London, 6th July, 18--.
SIR,--You are rather an elderly person, and, as such, naturally inclined
to be a little jealous of men like me, who are in the prime of their
lives and their faculties. Under these circumstances, it is my duty to
be considerate toward you, and not to bear too hardly on your small
failings. I decline, therefore, altogether to take offense at the tone
of your letter; I give you the full benefit of the natural generosity of
my nature; I sponge the very existence of your surly communication out
of my memory--in short, Chief Inspector Theakstone, I forgive you, and
proceed to business.
My first duty is to draw up a full statement of the instructions I have
received from Sergeant Bulmer. Here they are at your service, according
to my version of them.
At number Thirteen Rutherford Street, Soho, there is a stationer's shop.
It is kept by one Mr. Yatman. He is a married man, but has no family.
Besides Mr. and Mrs. Yatman, the other inmates in the house are a
lodger, a young single man named Jay, who occupies the front room on
the second floor--a shopman, who sleeps in one of the attics, and a
servant-of-all-work, whose bed is in the back kitchen. Once a week a
charwoman comes to help this servant. These are all the persons who, on
ordinary occasions, have means of access to the interior of the house,
placed, as a matter of course, at their disposal.
Mr. Yatman has been in business for many years, carrying on his affairs
prosperously enough to realize a handsome independence for a person in
his position. Unfortunately for himself, he endeavoured to increase the
amount of his property by speculating.
He ventured boldly in his investments; luck went against him; and rather
less than two years ago he found himself a poor man again. All that was
saved out of the wreck of his property was the sum of two hundred
pounds.
Although Mr. Yatman did his best to meet his altered circumstances, by
giving up many of the luxuries and comforts to which he and his wife had
been accustomed, he found it impossible to retrench so far as to allow
of putting by any money from the income produced by his shop. The
business has been declining of late years, the cheap advertising
stationers having done it injury with the public. Consequently, up to
the last week, the only surplus property possessed by Mr. Yatman
consisted of the two hundred pounds which had been recovered from the
wreck of his fortune. This sum was placed as a deposit in a joint-stock
bank of the highest possible character.
Eight days ago Mr. Yatman and his lodger, Mr. Jay, held a conversation
on the subject of the commercial difficulties which are hampering trade
in all directions at the present time. Mr. Jay (who lives by supplying
the newspapers with short paragraphs relating to accidents, offenses,
and brief records of remarkable occurrences in general--who is, in
short, what they call a penny-a-liner) told his landlord that he had
been in the city that day and heard unfavourable rumours on the subject
of the joint-stock banks. The rumours to which he alluded had already
reached the ears of Mr. Yatman from other quarters, and the confirmation
of them by his lodger had such an effect on his mind--predisposed as it
was to alarm by the experience of his former losses--that he resolved to
go at once to the bank and withdraw his deposit. It was then getting on
toward the end of the afternoon, and he arrived just in time to receive
his money before the bank closed.
He received the deposit in bank-notes of the following amounts: one
fifty-pound note, three twenty-pound notes, six ten-pound notes, and six
five-pound notes. His object in drawing the money in this form was to
have it ready to lay out immediately in trifling loans, on good
security, among the small tradespeople of his district, some of whom are
sorely pressed for the very means of existence at the present time.
Investments of this kind seemed to Mr. Yatman to be the most safe and
the most profitable on which he could now venture.
He brought the money back in an envelope placed in his breast pocket,
and asked his shopman, on getting home, to look for a small, flat, tin
cash-box, which had not been used for years, and which, as Mr. Yatman
remembered it, was exactly of the right size to hold the bank-notes. For
some time the cash-box was searched for in vain. Mr. Yatman called to
his wife to know if she had any idea where it was. The question was
overheard by the servant-of-all-work, who was taking up the tea-tray at
the time, and by Mr. Jay, who was coming downstairs on his way out to
the theatre. Ultimately the cash-box was found by the shopman. Mr.
Yatman placed the bank-notes in it, secured them by a padlock, and put
the box in his coat pocket. It stuck out of the coat pocket a very
little, but enough to be seen. Mr. Yatman remained at home, upstairs,
all that evening. No visitors called. At eleven o'clock he went to bed,
and put the cash-box under his pillow.
When he and his wife woke the next morning the box was gone. Payment of
the notes was immediately stopped at the Bank of England, but no news of
the money has been heard of since that time.
So far the circumstances of the case are perfectly clear. They point
unmistakably to the conclusion that the robbery must have been committed
by some person living in the house. Suspicion falls, therefore, upon
the servant-of-all-work, upon the shopman, and upon Mr. Jay. The two
first knew that the cash-box was being inquired for by their master, but
did not know what it was he wanted to put into it. They would assume, of
course, that it was money. They both had opportunities (the servant when
she took away the tea, and the shopman when he came, after shutting up,
to give the keys of the till to his master) of seeing the cash-box in
Mr. Yatman's pocket, and of inferring naturally, from its position
there, that he intended to take it into his bedroom with him at night.
Mr. Jay, on the other hand, had been told, during the afternoon's
conversation on the subject of joint-stock banks, that his landlord had
a deposit of two hundred pounds in one of them. He also knew that Mr.
