CHAPTER NINE

FOOTSTEPS IN THE FOG

In the Scotland Yard archive, colourful maps that could be mistaken for works of art show Victorian London divided into an array of different segments, each with a large letter superimposed. These maps show each segment shaded either red, blue, yellow or orange–not to signify crime levels, but simply to render each district clear and distinct. They show how Scotland Yard organised the policing of London throughout the late nineteenth century. From the elegant hub of Piccadilly Circus to the clamour of the docks, each division was assigned a letter of the alphabet, with ‘A’ signalling Westminster and the area of the Yard itself. Constables and stations worked and patrolled these patches and got to know them intimately.

The story of Scotland Yard through the years has helped paint a picture of the social tides of the city, and of its changing landscapes; not just the ubiquitous fogs, through which constables walk and screams echo, but also the less salubrious quarters which would most likely have been left out of any glossy guidebooks. The winding alleys and dangerous areas had to be charted, catalogued, and carefully monitored by the Yard, and, more often than not, this intimate knowledge of each and every shadow on London’s streets was hugely valuable. Chasing criminals is a lot easier when you know the shortcuts…

The puzzles in this section are therefore based around London’s geography. There are games involving tempting historical targets, labyrinthine escape routes, criminal landmarks in Soho and down at the docks, with some even inspired by the Tower of London (since surely every self-respecting super-criminal has at one point or another turned his thoughts to the mouth-watering prospect of the Crown Jewels, even if they would be a little tricky to sell on afterwards). The best detectives can negotiate these mazes effortlessly, but can you?

In the earliest days of the police, before London had ballooned outward into a vast metropolis, some of the city’s central districts had an extraordinarily tough and squalid character. St Giles was among the most notorious; with hideous over-crowding, people stupefying themselves with gin and every sort of crime a daily occurrence. St Giles is now the area that lies between New Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road and is full of luxury flats, swanky offices and trendy bars. Also best avoided in the nineteenth century was Saffron Hill, a district of closely-built slum housing on the banks of the reeking River Fleet. It was around here that Charles Dickens’s Fagin operated with his gang of child thieves. Today there are tech start-ups and hipster coffee joints.

Despite their squalor, these and other Victorian districts acquired an air of gothic romance. Long before the hideous Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, Whitechapel, Stepney and other neighbourhoods in the East End of London had become a subject of some fascination thanks to the ‘Police Intelligence’ reports that featured in most newspapers. These locations proffered plenty of content, from violence to riots, even as far as body-snatching from the churchyard in Poplar.

The areas closest to the docks–which in the Victorian era fell within ‘F’ Division–needed sensitive policing at all times. In the earliest days of the force, Sir Robert Peel gave careful thought to the best kind of recruits for his new service, and there was a great effort made to employ constables of Irish heritage. The reason, very simply, was that the streets around Shadwell and Ratcliffe were filled with a great many Irish families who had moved to London looking for work. They resided in a landscape full of warehouses, great sailing ships, railways and factories, which provided plenty of dark corners for harbouring crime. Peel hoped that Irish residents would feel more at ease with police who might have some understanding of their circumstances, but it did not always quite work out in this way and some of these constables found themselves at the receiving end of abuse. This came from both Irish families who felt that their uniformed countrymen were actually an oppressive tool of the state, and also from non-Irish offenders who complained that these officers were ‘hot-headed’.

The docks were also a hotbed of intrigue and conflict for Scotland Yard because of the dazzling range of cultures that came to settle in the area. The German population of Shadwell, in particular its young drinking men, were partial to getting into battles with Irish neighbours, and come the turn of the century, prompted by the racist fictions of Sax Rohmer and his super-criminal/mastermind Dr Fu Manchu, there was a lurid fascination with the Chinese community in Limehouse. Many believed the district was riddled with opium dens. It was not. Nonetheless, the local police had to be assiduous in ensuring that gangs of whatever variety could not get a secure footing in the damp alleys and passageways that ran along the curve of the dark river.

