CHAPTER XI.

MODERN POLICE (continued): INDIA.

Nevertheless, the character of the new police was as little military as

it could be made consistently with the control and discipline of a large body of men. Constables learnt the rudiments of drill, and wore uniform, but were seldom armed except when employed in gaols or to guard treasuries. As a general rule supervision was entirely entrusted to Europeans, but there was a superior grade of native officer fairly well paid. Yet the service was not generally popular, owing to persistent local prejudices, and good material was not always available either for sub-officers or for constables. Natives preferred to enter the fiscal and administrative departments.

At first the new force did not work very smoothly. The military superintendents were not always acceptable to the civilian magistrates, and no doubt many thought more of drill than of their more important functions in preventing and detecting crime. Numbers of the old order of police hated the “new-fangled notions” and resigned, with the result that the force was recruited hastily with inexperienced, often unsuitable men, many of them old soldiers, and few, if any, fitted to deal with intricate and complicated police investigations. Colonel Lewin, one of the first-appointed district superintendents, has frankly recorded his want of experience and his mis-directed zeal when first called to police work; but he also hints at the difficulties and obstacles thrown in his way by magistrates who hated the change. Gradually, however, the steady, settled action of the well-organised, well-governed body of earnest workers has made itself felt, and the regular Indian police of to-day is not inferior to any in the whole world.

Another form of police has existed from time immemorial in India, the rural or village police, and it has still a certain limited power. These functionaries hold office by a quasi-hereditary tenure; they are not appointed by the State nor paid from the public treasury, but they have a recognised position; their clearly defined duties, as well as their emoluments, drawn from the villages, are fixed and controlled by authority. These village watchmen, and they are little more, although distinct and separate from the regular police by constitution, are yet allied to them, being expected to report to them, without fail, all criminal and extraordinary occurrences, and at the same time to take their orders and execute them punctually. This local, unofficial police is not in the highest state of efficiency, perhaps, but much has been done of late to bring its members into good order, and to exact from them a punctual performance of their duties. The worst that could be alleged against them was that they might at times work with evil-doers who were their friends and neighbours, or that they might yield to the threats or temptations of the larger landowners around when these were criminally disposed.

It has been said by all who know India well that the deceit inherent in the character of its people must tend to interfere with the course of justice. Witnesses will not speak freely, or will say too much; they conceal facts or over-colour them just as their interests suggest; some can be bought, others intimidated, while the most independent chafe at police inquiries which are apt to be wearisome and irritating, and though not always personally hostile, will say anything or nothing merely to get rid of the police. “They would condone even grievous wrongs,” says Sir Richard Temple,[17] “disavow the losses of property which they had suffered, and withhold all assistance from their neighbours in similar plights, rather than undergo the trouble of attending at police offices and the criminal courts.”

Police methods under the old system were often most discreditable. The native officers charged with detection had but one thought—to make the case complete. For this they would invent facts, manufacturing evidence from witnesses inspired by themselves. “The police,” an eminent Indian judge once said from the Bench, “will never leave a case alone, but must always prepare it and patch it up by teaching the witnesses to learn their evidence off by heart beforehand, and to say more than they know.” In another case a judge gave it as his opinion that certain prisoners confessed to a burglary merely to screen others whom the police befriended, and that in the prosecution there was not a single fact on which he could with confidence rely. Again, a darogah, or village official, was so impressed with the necessity for succeeding where his colleagues had failed, in a murder case, that he used the most unjustifiable means to create evidence: witnesses were forced under threats and ill-treatment to depose to facts which had never occurred. Another reprehensible practice was that of drugging prisoners before their appearance in court so that they could make no defence. One was given a hookah to smoke, and remembered nothing of what he said or had to say. Still worse remains, for it is a well-authenticated fact, attested by all who have personal experience, that where evidence of the right sort was not forthcoming it was obtained by intimidation or actual torture.

Of the survival of torture in India as a judicial process, secret and unavowed, but undoubtedly practised, there can be no doubt. It was the subject of constant regret to conscientious English officials, who were yet unable entirely to check it. Cases of cruel maltreatment were continually brought to light, and met with exemplary punishment. Thus in 1855 a darogah and his men were convicted in the Court of the “Twenty-four Pergunnahs” of having tortured a man into confession by tying his hands behind him and then hoisting him by his wrists to a beam in the roof. Another case consisted in tying a prisoner’s hands and feet together and introducing a stick below the knees, after which the police, holding each end of the stick, dashed him violently against the door.

