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and went down the stairs to see what all the commotion was about.
    Detective Officer Chamberlain curtly introduced himself to Martha Stacey. He had no time to waste, he said. There was urgent business, police business, that needed attending to.
    ‘He asked whether two gentlemen lived there who dressed in female attire. He said they were in custody,’ Martha Stacey recalled a week later. ‘I forget the answer I gave but I said I was astonished.’
    ‘What were they taken for?’ she asked him.
    ‘Either it was a freak or a lark,’ Chamberlain replied shortly. ‘Which room do they occupy?’
    ‘I said they dressed in the one adjoining the ground floor,’ recalled Martha Stacey. ‘He went into the room and commenced searching it.
    ‘Chamberlain did not show me any warrant, and I did not ask him for it,’ she added. ‘I was too confused.’
    Once inside, Chamberlain began methodically opening boxes and portmanteaux, pulling out dresses and bonnets and boots, tipping out drawers, leafing through piles of papers and rummaging through boxes of jewellery.
    ‘My mother remonstrated with him about it,’ Martha Stacey testified. But Chamberlain merely shrugged his shoulders contemptuously. ‘He said he had a right to do it and that he would take them away with him and sell them if he thought proper.
    ‘He also took away some letters,’ she continued. ‘I can’t say how many. Chamberlain looked at an album and took what portraits he thought proper out of it. He also took some more from another album. I should think about twenty in all.’
    Clutching a pile of papers and photographs, Chamberlain locked the door and pocketed the key. No one, not a soul, was to enter those rooms under any circumstances, he said. There was important evidence which needed to be taken into custody. He would return in an hour or two.
    Martha Stacey was in trouble and she knew it. ‘Houses of accommodation’ like hers were common in London and came in all shapes and sizes. They were not exactly brothels but they were places where people went to have sex, away from prying eyes and with no awkward questions asked. On the very lowest rung of the erotic ladder, they were places where for a shilling, sixpence or even less, streetwalkers could take their punters to a room where there would be a bed with filthy sheets, a verminous mattress and a bucket for the punters to wash in before and after doing the business. But at least there would be privacy. At the upper end of the scale, sumptuously appointed rooms or suites catered for wealthy gentlemen to pass an hour or two with a high-class whore.
    Martha Stacey’s house of accommodation was somewhere in the middle range. Though there was a problem with the whores in nearby Brunswick Square, Wakefield Street was, by and large, a respectable and quiet residential street, the ideal street for a respectable and quiet house of accommodation. The houses were very often owned and run by former prostitutes who in sharp contrast to the prevailing notion of the natural history of the profession – seduction, ruin, degradation, disease and premature death – had often saved a comfortable little nest egg from the game and wanted to invest it. Running a house of accommodation was a safe bet. They knew the business; they knew the girls; and they knew there would always be a demand for rooms from everyone from the poorest streetwalker to the grandest concubine.
    Martha Stacey was most likely a former prostitute herself. She was certainly not the shy, retiring or easily shocked type. Quite the opposite. Even old Mrs Stacey may have been in the business once. Prostitution ran in families, and successful prostitutes would teach their daughters the tricks of the trade. Even Frances Stacey, Martha Stacey’s niece, who came in to help with the chores at Wakefield Street, may have been on the game some of the time.
    Martha Stacey’s establishment was, as far as she knew, unique in London, and its very uniqueness