The Female Detective (12 page)

I am now convinced that Georgy was not only quite capable of managing without help, but I am quite sure he relied upon his own abilities.

It must have been very far from pleasant for all George Lejune's young friends, but they had mutually to endure that agony. I refer to their examination and the investigation of their premises by the detective force of the city of London.

One gentleman was so shocked that he took to his bed over the business.

Meanwhile, George had got clean away, and the police (they were the city police be it remembered) could gain no tidings of him.

His ability in deception was wonderful.

He had deceived his mother as to his expenditure by saying he worked and was paid for overtime. This accounted for his absence and his ease in the matter of cash-payments.

And his companions, his fellow-clerks, and also myself, he had blinded by the statement that he had all the money he earned to spend on himself, his mother being in the receipt of an annuity.

The annuity statement—
as
a statement—was strictly true, but he neglected to add that the income did not go beyond seven pounds ten per annum.

This explanation had of course served to cover his ordinary expenses. But he had to manage to avoid exhibiting any remarkable flush of cash before his companions. He would never spend more than they. This was ascertained beyond any question.

But as the slow discoveries of the police were pieced together, it came out clearly enough, that when alone, or in company who were not aware of his actual circumstances, he would launch out into handsome extravagances, always, however, liking to have something for his money.

He would take a private box, it appeared, after a nice quiet dinner at the Tavistock—which he rather patronized than otherwise—or he would take his ease in a stall at the Italian, dressing at the Tavistock. He had much musical taste.

The opera or play over, he would take a quiet chop, it appeared, at Evans's, where he was rather looked upon as a gentleman. Then taking a fast cab home to Bow he would to bed, and rise cheerfully, and to all appearances contentedly, to coarse coffee and thick bread and butter, beyond which plain breakfast the rigid economy of the household would not go.

I doubt if anybody suspected George Lejune. When he was found out there was no need for suspicion.

He spent his money, or rather his employers', so judiciously, that nobody could suspect him. For instance—he had one pair of opera-glasses which were left at the Tavistock, and another pair at an establishment much affected by him—a place I will call Aggerney Vick—an establishment which is not much to look at, but where you can pay half-sovereigns to see prize-fights, or running matches, or walking encounters.

I have heard that he would take his
lorgnettes
and seat at this place with the air of a self-conscious and well-bred prince.

There was no
blague
about him. He did everything in a gentlemanly and an effective manner. He was always brilliantly civil, courteous, attractive, and never exceeded the margin of good language, while he bore with much friendly patience the strong expressions of others.

And to think that all these social good qualities should end in his printed description all over the walls of London—his height, the colour of his hair, eyes, and finally, the statement (which was eminently untrue) that he had a slightly Jewish cast of countenance.

He had appropriated the money he had taken in three divisions. The first, a month before he said
bon voyage
; the second, a fortnight previous to that event; and the third, on that very fatal Friday morning.

The last appropriation was the most audacious, and this he covered with the meek request that as he was going into the country he should be glad of his month's salary.

On the Thursday, so great was the laxity evident in the conduct of affairs at the office, no smaller a sum in gold (Georgy was too wise at any time to take anything but gold, though it is evident he was too luxurious a rascal to be bored with a weight of metal, for it was found out he exchanged his gold for notes in several instances)—no less a sum in gold than £75 was left unbanked and in the office safe.

Georgy was last in the office, after the others had gone, and he showed this gold to a friend—one of those to whom the police were so specially unobliging after the catastrophe—commenting upon the bad management which allowed such a sum to remain at the office.

It went next morning.

Wherever he passed that evening, it is very clear he plotted those next days' performances, which ended, as far as he was concerned, so successfully. It is possible he saw that the game could not be carried on much longer, that the difference between the cash and bank-books must terminate in discovery, and the result be his fall. Therefore, no doubt he argued, as there was a good golden haul in £75, it was a fine opportunity to be off, as the next day was Friday.

Hence that little arrangement by which he got clear away, with three days' clear start. On that Friday morning, as he expected, he was sent with the £75 of gold to the bank. He forged his draft, he paid in the money this time without any nice reference to figures, he left the pass-book to be made up, he returned to the office (in all probability with the gold in his pocket) he asked for his leave of absence till two o'clock the next day, as he was going in the country. Then he suggested a cheque for his month's money, with the idea, it may be presumed, of getting all he could, and then he said “good day, sir.” And went.