As late as 1866, after the introduction of the new system, an inspector and sub-inspector trussed up four recalcitrant prisoners upon the roof of a house and left them there to starve. In the same year another sub-inspector was transported for life for having caused the death of a suspected thief by ill-usage. In this case the victim was stripped on a cold February night, whipped, then water was poured upon his naked body, and a fan was used to keep down the temperature. Again, in the same year, a high official, Colonel Pughe, reports twelve cases in which the police were accused of torturing prisoners, and out of the twelve cases seven convictions were secured. He relates in the same document that soon after the establishment of the new police, a sub-inspector of the old school ordered a man to be tied up and flogged to extort confession from him, and this in open day in the middle of a large bazaar in the Hooghly district! “So little was the occurrence thought of,” writes Colonel Pughe, “that no complaint was made by the sufferer, and it was by the merest accident that the circumstance came to notice.” The custom till then was apparently too common to attract attention. The people of Bengal had become accustomed to be flogged, just as the fakir grew so fond of his bed studded with pointed nails that he could not sleep comfortably on any other. As late as 1870 the editor of a respectable periodical in Bengal expressed his belief that the flogging of supposed delinquents had been so long practised with impunity that the natives took it as a matter of course.

It may be interesting to make a short digression here and recount some of the modes of extra-judicial torture that have prevailed throughout India. There is abundant evidence that this atrocious custom was, and probably still is, common among all sects and classes of natives in India. Dr. Cheevers gives it as his opinion that “the poor practise torture upon each other; robbers on their victims, and vice versâ; masters upon their servants; zemindars upon their ryots; schoolmasters upon their pupils; husbands upon their wives; and even parents upon their children.” “The very plays of the populace,” says another authority, “excite the laughter of many a rural audience by the exhibition of revenue squeezed out of a defaulter coin by coin through the appliance of familiar provocatives.” Colonel Lewin, already quoted, details some of the devices which he discovered had been in use among the old police. They would fill the nose and ears of a prisoner with cayenne pepper; stop the circulation of the blood with tight ligaments; suspend their victim head downwards in a well; and in cases of great obstinacy immerse the body repeatedly in the water until insensibility, but not death, was produced.

Dr. Cheevers has been at great pains to collect details of the various processes. They are torture by heat—by a lighted torch or red hot charcoal or burning tongs, or by boiling oil, which sometimes was poured into the ears and nose; torture by cold; suspension by the wrists, by the feet, by the hair, by the moustache; confinement in a cell containing quicklime; blinding by the bhela nut; placing on a bed of thorns; rubbing the face on the ground; employing the stocks; tying the limbs in constrained postures; placing stinging or annoying insects upon the skin; flogging with stinging nettles; sticking pins or thorns or slithers of bamboo under the nails; beating the ankles and other joints with a soft mallet—a devilish invention from Madras. The list is long and horrible, but before leaving the subject we may mention milder methods, as they seem, because the ill-treatment leaves no mark, but in which the agony is nevertheless extreme. Exposure to the sun is one of these, starvation another, pinching a third, and “running up and down” a fourth, as practised in Madras till quite recently, according to a report under date 1870, where the police, unable to obtain evidence, made it their business to “walk the prisoner about.” This was not done, as was pretended, out of mere wantonness, but with the ostensible purpose of obliging him to show where certain stolen property was hidden. The police relieved each other every two hours or so, but the prisoners were kept perpetually in motion. After a night’s unceasing promenade the craving for rest and sleep becomes imperative, especially in a native who is always ready to sleep, and is often awake for no more than eight hours out of the twenty-four. Other refinements of torture are the infliction of degradation and mental suffering by breaking caste, and by exposing the victims to various indignities.

