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Cross, the incoming Secretary of State, was impatient with the whole thing. He met both men and scribbled a set of rules which he considered adequate to settle it. The rules could be partially interpreted, and were.

For the rest of 1885 Monro and Jenkinson were distracted by other matters. Jenkinson knew that a plot was being cooked up that would involve the Tsar in sponsoring Irishmen to drive the British out of Afghanistan, and possibly promote a Franco-Russian alliance against Germany. It was all a diversion. The Foreign Office was paying a senior Fenian called Carroll-Tevis in Paris and he, along with Jenkinson's man Casey, was deep in the plot. The English Government now had so many agents dotted about Paris, New York and London unknown to each other that they risked playing a double or treble game that would inevitably lead nowhere; this to a great extent was the case with the Russo-Irish plan.
¹³

Nonetheless Jenkinson looked forward to Millen's arrival from America via Le Havre in November.
¹⁴
Before that a meeting of Irish revolutionaries would leave France by way of Le Havre in September.
¹⁵
It would be Melville's job to watch them; to watch them come in, and make sure they left; to watch Millen arrive. Jenkinson was still excluding the SIB from anything but mundane tasks, but Melville had plenty of routine work at the port, his French was fluent, and there was a new baby at home: in April, James Benjamin had been born.

There were no immediate bomb threats to London. In the lull that marked the second half of 1885 Jenkinson's urge to manipulate events became almost megalomaniac and his epistolary efforts more stupendous than ever. His eighteen-page
Memorandum on the present situation in Ireland
of 26 September set out an eloquent case for Home Rule which he sent to Lord Salisbury and selected members of the Cabinet. In his view, were Home Rule not conceded the violence would worsen; the reasonable majority of Parnellite Irish nationalists would be overwhelmed and outmanoeuvred by the violent extremists unless Parnell received support.

Salisbury dismissed this. Home Rule was out of the question from a Conservative government and he was perfectly prepared to confront an escalation of hostilities. Jenkinson bombarded his only sympathiser in Cabinet, Spencer's successor in Dublin Lord Carnarvon, with notes and memos; he even wrote about Home Rule to Gladstone, pointing out that only by keeping Parnell on side could violence (and implicitly a violent swing to the Tories) be prevented. Gladstone, who had always kept the Secret Service strictly at arm's length, sent the following somewhat deflating reply:

I agree very emphatically – but these are not abstractions, they call for immediate action. I must ask in what capacity you address me – and what use I can make of your letter?
¹⁶

1886 would be Melville's third year in Le Havre, and he was frustrated by a dangerous situation that nobody seemed to be doing anything about. There was a pretty little port called Honfleur set deep into the south side of the Seine estuary, and close to Honfleur was a dynamite factory. Ships laden with the stuff now sailed quite regularly away from Honfleur along the river mouth beyond Le Havre and out into the English Channel whence, it was claimed, they headed for the Baltic, their cargo apparently intended for use in the Russian mining industry. Melville would have been aware that the Irish-American dynamiters used materials bought in Europe. He could have a source of supply here under his nose, a short ferry ride away, and yet he had no intelligence with which to make further enquiries.

If he pointed this out in a report to his superiors in London, and we have no proof that he did, nothing came of it. Hostilities had re-opened in the New Year over, of all things, a threat to HRH the Prince of Wales. It came in a letter signed ‘Magee', and under the mistaken impression that Mr Jenkinson was head of the Secret Police, the Prince of Wales passed it on to him. Rather than conveying the letter, or at the very least its contents, to Scotland Yard, Jenkinson organised a ludicrous sting operation.

He sent a woman for the purpose of entrapping the writer of the threatening letter, entrusting to her a bag of farthings, supposed to represent sovereigns, in payment of the bribe demanded by the writer of the letter.
¹⁷

This masterly ruse not only failed, but emerged into daylight when the Prince passed a subsequent letter directly to Scotland Yard. Dogged detective work by the SIB revealed that the woman had been one of many Irish people employed by a private agency off Piccadilly Circus which was supported by Mr Jenkinson's Secret Service funds and advertised for assistance in the public press.

