by Roy Vickers
“I admit that Raffen wrote to me too—and that I made him a small loan. Some of the other masters were also importuned. But can this investigation serve any purpose, now that the unhappy man is dead?”
“We have to find out who killed him, sir. It’s most probable that he was killed by a man he had been blackmailing.”
“Blackmail! I hope he didn’t sink to that. Cadging is bad enough. But to blackmail an old schoolfellow would be abominable. I feel sure you can safely put that thought out of your mind.”
“Was there a contemporary of Raffen’s here, sir, named Grenwood?”
“Your train of thought is obvious. And, if I may say so, Inspector, as obviously fallacious. There was no possibility of his levying blackmail on Grenwood. The report made it abundantly clear that no kind of blame attached to Grenwood.”
Rason agreed with enthusiasm, not having the least idea what the headmaster was talking about. He was given an Old Boys’ list and a copy of the report on the fire, which he read on the way back. From his point of view, it was a depressing document, for Grenwood emerged very creditably. Yet the headmaster had come over very headmasterish about that fire. Might be worth shaking it up in the lucky bag!
Back to the original riddle. Raffen had been cadging for fivers and tenners from everybody except Grenwood. And from Grenwood he had turned down offers of hundreds.
Perhaps because he was demanding thousands? There could be, he thought, no other possible explanation.
On his next call at Grenwood’s office he took Chief Inspector Karslake with him.
“Our experts have certified that this letter and I.O.U. are not forgeries, Mr. Grenwood. Moreover, we know that Raffen wrote similar letters to the headmaster and other masters at Charchester. Will you admit that you misled us as to Raffen’s character—admit that he had no social pride at all?”
“I have to accept your statement,” said Grenwood. “I am utterly astounded. I can only say that I misled you in good faith—in the light of my own experience with him.”
“Yeh! As we’ve agreed he had no social pride, we want another explanation of why he refused to let you help him in a big way.”
A long silence told Rason he had registered. Grenwood was racking his brain for a credible lie. Why had Raffen begged tenners from others and refused hundreds from him? The perpetual sneer danced before his eyes.
“I have no explanation to offer.”
“The jury will want one,” said Rason. “And they’ll probably like to hear all we can tell ’ em about that fire!”
Grenwood felt panic rising. As in the trenches long ago, his nerves played him tricks. Again the boyish voice that could not be there screamed his name: ‘Grenwood! Tell them you heard me calling your name and you wouldn’t turn back because you were afraid for your own skin.’ And once again Grenwood rushed from the greater fear to an enemy superior in all the relevant talents.
“He was blackmailing me because he had found out I had been unfaithful to my wife. He asked too much. And I lost my temper and hit him with the bottle.”
PART SEVEN
ALL RIGHT ON THE NIGHT
Surgeons will often claim success for an operation that has resulted in the death of a patient—provided that there is a reasonable lapse of time between the two events. By the same thought process George Hudson might have claimed that he had successfully murdered Ethel Mollett, concealed the body, and removed all traces of the crime.
True that he was hanged for it all. But the fact must not be allowed to dim his brilliance as a criminal. He beat the police and for nearly a year afterwards led a life of blameless domesticity.
By all the rules of the game, if one may call it so—by everything that was logical—he ought to have escaped. He was beaten by a preposterous coincidence—by a million-to-one chance that happened to turn up against him.
George Hudson was born at Salisbury, the son of a well-to-do architect. Both his parents were killed in the Salisbury railway disaster of 1902 when he himself was twenty-two and within a month or two of qualifying in his father’s profession.
The death of his parents left him with a little under two hundred pounds a year and a clear sum of about eight hundred. It was just enough to enable him to live in idleness, and with that object in view he decided to move to London where he had neither friends nor relatives to worry him with advice.
Romance met him, as it were, on the doorstep—or, more exactly, in the third-class compartment in which he travelled up to London—in the person of Ethel Mollett.
Ethel was eighteen, the daughter of a farm labourer from an outlying village. She was on her way to take up her first situation as housemaid to a chemist living in Tredegar Road, Bow, E. She was plumpish and pretty, with apple cheeks and big, trustful eyes.
To these rather elementary physical charms she added the subtle fascination of being very bewildered and rather helpless. She had never before left her village except for an occasional jaunt to the market town. She was more than a little afraid of the train and quite horribly afraid of the vast city that lay at the end of the journey.
Hudson told her tales of London, the kind of tales that the rustic mind seems curiously eager to believe—tales of staggering dangers that beset the unwary. If this did not allay her fears, it at least made her snatch at his offer to see her safely to her employer’s house.
Before they parted the girl had gratefully accepted Hudson’s generous invitation for her first free afternoon.
For the next year the story of their association is the commonplace story of a man’s infatuation for a woman who is his social and intellectual inferior. He was fascinated by her naïveté and innocence—more brutally expressed, her almost incredible “greenness.”
