Captain Shannon

by Coulson Kernahan

At the worst it was possible that the pretended Queen’s evidence had been carefully prepared beforehand by Captain Shannon, and communicated by him to his agents, to be used in the event of any of them falling into the hands of the police. In that case the statements which might thus be put forward, so far from being of assistance to the authorities, would be deliberately constructed with a view to confuse and mislead.

The one thing which I found it utterly impossible to reconcile with the theories I had previously formed about Captain Shannon was that the informer should have in his possession a portrait of his chief.

Was it likely, I asked myself, that so cunning a criminal would, by allowing his portrait to get into the possession of his agents, place himself at the mercy of any scoundrel who, for the sake of an offered reward, would be ready to betray his leader, or of some coward who, on falling into the hands of the police, might offer to turn Queen’s evidence? Was it not far more likely, on the contrary, that the explanation of Captain Shannon’s having so successfully eluded the police and kept the authorities in ignorance of his very identity was that he had carefully concealed that identity even from his own colleagues?

The more I thought about it the more assured I became that so crafty a man—a man who was not only an artist but a genius in crime—would trust absolutely no one with a secret that concerned his own safety. On the few occasions when he would have to come into personal relation with his confederates, it seemed more than probable to me that he would assume some definite and consistent disguise which would mislead even them in regard to his appearance and individuality.

On being asked how the portrait got into his possession, and whether it was a good likeness, the informer had replied that he had only seen Captain Shannon on a single occasion, when he met him one night by appointment at Euston Station. The portrait had been sent home to him beforehand, so that he might have no difficulty in recognizing the person to whom he was to deliver a certain package, and he added that, so far as he could see, it was an excellent likeness.

Some such explanation as this was just what I had expected, for if the portrait were intended, as I supposed, to mislead the police, I was sure that Captain Shannon would invent some plausible story to account for its being in the possession of one of his colleagues. Otherwise the fact of a man, for whose arrest a large reward had been offered, having, for no apparent reason, presented his photograph to a fellow-conspirator, might arouse suspicion of the portrait’s genuineness.

That the portrait represented not the real but the disguised Captain Shannon, I was equally confident. I thought it more than possible that the man I had to find would be the exact opposite of the man who was there portrayed, and of the informer’s description. For instance, as the pictured Captain Shannon was evidently dark, and was said to be dark by the informer, the real Captain Shannon would probably be fair, as the more dissimilar was the real Captain Shannon from the Captain Shannon for whom the police were searching, the less likely would they be to find him.

Then, again, it had been particularly stated by the informer that James Mullen was slightly lame, and to this the police attached the greatest importance. The fact that the man they wanted had an infirmity so easily recognised and so difficult to conceal was considered to narrow down the field of their investigations to the smallest compass and to render the fugitive’s ultimate capture nothing less than a certainty.

For myself, I was not at all sure that this supposed lameness was not part and parcel of Captain Shannon’s disguise. A sound man could easily simulate lameness, but a lame man could not so simulate soundness of limb, and I could not help thinking that if Captain Shannon were, as had been asserted, lame, he would have taken care to conceal the fact from his confederates.

If the police could be induced to believe that the man they wanted was lame, they would not, in all probability, be inconveniently suspicious about the movements of a stranger evidently of sound and equal limb, who might otherwise be called on to give an account of himself.