Queer People E-Book

Basil Thomson

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

MY READERS WILL be divided between those who think that I have not told enough, that I have told too much and that I had better have told nothing at all. I bow my head to them all.
The list of those to whom my thanks are due is too long to set out in a preface. It would include the names of my admirable staff, of sailors, soldiers and civilians of many countries besides our own in almost every walk of life and even of a few of our late enemies. No drama, no film story yet written has been so enthralling as our daily repertory on the dimly lighted stage set in a corner of the granite building in Westminster. In a century after we, with our war-weariness, are dead and gone, the Great War will be a quarry for tales of adventure, of high endeavour and of splendid achievement; when that time comes even some of the humbler actors who play their part in these pages may be seen through a haze of romance.

Leseprobe

QUEER PEOPLE

Hunting Spies in World War 1

Sir Basil Thomson

First Published in 1922

Copyright © 2020 Librorium Editions

Frontispiece: Sir Basil Thomson

Contents

Preface

1: The Detective In Real Life

2: The Imaginative Liar

3: The Lure Of Something For Nothing

4: The First Days

5: The Special Branch

6: War Crimes

7: The Germans And The Irish

8: The Casement Case

9: Strange Sideshows

10: The German Spy

11: Müller And Others

12: The Hireling Spy

13: The Last Executions

14: Some Americans

15: Women Spies

16: Curious Visitors

17: The End Of Rasputin

18: Recruits For The Enemy

19: The Decline Of Morale

20: The Bogus Princess

21: Footnotes To The Peace Conference

22: The Royal Unemployed

23: Unrest At Home

24: Our Communists

25: The Return To Sanity

____________________

Preface

MY READERS WILL be divided between those who think that I have not told enough, that I have told too much and that I had better have told nothing at all. I bow my head to them all.

The list of those to whom my thanks are due is too long to set out in a preface. It would include the names of my admirable staff, of sailors, soldiers and civilians of many countries besides our own in almost every walk of life and even of a few of our late enemies. No drama, no film story yet written has been so enthralling as our daily repertory on the dimly lighted stage set in a corner of the granite building in Westminster. In a century after we, with our war-weariness, are dead and gone, the Great War will be a quarry for tales of adventure, of high endeavour and of splendid achievement; when that time comes even some of the humbler actors who play their part in these pages may be seen through a haze of romance.

My thanks are due to Mr Milward R. K. Burge for permission to use his verses on the Hotel Majestic during the Peace Conference.

Basil Thomson London, 1922

1

The Detective In Real Life

IF I WERE asked what were the best qualifications for a detective I should say to be a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. That, perhaps, is because I happen to be an indifferent jack-of-all-trades myself and I cannot remember any smattering that I acquired in distant corners of the earth that did not come in useful at Scotland Yard.

Other countries try to make specialists of their detectives. They would have them know chemistry, surgery and mineralogy; they would have them competent to appraise the value of jewels, to judge the time a corpse has been dead, or how long a footprint has been impressed upon damp earth. They forget that there is a specialist round every corner and that a detective who knows his work knows also where to find a jeweller or a doctor or skilled mechanic who will give him a far better opinion than his own. All that they succeed in doing is to furnish a very alluring laboratory for the edification of visitors and saddle themselves with a host of theorists who make a very poor show by the test of the statistics of discovered crime.

Real life is quite unlike detective fiction; in fact, in detective work fiction is stranger than truth. Mr Sherlock Holmes, to whom I take off my hat with a silent prayer that he may never appear in the flesh, worked by induction, but not, so far as I am able to judge, by the only method which gets home, namely, organisation and hard work. He consumed vast quantities of drugs and tobacco. I do not know how much his admirable achievements owed to these, but I do know that if we at Scotland Yard had faithfully copied his processes we should have ended by fastening upon a distinguished statesman or high dignitary of the Church the guilt of some revolting crime.

The detection of crime consists in good organisation, hard work and luck, in about equal proportions; when the third ingredient predominates the detective is very successful indeed. Among many hundred examples the Voisin murder at the end of 1917 may be cited. The murderer had cut off the head and hands of his victim in the hope that identification would be impossible and he chose the night of an air raid for his crime because the victim might be expected to have left London in a panic; but he had forgotten a little unobtrusive laundry mark on her clothing and by this he was found, convicted and executed. That was both luck and organisation. Scotland Yard has the enormous advantage over Mr Sherlock Holmes in that it has an organisation which can scour every pawnshop, every laundry, every public-house and even every lodging-house in the huge area of London within a couple of hours.

