McLevy (24 page)

At the time Dan left me, I was not in this grand way of thinking. Nay, to be very plain, I was laughing in my sleeve; because, in the first place, a detective is not a Methodist preacher; and in
the second place, because I have a right to my fun as well as others; and in the third place, because I came to the conclusion that Dan Gillies had some reason for shaving his whiskers which ought
to interest me. In short, I had no doubt that Dan and his “wife” had been at the ship-launch.

With the laugh, I suppose, still hanging about my lips as a comfortable solace after my ineffectual hunt after the brewer’s clerk and the jolly maman, I entered the Office, where the first
information I got was, that a lady had been robbed of her purse at Leith, and that a young wench was in hands there as having been an accomplice along with a swell of a pickpocket who had
escaped.

“I was thinking as much,” said I, with a revival of my laugh; “I know the man.”

And so I might well say, for I had now got to the secret of the shaved whiskers.

“What mean you?” said the Lieutenant.

“Why, just that if you want the man, I will bring him to you. I will give you the reason of my confidence at another time.”

“To be sure we want him,” was the rather sharp reply of my superior.

“Then I will fetch him,” said I.

And so I went direct to Brown’s Close, where I knew the copartnership of Gillies and M’Diarmid formerly carried on business, both in the domestic and trading way. Domestic! what a
strange word as applied to these creatures—charm, as it is, to conjure up almost all the associations which are contained in the whole round of human happiness! Yes, I say domestic; happiness
is a thing of accommodation. These beings will go forth in the morning in the spring of hope, and after threading dangers which are nothing less than wonderful, jinking the throw of the loop of the
line which grazes their very shoulders, and turning and doubling in a thousand directions to escape justice, they meet at nightfall to
enjoy
the happiness of a home. The beefsteak, as it
fries, gives out the ordinary sound, the plunk of the drawn cork is heard, and they narrate their hairbreadth escapes, their dangers, and their triumphs. They laugh, they sleep, but their enjoyment
terminates with my knock at the door. The solitary inmate is wondering at the absence of the female without whom the word “domestic” becomes something like a mockery. It is needless to
deny him affections; he has them, and she has them, as the tiger and the tigress have them. They don’t complain like other folk, because they don’t bark or growl at Providence; but the
iron screw is in the heart. I have read its pangs in the very repression of its expression.

I had been so quick in my movements that I went right in upon my man just as he had entered, no doubt after the cautious doublings consequent upon our prior interview. The salutation given me
was a growl of the wrath which had been seething in the Pappin’s digestor of his heart.

“What right have you to hound me in this way?” he cried, as he closed his fist and then ground his teeth.

“Why, Dan,” said I, calmly, “I’m still curious about the whiskers.”

“Whiskers again,” he roared.

“Aye, just the whiskers,” said I. “I have told you I am curious about them, and I want to know why you parted with what you seemed so proud of?”

“Gibe on; you’ll make nothing of me,” he cried again. “I defy you.”

“Well, but I cannot give up the whiskers in that easy way,” said I, “because I have an impression that if the lady in Leith had not lost her purse, your whiskers would still
have clothed your cheeks.”

From which cheeks the colour fled in an instant. Even to the hardest of criminals the pinch of a fact is like the effect of a screw turned upon the heart. It is only we who can observe the
changes of their expression. Dan knew, in short, that he was caught; and I have before remarked that the regular thieves can go through the business of a detection in a regular way.

“Well,” he said, as he felt the closing noose, and with even a kind of grim smile, “I might as well have kept my hair.”

“Never mind,” said I, “it will have time to grow in the jail. Come along. The cuffs?”

“Oh no, I think you have no occasion. Them things are only for the irregulars, you know. But do you think you’ll mend Daniel Gillies by the jail?”

“No,” said I, “I don’t expect it.”

“Then why do you intend to send me there?”

“Why,” replied I, in something like sympathy for one who I knew to be of those who are trained to vice before they have the choice of good or evil laid before them, “just
because it is my trade.”

And, strange as it may seem, I observed a tear start into his red eye.

