His “life of luxury” was only the life of a small tradesman who prospers, and was maintained by constant exertion at a risk which, in spite of his daring and his health, made him an old man before he was fifty—so old that the police thought him too feeble for the usual fetters to be needed.
The bravest dread assassination, and it was that kind of terror, always present and always invisible, which Peace had constantly to face.
It was in spite of constant detection and severe punishment—once including a prison flogging—that Peace persisted in a career of crime, much of which, like his shooting at policemen, and, above all, his murdering Mr. Dyson, was entirely unnecessary, and, as it were, a superfluity of evil.
That he did murder Dyson intentionally seems, on the face of the evidence, certain; and whether his own account of his relations with Mrs. Dyson, or her account, or the third and most probable theory—that she was a foolish woman of a vulgar type, who accepted attentions from vanity, and was concealing something in her evidence, but not much—is the true one, does not signify a jot.
If the evidence was true, Peace resolved to shoot Dyson whenever Dyson’s jealousy became inconvenient, and did shoot him, and if that is not murder there is no such crime.
The man, in fact, liked crime for crime’s sake, and it was not possible for him to remain long without having recourse to his old practices—he was irreclaimable.
After his marriage he installed his unhappy partner in a house at Sheffield, and professed to be earning a living as a hawker.
It is quite certain that at this period of his career he was looked upon with suspicion by the police, who watched him most zealously; but he was so specious a rascal, that he half persuaded them he was pursuing an honest course of life.
Returning one day from one of his depredatory excursions, he met Sergeant Marsland, one of the officers who gave evidence against him in the inquiry respecting the Crookam-house robbery.
The sergeant regarded him with a look of suspicion.