Traced and Tracked; Or, Memoirs of a City Detective

by James M'Govan

I smiled, and though I made some inquiries after O’Lacey, they never came to anything. Tommy Tait was duly identified by the captain, and sentenced to seven years’ retirement, the captain getting back his chronometer, and saying and doing some handsome things on the occasion.

THE TORN TARTAN SHAWL.

A servant in a house at the outskirts of the city had been tempted by the clear air and dry frost to leave a whole “washing” of things out over night. She wanted them to get a nip of the frost, she said, but instead they got a nip of another kind. The girl woke at four o’clock in the morning and happened to look out at the green, when the clothes were there all right. She rose again at six, and, looking out, had to rub her eyes to make sure that she was not still in bed and dreaming. Nearly the whole of the things were gone.

Satisfied that she was awake, she first asked herself if some kind “brownie” had taken the brunt of the morning’s work off her hands by taking down and folding up the things; but then, remembering that these useful fairies had all vanished before the steam engine and electric telegraph, she ran out of the house, fearing theft and hopeful of catching some of the thieves. No one was visible. The very best of the clothes were gone; the clothes pegs, all scattered over the ground, the empty ropes, and a few articles of trifling value alone being left to tell of the robbery. At least so the girl thought as she ran into the house and roused all within it with the news. Of course the servant got the blame, and received notice of dismissal at once, although, as she afterwards informed me, it had been by her mistress’s express orders that the things had been left out. The lady denied that—it is convenient at times to have a bad memory—and so the disgrace rested on the girl’s shoulders. Had the lady, instead of indulging in recrimination and wrangling, sent word promptly to us, the whole case might have assumed a very different aspect, as we could thus have sent word to most of the pawnbrokers by their hour of opening. A good haul had been made, including some gentlemen’s shirts of fine linen, the best of the lady’s underclothing, and some twenty or thirty pairs of worsted stockings, of all sizes and sorts, as there was a big family. The most of the linen was marked with the letters “A. M. B.,” and some of the stockings had the same initials worked into them with pink worsted near the top of the leg.

When the news reached us I went out to see the place and get a list of the stolen articles. Six valuable hours had been lost, and I frankly told the lady that she need scarcely hope to recover all she had lost, and all through that stupid delay. The green had been left exactly as the servant had found it when she rushed out in the morning—the clothes pegs littered the ground; and while I glanced over the approaches to the green, the girl began to pick up these pegs and put them into a cotton bag which hung about half-way up one of the clothes poles. This bag was suspended from a nail at a height convenient for the hand, and at the head of the nail there fluttered a little pennon, which had never been meant for that queer flag-staff. It was a shred of bright coloured tartan, which appeared to have been rent out of some one’s shawl, as the owner hurriedly switched past.

“You’ve been damaging your shawl, Maggie,” I remarked to the servant girl, who was busy laying off to me her wrongs and grievances, and the deplorable failings of mistresses in general.

“It’s no mine—I dinna wear shawls,” said Maggie shortly as she continued her task. Her head was full of her troubles—mine was far away from what she was most anxious to speak of.

I took down the shred of tartan. It began narrow at the nail head which had caught it, and got gradually broader, till it ended, liked a filled-up A, in a fringe of the same colours. I spread the piece out along my palm, and then called to Maggie.

“Look here, now, and tell me if any one about the house, or living near, wears a shawl of that pattern?”

Maggie looked at the scrap of tartan, and declared most emphatically that no one in the household did wear such a shawl, and added with a smile that none of her acquaintances would be seen in such a thing—the colours being about the brightest and “loudest” that could be made for money. The same thought had already struck me, and my thoughts instinctively wandered in the direction of some of my own “bairns.” The tartan was of just such a pattern as one may see on scores of shoulders about the Cowgate on a Sunday afternoon. I seemed to see the whole shawl in that shred—a little square thing, folded across, and just big enough to cover the shoulders. By mentally picturing the shawl on a woman’s shoulders, and gauging her height by that treacherous nail, I could guess her to be a person rather under than above medium height, and immediately began to ask myself which of my “bairns” given to “snow-dropping” had been lately displaying such a grand shawl. Useless! their name is legion. They nearly all delight in these things, and a dozen at least might wear tartan of the identical colours of the shred in my hand. I began to think that I should make little of my discovery. However, I placed the scrap of tartan carefully between the leaves of my pocket-book, completed my list as far as I could at the house, and left. A bundle of the stolen things was in the Office before me. They had been offered at a pawnbroker’s shortly after the opening hour, and pledged for fourteen shillings. The boy who had taken in the things and paid over the money was a blockhead. He knew that the pledger was a woman, but could not describe her appearance. He did not think she was very old, and he did not think she was very young. Did she wear a tartan shawl? Yes, he thought so; but then he changed his mind, and thought that she hadn’t any shawl. No one could make anything of such a fool, and I strongly recommended the pawnbroker, for his own safety, to get rid of such a stupid assistant, to which the man replied that he would have been happy to do so, had the lad not been his own son. I grinned over my mistake, the pawnbroker helping me liberally, and then left. I then took a long stroll through the likeliest quarters, with a keen eye to every tartan shawl. Twice in the course of that walk did I start joyfully at sight of a shoulder shawl of the identical pattern, but in both cases the owners were decent, hard-working folks, and not a trace of a rent or patch to be found in either of the articles. With my eyes thus grown familiar in the search, I was wearily trudging homewards late in the afternoon with the shawl nearly gone from my thoughts, when on the South Bridge, near the head of Infirmary Street, I came up to a wretchedly-clad woman bearing in her arms a child, round which was wrapped a gaudy and apparently new shawl of the exact pattern I sought. Now, at the first glimpse of this shawl I decided that it was not the one I sought, which I imagined would scarcely be so bright and fresh-looking; but it was the incongruity of that bright shawl, allied to such rags and poverty, which made me slacken my pace, and almost instinctively follow the owner of the child.