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+{"text":" \n# UNTOUCHABLES\n\nDirty cops, bent justice and racism in Scotland Yard\n\nMichael Gillard and Laurie Flynn\n\n## Contents\n\nUnfinished Business\n\nPart One: The Ghosts of the Ghost Squad\n\n1 Noble Cause Corruption\n\n2 The Ghost Squad\n\n3 The Ghost of Brinks Mat \u2013 A Firm Within a Firm\n\n4 The Ghost of Brinks Mat \u2013 A _Liaison Dangereuse_\n\n5 Death of an Expert Witness\n\n6 The Suicide Club\n\n7 The Ghost of David Norris\n\n8 \"What? What? Nigger!\"\n\n9 A Ragamuffin Bunch\n\nPart Two: The Supergrass Farce\n\n10 Geoff Brennan \u2013 Double Agent Supergrass\n\n11 Hector the Selecta' \u2013 Rude Boy Supergrass\n\n12 Ghostbusted\n\n13 The Sleaze Machine\n\n14 Bad Blood\n\n15 Manipulating Lawrence\n\n16 The Electricians Plug a Leak\n\n17 The Selecta' Returns, Police Babylon Burns\n\n18 Fruit of a Poisoned Tree\n\n19 The Fall of the Ginger Giant\n\nPart Three: The Directorate of Double Standards\n\n20 The Butcher, the Baker, the Undertaker and his Son\n\n21 Secret Justice\n\n22 A Lurking Doubt\n\n23 W.O.G.S.\n\n24... and the Beating Goes On and On\n\n25 The Dark Side: Undercover 599\n\n26 In-House\n\n27 \"We Are Subjects Not Citizens\"\n\nPart Four: A Silent Coup\n\n28 Watchdogged\n\nList of Plates\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nAcronyms\n\nCast of Characters\n\nNotes\n\nA Note on the Author\n\n## Unfinished Business\n\nUntil very recently the corridors of power at Scotland Yard swirled with virtually unlimited self-regard. Despite the current scandals and resignations, its presence is still evident on the Commissioner's floor in the shape of giant portraits of their predecessors. There's one for each and every commissioner, with paint and colour and the dressing up clothes of ceremonial uniforms laid on arrestingly thick.\n\nAs we write this update and re-introduction to _Untouchables_ , Sir Paul Stephenson, who fell on his truncheon over the phone hacking scandal last July, is probably being fitted up for his portrait. He left through the gift shop with his pension pot in hand amid a spate of revelations about cosy arrangements between the Yard and _News of the World_ executives, who his officers were supposedly investigating without fear or favour.\n\nWith a range of police, judicial and parliamentary inquiries into the phone hacking affair yet to report, it remains to be seen what epitaph Sir Paul will choose on his portrait to reflect his short time as Britain's top cop.\n\nThe one chosen by Lord Ian Blair, his immediate predecessor, who also resigned early amid scandal and leadership crisis, may give Sir Paul food for thought. It reads: _\"He could have done better.\"_\n\nBlair took up the commissioner's post in January 2005, a few months after the first edition of this book was published. In it, we dissected his performance as deputy commissioner responsible for a secret anti-corruption squad known as the Untouchables.\n\nWhat we wrote eight years ago gives the essential context for the scandals currently gripping Scotland Yard and those who are supposed to hold it to account in politics and the media. The troubling past of many senior officers, men like Andy Hayman and John Yates, who are now household names for all the wrong reasons, were laid bare over 500 pages. We also exposed the Met's systemic failure to dismantle Southern Investigations, _The News of the World's_ go to private detective agency, which was at the centre of a web of police corruption, drugs and murder allegations.\n\nSince 2004, prosecution after prosecution has been overturned as judges finally saw what we had exposed in this book \u2013 that the discredited supergrass system, secretly resurrected by the Untouchables, was an abuse of the law. Slippery prosecution witnesses \u2013 mainly corrupt former detectives and criminals \u2013 were being debriefed in circumstances of complete secrecy over many months without any tape recording of what was said.\n\nThe Untouchables have left the taxpayer with a huge bill, stretching into many tens of millions of pounds, for their wasteful impropriety; and in some cases the guilty have walked free to now claim compensation, again from the taxpayers' pocket. However, none of the senior officers responsible for this supergrass farce have paid any price, quite the reverse.\n\nSimon Hughes, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats and a victim of phone hacking, was one of the MP's who launched this book at the House of Commons in October 2004. Eight years on he explains why re-publication is welcomed.\n\n\"The honesty and integrity of our police is back on the agenda. If we are to have a more honest and more trusted police service in the future, we need to learn the lessons from the past. Those who have been involved in the writing of and the work behind _Untouchables_ deserve our thanks for their job. It is good that they are bringing the issues up to date now that a public inquiry and public interest is focused on these subjects again.\"\n\n* * *\n\nWe had warned that Ian Blair and his band of Untouchables charged with testing the Met's integrity were straw men who exercised power in highly problematic ways that needed very careful watching.\n\nHowever, our book went on to explain why the new body set up to do this job, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), was not up to it. Its investigation arm and legal department were led by senior former Untouchables responsible for the supergrass farce, making its culture essentially that of the very organisation it was now supposed to be policing on behalf of the public. And its mission was not independence from the police but to improve the quality of self-regulation.\n\nUnfortunately, within a few months of publication these warnings proved tragically prescient. In July 2005, an innocent young Brazilian electrician on his way to work was mistakenly identified as a terrorist, pursued on to the London Underground and executed. A cabal of unelected police officers had secretly devised a shoot to kill policy, which had now gone horribly wrong. And once again, truth was the first casualty. Rather than admit its errors, the Yard returned to its default setting \u2013 shifting blame, manipulating the media and covering things up.\n\nThat Commissioner Ian Blair could have done better by Jean Charles de Menezes is putting it mildly. The shocking facts about the killing only came out in controversial circumstances.\n\nWitnessing at close quarters that the Met's cover-up-atron was playing at full volume, a gutsy whistleblower came forward to defend the public interest. Linda Vandenberghe had typed up witness statements at the IPCC clearly showing that the Met was deliberately promoting a false narrative in the aftermath of the shooting. Against all the evidence she saw in private, the Met was suggesting in public that Jean Charles had been acting suspiciously, was wearing a bulky bomber jacket and had tried to run away, vaulting the barrier at Stockwell tube station as armed counter-terrorist officers pursued him down the escalator.\n\nThe official narrative was strengthening in other ways too. Blair \u2013 well aware that the 48 hours after any murder are the key \"golden\" ones for gathering evidence \u2013 ensured, with Home Office support, that the IPCC was shut out of the crime scene for four days, with hardly a bleat, let alone a bark, from the young watchdog.\n\nVandenberghe was appalled and decided to act in the public interest. She gave the typed witness statements to a TV news journalist, many of whose colleagues had until then been lapping up the spoon-fed police falsehoods and incorporating them into the drive-by journalism that passes for most modern crime reporting.\n\nVandenberghe's reward for this important act of public service was an early morning police raid on her home by an outside force which the Yard and the IPCC had brought in. Unbowed, she later said she had no regrets for ensuring that neither the de Menezes family nor the British public could be misled any further.\n\nThe \u00a3300,000 IPCC report into the Stockwell tragedy magically protected the Yard, concluding but not explaining why senior officers apparently kept Blair in the dark for 24 hours that his officers had killed an innocent man. Shortly thereafter, the group of defence lawyers on the IPCC's advisory board resigned. They were in post to ensure independence and to provide a proper voice for complainants. Now they were packing their bags, citing concerns that the watchdog was not properly accountable or even an effective oversight body.\n\nIn reality, it was Blair and other Untouchables in the Met who vaulted the barrier at Stockwell \u2013 the barrier of democratic accountability for the death of an innocent man. Nevertheless, the same men in blue who steered the Met between fiasco and farce during the war on corruption would remain leading lights in the war against terror, and go on to demand ever more draconian powers. These demands met little resistance from successive New Labour and Coalition home secretaries, who've marshaled a sleepwalking British public still further into the surveillance society.\n\n* * *\n\nLeading the push for more power was Andy Hayman, who became the Yard's anti-terror chief in 2005 despite his derisory record as an anti-corruption boss. Like Blair, he too walked away from the Stockwell killing without serious rebuff. He escaped meaningful censure yet again for other seriously botched or misconceived anti-terrorist operations, including authorising the bugging of lawyer and MP, Sadiq Khan, during a prison visit to one of his constituents. The conclusions of a retired establishment judge and senior copper tasked to investigate the scandal had echoes of the Stockwell whitewash: Five junior officers who carried out the bugging of Khan's prison visit knew he was an MP, but their boss, Hayman, apparently, did not. Khan found this incredible, not least because Hayman had once briefed him and other MPs in an unsuccessful attempt to increase the period of detention of terror suspects without charge to 90 days.\n\nLater in his career, Hayman came under some sort of scrutiny over problematic expense claims \u2013 and a relationship with a woman who worked at the IPCC during the watchdog's inquiry into the Stockwell killing. But that scrutiny did not reach its natural conclusion because Hayman was allowed to resign in December 2007 with a full assistant commissioner pension.\n\nThe mediocrity of the man was encapsulated in a pitiful performance last summer before a committee of MP's examining the phone hacking scandal. They grilled him over his grievous mishandling of the original inquiry into the hacking of mobile phones belonging to Princes William and Harry.\n\nOne MP called Hayman a \"dodgy geezer\" and his denial-cum-tantrum when asked whether he had taken a bung from News International, for whom he worked as a paid columnist, remains a YouTube favourite.\n\n* * *\n\nU _ntouchables_ has an interesting pre-publication history and in his own way Andy Hayman deserves some credit for this book. It began as a _Guardian_ investigation of Scotland Yard in the wake of the 1999 Macpherson report into the police mishandling of the Stephen Lawrence murder. In the course of our inquiries it became clear that the anti-corruption campaign \u2013 launched in secret and with a beady eye on the Macpherson public inquiry \u2013 was tainted by huge double standards. The senior officers chosen to run it seemed highly inappropriate. Some came from heavily compromised police stations with much to hide. Others were bullies or proven enemies of due process, sworn to resist the healthy breeze of democratic accountability. Instead, these zealots in uniform were corrupted by secrecy and the exercise of awesome power in the pursuit of what they privately called \"God's work\".\n\nWe were looking into the background to three murders in south-east London of private investigator Daniel Morgan, police informant David Norris and budding architect Stephen Lawrence. At first blush, these savage killings by axe, gun and knife respectively seemed unconnected, and the Met was desperate to keep it that way. But the more we probed, the more it was apparent that a common denominator was the cover up of police corruption.\n\nAt the time, Alan Rusbridger, _The Guardian_ editor, was far from keen on taking on Scotland Yard. One of his executives told us that the editor wanted to be \"on the side of the angels\", by which he meant the Untouchables, whose motto was 'integrity is non-negotiable.' Unfortunately, the Met's integrity was very much negotiable and whilst at _The Guardian_ we were able to document a frightening array of double standards, unpunished corruption and authorised cover-ups.\n\nThe Met was very concerned and on August 2, 2000 made its move. That day Hayman wrote privately to _The Guardian_ editor smearing our professional reputation in a letter we were never shown.\n\nThe Hayman letter suggested that our investigation was in effect corrupt and that we were assisting private investigator Jonathan Rees, the man suspected of murdering Daniel Morgan, to get off a separate and very serious charge. Details of any meetings with Rees and copies of our notebooks were sought but we were told nothing of this or Hayman's offer to Rusbridger of a private briefing where he would be shown secret footage.\n\nThe Hayman letter and other behind-the-scenes lobbying led to an order to stop investigating the police, even in our own time \u2013 an instruction we declined because it was both ludicrous and unethical. Unpublished stories piled up on the stench of corruption around the Morgan, Norris and Lawrence murders, so in March 2001 we resigned from what we then called the _The Yardian_ to write _Untouchables_.\n\nRusbridger has always denied seeing the Hayman letter and he downplayed its significance and derided any suggestion of bowing to Met pressure. \"I'm not that kind of editor,\" he told us when confronted in his office. This March we received confirmation from an unlikely source of what we had long suspected, that pressure was applied to _The Guardian_. The corroboration came from former Untouchable Bob Quick in a witness statement he gave to the Leveson Inquiry, which is currently examining the Met's relationship with newspapers.\n\nQuick's statement started with a biography, which mentioned his significant high profile postings and dealings with some of the Met's most difficult problems. He had helped shape the Met's response in 1998 to the public inquiry looking at its many failings over the Stephen Lawrence murder. A year later he joined the Untouchables, taking over from John Yates. In a very short time he rose within the anti-corruption squad from superintendent to the rank of commander, answerable to Andy Hayman.\n\nQuick told Leveson about an important operation, which gave the Met its first glimpse into the relationship between tabloids and coppers with stories to sell:\n\n_\"During 1999, Anti-Corruption Command was conducting an operation, code named Operation Nigeria, which was a covert infiltration of office premises operated by 'Southern Investigations' whose proprietors were two men, Jonathan Rees (\"Rees\") and Sidney Fillery. Both were suspected of involvement in the murder of a former partner in the company, Daniel Morgan, who was murdered with an axe in a pub car park in Sydenham in 1987. Fillery had been a former police detective and had worked on the original murder investigation. The objective of this operation was to try to advance the investigation into the Morgan murder. During the course of Operation Nigeria, it became clear that, amongst other criminal activities, 'Southern Investigations' was acting as a 'clearing house' for stories for certain newspapers. Many of these stories were being leaked by police officers who were already suspected of corruption or by unknown officers connected to officers suspected of corruption, who were found to have a relationship with 'Southern Investigations'. A number of journalists were identified as having direct relationships with 'Southern Investigations'. To the best of my recollection these included journalists from papers like 'The Sun' and 'News of the World' but may have included other newspapers. My recollection is that one of the journalists suspected was [name redacted] an executive with the 'News of the World'. During the operation it became clear that officers were being paid sums of between \u00a3500 and \u00a32000 for stories about celebrities, politicians, and the Royal Family, as well as police investigations._\n\n_I recall one instance where certain officers from the Royalty Protection Branch appeared to have leaked a story in relation to a member of the Royal Family and details of bank accounts. It was often difficult to take direct action against such officers without compromising the covert investigation techniques being used against those connected with 'Southern Investigations', but where possible, action (criminal or discipline) was taken._\n\n_Matters in Operation Nigeria were brought to a head when evidence emerged that Rees was conspiring with a known criminal to plant cocaine on the criminal's wife in order to have her arrested and prosecuted so as to enable the criminal to win a custody battle over their one year old child. The Operation Nigeria investigation revealed that this conspiracy involved at least two corrupt Metropolitan Police detectives who were actively involved in attempting to pervert the course of justice in order to ensure the conviction and imprisonment of an innocent woman. These events precipitated the end of Operation Nigeria as police were forced to intervene and arrest those involved, thereby revealing that 'Southern Investigations' had been infiltrated covertly by police. Rees, two known criminals and two detectives were arrested and subsequently convicted and imprisoned for these crimes._\n\n_Following these events and as a result of intelligence from Operation Nigeria, in around 2000, I wrote a short report highlighting the role of journalists in promoting corrupt relationships with, and making corrupt payments to, officers for stories about famous people and high profile investigations in the MPS. Despite detailed archive searches, the MPS have been unable to provide me with a copy; ordinarily material of this nature would have been destroyed after six years. In my report I recommended the commencement of an investigation into such activities. I believe my report also names some newspapers but I cannot recall which ones. I proposed an investigation of these newspapers\/officers on the basis that I believed that the journalists were not paying bribes out of their own pockets but were either falsely accounting for their expenses and therefore defrauding their employers or, that the newspaper organisations were aware of the reasons for the payments and were themselves complicit in making corrupt payments to police officers._\n\n_I submitted my report to Commander Hayman (\"Hayman\"), who was at the time the head of MPS Professional Standards Department and the person I reported to directly. I recall speaking to Hayman about these matters and that he had reservations based on potential evidential difficulties pertaining to privileged material (journalistic material). I did not believe that the circumstances in which these stories were being obtained offered the facility to hide behind the legal protections available to journalists and I recall debating this with him. I am unable to say whether Commander Hayman referred this matter further up the command chain although I was under the impression he had. I did not sense much appetite to launch such an investigation although I felt Hayman was sincere in his reservations at the time. I do recall Hayman making a suggestion that he should visit a particular editor or newspaper and confront them with this intelligence but I do not know what action was taken in this regard._\n\n_I believe at about the same time I also had concerns about two freelance journalists, named [names redacted] who appeared to be conspiring to place misleading stories in [title redacted] newspaper to influence the jury in the 'drugs planting' case against Rees. I believe Hayman and I did take some action in relation to these journalists that resulted in them no longer being employed by [newspaper title redacted].\"_\n\n_The Guardian_ had asked Leveson to redact its name from Quick's statement before it was published online. But you can't keep a good story down and days later _The Sunday Times_ published an article headlined 'Police 'nobbled' Press Inquiry into Corruption. A _Guardian_ spokeswoman said: \"Any suggestion that influence from the police resulted in the ending of Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn's relationship with the _Guardian_ is simply wrong.\"\n\nWe have also recently discovered that the Met spied on us during our time at _The Guardian_ and while writing this book. One of our sources, a former detective called Derek Haslam, has admitted that he was also a paid informant for the Untouchables. Haslam, whose codename was Joe Poulton, had been tasked in 1998 to get close to Rees at Southern Investigations. But during his nine years undercover he was also telling his handlers in the Met about what we were up to and who we were meeting. Was this, we wonder, the confidential material Hayman offered to show Rusbridger back in 2000?\n\nUpon re-publication of _Untouchables_ , however, we are glad to see that _The Guardian_ editor has at least reunited his back with his bone over the recent crisis in Britain's most powerful police force. Questions, though, remain unanswered about the newspaper's own dealings with private investigators, including former MI6 officers.\n\nThe Leveson Inquiry has been confined, with government connivance, to buggers, blaggers, hackers and hawkers paid by newspapers to access confidential, personal information. But this is only one aspect of a very lucrative trade. For the same small pool of corporate gumshoes is routinely used by big business and the super rich to gain commercial advantage over competitors and enemies. Blue chip companies and their lawyers frequently engage former cops, spooks and squaddies to break the law on an at arms length and 'deniable' basis.\n\nMany former senior Met officers are involved in the corporate intelligence gathering nexus, and no doubt would swear blind that they stay within the law when contracted by a fragrant variety of City clients and oligarchs. But Leveson and the police are not putting them to the test.\n\n* * *\n\nBesides questioning Hayman, our book also interrogated the record of another supposed golden boy of the Yard whose recent failures have resonated with the victims of crime. Step forward John Yates, formerly of the Yard now of Bahrain.\n\nUntil his sudden resignation last July, there was a virtual media love-in when it came to Yates of the Yard. Journalists relentlessly puffed him as a future commissioner without the slightest examination of his casebook and its many problems, from the prosecution of royal butler, Paul Burrell, the cash-for-honours investigation and more recently, phone hacking.\n\nLike Blair, Stephenson and Hayman, Yates was also allowed to resign with an equally generous pension pot before his past caught up with him. The high profile failure that brought him down was his impromptu decision that there was no need to broaden Hayman's original phone hacking inquiry. Yates did little more than rubber-stamp his predecessor's decision not to probe further, taking only a couple of hours to examine a file of thousands of documents.\n\nAs he headed for the door, Yates made some concessions \u2013 and some excuses too. His decision, he said, was a \"crap\" one but in no way influenced by his own or Scotland Yard's relationships with executives from News International, owners of _The News of the World_.\n\nBy resigning, Yates has avoided having to defend his actions as senior officer in charge of the unsolved murder of Daniel Morgan, which like the ghost of Stephen Lawrence still haunts the Yard.\n\nAs we have seen from Quick's statement, Jonathan Rees, Morgan's business partner, was the chief suspect for the murder. But he has more recently achieved public notoriety during the phone hacking scandal over his firm's partnership with _The News of the World_.\n\nTwenty-five years on from the murder, the tragic plight of the Morgan family, detailed in three chapters of this book, continues unrelieved after five failed Met investigations.\n\nYates led the last inquiry, which started in 2006 and collapsed in March 2011, yet again because of serious police misconduct in the handling of supergrasses.\n\nAlastair Morgan, Daniel's brother, told us he finds himself in the same lamentable situation as when he spoke at the launch of _Untouchables._\n\n\"Seven years ago, I spoke about the many worrying questions raised by Daniel's murder, the probable involvement of corrupt police officers in organising, committing and covering-up the murder, the extraordinary failures of the Met in the initial investigations and the high-handed way we were treated by senior officers over many years.\n\n\"The intervening years since _Untouchables_ was published have been torture. An approach to the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) to seek support for a judicial inquiry, which the Home Office had already turned down, led the case to be re-opened in 2006, for a fifth time.\n\n\"Five men [including Rees] were charged two years later. But after twenty agonising months of pre-trial hearings the prosecution collapsed in March [2011] \u2013 a direct result of police disclosure failures and their mishandling of supergrass witnesses.\"\n\nAlastair told us his family has always been suspicious about the timing of the fifth inquiry. The MPA, he points out, had decided to appoint an independent barrister to examine the entire police files on the Morgan murder. This prospect did not please the Met hierarchy, which suddenly announced to the family and the police authority that there had been a dramatic \"breakthrough\". A fresh witness had belatedly emerged with vital evidence \u2013 a criminal who was willing to become a supergrass prosecution witness. The launching of a covert fifth murder investigation meant the independent inquiry was put on hold.\n\n\"Was this new investigation just a way to stop an independent legal expert exposing the failures of previous inquiries?\" Alastair Morgan wonders. And had an independent barrister seen the Met's intelligence files on Southern Investigations in 2006, it is likely they would have discovered the relationship with tabloid newspapers, including _The News of the World._\n\nConcerned that he and his family would be put through the judicial wringer again, Alastair raised his anxieties about the Met's highly problematic track record with supergrasses at a meeting with officers. New legislation had come into force in 2006 \u2013 the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act \u2013 allowing such witnesses to once again become a key plank in mainstream prosecutions. Alastair was reassured that the supergrasses behind the fifth murder inquiry would be handled by the book. But these reassurances turned out to be entirely hollow.\n\nThe trial judge subsequently found that one of the main supergrasses, Gary Eaton, had been tipped off and coached by officers so that he could be presented in the best possible light. In other words, the self-same abuses highlighted in our book eight year ago were being repeated yet again.\n\n\"In some ways this fifth investigation has just been a five year diversion for the family,\" says Alastair. \"As far as we can see now, it started on very shaky grounds \u2013 the evidence of a single supergrass who received a massive reduction in his sentence (from 18 years to 16 months) as a payback for giving his evidence. This should be the end of such witnesses,\" he suggested.\n\nThe Morgan family is also troubled by the Met's document handling, which also caused the prosecution to collapse. \"How can sensitive informant documents be left lying in disused buildings for years and the police have no record where they are? How can the anti-corruption squad apparently be so unhelpful to colleagues investigating a highly controversial murder?\"\n\nThese are the very type of awkward questions only an independent inquiry could address, says Alastair. After all, the police misconduct was so deliberate and so severe that the prosecution threw in the towel on the twenty-fourth anniversary of his brother's murder.\n\nYates wanted the Morgan family to stand by him as he gave a statement to the media outside the Old Bailey. They refused. For his part, Yates declined to support the family's call for a judicial inquiry into the case.\n\nHome Secretary Teresa May has also stonewalled on this. In a letter this January, she refused a judicial inquiry but offered the family an outside force and independent barrister to review issues around police corruption. She insisted that the Morgans' concerns were misplaced and felt the police had the necessary integrity to investigate themselves.\n\nTom Watson, the MP who has led the charge on the phone hacking scandal, didn't agree and asked her to reconsider in an adjournment debate at the House of Commons on 29 February. He reminded the government that the five failed police investigations had cost the taxpayer almost \u00a330 million.\n\nOf course when the fifth investigation collapsed at trial in March last year, bubbling in the background was the phone hacking scandal, which just four months later would force Yates out of office, full pension intact.\n\nThe IPCC later cleared Yates of any impropriety over his relationship with a _News of The World_ executive and one of the last acts of the MPA was to give him a large cheque with a gagging clause that prevents him suing the Met or talking about the deal he secured. Yates now acts as a paid adviser on ethical policing and human rights for the brutal regime in Bahrain.\n\nThe Met and Crown Prosecution Service launched the obligatory 'lessons learned' internal investigation into the Morgan case. It has yet to report and when it does it will not be made public.\n\nTo date no serving officer is facing any internal police discipline or criminal prosecution for misconduct. The trial judge singled out Dave Cook, the detective chief superintendent with day to day running of the fifth investigation, for most criticism. He faces no sanction but instead is suing News International. His claim appears to suggest that Rees, the murder suspect he failed to convict, was behind the _News of The World's_ surveillance of Cook's family and the hacking of his phone. However, in a bizarre twist, the IPCC arrested Cook in January this year for allegedly leaking information to a tabloid journalist.\n\nAlastair and his partner Kirsteen intend to tell the family's story in a forthcoming book. They are also calling for the end of the supergrass system and a truly independent police watchdog. \"The whole experience of dealing with the British police has been a nightmare,\" he said.\n\n\"I honestly don't know how we survived it. It has completely shattered illusions we had about justice and the country we live in. What we want more than anything else is for the people to know exactly how the police have handled Daniel's murder and how they have treated us. We also need a completely independent police complaints system with no former government investigators involved. We hope one day the sick relationship between the media and the police will be a thing of the past. We also hope to reclaim the Met for the people it is supposed to serve, for the public interest.\"\n\n* * *\n\nYates had made his name as a fearless slayer of bent cops while in charge of a police corruption case in 1998. Operation Russia targeted detectives on the drug wing of the South East Regional Crime Squad (Sercs). It was based on an old and discredited supergrass system, which the Untouchables had secretly resurrected with the connivance of crown prosecutors and in breach of key rules governing evidence gathering.\n\nCrucial to Operation Russia were two supergrasses: a drug dealer and police informant who turned against her detective handlers and a Sercs detective who turned against the police brotherhood and its vows of silence about misconduct.\n\nBetween 1999 and 2001, supergrass evidence from Evelyn Fleckney and Neil Putnam put away five Sercs detectives for serious corruption offences essentially involving ripping off drug dealers. Yates made his name and was rewarded with a breathless BBC _Panorama_ documentary and a promotion.\n\nHowever, in October 2011, Bob Clark and Chris Drury, two of the five convicted Sercs detective targeted by Operation Russia, were acquitted following a retrial ordered by the Court of Appeal. The prosecution threw in the towel after a revealing judicial examination of the way the two supergrasses had been mishandled by Yates and his team. There was also an equally troubling failure by the Untouchables and crown prosecutors to disclose information that seriously undermined Fleckney's credibility prior to her giving evidence at the original trial in 1999.\n\nLast October, Fleckney effectively withdrew her earlier evidence and claimed she had been induced, threatened and signed officers' debrief notes while drugged up on anti-depressants. The prosecution had no option but to abandon the retrial. There was one positive outcome for Yates, though: he escaped having to give evidence about his stewardship of Operation Russia.\n\nWe only have one explanation from him about why the supergrass system was run in such a dangerous way that inevitably would lead to expensive judicial failure. He claimed back in 2001 during a court hearing that the simple issue of tape recording all dealings with the supergrasses would have been too expensive. This, despite Operation Russia being a flagship anti-corruption case of the Met's best-resourced squad.\n\nThis explanation has left the taxpayer with an estimated bill of more than \u00a320 million and counting, as further convictions are now likely to be overturned largely because the Untouchables refused to turn on the tape machine.\n\n* * *\n\nHad all dealings with supergrass Neil Putnam been tape-recorded, the home secretary would not now be facing calls from the family of Stephen Lawrence that there should be a new public inquiry specifically into whether corruption undermined the hunt for their son's killers.\n\nThis new development follows an investigation by us, which was recently published in The Independent. Evidence for that piece emerged from the retrial of Clark and Drury.\n\nIt was high noon for the Met when on October 12 last year Putnam once again stepped into the witness box at the Old Bailey. The last time was eleven years ago, when his supergrass evidence helped convict his two former colleagues.\n\nLawyers for Clark and Drury were now seeking to persuade the judge that the retrial should be stopped because the supergrass system underpinning it was illegal. The debriefing process, they argued, was designed to filter out evidence from supergrasses that was inconvenient to the Met's reputation and management of its wider corruption problem.\n\nTo help prove this, the defence demanded Putnam give evidence. He was not in the witness box to recant his earlier evidence against Clark and Drury. Their barristers, however, wanted to cross-examine him on one point only: that during his 1998 debrief Putnam had spoken about police corruption in the Lawrence murder inquiry involving John Davidson and Clifford Norris, the gangster father of one the suspects; and the Met had covered it up.\n\nPutnam agreed with this part of the defence case. He felt strongly that the Untouchables had \"brushed under the table\" his allegation, which he says he was told would \"blow apart\" the Met during the Macpherson Inquiry. He was also angry that Macpherson had not been told of his willingness to give evidence about Davidson.\n\nMark Ellison QC, the retrial prosecutor, was in a difficult situation. A 1998 intelligence report by Yates said of Putnam: \"[His] value as a witness to the Crown cannot be over-estimated. In spite of his criminality he will present as a credible witness thoroughly contrite about what he has done and the shame that this will bring upon him, his family and the MPS [Metropolitan Police Service]. This has been a consistent thread throughout his debrief.\"\n\nEllison explained to the court that Putnam was still regarded as a witness of truth except when it came to the evidence he was about to give on Davidson and the Lawrence murder. Yates, in a witness statement for the case, said Putnam was simply \"mistaken\".\n\nPutnam, however, had never given evidence under oath about the Lawrence allegation and risked returning to prison for perjury if he was now lying at the Old Bailey.\n\nPutnam told the court that Davidson had one day casually admitted to him that he was in a corrupt relationship with Clifford Norris.\n\nDavidson was Putnam's sergeant at the east Dulwich Sercs office, which he joined in 1994 directly after working on the Lawrence murder. The pair had become friends, played football and socialised with each other's family.\n\nRecalling how one Sunday that year they sat in the office waiting for a phone call, Putnam said he had asked Davidson about the Lawrence case. \"We were talking and I turned round and said that I felt that it was obvious that the boys were guilty, so obvious something's wrong. And then John suddenly came out with the fact that he'd been dealing with, his exacts words were, 'old man Norris'.\n\n\"Now I knew that one of the boys was Norris and old man Norris is the dad. John said that he'd given them information. John wasn't precise as to what the information was and John said they'd looked after him, those were the exact words 'they'd looked after him' and then, that there'd been 'a real little earner out of it' and I knew exactly what he meant by 'a real little earner' and it meant that they'd received cash, received money.\n\n\"I didn't pursue it, you know, act in horror or anything like that, as I said because of my own bit of corruption at the time as well... I knew from my police experience that they'd lost evidence or they'd hidden evidence or done something and [Norris] paid for it in order to protect the Norris boy by helping the dad.\n\n\"[It was] one small part of one large conversation, but it was quite clear what [Davidson] said and it's something that sort of stuck with me, made me think, I may be doing some bad things but I'm not hiding away murders, and that's why it stuck with me and basically never went away.\"\n\nWhen he turned supergrass four years later, on 21 July 1998 Yates had warned Putnam that he must give all he knew about police corruption. \"He told me he wanted more details, more names,\" said Putnam.\n\nOne week later, the supergrass was debriefed, but not on tape, solely on what he knew about Davidson. Putnam gave the Untouchables three detailed examples of allegedly corrupt acts between 1994 and 1995, which he claimed to have carried out with Davidson and an informant they jointly handled. These involved the disposal of stolen watches, handling stolen electrical equipment and the theft of cocaine from a drug dealer.\n\nDavidson had already appeared in front of the Macpherson inquiry on three occasions. The last time, on 16 July, was the most memorable. In a tense and televised encounter with Michael Mansfield QC, barrister for the Lawrence family, he denied any corrupt link with Clifford Norris.\n\nIt was the first time rumour of a link between the cop and the gangster was publicly referred to, but the Untouchables never asked Putnam about this during his debrief on 28 July or subsequently. The supergrass, however, insists he raised it with the debriefing team. Asked why, he told the court wryly: \"Yates wanted the lot, he got the lot\".\n\nPutnam was \"absolutely certain\" it was written down and recalled there were at least fifteen notebooks kept in a pile outside his cell and by the telephone he used to call his wife. \"It was written down. I don't know if they did it chronologically. They said they were going to get someone from the Macpherson Inquiry,\" he told the court.\n\nShortly after giving the information on Davidson he vividly recalled sitting in his cell with the television on. The news was dominated by the on going Macpherson inquiry hearings. One of his debriefers stood at the open door and asked him if he was sure about the Davidson-Norris link. Putnam nodded and he claimed the officer responded that it would \"blow the Met apart.\"\n\nPutnam said he felt the Lawrence matter was \"unfinished business\" in his life as a supergrass. Asked why he was now giving evidence, he replied: \"I said it to the police and they did nothing about it. As far as I'm concerned they hid it away, they didn't want it to come out.\"\n\nPutnam explained in court that he had on two further occasions between 1998 and 1999 asked his debriefers if Macpherson was calling him to give evidence. By the time he came to give evidence at the original trial of Clark and Drury in November 1999, Putnam was convinced the Met had \"covered up\" his information and said so in court. However, it appears no one from the Met asked him what he meant by this.\n\nPutnam's estranged former wife Gail, who he used to beat when drunk, also gave evidence at the retrial last year supporting his explosive claims. She told the court that Putnam had confided in her while he was a supergrass that \"evidence was withheld for some time because [Davidson] was linked to the father of one of the suspects.\" She added that: \"Davidson had an informant and that informant was the father of one of the perpetrators ... Neil had told me that Davidson withheld information and that was wrong and it would have given the guys in the frame time to get rid of any evidence.\"\n\nDoreen Lawrence had complained in 2006, when Putnam's claims of a cover up were repeated on the BBC after we had explored them in this book.\n\nThe Lawrence family and their lawyers were not hopeful about complaining to the IPCC. The watchdog was the then Labour government's response to a key recommendation of the Macpherson report that there should be proper independent investigation of police misconduct. However, Doreen Lawrence was unconvinced of the IPCC's independence and said so in her autobiography, published shortly before the BBC programme was aired. Her concern followed revelations in _Untouchables_ of the close links between the IPCC and the Met's anti-corruption squad. Mrs Lawrence was not surprised therefore when in 2007 the IPCC ruled there was no evidence that Putnam had said anything to the Untouchables about the Davidson-Norris link, no evidence that the Met misled the Macpherson Inquiry and no evidence of corruption in the Lawrence murder inquiry.\n\nHowever, the scale of the watchdog's failures were something she was not expecting. The IPCC did not investigate important lines of inquiry or disclose relevant information that corroborated Putnam. It also failed to disclose in its report conflicts of interest with the Met's anti-corruption squad that questioned its independence.\n\nThe IPCC report did not resolve Putnam's pressing suggestion that Clifford Norris was in a corrupt informant relationship with Davidson and other police officers. Putnam had explained to the watchdog how police corruption works: \"Police do not work corruptly independently... it does not happen, there's always at least two... There's an old police sort of CID saying 'there's always mouths to feed' and you know that it wouldn't have been John on his own because within the framework of [a murder] investigation you've got to have someone else to help you to get rid of something, to lose something, to hide something what ever you do. I mean in his role as a detective sergeant on the team he could well have been on his own but my experience says no... it's very, very rare for a police officer to work individually as far as corruption is concerned... but who the others would have been I've no idea.\"\n\nNeither, it seems, did the IPCC. Its report shows no investigation into whether Davidson was acting with others. Instead, the watchdog relied on old Met internal assessments that there was no corruption in the Lawrence murder inquiry.\n\nJohn Davidson declined to meet the IPCC. In a statement he released at the time, Davidson strongly denied being corrupt, which is still his position. The statement said: \"The first and only time I came into contact with Clifford Norris was in 1994 when, whilst leading an arrest team, I arrested him for offences including firearms and drugs. He was subsequently charged and convicted in relation to these offences. Other than in relation to this arrest, I have had no dealings either directly or indirectly with Clifford Norris.\n\n\"I am not corrupt. I did not hamper in any way the investigation into the death of Stephen Lawrence. I am not 'a friend' of, nor did I know, Clifford Norris other than that mentioned above. I would stress the only time I dealt with Clifford Norris was after I had stopped working on the Lawrence investigation.\"\n\nThe former detective also criticised Yates for saying he was corrupt: \"I am also very concerned that... Yates thought it appropriate to condemn me as a corrupt officer.\"\n\nToday, as we re-publish _Untouchables_ , Michael Mansfield QC has joined the growing chorus for a new Macpherson inquiry into police corruption and the Lawrence case. \"In my view, this home secretary has an obligation to finish the job, whether it is [with] a new panel and chairman, fine. The public are also owed an explanation here. I don't want the IPCC involved. It's got to be public, transparent and thorough, as the original one was. This isn't just about Davidson, there are other officers here. The Met, I suspect, has no stomach for looking at it. The only way the public can have confidence restored is not by the Met and not by the IPCC. I know that is what Doreen and Neville Lawrence want. They are owed this at the very least and I will support them to the bitter end.\"\n\nMichael Gillard  \n& Laurie Flynn  \nMarch 2012\n\n## Part One: The Ghosts of the Ghost Squad\n## [1\n\nNoble Cause Corruption](contents.html#ch01)\n\nWhen it came to reinforcing the thin blue line between law and order and the descent into anarchy Margaret Thatcher was no pussy. If women like a man in uniform, during her 11\u2013year reign, from 1979 to 1990, Maggie positively gushed over the forces of law and order. The military helped save the Conservative prime minister's political project and her bacon in 1982 with a victory thousands of miles away on the Falkland Islands. And the long-running dirty war in Northern Ireland always made the intelligence services especially welcome at Number Ten. But it was the police \u2013 Scotland Yard in particular \u2013 who were singled out, above teachers and nurses, as her elite public sector workers. One political biography described them as Mrs Thatcher's \"favoured class\".\n\nThis flirtatiousness was not just an instinctual alliance of two traditionally right-wing bodies, but a calculated union to enforce her radical vision. From the very beginning of her premiership Mrs Thatcher realised that the social and economic experiment she and her advisers planned for Britain would need the boys in blue on their side. Police pay and numbers were therefore made a priority. So much so that on the first working day of her new administration, leaders of the Police Federation, the representatives of rank and file officers, were invited to Downing Street to be informed about their large pay packet. This would be the last time anything approximating a trade union got a warm reception at Number Ten.\n\nInside Downing Street the political dominatrix was more than capable of handbagging any hint of a social conscience out of the remaining \"wets\" in her cabinet. It was outside, up and down the country, that the Iron Lady would need the police to quell rising civil disorder caused by her unfolding conviction politics.\n\nThe Greenham Common Peace Camp, made up of women opposed to Cruise missiles on British soil, was dug in outside an airbase in Berkshire \u2013 not a county known as a hotbed of radicalism. According to a secret cabinet document leaked to a newspaper, the security forces were authorised to use live ammunition if protestors tried to prevent the arrival of the nuclear warheads.\n\nElsewhere, the coal miners, or \"the enemy within\" as the prime minister called them, were striking in 1984 to save their communities from becoming ghost towns. While she swung her handbag at the Welfare State, police officers co-ordinated by Scotland Yard swung their truncheons across the coal pits of Albion. One serving detective, whose father was a miner, remembers with shame how his colleagues returned to London from duty \"up North\" bragging about waving wads of money at the hungry strikers. This was several years before Harry Enfield's grotesque comic creation \"loads-a-money\" summed up the mood.\n\nA defining TV image of these turbulent times was the police cavalry charges at Orgreave coking plant near Sheffield. Another was the Battle of Wapping, a site in east London where press baron Rupert Murdoch had relocated his non-unionised media empire in 1986. \"It was the working class pitted against the working class,\" recalls one recently retired detective. \"But we were offered extra pay [to police the strikes] so those keen to supplement their incomes and get on in the organisation agreed to do it.\"\n\nThese grinding, bloody public order set-pieces, which on occasion resembled scenes from an epic movie, led to an increase in the number of assault complaints by civilians against the police. As a result, says one lawyer, the Police Federation changed the funding rules to include free legal representation for any \"incident\" that occurred on duty. Demonstrators responded with the satirical refrain \"HELP THE POLICE \u2013 BEAT YOURSELF UP\".\n\nAnd what of the battle of ideas? The well-developed concerns for the erosion of civil liberties, such as freedom of association or the right to strike, were immediately dismissed by Mrs Thatcher or ridiculed by her friends in the right-wing press as the hand wringing of the bed-wetter fringe of the democratic Left.\n\nMeanwhile, the bond between the prime minister and Scotland Yard was further cemented by three brutal police killings. The first was WPC Yvonne Fletcher, shot dead by a gunman inside the Libyan embassy in April 1984. Nine months later undercover cop John Fordham died from multiple stab wounds inflicted by Kent gangster Kenny Noye, who was under surveillance for his role in the disposal of \u00a326 million of gold bullion stolen from the Brinks Mat warehouse near Heathrow. Then, in October 1985, rioters on the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, north London, hacked to death PC Keith Blakelock.\n\nEach death neatly identified Mrs Thatcher's three enemies \u2013 terrorism, organised crime and domestic subversion.\n\nDespite the ideological resistance of Tory governments to restraining police powers, it was the murder of a gay man in 1972 and the inner city riots nine years later under her premiership that eventually led to the first real check on police misconduct.\n\nMaxwell Confait, a London rent boy, was murdered in his home before it was set alight. Three suggestible boys aged between fourteen and eighteen, all with low mental ages, were jailed on confessions extracted by the police. However, the Court of Appeal quashed their convictions, saying the confessions were unreliable. A judicial inquiry was launched, followed by a Royal Commission on criminal procedure.\n\nThe main concern was police reliance on and fabrication of confession evidence, a then widespread practice known as \"verballing\". This criminal act involves falsely attributing incriminating comments, partial admissions or full confessions to the suspect. A good verbal has an added benefit for the police. When the defendant is giving evidence in court, the prosecution will try to rile him into accusing the officer of lying. The trap is now set because if the defendant has a criminal record and attacks the officer's character then the jury can be told of his own peccadillos.\n\nIn a recent _mea culpa_ autobiography, Keith Hellawell, the former chief constable of West Yorkshire and retired Drug Tsar to the Blair government, described a corrupt culture in the detective branch from the sixties to the eighties, which the courts did their best to condone. Detectives, he wrote, were \"beating confessions, fabricating evidence, doing anything at all that would help them gain the required result... Confessions were everything to us.\"\n\nOn its own, the Confait case was just another _cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre_ that neatly exposed the institutionalised corruption of the criminal justice system, which all the key players recognised but refused to address. It took a series of inner city riots across the country, however, to make the politicians and judiciary take note.\n\nIf 1968 was the summer of love then 1981 in Thatcher's Britain was the summer of hate. Brixton, before it became ghetto fabulous, and the inner city areas of Handsworth in Birmingham, Moss Side in Manchester and Toxteth in Liverpool all burnt, as disaffected youths rioted against high unemployment, no future and overtly racist policing.\n\nLondon dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson gave lyrical expression to the \"iration\" in his song _Sonny's Lettah_ , an attack on the police's liberal use of the \"sus laws\" to stop and search those in possession of afro hair and thick lips or driving while black.\n\nJim start to wriggle\n\nThe police start to giggle\n\nThe Brixton riots were followed by Lord Scarman's inquiry report in 1982. The liberal jurist called for greater accountability of the police and greater sensitivity in how they policed deprived multi-cultural inner city communities.\n\nOn the issue of accountability, Scotland Yard was way behind other regional police forces. Since its creation in 1829 the Yard had only been accountable to the Home Office, which was now in the hands of a rabidly pro-police government. However, the accumulating pressure for reform led to the introduction of unprecedented new police procedures through the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act.\n\nPACE, as it is known, now made it very risky for officers to try and obtain fabricated or coerced confessions. The act introduced due process \u2013 legal protection for the arrested person \u2013 where before there was unchecked police discretion. The right to a lawyer before questioning and the recording of all police interviews were designed to break with the corrupt past. And if officers blatantly ignored the new codes of practice then cases could now be lost at trial, no matter how pro-prosecution the judge was.\n\nA further element of independence came from the 1985 Prosecution of Offences Act. This landmark legislation created the Crown Prosecution Service in October the following year. The CPS, instead of the police, would now prosecute and prepare all cases for trial. It was supposed to act as a check on the quality of police evidence before it was tested in front of a judge or jury.\n\nLord Scarman's report had also called for a fully independent system of investigating complaints against the police. He criticised the existing Police Complaints Board, set up in 1976, as lacking public confidence. The police investigated themselves with no oversight and those members of the public who dared to complain feared \"harassment and intimidation\", he concluded.\n\nOne young detective constable from the Met succinctly summed up, without realising it, the problem of allowing the police to be judge and jury in its own cause: \"I will always put loyalty [to the organisation] over honesty,\" he said. This rationale is as true of the officer complained about as it is of the officer carrying out the complaint investigation.\n\nUnsurprisingly, the Thatcher government was unmoved by Scarman's arguments and opted for not even a halfway house towards independence. Out of PACE was born the Police Complaints Authority, a supervisory body with no real power and no investigative function, which Scarman rightly predicted would become \"an irrelevant fifth wheel to the investigation coach\".\n\nIn practice, as time passed, the PCA became complicit in many police cover-ups. Most of its government-appointed members proved themselves aloof, out of their depth, arrogant, too police friendly and susceptible to political pressure.\n\nThere was a long-held myth that British justice is the best in the world and corruption happened in other countries. But by 1988, reactionary voices in the government, the police and the judiciary were struggling to defend the _ancien r\u00e9gime_ as the Court of Appeal began to overturn a cascade of convictions from the seventies and eighties. These miscarriages of justice exposed the true danger of politicised prosecutions where the courts connived to excuse or ignore evidence of severe police misconduct. This ranged from torture, suffocation using plastic bags, planted evidence and \"lost\" documents which officers knew if disclosed would clear those falsely accused.\n\nOver the ensuing five years of Conservative rule the criminal justice system suffered its greatest crisis of public confidence as one by one prisoners wrongly incarcerated for decades emerged from the appeal court and onto the front pages. Many of these miscarriages, like the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six, the Maguire Seven and Judith Ward, had their roots in the dirty war in Northern Ireland. They had been wrongly convicted for an IRA bombing campaign on mainland Britain that killed over 26 innocent people.\n\nOther tragic cases, like those of Stefan Kiszko and Derek Treadaway, showed the rampant lawlessness of certain police squads when they needed \"a result\". Kiszko, a mentally retarded man, served 16 years after allegedly confessing to a sexual murder the prosecution knew he could not have committed. His zero sperm count did not match the semen found in the victim, but these tests weren't disclosed to his defence. Treadaway's story could easily have come out of a Latin American dictatorship, but was again set in Birmingham. He maintained that detectives from the West Midlands Crime Squad suffocated him in 1982 with sealed plastic bags over his head until, fearing for his life, he confessed to four armed robberies.\n\nFor all these and other disturbing miscarriages of justice, between 1989 and 1994 no police officer accused of misconduct was ever prosecuted. Similarly, the barristers and solicitors who prosecuted these cases continued to rise within the judiciary. And Sir Peter Imbert, who had been involved in the investigation of the Guildford pub bombings, was commissioner of the Metropolitan Police at the very time the appeal was allowed.\n\nOn 31 March 1990, middle-class Conservative voters united with Labour supporters and others to march through London in protest at the introduction of the Poll Tax, a flagship Thatcherite policy which she had cynically first tested on the Scottish people one year earlier. The demonstration turned violent in Trafalgar Square, and once again her boys in blue were there to quell the riot.\n\nNo policy U-turn would be possible with Maggie at the helm, so her key cabinet colleagues and party grandees, fearing a loss at the next general election, conspired to oust her from the throne, tired as they already were with her bullying leadership style and intransigence on relations with Europe. The Iron Lady cried as she was driven out of Number Ten for the last time. Few shed a tear for her.\n\nJohn Major, the incoming party leader and caretaker prime minister, was a politician whose greyness was in sharp contrast to his wounded predecessor. In April 1992 he went to the polls and beat an over-confident Labour Party to begin an unprecedented fourth term of Conservative rule. However, this time, relations with Scotland Yard and the police service would not be so cosy.\n\nMajor was desperately worried about looking weak on law and order. The early nineties was a period of economic recession with high unemployment returning and increased crime. So his ministers had to address the collapse of public confidence in the criminal justice system and the failure of a well-financed police service to deliver on crime reduction.\n\nA 1992 government inquiry into police pay and conditions marked a reversal of Thatcher's financial mollycoddling. Predictably, it caused uproar among the federated ranks and senior officers. Performance-related pay, fixed-term contracts and substantial pay cuts for new recruits finally ended the immunity from the ravages of Thatcherism that the police had enjoyed for over a decade.\n\nSenior Home Office civil servants also started to cast their net for a new Met commissioner to replace Sir Peter Imbert, whose tenure was coming to an end. In the autumn of 1992 they settled on a lanky, awkward-looking candidate, Paul Condon, who, like Major, was conspicuous for his greyness. Far more interesting was the fact that for the first time the government had decided to extend the new commissioner's period in office from five to seven years. This was a clear indication that Condon's brief from his political masters was to modernise the most powerful and recalcitrant police force in the country. He had until the new millennium.\n\nTo the crime correspondents of the national media, Condon was billed as a reformer ready to grasp the nettle on racism, perks, low professionalism and inefficiency. The _Guardian_ described him as part of \"a new breed of articulate, fast-track, graduate officers who emerged in the 1970s\". Besides his years in the Met, Paul Condon had spent two long stints at Kent Constabulary, first as an assistant chief constable and then as the top man. From there, he was plucked from relative obscurity to be appointed the most senior police officer in the UK.\n\nWhen Condon took over the Met its moral authority was in tatters. It is tempting for some to buy into the spin and see him as an ethical new broom parachuted in by a cuddly, more inclusive Conservative party who'd ditched the bitch. But, as ever, the reality is murkier.\n\nIn February 1993 Paul Condon, then aged 45, took the reins of the Met. In came the management and image consultants looking for efficiencies, and fast-tracked graduate cops who were more _Brideshead Revisited_ than _The Sweeney_. One crime correspondent described the commissioner as \"John Birt in uniform\", a reference to the director general of the BBC who was simultaneously reforming his organisation.\n\nLater that same month, John Major gave an interview to the _Mail on Sunday_ in which he expressed how strongly he felt society needed \"to condemn a little more and understand a little less\". The interview publicly signalled to the nation and the police service what journalist David Rose rightly calls a period of \"new authoritarianism\".\n\nFor the next four years, from 1993 to 1997, the Major government worked closely with Condon to win back a crime-weary public. This was done through a series of draconian measures that ignored the unresolved and awkward questions about police misconduct raised by the previous period of miscarriages of justice. What Major had taken away from the police in financial perks he was about to give back in legal powers.\n\nIn the autumn of 1993, the new home secretary, the oleaginous Michael Howard, worked closely with the Association of Chief Police Officers to develop a list of measures to bring offenders \u2013 car thieves, burglars, vandals and the like \u2013 to book. He presented his list at the October party conference to rapturous applause. Among it was an end to the right to silence. The prosecution, he said, should be able to infer to a jury a defendant's guilt if he said nothing when interviewed by the police. There would also be less disclosure of police documents ahead of a trial. This, it was claimed, would prevent cunning defence lawyers picking holes in the prosecution case to acquit their \"factually guilty\" clients.\n\nHoward's party piece was yet to come. What he told the conference was manna from heaven for Condon and other less enlightened senior police officers. The time had come, said the home secretary, to \"rebalance\" the criminal justice system in favour of protection of the public and against the criminal. The war on crime had been declared, and the police would be given the tools to recalibrate society.\n\nThe New Labour Party under Tony Blair showed in opposition how little there was between it and the Tories in their pursuit of support from Middle England. \"Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime\" was Blair's pithy law and order catchphrase as shadow home secretary. That too was manna from heaven for the 44 police forces.\n\nBy contrast with his predecessor, it was clear to the new Met commissioner that the next four years would be a period of policing on the front foot. And, incredibly, the country's most powerful policeman was right to believe he would have support from the two main political parties.\n\nThe Home Office had chosen Condon to stop the slide, not stop the rot in the criminal justice system. In furtherance of this aim, Condon made two crucial appearances in 1993 to rehabilitate the authority of his officers \u2013 one in front of a parliamentary select committee and the other on BBC's _Panorama_ programme.\n\nOn both occasions, he deployed a tidy little argument straight from the mouths of spin-doctors. It ran like this: Yes, there have been abuses. Fabricating evidence and lying on oath to convict people officers believed were \"factually guilty\" did occur. But those abuses are born of frustration with the excessive rights enjoyed by defendants. Pause. Solemn look. The bad days will return if the pendulum is not swung back in favour of the victims of crime and the police. Trust us. We've learned from our mistakes and moved on.\n\nThese abuses were in fact serious criminal offences \u2013 perjury and perverting the course of justice \u2013 by those in a position of public trust. And as such it should make no difference if the officer did it for money or, as Condon claimed, out of a misguided morality. Such acts are crimes and should be dealt with as such. But the image consultants at the Yard, needless to say, didn't see it that way. They told the commissioner to give such severe misconduct a more palatable name \u2013 welcome to the ignoble concept of \"noble cause corruption\".\n\nThis sinister phrase \u2013 which belongs among the pages of Anthony Burgess's _A Clockwork Orange_ \u2013 is still used today and remains a pitiful but effective effort by the Yard at self-delusion and damage limitation. Just as politicians now call telling lies \"spin\", so too has the Yard substituted police crimes with \"noble cause corruption\".\n\nThe phrase was part of the 1993 propaganda effort to rehabilitate the police through the launching of a war on crime and on due process. One after the other, the country's top cops conspicuously failed to admit how senior management had in fact tolerated and even encouraged 'noble cause corruption'.\n\nThe fish rots from the head, but not according to Piscean, Paul Condon. He gave typical expression to the spineless distancing exercise when he told _Panorama_ about a far-off land a long, long time ago. \"There was a time,\" he began, \"when a minority of officers were prepared to bend the rules, massage the evidence, not for personal gain or not even in their own terms to tell lies about people. But I think elaborating on things that were said in a way to make sure the case had the strongest chance of going through to a conviction.\"\n\nDespite the Tory government's awareness of how pervasive the culture of \"noble cause corruption\" was, in 1993 the Home Office paved the way for a new piece of legislation which would roll back even more of the legal protections reluctantly squeezed out of the criminal justice system since PACE. The Criminal Procedures and Investigation bill was the last act in the total public rehabilitation of the police under the Major government. It put in officers' hands the power to decide which documents from the criminal inquiry should be disclosed to the defence before the trial. Any information that could help the defence's declared argument or, more crucially, that would undermine the prosecution case had to be disclosed.\n\nBut of course the system would rely entirely on the integrity of the disclosure officer and his ability to put aside his loyalty to the police and to his colleagues, and to withstand pressure from his superiors and the government. When it became law in 1996, the Act created a whole new mechanism for potential miscarriages of justice.\n\n## [2\n\nThe Ghost Squad](contents.html#ch02)\n\nIt was in the climate of \"new authoritarianism\" that less than one year into his post, commissioner Paul Condon took the decision to set up a covert operation to develop \"a strategic intelligence picture of corruption\" in Scotland Yard.\n\nThe setting up in late 1993 of a Ghost Squad to develop that intelligence picture was carried out with unprecedented secrecy. The Home Office was aware of \"the squad that didn't exist\", and had authorised funding for it, says the Yard. But the whole affair, at first glance, appeared entirely at odds with John Major's highly public war on crime, to which a rehabilitated Scotland Yard was essential. After all, how could the government hope to restore public confidence if it ever got out that the most senior officer in the country didn't know whom he could trust in his own force?\n\nThe truth is the Ghost Squad and the intelligence it would gather over the next four years was never supposed to be made public. It was designed to operate completely in the shadows, without any legal oversight. Over a decade later Scotland Yard still won't come clean and reveal why the Ghost Squad was really set up.\n\nAnti-corruption chiefs confirm that the strategic document to set up the covert operation was signed by the commissioner in 1993. But ask when and what underpinned it, and the shutters come down. \"The decisions taken around the formation of this document and the document itself are strictly confidential,\" wrote one senior officer.\n\nGeorge Orwell said in his novel _1984_ , \"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.\" In free societies, he observed, censorship is more sophisticated because \"the inconvenient facts [are] kept dark without any need for an official ban\". This bad news management can only be done with the help of those loyal servants of the state who pose as journalists. We are talking about many of the national media's spoon-fed crime correspondents who on command, like Pavlov's dog, scurry, fighting among themselves for a suck on the Yard's teat, where the official version is dispensed. In place of transparency about the origins of the Ghost Squad, the Yard developed a cover story disseminated by loyal crime correspondents, which portrays the Yard in a very positive light. In essence, Condon was a bold, reforming commissioner who, alerted by his concerned intelligence chiefs, decided once and for all to stop the \"cycle of corruption\" that had dogged Scotland Yard since the seventies.\n\nThe Ghost Squad, it is true, was the brainchild of two senior officers, commander John Grieve and his number two, detective chief superintendent Roy Clark. At the time, they ran the very secretive Directorate of Intelligence (SO11), which was at the forefront of a new type of policing. \"Intelligence-led policing\" was a significant departure from the past, in that targeting local and major criminals now took precedence over investigating crimes. The targeting was achieved by a greater reliance on phone-tapping and bugging criminals' premises and cars, combined with the use of informants and sting operations.\n\nIn the early nineties, SO11 was behind a series of covert intelligence-gathering operations targeting known crime families and individuals in London, especially in the East End. According to the official version, during the course of these investigations, criminals were secretly recorded talking about their corrupt links with the police. Transcripts of the secret recordings were passed to Grieve and Clark at SO11. They were already concerned, says Scotland Yard, because \"a lot of their operations were being compromised... for no apparent reason\". Consequently, they moved \"to look at the state of health of the organisation and see if corruption was a problem\".\n\nRetired cops are like guests at Hotel California \u2013 they might check out but they never leave. Grieve and Clark are no exception and remain very loyal to Scotland Yard. They still are the gatekeepers of its secret history. Sadly, they declined to be interviewed about their past in the Ghost Squad. Clark, however, did flesh out the official version in an academic text: \"[We] analysed the information, albeit in an unconventional manner, and noticed that a small number of criminals received immunity from police attention and a degree of protection from arrest. Moreover, the criminals seemed to be confident that even if arrested they could buy their way out of trouble, and could rely on a small group of corrupt police officers for information, advice and a range of other criminal services. The analysis continued throughout 1992 and into 1993 under a cloak of secrecy.