hurriedly to the door of the coupé with a nonchalant air. “Oh, mademoiselle,” he said, in an off-hand tone, “Lady Georgina has sent me to fetch her jewel-case.”

  I gripped it hard with both hands. “Pardon, M. le Comte,” I answered; “Lady Georgina intrusted it to my safe keeping, and, without her leave, I cannot give it up to any one.”

  “You mistrust me?” he cried, looking black. “You doubt my honour? You doubt my word when I say that miladi has sent me?”

  “Du tout,” I answered, calmly. “But I have Lady Georgina’s orders to stick to this case; and till Lady Georgina returns I stick to it.”

  He murmured some indignant remark below his breath, and walked off. The shabby-looking passenger was pacing up and down the platform outside in a badly-made dust-coat. As they passed their lips moved. The Count’s seemed to mutter, “C’est un coup manqué.”

  However, he did not desist even so. I saw he meant to go on with his dangerous little game. He returned to the buffet and rejoined Lady Georgina. I felt sure it would be useless to warn her, so completely had the Count succeeded in gulling her; but I took my own steps. I examined the jewel-case closely. It had a leather outer covering; within was a strong steel box, with stout bands of metal to bind it. I took my cue at once, and acted for the best on my own responsibility.

  When Lady Georgina and the Count returned, they were like old friends together. The quails in aspic and the sparkling hock had evidently opened their hearts to one another. As far as Malines they laughed and talked without ceasing. Lady Georgina was now in her finest vein of spleen: her acid wit grew sharper and more caustic each moment. Not a reputation in Europe had a rag left to cover it as we steamed in beneath the huge iron roof of the main central junction. I had observed all the way from Ostend that the Count had been anxious lest we might have to give up our coupé at Malines. I assured him more than once that his fears were groundless, for I had arranged at Charing Cross that it should run right through to the German frontier. But he waved me aside, with one lordly hand. I had not told Lady Georgina of his vain attempt to take possession of her jewel-case; and the bare fact of my silence made him increasingly suspicious of me.

  “Pardon me, mademoiselle,” he said, coldly; “you do not understand these lines as well as I do. Nothing is more common than for those rascals of railway clerks to sell one a place in a coupé or a wagon-lit, and then never reserve it, or turn one out half way. It is very possible miladi may have to descend at Malines.”

  Lady Georgina bore him out by a large variety of selected stories concerning the various atrocities of the rival companies which had stolen her luggage on her way to Italy. As for trains de luxe, they were dens of robbers.

  So when we reached Malines, just to satisfy Lady Georgina, I put out my head and inquired of a porter. As I anticipated, he replied that there was no change; we went through to Verviers.

  The Count, however, was still unsatisfied. He descended, and made some remarks a little farther down the platform to an official in the gold-banded cap of a chef-de-gare, or some such functionary. Then he returned to us, all fuming. “It is as I said,” he exclaimed, flinging open the door. “These rogues have deceived us. The coupé goes no farther. You must dismount at once, miladi, and take the train just opposite.”

  I felt sure he was wrong, and I ventured to say so. But Lady Georgina cried, “Nonsense, child! The chef-de-gare must know. Get out at once! Bring my bag and the rugs! Mind that cloak! Don’t forget the sandwich-tin! Thanks, Count; will you kindly take charge of my umbrellas? Hurry up, Lois; hurry up! the train is just starting!”

  I scrambled after her, with my fourteen bundles, keeping a quiet eye meanwhile on the jewel-case.

  We took our seats in the opposite train, which I noticed was marked “Amsterdam, Bruxelles, Paris.” But I said nothing. The Count jumped in, jumped about, arranged our parcels, jumped out again. He spoke to a porter; then he rushed back excitedly. “Mille pardons, miladi,” he cried. “I find the chef-de-gare has cruelly deceived me. You were right, after all, mademoiselle! We must return to the coupé!”

  With singular magnanimity, I refrained from saying, “I told you so.”

  Lady Georgina, very flustered and hot by this time, tumbled out once more, and bolted back to the coupé. Both trains were just starting. In her hurry, at last, she let the Count take possession of her jewel-case. I rather fancy that as he passed one window he handed it in to the shabby-looking passenger; but I am
not certain. At any rate, when we were comfortably seated in our own compartment once more, and he stood on the footboard just about to enter, of a sudden he made an unexpected dash back, and flung himself wildly into a Paris carriage. At the self-same moment, with a piercing shriek, both trains started.