Yatman left him with the intention of drawing that money out; and he
heard the inquiry for the cash-box afterward, when he was coming
downstairs. He must, therefore, have inferred that the money was in the
house, and that the cash-box was the receptacle intended to contain it.
That he could have had any idea, however, of the place in which Mr.
Yatman intended to keep it for the night is impossible, seeing that he
went out before the box was found, and did not return till his landlord
was in bed. Consequently, if he committed the robbery, he must have gone
into the bedroom purely on speculation.
Speaking of the bedroom reminds me of the necessity of noticing the
situation of it in the house, and the means that exist of gaining easy
access to it at any hour of the night.
The room in question is the back room on the first floor. In consequence
of Mrs. Yatman's constitutional nervousness on the subject of fire,
which makes her apprehend being burned alive in her room, in case of
accident, by the hampering of the lock if the key is turned in it, her
husband has never been accustomed to lock the bedroom door. Both he and
his wife are, by their own admission, heavy sleepers; consequently, the
risk to be run by any evil-disposed persons wishing to plunder the
bedroom was of the most trifling kind. They could enter the room by
merely turning the handle of the door; and, if they moved with ordinary
caution, there was no fear of their waking the sleepers inside. This
fact is of importance. It strengthens our conviction that the money must
have been taken by one of the inmates of the house, because it tends to
show that the robbery, in this case, might have been committed by
persons not possessed of the superior vigilance and running of the
experienced thief.
Such are the circumstances, as they were related to Sergeant Bulmer when
he was first called in to discover the guilty parties, and, if possible,
to recover the lost bank-notes. The strictest inquiry which he could
institute failed of producing the smallest fragment of evidence against
any of the persons on whom suspicion naturally fell. Their language and
behaviour on being informed of the robbery was perfectly consistent with
the language and behaviour of innocent people. Sergeant Bulmer felt from
the first that this was a case for private inquiry and secret
observation. He began by recommending Mr. and Mrs. Yatman to affect a
feeling of perfect confidence in the innocence of the persons living
under their roof, and he then opened the campaign by employing himself
in following the goings and comings, and in discovering the friends, the
habits, and the secrets of the maid-of-all-work.
Three days and nights of exertion on his own part, and on that of others
who were competent to assist his investigations, were enough to satisfy
him that there was no sound cause for suspicion against the girl.
He next practised the same precaution in relation to the shopman. There
was more difficulty and uncertainty in privately clearing up this
person's character without his knowledge, but the obstacles were at last
smoothed away with tolerable success; and, though there is not the same
amount of certainty in this case which there was in the case of the
girl, there is still fair reason for supposing that the shopman has had
nothing to do with the robbery of the cash-box.
As a necessary consequence of these proceedings, the range of suspicion
now becomes limited to the lodger, Mr. Jay.
When I presented your letter of introduction to Sergeant Bulmer, he had
already made some inquiries on the subject of this young man. The
result, so far, has not been at all favourable. Mr. Jay's habits are
irregular; he frequents public houses, and seems to be familiarly
acquainted with a great many dissolute characters; he is in debt to most
of the tradespeople whom he employs; he has not paid his rent to Mr.
Yatman for the last month; yesterday evening he came home excited by
liquor, and last week he was seen talking to a prizefighter; in short,
though Mr. Jay does call himself a journalist, in virtue of his
penny-a-line contributions to the newspapers, he is a young man of low
taste, vulgar manners, and bad habits. Nothing has yet been discovered
in relation to him which redounds to his credit in the smallest degree.
I have now reported, down to the very last details, all the particulars
communicated to me by Sergeant Bulmer. I believe you will not find an
omission anywhere; and I think you will admit, though you are prejudiced
against me, that a clearer statement of facts was never laid before you
than the statement I have now made. My next duty is to tell you what I
propose to do now that the case is confided to my hands.
In the first place, it is clearly my business to take up the case at the
point where Sergeant Bulmer has left it. On his authority, I am
justified in assuming that I have no need to trouble myself about the
maid-of-all-work and the shopman. Their characters are now to be
considered as cleared up. What remains to be privately investigated is
the question of the guilt or innocence of Mr. Jay. Before we give up the
notes for lost, we must make sure, if we can, that he knows nothing
about them.
This is the plan that I have adopted, with the full approval of Mr. and
Mrs. Yatman, for discovering whether Mr. Jay is or is not the person who
has stolen the cash-box:
I propose to-day to present myself at the house in the character of a
young man who is looking for lodgings. The back room on the second floor
will be shown to me as the room to let, and I shall establish myself
there to-night as a person from the country who has come to London to
look for a situation in a respectable shop or office.
By this means I shall be living next to the room occupied by Mr. Jay.
The partition between us is mere lath and plaster. I shall make a small
hole in it, near the cornice, through which I can see what Mr. Jay does
in his room, and hear every word that is said when any friend happens to
call on him. Whenever he is at home, I shall be at my post of
observation; whenever he goes out, I shall be after him. By employing
these means of watching him, I believe I may look forward to the
discovery of his secret--if he knows anything about the lost
bank-notes--as to a dead certainty.
What you may think of my plan of observation I can not undertake to say.
It appears to me to unite the invaluable merits of boldness and
simplicity. Fortified by this conviction, I close the present
communication with feelings of the most sanguine description in regard
to the future, and remain your obedient servant,