'That’s not possible,’ said Burden. ‘People would have known or at least suspected.’ Intently staring at Wexford’s face, he was oblivious of the long bulky shadow that had been cast across the table and his own face.
Wexford turned round, said, ‘Good evening, sir,’ and smiled pleasantly. It was Burden who, realizing, got to his feet.
‘Sit down, Mike, sit down,’ said the Chief Constable, casting upon Wexford a look that implied he would have liked the opportunity to tell him to sit down also. ‘May I join you? Or is the chief inspector here indulging his well-known habit of telling a tale with the minimum of celerity and the maximum of suspense? I should hate to interrupt before the climax was reached.’
In a stifled voice, Burden said, ‘The climax was reached just as you came in, sir. Can I get you a drink?’
‘Thank you, but I have one.’ Griswold produced, from where he had been holding it, for some reason, against his trouser leg, a very small glass of dry sherry. ‘And now I too would like to hear this wonderful exposition, though I have the advantage over you, Mike, of having read a condensed version. I heard your last words. Perhaps you’ll repeat them.’
‘I said she couldn’t have got away with it. Anyone she knew well would have known.’
‘Well, Reg?’ Griswold sat down on the settle next to Burden. ‘I hope my presence won’t embarrass you. Will you go on?’
‘Certainly I will, sir.’ Wexford considered saying he wasn’t easily embarrassed but thought better of it. ‘I think the answer to that question is that she took care, as we have seen, only to know well not very sensitive or intelligent people. But even so, Malina Patel had noticed there was something odd about Grenville West, and she said she wouldn’t have liked him to kiss her. Even Victor Vivian spoke of a “funny high voice” while, incidentally, Mrs Crown said that Rhoda’s voice was deep. I think it probable that such people as Oliver Hampton and Mrs Nunn did know, or rather, if they didn’t know she was a woman, they suspected Grenville West of being of ambivalent sex, of being physically a hermaphrodite, or maybe an effeminate homosexual. But would they have told me? When I questioned them I suspected West of nothing more than being acquainted with Rhoda Comfrey. They are discreet people, who were connected with West in a professional capacity.'
'As for those men Rhoda consorted with in bars, they wouldn’t have been a bunch of conservative suburbanites. They’d have accepted her as just another oddity in a world of freaks. Before you came in, sir, I mentioned three names. Isabelle Eberhardt, James Miranda Barry and Martha Jane Burke. What they had in common was that they were all eonists.'
'Isabelle Eberhardt became a nomad in the North African desert where she was in the habit of sporadically passing herself off as male. James Barry went to medical school as a boy in the days before girls were eligible to do so, and served for a lifetime as an army doctor in the British colonies. After her death she was found to be a woman, and a woman who had had a child. The last named is better known as Calamity Jane who lived with men as a man, chewed tobacco, was proficient in the use of arms, and was only discovered to be a woman while she was taking part in a military campaign against the Sioux.'
‘The Chevalier d’Eon was a physically normal man who successfully posed as a female for thirty years. For half that period he lived with a woman friend called Marie Cole who never doubted for a moment that he also was a woman. She nursed him through his last illness and didn’t learn he was a man until after his death. I will quote to you Marie Cole’s reaction to the discovery from the words of the Notary Public, Doctors’ Commons, 1810: “She did not recover from the shock for many hours.”
‘So you can see that Rhoda Comfrey had precedent for what she did, and that the lives of these predecessors of hers show that cross-dressing succeeds in its aim. Many people are totally deceived by it, others speculate or doubt, but the subject’s true sex is often not detected until he or she become ill or wounded, or until, as in Rhoda’s case, death supervenes.’
The Chief Constable shook his head, as one who wonders rather than denies. ‘What put you on to it, Reg?’
‘My daughters. One saying a woman would have to be an eonist to get a man’s rights, and the other dressing as a man on the stage. Oh, and Grenville West’s letter to Charles West – that had the feel of having been written by a woman. And Rhoda’s fingernails painted but clipped short. And Rhoda having a toothbrush in her luggage at Kingsmarkham and West not having one in his holiday cases. All feelings, I’m afraid, sir.’
‘That’s all very well,’ said Burden, ‘but what about the age question? Rhoda Comfrey was fifty and West was thirty-eight.’
‘She had a very good reason for fixing her age as twelve years less than her true one. I’ll go into that in a minute. But also you must remember that she saw herself as having lost her youth and those best years. This was a way of regaining them. Now think what are the signs of youth in men and women. A woman’s subcutaneous fat begins to decline at fifty or hereabouts, but a man never has very much of it.'
'So even a young man may have a hard face, lined especially under the eyes without looking older than he is. A woman’s youthful looks largely depend on her having no lines. Here, as elsewhere, we apply a different standard for the sexes. You’re what, Mike? In your early forties? Put a wig and make-up on you and you’ll look an old hag, but cut off the hair of a woman of your age, dress her in a man’s suit, and she could pass for thirty. My daughter Sheila’s twenty-four, but when she puts on doublet and hose for Jessica in The Merchant of Venice she looks sixteen.’
Remarkably, it was the Chief Constable who supported him. ‘Quite true. Think of Crippen’s mistress, Ethel Le Neve. She was a mature woman, but when she tried to escape across the Atlantic disguised in men’s clothes she was taken for a youth. And by the way, Reg, you might have added Maria Marten, the Red Barn victim, to your list. She left her father’s house disguised as a farm labourer, though I believe transvestism was against the law at the time.’
‘In seventeenth-century France,’ said Wexford, 'Then, at any rate, were executed for it.’
‘Hmm. You have been doing your homework. Get on with the story, will you?’
Wexford proceeded: ‘Nature had not been kind to Rhoda as a woman. She had a plain face and a large nose and she was large-framed and flat-chested. She was what people call “mannish”, though incidentally no one did in this case. As a young girl she tried wearing ultra-feminine clothes to make herself more attractive. She copied her aunt because she saw that her aunt got results. She, however, did not, and she must have come to see her femaleness as a grave disadvantage.'
'Because she was female she had been denied an education and was expected to be a drudge. All her miseries came from being a woman, and she had none of a woman’s advantages over a man. My daughter Sylvia complains that men are attentive to her because of her physical attractions but accord her no respect as a person. Rhoda had no physical attractions so, because she was a woman, she received neither attention nor respect. No doubt she would have stayed at home and become an embittered old maid, but for a piece of luck. She won a large sum of money in an office football pools syndicate. Where she first lived in London and whether as a man or a woman, I don’t know and I don’t think it’s relevant. She began to write. Did she at this time cease to wear those unsuitable clothes and take to trousers and sweaters and jackets instead? Who knows? Perhaps, dressed like that, she was once or twice mistaken for a man, and that gave her the idea. Or what is more likely, she took to men’s clothes because, as Havelock Ellis says, cross-dressing fulfilled a deep demand of her nature.'