I took charge of the Criminal Investigation Department in June 1913. The late Sir Melville Macnaghten, my predecessor, who wrote his reminiscences, held the view that the proper function of the head of the CID was to help and encourage his men but not to hamper them with interference. He had an astonishing memory both for faces and for names: he could tell you every detail about a ten-year-old crime, the names of the victim, the perpetrator and every important witness and, what was more useful, the official career of every one of his 700 men and his qualifications and ability. Unlike my predecessors, I had already a wide acquaintance among criminals, chiefly those of the professional class. To read their records was to me like looking at crime through the big end of the telescope. At Dartmoor I had 1,200 of them, nearly all professionals with anything from one to thirty previous convictions. There were Scotsmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Englishmen, with a good sprinkling of foreigners, some of whom had come to England when their own countries had become too hot to hold them. When you read of crime in the magazines or the detective novels it is nearly always murder. You have to be in charge of a prison in order to realise that the murderer is rarely a criminal by nature at all. But for the grace of God he is just you and I, only more unlucky. For the real criminal you have to go to the crimes against property. Most murders are committed without any deep-laid plot, whereas the professional thief or forger or fraud has carefully planned his depredations before he sets out to commit them: the murderer is repentant and is planning only how he can earn an honest living after he is discharged; the others are thinking out schemes for fresh adventures.

Criminal investigation was not quite what I expected to find it. The department was well organised, though perhaps a little rusty in the hinges. The danger of centralisation had been realised long before. London had been divided into twenty-one divisions, each with a criminal investigation staff whose business it was to know everything about its portion of the huge city. These divisional staffs dealt with all the ordinary crime that occurred in the division: it was only the graver crimes or those that were spread over several divisions that were taken up by the staff of the Central Office. In such cases it was usual to detach a Chief Inspector to take charge of the inquiry. Every day we received a thick bundle of forms in which every crime, however small, committed in London during the previous twenty-four hours was reported. The graver of these formed the subject of a separate report and there was the excellent practice of making a detailed report upon every suspected crime as soon as it occurred, because one could never tell into what it might develop.

The Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard is not responsible for the crimes committed out of London, but by an arrangement with the Home Office a chief constable may ask the department for help to unravel any serious crime committed in his area without any cost to the local authority. That this permission is not always acted on is due less to the very natural amour propre of the local force than to the difficulty in determining what difficulties lie ahead. The larger cities have, moreover, efficient detective organisations of their own: most of them have sent men to be trained in the Detective Classes at New Scotland Yard; these have greatly distinguished themselves in the examinations.

The training of detectives was almost entirely legal and, as far as it went, it was admirably done. It was essential that they should know the rudiments of the criminal law as well as the procedure of the criminal courts, otherwise they were bound, sooner or later, to commit some solecism that would incur the comments of the judge. But on its practical side their education was neglected. Very few were craftsmen and if it came to making an exhaustive search of a house they might be expected to look conscientiously in all the obvious places and make no search for such hiding-places as a short board in the floor or the space behind the wainscot; probably none of them had ever watched a house in the course of erection. It is only by experience and by failure that real proficiency in the matter of searching is acquired. Nor were they taught any uniform method of description. The average police description was a very colourless document, for in any crowd one might find a dozen men with a ‘fresh complexion, blue eyes, brown hair, oval face and medium height’. Such matters as peculiarities of gait and speech were very often omitted. They did not always know the trade names of articles of clothing or plate or jewellery, nor could they distinguish between real stones and pearls and their counterfeits. The more intelligent picked up these things by experience, but the others did not. Many of them seemed to me to be unimaginative in the matter of observation; at any rate, they seemed seldom to follow a man without his becoming aware of it. On the other hand, they were admirable when it came to dealing with the public. Their courtesy never failed and naturally it brought them much help from the people living in their locality.

I soon found that the London detectives were naturally divided into two classes, the detective and the ‘thief-catcher’. The latter belonged to the class of honest, painstaking policeman without sufficient education to pass examinations for promotion, but who made up for this deficiency by his intimate knowledge of the rougher class of criminals, his habits and his haunts and by personal acquaintance with the pickpockets themselves, who had the same regard for him as a naughty little boy has for a strict and just schoolmaster.

The thief-catcher has no animus against the people he has to watch. He keeps his eye upon them warily, as the keeper at the zoo keeps his eye upon the polar bears and when it comes to business he arrests them impartially without rancour and without indulgence. This explained what I had never been able to understand in prison— how the convicted criminal seldom bears malice against the detective who brought him to justice provided he thinks that he was treated fairly. ‘The man was only doing his dooty,’ he says. The danger of over-educating your detective is that, little by little, you will eliminate the ‘thief-catcher’ for whom there is a very definite place in the scheme. I remember one whose zeal had communicated itself to his wife. At that time we were overwhelmed with complaints about pickpockets at the stopping-places of the buses in the crowded hours. They would take part in the rush to get in, crowding on with the other passengers and relieving them of the contents of their pockets; if they were disappointed of a place, they fell back and waited for the next bus to continue their business. If they saw any one eyeing them they would mount the bus until they came to a stopping-place where they thought they would be more free from observation. My ‘thief-catcher’ was a rather conspicuous person and when he appeared on the scene the pickpockets would melt away. He could not be everywhere at once, but he used to make a sort of ‘busman’s holiday’ of his days off duty and go out with his wife. She mounted the bus with a gaping handbag, which was as effective a bait for a pickpocket as roast pork is for a shark; the pickpocket followed and just behind him went the husband to take him into custody in the very act. It must have been a quite exciting sport for both.