Police action in India is often complicated, impeded, and even neutralised by the peculiar conditions of the country, where long prevailing, more or less ineradicable custom is supreme. The average native does not pause to balance right or wrong; he likes to do just as his forefathers did through the centuries, and fails to see why an act honoured by long prescription should be called wrong-doing. Offences that the present rulers of India have put down with a strong hand, such as suttee (widow burning), leper burying, and suicide, the natives are still reluctant to call crimes. Thuggee, the cowardly murder and robbery of inoffensive and unsuspicious travellers, was part of its perpetrators’ religion; theft is to thousands a sport or a profession, a habit or family tradition inherited from ancestors who were all gang-robbers. While thus tradition and custom continue to make even serious crime appear venial to the ordinary intelligence, the investigation is continually hampered, and the actual fact often concealed. Many natives, as I have said, detest police proceedings, afraid of their being unduly prolonged, of their wasting time, of their imposing the inconvenient presence of officers charged with the inquiry. Others forbear to speak, either fearing the enmity of the friends or neighbours they may implicate or with a mistaken tenderness for their honour. Yet again, timidity, venality, or stupidity has led to concealment. Witnesses whose testimony was damaging have often been bought off, having been found ready to perjure themselves for quite small sums.

The police themselves have been known to hush up crimes, having been bribed to silence, and it has been discovered later that some mysterious murder had been no secret to them from the first. They have been known on sufficient payment to transport a victim’s corpse to another jurisdiction, so that they might evade all responsibility for its presence. Suspicion of foul play was once aroused (it was in the old days) by the fact that certain persons who had but just dug a well for the irrigation of their fields had, for no plausible reason, filled it up again. Police officers were ordered to reopen the well, and they reported that they had done so, finding nothing wrong. But the magistrate of the district heard presently that a woman had been seen in the neighbourhood of the well just about the time it had been filled up, and that she had disappeared. Rumour said she had been murdered for the sake of some golden ornaments which she wore. The well was now dug out under the official’s own eye, and it was clear that a female corpse had been buried within; a quantity of long hair was found, but the body had been removed, probably by the police.

The dishonest vagaries of the Indian police are nearly endless. The police when baffled in detection will try to create a criminal and manufacture a crime. Higher officials must always be on their guard against such frauds. It is essential, for example, to watch identification closely. A case is on record where the headless body of a woman was found in a well, and suspicion fell upon certain Rajpoots whose sister was known to be missing. They were arrested, and confessed most circumstantially that they had in truth murdered her. Conviction followed, and they would have been executed but for the unexpected reappearance of the missing woman herself. She had eloped with a man who, having heard of the charge brought against her brothers, produced her in court. The accused men, thus saved at the eleventh hour, explained their false confession by their fears that they could not prove their innocence, so strong was the presumption of their guilt. It should be added that the headless corpse was never identified.

One more case of the same kind. A corpse bearing marks of violence was found floating on the Teesta river, and a murder was surmised. The head-constable proceeded to investigate, and found a woman ready to declare that her adopted father, Oootum by name, was missing. She could not identify the body at first, but was eventually persuaded to do so. Corroboration was now needed, and after that the discovery of the perpetrators of the crime. Aided by the woman, the constable fixed upon four men, who were forced (probably in the usual manner) to confess that they had murdered Oootum. Fortunately, at the first inquiry into the case the missing Oootum turned up before the district magistrate. For this the head-constable and three associates were very rightly sentenced to five years’ imprisonment.

A curious case of theft which was never explained, although the supposed thief was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to imprisonment, is told by a Bengal civilian. It appears that a Mr. and Mrs. Phillips were on a visit to the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, and that one evening the lady missed a diamond ring. Information was at once lodged with the police, and a native detective was employed, who entered the Governor’s service disguised as a kitmutgar (butler). Suspicion from the first had rested upon an ayah, or female servant, and it was to be the detective’s duty to worm himself into her confidence. The police officer was successful, as it seemed, for the woman presently admitted that she had stolen the ring. She was anxious to dispose of it, but did not dare. However, she picked out one diamond and handed it over to him to sell, promising him others if he succeeded. The police officer produced the diamond, which was identified by Mrs. Phillips as one belonging to her ring. On this evidence the ayah was tried and convicted. She appealed, but the conviction was upheld.

