Ace of Spies (12 page)

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.
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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 McCormick
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in his book,
Murder by Perfection,
which concerns the activities of Arthur Maundy Gregory, the honours tout,
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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’.
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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,
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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.
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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.

S
ix 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.
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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.

Margaret’s own brief account
²
of Reilly’s life is completely silent on personal and marital matters generally. In fact, one could be forgiven for gaining the impression that they were anything but a devoted, albeit distant, couple. Some twenty years later, while working in Brussels as a governess in the household of Robert Messenger and his wife, she confided to Mrs Messenger that she had loved Reilly ‘with complete abandon, but that his many betrayals and affairs with other women had turned her love into hatred’.
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Although particularly hurt by his affair with Eve Lavallière,
the wife of the director of the Parisian Théâtre de Variétés, she was never disparaging in any way about her husband, at least not in the hearing of Mrs Messenger.
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It would not appear, however, that it was this particular betrayal that caused Margaret the greatest distress, but a much greater sin in her eyes – that of bigamy.

This traumatic discovery while in St Petersburg apparently led Margaret to make an attempt on her own life. According to Mrs Messenger, Margaret had taken a pistol that Reilly kept in his desk drawer and shot herself in the eye. By some miracle she survived, but spent six weeks in a coma. As a result of losing her right eyeball she was given a glass eye.
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How Margaret managed to shoot herself in the eye without causing serious brain damage, let alone killing herself, is at first hard to fathom. It has been known, however, for those attempting suicide in this way to place the gun against the temple, behind the eye socket, rather than further back to the ear. A shot in the region of the ear would impact into the brain, whereas a shot to the forward region of the temple would enter the cavity behind the eye socket and depending upon the angle, exit through the eye or nose. Even this lucky escape would have meant tissue, skin and bone damage to the temple, eye and nose. British diplomat Darrell Wilson, who met Margaret in May 1931, when she was seeking to renew her passport, gives confirmation of this.
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According to Wilson, ‘Mrs Reilly is of a nervous disposition and bears the trace of an attempt to commit suicide by shooting herself through the right temple, when she found her husband had committed bigamy’.
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When, after six weeks, she came out of the coma, Reilly was nowhere to be found. The issue of bigamy does, of course, raise the question of with whom it was committed, for it was to be another two years before he met Nadezhda Zalessky and a further four years before they married. This account therefore gives further credence to the possibility that Reilly had indeed married a hitherto unknown bride at some point after the Russo-Japanese war, as discussed at the end of Chapter Three.

No word of Margaret’s attempted suicide appears in
Ace of Spies,
which contends that Reilly bribed her to leave St Petersburg.
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Through Boris Suvorin, part of the Suvorin family, proprietors of the
Novoe Vremia
newspaper, Reilly then supposedly planted a story in
Novoe Vremia
that a Red Cross ambulance had swerved off a mountain road in Bulgaria and fallen into a ravine killing several nurses, ‘including a Mrs Reilly who until recently was a resident in St Petersburg’.
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One can only assume that Lockhart himself was somewhat unsure about this tale, as in his follow-up book on Reilly
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he refers to him ‘placing a false news item in the Russian press about a railway accident in which several people had been killed, including Mrs Reilly’.
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A comprehensive search of
Novoe Vremia
during this period failed to unearth any item about the death of a Mrs Reilly, in either an ambulance or a train accident.

Although the ambulance story is somewhat out of place, in that no situation requiring the presence of Red Cross volunteers existed in Bulgaria in 1909,
Novoe Vremia
coverage of the first and second Balkan wars, fought between October 1912 and August 1913, yielded a surprise result. On 8 November 1912
Novoe Vremia
¹²
reported that an English medical team of thirty-eight persons had arrived in Sophia, Bulgaria. According to the Red Cross, the female volunteers included a Mrs M. Reilly.
¹³

As a ten-year-old, Leon Messenger was enthralled by the fact that his governess, whom he knew as Daisy, was the wife of the legendary spy Sidney Reilly. His recollections provide a rare window into Margaret’s personality and outlook on the world, which was no doubt shaped by her earlier life. Although Irish by birth, it is clear that Margaret not only regarded herself as English, but as belonging to the upper class. Messenger remembers her as ‘well educated and well read… in every respect a cultured Englishwoman who spoke in upper-class accents and was to everybody who met her… the perfect embodiment of a cultured lady’.
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His reminis-cences on her outlook are equally fascinating: on their long walks in the woods and parks, ‘she would talk about the glories of England… the greatness of the British Empire and the white man’s burden’.
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Although Margaret and Sidney were clearly leading separate lives, and always would, there was never any possibility in her mind
that she would grant him a divorce. Whether this was dictated by her Catholic faith or by a hardheaded recognition that while she was legally Mrs Reilly she would always have a financial call on him, is open to question. By 1910 she was thirty-six years old, down on her luck and physically disfigured. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that she would not voluntarily sever her hold over him. Whether Margaret was ever aware of Nadezhda Zalessky is unknown. Certainly Nadezhda had no knowledge of her. Margaret was long gone from St Petersburg by the time Reilly met Nadezhda, to whom he presented himself as a bachelor.

Born Nadezhda Massino in Poltava, Ukraine, on 26 March 1885,
¹⁶
the daughter of Lt-Col. Petr Massino and his wife Varvara Kondratyevna Brodskaya, she was the second of four children.
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Both parents were Jewish by origin, but had converted to Orthodox Christianity. Like Reilly, Nadezhda later drew a veil over her family origins by claiming they were Swiss by descent. In 1907 she married Petr Ivanovich Zalessky, a naval lieutenant who had taken part in the defence of Port Arthur during the siege of 1904.
¹⁸
It was in Port Arthur that Zalessky first met Admiral Grigorovich, to whom he was appointed aide-de-camp when the admiral became Minister for Marine. This was a particularly important time for the Ministry of Marine, which was responsible for rebuilding the Russian fleet which had suffered such a catastrophic defeat at the hands of Japan. Their home at 2 Admiralty Quay, St Petersburg,
¹⁹
was often the venue for parties and receptions, which were attended by high-ranking military and naval officials as well as senior politicians and members of the Russian Court.