“Your trade,” said he, as he rubbed the cuff of his coat over his face, “your trade; and have you a better right to follow it than I have to pursue mine? You didn’t learn
yours from your father and mother, did you?”

“No, Dan, but I know you did.”

“Yes, and the more’s the pity,” replied he, as he got even to an hysterical blubber. “I have had thoughts on the subject. Even when last in the Calton I could not sleep.
Something inside told me I was wronged, but not by God—by man. I was trained by fiends who made money by what they taught me, and I have been pursued by fiends all my life. When was a good
lesson ever given me, or a kindly word ever said to me, except by a preacher in the jail with a Bible in his hand? Suppose I had listened to him, and when I got out had taken that book into my
hand, and had gone to the High Street and bawled out, ‘Put me to a trade, employ me, and give me wages.’ Who would have listened to me? A few pence from one, and the word
‘hypocrite’ from another, and then left to my old shifts, or starve. Take me up, but you’ll never mend me by punishment.”

I always knew Dan to be a clever fellow, but I was not prepared for this burst. Yet I knew in my heart it was true.

“Well,” said I, “Dan, I pity you. I have often thought that if that old villain David, and that old Jezebel Meg, who were your parents, had not corrupted you, you had heart and
sense to be a good boy.”

“Ay, and it has often wrung my heart,” he replied, “when I have seen others who were born near me, though only in Blackfriars’ Wynd, respectable and happy, and I a
criminal in misery by the chance of birth; but all this is of no use now. Then where’s Bess, poor wretch?”

“She’s in Leith jail.”

“Right,” cried he, as he blubbered again. “I sent her there. She was a playmate of mine, and I led her on in the path into which I was led. She might have been as good as the
best of them.”

And the poor fellow, throwing himself on a chair, cried bitterly.

I have encountered more than one of these scenes. They have only pained me, and seldom been of any service to the victims themselves. Were a thousand such cases sent up to the Privy Council, I
doubt if their obduracy in endowing ragged and industrial schools would be in the slightest degree modified.

I believe little more passed. I had my duty to perform, and Dan was not disobedient. That same evening he was sent to Leith. He was afterwards tried. He was identified by the lady and a boy who
knew him, and sentenced to twelve months. Bess got off on the plea of not proven. I lost all trace of them, but have no hopes that either the one or the other was mended by the detection through
the whiskers. The hair would grow again not more naturally than would spring up the old roots of evil planted by those who should have engrafted better shoots on the stock of nature.

The Club Newspaper

❖

T
he sliding scale is so far applicable to us as well as to thieves. As the latter proceed from crime to crime, the less to the greater—in the
scarlet tint from the lighter to the deeper, so we slide on from trace to trace till we get to the fountain. And there is this similarity, too, between the cases. Our beginnings are small, but they
are hopeful, and as the traces increase, we get more energetic and bolder: so with the thieves; there is an achieved success which leads to the greater triumph. Nay, I have known the parallel
carried further. If we fail in one attempt, we try again; and I have a case to give, but not just now, where the urchin Gibbon’s first attempt at a till, from which he appropriated one
farthing
, and for which he was punished by confinement, was quickly succeeded by a greater triumph, to the amount of
seventeen shillings and sixpence
. My present case has a
peculiarity, in so far as I contrived to make a paltry theft the lever whereby to raise up another of a serious description.

In 1840, Mr Ellis, the manager of the Queen Street Club, was exposed to much trouble, suspicion, and difficulty, by complaint after complaint, on the part of the officers frequenting and
sleeping in the house, that money, in five and ten-pound notes, had been taken from their portmanteaus. The case was painful to Mr Ellis in more respects than one; for although no suspicion could
attach to him, yet in all such concealed robberies, the natural shades that spread everywhere over all in positions liable to be suspected, require to be elevated or dispersed by the light of
reason, and that light comes always with an effort. Mr Ellis came to the Office, and I got my charge. I saw at once that the culprit was one of the waiters; but then there were several in the
house, and I knew all the difficulties of a case of that kind. The wider spread the suspicion, the less easy the concentration. I would do my best, and Mr Ellis had confidence at least in my
zeal.

