head; so what I looked like, altogether, I don’t know. He turned
blue – literally blue – when he saw me crawling out, and I couldn’t
feel surprised at it.
‘”I am an officer of the Detective Police,” said I, “and have been
lying here, since you first came in this morning. I regret, for
the sake of yourself and your friends, that you should have done
what you have; but this case is complete. You have the pocket-book
in your hand and the money upon you; and I must take you into
custody!”
‘It was impossible to make out any case in his behalf, and on his
trial he pleaded guilty. How or when he got the means I don’t
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know; but while he was awaiting his sentence, he poisoned himself
in Newgate.’
We inquired of this officer, on the conclusion of the foregoing
anecdote, whether the time appeared long, or short, when he lay in
that constrained position under the sofa?
‘Why, you see, sir,’ he replied, ‘if he hadn’t come in, the first
time, and I had not been quite sure he was the thief, and would
return, the time would have seemed long. But, as it was, I being
dead certain of my man, the time seemed pretty short.’
ON DUTY WITH INSPECTOR FIELD
HOW goes the night? Saint Giles’s clock is striking nine. The
weather is dull and wet, and the long lines of street lamps are
blurred, as if we saw them through tears. A damp wind blows and
rakes the pieman’s fire out, when he opens the door of his little
furnace, carrying away an eddy of sparks.
Saint Giles’s clock strikes nine. We are punctual. Where is
Inspector Field? Assistant Commissioner of Police is already here,
enwrapped in oil-skin cloak, and standing in the shadow of Saint
Giles’s steeple. Detective Sergeant, weary of speaking French all
day to foreigners unpacking at the Great Exhibition, is already
here. Where is Inspector Field?
Inspector Field is, to-night, the guardian genius of the British
Museum. He is bringing his shrewd eye to bear on every corner of
its solitary galleries, before he reports ‘all right.’ Suspicious
of the Elgin marbles, and not to be done by cat-faced Egyptian
giants with their hands upon their knees, Inspector Field,
sagacious, vigilant, lamp in hand, throwing monstrous shadows on
the walls and ceilings, passes through the spacious rooms. If a
mummy trembled in an atom of its dusty covering, Inspector Field
would say, ‘Come out of that, Tom Green. I know you!’ If the
smallest ‘Gonoph’ about town were crouching at the bottom of a
classic bath, Inspector Field would nose him with a finer scent
than the ogre’s, when adventurous Jack lay trembling in his kitchen
copper. But all is quiet, and Inspector Field goes warily on,
making little outward show of attending to anything in particular,
just recognising the Ichthyosaurus as a familiar acquaintance, and
wondering, perhaps, how the detectives did it in the days before
the Flood.
Will Inspector Field be long about this work? He may be half-anhour
longer. He sends his compliments by Police Constable, and
proposes that we meet at St. Giles’s Station House, across the
road. Good. It were as well to stand by the fire, there, as in
the shadow of Saint Giles’s steeple.
Anything doing here to-night? Not much. We are very quiet. A
lost boy, extremely calm and small, sitting by the fire, whom we
now confide to a constable to take home, for the child says that if
you show him Newgate Street, he can show you where he lives – a
raving drunken woman in the cells, who has screeched her voice
away, and has hardly power enough left to declare, even with the
passionate help of her feet and arms, that she is the daughter of a
British officer, and, strike her blind and dead, but she’ll write a
letter to the Queen! but who is soothed with a drink of water – in
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another cell, a quiet woman with a child at her breast, for begging
– in another, her husband in a smock-frock, with a basket of