\"\n\nImmodestly, Clark also claimed that in \"the early part of 1993\" he wrote \"a document that was influential in everything thereafter\". That document was discussed by a select group of very senior police officers before approaching their relatively new commissioner later that year. It set out the blueprint and operational ethos for what would become the Ghost Squad. It purported to outline a radical new way of dealing with police corruption in the Met, and explicitly admitted that the existing system was a failure.\n\nAt this time, the Met's internal affairs department was called the Complaints Investigation Bureau. It had two teams, CIB1 and CIB2. They overwhelmingly dealt with complaints of police misconduct generated by the public. These ranged from assault and theft to \"noble cause corruption\". CIB2 also investigated what they regarded as more serious offences, where for example allegations emerged during court cases that officers had taken money from criminal defendants to lose a key piece of evidence.\n\nAt the time senior Yard figures were discussing the document, CIB was engaged in Operation Jackpot, an internal inquiry led by superintendent Ian Russell into drug and noble cause corruption at Stoke Newington police station in north-east London, where Clark had been in charge from 1989 to 1992.\n\nCIB came directly under the command of the deputy commissioner, who in 1993 was John Smith. It was natural therefore that he would be part of the small circle of very senior officers that finessed Clark's research document into a comprehensive secret strategy for the Ghost Squad. The inner circle also included assistant commissioners David Veness and Ian Johnston, commander John Grieve, detective chief superintendents Roger Gaspar and Bill Griffiths, superintendents Ian Quinn and Ian Russell, plus a newly promoted detective chief inspector called Dave Woods.\n\nThe strategy document has never been disclosed, not even to Parliament. But from well-placed police sources and listening to the court evidence of Clark and Gaspar, it is possible to identify the key elements of the plan.\n\nGaspar would be appointed the head of CIB. It was accepted that existing staff could not be trusted. So he would have a \"cover story\" to explain the arrival of a small group of detectives who only reported to him. Dave Woods would run a covert intelligence cell of between 12 and 20 officers. They would operate outside of CIB and the Met in a secret location known only to the small \"high level committee\" of senior officers. Gaspar said he and Clark had \"buried the money\" to rent premises for the intelligence cell so well that the landlord thought it might be crooked.\n\nThe intelligence cell had several functions. Firstly it would control the phone-taps and electronic bugs planted in police offices, cars and the premises of targeted criminals. After the secretly recorded conversations were transcribed and analysed, Ghost Squad officers would then decide how to further the intelligence. This, for example, could mean deploying a surveillance team \u2013 made up of retired and serving military and intelligence personnel \u2013 to follow suspect detectives and criminals.\n\nClark laid out the need for secrecy in these remarkable terms: \"We didn't know who we could trust. The rule was there would be absolute secrecy. The fact that there was a very covert intelligence-gathering operation should not be known to anybody, irrespective of rank.\"\n\nWoods would also need a cover story to explain his sudden departure from normal detective duties. A fiendish plan was hatched that could have come straight from an Ian Fleming novel. Woods was going to die, then rise from the dead. First an announcement would be placed in Police Notices, the official system for appointments, commendations and retirements. It would say, \"Dave Woods is retiring.\" The cover story was that an earlier operation to remove a lump had not been successful. It had returned as terminal cancer and Woods was therefore retiring abroad, to die.\n\nWhen the plan was put into effect the tragic news spread like a bad smell through the Yard's satellite offices across London. A number of officers who had served with Woods distinctly remembered contributing to a whip-round for him in 1994. Some were a little miffed when they realised he had gone to spy on them and their colleagues.\n\nOne senior officer recalls putting \u00a320 into the whip. But in 1997, after the Ghost Squad had been disbanded, he bumped into Woods on a superintendents' course. The Lazarus cop, he says, denied he'd been running the Ghost Squad intelligence cell and claimed instead that some dangerous criminals were after him and so the Yard had relocated him for several years. A cover story for the cover story.\n\nIt was Roger Gaspar who presented to commissioner Paul Condon the finessed strategy document on 5 May 1994. According to Gaspar, he took 40 minutes because there was so much to explain. Again, we are not allowed to know the full details of what he told the commissioner. So we have put together a composite from well-placed sources and court evidence.\n\nAt 3.30 p.m. Gaspar arrived at the commissioner's offices at New Scotland Yard armed with a full intelligence picture. He named a number of officers whose activities he claimed were corrupt and outlined the threat they posed to the organisation. Clearly the material was \"persuasive\", he said, because it met with the commissioner's \"full approval\".\n\nCondon was told the existing system of investigating police corruption was inadequate. CIB could not be trusted and was too leaky. The argument was put this way: \"An overt inquiry where officers are cautioned and asked if they are corrupt is futile. And a covert inquiry where everyone knew about it in days is ineffective.\"\n\nConsequently, certain officers in the Ghost Squad would become \"sleepers\" within their own organisation. These moles would be posted to specialist squads like the South East Regional Crime Squad (SERCS), where detectives tackling the highest levels of organised crime were thought most likely to cross the line. The sleepers would spy on suspect colleagues and report back to the intelligence cell.\n\nThe Ghost Squad's mission, Condon was told, was not to arrest bent cops and put them on trial, but to identify how exposed the Yard was to corruption. Who, in other words, among the organised criminals and the specialist detectives targeting them, were corruptly linked? The results would only be for internal purposes.\n\nA specific type of corruption would be under the microscope. The Ghost Squad, it was made clear, wasn't interested in \"noble cause corruption\", or racist and violent officers who regularly abused the public: in other words the sort of general police crimes that affect Londoners most. It was only after those detectives who actively worked with organised criminals in return for money and favours.\n\nCondon was delighted by Roger Gaspar's presentation. His approval was total. \"And so began what is arguably one of the most adventurous policing operations of recent times,\" wrote Roy Clark. \"Over the course of the next two years a secret squad of police officers gathered intelligence, which enabled a more sophisticated understanding of the corrupt relationships between criminals and a few police officers to be achieved. Whilst the numbers involved were not large it became clear that the potential damage to the reputation of the police service and the criminal justice system was immense.\"\n\nFor four years, Condon's Ghost Squad operated without any independent oversight. The only control was by those select senior officers who set up and ran it.\n\nRoy Clark claimed the alarming intelligence picture he had developed between 1992 and 1993, which led to setting up the secret squad, not only identified bent cops but also \"indicated there were concerns\" about the integrity of certain (unnamed) members of the Crown Prosecution Service. The convenience of this untested argument should not be underestimated. Who after all was in a position to challenge his self-serving assertion? Clark's unspecified \"concerns\" about the CPS enabled the Ghost Squad to operate as judge and jury in its own cause, without the involvement of the very agency formed seven years beforehand to prevent this.\n\nUnder such a system, anything could be said about anyone to justify the continued lack of democratic accountability or legal safeguards. It wasn't until the second, overt phase of the anti-corruption crusade began in 1998 that the CPS was formally consulted, and even then its advice was ignored on key issues around legal safeguards. Leading CPS lawyers confirm this. They also accept it would have been better if the agency had been brought in at the very beginning.\n\nClark concedes that the covert nature of the Ghost Squad was far from ideal. However, he contends that his natural democratic tendencies were \"hogtied by the need for secrecy\".\n\nThis is open to question. For if the old CIB couldn't be trusted, then why weren't the public it was supposed to protect told? Instead, thousands were encouraged to continue to use the internal system when the commissioner knew it was severely compromised. If CIB was too leaky, in that officers posted there were more likely to tip off their friends under investigation than investigate the alleged misconduct, then why wasn't the commissioner seeking to reform the system? After all, just a few years before Gaspar's presentation to Condon, a 1991 Home Office study of police deviance displayed a widespread dissatisfaction from those members of the public who'd bothered to go through the internal complaints system.\n\nAnother unanswered question concerns the selection of Ghost Squad members. Who guaranteed its members weren't really poachers turned gamekeepers? Well, quite simply, the handful of detectives who made up the secret intelligence cell were selected by the bosses, and they in turn selected themselves.\n\nThere is no external or internal accounting for this selection process. On what basis were John Grieve, Roy Clark and Bill Griffiths, for example, considered any more honest or of greater integrity than the then head of SERCS, Roy Penrose, who according to Clark was not someone they felt they could bring into the Ghost Squad circle? This was a strange statement for Clark to make given that his last posting at Stoke Newington had been mired in allegations of corrupt practices in the drug squad and unanswered questions about severe management failures.\n\nThe Ghost Squad was not only a self-selecting secret unit within the Yard charged with identifying pockets of corruption, it also had a second undeclared level of covertness. Some of its senior intelligence officers and those who made up the pool of detectives that eventually grew to 200 in number were active members of another secret society, Freemasonry.\n\nNo one independent existed to ask these questions or whether certain senior officers in the Ghost Squad, who had risen through the ranks during the bad old days of the seventies and eighties, were suitable to point the finger. But then as noble cause corruption was not an issue for the Ghost Squad, anyone who may have transgressed in this way was not considered unsuitable to serve on it.\n\nThe Ghost Squad gave the Yard the ability to decide for itself where the historical \"cut-off point\" of corruption would be. By analysing the secret intelligence it then drew a line and declared Year Zero. Gung ho officers, who now find themselves on the wrong side of that line, are understandably amazed at the sanctimony and selective amnesia of their accusers, who they claim in the past endorsed, turned a blind eye to or even participated in what is now classed as unethical or dishonest behaviour. Conveniently, their accusers' crimes and misdemeanours fall on the right side of Year Zero, and they will not be called to account for them. In a fully independent system of investigating police misconduct there would be no Year Zero. Investigators would be free to follow the evidence wherever it took them because preserving the reputation of the Yard, or a secret team within it, would not be a consideration.\n\nThe Home Office should have asked more questions when Condon presented the secret plan. But its ministers and mandarins were not interested in making the police more accountable, let alone the Ghost Squad. As the previous chapter has shown, the trend between 1993 and 1997 under the Major government was entirely in the other direction.\n\nAsked a series of detailed questions about how the Ghost Squad operation was pitched, and what oversight function ministers fulfilled, a Home Office spokeswoman consulted with the unit in the ministry that deals with police corruption and offered this rather alarming or disingenuous reply: \"There is no role for ministers and the Home Office. We haven't got the authority, therefore the Met has no need to approach the Home Office or explain what they did and why they did it... They don't need our authority to [launch an anti-corruption operation]. They might let us know as a matter of courtesy that they were thinking of doing it.\" The relevant Home Office unit would have \"monitored\" events, but more through parliamentary questions and press reports, she added.\n\nFormer home secretary, Michael Howard, had this to say: \"I'm not sure, I'm afraid, that I am going to be able to help you. And I'll explain on another occasion when I hope I'll be able to speak to you. Bye.\" Despite chasing him up, he never called again. Six months later he became leader of the Conservative Party.\n\nThe launching of a secret undercover squad to spy on police officers was entirely at odds with and jeopardised prime minister John Major and Michael Howard's high-profile war on crime. It also ran contrary to the commissioner's public claims that the Met could be trusted.\n\nHad Paul Condon and John Major gone public with the revelation about not knowing who could be trusted in the country's biggest police force, the political rehabilitation of Scotland Yard would have been exposed as a sham, and the government's law and order policies as unworkable, at least in the capital. The need for secrecy was not just an operational necessity, therefore, but a political one.\n\nIt should not be surprising perhaps that the Major government was willing to go along with this deception of the British public. After all, the prime minister had run his own scam on the electorate since 1992. During the Ghost Squad years, John Major launched his own sanctimonious crusade called \"Back to Basics\", against moral corruption in public and private life. His reassertion of \"family values\" was a key front in this campaign. Indeed, so concerned was John about the sanctity of the family unit, he had an affair with the former minister of rotten eggs, Edwina Currie. Other ministers followed suit, most notably heritage secretary and Spanish toe-sucker David Mellor. He achieved the impossible and appeared even oilier when he marshalled his family before the press to brazen out the allegation of adultery.\n\nMeanwhile, in the world of big business, the prime minister's concern about probity in public life seemed to be lost on a succession of Tory ministers and MPs, who sold parliamentary favours to enrich themselves through corrupt deals and kickbacks in brown paper bags.\n\nSome academics argue that police corruption rises when political sleaze is the order of the day. At the very least it couldn't have been much of an incentive for our boys in blue to stay straight when they saw professional lawbreakers in flash cars and lawmakers with their snouts in the trough.\n\nAlthough it was not the major reason for launching the Ghost Squad, it enabled Scotland Yard to fight off the domestic security service, MI5, with whom it was locked in a fractious turf war.\n\nMI5 already had primacy in intelligence gathering against the IRA in Europe. The intelligence agency's new director-general, Stella Rimmington, embarked on an intense lobbying campaign of the Home Office for a lead role over the Met in gathering intelligence against the IRA on the British mainland. This was fiercely, but unsuccessfully, resisted by Yard chiefs, who used their friends in the press to raise concerns about MI5, among them its lack of accountability \u2013 an argument that was advanced with a straight face. In May 1992, MI5 officially won the day.\n\nCombating organised crime was the cause of a parallel turf war with the Yard. MI6, the overseas intelligence service, already had a role because of the global nature of the drug trade, which exploded in the eighties. MI5 made no secret to Whitehall mandarins of its desire to work on British organised crime syndicates and their international associates, an area traditionally dominated by the police and customs. To advance their argument, the spooks were happy to point out police failures and the wider crisis of public confidence. Some Yard bosses retorted that MI5 was just looking for a new role after the collapse of communism. This was true. But the spooks made it plain to the Home Office that they could also investigate corruption of all kinds, including police corruption. Such a message must have sent shivers down the spine of Scotland Yard.\n\nConcern about law enforcement corruption was a pressing issue at the Home Office, says veteran muckraker Geoff Seed. He was shown a confidential minute of a meeting attended by home secretary Michael Howard in 1994. \"It dealt with the complete re-disposition of all the UK's security assets around three new threats \u2013 terrorism, money laundering and corruption,\" the journalist recalls. \"It was a complete breakdown of the new structure and implementation.\" Such a re-disposition had been in the planning phase for years. The collapse of communism in 1989, the 1991 Gulf War and the dirty war in Northern Ireland were the three main factors that had led John Major to begin a radical re-alignment of Britain's security establishment.\n\nJohn Grieve and Roy Clark, the Yard's intelligence chiefs, were not seen as officers who feared a closer relationship with MI5. As the architects of the Ghost Squad, they adopted a more inclusive approach. \"For Grieve, it was far better to have MI5 inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in,\" says a retired senior CIB officer, adding: \"On the outside, the spooks could poison the well by pointing out to the Home Office where the holes in the anti-corruption strategy were.\" So Condon was advised to use retired and serving members of MI5 in the Ghost Squad intelligence cell. There was also an agreement to use MI5's highly experienced surveillance teams to follow target criminals and suspect detectives.\n\nAs 1993 turned into 1994, Grieve and Clark found themselves at the helm of the most politically powerful department in Scotland Yard. SO11 was the focal point of the new intelligence-led policing strategy. Meanwhile, secretly, it was also the controlling department behind the covert anti-corruption crusade.\n\nEmpire building was not unique to the Yard's intelligence chiefs. How much the Ghost Squad was used by the commissioner as a political tool over the next seven years to reduce the power base of the detective branch is an interesting question. Unfortunately, Lord Paul Condon, as he is now known, refuses to be interviewed about this.\n\nWhen Roger Gaspar made his pitch, the commissioner was already skilfully implementing his Home Office brief to modernise the force. The Met's 3,000 detectives traditionally had considerable power and regarded themselves as an elite compared to their uniformed colleagues. Condon's predecessors had already reduced some of this autonomy by bringing detectives within police divisions and making them subordinate to a senior uniformed officer.\n\nCondon, however, wanted to go further. First, he promoted more fast-tracked graduate entrants into senior positions within the \"oikish\" detective branch. Then he restricted the amount of time an officer could spend as a detective. And finally, he ensured that rank-and-file representatives of the detective branch no longer automatically had \"the commissioner's ear\".\n\nSome senior detectives spoke of an aura of \"McCarthyism\" surrounding the anti-corruption crusade. The commissioner and his inner circle, it was felt, had the power to brief against their political opponents inside the Yard just with a well-timed nose tap. The fear of being told you had lost the commissioner's trust was enough to silence some of his natural critics.\n\nThe public phase of the anti-corruption crusade also gave the argument for reform a moral dimension. Those who resisted change could simply be asked whether they wanted to be on the side of the angels. One retired senior CIB officer described Condon's reforms as \"a management coup\".\n\nCorruption, says Scotland Yard, is a \"cyclical\" phenomenon. Until the arrival of the new commissioner the force was caught up in a malignant cycle, described this way by a senior anti-corruption chief: \"Every five or six years [corruption] manifested itself. We put huge resources into it to make sure it was cut out. Then back to normal duty. We felt we'd cured the problem.\"\n\nOther journalists were treated to a similar, cancerous excuse for why there had been no proactive approach to corruption in the eighties and early nineties. These are our favourites culled from the press clippings: \"We thought it had gone away\"; \"We took our eye off the ball\"; \"We believed it was almost non-existent\"; \"We were not sufficiently alert or skilled to recognise the problem\"; \"CIB had become a sleepy hollow\"; \"We fell asleep at the wheel\".\n\nThe idea that when it came to tackling corruption, Scotland Yard's management had collectively suffered from a special kind of narcolepsy \u2013 a rare condition characterised by sudden episodes of deep sleep \u2013 would be funny if it wasn't so intellectually dishonest. To then claim that under the new commissioner there was an ethical reawakening, with Condon in the role of Dr Oliver Sacks, followed by an unprecedented period of purge and reform, is to grossly re-write the Yard's history.\n\nDuring the eighties and early nineties, the Yard wasn't complacent about corruption or lacking vigilance, as it now claims. Rather, senior officers deliberately ignored, played down or covered up the corruption allegations presented to them. And furthermore, in doing so, they allowed a number of bent detectives to thrive inside the country's biggest police force, some of whom had risen to high rank by the start of Condon's reign.\n\nThe setting up of the Ghost Squad was a defensive reaction by the Yard's senior management, its intelligence chiefs, strategic planners and spin-doctors to several pressing corruption scandals they could no longer ignore, play down or cover up. It was not, as they now maintain, an ethically proactive response. These scandals that forced Condon's hand are \"the ghosts of the Ghost Squad\". They arise out of three brutal and still unsolved murders in south-east London between 1987 and 1993. These restless souls have stalked the corridors of Scotland Yard for over ten years.\n\nBut it's not just the murder victims who haunt the Condon and Stevens eras, so too do the three police investigations of those murders, all of which have the same stench of corruption and cover-up.\n\nAmong all this scandal is a spate of unexplained suicides of four Scotland Yard detectives who were caught up in separate corruption inquiries.\n\nAll these deaths, more than any other events, are the points of entry to the key patterns of corruption that emerged in the ten years, between 1983 and 1993, before the Ghost Squad was launched. They continue to haunt the Yard because they were deliberately ignored, played down or covered up at the time and afterwards.\n\nIn 1987, private detective Daniel Morgan was found dead in a pub car park in Sydenham, south-east London, with an axe buried in his skull. He was about to blow the whistle on local police corruption.\n\nA few months later Morgan's friend, detective constable Alan \"Taffy\" Holmes, wrapped his chest around a shotgun and pulled the trigger. At the time he was under investigation for corruption, Taffy Holmes was also part of a massive investigation into the biggest robbery ever committed in the UK \u2013 the theft of gold worth \u00a326 million from the Brinks Mat depository at Heathrow.\n\nIn 1991, Scotland Yard's most prolific informant, a man called David Norris, was gunned down as he arrived home from the pub. He had just come from a meeting with his police handler when a man, riding pillion on a motorbike, pumped him full of lead. Norris died moments later cradled by his pregnant wife.\n\nThe following year, police sergeant Gerry Carroll removed a gun from the armoury and shot himself through the head, at the height of the major corruption probe into officers at Stoke Newington police station. Scotland Yard had been forced to carry out the inquiry after a local community group exposed systematic drug corruption and police brutality that had led to at least 13 miscarriages of justice.\n\nThen, in April 1993, black teenager Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death by white racists with family links to organised drug crime and local cops.\n\nFinally, in September 1993 BBC's _Panorama_ broadcast a documentary exposing a corrupt South East Regional Crime Squad detective called John Donald. A south-east London drug dealer, who had been arrested by Donald and was facing trial, approached the BBC with a plan for the programme makers to secretly record him paying the bent detective for sensitive information. Police intelligence was eventually passed by Donald to a number of individuals in the criminal fraternity such as Kenny Noye. He was serving the tail end of a 14-year prison sentence for laundering the Brinks Mat gold. Donald's betrayal was even more acute because Noye had killed an undercover police officer during the Brinks Mat investigation.\n\nThis iconic heist was a watershed for organised crime and police corruption. As this book unfolds, it will become apparent just how much the ghost of Brinks Mat continues to haunt Scotland Yard today because the corruption was swept under the carpet 20 years ago, allowing a \"firm within a firm\" to grow inside south-east London policing. It is this corrupt firm of detectives we believe eventually contaminated the Morgan, Norris and Lawrence murder inquiries.\n\nThe Stoke Newington and Donald cases severely embarrassed Scotland Yard. Simultaneously, the families of Daniel Morgan and Stephen Lawrence were demanding justice and had voiced their concerns that the Yard was covering up police corruption. In the Morgan case Labour MP Chris Smith even suggested there was \"evidence\" police officers were actually involved in the murder.\n\nIt was in this climate that Yard intelligence chiefs John Grieve and Roy Clark reacted by suggesting setting up a secret Ghost Squad. Had the public known about Clark's secret role as the architect of this covert anti-corruption squad there may have been serious concerns, given his earlier stewardship of the scandal-ridden Stoke Newington police station.\n\nThe Ghost Squad was a cunning management response to all this rising pressure beyond the Yard's control, an invisible condom pulled over the Yard in late 1993 to safeguard its future reputation from bad seeds and bad publicity.\n\nThe first phase of the anti-corruption crusade was conceived as a pre-emptive strike. It allowed the intelligence chiefs to secretly \"scope\" the Yard's exposure to corruption, while publicly maintaining the fiction that it was still \"the most honest force in the world\" \u2013 something essential to the Major government's law and order policy.\n\nThe Yard's senior management was also aware that in opposition the otherwise police-friendly New Labour party had promised the parents of Stephen Lawrence it would hold a full public inquiry into the Met's handling of the murder investigation if it came to power. Sleaze and sanctimony in the Major government made that a dead certainty, as voters got weary of 18 years of Conservative hegemony. In May 1997, New Labour won the election and home secretary Jack Straw did not renege on his promise. The Yard, however, was by this stage ready for the fall-out. In late 1997 commissioner Condon announced he had been \"scoping\" corruption in his force for the last four years. He then revealed a new squad called the Untouchables, who he said were ready to ruthlessly arrest the bent cops his own organisation had identified during the unprecedented Ghost Squad years.\n\nThe image consultants and spin-doctors then picked up the phone to selected crime and home affairs correspondents to help create an official version. It portrayed the commissioner as a brave man driven by his conscience to grasp the nettle of corruption, and not someone who was in fact buffeted around by corrupt events the Yard had done its best for ten years to cover up.\n\nGrieve and Clark were also given a central role in this production. They would be cast as the intelligence chiefs sitting in their office surrounded by bugging equipment who first uttered the words, \"Commissioner, we have a problem.\"\n\n## [3\n\nThe Ghost of Brinks Mat  \n\u2013 A Firm Within a Firm](contents.html#ch03)\n\nIt all starts with Brinks Mat, an audacious robbery that still casts a malevolent shadow over the most powerful police force in the UK. It is quite simply for Scotland Yard the crime that will not go away. Unsolved murders, the unexplained suicide of an alcoholic detective, corruption, Freemasonry and, most enduring of all, the grubby relationships between the criminals and their police handlers, all these elements still distort the vicious internal politics of Scotland Yard today because they were swept under the carpet 20 years ago.\n\nOn 26 November 1983, four hardened armed robbers drove out of the Brinks Mat warehouse near Heathrow Airport with 76 boxes of gold ingots worth \u00a325,911,962. Platinum ingots, diamonds and travellers cheques raised the swag bag to a cool \u00a326,369,778.\n\nThe Brinks Mat robbery sparked one of the longest running and most controversial investigations in British police history. Scotland Yard's Flying Squad faced one of its most important challenges. Besides recovering the bullion before it was smelted and invested across the globe, there was another compelling incentive. The 1980s saw the emergence of a new breed of organised criminal connected through a global underground network to the rapidly expanding drugs business. If the weathered criminal faces across London managed to hold on to the proceeds it would propel certain gangs into the super-league of organised drug crime.\n\nBut Brinks Mat is not just an iconic crime where the proceeds of a multi-million-pound heist were laundered through snooty offshore banks and international property deals from London's Docklands to Panama City. It is also more than just the dawn of a new era of super league drug-crime syndicates feeding off an E-generation of loved-up, jaw-grinding ravers.\n\nFor Brinks Mat was also a seedy laundry where Scotland Yard's own dirty washing went round and round, but was always guaranteed to come out clean. The top brass have known for years the benefit of washing your own dirty linen is that stubborn stains don't always have to be removed. But a closer inspection of the Yard's sheets reveals a pattern of cover-ups, corruption, shot messengers and nobbled inquiries into allegedly dirty cops that no whitewash can ever fully remove.\n\nThe previously unchallenged reputation of Scotland Yard for honesty and integrity was a distant and soiled TV myth by the time of the 1983 Brinks Mat robbery. Margaret Thatcher's government may have done much to reassert the police's powers over her subjects, but its moral authority was in tatters when masked men walked into the Heathrow warehouse.\n\nThe post Second World War _Dixon of Dock Green_ consensus that the British police were fair but firm irrevocably broke down with a series of media expos\u00e9s of corrupt practices that Yard chiefs had known about for years but did little to combat.\n\nIn 1969, _The Times_ published a compelling expos\u00e9 of police corruption. Journalists Garry Lloyd and Julian Mounter had set up a sting using a disgruntled south-east London criminal who had contacted them claiming corrupt detectives were blackmailing him. Lloyd and Mounter secretly recorded three detectives discussing bribery and corruption with their criminal. On one of the thirteen tapes later given to Scotland Yard one of the bent detectives memorably described being part of \"a firm in a firm\", with people in police stations across the city who, in return for money, would look the other way, water down charges or offer no evidence. But instead of investigating the newspaper's allegations of serious corruption, the journalists themselves were relentlessly interviewed as Scotland Yard tried to undermine their published story. As an extra defence the internal investigation was given to a corrupt senior detective who at the time was on the take from Soho's porn kings.\n\nFinally, Labour home secretary Jim Callaghan brought in a former provincial chief constable called Frank Williamson to conduct an inquiry. Williamson told Callaghan there should have been an immediate independent inquiry because by now the firm within a firm would have covered its tracks. He was right. Important logbooks had already mysteriously disappeared. Williamson resigned in 1971 before finishing his inquiry. He claimed the Yard and the Home Office had smeared him and his key witnesses. There was no desire to properly investigate because senior Yard officers knew how high up the bribes and extras had gone. Two of the detectives identified by _The Times_ were later convicted. A third, John Symonds, fled the country in mysterious circumstances.\n\nLloyd wraps up the saga: \"The trial involved legal history because this was the first time that taped evidence had been admitted in court. [Before his trial] Symonds was ordered to disappear by the corrupt element in Scotland Yard. They had a whip round to send him away to South Africa and Rhodesia. Williamson told me that Symonds was flatly ordered to go because he was threatening to blow the whistle on the whole firm. Williamson knew that it had gone right up the ranks to very, very senior officers and that's what they've always wanted to cover up.\"\n\nWilliamson's resignation coincided with another series of newspaper expos\u00e9s, this time by the _People_ in 1972. Their investigations revealed top-level corruption in the Yard's Porn and Drug squads, including Chief Superintendent Bill Moody, the bent senior officer given the job of sabotaging the earlier _Times_ expos\u00e9.\n\nSoon after publication, a new commissioner, Robert Mark, set up an anti-corruption squad called A10, later renamed CIB. Mark then restructured the Flying Squad, who from then on dealt only with armed robberies. The system of payments to informants was also reformed to guard against detectives pocketing the money.\n\nBut soon the corruption merry-go-round exploded again, this time between 1978 and 1982. An inquiry, inevitably internal, called Operation Countryman was set up. One expert chronicler described it at the time as \"the most famously ill-fated anti-corruption probe in British police history\".\n\nThe allegations centred on a firm of corrupt detectives on the take while investigating major armed robberies in the capital. Comically, the City of London Police called in Scotland Yard to investigate them. But when the Yard realised its own Flying Squad was involved, an outside force from Dorset was called in. As the years rolled by the Yard undermined Dorset Police and regained control of the damaging probe. Operation Countryman originally had a list of almost one hundred suspect officers facing allegations. In the end, after four years and millions of pounds, it achieved the successful conviction of two City of London officers. Eight Scotland Yard detectives were acquitted at the Old Bailey, three being later dismissed following disciplinary action.\n\nOnce again the outside force brought in to investigate the Yard claimed their efforts had been nobbled. Once again they pointed the finger at senior management in the Yard, Freemasonry and even the Director of Public Prosecutions. Once again the firm within a firm survived and once again the public picked up the bill for a farce.\n\nNo sooner had Operation Countryman ended in failure than corruption emerged during the Brinks robbery investigation, which lasted nine years with the final trial concluding in 1992. The two senior Yard officers who led the investigation believe their efforts were constantly being undermined from within by a group of corrupt south-east London and Kent detectives working with the target criminals.\n\nIn December 1984, 13 months after the Brinks heist, an Old Bailey judge jailed armed robber Mickey \"the Bully\" McAvoy for 25 years. Another south-east London criminal, Brian \"the Colonel\" Robinson, who masterminded the robbery, got the same sentence. Tony White, the third heavyweight defendant, was acquitted, probably because he kept his mask on and could not therefore be identified by the terrified, petrol-soaked guards whom the robbers had threatened to torch if one of them didn't give up the combination to the vault.\n\nThe trial of these three top echelon villains was largely possible thanks to the evidence of the gang's \"inside man\", Tony Black, a guard at the Brinks Mat warehouse and Robinson's brother-in-law. In return for a reduced sentence Black \"rolled over\" and became a prosecution witness or supergrass in the time it takes milk to turn in the sun.\n\nTwo other notorious south-east London armed robbers are to this day widely believed to have also been \"on the plot\", but were never prosecuted for it. They are John \"Goldfinger\" Fleming and John \"Little Legs\" Lloyd.\n\nAround these five Brinks Mat principals was a team of villains whose job was to smelt and launder the gold bullion through a series of convoluted financial transactions and property purchases. Among the members of what the police called the \"Gold Conduit\" were minicab boss Brian Perry, Kenny Noye, gold dealer John Palmer, up-and-coming north London gangster Tommy Adams and gangland lawyer Michael Relton.\n\nIt was a long and painstaking surveillance operation in late 1984 that led the Flying Squad to uncover this Gold chain. The insurers of Brinks Mat had put up a reward. And naturally it had already attracted the usual assortment of nutters, lonely people and self-publicists.\n\nLittle Legs had been linked to a major armed robbery in Kent one year before the Brinks Mat warehouse was hit. The Bluebell Hill robbery of about \u00a31 million was at the time the biggest cash snatch from a security van. The robbers shut off the road near Maidstone, looted the van and drove off. Weeks later Lloyd was arrested and charged with Mehmet Arif, a member of the feared Turkish Cypriot family with a grip on the Old Kent Road, a main artery out of south-east London. One month later the prosecution discontinued the case for reasons that remain unclear. No money was ever recovered.\n\nThere is no doubt Lloyd was very busy in the period just before the Brinks Mat robbery. He was already diversifying into drugs, which may explain why, like many of his associates, Lloyd found it attractive to invest in a freight company. Little Legs had also diversified romantically. By 1983, the man whose mug shot bore an uncanny resemblance to white-suited war correspondent Martin Bell was living with Jeannie Savage.\n\nThe Flying Squad followed her to an address in the Kent village of West Kingsdown, near Brands Hatch. Through a Land Registry check detectives discovered that a low-profile criminal called Kenny Noye had sold Lloyd the house a few years back when he moved down the road into the large mock-Tudor splendour of Hollywood Cottage.\n\nThe Flying Squad watched in silent amazement as criminals moved heavy suitcases from Kent to Bristol in the West Country. By late January 1985 the Yard decided it was time to step up the surveillance.\n\nDetective chief superintendent Brian Boyce was the newly promoted officer in charge of the Brinks investigation. He had served under the legendary Scotland Yard officer Leonard \"Nipper\" Read on the squad that busted the Krays' criminal empire. Boyce was really a soldier in a policeman's uniform. His service in Cyprus and Northern Ireland had taught him the danger of allowing donkeys to lead lions. Good intelligence, he believed, was worth its weight in gold.\n\nThroughout most of January, Noye was observed meeting a criminal associate called Brian Reader at Hollywood Cottage. Reader regularly drove from there to London where he met with Tommy Adams.\n\nOn a number of occasions Reader was observed handing Adams heavy parcels, which he put in the boot of his white Mercedes. Adams was followed from Farringdon station near Smithfield meat market to a shop called Pussy Galore near St Pancras Station. From there he would travel to a bullion firm in Bristol called Scadlynn Limited.\n\nTwo undercover officers were inserted into the grounds of Hollywood Cottage. One was John Fordham, whom Boyce had handpicked for the job. The pair knew each other from Northern Ireland, where Boyce was an anti-terrorist officer in covert operations. Fordham was at the top of his game and had received training from the British Army's highly secret infiltration unit, 14 Intelligence Company.\n\nThe Flying Squad was already convinced Noye was moving Brinks Mat gold from his home to Scadlynn, and clean cash was coming back the same route. But it was still unclear where in Kent the stolen bullion was stashed. Boyce suspected some might be hidden in the Second World War concrete bunkers beneath Noye's house.\n\nOn 26 January 1985 Noye's Rottweilers spotted Fordham and started barking. Noye came out armed with a kitchen knife and a torch. He confronted the intruder who was dressed in military-style camouflage, wearing a balaclava. A vicious fight ensued and Noye fatally stabbed the unarmed cop.\n\nAs he sped towards Hollywood Cottage, Boyce was facing a turf war with the Kent police. Although an assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard had informed the chief constable of Kent about the 72-hour surveillance operation, no one else was supposed to know. Boyce was particularly worried because he had seen what he thought was convincing intelligence suggesting Noye was corruptly connected to some elements of the Kent police.\n\nBy the time of the robbery, Noye was part of a criminal exodus of south-east London \"faces\" that moved to Kent, the garden of England. Noye was a registered informant for a controversial Yard commander called Ray Adams whose name he put forward as someone who'd give him a good reference and certainly vouch that he was not a murderer. But he also worked for the Regional Crime Squad operating in Kent and was believed to be involved with a team of local villains who hijacked lorries on the A2. They would keep one load and offer up another to friendly Kent cops looking for an easy collar, and maybe a bit of the stolen gear on the side.\n\nOn the evening of Fordham's death distrust of the Kent police extended from top to bottom of the Flying Squad. The rocky relationship took a turn for the worse when within hours of the killing Boyce and his men were frozen out of the murder inquiry. Kent police had control of Noye for the following 36 hours. The Flying Squad remained in charge of the Brinks investigation but Boyce had to fight to regain control of the murder investigation.\n\nThe turf war went Boyce's way after 11 bars of near pure gold were found in the grounds of Hollywood Cottage on Sunday afternoon. By Monday the Flying Squad were back in charge, but they didn't like what they found. During the freeze-out Boyce felt the continuity of forensic evidence had not been properly preserved. He was critical of one senior Kent officer for allowing Noye to shower, change his clothes and have a photo taken of his injuries, all without a police officer or doctor present. \"A lot of forensic evidence was lost,\" recalls one Flying Squad detective waiting to interview Noye. Acting on a tip-off, Boyce authorised a secret assignment to target the senior Kent officer, the details of which are revealed here for the first time.\n\nThe Forge restaurant close to Hollywood Cottage in Dartford was popular with several faces from south-east London. Not long after Boyce had taken back control of the murder inquiry the restaurant's managers \u2013 a married couple \u2013 contacted detective sergeant Bob Suckling at the Flying Squad. They were concerned about earlier inquiries by Kent police because Noye was a regular diner at their restaurant with a local detective whom they could not identify by name.\n\nBoyce gave Suckling the job of identifying the man. A second Flying Squad officer returned to The Forge with a surveillance photo of a senior Kent detective whom we shall call \"Hamilton\". He was identified as Noye's regular dinner guest. Hamilton, it was also discovered, had previously investigated the 1981 Bluebell Hill security van robbery for which John Lloyd and Mehmet Arif were charged but then released. Suckling decided to re-investigate. He was astonished at how little paperwork on the robbery was left at Kent Police headquarters. Undeterred, he visited some Yard detectives who were sifting intelligence on local robbers. There he made a remarkable discovery. An informant, who we shall call \"Tom\", had provided some unnerving information. \"Tom\" said there were six people on the Bluebell Hill robbery, and each one took home \u00a3130,000 cash. The total haul, however, was \u00a3900,000. He told the police that Lloyd had escaped prosecution by paying off the Kent cops.\n\nThe official police log of the debriefing session with Tom put it this way: \"[The informant] describes the Arifs as powerful people \u2013 with friends in the police. [He] states that a trade was done over John Lloyd \u2013 Billy Haward [a well known armed robber and associate of Lloyd's] saw a cozzer [south-east London slang for a policeman].\"\n\nTo any seasoned detective, allegations by criminals that the local police had been paid off were no surprise. The Underworld is adept at using such claims to smear an effective officer, undermine police morale or derail an investigation. Such disruption by black propaganda is a strategy deployed by both sides of the criminal divide.\n\nWhile Suckling looked further into the Bluebell Hill robbery, Boyce reported the \"Forge affair\" to his superiors. Soon afterwards an outside police force was appointed to investigate the Kent detective and his associates. Paul Condon was number two in the Kent police at the time. He'd moved over from the Yard just a few months after the Brinks robbery.\n\nWhen the detectives from the outside force visited the Forge restaurant, its owners declined to make a statement, says Suckling. Some of his Flying Squad colleagues told us they believe the criminals put the frighteners on the restaurant managers. The couple had previously run the Dolomiti restaurant on the A20, near Sidcup. It was a haunt of the Arif crime family and their associates, which of course included members of the Gold Conduit.\n\nAccording to one Flying Squad detective, the outside force was unable to substantiate the allegations against Hamilton. It also concluded, unfairly he says, that Boyce had \"an exaggerated view of police corruption in the Kent police\" coloured by the political battle for control of the Fordham murder.\n\nBoyce had good reason to be concerned about Noye's ability to buy cops. Soon after he was arrested for killing the undercover officer, Noye had offered Boyce a massive bribe.\n\nNoye was concerned that Boyce and his Flying Squad team had reclaimed the murder inquiry from Kent police. Unbeknown to him the London detectives were also secretly looking into his relationship with Hamilton. At Bromley police station he asked to speak to Boyce. When they were alone in the cell Boyce claimed Noye offered to put \u00a31 million in a bank account \"anywhere in the world\". Boyce politely declined and reported the \"good retirement\" bribe.\n\nThe Brinks Mat investigation underwent a major re-organisation after the death of John Fordham. The renewed glare of the media spotlight put Scotland Yard under pressure to prove itself capable of finding the gold and dismantling the money laundering and reinvestment network. This was new territory for the police. Under Brian Boyce's guidance, a Specialist Operations Task Force, the first of its kind, was set up in early 1985 to chase the men in suits and their criminal clients around the offshore tax havens and money laundering centres of the world.\n\nRemarkably, the officer appointed in March to handle this crucial aspect of the Brinks investigation was detective superintendent Tony Lundy, who at the time was considered the most controversial cop in Scotland Yard. Senior management were split between those who thought he was \"corrupt\" or lacking in integrity and others, including Lundy, who believed he was the victim of a criminal vendetta seized on by jealous colleagues threatened by his reputation as a top thief taker. Lundy had served on the Flying Squad during the seventies. There he pioneered the turning of armed robbers into supergrasses to take down some of the toughest firms in and around the capital. This strategy naturally earned him the enmity of London's top villains who decided to pay him back, with interest. Or so he would claim.\n\nA firm of armed robbers had hijacked a lorry at Tilbury Docks and stole \u00a33.5 million of East German-owned silver bullion in March 1980. Lundy's boys investigated the crime and managed to retrieve almost all of the silver and convict the key villains. Twelve of the 321 ingots, however, were never recovered. Someone in the Underworld had a convenient explanation. There's no prize for guessing that a criminal turned supergrass called Billy Young put Lundy's name in the frame.\n\nThe silver bullion robbery took place in the middle of Operation Countryman. The theft allegation against Lundy coincided with an anonymous note to the Yard claiming he had also conspired with his colleagues to falsely obtain a reward for an undeserving informant. Lundy would claim the note came from one of his high-ranking enemies at the Yard. But the damage was done and an internal inquiry, parallel to Countryman, got underway.\n\nLundy was skilled at marketing his achievements so the humiliation of being returned to divisional duties was considerable for the gruff Lancastrian. Meanwhile, a former anti-corruption chief, deputy assistant commissioner Ron Steventon, started to look into the allegations. This took a remarkable two and a half years to complete. Equally extraordinary was the decision to allow Lundy on occasion to investigate complaints against other police officers while he himself was under suspicion.\n\nAs the Steventon inquiry lumbered into 1983 a few independent journalists were hot on Lundy's trail sensing there was something endemically wrong about his relationship with a criminal informer called Roy Garner, who was also a major drug dealer. As good a criminal as he was an informant, Garner had earned handsomely from his tip-offs to Lundy's Robbery Squad. But in return was he allowed to operate his drug business with impunity?\n\nFinally, in August 1983, a 4,000-page internal report on the Lundy affair was submitted to the Director of Public Prosecutions for a decision on whether to bring criminal charges. For roughly six months the DPP mulled over the evidence and implications of prosecuting officers like Lundy who had put away hundreds of serious criminals. Government lawyers decided the uncorroborated word of a convicted supergrass like Billy Young was good enough to convict other criminals but not police officers. This perceived lack of credible evidence meant no criminal charges were brought against any of the officers under investigation. The Yard did however issue a mild admonishment to Lundy for failings in his paperwork.\n\nIn January 1985, the month John Fordham was killed, Lundy felt confident enough to publicly claim he had been fully exonerated. No one in the Yard who saw the internal inquiry report contradicted him. This was more than a little strange, as the report contained a damaging two-page memo by DAC Steventon, who wrote: \"I feel bound to express a personal opinion and regrettably there is a dearth of evidence to support it, but it is my belief that Lundy is a corrupt officer who has long exploited his association with Garner.\" He recommended Lundy should be removed from specialist duty.\n\nIn the incongruent, bitchy world of promotion and preferment inside Scotland Yard, this would have been enough to sink the career of many detectives. Instead the total opposite occurred. On 11 March Lundy was made Brian Boyce's deputy on the Brinks Task Force. If ever there was evidence of a major split in the Yard's top hierarchy this was it. By posting him to the most high-profile and sensitive on-going inquiry, his supporters, among them four assistant commissioners, gave a two-fingered salute to Lundy's equally powerful detractors in Scotland Yard. Among those was the deputy commissioner, Albert Laugharne, the second most powerful man in the Yard and the person in overall charge of police discipline.\n\nBut what of the Steventon report and memo? It was archived \u2013 some say it was deep-sixed \u2013 but not for long. Just as Lundy thought it was safe to go back on the mean city streets, the Yard learned that two BBC journalists were almost through making a documentary called \"The Untouchable\" about his relationship with the drug trafficking informant Roy Garner.\n\nSuch was the concern that in April commander Phil Corbett visited a retired police officer to inquire if he had revealed the contents of the Steventon memo to the programme makers. Similarly, assistant commissioner John Dellow wrote confidentially to the BBC assistant director general, Alan Protheroe, urging restraint. The BBC executive saved Scotland Yard the trouble of any further assaults on press freedom. He pulled the documentary claiming \"insoluble legal difficulties\". The journalists, Andrew Jennings and Vyv Simson, consequently left the BBC. They suggest a compelling reason for why the Yard \"buried its head in the sand\" over the Steventon memo: \"If it got out that a detective who had put so many men in jail had been labelled 'corrupt' by the Yard, the Appeal Court could be besieged for years.\"\n\nOne faction in the Yard had certainly buried the memo, in insignificance. Had they not done so and it became public then not only would the Appeal Court be busy, but Lundy's position on the Brinks Mat Task Force would surely have been untenable.\n\nIn November 1986, after 18 months on the Brinks inquiry, Lundy's protection ran out. The refugee journalists had found a burly sponsor in Granada Television's flagship documentary series _World In Action_. An even harder version of \"The Untouchable\" was scheduled for broadcast in a few days.\n\nTransmission on 6 November came at the worst possible time for the Brinks investigation. The Task Force had already failed to convict Noye for the murder of John Fordham. And even though in July he received fourteen years for handling the stolen gold, three of his associates had escaped conviction.\n\nTo make matters worse, the Yard was engaged in a Keystone Cops hunt for armed robber John \"Goldfinger\" Fleming whom Lundy was pursuing for dishonestly handling \u00a3480,000 of the Brinks proceeds. Fleming had bought a villa near Benidorm on Spain's Costa Blanca immediately after the robbery. He fled there when McAvoy and the others were arrested. A surveillance squad eventually found him, wired up his patio and tapped the phone. Detectives staying in a nearby hotel were entertained by some of the things they heard, such as prostitute's leaving the apartment \"walking like Groucho Marx\".\n\nWhen his passport ran out Fleming hopped from one banana republic to another looking for the best safe haven dirty money can buy. Lundy sent detective inspector Tony Brightwell after him. He left London with trepidation. The Yard feared \"another Ronnie Biggs in the making\" if Fleming wasn't extradited quickly, recalls Brightwell.\n\n\"The Untouchable\" documentary caused great damage to Scotland Yard's cherished reputation when it was broadcast. Two influential Labour MPs, Chris Smith and Clive Soley, used parliamentary privilege to call Lundy \"corrupt\" and to repeat the call for a full investigation of his relationship with Garner. Even his high-ranking friends could not protect Lundy now.\n\nFleming of course cashed in on the chaos and agreed to come back to Blighty only if Lundy was taken off his case. Boyce was furious that the Brinks investigation was back in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. Lundy had apparently ignored his order not to pursue Fleming. Boyce was under \"instructions\" from British intelligence to leave Fleming in Brazil or the United States.\n\nAn outside force, this time from South Yorkshire, was appointed to investigate _World In Action_ 's allegations. Lundy was removed from the Brinks Inquiry but still allowed to carry out sensitive drug money laundering investigations overseas, working with US law enforcement authorities, though he was not called as a witness in subsequent Brinks trials.\n\nThe whole drawn out and inconclusive affair splits Scotland Yard even today. Tony Lundy now lives in Spain. He retired as a suspended officer in December 1988 with a doctor's note diagnosing him as suffering from acute stress. His detractors made a lot of the fact that by doing so he managed to avoid six disciplinary charges arising from the outside force inquiry. His supporters say the discipline offences were \"flimsy\" and a justification for not having found any evidence of criminal wrongdoing.\n\nLundy insists his mental illness was genuine and caused by seven years of police and media persecution. He went sick after formally complaining that the South Yorkshire inquiry had acted improperly. \"They got carried away and were determined to get a result,\" he told us. The suggestion of a Masonic conspiracy between the silver bullion robbers and his enemies in the Yard is also something Lundy genuinely believes played a part in his downfall.\n\nIn some important respects Tony Lundy is a victim. He may not be a victim of jealous colleagues duped by vengeful criminals \u2013 and _World In Action_ had every right to investigate the murky and uncontrolled world of the detective-informant relationship \u2013 but Lundy is a victim of a secret and undemocratic system that allows the police to investigate themselves.\n\nHad a fully independent body of corruption investigators and prosecutors existed then the factionalism inside the Yard, the shifting agendas and priorities, the personality politics which all did so much to obscure the facts in this case, would have been marginalised. Subordinated, if you like, to transparency, speed, public accountability and greater clarity over the verdict on Tony Lundy's guilt or innocence and the true level of corruption inside the Brinks Mat squad.\n\n## [4\n\nThe Ghost of Brinks Mat  \n\u2013 A _Liaison Dangereuse_](contents.html#ch04)\n\nIt's early spring 1986. Detective chief superintendent Brian Boyce is working in his office at Scotland Yard. The phone rings.\n\n\"Hello. My name is Professor Brian Griffiths, head of the prime minister's policy unit.\"\n\n\"Oh, hello,\" said Boyce, intrigued by why such a senior adviser to Mrs Thatcher would be calling him directly.\n\n\"Listen, would you mind coming to Downing Street? There is something we would like to discuss.\"\n\nThe call came at a time when the internal politics of the Yard were at their most vicious. Highly critical media coverage over Noye's acquittal for murder in December 1985 had led to recriminations. Boyce and SO11 Commander Phil Corbett were trying to raise spirits but at the same time animate the troops for Noye and Reader's second trial, due to start at the Old Bailey in May. Only 11 bars of the stolen bullion had been recovered.\n\nBoyce agreed to meet the prime minister's adviser but decided not to tell his superiors. It was just a short walk across St James's Park to Number Ten.\n\nOver coffee Boyce chatted with Professor Griffiths and his number two at the policy unit, Hartley Booth. Griffiths was an evangelical monetarist and economic guru of the Thatcher revolution. He came straight to the point. What, he asked, did Boyce think of the Theft Act as a weapon for tackling organised crime and terrorism? Boyce was one of a number of cops who believed the Act was outdated for the modern criminal landscape. He was confident about convicting Noye for handling, but to do so he knew he must absolutely prove the gold and the money found at Hollywood Cottage and Reader's home had come from smelting and laundering the Brinks Mat bullion.\n\nProfessor Griffiths was working on draft legislation to create a new offence of money laundering. Boyce was left under no illusion that Margaret Thatcher wanted to attack the secret financial structures of the IRA and organised crime. Until the Guinness share support scandal the following year, she had no interest in targeting Tarquin, the City dealer, and his white-collar band of pinstriped suits who were busy laundering their illegal profits from insider trading.\n\nUntil then, it was another kind of spiv entrepreneur \u2013 Kenny Noye and other members of the Gold Conduit \u2013 which was embarrassing Mrs Thatcher. They had laundered a lot of Brinks money through close-to-home offshore tax havens like the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, and far-flung ones like the British Virgin Islands (BVI). High Street banks that asked no questions were the financial conduit to these exotic locations.\n\nThe Foreign Office had previously encouraged Caribbean colonies like the BVI to establish a welcoming offshore financial sector that would generate local employment and revenue and reduce economic dependency on the Treasury. Now the government wanted to create a legal framework to control the Frankenstein it had fostered. And the islands' politicians and business sectors didn't like it.\n\nThe irony would not have been lost on Boyce as he walked back to Scotland Yard. He supported new legislation but knew it wouldn't come soon enough to be useful to him.\n\nAfter a ten-week trial, on 24 July 1986, Noye was found guilty of handling. He turned to the jury and told them he hoped they all died of cancer. The judge sentenced him to fourteen years. Brian Reader got nine. It was a success of sorts for the Task Force, in that the cop killer was finally behind bars. But Noye's business partner, Michael Lawson, was acquitted, so too was north London gangster Tommy Adams. Bristol linkman Terry Patch of Scadlynn had also walked free. The Gold Conduit was far from broken. In fact there was another far more prolific gold chain that hadn't even been touched. This was the money laundering operation fronted by bent solicitor Michael Relton.\n\nIn 1984 Relton had virtually abandoned his lucrative central London criminal defence firm to become a laundryman. Selective Estates, the property company he set up with minicab boss cum gangster Brian Perry, was the vehicle for this new career.\n\nOne inspired investment they made was in London's Docklands, a boom-time development promoted by the Tory government to international property speculators. Relton and Perry certainly fitted that bill and cleverly identified a number of wharfs which they bought and sold shortly afterwards for a killing.\n\nIt seemed a case of life imitating art. The prescient British gangster film _The Long Good Friday_ had developed a cult status since its release in 1981. The plot centred on an East End gangland boss, played menacingly by Bob Hoskins, who was laundering drug profits through a joint venture with the American Mafia, dirty cops and corrupt local councillors to develop London's Docklands.\n\nMeanwhile, back in the real world, the Arif crime family was working closely with Perry. They had already secured a foothold on the capital's prime real estate by nurturing links with the London Docklands Development Corporation. The LDDC took out commercial sponsorship with crime boss Dogan Arif's beloved south London football club, Fisher Athletic, situated in a prime Docklands location on the south side of the Thames. His football stadium and the LDCC-sponsored sports ground were named after the Labour party grandee and former MP for Bermondsey, Lord Mellish.\n\nIn August 1986, the Brinks 'laundry' Mat was interrupted mid-cycle. Perry had been under surveillance ever since jailed robber Mickey McAvoy nominated him as his negotiator in the deal he hoped to strike with the Yard to return his share of the gold for a shorter sentence. By following Perry, the Task Force uncovered the other main players in this second Gold Conduit and their laundering network of offshore accounts in Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Belgium, Panama and the United States.\n\nOn 12 August, the police made their move. Perry and McAvoy's current and ex-wife \u2013 Kathy and Jackie \u2013 plus four others were charged with handling the stolen Brinks gold and laundering some of the proceeds through two large house purchases.\n\nIt was by tracing these properties that the Task Force identified Michael Relton, the sophisticated criminal defence lawyer. Detectives were surprised and concerned. Relton was known in the police as a man with rather a lot of influential friends, some of them in Scotland Yard. Now he had disappeared. Had he been tipped off before the Task Force came calling at his Buckinghamshire country home?\n\nIt would take eight eventful weeks before Relton was located and arrested on 15 October. A ginger-haired, six-foot-five detective sergeant called John Redgrave was the officer tasked to feel the urbane solicitor's sweaty collar. The ginger giant had been on the Flying Squad since 1982 and served throughout the Brinks Mat investigation. He was definitely not one of Relton's friends in blue.\n\nRedgrave was put in charge of preparing the prosecution paperwork for the forthcoming trial. There were nine defendants including Relton. The files eventually ran to over 20,000 pages and took many months to compile. In October 1987, one year after Relton's arrest, Redgrave produced an alarming report. It outlined to the Yard's top brass serious concerns surrounding the approaching trial.\n\nThe concerns, revealed here for the first time, were based on secret intelligence and undisclosed evidence that painted a very different picture of the internal machinations of the Brinks investigation than the one being spun by Scotland Yard's press office. Had the media got hold of such a report, the consequences would have been devastating for the forthcoming trial and, of course, the Yard.\n\nThere were two main recommendations, firstly that the jury be given police protection and secondly that the trial should be held outside of London. Nothing unusual in that, you may think. But it was the reasoning that made this report so explosive. Examining the question of jury protection first, Redgrave reminded his bosses that Noye had tried to bribe Boyce with \u00a31 million. He then pointed out that since Noye's two trials there'd been two failed prosecutions where juries had no protection.\n\nTo support his recommendation that the trial be held outside London, Redgrave referred to the relationship between Relton and certain retired Scotland Yard detectives, some of whom had bought a bar from him. Briefs wine bar was a hostelry opposite the Inner London Crown Court, near Elephant & Castle. It was part of Relton's legitimate empire of bars and restaurants that he owned while running a highly successful criminal and conveyancing legal practice. Relton bought Briefs in 1978 with a crooked businessman. Here, the South African-born lawyer would entertain his criminal clients and journalists after work and sometimes after hours. The Underworld and its fixers mixed like gin and tonic at the bar, exchanging gossip, banter and pound notes.\n\nRelton knew the value of such a network of criminal contacts. Cleverly, he also developed a coterie of loyal police officers, some of questionable integrity.\n\nThroughout the Robert Mark purge and Operation Countryman, defending those officers accused of misconduct and corruption was a good sideline for Relton. It became the stuff of legend that he won thirty-five out of thirty-six criminal cases brought against police officers. Among them were three detectives who ended up buying Briefs in 1980 while facing criminal prosecution for allegedly fitting up two armed robbers and for accepting money with menaces.\n\nBrothers John and Michael Ross and Paul Rexstrew were acquitted in 1982 at the Old Bailey. It was the third Countryman trial in a series of four that failed to secure a conviction. The Ross brothers were subsequently sacked on a police disciplinary board. Rexstrew, however, resigned and later went to work for Relton's law firm as a clerk.\n\nToday, John Ross earns his crust using his police contacts to sell tips to the tabloids. He now operates from another wine bar, this time near the Old Bailey. \"The Flying Squad and the robbers used to drink together [in Briefs]. They did the same job. There were no problems because they all earned money out of bank robberies,\" he recalled over a bottle of wine.\n\nDuring the Brinks inquiry, the Yard had issued an order for its officers to stay away from Briefs. There was particular concern in the Task Force, which the Redgrave report reflected, about the recently disgraced Ross brothers and their loyalty to Relton. The Yard was also troubled about Rextrew's role in Relton's law firm and wondered how far he and the others would go to defend him.\n\nRexstrew is still a legal clerk. He originally agreed to discuss Brinks Mat and his relationship with the bent lawyer. \"Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was [at the firm] when monies were going into the Bank of Ireland through the client account, monies which were later shown to be coming from the purchase of property from Docklands through Selective Estates.\" He subsequently cancelled our meeting and refused to answer any written questions. One of the reasons he gave was that he had represented an unnamed defendant in the Relton trial.\n\nRexstrew also had dealings with a former business partner of Relton's, a detective turned private eye called Martin King. After Relton sold Briefs, he and King bought Docks Diner, near Tower Bridge. Rexstrew later represented King when he pleaded guilty to bribing an undercover police officer to destroy the case against two criminals.\n\nIn general, the concern among senior Brinks detectives was that a \"firm within a firm\" was still active. And the Underworld's brokers knew exactly how to get in touch.\n\nFormer commissioner Robert Mark will for ever be remembered for his inspired comment that a good police force is one that catches more criminals than it employs. And during his nearly five-year reign in the mid-seventies he sacked or forced out over 450 detectives. But undoubtedly, and with the Yard's connivance, corrupt officers of varied ranks, some because they were Freemasons, escaped the purge.\n\nThis is why Redgrave recommended moving the trial outside the Smoke. It was thought Relton's friends in Scotland Yard and those at the Criminal Bar could and would \"manipulate police organisation and the mechanics of London's legal system\". And although the Yard would find it \"unpalatable\" to have to guard against possible traitors in its own ranks, not to do so, the report intimated, could make the difference between winning and losing the forthcoming trial.\n\nBoyce and Corbett endorsed the argument wholeheartedly in a note attached to the Redgrave report. In his supporting comments published here for the first time, Corbett gave a fascinating analysis of the calibre of British villainy in the 1980s: \"We do not have crime families as recognised in Italy and the US,\" he wrote. \"We do however have potent cliques of criminals who will variously come together in combination according to their personal criminal projects \u2013 certainly and more unfortunately, this country is recognized worldwide for what might be termed an 'invisible asset', namely prolific and expert criminal figures.\" Corbett added he was \"convinced that serious and concerted attempts to pervert and impede the course of justice will be made\" in the Relton and co. trial. But far more intriguing was his final comment \u2013 \"indeed it is likely that they have already commenced\".\n\nThe Yard's head of criminal intelligence was referring to an unauthorised and highly irregular _liaison dangereuse_ in Paris between a Brinks detective and Michael Relton, while the bent solicitor was on the run. The detective was an inspector called Peter Atkins. In late August 1986, Atkins' friend, the disgraced detective Michael Ross, contacted him. By this stage Perry and others had been arrested. Ross said Relton was in Florida ready to deal. Atkins trusted Ross, who had been his best man, and knew he was close to Relton. So he passed on the information to the Brinks Squad.\n\nTony Lundy was already going to Florida, where the Task Force had opened an asset-tracing office. He waited for Relton to make contact, but the call never came. Lundy was unaware that Relton was in fact in Paris secretly meeting Atkins. He had flown there with Ross on 6 September and was picked up at the airport by the lawyer, who paid for a long lunch in Montmartre.