The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (26 page)

To the Chief Inspector of Police, New Scotland Yard.

Mary Robinson would feel much obliged if the Chief would send an Inspector to see her at the above Prison.

(sgd) Mary Robinson.

A matter of days after his return from Welbeck, Inspector Dew found himself on the way to Holloway Prison. Mary Ann Robinson, it would appear, was about to make a confession.

*
  
Equivalent to more than £50,000 today.

The criminal is the creative artist;
the detective only the critic.

G. K. C
HESTERTON

The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery

The four-wheeled cab pulled to a halt outside a pair of iron gates, which cast their shadow over the busy thoroughfare. Behind the gates rose a mass of Gothic battlements, towers and pinnacles. Holloway Prison, when it was built in 1852, had been modelled on the front of Warwick Castle. Originally envisaged as a mixed prison, it had over the course of the nineteenth century come to house predominantly women, in response to the increased demand for space to incarcerate the prostitutes, Molly cutpurses, thieves and drunks who constituted London’s burgeoning female criminal population.

Accompanied by a fellow officer, Inspector Dew rang the doorbell, at which a wary eye appeared at the grating. Then, after a deafening clanking of bolts and turning of keys in ancient locks, the two officers were let in. A melancholy prison guard led them through a series of winding, gas-lit passages. They passed through a courtyard overgrown with weeds, and continued on to a large reception room, flanked
by narrow individual cells. The pale shafts of winter sunlight that struggled through the window casements made barely an impression on the dingy walls. Mary Ann Robinson awaited them in one of the cells, accompanied by the prison matron and two strapping female wardens. Dew barely recognized the confident woman who had given evidence scarcely a month ago in the crowded police court. Now, she was pale and drawn.

As Dew had expected, Robinson announced that she had decided to plead guilty to the charge of perjury, and to make a full confession. She then went on to tell her story. It was an extraordinary tale, even in the light of the bizarre revelations that Inspector Dew had come to expect of the Druce case.

Mary Ann related how she had been living in 1906 as a widow in the suburbs of Christchurch, New Zealand, with her daughter Maud. One day, she saw an advertisement in a local newspaper, seeking people who knew anything about the 5th Duke of Portland. Having lived briefly on the Welbeck estate thirty years previously, she responded to the advertisement. About three weeks later, two men came to call on her. One of them said that his name was Druce. When she subsequently met George Hollamby in person, Mary Ann was positive that he was not the man who had visited her in Christchurch in 1906. The two men, however, were extremely similar – the visitor had the same blue eyes and bushy moustache as George Hollamby. She believed the man may have been George Hollamby’s younger brother, Charles.
*1

The ‘man named Druce’ told Mary Ann that he had heard she was clever at writing, and that if she did as he asked, she would receive £4000.
*2
The task was easy: all she had to do was write down everything she knew about the 5th Duke from her time at Welbeck, and make it as attractive as possible, to help them get the funds to fight their case. The visitor explained in outline the Druce claim that the 5th Duke of Portland had led a double life as T. C. Druce of Baker Street. Mary Ann was, in any event, familiar with the case from the extensive reporting of the proceedings to date in the New Zealand newspapers.

Mary Ann immediately set to work. As her father’s favourite, she had been privileged to receive an education at the progressive teacher-training institution, the Home and Colonial College. It was an unusual distinction for a policeman’s daughter at the time. Gifted from her childhood days with a knack for telling stories, she did not find it difficult to amalgamate the information that had been fed to her by the visitor named Druce, the newspaper accounts of the Druce case, and her own recollections of her brief sojourn at Welbeck as a shepherd’s wife in the 1870s, into a highly romantic and fictionalized account of a young girl’s encounter with a mysterious and haunted nobleman, who lived a double life as a tradesman named Druce. As she compiled her story, George Hollamby and Thomas Coburn – who were then in England preparing the case – kept in touch with her by letter, sending her pamphlets with further information about the claim. Having written out her ‘diary’ on sheets of notepaper and being well satisfied with the result, Mary Ann transcribed the pages into a copybook that she bought cheaply at an auction house.

