by Michael Sims
They were these: The prisoner, Annie—do not suppose I am going to conceal any fact, so I say prisoner—had been shoplifting the district for some time, in company with a companion about forty years of age. The prisoner had been identified by a jeweller who had been robbed; and one of the rings stolen from his shop was found on her left hand—it being sworn to by a private mark.
I may tell you that this statement was given to me with mock gravity by the inspector, on my calm representation that it was a case of mistaken identity. I need not add that I know my sister ran no chance of condemnation; but scandal has always got some weight, and therefore I had two ends to meet—her immediate liberation, and the arrest of the true depredators.
I need not state that both Annie and I saw how the ground lay—she had been arrested for Mrs. Lemmins (so called); and in a moment I comprehended the daily change of dress, and the return of the woman Mountjoy alone in order to avoid the greater chance of detection after a robbery by remaining with her companion.
Annie comprehended my warning glance as our eyes met, when the inspector, in the charging-office, stated the case; and I have no doubt he thought we knew the suspicion was strong. But I think I staggered him when I said—“Do thieves usually wear the jewellery they steal?”
“Good bye, Annie,” I said; and I could not trust myself to kiss her—nor did she offer to touch my cheek.
Now, what was to be done? Here were the facts. Annie could not be released till the next day, and I had about eighteen hours in which to work for her, and procure the arrest of the women going by the names respectively of Mountjoy and Lemmins. Had they taken the alarm? If so, how long? If not, what extent of time would they require in which to learn how matters stood—when might they infer my sister and I would suspect them? So far, there had passed but two hours and a-half since the arrest. Had they heard of it in that time?
“Can I have a detective in my employ, if you please?” I said to the inspector.
“Two,” the official said; who, in spite of the calmness of apparent fact against Annie Pendrath, was, I saw, interested by my action.
“One,” I said; and a soft-looking, quiet, almost womanly man, with fair hair and weak, soft blue eyes, a man about thirty-five, was placed at my disposal.
We three—myself, the constable (named Birkley), and Mrs. Blazhamey—left that station in a cab called, and then I said—
“Mrs. Blazhamey, the real thieves are your precious drawing-room lodger and her friend.”
“What, Mrs. Mountjoy!” screamed our landlady; “why, she’s a lady.”
“So she may be, but she’s a thief.”
“Then out o’ my house she goes the moment I gets home.”
Of course, this was just the kind of answer I expected. I had balanced it this way: if I do not tell Blazhamey, she will carry the whole history up to Mountjoy the moment we reach home; while if I inform her, she will put the woman on the alert.
“Mrs. Blazhamey,” said I, “will you make five pounds? Yes, I see you will. Go to your daughter’s at Kensington-park—don’t come home till half-past ten, and I’ll pay the note down to-morrow at twelve.”
Of course, she made a thousand objections; but she was packed off, at last, in another cab, and I and the policeman drove to Aylesbury Terrace.
“Policeman,” said I, “if this woman is still in the house, she must only leave it in your company. I’ll take the responsibility of charging her; but I don’t want you to take her (if she’s there) till I give you the word. I want to catch her friend.”
“Lor’, sir! do yer think her frind’ll turn up, and do yer think she’s there? Lor’ bless yer, sir! they takes an ’int in a hurry. They’ve hooked!”
“If she is still there,” I said, “will you watch opposite till I’ve put a canary cage in the second-floor front right-hand window, looking into, and not from the street?”
The blue-eyed detective, the most innocent-looking man I ever saw, opened his azure eyes; and the end of it was, that he agreed to my proposal, which was but natural.
“It may be hours you’ll have to wait,” I said.
“Days,” replied the man, with the best laconicism I ever witnessed.
We left the cab before reaching the house, and then separated to opposite sides of the street. It struck seven as I went up the garden path.
There she was, at the window, reading a yellow-covered book.
She could not have taken the alarm, I thought, or she would not be reading. I had up the servant directly. Did she know why her mistress had left the house in the afternoon?
“No,” the girl replied. “She was very much flustered, and only said, ‘It can’t be—it can’t be.’ ”
She (witness) did not know the beginning of the affair, because she had been out on an errand, and when she came back, missus had her every-day bonnet on. She went out with a policeman. I may here add, that Annie had sent the policeman to our lodgings to Mrs. Blazhamey; having forethought enough not to send to me at the establishment. I than asked the girl whether Mrs. Mountjoy was in at the time.
“No,” the girl said; “she com’d in at five.”
Had any letter arrived for her?
“No—not even a note, mister,” the girl replied.
Now, I could have had Mountjoy arrested at once, but I had learnt that the criminal classes are, as a rule of business, very faithful to each other, and therefore I felt that the apprehension of Mountjoy might prevent that of Lemmins. If the latter heard of Annie’s arrest first, I felt sure that Mountjoy would be in some way informed of the matter; while if our fellow-lodger was the first to acquire the knowledge, the accomplice would be in some way warned. The priority of information would chiefly depend upon this condition—to the residence of which woman was my sister nearest when she was arrested?