Every now and then the ‘thief-catcher’ would show a rare gleam of imagination. I remember the case of a man who was expected to pledge a stolen watch. It was impossible to search him until he did, because if he had not got the watch in his possession he would ‘have the law on you’. The suspect vapoured about the railings of St Mary Abbot’s church, watched from the kerbstone by John Barker’s, where people are always waiting for the bus. There was a pawnshop at the corner. Suddenly he formed a resolution and walked quickly across the street to the pawnshop, but the ‘thief-catcher’ was too quick for him. Flinging off his coat as he went, he plunged into the shop, dashed behind the counter and received the suspect in his shirt sleeves, resting on his knuckles in the conventional style and asked him what he could do for him. ‘What will you give me on this?’ said the man, producing the watch.

‘Come along to the police station and I’ll tell you and I caution you that anything you say may be used in evidence against you at your trial.’

I have no doubt that the suspect said something which was not fit to use in evidence when he realised what a trap he had fallen into.

In one respect the Central Office was very much alive. Besides its admirable system of identification by finger prints, elaborated by Sir Edward Henry, the Commissioner, a system since adopted by the whole civilised world, it had a very complete and practical method of record-keeping.

The late Dr Mercier was responsible for the fallacy that there was an almost invariable tendency on the part of criminals to repeat the method in which they had been successful on a former enterprise. But a glance at criminal histories shows that Dr Mercier’s theory was only partly true. Most of the practitioners vary their methods according to local conditions. You will find the blackmailer taking an occasional hand in a burglary; a pickpocket indulging in shoplifting; an area thief boldly breaking in through the front door. All that can be said is that a man who has successfully poisoned a dog in one case is more likely than another man to do the same again. The only successful organisation in detecting crime must have method, industry and local knowledge and I found all these strongly cultivated at New Scotland Yard.

The London thief is preternaturally quick in detecting that he is being followed. Even if he is not quite sure, he will adopt the expedient of turning sharp on his heel and walking for 50 yards in the opposite direction before resuming his journey and during that 50 yards his sharp eyes have taken a mental photograph of every person he has passed. In really big affairs he will pay a confederate to follow him at a distance, taking note of any other follower remotely resembling a policeman. The tubes are very useful to him. He books for a long journey, sits near the door and slips out at the next station just before the gates of the car are slammed and there is no time for the policeman to alight and having thus shaken him off, he sets off for his real destination. Four well-known thieves tried this device once with a pair of detectives in attendance. All went well up to the point of slamming the gate and then things began to go wrong. The detectives had the gate reopened. The lift was one of those that are operated by a liftman standing at the bottom and as it went aloft the detective explained the position to the liftman. Something went wrong with that lift: it stuck halfway for quite five minutes— time enough for the detectives to climb the stairs and summon uniformed policemen to man the gates on the level of the street. The feelings of the trapped rat who sees a group of terriers waiting for the wirework door of his cage to be opened must have descended upon the spirits of those four thieves when their cage rose at length to the surface.

Every now and then a detective would display real initiative in keeping observation. In quiet suburban roads a loitering man would at once bring a face to every window in the street. To keep watch upon a house there must be some excuse. In one case the detective became a jobbing gardener and undertook to clip the hedges and weed the paths of the house opposite and if he took a long time over the job, that is quite in accordance with the habits of jobbing gardeners; in another, attired in suitable clothing and armed with pick-axes, two detectives proceeded to dig up the roadway. Their leisurely method of work must have convinced the bystanders that they were genuine employees of the Borough Surveyor.

2

The Imaginative Liar

DURING THE WAR there was an outbreak of what the Americans call ‘congenital lying’, but which might better be termed ‘adolescent lying’ on the part of young persons. We all know the young girl who tells fibs and in normal times she would probably be spanked and sent to bed without her supper, but in wartime any story, however wild, was accepted.

One afternoon during the first year of the war I received an urgent request from a chief constable in the Midlands for help in a case of great difficulty. The family of a doctor in good practice had been upset by receiving a series of outrageous letters and postcards signed by a lady’s maid who had lately gone to another situation. While she had been with them she was a quiet and respectable person and yet her letters could have been written only by a woman of vicious and depraved character. They came in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they were pushed under the front door; sometimes they were thrown in through an open window and, though the front door was put under police observation and no one was seen to come to it, they were dropped into the letter-box at intervals of three hours.

And then the house itself became bewitched. The mistress would put down her bunch of keys on the kitchen dresser for a moment and a wicked fairy whisked them away. The cook would put a pound of butter into the larder: it vanished. The housemaid lost her pen and ink, the doctor his comb and the whole house was ransacked from top to bottom without recovering any of these things. It is a most harassing thing for a doctor in a busy practice to come home to a house which has been bewitched by wicked fairies.