Not long afterwards Mr. and Mrs. Phillips moved up country, and on unpacking their goods the missing ring was found jammed into an inkstand, with all the diamonds intact. The case was immediately reopened, and it was recommended that the ayah should be forthwith released. One of the judges protested, however, that the conviction was legal, on the ground that the prisoner’s friends had inserted a diamond in the place of the one removed, and had put the ring where it was certain to be found. Nevertheless the ayah was pardoned. The theory held was that the detective, eager to get the credit of having discovered the thief, had fabricated the whole story and gone to the expense of purchasing a diamond in support of it. He still stuck to it that the woman had given him the diamond, which, as has been seen, was one more than the ring contained. Now another strange fact cropped up. Mrs. Phillips discovered that a diamond was missing from a locket she possessed, and when this locket was produced the surplus diamond appeared to fit into the vacant space. From this a new theory was started—that the ayah had really stolen the ring, but, distrusting the disguised kitmutgar, had also picked out the diamond from the locket to test his willingness to serve her. When, later, the case had gone against her, her friends had intervened in the manner described, replacing the ring in the hope of obtaining her pardon. Jewellers who were consulted gave it as their opinion that the surplus diamond was very similar to those in the locket, but no one could swear that it was one of the same. There the matter rested, and the mystery has never been solved.

Attempts to defeat the ends of justice are very often made in India by the natives themselves on their own motion, to satisfy some personal animosity. Many cases might be cited of conspiracy to advance false and malicious charges against an enemy. In one case wounds were fabricated on a body already dead to support an accusation of murder. An old man was found with his head nearly separated from his body and other deep wounds in both shoulders, besides cuts on the back. Yet there had been no considerable effusion of blood, no retraction of the muscles, and medical opinion was emphatic that all these injuries had been inflicted after death, which had undoubtedly occurred from long-standing tubercular disease. It was presently shown that the whole case had been trumped up to support a charge of murder against an unpopular neighbour.

A monstrous case is recorded by Mr. Arthur Crawford, whose “Reminiscences” have been several times quoted in these pages, in which a son was on such bad terms with his father that he elaborated a great plot to involve him in disgrace and suffering, if not to convict him of his own (the son’s) murder. The father was an aged and most respectable Brahmin in the South Konkan, Madhowrao by name, described as a kindly, courtly native gentleman, with intellectual, well-cut features, and spare and active in body. He had this one son, Vinayek, a constant trouble to him, chiefly on account of his wandering habits. He often absented himself for months together, and roamed the country as a gosai, or religious mendicant. After an unusually protracted absence, the father offered the police a reward if they would trace and find his son. The matter was taken up by a local constable, and he had no sooner commenced his investigations than he received an anonymous letter through the post charging the father with having made away with his son. The story was told most circumstantially: how Madhowrao, assisted by his widowed sister, who acted as his housekeeper, had strangled Vinayek in the dead of night, and had then employed two servants to throw the body to the alligators, at the foot of a torrent hard by the village. These servants came forward and described how they had seen the corpse with protruding eyes and tongue, the cord still round its neck, then how they had stripped it, and, tying it to a heavy stone, had thrown it into the water. The constable searched the house, and found hidden away a bundle of clothes with a pair of sandals. Moreover, he fished up a great heap of bones from the alligators’ pool. The whole party were arrested, and the servants, the chief witnesses, were examined. They stuck to their story, declared that they had acted solely to oblige their master, who, they saw, was in great distress, and said that was all they knew.

But Madhowrao himself stoutly denied his guilt, repeating always that his son was alive, but was only keeping out of the way until his father was hanged. Closer inquiry was in the father’s favour, for it was clearly proved that the bones found in the water were those of a bullock, and also that there was no sort of attempt to conceal Vinayek’s clothes. Nevertheless, the High Court, to which the matter had been referred, pressed for the committal of the prisoners.

Meanwhile, the head constable, a very keen-witted and indefatigable officer, had gone away on a journey. Pleading ill-health, he had sought, and obtained, three months’ sick leave, which he had spent to very good purpose in searching for the missing Vinayek. He ran him down at length at a great distance, somewhere in the territory of the Nizam, and brought him back in person, to be confronted with his father, who was still lying under the charge of compassing his death. A very dramatic scene followed; Vinayek was brought into court almost noiselessly behind Madhowrao, who was desired to turn round; at sight of his son he fell down flat on his face insensible, while his sister went off into hysterics. Now Vinayek made full confession of the plot, in which he had been assisted by a young cousin. He was to disappear, as he did, and after an interval the other was to denounce the murderers; the two servants were suborned by the promise of a good reward when Vinayek came into his estate, and they very properly shared the punishment which was inflicted on the chief conspirators.

