In an age of brain scans–in which every flicker of emotion, every intellectual effort, can be analysed on a computer monitor–you would think that there would be no corner of the human psyche that could remain hidden. Yet, no computer can completely decrypt a criminal mind, so it remains up to detectives to continue to try to unravel the mysteries of the criminal psyche. This desire to understand evil goes right back to the days when Scotland Yard’s detectives were working by pale gaslight, and when doctors were claiming that the shape of a man’s skull with all its unique ridges and bumps was the key to determining his character.
For the detectives of Scotland Yard, the exercise of diving into a wrong-doer’s mind is about long years of observation, examining the quirks of human nature, and its weaknesses and vulnerabilities. This experience in turn proves invaluable in anticipating the moves of repeat criminals. A constant alertness for deceit and inconsistency is key.
The puzzles in this section feature that sense of a mental duel. A need to be watchful so as to not have the wool pulled over your eyes, and also a sharpness for spotting the key details amid cunning misdirection. The great historical detectives of Scotland Yard, who in many cases rose to become household names, were each adept at the quicksilver reading of essential signs. From identifying scammers to brilliantly organised shoplifting gangs, the detectives were quick to imagine methods and means by which breathtaking crimes might be carried out. And this tightly focused imaginative skill was brought to bear on the more gothic crimes, too.
Perhaps the most famous of all Scotland Yard’s detectives was Robert Fabian. Not least because when he retired and wrote his memoirs, they were deemed exciting enough to be turned into one of the very first hits of 1950s television. It was a show called Fabian of the Yard. Fabian’s methods were as far from Holmes as they could get. He believed in using the full panoply of Scotland Yard’s resources, including its brilliant cross-referenced card file index. This index, filled with everything from convict information to unusual car registration plates, was the means of making quick links between apparently disparate clues before the age of computers.
‘I soon realised’, said Fabian, ‘that if I was going to beat the crook, I would have to study his methods and follow the reasonings of his warped mind’. And from the start of his career in the 1920s, he followed the advice given to him by an older officer: ‘Give your eyes a chance’.
Eyes, and ears too. Early in his detecting career, Fabian was on the trail of another of those elegant jewel thieves who were such a feature of London rooftops in the interwar years. Like so many others, this particular character always opted for evening dress, and slipped in and out of apartments like a shadow. He was never seen and never heard.
Robert Fabian always had an avid appetite for the smallest clues, and one of these presented itself when a shoe-print was found in a flowerbed after an audacious heist. Something about the print pricked Fabian’s curiosity more than usual. He had it analysed back at the Scotland Yard laboratory (like the cross-reference card index, this was a key weapon in the armoury for Fabian). The result confirmed his niggling suspicion; the shoe was a ‘crepe rubber-soled evening dress shoe’. First, this was the sort of item, as he later noted, that ‘no gentleman would wear’. Second of all, there were not that many shoe shops that stocked them.
Fabian and his associates visited each and every stockist, together with a copy of the print indicating the size and the style of the shoe. One shop in the West End recognised the shoe in question and was able to check the records to see which customer habitually favoured them. But the cunning thief was one silent step ahead: he had given a false name and address to the shoemaker.
The detective was unfazed. He knew that this thief had a taste for Mayfair addresses and that his targets had all lived within quite a tight radius. So it was very likely that he would strike in that area again. Fabian’s next move was every bit as cunning as his foe’s. He spent a few evenings haunting the most fashionable Mayfair bars in the very swankiest hotels. His quarry dressed like a wealthy aristocrat, so there was every reason to believe that he would drink like one too. And Fabian’s insight paid off brilliantly. One evening, as Fabian was positioned by the bar, a young man in full evening dress walked past him. The floor was parquet, and yet the young man passed him completely noiselessly.
Fabian discreetly followed the man through the London streets until finally, the man reached a house and walked in. The detective noted the address and shortly afterwards returned with a warrant. The man’s home was found littered with sparkling jewels and an absurd amount of cash.
Another notable Fabian case was a warehouse heist that took place in the immediate post-war years. The sole clue was a tiny scrap of cloth torn from the jacket of one of the thieving heavies. This was once more a case for the Scotland Yard laboratory. The initial finding was dismaying. The cloth was from a demob suit of which, in the late 1940s, there were millions. These were suits issued to every man leaving the army and returning to civilian life. Nonetheless, the material had distinguishing features: chiefly, the pattern. Enquiries made to the Ministry of Supply established that the cloth was made near Somerset but was then sent to a Glasgow mill to be turned over for the mass production of suits.
Again, this was potentially disheartening, but visiting the Glasgow mill, Fabian learned from the supervisor the rule about stitching being individually identifiable, and from the fabric, he knew exactly who had worked on it. Stitching was ‘like handwriting’. The man in question was called over and here was where Fabian’s blend of patience and faith paid off. The worker remembered that he had been working on outsize suits and that this fabric was from a suit made for a man who was 6 foot 2 inches and also unusually broad.
Naturally, they had the man’s address. Fabian and his colleagues, now travelling south to Birmingham, were able to arrest the warehouse thief and, in time, all of his associates. The criminal mind, Fabian knew, was obsessive about fine details and he had to be doubly so. Anything that might be overlooked or discounted by the transgressor could, with time and some skill, be turned against them. This was even true in the bizarre post-war case of the luxury hotel thief who across multiple heists, checked in as a guest, paid for the room, then ransacked all the other guests’ rooms and departed. In all instances and under each different pseudonym, and with each different disguise, the thief left his own suitcase behind. And it was always weighted down with full beer bottles.
A quirky detail of no use to anyone, on the surface of it. Yet even here, Fabian saw his chance. All the bottles had had their labels carefully removed so they could not be identified. Except one, upon which a fragment of label remained with a fragment of a word: ‘hoke’.
There was a pub not far away called ‘The Artichoke’. Could this be where the burglar was buying his beer? After another bar stake-out and a sighting of a man buying an unusual quantity of bottled beer, the police found the man Fabian was seeking. This man (unnamed by Fabian in his memoirs) was something of an actor manqué. As well as containing a number of stolen items, the man’s flat contained an unusual quantity of wigs and make-up. He had taken the disguises very seriously. The beer, however, was an element of genuine eccentricity; why on earth leave suitcases behind and why weigh them down in this singular manner? This psychological tic was useful to the police though; and if it had not been for Fabian’s curiosity about the partially removed label, this otherwise crack thief might have got away with it.
Fabian was a brave man, too. In 1939, just before the outbreak of war, he was awarded the King’s Medal for disarming an IRA bomb planted at Piccadilly Circus. One such device had already gone off but Fabian, with a pen-knife, had set about physically cutting the fuses on the other.
Some of Fabian’s predecessors were also adept at out-thinking the malefactors. In the 1920s, Detective Fred ‘Nutty’ Sharpe (it is difficult to trace the source of this nickname) was on to a team of professional pickpockets who operated in and around the West End. Placing them under surveillance, he saw ten of them getting together to board a bus to take them to another district after a theft. As the gang moved to the upper deck, Sharpe swiftly boarded. Rather than having the bus brought to a halt, he moved to the cab window at the front and gave the bus driver some quiet instructions. Then he jumped off again and made for the nearest public telephone.
Passengers and pickpockets alike were puzzled when, first of all, the bus simply drove past a number of stops. Then, there was real bewilderment as the bus diverged from its route and started speeding down unfamiliar streets. It drew up outside a large police station. Outside were waiting a number of constables who had received the call from Sharpe. The thieves were arrested.
Another illustrious figure who used sharp intellect and a lively wit was Detective Frederick Wensley, who rose to be the head of the CID. He had started his career as something of an action man; to the delight of the popular press, he pursued a killer in Whitechapel up to the roof of a house, where, watched by a large crowd below, he physically fought the man and managed to subdue him. But following this he also developed a reputation as an incisive thinker. One newspaper described him as ‘Sherlock Holmes in real life’. He was there at the forefront of the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911, when the police were forced to take on a band of armed eastern European revolutionaries who had robbed a bank and murdered several policemen. Elsewhere, he had the idea of infiltrating a notorious, and hugely profitable, gambling den by disguising himself as a soldier. At the pre-arranged time, he leapt from his chair and stood imperiously on top of a green baize table, calculating that the moment of bizarre shock would shield him from the more violent elements in the room as his fellow officers swept in.
And in 1917, when London was facing attacks from German zeppelins in the First World War, Wensley and his colleagues were faced with an unusual murder where the killer had left behind a particularly perplexing clue.
The victim was a woman called Emilienne Gerard, although it took a while to identify her. Various parts of her were found wrapped in a meat sack and a sheet in a sooty street near King’s Cross station. An enigmatic note had been left behind with the body–it read ‘Blodie Belgium’! Was this crime somehow prompted by the war? Was it in some way political? But the poor victim, who was French, had no affiliations or causes. And the method of disposing of her remains suggested that her killer was skilled in a very particular trade.
The first thread to follow was the sheet in which parts of her body had been wrapped. It had a laundry mark indicating the premises where it was regularly washed, and also indicating which customer it belonged to. From this, the Scotland Yard team was able to not only name the unfortunate victim, but also to find her address. They visited her flat and among the effects they found was the photograph of a Belgian butcher called Louis Voisin.
It appeared that Voisin and Emilienne had been in a relationship, but Wensley, when inviting Voisin to the station for questioning, knew that the butcher was hardly going to admit to anything more than that. Even though suspicions were strong, there was nothing even especially circumstantial that linked him to the strange and barbaric murder.
That was until Wensley had a moment of lightning bolt inspiration. Procuring paper and pen, he asked Voisin to write down the phrase ‘Bloody Belgium!’ Voisin did so, and Wensley asked if he could write it out a couple more times. It was noted that the handwriting style changed a little each time, probably in a conscious effort to disguise the natural style. But what was very much more striking was the spelling. Voisin had written out, three times, the phrase ‘Blodie Belgium!’ He genuinely thought this was how it was spelled, and thus did not bother to correct it. From here, Wensley proceeded to Voisin’s Soho dwellings and in the cellar he found other parts of Emilienne Gerard. The crime, it was alleged, was essentially unpremeditated. Emilienne had paid an unexpected call on Voisin, her sweetheart, just as an air-raid had started. Entering his dwellings, she found that he was with another woman, Berte Roche. A desperate fight between her and Berte broke out and horribly, it appeared that Voisin then weighed in as well. His blows were so violent that Emilienne was killed on the spot.
What Voisin had then done, in trying to dispose of her so gruesomely, was an elaborate means of creating a false lead for police to follow. But Wensley, with his brilliant trap, secured the conviction. The butcher hanged; and the other woman, Berte, died while serving her prison sentence.
At that stage, psychology was an inexact science, and of course it still is. But as Freud’s revolutionary theories about the subconscious spread deeper into society throughout the twentieth century, so the operatives of Scotland Yard and other police bureaux around the world began to turn with interest to doctors who specialised in the murkier corners of the human mind. One early criminal psychologist was Hans Gross, who averred that ‘every thief has a characteristic style’. He studied a range of crimes and found that serial offenders had certain trademark characteristics.
In late 1920s Germany, a little before the economic firestorm of the Depression pitched the country into political darkness, there was an extraordinary and macabre case that saw the local police turn to a psychologist for help. A series of killings and attacks were being carried out by a figure dubbed ‘The Dusseldorf Vampire’. Dr Ernst Gehnert was consulted and his considered ideas about the type of man who might be capable of such crimes was then treated as the psychological equivalent of a photo-fit. The reality, though, was that these ideas were rather one-dimensional. Dr Gehnert averred that the killer must have had a plausibly friendly manner to get so close to his victims before the attacks, and he was ‘exceptionally cruel’ and ‘must be mad’. The killer, Peter Kürten, was eventually turned over to the police by his wife so Dr Gehnert’s theories played no actual part in bringing him to justice. Nonetheless, this was among the very first instances of psychological profiling.
And as the years went on, Scotland Yard became increasingly interested in the idea of building up a sense of an offender’s personality. They started to use experts who could pick their way through a maze of different manias and conditions. Practitioners such as Dr Patrick Tooley and Professor David Canter have helped Scotland Yard with investigations by pinpointing telltale characteristics that even the smoothest of sociopaths could not entirely disguise. And of course, the dream remains to identify such dangerous individuals before they ever have the chance to harm anyone else, a means of looking into the future of potentially criminal souls.
So the following puzzles, some in the form of logic problems, carry the extra implicit challenge that is presented on a daily basis to detectives: can you pick out likely suspects through certain personality quirks and oddities and certain sets of facts about whereabouts and habits?