I believe the business of that four pound cheque as the month's wages was a more difficult pill to swallow on the part of the principal than any bolus in the case. “It was
so
cool,” he said.

But Georgy being now safe for three days, the accusing bank-book being at the bank, and he himself having laid his little plans so cleverly, he was in no hurry to quit the city; and, indeed, to set out the better, he went round to his usual dining place and had a very festive little lunch, finishing up with black coffee after the French fashion.

He was in no hurry to go.

Here he was very gay, brilliant, charming, setting out he was going down into the country to dine with Lieutenant Dun. He was very gay with Amelia, the waitress, and gave her a florin for herself.

He chatted with all those he knew, and he made several small engagements for the following week, and one for Sunday to hear his favourite preacher—a Mr. Mellow.

Then he went, gay to the last, nodding through the plate glass window, and showing some of the very handsomest teeth in the city.

He had deceived every one.

He had told me and others his mother left him his money to spend as he liked—on the contrary she was poor, and took three-fourths of it.

He informed his mother what money he spent was the result of overtime; he had never been paid for overtime.

He had given his friends to understand he had eight pounds a month; he was paid four.

He spent modestly before his old friends—when he was by himself he would pay a guinea for a stall at the opera, and a similar sum before taking possession of that stall, as the price of a dinner.

But the most fallen trait in his character was the appropriation of the diamond ring.

The detectives beginning to make inquiries, the name of Lieutenant Dun, as a gentleman who had given Georgy a diamond ring, was mentioned. The lieutenant was found out, and then he discovered where his diamond ring had gone to.

This cheerful Georgy had left the card-party to which reference has been made, and gone into a bedroom, and after coolly taking the ring off the glass, he had returned to the card-table and played more cheerfully than ever.

“I do assure you,” said the lieutenant's brother to me—for the sake of the mother I had made some inquiries—“I do assure you he ate quite a handsome supper (he having the jewel in his pocket all the time), and he must have been perfectly at his ease, because I remember his discussing, with perfect justice, the merits of two varieties of cream in our
soufflé
.”

Just think of it. He was so fallen that he could even appropriate a ring, and yet he must have cared much for the world's opinion or he never could have taken such pains to charm it.

He got clean away.

I have given this narrative as an instance of the error of the absurd belief that young men when they are guilty can be neither cunning nor cheerful, and the farther mistake which lies in the belief that a detective is never hoodwinked.

The city police got to Gravesend three hours after Georgy had left that town. I never had any doubt about him being George after hearing what the boatman said when describing the lad. He added—“He was a main fine young gentleman, werry taking and smiling, and with a diamunt ring on his finger, an' as I was rowin' on him he steered his hand out Lunnonways, an' he says, says he, ‘There's a many there 'ud like to see me.'”

Well, he got away. I am afraid he will not make a figure in the world, but I am pretty certain of this, that he will be moderately happy wherever he goes, and will not be over-much troubled with his conscience.

The Unraveled Mystery

We, meaning thereby society, are frequently in the habit of looking at a successful man, and while surveying him, think how fortunate he has found life, how chances have opened up to him, and how lucky he has been in drawing so many prizes.

We do not, or we will not, see the blanks which he may have also drawn. We look at his success, thinking of our own want of victories, shut our eyes to his failures, and envy his good fortune instead of emulating his industry. For my part I believe that no position or success comes without that personal hard work which is the medium of genius. I never will believe in luck.

When this habit of looking at success and shutting our eyes to failure is exercised in reference, not to a single individual, but to a body, the danger of coming to a wrong conclusion is very much increased.

This argument is very potent in its application to the work of the detective. Because there are many capital cases on record in which the detective has been the mainspring, people generally come to the conclusion that the detective force is made up of individuals of more than the average power of intellect and sagacity.

Just as the successful man in any profession says nothing about his failures, and allows his successes to speak for themselves, so the detective force experiences no desire to publish its failures, while in reference to successes detectives are always ready to supply the reporter with the very latest particulars.

In fact, the public see the right side only of the police embroidery, and have no idea what a complication of mistakes and broken threads there are on the wrong.

Nay, indeed, the public in their admiration of the public successes of the detective force very generously forget their public failures, which in many instances are atrocious.

To what cause this amiability can be attributed it is perhaps impossible to say, but there is a great probability that it arises from the fact that the public have generally looked upon the body as a great public safeguard—an association great at preventing crime.

Be this as it may, it is certain that the detective force is certainly as far from perfect as any ordinary legal organization in England.