There was nothing to go upon except the bundle of letters, which certainly bore out the description which the chief constable had given of them. I suppose that Mr Sherlock Holmes would have taken another injection of cocaine and smoked three or four pipes over them before he sat himself down to analyse the ink and examine the paper under a powerful lens. The detective inspector to whom I entrusted the case did none of these things. He asked for the bundle of letters and took the next train. I thought that the case might take him a week, but it took him exactly two hours. When he returned next day he gave the following account of his proceedings.

On the way down in the train he read through the letters and made a note of every word that had been misspelt. There were seventeen. He then composed a piece of dictation which took in the seventeen words. It must have been like composing an acrostic. On his arrival at the house he summoned the entire household— the doctor, his wife, the children and the five servants— into the dining room and, adopting the businesslike procedure of the village schoolmaster, he served out paper and pens. When all were seated comfortably at the table he cleared his throat and gave them a piece of dictation. All entered into the spirit of the thing— all except one and she made no sign. At the end of twenty minutes the pens ceased to scratch and the copies were handed in. They did not take him long to run through. After a brief inspection he detained the mistress and the ‘tweeny’ and dismissed the others. He then said that he would like the mistress to take him up to the ‘tweeny”s sleeping quarters with the girl herself. In her room was a locked box. The ‘tweeny’ had lost the key, but when he talked of breaking it open the key was suddenly discovered. In the box were writing materials identical with those of the incriminatory letters and then after a little pressing the girl burst into tears and made a clean breast of it. She did not like the ex-lady’s maid; she did like to see the whole household in a flutter. She began with the letters and when she saw these beginning to lose their effect she became the wicked fairy with the keys and the butter-pats. Some people are surprised that children of sixteen can write horrible letters, but experience has shown that this is quite a common aspect of adolescent lying.

The spy mania was a godsend to the adolescent liar. A lady in a large house in Kensington came one day in great distress to say that her little maid had been kidnapped by masked men in a black car and carried off to some unknown destination in the suburbs, apparently with the intention of extorting information from her; but fortunately, with a resource of which her mistress had found no evidence in her domestic duties, she had escaped from them and returned the next morning. The mistress thought that we ought to lose no time in catching these masked miscreants and their black car. The girl’s story was certainly arresting. It had been her evening out and while coming away from listening to the band in Hyde Park a tall, dark man (these men are always tall and dark) had stopped her and had said, ‘You have got to come with me. You are wanted for the Cause.’ She refused. He had then given a peculiar whistle (these men always give a peculiar whistle) and two other tall, dark men had emerged from the darkness and laid hold upon her.

‘What were the policemen doing all this time? Didn’t you cry out?’

‘All the men wore masks and that frightened me so that I did not dare to cry out. Two of them took me, one on each side and led me out to the cab-stand. There I saw a dark car with the blinds down. They pushed me into it and shut the door and then the car started and drove at terrible speed with no lights.’

‘No lights? But the police would have stopped it.’

‘Well, I didn’t see any lights. It all looked black.’

‘Which way did you go?’

‘Oh, we passed down Kensington High Street and away into the country, but I was too frightened to notice the direction.’

‘And then?’

Then we got to a large house standing in a garden. It was all black. We stopped at the front door and I heard one of them say, ‘Where shall we put her?’ and the other said, ‘Into the black room.’ They took me out of the car and down a passage and pushed me into a black room with no light and locked the door. I heard them whispering and consulting and I thought they were going to kill me.

‘Well, and then what happened?’

‘Nothing, sir. I stayed on in the room for quite a long time and then I went to the window and found I could get out.’

‘And then?’

‘Well, then I got out and came home.’

‘How did you find your way?’

‘Oh, I met a lady not far from the house and she told me how to get home.’

‘But it must have taken you hours.’

‘It did, sir. I didn’t get home till the morning.’

The inspector asked her whether the men had talked about spying. They had not. Why did she think they were spies? Because they wore masks and had a black car. Also, I suppose, because they were tall and dark. He then took the mistress aside and said that he would like an opportunity of searching her box, because something she had said led him to think that there was only one man and he was not tall or dark. The key was produced, the box opened and there on the top lay— a pair of soldier’s gloves. And then the whole story was dragged out of her. He was in khaki, he had no confederates and no car, but he was soft-spoken and the poor fellow was just going off to the Front. That cleared up the mystery.

In 1915, when the spy mania was at its height, a little general servant, aged sixteen and fresh from the country, threw her master and mistress into an almost hysterical state by her revelations. One day the mistress found her in the kitchen writing cabalistic signs on a sheet of paper. The girl explained that this was part of a dreadful secret and when pressed a little, confided to her that she had become a sort of bondslave of a German master spy named ‘E. M.’, who had employed her to make a plan of the Bristol Channel and had taught her to operate an extraordinary signalling engine called the ‘Maxione’. She said that she was in terror of her life, that the spy would come and tap at the kitchen window, that he had a powerful green car waiting round the corner in which he would whisk her off to operate the ‘Maxione’ and the red lights, without which the submarines lying in wait in the Bristol Channel would not be able to do their fell work. When she saw that her master and mistress swallowed her story she began to enlarge upon it. She introduced into it a mythical girl friend, a sort of Mrs Harris, in whose name she wrote to herself in a disguisedhandwriting and this girl friend gave her a great deal of good advice, such as: ‘Trust in E. M. no longer. Really I believe he is a spy.’

