Traced and Tracked; Or, Memoirs of a City Detective

by James M'Govan

“If I had known they were there, I’d never have sold it so cheap,” he blurted out.

“Maybe not at all?” I suggested; and Tim did not deny the soft impeachment.

The notes were readily identified by the builder by the number “2020” which one of them bore; but when we came to look for Morley, he had vanished. From another country he afterwards sent a detailed confession of the circumstances which led to the crime. The payer of the money was dressed as a working man, and asked at the gate for Mr Lockyer. Morley at once conceived a suspicion that the man had come after the post of yard-keeper, and applied his eyes and ears to the inner door in the tool-house to ascertain the truth. He saw the notes placed in the desk, and the temptation followed, for he had found a key shortly before in the tool-house which fitted the lock perfectly. After taking the notes he dropped the key into a street “siver,” or we might have stumbled on it during our search. Tim was set free, but he has not yet developed into a detective.

CONSCIENCE MONEY.

An old man, a jobbing gardener, named Alexander Abercorn, stopped one of the day policemen at the West End one morning in July, and said in great concern and agitation—

“Man, I’m afraid this house has been robbed in the night time. And the worst of it is I have the keys, and they’ll be sure to say it’s been done by me.”

The house in question was a big one known as the Freelands, and occupied by a Mr Arthurlie and his family. The family were gone to country quarters, and the house was empty even of servants. Abercorn hurriedly explained, what indeed was already known to the policeman, that he had a contract for doing the gardening about the place, and, being a tried and trusted man, had been left with the keys of the place, with orders to enter it every day to see if all was safe. Other families had left him a similar charge, and he had some half-dozen bunches of keys, which he showed to the policeman in confirmation. Hitherto his task had been easy, and the result satisfactory enough, but now for the first time a calamity had come, and he begged the officer to step in and see. They entered the house, and the old gardener walked straight to the pantry, in which was built an iron safe for containing the plate and valuables of the family. This safe was inserted bodily into a large cupboard, which had an ordinary wooden door fastened with a common sixpenny lock, and so looked innocent enough outside. The wooden door stood wide open, and so also did that of the iron safe within, though both had hitherto been locked.

There were no breakages, or marks of prising with crowbars or chisels—the door appeared to have been opened in the ordinary way, by inserting a key and turning back the bolts of the locks. The detectors on the lock of the safe showed that no skeleton keys had been applied or used, and yet the old gardener declared that the key of the safe had never been intrusted to him. He did not know who had it, or where it was kept. He had the keys of all the rooms, and also the key of the press in which the safe was built, but not the actual key of the safe. The entire contents of the safe had been turned out on the pantry floor, and the thieves had then shown great discrimination in the selection of their plunder. None of the plated articles had been removed; only genuine silver, and, as some of these exactly resembled each other, the thieves had shown a skill almost magical.

The old gardener, of course, knew nothing of what had been in the safe; and, seeing the plated articles littering the floor, he only said he thought the place had been robbed. It was only after word had been sent to the Central Office, and we had telegraphed to the Arthurlies, that we learned that the value of the silver plate alone was upwards of £500, and that there had been in the safe other articles of value which brought the total loss nearly up to £800.

Within an hour of the report being sent in, I was out at the house, and was shown over the various rooms by the old gardener. To say that the old man looked excited and strange would be but faintly to describe his appearance. He was deathly pale; he trembled at the slightest question or look; his teeth chattered when he spoke; and he gave the most stupid and confused answers to some of the simplest queries. I had not been long in the premises when I found that there were several peculiarities about the robbery which marked it off from the ordinary burglary. There were three doors to the house. Two of these—the area door and the back door—had never been touched. They were bolted and locked just as they had been left. No window had been forced; every one was closed, and fastened, and shuttered exactly as it had been left. This narrowed the means of ingress to one door—the main door, which was secured by two patent locks. It was the keys of these locks which the old gardener carried and used in entering the house. I examined these locks closely, and when done, decided that they had not been opened with skeleton keys or tampered with in any way; either the door had been left unlocked, or the keys, or duplicates of these keys, had been used in effecting an entrance. The second peculiarity was that no room in the whole house of three storeys had been entered but the pantry. There had been no rummaging through bedrooms for valuables, no turning out of rare china and curiosities in the drawing-room, though there were articles of that kind there far exceeding in value the plate stolen. The thieves appeared to have had but one object in view—the contents of the safe—and for that they had made without a single divergence right or left. Now, that is not at all like the ordinary housebreaker, who is never satisfied with a moderately good haul, but must go tearing, and searching, and smashing, and destroying all over a house before he is convinced that there is no more to carry off. Then, what professional housebreaker could have resisted at least tasting a bottle of those rare wines which were within arm’s length of him in the pantry! I have caught them drunk on the spot just through that weakness, but I never knew them to be so rigidly abstemious as to pass good drink untouched.