But the reader may ask why I commit myself to this statement, damaging as it is to my profession.

My answer is this, that in my recent days such a parliamentary inquiry (of a very brief nature, it must be conceded) has been made into the uses and customs of the detective force, as must have led the public to believe that this power is really a formidable one, as it affects not only the criminal world but society in general.

It had appeared as though the English detectives were in the habit of prying into private life, and as though no citizen were free from a system of spydom, which if it existed would be intolerable, but which has an existence only in imagination.

It is a great pity that the minister who replied to the inquiry should have so faintly shown that the complaint was faint, if not altogether groundless.

I do not suppose the public will believe me with any great amount of faith, and simply because I am an interested party; yet I venture to assert that the detective forces as a body are weak; that they fail in the majority of the cases brought under their supervision; and finally, that frequently their most successful cases have been brought to perfection, not by their own unaided endeavours so much as by the use of facts, frequently stated anonymously, and to which they make no reference in finally giving their evidence. This evidence starts from the statement, “from information I received.” Those few words frequently enclose the secret which led to all the after operations which the detective deploys in description, and without which secret his evidence would never have been given at all.

The public, especially that public who have experienced any pressure of the continental system of police, and who shudder at the remembrance of the institution, need have no fear that such a state of things municipal can ever exist in England. It could not be attempted as the force is organized, and it could not meet with success were the constitution of the detective system invigorated, and in its reformed character pressed upon English society, for it would be detected at once as unconstitutional, and resented accordingly.

With these remarks I will to the statement I have to make concerning my part, that of a female detective, in the attempt to elucidate a criminal mystery which has never been cleared up, which from the mode in which it was dealt with, ran little chance of being discovered, and which will now never be explained.

The simple facts of the case, and necessary to be known, are these:—

One morning, a Thames boatman found a carpet-bag resting on the abutment of an arch of one of the Thames bridges. This treasure-trove being opened, was found to contain fragments of a human body—no head.

The matter was put into the hands of the police, an inquiry was made, and nothing came of it.

This result was very natural.

There was little or no intellect exercised in relation to the case. Facts were collected, but the deductions that might have been drawn from them were not made, simply because the right men were not set to work to—to sort them, if I may be allowed that expression.

The elucidation, as offered by me at the time, and which was in no way acted upon, was due—I confess it at first starting—not to myself, but to a gentleman who put me in possession of the means of submitting my ultimate theory of the case to the proper authorities.

I was seated one night, studying a simple case enough, but which called for some plotting, when a gentleman applied to see me, with whom I was quite willing to have an interview, though I did not even remotely recognise the name on the card which was sent in to me.

As of course I am not permitted to publish his name, and as a false one would be useless, I will call him Y——.

He told me, in a few clear, curt words, very much like those of a detective high in office, and who has attained his position by his own will, that he knew I was a detective, and wanted to consult with me.

“Oh, very well, if I am a detective, you can consult with me. You have only yourself to please.”

He then at once said that he had a theory of the Bridge mystery, as he called it and as I will call it, and that he wanted this theory brought under the consideration of the people at Scotland Yard.

So far I was cautious, asking him to speak.

He did so, and I may say at once that at the end of a minute I threw off the reserve I had maintained and became frank and outspoken with my visitor.

I will not here reproduce his words, because if I did so I should afterwards have to go through them in order to interpolate my own additions, corrections, or excisions.

It is perhaps sufficient to say that his entire theory was based upon grounds relating to his profession as a medical man. Therefore, whenever a statement is made in the following narrative which smacks of the surgery, the reader may fairly lay its origin to Y——; while, on the other hand, the generality of the conclusions drawn from these facts are due to myself.

I shall therefore put the conversations we had at various times in the shape of a perfected history of the whole of them, with the final additions and suggestions in their proper places, though they may have occurred at the very commencement of the argument.

As our statement stood, as it was submitted to the authorities, so now it is laid before the public, official form and unnecessary details alone being excised.

1. The mutilated fragments did not when placed together form anything like an entire body, and the head was wanting.

The first fact which struck the medical man was this, that the dissection had been effected, if not with learning, at least with knowledge. The severances were not jagged, and apparently the joints of the body had not been guessed at. The knife had been used with some knowledge of anatomy.

The inference to be drawn from these facts was this, that whoever the murderer or homicide might be, either he or an accessory, either at or after the fact, was inferentially an educated man, from the simple discovery that there was evidence he knew something of a profession (surgery) which presupposes education.