  Lady Georgina threw up her hands in a frenzy of horror. “My diamonds!” she cried aloud. “Oh, Lois, my diamonds!”

  “Don’t distress yourself,” I answered, holding her back, for I verily believe she would have leapt from the train. “He has only taken the outer shell, with the sandwich-case inside it. Here is the steel box!” And I produced it, triumphantly.

  She seized it, overjoyed. “How did this happen?” she cried, hugging it, for she loved those diamonds.

  “Very simply,” I answered. “I saw the man was a rogue, and that he had a confederate with him in another carriage. So, while you were gone to the buffet at Ostend, I slipped the box out of the case, and put in the sandwich-tin, that he might carry it off, and we might have proofs against him. All you have to do now is to inform the conductor, who will telegraph to stop the train to Paris. I spoke to him about that at Ostend, so that everything is ready.”

  She positively hugged me. “My dear,” she cried, “you are the cleverest little woman I ever met in my life! Who on earth could have suspected such a polished gentleman? Why, you’re worth your weight in gold. What the dickens shall I do without you at Schlangenbad?”

  M. MCDONNELL BODKIN

  (1850-1933)

  When Matthias McDonnell Bodkin died in 1933, he must have been tired. Born in the middle of the nineteenth century to well-connected Irish parents, he grew up to become a prominent journalist, editor, and author, all while building a respected career as barrister, judge, King’s Council, and rabid Nationalist opponent of Charles Stewart Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party. As barrister, he defended Nationalists; as newspaper editor, he attacked Parnell. He won a seat in Parliament by a very narrow margin but abandoned it after only one term, claiming that he could not afford to forgo his legal earnings.

  His many books range through history, politics, historical novels, autobiography, a volume entitled Famous Irish Trials, and a collection with the heinous title Pat o’ Nine Tales. He shows up in this anthology, however, because in 1900 Chatto & Windus in London published his story collection Dora Myrl: The Lady Detective. The glamorous young Myrl is a professional paid detective and she is indefatigable in pursuit of clues or miscreants. “A Sherlock Holmes in petticoats,” gushed the Morning Leader when Myrl appeared on the scene, dubbing her “pretty, refined, and piquant,” as well as “adorable.” The paper insisted that she was “quite a new kind of detective, and a distinct improvement on her predecessors.” The Daily News declared the stories “spirited and vivacious.” Of course, a lot of this fuss was because Myrl was more overtly feminine than some of her predecessors. Smart, efficient, and fearless, she may remind you of Grant Allen’s Lois Cayley, who in one story (not reprinted in this volume) pursues a foe via bicycle. Dora Myrl is also quite the mistress of disguise. As protean as Holmes himself, she appears as a telegraph delivery boy and an oracular palmist; at one point she doubly disguises herself as male and French.

  Two years earlier, in 1898, Bodkin had published Paul Beck, the Rule of Thumb Detective. Positioning his detective as no genius, almost an anti-Holmes, Bodkin has Beck claim modestly, “I just go by the rule of thumb, and muddle and puzzle out my cases as best I can.” Beck appeared in a couple of other novels over the next few years. Then, in a 1909 novel with the coy title The Capture of Paul Beck, he pitted his two detectives against each other and finally married them, in a tedious love story that is one-third over before Beck and Myrl even appear. Inevitably, the two raise a child who becomes a detective, in the subsequent novel Young Beck, a Chip off the Old Block. Bodkin seems to have been the first major figure in the genre to write about a married couple who engage in team-work crime solving. Many others would follow, including the charming Nick and Nora Charles, created by Dashiell Hammett in The Thin Man; Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence Beresford; and later the unaccountably popular Mr. and Mrs. North series by Frances and Richard Lockridge.

  Nowadays the story title requires some explanation; Bodkin packed two or three meanings into it. As long ago as 1899, a New York Times columnist explained,

  To cut his stick, in the sense of going away in a hurry, has long been a common expression, though it is not heard by any means so frequently as it was forty and fifty years ago. “He’s cut his stick” equals runs away. “Now then: cut yer stick!” equals be off. In playing cricket when I was a boy, the record of runs for each player was notched on a long stick, and runs were only known as “notches” in those days. I have seen the records of bigger matches also recorded on sticks by means of notches, say, forty-five years ago.