\n\nOne month later, on 8 October, Lundy, by now back in London, told his men they must find and arrest Relton within the next two weeks. After the briefing, the team adjourned for a modest libation. What happened at the Black Dog pub is a disputed story. Lundy claims a detective came to him in a distressed state saying that a fellow detective had recently offered him a \u00a3100,000 bribe to lay off Relton. Lundy reported this to commander Corbett, but the whistle-blower subsequently refused to confirm it when he was taken to the boss's office.\n\nAccording to a police source privy to the intelligence, Corbett had also just learned from a phone tap about the Paris meeting. He was furious with Atkins. Luckily, though, the Task Force had also discovered that Relton would be returning to London in 24 hours from Malaga.\n\nJohn Redgrave, the ginger giant, was put in charge of the surveillance team that followed Relton on his return to London. \"He was slowly getting more and more drunk and avoiding his usual [haunts]. He was making calls from a TK [telephone kiosk]. The stuff I was getting back from the surveillance team was of a man at the end of his tether. He was spooked. My judgement was that he was going to do a runner because of the way he was acting. So I requested permission to arrest him. I didn't know about the politics [over Atkins] back at the Yard but eventually I was given the green light. We were following Relton in his car near Rochester Row. I pulled him over and when I introduced myself I sensed an enormous relief on his face. I then made him open the boot. Inside were loads of documents. He must have emptied out his office.\"\n\nRedgrave had stumbled on a treasure trove of documents \u2013 the Selective Estates files. Two envelopes were found in the boot of Relton's car containing highly compromising financial information about the money laundering network. Weeks earlier Relton had posted the envelopes from London to an address in Malaga province. The network had invested in a large property development there.\n\nFurther documents were seized at Relton's home. By now faced with overwhelming evidence of his corruption, he turned supergrass. During lengthy debriefs he gave vital information of the laundering network that for the first time allowed detectives behind the curtain of confidentiality that is the most attractive feature of offshore banking. Relton, who was later described in court as the \"chancellor of the exchequer\", effectively admitted to laundering almost \u00a33 million.\n\nMichael Charman, Tony Curtis and another Flying Squad detective called John Bull were Relton's bodyguards while he was in protective custody. Charman says Relton didn't take too seriously the intelligence about a contract on his life. He was allowed to meet his wife at their favourite bistro in Clapham, south London, and his bodyguards also drove him to his Buckinghamshire home for conjugal visits and dinner parties.\n\nIn late November, the Task Force's top supergrass suddenly withdrew his evidence and entered a plea of not guilty. The police wrongly assumed Relton had had the frighteners put on him by his former gangster clients. In fact it was his wife, Helena Luff, who was threatened, says Curtis.\n\nSoon after pleading not guilty, Relton unsuccessfully applied for bail. His wife assured the court no one had threatened her husband to retract his evidence. But later she confided in Curtis that a fearsome duo had done exactly that when they visited her London flat on behalf of Brian Perry. She identified the unwanted callers as south London gangland enforcer \"Mad\" Frankie Fraser and Perry's son, Patrick. Fraser admits he was Brian Perry's friend and was asked by unnamed people to act as his \"minder\" during the Brinks trials. Patrick, however, refuses to comment. But a secret intelligence report reveals that two years after the approach to Relton's wife, Patrick was linked to a separate plot to poison one of his father's co-defendants, who at the time was in a Spanish prison awaiting extradition. The alleged plot involved providing the prisoner with a specially baked cake. Although the plan never came off, according to one police source, Patrick was heard joking that he was known for a while as Mr Kipling.\n\nBoyce had also gone ballistic on learning of the Paris meeting. He recommended Atkins should be removed from the Flying Squad. He was so surprised when no disciplinary action was taken against the errant officer for what commander Corbett had described as \"a flagrant breach of police protocols\". They wondered if Atkins had protection higher up.\n\nSome explanation came when the detective, by then promoted to chief inspector, gave some extraordinary evidence at Relton's trial. Atkins told the court he and Ross would regularly \"treat\" each other to meals. On the occasion in question Ross flew him to Paris for lunch. It was only on the plane that he was told Relton would be joining them. Most of the lunch he agreed was a \"highly enjoyable social occasion\". But during the first half Relton apparently told Atkins he was not knowingly doing anything illegal.\n\nProsecution barrister Nicholas Purnell QC asked Atkins who'd paid for the flight. Atkins replied: \"Well, what happened was Mr Ross paid for the flight. On the way over he told me that Mr Relton was in Paris and would meet us, and I was rather upset about that and I thought he abused our friendship, and in fact on the way back I gave him the money for the flight.\"\n\nIt was more than a little inconsistent that Atkins felt compelled to pay for the flight but admitted allowing Relton to pay for the meal. This wasn't the only anomaly and surprise in his evidence. Atkins also admitted to seeing Relton after Paris on three other occasions, this time in the UK. All the meetings took place in the month before he was arrested and therefore while he was on the run. On each occasion Ross organised the meeting and was present but not in earshot, Atkins was keen to stress. Once they even met in Briefs.\n\nRemarkably, Atkins claimed he had reported back to someone in the Brinks Task Force, but didn't name the person. Certainly it wasn't Boyce, Corbett or Lundy. He also confirmed he hadn't taken any notes of these four crucial discussions with a fugitive, nor did he make a witness statement or secretly record Relton.\n\nIn one simple exchange Purnell got straight to the heart of the matter. \"Detective Chief Inspector, were you going to give information to Relton or to receive information from him?\"\n\n\"Receive it,\" replied Atkins.\n\nIn July 1988 Michael Weber Relton faced the consequences of his decision not to remain a supergrass. He was convicted and sentenced to 12 years.\n\nAfter the trial, Scotland Yard did its best to quash rumours that there was a serious problem of police corruption during the Brinks Mat investigation. But Boyce and Corbett felt very differently. The SO11 commander cites the failure of the Yard to discipline errant officers as one of the reasons he chose to leave the force. Another reason, Corbett says, was the whitewash by Scotland Yard of an internal inquiry into Freemasonry.\n\nA very senior retired detective close to the Brinks investigation agreed to speak off the record about the internal machinations of Scotland Yard during this period. He was privy to important discussions. His comment is extraordinary. \"It was my impression there was a concert party to undermine the Brinks [investigation] and most of it came from south-east London. There is no doubt several people wanted to undermine it. Some of those were in the police and some of those were outside of the police.\"\n\nIn the summer of 1993 a man in his early forties with a blond ponytail took the stand at the Old Bailey where he was on trial for armed robbery. He told the court one of those incredible defences that in journalism would be put in an imaginary tray marked \"You couldn't make it up.\" Certainly the jury thought so, because they acquitted him.\n\nThe following account is based on allegations made in the witness box and in civil proceedings subsequently brought against the Met by Maurice O'Mahoney.\n\nHe claimed that corrupt Met detectives got him to carry out the armed robbery of a sub-post office in Shepherd's Bush, west London, in order to kill him because they suspected he was about to blow the whistle on the officers' involvement in the disposal of the Brinks money. Among the officers O'Mahoney named in court were Michael Ross and DCI Peter Atkins, who was still serving at the time of the trial.\n\nO'Mahoney had led a life of crime, extreme violence and criminal cheek. As a west London enforcer and debt collector, he enjoyed using a hammer to persuade people to pay up. When he was arrested in June 1974 for the armed robbery of a Securicor van in Middlesex, O'Mahoney turned supergrass. He claimed he rolled over to protect his girlfriend from his accomplices on the job, who wrongly suspected he had grassed them up. Rather than wait for them to gouge his eyes out, O'Mahoney pleaded guilty and admitted 102 other offences, including another 13 armed robberies. He then named over one hundred friends and criminal associates, an act of treachery that earned him the soubriquet \"Mo the grass\".\n\nIn return, the court sentenced him to a lenient five years, most of which he served in very comfortable conditions with conjugal visits. At some stage though, he refused to give any more evidence against his former partners in crime so the police withdrew his protection and stopped payments from a special fund.\n\nOn his release, Mo was given a new identity. He briefly provided security for pop stars like keyboardist Rick Wakeman and claimed he once planned to kidnap Elton John.\n\nMo apparently recouped some criminal kudos after years of grassing by providing certain \"faces\" with sensitive intelligence from corrupt contacts in SO11 about whether they were being looked at.\n\nMo started to frequent Briefs wine bar in the early eighties and throughout the period when the Gold Conduit was at its most active. During this period he says he was involved in moving money to the United States for Relton. He travelled with a false passport to New York on the same flight as the bent solicitor and even managed to hide two of Relton's account books from the police.\n\nIn 1990, Mo says he made contact with serving police officers at Brixton, south London, after an unnamed senior detective at the Yard refused to help him with a new identity. One of the Brixton detectives was reputedly Peter Atkins. Mo regarded him as a \"friend\" and claims he re-wired the detective chief inspector's house.\n\nDuring his Old Bailey trial, Mo revealed that the post office robbery was proposed to him at the Brixton police station Christmas party in 1990. He then produced the winning raffle ticket from the police party \u2013 ironically the prize was a flight to Paris \u2013 when the prosecution accused him of not being there.\n\nHe spoke of his friendship with Briefs co-owner Michael Ross, whom the trial judge later described as a \"rogue officer\". Mo also listed from the witness box other police officers that he claimed he'd had corrupt and commercial dealings with since the seventies.\n\nAfter his acquittal, Mo's lawyer wrote to home secretary Michael Howard asking him to guarantee his safety from criminals and police officers he had named in the murder plot. His lawyer later told the _Independent_ that he had also asked for an inquiry into the allegations of police corruption, but, remarkably, this was refused.\n\nIn December 1994, Mo sued Peter Atkins and the commissioner for aggravated and exemplary damages, alleging malicious abuse of office and malicious prosecution. He had spent over one year in prison on remand after his arrest for the post office robbery.\n\nThe writ said the murder plot was arranged \"to protect the interests of DCI Atkins and [his] friends and associates from the intended publication of details of corruption and to protect the same against possible loss of the proceeds of corruption\". The writ named Michael Ross as well and alleged Mo possessed information about corrupt activities by them and senior officers known to them.\n\nAlthough the claim was served on new commissioner Paul Condon, it related to a period when his predecessor Sir Peter Imbert was in charge. Nevertheless, Condon was in a very difficult position. By December 1994 he had been knighted and his Ghost Squad was secretly operating with Home Office approval.\n\nMo's corruption allegations in the civil claim fell into two periods \u2013 when he was a seventies supergrass and the Brinks Mat police investigation. Each one demanded a proper inquiry. Mo admitted in the writ that he'd given \"perjured evidence [as a supergrass] at the direction and request of officers of the Metropolitan Police\". In lieu of an independent inquiry, at the very least there should have been a separate team of officers, outside of Scotland Yard's control and supervised by the PCA, investigating this damaging allegation.\n\nFirst they would have to discover which trials Mo was referring to and, if he was telling the truth, which defendants were therefore wrongly in prison. Then they would have to look at those officers Mo alleged had instructed him to give perjured evidence. This, after all, is a very serious allegation of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, and any officer successfully prosecuted not only would go to prison, but all the criminal cases he had significantly played a part in would themselves become potential miscarriages of justice. The PCA confirm they supervised no such corruption inquiry.\n\nMo's other more damaging allegations of police involvement in money laundering the proceeds of the Brinks robbery could not have come at a worst time for the Yard. The final Brinks trial of four key defendants in the Gold Conduit, Brian Perry, Gordon Parry, Jean Savage and Patrick Clarke, had successfully concluded in August 1992 with long prison sentences. Mo's allegations clearly challenged the safety of these convictions by attacking the police's integrity.\n\nThe naming of DCI Atkins was a particular headache for the commissioner. In effect, the allegation that first emerged during Relton's trial in May 1988 that Atkins and Ross had at the very least an unethical relationship with the bent lawyer had now resurfaced six years later from someone the Yard had in the past regarded as a witness of truth.\n\nThe choice facing Scotland Yard was whether to reinvestigate the Brinks Mat robbery or settle out of court. For over four years, the Ghost Squad years, the Yard sat on the civil claim. Mo's lawyers had no idea what was going on. No one came to interview him about his allegations and take further details, he says. In the intervening period Atkins retired from the Yard in 1995. According to his friend John Ross, he slipped on some rubble outside Brixton police station and won an injury award from the force.\n\nThen, in late 1998, commissioner Condon privately settled the case. Mo's legal costs and damages, which he estimates at \u00a3100,000, were picked up by the Yard, who in turn dipped into the public purse to save their bacon while leaving the taxpayer in the dark about what had gone on.\n\nSuch out of court settlements rarely include an admission of liability by the Yard, and this one was no exception. Although the police often try to claw back some dignity by arguing that they settled because it was too costly to continue, more often than not the reality is they have no evidence to rebut the claim or to do so would open up an even bigger scandal, in this case the secret history of corruption during Brinks Mat, something the Ghost Squad had no intention of exploring.\n\nAsked what investigation the Yard conducted into Mo the grass's allegations, a spokesman replied: \"We do not have any details of this matter on our current record system.\"\n\nAs far as we can establish Atkins has never been able to give his side of the story in any proceedings. Peter Atkins and Michael Ross declined to be interviewed about the _liaison dangereuse_. John Ross told us even he couldn't get the full story out of his brother or Atkins.\n\nMo the grass is now 56 and married with grown up children. He is not worried about retribution from the criminals he put away. \"There are no firms left to bash me up,\" he says. \"They'll all be using zimmer frames.\"\n\n## [5\n\nDeath of an  \nExpert Witness](contents.html#ch05)\n\nThe elimination of private detective Daniel Morgan was planned with unusual care. At around 9pm on 10 March 1987 he left a meeting in the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, south-east London, and walked into the rear car park. As he unlocked the door of his BMW, someone wielding a huge axe attacked him from behind.\n\nThe assailant felled Daniel with four ferocious blows to the head. He was already on his back when the crowning blow struck. It was inflicted with specially concentrated venom \u2013 in all probability to ensure that if Daniel was found before his final breath, he could speak no whisper and leave no clue. As the private detective's lifeblood drained into the tarmac, the murderer slipped away, leaving the axe in his face.\n\nDaniel Morgan was just thirty-seven years old and a father of two very young children.\n\nThe next day, before the pathologist began the autopsy he required considerable assistance just to extract the murder weapon. It had been fused with Danny's cheekbone. Preliminary analysis made it pretty clear this was a professional hit. The 14-inch wooden axe handle had been shrewdly modified. It was expertly wound with Elastoplast to prevent slippage and allow the killer to boost directional control.\n\nAt the inquest it was suggested that the location for the killing was specially chosen to fall within the area of Catford police station. The apparent purpose of this particular piece of strategic planning was as sinister as it was simple \u2013 to contaminate the murder investigation from the inside, restraining and frustrating the gathering of evidence while keeping well ahead of any honest cop who might be assigned to the murder inquiry. With the integrity of the investigative process subverted, the murder would become what the police call \"a sticker\" and conveniently remain unsolved.\n\nIn 2004, 17 years later, this was precisely the position. The murderer and his co-conspirators remain at large. But so does a pungent aura of police corruption. Significantly, the Daniel Morgan murder came just days after the private detective began taking steps to expose that corruption. Because of this, the killing still stalks Scotland Yard, a ghost unexorcised.\n\nDaniel John Morgan was born on 3 November 1949, the middle of three children. The Morgan family line had its roots in Pontardawe, the Welsh valleys then renowned for coal mining. His father grew up in the interwar depression, an especially tough period in the valleys. At Arnhem during the Second World War, Daniel's father was not only badly wounded but also taken as a prisoner of war. On his liberation in 1945 he had the rank of captain and continued in service. There he met his wife Isobel who was working as an army telephonist. Later, the couple moved to Singapore where their sons Alastair and then Daniel were born, followed by Jane.\n\nDaniel was always something of an outsider; maybe it was his clubfoot. He didn't perform well academically in his early rounds within the British education system. At grammar school he preferred wood and metal work to any other subjects. After his father died suddenly at forty-one from emphysema, Daniel went to agricultural college. He then worked on a farm in Denmark for two years learning the language while tilling the fields and chatting up the locals.\n\nIn the late 1970s Daniel moved to London. His mother had remarried, and her new husband got him a job at a south London private detective agency called Madigans. Daniel learned the ropes in the unusual half world, half underworld of private investigation, tracing runaways and rate defaulters for local authorities and proving infidelities for other clients. In this early outpost of the information-sleaze economy, private eyes routinely gained access to confidential information supposedly held only by the state. Madigans, for example, had acquired a set of the reverse directories produced by the Post Office for state agencies, which covered all streets and phone numbers throughout Britain.\n\nJobs could often be accomplished even more speedily and more profitably with the help of other state assets \u2013 local police officers. They could help a private eye in a variety of ways in return for \"a drink\", London speak for a payoff.\n\nBy 1983 Daniel felt he had mastered the profession of a private eye. He and his Scots-born wife, Iris, were by then the parents of two young children \u2013 a daughter called Sarah and a son, also named Daniel. With these new responsibilities went a need for better pay, a pressure further compounded by Daniel's sense that Madigans cramped his style. He felt he could run a successful business himself.\n\nDaniel first set up a small operation called DJM investigations, opening an office in Thornton Heath, south London. He had been shrewd enough to cultivate good relations with a number of key clients during his time at Madigans and lured some of them away with him when he left. Soon his client list involved tracing and bailiffing work for credit companies, banks and big law firms.\n\nDaniel then set up Southern Investigation, recruiting a bookkeeper called Kevin Lennon as company secretary and a former Madigan employee, Jonathan Rees, as a fellow director. A tough, compact and exceptionally garrulous former merchant seaman with a Yorkshire accent in marked contrast to his Welsh family name, Rees, then 32, had some contacts in the local underworld and powerful connections in the local police, especially at Catford.\n\nThe news that her youngest son had been killed came to Isobel Morgan in the early hours of 11 March 1987 during a phone call from the police. After steadying herself, she contacted her remaining children, Alastair and Jane. When Isobel could manage to get the words out she gave them all the information she had. \"Dan's dead... Murdered...That's all I've been told.\"\n\nAlastair drove immediately from his home in Hampshire to London to comfort Iris, his brother's widow. On the way there he resolved to find out what he could about Daniel's last few days. Where had he been? What had he been working on? Who had he met at the Golden Lion pub before he was murdered?\n\nAlastair's loyalty to Daniel ran deep. They'd spent fifteen years as boys sharing a room. Later as men the two became closer still. When Alastair first returned to England after separating from his Swedish wife, Daniel cheered him up and found him a temporary job working by his side at Madigans.\n\nAlastair kept the job until he was ready to move on. But during his time there he developed a view of Jonathan Rees. He found Rees had a strong authoritarian streak and seriously enjoyed the exercise of power that went with his job as a bailiff evicting squatters and gypsies. Rees was also loud-mouthed and aggressive \u2013 with a strong rhetorical adherence to racist views that expressed his fear of the supposed swamping of the traditional British way of life.\n\nDuring his drive to London, Alastair also puzzled over something his brother had told him some months earlier, concerning the disappearance of \u00a318,280.62 in cash during a robbery outside Rees's home.\n\nBehind Daniel's back, Rees had done a private job to protect the transit of cash for Belmont Car Auctions. The company and Daniel felt Rees's explanation for carrying so much cash strained credulity. They suspected it was a scam. Rees had claimed he took the money home because the night safe of the bank had mysteriously been super-glued. First he dropped off his brothers-in-law, Glen and Gary Vian, two villains he had recruited to provide security. When he arrived home he was forced to park some distance from his house, whereupon two unidentified men apparently squirted ammonia in his eyes and robbed the money.\n\nAs he approached London, Alastair recalled his last conversation with his brother. Daniel had forcefully underlined his suspicions about the robbery and feared his company now faced ruin because Southern Investigations had no insurance for carrying cash. Furthermore, Daniel had told his brother Belmont was suing for the money. By the time Alastair arrived in London he was in a well of deep anxiety.\n\nAt the police incident room in Sydenham, Alastair learned the gruesome details of his brother's killing. Rees, he discovered, had pressed Daniel to come to the Golden Lion and then left just before the attack. Equally strange, while one of Daniel's trouser pockets had been torn open during the attack, another containing credit cards and \u00a31,000 in cash was untouched. Yet Daniel's watch was stolen in what, Alastair suspected, was a clumsy attempt to camouflage the murder as a mugging. More intriguing still was word that his brother had been seen writing something on pieces of paper in the pub just before he died. But no notes were found.\n\nAlastair found himself dealing with a middle-aged detective sergeant called Sid Fillery from the murder inquiry. He was a well-padded, confident man with powerful fists and a ready line in conversation. Alastair had met him briefly once before when he'd been out drinking with Daniel. At first the resumption of the relationship seemed reassuring. But very soon Alastair had cause to re-assess.\n\nHe had no idea how active Fillery had been in the immediate aftermath of the murder. Nor was he aware just how close the friendship between Fillery and Rees had become. They were the best of friends and confidants. The nature of this relationship was by then a matter of extraordinary importance, for Rees was under suspicion not only for the Belmont Car Auction robbery but also for the axe murder of his business partner.\n\nThe more Alastair learned about their relationship the more disingenuous Sid Fillery appeared. It emerged he had helped introduce Rees to Belmont.\n\nIn addition, Alastair discovered that 24 hours before the murder, Fillery and Rees were drinking at the Golden Lion. The session included a crowd of Catford cops. A row erupted, with some pushing and shoving. Those present would later claim the argument was over whether British policemen should routinely carry guns, with Daniel apparently taking a lone, dissenting view. Another theory is that the Belmont robbery and the missing \u00a318,000 was the real cause of the row.\n\nRees and Fillery had been out drinking together almost every night in the days before the murder, Alastair learned. In that same period his brother was growing increasingly sceptical about the Belmont robbery and considering whether he should distance himself from Rees and file an entirely separate defence. Daniel was even thinking about bringing in someone else to replace Rees in the business.\n\nIt transpired that on the day of the murder Daniel had reluctantly agreed to return to the Golden Lion the night after the row to meet Rees, who told him a man called Paul Goodridge would meet them there to discuss lending Rees money.\n\nGoodridge, a self-styled bodyguard, never turned up at the pub. And at around 8.45pm Rees left the Golden Lion, making him the last known person to see Daniel alive. This one fact had two immediate consequences. It made Rees an obvious suspect \u2013 a man to be carefully and neutrally questioned until he could be ruled in or out. Second, it meant that someone other than his best friend in the local police force should have been deployed to investigate and preserve all available evidence. Remarkably none of this was done.\n\nInstead, Fillery interviewed Rees soon after the murder and took his witness statement in which no mention was made of their contact immediately before the murder. Rees was then allowed to leave the station without either his clothes or his car being forensically examined. Fillery had simply told his best friend he could bring them back later.\n\nAlastair couldn't understand how Fillery was allowed anywhere near the murder inquiry, let alone in such a direct role. He started asking awkward questions. While he waited for answers, Fillery suggested to the Morgan family that Alastair should go back home to Hampshire and not get in the way of the police investigation.\n\n\"Eventually I had to go home to get on with my own work,\" says Alastair, a translator. \"I still made regular calls to the murder squad who could give me little assurance of any progress in the case. Like all the rest of the family I was uneasy.\"\n\nUnease turned to alarm when he spoke to his brother's office manager. Peter Newby said Fillery had visited the detective agency to recover documents the morning after the murder. He claimed the detective filled a black plastic bin liner after specifically asking for at least one file by name \u2013 Belmont Car Auctions. Fillery has always denied this. Wherever the truth lies, the Belmont file has never been seen again. As Alastair puts it, \"Someone had it.\" Significantly, Daniel's 1987 desk diary had also disappeared.\n\nDS Sid Fillery came off the Morgan murder inquiry after four days. He says as soon as he realised there was a conflict of interest over his relationship with Rees he withdrew. But the senior officer running the murder inquiry claimed at the inquest that he had removed Fillery.\n\nThree weeks later, Fillery was arrested in connection with the murder along with Rees and four others \u2013 Glen and Gary Vian, Rees's brothers-in-law, and two constables from Catford. They were just as suddenly released, without charge and again without anyone troubling to put the Morgan family in the picture. They learned of the arrests from the media. Alastair and his mother, Isobel, kept asking questions, but the family liaison was very poor and the Morgans felt they were being deliberately kept in the dark.\n\nFillery's closeness to Rees was not the only flaw in the murder investigation. When Alastair went to the Golden Lion the morning after the murder he saw there was no proper crime scene cordon. This meant key evidence could have been missed or even taken away.\n\nThe Morgan family also struggled with the unexplained delay in holding an inquest into Daniel's death. One month before it opened in April 1988 Fillery was allowed to leave the force on a full medical pension. The officer complained of suffering from depression after 22 years' service.\n\n\"We were very unhappy about him leaving the force,\" says Alastair, \"and we began telling people in high places just how seriously we viewed the situation.\" He wrote to the then Conservative home secretary, Douglas Hurd, asking that he authorise a substantial reward for information leading to the killer's arrest and conviction. \"I stressed strongly in my letter that the inference of possible police involvement in the murder was now very serious,\" says Alastair. Hurd did nothing, which was somewhat ironic in that in his spare time the home secretary wrote whodunnit novels.\n\nIn a private letter to the late Paul Keel, the _Guardian_ crime correspondent and one of the only journalists to take a serious interest in the background to Daniel's killing, Alastair expressed the family's growing sense of frustration: \"Sometimes I get the feeling that individual coppers are so damned busy watching their own backs and guarding their precious reputations that they have little energy left to pinpoint the real villains. The really good ones get harassed out by cynical and complacent colleagues.\n\n\"An inquest is due in the fairly near future. But the police are singularly uninformative about all the ins and outs of the hearing, and reading between the lines of their almost total silence, I get the feeling that they themselves don't feel particularly comfortable about it... Perhaps someone is going to finish up getting egg on their face.\"\n\nAt last, 13 months after the murder, the inquest opened. But Scotland Yard advised Iris Morgan, Daniel's widow, that there was no need for the family to be legally represented.\n\nAlastair was appalled. \"My mother was, if this is possible, even more suspicious than I was of what was going on. Despite her slender means and with a great deal of help from our solicitor at the time, she arranged for us to have a barrister present to protect our interests and cross-examine witnesses.\"\n\nJune Tweedie was their barrister. She arrived at the Southwark Coroner's Court direct from Gibraltar where she had been involved in another controversial inquest and one with more immediately obvious political ramifications \u2013 the \"Death on the Rock\" killing of three IRA members in an SAS ambush, which some argue was part of a shoot-to-kill policy exported from the dirty war in Northern Ireland.\n\nDespite their suspicions, nothing prepared the Morgans for what came out at the inquest. An early and electrifying witness was Kevin Lennon, the bookkeeper and company secretary of Southern Investigations.\n\nLennon explained he had been friendlier with Rees than with the murdered man; and as a result of this friendship Rees had, he claimed, repeatedly confided in him. Rees had come to hate Daniel, repeatedly referring to him in front of other people as \"the little Welsh cripple\", Lennon told the inquest. The two were also rivals over a mistress they shared called Margaret Harrison, a local estate agent.\n\nLennon claimed Rees repeatedly discussed with him how he intended to get Daniel out of the business. Initially, Lennon told the coroner Rees had confided in him that his plan was to get Daniel breathalysed by his friends at Norbury police station while driving home late one night. This would cost Daniel his driving licence and incapacitate him in the business. Lennon added that to his certain knowledge Rees proceeded to try to make such arrangements on at least three occasions. But the plan never came off for reasons that remain unclear.\n\nHowever, Lennon saved the most dramatic for last. He told the inquest Rees had asked him if he knew anyone who would kill Daniel. \"I formed the opinion that Rees was determined either to kill Daniel Morgan or to have him killed,\" Lennon told the coroner, adding, \"When he spoke to me about it Rees was calm and unemotional about planning Daniel's death.\"\n\nLennon also revealed that after Fillery left the force he went to work for Southern Investigations. The Morgan family could scarcely believe their ears. In essence, Rees's best friend who ended up playing an instrumental role in the bungled murder inquiry had effortlessly left the Yard on a full medical pension, only to resurface in Daniel's private investigation agency filling the dead man's shoes and working in partnership with the main murder suspect.\n\nCross-examined by Tweedie, Lennon volunteered further particulars of conversations he said he'd had with Rees. The bookkeeper testified that Rees had even discussed who would organise the murder (\"Policemen from Catford\") and how much it could cost (\"\u00a31,000\").\n\nLennon again: \"When questioned by me, Rees said: 'These police officers are friends of mine and will either murder Daniel or arrange for his murder...' He [Rees] went on to explain... that if they didn't do it themselves the police would arrange for some other person over whom they had some criminal charge pending to carry out Daniel's murder and in return police proceedings against that person would be dropped. Rees continued to explain to me that Daniel's murder would be carried out within the jurisdiction of Catford Police station.\"\n\nAt this point the Morgan family barrister interrupted him: \"It was, was it not?\"\n\nLennon: \"Yes\"\n\nTweedie: \"The reason for the murder being carried out in that area was because those same Catford police officers would then be involved in the murder investigation and would suppress any information linking the murder with Jon Rees or themselves?\"\n\nLennon: \"That is right.\"\n\nLennon claimed Rees had discussed murdering Daniel with his wife Sharon. She was therefore a key witness. But she never gave evidence, insisting to the coroner, Sir Montague Levine, that she wasn't mentally fit enough to attend. The coroner appeared unhappy at her absence. _Daily Mirror_ reporter Sylvia Jones, however, soon tracked down Sharon Rees. She was photographed shopping the day after she lodged her sick note with the Coroner's Court.\n\nThe _Mirror_ 's expos\u00e9 did little to bolster Rees's credibility when his turn came to give evidence. He categorically denied any involvement in the killing of Daniel Morgan.\n\nIt also emerged that the police chose Rees to identify the body to spare the family the trauma. The family felt this was completely unprofessional \u2013 if only because it gave a suspect direct access to the corpse before making a statement.\n\nThe Morgans then learned of a bizarre undercover operation run in parallel to the bodged murder inquiry. The man in charge, detective superintendent Douglas Campbell, acting alone or with CIB, was trying to sting Rees and Fillery into confessing their involvement in the murder. However, the detective constable he chose for this undercover role was entirely inappropriate. DC Duncan Hanrahan also had no undercover experience. He was, though, friendly with Rees and Fillery, and a fellow Freemason. Another disqualification was his posting at Norbury police station, where Rees had many other friends whom he was allegedly going to use ahead of the murder to fit up Morgan on a spurious drink drive offence.\n\nNevertheless, Hanrahan's evidence was not helpful to Rees. The detective had been the night duty officer who initially dealt with Rees's claim that he had been robbed of the car auction money. Hanrahan told the inquest he felt it was \"an inside job\" or \"a set-up\".\n\nTurning to his undercover role, Hanrahan explained how Rees had discussed obstructing the murder inquiry. Indeed, Hanrahan told the coroner that Rees had stated that although he was in a position to give the inquiry important leads and information, he had changed his mind in retaliation for the way the murder squad was treating him after his friend Sid Fillery was reassigned.\n\nHanrahan also claimed Rees had discussed ways of actively destabilising the inquiry by attacking its second-in-command, detective inspector Alan Jones. According to Hanrahan, Rees even contemplated planting illegal drugs in his car and having him arrested for possession. Rees denied this.\n\nWhen murder inquiry boss, detective superintendent Douglas Campbell, gave evidence, he admitted that Fillery's actions had effectively sabotaged the investigation. But it was comments about Daniel Morgan's contact with the media just before his murder that really reverberated. Campbell revealed that Daniel had been talking about blowing the whistle on police corruption in south-east London. June Tweedie tried to explore with the senior officer whether this perhaps was the motive for the murder.\n\nTweedie: \"Did you find anything relevant to the demise of Daniel Morgan?\"\n\nCampbell: \"I could find no evidence at all. It was a suggestion that he had a story to sell to a newspaper. I spoke to the other persons concerned. I even went to the newspaper but if I told you what he was offered you would see it was quite ludicrous. He was alleged to have been offered \u00a3250,000 per story.\"\n\nTweedie: \"I am not so interested in offers by newspapers.\"\n\nCampbell: \"All I will say, Madam, is that we looked in all directions to try and substantiate that and we could not.\"\n\nAt this point Sir Montague Levine brought the line of questioning to a halt. The name of the newspaper(s) and the persons Campbell spoke to during his murder inquiry have never been revealed. Campbell is now retired but he declined to be interviewed.\n\nA verdict of unlawful killing was recorded at the inquest.\n\nDaniel Morgan did have good contacts in the media. At the _Daily Mirror_ he knew a number of reporters including Anton Antonowicz and the _Mirror_ 's then political editor, Alastair Campbell.\n\nAntonowicz was helpful and remembered meeting Morgan on several occasions, some of them in a pub behind the newspaper, affectionately known as The Stab in the Back. Campbell, however, was less forthcoming. He was still prime minister Tony Blair's head of spin when we approached him. He wrote back saying the name Daniel Morgan \"rang a bell\", but it would be \"a waste of time\" to meet.\n\nDaniel had also provided information to _Private Eye_. But what was more interesting was his work in 1986, a year before the murder, for the BBC. The legal department had hired him to find witnesses to defend a crucial libel case brought by two Tory MPs who'd featured prominently in a _Panorama_ documentary called \"Maggie's Militant Tendency\". A senior BBC source confirms Morgan was hired to locate and interview Conservative Party members who were in Berlin on an official delegation with Neil Hamilton MP. The _Panorama_ expos\u00e9 of right-wing extremism in the Tory ranks alleged that during the Berlin visit Hamilton goose-stepped and gave a mock Hitler salute, an illegal act in Germany at the time. Hamilton and other right-wing Tory MPs denied this and sued the BBC with the support of powerful elements in the party hierarchy and funding from the maverick billionaire, James Goldsmith.\n\nBefore caving in, the BBC had robustly defended the programme. They instructed Morgan to find any witnesses who may have been \"got at\" and persuaded to keep silent about that night in Berlin.\n\nIt is likely Southern Investigation's involvement with the BBC would have attracted the attention of MI5 or its freelance contractors working for the Conservative Party. Around this time, Daniel Morgan's car was burgled and his offices broken into.\n\nBut would any of this \u2013 from moonlighting cops to silenced Tory witnesses \u2013 really have attracted a media price tag of \u00a3250,000? It's unlikely. To earn that much from Fleet Street, Daniel Morgan had to have been on to something very big.\n\nOne south London detective called Derek Haslam believes he was. According to Haslam, Daniel's best contact in the south London police was detective constable Alan \"Taffy\" Holmes. He illegally obtained police information for Southern Investigations. But Haslam claims Taffy Holmes and Daniel were getting ready to blow the whistle just before the private detective was killed. At the time of the murder, Taffy Holmes was serving on the Brinks Mat investigation. He killed himself four months after Daniel's death. At the time of his suicide he was being investigated for corruption.\n\nThese two deaths, at first sight, appear unconnected. But Haslam says you can't understand either in isolation. \"Those who kept the two deaths separate never wanted to know the truth.\"\n\n## [6\n\nThe Suicide Club](contents.html#ch06)\n\nThe ceremonial funeral of detective constable Alan 'Taffy' Holmes was a beautifully orchestrated police occasion. The coffin was draped in the force flag with a good conduct medal placed on top. His body was then carried to the chapel by a Scotland Yard guard of honour, a distinction normally reserved for officers killed on duty.\n\nHundreds of officers were given time off on full pay to go to the burial at Croydon cemetery in south London on 11 August 1987. Inside the chapel and down by the graveside were dozens of floral wreaths to Taffy Holmes. The dedication on one gave particular expression to the official line on his police record and tragic death. Taffy Holmes, it said, was \"a shining light\" to what a police officer should be.\n\nIt fell to detective chief superintendent Brian Boyce to give the superbly crafted funeral oration. Taffy was one of his officers on the Brinks Task Force when he died. The oration was precision engineered to stimulate the tear ducts of everyone inside the chapel, and all those hearing the saccharine tribute outside on loudspeaker. Boyce described his departed officer as \"a man who had a face as hard as granite, but a heart as soft and vulnerable as a butterfly.\"\n\nThe following morning crime correspondents added their own moving descant to the _missa solemnis_. The funeral was no less than \"a hero's send off\" befitting \"a man with 26 years of unblemished police service\" and 16 commendations, readers were told.\n\nBut these were spray-on pieties, part of a carefully mustered bodyguard of disinformation. It looked like the deliberate intention behind this was to cast a shroud around the corrupt activities of south London detectives and distract attention from an explosive crisis growing at the highest levels in the Yard and inside the on-going Brinks Mat robbery investigation.\n\nTaffy Holmes did not have an honourable record. Far from being a good detective with long and unblemished service, Taffy was bent. So bent that some of his police colleagues openly joked that the undertaker wouldn't be able to straighten him out long enough to nail down the coffin lid. Many believed he had killed himself rather than face up to his corrupt activities and name names. The uncomfortable fact excised from all the floral tributes was that in the four months leading up to his death Taffy Holmes was at the heart of one of the most serious \u2013 and most mismanaged \u2013 internal corruption investigations in Scotland Yard history.\n\n\"I don't wish to speak ill of the dead. But what was going on around Taffy seriously affected the Yard, and it was covered up. Taffy was no detective \u2013 he could never solve a crime. At best he was just a makeweight, someone who liked to attach himself to other detectives and make himself busy running errands, talking to informants in pubs and buying them drinks, lots of drinks, which he could then charge against expenses,\" says Derek Haslam, the detective who triggered the corruption probe. Taffy was \"the tribe scrounger\", a man always at the ready to obtain cheap booze and free food for police social occasions whether they were promotion piss-ups or a leaving do.\n\nAs the master of the Manor of Bensham Masonic Lodge in Croydon, Taffy used his position to keep in with Yard bosses, an incredible number of whom were also \"on the square\". But behind the funny handshakes and confused homoeroticism of Freemasonry, Taffy had a hidden agenda. He liked to earn out of these occasions by obliging people to buy tickets when the invitations were free. \"His god was money and he was on the lookout for it all the time,\" explains Haslam. Taffy, he says, had an exaggerated need for money because he was leading several lives.\n\n\"One moment he was at home with his wife and their two adopted children. The next he was off on a lengthy assignment, which he pretended was an unavoidable part of his detective duties. In reality the assignment was often with his lover, Jean Burgess, the ex-wife of a well-known south London criminal called Henry 'Chick' Burgess \u2013 whom Taffy also knew. The two sweethearts loved nothing more than marathon drinking sessions followed by meals in places that cost serious money,\" recalls Haslam.\n\nThe affair continued throughout Taffy's secondment from the Flying Squad to the Brinks Mat Task Force. His \"scrounging\" introduced him to the shallow end of 1980s police corruption to which Yard bosses turned a blind eye. Things like padding overtime, fiddling expenses, borrowing police vehicles for private use, obtaining free drink and meals. These peccadilloes are known in the lingua franca of police corruption as \"eating grass\". But before he died it was seeping out that Taffy had also abused his position in other meatier ways, much more than taking money off private detectives like Danny Morgan to do checks on the police national computer for a criminal record and other confidential information.\n\nBrinks Mat detective Michael Charman was one of several who wondered how a lazy alcoholic like Taffy had managed to stay on the Brinks Task Force for so long. Charman and Taffy met infrequently but he remembers one encounter in the summer of 1987 that signified Taffy's corruption had graduated to the carnivorous big league; big enough perhaps to know of a story worth \u00a3250,000.\n\n\"He didn't usually speak to people like me,\" recalls Charman. \"He was part of the set we christened 'The Gentlemen's Drinking Club'. As lazy as they were well connected they spent much of the morning discussing where they were going to have lunch; how long they could make it last and how much they would drink. One day I met him on the fire escape. He came straight up to me and said something strange and disturbing. 'Boyo,' he said, 'don't you ever take a penny from the likes of Kenny Noye.' From his choice of words and the look on his face there was only one way you could interpret the remark. He was speaking from experience.\"\n\nNoye was already serving a 14-year sentence for laundering the gold bullion when Taffy told Charman this. The Brinks Task Force was preparing for the bigger trial of Michael Relton and other key players in the so-called Gold Conduit. The Yard was concerned about the adverse effect any internal investigations into alleged police corruption would have on this and other forthcoming Brinks trials, and indeed earlier convictions.\n\nThis concern would also affect the way the anti-corruption investigations were conducted and their results made public. This is especially true of the corruption probe into Taffy and his friend and fellow Freemason, commander Ray Adams, who was under investigation by CIB2 for an alleged improper relationship with Noye and other criminals from the southside of the Thames.\n\nJust before he killed himself Taffy told his partner, detective sergeant John Davidson, that he planned to kill Haslam, who he believed had comprehensively betrayed him to CIB2. Davidson almost certainly passed the information on. It was one of a number of threats Haslam had received, leading him to sell the family home.\n\nTaffy, gun in hand, did come looking for Haslam but discovered the family had suddenly moved with no forwarding address. An anxious neighbour called the police. But Taffy was never arrested for threats to kill. Nor was he offered psychiatric counselling or time off. A few of his former colleagues we spoke to believe his suicide was an outcome some in the Yard might even have welcomed.\n\nOn 28 July 1987 Alan \"Taffy\" Holmes could take no more. Inside his south London home he wrote a suicide note to the wife, loaded his shotgun and stepped into the garden. He turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger. The weapon fell neatly at his feet beside the suicide note. The man with the butterfly heart was dead. He was 44 years old.\n\nRigor mortis had hardly set in before the cover-up began. In a flurry of hurried phone calls and crisis meetings Yard chiefs decided Taffy Holmes' death would be passed off as the poisoned outgrowth of a tangled personal life, an act of desperation born of a fear his wife would find out something the Yard was well aware she already knew \u2013 that Taffy was having an affair with gangster's moll Jean Burgess.\n\nThe Police Complaints Authority made an unusual statement the day after the suicide, which added to the Yard's woes. The PCA revealed for the first time that Commander Ray Adams was Taffy's friend and the watchdog had been for several months supervising a CIB2 inquiry into his relationship with Noye.\n\nA few days later the _People_ splashed with a headline that screamed, \"YARD BOSS AND THE BULLION CROOK\". It went on to detail how days after Taffy's death CIB2 investigators interviewed Noye in prison about his informant relationship with Commander Adams.\n\nIt didn't take long for Fleet Street to realise that the PCA was also supervising another corruption probe by South Yorkshire police into suspended Brinks chief superintendent Tony Lundy. Like Adams, it concerned a supposedly crooked relationship with a major criminal informant. The _News of the World_ had its own exclusive, one of several scoops rooted in reporter Alex Marunchak's access to Taffy's corrupt circle of friends. \"COP KILLED HIMSELF TO SAVE PALS IN THE MASONS \u2013 YARD MEN'S FURY\", ran the headline. A senior officer, the reporter revealed, had made a formal complaint against CIB2, in effect accusing the anti-corruption squad of driving Taffy Holmes to his death.\n\nIt was clear then that the troubled detective had a story to tell. The newspapers were already excited by the Brinks Mat story \u2013 the robbery of the century \u2013 and the hint of corruption surrounding it. They would have paid handsomely for a confessional interview by Taffy Holmes. Was this the story he and Danny Morgan hawked around Fleet Street?\n\nWhatever the case, the situation concerning Taffy Holmes was in danger of spiralling out of control for Scotland Yard. But a perfect opportunity presented itself to the spin-doctors. On 3 August a new commissioner, Peter Imbert, was sworn in. At the press conference he pledged to root out corruption and emphasised to the press pack that Taffy was \"not in any way suspected of any wrongdoing\".\n\nThe lobbying for a ceremonial funeral, a powerful vehicle of both internal reassurance and external image management, followed the new commissioner's investiture. Judicious leaks to tame journalists focused on how bad it would look to the rank and file if the top man did not bestow such an honour.\n\nImbert had talked tough about dirty cops. Corrupt Freemason officers would also be thoroughly investigated, he pledged. The new commissioner was seen as a reformer, albeit one who had come from the shadowy counter-subversive world of Special Branch, the arresting arm of MI5. But those close to him and far from hostile believe he let himself be bounced into conceding the ceremonial burial of Taffy Holmes, thereby concealing the truth about his death.\n\nOnce the nature of the funeral had been agreed, Yard crisis managers came up with a parallel wheeze. They needed to ensure that Jean Burgess, the other woman and ex-wife of a still active south London gangster, would not attend the public occasion. Jean played along but sent an anonymous wreath. She dedicated it, \"To you from me \u2013 thinking of you always\".\n\nThe Yard discreetly laid on an unusual, semi-official wake immediately after the funeral in one of Taffy's favourite pubs, the Prince of Wales in Thornton Heath. The publican was an active member of the same Masonic lodge. This was Jean's turn to be the grieving \"widow\" while the real Mrs Holmes was kept away. It was doubles all round as 50 officers, including senior ones, came straight from the cemetery to call last orders on the dead detective.\n\nTaffy's suicide note attacked CIB2 for driving him to wrap his guts around a shotgun, but also specifically accused Haslam of betrayal. Taffy denounced him for doing \"a Serpico\", a reference to the New York cop who in the 1970s exposed his corrupt colleagues to a newspaper after his bosses turned a blind eye.\n\nExtracts of the suicide note were leaked to the press, who wrongly branded Haslam as the man who'd invited Taffy for a game of golf, got him talking about corruption and secretly taped him.\n\nHaslam, then 40, had already been forced to relocate his family. But his situation was becoming more dangerous as police officers all over London discussed his supposed treachery. It is one of those paradoxes of police culture that an officer who develops a top quality informant to put away gangsters is a hero, but if that same officer grasses on corrupt colleagues he is, to use the vernacular, \"lower than whale shit\". Haslam believed his life could still be at risk either from corrupt cops or their criminal allies. CIB2 officers concurred, he says, and urged him to hide away with his wife and four children. The press even claimed there was a contract on his life.\n\nWhile in hiding Haslam had plenty of time to review the situation he found himself in. What was he achieving by lying low every day while his reputation was being traduced in police canteens all over London? He resolved to break cover and attend Taffy's funeral. There was a genuine desire to pay his last respects to a friend and fellow Freemason. And since Haslam's own reputation mattered to him every bit as much as his safety, he didn't want cops to think he had anything to be ashamed of.\n\nThe Yard bosses had other ideas. Haslam knew too much and could thwart their self-serving efforts to construct a sanitised narrative of Taffy's death without any references to the internal corruption probe, Brinks Mat and commander Adams. So they made him an offer they thought he wouldn't refuse. An attractive senior woman officer he used to know and who was now working for CIB2 offered him lunch at an Italian restaurant to take his mind off the Judas rumours at work. The lunch date would by happy coincidence clash with the funeral.\n\nThe Sicilians say assassins come with smiles. Haslam knew lunch with a comely CIB officer could comprehensively finish off his reputation, especially if a newspaper photographer just happened to be passing by. A canny man who could spot an elephant trap, even when it was disguised as a free lunch, he passed on the fungi e fagioli, but also stayed away from the funeral.\n\nA few days later, Haslam began the lengthy process of telling his side of the Taffy Holmes tragedy in a series of interviews with commander Thelma Wagstaff. She had been appointed to investigate the complaint against CIB2's handling of the internal corruption probe as well as the circumstances behind the detective's death.\n\nIt was a classic Yard farce. A new internal investigation was looking into an on-going internal corruption probe, which was looking into even older allegations against a senior officer. Commander Wagstaff was investigating a superior, the CIB2 boss, deputy assistant commissioner Peter Winship. He, in turn, was investigating commander Ray Adams, his Masonic friend Taffy Holmes and links to south-east London gangsters like Kenny Noye.\n\nWagstaff was certainly up to the job. She had worked her way through the male-dominated detective branch, serving on the drugs squad. She was also the highest-ranking woman officer in the country after her promotion in September 1986 to commander. As the chair of the Yard's working party on rape, Wagstaff had revolutionised the investigation of this crime and introduced so-called rape suites for victims to be debriefed in relaxed surroundings. She was highly respected by certain key male officers and tipped as a contender to become the Yard's first ever woman commissioner.\n\nWhen she took up the assignment Wagstaff knew little about the background to the CIB2 corruption inquiry, its roots in the Brinks Mat robbery and the tangle of accusations and counter accusations around Kenneth Noye, his Masonic connections and friends in high places in the Kent police and Scotland Yard.\n\nHowever, she was very familiar with commander Ray Adams, who just recently had mysteriously replaced her in an important post.\n\nIn February 1987, five months before the suicide, Thelma Wagstaff's police career was in the ascendant. She was given a prestigious and highly sensitive position as the head of the criminal intelligence branch, SO11. In other words, Wagstaff was to be the officer in sole charge of the Yard's entire intelligence gathering on major villains and the network of those among them who secretly double as police informers.\n\nThe previous incumbent, commander Phil Corbett, had vacated the post and later left the Yard in anger over the failure to discipline DI Peter Atkins for his unauthorised _liaison dangereuse_ with Michael Relton. Corbett was also agitated by the malign influence of Freemasonry in the force and bemoaned what sources say was the internal sabotage of an earlier inquiry into the Brotherhood.\n\nOn her appointment, Wagstaff was told there were two extraordinary reasons why she got the job: one because she was beyond reproach, the other because it was essential that the head of intelligence was in no way beholden to the Masonic network. For years Freemasons had honeycombed the upper tiers of the Yard and granted favours and preferential promotion to brother officers who swore secret oaths with rolled-up trouser legs. Wagstaff's gender discounted her as a possible Mason. It was therefore highly unlikely she would do any favours for this mafia of the mediocre inside the Yard. Her sponsors knew this and appeared to push her appointment as a way of breaking with the past.\n\nUnfortunately commander Wagstaff was not allowed to remain as head of SO11 for very long. By mid-afternoon on the very day of her appointment she had been replaced. Much to her amazement the new head of criminal intelligence was Ray Adams, a man with the most extensive and well-known Masonic connections.\n\nSeveral months later, when Wagstaff was appointed to investigate the whole murky affair surrounding Taffy's suicide, she could have been forgiven for thinking her new assignment was karma.\n\nHaslam explained to commander Wagstaff how he met Taffy in south London when they were both relatively young recruits, how they'd often gone drinking together and how Taffy had introduced him to the Freemasons early in 1987. Repeatedly Haslam underlined his co-operation with the CIB2 corruption probe, but pointed out he had never secretly taped Taffy for them.\n\nInitially, Wagstaff's view of Derek Haslam was highly coloured by the \"Serpico\" taunt. It seemed at first glance that Haslam was an unhelpful troublemaker who had deliberately, and with tragic consequences, set out to stir the pot. But when the cross checking began and Haslam repeatedly offered to take a lie detector test, he saw her view change.\n\nIn one of the early sessions Haslam took her step-by-step through the origins of the CIB2 corruption probe into Adams.\n\nIt began in February 1987 with a middle-ranking drug dealer called Raymond Gray. He was linked to a violent south London gang led by a man called John Crittendon. Police intelligence in turn linked Crittendon, a dog track owner, to the notorious Richardson brothers who had extensive business interests in south-east London and also to crime figures in the United States.\n\nGray lived in Shirley, south London, very near both Taffy Holmes and commander Adams. Press attention at the time was drawn to the commander's mock-Tudor house called Wildacre. His \u00a3450,000 home was situated in what locals in Shirley call Millionaire's Row. The rising star in the police firmament had bought it in the late seventies with his wife, who it was said was independently wealthy and owned a local boutique. They also owned a \u00a3100,000 villa in Portugal, one newspaper revealed.\n\nHaslam had arrested Gray for supplying three kilos of speed. He turned informant in return for a letter to the judge mentioning his co-operation with the police. Gray provided good quality information. But over five lengthy taped interviews with Haslam, revealed here for the first time, he also discussed his experiences of police corruption.\n\nGray alleged \"that the gang he dealt with had access to police records and criminal intelligence records via a corrupt police officer of substantial rank at New Scotland Yard\". He also claimed he had met the as yet unidentified senior officer who was connected to the Yard's Central Drug Squad.\n\nHaslam transferred in April 1987 to the Serious Crime Squad at Tottenham Court Road police station because they were already investigating the Crittendon gang as part of a wider investigation, called The Collection Plan, of London drug crime syndicates. Haslam's worry was that with insider knowledge from someone of substantial rank the gangsters would anticipate every move he intended to make.\n\nHaslam and another officer agreed to tape-record a final interview with Gray on 9 April at 3pm. \"[It was] a final attempt to discover the identity of the corrupt police officer he had stated he had met. During the course of this fifth interview without any prompting he mentioned Ray Adams' name in connection with corruption back in 1973.\"\n\nThe tape was played to a senior member of the Brinks Task Force. Then CIB2 was called in to investigate commander Adams under PCA supervision. The allegations were two-fold. Firstly, that when Adams was working as a detective chief superintendent on the Regional Crime Squad in the seventies he and other south London detectives were on the take from local criminals. The second allegation emanated from Adams' relationship with his one-time registered informant Kenny Noye. One newspaper suggested that Adams cultivated Noye in 1977 when he was arrested for receiving stolen goods.\n\nCommander Adams was not on the Brinks Task Force but he had featured in an intriguing way. When Boyce was cross-examined in the Noye murder trial he revealed that the Kent gangster had offered him a \u00a31 million bribe. Boyce also told the jury that Noye mentioned Ray Adams as someone who would give him a good reference. His actual words were, \"You ask Ray Adams. He will tell you that I am not a violent man or a killer.\"\n\nAs the allegations against Adams in the Gray tapes were imprecise, the informant was re-interviewed by CIB2 at Tintagel House. Meanwhile Adams, by now the head of SO11, suffered the indignity of having to present himself to CIB2 to be served with official notification that he was subject to an investigation.\n\nThe _Daily Express_ later revealed this was not the first time Adams had been quizzed by anti-corruption investigators \u2013 the Porn Squad inquiry in the seventies had spoken to him, it claimed. The _People_ brought things right up to date, informing its readers how CIB2 investigators were speaking to two judges concerning \"mercy plea\" letters Adams had written on behalf of two unnamed defendants.\n\nHaslam told Wagstaff he had been meeting Taffy Holmes and Jean Burgess for drinks throughout the initial stages of the CIB2 investigation. He was trying to keep Taffy out of the firing line after his friend had told him he was \"good friends\" with Adams. But when Taffy asked for copies of the Gray tapes for Adams, and made \"veiled threats\", Haslam says he decided to tell CIB2, without naming Taffy. He was unaware they had already identified him after a tip-off from another officer.\n\nWhen CIB2 looked into Taffy's background they discovered he had started his affair with Jean Burgess, a local barmaid, in 1979. His marriage was sexless and he was sleeping downstairs. During one meeting, Haslam says Taffy asked if he would meet with Adams. Instead Haslam reported the approach to CIB2 and offered to go in to the commander wearing a wire. Haslam takes up the story.\n\n\"I continued to meet Taffy socially and through work. On one occasion I was having a meal with him in an Indian restaurant along with Jean Burgess. Taffy stated that if I did not co-operate with Adams harm might befall me, or a member of my family. He told me Adams had powerful friends. He went on to tell me Adams knew everything the inquiry was doing. He even knew that CIB2 officers had had his house photographed from the air by police helicopter.\n\n\"Jean Burgess then told Taffy that if any harm came to me or my family because of Adams she would go to CIB2 and tell them about the money she had paid to Adams over the years on behalf of her husband. She went on to say that she had even paid him out on his own doorstep on behalf of her ex-husband. She made other comments about Adams which left me in no doubt that she knew Adams was corrupt.\"\n\nThe CIB officers were aghast at what Haslam told them and in early June asked him to deliver a message to Taffy that it was time for him to come clean if he wanted to avoid arrest. \"When I told him he seemed shocked and depressed but said he had been expecting something to happen. He told me that he believed he had been photographed meeting with Henry Burgess and Ray Adams in Jean Burgess's back garden a few weeks before.\"\n\nAfter he passed on the message Haslam had a secret rendezvous with CIB2 that evening and made a statement of what had happened. He advised that CIB2 go easy on Taffy. \"I told them beneath his tough exterior he was in fact a weak man and could not cope with stress.\" Haslam also considered Jean Burgess the key. \"I said if you play it right, Jean will give you all the evidence you need. I stressed that if Jean thought she was helping Taffy, she would give them Adams.\"\n\nHaslam believes CIB2 ignored his warnings and steamed into Taffy. He feels that Taffy was deliberately encouraged to believe that he had been secretly tape-recorded by Haslam, when CIB2 knew this to be untrue.\n\nSimilarly, in place of the softly, softly approach to Jean, like butchers performing heart surgery, the anti-corruption squad arrested her on suspicion of corruption. The arrest was used to put pressure on Taffy to talk and Haslam believes his friend did start to tell CIB2 about his corrupt dealings and associates inside and outside the police.\n\nAccording to Haslam's affidavit, CIB2 told him that as a result of things Taffy had told them about Adams they were in the position to obtain a warrant for the commander's arrest.\n\nCIB2 would also need the evidence of Taffy's lover. But for Jean Burgess it was too much. When her solicitor arrived she refused to make a statement. Her ex-husband, Chick Burgess, apparently threatened to blow her head off if she opened her mouth. Haslam already suspected the anti-corruption squad was a very leaky ship but now he started to sense \"a cover-up at the highest level\".\n\nThis, then, is the story Derek Haslam told commander Thelma Wagstaff over the late summer and autumn of 1987. She recommended he take time off work.\n\nIn early 1988, with the Holmes inquest approaching, Haslam returned to work. He was told that for his own safety he should not return to detective duties but to a prosecution support unit at Norbury Police Station. There he worked with detectives like Duncan Hanrahan, who says he was feeding information back to Adams. One morning Haslam found an anonymous hand-written message on his desk. \"You Judas rat. You're fucking dead.\"\n\nIn British police culture in the 1980s it was unthinkable that a police officer could talk directly and honestly to the press about corruption without fear of recrimination. Police regulations and canteen culture saw to that, concerns for their pensions and the Official Secrets Act took care of any floaters. Also, there was no independent system a courageous officer could go to. This was not an oversight but part of an arrangement between the police and the Home Office that for Scotland Yard at least, self-regulation was best all round.\n\nAccordingly, in March 1988 Derek Haslam's best chance for the truth to emerge was the long postponed inquest into the death of Taffy Holmes. \"Although I did not like the idea of having to call fellow officers liars in a courtroom full of press, I would do so if needed. The public were entitled to know the truth and politics should not come into it,\" Haslam wrote in a statement taken before the Holmes inquest.\n\nAs ever, the Yard had other ideas. Commander Thelma Wagstaff's responsibilities extended to preparing the inquest into Taffy Holmes' death. As one of the last people to see him alive, Haslam had vital information about the dead man's state of mind and the factors that had really brought about his death. Furthermore, he had also been named and blamed in the suicide note.\n\nAll this should have secured Haslam's presence at the inquest \u2013 his last hope of finding a forum to clear his name. \"I asked when her enquiry was finished if my name would be cleared. She replied that the resulting report would be forwarded to commissioner Imbert for him to take what action he saw fit. She assured me there would not be any cover-up on her part; however, she said that I had to be realistic as regards what he decided to do having received her report. She intimated that politics might well come into it, but that would be beyond her control.\"\n\nAs the Yard was hogtied to the lie that Taffy Holmes was not under investigation at the time of his death, Haslam says Wagstaff told him that \"domestic reasons\" for the suicide would be put forward at the inquest. His appearance would therefore \"make things awkward\" and he wouldn't be called. \"I decided that if commander Wagstaff was prepared to make reference [in the inquest] to the fact that I had not tape-recorded or tricked Taffy into confessing things I would be partly satisfied,\" says Haslam.\n\nWhile he kept his part of the deal and stayed away from the inquest, the Yard cynically broke its promise to him. The management of mendacity also extended to ensuring that the full suicide note never saw the light of day. The coroner said it would \"upset too many people\".\n\nWith the suicide note buried and Haslam out of the way, the inquest heard evidence of DC Alan Holmes' years of unblemished service, but that he had been having an affair he feared was about to be disclosed to his wife.\n\nThis was nonsense, says Haslam. \"I knew the real reason [for his suicide] was that it was the only way out for him not to have to give evidence as regards commander Adams, a fellow Mason.\" Not only was the inquest \"a total whitewash\", it was \"stage-managed\", says Haslam. \"No denial was ever made by commander Wagstaff that I had tricked Taffy into confessing and tape-recorded the conversation.\"\n\nOn 14 March 1988 the coroner recorded a verdict of suicide. He suggested Taffy Holmes' mind must have been in \"turmoil\" over his family and future in the police.\n\nCommander Thelma Wagstaff finished her investigation into the death of Taffy Holmes and wrote a scorching report, which was ready for publication soon after the inquest. Holmes, she felt, had been thrown to the wolves and Haslam was also treated very shabbily. The corruption inquiry into commander Adams, she had come to believe, was pitiful. The investigative resources were spread too thin; the will and skill levels were too low. There was widespread leaking. The Wagstaff report also recommended that because of the poor management of the CIB2 inquiry, its head, deputy assistant commissioner Peter Winship, should be moved sideways, while his number two, deputy chief superintendent David Banks, should be denied a promotion for which he had only just been selected.