Early in 1907, George Hollamby and Thomas Coburn cabled Mary Ann £250 to enable her to come to England with her daughter, Maud. On board ship, she took on the name of ‘Miss Mary Robinson’, and Maud posed as her female companion, Miss O’Neill. When they disembarked at Plymouth, Mary Ann and Maud were met by the Druce party’s legal men, Edmund Kimber and Thomas Coburn. Mr Kimber said to her, ‘We want to make a sensation: there is nothing done without it.’ On the train to London, there was a lot of talk about the Druce case. Kimber kept repeating to her, over and over: ‘Stick to your tale, stick to your tale.’ As they pulled into London, he told her: ‘You will get your £4000 without a murmur, perhaps £5000, if you will stick to your guns.’ Mary Ann also recalled that, during the course of the train journey, a strange incident took place. An unknown woman came up to her in the carriage and said, ‘Mrs Robinson, beware.’ Mary Ann later saw her in court, but she never found out who she was.

On their arrival in London, Mary Ann and her daughter were introduced to George Hollamby, whom everybody addressed as ‘Your Grace’. Kimber took possession of the diary and Thomas Coburn told Mary Ann that she had been brought over to ‘make a sensation’. He also told her that Mrs Hamilton was writing a life of the 5th Duke, which would cause ‘another sensation’, and for which she was to be paid £600. A few days later, Edmund Kimber told Mary Ann that he had read her diary, and that she should have been a historian: ‘It will just suit our purpose!’ he exclaimed. ‘We can raise any amount of money on it.’ He also told her that he would keep possession of the diary, that she should keep her counsel, and reiterated that she would get £4000, without a doubt. Mary Ann was insistent that the first time anybody had asked her any questions about the diary was when she was cross-examined in court by Horace Avory.

In the meantime, the diary did indeed seem to be making plenty of money – for some people. Whenever someone turned up at G. H. Druce, Ltd, and expressed an interest in buying shares in the Druce case, they were immediately taken to Kimber’s office to be shown the diary. Each time this happened, Kimber charged the company commission – with the result that, as George Hollamby complained to Mary Ann, Kimber was making £50 (£5000 in today’s money) or more a week out of it. Various newspapers also began to serialize the diary. Both George Hollamby and Thomas Coburn expressed annoyance to Mary Ann that they did not themselves have possession of the diary, and began to plot how to get hold of the elusive document with the unfailing Midas touch. In fact, it was clear that desire to gain possession of the diary was causing members of the Druce party to fall out with each other. But Edmund Kimber kept the diary under lock and key. Every day, Mary Ann would go to Kimber’s office, where he would read out extracts from it and then ask her to make alterations, marked on pieces of paper. But he took care to take the pieces of paper away afterwards.

‘Kimber and Coburn were constantly vying with each other, and running each other down,’ Mary Ann related to Inspector Dew. Coburn, she said, had told her he came from Australia, that he was a practising lawyer of some standing, and had made £20,000 from the land boom, but that he had then lost it, and gone bankrupt. If George Hollamby lost the case, he (Coburn) would ‘take good care that he did not lose anything by it, and that he would be worth a million, but if Druce got his rights he (Coburn) would be worth a lot more’. Like Kimber, he told her to stick to her guns, and she would get her £4000, which he described as ‘a mere flea bite’. Coburn asked her repeatedly to request the diary back from Kimber, but Kimber refused to return it. Coburn also told Mary Ann that the Druce claimants would have to depend on their witnesses, as they did not intend to say anything in court themselves.