In these cases it was vindictiveness and animosity that led to the plot, which was only unmasked by the astuteness and perseverance of the police. But greed also is a potent incentive to false accusation of crime, and thus it was with Khan Beg. Coveting the inheritance of a rich relative, Ibrahim Beg, whose heir he was, he laid a deep scheme to secure it without waiting for Ibrahim’s death. Khan Beg was a dissolute wastrel who had been reduced to poverty by his own extravagance, and who knew that he might expect no further help from his kinsman. Ibrahim was married to a young and handsome wife, Chumbelee, with whom he did not live on the very best of terms, due mainly to the lying stories of a confidential servant, an accomplice of Khan Beg’s. One day in a fit of fury he forgot himself so far as to raise his hand against Chumbelee. The woman, goaded by pain and disgrace, screamed aloud in the full hearing of neighbours and servants. Next morning she was gone, and information was laid at the nearest police station by the manservant above mentioned that Chumbelee had been murdered. Officers proceeded at once to Ibrahim Beg’s house, and searched the premises. It was soon seen that some earth in the courtyard had been recently moved; on digging, the headless body of a woman was found a little way down. The body was identified by the manservant, who swore to a bangle found upon one arm, remembering that he had once taken it for his mistress to be mended. A slave-girl who did the household work also declared that the body was Chumbelee’s.

Ibrahim Beg was, of course, apprehended, and locked up, vainly protesting his innocence. His own story was that he had been stupefied, he knew not how, by some narcotic, and after his violent quarrel with his wife, which he did not deny, he had fallen asleep until a late hour the following morning. His jealousy and ill-treatment of his wife were notorious, and told greatly against him; the seclusion in which he had always kept her also militated against him now. So few people had seen her that there was no more evidence of identity than that already adduced. All that could be said in his favour was that without the head, absolute recognition was impossible. Ibrahim Beg himself stoutly denied that the corpse was Chumbelee’s. The trial proceeded, and ended in his conviction; the case was referred to a superior court, which deemed the evidence conclusive; the sentence of death passed was about to be executed, and Khan Beg was on the point of obtaining his ends and acquiring considerable wealth.

But now came the slip. An anonymous letter was received by a young English civilian who had charge of the district, informing him that Chumbelee was still alive, actually residing within twenty miles of the scene of her supposed murder. The magistrate, knowing it to be a case of life and death, straightway rode to the place indicated, a certain tomb occupied by a gang of fakirs, men of evil repute, whom it was necessary to approach with caution. The magistrate, summoning the village police to his aid, cautiously surrounded the tomb, then broke in, and searched the whole place. He came upon Chumbelee at last in an underground apartment.

She was, of course, forthwith taken out and brought back to her husband’s house. The whole plot was now laid bare by the manservant, anxious to save his own skin. He had long been in the power of Khan Beg, and agreed to assist him the moment a body could be found to be palmed off as Chumbelee’s. A widower at last consented to sell the corpse of his recently deceased wife, which they took and decapitated. It was the manservant who had administered the drug to Ibrahim; he made the slave-girl prisoner, and then carried off Chumbelee in a blanket to the fakirs’ tomb. Ibrahim Beg, when he recovered next morning from the effects of the drug, gave the police no information of his wife’s disappearance, for he believed that she had eloped and left him of her own accord. The whole of this pernicious plot was admirably planned, but it failed, as such plots often do, through the avarice of the principal personage. Khan Beg had refused to pay a sum promised to one of his subordinate helpers, and the latter had written the anonymous letter.

In no country is it so essential that the body, in the case of a supposed crime, should be not only produced, but identified, as in India. An Englishman who was ascending the Hooghly nearly suffered the extreme penalty of the law through ignorance of this axiom. He had left his ship at Diamond harbour and hired a native boat to take him on to Calcutta. The boatmen greatly exasperated him by their laziness, and he applied his stick to them so vigorously that three jumped overboard. Their comrades declared that they were drowned, and burst into loud lamentations. On reaching shore they charged him with murder. He was arrested forthwith, and committed to gaol. Ere long he was duly arraigned, and on the oath of the boatmen who had been eye-witnesses of his offence he was convicted without the slightest hesitation. While he lay in gaol, however, under sentence of death, he was visited by a native, who promised him that on the payment of a substantial sum the drowned boatmen should be brought to life. The money was gladly paid, and next day the charge of murder entirely broke down by the reappearance of the missing men. It seemed that they were expert divers, and having gone at once to the bottom they rose again at a considerable distance from the boat, and swam ashore. Their comrades were fully aware of the fact, and the conspiracy was formed so that the English stranger, when in peril of his life, might be induced to pay a large ransom to escape. It is clear from such cases as these that the police of India have to be always on their guard against being led into traps.