He kept her very much to himself. Invariably, on her afternoon off, he would call for her at the house in Tredegar Road. There was no narrow snobbery about him. He allowed himself to be interviewed by the chemist and his wife as Ethel Mollett’s sweetheart, who was supposed to be employed in some vaguely humble capacity on the night staff of a newspaper.
In May of the following year Ethel was granted a fortnight’s holiday which she spent with Hudson at Lowestoft.
Just a little of the greenness had perhaps worn off by this time, for at the end of June we find her unwilling to listen any longer to reasons, however ingenious in themselves, for postponing the wedding day. The wedding must take place at George Hudson’s earliest convenience, or she would consult not only her employer but also her father.
Mention of her father frightened Hudson. He knew the village custom in these matters. Her father would come first; if he were not successful, he would return with all the relatives and friends he could muster. The village, in short, would pool its resources for the purpose of putting pressure upon the man who had made love to one of its maidens. They would come to his lodgings (where Ethel had never been) and make scene after scene.
All this would upset George Hudson’s other plans.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, my dear,” he said in the man-of-the-world tone that she so admired. “For one thing, if you tell your employers they will promptly turn you out. And what is the good of upsetting your father—you don’t think his word counts for anything up here, do you?”
One imagines her trying to ignore this and repeating with deadly monotony her demand for marriage.
“Now listen to me. If you carry out these ridiculous threats of yours I will never speak to you again. Promise to do as I tell you and we’ll ‘go to the parson,’ as you call it, this afternoon.”
This overawed her and she promised to obey—a promise which she kept with a literal faithfulness that was her undoing.
A few minutes later they were interviewing the rector of the parish. As the girl was a minor, he asked the usual questions and was assured by Hudson that her parents would send formal consent and would, of course, be present at the ceremony.
Next, they took the train to Victoria, as Hudson had lodgings
in the adjacent district of Pimlico. He gave her the satisfaction of accompanying him while he in turn gave particulars, so that the banns might be called in his parish.
The very obvious genuineness of the reverend gentleman, the indisputable reality of the adjoining church, banished the last of her suspicions of the strange manner in which apparently one got married in London. She was ready once more to obey George Hudson in anything.
He told her to ask for an hour off the next evening and to meet him at Bow Station—and in the meantime to say nothing to her employer or anybody else of their wedding.
George Hudson is possibly the first murderer in history to hit upon the remarkable device of “trying out” the murder before actually committing it—to see if it were really as safe as it looked. It was his intention that Ethel Mollett should disappear in such circumstances as to suggest that she had met with foul play at the hands of some man other than himself.
It was easy enough to make so very gullible a girl disappear without leaving any direct trace. The vital question was: had the police some trick up their sleeves for finding young women who disappeared suddenly?
He proceeded to find out in the following manner.
When Ethel met him as arranged at eight o’clock, he took her from Bow to Waterloo Station. This, of course, was in the days when the station was a comparatively small one, surrounded by a network of mean streets. In one of these streets, known as Walsall Place, he had previously booked lodgings in the name of Wall (doubtless suggested by the address) for himself and his wife.
Here, at No. 7, he installed Ethel as his wife and presented her with a brown-paper parcel containing various articles of feminine attire which he himself had bought to offset the inconvenience caused by leaving her employer’s house without luggage.
On the following morning he gave her twelve pounds and told her to go to a certain shop and buy, ready-made, a walking costume, a new hat, and anything else she wanted, after which she must return to Walsall Place and pass the time as well as she could until he came back from Salisbury. Overnight, it had been agreed, at his suggestion, that he should go by himself to her parents, explain the situation in full, and beg them to come to the wedding. That, she readily admitted, would be “better than writing.” She was always ready to believe that almost anything was “better than writing.” She gave him messages which he promised to deliver. Now, although he did not deliver the messages, he did go to see her parents. But he went first to the house of her late employers at Bow who were in a state of mingled indignation and alarm at the girl’s failure to return the previous night. Before they could get in a word edgewise, he asked whether Ethel were ill, as she had failed to keep an appointment with him the previous evening.
Explanation was followed by discussion. At the right moment Hudson made a manly confession. He had intended, he added, to behave in as honourable manner as was left to him and to marry her secretly as soon as the statutory three Sundays had passed. He had wanted to see her the previous evening in order to persuade her, against her will, to inform her kind employers.
This explanation only made Ethel’s disappearance seem all the more sinister. It was incredible that such a nice, quiet, simple country girl should elope with one man when the banns were about to be called in respect of another. It almost looked as if something must have happened to her.
“There’s just the one chance that she has gone home,” exclaimed Hudson. “It’s not much use wiring—her people probably can’t read. I’m going down to see for myself, and if she isn’t there I’m going straight to Scotland Yard. I hope you’ll back me up in all I say.”
He went down to Salisbury, told the same substantially true story that he had told the girl’s employers, and on his return to London that night went with the chemist to Scotland Yard and laid the “facts” before the authorities.
