Charles stopped pacing. “And what does he wish me to accomplish?” he asked testily.
“Merely to look into the incident and the circumstances and conditions surrounding it and report back to him what you find. No more, no less than that.” Ponsonby smiled. “It is not all that difficult, really. He is not asking you to crack the case, as our friend Sherlock Holmes might put it.”
Charles sighed. “Well, then, I suppose I shall do my best. Lady Sheridan and I had arranged to go down to Bishop’s Keep at the weekend, however. I’m seeing Marconi on Saturday, and I hadn’t planned to come back to London before the beginning of next week.”
“Splendid.” Ponsonby put down his empty glass. “The beginning of the week will do very well; I don’t think there is a great hurry.” He stood, his tone lightening. “Do give my regards to your wife, Sheridan, and tell her that I very much enjoyed Beryl Bardwell’s novel about Dartmoor, which I read while I was in hospital. I must say, I felt it to be more realistic than Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, which was rather more Gothic than I would have liked. Lady Sheridan exactly caught the spirit of the moors and the people there.”
Charles smiled. “She’ll enjoy hearing that. Funnily enough, Doyle was at the Princetown hotel, writing, while I was carrying out a project at the prison and Kate was doing the research for her book.” [2]
“Is that right? Odd how these things happen.” Ponsonby took Charles’s hand and shook it. “Well, good night, then, Sheridan. Let me know how I can aid your inquiry.”
“I shall,” Charles said. “Good night.” He watched Ponsonby leave the room and then, with a long sigh, went to join Kate and their guests.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the decade between 1903 and 1913, Scotland Yard faced a difficult challenge with regard to the Russians who sought refuge in London ’s infamous End. There were two different revolutionary groups, the Anarchists and the Bolsheviks, and Scotland Yard frequently confused the two. To complicate matters still further, the Czar’s Secret Police, the Ochrana, hired spies to infiltrate both groups. These spies employed agent-provacateur tactics, inducing the revolutionaries to commit illegal or terrorist acts, then betraying them to the police. When the informants employed by the Yard were added to the mix, it was sometimes very difficult to know who belonged to one side or the other.
Albert J. Williams,
“A Brief History of British Anarchism”
The Metropolitan Police, founded by Sir Robert Peel in 1829, was headquartered in an area of Whitehall known as Scotland Yard, a term that (owing to the English habit of naming buildings and agencies after their location) became synonymous with the force itself. Scotland Yard grew rapidly, from 1,000 in 1829 to 10,000 in 1870, to 15,763 on the eve of the new century. But new technologies and new kinds of crime required a new kind of thinking and a different sort of training. For instance, when the streets and roads began to fill up with motorcars, the work of the Public Carriage Office changed from monitoring horse-drawn lorries and brewers’ drays to dealing with speeders (motorized vehicles traveling faster than twenty miles an hour) and issuing licenses to drivers; and a new “Fraud Squad” had to be formed to investigate the escalating numbers of embezzlements, swindles, and con games, some of which involved some rather important personages who had lost (or had made) significant amounts of money.
Other challenges required the Yard to branch out in other ways. In the early 1880s, a Special Irish Branch of the Criminal Investigation Department was staffed with Irish officers and organized to deal with the Fenians, the Irish Dynamiters who blew up The Times office and a government office in Whitehall and set dynamite bombs in Scotland Yard, Trafalgar Square, and Westminster Hall. By the 1890s, however, the Fenian threat was replaced by the Anarchist threat, and the Special Irish Branch became simply the Special Branch. The Continental terrorists making their way to England-Italian, French, Spanish, and Russian-seemed to believe that a few bombs were neither here nor there, and through the nineties, members of the Special Branch were kept busy hunting for bomb factories, pursuing accused bombers and their accomplices, and keeping a wary eye on those they suspected of plotting terrorist activity. There were Anarchists in Walsall and a botched explosion in Greenwich Park (which Joseph Conrad used as the inspiration for his novel The Secret Agent), followed by bomb bursts in Mayfair and in the Underground, together with a half-dozen other minor skirmishes.
All this uproar was followed by silence, an uneasy, fear-inducing silence that went on from the last three years of Victoria ’s reign and into the first two years of Edward’s. Abroad, assassins were spreading terror among heads of state, while in England, Special Branch became increasingly anxious that a storm was brewing in the East End. But frustratingly, the police were left with little to do, except to keep a close watch on known and suspected Anarchists in the hope that they might commit a crime under the noses of the police. The Branch were assisted in this effort by the growing number of counterrevolutionary agents provacateurs who had begun to appear in London, sent by the Russian Secret Police to entrap Russian émigrés who posed a threat to the Czar’s life and regime.
Inspector Earnest Ashcraft of the Special Branch was perhaps more frustrated than any of his colleagues, for he had a very strong sense of duty, and every day that passed without his being called upon to perform that duty was a day that he felt he had somehow failed. Ashcraft was a man in his early thirties, broad-shouldered and thickset. He deeply regretted having missed the excitement of the Fenians and the Walsall terrorists and that bang-up Greenwich affair, all of which had occurred while he was still a youth.
In fact, almost everything of note, Inspector Ashcraft often thought sadly, seemed to have happened before he joined the force in ’98-except for the Boer War, of course. He had done his duty there, not waiting to be called up but enlisting as soon as the trumpets sounded and shipping out on the very first transport to South Africa. But he had been struck by dysentery before he could fire a shot at the enemy, and had come back wasted, in what he felt in his soul to be a kind of mortal disgrace. The fact that Scotland Yard welcomed him back without question and even promoted him to the rank of Inspector made no difference to him. In his mind, his promotion had no redemptive qualities; he could only hope to redeem himself by some sort of significant action.
While others in the Special Branch may have been lulled by the seeming quiet on the Anarchist front, Inspector Ashcraft was convinced that these dangerous people were only biding their time. The times themselves were dangerous, for the end of the war threw thousands of men into the labor market, and large throngs of the unemployed marched through the streets of London, disrupting traffic and frightening law-abiding citizens. And even the employed were dangerous, for membership in the trade unions was rising and the unions held the cudgel of the strike in their hands. In this restive, rebellious climate, Ashcraft felt, any little spark might flame up into an uncontrollable conflagration. All hell would break loose, and unholy chaos would reign over law and order. But Ashcraft knew this could not be allowed to happen. When the peace and stability of society were threatened, Special Branch would be there to protect it. And Earnest Ashcraft, at last, would have the chance to do his duty.