McLevy by James McLevy

Author:James McLevy [McLevy, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857902153
Publisher: Birlinn

The Wrong Shop

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It is only a state of civilisation that can produce so strange a relation as that between detectives and robbers. In any other condition of society it is inconceivable, for love is almost always mutual, and hatred reciprocal in rude states; and it is not very easy to conceive a condition where one party follows and seeks from a spirit of well-wishing, and another curses and flies from a spirit of hatred. If there is any one we wish to see more than another, it is a robber; and if there is any creature out of the place of four letters a robber wishes to be away from, it is an officer of the law. It may seem strange enough if I should be able to give a case where this was reversed, in a manner which has sometimes forced from me a laugh.

In 1847, a house in Minto Street, and another in Claremont Crescent, were broken into, and robbed of a vast number of portable articles of great value. The families had left the houses to go to the country; and the robbers, being aware that there was nobody to disturb them, had gone about their selection of articles with much artistic deliberation and skill, taking only those things which could be melted, such as silver utensils, or altered or dyed, such as silk dresses, shawls, and the like. We got intimation first of the Minto Street affair, for it was some time before it came to be known even to the proprietor that the house in Claremont Street had been disturbed. Having got my commission, I very soon came to the conclusion that, for a time at least, there could be no discovery by tracing the articles; and just as soon to another, that the whole were secreted, probably in a mass, in some of the lodging-houses resorted to by the gang—for that there was a gang I had no manner of doubt—nor was I at a loss about some of the component parts of the crew,—at least I knew that one or two well-known housebreakers had been seen in the city, and their affinities are almost a matter of course with us.

There was ingenuity, therefore, required in this affair beyond the mere care in dogging some of the artists to their dormitories, and this I soon accomplished by tracing Jane Walker, one of their callets, to the house of one Sim at the West Port. Other bits of intelligence contributed to the conclusion, that Sim’s house was the sleeping place of some of them, and the rendezvous of the whole pack. As I have already said, I have always had a craving for a full haul when I put out my net, and take my seat in the cobble to see the wily tribe get into the meshes. So on this occasion I made my arrangements with this view.

At a late hour one night I took with me several constables and proceeded to Sim’s house.

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