Chapter II: The Great Jewel Robbery at Balin Abbey

"You began, Mr. Morgan," I said, "by telling me that you would give me some account of the great jewel robbery at Balin Abbey, and the burglar you call Gentleman Coggins."

"I have been telling you about Gentleman Coggins," said Inspector Morgan, "all along. Captain Towers and Gentleman Coggins are one and the same person."

"What!" I said, "an officer in the army turned London burglar! Towers sank so low as that, did he?"

"Don't say 'sank,'" said Morgan, laughing, "say rather he rose. There is rank in crime as in every other profession. No man stands so high as Coggins--Ikey Coggins. Captain Towers, who cheated us all at cards and won those thousands of pounds on the turf and then let himself be found out, is not to be named in rank and social position with Ikey Coggins--_alias_ Conkey Coggins--_alias_ Gentleman Coggins. He stands at the head of his profession in Great Britain. He has been suspected and watched by the police for years, and never once been nabbed, never once been sent to jail, never once even been brought before a court of justice. It is a proud position!"--The Inspector smiled.

"Did he go at once from soldiering to burglary?" I asked.

"No," said Morgan. "Captain Towers went first to America. After a short and successful career in that country, finding it got too hot to hold him, he got killed in an accident."

I laughed--"A sham accident, I presume."

"No, the accident was serious enough. One of the biggest things of the kind in America of that season. Sixty drowned, forty burned to death, and over a hundred injured for life, but I don't suppose Towers was anywhere near the place where it happened. I have kept the announcement of his death in the _Morning Post_. It is a curiosity."

The Inspector drew from his pocket a newspaper cutting and read aloud: "'_Obituary Notice_. We regret to announce the death, in the recent accident on the Wabash & Susquehanna Railway, America, of Captain Towers, late of H.M.... The great success of Captain Towers as a gentleman rider on the Irish Turf, his fine horsemanship and his phenomenal winnings will be in the recollection of our readers. Captain Towers was not only a gentleman rider of remarkable skill, but a sportsman of rare integrity. His winning of a fortune on the Irish Turf was the immediate cause of his honorable retirement from the British Army. The sudden melancholy demise of Captain Towers has cut short what promised to become a very brilliant sporting career in the United States, where he leaves many admiring friends.'

"The fact is," said Inspector Morgan, "that Pinkerton's police were hot upon his scent, and he bolted over here, under a false name, just in time to save himself. He had won quite a lot of American money."

"He must have been a rich man with his winnings on both sides of the water."

"Yes, but not too rich for the position he aspired to take up in the profession."

"What!" I said. "It takes capital to set up as a London burglar?"

"A very large capital. That is, if you have ambition to take rank. Recollect, too, it is one of the most lucrative professions in the world. Great lawyers, great surgeons, great jockeys, are not in it with great burglars. When you may look to net from £50 to £200,000 a year, you must not stint in preliminary expenses."

"I don't really see, Mr. Morgan, what a burglar can require beyond a set of burglary tools, a pair of list slippers, a mask, a dark lantern, a revolver, and perhaps a few skeleton keys and center-bits."

Morgan smiled. "That is not enough for the modern professional. It was all very well for the old-fashioned cracksman. The modern burglar leads a double life. He passes half his time in society--of a kind--the other half among his pals. He has to keep in his pay an army of retainers as large as a mediæval baron. Some of them are his agents, some his spies, half the criminal classes in town are his pensioners, and good pay, too, they get, for if he give less than the police offer, the rascals would betray him at once. Then he has to pay for the defense in court of his agents when they get caught. I calculate that a man in the position of Ikey Coggins, lately Captain Towers, does not pay away less than twelve or fifteen thousand a year."

"And it pays him to do that?"

"Handsomely. Why, a single haul like the one at Balin Abbey must have brought in not far short of £100,000. Even the papers said £60,000, but ladies, we find, invariably lessen their losses in these cases."

"Was Towers' name mentioned in the case? I don't remember his name in the papers."

