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  ‘Now’, whispered Melville, ‘mind you obey instructions and keep your pistol handy. We are getting near the spot.’

  They followed the woman on foot as she made her way through a neighbourhood that ‘fairly reeked with smells foreign to London’. When she entered another darkened house, Melville and Steinhauer lurked unnoticed in the black and silent street. She emerged and took Melville into the house. Then she came back and Steinhauer followed her. He felt her be-ringed fingers through her glove as she took his hand. Inside the house was ‘blacker than ink… one of those terrifying darknesses you can almost feel’. He and Melville stood motionless and waited.

  Then, so rapidly that we were taken unawares, there was tragedy on the floor above. We saw a flash of light from an open door, heard the crash of a pistol shot and an agonizing cry of pain in a woman’s voice. In almost the same moment there came a hail of bullets from above.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! One, as we discovered subsequently, went through Melville’s hat, another struck me on the arm. But it did no great damage beyond a temporary numbness; it must have ricocheted from the wall and spent its force – luckily for me.

  Our own pistols were out almost as soon. Like madmen we blazed away into the light above and were rewarded by a cry and a fall which proved someone had been hit.

  Upstairs, the woman and a man lay dying. Two men had leapt from the window into the street; they dashed off in a cab and succeeded in giving Melville and Steinhauer, who pursued them in another cab, the slip. Back to the house went the two policemen, only to find the upstairs room empty.

  The girl had disappeared, and so had the man who had been lying wounded on the floor beside her. The handcuffs Melville had put on him… had been broken off and lay on the floor. We lit the gas and saw a scene of terrible disorder. The room itself looked as though it belonged to a woman of the streets. There was a bed in it, a table, two or three chairs, a couple of mirrors and a small oven. On the walls were photographs of actresses. Over the bed were a number of pictures in the nude and a large paper fan which Melville took away with him. There was blood all over the floor.

  It seemed that the runaways had returned for their friends. Why Melville wanted the fan is unclear. The idea that a crime scene should remain undisturbed for forensic examination in situ had not yet emerged. However forensic science was on the horizon and fingerprinting was probably in his mind. A Home Office committee had recently reported upon methods of ‘Identification of criminals by measurement and fingerprints’. The new Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID, Sir Edward Henry, had a passion for the subject and was publishing a book, The Classification and Use of Fingerprints. The subject was not entirely new, but Henry’s appointment in the spring of 1901 represented commitment to a fingerprinting system and rejection of the old unscientific Bertillon system, which had proved useless since it relied largely on cranial measurements, definition of the ‘stunted’ criminal physique, chaps whose eyes were too close together, and so on.

  Three Russian nihilists had got away, but the body of the woman informer was dragged from the Thames some weeks later.37 Melville told Steinhauer she was an Italian, who had volunteered information about a Russian plot to kill the Kaiser and King Leopold after being rejected by one of the men. When her lover’s two companions arrived from the continent one dark night, she travelled to Melville’s private address to alert him. She was able to show him their plan to escape from the funeral procession: this had been torn up and thrown into the fire, but she retrieved enough of the charred map to satisfy Melville that she told the truth. The anarchists were not found in London, although long after the funeral

  A clue to their fate came in Berlin one day when an official of the Russian Secret Police informed me that two anarchists who had come from England had been hanged. One of them had had an arm amputated on account of a shot in the left shoulder. The description of this man strikingly resembled that in the possession of Melville.38

  Never very communicative at the best of times, Melville no doubt continued the chase long after my return to Germany. What astounded me more than anything else was the cleverness he displayed in keeping the details of this dramatic affair out of the Press. Such a thing would not have been possible in Germany.

