know nothing about her, and have not seen or heard from her since I took her and left her at Stanstead Station three years ago. I drove her there with her luggage, consisting of two boxes.”
“But don’t you know her relations or friends?” asked the superintendent.
Dougal shook his head.
“She left nothing behind her in the house. We had a tiff, in consequence of the servant telling her that I wanted to go into the girl’s room.”
“Have you seen any papers bearing the name of Miss Holland, or any letters addressed to her?” asked the superintendent.
“None,” replied Dougal — a somewhat rash statement to make, in view of the fact that letters had been continuously delivered at the house addressed to Miss Camille Holland.
“It is said she is shut up in the house,” said the superintendent. “Will you let me have a look round?”
Dougal laughed and said:
“Certainly; go where you like.”
§ 5
The superintendent made a very careful inspection of the house, but found nothing, and returned to ask if it was true that Dougal had given away some of Miss Holland’s clothes to his own wife and servant, and that they had had them altered. He replied:
“I couldn’t do that, because she left nothing behind her.”
Dougal had an account at the Birkbeck Bank, and the day that Superintendent Pryke saw him he drew out practically the whole of his balance, £305. This fact was known through a shrewd inspector (Marsden), who did not share the superintendent’s complete faith in Dougal’s bona fides. Undoubtedly Superintendent Pryke was gulled by the seeming frankness of the master of Moat Farm, and his report was creditable to the man whom he had cross-examined.
Marsden began searching round for a relative, and presently found the nephew, who was taken to see certain The cheques which had been drawn and had been apparently signed by Miss Holland. He declared them, without too close an inspection, to be forgeries. This was all that Marsden required. He was satisfied that Camille Holland had been done to death, but it was absolutely necessary that he should have Dougal in safe keeping whilst he made a leisurely examination of the property; and though the grounds for the warrant were very slight, and, indeed, the evidence of the nephew would have been absolutely worthless to secure a conviction for forgery, the warrant was granted.
A cheque had been drawn by Dougal in Miss Holland’s name, and the bank had paid him the sum in £10 notes. These notes were immediately stopped, and, as though he were knowingly playing into the hands of the police, Dougal went to the Bank of England to change the £10 notes into £5 notes, signed a false name on the back of one, and was immediately arrested on a charge of forgery.
Had no further charge followed, it is certain that Dougal would not have been convicted, for the evidence against him was of the flimsiest kind, and the fact that both the broker and the banker were satisfied that the signatures were genuine would have disposed of the prosecution’s case.
But the arrest served its purpose: no sooner was Dougal in the hands of the police than Scotland Yard descended upon the Moat Farm and took possession.
Thereafter followed days and weeks of search which will not readily be forgotten, either by the police or by those journalists, like myself, whose duty held them to this bleak and ugly spot. Week after week, Dougal, handcuffed and between warders, was marched from the railway station to the little courthouse at Saffron Walden to hear the scraps of evidence and the invariable request for a remand. Week after week the police probed and pried, dug up floors and examined outhouses, in the vain hope of finding something which would solve the mystery of Miss Holland’s disappearance.
What complicated the search was the discovery in the first day or two of a skull in one of the sheds. It had the appearance of having been burnt, and at first it was thought that this was a portion of the remains of the woman. But it afterwards transpired that the skull had been at the farm when Miss Holland was still alive.
It is a curious fact that, though the general opinion amongst the reporters present was that the body of the woman was in the moat, and although it was also known that in the early days of Dougal’s occupation there were open trenches leading to the moat, no attempt was made to investigate these “leaders” until every other channel had been explored and every possible hiding-place examined. The police were giving up the search in despair when one of the journalists present said to the detective in charge:
“Why don’t you open one of these trenches that Dougal filled up?”
The idea occurred simultaneously to Detective Inspector Marsden, and a labourer was sent for with instructions to dig steadily. His work had not proceeded far when his spade turned up a boot. Very soon afterwards the body of Miss Holland was exposed, and Dougal’s secret was a secret no more.
With some difficulty the body was brought to ground level and taken to a summerhouse. A jury was hastily summoned, and the first sitting of the inquest was held in a great, stark barn on the property.
Hither, heavily guarded, Dougal was brought, and the scene was one which will long linger in the memory of the witnesses. The old barn with its thatched roof was crumbling away with age and neglect. The only light was that admitted by the door, which had been swung back. Here, under the twisted beams and crooked rafters, the court arranged itself as best it could, and Dougal, led past the open grave of his victim, came into the gloom of this queer coroner’s court.
The work of the police, however, was not finished with their terrible discovery. Was the body that of Camille Holland? The face was unrecognisable; there were no peculiar marks by which she could be identified. The rotten remnants of a dress might be sworn to by Mrs. Wiskens of Saffron Walden, who had stitched some braid upon it, but it was not sufficient evidence to convict Dougal.
The dress was like thousands of other dresses; the hair shape, the bustle, the various other wisps of clothing which were found might have been worn by any other woman. All that was known was that she had been a woman and that she was murdered, for there was a bullet-hole in the skull, and the bullet itself was discovered at the post-mortem examination.
Still, there was sufficient evidence to commit Dougal for trial on the capital charge, and there was one witness, and one witness alone, who could hang him. This was Mold, a bootmaker of Edgware Road.
Miss Holland had patronised Mold regularly. Her feet were so small (and they had been her great pride) that her boots had to be specially made for her, and Mr. Mold had built a last and made a number of pairs of boots of one pattern. They were half a size smaller than she required, and were lined with lamb’s-wool. Mold invariably made these himself, working his initials with brass tacks in the heels of each pair.
There might be in the world thousands of women with small feet, thousands who wore tiny boots; there might be many who wore tiny boots lined with lamb’s-wool, as these were lined; but the “M” in brass tacks found in the dead woman’s heel was undoubtedly Mold’s work, and he only had one customer who wore shoes of this kind, and that customer was Camille Holland.
Dougal’s trial ran an extraordinary course. He stood up in the quaint assize court at Chelmsford and received sentence of death from the lips of Mr. Justice Wright, and on a bright July morning he stood up again, this time to meet the executioner. For a second he flinched, until somebody handed him a glass of brandy and water, and he drank it down. Then, without a word, he submitted to the
