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
In the month of October the market, that unfailing barometer of public nerves, moved slowly in an upward direction.
If the “House” was jubilant, the “Street” was no less gratified, for since the “Baggin Failure” and financial cataclysm which dragged down the little investors to ruin, there had been a sad flatness in the world of shares. There are many places of public resort where the “Street” people meet — those speculators who daily, year in and out, promenade the pavement of Throgmorton Street, buying and selling on an “eighth” margin.
To them from time to time come the bareheaded clerks with news of this or that rise or fall, to receive instructions gravely imparted, and as gravely accepted, and to retire to the mysterious deeps of the “House” to execute their commissions.
The market was rising steadily, as the waters of a river rise; that was the most pleasant knowledge of all. It did not jump or leap or flare; it progressed by sixteenths, by thirty-seconds, by sixty-fourths; but all down the money columns in the financial papers of the press were tiny little plus marks which brought joy to the small investor, who is by nature a “bull.”
Many people who are not directly interested in finance regarded the signs with sympathy. The slaves of the street, ‘busmen, cabmen, the sellers of clamorous little financial papers, all these partook in the general cheeriness.
Slowly, slowly, climbed the market.
“Like old times,” said a hurrying clerk; but the man he spoke to sniffed contemptuously, being by nature one of that sour class from which all beardom is recruited.
“Like old times!” chuckled a man standing at the Bodega bar, a little dazed with his prosperity. Somebody reminded him of the other booms that had come and undergone sudden collapse, but the man standing at the counter twiddled the stem of the glass in his hand and smiled indulgently.
“Industrials are the feature,” said an evening paper, and indeed the biggest figures behind the tiny plus marks were those against the famous commercial concerns best known in the city. The breweries, the bakeries, the cotton corporations, the textile manufacturing companies enjoying quotation in the share list — all these participated in the upward rush; nay, led the van.
Into Old Broad Street on one day at the height of the boom, came a man a little above middle height, cleanshaven, his face the brick tan of one who spends much of his life in the open air. He wore a suit of blue serge, well cut but plain, a spotless grey Tirai hat, broad-brimmed, white spats over his patent shoes, and a thin cane in his hand. “A fellow in the Kaffir market” guessed one of the group about the corner of Change Alley, but somebody better informed turned hastily when he saw the quick striding figure approaching, and dived down a side court.
A showily-attired young man, standing on the edge of the pavement chewing a quill toothpick thoughtfully, did not see the newcomer until he was close on him, then started and changed colour. The man in the wide-brimmed hat recognized him and nodded. He checked his walk and stopped.
“Here’s Moss,” he said. He had a snappy, curt delivery and a disconcerting habit of addressing one in the third person. “How is Moss? Straight now? Straight as a die, I’ll swear. He’s given up rigging, given up Punk Prospectuses for Petty Punters. Oh, Moss! Moss!”
He shook his head with gentle melancholy, though a light twinkled in his humorous grey eyes.
“I don’t know why you’re so ‘ard on me, Mister Smith,” said the embarrassed Moss; “we’ve all got our faults—”
“Not me, Mr. Moss,” said T.B. Smith promptly.
“I dessay even you, sir,” insisted the other. “I’ve ‘ad my flutter; and I failed. There’s lots of people who’ve done more than I ever done, worse things, and crookeder things, who are livin’ in what I might call the odour of sanctity.
“There’s