href="#ub92235c6-6f24-5f92-8ead-5abca6d94513">Table of Contents
In the month of March, 1904, 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, and a pathetic note addressed to the chief steward was pinned to his pillow. It said, in the extravagant language of remorse, that overwhelmed by the horror of his position, the writer had decided to leave this world for a better, and, he trusted, brighter life. It was signed “George T. Baggin.” 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 inquiries 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. Two months after the disappearance, the firm of Woolfe, Meyers, Limited, crumbled into dust — for Louis Meyers himself failed to take his place one fine morning in the lavishly furnished boardroom in King William Street. Meyers was a dealer in Premium Bonds. A stout man, scant of breath, loose-lipped, sparing pronouns. His ingenious method of trading may be summarized in a sentence. You paid your money and he took his choice. “There can be no doubt at all,” said the Daily Megaphone, in commenting on his disappearance, “that this wretched man, face to face with exposure which was inevitable, has taken the supreme and desperate step of suicide. His overcoat, in which was a letter to the coroner, was found on one of the seats of the Thames Embankment…”
Yet Scotland Yard took no trouble to find the body. Instead, it sent its most experienced detectives to watch the seaports. T.B. Smith’s instructions to his watchful subordinates were marked with sardonic levity.
“You will recognize the body of the late Louis Meyers,” he wrote, “from the fact that it will be smoking a big cigar and carrying a portmanteau containing £150,000’s worth of French and German notes; it speaks English with a slight lisp.”
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 summer holidays 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 (I again quote the Megaphone) “yet 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, and the space of time occupied in their investigations 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 smokerooms 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 witnessbox to testify against a pallid prisoner. He grants no interviews to curious newspaper reporters, he appears in no magazine 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 fingerprint 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 conies 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, pigeonholes, 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 stockin-trade.
When George Baggin disappeared in 1904, his simple arrangement of indexing showed the connection between the passing of Lucas Damant six months later, and the obliteration of Meyers between these times. 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, Sittings 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 businesslike 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 (Silinski’s autobiography occupies a folder by itself). 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 heavensent 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 shortsighted from overmuch study of criminal records.
IV. Introducing T.B. Smith