"He was only known among us as Coggins. His identity with Captain Towers did not come out at the trial. No one but four or five persons can know the truth about it. Of course, my chiefs at the office know, for I told them."

"Is it to be a secret still?"

"I don't see that it's any use making a secret of it any longer. It's ancient history now. Certainly not to you, who are, if you will allow me to call you so, a brother official and something of a colleague.

"You honor me, Morgan, by calling me so. But tell me this story of the jewel robbery if it's fresh in your memory. It's anything but fresh in mine."

"It is in mine. It was my first big job, and it won my inspectorship for me."

"Then, please, Mr. Morgan, tell me the story, and tell it in your own way. I don't know a better. You give the length and breadth and look of things and let me see their working out, so that I could do it all myself if I wanted to. I never get that sort of thing in books. I suppose it's a detective's way of telling a story to his brother detective."

"I suppose it may be that," said Inspector Morgan. "We know the importance of detail. One nail-hole in a footprint on a dusty road may make all the difference between finding our man or losing him."

I interrupted him as he was beginning his story.

"One thing I want to know first. You said the swindler Towers, who had given himself out as dead in that name, was leading a double life in London. Surely he has not come to life again and resumed his own name?"

Morgan paused. "Well, he is undoubtedly living a double life. That is certain, for 'Coggins' disappears from time to time, but, so to say, his life activity goes on."

"And what's his new name? What is his other life?"

"The answer to that question," said Inspector Morgan, "is the answer to the problem I set myself to discover. You will see that I did discover it. More by a strange sort of accident than by any cleverness of mine it came out. That he kept his secret so long was due to his wonderful talent."

"You mean that the police knew Coggins and could lay their hands on him when they would, but the other life of the man was a mystery to them?"

"Just so, and what was the good of arresting Coggins? He managed that there should never be a scrap of evidence against him, though we know he was behind every big thing in London and 100 miles round London.

"Why, when Balin Abbey was broken into, Coggins was at Pangford, eight miles away, and our fellows had been there watching him for a week. He was staying at the Balin Arms at Pangford as Monsieur Dubois, traveling for a Lyons silk firm and booking a good many orders for silk skirtings and dress pieces. The man was the life and soul of the Commercial Room, speaking fluent English with a French accent and singing French songs to the piano in the travelers' room! What can you do with such a fellow!"

"What made your people watch him?"

"We had got notice from trustworthy sources that he had gone to crack a crib, as they call it, on the outskirts of Pangford. We had three good men on the watch, Sergeant Smith and two others under him, and they reported that he was seen at odd hours to be watching and studying this particular house--a retired manufacturer's villa."

"A blind, I suppose?"

"Not exactly; the house was broken into the very night following the affair at Balin Abbey, when every one was full of that, and the fellow got off with £5,000 in plate and jewelry. The burglary, however, could not be traced to Coggins, though of course we suspected him.

"It was the day after the great affair at the Abbey that my chief sent for me. 'There is something going on down in Somersetshire,' he said, 'which beats us all. Coggins is in it. I can tell you that much, but I can tell you no more. We are going to give you a chance of unraveling matters.'"

"Stop, Morgan," I said. "Pray, did your chief know or did you guess that Coggins and Towers were the same person?"

"He did not and I did not--at that time. All we knew of Coggins was that he was a burglaring luminary of the first order, who had come from nowhere about four years before and had beaten all our best men."

"Please go on. Forgive me for interrupting. I won't again."

Morgan continued: "'The case,' said my chief, when I went before him, 'is peculiar, and we are taking unusual measures to come at the truth. The facts, as we know them, are these--(Forget what you have read in the newspapers, the reporters have got hold of some things by the wrong end). The plain facts are these:

"Lord and Lady Balin were entertaining a house party at the Abbey some days ago. On the 23d of this month of January there was a big shoot on. The day was fine, dry and frosty; the wind got up at night and some rain had fallen.