This girl went on to say that in the course of a ride she had taken documents out of his pocket which she recognised as containing a plan for blowing up Tilbury Docks. She also produced letters from the spy himself— impassioned love-letters which contained gems like the following:

Herr von Scheuaquasha will pay you £50 for one tapping of the red light, the X signal of the seventh line, the universal plug and the signalling. The staff of the Kaiser Wilhelm will pay you greatly and you will be rewarded for the rest of your life. You will be mentioned in all the German head papers as the heroine of a brave act and heroic deed. I have a home in Germany and two servants awaiting your arrival. A valet shall wait on you, darling. You shall be driven in a smart car, you shall enjoy all the luxury possible for soul of man on the face of The Globe to bestow on a maid in the hand of marriage. I have an income of £500 a month. We shall live by Berlin honoured and welcomed through Germany and Germany’s people. For the sake of those who love, which I am sure, you would sacrifice your country for my sake. Your excommunication of the language known in England will be brought before the Kaiser and for saving his people you shall be forgiven for your English blood. If I was certain that I had English blood in my veins I would go to the West Indies to be gnawed by a lion.

From this it may be inferred that the German master spy was not a Fellow of the Zoological Society. In another letter E. M. reproached her for not keeping an appointment: ‘You have ruined me and yourself by not coming out. There is yet plenty of time. Our men cannot get the messages through and even if it was switched halfway it would be well. Germany must have their report and I shall again try for you sooner or later.’

The letters from the spy were in code, but those from the girl friend were en clair. Gradually the volume of correspondence grew until it became a formidable bundle. The master and mistress confided in a sensible friend, who passed the whole matter over to the authorities. Some of the master spy’s letters were amatory, but the love-making was indissolubly intertwined with strict business, only every now and then his admiration for her transcendent beauty would break loose— ‘But your beauty may enchant us.’

The extraordinary part of this fraud was that the girl was quite uneducated and had never been out of her native village and yet she could fabricate different handwritings and make signs that distantly resembled Pitman’s shorthand. She had dotted all over her map sham chemical and mathematical symbols and whenever she was cornered for an explanation she invented a new romance.

She had reduced her mistress to such distress that she did not dare to leave the house and therefore the police superintendent who was detailed to see her had to make a visit to the suburbs. There he found a simple, pleasant-faced country girl, the daughter of a labourer, who would have been supposed to have no knowledge of the world outside her native village. Her employers were in such a state of mind that it was decided to send her home to her mother. One of the curious points about her imagination was her power of inventing names upon the spot, which is a very rare quality even among practised liars. When pressed as to the name of the master spy, without a moment’s thought she gave it as Eric Herfranz Mullard. When she was pressed to explain why the Germans were not able to operate their own machine, the ‘Maxione’, which she described as being a sort of collapsible framework of iron rods, quite portable, but 5 or 6 feet in height when extended, she said that the keys of the base, which flashed rays from the little lamps attached to the arms at the top, had to be worked with great speed with the fingers and the elbows as well and she gave a demonstration on the dining room table, which was so energetic that it must have left bruises on her elbows. The flashes were green and red and could be seen for a distance of 150 miles. That was why one had to strike the keys so hard and, naturally, a German’s fingers were not likely to be so nimble as those of an English girl.

The ages of from fourteen to eighteen have been so productive of trouble to the police that I have sometimes regretted that all girls between those ages are not safely put to sleep by the state and allowed to grow quietly and harmlessly into womanhood unseen by the world. Perhaps the legend of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ may have been suggested by the pranks of adolescent liars in the dawn of the Christian era. How many hay-stacks have been set on fire by little farm servants? How many ghosts have been conjured up? How much paraffin has been thrown on ceilings to attract photographers for the daily press, merely from an infantile desire to see the grown-ups buzzing about like a nest of disturbed wasps?

But to return to pre-war memories. At the moment when I took charge of the Criminal Investigation Department the Central Office was busy over the robbery of the pearl necklace. A necklace valued at about £110,000 had been dispatched from Paris to a London jeweller by registered post. The box was safely delivered with all the seals apparently intact, but the pearls were missing and lumps of coal had been substituted for them. At first suspicion fell upon the French postal servants. Elaborate inquiries were made on both sides of the Channel and it was established beyond a doubt that the wrapper and the seals were exactly in the condition in which the parcel was delivered for registration. There was no doubt whatever that they had been properly packed and therefore somewhere there existed a counterfeit seal of the firm, which consisted of the initials ‘M. M.’ within an oval border. My first contribution to the case was to establish by experiment that a counterfeit seal could be made and used on melted sealing-wax within four minutes and that therefore at some point in the parcel’s journey it would have been possible to break the seals, undo the wrappings, remove the pearls and seal the parcel up again without the loss of a post. Gradually the police began to see daylight. Rumours fly in Hatton Garden and it was not long before the names of X and Y and one or two others were whispered in connection with the robbery.