\n\nCertainly CIB2's behaviour towards Haslam was very strange. First they tried to keep him away from the funeral with a honeytrap lunch invitation. Then, Haslam reveals, the anti-corruption squad undermined Gray's credibility by speaking to his doctor, who subsequently wrote a report saying his patient was \"deranged\" and a drug user. Finally, when Wagstaff interviewed CIB2 officers for her inquiry, one denied asking Haslam to pass any ultimatum to Taffy Holmes.\n\nWhen Wagstaff interviewed detectives from the Brinks Mat Task Force they too closed ranks \"to avoid adverse publicity which might lead to acquittals in subsequent trials\", says Haslam. The trial of Brinks Mat money launderer Michael Relton, a man who had acted as an interface between criminals and crooked cops, was due to start one month after the inquest, and at the same time as the Daniel Morgan inquest. The Morgan family wouldn't discover until much later the links between the two deaths.\n\nThe temptation or pressure on those who carry out internal investigations to delay and downplay the results until the timing suits the many other priorities of the police should not be underestimated. The repercussions of an ill-timed internal inquiry can cost a multi-million pound prosecution and lead to negative headlines and a loss of public confidence.\n\nIt was not surprising, therefore, that soon after submitting her report commander Wagstaff was ordered to re-write it. Two very senior retired Scotland Yard detectives close to the Brinks inquiry confirm this. It was not the first and would certainly not be the last time that the Yard nobbled a problematic report that exposed the shortcomings of self-regulation.\n\nWagstaff complied with the order to re-draft her report, to a degree. But it galled her. She left the police a few years later.\n\nIn January 1990, Scotland Yard told commander Adams he would be cleared of the Noye bribery allegations and those made by drug dealer and police informant Raymond Gray.\n\nThe PCA-supervised CIB2 inquiry had produced 44 volumes of documents including 125 statements. However, neither the public nor parliament could know the contents of the report and therefore had to rely on the Yard's word that no evidence was found to justify a criminal prosecution.\n\nNo one stopped to ask how the CIB2 inquiry could ever be relied on when the two senior officers running it had been severely criticised for their stewardship and competence, at least in the early draft of the Wagstaff review. Commander Adams, however, told the _Sunday Times_ that CIB2's efforts were \"very thorough and rigorous\" but it was time to get on with his career.\n\nAdams had not been suspended during the 30 months it took the internal investigation to conclude. He was eventually moved sideways from his highly sensitive and operational role as head of criminal intelligence to a non-operational post. By the time he was cleared, Adams had for some time been working in the Yard's own inspectorate, the force's quality assurance division. It was an odd appointment for someone under investigation for serious corruption allegations. But then Adams had a different take. He told reporters that the very fact he was still in such \"an important job\" meant he would not face any disciplinary action either. He didn't.\n\nAdams claimed to us that Haslam had a vendetta against him and was \"on a mission to bring about [his] downfall\". He added that the root of all this was a fatal car accident back in 1977.\n\nContinuing his vendetta theory, Adams claimed Haslam befriended Taffy Holmes to get dirt on him. \"I told Taffy to tell CIB2 everything. Taffy knew nothing about me. Taffy could say nothing about me.\"\n\nAdams denied having an unauthorised secret meeting with Holmes on a golf course that backed onto his home. He said he was walking his dog and bumped into Taffy who used to go shooting on the golf course. The conversation was limited to warning Taffy to be careful because the dog was off its lead.\n\nAdams admitted he had considerable influence over Taffy and regrets he was unable to counsel the troubled detective and fellow Mason into not killing himself. Adams was on holiday in the immediate period leading up to Taffy Holmes' death. He revealed that Taffy had tried to contact him and believes that if they had spoken he could have prevented the suicide.\n\nThe CIB2 inquiry had investigated claims that Adams had once gone on an earlier holiday with armed robber Chick Burgess and his then wife Jean. Adams told us it was a coincidence that he and Burgess were booked into the same Spanish resort. \"I approached Burgess [on the beach] and said, 'Fuck off, you've embarrassed me.'\" When he returned to work Adams said he told his boss and wrote a report. \"My relationship with Burgess was entirely professional,\" he insisted.\n\nAdams also talked about his relationship with his informant Kenny Noye. Enigmatically, he referred to being \"asked to do something [during the Brinks investigation] at a senior level\" soon after Noye had been arrested for the Fordham murder. Adams said it was an assistant commissioner at the Yard who had asked him and he now \"regrets\" doing it because it led to his aggravation with CIB2.\n\nAdams is more than likely referring to his secret meeting with Noye sanctioned by the Home Office and said to have taken place in the cells at Lambeth Magistrates Court. Noye was asked to help locate the gold bullion. What the _quid pro quo_ was is not clear. At the very least, presumably Noye was offered some deal with regard to the murder charge he was facing.\n\nIt was during this secret meeting that the bribery allegations emerged. Noye, it was suggested, had offered Adams a large payment if he helped corrupt the Brinks investigation. When CIB2 later interviewed Noye in prison, Adams said his informant gave him \"a clean bill of health\". And although both men were Masons, Adams said he was not in the same lodge as Noye and had left the Brotherhood before he even knew Noye was \"on the square\".\n\nAlthough Ray Adams was never suspended, charged or disciplined over any of these allegations the rising star would never be promoted beyond commander. Nor did he ever again hold as sensitive a post as head of criminal intelligence. Adams remained a controversial figure in and outside the Yard. Not least because he was soon back in the limelight over, among other things, his professional relationship with informant David Norris and with south-east London criminals linked to the murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993. Adams left the police that year with a bad back after 31 years' service.\n\nScotland Yard fixed the Taffy Holmes inquest and rather than protect their whistle-blower cop, Derek Haslam, they allowed him to be portrayed as a hate figure, an unhinged traitor and malcontent. Yard bosses rallied to the defence of a man, Taffy Holmes, who they knew or ought to have known was corrupt. Meanwhile the signal sent out to other officers thinking of blowing the whistle was \u2013 DON'T.\n\nAs a result of his treatment by the Yard, by CIB2 and his own colleagues, Haslam lost faith in the integrity of the police service to investigate itself. He also lost his own place in the world. Depressed and ill, Haslam was right to believe he had no further prospects in the police. Senior officers suggested he should seek medical retirement. He left in October 1989 on his 42nd birthday.\n\nToday he is still chain-smoking and very neatly dressed with his leather shoes shining to drill-ground specification. Haslam still hopes that someday soon Scotland Yard will own up to the extent of mid-eighties police corruption. \"I strongly believe that a grave chapter in Scotland Yard's history needs to be opened up to public scrutiny in order that lessons be learned and certain persons who once held high rank and abused their power be subject to public examination.\"\n\nHis experience gives the lie to the Yard's recent claim that it took its eye off the ball about corruption in the 1980s. The handling of the Taffy Holmes saga shows quite clearly the Yard turned a blind eye to corruption while pretending to do something about it.\n\nAlan \"Taffy\" Holmes was part of a corrupt network, a firm within a firm in south London, which Scotland Yard, for a variety of reasons, chose to ignore. It was the activities of this network we strongly suspect that Danny Morgan and Taffy Holmes were considering blowing the whistle on when they died within months of each other.\n\n## [7\n\nThe Ghost of David Norris](contents.html#ch07)\n\nIn Miami, the cocaine capital of America, the orgy of drug violence gripping Latin America in the late eighties was spilling onto the city's art deco streets. Brian de Palma set his gangster masterpiece, _Scarface_ , there. Cuban assassin Tony Montana, played by Al Pacino, had enough of washing dishes in a greasy diner across the road from the _narcos_ ' favourite nightclub, so he decided to strike out on his own. After a few contract killings for the local drug boss, Montana made his own moves on the street. \"Watch out,\" he swaggers, \"there's a new bad guy in town.\"\n\nA new breed of bad guy was also taking over in London and throughout the UK. These new faces were young and tuned in to drug culture. They moved seamlessly in the associated underground music and club scene both as users and abusers of those who didn't pay for their gear.\n\nBy the end of the eighties the criminal landscape was radically different. Kent, Essex and London were especially awash with good quality cocaine, ecstasy and skunk \u2013 a hydroponically grown powerful type of grass. It didn't take long for even the dumbest career villain to see that drug trafficking was safer and much more lucrative than armed robbery. The sentence was lighter and the time easier to do, especially if the large profits had been salted away or laundered through legitimate cash businesses.\n\nDistribution to the growing community of weekend ravers and other recreational drug users would soon take all the hassle out of scoring, with some gangs offering a home delivery service, organised through laptops and untraceable mobile phones. Some special customers even received Christmas cards signed with just a mobile number; let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.\n\nThis transformation of London's underworld was ironically eased by Scotland Yard's pursuit of the Brinks Mat robbers and their associates, which left a leadership vacuum in the east and south-east of London, traditionally the epicentre of villainy in the capital.\n\nThis hole in the criminal ozone layer was further widened in 1990 and 1991 by the fall of the Arif crime family, who'd usurped the Richardsons as the dominant gang in south-east London. Dogan Arif, the boss of the Turkish-Cypriot crime family, had gone down for nine years for his role in an \u00a38 million cannabis importation, which he still maintains was a police fit-up. His brothers Mehmet and Denis received hefty 18 and 22-year stretches respectively after they were caught in a sting operation attempting an armed robbery of a Securicor van carrying \u00a3700,000. The Arifs were also engaged during this period in a bloody tit-for-tat gang war with the Brindle brothers, which saw one soldier from each family shot dead by masked gunmen, one in a bookies, the other in a pub.\n\nInto this void stepped a number of organised crime syndicates and families who'd served their apprenticeships as armed robbers, enforcers and runners for the old school villainocracy of the seventies. Now they wanted to restructure the pecking order around drug trafficking.\n\nThe drug business can be likened to a privatised railway system in that the dominant syndicates or individuals control key parts of the track and therefore their own distribution network for the drugs they import. Alternatively, smaller criminals may come to them to rent out a part of the track for distributing drugs imported by others. Drug syndicates in different parts of the country also form temporary alliances to distribute one enormous importation, sometimes of several tons. Often a powerful syndicate will pay a \"tribute\" to another for moving drugs through its turf. Similarly, individual operators will pay a \"tax\" to the local dominant crime syndicate after carrying out \"a bit of work\" on their patch.\n\nThis is not to say the transformation of the British crime scene was without its turf wars. Crime syndicates battled for ascendancy in all four corners of the capital in the early nineties. The vast profits and greater opportunities to rip off \"associates\" was another cause of an increase in violence. Also, the greater ease with which the police could insert undercover officers at most points along the drug distribution chain or run informants inside syndicates created a climate of suspicion. This quickly turned to paranoid violence, especially if criminals were getting high on their own supply.\n\nThere were said to be 43 murders in south-east London by the end of 1991, a 100 per cent rise on the previous year. The hit on David Norris was arguably the most significant.\n\nA few minutes before 10 p.m. on Sunday night, 28 April 1991, David Norris turned the wheel of his Toyota into Regent Square. His young wife, Debbie, heard the jeep approach the driveway of their small home. Their two daughters were fast asleep. The square was otherwise quiet, an ideal suburban setting in Belvedere, Kent.\n\nThe previous month Norris had turned forty-six, and only two weeks earlier he and Debbie had celebrated their fifth wedding anniversary. She was also five months pregnant with twins.\n\nThe couple had known each other since the early eighties. They initially set up home in the Bermondsey area, living in a council flat overlooking Tower Bridge. David's dad was a retired coalman. His son officially described himself as a market trader. The job title was to some extent correct. But then deception and David Norris were always close bedfellows. Norris traded lorry-loads of stolen goods, some of which he thieved himself. He also traded drugs and one other valuable commodity \u2013 top quality information on the criminal Underworld. This he regularly sold to the police, making him one of Scotland Yard's most prolific informants.\n\nAs Norris parked in his drive, two men on a motorbike approached, cutting the silence with the sinister revving of their engine. The pillion rider was carrying a .38 calibre pistol. Norris knew exactly what it meant. He ran down the square away from his home, but was shot in the back. The assassins, one on the bike, the other on foot, gave chase. They caught him near a lamppost. Norris pleaded for his life and offered money. But the gunman was not moved and fired four more shots into his left forearm, chest, hand and head.\n\nNeighbours, who heard the commotion from their window, saw the two helmeted men speed off. Debbie came rushing out of the house. She cradled her dying husband, his blood staining her floral nightdress and his head lying on her pregnant stomach.\n\nAn article by Chester Stern, the former Met press officer turned _Mail on Sunday_ reporter, which appeared one week after the Norris murder, revealed what looked suspiciously like damage limitation by the Yard. The _Sun_ had already suggested an obvious motive, namely that the Underworld wanted Norris silenced because he was a grass. Stern, however, was briefed that a \"gangland mythology\" no less had developed around Norris, whom criminals mistakenly identified as one of the Yard's most important informants, when he wasn't.\n\nThe downplaying of Norris's role in the war on crime does not sit well with two of his former police handlers. They were both in contact with the prolific informant minutes before he died. Until now, they haven't spoken out.\n\nRetired detective Chris Simpson is a giant of a man with a \"hail fellow well met\" demeanour. He left the Yard six years after Norris's murder, having completed 30 years' service. He now works in the insurance investigation world.\n\nSimpson was the detective inspector in charge of a team at the South East Regional Crime Squad in East Dulwich. SERCS had various satellite offices across the greater London area and its detectives were on the front line of the fight against organised crime. The office at East Dulwich had a vast area of operation from the south and south-east inner city boroughs to the suburbs and borders of Kent, Sussex and Surrey.\n\nNorris had been their registered informant since about 1985, says Simpson. He explained how a SERCS detective called Ron Harrison first arrested Norris over a major shoe robbery and \"turned him\" into an informant. Before leaving the squad for another posting a few years later, Harrison passed Norris to a colleague on the same team called Terry Pattinson. Under Scotland Yard rules, to avoid corrupt relationships forming between informant and handler the \"grass\" remained the Yard's property and was therefore passed to a new handler before the old one left the squad. Pattinson passed Norris to Simpson in early 1989 and Simpson was Norris's handler until his violent death in April 1991.\n\nAn informant handler normally has a controller above him, who is more senior in rank and above all should hardly ever meet the informant. This way the controller can in theory at least dispassionately evaluate the credibility of the intelligence and the informant's motive for giving it. But by the time Simpson was handling Norris, a more relaxed informant system was operating at East Dulwich SERCS. Simpson was both Norris's handler and the controller who assessed his tip-offs and planned police operations around them. If the job was successful Simpson was also the detective who then recommended Norris for a reward and accompanied him to the Yard to be paid, usually thousands of pounds from a special Informants' Fund.\n\nNorris was \"the bizzo\", says Simpson sipping his pint, \"a top class informant. One of the top half dozen you could name over the last 20 to 30 years in London.\" In his time Norris provided tip-offs about lorry-loads of stolen gear, counterfeit currency, stolen artwork and drugs jobs, he adds. Their arrangement was worked out with clockwork efficiency, making Norris an indispensable member of the team.\n\n\"I was more or less the sole handler. At this time he was so prolific everyone on my team knew him. I would see him almost every day, five times a week,\" recalls Simpson. \"I'd ring him up on Monday morning and say, 'Anything happening this week, Dave?' And he'd say, 'No, but I'm seeing someone this afternoon. I'll give you a call.'\"\n\nWhen an informant is registered his handler gives him a pseudonym. Norris's was \"John Tracey\", says Simpson. This is thereafter used in any internal police correspondence, especially the informant's log, a confidential document that detectives must fill in soon after having any contact with their source. Simpson remembers travelling with Norris to a caf\u00e9 near Scotland Yard to meet assistant commissioner David Veness. There Norris signed a prepared receipt in his pseudonym and only then would Veness hand over the cash. Simpson says the largest amount he witnessed in one payment was about \u00a33,000, adding: \"He was so prolific it was almost as if he was up there every week.\"\n\nMost of the top brass at the Yard knew of Norris. And the overall head of the East Dulwich SERCS, a respected detective called Pat Fleming, kept a copy of Norris's informant logs at the central London headquarters. He was the senior officer to whom Simpson first sent the request for a recommended reward. Simpson is candid about how it was normal to inflate the figure and try to get the best deal for \"your man\". But Fleming would invariably revise the amount downwards, he says, smiling.\n\nWhere possible, detectives are supposed to meet their informant only with another colleague present. Clearly Simpson felt very comfortable with Norris because he says he would sometimes meet him alone and without seeking permission from a superior. This was certainly the case on the night of the murder.\n\nSimpson had arranged to meet at Norris's local pub, the Fox, in Belvedere, less than five minutes' drive from his house. They had said 8 p.m. but Simpson was running late and called Norris on his pager at about 7.50 to say he would be there in 40 minutes. When Simpson eventually arrived, over a few drinks they discussed the next week's business. Norris had put up some information about a robbery, Simpson recalls.\n\nAt a few minutes to ten they parted company. Norris drove home and Simpson headed for his mother's house in east Kent, where he was staying that night. \"I had taken the Monday off to install a burglar alarm,\" he explains.\n\nThe second detective who spoke to Norris on the night he was killed was detective constable Peter Bleksley. He co-handled Norris while he was an undercover officer attached to the Central Drug Squad. Blex's forte was posing as a ponytailed south-east London drug dealer. Being born and bred on the London\/Kent border, or \"Kenny Noye country\" as he calls it, helped his cover among the younger generation of drug dealers. Blex was very believable as one of the new bad guys in town, who could pull together a drug deal, knew good gear from bad, and if asked could build a spliff or rack up a few lines of Charlie (cocaine) to party with his prospective \"business associates\". But he was under no illusion how dangerous Norris could be.\n\nIn about 1986 Norris was starting to act like a \"loose cannon\", says Blex. \"If a lorry-load was stolen, Norris would earn from selling it on. He would then earn again by grassing to the police. They would pay him a reward. If there was bent old bill involved, he would earn a commission for recycling some of the recovered proceeds for them.\"\n\nBut \"he was putting up so much drug work\" the police officers he gave it to just couldn't turn it down, says Blex. \"Remember, these were the years when [US president] Ronnie Reagan was banging on about a War on Drugs.\"\n\nThe Home Office and Scotland Yard were slavishly following suit, refusing to see the drugs issue as anything but a supply problem. Tackle the drug dealers, problem solved. Consequently Whitehall threw millions at the police to fight this unwinnable war. And on this domestic battlefield, informants like David Norris were considered gold dust \u2013 the hidden tool that produced the drug seizures and arrests that satisfied the politicians who authorised the mandarins to release more money to the Yard.\n\nNorris, too, knew exactly his worth to Scotland Yard and its gung-ho detectives, many of whom were in awe of the informant's bottle and too stupid to see his double-dealing ways.\n\n\"There was obviously shit about to hit the fan,\" says Blex, \"so a protocol was drafted by the Yard to radically change the way Norris was used. It was decided that he would give all drug work to us on the Central Drug Squad based at the Yard and everything else he gave to the East Dulwich SERCS. The protocol meant that from then on we were supposed to let each other know if we were seeing Norris. But in practice this was an oft-breached protocol.\" Breached or not, the existence of the protocol made a mockery of the Yard's attempt immediately after Norris's murder to downplay his role as a major informant.\n\n\"At first Norris was handled at the Central Drug Squad by Tim Beer. Then because of my successes in informant handling and my UC status, I was introduced to him [as a co-handler]. Tim would see Norris a lot without me because I was busy on other undercover jobs,\" says Blex. In 1989, he left the drug squad for another posting. Norris was still providing quality information when Blex returned at the beginning of April 1991. Once again he co-handled Norris, this time with another officer.\n\nBlex had a unique relationship with Norris. He was reliant on him in a way that other handlers weren't. Norris not only provided the Central Drug Squad with information, he also introduced Blex into the crime syndicate as the undercover \"buyer\" of drugs on offer. Consequently, Blex and Norris would spend a lot of time together developing the cover story.\n\nBlex was surprised at how little Norris knew about the drugs business he was informing on. But then it was a sign of the times that career villains of his generation were diversifying into drug crime without having taken, handled or been around drugs previously.\n\nUCs take a huge risk when dealing with informants \u2013 the most slippery of all the cast of characters in the crime business. Even with armed back-up from a surveillance team, Blex still had to walk into a business meeting trusting that Norris hadn't sold him out for a better deal.\n\nUndoubtedly, informants like Norris also take huge risks but for dishonourable reasons. Norris knew the big rewards were in agreeing to be what is called \"the participating informant\", someone who must walk an incredibly difficult line between appearing to help other criminals carry out a crime without himself breaking the law or enticing them to do so.\n\nAlthough the payoff is high for being a participating informant the risk of getting caught is commensurate. For even the criminal with one brain cell will eventually work out, with some help from an astute lawyer, who the grass was. It's just a process of working backwards. Once you've identified the undercover officer the next question is who referenced him. In the drug business, suspicion alone of being a grass can get you killed or at the very least badly bashed up. Norris had \"a lot of front\" and loved the thrill. That's why Blex dubbed him a \"serial grass\".\n\nThe undercover cop and the informant have a lot in common. Their trade is treachery and they must enjoy the buzz. But selling out your friends for a pound note was not a line Blex would cross. Norris was \"scum of the earth\" but also one of Blex's best informants. Thus on Sunday, 28 April, he was paging him no more than 90 minutes before his murder to set up another promising bit of work.\n\nNorris and Blex spoke on payphones. Norris was at the Fox and Blex at another south-east London pub. After some general chitchat the informant explained that he was with Simpson. Blex was unaware and had a quick word with his police colleague. He then asked Norris if they were still on for a meet the next morning. Earlier that week Norris had offered information on what appeared to be a significant drug deal. Blex was calling to see if the deal was still on. Norris confirmed it was. He promised further details over breakfast in a nearby caf\u00e9.\n\nThe next morning Blex was driving to the caf\u00e9 with his new co-handler, a detective sergeant called Phil Barrett. On the way the radio news reported that a man named as David \"Morris\" had been murdered outside his Belvedere home. Blex knew instantly it was their informant. Moments later his boss at the Central Drug Squad, detective inspector John Coles, called on the car phone. Coles was the controller of Norris at the time and would later become a major player in the Untouchables.\n\nBlex knew there would be panic throughout the Yard and in various specialist police squads, including his own. And not only because one of their top grasses had been killed. Norris had deliberately tried to cultivate corrupt relationships with the large number of police officers of varying ranks he came across. It was his insurance policy. \"I had nothing to be afraid of over any dealings with David Norris,\" says Blex. \"But there were an awful lot of cops, some I liked, who [did].\"\n\nA few months after the murder of David Norris detectives from the drugs wing of the SERCS office in Surbiton, Surrey, received a tip-off. A gang of Protestants from Northern Ireland were sending hash from Margate on the Kent coast to Belfast using British Rail's Red Star parcel service. The drugs were being sent to a fishing tackle shop acting as a front.\n\nAccording to a police source close to the operation, the National Drugs Intelligence Unit had either bugged up the fishing tackle shop or had an informant working inside it. The intelligence received from Belfast was passed to Surbiton to develop. Detectives travelled to Margate and set up a surveillance operation outside a house there. Inside were two young men identified as Stuart Warne, thirty-four, and Renwick Dennison, twenty-six. They had shacked up with two attractive girls, one of whom the detectives believed to be the daughter of an Irish policeman.\n\nThere were two other members of the drug gang unaccounted for. One was called Thomas McCreery and the other Steven Pollock. According to detective sergeant Alec Leighton, the SERCS officer leading Operation Bohemian, these two men were believed to be in Holland at the time organising another drug parcel.\n\nWarne and Dennison were followed to a garage in the Margate area where they were storing the hash. They were arrested and taken to Margate police station where two SERCS detectives, John Donald and Alistair Clarke, interviewed them. After some questioning the two suspects made a momentous decision \u2013 they agreed to admit their guilt and give evidence against their associates.\n\nThe decision to turn supergrass was not a light one. It soon emerged that Warne and Dennison were frightened about another more serious matter \u2013 their involvement in the murder of David Norris. That admission came as a complete surprise to the two officers interviewing them, who rushed to notify Leighton. \"Warne and Dennison also told us where the gun used to kill Norris was buried,\" recalls Leighton. \"One of them thought they were next on the hit list when McCreery and Pollock returned from Holland.\" This, he speculates, was their reason for turning supergrass.\n\nLeighton notified the officer in charge of the Norris murder inquiry, a detective superintendent he respected called Ian Crampton. They agreed to send two drug squad detectives with Dennison to London to locate the gun. \"I believe it was buried under a bush, near a fence,\" says Leighton. Murder squad forensic specialists were then called in to dig up the weapon and also to search the Margate house where helmets, balaclavas and other evidence were recovered.\n\nWarne and Dennison were subsequently produced in front of a Margate magistrate for their bail application, which the murder squad was naturally opposing. Leighton says Crampton gave him strict instructions. \"He told me not to mention in court anything to do with terrorism or any association with paramilitary organisations. I was struggling to keep Warne and Dennison in custody, so I mentioned to the magistrate that they might be in personal danger from associates who were still at large.\"\n\nMcCreery, it appeared, had very murky connections to the Loyalist underworld and paramilitaries of the Ulster Defence Association. He was said to have recruited hit men in Belfast and dealt drugs there. His involvement in drugs made him a target for a failed punishment shooting, presumably by Republican groups. After the attempt on McCreery's life, in early 1991 he moved from Belfast to the Isle of Thanet in Kent with Pollock and Dennison, who was said to have been a UDA getaway driver during a petrol bomb attack on Catholics.\n\nSix months after the death of David Norris, Warne and Dennison were sentenced to life at the Old Bailey for plotting the murder. In mitigation they claimed they were in over their heads and regretted the crime.\n\nIn March the following year, four Ulstermen were arrested in connection with the Norris murder and drug trafficking offences. McCreery and Pollock, however, were still at large. Warne and Dennison, the star prosecution witnesses, had helped the police track down four of their six alleged accomplices. When the trial started in April 1993, two years after Norris's death, the murder squad felt they had put together a convincing case.\n\nCrampton's number two was a south-east London detective inspector called Chris Jarratt, who would go on to be a leading figure in the Untouchables. Jarratt recruited several of his colleagues, like Jack Kelly from the Tower Bridge Flying Squad, onto the Norris murder inquiry.\n\nJarratt and Kelly had groomed the two supergrasses for the trial. The Old Bailey jury were given armed protection and armed police patrolled the courts' marble corridors. Terence McCrory, 30, from Belfast, and John Green, 32, from Falkirk, Scotland, were charged with murdering Norris and with conspiring to murder Norris with a third defendant called Patrick Doherty, 35, of Brockley, south-east London. Doherty and George McMahon, 46, from New Cross, also in south-east London, were charged with conspiracy to supply hashish.\n\nIn a nutshell the police case was a murder for cheap drugs plot. The prosecution claimed a south-east London drug trafficker called Terry Reeves had put up the contracts to kill two men. One was John Dale, who ran a drinking club and a pub in east London. Dale was described in court as someone with \"a murky past\" who was \"the object of dislike and hatred apparently because he was in the habit of ripping people off in drugs deals\". The other target was David Norris, whom Reeves apparently wanted dead because he was a grass who'd told the police about a drug warehouse in Greenwich.\n\nReeves had two henchmen, Doherty and McMahon. They supplied drugs to Warne, who in turn supplied drugs to the Margate-based Protestant gang led by McCreery, Pollock and Dennison.\n\nMcCreery brought over from Belfast two Loyalist hit men, McCrory and Green, to do the hit on Dale. The asking price was \u00a326,000. The plan was to cosh Dale and \"carve his heart out\" as a sign to others. However Green and McCrory were unsuccessful in locating their target and returned to Belfast. Dennison shot him instead at point-blank range with a sawn off single-barrelled shotgun. Incredibly Dale survived.\n\nThree weeks later, the Loyalist hit men returned to London and killed Norris. This time the value of the contract was \u00a335,000. Doherty had allegedly told Warne that \"five or six\" more hits were being planned.\n\nAfter six weeks of evidence, on 24 May the trial suddenly collapsed and the defendants all walked free. The _Evening Standard_ 's prolific court reporter, Paul Cheston, filed a story that screamed: \"'Hitmen' cleared in \u00a31m death plot trial\".\n\nA key discrepancy between Dennison's evidence and that of another prosecution witness forced the judge to direct the jury to acquit on one of four charges. This in turn led the prosecution to take a remarkable decision to drop the other three charges. The prosecutor argued that because the evidence of one supergrass could not be relied on, it undermined the evidence of the other. He therefore considered it \"improper to proceed\".\n\nThe police never managed to arrest McCreery and Pollock. Intriguingly, DS Alec Leighton remembers being told officially that after surviving the punishment shooting, UDA insider McCreery had been \"relocated\" to Kent by the British authorities. If this is correct then McCreery was collaborating with one of the key state agencies running the dirty war in Northern Ireland, which may explain why he was never caught. \"You don't relocate criminals unless they are witnesses [which McCreery wasn't] or informants,\" Leighton explained.\n\nThere was a lot the Old Bailey jury were not told about in those six weeks during the spring of 1993 before the plug was pulled on the Norris murder prosecution. Most of it however had nothing to do with Northern Ireland. It concerned the swirl of corruption allegations around three elite police squads \u2013 the East Dulwich and Surbiton offices of SERCS and the Central Drug Squad \u2013 directly associated with the life and death of Scotland Yard's star informant.\n\nAll that follows was known to the Yard as they prepared the prosecution against the men accused of conspiring to kill Norris. The prosecution counsel knew some of it and should have known a lot more, but one suspects the Yard chose not to tell them. The defence barristers certainly knew almost nothing about the police corruption allegations. If they had, the Crown most likely would have been forced to pull the prosecution completely or delay it pending a full inquiry \u2013 internal, of course.\n\nFor example, the jury never got to hear from Debbie Norris, the murder victim's widow who had cradled her bullet-ridden husband outside their home. By the time of the trial, two years later, much had changed in Debbie's life. The twins, a boy and a girl, were starting to walk and she had remarried \u2013 a policeman.\n\nMark Norton was not just any copper. He was a member of the Norris murder inquiry team who'd fallen in love with Debbie while acting as the family liaison officer. Norton was a 24-year-old trainee detective who had so impressed DI Chris Jarratt that he personally selected him for the murder inquiry.\n\nThe relationship with Debbie had developed slowly. Norton was there to help her through the funeral and the birth of the twins. But they began a full and secret relationship in January 1992. By August they had decided to marry. Norton didn't tell Crampton and Jarratt until months later. They went ballistic. The senior officers had only recently emphatically recommended Norton for promotion to full detective. News of the marriage spread through south-east London police pubs and canteens. Crampton was only too aware how bad it looked for the Yard with the trial looming. But as Norton had broken no police regulations there was nothing they could do. He was kept on the murder inquiry until the end of the trial in May 1993.\n\nNaturally, Debbie discussed the tragedy with Norton, sharing her most intimate thoughts on what was behind the murder. The jury never had the opportunity to hear her story, which is revealed here for the first time. When we tracked Debbie Norris down she welcomed us as if she knew the opportunity to tell her side would one day arise.\n\nDebbie confirmed something we'd heard on the grapevine. Within 48 hours of her husband's death she'd made an extraordinary allegation to the murder inquiry. Debbie had claimed that on the night of his murder, just before he left the house, David Norris counted out in front of her \u00a315,000 in cash. He told her he was going to meet DI Chris Simpson at the Fox. She saw him put the money in a green carrier bag \u2013 \"the kind you get at the local supermarket\" \u2013 and leave for the pub. She believed he was going straight there. Shortly after his Toyota jeep pulled away, Simpson called and left a message on the answering machine saying he would be late.\n\nDebbie told the police that the \u00a315,000 was not found on his gunned-down body. There was never any suggestion that the two assassins had stolen it. The killing after all was a planned contract hit, not an opportunist crime where the killers hung around to go through belongings.\n\nDebbie told us she had also informed Jarratt that her husband kept a black book of people who owed him money. There was a person listed as \"Chris\" in the book with no surname. And next to it was the figure \u00a315,000. She believed Chris Simpson might have borrowed the money from her husband, and told Jarratt so, making two statements to the inquiry within days of the murder.\n\nMark Norton confirms a lot of Debbie's story. They split up acrimoniously in 1996, separated a year later and are now divorced. Nevertheless, Norton recalls taking Debbie's statements. He also saw the entries in Norris's diary of those who owed him money. The diary was a police exhibit in the murder inquiry. And he recalls going to see one of Debbie's ex-husbands named in it as one of Norris's debtors. The man confirmed he owed the money but was never a suspect in the case. Another name in the diary was Debbie's dad. The third name he remembers was an entry for \"Chris\".\n\nSimpson had left East Dulwich on promotion as a detective chief inspector before the murder trial started. Like Debbie and Norton, he was never called as a witness. We spoke to him about her allegations.\n\nSimpson says the murder squad knew from checking Norris's pager that he had met him the night he died. He was asked to brief Crampton and Jarratt. \"They wanted to know who had a motive to shoot him and who he had grassed up. 'Give me a couple of weeks and I'll tell you,' I said.\" Simpson delivered the punchline with comic timing, followed by a hearty laugh and some co-ordinated shoulder shrugging. It was all very Tommy Cooper, an impression for which he is apparently well known in police circles.\n\nThe murder squad had \"every bit of paper that existed\" including the informant logs and a list of operations based on information Norris had supplied and been paid for. Simpson says he identified the East Dulwich SERCS jobs for the murder inquiry.\n\nHe confirms they spoke to him about the \u00a315,000 and the financial reference to \"Chris\" in Norris's diary. \"Crampton said to me, 'Is this you?' I said it might be. He said, 'Has Norris ever lent you or given you any money, or the other way around?' I said no, except police money [for reward payments and expenses]. Crampton then says, 'Did [Norris] know someone else called Chris?' I said, 'Yes, he's a villain.'\"\n\nSimpson believed he was the only person Norris met the night he was killed but denies receiving a carrier bag of cash from his informant, although he said it was not unusual for Norris to carry a big wad of \"two or three grand\".\n\nAs soon as Debbie Norris alluded to possible corruption surrounding her husband's death, CIB should have been called in and an inquiry launched. This probe could have been conducted parallel to the murder inquiry but away from the very policing area of south-east London from which the corruption allegations were coming. Had this been done, at some stage the Norris murder inquiry would have had to disclose to the defence the existence of the CIB inquiry, despite the problems it would cause to a successful prosecution.\n\nThe Yard however confirms no such inquiry was ever conducted. Crampton went further and told us Debbie Norris had refused to co-operate with CIB. She strongly denies this. And Mark Norton counterclaims that the murder squad put Debbie under \"pressure\" not to make any corruption allegations.\n\nDebbie was just 31 and the mother of six children when David Norris died. It is unusual for the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board to pay the family of those with active criminal records. But the Yard made representations to secure her a substantial payment in 1994. The CICB won't confirm the amount. Norton says it was \u00a329,000 and that a lawyer had to persuade the board that Debbie and her kids were reliant on the money Norris earned as a police informant. Norton told us the murder squad had a list of those earnings totalling around \u00a375,000. Debbie, he says, got an additional payment of about \u00a325,000 from the Scotland Yard Informants' Fund after the murder.\n\nHad there been in 1991 a truly independent system of investigating police misconduct, DC Peter Bleksley says he would have unloaded some explosive information about police corruption that was weighing heavily on his mind soon after the murder of his informant.\n\nSince his retirement Blex has been \"warned off\" ever speaking out about David Norris. We talked briefly over the phone and arranged to meet in his old stomping ground of south-east London. Blex ended the call with words no journalist easily forgets. \"I have a story about Norris that will absolutely make your toes curl. It's linked into the demise of him and everything.\"\n\nBlex says he immediately saw the danger of handling someone like Norris, a sociable, funny, hard-drinking shagger \u2013 the qualities that make it easier to break down the defences of the macho world London's detectives move in.\n\n\"Norris was driven by a pound note.\" He had propped up some terrific jobs right up to his death, says Blex. Interestingly though, like Simpson, he did not recall Norris ever providing information about Terry Reeves, Irish paramilitaries running drugs or the six men subsequently arrested in connection with his murder.\n\nNorris was very \"well connected\" and in the big league as informants go. He had inserted Blex into top echelon drug traffickers like Liverpudlian Delroy Showers, who had contacts with the south-east London Richardson gang.\n\nBlex remembers only too well another job Norris put up in the early summer of 1989 involving \u00a31 million of funny money. Three arrests were made and the case went to trial. But Blex was held in contempt of court when he refused to name the informant who had introduced him to the defendants. They walked. Norris's identity was preserved.\n\nBlex did the honourable thing in court \u2013 protecting a source \u2013 but he was under no illusion that there came a time, well before Norris's murder, when it was \"an open secret\" in south-east London that he was a grass. It became increasingly difficult, he says, for the Yard to find ways of protecting Norris's identity in court. \"He was so blas\u00e9, so stupid about who he propped up [informed on]. It was only a matter of time before someone killed him.\"\n\nDetective constable Robert Clark, who worked on Simpson's team at East Dulwich, shares the same view. Clark was amazed that Norris lasted so long. \"I don't know what made him go from being a good informant to a suicidal one. We thought he had a death wish.\" Norris would give information about drugs or stolen goods at houses he had just visited. During the briefing before the bust officers would shake their heads at the sheer risk he was taking, says Clark.\n\nBlex has no doubt that Norris was a double agent informant playing both sides from the middle. He had insurance policies to protect him from the police and from the Underworld. For the criminals, he passed them information and used his informant status to grass up their rivals. To protect himself from the Yard he would corrupt or compromise their officers.\n\n\"Norris was such a slippery piece of work, I saw so many [detectives] taken in by him. He was someone who would try and get you involved in a divvy up over the jobs he had offered up,\" says Blex candidly. Norris once called him and two other officers to a meeting at the Prince of Wales pub in Belvedere. He told them a Kent coke dealer had stashed \u00a370,000 in cash in his deep freeze. Norris suggested the cops use a search warrant to nick it. \"He knew the drug dealer was hardly likely to have a scream up over the stolen money,\" recalls Blex. \"I told him in no uncertain terms that I wasn't going to be a legalised burglary team for him.\"\n\nNorris was a charming criminal but a ruthless grass. His modus operandi around detectives was to sweetly suck them into his corrupt world by socialising and getting drunk with them. DC Robert Clark, for example, can recall two occasions when Norris had taken the East Dulwich SERCS squad for a meal and paid in cash. During one of those meals, says Clark, Norris produced a \"carrier bag stuffed with ten-pound notes\". And when he paid the bill, no pun intended, some of the notes fell on the restaurant floor. The waiter who'd knelt down to help pick them up was told it was his tip.\n\nBlex felt many of his colleagues were relieved by news of Norris's death. Dead men don't tell tales, but if Norris was ever arrested for something serious he would have had no hesitation cashing in his insurance policy and grassing up his corrupt friends in blue to get out of a tight spot.\n\nAll of which leads us to Blex's toe-curling story: \"After Norris's murder I was at a police piss-up in a pub opposite the East Dulwich Regional Crime Squad. People were drinking and a detective who I knew from old approached me. He was a bit drunk and emotional, but there was genuine anxiety in his voice.\n\n'You know Norris?'\n\n'Yes,' I said. He knew I had been his handler.\n\n'We've got a real big problem going on.'\n\n\"The officer proceeded to tell me that not long before Norris was shot he had given East Dulwich some information. There was a lot of cash found during the raid. And ten officers, including the man telling me this story, had had an almighty weed, to the tune of \u00a3200,000. They split it ten ways. That's \u00a320,000 each. But one of them then split his share, down the middle, with another detective, his girlfriend, who wasn't in the inner sanctum.\n\n\"Now they were all shitting themselves that the people who killed Norris had done so because of the stolen \u00a3200,000. It wasn't that this inner sanctum of officers was worried they had Norris's blood on their hands, but that they would get caught if the weak link, the girlfriend, talked.\n\n\"She was not in on the theft but I was told she knew the money had been stolen. They feared that if she realised that the money represented the motive for the murder she might shit herself and come forward to the authorities. The geezer said to me the only way the inner sanctum could see was to bump her off. So they were seriously considering murdering the weak link \u2013 the girlfriend who'd got \u00a310,000.\n\n\"The man who approached me said he did so because he didn't want the blood of a police officer on his hands. I was not being asked to get involved in the murder, to be a co-conspirator. It was a cry for help. I had a big reputation then. He genuinely thought I could stop it happening. I think he was hoping that I would be able to tell him that the reason Norris was killed had nothing to do with the weed. Then he could report that back and the murder would be called off. But I didn't know why Norris had been killed.\"\n\nDebbie Norris had previously told us that soon after the hit on her husband his criminal associates had suggested there was some corrupt police involvement behind the murder.\n\n\"I was now in an invidious position. What do I do? I don't do grassing. It would have been the end of my career. But I've got to do something. So the following day I met up with my old friend Tim Beer. He was senior to me and we had co-handled Norris together [on Team C of the Central Drug Squad]. I regarded Tim highly and sought his advice. He was a very competent person.\n\n\"I told him what I'd been told but said I was not willing to come forward. I gave him the names of the three people I knew were involved \u2013 the man who approached me and the boyfriend and girlfriend. Tim knew all three detectives. He said, 'Leave it to me.' A few days later he came back to me and said, 'You'll never have any reason to speak to a living person about this. The murder isn't going to happen.' Call me shallow, but that was enough for me. It still leaves me cold.\n\n\"Tim, I don't think, went to CIB. I think he went to the murder squad to see what tack they were taking. As a former handler of Norris, Tim was someone who would have been in touch with the murder squad no matter what. He also went to see one of the persons who were plotting to kill the weak link and told him to stop because someone knew about it.\n\n\"If an independent system that was competent had existed it would have immensely altered my view about reporting it at the time,\" says Blex. He didn't go to CIB because they lacked integrity and professionalism. It's one load of bent cops investigating another, he thought.\n\nCIB was also a leaky ship and he wasn't going to be a Serpico for them to use for their own agenda and then discard. It wasn't that he was so loyal he wouldn't work against other cops who had crossed the line. In 1989, for example, Blex went undercover as a hit man to entrap a West Midlands police sergeant who wanted to hire someone to kill his lover's husband. The job was successful and the officer went to prison for six years.\n\nBlex's objection to grassing was understandable given the explosiveness of the allegation. The internal affairs department wears two hats, and one of them is acting as the political police of the commissioner. As such, if in 1993 the top cop wanted to deep-six what Blex had to say, his promising thirteen-year career would have been over at the age of thirty-two.\n\nWhat about Tim Beer? Had he said anything to the murder squad or senior Yard officers about the \u00a3200,000 murder plot? Beer is still serving as a detective inspector. He declined to comment.\n\nEven if the murder squad was unaware of the \u00a3200,000 allegation, which is debatable, it is remarkable that detectives investigating Norris's death never spoke to Blex. Having checked Norris's pager on the night he was killed the murder squad would have been aware of the contact. \"In any other murder inquiry somebody that spoke to a victim hours before they were killed would be a prime person to speak to, as a suspect or as a witness. But to this day I have never had one word of contact with anybody who investigated this murder.\"\n\nWhat does he put that down to? \"Maybe they didn't want me to know something. I don't know. It will always mystify me to my dying day. The sooner there is an independent body for investigating police complaints, the better for everyone.\"\n\nThe workings of the murder squad were also a mystery to another experienced officer, detective inspector Keith Pedder. When he visited its offices at Erith police station Pedder saw what he regarded as a very unusual practice. \"The murder inquiry was running two action books, a super secret one and a general one. I am absolutely certain they were running two inquiries over the same incident,\" one on the murder and the other on police corruption, he told us.\n\nAn action book is a handwritten contemporaneous diary of the murder inquiry as it develops. It gets its name from the \"actions\" that the heads of the inquiry believe must be carried out to solve the murder, such as checking alibis and following up new leads. All those involved in the murder inquiry have access to the book so they can check their actions against others to avoid, among other things, duplication.\n\nPedder, an erudite Flying Squad detective with a sharp wit, had never heard of an inquiry run with two action books before, and it \"troubled\" him. He had gone to Erith police station to give his friend Chris Jarratt, the deputy head of the murder inquiry, some information he'd just received from an informant that the murder had a Turkish connection, possibly the Arifs. \"At Erith there was this other room that we weren't allowed access to. There were two action books, a locked room, locked filing cabinets and secret files,\" Pedder remembers. \"It could be that there was very sensitive material that the officers in charge didn't want the rest of the murder squad to know about so they put it in a secret action book.\"\n\nWhat could this sensitive material be? Pedder says he was told it concerned Norris's informant activities. But we now know that it was through his registered informant status that Norris had effectively compromised two police squads who fed off his information in a mixture of legitimate and corrupt ways.\n\nGiven the aura of corruption that had emerged in the first few weeks of Norris's death, in all likelihood the secret action book was being used as a log for senior officers back at the Yard. But they decline to answer any questions about it.\n\nIn March 1999 Blex retired from the Met suffering from a severe mental illness caused by seven intense years of undercover work in the drug sewers of south-east London and abroad.\n\nHe sued the Met for failing in their duty of care after he was forced to move homes when an international organised crime syndicate took a contract out on him after a lengthy undercover operation in 1992. To make matters worse a sensitive report with his real name had been stolen from the back seat of a police officer's car.\n\nThe Yard eventually settled the claim with a \u00a310,000 payment. But Blex has had to fight his employers for a top-up medical pension. The Yard finally agreed, but only after a tribunal ruled that his mental illness was an industrial injury.\n\nWhen he had fully recovered, Blex decided to write a sanitised book called _Gangbuster_ about his exploits in the police. Tim Beer had been a good friend to Blex during his service. He thought if he could confide in him about the plot to murder a fellow detective, he could confide in him about his plans for a book. Beer's response took him by surprise. \"He threatened me not to write the book. He said, 'You will not write this fucking book.' I said, 'Yes I fucking will. And I think this drink is coming to an end. Don't you?' I wasn't in the job any more and there he was trying to pull rank on me!\"\n\nWhen he completed the manuscript, Blex informed commissioner Sir John Stevens and submitted it to Scotland Yard's Directorate of Public Affairs for vetting some time in January 2001. He heard nothing for several months, then in spring that year a senior officer from the Untouchables asked for a meeting.\n\nBlex's co-author, the former _Sun_ journalist Mike Fielder, arrived at Sevenoaks police station where detective superintendent Barry Norman, an elfin corruption-buster with a goatee beard, was waiting. He told Fielder the Yard was not going to injunct the book, but did require all police officers' names to be changed to pseudonyms.\n\nThe manuscript CIB had vetted included a chapter on Norris. On the last few pages was a passing but unmistakeable reference to the \u00a3200,000 theft and murder plot. Yet to this day Blex has not been asked about it. The assassination may have been ten years old by the time of the Sevenoaks meeting, but the commissioner had publicly committed himself to a \"no-hiding-place\" corruption probe that would investigate serving and retired officers. It is hard to imagine an allegation more serious than a plot to kill a police officer to prevent her revealing the theft of \u00a3200,000 by ten other detectives.\n\nIt's also not the case that CIB had no knowledge of the squad alleged to be involved in the theft. Since at least 1998 they had been investigating the East Dulwich SERCS. The investigation, codenamed Operation Russia, was largely reliant on the evidence of two supergrasses, one a former squad detective called Neil Putnam and the other Eve Fleckney, the registered informant who had replaced Norris as the squad's main earner. Her handler, DC Robert Clark, was already corruptly breaking in Fleckney at the very time Norris was killed. And Operation Russia knew that it was information provided by Norris to Simpson that led to Fleckney's arrest for drugs and her subsequent agreement to become an informant.\n\nBy the time CIB received Blex's manuscript, six members of the SERCS squad, including Clark, had been convicted for major drug corruption going back to 1991, the time of the Norris murder. Blex will only confirm that none of those six convicted detectives was the man who originally approached him or the detective couple who split one share of the \u00a3200,000. The inner sanctum of ten officers, who may not all be from East Dulwich, is therefore unaccounted for and they could still be serving.\n\nIt cannot be argued that CIB did not have officers capable of understanding the significance of this serious allegation. For eight detectives who had served on the Norris murder squad or had intimate knowledge of the informant were by 2000 senior members of the anti-corruption squad.\n\nJohn Coles, the controller of Norris when he died, became a detective chief superintendent in the Untouchables. He declined to be interviewed.\n\nChris Jarratt, the deputy head of the Norris murder inquiry, went on to run the highly secretive CIB intelligence cell from 1997 to 2000. Was it a coincidence that he was allowed to recruit many of the Norris murder inquiry team as Untouchables? Jarratt was promoted to detective chief superintendent by the time we asked to interview him. He declined.\n\nAn industrious defence solicitor called Phil Kelly handled the appeals by supergrasses Stuart Warne and Renwick Dennison against their life sentences for involvement in the Norris murder. He recalls that Jarratt and an even more senior anti-corruption officer, Bill Griffiths, a founding member of the Ghost Squad, were both very involved. Debbie Norris also told us that in 1997 Jarratt tried unsuccessfully to recruit her as an informant.\n\nDespite all this, the Yard still maintains that the Norris murder was never a matter for CIB. But we now know that cannot be because there was nothing for it to investigate.\n\nIn the absence of a fully independent complaints system the sole arbiter of whether to launch such a sensitive investigation will remain the very organisation that stands to lose most from it. The temptation for CIB to ignore or bury such bad news was enormous. Corruption allegations surrounding an informant are inevitably highly sensitive and involve a multitude of senior officers, not just the handlers and controllers. A proper inquiry also has the potential to cross-contaminate other police operations and jeopardise ongoing and future trials.\n\nThe Yard's failure to investigate the aura of corruption around Norris's murder back in 1991 had profound consequences for the criminal justice system and the public who fund it to protect them. Through its inaction it appears the Yard allowed a corrupt firm within a firm to grow inside the East Dulwich SERCS for the next seven years. Some of these corrupt officers moved to other squads where they contaminated the work of honest detectives doing a difficult job. During this seven-year period, drugs were recycled, criminals let off, operations sold out and innocent people fitted up.\n\nIt is hard to imagine what palatable arguments can be marshalled by the Yard to explain why it wasted such an opportunity to tackle serious corruption. The unpalatable arguments are easier to determine, even in the face of the Yard's orchestral silence about the David Norris murder.\n\nIt was a Pandora's box. Any senior Yard officer who dared to look inside it would have seen Norris's ghost clasping an insurance policy listing all his corrupt dealings.\n\nAt the time of his murder, the Yard was desperately trying to rehabilitate its image as an efficient, effective and clean force capable of executing the Major government's controversial, draconian law and order policies. They couldn't afford to exorcise Norris's ghost in this climate.\n\nBut there was another compelling incentive to close the lid on David Norris. In 1993 his murder was linked to another brutal killing in south-east London that was rocking Scotland Yard to the core \u2013 the fatal stabbing of Stephen Lawrence by south-east London thugs from families connected to organised drug crime within the corrupt area of operations of various police squads, including the South East Regional Crime Squad.\n\n## [8\n\n\"What? What? Nigger!\"](contents.html#ch08)\n\nA bus stop in south-east London, an outburst of racist bile, which as it crossed the lips of an all-white gang of five young thugs became a sentence of death for a black teenager and for the integrity of Scotland Yard.\n\nTwo vicious stabbing movements accomplished the murder, each calculated to shed so much blood that the victim would know by his own drenching that death was on the way.\n\nThis is a snapshot of what happened at 10.40 p.m. on Thursday, 22 April 1993, at the request stop in Well Hall Road, Eltham; a cut-down version of events which engulfed a young man of 18 summers who, after an evening out with his friends in south-east London, was trying to return to home to his mother Doreen, his father Neville, his brother Stewart and his sister Georgina.\n\nDespite his awesome wounds and because he was so fit, Stephen Lawrence managed to run 300 yards from the thugs who had stabbed him. With each yard covered and each footfall made he was pumping blood from two severed arteries. And then he fell. Unconscious.\n\nThough traumatised, the other victim of the attack, Stephen's friend, Duwayne Brooks, had found a phone box. At 10.46 p.m. he dialled 999 pleading for an ambulance. In the meantime a police car arrived. The officers checked Stephen for a pulse. But they failed to examine him thoroughly or to give first-aid. The kit was never even taken from the patrol car. Instead, they questioned Duwayne as if he was a suspect rather than a victim, as if the two black boys had done something wrong.\n\nIn 1977, when Stephen Lawrence was 3, there were just 199 black police officers in all of England and Wales. When he died, 15 years later, the figure had scarcely improved. None of the detectives who investigated the murder was black. Stephen's parents, who came from Jamaica, still wonder whether the boys' colour shaped the police's attitude and contributed to the failure to give first aid. \"None of the police officers attending the scene made any attempt to see if there was anything they could do. They just stood there while my son bled to death. None of them checked to see how serious his injuries were, they just stood there waiting for the ambulance. Maybe there was something they could have done to save him. But the fact was they never tried. That says it all. There are two questions I would like the police to answer. Are all officers trained in basic first aid? Or was it because they just did not want to get their hands dirty with a black man's blood?\"\n\nFourteen-year-old Catherine Avery was in the house just across the pavement where Stephen lay bleeding. She had no more first-aid instruction than the officers on the scene. Yet her basic Red Cross training made her realise they should have attempted to stem the flow of blood.\n\nAt 10.54 p.m. the ambulance arrived and a paramedic tried to re-start Stephen's heart without success. By the time he was in the recovery room Stephen had lost too much blood and his veins had collapsed. At 11.17 p.m. the death certificate was signed.\n\nIt is strongly suspected by the police and the Lawrence family that the five murderers are: David Norris, aged 16 at the time, brothers Jamie and Neil Acourt, then aged 16 and 17 respectively, Luke Knight, 16, and Gary Dobson, 17.\n\nFour of them lived on or very near the Brooke Estate. The five boys led a gang with a history of involvement in stabbings and racism in the area. Neil Acourt, for example, had been expelled from school for a racist attack in 1991. And five weeks before Stephen's murder, Gurdeep Bangal was stabbed in the stomach while serving in his dad's Wimpy Bar in Eltham High Street.\n\nNine months earlier, on the other side of the roundabout from the spot where Stephen was killed, Rohit Duggal, a young Asian boy, was stabbed to death outside the local kebab shop. Peter Thompson is currently serving life for this murder and he too was linked to the gang through information given to the Lawrence murder inquiry.\n\nSometimes ecumenical in their violence, the gang also attacked white kids. Lee Pearson, for example, was stabbed outside the local kebab shop in 1991. Eleven months before Stephen's murder, Jamie Acourt, David Norris and Luke Knight were suspected of stabbing the Witham brothers with a butterfly knife. David was charged with wounding and Jamie with possession of an offensive weapon. But the CPS withdrew the charges a few months before Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death, claiming it would not be in the public interest to proceed.\n\nThe gang referred to themselves as the Eltham Krays, a sad homage to the dysfunctional, homosexual gauleiters of an earlier age and another part of London.\n\nThe apprentice boys from Eltham appeared to have developed contacts with another bunch of local hoodlums called the NTO, short for the Nutty or Nazi Turn Out, a group of boneheads involved in a range of racist incidents including killings in south-east London and Kent.\n\nBy April 1993, local people were giving the Eltham five another name for their gang \u2013 the Untouchables \u2013 as in someone was protecting them; as in they were thought to be able to get away with things and have some form of insurance from the local police. One way or another these five boys were completely out of control \u2013 a gang of _droogs_ practising ever more perverted forms of _ultra-violence_.\n\nNick Jeffrey, an American-born teacher and community activist, knows the youth scene from 40 years of living in south-east London. Eleven years on he still recalls with horror the semi-literate announcement he saw soon after Stephen Lawrence's murder. Cycling along the south circular he passed the \"Welcome to Greenwich \u2013 Millennium Borough\" sign and up the hill towards the churchyard was a daubing that read: \"Watch out coons, you are now entering Eltham\".\n\n\"In Eltham centre, midday or midnight, you saw no black faces on the street. The Well Hall Road McDonald's opposite the churchyard has been a known hang-out for racist youth, as was the Wimpy Bar before it,\" says Nick.\n\nHis knowledge of the community comes from years of teaching at local schools and from scouting for Arsenal and Preston North End. Nick is a familiar face at the Millwall, Crystal Palace and Charlton Athletic grounds. He also trained local teams and met many of the youngsters who form the gangs. Eltham, he concludes, is the front line behind which Kent, white Kent, is in aggressive retreat.\n\n\"Following the 1981 Brixton riots more inner-city clubs were formed and boys in them had to travel out for competition and for pitches. The team I managed was called Tulse Hill but it was a Brixton and Peckham Club. When we travelled to Greenwich racial abuse was common \u2013 on and off the Sunday league pitches. The Acourts' club, Samuel Montague, began to attract racists. They expelled Neil in 1991 for a post-match knife threat allegedly against a black boy from Red Lion, a Peckham and Deptford club. His brother Jamie, David Norris and Luke Knight left as well.\n\n\"South from the Millennium Dome and along the edges of inner London are vast low-rise, mostly all-white council estates. Yards from the bus stop where Stephen was stabbed a mixed-race family had their home petrol-bombed. Along these routes are a string of mixed-sex comprehensive schools, including the first two purpose-built in this country for the post-war influx of tenants from slum clearance. The GCSE results published for that string of schools in Greenwich are among the lowest in the country for boys. Truancy rates are high. Bullying and gang violence have been major issues.\n\n\"Five of England's largest pubs from Downham to Thamesmead have been habitual meeting places of the British National Party and the National Front, each one closed for violence. The Yorkshire Grey at Eltham Green, once host to neo-Nazi organisations Blood and Honour and Combat 18, is now... [a] McDonald's. The NF logo, however, remains the graffiti of choice \u2013 it has more punch and is easier to scratch into a school textbook. In 1990, NF was painted in letters three feet high at the Orchards Youth Club next to the Kidbrooke Estate. Neil Acourt was excluded from the club for that along with David Norris.\"\n\nDetectives call the first 60 minutes after any murder the \"golden hour\". It is the period when all forensic and other clues are fresh and the chance of solving the crime is at its highest. From then on the trail starts to go cold, like the victim.\n\nThe fall of Scotland Yard began at 11.17 p.m. on the Thursday night Stephen Lawrence died. In the following 96 hours the best chance of successfully prosecuting the murderers was frittered away.\n\nIn those four days the mind-boggling inaction of a handful of senior officers would ultimately cost the Yard what reputation it had left. For the black British population it merely re-confirmed what they already knew. But it was the loss of confidence among white middle Englanders and _Daily Mail_ readers that rocked the police, and not just Scotland Yard. Chief constables across the country dreaded the Lawrence scandal would have ramifications for British policing in the same way the Scarman report had after the Brixton riots 12 years earlier. They were right.\n\nThe mistakes of such senior Yard detectives made the Lawrence family and their supporters question almost immediately whether this was not just another example of wilful racism but something just as sinister \u2013 police corruption.\n\nSuspicions were raised when it emerged no officer at the scene had recorded how Duwayne Brooks had heard the attackers say, \"What? What? Nigger!\" As more officers arrived, the professional quality of the policing continued to decline. In all, fifty-five police officers came to the Well Hall roundabout between 10.50 p.m. and 3 a.m. The turnout included forty-four constables, five sergeants, one inspector, one detective inspector, one chief inspector, one detective superintendent and even, uniquely, two chief superintendents.\n\nDespite this parade of top brass, there was a complete lack of co-ordination, with arriving senior officers barking contradictory orders at subordinates. Consequently, there was no search of the circular area around the murder scene, no house-to-house search of the Brooke Estate and no questioning in a methodical manner of the neighbours.\n\nWith good intelligence, the input of local officers who knew the area and proper direction and control, it was a realistic goal not only to identify and interview witnesses but to pinpoint suspects and try to catch the perpetrators red-handed before they could dispose of the evidence, like blood-stained clothing and the weapon, which to this day hasn't been found. But the golden hour and the golden opportunities that went with it were squandered.