Curiously, some London areas still carry subliminal associations with their lurid pasts. The exquisitely fashionable Hoxton, for instance, in its more crumbling, entropic corners, and little alleys of brick and cobbles, and occasional preserved shop-fronts, somehow continues to evoke a folk memory of the district’s 1930s razor gangs, even amid all the exclusive nightclubs. Elsewhere, some addresses acquired such terrible notoriety that they had to be erased from the London map altogether. One such location was Rillington Place, in a run-down corner of north Kensington. The slayings that took place in this house in the late 1940s–truly hideous crimes committed by John Reginald Christie–led first of all to an innocent man, a lodger called Timothy Evans, being mistakenly convicted and hanged for the murder of his wife and baby daughter. But a few years later, in 1953, Christie moved out; and the new lodgers discovered corpses behind a hidden alcove in his kitchen, and the body of Christie’s wife under the floorboards. The story was so nightmarish that the eventual slum clearance of the street allowed its name to be rubbed out. In its place there is now a peaceful mews backing on to the Hammersmith and City line.

Throughout the twentieth century, it was Soho that came to symbolise all that was transgressive about the capital. There were dens of vice, ruthless gangs, strippers, and a whole seething concourse of punters and mobsters. The tight streets and alleys acquired a whole new luminous life after dark, with scarlet lights luring excited customers through the doors of dubious establishments. There was a vicarious thrill here for the newspaper-reading public, especially when it was suggested that among the patrons of the seedier clubs were senior establishment figures including judges, MPs and peers. Alongside this was a certain transgressive comedy about the efforts of the police in trying to prosecute for obscenity.

One such case, in the 1960s, centred around a club owner called Quinn. His establishment featured a salty blend of striptease artistes and comedians telling extremely rude jokes. Surreptitious film had been taken of the acts on the stage. One young lady danced with a whip, which was occasionally cracked theatrically. Another removed her clothing while simultaneously handling several snakes which were being ‘charmed’ by the music. She then appeared to swallow one. There was an act involving a young lady called ‘Bonnie Bell–The Ding Dong Girl’. She had bells on carefully-placed tassels that audience members were permitted to ring. This was altogether too much: a case was brought before the courts on the grounds that this was an ‘unruly house’; the judge proclaimed it ‘filthy, disgusting and beastly’ (it is worth asking: how many other members of the legal profession were then among the thousands of furtive members of this club?). The young club owner was fined a then eye-watering £5000. The club owner’s real name was Paul Raymond and it was not long before his particular brand of stage entertainment, Bonnie Bell and all, was accepted as a legitimate part of the Soho landscape.

This vista of pimps and gangs, strippers and club-owners, card sharps and illegal gambling premises put Soho at the heart of so many of Scotland Yard’s departments. Up until the start of the 1960s, any young lady appearing completely nude on a stage was required by law to be completely still. To get around this performers would assemble ‘tableaux’ with titles such as ‘Paris by Night’ with women arranging themselves in the shape of the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. One evening, a party of drunken journalists watched the female performers troop on to the stage. As they started disrobing, one witty young hack shouted as a joke: ‘Mother! How could you’? His fellow punters were not amused at having the spell broken and a fight began that soon assumed Wild West proportions. The police were quickly called to break it up.

There have been many other areas of London that have earned their place on the map thanks to their notorious criminal reputations, and one of these is Hatton Garden, near Holborn. For about 150 years, this otherwise drab thoroughfare has glittered with diamonds, exquisite precious stones, and stunning gold and silver jewellery. To protect this street of flashing beauty, merchants have always invested in the most up-to-date and innovative security, because of course Hatton Garden has provided the most irresistible temptation for generations of thieves. The most recent heist, an elaborate attack on a sealed vault in 2015, was both reprehensible and curiously quaint; the sort of crime one might see in a film from the 1950s.

