I explained my reasons for not allowing my friend with the warrants to arrest Wilson. He was very grateful. I told him that if he followed me out I would allow him to make his way, under my eye, to one of the least objectionable of the cafés on the Boulevards, where I should take him into my custody. The poor wretch was glad enough to avail himself of this privilege.
I telegraphed my success that night. By an early train next morning we took our journey homewards, and arrived in London the same evening in due course. Mr. Wilson consented to become my guest for the evening, and until either the stress of duty compelled me to hand him over to the police, or I had the pleasure of announcing that he was no longer under restraint.
The day after my return to London there was a solemn conference at the head-quarters of the —— Railway. That august assembly, the board, had been hastily convened, and had a special meeting. The whole matter was investigated by the light of facts now within the knowledge of its officers and advisers. Other minor and auxiliary conferences were held in ante-rooms between myself and the leading partner of the firm who enjoyed the lucrative and honourable appointment of solicitors to the company. The results of the whole deliberations put together were, a resolution not to prosecute the suspected clerk, because there was not enough evidence at hand to warrant a conviction; and another resolution, that as there was more than enough evidence to justify a strong suspicion of his complicity in the affair—as there was abundant proof of gross negligence—the clerk Wilson should be dismissed.
One victim not being sufficient to compensate for the loss of so much money, the two other clerks—one in the chief cashier’s and one in the telegraph department—were also deprived of their situations.
The most unsatisfactory part of the affair, to my mind, was the abandonment of all further search for the culprits. No why or wherefore was given me in explanation of this abrupt and extraordinary decision. I suspect the cause was an unwillingness to allow so palpable a sign of administrative weakness at headquarters, and from the very centre to the extreme circumference of the financial operations of the company, to be trumpeted throughout the world. I have known much heavier losses quietly submitted to for a like reason by joint-stock companies and by great mercantile firms. When one of the oldest, wealthiest, and most highly reputed discount-houses in the City of London discovered that its chief acting partner had advanced a young firm of traders a vast sum of money upon the security of forged dock-warrants, it determined not to prosecute the scoundrels, because the defrauded gentlemen, knowing their own importance, feared that if it should become known in Lombard Street that they, the great, old, wealthy, and “knowing” house, had been so let in, all the floating securities in the London markets would be discredited, a panic would seize all the money-changers, metropolitan bankers would be involved in trouble that might upset a lot of them, the governor and company of the Bank of England would have to guard its issues, limit to the minimum its credits, and, in fact, that through the one gigantic fraud a radius of half a mile round the Royal Exchange (where the potentates of gold, who are the arbiters and controllers of manufacture all over England and beyond this Queendom, do congregate) might become a scene of despair, ruin, or chaos. Am I overstating the case? Let the reader who thinks so peruse the evidence given by Mr. Chapman, of the well-known house of Overend, Gurney, and Company, at the London Bankruptcy Court, and in the Central Criminal Court, in the proceedings taken against Messrs. ——. Or, if he cannot readily learn the particulars of this noted case, let him ask any friend who knows the history of British banking and British trade during the last twenty years, and that friend will supply him with at least as many instances in which splendid swindles, forgeries, and frauds have not been investigated—ay, or, being investigated and proved, have been secretly condoned, for such reasons as my imagination assigns to the directors of the —— Railway Company for their decision in the present case. No man of the world, no one who has had much experience in practical business, will gainsay the probability of my suggested motive. I do not say that the reason hinted at was the operative reason in this instance, but I think it was, and I say that I think it was; and the intelligent reader can form his own opinion as to the soundness or hollowness of my hypothesis.
It may be satisfactory to further explain (as I have very much pleasure in doing), that although not instructed to hunt down the perpetrators of this crime, I was requested to assist the officials of the company in framing such arrangements as would make it impossible to repeat a robbery like that so successfully accomplished. With the aid of the company’s officers, I did this; and I have the satisfaction of knowing that if any further designs of the same description were afterwards conceived, they were never carried out. A survey of the obstacles to their realisation must have warned off the conspirators.
The reader who desires to see poetical justice summarily inflicted on every wrong-doer as soon as the wrong has been committed, may have been grieved to learn that a gang of villains escaped their merits. I shared that feeling. I do not believe that Wilson was in the fraud, although I cannot undertake to say that the evidence of my faith is so perfect as I could wish. He, however, was utterly and hopelessly ruined, by the dismissal from his situation under circumstances of so grave suspicion; and if his worst offence was negligence (as I suppose), he has been terribly punished. The last time I saw him (not six months ago) he was selling penny packets of “stationery for the million” on a stall in one of the popular marts at the East End of London. The reader last mentioned may obtain some proper comfort in the evidence I can supply as to the ultimate vindication of justice upon the persons of the whole of the gang concerned in this great “plant.” I hunted down four of them not long since, and one volunteered a statement of the facts of that case (as each of the four did), in the hope of being admitted to the privileges of what the Irish call an approver. During this conversation (after he had completed his confession of the offence he was then charged with) he also told me that he had taken part in this affair along with all his present companions in crime,—who were the last of the set who had up to that date eluded justice.
AN EPISODE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE.
SOME time ago a robbery was perpetrated in the mansion of Lord H——, which is situated in one of the squares of Belgravia. The thieves made a tolerably successful and remunerative haul. They cleared out the whole of the plate, and also much of the jewelry, which chiefly belonged to Lady H——, and was of enormous value.
How the thieves obtained access to the premises did not for a long while seem at all clear. Appearances on the surface warranted a belief that one or more of the servants of his lordship or her ladyship had aided and abetted the robbery. But there was no scintilla of what is called legal evidence to justify or warrant that suspicion. Nobody attached to the household was therefore arrested on the charge; but a reward was offered for the discovery of the offenders, and ordinary police vigilance was exhausted in the endeavour to track the delinquents.