The difficulty the police always have with the “fence” is to bring the guilty knowledge home to him.
The skilled “fence” will purchase nothing the identity of which cannot be at once destroyed without very materially depreciating its value.
Some few years ago the Messrs. Hancock, of Bruton-street, discovered, at their stock-taking, that jewellery—principally consisting of brilliant diamond rings and bracelets—was missing to the value of several thousand pounds.
They said nothing, but put the police on the alert. A few days later a little boy offered a marine-store dealer a small mass of mis-shapen metal tied together with a string.
The boy was detained, and the metal proved to be the settings of the missing jewellery. The boy declared he had picked them up in the mud of the Thames off Battersea, and there was every reason to believe his story.
Evidently the whole of the plunder had come into the hands of a single receiver; the stones had been wrenched out of their setting, and the gold itself had been actually thrown away.
As for the stones, they no doubt found their way to Amsterdam, or the Hague, or Antwerp.
But the “fence” escaped detection, although it is possible that the thief himself was discovered in the person of one of the shopmen, who pleaded guilty to several small robberies, but obstinately denied all knowledge of the larger offence.
When Lady Ellesmere’s jewels, valued at fifteen thousand pounds, were stolen from the top of a cab in 1857, they came into the possession of a small shopkeeper and tallyman, who paid rather less than ten pounds for them.
The thieves were ignorant of the true value of their booty, and the “fence” represented that the articles were mere “Brummagem ornaments,” worth a few shillings at the most.