Here Lies Gloria Mundy

Dame Beatrice’s answer came a few days later. She wrote that, acting upon what I had written, together with what she had already known or had surmised, she had been very busy. The rest of her letter bore this out. She seemed to have accomplished a very great deal in a very short time. She wrote:

When I received your letter Laura and I turned out our collection of cuttings and found details of the Earls Court case. The regular letters and postal orders which the deceased had received hinted plainly at blackmail. This was also the opinion of the police.

I visited the landlady, but she could tell me nothing useful except that among the dead woman’s effects had been an expensive camera. From what your letter told me, I formed a theory that this could have been the camera with which the compromising photograph of Mr Wotton, Miss Mundy and the baby had been taken.

The police impounded the camera and all other effects belonging to the murdered American woman and I am told that they made every possible effort to trace any relatives she may have had (apart, of course, from her child) either in this country or in America, but had no success until quite recently. The camera contained no film, so there was no help to be obtained from it.

Acting on your information, but without mentioning your name, I have interviewed Mr Wotton. I asked him point-blank whether Miss Mundy had come to Beeches Lawn that day in order to blackmail him. He knew that I had talked with Miss Brockworth and he appeared to take it for granted that all my theories, instead of only some of them, were based on what she had told me.

He was extremely frank. He said that Miss Mundy had made one or two attempts, early on, to blackmail him on the strength of the photograph, but he had told her that her threats were useless, since his father and (later on) his wife knew the whole story and believed his version of it. It was not true that either of them knew anything of the kind, but she appears to have believed him and he heard no more from her and was greatly surprised and discomfited when she turned up at Beeches Lawn.

Well, now, it seems that she came to beg for money, not to demand it with menaces. She told Mr Wotton that all she wanted was to get out of the country. She promised that, if he would help her on this one occasion, she would never trouble him again. He refused to assist her in any way and was taken aback when his wife invited her to stay to lunch.

What follows is part theory, part fact. The fact that the murdered American woman received regularly letters containing English postal orders, plus the fact that she was murdered, give rise to the theory that when she had taken back her baby from Miss Mundy, she also made off with the camera, promising to give it and the film back when the payments had reached a certain amount. I do not think she kept her word.

This, of course, I cannot prove, but the payments could not have been very large if they could be covered by a weekly postal order. However, either Miss Mundy grew tired of being so consistently bled, or else, the agreed sum having been reached (and over a period of years, remember), the woman persisted in her demands and did not release the camera and the film. At any rate, there is no doubt in my own mind that Miss Mundy enticed the woman into a meeting with her and then killed her.

The Earls Court landlady’s story that she was lured by the promise of a post in a hotel sounds to me very unlikely. Far more likely, I think, is that Miss Mundy, when she sent her last remittance, one which she fully intended should be final, suggested a meeting and a full settlement so that the woman could return to America.

The landlady told me that she had often expressed a wish to do so.

That in meeting her victim she might be placing herself in great danger appears never to have occurred to the woman. I suppose she thought that, after years of unquestioning payments, Miss Mundy was as a lamb for the slaughter. The slaughterer, however, was the lamb.

The Metropolitan Police have not yet closed the file on the case, and by piecing together bits of evidence gathered on both sides of the Atlantic they were already on Miss Mundy’s trail before the murder at Mr Wotton’s old house took place, and I am sure she knew that she was in danger. However, she must have thought she was safe as soon as the body found in the old house was identified by you and by Mr Wotton as her own. Then came the shock of realising that Mr McMaster had recognised her as the black-haired, white-faced assistant at Trends when she had thought that her disguise was impenetrable to those who had known her in the past when she had that striking head of red and black hair.

Certain that Mr McMaster would make known his discovery to the police — which, from a mistaken sense of chivalry he appears not to have done — she lost no time in getting away from Trends, but the police are busy searching for her. As you point out in your letter, Mr McMaster’s evidence would not have been necessary to prove that she is still alive. The detailed autopsy proved that the dead woman at Beeches Lawn could not have been Miss Mundy.

When I had gained what I could from Mr Wotton, from the police and from the landlady, I wanted to establish a connection between Miss Mundy and this body found in the old house. It is you, my dear Corin Stratford, not I, who connected the two murders, although the police, with their relentless perseverance and patience, would have reached the conclusion you came to. From the American end they have established that Miss Mundy and the murdered girl were cousins.

Much is now in Mr Coberley’s favour. For one thing, although both murders were stabbings, his dagger could not have been used for the murder of the American woman. Another pointer is that neither woman was murdered in her own home, but was decoyed and then killed. These, however, are nothing more than straws blowing in the wind. It was the autopsy which gave the police a clear lead in the chase after Miss Mundy.

Once it was shown that you and Mr Wotton had been misled in your identification of the body, added to the number of witnesses who were able to swear that Miss Mundy had been at Beeches Lawn shortly before the discovery of the body which had been furnished with that red and black wig — what a mistake that was on Miss Mundy’s part, as matters turned out, although one can appreciate the difficulty she was in, of course! She had to make the features of the corpse unrecognisable, while, at the same time, finding some means of making sure that the body would be accepted as her own.

Imogen was with me when I received the letter. I handed it to her when I had read it so far, and asked for her views and comments. When she handed the pages back, she said, ‘I wonder whether the American girl was told that the whole business of the baby and the photograph was intended as a joke?’

‘Likely enough she was talked into it that way, but she soon seems to have realised its possibilities so far as she herself was concerned. She must have been relying on Gloria to give her a home and get her a job and then found out, when she had kept her part of the bargain and taken the photograph, that Gloria was going to ditch her. The rest, it seems to me, follows on naturally.’