As this case was followed up, the Tories were preparing for a fresh election. By February Gladstone and the other old faces were back. Hugh Childers was Home Secretary. In March Godfrey Lushington, Under-Secretary at the Home Office, declared that the endless squabbles were leading him to favour the loss of Jenkinson over the loss of Monro.

Unless the case is very carefully handled I believe Mr Monro would resign. And this would be a deplorable loss, very far exceeding any gain from Mr Jenkinson obtaining a free hand, if indeed that were possible.
¹⁸

Nothing could be done to make these two work together. By May, Monro had gone on the offensive. He wanted Jenkinson out, and wrote a long memo listing every instance of the man's arrogant behaviour and more:

[and then]... the explosions at the Houses of Parliament and the Tower occurred. While investigating these cases, the manner in which my action as a police officer was interfered with is almost beyond belief. Not only was freedom of action denied to me, but in one instance illegal action was taken by Mr Jenkinson himself and suggestions involving illegal procedure were made to me by Mr Jenkinson which, had they been listened to, would undoubtedly have led to the failure of the case and involved the police in well-merited disgrace. I do not further allude to the matter here, but I am fully prepared to substantiate the accuracy of this statement.
¹⁹

He concluded his note with a cool evaluation of Mr Jenkinson's usefulness.

I have already said that all the information regarding dangerous, or supposed dangerous, subjects in London was given to Mr Jenkinson by Scotland Yard... I have furnished to Sir Charles Warren a list of every file of information issued by Mr Jenkinson to me during the past year, and the result
qua
tangible information is absolutely
nil.
There have been many vague rumours communicated; the time of police has been frequently wasted on following up the intelligence of an (unintentionally no doubt) misleading character; but of real, practical, valuable information there has been a very decided absence.
²⁰

InJune 1886, afterjust four months in office, the Liberal Government split over Home Rule. An election was called, and a coalition of Tories and Liberal Unionists took its place. Lord Salisbury returned as Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, and for the first time a Roman Catholic, Henry Matthews, became the Home Secretary.

As for relevant information from overseas, in September of 1886 Monro was complaining that he seen not a single item of consular intelligence in a year.
²¹
Relevant documents from consulates went to the FO and thence to Jenkinson. But this is not to say Scotland Yard received no information from overseas. Some embassy intelligence certainly reached Monro, such as this hair-raising note on 10 July from the Secretary at the British Embassy in Paris:

A man came to me this morning and said that he was convinced that some dynamite plot was being prepared by the Irish Americans who frequent Reynolds' Bar… He has overheard phrases like ‘we shall have another earthquake ready soon'… He has twice seen suspicious looking bags at the Bar, which are taken charge of by the proprietor. My informant had an opportunity of touching one: he found it very heavy, and heard a ticking noise coming from it. He thinks it contains dynamite, which comes from Havre.
²²

The informant was sent direct to Scotland Yard and told Monro, in answer to questioning, that an Englishman had been seen hanging around Reynolds' Bar. Monro saw a means to expose one of Jenkinson's unacknowledged ‘threads'. He knew that the man who ran the private agency off Piccadilly was called Winter, alias Dawson. He had long ago put the information before Childers and Jenkinson. Jenkinson tipped the man off; he fled to Paris; and it was he who was lurking around Reynolds' Bar. As Winter was a bigamist, Monro sent a man (either Melville or Moser) to Paris who arrested him and Monro asked Matthews to ask the Foreign Office for extradition. But Matthews agreed with Jenkinson that there was no need for that. The smoking gun – Monro's proof that Jenkinson was running a private detective outfit in London in parallel with the police – remained just out of sight.

The information about Reynolds' Bar had been followed by a tight-lipped little note from HM Consul Bernal in Le Havre itself on 26 July.