I went to the window, after dismissing the servant, and there was that blue-eyed man, who no one could take for a police-officer, eating nuts, and with a couple of newspapers under his right arm. I saw Mrs. Mountjoy was safe, but it was her accomplice I wanted to encompass.
Nothing occurred up to ten minutes to eight, except Mrs. Mountjoy calling for some warm water; but at that time a woman limped up the garden, and carrying a basket of clothes, which, it seemed to me, was just home from the laundress. She did not come in, but she left the basket, and quietly went her way.
Almost immediately after she had closed the gate, the detective opened it, and before he reached the door I had my hand on the lock.
“Quick!” he said, pushing past me; “that’s a ’complice—the letter’s in the wash.”
The girl was coming out of the drawing-room, having taken in the basket, as I ran down to the door; and as the policeman pushed past me and up the stairs without the waste of a moment, I am quite sure the basket had not been carried into the room more than a quarter of a minute, when the officer followed it.
Half a glance satisfied the man. The linen on the top of the basket had been roughly turned over. There was no letter in Mrs. Mountjoy’s hand, but I saw it was trembling. She was seated in the chair near the window, exactly as I had seen her when I came home, but the book she had been reading was on the table.
The officer looked from me to the basket, flinging an expression into his blue eyes I never should have thought could characterize them; and then turning to the woman, he said—
“Come—the game’s up.”
“I don’t understand you,” said the woman.
“I does,” added the officer; and continued to me—“will you go and fetch a cab, sir? I dare say the lady’ud rather not walk.”
Upon the removal and charging of the woman I need not dilate, as those circumstances have nothing to do with my statement.
What I wanted was the letter, which I felt sure, without the help of the policeman, had been brought amongst the linen.
She had not had time to read it, and, therefore, it would not be destroyed, unless she had recognized the policeman’s step at the bottom of the stai
rcase, and had managed to annihilate it while he and I were ascending the staircase. The officer appeared to have been aware of the value of the letter equally with myself; for when I returned to the house, he had manacled her hands, as he told me afterwards, to prevent her from touching the letter if she had it about her.
Under the policeman’s directions, I kept my eyes on the ground from the drawing-room to the cab—(I seem to be writing the word “cab” very frequently; but the fact stands, that I was in one cab or another by far the better part of the score of hours between Annie’s arrest and the end of my statement)—and I was quite sure the letter was not dropped during the passage. Again, when we reached the station-house, the vehicle was closely examined, and even the ground over which we passed to the charging-office.
Then the woman was closely searched. I was told that even her hair was examined minutely, and the basque of her stays taken out. But all to no purpose—the letter was not found. That some kind of communication had been made, or rather attempted, I was certain, for the policeman had recognized the apparent laundress as a hanger-on, and general thieves’ go-between.
The conclusion both I and the officer came to before we left the station was, that the letter, or note, was in the drawing-room, and still in the basket.
It was clear she could not have found and read the warning, however short, in the few moments that elapsed while I ran down stairs and up again with the constable. It would take some seconds to reach the chair in which she was seated, and further time in which to hide the communication.
The constable said, “P’raps she swallered it,” as a kind of preparation for the worst. But I was not inclined to accept this theory, notwithstanding he urged that it might have been a mere scrap of paper; because it seemed impossible that it could have been found, masticated, and swallowed in the time.
When the officer and I returned to the house, it wanted a quarter to nine. You see, time was progressing.
And now began the search for the letter. And here it was that I think my experience beat that of the police constable; for, after we had ransacked the basket, and were quite sure the letter was not within it, be began the ordinary routine search, while I sat down and began to think. The constable supposed I was broken down, and so he said—
“Chirrup, sir.”
Whereupon I answered him—
“Go on, officer; I’m searching, too.”
I suppose he was inclined to laugh, for he turned away to the stove. It was summer time (August), and so there was no fire in the grate. The officer, being at the stove, began examining it.
“Any ashes on the ground?” I asked.
“Why, you don’t suppose she burnt it? It’s hid,” the man replied.
“Any soot on the hobs or hearth?”
“No,” he replied.
“Then the top moveable flap of the stove has not been moved. Could a letter—take this card—be thrust between the damper and its frame?”
“No,” said the man; “there’s a hedge to it.”
“Then, what are you staying about the stove for?” I asked.
The man turned, looked at me, his foolish-looking jaw dropped low, and then he said—
“You knows a thing or two, mister—you do.”
Of course I do not wish to hide from the reader that I was trying to copy Edgar Poe’s style of reasoning in this matter; for confessedly I am making this statement to show how a writer of fiction can aid the officers of the law.
“I shall do the regular round,” said the officer, beginning to the right of the fire-place.
Now, as I sat, I was exerting all my reason to deduce the probabilities of the place of concealment from the facts known. I remembered that in the case of a search for a letter by the French police, recounted by Poe, that while the officers were hunting for the missive, even in the very legs and backs of the chairs, that it was stuck in a card rack, openly, with a dozen others; and though this knowledge was the basis upon which I built up my argument, yet, of itself, it was valueless, for I felt it would require a mind far beyond the common-place—a condition which did not distinguish Mountjoy—to imagine and rapidly complete a mode of concealment which should be successful by its very candour.