"'The ladies joined the guns at lunch time at a point in the Balin woods some two miles from the Abbey. Every one of the ladies had elected to walk, except two: the hostess, Lady Balin, and Lady Drusilla Lancaster, an elderly lady, a first cousin of Lord Balin. These two ladies were driven to the luncheon place in her Ladyship's pony phaeton.

"'The fact is important; because that night the Abbey was broken into, and the room of every one of the ladies was entered by the burglar, or burglars, except Lady Drusilla's.'

"'Lady Balin's room was not entered?'

"'Yes, it was,' said my chief, 'and the famous Balin emeralds were abstracted. They are historical jewels, and cannot be worth less than £20,000.'

"'Then the inference which you wish me to draw, that the four-mile walk and the day in the open air would have made all the ladies drowsy except the hostess and Lady Drusilla, partly breaks down.'

"My chief smiled. 'Only partly. Lady Balin is a stout lady, and presumably a heavy sleeper. That fact would be known to the dwellers at the Abbey--servants and others.'

"'Ah,' I said, 'you suspect connivance of some one in the house?

"'We are sure of it. The burglar had learnt when to break in, where to break in, and, being in, where to go. The house is ancient and very large, and the corridors and passages and bedrooms are a perfect rabbit warren; no one but an inmate could make his way about. He made no mistake. He went into every room where there were jewels to be got, and he took everything except the pearls and diamonds of Lady Drusilla. The old lady is more careless even than most ladies with her jewels, and insists upon her maid leaving the string of pearls--about the biggest in the country--hanging by the side of her mirror, and her diamond necklace and pendant fastened to her pincushion, where she can see both from her bed in the light of her night-light. Coggins, or his agent, never troubled her, however, and her diamonds and pearls were safe in the morning.'

"The chief had turned over the pages of a little MS. pocket-book, and he referred to an entry in it as he read these particulars in the habits and behavior of Lady Drusilla Lancaster.

"'Lord Balin,' my chief went on, 'was here this morning. He asks, with the sanction of the local police, for the help of Scotland Yard. He wished to offer a great reward. I dissuaded him. He was himself of opinion that the burglar must have a confederate in the house. I told him I had no doubt of it. I told him I would send a couple of my men down to make inquiries. These inquiries, as you know, Sergeant, made openly and to the knowledge of every one, are worth next to nothing. I told Lord Balin so; but told him that, with his leave, I would also send down a competent officer with two assistants, who, while the other officers would fill the eyes of the people at Balin, would carry on a real inquiry. Would Lord Balin agree to receive such an officer as a guest?'

"'Lord Balin hesitated. He said, 'Would the detective be enough used to the ways of the world not to be discovered at once by the rest of my guests?'

"'The person I shall choose,' said my chief, 'will run no such risk.'

"Lord Balin bowed. 'I have an idea,' he said. 'I have a distant cousin in Australia of whom I often talk. I have never seen him since he was a child. Let your officer impersonate him.'

"'What is his age?"

"'About thirty or thirty-five,' said Lord Balin.

"'Rich or poor?' asked the chief.

"'Fabulously rich. A squatter who has speculated successfully in gold mines in Western Australia.'

"'The very thing. My officer shall go down in a motor, with a chauffeur, and an Irish valet, both trustworthy officers in the force. Pray, Lord Balin, may I ask if you have lunched?'

"'Not yet. I propose to do so at my club.'

"'Please do, and when you come back I will introduce you to your relative from Australia!'

"'Before Lord Balin went off to lunch," said my chief, 'I took down from his lips certain intimate particulars relative to every guest staying in the Abbey. Here are my memoranda. Put them in your pocket and study them at your leisure.'