Then began one of the most difficult cases of observation that I remember. No fox was ever more cunning in covering his tracks. The men had no reason to suspect that they were being followed and yet they never relaxed their precautions for a moment. If they took a taxi to any rendezvous they gave a false destination, paid off the taxi and took another, sometimes repeating this process of mystification two or three times. If they met in Oxford Street to lunch together at an ABC shop they would suddenly change their minds on the doorstep and go off to another and all the while they had an aged discharged convict in their pay to shadow them and call their attention to any suspicious follower. I shall not tell here what devices the police adopted, but I will say that at the last, when every other kind of observation failed, we did adopt a new device which was successful.

The object throughout had been to find a moment when one or other of the parties had the stolen pearls about his person and when the day came for making the arrest, just as the four thieves were entering a tube station the police failed, because on that particular day they had left the necklace at home. They were detained, nevertheless, in order that a thorough search might be made of all their hiding-places. As it then turned out, the necklace was in the possession of the wife of one of them and when the search became too hot and she feared a visit from the police she put the necklace into a Bryant & May matchbox and dropped it in the street. There it was found, without, however, its diamond clasp, which had been disposed of separately.

It did not take the police long to unravel the details of the crime. They found the engraver who had innocently cut the false seal and the office where the parcel had been opened. The thieves had arranged with the postman to bring the parcel to the office for three or four minutes before taking it on to deliver it. Whether the postman knew beforehand what they intended to do is uncertain. They expected to find diamonds, which were far more easily disposed of: when they found pearls, so large that in the trade each pearl had almost a history, they knew that they could not dispose of them and were at first tor throwing them into the Thames. It may be judged that I was not an expert in precious stones when I say that I had the matchbox and its contents laid out on my table for quite half an hour before I was sure that the pearls were genuine. They looked, to my untutored eye, so yellow. We telephoned to the owner and the insurance agent. The owner fell upon the pearls as a man might fall upon some beloved and long-lost child whom he had never expected to see again in this world. I then told him jocularly of my doubts. ‘Yellow?’ he said, with genuine amazement. ‘Yellow? They are rose-colour.’

Every now and then there was a sensational seizure at the house of a receiver of stolen property. In October 1913 a certain jeweller’s shop in Shaftesbury Avenue was raided and the contents were carried off to Bow Street, which resembled for some days an exhibition of wedding presents. It contained the proceeds of quite twenty known burglaries and even then only one-third of the plate had been identified because it has been found by experience that in these days, when people insure their jewellery against burglary and draw the insurance money, they take little interest in bringing the thieves to justice. There is also the fact that things are stolen from a house sometimes for many months before they are missed. Some of the objects in this exhibition belonged to a Lady H. and while she was going round she caught sight of a clock given to her by Lord Charles Beresford which she thought was still at home. Unclaimed stolen property is held by the police for a certain period and then disposed of by public auction.

In 1913 there was an epidemic of safe-breaking. The capacity of the oxyacetylene flame for cutting through steel plates appealed to the safe-breaker, who had long deplored the weight and inefficiency of the tools on which he had to rely for his livelihood. For years there has been a competition between the burglar and the safe-maker and so far I believe the safe-maker has won.

Two enterprising persons spent a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1913 in a certain office in Regent Street cutting a great hole in the safe with an oxyacetylene apparatus, which they had transported to the house in a taxi-cab on the previous afternoon. Having secured their booty they left this very incriminating apparatus behind them.

Not many weeks later the police were forewarned that an attempt would be made on a safe in a certain much frequented cinema hall, but here the burglars received a nervous shock. All went according to plan that Sunday afternoon. The street and the hall had the deserted Sunday look when, on a sudden, just as operations were beginning, from every corner sprang truncheoned men and the burglars were caught in a trap.

3

The Lure Of Something For Nothing

THE GREAT BUSINESS of transferring the contents of your neighbour’s pocket to your own is what more than nine-tenths of the world live upon. Society draws the line between what is legitimate and what is dishonest rather low down in the scale. A grocer may rob you by high prices but not by giving you short weight; a moneylender may fleece you by usury but not by picking your pocket; but I confess to a sneaking preference for the rogue who, without any pretence of respectability, preys upon your vanity or your cupidity and cheats you quite openly.

The Spanish prisoner fraud has flourished for nearly half a century. It has the advantage over all other frauds in costing practically nothing for stock-in-trade and incurring no risk whatever to the practitioner. All he needs is a little stationery, a few postage stamps and the names and addresses of farmers in Scotland and England. The farmer receives a letter with the Valencia postmark from a Spanish colonel now languishing in prison on account of the part he played in a revolutionary conspiracy.