  In America, President McKinley was assassinated in September. The German and Russian Governments once again hinted that British practice should fall into line with theirs in dealing with anarchists. A certain sense of déjà vu develops. Edward Henry presented two reports in 1902 which, though couched more tactfully, and even disingenuously, than Anderson’s, followed the usual line:39

  …the police have always been compelled to keep a number of suspects under more or less sustained observation, an observation not sanctioned by express provision of the law but by usage only and by the general acquiescence in it of the community who realise that it is worked under direct departmental control and under the indirect but effective control of the Courts to whom any person aggrieved by police action can apply for redress. It is to this form of observation exercised not only through plain-clothes officers, but also through other agents that anarchists are subjected, and it is quite certain that the working efficiency of the police would not be much increased if an Act of the legislature conferred upon them special powers in this direction.

  And precious little help they were getting, either:

  Their work… has been carried on under difficulties, the Special Branch receiving but little assistance from the Continental Police. It is true that periodically they receive from France, Belgium, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Switzerland and Holland reports from either the Police or the Minister of Justice regarding the anarchist movement in these countries and when expulsions are made the fact is occasionally noticed but such expulsions are often made weeks before the reports arrive. The last list of expulsions received from France is dated December 1901, the preceding list having come in the January of that year. No such list has at any time been sent by Germany, Russia, Spain or Italy…

  Having rehearsed once again the concessions the British were and were not prepared to make, Henry went on to say that no interference with the freedom of the press was required either. The newspapers of Most, Burtsev and Nicoll had been put out of action by existing laws and English juries. Some flexibility was desirable; all sorts of newspapers were currently telling their readers that Mr Chamberlain:

  …because he is recognised to be a masterful exponent of a policy of colonial expansion of which their readers disapprove, has been pilloried in their publications as responsible for the blood that is now being shed in South Africa and for all the deaths among the women and children of the refugee camps. Without any express intention of so doing these writers have enlisted to their side the active partnership of anarchist association by whom Mr Chamberlain… is denounced as the common enemy of the human race and there is little doubt that the more violent and desperate spirits among them would view his removal as a laudable and meritorious act. Thus indirectly these newspapers are inciting irresponsible and unreflecting persons to commit crime, but no legislation that could be devised would meet the danger…

  Behind all the objections and excuses lay mistrust of the competence of certain foreign police. The need for secrecy in dealing with informers and informants was as important to Melville as it had been to Jenkinson and Anderson, and the issue was brought into the foreground by the Rubini case in 1902, the year of Edward VII’s coronation.40

  The man known as Rubini was an Italian anarchist who arrived in England in May 1897 and did not come to the attention of Melville’s surveillance team until September, when he wrote to Reynolds’ Newspaper praising Agiolilli, the assassin of the Spanish Prime Minister. Rubini married an Englishwoman in Soho in the December after his arrival, and thereafter worked as a newsagent for various employers in Soho. The couple had a baby. There was a pattern of petty theft, frequent changes of address and failed attempts to set up in business alone or with a partner.41 In June of 1900, having
been denounced in a widely-circulated leaflet as a spy for the Italian police, Rubini was no longer able to obtain work in the expatriate community and could not pay rent or buy food. Special Branch’s observations confirmed that he was peddling worthless information to an Italian policeman at the embassy. As he was, so to speak, on their side and out of favour with the comrades anyway, they watched him less keenly from then on.

  In May of 1902 with the Coronation looming, the Italian Ambassador wrote a memorandum to the Foreign Office suggesting collaboration between an Italian police officer, living in London since last year, and Scotland Yard. In view of the Rubini case, this got a dusty response from Sir Edward Bradford.42 Special Branch had known of Inspector Prini’s arrival, and ‘have been in a position to appraise the value of the information he received and transmitted to his Government.’ He had deliberately exposed his informer to danger by circulating a leaflet.