Another trick which the police have to guard against is the simulation of death by suicide. This is a very ancient imposture. Captain Bacon, in his “First Impressions in Hindustan,” describes how he saw a corpse bearing three wounds on the chest and many marks of violence brought to a magistrate’s house, with the idea of fixing an accusation of murder on a certain man. The magistrate, having his doubts, was about to examine the body, when he was implored by those who carried it not to pollute it by touch before the rites of sepulture had been performed. He did no more, therefore, than thrust the sharp end of his billiard cue once or twice into the side with such force that the point of the cue penetrated between the ribs. Upon this the muscles of the supposed corpse quivered, and there was a barely perceptible movement of the head. The natives around were now told that life could not be yet extinct, but they persisted in declaring that the man had been dead since cock-crow. Whereupon, a kettle of hot water was produced and a small stream poured upon the foot of the corpse, which there and then jumped up from the litter and ran away at full speed! The same test was applied by a young officer when the body of a native, who was supposed to have been murdered by sepoys, was brought to his tent. There was no more evidence than the existence of the corpse, but the officer was at breakfast, and had the kettle handy. At the first touch of the scalding fluid “the murdered remains” started up and scampered away. Boiling water, by the way, is no doubt a generally satisfactory test of whether life is actually extinct. But there is a better, as practised by a French doctor in a Lyons hospital. He applied the flame of a candle for some seconds to one digit of the hand or foot. A vesicle formed, as it will invariably; if this vesicle contains serous fluid, there is life; if vapour only, death has certainly supervened.

On the whole, the modern Indian police system may be said to operate well. The police have numerous duties over and above those of the prevention and detection of crime. A Government so paternal as that of India finds the machinery of the police exceedingly useful in keeping in touch with the great masses of the population. The constable is the agent through whom the Government issues its orders or conveys its wishes. If the people are wanted in any large numbers, such as for the identification of bodies found, and if foul play is suspected, it is the police who beat the drum and call them in. When supplies are needed, such as carts, camels, bullocks, or forage, for any military expedition, it is the police who work upon the men of the villages and gather in what is required. When a high functionary had discovered a cure for snake bites, it was the police who were entrusted with its distribution through the districts most troubled with poisonous reptiles. The particular panacea was liquid ammonia, which had to be applied at once and in a particular way. It was not only necessary, therefore, to issue supplies of the useful drug, but all the headmen of villages had to be taught how to use it; this was the duty of the police. Again, when the Government once seriously attempted to exterminate snakes, and offered a reward for every dead reptile brought in, the machinery of the police was at once set in motion to encourage natives to hunt up and kill the snakes, and afterwards to distribute the rewards. When the plague of locusts overran the length and breadth of the land, the police were sent out to organise beaters and instruct the villagers how to destroy the terrible pest. Another plague, that of rats, the jerboa rat, which travels like a kangaroo by leaps and bounds and eats up everything it meets, was to be grappled with by the police, and though they do not seem to have been very effective in destroying the pest, it became their business to pay out the rewards for all the vermin killed. An interesting detail in Government methods may be mentioned in this connection. The rats, when destroyed, were buried or burnt, but the tails were first cut off and tied up into neat little bundles like radishes, which were produced as vouchers for the numbers destroyed. A police official records that the travelling police superintendents were called upon to make entries in their diaries such as: “Visited Bangalpore, counted 10,000 rats’ tails, paid the reward, burnt the tails.”

The police have also rendered very valuable services during famines, when their labours increase ten-and twenty-fold. Not only does crime multiply in these dread seasons, but the force is actively employed in helping to establish relief camps, in hunting up and bringing in the starving population, in passing on supplies of grain from the railway stations to the out-districts, and so forth.

Yet with all this the Indian native policeman is but indifferently paid, much less than a soldier or other subordinate members of the public departments. Ordinary labour even is better paid. The horsekeeper, the gardener, the cowman is better off, even the coolie despises the pittance of the policeman, who has no advantages but those of a remote pension and the respect he inspires as a man clothed with a little authority.

CHAPTER XII.

THE DETECTIVE, AND WHAT HE HAS DONE.

In times past the detection of crime was left very much to chance; but now and again shrewd agents, both public officials and private persons, contributed to the discovery of frauds and other misdeeds. Long ago, in France, as I have shown, there was an organised police force which often had resort, both for good and evil, to detective methods. Here in England the office of constable was purely local, and his duties were rather to make arrests in clear cases of flagrant wrong-doing than to follow up obscure and mysterious crime. The ingenious piecing together of clues and the following up of light and baffling scents was generally left to the lawyers and those engaged on behalf of the parties injured or aggrieved.

THE CASE OF LADY IVY.

One of the first cases on record of a fraud on a very large scale cleverly planned and not less cleverly detected was the claim raised by a Lady Ivy, in 1684, to a large estate in Shadwell. It was based on deeds purporting to be drawn more than a hundred years previously, in the “2nd and 3rd Philip and Mary of 1555-6, under which deeds the lands had been granted to Lady Ivy’s ancestors.” The case was tried before the famous, or, more correctly, the infamous Judge Jeffreys, and the lawyers opposed to Lady Ivy proved that the deed put forward had been forged. It was discovered that the style and titles of the king and queen as they appeared in the deed were not those used by the sovereigns at that particular date. Always in the preambles of Acts of Parliament of 1555-6 Philip and Mary were styled “King and Queen of Naples, Princes of Spain and Sicily,” not, as in the deed, “King and Queen of Spain and both the Sicilies.” Again, in the deed Burgundy was put before Milan as a dukedom; in the Acts of Parliament it was just the reverse. That style did come in later, but the person drawing the deeds could not foretell it, and as a fair inference it was urged that the deeds were a forgery. Evidence was also adduced to show that Lady Ivy had forged other deeds, and it was so held by Judge Jeffreys: “If you produce deeds made in such a time when, say you, such titles were used, and they were not so used, that sheweth your deeds are counterfeit and forged and not true deeds. And there is digitus Dei, the finger of God in it, so that though the design be deep laid and the contrivance skulk, yet truth and justice will appear at one time or other.”

Accordingly, my Lady Ivy lost her verdict, and an information for forgery was laid against her, but with what result does not appear.

A LAWYER TURNED DETECTIVE.

Fifty years later a painstaking lawyer in Berkshire was able to unravel another case of fraud, which had eluded the imperfect police of the day. It was an artful attempt to claim restitution from a certain locality for a highway robbery said to have been committed within its boundaries: a robbery which had never occurred.

On the 24th March, 1747, according to his own story, one Thomas Chandler, an attorney’s clerk, was travelling on foot along the high road between London and Reading. Having passed through Maidenhead Thicket, and while in the neighbourhood of Hare Hatch, some thirty miles out, he was set upon by three men, bargees, who robbed him of all he possessed, his watch and cash, the latter amounting to £960, all in bank-notes. After the robbery they bound him and threw him into a pit by the side of the road. He lay there some three hours, till long after dark, he said, being unable to obtain release from “his miserable situation,” although the road was much frequented and he heard many carriages and people passing along. At length he got out of the pit unaided, and, still bound hand and foot, jumped rather than walked for half a mile uphill, calling out lustily for anyone to let him loose. The first passer-by was a gentleman, who gave him a wide berth, then a shepherd came and cut his bonds, and at his entreaty guided him to the constable or tything-man of the hundred of Sunning, in the county of Berks.

Here he set forth in writing the evil that had happened to him, with a full and minute description of the thieves, and at the same time gave notice that he would in due course sue the Hundred for the amount under the statutes. All the formalities being observed, process was duly served on the high constable of Sunning, and the people of the Hundred, alarmed at the demand, which if insisted upon would be the “utter ruin of many poor families,” engaged a certain attorney, Edward Wise, of Wokingham, to defend them.