Any suspicion that might have fallen on George Hudson was allayed by the fact that investigation showed that the story he told was true in every particular. It was true about the banns; it was true that he had been to see the girl’s parents.
The grief-stricken parents had supplied through Hudson the only existing photograph—a wedding group taken three years previously which was of little use for purposes of reproduction. A description was published, giving details of the dress in which she had left the house in Bow.
Hudson knew that he was in no danger from that published description. She was wearing her new dress, and the descriptions of her face and figure would have fitted thousands of young women.
On returning to the squalid lodgings in Walsall Place, the account he gave of his interview with her parents must be considered as an item of propaganda rather than a summary of facts. That he had indeed been there she could not doubt because he gave an accurate description of the cottage. Besides, she did not bother to doubt anything—now that George was really going to marry her.
She was therefore willing to believe that her father had promised to come, with her mother, to the wedding; that in the meantime he wished her to keep the whole thing as secret as possible, to continue to live under the protection of her future husband, and to obey him in all things.
For once her placid nature found obedience difficult because obedience consisted mainly in staying indoors and doing nothing but look at the books and magazines that George brought her. (Ethel, it must be admitted, was but an indifferent reader.) George left her alone a good deal, having, as he told her, so many things to attend to.
One of the many things that George attended to was Scotland Yard. At any odd time of day he would make himself a mild nuisance by calling for news of his “missing sweetheart.” Another item that claimed a good deal of his energy was the renting of a house.
In those days it was easy enough to rent a house, but George Hudson wanted something rather special in the matter of a garden. It need not be a big garden nor a beautiful garden; it merely had to be a garden that was not overlooked by the neighbours.
He found what he wanted at Surbiton, then a very small suburb struggling to expand.
One afternoon, some ten days after she had left Bow, he took her down to Surbiton and showed her that which he described as their future home—a pleasant little six-room house with a very fair-sized garden adequately screened by a high wooden fence. In that part of the garden which was intended for the growing of vegetables two men were putting the finishing touches to a circular pit, five feet deep with a diameter of ten feet.
That, George explained, was to be a fish pond with an ornamental fountain in the centre. Local men had done the digging; a London firm would attend to the rest of it.
He paid off the local men and then, being possessed of the key, showed Ethel over the house. There arises the pathetic picture of the girl flitting from room to room in the eager business of home-making—wholly unsuspicious of the dreadful significance of the “fish pond.”
In spite of her entreaties he did not take her to Surbiton again until the following Monday—two days before their promised wedding day. The police had had a clear fortnight in which to find the missing Ethel Mollett. They had failed to discover so much as a single clue.
In short, the coast seemed as clear as any murderer could reasonably expect.
They left their lodgings, depositing their scanty luggage in the cloak room at Waterloo whence Hudson subsequently reclaimed and destroyed it. They arrived at the house in Surbiton in the early evening. In his pocket he carried a velvet pad of the kind that is used for dusting silk hats, a part of which was eventually found in the girl’s mouth. In the house were several lengths of box cord with which he bound her and suspended her by the neck from the baluster rail on the first floor.
He spent the hours of darkness burying her in the “fish pond” with a spade previously brought to the house.
On the next day, having removed all traces of the night’s toil, he called on the house agent, mentioned a sudden change of plans which would make it impossible for him to occupy the house, and suggeste
d that he should forfeit his half-quarter’s deposit in return for cancellation of the lease. The agent was quite willing to do this but raised the question of the fish pond.
“I’ve already had it filled in,” explained Hudson. ‘Of course, it makes a bit of a mound just now, but that will subside in a week or two. I don’t imagine it will be a bar to re-letting.”
It was no bar … The house was let for the September quarter and duly occupied by a dentist with his wife and child who, as far as we know, made no complaint about the garden.
The case of Ethel Mollett was filed in the Department of Dead Ends among the other unsolved mysteries.
During his year of residence in London George Hudson had had plenty of leisure. The late Ethel Mollett’s demands on his time had been limited to one afternoon per week and alternate Sundays.
Through a mutual friend in Salisbury he had early become acquainted with a Mrs. Strickland, a very, very buxom widow some dozen years his senior. During the year of frequent meetings the acquaintanceship had ripened into something deeper. In November an advertisement in The Times proclaimed that they were engaged and would be married in January.
It cannot be known whether George Hudson was attracted by the lady’s ample person or by the fact that she had inherited from her late husband a grocery business that yielded her over a thousand pounds per year—together with a very suitable house on the outskirts of Guildford.
The marriage, however, did not take place in January, but in February, the postponement being caused by the lady having a serious “heart attack,” for which the doctor prescribed a period of absolute rest. As a matter of fact, the unhappy woman was suffering from Bright’s disease from which she died two years later—though this was not known at the time.
In February, then, they were married and spent their honeymoon at Herne Bay, but were driven away after three days by the inclemency of the weather, returning to the bride’s house at Guildford, where they settled down to a humdrum life of prosperous indolence.