SOME DISAPPEARANCES
In the last week of April, 1908, a notice was posted on the doors of
the London, Manhattan, and Jersey Syndicate, in Moorgate Street. It
was brief, but it was to the point:
"Owing to the disappearance of Mr. George T. Baggin, the L. M. and J.
Syndicate has suspended operations."
With Mr. Baggin had disappeared the sum of £247,000. An examination
of the books of the firm revealed the fact that the London,
Manhattan, and Jersey Syndicate was--Mr. Baggin; that its imposing
title thinly disguised the operations of a bucket-shop, and the
vanished bullion had been most systematically collected in gold and
foreign notes.
Mr. Baggin had disappeared as though the earth had swallowed him up.
He was traced to Liverpool. A ticket to New York had been purchased
by a man answering to his description, and he had embarked on the
_Lucania_. The liner called at Queenstown, and the night she left,
Mr. "Coleman" was missing. His clothing and trunks were found intact
in his cabin. The ship was searched from stem to stern, but no trace
of the unfortunate man could be discovered.
The evening newspapers flared forth with, "Tragic End of a Defaulting
Banker," but Scotland Yard, ever sceptical, set on foot certain
enquiries and learnt that a stranger had been seen in Queenstown
after the ship sailed. A stranger who left for Dublin, and who
doubled back to Heysham; who came, via Manchester, back to London
again. In London he had vanished completely. Whether or not this
was the redoubtable George T. Baggin, was a matter for conjecture.
T. B. Smith, of Scotland Yard, into whose hands the case was put, had
no doubt at all. He believed that Baggin was alive.
Most artistic of all was the passing of Lucas Damant, the Company
Promoter. Damant's defalcations were the heaviest, for his
opportunities were greater. He dealt in millions and stole in
millions. Taking his holiday in Switzerland, Mr. Damant foolishly
essayed the ascent of the Matterhorn without a guide. His alpenstock
was picked up at the edge of a deep _crevasse_, and another Alpine
disaster was added to the alarming list of mountaineering tragedies.
What time four expert guides were endeavouring to extricate the lost
man from a bottomless pit, sixteen chartered accountants were engaged
in extracting from the chaos of his documentary remains the true
position of Mr. Damant's affairs, but the sixteen accountants, had
they been sixteen hundred, an the space of time occupied in their
investigation, in a thousand years, would never have been able to
balance the Company Promoter's estate to the satisfaction of all
concerned, for between debit and credit yawned an unfathomable chasm
that close on a million pounds could not have spanned.
In the course of time a fickle public forgot the sensational
disappearance of these men; in course of time their victims died or
sought admission to the workhouse. There were spasmodic discussions
that arose in smoke-rooms and tap-rooms, and the question, as to
whether they were dead or whether they had merely bolted, was hotly
debated, but it may be truthfully said that they were forgotten; but
not by Scotland Yard, which neither forgets nor forgives.
The Official Memory sits in a big office that overlooks the Thames
Embankment. It is embodied in a man who checks, day by day, hour by
hour, and minute by minute, the dark happenings of the world. He is
an inconsiderable person, as personalities go, for he enters no
witness-box to testify against a pallid prisoner. He grants no
interviews to curious newspaper reporters, he appears in no magazines
as a picturesque detector of crime, but silently, earnestly, and
remorselessly he marks certain little square cards, makes grim
entries in strange ledgers, consults maps, and pores over foreign
newspaper reports. Sometimes he prepares a _dossier_ as a cheap-jack
makes up his prize packet, with a paper from this cabinet, a
photograph from that drawer, a newspaper-cutting, a docketed
deposition with the sprawling signature of a dying man, a
finger-print card--and all these he places in a large envelope, and
addresses it in a clerkly hand to Chief Inspector So-and-So, or to
the "Director of Public Prosecutions." When the case is over and a
dazed man sits in a cell at Wormwood Scrubbs pondering his sentence,
or, as it sometimes happens, when convict masons are at work carving
initials over a grave in a prison-yard, the envelope comes back to
the man in the office, and he sorts the contents jealously. It is
nothing to him, the sum of misery they have cast, or the odour of
death that permeates them. He receives them unemotionally,
distributes the contents to their cabinets, pigeon-holes,
guard-books, and drawers and proceeds to make up yet another
_dossier_.
All things come to him; crime in all its aspects is veritably his
stock-in-trade.
When George T. Baggin disappeared in 1908, his simple arrangement of
indexing showed the connection between the passing of Lucas Damant,
six months later, and the obliteration of Gerald Grayson. The
Official Memory knew, too, what the public had no knowledge of:
namely, that there had been half-a-dozen minor, but no less
mysterious, flittings in the space of two years.
Their stories, briefly and pithily told, were inscribed on cards in
the silent man's cabinet. Underneath was the significant word,
"Incomplete." They were stories to be continued; some other hand
than his might take up the tale at a future time, and subscribe
"Finis" to their grim chapters. He was satisfied to carry the story
forward as far as his information allowed him.
There never was a more fascinating office than this of the Silent
Recorder's. It was terribly business-like, with its banked files,
its innumerable drawers, its rows of deep cabinets. "A, B, C, D,"
they ran; then began all over again, "AA, BB, CC," except the big
index drawer where "Aabot, Aaroon, Aato, Abard, Abart" commenced the
record of infamous men. There were forgers here, murderers, coiners,
defaulters great and small. There are stories of great swindles, and
of suspected swindles, of events apparently innocent in themselves,
behind which lie unsuspected criminalities.
I show you this office, the merest glimpse of it, so that as this
story progresses, and information comes mysteriously to the hand of
the chief actor, you will understand that no miracle has been
performed, no Heaven-sent divination of purpose has come to him, but
that at the back of the knowledge he employs with such assurance is
this big office at New Scotland Yard. A pleasant office, overlooking
the Embankment with its green trees and its sunny river and its very
pleasant sights--none of which the Recorder ever sees, being
short-sighted from overmuch study of criminal records.