Fly Catching

It is as Mr. Brown of the Stock Exchange that I am now addressing the public. I had occasion some few months back to go to my bankers in Saint James street to draw the sum of fifty pounds in gold, for the purpose of defraying certain household expenses. The banker—although it was during panic time—delivered it to me without a murmur. I kept my hand over the pocket in which it lay, as a bird forsakes not her nest when it has eggs within it, from the very door to that of my own, on Ludgate Hill; yet when I got home it was gone. The loss itself did not affect me nearly so much as the method of the losing. I knew where another fifty pounds was to be got without much inconvenience, but whither that fifty pounds was gone, and by what miraculous means, was indeed a question. The pocket which my hand had covered was inviolate and without a hole in it. It could scarcely have happened that any thief, having ripped it open, would have the courtesy, as well as the skill, to sew it up again as I came along.

The problem so worried me, took so strong a hold upon my mind, that I sent for Inspector Ferret, of the detective police.

“Ferret,” I said, after I had put him in possession of the circumstances, “now, who can have got this money?”

“Tom Daddles, or else the Spider, sir,” he replied coolly, and without the least hesitation; “one of those two—certain; which one of them, depends upon whether you lost the money east or west of the Bar. Tom takes all the Strand, and the Spider has Fleet street and the Hill here.”

“Well, now,” I said, “let me have a personal interview, Mr. Inspector, if you please, with the gentleman who has transferred this property of mine to his account. Of course, I will pass my word not to employ the arm of the law against him. But I very much want to know how the transfer was effected.”

On the same afternoon the Inspector informed me that… Read More