My dear sir and relative,

Having not the honour to know you personally but only for the good references my deceased mother Mary Harris, your relative, did me about your family, I apply myself to you for the first and perhaps last time to implore your protection for my only daughter Amelia, child twelve years age.

Here the writer is banking on the fact that very few of us are in a position positively to say that no one of the sisters or cousins of our parents was called Mary and that no one of that name married a Spaniard. The letter, which is beautifully written in halting English, goes on to say that the writer, a colonel named Alvaro de Espinosa, at the direction of the revolutionary committee, went to Berlin to buy arms, was betrayed and went to England, but that while in London he heard of the death of his wife. In the first shock of grief he converted all his property into English and French banknotes and with the proceeds cunningly concealed in the lining of his trunk he set out for Valencia.

Well disguised, I went out to Spain, arrived in this city. Arranged secretly some private business, took my leave from the martyr as was my noble wife and when I was very near coming in England again with my daughter but with my heart contrite by grief I was arrested. A wretch enemy had recognised and accused me. They proceeded me and after in a war court I was condemned by desertion and rebellion delinquency at one indemnification at twelve jail years and at the payment of the process outlays, a sentence I am undergoing now in these military jails, deprived of any intercourse.

When I was arrested my equipage which is a trunk and two portmanteaux, was seized and sealed and folded before me and delivering me its keys without might be discovered the so well artful secret in which I hidden the said sum and it remained laid down in the same Court as a warranty for the outlays of process payment in the event of being condemned and as I am already unhappily sentenced it is indispensable to pay the court the amount of the expenses to be able to recover the luggage. Thereby necessary sum pay the tribunal by the process outlays since I would not see me in the debasing and shameful case to have to resort to my fellow countrymen; then I would be wretchedly betrayed again.

That is why he writes to Harris. But what is Harris to get out of all this? You shall hear. When the trunk reaches him,

you will see in its interior part and in its left side of Spain shield in its centre you will set upon your forefinger so that when an electric bell is pushed and quickly the secret will appear in full view in which you will find my fortune … I will name you as tutor of my daughter and her fortune trustee until her full age and as a right reward for your noble aid I leave you the fourth part of all my fortune.

So there you have it— something for nothing— the bait which so few can resist; least of all when the something is £6,250 and a beautiful young Spanish ward.

The poor old revolutionary colonel is in a dying state, as you learn from a letter from the chaplain, the Reverend Adrian Rosado, which is enclosed. This devoted priest has letter paper headed with a cross and has a markedly feminine handwriting. He is not in the secret, as the cautious old colonel has been careful to warn you. He ‘befriends me by his vocation and good feelings: he is a venerable priest and honest man and I do not think it necessary he knows the secret very extensively.’ The honest man regrets very much ‘that on the first time I write to you I may be herald of bad news, but the case so requires it and the truth must be said though it may be painful. Your relative’s health state is very bad.’

Indeed, so bad that ‘we must have patience to suffer with resignation what God dispose and beg his help to accomplish the last will of the unfortunate Sr Alvaro de Espinosa.’

The honest priest goes on to say that in a little while he will deposit Miss Amelia and the trunk at your door, always provided that the necessary expenses are defrayed.

By your relative charge I think convenient to beg your aid for getting out the seized equipage to which end I am making steps in order that the Tribunal tell me the exactly amount to pay the cost and process expenses.

Awaiting anxiously your reply to accomplish the sacred mission your relative has commissioned me.

I am, dear sir, your most affected servant and Chaplain,

Adrian Rogado

Strange that this holy and disinterested man should have a delicacy about receiving letters at his presbytery. He, no less than the poor prisoner, adds in a postscript― ‘By greater security please answer to my brother-in-law, name and here as following: Mr Arturo Rivier, Maldonado 19, Entremets, Valencia, Spain.’

Is it because a letter addressed to the presbytery would be returned through the Dead Letter Office marked that no such person as Rogado exists?

The world may be divided into two classes― those who would reply to such letters and those who would consign them to the fire. In spite of the picture drawn of Englishmen by envious foreigners, the Britisher is by nature an imaginative and romantic person. That is why you find him in every part of the globe: he goes abroad for adventure, to escape from the humdrum routine of his home surroundings. And the farther you go north the more romantic he becomes. That is why there are so few Scots left in Scotland. To judge from the correspondence filed by the police, nine out of every ten reply and because the Britisher is practical as well as romantic, the reply invariably asks how much money is required to pay the ‘process outlays’. On this the dying Espinosa, whose handwriting is unusually firm for a stricken man so near his end, rises to fresh flights of eloquence:

‘I will die peaceful,’ he says, ‘thinking of the good future welfare of my dear daughter near you.’

His ‘health state is becoming grievous’ and so he makes his will:

Here is my last will.

I name heiress of the three-fourths parts of my fortune my alone daughter Amelia de Espinosa.

I name you heir of the fourth part of my fortune and Tutor of my daughter and Manager of it until this one may reach her full age.

