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In March of 1898 the invalid Reverend Thomas died suddenly in a Newhaven hotel. For the past year he had been in the care of a nurse who, unknown to him, was a murder suspect who had evaded the law abroad.
¹⁵
The death certificate was signed by a young Dr T.W. Andrew, MRCS, who, according to the researches of this author over a century later, did not exist under that name; he was seen by hotel staff, but quickly left; the burial took place within two days. Thomas had made a new will just twelve days before he died, and left his great wealth to his widow Margaret (who just five years before had been employed as his maid).

By the summer of 1898 Melville knew that Rosenblum wished to marry Mrs Margaret Thomas, and he knew also that Rosenblum was keen to change his identity. He wished to return to Russia, but could not do so under his current identity, as he was eligible for army service, which he had effectively evaded when he left in 1893. Melville was aware of Sigmund Rosenblum's value as an informant and would go out of his way to assist. Circumstantial evidence for his role in what followed is strong, particularly since Rosenblum now prepared to adopt the surname of Melville's first wife Kate.

The oldest known way of satisfying officialdom about one's identity is to produce evidence of place of birth. It was not until 1971 that Frederick Forsyth's best-seller
Day of the Jackal
revealed to the world the ease with which a deceased infant's identity can be assumed. Melville would have known about it in the 1890s as Special Branch sometimes needed to create new identities for people. It so happened that a Sidney Reilly had been born to Michael and Mary Reilly in Belmullet, County Mayo, in 1878 and had died soon afterwards. Quite what relationship Michael was to Kate Melville is unclear. (Civil registration of births in Ireland did not begin until 1864.) But since Michael Reilly bore Kate's name and came from the same small place, it is on balance probable that Melville knew of the baby Sidney Reilly's birth and almost immediate death.
¹⁶

The birth of a single Sidney Reilly in Ireland, in the 1870s, was traceable; that would be enough. At the time Irish-born men and women were subjects of the Queen.

When, in August of 1898, Sigmund and Margaret married, both the witnesses were future sons-in-law of a man called Pannett, who worked for the Royal Mail and knew Melville in a professional capacity. In the register Margaret, whose maiden name was Callaghan and who had been born and brought up in Ireland, gave her father's middle name as Reilly (which it was not).

Shortly after the wedding Sigmund Rosenblum departed, well supplied with money, for Spain, leaving Margaret to move out of the Manor House in Kingsbury and dispose of the contents. They would henceforth reside at Upper Westbourne Terrace, Hyde Park. Rosenblum, with his fine-eye awareness of appearances, never called it ‘Paddington'.

Quite what his business in Spain was is unclear. He could have been doing something for Melville, who had been approached through diplomatic channels by the Spanish Government in the past. They had recently deported a number of anarchists, inevitably to England, and there were moves afoot to co-ordinate international reaction to violent anarchists who now appeared to favour assassination by knife or gun, rather than bombs in public places. In 1897 the Spanish Prime Minister Canovas de Castillo had been murdered by an Italian and, in September 1898, the Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary was killed.

Late in 1898 an anti-anarchist congress was held in Rome. The participants were, on the hard-line side Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany; on the other, Britain, France and the rest.
¹⁷
Before the conference, Robert Anderson wrote of the congress's intention that certain laws should be co-ordinated:

The chief effect upon my mind produced by reading these documents is to deepen the misgivings I entertain that the Congress will result in increasing our difficulties – serious enough at all times – in dealing with the alien revolutionists who congregate in London. I am clear that the level of peace and order which we have been able to maintain in recent years has been due to action taken by this department which was (if I may coin a word) extra-legal; I hesitate to use the ordinary word which seems applicable to it. But if the proposed legislation is obtained at the cost of a public statement of what are the actual powers of the police in this country, then the methods which successive Secretaries of State have sanctioned, and which have been resorted to with such excellent results, will be shown to be without legal sanction, and must be abandoned. Sir E. Lushington's memo brackets ‘surveillance' with expulsion as ‘practices unknown to English law.' But is it not strange that foreign anarchists should be unaware of this, having regard to the statement in Sir P. C[illeg.]'s declaration ‘I do not need to add that any individual suspected of intending to commit one of the criminal acts already referred to in contravention of English law is subject to scrutiny by the police.'
¹⁸
Such indeed has been our practice in dealing with anarchists. So recently as a few weeks ago it enabled us to break up a conspiracy for the assassination of the King of Italy.