Mr. Wise had all the qualities of a good detective: he was ingenious, yet patient and painstaking, and he soon pieced together the facts he had cleverly picked up about Chandler. Some of these seemed at the very outset much against the claimant. That a man should tramp along the high road with nearly £1,000 in his pockets was quite extraordinary; not less so that he should not escape from the pit till after dark, or that his bonds should have been no stronger than tape, a length of which was found at the spot where he was untied. He seemed, moreover, to be little concerned by his great loss. After he had given the written notices to the constable, concerning which he was strangely well informed, having all the statutes at his fingers’ ends, as though studied beforehand, he ordered a hot supper and a bowl at the Hare and Hounds in Hare Hatch, where he kept up his carousals till late in the night. Nor was he in any hurry to return to town and stop payment of the lost notes at the banks, but started late and rode leisurely to London.

It was easy enough to trace him there. He had given his address in the notices, and he was soon identified as the clerk of Mr. Hill, an attorney in Clifford’s Inn. It now appeared that Chandler, for a client of his master, had negotiated a mortgage upon certain lands in the neighbourhood of Devizes for £509, far more, as was proved, than their value. An old mortgage was to be paid off in favour of the new, and Chandler had set off on the day stated to complete the transaction, carrying with him the £500 and the balance of £460 supposed to be his own property, but how obtained was never known. His movements on the previous day also were verified. He had dined with the mortgagee, when the deed was executed and the money handed over in notes. These notes were mostly for small sums, making up too bulky a parcel to be comfortably carried under his gaiters (the safest place for them, as he thought), and he had twice changed a portion, £440 at the Bank of England for two notes, and again at “Sir Richard Hoare’s shop” for three notes, two of £100 and one of £200. With the whole of his money he then started to walk ninety miles in twenty-four hours, for he was expected next day at Devizes to release the mortgage.

Mr. Hill had kept a list of his notes in Chandler’s handwriting, which Chandler was anxious to recover when he got back, in order, as he said, to stop payment of them at the banks. His real object was to alter the numbers of three notes of Hoare’s, all of which he wished to cash and use, and he effected this by having a fresh list made out in which these notes were given new and false numbers. Thus the notes with the real numbers would not be stopped on presentation. He did it cleverly, changing 102 to 112, 195 to 159, 196 to 190, variations so slight as to pass unnoticed by Mr. Hill when the list as copied was returned to him. These three notes were cashed and eventually traced back to Chandler. Further, it was clearly proved that he had got those notes at Hoare’s in exchange for the £200 note, for that note presently came back to Hoare’s through a gentleman who had received it in part payment for a captain’s commission of dragoons, and it was then seen that it had been originally received from Chandler.

While Mr. Wise was engaged in these inquiries the trial of Chandler’s case against the Hundred came on at Abingdon assizes in June, and a verdict was given in his favour for £975, chiefly because Mr. Hill was associated with the mortgage, and he was held a person of good repute. But a point of law was reserved, for Chandler had omitted to give a full description of the notes, as required by statute, when advertising his loss.

But now Chandler disappeared. He thought the point of law would go against him; that the mortgagee would press for the return of the £500 which he had recovered from the Hundred; that his master, Mr. Hill, had now strong doubts of his good faith. The first of these fears was verified; on argument of the point of law the Abingdon verdict was set aside. There was good cause for Chandler’s other fears also. News now came of the great bulk of the other notes; they reached the bank from Amsterdam through brokers named Solomons, who had bought them from one “John Smith,” a person answering to the description of Chandler, who in signing the receipt “wrote his name as if it had been wrote with a skewer.” The indefatigable Mr. Wise presently found that Chandler had been in Holland with a trader named Casson, and then unearthed Casson himself.

All this time Mr. Hill was in indirect communication with Chandler, writing letters to him by name “at Easton in Suffolk, to be left for him at the Crown at Ardley, near Colchester, in Essex.” Thither Mr. Wise followed him, accompanied by the mortgagee, Mr. Winter, and the “Holland trader,” Mr. Casson, who was ready to identify Chandler. They reached the Crown at Ardley, and actually saw a letter “stuck behind the plates of the dresser,” awaiting Chandler, who rode in once a fortnight, from a distance, for “his mare seemed always to be very hard rid.” There was nothing known of a place called Easton; but Aston and Assington were both suggested to the eastward, and in search of them Mr. Wise with his friends rode through Ipswich as far as Southwold, and there found Easton, “a place washed by the sea,” where he halted, “being thus pretty sure of going no farther eastward.” But the scent was false, and although they ran down a young man whom they proposed to arrest with the assistance of “three