"My chief, having given me these details of his conversation with Lord Balin with his accustomed succinctness and lucidity, turned to me and said:

"'You will guess, Sergeant Morgan, that the cousin from Australia, whose name is Stanley, is yourself. Macgregor is your chauffeur, and O'Brien your valet and servant, both in your division; they will, of course, take their orders directly from you. Go with O'Brien to the stores now and make yourself ready to go down to Somersetshire. You know what a smart man's outfit should be on a country visit. As you are a millionaire, you may safely outdo good taste. You will take my own 24 h.p. Napier. Macgregor is accustomed to drive it, and he will carry you down in less than five hours. Try to get there before ten, so as to see the guests and make a good impression before you turn in for the night, The rest I leave entirely to you. Go now and make your preparations and purchases, and in two hours' time come back here and make Lord Balin's acquaintance.'

"When I returned Lord Balin was with my chief.

"He received me very pleasantly. Lord Balin is known for a charm of manner not common among Englishmen of his class. In his case it is explainable by the fact that he was in diplomacy before he succeeded to the peerage. I think my chief had said more in my favor than he had told me, for Lord Balin smoothed over a difficult position cleverly and kindly. He seemed particularly struck by the humor of the situation, and acted the part of a long-separated relation to perfection.

"'Well, Mr. Stanley, you have changed less than I expected. It is true you were a chubby infant of four when your father carried you off to the Antipodes; you've grown, my boy, but not out of remembrance. I could swear to those eyes of yours. You don't remember me, Mr. Stanley--Stanley, I mean, for I must drop the Mr. with Dick Stanley's you.

"'Now tell me, my dear Stanley, one thing. Can you shoot? Have you taken after your poor father in that?'

"'I used to shoot pretty straight,' I said, 'years ago. I hope I haven't forgotten how.'

"'I'm very glad to hear it. We have a big shoot on to-morrow, and we want an extra gun. Moreton is half blind, Pulteney nervous, and there is only myself left to account for the pheasants, and you, if you will help me. You didn't bring your guns from Australia?' asked Lord Balin slily.

"'No,' I said, 'I'm afraid I left them behind.'

"Never mind, we can find you all that at the Abbey. I thought, Sir Henry,' said Lord Balin, addressing my chief, 'that I would not put off this shoot. It is one planned on pretty much the same scale as the one we had on the 23d, the day of the robbery, and I thought it would help our friend'--he turned to me--'that everything should take place to-morrow as it took place on the day the Abbey was broken into.'

"'Excellent idea! Pray, Lord Balin, combine your plans with Sergeant--with Mr. Stanley.' He laughed, shook hands with Lord Balin, nodded to me, and went off. 'You have your last orders, Sergeant,' he said to me as he left the room.

"Lord Balin and I talked over things in the chief's room, and the more we talked the more did Lord Balin smooth over the awkwardness of the situation in which I found myself about to plunge, into the midst of a kind of society in which I had practically taken no part for over six years, and in which I was to appear--with the best of motives, of course--under false pretences, and in a name which did not belong to me.

"It was a pleasant drive down to Balin Abbey in Somersetshire: cold but pleasant. We three professionals talked naturally of nothing but the great jewel robbery. Certainly our chief could not have given me a better staff. Macgregor is a young Scotsman of great intelligence and promise. He would take advantage of his superior position in the house as chauffeur to deal with the upper servants. Phelim O'Brien, a clever, good-looking, lively Irishman, who had himself served in the Irish Constabulary, had found the county work in that service too dull, enlisted into a line regiment, had been an officer's servant, but gave that up for harder work of a higher kind, and found his way at last to Scotland Yard. We trusted to him to find out what was going on among the valets and ladies' maids in the servants' hall. We naturally talked of 'Coggins,' the mysterious factor in the criminal world. Coggins, who went about evading us--the king of burglars, a master of disguise and make-up, admired and feared by every thief, bully, and hooligan in the streets--and though always suspected, never arrested. The very boys chaffed the policeman on his beat with "_Yah! Pinch Coggins--caunt yer? garn!_"--and here was this impudent scoundrel settled down at Pangford, within a few miles of the scene of his last successful exploit--and not a single ounce of evidence against him!"