Now, it is an ordinary rule, in cases of murder where there are two or more criminals, that these are of a class.

That is to say, you rarely find educated men (I am referring here more generally to England) combine with uneducated men in committing crime. It stands evident that criminals in combination presupposes companionship. This assertion accepted, or allowed to stand for the sake of argument, it then has to be considered that all companionship generally maintains the one condition of equality. This generality has gained for itself a proverb, a sure evidence of most widely-extended observation, which runs—“Birds of a feather flock together.”

Very well. Now, where do we stand in reference to the Bridge case, while accepting or allowing the above suppositions?

We arrive at this conclusion:—

That the state of the mutilated fragments leads to the belief that men of some education were the murderers.

2. The state of the tissue of the flesh of the mutitilated fragments showed that the murder had been committed by the use of the knife.

This conclusion was very easily arrived at.

There is no need to inform the public that the blood circulates through the whole system of veins and arteries in about three minutes, or that nothing will prevent blood from coagulating almost immediately it has left the veins. To talk of streams of blood is to speak absurdly.

If, therefore, an artery is cut, and the heart continues to beat for a couple of minutes after the wound is made, the blood will be almost pumped out of the body, and the flesh, after death, will in appearance bear that relation to ordinary flesh that veal does to ordinary beef—a similar process of bleeding having been gone through with the calf, that of exhausting the body of its blood.

What was the conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the fragments showed by their condition that the murdered man had been destroyed by the use of the knife?

The true conclusion stood thus—that he was murdered by foreigners.

For if we examine a hundred consecutive murders and homicides, committed in England by English people, we shall find that the percentage of deaths from the use of the knife is so small as barely to call for observation. Strangling, beating, poisoning (in a minor degree)—these are the modes of murder adopted in England.

The conclusion, then, may stand that the murder was committed by foreigners.

I am aware that against both the conclusions at which I have arrived it might be urged that educated and uneducated men have been engaged in the same crime; and secondly, that murders by the knife are perpetrated in England.

But in all cases of mystery, if they are to be solved at all, it is by accepting probabilities as certainties, so far as acting upon them is concerned.

3. There was further evidence than supposition to show that the remains were those of a foreigner.

This evidence is divided into a couple of branches. The first depends upon the evidence of the pelves, or hip bones, which formed a portion of the fragments; the second upon the evidence of the skin of the fragments.

First—

It may be remarked by any one of experience that there is this distinctive difference between foreigners and Englishmen, and one which may be seen in the Soho district any day—that while the hips of foreigners are wider than those of Englishmen, foreign shoulders are not so broad as English; hence it results that while foreigners, by reason of the contrast, look generally wider at the hips than shoulders, Englishmen, for the greater part, look wider at the shoulders than the hips.

This distinction can best be observed in contrasting French and English, or German and English soldiery. Here you find it so extremely evident as not to admit discussion.

Now, was there any evidence in the fragments to which this comparative international argument could apply?

Yes.

The medical gentleman who examined the fragments deposed that they belonged to a slightly-built man. Then followed this remarkable statement, that the hip bones, or pelves, were extremely large.

The second branch of this evidence, relating to the skin, may now be set out.

The report went on to say that the skin was covered with long, strong, straight black hairs.

Now it is very remarkable that the skin should exhibit those appearances which are usually associated with strength, while the report distinctly sets out that the fragments belonged to a slightly-built man.

It strikes the most ordinary thinker at once that his experience tells him that slight, weakly made men are generally distinguishable for weak and thin hair. Most men at once recognise the force of the poetical description of Samson's strength lying in his hair.

There is, then, surely something contradictory in the slight build, and the long, strong black hair, if we judge from our ordinary experience. But if we carry our experience beyond the ordinary, if we go into a French or Italian eating-house in the Soho district, it will be found that scarcely a man is to be found who is destitute of strong hair, for the most part black, upon the face. It need not be added that hair thickly growing on the face is presumptive proof that the entire skin possesses that faculty, the palms of the hands and soles of the feet excepted.
2

Now follows another intricate piece of evidence. The hairs are stated to be long, black, and strong—that is to say, black, thick, and without any curl in them.

Any man who, by an hospital experience, has seen many English human beings, will agree with me that the body hair here in England is rarely black, rarely long, and generally with a tendency to curl.

Now, go to the French and Italian cafés already referred to, and it will be found that the beards you shall see are black, very strong, and the hairs individually straight.

The third conclusion stands thus: