HOW FEMALE DETECTIVES WORK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9022, 7 April 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

HOW FEMALE DETECTIVES WORK.

A NEW CRIMINAL DEPARTMENT. Lkabnino the other day that a criminal who will shortly appear before a judge ab the Old Bailie, had been successfully tracked by a female detective, and apprehended by means of the information she obtained, when three male detectives employed in the case had failed to catch him, I obtained an introduction to a detective office where female detectives are a speciality, and gained some information of a useful sort. " Female detectives," said the gentleman to whom I was introduced, "are of two or three different kinds. At first I started with only one, aud advertised that her services were available; it was astonishing how soon I had applications for employment from women of almost all classes. I actually received two letters from ladies of title, who said that, supposing their names could be kept absolutely secret, they could be of great assistance to me—for a consideration —and I have aince

utilised the services of both of them, with considerable profit to myself and clients. And I have, at this moment, eight or ten small shop-keeping women as occasional detectives, who are exceedingly useful, so that, you see, I treat with all grades." "But what are the shopkeeping women useful for?" "Well, I'll tell you of a little incident that occurred only a very few months ago. A KOBBEKY DETECTED. " A gentleman came to me and consulted me about some very curious robberies that had occurred in his house. He had a mania for book collecting, and he had lost, strange to say, not only one or two rare editions, but title pages and leaves of volumes which had not been taken away bodily. His servants had been in his house for years, and now and then only had he engaged outside help, but the robbery of all that was most valuable in his library went on, and he did not know how to 6top it. lat once told him that he must let me put a couple of occasional servants in the house when he next gave a dinner party, and that he must let this man and woman come to help for a few times at least. He agreed, and I sent for a greengrocer's young wife who was in my pay and told her what I wanted her to do. Her husband must wait at table; she must be useful in the kitchen and keep her eyes open. They went to the party, but the woman found out nothing ; and a few days afterwards I got her a sort of temporary engagement in the house to do some odd jobs that were wanted, so that she stayed there a wjeek. One evening I got a note from her by a cabman, and, going up to the house, I found she had seen a man-servant in the library, and watched hitnabstractsome leaves from a book in one of the cases. I waited outside the house till past midnight, and was almost giving the matter up, for that time at least, when, lone after the family had retired to rest, an old gentleman came up in a hansom, got down a little distance from the house, gently tapped the area palings, and was at once answered by the man servant, who handed him the leaves after some little confabulation. I need not trouble you with more of that incident. The old gentleman turned out to be a man of considerable means. A FEMALE DETECTIVE UNFAITHFUL. " I have sent female agents as travelling companions with ladies. I have introduced them as eeanistresses into families ; I have sent them to the reading rooms of the British Museum, and over and over again I have employed them to open up correspondence with people whom it was necessary to know something important about. But I once hit upon a regular Tartar, who not only gave away my secret to the man whom she was employed to catch, but married him, and got away to South America with him and the whole of the property which I intended to make him disgorge," A SWINDLING PAWNBROKER. '' Some time ago a pawnbroker in the north of London was suspected of doing a very irregular kind of business. The police, however, did not care to take any trouble about him, and it was at the instance of one or two respectable householders in the neighbourhood that I was called in. Little things of value were missed over and over again, servants were suspected, and one or two had declared that they had pawned the articles at the shop of this man, but when asked for the tickets which represented the articles they had always said that they had received none. Despite all the regulations environing pawnbrokers, they haa simply sold the things outright to him without getting acknowledgcaent of any sort. To catch him was not at all an easy matter. I had to get not only a person to pawn some articles, but a receiver. The latter lat length found in the person of an ancient Israelite who had previously had some dealings with this same pawnbroker, and I instructed him to let the suspected man j know that he wanted to buy a silver-backed toilet-brush of a certain kind if he could get it. On his reporting that he had done so to me, I was ready to send exactly such a brueh by the hands of a ' decoy duck , to the pawnbroker. Dressed as a domestic servant, she ran into his shop one evening just as he was closing, and offering the brush said she wanted as much as he could let her have on it. He inquired whether she wanted to redeem it again, and she said ' No,' whereupon he put down eleven shillings on the counter—or about one-sixth of the value. The girl took the money but no ticket; and three or four days afterwards I had received the brush from my Israelitish friend, the pawnbroker had sold his business, and the neighbourhood was rid of a thorough-paced scoundrel. VICTIMISED. " I regret to say that I was once victimised into assisting an undoubtedly unfaithful wife to hamper and checkmate an easygoing ill-used husoand. One day I was sitting here, when a lady, apparently in great distress of mind, called upon me, and asked if I could assist her. Her husband, she said, was in the habit of going up the river a great deal, and she suspected ne forgot her while he was on these excursions. Could I find this out and furnish her with proofs. She suggested that if I could send some passably good-looking girl to a popular river-side resort which she named, and let her endeavour to attract his attention, she might speedily find out whether these suspicions were correct. I will not detail our preliminary steps; suffice it to say that I employed a pretty dark-eyed girl—he liked dark girls, his wife told me—to go to , and stay in the hotel he frequented. How far she threw herself in his way I do not know, but it is certain thob he took her for a row in his boat, wrote her two or three letters, gave her a dinner in London, and generally compromised himself sufficiently For his wife—whom he had reason to suspect, with perfect truth as it turned out —so completely to turn the tables on him, that he had to surrender at discretion and forego some proceedings in the Divorce Court which he had contemplated taking. It was not, however, till after I had furnished the lady with all the details of my ' decoy duck's' reports that I found out exactly what I had been doing."—Echo.