As soon as the equipage may be in the Chaplain’s hands he shall go out to your home with my daughter and equipage in order that you may take away the money of my trunk secret to come immediately in possession of the sum.

From the part belonging to my daughter you will deliver to the Chaplain £200, for I will make a present to him. I beseech you to grant all your assistance to the Chaplain since he is poor and he does not reckon upon any resource to pay these outlays.

The equipage must be recovered immediately, for in the trunk is all my fortune.

You will place my daughter in a college until her full age … I shall die peaceful thinking of her being happy near you and she will find on you some warm-hearted parents and brothers.

Your unfortunate relative,

Alvaro de Espinosa

And still no mention of money: that was because the recipient was more than usually cautious and was, in fact, a wary fish that must be played. So wary was he that he took the letter to the police for advice. But I remember a case where a farmer in Norfolk was so much touched by the misfortunes of his Spanish cousin and so conscious of the sensation that would be caused among his neighbours when it became known that he was guardian to a beautiful young Spanish heiress, to say nothing of the things that might be bought with £6,250, that he sent £200 to the address indicated by Espinosa and sat down to wait. He waited so long that he became anxious about the safety of the chaplain and his ward and it was on their account and not from any doubt about the story, that he came to the police. He indignantly refused to believe that he had been a victim to the familiar Spanish prisoner fraud.

The war was unkind to Espinosa, who had been lingering upon his death-bed for over forty years and I hoped that it had killed him, but the ink was scarcely dry upon the Treaty of Versailles before he broke out again. From time to time the Spanish government has been furnished with the address to which victims are invited to reply, but hitherto to no purpose: the game is too profitable to be easily killed.

I can understand succumbing to the wiles of Espinosa better than I can understand the perennial success of the confidence trick, which is practised generally by Australians on American visitors to London. There are several variants because the tricksters are artists and are not above improving with practice. Here again the bait is ‘something for nothing’. Though the commonest form has been described in the police court it may be well to repeat it here. An American walking in Hyde Park sees an elderly man drop a pocketbook. He overtakes him and restores it. The old man, whom we will call Ryan, is effusively grateful. He would not have lost that pocketbook for the world: it contained the evidence of his fortune: his benefactor must come and have a drink. He holds him with his glittering eye and while they imbibe whisky he tells his story— how an uncle of fabulous wealth but eccentric habits has left him a couple of million dollars on condition that he can find a really trustworthy person to distribute one-eighth of the sum among the poor of London. The dupe mentions the fact that he has a return ticket to New York and hails from Denver. So, as it now appears, does Ryan, who takes from his pocketbook a newspaper cutting setting forth the virtues and the enormous fortune of the uncle and at that very moment a third man, Ryan’s confederate, drops in. Hearing the word ‘Denver’, he joins in the conversation, for he, too, is from Denver— George T. Davis, at their service. So there they are— three exiles from Denver— a little oasis in the vast waste of London. To George T. Davis Ryan relates his good fortune and the strange condition in the will.

‘I know no one in this city. How am I to find a man in whom I have confidence to distribute all this money? Now I like your face, Mr Davis, but I don’t know you— never saw you till this afternoon— how can I say I’ve confidence in you?’

‘Confidence for confidence,’ replies Davis. ‘I’ve confidence in you anyway. I’d trust you with all I’ve got, and I’ve got more than what I stand up in. Why, see here! Here’s what I drew from the bank this morning’— he thrusts a roll of bank (of engraving) notes into Ryan’s unwilling hand— ‘and here’s my watch and chain! Take them all and just walk through that door. I know you’ll bring them back because I’ve confidence in you.’ But Ryan still looks doubtful. ‘No good,’ whispers Davis. ‘He don’t take to me. Why don’t you have a shot at the money? He takes to you.’

And so by appeals to the vanity of the man from Denver, by playing on his cupidity, under the softening influences of liquid refreshment, by the force of example, Davis succeeds at last. Into the still apparently unwilling hand of Ryan the victim presses all the money and valuables he possesses and out goes Ryan into the street. The two men continue drinking: George T. Davis is the first to betray anxiety.

‘The old man ought to be back by now. Can’t understand it— man I’d have trusted anywhere. Couldn’t have been run over by a taxi? You stop here: I’ll just step out and see where he’s got to.’ And that is the last that the victim sees of either of the rogues.

Before the war most of the confidence men lived in Ealing. Each pair have their own pitch and there was a tacit understanding that neither should poach on the ground of the other. Northumberland Avenue belonged to one; the Mall to another; a third worked Hyde Park. The essence of the trick is that the victim should be a bird of passage, for as soon as the trick is played the actors leave for Rome. Why Rome was chosen I never understood. There they stayed until a confederate reported that the victim had sailed for home and the coast was clear. During the war the poor confidence man fell on evil days: there were no American tourists to prey upon and if there had been any, one could not fly to Rome. The passport people saw to that. The absence of a prosecutor is a bar to police action, but occasionally one or other of the fraternity is run to ground.