The Arthur Morrison Mystery by Arthur Morrison

Author:Arthur Morrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, crime, suspense, detective, sleuth
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-11-03T04:00:00+00:00

SPOTTO’S RECLAMATION

First published in Pall Mall Magazine, Vol. 35, 1905, pp 457-464)

Spotto Bird’s reclamation, like a number more of his adventures, came about through a watch.

It was at a period of some difficulty in Spotto’s history. He had had a bad “fall”—a stretch and a half; that is to say, in shameless English, he had been imprisoned for eighteen months; the most prolonged misfortune of the sort that had yet befallen him. Now, it is not well to begin “the game” again too soon after such a release, and that for more than one reason. Firstly and obviously, of course, the police eye is upon you, and a fresh conviction just then is looked on with peculiar disfavour from the bench. But furthermore, eighteen months with hard labour (and for that term the living is as hard as the labour) has a ruinous effect on the professional abilities of so finished a fingersmith as Spotto Bird. Like the cultured quickness of the boxer trained to the hour, like the lightning riposte of the fencing-master, and like the preternatural spurt of the nurtured runner, the dexterity of the master pickpocket is an artificial product, kept alive by daily practice, and vanishing utterly with a month’s disuse. And even that is not all; the seclusion of a year and a half costs more than touch and training; the practitioner loses his accustomed nerve; he feels shy in the crowded streets, and desperately apprehensive of a thousand eyes.

So it came about that for some little while Spotto Bird did not “go out.” In the common and ordinary sense of the term he went out frequently, it is true, but never in the restricted and recondite meaning of the term—to go in search of professional adventure. Funds sank low—very low. There was a half-sovereign gratuity on discharge from prison, but what was ten shillings to a man of Spotto’s tastes and habits? There were also a few contributed half-crowns and crowns from friends, but a sporting attempt to found a financial start on these ended in disaster, through the pestilent prowess of the wrong horse. And two of Spotto’s most sympathetic and affluent friends were in trouble (prison) themselves. Spotto Bird was driven to begin the game again.

But it was not easy. On his very first outing he encountered a certain plain-clothes constable, well known to him and others in the trade as “Ears.” This man’s ears—they were huge ears, splayed outward—had won him promotion from the uniformed force; not so much because of their size as because of their quickness, whereby he had been enabled, unsuspected, to overhear conversations addressed from one cell to another, and so acquire information of much use.

No sooner had Spotto discovered a promising little crowd before a shop window—it was in Regent Street—than he became aware of the presence of “Ears.” There the enemy lounged by the kerb, and Spotto, cold shivers running between his shoulder-blades, averted his face and slunk away, hoping—and he thought with reason—that he had not been observed.

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