Here Lies Gloria Mundy

‘What anybody who can put two and two together would gather. When she applied for a post here six years or so ago, her hair was a perfect sight, one half red — not a colour we encourage — and the other half black. The effect was most bizarre. However, she agreed to change it and the manager — a man, of course! — thought she had an engaging personality and would make a good saleswoman and her references (forged, I daresay, and, most mistakenly, not thoroughly investigated) were satisfactory, I suppose, so she obtained employment here.’

‘Just one more question, if you will be so good,’ I said. She tossed the blonde coiffure and told me that she supposed it was unwise to obstruct the police, but would I make it short, as she had already lost a customer to her second in command.

‘Were you surprised that Violetta, as you called her, was so rude to a customer as to get herself dismissed?’

‘Not altogether. The customer was a woman. The customers who come here are usually accompanied by gentlemen, and to gentlemen Violetta was the best saleswoman I had.’

‘I bet she was!’ I said, thinking of those usually sane and sober men, Anthony Wotton and Hardie Keir McMaster. I realised, when I had settled down again in my flat and was trying to persuade myself that it was a good time to get busy on my own work, that something had shaken itself out of my subconscious mind and was clamouring for attention.

I don’t know what had triggered off my new train of thought. Possibly I was somewhat frustrated that I could not use the Earls Court Road story about the murdered American woman, because it was too soon after that young woman had been stabbed and thrown into the sea. Apparently the murderer had never been traced and no doubt the case was still on the police files. They might not take kindly to somebody fictionalising it, I thought, and so inadvertently giving away clues.

Anyway, as I sat there at my writing-table trying to rough out a very different plot, the Earls Court and Hastings story came back to me and, although I could do nothing with it at that time in the way of turning it into a book, it got between me and my powers of invention and held me mentally a prisoner.

So I wrote to Dame Beatrice about it and at the end of the letter I put a large question mark and beside it I wrote Gloria’s name. It took me a long time and several drafts before I was satisfied with what I had written, but at midnight I went out and posted it.

17

A Letter from Dame Beatrice

« ^ »

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.