\n\nIn the weekend immediately after the murder things went from tragedy to farce. Within forty-eight hours a skinhead walked into Eltham police station with remarkable information. He named the gang of five. But no one properly registered the young man as an informant and there was no swift follow-through on his vital leads. He later stated he had given his real name but officers denied this.\n\nThere were other sources that came forward to confirm what the skinhead had told the police. Maureen Smith, for example, indicated that she had high-grade information, but there was a six-day delay in interviewing her. Swifter action would have led immediately to two key witnesses, her son and his girlfriend, who could place the Acourt brothers at the murder scene. No proper attempt was subsequently made to identify and trace these two witnesses.\n\nAn anonymous letter naming the same suspects was found by a member of the public in a phone box near the murder scene and handed to the police. Nobody bothered to immediately follow up the information. This serious mistake was compounded the following day, when on Saturday morning the police received a call from an unidentified person saying an anonymous letter with important information would be left in a waste bin near a local pub. Two police officers went in separate cars, one to search the bin, the other to observe. The officer searching the bin found nothing. But while he was out of his car his colleague across the road saw a young man sticking a note on the back window of his car. Nothing was done to approach or follow the man. Once again the letter contained vital leads and named the same gang of five.\n\nThe landmark public inquiry into these matters five years later put it succinctly: \"The truth is that although people were reluctant to give their names there was no 'wall of silence'. In fact information purporting to implicate the suspects was readily and repeatedly made available.\"\n\nIt poured into the murder inquiry as quickly as the lifeblood poured out of Stephen Lawrence's body.\n\nThe two senior officers responsible for the catalogue of errors in those first four days in April 1993 were also the detectives in charge of the highly sensitive David Norris murder inquiry since April 1991. The careers of detective superintendent Ian Crampton and his immediate superior, detective chief superintendent Bill Ilsley, had been dominated during the intervening two years by the contract killing of the Yard's top informant and preparing for the murder trial of the four Irish Protestant suspects.\n\nCrampton, a wiry south Londoner in his mid-forties, was the senior investigating officer for both the Norris and Lawrence murders. The SIO makes the vital decisions on the ground at the relevant time and is the highest-ranking detective with day-to-day involvement in running the murder inquiry. However he deferred to Ilsley, a lean, tall detective of a similar age, for all the major strategic decisions. Ilsley, as the crime manager for south-east London, in turn reported to and took his orders from the Yard.\n\nSix days before the killing of Stephen Lawrence, the Norris murder trial started at the Old Bailey. It was therefore uppermost in the minds of both senior officers. Crampton was preparing his evidence to withstand cross-examination by four formidable defence barristers; among them was Michael Mansfield QC, who ironically would soon be representing the Lawrence family.\n\nThe Norris murder trial was going to be the biggest test of Crampton's detective acumen in the witness box, given the enormous sensitivities he would have to circumnavigate around police informant confidentiality, the use of supergrasses and the link between British intelligence and loyalist paramilitaries in the dirty war in Northern Ireland.\n\nThere was also a lot the Yard felt the defence didn't need to know. This, of course, concerned the swirl of corruption allegations around Norris and south-east London policing that emerged during Crampton's murder inquiry, and which it appears were kept in a secret and undisclosed action book.\n\nIlsley had been promoted to chief superintendent one month after the assassination of Norris. Since May 1991 he had been responsible for all criminal inquiries in 3 Area, an enormous patch of south-east London from Tower Bridge to the Kent borders. His officers liaised closely with the specialist detectives targeting organised crime in the region, namely the East Dulwich South East Regional Crime Squad and the Tower Bridge office of the Flying Squad. In fact detectives on these two elite squads often came from the very areas they were targeting and when their tour of duty was over they would return to normal detective duties under the command of Ilsley at one of the twenty-five or so police stations he managed.\n\nCrampton was on night duty when Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death. He attended the scene of the crime and early next morning spoke to Ilsley. They agreed Crampton would run the inquiry only until Monday. From then on he would be occupied with the Norris murder trial.\n\nThe two senior detectives say they made a \"strategic decision\" based on all the available information not to arrest the gang of five named suspects over the weekend. It was a fundamental mistake that led to withering criticism of their professional integrity and truthfulness during the Stephen Lawrence public inquiry in 1998.\n\nCrampton never recorded in any policy file the decision not to make early arrests. Best practice required him to preserve a contemporaneous and accurate log of why certain lines of inquiry were preferred over others. The Lawrence inquiry report twice referred to the \"alleged\" strategic decision in terms that strongly implied Crampton and Ilsley had made this up. Such improper record keeping had echoes of the highly irregular secret action book during the Norris murder inquiry.\n\nEver since Stephen's death the Yard has done its best to try and keep the two murders separate. Those who suggested a connection were simply dismissed as conspiracy theorists.\n\nYoung David Norris, the prime suspect in the Lawrence murder, had a notoriously violent criminal father called Clifford, who by the mid-eighties had become a successful player in the south-east London drug business. The local police and specialist detectives in 3 Area all knew of Clifford Norris. Police informant extraordinaire, David Norris, also knew Clifford and his circle.\n\nClifford Norris was born in Greenwich in 1958. He was the second son in the family. His brother, Alex, was eight years older. Both boys were teenage hoodlums who graduated to violent crime and then drug trafficking. In 1976, barely a man himself, Clifford and his then girlfriend Theresa had a baby boy. They named him David.\n\nClifford's propensity for violence seemed untempered by parental responsibility and in 1983, aged 25, as he was driving along the Old Kent Road, a van cut him up. Clifford gave chase, forced the van to a halt and smashed the window with a hammer. Realising the police were on their way, he stopped and threw away his wallet which, when recovered, had inside it a key to a safety deposit box. When this was opened it contained \u00a317,000 in cash. Clifford denied all knowledge of the money and was fined just \u00a3150 for criminal damage.\n\nOn another occasion he savagely attacked a woman shopkeeper who he believed was responsible for spreading gossip about the state of his marriage. Clifford shot her in the throat. She recovered because the bullet missed her spinal cord but wouldn't give evidence against him. It was this shooting in 1989 that led an informant to contact Bill Ilsley and name Clifford as the culprit. But without the victim's evidence the case died.\n\nThe Norris brothers had a number of criminal associates in south-east London who like them were the targets of the local detectives and also the East Dulwich SERCS and the Tower Bridge Flying Squad.\n\nAlex Norris married into the French family. His new brother-in-law, Gary French, had a close escape in 1989 when he drove to a meeting with David Norris, the informant. Gary apparently spotted he was under surveillance and sped off. Details are scarce about what happened next. When the police confronted David Norris he denied knowing Gary, but told the officers he was the cousin of Clifford Norris.\n\nAt the time of Gary French's close escape, David Norris was \"working\" for the Central Drug Squad and East Dulwich. He was also nurturing corrupt relationships with several detectives. Clifford too had developed his own contacts in the police and there was one detective in particular with whom he was seen in highly suspicious circumstances.\n\nIn the late eighties Clifford and Alex Norris were under surveillance by a team of Customs investigators rightly convinced they were preparing a significant cannabis importation from Holland with several others. The Norris brothers had been tailed over eight months visiting a Dutchman in Switzerland and a detective from the Tower Bridge Flying Squad. Undercover Customs officers observed Clifford and Alex Norris on three occasions meeting detective sergeant Dave Coles, who was seen carrying a plastic bag with oblong slabs inside. One meeting which Customs videoed was on 20 June 1988 in the Tiger's Head pub in Chislehurst, around the corner from the mock-Tudor house Clifford had bought for his family. Coles was seen talking to Clifford, making notes and using a calculator.\n\nTo Customs it must have looked as if the two men were in business together. The next day their officers made a series of arrests as the gang unloaded a large parcel of cannabis from a lorry parked in an east London side road. Alex and Clifford were not there or at their homes when Customs arrived. They spent over a year on the run together until Alex was caught in July 1989 and received nine years. Incredibly, Clifford remained at large for another five years, unbothered, it seems, by the local police.\n\nCustoms immediately reported Coles' meetings with Clifford to the Yard. CIB began an investigation. Coles denied he was in any way corrupt and claimed he was trying to cultivate Clifford Norris as an informant, although he had no authorisation to do so. The CIB inquiry was totally unsatisfactory \u2013 a model of mixed messages and unanswered questions that left the strong impression that the whole highly suspect liaison between Coles and Clifford Norris had been swept under the carpet by the Yard.\n\nColes never faced disciplinary charges for those unauthorised meetings. A more senior officer just gave him a mild verbal rebuke, known in police terminology as \"words of advice\". Instead, Coles was formally disciplined in May 1989 for falsifying his duty state on a number of occasions when he claimed to be at court, but was in fact having sex with a girlfriend. This period of dishonesty coincided with his suspicious meetings with the Norris brothers.\n\nIn mitigation to his guilty plea, Coles produced a character reference from his old boss at Bexleyheath police station. Step forward detective superintendent Ian Crampton. Coles, he wrote, was to be commended for his work and indeed his honesty. The reference showed extraordinarily bad judgement on Crampton's part, as there was ample documentary evidence of Coles' dishonesty. If a detective can lie on his duty state then what is he likely to do when gathering evidence against a member of the public? Coles was required to resign.\n\nThe discipline farce continued when he appealed and was reinstated the following year by an assistant commissioner, although at the reduced rank of detective constable. Nevertheless, he was still allowed to operate as a frontline detective in the very area his highly suspicious activities had taken place with Clifford Norris, who was still on the run.\n\nSince the Lawrence scandal exploded, Crampton and Ilsley have made emphatic claims about what they knew and didn't know in the immediate aftermath of Stephen's murder. Crampton insists that over those four days he was in charge he never connected the prime suspect as the son of Clifford Norris. Similarly, he says he never made any connection between David Norris, the informant, and Clifford Norris, the suspect's father. For his part, Ilsley says he never connected the two David Norrises during these early stages.\n\nThe Lawrence family and their lawyers have never accepted these claims. Some members of the public inquiry team also privately felt very uncomfortable about these and other aspects of the two senior detectives' evidence.\n\nClifford Norris remained at large throughout the period his son became a prime suspect for the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Ilsley should have taken him out of circulation. The chief superintendent accepts he was aware two days after the murder that Clifford was David Norris's father and was wanted by Customs. But his collar was never felt.\n\nThe Coles affair only emerged much later during the public inquiry. The Lawrence family felt it further justified their suspicions that Clifford Norris had some sort of illicit protection from the cops. The Lawrence family suspected that Clifford Norris had exercised corrupt pressure on Coles, who the family and its legal team speculated may have approached senior officers to delay the arrests of young David Norris. No proof was ever produced to support this alleged chain of events. In fact, it seemed Clifford Norris was looking elsewhere, and had corruptly approached, through intermediaries, civilian witnesses who could damage his son.\n\nYoung David had stabbed another youth called Stacey Benefield four weeks before Stephen was killed. Initially Benefield declined to name his attacker to the police. But on the weekend after Stephen's death he made a statement naming David as the one who stabbed him with Neil Acourt. This, combined with the intelligence from the skinhead informant and other witnesses who'd come forward, was clearly enough to arrest David and his gang for the Lawrence murder. Crampton and Ilsley thought otherwise but never recorded their momentous decision.\n\nYoung David was eventually arrested after Benefield picked him out in a line-up in May 1993. Weeks later, he was approached in the street by an intermediary and taken to meet a man who gave him \u00a32,000 in cash to change his account of events. The man intimated he could take care of the local police, and they parted company. Benefield was left with the strong impression he had been talking to the fugitive Clifford Norris. He spent the money but also reported the approach to the police.\n\nNevertheless, young David was acquitted later that year in highly suspicious circumstances. According to Michael Mansfield QC, the Lawrence family barrister: \"... the foreman of the jury had approached David Norris prior to the verdict, to reassure him of the result and then to subsequently offer [him] employment. The juror himself was on bail for serious fraud at the time of the trial and he was later convicted of this fraud. He has also admitted a substantial connection with the London criminal underworld.\"\n\nNo one dispassionately looking at the Lawrence case can blame the family for believing the worst of Scotland Yard. In the run-up to the Lawrence murder and the crucial months that followed it was covering up three highly relevant corruption allegations in three specialist police squads operating in south-east London.\n\nThe first was the Dave Coles\u2013Clifford Norris affair at Tower Bridge Flying Squad, followed by the relationship between David Norris and the East Dulwich SERCS. The third scandal once again involved south-east London drug dealers connected to Brinks Mat gangster Kenny Noye, who included among his circle of associates people like Clifford Norris.\n\nOn 25 May 1993, the day after the collapse of the David Norris murder trial, a man in Bournemouth made an unconnected complaint against four detectives from the Surbiton office of SERCS. Two of the officers named in the complaint, detective sergeant Alec Leighton and detective constable John Donald, had been intimately involved in the Norris case. Leighton was in charge of the operation that arrested Warne and Dennison in Margate and Donald was the officer who interviewed them when they turned supergrasses and admitted their involvement with others in the murder.\n\nThe next month CIB mounted a sting operation, codenamed Zorba, against Donald, Leighton and the two other detectives. Word however leaked to the targets and the anti-corruption squad had to pull back without any success.\n\nThen, in September, five months after Stephen Lawrence's death, the Yard was shown compelling evidence by BBC's _Panorama_ that Donald was in a corrupt relationship with a south-east London drug dealer called Kevin Cressey, whom he had registered a year earlier as an informant after arresting him with 55 kilos of cannabis.\n\nCressey decided to deal his way out of trouble by supplying information, including on the Norris murder. But under the cover of the informant-handler relationship he also corruptly paid Donald for bail and for information to be passed to Kenny Noye, who although in prison at the time was believed to be behind a large cocaine shipment. To obtain further insurance, Cressey then went to _Panorama_ and agreed to set up Donald.\n\nCIB immediately suspended Leighton and Donald while mounting another operation codenamed Gallery into the Surbiton SERCS office and the new National Criminal Intelligence Service.\n\nThrough the BBC documentary the Lawrence family found out about corruption in Surbiton. But they knew nothing of the problems at East Dulwich, or for that matter at the Tower Bridge Flying Squad. Scotland Yard needed to keep the collapsed Norris case and the Lawrence murder inquiry separate in the family's mind. To do that they had to neutralise the growing view that corruption and collusion had taken place.\n\nPaul Condon was only two months in the commissioner's chair when he started to cop the fall-out from the defective Lawrence and Norris murder investigations.\n\nHis maiden speech in February 1993 was a touchy-feely affair about ethics and racism in the police and society at large. At a Yard-organised conference on \"Fairness, Community & Justice\" seven weeks before Stephen's murder, commissioner Condon talked about the need for his officers to be \"totally intolerant\" of race hate crimes and those who peddled racial hatred for political ends.\n\nPerhaps he felt qualified to make this plea having spent four years, between 1978 and 1982, at the Community Relations Branch of Scotland Yard. Then in 1987, after returning from a stint at Kent Constabulary, he served two years in a senior rank at Notting Hill Gate police station in west London. His responsibilities involved the August Bank Holiday Carnival organised by the well-established Caribbean community. They had suffered terribly since the fifties from police brutality and corruption. Had things improved under Condon's watch? A now very senior CPS lawyer who prosecuted cases from Notting Hill Gate police station at the time told us racism and corruption were still rife, paperwork in bad order and leadership poor.\n\nThe Carnival had until recently a cynical place in the Yard's attempt to put a positive gloss on its bad relations with the local black community. Newspapers would oblige police spin doctors every year with the same condescending image, often on the front page, of a white officer with an embarrassed smile attempting to dance calypso with a matronly black woman.\n\nCommissioner Condon told his maiden audience that racial issues presented the greatest challenge to the force. There would, he promised, be no compromise on demanding exemplary conduct from his officers. It was a standard, however, that the top cop and his circle of senior officers apparently felt did not apply to them. For within a few months of making that speech the commissioner authorised an internal investigation of the murder inquiry into Stephen Lawrence's death, which was later exposed as a most cynical whitewash.\n\nThe events leading to this cover-up began when the Lawrence family met Nelson Mandela during a state visit to London on 6 May, two weeks after the murder. The South African president lent his moral and political weight by likening their fight for justice to those black parents who had lost children during the struggle against apartheid. After Mandela spoke to the media, Doreen had her turn. She lambasted the police for their \"patronising\" treatment and the Major government for showing \"no interest\".\n\nThe moral authority of Nelson Mandela eventually propelled the Yard into action. Senior officers like Ilsley admit that \"external pressures\" forced him to take a greater interest in the case after Crampton had left to attend the Norris murder trial. But he and the Yard still deny that the hurried decision to arrest the five prime suspects the day after Mandela's visit was anything but \"pure coincidence\".\n\nIn late July recriminations flowed when the CPS decided not to prosecute. The case was largely dependent on the identification evidence of Duwayne Brooks. However, even this became tainted following a disputed conversation with a detective who was escorting Brooks to the line-up. The detective alleged Brooks had admitted being coached by friends ahead of the identification parade about the Acourt brothers' physical appearance. Duwayne said the detective was lying.\n\nThe CPS had also relied on legal advice that although the five suspects were more than likely the culprits, there was no realistic chance of a successful prosecution on the available evidence. This of course was clearly down to the bungled police investigation.\n\nBy mid-summer, increasing dissatisfaction with the Yard's response to the killing of Stephen Lawrence had become a key community issue, with demonstrations being prepared. This annoyed Ilsley's immediate boss, deputy assistant commissioner David Osland, who wrote to Condon complaining that the patience of his detectives on 3 Area was \"wearing thin\" with the Lawrence family and \"self-appointed public and media commentators\". Some of these busybodies included elected local MPs like the Tory left-winger, Peter Bottomley, and Labour backbencher Paul Boateng, who both sought reassurances from the commissioner. However, even Osland eventually realised the murder inquiry was getting nowhere, and began thinking up \"a way to placate the influential people in the local community\".\n\nSix officers were approached to give him the tools to make good this placation. But every one of them declined the poisoned chalice, until detective chief superintendent John Barker stepped forward. Although the last to be approached, Barker agreed to conduct a confidential internal review of the murder inquiry.\n\nOsland commissioned the now infamous Barker Review with Condon's prior approval. The commissioner had told the Lawrence family he was keeping a close personal eye on the situation. The review began in September 1993 and took Barker ten weeks to complete. The commissioner saw it in November and signed it off. It was as short in length as it was self-serving and convenient in its conclusions. Barker concluded that the Lawrence murder inquiry had \"progressed satisfactorily\" with \"all lines of inquiry being correctly pursued\".\n\nThe cover-up mentality was so deeply ingrained in the Yard that Barker even considered creating two different versions of the report. One would be for internal consumption. The other, a phoney, much more anodyne alternative, would exist for disclosure to the Lawrence family and their legal advisers should they ever sue. But in the end Barker and Osland didn't proceed with this misleading strategy, creating instead only one flawed and unprofessional document that gave the murder investigation an entirely unwarranted clean bill of health.\n\nCrampton, Ilsley, Osland and other senior officers had all seen the final draft of the Barker Review and failed to point out its wholesale untruthfulness. Of course they claimed that was because the murder inquiry, in their view, was not incompetent. This self-delusion would in all likelihood have persisted today had the Lawrence family not complained and triggered a PCA-supervised investigation in 1997.\n\nThe Kent detectives who examined the Barker Review on behalf of the PCA felt it was \"misleading\"; gave reassurance, which was \"undeserving and highly damaging\"; and did \"nothing to re-focus the Stephen Lawrence murder investigation\". Indeed, the PCA\/Kent report specified 28 shortcomings in the initial investigation that had been missed or suppressed by the Barker Review.\n\nThe family's barrister, Michael Mansfield QC, would later submit to the Stephen Lawrence inquiry that the Barker Review demonstrated \"the capacity and propensity of senior officers to collude with each other to manipulate and engineer a desired result\". The inquiry report put it another way: \"The Review provided a convenient shelter to those involved. The failure of all senior officers to detect the flaws in [it] is to be deplored.\"\n\nThe Barker Review was a multi-layered cover-up, not just a whitewash of police incompetence during what had become a _cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre_ black murder. The Home Office under Michael Howard was hardly concerned about the effect of the case on Britain's race relations \u2013 which is why he consistently ignored calls for a public inquiry. The real concern was how the Lawrence case threatened to undermine the confidence of middle Englanders in the Major government's political project of a rehabilitated Scotland Yard efficaciously fighting the war on crime.\n\nThe Barker Review was the dishonest document the government and the Yard could point to over the next four years, like a fake environmental health certificate on the greasy wall of a back street kebab shop. It was also commissioner Condon's official imprimatur that corruption was not a problem, when his inner circle was telling him this was definitely not the case.\n\nIn other words the setting up of the Ghost Squad in late 1993 began with a deceit that would mark the commissioner's period of office for the next seven years.\n\nThe Lawrence scandal was undoubtedly one of the chief reasons the anti-corruption initiative was launched covertly. For the next four years the secret strategy was one of containment. The Yard's corruption problem was not publicly admitted until 1997 by which time a small cabal of senior officers and spin doctors had worked out how bad it was and how the damage could be limited and the fall-out managed.\n\nSo it was that in the spring of 1994, commissioner Condon met the Lawrence family and their legal team at Scotland Yard to discuss the Barker Review. He looked Neville and Doreen Lawrence in the eyes and assured them with all the solemnity he could muster for the occasion that his officers had done everything they could. The Barker Review said so.\n\nA few weeks later, Paul Condon was made a knight of the realm.\n\n## [9\n\nA Ragamuffin Bunch](contents.html#ch09)\n\nOn New Year's Day 1987, John Monerville went to Stoke Newington police station to report his 19-year-old son Trevor missing. The family had last seen him in the early hours of the morning. The streets of Hackney, a depressed north-east London borough, can be an unforgiving place, even to the most fly.\n\nThe police claimed no knowledge of Trevor's whereabouts and quite reasonably informed the worried father they could not register him as a missing person until 24 hours had elapsed. The next day, Friday, Mr Monerville returned to the police station with a photograph. Trevor was registered as missing and the police repeated that they still had no trace of him. They said the same on Saturday.\n\nOn Sunday, the family rang around the capital's prisons. Finally they located Trevor in Brixton Prison on the other side of London. A prison official said ominously he was in the hospital wing and asked Mr Monerville if Trevor was epileptic or took any regular medication. No, said his anxious father.\n\nSoon after, Mr Monerville went to Stoke Newington police station. He sought details of how Trevor had ended up in prison. After all, there must have been an arrest. A police station must have charged him with some offence, then held him in police cells until the court remanded his son into prison custody. He felt the officer becoming abusive, almost ordering him out of the police station. He was told he'd get all the answers he needed at Highbury Magistrates Court when it opened Monday morning.\n\nThe next day, Mr Monerville visited his son in Brixton prison. He was shocked to see his bruised body. Three days later, Trevor underwent emergency surgery to remove a blood clot on his brain. Meanwhile, the police quietly dropped the minor charge of criminal damage \u2013 Stoke Newington officers had arrested Trevor at 10.40 p.m. on New Year's Day after finding him asleep in a car they believed he had broken into.\n\nAs the family made further inquiries and complained to the new PCA, several facts emerged with echoes of Pinochet's Chile: Trevor _was_ in the cells at Stoke Newington police station when his father made inquiries on the Friday and Saturday. A group of officers had forcibly fingerprinted him. And before Trevor was taken to the Magistrates Court on Saturday, he had been examined four times by a police surgeon and twice taken to a nearby hospital.\n\nAnnette Monerville noticed a change in her son when he was discharged from hospital after the brain surgery. Trevor had contracted epilepsy and went through bouts of aggression and depression. The family set up a campaign to establish the truth behind his \"disappearance\".\n\nStoke Newington police did apologise for misleading Mr and Mrs Monerville, blaming it on an administrative error. But Trevor's parents and friends believe something far more sinister occurred inside the notorious police station.\n\nThat notoriety has been a persistent feature of local community relations with the police since the first immigrants arrived in the fifties. The borough is a vibrant mix of cultures from the Caribbean, Ireland and Cyprus, and more recently from West Africa. Hassidic Jews and Muslims, Kurds and Turks live side by side, although not always in harmony. The local police are almost entirely all white officers often from outside London, whose past experience of multiculturalism is limited to their local takeaway. Detective constable Paul Goscomb, for instance, joined the Met in the eighties after Gloucestershire Police rejected him. The West Country boy, then just 22, was sent to Stoke Newington on his first posting. He had no idea where it was and viewed the area as \"Vietnam\". Policing had very much its \"own style\", he suggested. These comments reflect the siege mentality that dominated the local force. Detective constable Declan Costello transferred to Stoke Newington in January 1988. \"[The community] hated us and we hated them,\" he explained. \"It wasn't a black thing. It wasn't as complex as that. If you went out in uniform or plain clothes you could feel the hatred.\" Costello and his colleagues believed if they were caught on their own they'd get a good hiding. This justified dishing one out. He recalled how people would run when they saw the Stoke Newington cops coming.\n\nRacism, incivility, excessive force, poor training and corruption have all shaped community relations. But it is deaths in police custody or care that are a major cause for real concern and a flashpoint of civil resistance. Cases like Aseta Simms in 1971 and Colin Roach in 1983 were highly influential. Invariably, in these and other cases the police establishment circled its wagons and blamed black activists and red politicians for exploiting the inner city blues. Alternatively, Yard press officers would privately brief mainstream journalists that the victims of such police crimes were drug addicts, alcoholics or mentally ill.\n\nThe Trevor Monerville case was a key turning point for British policing. A storm was raging in the hearts and minds of a ragamuffin bunch of Hackney residents. And the \"disappearance\" of one of their sons became the catalyst to form a community defence organisation that drew a line in the pool of blood.\n\nFrom 1988 until 1995, the Hackney Community Defence Association's approach to forensically investigating over 130 cases of police brutality led them to uncover a web of organised corruption in the local drug squad, and to overturn 13 miscarriages of justice. Their efforts exposed a force out of control, racist and in denial.\n\nThe founding members of HCDA shared a common experience beyond their political commitment to confronting racism and tackling the causes of other social injustices. Nearly all had a scarring experience of police brutality.\n\nGraham Smith was the driving force behind HCDA. His personal journey is a tragic one that shaped the association it became. When Smith discovered the girlfriend he lived with in Manchester had been gang-raped, his life started to fall apart. He felt emotionally shut out, as she struggled with the additional trauma of an approaching trial. Smith's job as a supervisor in an outside leisure centre was no distraction. He blotted out his profound vulnerability with some heavy drinking. Then one evening in 1983 the police assaulted him. With time, he has managed to reflect on the incident with dark humour. \"I got queer bashed by proxy,\" he now says.\n\nSmith was out with a black gay friend who was still in drag from the night before. \"It was only six or seven at night and we were drunk. Two officers in a van stopped and arrested us. We were charged with being drunk and disorderly. We were separated and I was taken to a room. One officer was walking up and down on my back. Another was punching me in the back of the head saying, 'You're a queer bastard!' I was thrown against the wall and passed out. The next thing I remember was coming to in hospital and seeing the officer. I screamed: 'You beat me up!' I wanted to get out of there. But the nurse insisted the officer left.\" The police, he says, blamed his injuries on a fall. \"At that time it wasn't common for people to complain or seek redress for being assaulted. It happened before the PCA was set up.\" Smith pleaded guilty and the court fined him \u00a325. \"I didn't pay on principle,\" he recalls with indignation. Then with a smile he adds, \"I bought a gold chain instead.\"\n\nThe following year, Smith moved to north London. With support from the Greater London Council and local trade unions he set up a community outreach programme, which ran for almost three years. By 1987, now sporting an alarming mullet haircut, he relocated to Stoke Newington. There he learned about Trevor Monerville's disappearance and joined the family's campaign for justice.\n\nIn June 1987, while Trevor was recovering from brain surgery, another young man, Tunay Hassan, died after being detained by Stoke Newington officers. Five months later, Gary Stretch, a young white window cleaner, was severely assaulted by seven off-duty cops inside a pub.\n\nThese incidents galvanised Smith and others into action. Among them was a campaigning journalist and political activist called Martin Walker. He was a fellow Mancunian who'd recently published two books exposing the violent police tactics used during the Miners' Strike and against protesting students from Manchester University.\n\nThey wanted HCDA to concentrate on legal investigations of police malpractice while offering support to the victims. \"Because of the isolationism of those victims, you didn't disbelieve people \u2013 this was one of the rules. You believed until your own investigation showed reason not to,\" says Smith. There was a \"cold professionalism\" about the way HCDA came together, he adds. \"Although we had personal experience of police brutality we didn't discuss it except with a few close friends.\"\n\nHCDA was launched on 23 July 1988 at Hackney Town Hall. Among the founders were two civil liberties lawyers, Louise Christian and Jane Deighton, and representatives of Anti-Fascist Action. HCDA's first real case came the following January when Trevor Monerville's 73-year-old grandmother was assaulted at home after reporting to the police a car accident in which she and a family friend were involved. As more people in the community heard about HCDA its meetings filled up.\n\nSmith invited Celia Stubbs, a mental health social worker, to join in 1989. She was a long-time Hackney resident and co-founder of INQUEST, the organisation that campaigns for family rights following deaths in custody. Celia came to speak on the tenth anniversary of the death of her boyfriend Blair Peach. After his killing, Stubbs had fought to identify which officers from the Special Patrol Group had administered the fatal blow. The thing Celia loved most about HCDA was how it catered to the victims and the needs of the families they left behind.\n\nRudolf Hawkins, a local black bricklayer, is one such case. In February 1990 he was severely truncheoned when officers arrested him at home over a motoring incident. He ended up hospitalised and unconscious with a broken hand. \"I went through one of the most traumatic and depressing periods in my life. Initially the psychological effects were unbearable, so much so that I had to seek psychiatric help. At times I found it hard to come to terms with my life. Worst of all was the thought of not being able to pursue my career as a bricklayer [and] provide for my family.\"\n\nHawkins resented having to expose himself to humiliating cross-examination to get redress. A jury found in his favour and the Met paid him substantial damages. Many took their awards and left the struggle to HCDA, but Hawkins carried on as one of the association's key caseworkers. He still works in Hackney but as a market trader. The whole experience makes him wary of talking about it, even now.\n\n\"In the early days HCDA was like political therapy where people, by reaching out and supporting other cases, dealt with the pain and shame of understanding what had happened to them,\" says local schoolteacher Tony Pryce, another HCDA ragamuffin.\n\nIt was the legal side of HCDA's mission that attracted his friend Russell Miller, a young radical lawyer. He had been studying law at Manchester when Martin Walker was conducting defence work for the student union. \"I was radicalised in the late seventies and eighties by my parents and through the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,\" says Miller. \"But it wasn't until I saw Martin building a legal case against the local police that I realised how effective a career as a solicitor could be.\n\n\"The good thing about HCDA was it was political activists working not for their own ends but for the community. We had very limited resources to bring accountability to a very powerful institution. HCDA was grounded in the needs of the victims. It sought to put pressure on every level: on the media for not reporting police crimes; on lawyers for not defending clients properly; on the police for not investigating crimes committed by their own; on the CPS for not bringing prosecutions against those officers; and on the PCA for failing to supervise internal investigations properly.\"\n\nFrom the 1970s to the 1990s, many inner city areas had a \"Front Line\", a street where locals and outsiders scored drugs. The dealers were relatively open about it, and hung out on the street, or in a caf\u00e9 or pub waiting for punters. Prostitutes could be found touting for business nearby. Many of the girls on the game were also on the gear in a spiral of debasement and self-destruction.\n\nDealers on the Line knew one another and competed fiercely for the junkies and recreational users. An early warning system of clockers, people who watch for marked and unmarked patrols by the drug squad, operated on most Front Lines. But these sentries were the only hint of collegiality in an otherwise treacherous business riven with factionalism and police informers.\n\nIn Brixton there was Railton Road and in Notting Hill there was All Saints Road or the Mangrove. For the residents of Hackney the Front Line was a half-mile stretch of the borough called Sandringham Road. Dealing went on predominantly on its east side, in a section no more than 100 metres long. Notable landmarks included the Sandringham Arms, the Jerk Chicken Caf\u00e9, the Mitford Tavern and at number 150, a place known simply as \"the Shop\".\n\nThis was a late night convenience store but not in the conventional sense. The Shop was a small council house where a Jamaican mother called Pearl Cameron sold rocks of crack from a service hatch in her kitchen. Each rock was roughly the size of a peanut, wrapped in silver foil, which Pearl dispensed at \u00a320 to \u00a325 a time.\n\nIn August 1989 she became a registered informant for a young detective constable on the drugs squad called Roy Lewandowski. He was originally from Merseyside and had joined the Met eight years earlier. Most of that time was served at Stoke Newington police station. Lewandowski had a reputation among his colleagues for expensive tastes and the gift of the gab. On the street he was known as \"Blondie\", because of his mop of hair cut in a soul boy wedge that obscured most of his forehead.\n\nPearl was caught dealing, but in return for a caution she agreed to \"work\" for Blondie. In itself this was not corrupt. Detectives at Stoke Newington and elsewhere in the Met were encouraged to develop informants within the community to fight the wars on crime and drugs. \"Snouts\" were also a measure of detective acumen and a way of getting noticed by those who ran the informal reference system onto specialist squads, where the opportunities for overtime and skulduggery were greater. Relationships with informants were nominally governed by strict regulations, but lazy or results-driven senior officers often didn't enforce them properly.\n\nPearl tells an incredible story about her time as Lewandowski's snout. She maintains they went into the crack business together. He provided her with the drugs confiscated from other dealers and junkies. She sold it at the Shop and they split the profits. At one point she claimed he was taking between \u00a31,000 and \u00a32,000 every week. Pearl provided information on other dealers so Lewandowski could cover his back at the station. But his frequent visits to her house made those on the Line suspicious, so Lewandowski introduced a Greek Cypriot called Michael Kyriacou as his middleman.\n\nKyriacou was a local landlord who ran various businesses. Among them, he provided gaming machines to the scores of Cypriot social clubs that dominate the boroughs of Hackney and neighbouring Haringey to the north. Crucially, Kyriacou was also a registered informant to Lewandowski and his partner on the drugs squad, detective sergeant Graham Le Blond.\n\nPearl was happy with the new arrangement and the extra money coming in. She travelled frequently to Jamaica, where she had invested in a house jointly owned with her parents. Lewandowski even squared it with immigration to allow her cousin to stay with her in the UK. Then Cupid's arrow struck and Pearl fell in love with Blondie, who flirted back although she swears they never slept together.\n\nAfter Lewandowski fell out with Kyriacou, the drug recycling business ran into difficulties. In the autumn of 1990, the drug squad turned up the heat and busted many people on the Line for possession of crack with intent to supply. They also set up an operation codenamed Cancer solely targeting Pearl. The Mitford Tavern was used as an observation post because it overlooked the Shop.\n\nIn January 1991 Pearl was arrested and remanded to prison. She faced a substantial sentence. Her 19-year-old son, Marlon, had been arrested too and was also on remand awaiting trial. Only then did she reveal her dealings with Lewandowski to CIB. Anti-corruption officers went to Holloway Prison and took Pearl's 11-page statement.\n\nThe officer in charge of CIB was a slight, angular superintendent called Ian Russell. Throughout his career he remained a uniform officer and was only made detective when he joined CIB in 1990. A friendly chief superintendent had sponsored Russell's move to CIB with a brief to improve the quality of investigations.\n\nWhen Pearl Cameron outlined the allegations against Lewandowski, it was a name already on Russell's radar. CIB were also familiar with Kyriacou and were inquiring into the relationship with both his police handlers. DS Graham Le Blond had left Stoke Newington and was by then working at Edmonton police station.\n\nA Customs investigation of VAT fraud in the gaming machine business in north London had reported concerns that Stoke Newington officers were tipping off targets in the Cypriot community. After his fall-out with Lewandowski, Kyriacou started naming names to Customs about his competitors. He had also claimed Lewandowski was protecting certain players. These allegations were passed to Russell weeks before Pearl made her claims about recycling crack provided by Lewandowski. By now CIB had a list of suspect officers.\n\nRussell briefed senior officers at the Yard, including deputy commissioner John Smith. Senior management at Stoke Newington was also alerted. In April 1991, CIB were given the go-ahead to start Operation Jackpot to investigate allegations of drug dealing, theft and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice at Stoke Newington police station. Jackpot made applications to home secretary Michael Howard for taps on Lewandowski's office phone and his mobile, according to detective sergeant Barry Toombs, one of Russell's team. Toombs recalls CIB were refused authority to tap Le Blond.\n\nAnother fruitful source of information was CIB's taped interviews with Kyriacou. He revealed Lewandowski had stolen some antique books from the home of a man whose murder he was investigating. He also alleged he had paid Lewandowski a small fee to be able to clear the rest of the dead man's possessions. However the slippery Cypriot denied being the middleman between Pearl and Lewandowski but admitted buying drugs from her house when the cop was there. He also said Lewandowski and Le Blond had fallen out.\n\nThen in early September 1991 yet another allegation of corruption reached CIB that partly confirmed Pearl's story, albeit from an equally problematic source. Nigerian-born Ida Oderinde, a 32-year-old mother of several children, wrote a series of letters from prison soon after being jailed for four years for possessing heroin with intent to supply. Ida claimed at trial and in letters to Scotland Yard and to prime minister John Major that the Stoke Newington drugs squad had planted a large bag of heroin in her kitchen freezer during a raid.\n\nIda was no angel. Her parents had abandoned her in the sixties when they left Nigeria for London. She rejoined them at 14 when they were living in Hackney. Ida's mother became very violent, so she was put into care. At first she shoplifted. Then she tried cheque fraud. All the while she was in an abusive relationship with a junkie whom she blames for getting her hooked on heroin. She robbed to feed their habits and their addicted baby. When Ida fell pregnant again she miscarried after the father battered her. She reported him to the police and confessed her own crimes, which led to a spell inside.\n\nWhen Ida came out she befriended Pearl Cameron. Immediately she picked up rumours that her new friend was a grass. \"It was becoming very obvious that at least four people were not arrested at any time because they worked for the police,\" she told CIB. Pearl had confided she was dealing for the police. And Ida claimed it was when she refused to do the same that she was set up.\n\nRussell suspected there was a corrupt cell of detectives at Stokey Cokey, as locals were now calling it, and not a few lone wolves. After six months of secret investigation, the Yard made its move. It was no coincidence that the decision in November 1991 to arrest Lewandowski coincided with a formal and public complaint to the PCA by Pearl Cameron. The arrest was part of a joint operation with Customs, whose officers had detained several targets over the gaming machine VAT fraud, including Kyriacou, presumably to disguise his role as the informant.\n\nWhen Lewandowski's home was searched CIB officers found some of the items stolen from the murder victim's home. Two days later Lewandowski was committed for trial to face a charge of theft and malfeasance.\n\nWhile he was suspended and awaiting trial, a black DJ from Stoke Newington approached him for help with a case he hoped to mount against the police for malicious prosecution.\n\nBenny Wilson used to spin a soul set at the Roxy in central London before the Punk-Reggae fusion pioneered by producer Don Letts and typified by bands like The Clash persuaded the owners to replace his slot. He later became DJ\/manager of the Cotton Club, which opened in Stoke Newington in 1986. A well-known local sports promoter called Ambrose Mendy owned the club in partnership with the brother of cross over reggae star Eddie Grant.\n\nRunning the Cotton Club's door was a difficult business because it was also frequented by north London faces like the Adams brothers. One barmaid was the girlfriend of their enforcer, Gilbert Wynter, who later disappeared in mysterious circumstances. The Adams crime family owned bars and pubs in the neighbouring borough of Islington, like RaRa, where Arsenal footballers relaxed, and the Edward VII.\n\nMendy was a police target from an early age with convictions for burglary and fraud. He was friendly with the Adams brothers. They shared an interest in boxing. Mendy had moved from unlicensed boxing promotion to working with Islington's Frank Warren, who was breaking the hold Mickey Duff had on televised British boxing. Many of Mendy's other clients were entertained at the Cotton Club by Benny Wilson's platters.\n\nThe DJ lived with his young daughter in a nearby flat, which was owned by the slippery police informant Michael Kyriacou with whom he'd been engaged in a courtroom tussle over rent arrears. Wilson was arrested on 10 January 1991 on the way back from dropping his daughter at school. DS Graham Le Blond led the operation, which found firearms, ammunition, cannabis, amphetamine and cocaine in the flat. Wilson denied they were his. Wilson says he declined an offer to become a grass in return for dropping the charges. But the approach made him wonder if the operation was a way of getting at Mendy or even the Adams crime syndicate.\n\nCertainly police pressure on the Mendy empire was intense in January. A week after Wilson's arrest, Terry Marsh, the former world champion boxer, was arrested for the attempted murder of Frank Warren, his one-time manager. Mendy was Marsh's agent at the time of the shooting. One week later, Mendy was himself bailed to face charges over a \u00a31.2 million bank fraud.\n\nWilson remained in custody for six months protesting his innocence. Mendy supplied his top solicitor, Henri Brandman. In June, Wilson was discharged at committal because no evidence could link him to the objects found in his flat.\n\nWord filtered back to him that Kyriacou was a grass. And when news of Lewandowski's arrest emerged, Wilson approached him for information about the Cypriot. Wilson says he paid Lewandowski \u00a32,000 for copies of the secretly tape-recorded CIB interviews with Kyriacou. In them the Cypriot informant appears to confirm that he had set up Wilson with Le Blond.\n\nLewandowski's only condition for further co-operation was that Wilson made a formal complaint to Operation Jackpot. The DJ made a statement to CIB in 1992. That November Lewandowski was convicted of theft and jailed for 18 months. Towards the end of his sentence he made an explosive five-page statement for Wilson's lawyers, which was also provided to CIB. It alleged that Le Blond, acting for Kyriacou, had suggested planting a shotgun in Wilson's flat and then arresting him in return for money. Lewandowski said he declined the offer. But his statement went on to say Le Blond suggested instead he would approach a former Stoke Newington cop called Martin Morgan who was working with him at Edmonton.\n\nThe fall-out between Lewandowski and Le Blond and their informants, Cameron and Kyriacou, would lead Operation Jackpot to places some within the Yard did not want to go.\n\nMark Jackson was 26 when in May 1988 he landed a job as a junior lawyer with the CPS. The service was still in its infancy. Each police station in north London had a nominated CPS team to prosecute its cases. Jackson was given Stoke Newington to look after. It proved to be a baptism of fire. The relationship between the police and CPS was, he says, very poor. They didn't trust the lawyers and saw them as errand boys for prosecuting counsel. He recalls that officers used to prosecuting their own cases could be domineering and dismissive and few CPS lawyers would decide against prosecution.\n\nAfter an initial 18-month stint, Jackson returned to Stoke Newington in early 1991, this time as the youngest senior prosecutor in the CPS. \"The relationship with the police had broken down and my job was to repair the damage.\"\n\nJackson noticed that compared with other CPS teams in the office, Stoke Newington had an oppressive in-tray. He discreetly asked senior officers in charge of the detective branch what could explain this. \"I was told there was an epidemic of crack and they were under immense pressure from the community to clean it up. It wasn't the crack problem but the burglary that went with it. The police in Stoke Newington were under pressure to make a lot of arrests.\"\n\nHowever it soon became apparent to Jackson that the bad relationship with the CPS was down to the quality of those arrests. Concerns over poor paperwork were, with hindsight, clues to corruption, especially in the drug squad, he says.\n\nJackson recounted an example where someone had been fairly arrested for crack possession, but then an unexplained shotgun was added to the charge sheet, which the defendant complained was a plant. \"When we asked the police to do a forensic test on the gun, something you'd assume they would have already thought of, they backed off the charge.\"\n\nOne of the most frequent anomalies was the \"lack of continuity\" in evidence following arrests for small possession of crack. These rocks should have been exhibited in sealed evidence bags and sent for analysis. But Jackson recalls reviewing cases where the forensic scientist was analysing a drug sample with a different seal number or the drugs had simply gone missing.\n\nThe police and the CPS came under another type of pressure when, in March 1991, the home secretary, Ken Clarke, announced a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice following the quashing of the Birmingham Six convictions. The Commission's remit was to prevent further miscarriages of justice, but these just kept coming.\n\nIn April, Jackson was called to meet his boss Jerry Hyde in his top-floor office at Highbury Corner. When he walked in he was surprised to see the head of all Stoke Newington detectives, Robin Scott, and his boss, detective chief superintendent Roy Clark. It was clear to Jackson the three men had been discussing something of great importance before his arrival. A list of about eleven police officers was passed over the desk. The detectives asked in a tone he didn't much care for, \"What do you know about any of these names?\" Hyde intervened and told DCS Clark that he would discuss the list with Jackson in private.\n\nHe was later taken aside and informed that a corruption probe called Operation Jackpot had been launched, beginning with the officers on the list. Jackson was told he was to continue his normal role but also to secretly review the integrity of old cases dealt with by those officers and pass this to the Jackpot team. \"I felt I was being asked to spy on these officers and refused. There was an obvious conflict of interest.\" But Hyde, he says, told him the instructions came from the top of the CPS, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Barbara Mills. \"I think it was our fire fight until we knew how we were going to sort it out. There was no back-up plan in place at the time. The special casework lawyer should have dealt with it from the beginning.\" But this wouldn't happen for many months.\n\nJackson therefore carried out his secret dual role but says he felt \"very uncomfortable\". Every so often he was passed new names of suspect officers. \"I was shocked by the level of corruption that had gone on, not that it had happened. When I started to think back and marry things together, like the missing drugs, it started to make sense.\"\n\nOperation Jackpot had parallels with the 1989 West Midlands Crime Squad scandal, whose tactics for securing confessions involved mixing straight fit-ups and verbals with torture. Although calls for an independent public inquiry were rejected, an outside force had at least done the two-year investigation. Jackson was not alone in thinking that given the public concern which led to the Royal Commission, it was extraordinary that the government had allowed Scotland Yard not only to conduct an internal investigation, but one where the senior management at Stoke Newington were intimately involved.\n\nJackson thought DCS Roy Clark's role was conflicted. How could his involvement with Operation Jackpot hope to inspire public confidence when it was men under his command being investigated? Wasn't this prejudging where the corruption probe might lead?\n\nThe Yard defended its position at the time, claiming the internal inquiry was \"entirely appropriate\". By then the PCA had been shut out for six months, even though Operation Jackpot's list of suspect officers clearly suggested a possible cell of corruption in the drugs squad that questioned the safety of many prosecutions.\n\nThis had all the hallmarks of an organisation trying to keep a lid on the scandal until they had a grip on the handle. Operation Jackpot hadn't even contacted HCDA, who clearly possessed leads vital to any serious inquiry that put the public interest first.\n\nThe community watchdog had lobbied the Royal Commission with its evidence and provided a report entitled _A Crime is a Crime is a Crime_. It campaigned for police officers who commit crimes in the exercise of their duty \u2013 such as fit-ups and assaults \u2013 to be treated like ordinary citizens rather than enjoy the \"exceptional provisions\" of an internal complaints system. Operation Jackpot was aware of the report because HCDA publicised in the media its case files. These files suggested a sinister trend of police officers assaulting members of the public then, to cover it up, charging them with assault on the police.\n\nSuperintendent Russell could not have missed the alarming development of successive officers being disbelieved or caught lying in court during a spate of cases between September and December 1991. Notorious police constable Ronnie Palumbo \u2013 who Jackson says was on the list he saw in April \u2013 was later that year disowned by the prosecution as a credible witness of truth during the trial of Paul Noel, accused of possessing cannabis with intent to supply. The trial collapsed and the judge indicated Palumbo should be investigated. It emerged that in a previous trial the officer had taken the almost unprecedented step of invoking his right against self-incrimination and refused to answer further questions. Palumbo, known as \"Nathan\" on the Front Line, had also been involved in the disputed search of Ida Oderinde's house, after which she alleged to CIB heroin had been planted in her freezer.\n\nOn 28 January eight Stoke Newington officers were told they were being transferred out of Hackney division and could go anywhere in east London but no two officers could transfer to the same police station. The following day, DCS Roy Clark accompanied his men to City Road. The atmosphere in the anteroom waiting to see the commander-in-charge of personnel was icy. Each officer was given official notification that they were subject to complaints now being investigated by Operation Jackpot. These ranged from theft to assault and perjury.\n\nDeputy assistant commissioner Mike Taylor had taken the decision to transfer the eight officers at a meeting the previous day with assistant commissioner Peter Winship, who was overseeing Jackpot. They were briefed by Russell, who told them thirty-two officers had complaints against them and more were in the pipeline. The high-powered group considered three options: do nothing, suspend the officers or transfer them. The CPS was not consulted. Mark Jackson felt the officers should have been moved or suspended in April 1991, when he was first handed the Jackpot list.\n\nA Met press release on 29 January made it clear the transfer was a result of complaints from \"people accused of drug dealing\" and that the eight officers had not been suspended and would \"continue their full range of duties\". But while journalists concentrated on making front-page news of the transfer, another equally explosive story was unfolding. At six o'clock that same morning, forty-six-year-old sergeant Gerry Carroll was found slumped in the toilets at Barkingside police station having shot himself in the head with a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. Carroll had been the custody sergeant at Stoke Newington from 1982 until October 1990 when he moved to Barkingside. At the time of his suicide, Carroll and other officers were the subject of a civil action for the malicious prosecution of Glenford Lewis, a Jamaican man whose trial for possession of cocaine collapsed after the CPS withdrew. Lewis had alleged the police planted a matchbox of cocaine during a search of his car and had beaten him up.\n\nSome news reports suggested an internal inquiry into the Lewis case, parallel to Operation Jackpot, was due to report its findings within days of Carroll's death, and that he had rung Stoke Newington police station the night before he killed himself to ask if he would be named in the Jackpot inquiry too.\n\nOne of his police friends, DC Declan Costello, recalls that at Stoke Newington detectives were taken into the corrupt circle of fit-ups and theft on the recommendation of experienced hands that \"they could do the business\". He says Carroll, like him, had that recommendation. Costello told us Carroll made three calls to various officers without response the night before he died. Intriguingly, the Yard later confirmed to local Labour MP, Brian Sedgemore, that Carroll committed suicide after receiving three telephone calls from unnamed officers. This information could only have come from phone-taps.\n\nA verdict of suicide was recorded at the inquest. His GP told the coroner Carroll had suffered from tinnitus \u2013 a constant ringing, buzzing or humming in one's ear or head \u2013 since he was punched on the cheek in 1986, and that two weeks before his death he had complained he couldn't sleep. A superintendent investigating Carroll's death also told the court he was not under investigation or suspicion and was not going to be disciplined.\n\nThe main causes of tinnitus are ageing and loud noises. Sufferers can train their mind to filter out unwanted sounds, but it is exacerbated by stress. One suggestion is that CIB was squeezing Carroll to turn informer against his colleagues, who at the same time were urging him to stay staunch. What the Yard says publicly and the truth surrounding officers who kill themselves during corruption inquiries can be canyons apart, as the Alan 'Taffy' Holmes case showed four years earlier.\n\nThe developments of 29 January led Sedgemore to table a colourful early day motion (EDM) two days later condemning the \"nasty, vile and corrupt\" cops at Stoke Newington. More explosively, DCS Roy Clark was accused of misleading the MP about \"the true nature of the problems because [Clark] himself had been duped by his own police officers\". The parliamentary intervention was followed by an invitation from assistant commissioner Winship to attend a briefing. Sedgemore told the senior officer he felt \"badly let down\" by the police, given his own efforts to clean up Sandringham Road. He said he also believed some police officers were allowing drug dealing to continue but he never imagined officers were \"on the take\". The MP gave Winship two names.\n\nSedgemore's note of the 6 February meeting records the following: \"[Winship] told me we were dealing with the worst case of police corruption in the Met for ten years. It had come as a body blow to the commissioner and to Stoke Newington police station... Whether or not [the transferred officers] were charged and convicted there was no doubt that some at least were involved in serious corruption. The original tip off had come from Customs.\" The note continued: \"By transferring them [the Yard] had of course reduced the chances of getting enough evidence to convict them, he said, but they had no alternative.\"\n\nRoy Clark was angered by the EDM and told the local paper: \"I am amazed that an MP who is a trained barrister can pre-judge an issue... on the strength of allegations alone. I do not feel I have been duped by my police officers. It is important these allegations are put in perspective. They are being made by people, on the whole, who are self-confessed drugs dealers. At the moment they are only allegations. It could well be that they are exonerated at the end of the day.\"\n\nSedgemore, who had also called for an independent judicial enquiry, slapped down Clark in a confidential reply seen by the authors: \"In light of the very helpful briefing I had with [Winship] last week your comments as quoted in the _Hackney Gazette_ were unfortunate and misinformed. I understand we are dealing with the worst case of corruption that the Met has faced in a decade.\"\n\nHackney's other Labour MP, Diane Abbott, joined forces with a Stokey Cokey awkward squad of left-wing parliamentarians including Dennis Skinner, Bob Cryer and Terry Lewis. They tabled a second EDM asking home secretary Kenneth Clark to explain why senior Yard officers had attended Gerry Carroll's funeral when \"they know or could have been told by their colleagues that evidence pointed unmistakably to Carroll being involved in organised crime, and hopes that this Sicilian practice will be discontinued.\"\n\nThe Carroll suicide gave one Hackney resident, a baker called Hugh Prince, the security to come forward to HCDA. Prince had arrived from Jamaica in 1967, aged just 12. In the early eighties he moved to the borough. He hung around the Roots Pool Community Centre on the Front Line, where the talk over a game of cards or dominoes was of how the only black people safe from police brutality and fit-ups were dealers working for the drugs squad.\n\nPrince had been arrested at a shebeen in August 1990 for possession of crack, allegedly found in his cigarette packet. He made an immediate complaint that officers working under Carroll had planted it. Nevertheless, he was convicted and jailed for two months. \"For nearly a year after my release from prison I hardly left my home. I was frightened of being planted with drugs again. It wasn't until I heard that Carroll shot himself that I felt it was safe to go out.\"\n\nSedgemore took up his case and wrote to the home secretary about \"the extraordinarily cavalier way\" Prince's complaint had been ignored for two years. Operation Jackpot was forced to take it up. His appeal was subsequently allowed in December 1994 and he later won considerable compensation from the Met.\n\nThe transfer of officers in January 1992 was for HCDA the first official confirmation of a drug corruption inquiry into Stoke Newington. Only then, on Valentine's Day, did superintendent Russell make contact with the ragamuffin bunch seeking their information on corrupt officers.\n\n\"The problem for the Met,\" says Russell Miller, \"was HCDA was going for three years before the drugs scandal broke so there was a well-oiled database in place.\" The drug corruption aspect gave the apparent randomness of the police brutality a meaning, adds Graham Smith.\n\nHCDA was unique in its commitment to do the legal gumshoeing many solicitors ignored until Legal Aid was secured. That could take months, by which time the evidence trail was cold. But as Stokey Cokey snowballed into a national scandal, so did the number of local victims willing to come forward. Among the genuine ones were chancers, but most were soon weeded out by HCDA's para-legals.\n\nAt the time Jackpot made its approach, Miller was working at the radical solicitors, Birnberg & Co, who had recently defended the Birmingham Six and were engaged in unpicking numerous other miscarriages of justice. Frustrated that the CPS was not proactive enough when cases of police misconduct were brought to its attention, Miller set up a Lawyers' Liaison Group (LLG) in March 1992 to share information collated by HCDA around drugs and assault cases involving Stoke Newington officers. At first Miller says he was unsure it would work because many solicitors and barristers are not given to sharing information, let alone outside work hours and for no pay. Solicitor Debbie Tripley agrees but says colleagues soon saw the cross-examination potential of knowing the arresting officer had previously been disbelieved on oath in a similar trial; something the CPS and Yard were not exactly rushing to make widely known.\n\nNow a defence solicitor, Mark Jackson can understand her frustration. He was uneasy about how his CPS bosses were managing the legal fall-out and frustrated by CIB's unwillingness to share information with him, let alone defence lawyers. He also felt \"under pressure\" from senior officers at Stoke Newington to save cases jeopardised by the ongoing corruption probe. \"There came a point defence solicitors would ring up and I looked a twat because they knew more than I did. I think the CPS had been kept very much in the dark. I was told by one detective inspector, 'You are being drip fed.' There were case conferences where prosecuting counsel would say to the senior officer from Stoke things like, 'How many rabbits are there left in the hat?'\"\n\nAfter many months in \"this invidious position\", the job of reviewing old cases dealt with by suspect officers on the Jackpot list was passed to Special Casework, a department within the CPS handling what are deemed sensitive and political cases.\n\nStuart Sampson took over in October 1992. He is an experienced lawyer with an uncanny resemblance to the bespectacled Mole from _Wind in the Willows_. \"Going to Stoke Newington was like being back in Notting Hill Gate police station in the late eighties during the Mangrove days,\" he recalls. His new job got off to a difficult start, he says, because the Yard didn't want him to see superintendent Russell's interim and final report to the PCA. \"That was the police view, which we soon disabused them of but it took a little while.\"\n\nKeeping the CPS out of the decision to transfer the eight officers was also a mistake, which he feels had little regard for the disclosure problems it caused. It was Sampson's job to review the merits of past and current prosecutions, to decide whether the CPS should oppose appeals against convictions and what to disclose to the defence. This task was further hindered, he suggests, by the time CIB took to deliver its reports. The Yard was also relying on a discredited legal instrument called a public interest immunity certificate (PII) \u2013 in effect a gagging order \u2013 to prevent disclosure around Operation Jackpot.\n\nSampson says it wasn't until February 1993, almost two years after Operation Jackpot started, that \"CIB disclosed details of all officers under investigation. Accordingly, with the pressure from the courts, the review of current cases had to be completed on the material available.\"\n\nThe situation typified the problem of internal corruption probes, which allow the police force to decide, without independent legal oversight, when and whether to release information prejudicial to its own interests. The practical effect is people remain in prison or with the stigma of being a criminal longer than they should. And suspect officers are dealt with away from the courts and in a way that suits the Yard rather than the interests of justice and the community it serves.\n\nThe Lawyers' Liaison Group tried to change that. It was made up of twelve solicitors' firms and nineteen barristers. They wrote to the DPP and the home secretary expressing profound concern about the injustice caused by the lack of disclosure from Operation Jackpot.\n\nBrian Sedgemore and eleven other MPs tabled two further early day motions in June 1992 criticising the Yard's handling of Jackpot and asking why constable Palumbo, whom he called a \"lying witness\", had not been suspended. The MPs got an audience with Ken Clarke followed by a letter in August. A civil servant claimed Clarke had \"no authority to intervene\" in the internal investigation and made it very clear disclosure issues were a matter for the police.\n\nAs the months passed more convictions were quashed, largely because the CPS had to accept that the evidence of named Stoke Newington officers could no longer be relied on. Sampson recalls there were twelve unopposed appeals. The CPS did however oppose four cases but the Appeal Court still found for the appellants. The judges only refused one full appeal.\n\nAlways the barrister, Sedgemore inquired of the Attorney General whether the CPS had ever received representations from the Yard on which appeals to allow and which to oppose. He was told Sampson had simply consulted Russell and considered his views. But Sampson reveals he also discussed these appeals with DCS Roy Clark and his replacement Nial Mulvihill.