every man we rub elbows with may be one of the Four, and we none the wiser. Heavy, black-looking posters stared down from blank walls, and filled the breadth of every police noticeboard.
£1000 REWARD
Whereas, on August 18, at about 4.30 o’clock in the afternoon, an infernal machine was deposited in the Members’ Smoke-Room by some person or persons unknown.
And Whereas there is reason to believe that the person or persons implicated in the disposal of the aforesaid machine are members of an organised body of criminals known as “The Four Just Men,” against whom warrants have been issued on charges of wilful murder in London, Paris, New York, New Orleans, Sattle (USA), Barcelona, Tomsk, Belgrade, Christiania, Capetown and Caracas.
Now, Therefore, the above reward will be paid by his Majesty’s Government to any person or persons who shall lay such information as shall lead to the apprehension of any of or the whole of the persons styling themselves “The Four Just Men” and identical with the band before mentioned.
And, Furthermore, a free pardon and the reward will be paid to any member of the band for such information, providing the person laying such information has neither committed nor has been an accessory before or after the act of any of the following murders.
(Signed)
Ryday Montgomery,
His Majesty’s Secretary
of State for Home Affairs.
J. B. Calfort,
Commissioner of Police.
[Here followed a list of the sixteen crimes alleged against the four men.]
God Save the King
All day long little knots of people gathered before the broadsheets, digesting the magnificent offer.
It was an unusual hue and cry, differing from those with which Londoners were best acquainted. For there was no appended description of the men wanted; no portraits by which they might be identified, no stereotyped “when last seen was wearing a dark blue serge suit, cloth cap, check tie,” on which the searcher might base his scrutiny of the passer-by. It was a search for four men whom no person had ever consciously seen, a hunt for a will-o’-the-wisp, a groping in the dark after indefinite shadows.
Detective Superintendent Falmouth, who was a very plain-spoken man (he once brusquely explained to a Royal Personage that he hadn’t got eyes in the back of his head), told the assistant commissioner exactly what he thought about it.
“You can’t catch men when you haven’t got the slightest idea who or what you’re looking for. For the sake of argument, they might be women for all we know—they might be Chinamen or niggers; they might be tall or short; they might—why, we don’t even know their nationality! They’ve committed crimes in almost every country in the world. They’re not French because they killed a man in Paris, or Yankee because they strangled Judge Anderson.”
“The writing,” said the commissioner, referring to a bunch of letters he held in his hand.
“Latin; but that may be a fake. And suppose it isn’t? There’s no difference between the handwriting of a Frenchman, Spaniard, Portuguese, Italian, South American, or Creole—and, as I say, it might be a fake, and probably is.”
“What have you done?” asked the commissioner.
“We’ve pulled in all the suspicious characters we know. We’ve cleaned out Little Italy, combed Bloomsbury, been through Soho, and searched all the colonies. We raided a place at Nunhead last night—a lot of Armenians live down there, but——”
The detective’s face bore a hopeless look.
“As likely as not,” he went on, “we should find them at one of the swagger hotels—that’s if they were fools enough to bunch together; but you may be sure they’re living apart, and meeting at some unlikely spot once or twice a day.”
He paused, and tapped his fingers absently on the big desk at which he and his superior sat.
“We’ve had de Courville over,” he resumed. “He saw the Soho crowd, and what is more important, saw his own man who lives amongst them—and it’s none of them, I’ll swear—or at least he swears, and I’m prepared to accept his word.”
The commissioner shook his head pathetically.
“They’re in an awful stew in Downing Street,” he said. “They do not know exactly what is going to happen next.”
Mr. Falmouth rose to his feet with a sigh and fingered the brim of his hat.
“Nice time ahead of us——I don’t think,” he remarked paradoxically.
“What are the people thinking about it?” asked the Commissioner.
“You’ve seen the papers?”
Mr. Commissioner’s shrug was uncomplimentary to British journalism.
“The papers! Who in Heaven’s name is going to take the slightest notice of what is in the papers!” he said petulantly.
“I am, for one,” replied the calm detective; “newspapers are more often than not led by the public; and it seems to me the idea of running a newspaper in a nutshell is to write so that the public will say, ‘That’s smart—it’s what I’ve said all along.’ ”
“But the public themselves—have you had an opportunity of gathering their idea?”
Superintendent Falmouth nodded.
“I was talking in the Park to a man only this evening—a master-man by the look of him, and presumably intelligent. ‘What’s your idea of this Four Just Men business?’ I asked. ‘It’s very queer,’ he said: ‘do you think there’s anything in it?’—and that,” concluded the disgusted police officer, “is all the public thinks about it.”
But if there was sorrow at Scotland Yard, Fleet Street itself was all a- twitter with pleasurable excitement. Here was great news indeed: news that might be heralded across double columns, blared forth in headlines, shouted by placards, illustrated, diagramised, and illuminated by statistics.
“Is it the Mafia?” asked the Comet noisily, and went on to prove that it was.
The Evening World, with its editorial mind lingering lovingly in the ‘sixties, mildly suggested a vendetta, and instanced “The Corsican Brothers.”
The Megaphone stuck to the story of the Four Just Men, and printed pages of details concerning their nefarious acts. It disinterred from dusty files, continental and American, the full circumstances of each murder; it gave the portraits and careers of the men who were slain, and, whilst in no way palliating the offence of the Four, yet set forth justly and dispassionately the lives of the victims, showing the sort of men they were.
It accepted warily the reams of contributions that flowed into the office; for a newspaper that has received the stigma “yellow” exercises more caution than its more sober competitors. In newspaperland a dull lie is seldom detected, but an interesting exaggeration drives an unimaginative rival to hysterical denunciations.
And reams of “Four Men” anecdotes did flow in. For suddenly, as if by magic, every outside contributor, every literary gentleman who made a speciality of personal notes, every kind of man who wrote, discovered that he had known the Four intimately all his life.
‘When I was in Italy. …’ wrote the author of Come Again (Hackworth Press, 6s.; “slightly soiled,” Farringdon Book Mart, 2d.) ‘I remember I heard a curious story about these Men of Blood. …”
Or—
“No spot in London is more likely to prove the hiding-place of the Four Villains than Tidal Basin,” wrote another gentleman, who stuck “Collins” in the northeast corner of his manuscript. “Tidal Basin in the reign of Charles