The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (27 page)

Certainly, Dew had to admit that the lady had a gift for high-flown rhetoric. A cache of ‘letters’ to her from the 5th Duke, penned by her own hand, had been found in her flat, along with other correspondence. One of them read as follows:

My dear Mary,

Remember this that though you were not the wife of my youth, you are the joy of my life. You are the most worthy of my earthly comforts.

You possess what I most admire in womanhood, sweetness and cheerfulness mixed with gravity of manner.

For your studies I recommend some of the most useful parts of mathematics, as in my eye they are a special object of interest.

So farewell my dearest
From your faithful and dearest friend
John CS Bentinck

Welbeck Abbey. 1874.

Dew could not resist a chuckle. Why, in another life, the lady might have been a writer of romance. He had read worse among the cheap railway fiction paperbacks on the shelves of news stalls in railway stations. At least, however, the wretched woman had now dispensed with the services of that blackguard, Kimber: for even as Dew had been interviewing her in prison, a message had arrived for the governor of Holloway from Kimber, asking if Mary Ann wished him to continue to represent her. She had, at last, the wit to refuse. Dew thought that she would be immeasurably better off without him, especially as he had heard on the grapevine that she would likely be represented at her future court hearings by the formidable Sir Edward Marshall Hall (known as ‘the Great Defender’).

Inspector Dew’s musings were cut short by the sudden, shrill ring of the black candlestick-and-wall telephone that was precariously perched on the piles of papers on his desk. He lifted the receiver to his ear. George Hollamby, he was informed, had that day publicly repudiated Kimber. At the same time, ‘Miss O’Neill’ had finally confessed to being Mary Ann’s daughter, admitting that her real name was Maud Robinson.

In his estate office at Welbeck, Turner too was exultant. It appeared that the Druce show was falling apart.

‘We just need to find some evidence getting Kimber and Coburn into our net,’ he wrote to Horseman Bailey, echoing the 6th Duke’s impatience to put the master puppeteers of the Druce charade behind bars as soon as possible.

*

Events now seemed to be gathering pace. In the ensuing weeks, the civil action that George Hollamby had commenced against the estate of Lord Howard de Walden disintegrated, like the perjury proceedings that had been brought against Herbert Druce. Only this time, rather than being voluntarily withdrawn, the case was dismissed out of court as ‘frivolous and vexatious’. The evidence of T. C. Druce’s body in the grave, the judge ruled, had finally laid to rest any doubt as to the matter.

Then, in early spring, the last of the key Druce witnesses was apprehended. On 7 March 1908, the mysterious Mrs Hamilton was arrested on a charge of perjury, and brought before the police court. The true identity of the ‘Veiled Lady’ – the woman in black who had testified both for Anna Maria Druce in 1898 and for the second Druce claim of 1907 – was about to be revealed.

*1
  
The identity of the ‘man named Druce’ who visited Mary Ann in Christchurch has never been established for certain. It is likely that he was a relative of George Hollamby.

*2
  
More than £400,000 in today’s money.

*3
  
£40,000 in today’s money.

It is perfectly obvious by the mere application of one’s common sense to the problem before us, that this woman is the smallest possible component part of the great whole which constitutes this conspiracy.

S
IR
E
DWARD
M
ARSHALL
H
ALL
, KC

in defence of Mary Ann Robinson

Margaret Jane Atkinson – the woman who was in her later years to play a leading role in the Druce saga, as the mysterious ‘Veiled Lady’ – came from a family cursed by madness. Born in the 1840s in the town of Kendal, in Westmorland, her childhood was spent in a windswept valley of southern Lakeland. Much of the world in which Margaret grew up was grey, from the slate roofs of ‘the auld grey town’, as the locals called it, to the winding ribbon of the old Kendal canal with its barges drawn by packhorses, soon to be replaced by the new, steel-grey ribbon of the railway. Perhaps this was the reason she felt the need to invent a world of colour for herself. Certainly, she cut an eccentric figure in the old town, with her curious, old-fashioned stuff gowns and black ringlets. Rumour had it that the whole family was mad: Margaret’s sister Isabella was incarcerated in a Carlisle asylum from an early age, and her uncle was known to the Kendal townsfolk as ‘Silly Ned’.

