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.”