M by Andrew Cook

but said it was by chance.
    This pushy French policeman was making him uneasy. He hadn’t walked in expecting a grilling. He would answer no more questions. He demanded reassurance from the Préfet, who had been quietly observing, that none of this information about himself, or the banknotes, would reach the English police.
    The silence was broken by Melville: ‘Walsh, man, I am an inspector from Scotland Yard.’
    Walsh’s exact response is not recorded but we have it on Monro’s authority that it was ‘more emphatic than reverent’. 12 He was allowed to go and McKenna was shadowed – so obviously shadowed that he dared not meet Walsh, but had to go back to his hotel. The two detectives sat down at a restaurant across the street and ordered un verre. After some time McKenna came out. The detectives got up to follow him. McKenna turned around crossly and came back. This he did several times. He was not a happy man. When finally he came out again they waved him over for a drink. He had been worn down; he could not resist. The glasses were on the table and the rounds were being thoughtfully consumed when around the corner who should come but – Walsh. When he saw McKenna sitting with two detectives he sprang to a certain conclusion about the cause of his own predicament. And he said so to McKenna, roundly abusing him. In the stand-up shouting match that followed, the two detectives crept away.
    A couple of days later both men were gently escorted to Le Havre by train, Walsh travelling with Melville and McKenna with Sergeant Flood.
    The two conspirators were so irate still with one another that they declined to travel in the same carriage. On the way to Havre Walsh attempted to pump Inspector Melville as to the ports which were watched by the Police. Inspector Melville naturally was not lavish in the information given, but he rather implied that there was not a port in the world where Scotland Yard was not strongly represented. On arrival at Havre, many of the employees at the wharves and shipping who knew Melville well owing to his having been formerly stationed at Havre, came forward effusively and greeted him. To Walsh this sight suggested that all these men must be allies of Melville in the police, and his comment, with an oath was ‘There are scores of them.’ 13
    Monro gleefully informed the press that Walsh and McKenna were on their way home from France with their tails between their legs. Someone in America issued a denial that Walsh was in Europe at all; he was in Omaha. At this Monro sent a wire to Pinkertons, suggesting that if any American newsmen cared to see Walsh and his former friend Roger McKenna for themselves they could meet SS Gascogne when she arrived from Le Havre.
    Walsh and McKenna were greeted on the NewYork waterfront by about forty news hounds. Walsh was in an abusive mood, and no one was left in much doubt that he had been made to look foolish. ‘Thus the Walsh assassinations scheme was extinguished by the slaughter and ridicule of both England and America’, concluded James Monro, recalling the event with great satisfaction fifteen years later.
    Perhaps Sir Charles Warren felt, in the summer of 1888, that his Assistant Commissioner was stealing the limelight. His own standing with the public had never been lower. In November of 1887 he had called out thousands of troops to assist in policing a demonstration in Trafalgar Square; shots were fired and two people killed. The Pall Mall Gazette called it Bloody Sunday. Notwithstanding the roar of protest that greeted his rigid and heavy-handed methods, he threw his weight about more than ever. Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, could not keep him in check; ‘indeed he took the attitude that the Commissioner once appointed by the Crown had certain powers by statute in the exercise of which he was responsible to no higher official.’ 14
    He was particularly incensed by Monro’s direct line of