A search of City of London records confirms that the Ozone Preparations Company traded for some three years between 1908 and 1910, occupying not 3 Cursitor Street, but the first floor of 97 Fleet Street on a sub-lease from the owner, S.R. Cartwright.31 Reilly certainly had a partner in the venture, William Calder.32 It is most unlikely, however, that he absconded with company funds, as he was involved in other Reilly business ventures in the 1920s. The business was indeed wound up in 1911 by Michael Abrahams Sons & Co., other associates of long standing.
The Fleet Street address was within walking distance of the Hotel Cecil in the Strand, where Reilly occupied a suite whenever he was in London. In Edwardian times the Cecil was England’s largest and most luxurious hotel to which the rich flocked and where foreign heads of state were received. The Savoy next door was very much the poor relation by comparison. Opened in 1896, the Cecil had 1,000 rooms and boasted interiors of multicoloured marble, and corridors with hand-wrought tapestries.33 The adjacent Cecil Chambers housed a number of businesses, which at the time included the British Tobacco Company at No. 86 and a number of its European and Empire subsidiaries. Two decades later Stephen Alley, George Hill, Ernest Boyce and William Field Robinson (all of whom we shall meet later in our story) were to work for the company. In 1908, however, one Basil Fothergill worked at the company’s Cecil Chambers office and was a known acquaintance of Reilly. Fothergill’s father, Charles, was a retired British Army major and may well have been known to Reilly through his son.34 To what extent, if any, Fothergill senior served as an inspiration for the Maj. Fothergill in Reilly’s Amazon story is very much open to debate.
It was also at the Cecil that one Louisa Lewis disappeared without trace, on the evening of 25 October 1908. Louisa had worked at the hotel for four years, having moved to London from Sussex. She was last seen early that evening in her coat and hat speaking to a gentleman at the foot of the hotel’s main staircase.35 It was assumed that they left the hotel together. The gentleman was described as being between thirty and forty years of age, medium height with dark hair. Whilst this description could easily apply to a good many men who were in London on 25 October 1908, one particular thirty-five-year-old, who was 5ft 10ins with dark hair, might have had good cause to remember Miss Lewis. In fact, more to the point, she might well have had good cause to remember him – ten years previously Louisa Lewis lived and worked at the hotel managed by her father, Alfred – the London & Paris at Newhaven. On the morning of 13 March 1898 she had encountered Dr T.W. Andrew, who had examined the dead body of the Reverend Hugh Thomas, and declared his death to be by natural causes. Such a death was not an everyday occurrence at the London & Paris, and it would no doubt have remained etched forever in her mind. Is it too much to speculate that ten years later, by pure chance, she happened to meet Dr Andrew again at the Hotel Cecil? Reilly’s face was not one that could be forgotten in a hurry. Had such a crossing of paths occurred, what might Reilly’s reaction have been? Although Hugh Thomas’s death was never suspected of being anything other than natural if untimely, could he afford to take the chance of allowing someone who could match his face with the identity of Dr Andrew seeing him again?
We know from his Deed Poll petition that Reilly was residing at the Hotel Cecil on 23 October 1908, two days before Louisa’s disappearance. Such evidence is purely circumstantial, but compelling all the same. Equally of interest is a story related by Donald McCormick36 in his book, Murder by Perfection, which concerns the activities of Arthur Maundy Gregory, the honours tout,37 and his possible involvement in the death of Edith Rosse. McCormick relates how Gregory established his own private detective agency and was apparently observing the comings and goings in the West End’s major hotels. On one such observation, he was initially suspicious of a ‘free-spending foreigner who was masquerading as an Englishman’.38 This suspicious character turned out to be none other than the ‘flamboyant womaniser’ Reilly.
McCormick, who had no knowledge of the fact that the Hotel Cecil was Reilly’s home from home, mentions that Gregory was exploring the possibility of leasing a small theatre in John Street, off the Strand. Although there is no street off the Strand by the name of John Street today, John Adam Street is the nearest fit, running parallel with the Strand from Villiers Street, next to Charing Cross Station, to Adam Street. According to London County Council records,39 in 1940, streets by the names of John Street and Duke Street were administratively joined, and properties renumbered, to create John Adam Street.
Contemporary records also indicate there was indeed a small theatre in John Adam Street during this period,40 which turns out to have been briefly let to one A.J.P Maundy Gregory. Anyone walking down John Adam Street today cannot help but be aware of the imposing former Shell Mex House, which overshadows the street. Shell Mex House was built in 1930 following the controversial demolition of one of the Strand’s great landmarks – The Hotel Cecil. This places Maundy Gregory in the near vicinity of Reilly at this time. Maundy Gregory’s nocturnal detective activities are corroborated by Superintendent Arthur Askew of Scotland Yard, who investigated the mysterious death of Mrs Rosse and the ‘honours for sale’ charge against Maundy Gregory.41 Whether there was any connection at all between Reilly and Louisa Lewis’s disappearance, and whether Reilly met Maundy Gregory at this stage can only remain speculation. However, the fact that all three were in the same place at virtually the same time can no longer be in any doubt.
If, on his return to St Petersburg in late October or early November 1908, Reilly felt any sense of relief, this was to be short lived, for the reappearance of another face from the past was about to set in motion a chain of events that would end in tragedy.
FIVE
THE COLONEL’S DAUGHTER
Six years had elapsed since Margaret Reilly left Port Arthur at the behest of her husband. Although her departure was nominally on grounds of impending war, to Reilly she had already served her purpose and he had effectively discarded her. She had seen little of him in the intervening years, and when she did see him or receive letters from him, he was always insistent that he was on his ‘beam ends’, with little or no money to spare her. While Reilly’s finances before the First World War certainly had their ups and downs, we can take it as read that he wished to have as little to do with her as possible. He married her for her money and unashamedly used her to adopt a new identity to conceal his Russo-Jewish origins.
Unsurprisingly, his account of their parting put a somewhat different gloss on matters. According to Reilly, she had turned to drink and become a liability to him during their time in Port Arthur. Robin Bruce Lockhart has also stated that on Reilly’s return from the Far East, he found that she had left him and disappeared.1 This view of Margaret has been unquestioningly accepted by almost all those who have ever written about Reilly over the years. Of course, we have only his word for this assumption, which is hardly the best of recommendations.
Margaret’s reappearance in St Petersburg in 1909 was almost certainly triggered by the fact that what little money she had left was now running low. Unwelcome in the best of circumstances, Margaret would no doubt have received an even frostier reception from Reilly being in such a penurious state. Knowing Reilly as we do, it might well be asked why he had not already sought to dispose of her permanently. After all, he is reputed to have threatened to kill her on at least one occasion, although there is no evidence for this assertion. Having shown no such mercy to others who had crossed his path in the past, this is a question that begs an answer, albeit a speculative one. Margaret, we know, was not naïve in the ways of the world. Even before she met Reilly she had managed to advance her interests well enough. She was certainly not beyond gilding the truth, and was, without doubt, a quick-witted and resourceful woman. It is likely that if Reilly had actually wanted to kill her he could have done so quite easily. On the basis that he made no such efforts, we can only assume that Margaret had some kind of preventive hold over him. Being a party to the guilt and responsibility for the death of Hugh Thomas, she must also have been aware of other matters that Reilly would no doubt wish to keep secret. If she effectively held an insurance policy against any untoward accidents that might befall her, it might well have been in the form of a written statement or testimony against Reilly that was held in safe keeping as security. Should she meet a sudden or unnatural end, whoever had custody of the document would be under instruction to make it public or, more likely, direct it to the appropriate authorities.