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Dulwich, Clapham and Stockwell who could not resist – straight from Paris! – its parasols, hats, furs, dress materials (‘New Shades in French Beiges, Summer Serges, Indian Cachemires, and Merinos, Alpacas and Russell Cords’ 29 ), bedsteads, Davenports and Canterburies, overmantels and dressing sets, bamboo whatnots, and on, and on. No doubt Kate Melville spent a few rapturous hours gazing into its plate glass windows.
    One woman who was quite a lot richer was also distracted by the delights of the Elephant and Castle in August of 1880. She took £400 in cash from her bank there: three £100 notes, one £50, four £10 notes and the rest in gold and silver. She put the cash in a purse inside a bag before setting off for an absorbing shopping trip with her little girl and her sister-in-law. When at last they caught a tramcar home to Clapham, she asked her sister-in-law for the money and was told the little girl had it; but the bag was open and the money gone. She asked the conductor urgently to stop the tram, insisting that she must return to the bank and get the notes stopped. He ignored her and rang the bell, but she grabbed her skirts, jumped off and hurried to the bank as her sister-in-law and daughter rode away.
    Within weeks, Detective Sergeant Melville had traced some of the notes. The tram conductor had ordered a new suit from a Clapham tailor and changed a £10 note to pay for a gold watch and chain for his girlfriend. At Lambeth Police Court he was remanded week after week, but continued to insist that he had not only ‘found’ the original cash, but ‘thrown away’ the other £280. To help him remember where he had thrown it, he was remanded until November; and there The Times, infuriatingly, ends its tale. 30
    In January of 1882 Melville’s name appeared again when he was one of the officers investigating a couple of shoplifters; 31 and at the end of that year, he bore witness against a light-fingered, twenty-four-year-old assistant to a milk roundsman, who was accused of stealing from funds received, which he was supposed to deposit twice daily. He had been employed by the roundsman for four months. ‘Detective Melville in answer to the magistrate said he believed the prisoner had been living at a rather high rate, and on Sunday week had entertained some sixteen persons at dinner.’ 32
    Melville had now been a policeman for over a decade. The little family was growing. This year Kate had given birth to a baby girl also called Kate. Perhaps Melville expected to carry on indefinitely outwitting the burglars and embezzlers of South London until he retired; but the opportunity soon arose to become part of something altogether more exciting.

TWO
D YNAMITE C AMPAIGN
    In March of 1883, when Kate was six months pregnant with their third child, Melville was offered a position within a new covert branch of the CID based at Scotland Yard. Headed by Superintendent ‘Dolly’ Williamson, it would be called the Special Irish Branch (SIB).
    Although the Special Irish Branch was new, its approach was not. It had developed out of existing efforts to contain Irish discontent. It was established in response to a Fenian bombing campaign which had begun in 1881 and was causing increasing alarm.
    Since the Clerkenwell bomb of 1867 (an attempt to blow up the Middlesex House of Detention to release a Fenian prisoner), the British Government had employed Robert Anderson, an Anglo-Irish barrister, on Irish matters – that is, spying and counter-terrorism. At first he worked out of Dublin Castle where his brother occupied a senior position. The Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) relied on a network of clandestine agents all over Ireland (publicans, butchers, ordinary people in ordinary towns) to warn them of anti-British feeling. In other words they operated as an internal Secret Service. In England, this pro-active attitude to detection even of ordinary criminal cases had