Repairing, accordingly, to the Club one forenoon, I questioned Mr Ellis as to the habits of the waiters, and, in particular, which of them lived out of the house. I found that one man, Donald
M’Leod, had a house in Rose Street, with a wife and no children; and in order that I may not take too much credit to myself, I may state that that man was more suspected by his master than
any of the others. I was now so far on my way. I called the waiters together in a room with closed doors.

“Now, gentlemen,” (that’s my polite way) “I have to inform you that there is a robber among you. Bags and portmanteaus have for a lengthened period been opened in this
house, and sums of money extracted. All who are innocent will be glad to answer in the affirmative to my question. Will you consent to your trunks and persons being searched?”

“Yes,” answered every one.

“Donald M’Leod,” continued I, “an honest married man, with a decent wife, I have no doubt can have no objection to my going to his house and taking a look about
it—not that I have any suspicion of him because he lives out of the Club, but that his trunks being at home, I must make him like the others.”

“No objection,” replied honest Donald, whose honesty, however, did not sit so easy upon him as honest Rab’s of certain romantic notoriety.

“You will all remain here till I finish my process in the house.”

To which last question having got the answer I expected, I went out and told Mr Ellis to take care that no messenger should, in the meantime, be allowed to leave the house. The search among the
trunks yielded me just as much as I expected—perhaps a little more, in the shape of certain love epistles, which might have made a little fortune to the street speech-criers. What a strange
undercurrent, swirling in eddies, does love keep for ever moving! But what had I to do with love, who only wanted money,—two things that are so often cruelly separated, but which should be
for ever joined.

I then proceeded to Rose Street, and soon finding my house, I knocked gently. A quiet, decent-looking woman opened it.

“Are you Mrs M’Leod?”

“Ay,” she answered without fear or suspicion, for what did she know of James M’Levy the thief-catcher?

“Well, my good woman,” said I, as I shut the door behind me somewhat carefully, and afterwards sat down, “you don’t know, I fancy, that some things have been amissing
belonging to the gentlemen of the Club? Donald, no doubt, so far as I know, is innocent; but as all the waiters, like honest men, have consented that their trunks should be searched, it is but
fair, you know, that I should take a look through your house, to put them all on a footing of equality.”

“And that’s right,” said she, with really so little timidity, or rather with so much apparent sincerity, that, if I had not been M’Levy, I would have thought that Donald
was an honest man after all.

With this permission, and under so kindly a sanction, I commenced my search, by no means a superficial one—perhaps deeper in proportion to Mrs M’Leod’s seeming sincerity. It
was not altogether unsuccessful—small thefts lead on in the scale to big ones, and superficial traces to deeper. I got some newspapers, one with the Club’s address, and putting them
together, said—

“Mrs M’Leod, you will allow me to take these papers; I fancy Mr Ellis allows Donald, as a favourite, to take away an old one now and then to amuse him at home, and, perhaps, to read
to you.”

“Nae doot,” said she, “ye dinna fancy Donald wad steal them.”

“By no means. I never said it,” replied I. I was not bound to say I never
thought
it-—a little beyond my candour.

So I bade Mrs M’Leod good day, and making my way to the Club, I told Mr Ellis the result of my search.

“Well,” replied he, “you have got something, and you have got nothing.”

“Had Donald M’Leod any authority from you to take these papers, and this one especially directed to the Club?”

“Certainly not; but the matter is so small, that I can’t see how anything can be made of it.”

“And you would give up the charge?”

“Yes; it cannot lead to my money.”

“Well,” said I, “if that is your decision, I bow to it; but I tell you this, that out of that solitary old newspaper I will get your money. Will you give me my own
way?”

“Well, I have heard so much of your success in desperate cases, I don’t care though I do.”

“Agreed,” said I.

And without further parley, I went to Donald, who was at the time in the lobby.

“Donald,” said I, “I want you up to the Office.”