I felt that this woman had concealed the communication—if, indeed, it were not destroyed, a supposition I refused to entertain—in such a manner as a child would conceive, with the superaddition of some dexterity, the result of the shifting and elusive nature of her life.
I was still pondering, when the officer came to the bookcase, which was locked.
“Yere’ll be a job, to hunt all through them books,” said the blue-eyed, amiable officer, in a confidential tone.
Now, had the bookcase been opened? I got up, and looked at the projecting ledge of the escritoire portion, below the bookcase. The dust had been blowing that day, and the upper part of one of the windows was still open. A glance showed me the case had not been unclosed, for the particles of dust lay equally over the ledge; and I noticed that the opening, or key-door was furnished with an inner green silk curtain, which was shut in, and protruded below the bottom of the panel. Had it been opened, this curtain must have broken the regularity of the dust, which was not disturbed. So, again, the fine, white, pulverous particles lay on the upper part of the two knobs of the escritoire slide—a fact which proved to me that the escritoire had not been opened, as in that case both handles must have been touched.
My argument was so clear, that the officer did not even hesitate to admit I was right.
“And what about the cupboard under the askertor?” he asked.
“Search it,” I said, “though I doubt if it’s there. She was a stout woman, and would avoid stooping.”
“Ha!” answered the officer approvingly; but he examined the cupboard, and found little else than china in it.
Still I sat, for I felt I could thus more easily concentrate my thoughts than by standing. And do not suppose that all this time I did not think of Annie. The fact is, I knew I could best serve her by acting exactly as though I was doing an ordinary duty, rather than one of love. Indeed, if people would but think of themselves a little less than they do, they would often-times get through more work than most men manage.
“Officer,” I said, after a pause, in which he had looked over the chairs, under the table-cloth, and in all parts of the ebony inkstand—even fishing in the ink with a pen, and catching nothing worth the taking. “Officer, will you examine the joins of the wall-paper from the ground, to about six feet high?”
“Very well, mister; but will you help me move the heavy things?”
“Only note the joins you can see,” I said, adding, with the first smile I had indulged in since the morning, “I don’t think she had them out and back again in the time it took us to come upstairs—see if the joins fit and are flat.”
This was a long piece of work for the officer, and dusk was coming on as he made half-way round the apartment.
“Look at the cracks in the mantelpiece, where the flat and the top of each pillar come together? Nothing! Well, and now the edge of the carpet all round the room, where the edge can easily be raised.”
I dare say you will wonder that I did not help actively to search. I was hunting with my brains. Was it possible, I thought, that always anticipating a visit from the police, she had some easy place of concealment for pieces of jewellery and small articles of value, and into which she had conveyed the letter?—of the existence of which there could be no doubt, for we found that the tumbled linen belonged, some of it to children, and some of it to grown-up men, while a pair of stockings were unfolded, “and,” said the constable, “somehow, a stockin’ allers is the pest-bag among ’em.”
Could such a place of immediate concealment be a slit in the carpet? This might be the case, and I suggested the idea to the officer.
“Then hadn’t we better have the carpet up!” he asked.
“It will cause a great waste of time,” answered I, “and we will not do so
till we have done searching elsewhere.”
But I found this idea so clung to my mind, that it impeded the progress of my thought. So, deciding that I must settle this point before I proceeded to another, I sat devising a means of ascertaining if there were a slit in the carpet without hauling it up. Soon I found one. If I took up one end of the carpet, and flapped the air under it, the dust you will always find under a lodging-house carpet would rise, and fly in a little cloud through any cutting.
The officer saw the force of this argument, and it was put into operation.
But nothing came of it; and I think it was at this point that my official friend began to break down, saying—
“Derpend upon it, she swallered it.”
Then he began to hunt again—this time behind the pictures, but I soon called his attention from them by saying—
“The moderator-lamp.”
“Ha! I didn’t think o’ the lamp,” said the officer.
But we found nothing in the lamp beyond disappointment.
Time, however, had not been lost; for the field of observation was nearly gone over. The letter, or scrap of paper, was not below the wall-hangings, for not one of the seams was loose, or wet with paste or gum. It was not up the chimney, not even concealed in the paper ornament in the stove, nor about the bookcase, lamp, chairs, or table; nor, in all probability, was it under the carpet.
“The tea-caddy,” I said, after a pause.
The caddy was easily opened, for Birkley had brought the woman’s keys with him; but it was searched to no purpose. And when the night had well closed in, and Mrs. Blazhamey had come home (before her time, though), and hindered us, we were no nearer a satisfactory result than we had been at the commencement of the search. By this time, the carpet had been taken up, the pictures down and out of their frames, every loose book about nearly pulled to pieces with examination, and even the bell-pulls unripped. The sacking of the chairs, the bottom of the fender, the cornice of the bookcase—a hundred spots, nine-tenths of which must have been totally inaccessible to the woman in the time at her disposal, had been examined, and with equal want of success.