Someone has scrawled in the margin beside this last sentence –
This appears to me very far-fetched – PRIB.

After the conference, Robert Anderson wrote an even clearer confidential memo pointing out that the law should be left as it was and the Expulsion of Aliens act tightened, since the police seemed quite effective at driving anarchists away rather than prosecuting them; and regarding anarchy in general

…I would say emphatically that in recent years the police have succeeded only by straining the law – or in plain English, by doing utterly unlawful things – at intervals, to check this conspiracy; and my serious fear is that if new legislation affecting it is passed, police powers may be thus defined, and our practical powers seriously impaired. Within the last few weeks I have by means such as I allude to driven away two of the most dangerous anarchists in Europe, who were plotting to murder one of the crowned heads of Empire. A power to expel such men would prevent such plots altogether.'
¹⁹

Within weeks the Foreign Office concurred that in return for an agreement on the part of the other countries not to deport all their anarchists ‘wholesale' to British shores, the British should consider tightening their own laws.
²⁰

In the winter of 1898–99 the Rosenblums were living at Upper Westbourne Terrace. Nearly seventy years later, Robin Bruce Lockhart asserted that shortly after their marriage, Margaret sold the Hyde Park house and the couple moved into St Ermin's Chambers, Caxton Street, Westminster.
²¹
In fact they held onto the Church Commissioners' lease of the Paddington house until June 1899 when they left the country.

Rosenblum was still friendly with Voynich, who is said to have made money for the Society by selling fake medieval manuscripts, having obtained a supply of fifteenth-century paper from continental Europe. Now he needed to make the inks as authentic as possible. Early in 1899 it was Sigmund Rosenblum who, as Sigmund Rosenblum FCS FIC ‘&c', applied for and was granted permission to use the British Museum Reading Room. Here he had access to a range of medieval books and manuscripts that contained the formula for a range of ancient inks, pigmentations and colours.

It seems that having gained expertise in the field, he may have turned his attention to still more lucrative opportunities. On 17 April 1899, Rachkovskii wrote to Melville alerting him to the presence of a massive rouble-counterfeiting ring operating in London. His friend Fiodor Gredinger, the Deputy State Prosecutor of St Petersburg, was on his way to London to take charge of the case and would much appreciate Melville's assistance (and any costs incurred would naturally be reimbursed.) To quote my own account in
Ace of Spies – the True Story of Sidney Reilly:

The counterfeiters had a contact inside the currency-printing firm of Bradbury and Wilkinson, and the contact obtained a plate that was copied by an engraver. The counterfeiters then carried out the printing themselves using their own ink and paper. Rosenblum's name was not initially connected with the investigation. It emerged when attention turned to how the forged money was being shipped out of the country.

According to Okhrana records, Rosenblum had an interest in the Polysulphin Company in Keynsham, Somerset. The factory produced a host of chemical products including soap, which it exported abroad. This was an ideal vehicle for smuggling money and indeed other commodities… [Also] in order to perpetrate such a scheme an expert knowledge of printing inks would have been required. As a chemist with some experience in this line, Rosenblum would therefore have played a wider role outside that of mere distribution. Once Rosenblum's role was uncovered, Melville would have had good grounds to fear that his connection with Scotland Yard might prove a severe embarrassment…
²²

Melville's cleverest agent must vanish from the scene at once. In the first week of June 1899, Mr and Mrs Sigmund Rosenblum gave up their lease; Mr and Mrs Sidney Reilly sailed away from England. Sidney, at least, would be back.