During their stay in England, the Druce party rented a flat for Mary Ann and Maud in Lavender Hill. However, they were usually late with paying the rent, and Mary Ann frequently had to chase Kimber for it. Kimber’s chief clerk, Jenkins, would come over with the money, and used to mutter darkly that everybody involved in the conspiracy ‘would sign their own death warrant’. George Hollamby, in Mary Ann’s view, was a crude man, his behaviour hardly befitting the claimant to a dukedom. One day, he and one of his cronies exposed themselves to Mary Ann and her daughter by opening their trousers in front of them. Coburn also behaved lecherously towards them, running his hands up Mary Ann’s and her daughter’s clothes. When she complained about him to Edmund Kimber, he said he knew Druce was a ‘low man’, and asked if he or the others were drunk at the time.

Her suspicions of the Druce party growing deeper as the days passed, Mary Ann instructed her own solicitors, Oswald Hanson & Smith, and through them finally managed to recover her diary from Kimber. But the diary was subsequently stolen: the account of its theft in the street, which Mary Ann had given in court the previous October, was true. She did not know who stole it. ‘I never actually told the Druce people I manufactured the contents of the diary,’ Mary Ann told Dew. ‘But I felt that they knew it, from the manner they treated me.’ She had thought the diary was just to be used for the purposes of raising funds for the case, and never imagined she would have to appear in court. ‘I told Coburn I should be no good, as I knew nothing about the lead in the coffin, and would not swear it for nobody,’ she told the inspector. ‘He then said I should only have to kiss the book and that it would be over, and that the others would swear to lead in the coffin. But when I read Nurse Bayly’s evidence, my eyes were opened, and I could see that Druce was nothing but a base imposter. Then I made up my mind I would tell the police all about it. I know my father was a policeman, and I would rather tell the police than anyone else.’

Mary Ann related that shortly after she was remanded in custody following her arrest by Dew on 17 January, Edmund Kimber came to see her in Holloway Prison. She told him, defiantly, that she was minded to plead guilty, and ‘show the lot of them up’. Kimber replied, ‘Oh, you must not do that, if you do, they will give you seven years.’ He then persuaded her to allow him to represent her, but at the same time was writing to all the newspapers claiming that she was mad.

Thus ran the substance of Mary Ann’s confession.

*

Back in his office at Scotland Yard Inspector Dew sighed, leaning back in his black leather chair, studded with neat
rows of brass nails. Ranged on the top of the leather-topped walnut desk, which was littered with papers, were souvenirs from some of the chief inspector’s famous cases: a framed letter from the dowager Duchess of Sutherland thanking Dew for his efforts in capturing the international jewel thief ‘Harry the Valet’, and one from Parr’s Bank expressing gratitude for his role in tracking down the notorious Russian fraudster Friedlauski, who had posed as a City gentleman under the name of Conrad Harms.

Dew thought it over carefully. Mary Ann Robinson was not a reliable witness, but somehow, he felt that the bulk of what she said was probably true. What, after all, had she to lose, now that she was pleading guilty? It seemed clear to him that her ‘diary’ was a clever fake, an amalgamation of personal recollections of Welbeck, newspaper reports of the case, and what the Druce people had told her about the claim, without their specifically directing her to make it up. The fact that the diary was a fabrication had been implicitly assumed by all the parties, but never openly discussed. Presumably, this was part of the strategy by which George Hollamby, Kimber and Coburn intended to avoid directly incriminating themselves in the fraud. In her confession Mary Ann had persisted with her claim that she did indeed know the author Charles Dickens, although she admitted that she had concocted the story of his introducing her to Druce/the duke. She had also hinted to Dew, although she did not put this in her official statement, that she had enjoyed intimate relations with the 5th Duke of Portland. This Dew considered utterly preposterous (he did not, after all, know of the 5th Duke’s apparent penchant for servingwomen, as revealed to Turner). The 6th
Duke also dismissed the idea of a liaison between Mary Ann and his cousin as ridiculous, highly amused at the ‘old liar that she was’. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is a curious fact that Robinson – the wife of a lowly shepherd – possessed valuables, including jewellery and a piano, to the amount of £400
*3
in her Christchurch house. These items were certified by the insurers, and subsequently made the subject of the fraudulent insurance claim.