\n\nThe press turned out in full when two months later the Appeal Court quashed the drug convictions of Ida Oderinde, Rennie Kingsley, Dennis Tulloch and Everard Brown. All these unopposed appeals originated from arrests made in the autumn of 1990. Palumbo featured in each case and the convicted cop Lewandowski had a role in others. But the CPS indicated it also had \"serious doubt as to the honesty\" of the evidence of all other officers, some of whom were suspended.\n\nDiane Abbott made an attacking speech in the Commons. \"A number of officers have been accused of planting drugs, theft and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. To date, twelve officers have been named: PC Mark Carroll has been mentioned in ten cases; PC Terence Chitty has been mentioned in twelve cases; PC Bruce Galbraith has been mentioned in five cases; DC Bernard [Jim] Gillan has been mentioned in six cases; DC Paul Goscomb has been mentioned in five cases; PC Christopher Hart has been mentioned in twelve cases; DS Graham Le Blond has been mentioned in one case; DC Roy Lewandowski has been mentioned in four cases; DC Barry Lyons has been mentioned in eight cases; DC Peter McCulloch has been mentioned in seven cases; DC Ronnie Palumbo has been mentioned in fourteen cases; DS Robert Watton has been mentioned in four cases.\" Abbott continued: \"It is difficult to believe that senior officers were not aware of what was going on or that they did not condone it.\" She criticised them for a \"siege mentality\" and for downplaying the corruption scandal by attacking the complainants.\n\nAround this time HCDA members began to worry about the security of their most visible representative, Graham Smith, the man they all agree made the association such an effective watchdog of the local police. \"He dedicated his life to HCDA and it cost him his marriage,\" says his friend Mark Metcalf. \"Countless times me and his wife would be waiting in the pub for him to arrive only to return to the house to see Graham on the phone dispensing some legal advice or just listening to a victim of police brutality.\"\n\nIn private, the senior management at Stoke Newington took HCDA a lot more seriously than its public jibes about them being \"toy town revolutionaries\" would suggest. Roy Clark was particularly energetic in supporting his men publicly and dismissing the long history of \"myths\" around police brutality in Hackney. It was HCDA, he said, that was using the scandal to \"beat the police\".\n\nThe community watchdog's files show that at the height of Operation Jackpot it received various anonymous threats and apparent random acts of intimidation. On Valentine's Day 1992, for example, an anonymous caller rang the office and said: \"Yes, you fucking cunts, I'm going to blow your heads off, you fucking cunts!\" then put the phone down. On 2 March Smith discovered one side of his bicycle handlebars had been \"loosened deliberately\". The following month the office received an offensive letter from a police officer.\n\nSmith says when he left his house he would often have a marked police car overtly tail him. He also got calls saying he was being followed. But the most chilling incident happened one night when he was returning home alone from a meeting and found a dead white laboratory rat lying on his doorstep. His wife had arrived ten minutes before him, he says, and saw nothing there. Smith reported the incident to his local MP Diane Abbott. \"It occurred shortly after a letter to the office calling me a white nigger. The whole point of this harassment is they turn it off and on, you never know when. It's a psychological tool that plays on your nerves and you don't know who is responsible. Is it high up or low down? I assumed it was low down, that we were getting close and someone was feeling the heat.\"\n\nOn 2 February 1994 the PCA released scant details of the final Operation Jackpot report. It revealed 45 officers at Stoke Newington, whose identities were kept secret, had been investigated over 3 years, at an undisclosed cost. 22 cases involving 134 allegations, most of which involved the planting of drugs and other \"evidence\", had been examined. The public was told the CPS was considering if any officer should face criminal charges. The Yard, meanwhile, were examining disciplinary matters.\n\nThe PCA signed off Jackpot as an internal investigation \"completed to the maximum extent possible\". It then had a snide dig at the local community suggesting that complaints had \"tended to follow publicity about the investigation and some officers\" and that most were made over a year after the alleged incident, which along with \"limited co-operation\" from the complainants hampered the investigation and helped cause the delay.\n\nIn July 1994, the CPS announced that two suspended officers \u2013 Barry Lyons and Ronnie Palumbo \u2013 would be charged with perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Both were tried in December 1995 and acquitted. That month the PCA also announced the Yard was to discipline 8 of the 45 officers. Again they were unnamed and the punishment was minor \u2013 the equivalent of a slap on the wrist with a feather duster. This tough display of self-regulation took another two years to execute.\n\nHCDA, the Lawyers' Liaison Group and local MPs had every confidence that Jackpot would be a whitewash; that's why they wanted an independent judicial inquiry. Barrister Peter Hall wondered aloud how it was that a drug corruption probe hadn't charged any officer with drug offences when 13 drugs cases had been overturned on grounds including that officers had lied on oath and planted drugs?\n\nHCDA also questioned the thoroughness of Jackpot, suggesting that 77 cases had not been investigated. In a letter to new home secretary Michael Howard it pointed out that despite Operation Jackpot, HCDA was still receiving complaints \u2013 57 in 1993. One was from Audley Harrison, the young Hackney boxer who went on to win a gold medal in the 2000 Olympics. He complained after being acquitted with his girlfriend of obstruction and assaulting a police officer.\n\nThe PCA came rushing to superintendent Russell's defence. Privately, he felt HCDA had an agenda \u2013 as if Jackpot didn't. He also doubted the motives of those who had complained about the police.\n\nThe HCDA campaign had been a model in community defence and support. Through it Smith came to realise that civil actions, not internal inquiries, were the best remedy for victims of police crimes. It was the solicitor Raju Bhatt, adds Miller, who was responsible for perfecting civil actions against the police in the way they are carried out now. The Yard had paid out over \u00a3500,000 in public money to the victims of corrupt and unethical policing in Stoke Newington.\n\nAnother legacy of this ragamuffin bunch was the setting up in 1994 of a database on dirty cops. Smith and Miller developed it to service defence solicitors like Bhatt. There was great resistance from the Association of Chief Police Officers to getting DIS \u2013 the Defendants' Information Service \u2013 Data Protection registered. HCDA successfully sued _Police Review_ for an article suggesting \"organised criminals\" were behind DIS. Other attacks were more sinister. In December 1994, the office was broken into and ransacked. One computer was stolen, other equipment was urinated on and cash left untouched. Luckily, the database was elsewhere.\n\nThis burglary came on the eve of a demonstration outside Stoke Newington police station following the death in custody one week earlier of a 32-year-old Nigerian man called Shiji Lapite. His wife, cradling her six-week-old daughter, sat on the floor in the station foyer shouting: \"They killed him! They beat him to death! Why? Why? Why?\"\n\nOperation Jackpot was a failure. Privately, superintendent Ian Russell felt his probe only netted a third of the core group of corrupt officers he believed were taking out the opposition on the Front line and recycling part of the proceeds. \"Lewandowski, he wasn't a bit player by any stretch of the imagination, but there are others who are in some respects more important in the scheme of things. We got one third of it,\" a senior CIB officer on Jackpot told us.\n\nRussell blamed untrustworthy elements in SO11 for the problems he apparently experienced getting authority for phone-taps on Stoke Newington officers. \"If we had got those technical facilities at an early stage we would have got a different result. It may be wishful thinking, but we would have known what was going on early,\" a source close to Russell explained.\n\nSenior CPS lawyers now agree Operation Jackpot was a failure. It just \"scratched the surface\", said one, who asked to remain anonymous. But at the time, the CPS, CIB and PCA were saying no such thing. Consequently, there was never a chance of a proper judicial inquiry into policing in Hackney after Operation Jackpot reported in 1994. Home secretary Michael Howard and his new commissioner, Paul Condon, were travelling on the other bus heading away from greater accountability. Howard had already rejected calls the previous year from the family of Stephen Lawrence for a judicial inquiry into the Yard's mishandling of their son's murder investigation and the stench of corruption coming from south-east London police stations. In fact, the disgraceful Barker Review cover-up was being concocted at precisely the same time the ink was drying on the Operation Jackpot report.\n\nCommissioner Condon had enough difficulty keeping the Lawrence and David Norris murders apart. Both had already revealed serious allegations of corruption in the Central Drug Squad, the East Dulwich South East Regional Crime Squad and the Tower Bridge branch of the Flying Squad. The BBC expos\u00e9 of bent cop John Donald in September 1993 had added concerns about the Surbiton branch of SERCS and the relatively new National Criminal Intelligence Service.\n\nThe last thing Scotland Yard now wanted was to add the Stoke Newington drug squad, Edmonton police station and the Rigg Approach branch of the Flying Squad to that list and then publicly air it before a high court judge. That would undermine the political pact between John Major's government and Scotland Yard to rehabilitate the office of constable with new, draconian powers. It was a time to condemn more and understand less, the prime minister had said.\n\nThe government could also point to the Royal Commission it had set up in response to the miscarriages of justice problem. That reported in July 1993 at roughly the same time superintendent Russell passed his final report to the PCA. However one key representative now claims the police establishment hijacked the Royal Commission. In a recent book Sir Roger Bunyard, a former commandant at Bramshill police training college and chief constable of Sussex, says the Major government went with the minority report, which was totally opposed to fundamental reform of the police, including a fully independent police complaints system and tackling the causes of noble cause corruption. Bunyard wrote: \"It is very dangerous to accept the proposition that noble cause syndrome can lessen the culpability of police who tamper with evidence and obtain confessions by illegal means. It is such behaviour that resulted in courts and juries rejecting police evidence during the second half of the twentieth century. Illegal acts done in the name of 'justice' can extend to malpractice to improve statistics, to justify the continued existence of a specialist squad, for personal ambition or for personal greed. There is no line between malpractice for whatever reason and corruption.\"\n\nDiane Abbott MP was not alone in finding it difficult to believe senior officers at Stoke Newington were not aware of misconduct and did not condone it. But for Operation Jackpot, the PCA and the Home Office this was of no interest. Only a judicial inquiry stood a chance of unravelling whether the scandal was the result of junior officers implementing a secret and questionable policing policy for the borough. \"Hackney was policed on an anti-community policy,\" says Miller. Smith adds that the area was also a \"dustbin\" for punchy and racist cops. In general the type of policing seen in inner city areas is not that experienced in affluent middle-class ones. What's good for Hackney is unsustainable in Hampstead.\n\nDCS Roy Clark admitted at the time that his command was under pressure to clear up the drug and associated burglary problems. But did this lead to a questionable policy of zero tolerance, where younger officers felt they could take the gloves off to get results? Mark Jackson believes that behind the volume of ramped-up arrests he reviewed daily was management pressure to take out dealers and nurture informants. This, he says, created the Frankenstein inside the drugs squad as certain officers saw the opportunity to make a lot of money, while others stuck to fitting up people with drugs, weapons and phoney assaults.\n\nDC Declan Costello was one of the corrupt cell of detectives under Clark's watch. He told us the culture of violence, fit-ups and personal corruption operated in the belief that his management would do little if a complaint came in. Stuart Sampson of the CPS accepts Stoke Newington certainly had \"problems of poor supervision and management\". Jackson goes further. He says there was \"massive incompetence at middle and senior management\".\n\nAgain, this was never publicly addressed and no senior officer saw the need to fall on his sword. Indeed, Roy Clark left Stoke Newington in the middle of Operation Jackpot for a better posting as deputy to John Grieve at the Directorate of Intelligence, SO11.\n\nOperation Jackpot didn't consider that any senior officers at Stoke Newington might end up being implicated criminally or for breaches of discipline. CIB simply weren't looking. And the CPS weren't forcing the issue either. Sampson confirms this: \"We have to deal with the reality of life. [Clark and others] were the operational commanders and were not under suspicion or investigation.\"\n\nThus, while Operation Jackpot was ongoing Clark secretly started to develop a Ghost Squad strategy, with Home Office support, for the whole of Scotland Yard. Russell was brought into the planning phase of the Ghost Squad strategy while he was still directing Jackpot. In late 1993 he attended a crucial meeting at Tintagel House with commissioner Condon. Also present was Ian Blair, who at the time was in charge of Operation Gallery, the John Donald corruption inquiry. Today he is deputy commissioner.\n\nNo amount of asking will persuade Scotland Yard to provide the policy document Condon signed which laid out the reasons for setting up the Ghost Squad with Grieve and Clark at the helm.\n\nThe Stokey Cokey scandal taught Scotland Yard a lesson that would shape the approach of the Ghost Squad. It would never again make the mistake of launching a public corruption investigation with all the attendant problems HCDA and its lawyers had caused over disclosure, successful appeals, civil actions and a torrent of bad publicity. The Ghost Squad wouldn't publicly exist, and would not therefore be a hostage to community or media pressure. It would operate in the darkness of no accountability, gathering intelligence on corruption in its ranks and releasing what suited the Yard's wider managerial interests. Timing and control of the media became crucial to handling the unfolding Stephen Lawrence scandal and continued calls for an independent judicial inquiry into policing in London.\n\nThe Ghost Squad appeared not to be interested in tackling endemic noble cause corruption. The secret squad would become a political tool for the new commissioner to reshape his force \u2013 a management coup, as one CIB officer called it \u2013 and a damage limitation strategy for controlling the pace and appearance of reform.\n\nNor did the Ghost Squad seem interested in taking out every corrupt officer. The illusion of a no-hiding-place anti-corruption drive was fostered to cover up the simple fact that certain types of serious corruption were untouchable because they led to places the Yard didn't want to go.\n\nInstead, the Ghost Squad gave the impression of carefully selecting its targets, manipulating the investigation and presenting the results through tame journalists as a measure of its willingness to clean its own house and consequently, the effectiveness of self-regulation.\n\nTo achieve this illusion the supergrass was resurrected.\n\n## Part Two: The Supergrass Farce\n## [10\n\nGeoff Brennan \u2013 Double  \nAgent Supergrass](contents.html#ch10)\n\nDealing with informants is a dangerous business for honest cops and a lucrative one for the corrupt. An effective informant is almost invariably an effective criminal and therefore his motive for grassing up dangerous people who could do him serious harm is very rarely honourable.\n\nSome do it for the money \u2013 either a reward from the insurance company or a payment from the police informants' fund. Some do it to remove the criminal competition. Others are motivated by revenge. But there is one type of informant who is the most dangerous of all \u2013 the double agent. They specialise in working for the very criminals the police think they are grassing on. Alternatively, the double agent informant plays each side off against the other for money and to cover up his own crimes.\n\nThe Ghost Squad period from 1993 to 1997 was marked by its incredible mishandling of two very different supergrasses \u2013 Geoff Brennan, a white south-east London businessman, and Hector Harvey, a black west London armed robber. Their stories, and those of other supergrasses, are revealed in this part of the book from interviews and secret documents that were never supposed to see the light of day.\n\nBrennan was the Ghost Squad's first supergrass. His allegations against two frontline detectives sparked off the longest running corruption inquiry in Scotland Yard history, which remarkably is still ongoing.\n\nThe two detectives \u2013 John Redgrave and Michael Charman \u2013 were suspended on full pay for seven years. For four years before that they were under secret investigation. The suspension alone has cost the taxpayer over \u00a3600,000. The entire corruption investigation easily exceeds the \u00a310 million mark, but it has produced no evidence whatsoever of their guilt. That in large part is because Geoff Brennan made the whole thing up and in the process had over the anti-corruption squad.\n\nThe two detectives have always maintained their innocence and say with considerable justification they have been destroyed for challenging Scotland Yard's anti-corruption narrative.\n\nOn 25 June 1993, detective constable Michael Charman was a few months into his second posting to the Flying Squad, the elite armed robbery unit popularised by the seventies hit TV series _The Sweeney_. The first time he'd served there was during the Brinks Mat heist a decade earlier.\n\nAs Charman walked through the Tower Bridge office he heard an outside call being put through to his new boss, detective chief inspector Andy Cater. \"It's a Mr John Brennan on the phone for you,\" the office secretary announced.\n\nHad Charman fought his curiosity things could have been very different. But instead he put his head round the door and said: \"Gov, I know who that is. I used to run old man Brennan as an informant.\"\n\nJohn Brennan had been handled by at least four detectives before he became Charman's grass on the \u00a326 million Brinks Mat robbery. By then he was in his early sixties and would typically meet Charman in the City wearing what he considered was the old-fashioned Scotland Yard detective's look \u2013 a sports jacket with leather patches and grey flannel trousers. As he grew to know him, Charman suspected old man Brennan was really \"a frustrated copper\". Certainly he seemed to enjoy the sneaky beaky side of his informant role, although he was also paid for his information and liked a drink.\n\nAfter the call, Charman and another detective met John Brennan at his local pub, The George in Eynsford, Kent. He explained how his son, Geoff, was being pulled into something with two major south-east London criminals well known to Charman. One was \"Tall\" Ted Williams and the other was John \"Goldfinger\" Fleming. Both targets had skilfully evaded prosecution during the Brinks Mat inquiry.\n\nCharman was intrigued. As the tale unfolded Geoff Brennan walked into the pub looking for his father. He was a heavy-set man with a facial tic that became more pronounced when he was nervous or scheming.\n\nWilliams wanted him to go to Margarita, an island off the Venezuelan coast, to help dispose of some property he owned with Fleming. The proceeds would then be funnelled through Geoff's bank account, he told the two detectives.\n\nApparently, Williams and Fleming had invested in a plastics business called Poliflexor in the UK that became a money pit into which they and other associates had sunk over \u00a3600,000. Disposing of the Margarita properties was a way of recouping some cash flow, which Geoff Brennan suggested would then be invested in a drug importation, probably cocaine.\n\nCharman returned to the office excited. He spoke to detective inspector Bob Suckling, old man Brennan's co-handler during the Brinks inquiry. Suckling and Charman were very wary of the Brennans but at the same time didn't want to lose an opportunity to take down Williams and Fleming.\n\nThe Flying Squad didn't do drugs jobs so the information was passed to an old friend, detective John Redgrave, the ginger giant. He, Suckling and Charman had all worked together on the Brinks inquiry, earning them the nickname The Three Musketeers. In 1984 old man Brennan had given them a lead with which they eventually located armed robber John \"Little Legs\" Lloyd and Kenny Noye, the man behind the Gold Conduit \u2013 the Brinks robbers' smelting and money laundering network. Redgrave had also played a key role in the prosecution of a second laundering network run by bent solicitor Michael Relton.\n\nRedgrave was by now an ambitious detective inspector about to turn 40. He was in charge of a drugs team working from SERCS's New Southgate office. He too shared a desire to get the ones that got away, but was also wary of the Brennans. The Three Musketeers believed Geoff Brennan had been a double agent informant for Williams and Lloyd during the Brinks inquiry. Back then he was registered to another detective called Chris Smith who will feature heavily as this story unfolds. Suffice to say, Geoff Brennan's value as an informant and his true intentions had split the Brinks squad down the middle.\n\nGeoff's new information, however, had the ring of truth. Williams had indeed moved into the drugs business since Brinks. Another SERCS informant had revealed that he and Fleming were moving ecstasy pills from Holland by car to Hull.\n\nRedgrave decided to go with it. He got authority for Geoff to accompany Williams to Venezuela as a participating informant registered to Charman, who would be his new handler.\n\nOperation Nightshade was underway.\n\nAfter the Second World War, Geoff Brennan's father moved to south-east London from Preston in Lancashire. \"He was one of the few soldiers rescued from Dunkirk,\" says Geoff. It was through the army that his parents met and started a family. Denise came first, followed by another daughter, a son and finally Geoffrey Paul Brennan was born on 13 March 1953.\n\nDenise and Geoff grew up in what was then the epicentre of London's criminality. The Old Kent Road is a south-east thoroughfare running from the foot of Tower Bridge through the tough inner city areas of Bermondsey, Rotherhithe and New Cross. Old man Brennan was well connected in the Bermondsey area, recalls Charman. But as he aged, his introduction to the rising criminal talent was made through Denise's circle of friends. He watched her grow up with little acorns that would later become top London villains, like John Lloyd.\n\nAt one stage Denise was being courted by Colin \"the Duke\" Osbourne, an armourer and trusted associate of the Krays. Dukey was bisexual and said to be Ronnie's special friend. In his early teens Geoff was very taken by Dukey. \"He was a gent. I used to run bets for him and he would give me money to buy clothes and things.\" Geoff looked up to Dukey in a way he couldn't to his father \u2013 \"a piss artist that shagged about and had a vicious mouth\". Old man Brennan boasted to Charman about ending Dukey's relationship with Denise by grassing him to the police. He got a long prison stretch.\n\nGeoff Brennan's father used his relationship with the police to protect his family, says Charman. Another of his past handlers, who asked not to be named, remembers the old man once turned to a Flying Squad detective to get his wayward son out of trouble. Young Geoff had been arrested with some Bermondsey faces on the south coast after the police found guns in a caravan they were using.\n\n\"I took a wrong turn and got involved with the wrong people,\" says Geoff. His \"salvation\" was meeting Sylvia and getting married at 21. \"I idolised her,\" he says with genuine affection. He would later give her a kidney.\n\nGeoff tried his hand at the greeting cards business, then minicabbing. In the early eighties he became a court bailiff in south-east London. Through his father's police contacts and Freemasonry, Geoff also became an informant for various old school Yard detectives.\n\nMeanwhile, his older sister, Denise, had given birth to a daughter called Debbie. Old man Brennan doted on her. As Debbie grew up, again he used his relationship with the police to protect her. He was particularly concerned about local up-and-coming criminal Tall Ted Williams, who'd fancied Debbie since her early teens.\n\nWhen old man Brennan was first introduced to Charman in 1984 he explained how he wanted revenge on Williams, whom he blamed for introducing Debbie to drugs. It was only cannabis, says Charman, but being of an older generation he was worried for his granddaughter, who by then was in her early twenties. Old man Brennan also had no liking for Williams' close associate, John Lloyd, who back in the early days had used Denise as his runner in a stolen rent book scam.\n\nThe Brinks squad's intelligence unit had already established that Williams was Lloyd's representative in the early disposal of the stolen bullion. Detective inspector Tony Brightwell, the head of the intelligence unit, had developed a significant picture of Edward Paul Williams, born 31 March 1947.\n\nThe Yard already possessed intelligence that in 1981 Williams was involved with south-east London crime family boss Dogan Arif in a plot to kidnap and swindle some Iranian colonels secretly negotiating a $55 million embargo-busting arms deal in London and Antwerp.\n\nShortly after the Brinks robbery two years later, surveillance officers watched in amazement as Williams tried to buy one of London's most notable landmarks \u2013 Battersea Power station. They secretly photographed Williams with Fleming and another Brinks suspect Patsy \"Bolt Eyes\" Clark, meeting the sellers of the derelict site. Needless to say, the sale didn't go through.\n\nWilliams certainly had the money. It came from the London Bullion Company, which he had set up in Hatton Garden, the centre of the legitimate and illegal precious stones and metals trade. Detectives believed that during the first half of 1984, LBC was handling almost all the stolen bullion.\n\nWilliams needed a \"smokescreen\", says Brightwell. So he set up another business venture in the West African state of Sierra Leone to justify the volume of gold passing through LBC's books. Sierra Leone is still a violent cove of diamond and arms smuggling. It also has plenty of alluvial gold. Scotland Yard detectives were dispatched to the troubled former British colony to check out the smokescreen. But in August 1984 Williams escaped prosecution again, this time after Customs officers raided LBC for VAT evasion.\n\nMeanwhile, the Brinks Task Force was chasing Fleming all over the Spanish-speaking world because they believed he had handled almost \u00a3500,000 of the laundered money.\n\nBrightwell, who led the chase for Fleming, says the villain spent a lot of money on lawyers fighting extradition. \"This was funnelled through Lloyd and was part of Fleming's share of the robbery.\"\n\nThe apartments Williams and Fleming owned in Margarita were a well-kept secret from insurers Lloyds. They were the unfortunate lead underwriter of the Brinks Mat gold. After the robbery Lloyds retained legal firm Shaw & Croft to claw back from the Underworld the \u00a326 million it had paid out to the Brinks Mat security company within days of the heist.\n\nCivil actions to freeze the assets of about 50 defendants started in 1986. Lawyer Bob McCunn handled every claw back deal. \"At one stage,\" he says, \"we were looking at every villain in south-east London.\" The deal making was an experience he describes as \"fishing in a dark, murky pond. I know what I've pulled out but I have no idea what's still in there.\"\n\nIn August 1992, the last Brinks money laundering trial concluded with the convictions of Williams' south-east London associates Brian Perry, Patsy Clark and Jeannie Ishmael, John Lloyd's wife. Williams had been looking after Lloyd's interests since he went on the run in 1985 to the US. McCunn credits Kenny Noye with bringing the other defendants like Perry to the table after the trial. \"[Noye] was one of the first people to talk turkey. When he saw that it was a commercial transaction he talked to the others and said we were not the police, we were not after blood or to convict, we just wanted the money.\"\n\nIt was precisely at this time that Williams started to dispose of the Margarita properties, which McCunn had no idea existed.\n\nFleming will always deny he was a Brinks robber but he confirmed to us that he and Williams bought one apartment each in Flamingo Bay for \u00a380,000 in 1990. His dream was to extend his investment into a bar, restaurant and nightclub in the same island complex. \"I could then slightly alter the name to Flemingo Bay,\" he quipped.\n\nThe Caribbean apartments were one of a number of schemes Williams had persuaded Fleming to invest in. He said he also put money into a diamond mine in Sierra Leone and the failed plastic business.\n\nGeoff Brennan arrived in Margarita on 24 July 1993. Williams met him at the airport with a local girlfriend. They stayed at the Flamingo Bay apartment and then moved to the Hilton with adjoining rooms.\n\nBrennan was not a good traveller. His Bermondsey skin, sensitive to even a bar room tan, burnt immediately. He also got \"the galloping gourmets\", while an unsympathetic Williams tucked into seafood platters. \"He loved squid and all this and I'm a, you know what I mean, I'm a fucking... pie and mash would suit me.\"\n\nWilliams quickly sussed he was under surveillance. A maid let him into the adjacent hotel room where he found recording equipment. It wasn't Scotland Yard and he didn't suspect Brennan, although the informant was keeping Charman abreast of developments by phone. It was from the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) working with Operation Nightshade.\n\nAs a career criminal, Williams expected regular interest from the authorities. He wasn't unduly concerned but cleverly complained to the hotel manager and left a note for his solicitor in the hotel safe alleging police harassment, says Brennan.\n\nWilliams didn't want to be arrested before selling the properties. His buyer was a Venezuelan colonel, whom the local army had identified from a surveillance video. The sale did go through and Williams and Brennan returned to London on the same flight. \u00a360,000 had already been transferred to Brennan's NatWest account from the Banco Venezolano de Credito. Williams also smuggled a Lloyds bank draft for \u00a329,000 through Customs by tucking it into the turn-ups of a pair of trousers in his suitcase.\n\nOver the next few days, further money came into Brennan's account from Venezuela. He later told the police that Williams used some of it to pay off his debts, including to the Adams crime family. Brennan even accompanied Williams to their bar, Belugas, in Swiss Cottage.\n\nBut the informant was not being straight with Charman about why he was grassing on such a dangerous and violent enforcer like Williams and his associates.\n\nBrennan had recently gone into the mobile phone business, setting up a company, Dial Communications, which operated from a rented shop in Bexley High Street. He became an authorised dealer for Vodafone's early incarnation as Talklands. When Williams turned to Brennan in the spring of 1993 because of his cash-flow problems, the pair had not done business for ten years. Williams was suggesting investing money from the Margarita apartment sale in a new phone shop Brennan was thinking of opening in nearby Eltham.\n\nBrennan didn't want Williams muscling into his new business. He shared his family's hatred for the man and the way he treated Debbie. So they conspired to get rid of Williams once and for all.\n\n\"I was in there at the beginning to get rid of Ted... My first meeting with Mick [Charman] was regarding Margarita and the main aim of it was to have Ted nicked in possession of cocaine... we all really wanted to tie Williams up. That was the main aim, to get a fuck pig like that out of the way... He has been such a fuck cunt to my relations, and the way he's ruined this family. And it's always been me and my sister's intentions, if [a] possibility, to string Ted up if that could be done... legitimate information, not fitting him up.\"\n\nBut Geoff Brennan was playing an even more dangerous game that Charman also knew nothing about. While trying to get Williams arrested for drugs, Brennan was also using the enforcer to take advantage of a crooked business opportunity involving mobile phones that had mysteriously fallen into his lap.\n\nThe entrepreneurial nature of communist China is apparent in the state-owned companies set up abroad by each provincial government to trade in \"commodities\". The fantastically corrupt Guangxi Zhuang provincial government owned a company called GX Impex. It had branches in the UK, Germany, Australia and Africa, and in April 1992 set itself up in Los Angeles.\n\nIn the summer of 1993 there was a worldwide shortage of a particular model of Motorola mobile phone. These were very popular with the Chinese community in LA and Hong Kong because they worked well with the communications system in the British colony.\n\nGX Impex president Hu Yung Chuang thought he could shift 20,000 phones, a deal worth \u00a313 million. He contacted two Chinese\u2013Vietnamese brothers who'd become US citizens and settled in LA in 1980.\n\nTom and Sam Wang were an odd choice as suppliers because they mainly traded in luxury cars and spare parts. Nevertheless, like Hu, the Wang brothers also saw an opportunity to make money and approached a group of Texan car dealers in Houston to see if they could supply the large order.\n\nJames Sprouce and Vernon \"Butch\" Jones turned to the improbable sounding Billy Council Padon III, a fraudster who ran a company also in Houston called Delta Acceptance Corporation. A fourth Texan, Bill Padgett, who describes himself as a \"self-employed investment banker and estate agent\", was also brought into the deal. This group of forty-something wheeler-dealers, to whom we shall refer as the Houston Four, assured the Wangs they could supply the phones. They couldn't. Calls were made across the US and UK and apparently in July 1993 Padgett alighted on Dial Communications, Brennan's new business.\n\nAfter returning from Margarita, Brennan had accepted an invitation to Texas without telling his police handlers. Brennan believed the Houston Four were planning an advance fee fraud on the Wangs and wanted to use his banking facilities to execute it. They were unsuccessful in trying to open bank accounts in London and had been ejected from one bank that suspected they were trying to launder money.\n\nBrennan played along with the Houston Four, giving them every indication the phone deal could be done, but it would have to be quick and the money up front. In the meantime, he discussed these strange happenings with Tall Ted Williams, who of course was blissfully unaware Brennan was also trying to get him arrested for drug trafficking.\n\nWilliams could spot easy money. He advised Brennan to invite the Houston Four to London with a \u00a3150,000 advance for the phones. Brennan would then introduce a lawyer friend of Williams who would pose as a Motorola representative. During the meeting Williams and another criminal known as \"Nutty Brian\" would burst into the hotel room and steal the money.\n\nBrennan now saw the perfect opportunity to rip off the Americans with Williams' help and then get the enforcer arrested for drug trafficking before having to split any of the proceeds with him. But Brennan needed a further insurance policy, or each way bet, in case the devious plan didn't work out. So he contacted Charman in late August and told him about the Houston Four and the phone deal with the Wangs. However, he claimed it was Williams who was pressuring him to rip them off and that the money would be used to buy into 750 kilos of cocaine coming via Jamaica.\n\nCharman passed the information to the Yard's Special Intelligence Section (SIS) and to Redgrave. Meanwhile, Brennan happily progressed the phone fraud behind their backs.\n\nSam Wang was uncomfortable with Jones and Padgett and had insisted on meeting Brennan in London when he learnt he was their supplier. On 24 August they all had dinner at the Thistle Hotel overlooking Tower Bridge and the badlands of Bermondsey, Brennan's old stomping ground.\n\nFor credibility, Brennan brought along serving south-east London detective constable Mark Norton and his new wife Debbie Norris. She was the woman who had cradled her dying husband David Norris, the prolific double agent informant, on the night he was murdered two years earlier. Brennan knew her from Bermondsey days and had met Norton when they came to his shop to buy a phone.\n\nThe dinner went well. Sam Wang believed Brennan was a \"very handsome, serious businessman\" with 3,000 Motorola phones in a bonded warehouse ready for onward transfer. He gave Brennan \u00a311,000 in travellers cheques as an advance from GX Impex.\n\nWeeks later, the balance of \u00a3402,300 was transferred into Brennan's NatWest account. He couldn't believe how fast it had arrived, well before he had time to set up an untraceable account. The situation wasn't ideal but Brennan thought he could handle it.\n\nSam Wang had left London for LA via Houston, where Padgett and Jones persuaded him to set up new companies in the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and offshore accounts with the Bank of Bermuda. They would later claim these accounts were set up to deposit commissions from future phone deals with the Guangxi provincial government.\n\nBrennan was keeping Charman informed only of the barest details of his phone deal. For instance, he told Charman about the BVI accounts and companies and claimed the Houston Four were suggesting millions of pounds was waiting to be transferred into his NatWest account.\n\nRedgrave had Scotland Yard's undercover unit SO10 provide a covert account at the Midland Bank in London to test Brennan's hypothesis that this was a money laundering scam.\n\nBrennan then extended his insurance policy by telling Charman a large sum of money (the \u00a3402,000) had already come into his NatWest account from the Wangs but that he had returned it. This was a lie. Brennan had in fact withdrawn a huge sum in cash and bought a new house called Silverlands.\n\nRedgrave had every reason at this stage to accept Brennan was acting as a genuine informant. He had recently set up a surveillance operation in Portugal after Brennan revealed that Williams was trying to develop an amphetamine factory there with a Briton called David Shaw. According to Brennan's information, the drugs factory had UK investors and a planned distribution network including the Adams crime family and associates in Liverpool, Scotland and Ireland.\n\nRedgrave sent detective sergeant Paul Kelly to liaise with the Portuguese Policia Judicial. Initially there was a turf fight between SERCS and Customs, says Kelly, but eventually they agreed to work together.\n\nWilliams had asked Brennan to bring a technical manual for chemical equipment to Shaw's villa near Albufeira. Kelly photographed Williams and Shaw at the villa. The phone was tapped and a bug inserted on the terrace. All this information was being fed back through Charman to SIS and the National Criminal Intelligence Service, which looks at Britain's top 200 criminals.\n\nThere was nothing therefore to suggest Brennan was acting falsely. Ironically, it was the Wangs who first suspected something. Back in LA, they had quickly tired of Brennan's excuses that he couldn't send the phones until the Inland Revenue finished a routine inspection. Another lie.\n\nSam Wang returned to London under pressure from GX Impex to look for Brennan. He discovered the phone shop in Bexley was abandoned. They eventually met at the Forte Crest Hotel in Gatwick on 6 October. Brennan assured Wang that 1,000 phones were on a British Airways flight to Hong Kong and showed him an airway bill as proof. It wasn't. Williams had bought the official document for \u00a38,000 and Brennan filled in a false forwarding agent. A satisfied Sam Wang left for Hong Kong expecting his phones to be there.\n\nBrennan used the time to clear up loose ends. He vanished, leaving a string of creditors owed over \u00a335,000. One of them sent debt collectors to his house, which resulted in Brennan's arrest for assault. Helpfully, his friend DC Mark Norton was serving at Bexleyheath police station and dealt with the case papers. Brennan was bailed to return in November.\n\nBrennan didn't know what the Wangs would do about the theft. If they were as dodgy as he believed them to be, they wouldn't report it. But if they did, Brennan knew Redgrave would have him arrested. So he devised a plan to muddy the waters.\n\nThe first step was to get re-registered to his close friend detective sergeant Chris Smith, whom he'd known for 20 years and who had handled Brennan during the Brinks Mat inquiry. Smith is originally from New Zealand. Not that you would know. He has a broad \"sarf\" London accent having spent most of his service in that part of the capital, half of it on the Tower Bridge Flying Squad, where Charman was based.\n\nIn late October, Brennan met their boss, DCI Andy Cater. He told him he was unhappy with the way he was being handled but made no mention of corruption or unethical practice. However, by engineering this phoney conflict of interest, the experienced informant knew DCI Cater would have to agree to let Smith take him over, at least for a short while. Brennan's plan was to play one handler off against another. He eventually returned to Charman by which time two conflicting sets of informant logs had been generated.\n\nIn the end, Brennan did miscalculate the Wangs. They had come under increasingly menacing pressure to repay the money to the Chinese provincial government. In late October, the Wangs made formal allegations to the FBI that they were victims of an advance fee fraud by Brennan working with Padgett, Jones and Padon.\n\nThe Wangs also reported Brennan to the Met. Detectives from Bexleyheath police station couldn't locate him but did discover he was due to answer bail on 12 November over the assault case. They waited and arrested Brennan for the theft of \u00a3400,000. He immediately played his informant card and asked to speak to DS Chris Smith.\n\nRedgrave was also alerted. He asked the detectives investigating the theft to postpone their inquiries because Brennan was part of an important ongoing operation. He suggested that a financial investigator attached to SERCS be allowed to take over the theft inquiry so it could be developed without disturbing the other strands of Operation Nightshade \u2013 the drugs surveillance in Portugal and the potential money laundering scam by the Houston Four.\n\nRedgrave had an abrasive and cocky way about him as if his operation was the most important in the Met. The ginger giant was an imposing figure at six foot five. And when his judgement was questioned, he'd scowl and push his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a stabbing middle finger before throwing a few fucks into whoever was pissing him off.\n\nDetective Inspector Peter Newman and his team didn't take to Redgrave's approach. Newman wouldn't relinquish the case and he had support from the local CPS to progress his inquiries in the United States. A nasty turf war was developing between Redgrave and Newman that Brennan sought to exploit.\n\nTo derail DI Newman's inquiries into the theft, Brennan concocted a diversion and like an evil shaman summoned the ghost of David Norris. Newman had worked on the Norris murder inquiry in 1991 with Brennan's friend DC Mark Norton. Both officers were now at Bexleyheath police station but had fallen out over Norton's marriage to Debbie Norris. On 26 January 1994 Brennan told Charman there was a plot by relatives of Norris to discredit Newman by placing \u00a315,000 in his bank account. To add authenticity Brennan had obtained the account number and sorting code.\n\nBrennan confected this plot from the stench of corruption surrounding the Norris hit and bits of information he'd picked up listening to Debbie Norris and Norton talk about the murder investigation. She had told the murder inquiry that on the night he died Norris left the house with \u00a315,000 in cash on his way to meet one of his police handlers. Brennan hatched a plan with these ingredients and fed it to Charman knowing Newman and his superiors would be immediately alerted. This would hopefully buy Brennan more time while he further disposed of the remainder of the \u00a3400,000.\n\nThe plan worked. At a quickly convened meeting in Catford between the management of SERCS and the Met's 3 Area the plot was discussed. Present were detective chief superintendent Bill Ilsley and detective superintendent Ian Crampton, who had a special interest as they were in charge of the Norris murder inquiry and the failed prosecution just eight months earlier. They took news of a plot seriously. It came at a very sensitive time for both senior officers and Scotland Yard. The whitewash Barker Review of their handling of the Lawrence murder inquiry was being confected at that very moment.\n\nSeveral actions came out of the Catford meeting in early February. Firstly, Redgrave and Smith were told to meet Brennan and get further details about the plot. Brennan subsequently told them it had been called off following his intervention! Secondly, the head of SERCS, commander Roy Penrose, resolved with Ilsley that the theft allegation against Brennan would be taken off DI Newman and given to a full-time fraud investigator from SERCS. Detective constable Kevin Maul was ordered to investigate Brennan, mindful of Redgrave's ongoing Operation Nightshade, but to report only to Penrose and another senior officer.\n\nBrennan had successfully used David Norris's ghost to buy time. He knew that Maul's fraud investigation would have to tread carefully, especially when making inquiries about the Houston Four. Why? Because Padgett and Jones were also engaged in an illegal arms deal with undercover officers whom Brennan had helped introduce.\n\nIn late September 1993 Brennan had told Charman that while he was in Houston discussing the phone deal, Padgett asked if he could connect him with anyone in the UK interested in buying arms.\n\nRedgrave decided to set up a third limb to Operation Nightshade. He was already looking at the Houston Four over suspected money laundering. But illegal arms dealing would need something special. Commanders Penrose and John Grieve at SO11 gave authority to deploy an undercover officer called Micky Barr, a weapons expert.\n\nRedgrave kept Barr's identity and appearance from Brennan. He simply instructed the informant to tell Butch Jones to expect a visit from a man called \"Peter\" when he was next in London.\n\nOn 11 October over a drink at the Forte Crest Hotel near Gatwick Airport, Jones and a man called Walter Le from Hong Kong met \"Peter\". Police documents suggest they were under no doubt he was fronting for Irish paramilitaries.\n\nWalter said: \"I have offices in Hong Kong, mainland China, Vietnam and Cambodia. I have very good contacts with Chinese government at all levels and with the military. Let me just say some of my friends are generals in the army and they like to increase their salary by selling some equipment they hold in reserve.\"\n\nWalter tried to reassure \"Peter\" these were not unreliable Soviet Bloc weapons. \"I can supply anything from fighter aircraft, tanks through to blankets and tents but I think for the type of people I believe you represent, I can supply you unlimited amounts of heavy machine guns, anti-tank grenades, explosives, same as Semtex but manufactured in China, fuses, detonator cord and of course assault rifles.\"\n\n\"Peter\" asked about End User Certificates, the official documents that prove the arms are going to a legitimate company or government. Walter again said reassuringly, \"You are dealing with the government of China. Documentation will be arranged through me. Certain people will require payment.\" When Le told \"Peter\" he could inspect the weapons ahead of shipment in mainland China, the undercover officer feigned concern he would end up in a re-education camp. But Le said there was no need to worry, he had \"very good friends at the highest levels of police and government\".\n\nButch Jones also offered Peter \"hi-tech weaponry\" like a GEC Gatling gun. Ideal for wasting \"half of Belfast\", he said. Jones spoke of a \"middle man\" he would introduce who was well connected, including with the nephew of the deposed Iranian Shah.\n\nIt soon transpired this middle man was a colourful entrepreneur called Roger Dale Crooks, born 3 September 1948. Little is known about his early years other than his home town is Houston. Yet, since 1988, Crooks has operated from the capital of Sierra Leone, Freetown, the deepest port in Africa, making it a transhipment point for drugs, diamonds, gold and guns.\n\nOn 21 December, Crooks met \"Peter\" at the Britannia Hotel in London. Another undercover officer, Richard Hester, came along wearing a body wire. Hester and Barr often worked together on arms stings and had established a long-term front company and reputation as international arms dealers. Hester was a founding father of the undercover unit and entirely believable as the financier \"Richard Meades\". His performance was polished and measured, whereas Barr was naturally more of a wide boy with his ponytail, estuary accent, jewellery and handlebar moustache.\n\nPolice documents of the meeting suggest Crooks was told he was dealing with representatives of the Ulster Defence Association, a Loyalist paramilitary group. \"Roger seemed happy to deal,\" Hester recorded. \"[He] said he had no problems selling weapons to our organisation but he could only get it out of the USA to, say, Nigeria, Sierra Leone. However he could put us in contact with the right people who would facilitate its onward shipment to the UK by containers... He suggested he might be able to have everything ready by February... as he was going to book a ship for then as he was building an oil rig and would be shipping to Nigeria at about that time.\n\n\"We gave Roger a list of weapons, ammunition, explosives... He went through [it] and said he didn't have a problem supplying us. Roger again said he would not have a problem getting it from Sierra Leone as he had all the right contacts, in fact he even had a diplomatic passport for that country.\"\n\nCrooks told us the passport was issued by the Momo government in 1991 to allow him to represent it in Iran where he was negotiating the supply of oil for the refinery he and Wyatt were renovating.\n\nFreetown in the nineties was a lot like the Casablanca of Michael Curtis's eponymous 1941 film. Crooks however was no Rick, but the Mama Yoko was like the Caf\u00e9 Americain, a den of fraudsters, corrupt government officials, diamond smugglers, gun-runners, spies and mercenaries protecting the multinationals who had carved up the incredible mineral wealth of this former British colony.\n\nOn 5 May 1994, Redgrave travelled to Houston to brief US Customs about the arms deal involving Crooks. He had decided against Walter Le's Chinese military option because of anticipated jurisdiction and co-operation problems.\n\nCustoms advised that the Yard's two undercover officers should push Crooks for American weapons to make a prosecution in the US feasible. He had already mentioned a Californian weapons supplier called Condor. Customs also provided another undercover officer to handle the arms sting from Houston. Senior US Customs special agent Nigel Brooks had a fascinating past. He was British-born but went to live in the US in the mid-sixties aged eighteen. He served a five-year tour in Vietnam and then joined Customs, where he spent most of his time undercover infiltrating drug traffickers.\n\nA preliminary background check by US Customs revealed Crooks had a criminal record for forgery and theft. When Crooks had been recently stopped at Houston Airport on his way back from London, he was found to be carrying $14,000 in cash and some diamonds. Police reports suggest he tried to deal his way out of trouble by offering to become an informant for various agencies on the arms deal. In effect, Crooks was another Brennan! \"We felt he was attempting to create an alibi should the arms deal be discovered. We decided to proceed with [the joint] investigation with DI Redgrave... [and] play [Crooks] along to see exactly what he would report,\" recalls Brooks.\n\nOn 9 May Customs set up a covert account in a Houston bank and deposited $700,000. Brooks gave Crooks the PIN number to verify his terrorist clients were serious. Crooks, now satisfied, wanted to transfer the money straight away into an escrow account he controlled. Brooks declined. Cash on delivery or no deal, he replied.\n\nThe arms deal was progressing well. Crooks and Padgett had the fake end user certificate and encouraged the undercover officers to set up a bogus company in Sierra Leone. The arms would be transported to Freetown, but first \"Peter\" was assured he could inspect the container in Houston. That was when US Customs were planning to make the arrests for violations of the Arms Export Control Act. After consulting with the senior government lawyer in Texas they felt there was a very good case against the targets.\n\nIn early March 1994, while the arms deal was progressing, DC Kevin Maul began examining the \u00a3400,000 theft as agreed at the Catford meeting.\n\nTom Wang had been in London for three months by then. He'd fled Los Angeles because representatives of the Chinese provincial government and people from Hong Kong were looking to beat him up. Back in LA his brother had been attacked over Christmas and New Year. Sam Wang's house was broken into and his two-year-old daughter assaulted. A car had also been driven at him on the motorway.\n\nWhile hiding out in London, Tom Wang tried to find Brennan but ended up sending this message to his abandoned home: \"PLEASE HELP US BY SENDING THE MONEY BACK TO OUR CUSTOMERS. YOU MAY SAVE SOME LIVES, WHICH MAY INCLUDE THOSE OF YOUR FAMILY. WE DON'T WANT TO SEE TERRIBLE THINGS HAPPENED... WE KNOW THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE ALREADY HERE IN UK TRYING TO FIND YOU.\"\n\nDC Maul interviewed Brennan's bank manager and other key witnesses in the money trail. He then wrote to commander Penrose in late April stating there was a good prima facie case that Brennan had stolen the \u00a3400,000 and \"disappeared\". At this stage Maul didn't know about the purchase of Silverlands, which Brennan had disguised by putting it in his son's name. Nevertheless, the informant believed rightly that Maul's fraud net was closing in. He also had Ted Williams after him for his cut of the stolen money.\n\nOut of the blue Brennan's identity as an informant was deliberately disclosed to Williams. Who by remains unclear, although crooked cops working with or independently of Brennan is a strong possibility.\n\nA lot of detail surrounding the compromise is still very opaque. Over 12 days in June 1994 the actions of senior Ghost Squad officers ensured the truth was obscured even further and took Scotland Yard down a road that it could not turn back from without admitting wanton unlawfulness and staggering incompetence.\n\nGeoff and Denise Brennan claim she was ordered to go to Williams' house in West Kingsdown where she saw Operation Nightshade documents about the covert efforts in Portugal and Venezuela. Only the informant's pseudonym, \"John Millwall\", was used in the confidential police documents. But Williams didn't accept Fleming had grassed him up and was easily able to identify Geoff's handiwork.\n\nDenise took three days to alert her brother that Williams was going to kill him. Geoff Brennan was in the Isle of Wight with his wife and in-laws at the time. He phoned DS Chris Smith, who in turn phoned detective chief superintendent Bill Griffiths, a manager of the Flying Squad who was also in the Ghost Squad management group. The following day Smith was introduced to detective chief superintendent Roger Gaspar, the operational head of the Ghost Squad. Only a few weeks earlier Gaspar had given commissioner Condon a major briefing about the projected work of the secret anti-corruption squad he was in the process of setting up.\n\nGaspar met Smith and arranged a secret assignation in Hyde Park with Brennan later that afternoon. Appropriately they met by the Serpentine. The discussion lasted 30 minutes but strangely was not covertly recorded. Gaspar took the threat seriously because Brennan was given armed protection when he returned home that afternoon. He was also told he would be put, along with his wife and 19-year-old son, in a witness protection scheme with a new identity.\n\nTwo days later, on 16 June, Gaspar and Brennan met again in the conference room at the Hilton Hotel near Gatwick. DS Smith had ensured Denise was there as well. She had also been his informant during the Brinks Mat investigation. Again, the meeting wasn't recorded.\n\nBrennan was still unwilling to make a statement, be interviewed under caution or be a witness. But something dramatic happened over the next five days to radically change his mind. Again all these contacts between Brennan, Smith and the Ghost Squad were also unrecorded.\n\nOn 21 June, Brennan made the first of two taped interviews with Gaspar. He confessed to the premeditated theft of \u00a3400,000 from the Wangs. The Houston Four, he explained, were going to rip them off so he did it first. Brennan said he planned to use Williams as a \"minder\", but when the enforcer talked of using violence, even murder, he decided to double-cross him. \"It was a big scam all the way through.\"\n\nThat part was true. But Brennan then fed Gaspar a load of well-rehearsed lies about Redgrave and Charman. He claimed that part of the double-cross was to involve the two detectives in the theft instead of Williams. He claimed he had bunged them \u00a350,000 to turn a blind eye and frustrate any inquiries. Redgrave got greedy and wanted more money, claimed Brennan. This caused a rift in the relationship. When he realised they were not protecting him as an informant, he turned to DS Chris Smith, his old handler.\n\nWhat could account for Brennan's dramatic change of heart and willingness to be taped by Gaspar? The informant, and later his defence team, maintain with considerable justification that the Ghost Squad offered an incredible deal, which no criminal with half a brain would have turned down. The conditions were so favourable Brennan practically bit Gaspar's hand off. He was effectively offered secret immunity from prosecution for serious criminal offences in return for becoming the Ghost Squad's first supergrass. His friend and handler DS Chris Smith helped broker the deal.\n\nBrennan agreed to admit and explain the theft on tape but only if he was not cautioned and arrested. He also agreed to talk on tape about corrupt activities with Redgrave and Charman, but again on the understanding he would never give evidence against them or make a statement. He calculated that by the time the Ghost Squad realised he was lying about the police corruption aspect it would be too late to prosecute him for the fraud.\n\nBrennan was not legally represented throughout these secret negotiations and therefore no deal was ever written down. Nevertheless, the informant couldn't believe it when Smith told him the Ghost Squad had agreed to his conditions. It was a liar's charter.\n\nThe deal was also unlawful, which is presumably why the Ghost Squad management hid it from the CPS and why all dealings with Brennan leading up to his taped admission were not properly documented.\n\nSupergrasses had fallen into disrepute in the seventies and eighties precisely because of the unethical way they were handled by the police in criminal trials and during the political prosecutions of alleged IRA members in Northern Ireland. Many trials collapsed or the convictions were subsequently overturned on appeal as details of inducements and secret deals emerged.\n\nThe Court of Appeal had poured so much judicial scorn on the supergrass system after the case of armed robber Derek \"Bertie\" Smalls in 1975 that the police were forced to abandon the policy. A senior judge determined that undertakings of immunity from prosecution should be given very sparingly and only then by the most senior government lawyer, never in secret and never by the police.\n\nA decade later, the 1984 Police & Criminal Evidence Act made such secret deals unworkable. And in 1992 the Home Office issued new guidelines for dealing with \"resident informants\" (the new police term for supergrasses). The Courts' wishes could not have been clearer on how to preserve the integrity of supergrass evidence. In layman's terms the rule is if you really must use a supergrass there should be transparency during the crucial debriefing process. Tape-record everything, log every contact no matter how small, show no favouritism, apply no pressure and offer no deals. Instead of immunity, criminals wishing to \"roll over\" would be sentenced for their own admitted crimes before or soon after giving evidence against others.\n\nDetectives fighting organised crime in the nineties, including those at Scotland Yard, had taken heed of judges' displeasure toward supergrass evidence and started using undercover officers instead. Their credibility and evidence was far less assailable in the courtroom and they were easier to protect from smart defence barristers. Very importantly, the chances of a successful conviction were also higher.\n\nYet here were senior officers deciding in secret and with no recourse to the CPS or the new guidelines that they were going to rehabilitate the old supergrass system and act like a star chamber above the law.\n\nBefore Gaspar interviewed Brennan on 21 June the Ghost Squad management was fully aware that the informant would be admitting at least four serious criminal offences of theft, fraud, conspiring to pervert the course of justice and corruption. However, Gaspar later explained that a secret \"strategic decision\" was taken in advance not to caution Brennan or treat him as a suspect but rather to use him as a \"source of information\". The failure to caution and arrest someone who admits serious criminal acts is a severe disciplinary transgression.\n\nBrennan knew that protection from Williams also meant protection from prosecution. So during his disingenuous taped interview with Gaspar he laid on the threat to his life with a spade. Williams, he said, would have no choice but to kill him to save face with his East End criminal associates for letting someone get so close. \"I've seen the damage that man can inflict. He's a very, very fucking violent man. You know you are not talking about a mug here, you're talking about a proper named man that enforces what he says. And his business is drugs. It's always been drugs.\"\n\nSuddenly, and with no evidence, the Ghost Squad was claiming internally that Redgrave was the source of the leak. The whole matter could have been cleared up immediately had the Ghost Squad moved to recover the documents from Williams and question him. That they did not is a serious failing, which again remains unexplained.\n\nAfter all, in June 1994 the arms side of Operation Nightshade was still live and undercover officers were about to meet Crooks in London later that month. They could have been walking into a trap. Gaspar had no way of knowing how far Williams had disseminated the documents. The only way to be sure was to immediately raid his home and at the very least retrieve the documents. Williams could also have been arrested and questioned.\n\nThe Yard has never managed to recover these documents, but we did. The bundle leaked to Tall Ted Williams contained sensitive NCIS and SERCS reports (mainly by DS Paul Kelly) concerning the surveillance operations in Portugal and Venezuela. In addition there was secret information about phone-taps in the UK and abroad and the names of those detectives targeting Williams and Fleming. The latest report was dated 14 March 1994, which means Williams was given the bundle some time between then and early June.\n\nWilliams told us the documents came from a \"bent copper\". But he said it was \"definitely not\" Redgrave and he had told Denise this at the time. \"I'm not afraid of coppers but Redgrave is a straightgoer.\" Williams was slightly miffed that anyone would think a career criminal of his stature would deal with a lowly detective inspector. \"I get my information from commanders,\" he said.\n\nIn July 1994, the Brennan family officially became the Newmans. The Ghost Squad provided them with new National Insurance cards, driving licences and passports. Brennan says he chose the name Newman after the Bexleyheath detective inspector whom he had months earlier tried to discredit with a false corruption allegation to frustrate the fraud investigation.\n\nVarious options were discussed to explain Brennan's disappearance. One was to arrange a fake car crash in Spain. Another was emigration to Australia. Eventually it was agreed that Scotland Yard would buy Silverlands and with that money Brennan could purchase a new house in a safe location under his new identity.\n\nThe offer was remarkable, even by the Ghost Squad's standards, and Brennan knew it. Privately he couldn't believe his luck. If ever there was an indication he had been given immunity this was it. On top of not being prosecuted, he was also going to keep the proceeds of the fraud and now the Yard would help him launder some of it by purchasing the house he had bought with almost half the money stolen from the Wangs. All he had to do was keep on insisting Redgrave and Charman were corrupt.\n\nWhen Brennan confessed to the theft he had lied extensively about the dispersal of the \u00a3400,000 proceeds and failed to tell Gaspar that he had bought Silverlands eight months earlier. Instead, Brennan claimed he had given \u00a3133,000 to Williams, \u00a340,000 to the Houston Four and of course \u00a350,000 to Redgrave and Charman.\n\nThe figures just didn't add up and had the Ghost Squad done a proper financial investigation of their supergrass they would have discovered this, which in turn would have seriously undermined his credibility at an early stage. The simple facts were that Brennan withdrew \u00a3250,000 of the \u00a3403,000 in his NatWest account 48 hours after it arrived from the Wangs and GX Impex in mid-September 1993. He went to his regular solicitors the Marston Partnership with \u00a3178,351 in cash and bought Silverlands. The house purchase was completed on 11 October. To protect the investment in case he was arrested, Brennan put the property in his son's name.\n\nIn July 1994, the Ghost Squad asked Scotland Yard's receivers to instruct London law firm Winkworth Pemberton & Co to purchase Silverlands for \u00a3169,500. This money was deposited in an Alliance & Leicester account, which the Ghost Squad had set up under Brennan's new identity. Gaspar also personally handed over \u00a314,000 in cash to Brennan as compensation for damage to the furniture during the removal and for storage costs.\n\nHaving laundered the money with police help, Brennan bought a new home in Maidstone, called Roscott House. This one he purchased with his wife under their new identities. But the family grew weary of this property and four months later told Gaspar they wanted to sell. Winkworth Pemberton bought Roscott House for \u00a3143,500 on 14 December 1994 and transferred the money to another joint account Brennan held at the TSB in Ashford as Mr and Mrs Newman.\n\nThis was now the second time the Ghost Squad had laundered the money. But the police farce didn't end there. The Brennans no longer wanted to live so far away from their traditional stomping ground of Bexleyheath. So they arranged to move back to the very area where they were supposedly vulnerable to reprisals from Tall Ted Williams. In February 1995 the Ghost Squad watched Brennan buy 39 Braebourne Crescent in Bexleyheath with \u00a3108,000 of the funds they had knowingly laundered for him. This should have immediately raised serious questions that maybe the threat from Williams had been a \"get up\" by the Brennans. Denise and her family had also been re-housed. Like her brother and parents, she too eventually moved back to the same area from which the so-called threat came.\n\nBrennan is very tight-lipped about how the threat on his life suddenly evaporated. Denise says implausibly she moved back to West Kingsdown because her daughter didn't like Maidstone.\n\nThe suspicion is that behind the back of the Ghost Squad Brennan made reparations to Williams by paying him some of the money he stole. Debbie, Williams' common-law wife, is also believed to have helped negotiate the truce so that her mother, Denise, could return.\n\nAs a result of Brennan's double-dealing antics the surveillance operation in Portugal against Williams folded with no arrests. Roger Crooks, Butch Jones and Bill Padgett also evaded prosecution for arms dealing. In fact, Crooks managed to extricate himself from the arms sting in equally strange circumstances. The FBI tipped him off on the same day Brennan turned supergrass.\n\nOver the years, as an American businessman working in Africa, Crooks had had a lot of dealings with the Feds and with the CIA. On this occasion, he says the FBI gave him a telephone number to ring at Scotland Yard. He spoke to a police officer and explained roughly that he was involved in an arms deal with Irish terrorists. Two detectives from the Yard's anti-terrorist branch SO13 came immediately to interview him at his hotel in Gatwick. He was about to fly to Sierra Leone. They retrieved a number of exhibits, including the arms list and returned to the Yard thinking they had a \"coup\", says undercover cop Richard Hester. There followed a high level meeting between the SO13 boss, MI5 and Special Branch. \"It was [the SO13 boss] I think who said, 'Those aren't Irish terrorists, that's Hester and Barr,' and everyone was suitably embarrassed.\"\n\nUS Customs felt Crooks had built himself enough of an insurance policy by contacting various US law enforcement agencies to run a successful entrapment defence. They felt in the end he was trying to get his hands on the $700,000 flash money without supplying any arms. \"I beg to differ,\" Crooks told us. \"I kept the FBI fully informed. It was never my intent to supply any kind of arms.\"\n\nCrooks returned to Sierra Leone, where we catch up with him. US Customs asked SERCS to continue targeting Bill Padgett. But this too came to nothing.\n\nBy August 1994, the light on Operation Nightshade was finally put out. A secret corruption probe into detectives John Redgrave and Michael Charman had usurped it. Operation Wrabness ran for the next 27 months.\n\nIn November 1994, Gaspar began a secret financial investigation of them and their two wives. Bank and building society accounts were examined and the wages of all four plotted against spending patterns. The secret probe concluded that Redgrave had an unexplained substantial increase in wealth and that Charman was making fewer withdrawals from the cash point.\n\nThe Ghost Squad had taken \"a strategic rather than a tactical decision\" not to arrest and question the two detectives. Had they, says Redgrave, he would have explained the following.\n\nJohn William Redgrave was born in November 1953 in London's East End. At five his parents moved to a grotty council estate in Deptford, south-east London. His father had astutely worked his way up in the City \"from a slum to a stockbroker\". But the marriage was an unhappy one and Redgrave's mother tried to run off with a man she'd met while working in a local pub.\n\n\"My father took her back because the bloke she tried to run off with didn't wanna know. She was willing to leave me, my brother and baby sister. She couldn't cope and was in and out of hospital. She'd tried to kill herself with a drug overdose and for a while we were farmed out to various aunts and uncles,\" he recalls with obvious melancholy and embarrassment. \"My father detested the closed society of Freemasonry designed to advance the few by who they knew and not by what they do. He instilled that in me. When he eventually left my mother, he gave her everything. I've had nothing to do with her since then.