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 war-time 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 house-maid 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 business-like 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 motor-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 motor-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 motor-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 motor-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 motor-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 bond-slave 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 motor-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 motor-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 half-way 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.
[Illustration: THE PEARL NECKLACE STOLEN IN THE POST BETWEEN PARIS AND
LONDON, JUNE, 1913. VALUED AT ABOUT £110.000.]
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
A.B.C. 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, without, 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 for 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.’
Every now and then there was a sensational seizure at the house of a
receiver of stolen property. In October 1913 a certain jeweller’s shop
in Shaftesbury Avenue was raided and the contents were carried off to
Bow Street, which resembled for some days an exhibition of wedding
presents. It contained the proceeds of quite twenty known burglaries,
and even then only one-third of the plate had been identified because
it has been found by experience that in these days, when people insure
their jewellery against burglary and draw the insurance money, they
take little interest in bringing the thieves to justice. There is also
the fact that things are stolen from a house sometimes for many months
before they are missed. Some of the objects in this exhibition belonged
to a Lady H----, and while she was going round she caught sight of a
clock given to her by Lord Charles Beresford which she thought was
still at home. Unclaimed stolen property is held by the police for a
certain period and then disposed of by public auction.
[Illustration: THE CONTENTS OF A RECEIVER’S SHOP WHICH CONTAINED THE
PROCEEDS OF MORE THAN SIXTY BURGLARIES.]
In 1913 there was an epidemic of safe-breaking. The capacity of the
oxy-acetylene flame for cutting through steel plates appealed to the
safe-breaker, who had long deplored the weight and inefficiency of the
tools on which he had to rely for his livelihood. For years there has
been a competition between the burglar and the safe-maker, and so far I
believe the safe-maker has won.
Two enterprising persons spent a Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1913
in a certain office in Regent Street cutting a great hole in the safe
with an oxy-acetylene apparatus, which they had transported to the
house in a taxi-cab on the previous afternoon. Having secured their
booty they left this very incriminating apparatus behind them.
Not many weeks later the police were forewarned that an attempt would
be made on a safe in a certain much frequented cinema hall, but here
the burglars received a nervous shock. All went according to plan that
Sunday afternoon. The street and the hall had the deserted Sunday look
when, on a sudden, just as operations were beginning, from every corner
sprang truncheoned men, and the burglars were caught in a trap.