Lady Molly of Scotland Yard

Lady Molly of Scotland Yard

Lady Molly of Scotland Yard* by Baroness Emmuska Orczy is a collection of linked detective stories narrated by Mary Granard, the loyal companion and assistant of Lady Molly, a brilliant female detective who heads the Female Department of Scotland Yard. The stories follow Lady Molly as she solves a series of crimes that baffle the male investigators at the Yard, demonstrating throughout that feminine intuition, psychological insight, and social intelligence are superior tools in detective work to the blundering methods of the "sterner sex." The opening case, set in the village of Ninescore in Kent, concerns the apparent murder of Mary Nicholls, whose badly decomposed body is found in the grounds of Ash Court. Suspicion falls on Lionel Lydgate, a gentleman who had been associating with the victim, but he provides a solid alibi. Lady Molly deduces that it is not Mary but her sister Susan who has been murdered, and that Mary herself has been persuaded to disappear by the actual killer, Lord Edbrooke, the wealthy peer who fathered Mary's illegitimate child and who murdered Susan when she came to blackmail him in Mary's place. Lady Molly lures Mary out of hiding by planting a false newspaper report that her child is dying, and then tricks Mary into admitting the truth by threatening to send the child to the workhouse. Confronted with the evidence, Lord Edbrooke throws himself before a train. The case establishes Lady Molly's reputation at the Yard. In the case of the stolen Frewin miniatures, a priceless collection of Engleheart paintings disappears from Blatchley House on the night its elderly owner is dying. The police suspect the owner's estranged and dissolute son, Lionel Frewin. Lady Molly, however, reasons that the dying man's wife had no motive to steal what would shortly be hers by inheritance. Pursuing a separate line of inquiry, she discovers that the miniatures sold to the Budapest art museum two years earlier are the originals, and that the ones supposedly stolen were actually skilled copies made by Mrs. Frewin herself in order to raise money for her son. The staged burglary was intended to conceal the substitution before the will was probated. Lady Molly confronts Mrs. Frewin with a bluff about purchasing two of the Budapest miniatures, triggering a betraying reaction. Mrs. Frewin confesses privately and reaches a settlement with the heir. The Shuttleworth case takes Lady Molly and Mary abroad. A young Englishman named Cecil Shuttleworth is arrested in Palermo for the murder of his employer, a Yorkshire factory owner opposed to secret societies, with a torn piece of his coat found in the murdered man's hand. His father believes the Mafia is responsible and has discovered the real coat, along with the victim's stolen watch and chain, buried in a London garden by Sicilian lodgers. Distrusting the Italian police, he enlists Lady Molly to help smuggle the proofs to a trusted police officer at the Austro-Italian frontier. Lady Molly impersonates the courier, Mrs. Tadworth, after that woman proves cowardly, and reaches the frontier officer with the exculpatory evidence. Cecil Shuttleworth is acquitted, though the Sicilian conspirators ultimately escape justice. The Fordwych Castle mystery involves the murder of Roonah, a devoted Indian servant, at the ancestral home of the d'Alboukirk family. Roonah had accompanied her young mistress, Joan Duplessis, to England to press a claim that Joan was the only legitimate child of the late Captain Duplessis and therefore the rightful heir to the barony. The claim rested on documents Roonah carried on her person, proving that a prior wife of Captain Duplessis had not died until after the birth of the elder daughter, Henriette. After Roonah is found murdered and the documents stolen, suspicion falls on Henriette and the old Baroness. Lady Molly notices that Roonah had converted to Roman Catholicism and had locked the connecting door between her room and Joan's, suggesting she feared her own mistress. She deduces that the entire claim was a fabricated blackmail scheme, and that Joan, realising Roonah's religious conversion had made her unwilling to commit perjury, killed her and took the papers. Lady Molly engineers the recovery of the papers from Joan's luggage, confronting Joan with the evidence at breakfast. Joan leaps from the window to her death. The Somersetshire outrage concerns a shop girl, Jane Turner, found bound, gagged, and chloroformed in her lodgings at Weston-super-Mare. She had been blackmailing a German noblewoman, the Countess of Hohengebirg, over a compromising photograph taken in Boulogne. Lady Molly discovers through the personal columns of a regional newspaper a series of secret assignations connected to the blackmail scheme, and realizes that Jane Turner had staged the assault on herself to obtain money from the countess while eliminating the evidence. Lady Molly and Mary impersonate the Grand Duchess of Starkburg and her daughter, confront Jane with exposure, and drive her to a suicide attempt that is narrowly prevented. A Breton episode involves the eccentric Miss Angela de Genneville, a wealthy Englishwoman who has hidden her will inside a monumental clock at her château to prevent her scheming nephew, the Marquis de Terhoven, from destroying it before her death. Lady Molly persuades the dying woman to place the actual will with her Paris lawyer and use the clock merely as a decoy. After Miss de Genneville's death, Lady Molly allows the plot against her and Mary to unfold, sending Mary to the château in her place while she arrives with the lawyer at the critical moment. The Marquis opens the clock only to find his own signed confession of forgery and nothing else. The will is duly proved and the charitable legacy secured. The final major case concerns the Christmas Eve murder of Major Ceely at Clevere Hall in Yorkshire, a cantankerous man with many enemies. He is stabbed on his terrace during the night, apparently while investigating sounds associated with a local cattle-maiming gang. Suspicion fixes on Laurence Smethick, a young man who had quarrelled violently with the Major and who is found to have been near the Hall that night. A ring purchased by Smethick is found in the garden. He refuses to account for his movements. Lady Molly is convinced of his innocence and works to uncover the true facts. The collection does not conclude this final case within the surviving text, but the investigation demonstrates Lady Molly's characteristic method of protecting the innocent while pursuing the guilty through psychological penetration rather than material evidence alone. Throughout all the cases, the narrator Mary Granard maintains that Lady Molly possesses a private history of great personal importance connected to Scotland Yard, involving a promise made to a wrongly convicted man, which she has sworn never to reveal, and which is hinted to be the true reason she entered detective work. This personal mystery is never fully disclosed, lending the collection an additional layer of romantic suspense beneath its detective plots.

By Baroness Emmuska Orczy · First published 1910 · Genre: Detective Fiction, Mystery, Crime Fiction · 12 chapters

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