  This leaflet printed in Italian, headed WARNING and addressed to ‘Companions and the public’ calls attention to one Rubini who has been proved to be a spy in the service of the Italian Agent, gives the address of the Agent and also of Rubini, and mentions the assumed name as well as the real name of the Agent.43

  Rubini had been called to account by the anarchists but instead sent a letter, admitting that he had been an informer but had fed Prini only lies. The bearer of the letter admitted that he too had been approached, and had indeed been told ‘that there was money in the business as it would be easy to concoct plots with a view to their being discovered’. In Sir Edward’s opinion, the Italian Government was making matters worse. Not only were they inciting violence and making fools of themselves by paying for dud information, but their treachery impelled the anarchists to greater secrecy. The door to collaboration between English and Italian police was slammed and bolted, and at the Foreign Office Lord Lansdowne smoothly issued the usual response about different practices being incompatible.

  Later in the year Rubini resurfaced. He was arrested in Belgium, having made an attempt on the life of Leopold, King of Belgians. He was also apparently plotting against Edward VII. ‘I marked down the English Prince of Wales for death! It has been tried once! You have got me, but somebody else will take on the job!’44 Melville and the Special Branch were asked for information. They intercepted mail and immediately traced and interviewed Rubini’s wife. She had left him after the financial disaster of his betrayal to the comrades, and had gone to live with her sister. By now the sister had agreed to adopt the child and the young mother had found employment as a cook. They were given to understand that Rubini had indeed been receiving a handsome retainer from Prini, amounting to three pounds ten shillings a week (more than double a working man’s wage). He had bought a revolver too; detectives interviewed the shopkeeper who sold it to him.

  This time Sir Edward Bradford was able to point out that both Rubini and Agiolilli had been incited to murder because, having been betrayed, they must restore their own credibility, Agiolilli also having been drummed out of London as a police spy.45 His fear that the Italian police’s leaden-footed activities made violence more, rather than less, likely had been proved well founded. Secret informants must not be compromised.

  Melville was shifting his position on other police forces. At one time, having worked closely with the French police, he had been disposed to treat the police of all other nations as an international brotherhood transcending cultural barriers. It was in this spirit that he had gone out of his way to help the Okhrana over Burtsev. But times had changed. As early as 1896, when he was talking to one of the Tsar’s bodyguards at Balmoral, he found doubts creeping in. In 1904 he would write about Rachkovskii’s colleagues in the Okhrana in Western Europe:

  I also know Harting well. He occupies the next position to Rataev. For about the past five years he has been stationed in Berlin, in charge of the Russian officers apparently engaged respecting nihilists in London and the protection of the Tsar and Tsarevitch. For immediately either of the latter left Russia they followed on or preceded them for protection. I feel convinced however that they were also engaged as a matter of course on espionage. In 1896 they were with the Tsar at Balmoral and on that occasion Harting in conversation remarked that he had been several months in Ireland, but did not further refer to it. I thought at the time, what could he be doing there? Certainly not after nihilists.46

  Late in 1899 Special Branch undertook to investigate a Russian called Mitzakis, who was believed to be reporting to a Russian agent in Paris called Hansen. At this time Mitzakis lived with his wife and child in a flat in Earls Court while also appearing to maintain a smart house in Drayton Gardens, South Kensington, which was kept empty, locked and in the charge of a servant. From time to time it was used for overnight stays by Mitzakis’s colleagues. Inspector Sweeney reported that Mitzakis and two other men, all three either Russian or Greek, occupied offices in a City building where they appeared to do little but accept mail; they were associated with a military fellow, living at the Cecil Hotel, whom Sweeney suspected of having shown them ‘plans of fortifications’.47 The military man proved to be associated with a respectable English railway syndicate. Mitzakis, Rachkovskii the head of the Okhrana in Western Europe, and an Okhrana man called Golschmann48 were ‘endeavouring to form a syndicate which would have the monopoly of sending English coals to Russia’. The three of them were also

  …engaged in Paris with a poor Italian inventor who brought out an electric accumulator which was patented on the continent, but Mitzakis brought it to London and exploited it on his own account making thereby an immense amount of money… Mitzakis was correspondent of some newspaper using some such initials as E.J.B... 49