It involved a quiet Bank Holiday; a lift shaft; an industrial drill; and thieves of a certain age. They managed to get away with an extraordinary sum, some twenty-four-million pounds’ worth of rare stones and gold. But the methods that Scotland Yard employed to catch and convict them were rather more modern than the vintage villains had bargained for. Understanding that the audacious raid was carried out by experienced hands, the Metropolitan Police did not have to scour records for very long to see the echoes and patterns in previous heists. The twenty-first-century twist saw the deployment of number-plate recognition software, and sophisticated hidden cameras. Some time after the raid, the suspects met up in a pub on the Pentonville Road and were filmed and recorded discussing the triumph of their theft. Here was the quintessential London crime, thwarted by a very modern Scotland Yard.

In an earlier age, another London landmark that hit the headlines was the Savoy Hotel, known across the globe for its elegance and luxury. In 1923, it hosted a wealthy young Egyptian, Ali Fahmy, who had bestowed upon himself the title ‘Prince’. He was there with his wife Marguerite Alibert (‘the Princess’) and his manservant. They had one of the finest suites in the building, but from the very start of their visit, it seemed embarrassingly clear that this fashionable couple were in a state of almost perpetual acrimony. He was young; just 23 years old. She was ten years his senior. And it was noted everywhere they went that both of them seemed to be trying to cover up facial cuts and bruises. They did not seem able to disguise their mutual loathing.

One spring evening, on an unusually warm and humid night, the glamorous couple went to the theatre to see a production of The Merry Widow and they returned to the Savoy for a late supper. They caused consternation when the Princess threatened to hit her husband over the head with a wine bottle and he replied that if she did, he would do exactly the same back to her. With the meal over, she retired upstairs, and he went out into that uncomfortably warm night, seen hailing a cab in the direction of Piccadilly.

He was seen returning to the hotel at around 2 a.m. By this time, the muggy night air was filled with hollow booms and sharp cracks; a wild thunderstorm had broken out along the Thames. As he approached his suite, Prince Ali Fahmy was seen by a hotel porter, who witnessed the Prince opening the door of his room, crouching and talking to his small dog. There were further terrific booms from the sky above, and as the porter walked away he thought he heard more defined cracks among them.

He made his way back along the corridor and there, through the open doorway, he saw Fahmy’s wife standing over the Prince’s bleeding body and saying repeatedly to herself (in French): ‘What have I done, my dear’? The revolver with which she had shot him had been tossed aside on a sofa.

From the point of view of Scotland Yard, there was hardly any difficulty in detecting who had committed the crime, and Marguerite Alibert was swift to confess. But when it came to the matter of why she had done it, her subsequent trial for murder was sensationally turned upside down. The jury was told of her husband’s ‘unnatural’ desires and demands and of his drastic use of servants to oppress and restrict her every move. The jury was told that he was a monster, and she was his prisoner and the defence argued that her actions could only be seen as self-defence. Extraordinarily, the jury acquitted her. Behind all of this was a series of deeply racist assumptions about the behaviour of the Egyptian prince. This case came to fruition at the height of other sensationalist reports concerning the white slave trade. But the broader point was that the Savoy, swankiest of all West End landmarks, acquired the same kind of notoriety as the more usual crime scenes.

Not that long ago, the Tower of London, home to the Crown Jewels and inspiration for countless heist daydreams, made the headlines when an intruder hit a streak of luck, having clambered over a wall late at night. The intruder was eventually detected by the Tower’s cutting-edge security measures and picked up by the police but, having chanced upon an empty guard hut and some keys, he got a little further through the layers of security than even he might have been expecting. It was a rare and extraordinary breach. Thankfully, the Crown Jewels remained safe, as indeed they have been since 1671, when one Colonel Blood succeeded in reaching them. His was an exquisite and carefully calculated plan. Posing as a parson, Blood contrived to become friends with one of the wardens at the Tower. Weeks went by and their social ties deepened, with Blood’s wife getting to know the warden’s wife. After a suitable amount of time, Blood asked the warden if he might take a friend to see the Crown Jewels, then kept underground behind a metal grille. The warden was delighted to oblige his gentle friend the parson. And it was only when the parson’s associate knocked him out that he understood he had been taken for a fool.

Blood and his associate started trying to pack as many of the jewels into their clothing as possible, but as they did so, Edwards the warden regained consciousness and started shouting about murder and treason. Blood was apprehended. This was a violent crime against the Crown, yet there were those who had nothing but admiration for Blood’s guile. As we know, often such ambitious criminals tended to get admiration from the public who looked at such cases through rose-tinted glasses. Among those was King Charles II himself, who was fascinated when the miscreant was brought before him, and Blood was acquitted.

The one institute in London that seems to have always been secure from the attentions of predatory criminals is the Bank of England. Save the ingenious scheme cooked up by Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway in The Lavender Hill Mob (1949)–stealing the bank’s gold ingots, melting them down and turning them into souvenir models of the Eiffel Tower–the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street has always been too impenetrable a target. Of course, that particular district has its own bespoke City of London police.

As for the rest of the capital, famous locations of dastardly crime have become part of the rich tapestry of London’s underworld history. Tourists come from all over the world to visit the streets of Whitechapel, the Tower of London and the Clink. There are some particular districts of the city that always seem to attract crime and criminals; equally, though, these streets have also inspired great crime-fighting. It is not just about knowing where gangs meet; it is about understanding the very fabric and history of those areas that seem to have been more prone to outbreaks of transgression than others. And from the East End to the leafy heights of Hampstead, the crimes that Scotland Yard faces seem to have a certain degree of consistency. With the grand villas of north and south London attracting the light-fingered, and the back streets of Shoreditch playing host to drunkenness and narcotics (though in a rather trendier fashion now than in the late nineteenth century), patterns have been established across the decades. So the puzzles that follow pay tribute to that very specialised brand of local knowledge: the feel for the essential bones of the city that keep the Yard perennially one step ahead.

1

MIND YOUR MANORS

It always helps to know your own patch. Officers take pride in knowing the geography of their own ‘manor’. Here is an aerial view of a suburban area.

Can you locate the position on the map of the square shown at the top of the page? There is one segment of map that exactly matches this square.

2

BLOCKS

Fit the blocks into the grid so that each horizontal and each vertical row spells out a word, i.e., five horizontal words and four vertical ones. Hopefully by the end you will have emerged from the fog.

3

A STEP AT A TIME

The bobby on the beat knows to take a step at a time when out and about. There is a set starting point and a clear finishing point to be reached.

In this challenge, link the top word to the bottom one, changing a letter at a time and making new words at every step.

1 T E N T H

P L A C E

2 S W O R D

C H A S E

4

NO HIDING PLACE

The detective’s only clue to the whereabouts of a man on the run is the list of words below. He is hiding in a building in the heart of London. Work out what these words mean and it should guide you to the building where he is concealed. Is it a school, a church, a factory or a theatre?

REIGNS

PERTAIN

STRAIT

CRANED

RESIGNED

ROASTING

CARTHORSE

5

LETSBY AVENUE

In Letsby Avenue there is a large police HQ subdivided into three separate buildings. There is a fourth police building a distance from the others.

Can you divide the map so that each building appears on its own patch and ALL divisions are identical in area and in shape?

6

ONE-WAY SYSTEM

You and your co-driver must make your way through the maze of back streets to reach your destination and catch the thieves red-handed. As if the labyrinth of highways and byways wasn’t enough, you also have to contend with one-way systems. Find the right route and always travel in the direction of the arrows. If the arrow is going towards you as you try and enter a street you must seek an alternative route. You must travel from the top to the bottom of the map. Where will you start, and where will you finish?

7

PAWNBROKER

Pawnbroking was introduced in England in the thirteenth century. A person could leave a valuable item with the pawnbroker in return for ready cash, with the opportunity to buy the item back at a later date when his or her financial circumstances had improved. Of course, the pawnbroker charged for his services.

Some pawnbrokers were more honest than others. Here are some receipts that the men at the Yard have collected. One of them looks a bit suspicious as it doesn’t follow the pattern of the rest. Can you work out which one it is?

1 0 0 1

1 6 9 1

1 8 8 1

1 9 9 1

1 6 0 9 1

1 8 0 8 1