Margaret herself was prone to wild fantasies. At some point in her youth, she took up with a dissolute married sailor by the name of Captain William Hamilton. She was subsequently to claim that they married on board ship, in a storm. Whether this really happened was doubtful, and was vehemently denied by Captain Hamilton’s wife. What is certain, however, is that Margaret had two children by the captain and a third by a travelling scissor-grinder, whose baby she gave birth to in a barn.

When Captain Hamilton found out about his mistress’ unfaithfulness he immediately returned to his wife, leaving Margaret to wander the country, supporting herself and her children by taking jobs as an itinerant housekeeper. Margaret’s daughter became a prostitute in London, until she was ‘rescued’ by a worthy lady called Mrs Whingate. Mrs Whingate ‘saved’ Margaret’s daughter by persuading one of the girl’s former clients, a Mr Edward Mussabini, who went by the name of Edward Bower, to marry her. It was at the Bowers’ home in Norwich in 1898 that Margaret, or Mrs Hamilton as she was now known, appeared one day, talking about Anna Maria Druce and the extraordinary claim to the Portland millions. Her late father had been intimate with the 5th Duke, she declared; and of course, Druce was the duke.

Whether or not Edward Mussabini strictly believed his eccentric mother-in-law’s story, he was quick to spot an opportunity. He therefore paid a call on the barrister who was then representing Anna Maria Druce, Mr Arnold Statham. During his visit, a journalist by the name of John Sheridan knocked on Statham’s door. ‘Oh, here’s the very man,’ Statham exclaimed, and introduced Sheridan to Mussabini.
Sheridan wasted no time in setting up an interview with this intriguing new witness, and within a few days Mrs Hamilton found herself ensconced in a plush red velvet sofa in the cosy panelled dining room of Anderton’s Hotel on Fleet Street, engaged in conversation with the charming young journalist before a roaring fire. Sheridan carefully recorded everything that Margaret said in his notebook, and promised that she and Mussabini would get £3000
*1
each for the information.

‘In fact,’ Mussabini complained bitterly to J. G. Littlechild, the private investigator employed by Freshfields and the 6th Duke to investigate the case, ‘he never gave her more than £1 after each interview, and not a penny more than £7 altogether.’ Sheridan guarded Mrs Hamilton jealously, Mussabini continued. He kept the old lady to himself until he had exhausted all the stories she could tell, which he reported, with padding, in
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper
. Finally, when he had got all he could out of her, he introduced her to Mrs Druce’s solicitors. After Anna Maria’s case collapsed in 1901, Sheridan ‘took her with him’ to George Hollamby, who paid him handsomely for the new and valuable witness. Asked by J. G. Littlechild if he actually believed his mother-in-law’s story, Mussabini became evasive: ‘My wife always found her mother reticent and mysterious,’ he replied. ‘She would often say to her, “Ah my dear, I have seen a bit of the world you know, and have had a good time in my day.” But she never told her where or how she had the good time.’ Mrs Hamilton spoke often of visiting Welbeck, but whether this was imagination or reality, they had no idea. ‘From past experience,’ Mussabini mused,
‘I think she is quite capable of imagining a thing, putting it forward as truth, and coming in time to believe it herself.’

*

The information about Mrs Hamilton’s true identity and background had been gathered painstakingly for some months before her trial by J. G. Littlechild. A former Scotland Yard officer, now retired and going it alone as a private investigator, like John Conquest, Littlechild had conducted a very thorough search into the ‘Veiled Lady’s’ past. In doing this, he had been helped in no small measure by his previous acquaintance with Margaret’s son-in-law Edward Mussabini, whom he knew by his real name, Giuseppe Mussabini, probably from his time in charge of criminal foreigners at Scotland Yard. Littlechild had unscrupulously blackmailed Mussabini into persuading his mother-in-law not to give evidence on behalf of Anna Maria, by threatening to reveal dubious goings-on from the Italian’s criminal past. Mussabini’s report back to Littlechild left little doubt as to the heavy-handed tactics that had been used to scare the old woman into silence:

I gave her the strongest points I could, and laid stress upon the horrible ruin she would bring upon her daughter and myself if the facts, which would be wrung from her in cross-examination, were to reach the ears of my people. That all would be well if she would upon leaving her present employ next Monday take a small room somewhere in London, and live in complete obscurity, until it was safe for her to join us here.