\"\n\nRedgrave joined the Met as a 17-year-old cadet in 1970 looking for a surrogate family and a sense of honour. It was the birth of his children in the early eighties which pushed him to reunite with his father. Their relationship became very close right up to his death from cancer two weeks before Brennan stole the Wangs' money.\n\nThe estate was sizeable. But Redgrave says that in the months leading up to his father's slow death they made a private arrangement, which has since caused him enormous problems. He received substantial funds that his father didn't want the rest of his family to know about. This included Redgrave's wife. His marriage was very strained by then because of his workload and the macho, heavy-drinking, womanising culture that went with it. \"I remember seeing my young son's diary with repeated entries, 'Dad at work. Didn't see him today.'\"\n\nRedgrave accepts he handled his finances badly. But he was never given an opportunity to account for the extra money because the operation against him was covert.\n\nThe Ghost Squad however did have an opportunity to corroborate Brennan's allegations without alerting the two detectives. The supergrass, after all, was in their witness protection scheme. Yet not once during Operation Wrabness was Brennan asked to provide precise details of when and how he had made the alleged corrupt payments totalling \u00a350,000. Similarly, no financial investigation was carried out into Brennan's accounts. Had the Ghost Squad done so, they would have discovered what Brennan really did with the stolen money \u2013 the cash purchase of Silverlands and a savings account where he had deposited the remaining \u00a3200,000.\n\nAnother extraordinary Ghost Squad failure was the decision not to send Brennan back into Redgrave and Charman wearing a hidden microphone to get some, any, corroboration of his corruption allegations.\n\nWhat could explain this and all the other oversights? By his own admission Gaspar believed Brennan was \"a dishonest man only focused on his own self-interest\". So why did he not seek to record and corroborate every syllable?\n\nIt looked suspiciously like Brennan's value to the Ghost Squad was as a trophy supergrass. His mere existence helped justify their highly politicised anti-corruption campaign within the Yard and within certain corridors of the Home Office. Brennan's allegations were just too good to check, says Redgrave.\n\nIt was not as if Operation Wrabness was corroborating Brennan's claims by other means. For example, the Ghost Squad had secretly tapped more than 1,500 of Redgrave's conversations in over two years. During this time he had moved from SERCS to Belgravia police station with plenty of opportunity to act corruptly. According to senior CIB sources, Redgrave's office at Belgravia had a probe in it, and his work phone and pager were also monitored. But the Yard now admit that none of the secretly recorded material gathered over two years supported any of the allegations Brennan had made against either detective. Nor have they resulted in any other charges.\n\nPerhaps the most bizarre aspect of Operation Wrabness came in June 1996, when Redgrave, still secretly under investigation, was told that commissioner Condon was honouring him with a long service and good conduct medal after twenty-five years. He brought his two children and wife to the ceremony. \"It was one of the proudest moments of my life,\" says Redgrave, as the photograph of him shaking Condon's hand showed. \"Although I was under investigation since 13 June 1994 I continued to be involved in high-profile, proactive operations against drug dealers involving orthodox and covert infiltration methods authorised at the highest level. How can any professional organisation allow me to conduct this type of work and honour me whilst being secretly investigated for the most serious of offences?\" he asks.\n\nDid the commissioner know about Operation Wrabness? And if not, then why did his Ghost Squad intelligence chiefs make such a fool out of their boss?\n\nWhile Brennan was in the witness protection scheme, the Ghost Squad management group made DS Chris Smith the minder of their premier supergrass. Part of his duties was to help resettle Brennan into his new life as Mr Newman. Their relationship became so close that both men and their wives socialised together. Smith also lobbied Gaspar when Brennan wanted to sell his two homes and move back to Bexleyheath. He did police computer checks on neighbours to ensure there was no one who posed a threat and he introduced Brennan to a lot of his serving and retired friends in the police.\n\nSmith would later claim that when Gaspar failed to find Brennan work, he stepped in with jobs for the supergrass. Private investigation work was a natural progression for an ex-repo man like Brennan. It was also a clever choice because the shadowy world of private eyes is dominated by retired police officers with close links to their serving colleagues, and therefore an opportunity for Brennan to keep his ear to the ground and make new contacts.\n\nSmith had almost served his full 30 years and decided he would moonlight with Brennan on various private surveillance jobs. One company they worked for was Hazlebury, run by a former detective in the Yard's bugging unit. Internal police documents show that between 1995 and 1996 Smith used Brennan as a \"cut out\" to receive payments in cash and cheques totalling \u00a310,000 for this moonlighting work. Throughout this period, Smith was in regular contact with Clark, Gaspar and Griffiths. How much they knew about this highly suspect arrangement has never been clarified.\n\nIn early 1996, the Ghost Squad was busy with another thorny problem that threatened to unravel the whole deal they'd secretly forged with Brennan during those 12 days in June 1994.\n\nOn 16 February 1996, Gaspar met Brennan at City Airport. The supergrass was looking for reassurance that he wouldn't be prosecuted. Once again Gaspar failed to caution him after he admitted the theft for the second time. Exactly two months later, at a secret meeting in a Hammersmith hotel, the Ghost Squad management group decided their supergrass would not be prosecuted.\n\nThe Chinese government, however, had other ideas. Since May it had been applying diplomatic pressure on the British government. The Wangs had also recently launched a civil claim in the British courts against Brennan to recover the money. They had tired of Maul's fraud investigation, which was going nowhere for reasons that will soon become apparent.\n\nThe Ghost Squad knew the whole rotten and unlawful supergrass deal would be hopelessly exposed in the civil courts if they didn't act quickly to take control. It was decided they had to unpick the deal and prosecute Brennan for the theft. The CPS was not even consulted.\n\nThis action would undoubtedly incur Brennan's wrath so the Ghost Squad made a last ditch attempt to get him to make a witness statement against Redgrave and Charman.\n\nOn 5 November 1996 detective superintendent Dave Bailey arrived by prior arrangement at Brennan's house unaware that the supergrass was taping the meeting. He told Brennan he would be arrested and charged the following day for the theft. Brennan protested. He said they had known he stole the money for almost three years and did nothing, so why now?\n\nBailey explained it was \"the Chinese\". He told Brennan his legal defence to the theft \"must be centred around corrupt policemen. This Redgrave has got to be arrested... These aren't human beings, Redgrave and Charman, they're just things that exist, that's all they are...\". But the supergrass could see the writing on the wall. He wasn't going to add perjury to theft and fraud by falsely incriminating the two detectives. \"I'm going down the pan. I'm dead, I'm fucking dead, and I'm going down fighting,\" he told Bailey.\n\nAfter Bailey left, Brennan called Smith to see if anything could be done. It couldn't. The next day he arrived at Reigate police station with his lawyer. DC Kevin Maul was eagerly waiting to interview the man he had been chasing for 31 months. Out of the blue Maul had been told two days earlier that Brennan would be resurfacing.\n\nThe interview started at 3.50 p.m. Maul immediately cautioned Brennan and after going through the offence charged him with theft. Brennan responded with a prepared statement that sent Maul into a spin. He told the detective he was a protected witness who had not disappeared in June 1994, but had all this time been helping the Ghost Squad with a corruption inquiry into Redgrave and Charman.\n\nMaul was seething with anger when Brennan revealed further details about the re-housing, the new identity and the bank accounts. It now dawned on him how systematically senior officers had misled his fraud inquiry. The Ghost Squad had allowed Maul in July 1994 to travel halfway around the world at taxpayers' expense, to Los Angeles and Houston, investigating a man they had all along secretly re-housed a mere 30 miles from Scotland Yard. While he was in the US, Maul had been unexpectedly transferred to a new posting, which meant the fraud inquiry \"took a back seat\" for the next two years, he told us.\n\nFrom the items Maul seized at Brennan's home he was now able to carry out a full financial investigation of the supergrass. What he discovered appalled him even further. The Ghost Squad, he subsequently wrote, had \"laundered\" \u00a3170,000 of the proceeds of crime through the two houses bought from Brennan. These were later resold at a loss to the taxpayer of \u00a336,937.18, during a property boom! Maul was also able to identify over \u00a3200,000 \u2013 the remainder of the theft \u2013 that Brennan had secreted in a Flexible Savings Account. As Brennan was penniless when he stole the Wangs' money, by accounting for the \u00a3400,000 Maul had proved Brennan was lying about the corrupt bribe to Redgrave and Charman.\n\nNow that he had been charged, double agent supergrass Geoff Brennan had nothing to lose by speaking out about his arrangement with the Ghost Squad and DS Chris Smith, who'd retired in September 1996, a few weeks earlier.\n\nBrennan turned up uninvited at Charman's home on 20 November. The off-duty detective was alarmed to see him, not least because he hadn't given Brennan his home address. There had been no contact between the pair for almost three years. As ever, Brennan's plan was self-preservation. He hoped to disrupt the fraud prosecution by tipping off Redgrave and Charman who had been the subjects of a corruption probe since June 1994.\n\nCharman immediately contacted his superiors and Redgrave. Over the next few weeks leading up to Christmas, the two detectives wrote several detailed reports to DCS Roy Clark and others in the Yard hierarchy, unaware they were behind it all.\n\nRedgrave and Charman didn't trust Brennan and merely repeated his claims and sought clarification. Their reports referred to the Bailey tape, and additional taped phone calls between Charman and Brennan in which the informant alleged he and his sister Denise had been prompted by Smith and other Ghost Squad officers to incriminate them. The reports also referred to Smith's moonlighting.\n\nIn a covering letter dated 9 December 1996 Redgrave demanded the whole matter be investigated. \"Whatever the merits of the case against [Brennan] the content of the [Bailey] transcript must inevitably damage any likelihood of a successful prosecution of him. The conduct is tantamount to perverting the course of justice and forms the basis of a serious criminal libel against DC Charman and myself. In essence [Brennan] is induced to plead guilty in advance of proceedings against him, commit perjury and fabricate evidence against myself.\"\n\nThe Bailey debacle was almost identical to an incident in 1981 when the Director of Public Prosecutions had to withdraw a case against six armed robbers after one of them secretly recorded a police visit to his cell offering a deal in return for evidence against allegedly bent cops. The parallels would not have been lost on a seasoned detective like Roy Clark, especially as Redgrave had indicated that his lawyer would shortly be taking a statement from Brennan as part of a legal action against Bailey.\n\nRedgrave left nothing to chance and distributed his report to the undercover officers in Operation Nightshade. He also ensured the covert material they had gathered was kept in a secure police storeroom to prevent this crucial evidence going \"missing\".\n\nMeanwhile, Smith had been complaining to DCS Clark about Brennan, who he said was bad-mouthing him to all his contacts in the private detective world and threatening to expose Gaspar and Bailey. \"Clark basically said to me this geezer [Brennan] is looking to do everyone and make trouble for everybody, do not worry about it... The last thing he said was, 'Chris, I want you to do one thing for me. I want you to get hold of him and tell him he either pleads guilty, if he's guilty [or] he comes forward with his solicitor as soon as possible and tells his side of it. We'll put it before the CPS and if what he says is true [the case will] get withdrawn.'\"\n\nSmith and Brennan met for the last time at the Little Chef in Orpington. It was late December 1996. This is how Smith recalled the conversation.\n\nSmith: \"The Metropolitan Police have like spent fucking fortunes on you and done everything for you, why don't you just come through [and give evidence against Redgrave and Charman] if you're telling the truth?\"\n\nBrennan: \"Everyone's going to suffer.\"\n\nBrennan's version differs slightly. He agrees Smith made him an offer on Clark's behalf. But he says the Ghost Squad boss wanted him to return the stolen money, which he refused to do.\n\nBy the time the Little Chef meeting took place, Roy Clark had just assumed \"full and lone responsibility for the [anti-corruption] strategy and investigations\", reporting only to the deputy commissioner. He was setting up a new anti-corruption squad, CIB3, the Untouchables, to be publicly launched in late 1997. This was supposed to be a seamless transition in which the existence (and failures) of the Ghost Squad years would be kept secret. Brennan, however, was making this very difficult. He was firing off in all directions.\n\nClark refuses to answer questions about his handling of Brennan. The secret approach Smith says he authorised raises serious questions. Under PACE, once someone is charged the police cannot try to interview them about the offence unless in controlled circumstances. This usually means in a police station, on tape and with their lawyer present. These safeguards are there to prevent any corrupt deals or inducements being offered to the defendant. Smith's approach effectively repeated the impropriety of Bailey's earlier visit to Brennan just before he was charged. Furthermore, the choice of Smith as the emissary was wholly inappropriate because by this stage Clark should have known that he was no longer a detective but a suspect alleged to be involved in a corrupt relationship with Brennan.\n\n\"The approaches to Brennan by Bailey and then Smith were authorised at the highest level for morally bankrupt and operationally partial reasons,\" says Redgrave. \"It goes to show the lengths certain people in the Yard were prepared to go to protect themselves and Chris Smith. The Ghost Squad had to be proved right and all its mistakes covered up.\"\n\nRedgrave and Charman were immediately suspended and would remain so for an incredible seven years.\n\n## [11\n\nHector the Selecta'  \n\u2013 Rude Boy Supergrass](contents.html#ch11)\n\nWhen armed robber Hector Byron Harvey turned supergrass in 1995, Scotland Yard launched its widest internal corruption probe costing tens of millions of pounds. It ended eight years later in wretched failure.\n\nThis should have been the finest hour of the Yard's anti-corruption squad, a bright, shining example of how the police can effectively investigate one of its most elite units, the Flying Squad. Instead it is a story of how another of the most manipulative and ruthless young supergrasses in recent police history ran rings around the anti-corruption squad in ever more humiliating ways.\n\nThe gallery of red faces extends from the commissioner's office through the Directorate of Criminal Intelligence to the Witness Protection Unit. Some of the officers responsible are still in senior positions at Scotland Yard; others are running new \"independent\" police watchdogs here and in Northern Ireland, or they are teaching anti-corruption techniques to international police forces.\n\nThe Hector Harvey story is a cautionary tale that echoes the mishandling of Geoffrey Brennan. Similarly, it unfolds over several chapters. Harvey's story is a further warning about the dangers of supergrass-led prosecutions driven by a politicised anti-corruption squad which thought it was wagging its own tail.\n\nThe key atop a corned-beef tin was the tool that set 15-year-old Harvey on a road to crime. He used it in 1979 to steal an Austin 1100, earning him his first conviction. Harvey learned to drive stolen cars in the garages underneath the estate near Shepherd's Bush in west London where he grew up. Eventually he graduated to the Corsair, cool enough, Harvey thought, to pick up his girlfriend outside school, but hot enough to still insist she wore gloves inside.\n\nHarvey was born in Jamaica in 1964. He came to London with his parents in the early seventies when he was eight. Family problems forced him to run away at twelve. The next three years were spent in care homes, approved boarding schools and hostels. At sixteen Harvey was living in his own flat and had fathered his first child, a son.\n\nHe drifted into a life of casual and then professional crime. At the time of his first conviction he was just weeks from joining the police. He would have made a very good detective, if he could have stayed straight. Throughout his career, Harvey got on well with the white criminals with whom he robbed and the white police handlers to whom he grassed. He preferred to work with white robbers because he felt they were more professional and reliable. Some of his former black associates, he says, needed a few shots of rum or a long drag on a spliff before going on a job.\n\nHarvey's no choc ice \u2013 a street metaphor used to denote black people who are, essentially, 'white on the inside'. It's more that detail and precision are very important to him. He doesn't drink or smoke, and prided himself as a career criminal on not getting chased off a robbery. In truth, Double H fancies himself in the role of the black outsider who plays the white system from within and wins.\n\nHe is good looking, physically impressive, disarming and flirtatious, but behind this silkiness is a ruthless manipulation of anyone who can advance his cause. Imagine an intellectual e-fit of John Shaft, Virgil Tibbs and Thomas Crown.\n\nIt wasn't long before Harvey graduated through various detention centres to mainstream prison after a conviction in 1985 for kidnapping and possession of a pump-action shotgun. \"I got all of my qualifications in detention centres,\" he says. \"I was good at English, okay at Maths and heavily into Social Studies.\"\n\nInside with the big boys, Harvey developed two skills that became his trademark \u2013 robbing security vans and riding motorbikes. He went in a burglar and came out a _blagger_ (armed robber). When Harvey was freed in September 1988 he quickly returned to committing numerous post office, cash in transit and jewellery shop heists.\n\nHarvey's path to supergrass status began in early 1989 when an associate offered to introduce him to a man called Laurel Blake, who was working as a security guard for Group 4 in London. Blake, it was said, wanted to rob a company van. Harvey's team obliged. In April 1989, \u00a3675,000 was stolen from Blake's security van in Ilford. Rigg Approach, the Flying Squad office based in Walthamstow and covering east London, investigated. At first detectives were unable to identify Harvey or his associates. But six months later when a second Group 4 van was robbed, this time by another team also believed to be working with Blake, the criminal conspiracy unravelled.\n\nHarvey had already moved to Luton and bought a house with his wife. Half the \u00a315,000 deposit came from the proceeds of the Ilford robbery. Harvey had also taped \u00a350,000 to the bottom of his wardrobe. He could have bummed around for a while, but decided to get a job. It wasn't just any job advert in the _Evening Standard_ that caught Harvey's eye. This one said, \"WANTED \u2013 Drivers for Group 4. Luton Office\".\n\nHe felt he had all the credentials. He was certainly wanted by the security company, so he applied \"for the balls of it\", using his own name and national insurance number. It surprised him when the application form arrived. He swears he didn't lie filling it in. Or more accurately, he didn't tell the full truth. Another trademark. \"I got the job with no aim to pull a job off. We'd just had a baby and the office was near my home,\" Harvey explains. Group 4 put him on three months' probation. He prayed no one tried to rob him while he was delivering cash, sometimes up to \u00a33 million.\n\nMeanwhile, back in London, the Flying Squad had arrested Blake and others. It wasn't long before they started grassing one another up. An informant had also told the police the man they were looking for was called Hector Selecta'. At first the detectives thought he might be a DJ on the London club scene they had noticed from flyers posted around the capital.\n\nIn the seventies and eighties the Selecta' was a crucial figure in the Jamaican and British reggae sound clashes. Rival sound systems had a Selecta', who played the tunes, and a DJ who sang over them. Being a Selecta' was very much a crucial but background role to the more colourful _toasting_ of the DJ star. This suited Hector Harvey, who refers to himself with great pride as \"the planner\".\n\nEventually the Flying Squad realised Selecta' was Harvey's street name. He was put under surveillance. The detectives were amazed to discover him working for the very security company he had recently robbed. It was inconceivable to the Flying Squad that Harvey, a man used to taking home a whole payroll, was content instead to take just \u00a3500 every month in wages. Group 4 was alerted to their probationer's outlaw past. In early February Harvey was called into the office and told sheepishly his references hadn't checked out. Harvey now realised he was definitely under surveillance.\n\nThe game of cat and mouse moved from the soulless industrial units of Luton to the Caribbean, as Flying Squad detectives in Bermuda shorts secretly followed Harvey to St Lucia and Barbados. They believed he'd salted money away, including the share owed to Blake and a man called Alan Lewis. It was this betrayal that had led to the domino grassing.\n\nIn February 1991, all three were tried. Harvey and Lewis were convicted. Blake however was acquitted, even though, according to a confidential police report, he had admitted his role to officers during earlier interviews.\n\nHarvey was only twenty-six when he was sent down for fifteen years. He wouldn't be eligible for parole until the new millennium. So when two Flying Squad officers involved in his case approached him in prison to help clear up loose ends, he was desperate to trade. The detectives, chief inspector Albert Patrick and sergeant Tim Norris, made Harvey their registered informant, under the pseudonym \"Marshall Cook\". In return they agreed to help with his appeal.\n\nHarvey gave up two other men he claimed were involved in the Ilford job. He then named the woman to whom he had given the \u00a350,000 hidden under his wardrobe to invest in the German stock market. There was also a trip to identify the house of an intermediary he said he paid \u00a320,000 to split with a detective inspector from a west London police station. The cop had been willing to try and \"lose\" the case papers, Harvey claimed. For all this information he received regular sums of money.\n\nHarvey told us a Home Office official had also visited him in 1991 at Long Larton Prison to ask if he'd \"befriend\" Michael Bettaney, a former MI5 officer by then into the seventh year of a twenty-three-year sentence for betraying secrets to the Soviet Union. Bettaney was a hopeless alcoholic whose obvious mental breakdown and the risk it posed were completely missed by the Security Services' managers until one day he threw confidential documents over the wall of the Soviet Embassy in London.\n\nHarvey claims the Home Office official asked him to spend one year with Bettaney, who was in another prison. The Flying Squad gave him no indication they were aware of the approach. Keen to reduce his sentence, Harvey agreed and waited to be relocated. But the shadowy official never made contact again.\n\nDCI Patrick, however, kept his word and a confidential 'text' was sent to the appeal judge pointing out Harvey's assistance to the police. His sentence was reduced to 12 years.\n\nIn January 1994 Harvey moved to a new prison, the Mount, near Hemel Hempstead, where the conditions were more relaxed. As he neared the end of his sentence, he was allowed to work during the week at a special needs school as a caretaker. He had to return every evening to his cell.\n\nOne day Laurel Blake, the alleged inside agent acquitted of the Ilford job, visited him. \"Blake told me he had a friend who worked for Security Express [the firm had taken over Group 4] who wanted his van robbed. In due course I learned the name of the person \u2013 Gregory Hepburn.\" Harvey agreed to put a team together and told Blake he'd be in touch. He then contacted his old partner David Brown and asked if he would be interested in the job. Brown declined but offered to make enquiries of his own criminal associates. Brown was unaware that Harvey had grassed him up in 1991 as one of the two other men involved in the Ilford security van robbery.\n\nBrown wasn't the only person Harvey was willing to betray. His Flying Squad handlers had tasked him to \"get close\" to two new targets, a pair of well-respected armed robbers called Gary Ward and Joey Simms. Harvey had served time with them at Maidstone Prison and his police handlers hoped to exploit this association to find out what they were up to. Ward was still inside but Simms had recently been released. The two men were well-known \"jump up\" specialists, criminals who hijacked lorries and sold on their loads through moody shopkeepers, market traders, publicans and the like.\n\nDeputy assistant commissioner John Grieve, the director of intelligence, authorised the tapping of Simms and Ward and the use of Harvey as a participating informant. His handlers took him to visit Ward at prison. To gain his trust, Harvey offered Ward a piece of the Security Express job he was planning with Hepburn. Ward expressed interest and confided that he too had an inside agent and was planning to rob a Post Office van with Simms later that year. Ward offered Harvey a piece of that action, and knowing how pleased his handlers would be, Harvey readily accepted.\n\nOn the way back to the Mount, Harvey told his handlers about Ward's Post Office job. He was content to let the two Flying Squad detectives feel chuffed their sneaky ruse had worked. Of course he kept from them the fact that he had just recruited Ward and Simms to rob a Security Express van.\n\nThat job was also moving forward. Derek Brown had arranged for Harvey to meet someone willing to do the robbery. Harvey agreed but didn't tell Brown that he now had another team of blaggers, Ward and Simms, interested in the same job.\n\nOne day while Harvey was working at the special needs school a Mercedes pulled up with Brown and two other men inside. The leader of the team was introduced as Chris McCormack, a feared gangland enforcer in his late thirties. Accompanying him was Dean Henry, his lieutenant and an experienced armed robber. McCormack naturally wanted to meet Hepburn, Harvey's inside agent. If the job came off sweetly, he promised Harvey \u00a3100,000 for the introduction. Harvey agreed and McCormack left thinking he was onto a nice little earner.\n\nMcCormack is a Bermondsey boy born in 1955. While serving in the armed forces he received his first major conviction for stabbing. Police sources say his apprenticeship was served as a private \"soldier\" for the south-east London Arif crime family. In October 1983, at the age of 28, Chris McCormack entered the big league after he was caught dressed as a policeman trying to kidnap and rob an Iranian airline executive at his home near the Albert Hall.\n\nThe Flying Squad had received an informant's tip-off. Detectives were waiting across the road when the armed robbers turned up in police uniforms they'd stolen from a dry cleaners. McCormack rang the doorbell and, when the Iranian executive's wife answered, he stuck a shotgun in her face. The Flying Squad made their move and among those arrested was another well-known south-east London villain, David Fraser, the son of Mad Frank.\n\nMcCormack, Fraser, Robert Davey and a fourth man received substantial jail sentences. McCormack got 12 years. After his release in the late eighties he continued to freelance for the Arifs. But by 1994 McCormack was developing new contacts in north London with the Adams crime family.\n\nTerry, Patrick and Tommy Adams are three of eleven brothers and sisters from an Irish Catholic working-class family. They grew up on a rough council estate in the Barnsbury area of Islington, a million miles from the skinny latte part of the borough where Tony and Cherie Blair plotted their path to Number Ten. Ironically, a police operation targeting the Adams would later covertly record Tommy boasting how he had donated several thousand pounds of dirty cash to the Labour Party's election coffers.\n\nIn 1990, the Adams family sorted out its north London rivals, the Reillys, in a memorable shoot-out and so began its domination of the London criminal underworld. Their vast profits from drug trafficking, estimated by the police at over \u00a350 million, have been laundered through investments in bars, restaurants, clubs, sports promotion, a West End ticket agency and horseracing. Before long the Adams family, known as the A-Team, were considered unassailable. Some suggested this was because for a long time they had \"bent old Bill\" on the payroll, and not just low-ranking detectives. It was rumoured by police and criminals alike that a south-east London commander managed to retire untouched by the current anti-corruption crusade.\n\nCertainly the Adams brothers and their associates had a Teflon coat when it came to avoiding heavy prison sentences. They eschewed publicity of any kind, which is understandable when your empire is built on fear and extreme violence meted out to double-crossers, if not personally then by trusted enforcers like McCormack.\n\nIn the winter of 1994, Harvey chose McCormack's team over Ward and Simms to carry out the Security Express robbery. McCormack took control of the job unaware anyone else had been in the running. The robbery, he told Harvey, would take place sometime just before Christmas when Hepburn's Security Express van was outside the Barclays Bank in Clapham High Street, south London.\n\nOn the morning of 16 December, two of McCormack's team took over at gunpoint a tyre shop near to the bank. The plan was for the third member, Dean Henry, dressed as a guard, to hijack the security van with a handgun and drive it to the tyre shop where the proceeds would be transferred to a new vehicle. Fortunately, a customer was suspicious about the closed tyre shop and reported it to the police, who subsequently arrested the gang after a chase and shoot-out.\n\nOver Christmas, Harvey devised a plan so duplicitous it would have made Machiavelli proud. In January 1995, Harvey contacted Ward and Simms. Ward had been released from prison by then. Harvey explained they needed to bring the Security Express job forward and rob the Post Office van later in the year, after he was paroled. Harvey explained that Hepburn, the inside agent, was worried he might be suspended from work while Security Express investigated the failed robbery of his van in Clapham.\n\nHarvey now needed a pretext for his Flying Squad handlers to release him from prison to carry out the robbery without their knowledge. Detectives Tim Norris and Paul Smith, who had taken over as co-handler, had no idea Harvey was behind the failed Clapham robbery. All police efforts were concentrated on the Post Office remittance van Harvey had told them Ward and Simms were planning to rob.\n\nHarvey told Norris that Ward and Simms wanted him out on 20 January to do a \"dry run\", and that the Post Office van would be robbed for real a week later. Harvey knew the Flying Squad had no real reason to doubt him. DAC Grieve again gave permission for Harvey to be released from the Mount. He was under strict instructions about what he could say and do as a participating informant. The last thing the Flying Squad wanted was any future prosecution of Ward and Simms undermined because Harvey had acted as an _agent provocateur_. Of course, that was exactly what he was doing.\n\nHarvey candidly laid out for us the point of his plan: he would do the robbery with Ward and Simms, skim off a large part of his share and then return the rest to the Flying Squad claiming he was bounced into doing the robbery during the dry run but on a different target and therefore had no opportunity to tip them off.\n\nThe Flying Squad might not like it, but would be reassured Harvey had returned his share, unaware it wasn't the full amount. Ward and Simms would then be arrested, oblivious that Harvey was the grass. To stymie probing defence lawyers, Harvey knew the police would seek a PII certificate or gagging order from the trial judge to prevent having to disclose his role. The Flying Squad would also put in a good word to the forthcoming Parole Board, ensuring Harvey's earliest possible release with a secret pot of money.\n\nThursday, 19 January was showtime. At midday, Harvey was released from the Mount Prison for the dry run. That night he contacted Ward and Simms and went over the robbery route. Afterwards he met his police handlers and showed them the _slaughter_ \u2013 a criminal term for the secure place where the loot from the security van would be unloaded onto another vehicle.\n\nHarvey took Norris and Smith to two separate locations, the first in Shoreditch, near the City, and the second a lock-up in Pages Walk, near Tower Bridge. This was the actual _slaughter_ and Harvey deliberately mentioned it to the Flying Squad to add credibility to the story he planned to tell the police immediately after the robbery.\n\nIn the early hours of Friday morning Harvey finally got his head down for a short nap. The next 24 hours would change his life for ever.\n\nAt about 6.30 a.m. Harvey met Ward and Simms outside Stepney Green tube station in east London. Ward collected the inside agent, Hepburn, in a white transit van. They planned to meet Simms at the Pages Walk warehouse. While Harvey drove the transit van there, Ward fixed a dummy bomb around Hepburn's waist. It was made out of two twelve-bore shotgun cartridges attached by wires to two batteries.\n\nAt the Pages Walk lock-up, Harvey changed into his motorbike leathers. Simms joined Ward and Hepburn in the van, which Harvey followed on a stolen Yamaha to the Security Express depot. Hepburn was dropped off nearby. His job was to convince his wholly innocent co-driver they had no choice but to co-operate with the robbery. This meant picking up money from the nearby Barclays Bank Cash Centre, then following Harvey's motorbike to Pages Walk. To ensure his co-driver's co-operation, Hepburn was supposed to show him a family photograph, say his mother was being held hostage and then reveal the bomb on his body, claiming that an attached microphone allowed the robbers to hear every word.\n\nThe plan went perfectly. The robbery netted just over \u00a31.4 million in various denominations. The three principal robbers took \u00a3400,000 each. Hepburn's share was \u00a3200,000, which Ward gave Blake to pass on when the heat was off.\n\nHarvey took a mini-cab from the divvy house in the Isle of Dogs and made a pre-arranged stop at a girlfriend's house in east London where he hid at least \u00a340,000. He then continued in the same cab to his mother's house in the White City Estate, in Shepherd's Bush. There, he hid the remainder of his share in her shed.\n\nNow Harvey had to complete his plan and revert back to his \"innocent\" informant role. So he paged detective inspector Tim Norris leaving the message from Selecta' that Ward and Simms had \"pulled a double whammy\" on him and he was heading back to Luton where he would explain everything.\n\nA furious Norris arrived in Luton with DC Paul Smith and two other Flying Squad officers in a second car. Norris suspected Harvey had duped him and ordered a search of the family home. Harvey said he'd hidden his share at his mother's. No mention was made of the money stored at his girlfriend's house.\n\nThe detectives drove Harvey to the White City Estate and recovered the money from the shed. Harvey was then arrested and taken to Edmonton police station in north London. There he was grilled over the next 24 hours by an experienced detective sergeant called Eamonn Harris. On Saturday evening he was returned to the Mount prison.\n\nWhat Harvey did next was truly extraordinary and triggered a shockwave that rocked Scotland Yard's headquarters.\n\nAfter a shower and some prison food, Harvey sat in his cell and put two tapes in his beat box. He cleared his throat and began a devastating recording of the events of the last 48 hours. The tape was directed at his legal representative, Jeremy Newell, and started with the words: \"Dear Jeremy, what I'm about to say on this tape is the assurance that I need for you to help me... in case anything goes wrong in my life as of this day.\"\n\nHarvey weaved into the narrative a cataclysmic allegation that Flying Squad detectives had stolen nearly \u00a3250,000 of the recovered money over the last 24 hours. He described how Flying Squad detectives drove him to his mother's shed to recover his share. He claimed DI Tim Norris placed the money in the boot of the police car and removed a portion of it from one bag into a sports bag next to it. On the way to Edmonton police station, Harvey claimed Norris stopped at a service station on the motorway and transferred the sports bag into the boot of his own car.\n\nNorris, he alleged, promised to take care of his wife with some of the stolen money. He also told him to ask for a local solicitor called Les Brown when they arrived at the police station because he would \"take care of everything\". Harvey knew Brown, who had acted for him on a domestic problem concerning access to his son. He says he confided in the solicitor about the \u00a340,000 he had skimmed, and told him Norris had also helped himself to a share of the remainder. Brown, he says, just sniggered.\n\nHarvey went on to claim that the two Flying Squad detectives who interviewed him, Eamonn Harris and Paul Smith, privately made him a deal: he could keep the money he had left at his girlfriend's (which Brown had apparently told them about) if he helped them steal the \u00a3200,000 share put aside for Hepburn, the inside agent.\n\nHarvey explained on tape how he made various calls and discovered Hepburn's friend, Kevin Dwyer, had stashed the \u00a3200,000 in a lock-up. Two detectives were sent to pick it up.\n\nJust past midnight, Harvey finished his explosive recording. He wrote a covering note to Newell: \"Please put this tape in your safe and keep it there as there's enough on [it] that'll put a lot of people away! No matter WHO THEY ARE!\" Harvey made two copies of the tape. He specifically asked Newell to contact CIB2 and pass them a copy.\n\nA good planner has to think on his feet and must sometimes adapt a plan to changing circumstances. An important question is whether Harvey planned all along to contact CIB2, or was it a reaction to genuine and unexpected corruption he had witnessed? Harvey maintains he only decided to make the tape and send it to CIB2 after Harris threatened him in the car on the way back to the Mount prison.\n\nIf Harvey is telling the truth about why he contacted CIB2 then the theft of over \u00a3200,000 by the Flying Squad detectives at Rigg Approach was opportunistic. But Harvey had a problem. He was not in a position to be totally straight with CIB2, because it would mean admitting he had planned the whole robbery.\n\nOn 26 January, Newell's copy of the tape arrived at his office in Wembley. He listened to it with increasing amazement. Newell had for five years worked for Les Brown's firm until they fell out in 1993. Newell left with another employee, a retired Flying Squad detective called Fred Bunn. It was to Bunn that Newell turned to seek advice about the tape. He played it to him and Bunn advised that CIB be brought in.\n\nOn 2 February, Newell called CIB. He explained that a client, whom he referred to only by the codename \"Swallow\" (one of Harvey's eight aliases) wanted to provide details of \"corrupt officers\" involved in a recent armed robbery. A meeting was arranged at Hemel Hempstead police station for the following day.\n\nBy January 1995, the Yard had set up a Ghost Squad under John Grieve and Roy Clark's stewardship that even regular members of CIB2 knew nothing about. The squad that didn't exist had been operating for just over a year when Newell phoned. By then, senior Ghost Squad officers had already been fooled by Geoff Brennan, who had come to them in June 1994. Many of the same errors were about to be repeated with Hector Harvey.\n\nOn 3 February, Ghost Squad detective superintendent David Bailey and a female officer saw Harvey at Hemel Hempstead. He wasn't cautioned and the covert recording was of such poor quality it was decided to re-interview him five days later, this time under caution and with his lawyer present. Bailey had enough in the meantime to brief Grieve and other Ghost Squad chiefs that they had a problem with the Flying Squad office at Rigg Approach.\n\nThe story Harvey gave to the Ghost Squad on 8 February was a melange of fact and fiction that fleshed out the police corruption allegations against Norris, Harris, Smith and north London solicitor Les Brown. Harvey knew that if he revealed his full role in the robbery he would be put back in prison and the key thrown away. With parole so close, once again he suggested Ward and Simms had duped him. His focus now was to make himself indispensable to the anti-corruption squad, in the same way he had previously made himself indispensable to the Flying Squad, and then betrayed them.\n\nFor the first time he declared his share of the robbery was \u00a3400,000 and that he had siphoned off \u00a340,000, leaving \u00a3360,000 in his mother's shed. On the day of the robbery Security Express had recovered \u00a3313,000 from the Flying Squad. Harvey was therefore alleging that his handler, Norris, had removed \u00a347,000 from the car boot. This plus the guard's share meant Flying Squad detectives were in the frame for stealing around \u00a3250,000.\n\nThe Ghost Squad's covert inquiry into the Flying Squad was aptly called Operation Spy. It had a secret room at Tintagel House where all its files and technical facilities were stored. \"The room was alarmed to nearby Kennington police station. There was stuff inside it that was so sensitive they couldn't even trust people in Tintagel,\" recalls one former insider.\n\nOn Valentine's Day, at the Mount Prison Harvey received a visitor he wasn't expecting. An angry Chris McCormack told Harvey he wanted the \u00a3200,000 or threatened to wage war on his family. Harvey tried to persuade McCormack that the police had stolen the guard's share. But the hard man was insistent Harvey had sent his own people to pick up the guard's share. \"He threatened me and said he had a detective inspector on the firm and would get me charged as the main organiser of the [failed robbery].\"\n\nHarvey was undoubtedly scared of McCormack. He knew he was more than capable of hurting him, permanently. Harvey claims that when they first discussed the robbery McCormack had boasted of killing the police informant David Norris, a fate he was apparently suggesting would befall Harvey if he ever double-crossed him. That time had now come.\n\nHarvey was also worried about CIB connecting him to the earlier attempted robbery of the Security Express van in Clapham. Although he notified the Ghost Squad of McCormack's threat, Harvey said nothing about having been involved with him in setting up the Clapham job. Nor that he had played two teams of armed robbers off against each other as well as the Flying Squad.\n\nSuperintendent David Bailey was genuinely concerned about the threat to his witness. As a way of gathering further evidence of McCormack's violent intentions, he taped Harvey calling the south London enforcer from a prison phone. According to a retired officer with access to the material, McCormack accused Harvey of \"putting three of his mates away\". The Ghost Squad paid little attention to this comment, says the source, which was clearly a reference to the forthcoming trial of Dean Henry and his two associates who were on remand for the failed Security Express robbery in Clapham.\n\nIt relieved Harvey greatly that Bailey and his team were not quizzing him about McCormack's aside. To keep the two robberies apart, Harvey threw cold water on the McCormack threat and said he had sorted it out but didn't divulge how. Consequently, McCormack was never arrested or interviewed by the Ghost Squad.\n\nOn Monday, 29 May 1995, Harvey was on home leave from prison. It had just gone midday and he was getting ready to go into Luton town centre. His motorbike was parked on the front lawn under the kitchen window of his three-bedroom semi on an estate. This was the house he part paid for with the proceeds of the 1989 Ilford robbery. Harvey's wife and three children, then aged fifteen months, five and eleven, had lived there for just over five years while their father served his sentence for the robbery.\n\nHarvey went to remove a green tarpaulin covering his Honda 750. The bike, he says, hadn't been driven for two months. \"I stood beside the front wheel [and lifted] up the tarpaulin from the front. I then undid the rear of the tarpaulin and lifted it over the box by the seat. I gave the tarpaulin a couple of pulls to try and remove it all in one go, but it seemed to be stuck at the front.\n\n\"I looked over the front wheel to see what was catching the tarpaulin. To my horror I could see what appeared to be a hand grenade wedged into the spokes. It had a pin, which had a ring on the end. Attached to the ring was a length of wire, which appeared to be attached to the tarpaulin at the front. I could see the pin was about three-quarters out of its holder. I immediately let go of the tarpaulin and ran to my right. I went behind the porch of the house next door. I waited for about ten seconds in case the grenade went off. It didn't. My wife was in the house and I called for her to get out. I then phoned the police.\"\n\nThe bomb squad disarmed the live grenade. Meanwhile, Harvey asked the Ghost Squad to relocate his family and put him into protected police custody.\n\nHarvey immediately suspected McCormack was behind the grenade incident. He was unaware the Yard had secret intelligence suggesting he was right. A very secretive police operation involving MI5, codenamed Trinity, was targeting the Adams crime family at the time. There were numerous phone taps and bugging devices inserted in the Adams' premises. The family and its main associates were also subject to intense physical surveillance. This included Chris McCormack, who was followed to Ireland and while playing golf with one of the Adams brothers in Spain, says a police source on Operation Trinity. The Yard's Special Intelligence Section (SIS), which operates from a white building with blacked out windows by the cinema in Putney High Street, had \"lines\" (taps) on McCormack. According to another police source, SIS had picked up conversations where McCormack apparently admitted his involvement in the grenade incident.\n\nThe Ghost Squad kept Harvey at the Mount Prison, but under a new regime of restricted movements. On 14 July Harvey walked out of the Mount into a witness protection programme organised by the Ghost Squad. Harvey and his family were moved to rented accommodation in north-west London. His wife carried on working and the kids went to school.\n\nShortly before his release on parole, Harvey recovered the \u00a340,000 he had stashed with a girlfriend just hours after the robbery. He says he spent it periodically, paying off debts, loans and on \"some fancy living\".\n\nIt's remarkable that the Ghost Squad did not exert greater pressure on their supergrass to return this money. After all, Harvey had offered to give back \u00a310,000 in February, but he admits this was just a ruse to buy more time. He had no intention of paying it back, and the offer was never enforced. Harvey played one senior Ghost Squad officer off against the other, later claiming to Bailey that Roger Gaspar had said he could \"forget about the forty grand\".\n\nLike Brennan, Harvey had skilfully inverted the supergrass relationship. In effect he was running his Ghost Squad handlers when he needed to and without them realising it. He never felt the choke collar, because there wasn't one. His ability to manipulate the supergrass system was greatly aided when, according to a police report on Operation Spy, Gaspar and Bailey had indicated to him back in March 1995 that the CPS had agreed he would be given immunity from prosecution. The report goes on to say that the CPS had done no such thing and had in fact refused to give the Ghost Squad any undertaking. This was still the position after Harvey's release.\n\nMany villains would have thought they'd had a result. Not Hector Harvey. He wasn't content to lie low in the witness protection scheme. He wanted money from the Ghost Squad for the assistance he had given them on bent cops, even though he had kept back at least \u00a340,000 from the robbery. Bailey said it couldn't be done and Harvey threatened to go elsewhere with his information. Operation Spy had now been running for over six months with the work phones of selected Flying Squad detectives tapped throughout this period. A leak would damage all this work, so Bailey implored Harvey to maintain the confidentiality. The reality was the Ghost Squad had no hold on Harvey and was dependent on his loyalty. But supergrasses have no loyalty, except to themselves.\n\nIn early November, Harvey developed a new plan to get some more money. He contacted Security Express national security manager, Mike O'Neill. The company had posted a \u00a350,000 reward. Harvey introduced himself as \"Mr Rogers\" and said he wanted to \"clear his conscience\" and in return for the reward would tell them about the robbery of one of their vans.\n\nA meeting was arranged at the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the Old Kent Road. O'Neill first contacted DCI Mick Fry of the Rigg Approach Flying Squad and told him about the call from \"Mr Rogers\". Fry thought quite sensibly this could be the inside agent wanting to come clean. There was no time to wire up O'Neill, so he organised for his Flying Squad team to cover the meeting.\n\nOn 23 November Harvey was photographed arriving at the KFC wearing a baseball cap\u2013fake afro combo he'd bought in Jamaica, and using crutches he borrowed from an old girlfriend. The surveillance team were inside KFC eating the Colonel's tender nuggets when Harvey arrived looking for his own bargain bucket (of gold) from O'Neill.\n\nHe told the Security Express manager he was helping detective superintendent David Bailey of CIB2 because of corruption among the Flying Squad with whom he was originally working as their participating informant. He said he had returned his share of the robbery, and once again claimed the robbers had bounced him on the dry run. After the meeting O'Neill called Fry and from his summary of the conversation with \"Mr Rogers\", the senior officer realised it was Harvey.\n\nThe industrious supergrass had also been busy. He called Bailey and told him about the meeting with O'Neill while suggesting Security Express was going to sue Scotland Yard. The call sent the Ghost Squad into panic. Had their covert operation into the Flying Squad been compromised? Was the Yard now facing a multi-million pound negligence claim?\n\nBailey met with O'Neill, an ex-Flying Squad detective, at Tintagel House. Security Express was annoyed at being kept in the dark. But after subsequent meetings with commissioner Condon and his deputy they decided against suing. In the end, the insurers, Lloyds, covered their loss, and co-ordination was improved between the police and the security company.\n\nThe whole embarrassing episode sent the Ghost Squad into a huddle to decide what to do about Operation Spy, the Flying Squad and the man who'd caused this problem, their finger-lickin' good supergrass.\n\nOn 13 December, after days of tense debate, John Grieve and other Ghost Squad chiefs decided to formally notify six Flying Squad detectives they were the subject of serious corruption allegations for theft of the recovered proceeds. Bailey suddenly appeared at Rigg Approach and served Regulation 163 Notices on Norris, Harris, Smith and three detective constables who were present when the money was removed from the shed. None of the officers was suspended. But Bailey took away all the paperwork on the operations against Ward and Simms and Harvey's informant logs.\n\nThe dramatic move was a desperate one forced on the Ghost Squad by the actions of another supergrass over whom they had lost control. The timing couldn't have been worse. By December 1995 Grieve was in the middle of another scandal over his department's appalling mishandling of two Yardies whom SO11 had used as participating informants in an abortive attempt to penetrate Jamaican drug gangs in Britain.\n\nEton Green and Delroy Denton had well-known, extremely violent pasts in Jamaica when they fled to Britain. Green had jumped bail for attempted murder. While agreeing to grass up fellow Yardies in return for payment from the police, they were shielded from prosecution here and allowed to terrorise the local black communities in London and Nottingham over four years. Inexplicably, charges for drugs and firearms offences and the rape of a minor were quietly dropped.\n\nHowever, the high-risk strategy blew up in Grieve's face in April 1995 when Denton raped and murdered a young Brixton mother of two. Marcia Lawes was stabbed twenty times during a frenzied sexual assault. Meanwhile, Green was facing trial for an armed robbery with other Yardie gangsters SO11 had encouraged him to invite over here. Green exploited his incredible lack of supervision to carry out the violent robbery in a Nottingham nightclub of 150 ravers, one of whom he shot in the leg and stood over saying, \"Bleed pussy, bleed.\"\n\nThe trial judge criticised Grieve's department for \"impeding\" the local police force's inquiry into the crime. There were also concerns that the Yard had either colluded with or deceived the Immigration Service to allow their informant and his gangster friends to stay in this country illegally. The Yard tried to get the trial aborted rather than reveal Green's informant status. In other words, it was willing to watch dangerous men go free to save its own bacon. When that failed and SO11 was forced by the Attorney General to disclose the informant's file, a whole year's worth of documents \u2013 revealing who knew and authorised what \u2013 went missing. The Yard claimed that the sensitive documents had unfortunately been shredded during a routine clear out.\n\nIn September 1995, Grieve apologised for the consequences of what he nevertheless argued was a justified strategy. A few months later, he should have been back in the frame over the unfolding Hector Harvey scandal. But as the public and politicians knew nothing about that mess, no inquiry could be launched despite its having very similar features \u2013 poor supervision, putting the public at risk and armed robbery. There was also one important new ingredient, the stench of police corruption.\n\nOver Christmas 1995 the Ghost Squad management committee developed an emergency strategy. John Grieve recommended a joint investigation. CIB2 would overtly re-investigate Harvey's corruption allegations. And the Rigg Approach Flying Squad office would reinvestigate the Security Express robbery and build a case against Ward, Simms and others.\n\nDeputy commissioner Brian Hayes approved the recommendation. There is no explanation why the same Flying Squad office at the centre of the corruption allegations was thought appropriate to conduct an inquiry into itself. Nor will anyone explain why the joint investigation was not referred to the Police Complaints Authority for supervision.\n\nThe officer Grieve chose from Rigg Approach was an experienced detective inspector called George Raison. It was an appointment Raison did not want. He says he was always opposed to police investigating themselves and could see immediately in this case the conflict of interest. Raison also feared rejection by his colleagues at Rigg. But in the end it was an order he couldn't refuse.\n\nIll health and a lengthy murder case meant Raison had been away from the Rigg office and therefore had little to do with the Hector Harvey case.\n\nRaison was also unaware his colleagues were under investigation by Operation Spy until Bailey walked into his office in December and told him his \"boys were at it\".\n\nRaison heard nothing more until 16 January 1996 when he was summoned to Tintagel House. There he was introduced to the man nominated to carry out the CIB2 limb of the joint investigation. Dave Niccol was an existing CIB2 superintendent.\n\nGiven the delicate situation he was in, Raison says he insisted all his meetings with CIB be properly minuted. In turn, Niccol promised he would be open with his new deputy. Raison then asked Grieve for three detectives from the Flying Squad to work with him. The Ghost Squad vetted the names by checking the phone-taps and other secret intelligence to see if it had captured any of the three saying or doing anything compromising. They all passed.\n\nAlthough his integrity was not in question and Grieve regarded him as \"honest\", Raison felt he was under permanent surveillance while part of Operation Spy, phase two. He suspected his office at Tintagel House was bugged. \"My garden was also entered for the purposes of taking off or putting a probe in my car,\" says the detective who knows only too well the technical capabilities of the Yard. This could easily be dismissed as paranoia, but Niccol reveals: \"It was openly accepted [from the beginning] that the two inquiries would flounder if the premise that [Raison] was honest proved wrong.\"\n\nRaison was soon exasperated by the non-disclosure of key documents. He complains that he was not allowed to see the policy docket detailing why and when important decisions were taken, or to compare past interview summaries with original police pocket-book notes. He felt the Ghost Squad wanted to shield Harvey from deeper questioning because, as with Brennan, they wanted to believe him.\n\nRaison discovered CIB officers were authorised to falsify their duty states in order to carry out secret lines of inquiry. He was fed up. His Flying Squad colleagues thought he was a traitor and CIB saw him as a spy. \"I was being treated like a leper at both ends, so I threatened to complain to a senior officer, but [CIB] said the deputy commissioner could trump anyone I put up.\"\n\nTo reinvestigate the Security Express robbery Raison needed to review sensitive covert recordings made by the Ghost Squad, in particular Harvey's contacts with McCormack. It was through proper detective work that Raison was the first to discover the link between the Clapham and Pages Walk Security Express robberies, something Harvey had been desperate to keep apart and the Ghost Squad had missed.\n\nRaison had grudging respect for Harvey's \"manipulation\" of the supergrass system. \"You've got to give him his due, he's good at what he does.\" But Raison was not fooled by Harvey's ever-shifting version of events. \"On three or four occasions I asked Niccol or Bailey to give me a team of men, even MI5, and I'd have Harvey nicked in a month. Then we'd have something to put his arm up his back so we could get to the truth. They declined and I don't know why.\"\n\nNiccol knew Raison had an \"uncompromising style\" and demanded high standards, but he felt his deputy's belief that Harvey was a liar \"may have clouded his approach\". Raison counters that the way the supergrass had been handled during phase one of Operation Spy left much to be desired and threatened any future prosecutions of dirty cops. Meetings with Harvey were often not taped, and when they were, he was not cautioned on every occasion. Also, certain obvious lines of inquiry, which would have helped evaluate Harvey's truthfulness, were simply not followed up. \"I went there to test Harvey's evidence, whereas [the Ghost Squad] was trying to prove what he was saying.\"\n\nWhat troubled Raison most was getting to the bottom of the true relationship between McCormack and Harvey and the threat to kill the supergrass. \"I was not allowed to properly investigate McCormack. I wanted to nick him for the threats against Harvey and couldn't understand why this hadn't been done before. But I wasn't allowed.\"\n\nRaison suddenly got a very late break when around November 1996 an officer at Kennington police station told him they had an informant who knew about the Security Express robberies. Raison interviewed the informant at Charing Cross police station on tape. He was a close associate of a money launderer called Gerald Fleming.\n\nWe shall call the informant \"John\". Some of what he told Raison has to be left out to protect his identity. He revealed that on the Monday, two days after the January 1995 Security Express robbery, McCormack came to Fleming's office with a sports bag containing \u00a3300,000. He asked Fleming to look after the cash, claiming it was from a recent robbery where the security guard had a bomb attached to him.\n\n\"John\" also talked about McCormack's involvement in the failed Clapham robbery a month earlier. Fleming, he said, had prepared the moody documentation for the cars and motorbike McCormack later burnt and dumped. \"John\" could also tie in Harvey. The informant claimed that Harvey went to Fleming for a loan and had to put up his motorbike as collateral. \"John\" claimed Fleming returned the bike after the loan had been repaid.\n\nThe significance of this intelligence appeared considerable. Here was an independent informant claiming that McCormack had been involved in both robberies. And if \"John\" was correct about the money McCormack left with Fleming, it now put a big question mark over Harvey's maths concerning the divvy-up.\n\n\"John\" was scared of McCormack beyond his violent reputation. He told Raison how McCormack boasted about having two unnamed senior corrupt officers on his payroll \u2013 a Yard commander and a chief inspector at the City of London police. This may explain why the Yard has consistently tried to bury this tape in PII certificates.\n\nOne copy of the tape was left with Kennington to be attached to the informant's docket. The other was taken to Tintagel House, where Raison spoke to Niccol about its contents. If Niccol was bothered by the implications he didn't show it.\n\nNext Raison went to the Fraud Squad, who already had an interest in Fleming. They took out a warrant to search his business, but when officers burst through the door it induced a massive heart attack and the suspected money launderer for the Underworld died. A promising lead had evaporated.\n\nRaison had also been to see detective constable Paul Carpenter at the Yard's Special Intelligence Section. He too was looking at McCormack as part of Operation Trinity, which was targeting the Adams crime syndicate. At SIS, Raison read the south London enforcer's file in which he was referred to as \"Commander\".\n\nRaison also scrolled down the transcripts of the phone-taps on McCormack and his associates. This was how he first discovered he was behind the grenade attack on Harvey's motorbike. According to Raison, the Commander was overheard saying about the failed attempt: \"That's what you get for using amateurs.\" SIS expressed interest in speaking to the informant, but Raison says it never happened because \"John\" was ultimately not willing to give evidence against McCormack.\n\nRaison's inquiries had now cast significant doubt on whether Harvey had been completely truthful with his Ghost Squad handlers.\n\nThe \"Fleming tape\" and its implications emerged just as DI George Raison was preparing a final report for the CPS on Operation Spy. He started writing it with Niccol's agreement in November 1996. The report would end up several phone-books thick and contain some explosive criticisms of the Ghost Squad's investigation.\n\nRaison stressed when interviews were not recorded and interviewees not cautioned. \"I was trying to highlight the whole investigation [since January 1995]. Some might say it was biased against CIB but they did the initial inquiry. This was going to the CPS. They needed to know the fuck-ups.\"\n\nAs the report was prepared, things he felt needed greater ventilation, like the Fleming tape, were discussed during private meetings with the CPS. Raison's job was to amass all the evidence and determine whether the CPS could mount a successful prosecution of cops and robbers. He examined the interviews of Ward, Simms, Hepburn, Blake and others named by Harvey. They had been arrested and then let go.\n\nThen Raison turned to the interviews with the accused Flying Squad officers. They had all refused to answer any of CIB's questions and instead read out a prepared statement denying the allegations.\n\nNorris was confronted in his interview with the results of a financial investigation by CIB, which showed that after the robbery he had \"deposited a total of \u00a35,185 cash, mostly in \u00a320 notes through various accounts. Mention was also made of a cheque for \u00a34,400 payable to Norris from Les Brown one week after the robbery.\" Brown was also interviewed by CIB and declined to comment.\n\nRaison's conclusion was very downbeat. A successful prosecution was \"impossible\". He went on: \"There still remain many unanswered questions. This is by no means a satisfactory conclusion to many months of investigation. Every effort has been made to establish the truth.\" When the final report was ready in the New Year, Niccol called it \"exceptional, albeit somewhat biased towards showing small flaws in Harvey's different versions\". The CPS was also very complimentary and suggested work of this quality was worthy of a commendation. They concurred with Raison's downbeat opinion that no realistic prospect of a successful conviction existed.\n\nPart of the problem was that compromising telephone intercepts on Ward and Simms were not admissible evidence; Harvey's informant status was already blown to the defence who would rightly argue he had acted as an _agent provocateur_ ; several key civilian witnesses refused to give evidence against Harvey, Blake and Hepburn; and Harvey was unreliable and largely uncorroborated in his allegations against the Flying Squad.\n\nRaison recalls that the CPS letter also expressed how \"unhappy\" they were with the CIB side of the inquiry. The mishandling of a slippery supergrass was a compelling reason alone for why no successful prosecutions were likely.\n\nThe decision by the Ghost Squad to circumvent or openly flout Home Office guidelines and laws around supergrass handling was taken at a high level in Scotland Yard, and in secret.\n\nMillions had been spent by the Yard on a Clouseauesque investigation by the Ghost Squad that left unresolved questions about whether a network of corrupt detectives existed in the Flying Squad. The public were kept totally in the dark about how obviously unfit the Yard was to carry out this internal corruption probe any longer, having allowed an intelligent supergrass to run rings around them for two years.\n\nIn January 1997, Raison returned to the Flying Squad. He says he was offered a posting anywhere in the Met, including CIB, but chose to return to Rigg Approach. He took a copy of the report, with CIB's authority, and kept it locked in the office.\n\nParallel to Raison's inquiry was a secret investigation into Rigg Approach about which he knew nothing. The Yard will not discuss it because this too ended in failure.\n\nNorman McNamara was one of seven superintendents in CIB2, along with David Niccol and David Bailey, who worked under Roger Gaspar. McNamara served there for over two years. During that time he learned how the Ghost Squad functioned under the cover of CIB2 and was at times inducted into its secret ways during the parallel secret inquiry, which is revealed here for the first time.\n\nAfter 25 years serving Scotland Yard, McNamara was still very loyal to the organisation when he joined CIB2 and had no problem with the idea of investigating his own. Not long after arriving in May 1995, he read Harvey's allegations about the Flying Squad with increasing disbelief. He thought Harvey was making it up. But that view evaporated as intelligence reached McNamara suggesting some of the Rigg Approach detectives really were \"gangsters with warrant cards\".\n\nThe intelligence, he says, was a list of names of detectives handed to McNamara by a friend who had served on the Flying Squad. The list was passed to Niccol sometime in early spring 1996. It purported to contain the names of those detectives who'd divided up the guard's share of \u00a3200,000 from the January 1995 Security Express robbery. Niccol secretly filed away the document, but Raison heard about it and demanded to know the contents. He was eventually allowed to read it because, as his name was not on the list, it \"partly confirmed his own integrity\", Niccol reasoned.\n\nThe list, says one CIB officer who saw it, included the names of detective sergeant Eamonn Harris and a detective constable called Kevin Garner, whom Harris had taken under his wing at Rigg Approach. The joint investigation, Operation Spy, had already identified Garner as one of two officers Harris had sent the day after the robbery to collect the \u00a3200,000 from the guard's friend.\n\nGarner left school without qualifications in 1976 and joined the army to escape a troubled family life. As a member of the Royal Guards, he served in Kenya, Germany and Northern Ireland. But after five years his young and pregnant wife wanted him to resign the commission. Garner obliged and joined the Metropolitan Police aged twenty-two in March 1982, passing out of training as the top cadet. Within seven years, he was a detective constable serving in London's East End. Garner now had two daughters and bought his mother's old house.\n\nTen years after joining the police, Garner was accepted into the Rigg Approach office of the Flying Squad in May 1992. His marriage was already on the rocks but this posting proved too much for his wife, especially when within seven months of joining the squad he volunteered for an undercover role in a high-profile murder inquiry.\n\nIn January 1993 a secretive businessman, Donald Urquhart, was shot dead by a man on a motorbike as he walked arm in arm with his Thai girlfriend in Central London. The police investigation soon established from an informer that this was a contract killing facilitated, they believed, by Charlie Kray, and that the man who'd taken it up for \u00a320,000 was called Graeme West. West's downfall was that he couldn't stop boasting about his rise up the criminal ladder from debt collector \u2013 his BMW registration was UOI \u2013 to contract killer.\n\nAfter Urquhart's brother posted a \u00a3100,000 reward, Garner told his bosses that he might be able to infiltrate the suspect's criminal circle. The husband of a family friend, Jackie Buisson, was willing to make the introductions. Garner was having an affair with Jackie at the time.\n\nGarner was not mentally prepared or formally trained for this dangerous undercover role, but his bosses failed to spot his weaknesses and authorised his deployment. When he bothered to come home after heavy drinking and socialising with his new criminal \"friends\", Garner was often abusive to his wife and threatened violence. He had already ignored her ultimatum to transfer off the Flying Squad because the hours were so unforgiving to family life. But when he pulled an imitation firearm on her, she took out an injunction banning him from the home.\n\nIn June 1993, while in the middle of the undercover operation, Garner had a breakdown. He started living as a vagrant, sleeping in his leaky car, not washing and sometimes not turning up to work for days on end. He moved in and out of flats and stayed with his girlfriend Jackie for a while. His behaviour at work was getting increasingly erratic \u2013 sometimes lying dead still on the office floor wearing a balaclava. Colleagues would just step over him. Even then, his bosses didn't pull him out of the Urquhart job.\n\nWhen Graeme West was arrested and charged that September, _The Sun_ was invited by the Yard to record the early morning operation. It was one of those cosy arrangements where everyone, except West, looked good.