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On 2 November Bacon returned to England. Tinsley watched him leave Rotterdam, and saw a couple of other suspected spies see him off. Mail interceptions had thrown up their names and connected them to people called Sander and Wunnenberg in New York. Instructions to the Port Police at Gravesend were that Bacon was to be ‘searched but not alarmed'.

In London, Melville's men watched him. He deposited £200 with the American Express Company and stayed at the Coburg Hotel in Bayswater. This was new; before the war, German spies had put up at a predictable range of hotels – the Bonnington and the Ivanhoe in Bloomsbury, the Wilton at Victoria.

On 14 November there came a breakthrough in Rotterdam. Tinsley was approached by a man called Graff, a metal merchant who was on the British blacklist but wanted to be taken off it for the sake of his business. He told Tinsley that he had been approached to join the ‘imperial messenger service' of the German admiralty and showed a couple of sheets, apparently blank but containing secret messages, which were destined for New York. This was what Breeckow would have been doing had he not been caught, but Graff had been invited to be a courier for what had obviously become a much more secure service. He described the instructions and props he had been given. He had been told to observe specific things while in transit through England, and to obtain answers to questions such as ‘What is the English end of a submarine cable from Alexandrovskii on the White Sea?' He was also given a sock impregnated with a solution which, when dunked in lukewarm water, would yield invisible ink; a palpable advance on the old talc-and-eau-de-cologne method. Graff was told to go along with Germany's plans for his deployment, and duly went into action.

Curtis-Bennett was with the Bureau now, and it was in the middle of collating an entire ring of spies. Many names were gathered by 23 November thanks to translation and development of Graff 's documents and associated mail interceptions from England and Holland. A number of American journalists and some business people were linked and all communicated with Sander and Wunnenberg in New York. A week after Graff 's visit to Tinsley, Bacon in London filed an article to America and sent a letter. Both were intercepted and read. By the time a decision had been made to call him to Scotland Yard for an interview that would frighten him off, he had left for Ireland. A message went out to all ports to review neutrals, especially those coming and going via New York.

Bacon travelled around Ireland between 25 November and 8 December, when he returned to London to find a letter from Basil Thomson awaiting him. It was an invitation to attend Scotland Yard for an interview. He was detained on admitting that he had been in touch with Denis. Meanwhile, a suspect American journalist called Hastings had landed in Rotterdam and had been spotted by Tinsley with other suspects. The ramifications of this spy ring seemed to spread almost beyond the capacity of the Bureau to deal with it. Information came from Germany to the effect that ‘reports satisfactory in the highest degree had been received from three sources in Ireland'. In December Tinsley obtained material from an anonymous informant which confirmed that Hastings, along with Rutherford and Cribben who had seen Bacon off on the boat to England, were part of the ring. Graff confirmed this with damning proof against Bacon and Rutherford in February.

It was time to wind this operation up: ‘A search of radiograms fell through owing to the labour and expense involved' and Graff 's proof was enough. Bacon made a full confession on 9 February. On 28 February he was tried and condemned to death.

However, he was put to better use still. On 20 February the American Senate passed an anti-espionage Bill which, once enacted, enabled the arrest of Sander and Wunnenberg. Bacon was released on licence and sent to America to testify against them. They were both jailed. Those other American spies who escaped appear to have scattered, never to be of concern to the authorities.

We do not know when Melville stopped working. There is a record of him in action in Bloomsbury in May 1917, when he was staying at an hotel in Tavistock Square and watching a young Norwegian journalist who had borrowed money from the Vice-Consul in London and was waiting for more from home:

Instructions were given to the General Post Office to forward the telegram and not to stop any reply to it but to send a copy to MI5… Meanwhile Mr Melville had made friends with Hagn at the hotel, had ascertained that the Dagblad had another correspondent in London, that Hagn did a good deal of writing in his bedroom [and] left the hotel at 11a.m. returning in time for dinner. By going out with him Mr Melville had managed to let him be seen by three members of the Special Staff and agents were watching to see whether he posted any letters. On the 12th, Mr Melville had secured from a glass-stoppered bottle in Hagn's bedroom some white liquid which on being tested proved to be, in MI9 nomenclature, C ink.
²⁴

Information that Alfred Hagn was a German agent had come from the police at Christiania. He was jailed for life but released after the war on compassionate grounds.

The wheel had come full circle. Melville had started like that, snooping in an hotel bedroom in Bloomsbury and uncovering a shirt marked ‘Kent'. Now he fell ill. In the late summer of 1917, suffering from a kidney complaint, he had an operation and at the end of the year, in Bolingbroke Hospital, Wandsworth, he decided to retire.

Chief Inspector Heat was very positive, but cautious.

‘Well, sir', he said, ‘we have enough to go upon. A man like that has no business to be at large, anyhow.'

‘You will want some conclusive evidence', came the observation in a murmur.

Chief Inspector Heat raised his eyebrows at the black, narrow back, which remained obstinately presented to his intelligence and his zeal.

‘There will be no difficulty in getting up sufficient evidence against him', he said, with virtuous complacency. ‘You may trust me for that, sir', he added, quite unnecessarily, out of the fullness of his heart; for it seemed to him an excellent thing to have that man in hand to be thrown down to the public should it think fit to roar with any special indignation …But in any case, Chief Inspector Heat, purveyor of prisons by trade, and a man of legal instincts, did logically believe that incarceration was the proper fate for every declared enemy of the law. In the strength of that conviction he committed a fault of tact. He allowed himself a little conceited laugh, and repeated:

'Trust me for that, sir.'

Joseph Conrad,
The Secret Agent,
1906
²⁵

Was Melville ‘Chief Inspector Heat'?

Was he a ‘purveyor of prisons', who sent innocent men to jail? He had cooked up the case against Deakin and the rest.

Asked by Counsel whether he had paid Coulon any money as a police spy, Inspector Melville declined to answer and the judge over-ruled the question on grounds of public policy. Counsel for the defence remarked that his object was to show that all which was suspicious in the case was the work of Coulon; in fact that it was Coulon who had got up the supposed plot.

Would he beat a man up to get a confession? Was he intolerant?

Was he not called in court a ‘notorious liar'?

London, Jarvis, 12th December

At the Trafalgar Square meeting last Sunday Malatesta got two black eyes, and Agresti had his left cheek smashed up, by Melville's men.

London, Jarvis, 12th December

...Melville wanted to close down the Lapie bookshop, but was dissuaded.

Would he do a deal with a criminal? Did he get

…that satisfactory sense of superiority the members of the police force get from the unofficial but intimate side of their intercourse with the criminal classes, by which the vanity of power is soothed, and the vulgar love of domination over our fellow creatures is flattered as worthily as it deserves?

He let Sidney Reilly escape arrest over the counterfeit roubles and he must have known the man was a murderer. And yet, by dealing with Reilly, who was a different class of informer altogether, he was surely placing his head in the lion's mouth. A ‘satisfactory sense of superiority' is not something that serves the lion-tamer well.

William Melville was not Conrad's Chief Inspector Heat. Unlike that sly and mean-spirited character, he had a sense of humour and its necessary obverse, a sense of tragedy. The Walsall case was indefensible, and so far as we know he never did anything like it again.

He was tight with information but generous with his staff: he had the gift of inspiring respect unaccompanied by fear. In later years, at any rate, he seems to have mellowed out of his intolerance; there is much in his professional reports to indicate that he recognised human frailty, as well as human viciousness. He loved his family and they loved him. James, his younger son, was a protégé of Ramsay Macdonald and became Solicitor-General in the 1929 Labour Government. He was of a different cast of mind from his father but so far as we know they came to accommodate one another's opinions. James died at forty-six, never having fully recovered from serious injury sustained at Salonika. William, the elder son, married and settled in New Zealand after the First World War. Kate became Mrs Clifford Rainey.

In 1913 Melville wrote his will.

I bequeath to my son William John Melville the gold ring which I usually wear the scarf pin presented to me by King George the scarf pin presented to me by Queen Alexandra the cigarette case presented to me by the German Emperor the cigarette case presented to me by his Excellency Monsieur Gorymikine Secretary of State for Russia the silver cigar case presented to me by Princess Henry of Battenberg the tantalus presented to me by my colleagues on my retirement and also the sum of two hundred pounds which bequest I make to him inasmuch as he showed no desire as a youth to enter any profession and consequently spared me the necessary expenses in connection therewith. I bequeath to my daughter Kate Mary Madelaine the ring presented to me by the Emperor of Germany and the ring presented to me by the Shah of Persia. I bequeath to my son James Benjamin the cigarette case presented to me by the Czarewitch the sleeve links presented to me by King Edward the scarf pin presented to me by the King of Spain the gold watch presented to me by the Emperor of Germany together with the gold chain and appendages thereto which I wear with the said watch. Decorations I have received from King Edward and from foreign powers the combined scarf pin and stud received from Lady Pirbright the presentation tea and coffee service received from my colleagues on my retirement. I would like my wife my daughter and my son James Benjamin to live together as long as possible and I desire that during the widowhood of my wife and while she and my said daughter and son continue to live together they shall have the joint use of my plate linen china glass books pictures prints furniture…
²⁶

On it goes, the palpable proof of a successful professional life whose prosperous, liberal-minded end arguably justified the sometimes cruel means.

Melville's attitude to policing was revolutionary in its day and it was he who passed on this attitude to the Secret Service. He was focussed to the point of ruthlessness, discreet to the point of secrecy. He had begun work in the days of the hansom cab and the street-sweeper; he had seen the first motor cars and speaking tubes; he had come to recognise telegrams and morse code, cryptography and fingerprinting and forensic analysis, as the tools of his trade. When he lay in the Bolingbroke Hospital dictating his memoir in the latter half of 1917, Zeppelins had already dropped bombs on London. It was a new, fearful century, and his great days were behind him.

He died of kidney failure on 1 February 1918, just one month after acknowledging that he would never work again:

In leaving the Branch now, it is to me a very great personal satisfaction that I cannot remember a single enquiry or mission on which I have been engaged, which was not carried out in a satisfactory manner. Another source of satisfaction is that I have always felt I had the support and confidence of my Chiefs, and never had a wry word with any of them.

I wish the Department all good luck.

(signed)

William Melville,

31st December 1917

Shortly after the publication of the first edition of this book in October 2004, I had the good fortune to meet and interview Bill Fitzgerald, the grandson of Harry Fitzgerald, a close colleague and confidant of William Melville's. The interview was originally published in
Eye Spy
Magazine in February 2005:.

We sip afternoon tea in a wood panelled room off the main lobby of London's Russell Hotel. After nearly fifteen minutes of small talk, Bill Fitzgerald takes off his glasses and slowly begins to relax. He had seemed slightly reticent when he arrived, but is now chatting away as if we're old friends. If it wasn't for the fact that I'd found his birth certificate some months earlier at the Family Records Office, it would have been difficult to guess that Bill was only a year and a few months short of his 75th birthday.

As interesting as his anecdotes about policing London's East End just after the last war are, it isn't his police career that we've met to talk about, but that of his grandfather, Harry Fitzgerald. In particular, Harry's tales of a superior he had referred to only as ‘Mr M'.

According to Bill, Harry ‘had known Mr M when they worked together at Scotland Yard' at the turn of the last century. Like Harry, he was a Londoner of Irish birth. One day, some years after Mr M's retirement, the two had met again at the wedding of a mutual friend, and Harry had been let into a confidence. Apparently, Mr M hadn't really retired at all, but was now working for the War Office in what Bill's grandfather described as a ‘hush hush job'. Not only that, but Mr M was looking for an assistant and wanted Harry to join him. Although this would mean leaving the police force, Harry was assured that he would be ‘well looked after' and would suffer no loss in earnings. So far as the neighbours were concerned, Harry was now working as an investigator for ‘a small insurance office not far from Temple Underground Station'. The hours could be a little irregular, but insurance fraudsters didn't always work nine to five either.