The Vice Society Read Online Free Page B

Liners’ – ensure that acquisitive vagrants are dragged before magistrates, that the vocational beggar is put behind bars and that the truly mendicant are given work or Tickets of Entitlement to exchange for food. It is righteous work and zealously executed.
    Indeed, for high-minded young men and sensitive young ladies of the city, the Mendicity Society is a place for the devout to be associated with: an opportunity to do good work. Such people are constantly arriving at the offices with fine intentions – even more so during that period when a certain illustrious ex-detective had begun work there. Let us enter the building and see the upstanding people at work . . .
    Here is the secretary escorting another earnest Christian volunteer through the various rooms and describing the activity of each. It is all highly organized and laudable, yet our young volunteer cannot help but become increasingly frustrated at the delay in approaching the most famed room of the building and of the Society itself – the one he has heard all about and in which he hopes to work: the begging letters office.
    It is here that more than one thousand letters annually pass across desks to be verified according to the concerns of ladies and gentlemen, lords, dukes and earls who can never be certain that the piteous entreaties they receive in the post are truths or falsehoods. Only here can expert eyes examine the letters for the warp and weft of veracity.
    Finally our volunteer is permitted entry. Within, there are shelves of ledgers containing the details of letter writers and their recipients across the country. Who is this sailor, for example, who claims to have fallen on hard times and purports to need ten pounds to release him from a debt? He has written to the Duke of ——— with a story that would wring tears from the very saline ropes of an ocean-tracing brig. Is he truly a straitened tar of Ratcliff-highway, or a skilled literary gentleman in a base lodging somewhere sending off fifteen identical versions of the letter with a sly grin upon his face?
    It is as quiet as a library, the silence disturbed only by the occasional shuffle of feet, the creak of a chair and the scrape of a ledger being withdrawn. Serious gentlemen examine letters before them, making notes and consulting endless columns of records for notable phrases, recurring names, prominent addresses, unusual vocabulary. By such means are the cheats trapped and brought to justice, and our volunteer is enthralled at the spectacle. He looks rapidly from desk to desk . . . at which one is seated the gentleman he hopes to meet?
    There at the centre of the room, sitting at a broad desk neatly arrayed with piles of papers and books, was George Williamson, previously of the Metropolitan Police’s Detective Force. He did not appear much changed from that grieving figure we saw seven years before – more careworn, perhaps; a little thinner about the face and with a harder edge to eyes that have seen more than any man should in the intervening period. Placed before him was a single sealed envelope which he was examining closely for clues that nobody else in the room – amateurs all – could possibly have seen.
    The secretary approached with his youthful volunteer, and the two exchanged a glance. Yes, this was he: the same George Williamson, previously Detective Sergeant Williamson. They arrived at the desk and the ex-policeman looked up with a level stare that said he was being interrupted by the secretary.
    ‘George – may I present Harold Jute. His father is a most generous benefactor and Harold will be joining you for a time. He has just come down from Oxford and has expressed a wish to work with the Society.’
    Mr Williamson did not stand, but appraised the young man with a swift, comprehensive glance and nodded a perfunctory assent to the secretary.
    ‘I am so terribly excited to be working with you, sir,’ said Harold, standing beside the desk. ‘I have been interested