I do not suppose the explosion of nearly two tons of dynamite which occurred here on Friday night, from which my house somewhat suffered, is of sufficient importance to Sir Julian Pauncefote, GCMG, to report officially, but I think it as well to mention that when the sloop came ashore she had on board 23 tons of dynamite from the factory at Ablon, near Honfleur; two and a half tons of gunpowder sent out to her from this port; &c. She was bound to St Petersburg, and the cargo was, I learn from one of the officials, for the Russian Government.
²³

Melville must have reported this event to London as well, for the following day the Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, wrote to the Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office that ‘I have reason to believe that explosives may be brought to this country by steamers plying between Russia and here' and asking for consular reports to be sent to him; for Port Police at Gravesend to be warned; and for crew lists to be obtained wherever possible. Known Irish dynamitards had visited St Petersburg that summer. This information was not of immediate concern to the police in charge of London, but it would have been useful background; even more useful had they known that plots involving Russia and Ireland were being cooked up by Jenkinson's men, apparently with Foreign Office connivance.
²⁴

Melville, conveniently located as he was, probably knew more about the provenance of dynamite than the Assistant Commissioner. Jenkinson was routinely holding onto key information from overseas which should go to the London police.

The Consul at Le Havre at least suspected that no one was paying attention.

I don't know whether the authorities care to know that the Schooner
Little Vixen
of Plymouth sailed three days ago from Honfleur for St Petersburg with ten tons of dynamite; 28 cases of fuse; and 2 cases of electric clocks.
²⁵

Relations between the English and French police at the ports were good. They helped each other. But what questions should be asked? Melville was not the only one whose effectiveness was diminished by lack of Irish intelligence from London. The Consul in St Petersburg pointed out:

No information worth having can be obtained by HM Consuls without some clue. If you can furnish me this secretly, Russian police can give valuable assistance.
²⁶

But Jenkinson had gone too far. The ‘threads', followed back to their source, became tangled. Lord Salisbury at least liked to feel he was in control and Jenkinson had never made any secret of his Home Rule sympathies; could he be trusted? It so happened that certain anti-Parnellite elements in London had been cooking up black propaganda against Parnell since the previous winter. One of them was a Captain Stephens, who had worked for Jenkinson until he was sacked for drunkenness. In September, at an audience with Matthews and Salisbury, Stephens asserted that there were letters in existence which proved Parnell approved and encouraged the dynamite faction. Jenkinson, he said, knew of these letters and suppressed them.
²⁷

On 11 December 1886 the stumbling block was at last removed. Home Secretary Matthews wrote to Jenkinson:

I regret that today, after much anxious consideration, I have determined to relieve you from your present duties as speedily as possible and I fix the 10th January as a convenient day.
²⁸

Jenkinson burned his papers and left.

By February of 1887 Monro was in sole charge both of Irish intelligence as it concerned London, and of the Secret Service. Melville's career could truly begin.

1887: Jubilee Year. The crowned heads of Europe were invited to a fortnight-long celebration starting with a royal thanksgiving ceremony at St Paul's on 21 June. It would be a display of Imperial glory unprecedented in the fifty years since the coronation.

James Monro knew that if he could only bypass the Commissioner, he could bend Home Secretary Matthews to his will; and he managed it. He got Robert Anderson back into the Home Office and whisked day-to-day intelligence of international political crime out of Sir Charles Warren's hands altogether.

The Criminal Investigation Department was reorganised. ‘Ordinary' serious crime would be dealt with by Section A. Superintendent Williamson would head Section B, a department about twenty-five strong dealing with Irish affairs in London as the old SIB had done. Section C would be the Port Police. All section heads would report to Warren.

Section D, an entirely new, very small and secret section called the Special Branch, would be financed separately from the Metropolitan Police; its money would come from the Treasury via the Home Office. It would consist of just four policemen but could draw on the resources of other CID sections if required. Chief Inspector Littlechild at its head would report to Monro, who (to Warren's annoyance) would report directly to Home Secretary Henry Matthews. Three inspectors would be answerable to Littlechild: Melville, Pope and Quinn. Their duties would take them outside London when necessary (Melville was still stationed in France), and would not be exclusively Irish. They would resurrect Von Tornow's old job, keeping a watchful eye on political agitators in general, and potentially murderous ones in particular. Information that came from Le Caron in America to Anderson would go to Monro directly. Occasional duties would include royal protection.