A year later, another unknown adventurer from overseas was to find himself in Melville's orbit. Eric Weiss, who ironically shared the same birth date as Sidney Reilly, arrived in London with his wife Beatrice in May 1900 and moved into theatrical lodgings at 10 Keppel Street in Bloomsbury. Weiss, better known to posterity by his stage name, Harry Houdini the handcuff king, had so far made little impact in the United States, his adopted home. He had therefore resolved instead to conquer America by first making a name for himself in Europe. Knowing that a good number of successful acts whose reputations had been made in London, Paris and Berlin had an exalted value in New York, he set about securing London bookings. According to Beatrice Houdini, after some days of unsuccessful interviews, C. Dundas Slater, the Manager of the Alhambra, gave him an audition on 13 June.
²³
Apparently not wholly convinced of the young man's abilities, he offered him a contract on the condition that he must first, ‘escape from handcuffs at Scotland Yard'. Slater was apparently acquainted with Melville and arranged for himself and Houdini to visit the Yard the following day.

At the appointed hour they were welcomed by Melville who immediately ridiculed the notion that anyone could escape from Scotland Yard handcuffs. Stage handcuffs were one thing, he told them, but Scotland Yard cuffs were the last word in scientific manacles. Houdini, unabashed, insisted on rising to the challenge. Later that day he told Beatrice that within seconds Melville suddenly grabbed his arms, encircled them around a nearby pillar, produced a pair of cuffs from his coat and snapped them tightly around his wrists. ‘I'm going to leave you here and come back for you in a couple of hours' Melville told him as he and Slater headed towards the doorway. To Melville's astonishment, Houdini replied, ‘I'll go with you' as the opened cuffs fell to the floor. For over a century no corroboration of Beatrice Houdini's recollections was thought to exist. However, in December 2003 a record of the meeting was found in New Scotland Yard records.

Melville, although somewhat taken aback, held out his hand to Houdini in genuine astonishment, offering him his unreserved congratulations. Two weeks later, on 27 June 1900, Melville was Houdini's guest at a special performance of his stage act at the Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square. There the London press were treated to his full routine of escapes from a variety of trunks, cabinets, chains, padlocks and shackles, many brought along by the audience themselves.

It has often been maintained that Houdini could compress his knuckles so that they became smaller than his wrists, thus enabling him to slip out of manacles. In fact, he was unable to perform such a feat, relying instead on giving them a single sharp rap in a certain spot. For more complex manacles he used a unique picklock he had devised while working for a locksmith in Appleton, Wisconsin. He could also improvise a picklock from a piece of wire, a pin or a watch spring, all of which were easily concealable. Over and above this, he had an encyclopaedic knowledge of every type of lock and locking system imaginable and a unique collection of locks and mechanisms. Melville was to remain an acquaintance of Houdini's long after their first encounter at ScotlandYard and, like a number of other police officers around the world, gave Houdini a glowing written testimonial. When, a decade later, Melville began his Spy School lectures to new Secret Service recruits, he often gave advice on the art of entering locked premises, and could well have drawn on the knowledge that Houdini was rumoured to have imparted to him.

Around the turn of the century Special Branch had done such a good job that the general public were no longer threatened by terrorism. Fenian bombs were a thing of the past, the wilder English elements were mutinous but had never succeeded in doing any harm, and foreign anarchists could hardly make a move without its being reported, and knew it.

Covert detection was no longer regarded as sly or underhand, but rather as an intellectual challenge worthy of the finest minds. There was a perceptible change in attitude. There could be many reasons for this, all of them plausible; the fact is that while Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes story,
A Study in Scarlet,
failed to make a stir in 1887, ten years later Sherlock Holmes was wildly popular.
²⁴

Conan Doyle could not have plucked his hero from the ranks of the police because such a hero would not be believable. Everyone knew that ‘the finest minds' were those of sophisticated, international, and classically educated men. Class prejudice was endemic. Policemen could be brave, as the newspaper-reading public knew since the arrest of Meunier, but everything was somehow
obvious
about a policeman. The progress of his career was there on paper for all to see. Policemen, with their nondescript backgrounds, suburban families and thumping boots,
²⁵
lacked the urbanity, the mystery, of the upper-middle-class detective, free of domestic encumbrances in his book-lined room. However: