Odd People

by Basil Thomson

  Every now and then a detective would display real initiative in keeping observation. In quiet suburban roads a loitering man would at once bring a face to every window in the street. To keep watch upon a house there must be some excuse. In one case the detective became a jobbing gardener and undertook to clip the hedges and weed the paths of the house opposite and if he took a long time over the job, that is quite in accordance with the habits of jobbing gardeners; in another, attired in suitable clothing and armed with pick-axes, two detectives proceeded to dig up the roadway. Their leisurely method of work must have convinced the bystanders that they were genuine employees of the Borough Surveyor.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE IMAGINATIVE LIAR

  DURING THE WAR there was an outbreak of what the Americans call ‘congenital lying’, but which might better be termed ‘adolescent lying’ on the part of young persons. We all know the young girl who tells fibs and in normal times she would probably be spanked and sent to bed without her supper, but in wartime any story, however wild, was accepted.

  One afternoon during the first year of the war I received an urgent request from a chief constable in the Midlands for help in a case of great difficulty. The family of a doctor in good practice had been upset by receiving a series of outrageous letters and postcards signed by a lady’s maid who had lately gone to another situation. While she had been with them she was a quiet and respectable person and yet her letters could have been written only by a woman of vicious and depraved character. They came in all sorts of ways. Sometimes they were pushed under the front door; sometimes they were thrown in through an open window and, though the front door was put under police observation and no one was seen to come to it, they were dropped into the letter-box at intervals of three hours.

  And then the house itself became bewitched. The mistress would put down her bunch of keys on the kitchen dresser for a moment and a wicked fairy whisked them away. The cook would put a pound of butter into the larder: it vanished. The housemaid lost her pen and ink, the doctor his comb and the whole house was ransacked from top to bottom without recovering any of these things. It is a most harassing thing for a doctor in a busy practice to come home to a house which has been bewitched by wicked fairies.

  There was nothing to go upon except the bundle of letters, which certainly bore out the description which the chief constable had given of them. I suppose that Mr Sherlock Holmes would have taken another injection of cocaine and smoked three or four pipes over them before he sat himself down to analyse the ink and examine the paper under a powerful lens. The detective inspector to whom I entrusted the case did none of these things. He asked for the bundle of letters and took the next train. I thought that the case might take him a week, but it took him exactly two hours. When he returned next day he gave the following account of his proceedings.

  On the way down in the train he read through the letters and made a note of every word that had been misspelt. There were seventeen. He then composed a piece of dictation which took in the seventeen words. It must have been like composing an acrostic. On his arrival at the house he summoned the entire household – the doctor, his wife, the children and the five servants – into the dining room and, adopting the businesslike procedure of the village schoolmaster, he served out paper and pens. When all were seated comfortably at the table he cleared his throat and gave them a piece of dictation. All entered into the spirit of the thing – all except one and she made no sign. At the end of twenty minutes the pens ceased to scratch and the copies were handed in. They did not take him long to run through. After a brief inspection he detained the mistress and the ‘tweeny’ and dismissed the others. He then said that he would like the mistress to take him up to the ‘tweeny”s sleeping quarters with the girl herself. In her room was a locked box. The ‘tweeny’ had lost the key, but when he talked of breaking it open the key was suddenly discovered. In the box were writing materials identical with those of the incriminatory letters and then after a little pressing the girl burst into tears and made a clean breast of it. She did not like the ex-lady’s maid; she did like to see the whole household in a flutter. She began with the letters and when she saw these beginning to lose their effect she became the wicked fairy with the keys and the butter-pats. Some people are surprised that children of sixteen can write horrible letters, but experience has shown that this is quite a common aspect of adolescent lying.

  The spy mania was a godsend to the adolescent liar. A lady in a large house in Kensington came one day in great distress to say that her little maid had been kidnapped by masked men in a black car and carried off to some unknown destination in the suburbs, apparently with the intention of extorting information from her; but fortunately, with a resource of which her mistress had found no evidence in her domestic duties, she had escaped from them and returned the next morning. The mistress thought that we ought to lose no time in catching these masked miscreants and their black car. The girl’s story was certainly arresting. It had been her evening out and while coming away from listening to the band in Hyde Park a tall, dark man (these men are always tall and dark) had stopped her and had said, ‘You have got to come with me. You are wanted for the Cause.’ She refused. He had then given a peculiar whistle (these men always give a peculiar whistle) and two other tall, dark men had emerged from the darkness and laid hold upon her.

  ‘What were the policemen doing all this time? Didn’t you cry out?’

  ‘All the men wore masks and that frightened me so that I did not dare to cry out. Two of them took me, one on each side and led me out to the cab-stand. There I saw a dark car with the blinds down. They pushed me into it and shut the door and then the car started and drove at terrible speed with no lights.’

  ‘No lights? But the police would have stopped it.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t see any lights. It all looked black.’

  ‘Which way did you go?’

  ‘Oh, we passed down Kensington High Street and away into the country, but I was too frightened to notice the direction.’

  ‘And then?’

  Then we got to a large house standing in a garden. It was all black. We stopped at the front door and I heard one of them say, ‘Where shall we put her?’ and the other said, ‘Into the black room.’ They took me out of the car and down a passage and pushed me into a black room with no light and locked the door. I heard them whispering and consulting and I thought they were going to kill me.

  ‘Well, and then what happened?’

  ‘Nothing, sir. I stayed on in the room for quite a long time and then I went to the window and found I could get out.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Well, then I got out and came home.’

  ‘How did you find your way?’

  ‘Oh, I met a lady not far from the house and she told me how to get home.’

  ‘But it must have taken you hours.’

  ‘It did, sir. I didn’t get home till the morning.’

  The inspector asked her whether the men had talked about spying. They had not. Why did she think they were spies? Because they wore masks and had a black car. Also, I suppose, because they were tall and dark. He then took the mistress aside and said that he would like an opportunity of searching her box, because something she had said led him to think that there was only one man and he was not tall or dark. The key was produced, the box opened and there on the top lay – a pair of soldier’s gloves. And then the whole story was dragged out of her. He was in khaki, he had no confederates and no car, but he was soft-spoken and the poor fellow was just going off to the Front. That cleared up the mystery.

  In 1915, when the spy mania was at its height, a little general servant, aged sixteen and fresh from the country, threw her master and mistress into an almost hysterical state by her revelations. One day the mistress found her in the kitchen writing cabalistic signs on a sheet of paper. The girl explained that this was part of a dreadful secret and when pressed a little, confided to her that she had become a sort of bondslave of a
German master spy named ‘E. M.’, who had employed her to make a plan of the Bristol Channel and had taught her to operate an extraordinary signalling engine called the ‘Maxione’. She said that she was in terror of her life, that the spy would come and tap at the kitchen window, that he had a powerful green car waiting round the corner in which he would whisk her off to operate the ‘Maxione’ and the red lights, without which the submarines lying in wait in the Bristol Channel would not be able to do their fell work. When she saw that her master and mistress swallowed her story she began to enlarge upon it. She introduced into it a mythical girl friend, a sort of Mrs Harris, in whose name she wrote to herself in a disguised handwriting and this girl friend gave her a great deal of good advice, such as: ‘Trust in E. M. no longer. Really I believe he is a spy.’

  This girl went on to say that in the course of a ride she had taken documents out of his pocket which she recognised as containing a plan for blowing up Tilbury Docks. She also produced letters from the spy himself – impassioned love-letters which contained gems like the following:

  Herr von Scheuaquasha will pay you £50 for one tapping of the red light, the X signal of the seventh line, the universal plug and the signalling. The staff of the Kaiser Wilhelm will pay you greatly and you will be rewarded for the rest of your life. You will be mentioned in all the German head papers as the heroine of a brave act and heroic deed. I have a home in Germany and two servants awaiting your arrival. A valet shall wait on you, darling. You shall be driven in a smart car, you shall enjoy all the luxury possible for soul of man on the face of The Globe to bestow on a maid in the hand of marriage. I have an income of £500 a month. We shall live by Berlin honoured and welcomed through Germany and Germany’s people. For the sake of those who love, which I am sure, you would sacrifice your country for my sake. Your excommunication of the language known in England will be brought before the Kaiser and for saving his people you shall be forgiven for your English blood. If I was certain that I had English blood in my veins I would go to the West Indies to be gnawed by a lion.

  From this it may be inferred that the German master spy was not a Fellow of the Zoological Society. In another letter E. M. reproached her for not keeping an appointment: ‘You have ruined me and yourself by not coming out. There is yet plenty of time. Our men cannot get the messages through and even if it was switched halfway it would be well. Germany must have their report and I shall again try for you sooner or later.’

  The letters from the spy were in code, but those from the girl friend were en clair. Gradually the volume of correspondence grew until it became a formidable bundle. The master and mistress confided in a sensible friend, who passed the whole matter over to the authorities. Some of the master spy’s letters were amatory, but the love-making was indissolubly intertwined with strict business, only every now and then his admiration for her transcendent beauty would break loose – ‘But your beauty may enchant us.’

  The extraordinary part of this fraud was that the girl was quite uneducated and had never been out of her native village and yet she could fabricate different handwritings and make signs that distantly resembled Pitman’s shorthand. She had dotted all over her map sham chemical and mathematical symbols and whenever she was cornered for an explanation she invented a new romance.

  She had reduced her mistress to such distress that she did not dare to leave the house and therefore the police superintendent who was detailed to see her had to make a visit to the suburbs. There he found a simple, pleasant-faced country girl, the daughter of a labourer, who would have been supposed to have no knowledge of the world outside her native village. Her employers were in such a state of mind that it was decided to send her home to her mother. One of the curious points about her imagination was her power of inventing names upon the spot, which is a very rare quality even among practised liars. When pressed as to the name of the master spy, without a moment’s thought she gave it as Eric Herfranz Mullard. When she was pressed to explain why the Germans were not able to operate their own machine, the ‘Maxione’, which she described as being a sort of collapsible framework of iron rods, quite portable, but 5 or 6 feet in height when extended, she said that the keys of the base, which flashed rays from the little lamps attached to the arms at the top, had to be worked with great speed with the fingers and the elbows as well and she gave a demonstration on the dining room table, which was so energetic that it must have left bruises on her elbows. The flashes were green and red and could be seen for a distance of 150 miles. That was why one had to strike the keys so hard and, naturally, a German’s fingers were not likely to be so nimble as those of an English girl.

  The ages of from fourteen to eighteen have been so productive of trouble to the police that I have sometimes regretted that all girls between those ages are not safely put to sleep by the state and allowed to grow quietly and harmlessly into womanhood unseen by the world. Perhaps the legend of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ may have been suggested by the pranks of adolescent liars in the dawn of the Christian era. How many hay-stacks have been set on fire by little farm servants? How many ghosts have been conjured up? How much paraffin has been thrown on ceilings to attract photographers for the daily press, merely from an infantile desire to see the grown-ups buzzing about like a nest of disturbed wasps?

  But to return to pre-war memories. At the moment when I took charge of the Criminal Investigation Department the Central Office was busy over the robbery of the pearl necklace. A necklace valued at about £110,000 had been dispatched from Paris to a London jeweller by registered post. The box was safely delivered with all the seals apparently intact, but the pearls were missing and lumps of coal had been substituted for them. At first suspicion fell upon the French postal servants. Elaborate inquiries were made on both sides of the Channel and it was established beyond a doubt that the wrapper and the seals were exactly in the condition in which the parcel was delivered for registration. There was no doubt whatever that they had been properly packed and therefore somewhere there existed a counterfeit seal of the firm, which consisted of the initials ‘M. M.’ within an oval border. My first contribution to the case was to establish by experiment that a counterfeit seal could be made and used on melted sealing-wax within four minutes and that therefore at some point in the parcel’s journey it would have been possible to break the seals, undo the wrappings, remove the pearls and seal the parcel up again without the loss of a post. Gradually the police began to see daylight. Rumours fly in Hatton Garden and it was not long before the names of X and Y and one or two others were whispered in connection with the robbery.

  Then began one of the most difficult cases of observation that I remember. No fox was ever more cunning in covering his tracks. The men had no reason to suspect that they were being followed and yet they never relaxed their precautions for a moment. If they took a taxi to any rendezvous they gave a false destination, paid off the taxi and took another, sometimes repeating this process of mystification two or three times. If they met in Oxford Street to lunch together at an ABC shop they would suddenly change their minds on the doorstep and go off to another and all the while they had an aged discharged convict in their pay to shadow them and call their attention to any suspicious follower. I shall not tell here what devices the police adopted, but I will say that at the last, when every other kind of observation failed, we did adopt a new device which was successful.

  The object throughout had been to find a moment when one or other of the parties had the stolen pearls about his person and when the day came for making the arrest, just as the four thieves were entering a tube station the police failed, because on that particular day they had left the necklace at home. They were detained, nevertheless, in order that a thorough search might be made of all their hiding-places. As it then turned out, the necklace was in the possession of the wife of one of them and when the search became too hot and she feared a visit from the police she put the necklace into a Bryant & May matchbox and dropped it in the street. There it was found, wi
thout, however, its diamond clasp, which had been disposed of separately.

  It did not take the police long to unravel the details of the crime. They found the engraver who had innocently cut the false seal and the office where the parcel had been opened. The thieves had arranged with the postman to bring the parcel to the office for three or four minutes before taking it on to deliver it. Whether the postman knew beforehand what they intended to do is uncertain. They expected to find diamonds, which were far more easily disposed of: when they found pearls, so large that in the trade each pearl had almost a history, they knew that they could not dispose of them and were at first tor throwing them into the Thames. It may be judged that I was not an expert in precious stones when I say that I had the matchbox and its contents laid out on my table for quite half an hour before I was sure that the pearls were genuine. They looked, to my untutored eye, so yellow. We telephoned to the owner and the insurance agent. The owner fell upon the pearls as a man might fall upon some beloved and long-lost child whom he had never expected to see again in this world. I then told him jocularly of my doubts. ‘Yellow?’ he said, with genuine amazement. ‘Yellow? They are rose-colour.’