On the basis of Littlechild’s research, it was clear that Mrs Hamilton’s evidence had been the stuff of fantasy from start to finish – from the tale of her father being an aristocratic friend of the 5th Duke’s by the name of Stewart (he was, in fact, called Atkinson), to her being ‘Mrs’ Hamilton (it looked very likely that she had never been married at all). The firm of Kendal solicitors who had acted for the Atkinson family for many years, and who knew both Margaret Atkinson and her sister Isabella well, had remarked in a letter to Bailey’s: ‘After reading her evidence as given in the newspapers, and in particular her cross-examination, we can only say that her story seems to us to be a tissue of lies from the time of her alleged birth at Rome onwards.’ It was also now known that it was Mrs Hamilton who had haunted the 5th Duke’s grave at Kensal Green dressed in black, laying a wreath on the tomb before fleeing the approaching journalists.

On reading Littlechild’s reports, Inspector Dew was of the opinion that Margaret Hamilton was a fantasist and hysteric. He had no doubt that she would be convicted of perjury in her forthcoming trial, as would Mary Ann Robinson, but the likelihood was that the judge would impose a reduced sentence on on account of Mrs Hamilton’s advanced age.

The real question, Inspector Dew mused, was how to catch the bigger players who stood in the shadows behind these two mad old women. Robert Caldwell, he could see, was likely a lost cause. The head of the New York asylum in which he had taken refuge, Dr Mabon, still refused to certify him as being in a fit condition to be extradited, and the New York court was showing no inclination to go against Mabon’s judgment. It was, however, becoming increasingly clear that Caldwell had
been mixed up with the set of City sharks that had hung around both Anna Maria and George Hollamby. Only a few months beforehand, in November 1907, a gentleman called Thomas Wyatt had written to Freshfields, stating that Thomas Marlow – one of the Marlow brothers, both of whom were notorious figures in the City underworld – had gone to America with Caldwell in 1871, and had become great friends with him in New York. Caldwell, Wyatt said, was what was known in New York as a ‘petty fogger’ – that is, someone who ‘would do anything for money’. More-over, having painstakingly trawled through his case files for a matching description, Dew was virtually certain that the man who had been shadowing the 6th Duke was the other brother, Henry Marlow. Presumably, now the bubble had burst, he had been hoping to obtain money out of his Grace in return for blowing the whistle on former chums such as Caldwell. But even Caldwell and the Marlow brothers had been but puppets to the masters of the show.

It was the question of how to snare the blackguards Kimber, Coburn, George Hollamby and Sheridan that was now taxing Inspector Dew. Coburn and George Hollamby had been too wily to be directly involved in the evidence-gathering, relying instead on intermediaries and middlemen. The role played by the solicitor Edmund Kimber in the conspiracy was beginning to look very black indeed. Mary Ann Robinson had already given a flavour, in her confession to Dew at Holloway Prison, of Kimber’s decidedly questionable methods of manipulating evidence in the form of additions and alterations to her diary. It seemed to Dew that the ‘theft’ of the diary was very likely his work. And Dew’s investigations were uncovering further evidence of wrongdoing on Kimber’s part. During
the hearing before the magistrate Plowden, Kimber had given evidence that he had sought an expert opinion on the age of the paper on which Mary Ann Robinson’s diary had been written, and had been informed that it ‘could well be before 1860’. In fact, Dew found out from his subsequent investigations, Kimber had been told precisely the opposite. A few months previously, Freshfields had received a visit from a man called Charles Botten, manager of the City stationers Dixon & Rowe. He told them that Kimber had come to see him in November 1907, seeking an expert view as to the age of the diary. Botten had declared that he was far from an expert, but that in his view, the paper likely dated from
after
1861. A few weeks later, Kimber had returned to Botten’s office, declaring that he had been put in the witness box by Atherley-Jones, and asked questions about the diary. He told Botten: ‘I’ll just put a few things down on paper, and send my clerk, Fletcher, to you with them tomorrow.’