  A slang dictionary from the same era suggests an alternative origin even older: “It seems that it refers to the custom centuries ago of cutting a stout walking stick or staff—which could double as a weapon—before beginning a long journey on foot.”

  And yet another meaning you’ll have to discover as you read.

  HOW HE CUT HIS STICK

  (1900)

  He breathed freely at last as he lifted the small black Gladstone bag of stout calfskin, and set it carefully on the seat of the empty railway carriage close beside him.

  He lifted the bag with a manifest effort. Yet he was a big powerfully built young fellow; handsome too in a way; with straw-coloured hair and moustache and a round face, placid, honest-looking but not too clever. His light blue eyes had an anxious, worried look. No wonder, poor chap! he was weighted with a heavy responsibility. That unobtrusive black bag held £5,000 in gold and notes which he—a junior clerk in the famous banking house of Gower and Grant—was taking from the head office in London to a branch two hundred miles down the line.

  The older and more experienced clerk whose ordinary duty it was to convey the gold had been taken strangely and suddenly ill at the last moment.

  “There’s Jim Pollock,” said the bank manager, looking round for a substitute, “he’ll do. He is big enough to knock the head off anyone that interferes with him.”

  So Jim Pollock had the heavy responsibility thrust upon him. The big fellow who would tackle any man in England in a football rush without a thought of fear was as nervous as a two-year-old child. All the way down to this point his watchful eyes and strong right hand had never left the bag for a moment. But here at the Eddiscombe Junction he had got locked in alone to a single first-class carriage, and there was a clear run of forty-seven miles to the next stoppage.

  So with a sigh and shrug of relief, he threw away his anxiety, lay back on the soft seat, lit a pipe, drew a sporting paper from his pocket, and was speedily absorbed in the account of the Rugby International Championship match, for Jim himself was not without hopes of his “cap” in the near future.

  The train rattled out of the station and settled down to its smooth easy stride—a good fifty miles an hour through the open country.

  Still absorbed in his paper he did not notice the gleam of two stealthy keen eyes that watched him from the dark shadow under the opposite seat. He did not see that long lithe wiry figure uncoil and creep out, silently as a snake, across the floor of the carriage.

  He saw nothing, and felt nothing till he felt two murderous hands clutching at his throat and a knee crushing his chest in.

  Jim was strong, but before his sleeping strength had time to waken, he was down on his back on the carriage floor with a handkerchief soaked in chloroform jammed close to his mouth and nostrils.

  He struggled desperately for a moment or so, half rose and almost flung off his clinging assailant. But even as he struggled the dreamy drug stole strength and sense away; he fell back heavily and lay like a log on the carriage floor.

  The faithful fellow’s last thought as his senses left him was “The gold is gone.” It was his first thought as he awoke with dizzy
pain and racked brain from the deathlike swoon. The train was still at full speed; the carriage doors were still locked; but the carriage empty and the bag was gone.

  He searched despairingly in the racks, under the seats—all empty. Jim let the window down with a clash and bellowed.

  The train began to slacken speed and rumble into the station. Half a dozen porters ran together—the station-master following more leisurely as beseemed his dignity. Speedily a crowd gathered round the door.

  “I have been robbed,” Jim shouted, “of a black bag with £5,000 in it!”

  Then the superintendent pushed his way through the crowd.

  “Where were you robbed, sir?” he said with a suspicious look at the dishevelled and excited Jim.

  “Between this and Eddiscombe Junction.”

  “Impossible, sir, there is no stoppage between this and Eddiscombe, and the carriage is empty.”

  “I thought it was empty at Eddiscombe, but there must have been a man under the seat.”

  “There is no man under the seat now,” retorted the superintendent curtly, “you had better tell your story to the police. There is a detective on the platform.”

  Jim told his story to the detective, who listened gravely and told him that he must consider himself in custody pending inquiries.

  A telegram was sent to Eddiscombe and it was found that communication had been stopped. This must have happened quite recently, for a telegram had gone through less than an hour before. The breakage was quickly located about nine miles outside Eddiscombe. Some of the wires had been pulled down half way to the ground, and the insulators smashed to pieces on one of the poles. All round the place the ground was trampled with heavy footprints which passed through a couple of fields out on the high road and were lost. No other clue of any kind was forthcoming.