  The newspaper accepted mail as ‘Paris Tid-Bits’, 87 Bd de Courcelles.50 Mitzakis ‘followed Rachkovskii everywhere, even to Copenhagen,’ yet when Melville made discreet enquiries of Okhrana agents he knew they ‘always characterised him as a filou’ (a crook). Melville must have been rather puzzled and disappointed by this dubious connection between the Okhrana and the Establishment. In his memoir he wrote:

  When in London Rachkovskii always called on me at New Scotland Yard. He was a very hospitable man and of genial character, but still he was mysterious. On calling upon me he would always say ‘I only arrived this morning. I could not rest until I called upon you.’ (This of course I put down at its proper value) – ‘I brought no person with me from Paris.’

  Without knowing exactly why, I got somewhat suspicious of Rachkovskii. One day he called to see me at New Scotland Yard, told me the same story – I suddenly called the same afternoon at the Hotel Cecil. I learned he had been there for a week and had several gentlemen with him. I went upstairs to his suite of rooms and found Rachkovskii at a table with six or seven others, all apparently writing. He certainly looked very silly over it… What was his object in thus deceiving me? Of course I did not refer to the matter but it left an unpleasant impression on my mind. This was somewhat relieved when on one occasion I was at Copenhagen. Rachkovskii was there at the same time. The Chief of Police, Hensen, was a fine frank sort of man. One day he said to me ‘Yes, Rachkovskii is a fine character, but I would like him better if there was not so much silly mystery about him. Why does he tell me he only arrived in Copenhagen last night when I know he has been here a fortnight? Why does he say he is all alone when I know he is accompanied by six of his officers?’

  The Russians had a great antipathy to the Germans. They said the latter were all-powerful at the Russian Court, and generally, so to speak, were the lions of society, all through it being known they had the Court behind them.

  The Mitzakis plot did not satisfactorily thicken, but remained a confusing minestrone of disparate and irreconcilable elements. When the well-connected Princess who lived with Mitzakis arrived to have a word with Sir Edward Bradford, the investigation was peremptorily halted.51 (‘She moves in good society.’52) But Melville’s appetite for intrigue was whetted, and his new awareness broadened: enemies of the state were not li
mited to self-proclaimed revolutionaries.

  EIGHT

  W. MORGAN, GENERAL AGENT

  The new century saw Melville at the prime of life and the peak of his career. At 16 Lydon Road, Clapham, the two eldest children, Kate and William, then aged eighteen and seventeen respectively, were clerks in an insurance office.1 James, at fifteen, was a pupil at Westminster City School, only half a mile from Scotland Yard. A young woman born in London but bearing the reassuringly Irish name of Bridget Joyce lived in and helped Amelia.2 There was also a live-in maidservant called Beatrice. Melville’s youngest brother George was living in the Ladbroke Grove area of London, married to an Irish girl. They had two children and George was a constable in the CID.

  Melville was well known and respected as the royal bodyguard: ‘the King’s detective’. In the autumn of 1903, he had run Special Branch for a decade and had spent the few weeks preceding his annual leave escorting King Edward to Lisbon, Rome, Paris and Vienna.

  So the announcement in November that he would retire at the end of the month came as a great surprise.

  Ill-informed but knowing types probably allowed suspicion to cross their minds. In the spring, Melville had been put in sole charge of considerable Special Branch funds for secret out-of-pocket payments. Was it possible that some irregularity had come to light?3 This retirement was so entirely unexpected. Patrick Quinn, hastily appointed Melville’s successor, was not yet qualified by examination for the rank of Superintendent. Surely something was going on.

  What had been going on, and was now over, was the Boer War. The British Government’s struggle to retain control of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State had succeeded, but it had revealed an army intelligence service flawed in both war and peace. Like senior policemen years earlier, many military men were inappropriately fastidious when it came to spying. As late as 1895, Colonel G.A. Furse found it necessary to point out, in Intelligence in War: