Fantastic reflections dappled the Pool of London--reflections from the riding lights of ships at anchor, and the brighter glare of the lamps of the bridges. They danced eerily on the swift-running waters of the river, intensifying the gloom of the black waters. Here and there the darker blur marked where a line of barges was moored.
The police-boat, its motor chug-chugging noisily, slipped unostentatiously behind one of the tiers of lighters. To my untrained eyes it was incredible that in the labyrinth of craft, amid the darkness, we should be able to pick our way. Yet deftly, unerringly, the inspector moved the tiller, while two constables kept keen eyes on the motley assembly of vessels.
A barge was swinging across the stream with two men at the sweeps. The tide caught it, and it dropped heavily down on us while we were trying to steal a passage athwart another vessel. The launch was caught between the two, and it seemed inevitable that our boat should crack like an egg-shell. With my heart in my mouth, I prepared to jump. But with swift precision the constables acted. Holding tight to the gunwale they forced our boat over sideways, and we sidled through at an angle of forty-five degrees into open water.
I looked for an expression of relief, but the men had calmly resumed their seats. The escape had been a matter of course to them, and they laughed when I spoke of it as an escape. For the men of the Thames Police take things as philosophically as sailors. It was all in the day's work to them.
Since then I have seen much of the men and methods of the force which guards the great highway of London. They have heavy duties to perform, and, from the rank and file to the superintendent, are adequately fitted for their work. The histories of some of those who wear the blue jacket with the word "Thames" on the collar, and the peaked cap with the anchor badge, would make enthralling reading.
There is Divisional Detective-Inspector Helden, who probably knows more of the ways of the waterside thieves than any man living. He is a linguist, as are many of his staff--a qualification much necessary in dealing with the cosmopolitan crews of ships plying to and from the Port of London.
There is an inspector who has saved three lives--a fact none the less noteworthy in that he holds the quaint superstition that all the troubles of those people will accumulate on his own unfortunate head.
There is a bronzed, brown-moustached station-sergeant who had been around the world before he was twelve, and who has had strange adventures in every quarter of the globe. There are men drawn from the Navy--and now serving again--the mercantile marine, and river craft.
All have an intimate knowledge of that thirty-five mile stretch of river which passes through London from Teddington to Dartford Creek.
They know every eddy, every trick and twist of the tide; they know on any given day what boats are on the river, be they barges or liners; and they know the men who work them.
The force is under the control of Superintendent Mann, who has had a varied experience of many years, and has brought a ripe knowledge of men and organisation to his work.
There are five stations--at Wapping, Waterloo Pier, Barnes, Blackwall, and Erith--with a complement of 240 men, fourteen launches and motor boats, as well as row-boats. The division possesses its own engineers and carpenters, and does its own building and repairs.
Now-a-days, men are only drafted to the division after serving for a time in the ordinary land force, but the rule has only been in force of late years, and consequently most of the men have spent their whole police career on the river.
A different thing this to land work. In the whole thirty-five miles there are only five "sections." These are patrolled by series of boats putting off at different hours. For eight hours they ply to and fro, keenly vigilant, courteous as their colleagues in the West End, as helpful and resourceful in an emergency as men of the Navy. Sometimes a barge gets adrift. It has to be boarded and towed to safe moorings.
Some of these barges have valuable cargoes--tobacco, silk, and what not--and the incredible carelessness of the owners in not always providing a watchman presses hardly on the police, who may, perhaps, have to spend a whole night in looking after some single craft. There was a case in which a barge broke adrift with 20,000 worth of goods aboard.
"Oh, that would have been all right," said the owner off-handedly, when told that it had been safely looked after. "It would have come to no harm."
Not a word of thanks. And that attitude is a typical one.
The patrol-boats beat to and fro, each with two men and a sergeant, in all weathers, amid blinding sleet and snow in the winter, fog in November, and more pleasantly on summer nights. Eyes are strained through the darkness at the long tiers of barges, ears are alert to catch the click of oars in rowlocks. They know who has lawful occasion to be abroad at such times.
Occasionally the sergeant hails some boat. He can usually identify the voice of the man who replies, but should he fail to do so, the police-boat slips nearer. A stranger or a suspicious character is invited to give an account of himself. Should he not be able to do so satisfactorily, he is towed along to the nearest police station until inquiries have been made.
Sometimes, not often, when a man, who on the river corresponds to the sneak thief ashore, is caught red-handed stealing rope or metal or ships' oddments there is resistance. But always the police win. They know the game. A hand-to-hand struggle in a swaying boat, even a fall overboard with a desperate prisoner, does not concern them greatly.
"You see," explained a veteran to me, "if you fall out while you've got hold of a man it's ten to one that he tries to get his breath as he goes under. That makes matters worse for him. All you do is to hold your breath, and let him wear himself out. He's usually quiet enough when you come up again." Of course, every man in the division is an expert swimmer.
There are other tricks of boatcraft in such a case which all river-police officers know. The flashing of a light is an equivalent of a police-whistle ashore, and will bring the assistance of any police-boat in sight.
At the floating police-station at Waterloo Pier a dingey is always in readiness to put off to rescue would-be suicides who fling themselves from the "bridge of sighs." In the little station itself there is a bathroom with hot water always ready, and every man in the division is trained to the Schafer method of resuscitation of the apparently drowned.
A still more grim side of the work is the finding of dead bodies. The average number is somewhere around a hundred a year. Most of these are suicides, a few accidents.
The duties of the patrols are to keep vigil over the river and its banks. There are other patrols at work for the Customs and the Port of London Authority, who see that the revenue is not defrauded, and that the traffic regulations are kept. But this does not free the police from all responsibility in these matters. Here are a few of the things they have to do:--
Secure drifting barges and inform owner,
Detect smuggling, illegal ship-building or illegal fitting out for service in a foreign State,
Report damaged cargoes or food, and offences against the Port of London Authority's bye-laws,
Arrest any drunken person navigating a boat,
Detect cases of navigation without sufficient free-board below Battersea Bridge,
Search all suspicious-looking craft,
Inform harbour-master of vessel sunk or dangerous wreckage adrift,
Report wrecks to Lloyd's.
There is more--much more. For instance, all manner of craft have to be watched to see that they do not carry more passengers than their licence permits, that obstruction is not caused by mooring across public stairs, that more than the fixed fare is not demanded by watermen, that no boat is navigated for hire without a licence, and so on.
Detective-Inspector Helden and his staff of the Criminal Investigation Department of the division are the most dreaded enemies of the river thieves. Time was, when the "light-horsemen" of the river were in their heyday, that 25,000 worth of property was stolen annually. That has been reduced to less than a couple of hundred pounds--a comparatively trivial, insignificant figure.
It is to both branches of the river police that those who use the river owe this complete immunity from theft. Every man of the C.I.D. in the division has a complete knowledge of thieves and receivers on whom it is necessary to maintain constant surveillance. Marine store dealers and old metal dealers are kept in close touch, for it is to them that the odds and ends of ship equipment might be taken by a dishonest sailor or watchman.
One of the most famous of river thieves was a man whom the public knew as "Slippery Jack." He made a rich harvest until he was laid by the heels. Almost naked, and his skin greased lavishly, he would slip aboard likely-looking craft in search of plunder. If he were disturbed, he would dodge away, his greased skin aiding him if anyone attempted to seize him. He was tracked down one evening to Blackfriars, where he backed his boat into midstream and turned at bay with a vicious sheath-knife. Only after a fierce struggle, in which the police did not escape scot free, was he arrested. His exploits cost him ten years'
penal servitude.
It was the detective branch of the Thames Police that solved the complicated mystery of a supposed case of murder which attracted much public attention at the time. The full facts have never been made public, and may be interesting.
In August, 1897, the body of a naked man was found floating near the Tower Bridge. A line was woven tightly round the body, arms and neck, and a doctor stated that the body must have been in the water about three weeks, that death was due to strangulation, and that he thought it impossible for the man to have tied the rope round himself, though it must have been tied before death.
A woman identified the body as that of her husband, Von Veltheim--he who shot Woolf Joel in Johannesburg and was later sentenced at the Old Bailey for the blackmail of Mr. Solly Joel--and a jury brought in a verdict that "death was caused by strangulation whether amounting to murder the evidence fails to show."
Here were all the elements of the mystery that might have puzzled Sherlock Holmes. The detectives began to puzzle it out. They were all watermen, and knew, what the doctor had apparently overlooked, that a body will often swell after prolonged immersion in water. Although the rope was woven tightly about the body there was only one actual knot.
They came to a directly opposite conclusion to the doctor--that the rope had somehow enwound itself round the man after he was in the water, and that the swelling of the body had tightened it. They began to make enquiries. Soon they discovered that a seamen named John Duncan had vanished from the ship _Thames_, moored at Carron Wharf, near Tower Bridge. Also a piece of "throw line" similar to that twisted round the body was missing. Also that Duncan, the last time he was seen alive, had declared his intention of taking a bathe. These facts made it easy for the sailor police to reconstruct the tragedy.
Duncan was unable to swim. He attached one end of the rope round his chest and fastened the other end to the ship. Then he had slipped overboard among the piles of the wharf. By some means the end of the rope in the ship became detached. Duncan struggled to save himself and the rope became entangled about him. That was the solution of what seemed a baffling problem.
The men of the division receive the same pay as men ashore, but they are a class entirely apart. On land, men are transferred from division to division as they are promoted, or as occasion demands. On the river this system does not apply in practice. Most of the men spend their whole police career on the water, for it takes so long to make the complete police officer of the Thames Division, and a man once trained is too valuable to be used for other work.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE BLACK MUSEUM.
Outside Scotland Yard they call it the "Black Museum"; within, it is simply the "Museum"--a private museum the like of which exists nowhere else in the world. Money cannot purchase access to it, and curious visitors are only admitted on orders signed by senior executive officials who know them personally. For the museum contains too many of the secrets of crime to be a wholesome place for the general public, although the indiscriminate publicity that it has suffered in print has made it appear to be a kind of gratuitous show-place. If that were its only purpose, it would not exist at Scotland Yard.