\n\nGarner's undercover role never featured in any media coverage of the Urquhart murder trial, which concluded with West's conviction in December 1994. Just as well, because the Flying Squad detective was imploding at a rate of knots. His itinerant lifestyle was in free-fall, punctuated by violent rages and heavy drinking. Garner had also crossed the line, probably while undercover, and declared himself to his criminal drinking buddies as a bad cop willing to work for a price. His new friends were into armed robbery, drugs and funny money.\n\nOne was Michael Taverner, a car ringer from Hackney who specialised in stolen Mercedes. Taverner was well connected and an associate of Joey Simms, the criminal who carried out the Security Express robbery with Gary Ward and Hector Harvey.\n\nIn April 1996, at around the time the list with Garner's name on it reached Operation Spy, Garner was planning what is known as a tiger kidnap. This involves blackmailing the driver of a security van to go along with the cash robbery because he believes his family has been kidnapped. Garner had inside knowledge because as a Flying Squad detective he had recently investigated a tiger kidnap of a Securicor van. He thought the driver was vulnerable to a copycat robbery and suggested it to Taverner, who expressed interest.\n\nTaverner enlisted the help of a friend called \"Irish\" Mick. But Mick was also an informant for SERCS, a CIB source has revealed to us. In July, Irish Mick told his handler he was going to meet an unnamed cop in an Essex pub to discuss an armed robbery involving other Flying Squad detectives.\n\nDAC Roy Clark was immediately notified. Time was pressing because the Essex pub meeting was scheduled the evening before the robbery. Clark met with his number two at SERCS, detective chief inspector Bill Brown and others. \"The discussion centred on whether we should let the tiger kidnap run or disrupt it. Clark decided to disrupt it. Securicor were brought in and asked to change the driver's shift. The informant had told us that the robbery had to be done on a certain day because corrupt Flying Squad officers would be on duty in a response car. By changing the driver's roster this would get back to the robbers and they would have to call off the plan. But we would cover the Securicor van just in case they didn't,\" explained a CIB officer.\n\nAuthority was given for the informant Irish Mick to participate in the operation. Before he left for the pub meeting, he was told to ring Taverner claiming the police were following him and suggested that the bent cop they were about to meet ran a number plate check. The Ghost Squad was monitoring the Police National Computer (PNC) to see which officer applied that afternoon to trace the car. Unfortunately, says our CIB source, although a check was made on the vehicle, the call was not taped and the voice at the end of the phone never identified.\n\nLater that July evening, a surveillance team sat in the Maypole pub garden in Chigwell and photographed the meeting. Acting superintendent Norman McNamara, who was waiting in an unmarked car, immediately identified the officer sitting with Irish Mick and Taverner as DC Kevin Garner.\n\nThe Ghost Squad management committee met soon afterwards and received authority from the deputy commissioner Brian Hayes to start a \"covert inquiry\" into named Rigg Approach detectives. Clark ran this from inside SERCS. The covert inquiry was separate but parallel to the joint investigation by Niccol and Raison. Niccol knew about the covert inquiry but Raison was kept out of the loop.\n\n\"The home secretary [Michael Howard] gave authority for taps on the home phones of Kevin Garner and Eamonn Harris. These taps were later extended to include at least three other Flying Squad detectives. The home secretary also gave authority for the covert inquiry to conduct cell site analysis on the officers' mobile phones [a system of mapping calls between targeted individuals],\" the CIB officer recalls.\n\nPolice use a technique once a target's phones are \"hooked up\" to stimulate conversation by creating a pressure point that will get people talking. In Garner's case there were two pressure points.\n\nFirstly, they spooked Taverner into thinking the police were following him. He contacted Garner telling him he wanted no part in the tiger kidnap. Garner was worried for himself, so two days later, on 27 July, he went sick with a bad back. Meanwhile, Clark created a second pressure point around a stolen Mercedes that Garner had bought from Taverner and registered in Jackie's name. The covert inquiry had discovered the car squad were looking into Taverner as part of an operation, codenamed Masterpiece, into a Mercedes ringing syndicate to Malaysia. Operation Masterpiece was \"accelerated\", says our CIB source, to rattle the cages of Taverner and Garner. Jackie was visited about the stolen Mercedes. And the car squad \"innocently\" spoke to Garner about two PNC checks he had done on cars they had traced to Taverner. Garner falsely claimed he had been trying to nurture him as an informant.\n\nThe covert inquiry ran from July 1996 for six months. By January 1997 it could no longer justify maintaining the phone-taps because nothing compromising was emerging, our source tells us. \"There was also pressure from the National Criminal Intelligence Service whose technical facilities faced competing demands from other police squads. So the [phone-taps] were taken off, ending the covert inquiry.\"\n\nThat same month the CPS, whose lawyers were kept in the dark about this parallel secret inquiry, also closed down Operation Spy after agreeing with Raison's report that no successful prosecution of Flying Squad detectives was possible.\n\n## [12\n\nGhostbusted](contents.html#ch12)\n\n1997 was to be a year of transformation for Scotland Yard. Ahead of commissioner Sir Paul Condon was an unknown road paved with political minefields that could cost him his job and personal humiliation if he put a foot wrong. His Ghost Squad was an undisclosed failure and needed reform to meet the challenges ahead, not least the possibility of a left-leaning government after 18 years of Tory rule.\n\nNearing the end of his five-year term, prime minister John Major had no choice but to call a general election for May while his party and government were drowning in a sea of political sleaze, sex scandals, lies and sanctimony. This electoral meltdown made it almost inconceivable for Tony Blair's remodelled New Labour Party to lose.\n\nIn opposition, Blair had fought a canny fight to appear tougher on law and order issues than the most atavistic Tories like Michael \"prison works\" Howard. But what worried Scotland Yard significantly was New Labour's promise to the Lawrence family of a public inquiry into the police investigation if they came to power.\n\nA private prosecution brought by Doreen and Neville Lawrence against three of the prime suspects had failed in April 1996. The Yard was still refusing to apologise or admit mistakes. How could it when the commissioner's integrity and that of his force had been hogtied since 1993 to defending the Barker Review cover-up?\n\nAnother of the Yard's concerns was New Labour's commitment to constitutional reform. A Bill of Rights incorporating the European Convention on Human Rights into British law would seriously affect operational policing, as would a proposed Freedom of Information Act.\n\nSuch openness was anathema to the Ghost Squad. Since 1993 it had been designed to prevent any bad seeds coming to the public's attention outside of the Yard's control. But in 1996 it all went wrong. The public and the politicians didn't know about its expensive failure and the Ghost Squad's secret management group was determined to keep it that way. The mishandling of Geoffrey Brennan and Hector Harvey had allowed both supergrasses to dupe the Ghost Squad and then expose its activities to the very people it was targeting. These two cases, sold to commissioner Condon as big breakthroughs, were in fact in utter disarray.\n\nSo too was the Ghost Squad's intelligence-gathering capability, run by the colourful Dave \"Lazarus\" Woods. He was the detective who mysteriously developed cancer, retired to die but reappeared as a shadow warrior in the anti-corruption crusade. The intelligence cell was very much a work in progress. But according to several CIB sources, by the end of 1996 it too was in \"chaos\". \"Woods worked on the principle that knowledge is power. He tried to recreate the IRA cell structure where only one or two people knew the entire picture. But this led to confusion,\" recalls one detective who worked with him. \"There was a lot of back-stabbing. They thought everyone was at it,\" says another, adding that the intelligence amassed from phone-taps and probes had not been properly sifted. \"There was a lot [of intelligence] going in but nothing going out.\"\n\nJohn Grieve, who oversaw most of this mess, had by late 1996 moved from director of intelligence to head of the anti-terrorist squad. He was still a Ghost Squad boss, as was his deputy Roy Clark. However, their cover was now blown. Clark was recalled to the Yard in November for another special assignment: to develop a new anti-corruption strategy that would meet the emerging public relations needs of Scotland Yard.\n\nA new intelligence cell, called CIBIC, replaced the Ghost Squad. CIBIC operated totally in the shadows. It provided intelligence to a new proactive squad called CIB3, dubbed the Untouchables. Detectives from CIB3 would use that intelligence to mount sting operations against suspect cops identified by CIBIC.\n\nRoy Clark's new anti-corruption model was a refined continuation of the illegal supergrass system his Ghost Squad had operated since 1994. In practice, CIBIC and CIB3 would also circumvent democratic and legal checks and balances during the evidence and intelligence-gathering process. In other words, it was a system designed to allow CIB3 detectives to manage any adverse findings they came across and thereby limit the damage to Scotland Yard's reputation while protecting the reputations of its favoured sons or those it could least afford to see exposed.\n\nJames Morton, in his excellent book _Supergrasses and Informers_ , makes the point that the most interesting thing about supergrasses is who they don't name. This is more so when the supergrass is part of a police corruption probe. Under the CIB3 system, supergrasses would in effect be debriefed in a way that controlled the naming process.\n\nThe Ghost Squad had been a law unto itself with no outside scrutiny. Its shadow warriors operated an illegal and ultimately disastrous policy of not cautioning its supergrasses, not taping all interviews, not taking extensive debrief notes and offering deals that could be construed as inducements. It turned out that the same would happen at CIB3, with one important difference. Unlike the Ghost Squad, this new squad hoped to produce supergrasses like Harvey as key prosecution witnesses of truth against corrupt officers.\n\nLiberal barrister Michael Mansfield QC recalls being invited in 1997 to address a meeting of some 200 police at a secret location in Surrey. \"I hadn't heard much about the anti-corruption squad. Sir Paul Condon spoke before me. I was given no brief so I assumed they wanted me to talk about how corruption in the police has occurred. It was only when I took a question from the floor that it was apparent the Yard wanted me to talk about the use of supergrasses and informants, some of whom would be cops who turned Queen's Evidence for corruption trials. I was somewhat taken aback because I had spent my entire career arguing against the use of supergrasses. If they had been upfront I would have said no to the talk. If I had been asked to give advice on the merits of a supergrass strategy for the anti-corruption squad I would have advised against it.\"\n\nSo too would the CPS. Martin Polaine left private practice as a defence barrister to join the CPS special casework directorate in 1994. Four years later he became the lead lawyer for the newly created CIB3.\n\nCPS involvement in the covert Ghost Squad phase was \"marginal to say the least\", Polaine confirmed. Back in 1993, Roy Clark did not want any formalised CPS involvement. He had argued that the agency wasn't trustworthy.\n\nPolaine says Clark never consulted the CPS about the merits of a supergrass system. Had he, they would have advised against it. \"If one was looking pre-1998 I think just about everyone in the CPS who looked at it would have said the supergrass system and debrief have fallen into disrepute. It would have been put that highly I think.\"\n\nIt is ironic that until Clark became witchfinder-general and resurrected the discredited supergrass system, he and the Yard had been vocal critics during previous anti-corruption inquiries into the force. When he served at Rigg Approach during the ill-fated Operation Countryman probe into the Flying Squad back in the early eighties, the Yard complained bitterly that the outside force was being led a merry dance by investigating the self-serving allegations of criminals against cops. And during Operation Jackpot into corruption at Stoke Newington police station, Clark defended his men against the allegations of what he repeatedly told the press were \"self-confessed drug dealers\". It is hard to see how after Brennan and Harvey, Clark was still a convert to the discredited supergrass system.\n\nAs the new operations director of the anti-corruption squad Clark replaced many of the old Ghost Squad bosses. Roger Gaspar was promoted and soon rewarded with an appointment as deputy director general of the National Criminal Intelligence Service where he became a leading advocate of Big Brother policing. Superintendent David Bailey apparently took up a job with MI5 in the vetting section.\n\nTwo south London detectives replaced Dave \"Lazarus\" Woods. Confusingly, one was called David Wood, a detective superintendent whose last posting had been at the corruption-troubled Surbiton office of SERCS. It is thought Wood had been placed at Surbiton as a \"sleeper\" after the John Donald scandal. His new job was to convert the tangled affairs of the Ghost Squad into the tidy new intelligence cell that could service CIB3 with \"intelligence packages\".\n\nDavid Wood had left school with few qualifications. He worked as a bank clerk, but got bored and sought more excitement by joining the police. His first arrest gives an insight into his character \u2013 young Wood frogmarched an impudent street beggar to the police station when he dared ask him for money. For most of his service up until joining CIB3, Wood was stationed in south-east London where he had hooked up with the equally ambitious detective chief inspector Chris Jarratt in Southwark division, running covert operations, like the pawnshop in Bermondsey with undercover cop Michael.\n\nClark was said to be a mentor to Wood and he in turn was a mentor figure for Jarratt. One colleague recalls how Jarratt described Wood as someone who if he felt the cause was just could smile in your face and when your back was turned put a bullet in your head, metaphorically of course. The pair became a spooky double act in the anti-corruption crusade. Wood and Jarratt spoke a very telling fundamentalist argot to accompany their crusade. They talked of \"doing God's work\" and once described to us how errant cops willing to \"purge their souls\" would be \"cleansed of their criminality\".\n\nOnce CIBIC was properly functioning, Jarratt took over as head of intelligence and covert operations. Jarratt was also the officer who had investigated the controversial killing of prolific informant, David Norris, back in 1991, where key questions about police corruption were never properly answered. Jarratt was allowed to bring almost the entire Norris murder inquiry team with him to the new CIB3 and CIBIC, an intriguing move that says a lot about how sensitive the Yard viewed the Norris scandal and its links to their ongoing Stephen Lawrence problem. Others Jarratt invited onto CIBIC were colleagues he had served with on the Brixton Robbery Squad and Tower Bridge Flying Squad, two units with controversial histories of racism and misconduct dating back to the seventies, some of it before Jarratt arrived there. This group of south-east London detectives would dominate this next five-year phase of the anti-corruption campaign.\n\nJarratt was an active Freemason as were a number of others pulled onto CIB3. Clearly, the Yard did not see Freemasonry as an impediment to anti-corruption work. They could hardly have argued it wasn't a live issue. In March 1997, one month before Jarratt joined CIBIC, the Home Affairs select committee published its report on Freemasonry in the police and judiciary. It recommended there should be a publicly available register.\n\nFreemasons doing normal police work often argue that it is a personal intrusion to be asked if they are \"on the square\", and unfair to automatically assume that membership implies anything sinister. We are not a secret society but a society with secrets, is their refrain. But a Home Office report on Police Integrity summed up the obvious danger this way: \"The perceived impartiality of the Police Service is fundamental to public confidence and therefore its effectiveness, and no person within the police service \u2013 regular, civilian or special \u2013 should belong to an organisation which may cause the public to mistrust his or her impartiality.\"\n\nCIB superintendent Norman McNamara recalls being told by a Ghost Squad superior not to make disparaging remarks about the Brotherhood. \"If you are being totally objective there is a conflict of interest with having people in senior positions in the Masons running the CIB inquiry. Does Masonry affect it? It must do because it excludes so many honest people from having a voice. It is also an ethic based on looking after your own and not hurting anyone on the square.\" The Masonic rulebook in fact refers to \"a column of mutual defence and support\".\n\nThe Home Office diluted the committee's recommendation and suggested a voluntary register. Clark wrote a round robin asking detectives to return the declaration form as a \"positive demonstration of our respect for public concerns\". It wasn't. Voluntary registration has been a failure and that includes the anti-corruption squad.\n\nAnother surprise appointment was that of superintendent Ian Russell who led the failed Operation Jackpot into Clark's old police station. In January 1998, he was appointed to lead the new-look CIB2, working alongside the Untouchables, or CIB3. Russell's new role was \"to analyse information, gather intelligence and to investigate allegations and suspicion of serious corruption and matters of corporate interest\".\n\nCIB2 would end up investigating several former alumni of Stoke Newington and even one of Russell's own detective sergeants on Operation Jackpot.\n\nSo, as with the Ghost Squad, Clark selected detectives for CIB3 whom he liked and felt he could trust. They in turn selected others on the same basis. The end result looked like jobs for the boys. We say boys because CIB is still a male-dominated environment, a view echoed by one of the few senior female officers up there. \"The Flying Squad was once regarded as the last bastion of male chauvinism, but now it is the anti-corruption squad,\" she says. Our source also feels that many male detectives on CIB3 were given accelerated (over) promotion while female detectives stayed in the same rank for years.\n\nAs CIB3 developed and grew in size to two hundred detectives over the next three years, the inducement to those who received the call was very alluring. Officers earmarked as high flyers were promised promotion, by at least two ranks, and a prestigious posting afterwards \u2013 a ruse often more effective than the Official Secrets Act. Others were told there were good overtime opportunities.\n\nThe mixing of preferment, friendship and Freemasonry with the inducement of accelerated promotion and financial reward put another question mark over CIB3's objectivity from the very beginning. In addition, detectives recruited there would be required to investigate friends, former sexual partners, enemies, fellow Masons and godfathers to their children. Not only did this make the anti-corruption squad potentially very leaky, it was also a recipe for score settling, partiality and victimisation.\n\nThe setting up of CIB3 and CIBIC in the first half of 1997 took place in an increasingly charged political atmosphere. In March, one month after the inquest into Stephen Lawrence's death, the family made a formal complaint against the Yard, claiming that corruption and collusion had contaminated the murder inquiry. The PCA appointed Kent Police to investigate.\n\nThen in July, two months after New Labour's landslide election victory, new home secretary Jack Straw announced the setting up of the public inquiry. Preliminary hearings, where the inquiry would listen to the public's criticism of the Yard, were scheduled to start in the autumn. The language of New Labour created a wide public expectation that it would dismantle the entrenched culture of official secrecy and use its massive majority to open up British society by making it less anachronistic and reverential to the titled and unelected.\n\nBut Clark and CIB3 were on a Tardis travelling the other way. Corruption management with the appearance of reform was their brief. But now there was an additional danger coming from the elected chamber of the Commons. The powerful Home Affairs select committee was under Labour control and its chairman was a former investigative reporter who knew first-hand about so-called noble cause corruption in the criminal justice system and institutional cover-up.\n\nChris Mullin, the MP for Sunderland South, had persuaded his select committee colleagues to look into how the police investigated and disciplined their own. The hearings were scheduled from October to December 1997 and therefore dovetailed with the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.\n\nIn the mid-eighties, Mullin had campaigned with Granada's _World In Action_ to uncover malpractice in the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad. His tenacity, with that of others, eventually led the Appeal Court to overturn in 1991 the conviction of six Irishmen wrongly accused of the Birmingham pub bombings seventeen years earlier. For his troubles, Mullin had been smeared by the right-wing press as a \"Loony Lefty\" and by the police as an IRA sympathiser or at best their dupe.\n\nMullin's select committee threatened to reveal the failures of a system of internal investigations that was well past its sell-by date. The Yard, in response, decided to go on a charm offensive, especially targeting the luvvies of the liberal media. In the summer of 1997, Condon gave interviews to the _Guardian_ and the _New Statesman_ , in which he called for a London Police Authority to monitor the Yard instead of the Home Office. The commissioner also claimed he was going to dedicate his last two years in office to \"ethical matters\". He started by calling for lowering the standard of proof required to sack dishonest officers at police disciplinary boards. The criminal test of beyond reasonable doubt should, he argued, be replaced by the civil test of determining guilt based on the balance of probabilities. Condon also told the _Guardian_ there were \"up to 200\" bent cops in his force.\n\nIn Britain's emaciated democracy, such \"reformist\" utterances can appear radical, especially when mouthed by the most powerful policeman in the country through a liberal newspaper. But a police authority was no more than Londoners deserved and something to which all other police forces already answered. Meanwhile, blaming tricky detectives who exploited the discipline process was hardly a clarion call for a fully independent police complaints system. It was, though, a pitiful attempt to compensate for Condon's silence over the Stephen Lawrence scandal.\n\nChris Webb, one of the Yard's spin-doctors, confirms that around this time a media strategy was developed that involved sending the commissioner on an extended \"round of visits\" to editors of national media organisations and potential troublemaking programmes and newspapers. The message was a simple one: Scotland Yard had the necessary integrity to investigate itself and put its own house in order, once and for all.\n\nIt was not a hard sell. The wholesale removal or blunting of ITV's once powerful quartet of factual programmes \u2013 _This Week, World in Action, Weekend World_ and _The London Programme_ \u2013 meant there was already little counter to the breathless, drive-by journalism of the Crime Reporters Association. Editors took seriously Condon's entreaties, mindful as they were of how easily the crime tap is turned off and that they could find themselves out of the loop as their competitors stole a march on the next circulation-ramping orgy of gore and sleaze.\n\nCondon offered access to the CIB casebook in return for the media's support for his war on corruption. In the emerging low-risk, dumbed-down news age such handouts not only help assuage in-house libel lawyers but could also be repackaged with two narcissistic ingredients \u2013 a public interest claim and the pretence of independent investigation. What's in it for the police? They get to control the media access while looking serious about clearing out their stables. Subliminally or explicitly, the argument for self-regulation is also reinforced.\n\nThe Yard and CIB3 were delighted by the resulting media comparisons with 1930s Chicago federal corruption buster Eliot Ness and his Untouchables. The name evoked imagery of lilywhite crusading cops who couldn't be bought. Of course Untouchables can also mean those imbued with a sense they are above the law. And by secretly operating an illegal supergrass system, senior officers were explicitly telling their new CIB3 recruits exactly that. But with key sections of the media now firmly embedded in the war on corruption, the ill-served public had few opportunities over the next six years of getting behind the spin.\n\nIt is standard operating procedure nowadays for police and intelligence services to conjure up what is known as a media \"spectacular\" when a positive publicity coup is required to offset a crisis. But what happened next was police choreography that made _Lord of the Dance_ seem clubfooted. The co-ordination between the commissioner's office, his press bureau and CIB3 was worthy of an Olympic opening ceremony, although more Berlin than Barcelona.\n\nPlanning for the Untouchables' spectacular began in late November 1997 with two critical events in mind, the forthcoming select committee appearance of commissioner Condon, followed shortly by the presentation to Parliament and the Stephen Lawrence public inquiry of the PCA\/Kent Police report into the family's complaint of corruption, collusion and incompetence at the Yard.\n\nLeading Untouchables David Wood and Chris Jarratt busily reassessed the failed Operation Spy into Flying Squad detectives at Rigg Approach and settled on 37-year-old DC Kevin Garner as the weak link.\n\nJarratt and Wood came up with a highly risky sting operation that they hoped would entrap Garner and his corrupt colleagues still serving in the Flying Squad. By doing so, CIB3 sought to corroborate Harvey's evidence that these defective detectives had stolen \u00a3250,000 of recovered proceeds from the January 1995 Security Express robbery.\n\nThis CIB3 sting operation was codenamed Brunei. On the orders of Wood and Jarratt, 80 kilos of black hash were borrowed from the Yard's confiscated drugs stash. Each one-kilo slab was wrapped in cling film and marked on its side with a varnish invisible to the human eye.\n\nIn late November 1997 a flat in east London, near City Airport, was rented under a false name and a few days later, on 2 December, two days before the commissioner was due in Parliament, the drugs were put inside green bin liners and planted in a cupboard under the bathroom sink. CIB3's bugging unit had also wired up the flat for sound and pictures. Across the road from the front entrance CIB3 officers set up a 24-hour observation post.\n\nThe trick now was to persuade Garner to steal the drugs. He had retired two months earlier on an enhanced medical pension, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. CIB3 turned to Garner's petty criminal friend, Mick Taverner. The Untouchables \"persuaded\" him to work for them after Taverner had been arrested earlier in the year for car ringing and possession of a gun and ammunition. A secret deal was struck: Taverner pleaded guilty to the ringing and the weapon offences were dropped. He received a low sentence and in return agreed to help police informant Irish Mick entrap Garner.\n\nThey spun Garner a lie about a man who was looking after a parcel of drugs and wanted it robbed in a way he could pretend to the owners that the police had raided his flat. He agreed to do the job for \u00a320,000.\n\nOperation Brunei was not the only preparation the Untouchables were undertaking in advance of Condon's appearance in front of the Home Affairs select committee. While spin-doctors worked on the commissioner's speech, Roy Clark had put together an intelligence package for committee chairman Chris Mullin as a little taster of the difficulties the Yard faced in getting rid of its rotten apples.\n\nThe intelligence package concerned three detectives who soon after their suspension for moonlighting went sick with stress and depression then retired on ill-health pensions before they could be disciplined. Mullin mentioned the case during the committee hearing which allowed the _Times_ crime correspondent to oblige the Yard with a splash highlighting Condon's \"frustration\" that his anti-corruption efforts were \"routinely curtailed by abuses of an ancient, creaking disciplinary and pensions system\".\n\nOn 3 December, Garner visited an old Flying Squad buddy known as Meathead. Detective constable Terry McGuinness was serving at Limehouse police station not far from the flat where the 80 kilos of dope had been planted by CIB3. McGuinness, then 39 years old, agreed to help nick the drugs the following evening when he would be on night duty. He also agreed to get a false search warrant to make it look like a police raid.\n\nThe next day, at lunchtime, Garner knocked on the front door of another former Flying Squad colleague. Keith Green had been retired for 18 months when Garner unexpectedly arrived. Green was now a rugby coach to schoolchildren, a job that was slowly helping him recover from a mental breakdown brought on by a near-fatal shooting accident caused by McGuinness during their time on the Flying Squad.\n\nMeanwhile, that same day at the Commons Sir Paul Condon was sitting in the committee room flanked by his deputy Brian Hayes and operational chief of the Untouchables, Roy Clark. They had kept him abreast of the sting operation and briefed him for his committee appearance. Primed crime reporters and television crews eagerly awaited the top cop's speech.\n\nThe committee had already heard in the past six weeks from the Police Establishment \u2013 the Association of Chief Police Officers, the Police Superintendents' Association and the Police Federation \u2013 and from the Home Office and CPS. To balance the evidence, there had also been submissions from the pressure group Liberty and the more radical Police Action Lawyers' Group, who told the committee how they advised victims of police crimes not to bother using the internal complaints system but to bring civil actions instead as a more effective remedy \u2013 a position that still holds today.\n\nThe commissioner's carefully crafted speech started by emphasising that the vast majority of his 27,000 employees were honest and hard-working. There was, however, a \"minority\" who were corrupt, dishonest and unethical. Their activities, said Condon, did \"immense damage to public confidence\". But these rotten apples in his orchard were \"cunning\" and wise to anti-corruption measures, like pesticide-resistant fruit flies. And in the event the Yard did catch one of them \"at it\". Condon bemoaned their cynical manipulation of the disciplinary process. \"The nature of the problem is such that tackling and preventing serious misconduct needs to be a constant part of police strategy. The system must allow for the effective investigation and punishment of wrongdoers,\" he roared.\n\nAfter finishing the speech the commissioner was subjected to some gentle questioning. Having neatly shifted the blame for a lack of public confidence in its entirety onto the small minority of corrupt cops, Condon was asked to quantify the size of the problem: \"I would say it is less numerically than the seventies. I do not believe and I hope it is not as serious as [former commissioner] Sir Robert Mark's nearly 500 officers who left the Met under a cloud. If you want a percentage figure on it, I would hope and believe it is contained somewhere between 0.5 per cent and one per cent. There is a spurious precision to that but I would say somewhere between 100 officers and 250 officers would be the range in which we are operating.\"\n\nCondon and his troupe of advisers left the Commons with the satisfaction of a job well done. The commissioner had come across as a reformer who bravely admitted his problem and requested political support to carry out a purge.\n\nWhat was needed now was the media spectacular to reveal to the politicians that his Untouchables were already poised behind enemy lines. That evening, just after 9.30 p.m., two CIB3 officers watched as Garner, McGuinness and Green arrived at the flat. Garner broke in and walked up the stairs shouting, \"Police, anyone in?\" McGuinness followed him, pretending he had a search warrant. Green remained on the doorstep, a police truncheon in his hand.\n\nWithin seconds of entering Garner went straight for the bathroom cabinet where he found the drugs. \"Here you are, it's here,\" he said to McGuinness, who grabbed some of the bin liners. Green had come upstairs by now and was given two sacks to take to Garner's car. In five minutes they were away. The drugs were stored in a lock-up. Green went home, McGuinness went back to the police station and Garner met Taverner and Irish Mick to hand over the keys.\n\nThe following morning, as commissioner Condon digested his shredded wheat and the favourable coverage of his select committee performance, he now had a \"spectacular\" up his sleeve for the second phase of the propaganda war.\n\nFour days later, on 8 December, CIB3 officers mounted a series of co-ordinated dawn raids on the homes of Garner, McGuinness and Green. Only Garner put up a struggle. They were taken to separate police stations and interviewed over two days. Garner and McGuinness declined to comment. Green, however, waived his right to a solicitor and explained himself over six hours of careful questioning. On 9 December all three men were charged with aggravated burglary and conspiracy to supply drugs.\n\nThe next day they were taken to Bow Street Magistrates court and remanded. The media were there to record the CIB3 triumph. At 6.40 p.m., Garner and McGuinness changed the course of their lives for ever.\n\nWhat suddenly persuaded them to turn supergrass is unclear, because CIB3's dealings with the two men were not tape-recorded. Maybe it was the unassailable video evidence against them. McGuinness later told us he decided to roll over when he was told Garner had coughed and Green was talking. He wanted to make it as easy on his family as possible and thought he would get a lighter sentence. Garner later claimed he became a supergrass because he felt his life was going nowhere. But roll over they did. CIB3 now had its first police supergrasses and the timing could not have been better for their bosses at Scotland Yard.\n\nJust before the select committee hearing closed, on 15 December Parliament was given a copy of the PCA\/Kent Police inquiry report into the Lawrence family's complaint. It was highly critical of the original murder investigation and attacked as \"misleading\" the scandalous Barker Review, to which Condon had pinned his integrity. Had the commissioner not already pre-empted the problem, this PCA report would have been very damaging for relations between Scotland Yard and the government. After all, his boss, home secretary Jack Straw, had just a few months earlier pinned _his_ credentials to a public inquiry into the Lawrence scandal.\n\nCIB3 couldn't yet go public that it was debriefing two former Flying Squad detectives who had turned supergrass. But in the end, a political showdown was not necessary because the Yard privately briefed the Home Office about their \"spectacular\" success with Operation Brunei. In the run-up to Christmas, Jack Straw felt confident enough to field parliamentary questions from MPs like Chris Mullin who were concerned about what the Yard was doing to catch the 250 bent cops.\n\nOn 22 December Straw told the Commons: \"No police officer should be in any doubt about the resolve of both the commissioner and I to ensure that any corruption is rooted out vigorously and firmly.\" Straw directed MPs to Condon's recently launched \"five-year strategic plan\" and commented that the commissioner had informed him he was using \"proactive methods and intelligence to target suspects\". CIB would have \"all the resources necessary\" and the detectives it needed to tackle the problem, he promised. This was music to Condon's ears given that his failed Ghost Squad had spent millions since 1993. At least that could now be lost in the new corruption budget he was authorised to spend. The Yard refuses to disclose the true cost.\n\nMullin asked Straw for an assurance he would not give in to \"mighty vested interests\", as his Tory predecessors had done, over shaking up the police disciplinary process. Straw replied that he looked forward to the select committee report and repeated his determination to ensure Britain's top cop had \"the full range of powers effectively and ruthlessly to root out corruption\".\n\nOver Christmas, Garner and McGuinness formally became supergrasses, a system supposedly regulated by the 1992 Home Office guidelines and PACE. But CIB3 flouted those guidelines. There was immediate pressure to get results from both corrupt cops, especially as Green had pleaded not guilty and was also rebuffing crude attempts by Wood and Jarratt to roll him over.\n\nOn 15 January, Mullin's select committee finally reported its findings. It unanimously concluded that the current police discipline and complaints procedures didn't command public confidence. The report expressed concern over the damaging influence of the \"small minority\" of up to 250 bent cops in the Yard, and recommended lowering the standard of proof in discipline cases, removing the right to silence and abolishing the double jeopardy rule, whereby a police officer could not be disciplined on the same facts for a crime he had been acquitted of in the criminal courts.\n\nThe report was also in some ways a radical blueprint for ending closed, internal police investigations of serious police crimes from corruption offences to deaths in custody. A key written and oral submission came from ragamuffin lawyer, and veteran of the HCDA expos\u00e9 of corrupt practice at Stoke Newington, Russell Miller of Birnberg & Co.\n\nMiller described the PCA as \"an unmitigated failure\", remarking that the percentage of proved complaints had steadily decreased from five per cent in 1984 to two per cent in 1990. He also accused them of smearing as greedy and uncooperative those who reject the police complaints system in favour of civil actions. \"The result of trying to dispel public cynicism without actually doing anything about the substantive issues was to widen the gulf in public confidence as the fa\u00e7ade of independence at the PCA inevitably descended into political apology for the problem it could not solve.\"\n\nMiller reminded the committee that since Scarman's inquiry created the PCA, the \"crisis of faith\" in marginalised communities had widened. The police were widely seen as \"above the law\", a view supported by the failure to convict one officer associated with the miscarriage of justice cases, deaths in custody and by the exceptional legal privileges extended to officers under investigation.\n\nCivil actions were not the solution, said Miller, but symptomatic of relevant authorities not controlling or prosecuting police crimes. He highlighted how in 1996 commissioner Condon had successfully persuaded the High Court to put a cap on jury awards in civil actions against the police and was now seeking to create a new offence of making a malicious complaint. The Police Federation lawyers were also on the counter-attack by seeking to prevent a successful plaintiff from having a statement read out in court naming the guilty officers involved in planting evidence or acts of violence and corruption.\n\nMullin's committee were clearly persuaded, and concluded \"independent investigation would be desirable in principle not least because of the boost this would give to public confidence\". It warned the government and the police that if the recommended reforms to the current complaints and discipline system \"continued to enjoy only low credibility, then independent investigation will have to be considered\". Consequently, the report called for increased powers and funding for the PCA and more openness, expedited apologies and _ex gratia_ payments to complainants from the police. Meanwhile, it suggested the government commission \"a feasibility study for an independent complaints investigation process\".\n\n\"War is declared on corrupt police,\" announced the _Guardian_. The commissioner was quoted endorsing the recommendations concerning the disciplinary process, which he said would make his \"crack down\" on corrupt cops easier. Honest officers had nothing to fear, he said. But there was total silence on the issue of independent investigation and the failures and bias of CIB.\n\nThe problem for Condon was this: the parliamentary clamour for an independent investigation system now \"legitimised\" the long-held demands of those the police had previously dismissed as the drug-addled rantings of \"toy town revolutionaries\" and assorted misfits with beards and sandals. That clamour was only going to get stronger when the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry formally opened in a few weeks on 24 March and started to examine Condon's conduct over the Barker Review, among other scandals.\n\nThe success of Condon's Untouchables therefore was crucial to his own political survival. If CIB3 could be seen to be ruthlessly rooting out the 250 bent cops in the force then Scotland Yard stood a chance of convincing the Home Office it should not be stripped of its privilege to investigate itself. And in the meantime the Lawrence Inquiry would leave corruption matters to the Yard. What was needed was to accelerate the media \"spectacular\".\n\nGarner and McGuinness had given CIB3 the names of various members of the Rigg Approach Flying Squad who they said were corrupt. The secret, unrecorded debriefings of Garner were way off corroborating Hector Harvey's accounts of the January 1995 Security Express robbery. Nor did Garner and McGuinness corroborate each other on key issues. Altogether it was just a mishmash of admittedly explosive but as yet uncorroborated allegations of organised and regular criminality at Rigg Approach.\n\nAfter high-level discussions at the Yard a decision was taken for CIB3 to set up a new operation codenamed Ethiopia under a new superintendent on the squad called Brian Moore, another ex-Stoke Newington officer who had served under Clark. Moore's number two was detective chief inspector Martin Bridger, a former member of the Tower Bridge Flying Squad.\n\nOn 27 January, CIB3 carried out a series of dawn raids on the homes of fourteen serving and five retired Rigg Approach Flying Squad detectives from the rank of detective constable to detective chief inspector. Undercover cop Michael, who'd rebuffed Jarratt's request to join the Untouchables, was one of them.\n\nThe serving officers were suspended and served with formal notification of the catch all allegations against them. It read: \"Between 1992 and 1997, a group of police officers from the Robbery Squad at Rigg Approach were engaged in committing a series of thefts, robberies, offences of dishonestly handling stolen property, and conspiracies to pervert the course of justice. You are one of those officers.\"\n\nThe raids were co-ordinated with coverage on radio bulletins and in the press. The banner headlines were a gratifying propaganda coup for the Yard. \"GHOST SQUAD ROOTS OUT YARD CORRUPTION\" was _The Times'_ take. \"CLEANING UP THE FORCE\" was the strap the _Sunday Telegraph_ used above an interview with commissioner Condon. The top cop talked of how it was better to \"wear the short term damage\" rather than bury your head in the sand while the problem worsened. He stressed how London's force was the envy of most big city police chiefs because the corruption was not as widespread as in other major capitals.\n\nWith the suspensions under his belt, Condon and his spin-doctors went on a whistlestop tour of the national media shortly before the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry formally opened in March.\n\nThree months later, on 23 June 1998, ten of the most important police officers and intelligence chiefs met secretly at the headquarters of NCIS in Vauxhall, south London.\n\nAmong the group were the chief or deputy chief constables of Manchester, Merseyside and West Midlands. Roy Penrose, formerly of the Yard, represented the new National Crime Squad, which had replaced the disbanded Regional Crime Squads. The director general of NCIS, John Abbot, was present with his deputy Roger Gaspar, the former head of the Ghost Squad. DAC Roy Clark was the most senior ranking officer representing Scotland Yard, the force Home Office mandarins were now hailing as the benchmark of excellence and success in anti-corruption work.\n\nThe meeting was called to develop a future nationwide \"anti-corruption strategy\". Managing the media was a prime concern. Controlling the Untouchables' image was crucial to neutralising the growing call for independent investigation of police crimes and misconduct. The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry hearings were in full swing. And the Lawrence family was demanding a public inquiry into police corruption, something the recent and high-profile launch of the Untouchables was designed to avoid.\n\nRoger Gaspar delivered the key presentation. \"Intelligence development to combat corruption should include investigation analysis of the recipients, brokers and sources of leaks to the media,\" he told the assembled group of securocrats. Gaspar also pointed out \"many officers\" in police work \"don't regard contact with the media or the release of inappropriate information as corruption\". Consequently, reinforcing a \"culture of need to know\" was essential, he proposed. With that in mind, the meeting agreed to develop a \"publicity strategy\" for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), the governing body for all forces in England and Wales.\n\nThe confidential minutes explained how \"within the coming year or so a number of high-profile corruption cases will come within the public gaze. It was felt ACPO should develop a strategy for dealing with the adverse publicity that would accompany such a process. While benefit could be made from revealing the lengths to which the Police Service has gone to detaining and prosecuting these individuals, great care must be taken not to educate the opposition.\"\n\nThe NCIS meeting signalled a new phase of police-media relations. From it came a strategy for dealing with those reporters who wanted to find their own rotten apples and do their own independent health-check on the orchard. It would involve criminalising the unauthorised relationships between independent journalists and police sources, thereby internally justifying surveillance, phone-tapping and other spookery against untamed elements in the media.\n\nIt was veteran investigative reporter Geoff Seed who was leaked the 19-page confidential NCIS document. When he read it he realised immediately there was a deliberate strategy to mislead the public about the true level of police corruption in the UK. Gaspar had warned the meeting that corruption was \"pervasive\" and may have reached \"Level 2: the situation which occurs in some Third World countries\". Lie detector tests were to be considered for rank and file detectives, the leaked minutes said. But not, it seems, for senior officers. One month after the NCIS meeting, ACPO put out a wholly misleading press release stating that corruption was in fact \"extremely low\".\n\nWhen the _Sunday Telegraph_ splashed Seed's story in September 1998, NCIS launched an immediate leak inquiry. Officers were sent to the newspaper to demand a return of the document. Seed says he was rung at home and asked the name of his source. He politely declined to assist.\n\nThis reaction was flatly at odds with how the then BBC home affairs correspondent, Graeme McLagan, was handled. While Seed was being attacked, McLagan was provided with information for an 'authorised inside story' of the Untouchables. The BBC veteran of 30 years admits receiving \"instructions\" from an anonymous caller to go to an address in London where over 2,000 pages of confidential Operation Ethiopia documents were made available to him for future programmes. Only CIB3 or the intelligence services could legitimately have had access to these documents on the Flying Squad corruption probe. This was either an authorised leak, of the kind Chapman Pincher used to get from the intelligence services, or a massive security breach at the anti-corruption squad.\n\nYet there was no leak inquiry. But when Seed received a mere 19-page document that revealed a strategy to deceive the public and nobble independent journalism, the securocrats went \"potty\", he says. \"The work of hackery and policery are very similar in that there is a search for information. It is what you do or don't do with it that matters. The police know the power they have got and can reward supplicants or cast into commercial darkness those who don't play ball.\" There are journalists, he says, who joined the Crime Reporters Association (CRA) waiting for the scoop that never comes.\n\n\"My worry is the master-servant relationship. You can have that. You can have this. You can't have anything at all. Metaphorically the police tell the crime correspondents, 'Here is the DO NOT CROSS tape.' Many have sold their independence and it is not a defence to say that the news desk had a gun to their ear. Crime correspondents are made privy to some material and leave the briefing with a warm glow that they are part of some elite, secret club. It's Masonic with a small M. Every so often they are thrown some red meat but in the main the lions of the press are docile.\"\n\nThe ACPO media strategy also focused on how to deal with potential troublemakers in the CRA, like veteran _Mirror_ crime correspondent Jeff Edwards. He was marked as \"too close\" to certain police officers, and therefore a risk to the official version about the Untouchables, a _Mirror_ source reveals. A senior executive was warned about Edwards during a party attended by the deputy head of MI5. The spook suggested how unfortunate it would be if Edwards was allowed to become \"aligned\" with the Rigg Approach Flying Squad, said the source. The crime reporter had built up an enviable list of contacts in different corners of the Yard over the years; some had even become good friends. \"My view has always been that the police have every right to drive down hard on corruption, but their tactics in doing so have to be absolutely beyond reproach. Anything less undermines the whole ethos,\" says Edwards.\n\nAmong all the puffery and fluffery of Scotland Yard's propaganda efforts was one story that had to be suppressed. The Untouchables' much-vaunted drug sting, Operation Brunei, had a dirty secret which if exposed would severely damage political confidence in the newly launched anti-corruption squad's competency and honesty.\n\nWood and Jarratt had arranged the planting of 80 kilos of hash worth \u00a3500,000 in the east London flat _against_ the advice of government lawyers, who quite understandably feared the drugs would be stolen. The two Untouchables convinced their bosses at the Yard that the risks were \"acceptable and legitimate\". However, one week after the sting operation, only 54 kilos were recovered. Just as the CPS predicted, CIB3 had \"lost\" 26 kilos of dope worth a staggering \u00a3162,500.\n\nNot only did CIB3 ignore legal advice, no surveillance team was deployed to follow Garner from the flat to the lock-up where he stored the drugs. CIB3 claim he might have spotted the tail. But this doesn't explain why the lock-up, which CIB3 knew about in advance through their informant Irish Mick, was not wired up as the flat had been. Similarly, tabs were not kept on Taverner and Irish Mick in case they decided to help themselves to the dope and pull a double whammy on CIB3.\n\nWhen the Untouchables finally arrested Garner, McGuinness and Green none of the hash was found in their homes. Green was never asked about the drugs and McGuinness confirms he too was never questioned about them during his debrief. Incredibly, Jarratt never asked Garner, the prime mover, one question about the missing dope in the days after his arrest or at any point during his subsequent debrief.\n\nAt 5 a.m. on 16 December the 54 kilos were \"recovered\" in the strangest of circumstances. Later that day, unannounced, Wood and Jarratt saw Green at the hospital wing of Brixton Prison. Green's depression had returned and he was feeling suicidal. CIB3 needed him to turn supergrass just as Garner and McGuinness had done six days earlier. That way they would not have to disclose details of the sting operation to Green's lawyers, and more importantly, they could hide their embarrassment over the missing 26 kilos of dope. In return for an admission and details of the corruption of others, Green claims Wood offered to recommend a two to four-year sentence in a secure location, a new identity for him and his family and some financial help to start a new life. He refused.\n\nThe next day Green appeared at Bow Street Magistrates Court to ask for bail. What happened in court was extraordinary. In opposing the bail application Jarratt swore on oath that Green had made a \"full confession\" the previous day. Green jumped up and denied it. Jarratt also told the magistrate that Green had access to the drugs, something which was untrue, given that they had been recovered the day before.\n\nAs a result of Jarratt's forceful submission, Green was denied bail and spent the next 11 months on remand until his trial in October 1998. During that time he attempted to hang himself. A fellow inmate intervened when he saw Green fixing the noose around the showerhead.\n\nGreen was transferred to a psychiatric intensive care unit in Essex. By this stage the Home Office had become involved and wrote to the hospital expressing concern that Green was a flight risk and once again repeated the canard, which could only have come from CIB3, that the drugs \"have yet to be recovered\".\n\nDuring the six-day trial at the Old Bailey, the prosecution barrister flatly contradicted Jarratt and made it clear to the jury that Green had no control or involvement with the drugs after he helped load all 80 kilos into Garner's boot. In the witness box Green claimed he had no idea it was drugs. He was just helping a mate recover some property. The prosecution never used Garner or McGuinness, the only two people who could challenge this. Instead they relied on the video evidence. \"The prosecution thought the video played to the jury would sink me,\" says Green.\n\nThe Yard now says it acted on CPS advice that the video evidence was ample enough to secure a conviction. But CIB3 had another more important motive for not using McGuinness and Garner: they didn't want to burn either supergrass too early. For had they, the unlawful debriefing system, damaging inconsistencies between Garner and McGuinness and the scandal of the missing 26 kilos of dope would have all been exposed under cross-examination. Instead, it made strategic sense to work out how their supergrasses, including Hector Harvey, corroborated one another before using them against the main targets \u2013 those Flying Squad detectives at Rigg Approach believed to be involved in the Security Express robbery.\n\nJust before the jury retired to deliberate on Green's fate, CIB3 tipped off the media about the dawn arrest and charging of four serving detectives and a lawyer in connection with that robbery. The publicity forced the judge to sequester the jury overnight in a hotel without access to the television or newspapers. If this was an attempt to influence their decision it failed, as the next day the jury unanimously acquitted Green.\n\nA few months later, he complained to the PCA. Green alleged that Jarratt and Wood had \"lied in court\" about his disputed \"confession\" and conspired to pervert the course of justice by covering this up. Both Untouchables, who denied this, were key prosecution witnesses in the forthcoming Flying Squad and other CIB3 trials. So the complaint investigation was going to be a real test of the PCA's independence from the police and Home Office.\n\nHowever, Green was unaware that soon after his arrest in early December 1997 CIB3 had approached the PCA and asked if they wanted to supervise the Flying Squad inquiry. The clever approach coincided with the publication of the damning PCA\/Kent inquiry report. However, the PCA's then chairman Peter Moorhouse and his deputy, John Cartwright, took a very strange decision. After what a spokesman called an \"agonising\" debate, the two PCA bosses over-ruled colleagues who favoured supervision. A lack of resources and manpower were the reasons the PCA couldn't offer any \"meaningful\" supervision, the spokesman explained. \"We'd just have been onlookers.\" The decision, however, was highly questionable given that at the very same time the PCA\/Kent inquiry concluded that the Yard had covered up during its internal Barker Review of the Lawrence murder inquiry. So how could they be trusted to get the Flying Squad corruption probe right without some supervision?\n\nStrangely, Moorhouse did find resources for the PCA to supervise Green's very damaging complaint. The Yard's Area Complaints Unit, a very poor relation to the commissioner's Untouchables, carried out the actual investigation. Green was not alone in doubting it would go anywhere other than into the long grass.\n\nAfter the introduction of PACE to end the practice of verballing, confessions were so rare that they immediately attracted suspicion. This suspicion grows when best practice regulations are not followed. Jarratt, the PCA discovered, had not tape-recorded Green's alleged confession. Instead he made a pocket-book note but never got Green to sign it as an accurate account. Nor had Jarratt timed and date stamped his own notebook to show it was contemporaneous. Similarly, although Wood had countersigned Jarratt's note, he did not make his own entry in a pocket book.\n\nGreen had also complained that CIB3 officers including Jarratt had repeatedly stressed to him they were not interested in detectives who fitted people up or ramped up the evidence. In his statement to the PCA, Green recalled one CIB3 officer saying: \"That's God's work, God wants you to do that, we're after people who work against God, ruin cases etc.\" I said, \"Who's God?\" He said, \"The commissioner.\" In other words, the Untouchables were telling potential supergrasses that so-called noble cause corruption was of no interest to them. This was a very serious allegation, which the PCA inquiry failed to look into.\n\nThe months rolled by, and in December 1999 the PCA informed Green there was insufficient evidence to substantiate his complaint. He cried \"cover-up at the highest level\" and told the PCA the investigation had not examined all the available supporting evidence. The PCA sought a response from the Yard, who after months of silence claimed they had \"lost\" the file. The Home Office declined to bring in an outside force to re-investigate.\n\nSo where is the 26 kilos of dope? At the time of writing, the Yard confirms the drugs are still \"missing\". \"They're gone. Obviously sold, smoked. Gone. Not under our control. No idea where they are,\" said Untouchable Dave Pennant, rather defensively.\n\nThe finger of suspicion points to a small number of people. Did Garner skim off 26 kilos before he handed the keys of the lock-up over to Taverner and Irish Mick? Certainly the CPS believed this at one stage. That's why in early 2000 they served the supergrass with a statement claiming he had profited by \u00a3200,000 from the drugs he admitted stealing from the flat. But Garner's lawyer was having none of it. He wrote to the CPS that his client was considering \"withdrawing his co-operation\" as a supergrass willing to give evidence against the four charged Flying Squad detectives if the confiscation issue was not abandoned. He also alerted the CPS to \"contradictory earlier promises\" from CIB3.\n\nTo its surprise, the CPS discovered that in October 1998, one day after Keith Green's acquittal, Wood had written confidentially to Garner's lawyer in the following unequivocal terms: \"Your client transferred the drugs to a garage from where the drugs were removed by another. At this point your client no longer had control of the drugs and it is our view he was not responsible for the disposal of the missing 26 kilos of cannabis resin.\" After consulting with CIB3, the CPS wrote back to Garner saying it was all a dreadful mix-up.\n\nLawyers for the Flying Squad detectives suggested CIB3 discovered Garner had sold on the drugs and allowed him to escape repaying the proceeds in return for giving his evidence against their clients. Garner still denies this. Nevertheless, the Yard told us it would be looking into why he was never asked about the drugs during his entire debrief. We are still waiting for a reply.\n\nSo if Garner didn't have them, did Taverner or Irish Mick take the drugs from under the Untouchables' noses? Worse still, was one of them allowed to keep the 26 kilos as payment for their services to the anti-corruption squad?\n\nCIB3 would have us believe that following a fortuitous and anonymous tip-off to Crimestoppers, 54 kilos of the dope was mysteriously recovered one week after Garner's arrest. Local police discovered the drugs in a flat, which CIB3 would also have us believe Taverner had rented. However the anti-corruption squad has consistently prevented any disclosure of material that would support their claim. Incredibly, they even resorted to PII certificates to prevent disclosure of the Crimestoppers docket. Furthermore, Taverner wasn't arrested until almost a year after the drugs were recovered. He refused to answer questions and the CPS decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. Irish Mick, the CIB3 informant, wasn't even interviewed.\n\nA cross-party group of MPs has raised the case of the missing dope with the Attorney General, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Home Secretary, but to no avail. The Yard told us it would examine the issue. We are still waiting for the results.\n\n## [13\n\nThe Sleaze Machine](contents.html#ch13)\n\nSid Fillery is a big, jovial, Toby jug of a man. With sad spaniel's eyes and a laugh as large as the London Palladium, he seems on first impressions as if he could have stepped out of an episode of _Dixon of Dock Green_.\n\nIt's a matter of dispute when Fillery started working as an equal partner with Jon Rees in Southern Investigations. Fillery says it wasn't until he left the Met one month before the April 1988 inquest into Danny Morgan's murder. For six months before that Fillery was off sick with depression.\n\nClearly, he found in Rees someone who lifted his spirits. Both men genuinely felt alive in each other's company. When the routine bailiffing and warrant-serving work had been farmed out to friends and contacts, Rees and Fillery relocated around lunchtime to a tiny pub called The Victory. Tucked away behind another more salubrious boozer in Thornton Heath high street, that south London no man's land somewhere between Streatham and Croydon, The Victory had a pleasing, run-down air which betrayed definite signs that it had last been decorated sometime around the end of the Second World War when, in the view of many of its regulars, England was still England.\n\nOne day in 1989, _News of the World_ reporter Alex Marunchak came to the pub by arrangement. The two private eyes had first crossed paths with him during the Morgan inquest and the suicide of detective Alan \"Taffy\" Holmes. This time Marunchak wanted help covering the forthcoming wedding of Princess Diana's Hooray Henry brother to a slender \"commoner\" with a supposed drugs habit.\n\nThere was a high concept embedded in this piece of low journalism \u2013 to see if Southern Investigations could snatch a picture of the bride-to-be taking drugs in the week before her wedding. Rees and Fillery leaped at the chance and quickly rounded up a stake-out team. While no pictures were forthcoming by the wedding day, their passion for tabloid sleaze had been aroused.\n\nOther missions for News International, Rupert Murdoch's media empire, were brought to a more successful conclusion. The target on one occasion was Tory Cabinet minister David Mellor and his affair with an unemployed actress, Antonia de Sancha. There followed a series of assignments with Mazher Mahmood, the _News of the World_ 's star investigator, a smooth operator who would eventually fool Sophie, the Countess of Wessex, into destroying her entire business career by her hunger to obtain golden ducats for her domestic treasury through public relations work for Arab tyrants.\n\nSadly for Southern Investigations not all Mazher's early sheikh impersonations went off quite as smoothly as the destruction of Wessex Girl. The mark on this occasion was a friend of Prince Charles who the _News of the World_ believed was involved in procuring what Fillery describes as \"high class toms\", prostitutes for wealthy businessmen and lonely foreign dignitaries from oil-rich Arab states. As part of the play, Mazher and Sid took a \u00a32,000-a-night suite at London's Dorchester Hotel so they could secretly film both procurer and procured. Mazher dressed up in his trademark sheikh outfit while Fillery played \"His Majesty's English private secretary\", in blazer and bow tie.\n\nUnderstandably, Fillery still relishes telling the story. The entire caper was progressing nicely. They were pretending it was his majesty's birthday \u2013 serving champagne and canap\u00e9s to the girls and Arab potentates \u2013 when misfortune set in. Because they were working undercover Mazher could not settle his bills by personal or company credit card, so everything was paid in cash. But at Dorchester rates they soon ran out. Fearful that their carefully choreographed con might collapse, Mazher arranged for an emergency transfusion of cash from Wapping HQ. \u00a310,000 was biked over and handed in to the concierge. Sadly, the money was to prove their undoing. The delivery driver left a yellow Post-It note attached to the rear of the package. It read: \"Deliver to the Dorchester, Park Lane. PS. On no account identify yourself or the recipients as working for the _News of the World_.\" With their cover blown, a burly bouncer escorted Mazher and Fillery to the door, with the private eye retorting, \"I've been thrown out of better places than this.\"\n\nAnother Southern Investigations assignment from the _News of the World_ involved an eight-man team spending a week in Blackpool during the Trades Union Congress annual conference. The idea was to film union leaders and TUC delegates indulging gargantuan appetites for expensive bourgeois fare, copious drink and illicit sex, all improperly claimed on expenses, of course. At the end of the week the Southern Investigations team had been in and out of just about every hotel, bar, nightclub and Blackpool brothel, without landing for its tabloid paymasters a 'SCARGILL IN CROSS DRESSING MIDGET HOOKER' splash.\n\nIn the run up to the April 1992 general election, Rees and Fillery were once again on the job for the _News of the World_ outing of a high-ranking Romeo MP. Liberal Democrat leader and former Special Boat Squadron officer, Paddy Ashdown, had been over the side with a House of Commons secretary called Tricia Howard.\n\nDefinitive proof of the affair was in the office safe of Ashdown's solicitor. It had been burgled and the documents were being hawked around Fleet Street. The _News of the World_ was interested and Southern Investigations went to meet a man in the Brighton area. Fillery denies having anything to do with the actual burglary but felt his own team were under surveillance by Special Branch or MI5.\n\nAshdown knew the game was up once the documents \u2013 notes of his conversation with his solicitor about the affair \u2013 were on the sleaze market. He held a press conference admitting his error, which led to the inspired headline \"Paddy Pantsdown\". At the time of the burglary, the Liberal Democrat leader was trying to broker a coalition with New Labour in return for their commitment to proportional representation. The governing Tories feared such an alliance and Ashdown believes they had a strong interest in destabilising it. \"What a terrible coincidence. That a thief should have broken in; that it should have been just before the election; that the Clinton\/Gennifer Flowers saga is running at the same time; and that it should have all ended up in the hands of the _News of the World_.\" Later, after the 1992 election defeat, Ashdown recorded in his diary his thoughts on an article he recently read about the NERDS, \"a group of scandal hitmen who operate in America and are said to have been active here \u2013 for the Tories of course... I wonder if this is what happened to us.\"\n\nSouthern Investigations were also hired to spy on Murdoch's own journalists at the _News of the World, The Sun, The Times_ and the _Sunday Times_. The management were apparently concerned about moonlighting hacks working shifts and selling stories and commercial information to its rivals.\n\nAfter New Labour came to power in May 1997, the search for Romeo MPs was renewed. According to Fillery, they had established before Robin Cook became foreign secretary that he was having an affair. The _News of the World_ apparently sat on the story until one of its rivals got wind, and then splashed it. Fillery also maintains that Jack Straw, the new home secretary, had attracted their attention. Other victims of drugs stings were England rugby captain Lawrence Dallaglio and _London's Burning_ TV star John Alford.\n\nAlas, thereafter it came to an end when Rees and Fillery fell out with News International over an unpaid bill. It is at this point, perhaps coincidentally, that having lost the protection of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, Southern Investigations became a target of the Untouchables. Little had been done in the previous decade since Danny Morgan's murder to tackle so obvious a network of sleaze and police corruption as the one Fillery and Rees were plugged into.\n\nA key player in that network was south London detective constable Duncan Hanrahan, whose corruption had few limits. When the Untouchables caught him in May 1997 they had the best opportunity ever to break up the firm within a firm in south and south-east London that had continued uninterrupted at least since the Brinks Mat robbery. If handled properly, Hanrahan was also the tool that could open up the mystery of the Morgan murder.\n\nDuncan Hanrahan is undoubtedly the most disarmingly devious of all the police supergrasses used by the Untouchables.\n\nHe joined the Met in 1977, aged 19. \"I just had this thing I wanted to be a detective. I never wanted to help people or help society. I just fancied nicking people,\" he says with his trademark lopsided smile and lazy eye. Hanrahan insists he only became corrupt on retiring from the police after 14 years' service. What he really means is he was not personally corrupt in the police but corrupt for the police. \"When I was in the job I never took a pound note. I was involved in sorting out evidence, a verbal here and a verbal there. I pulled strokes,\" he admits matter-of-factly.\n\nPerversely, for a man who has done so many corrupt things, it really matters to Hanrahan that no one thinks he took backhanders for blowing out operations while he was in the police. He sees himself more as a corrupter of police officers, and less as a corrupt cop.\n\nThroughout his police service Hanrahan had a knack for riding the coat tails of influential officers and Freemasons, in particular commander Ray Adams. Becoming a Freemason was also part of Hanrahan's survival strategy. He is too clever to take seriously the world of funny handshakes and homoerotic ceremonies, but saw in Masonic membership a way to benefit from the network of professional people providing \"a column of mutual support\".\n\nThe death of his one-month-old baby daughter in 1985 had a profound effect on his outlook on life and his future commitment to the police. \"Nothing ever again seemed that important,\" he says. \"It's very hard to think of anything that is going to hurt you more than that, you know.\"\n\nHanrahan had started drinking heavily and his marriage was falling apart when he transferred to Norbury police station. There he identified Jonathan Rees, a fellow Freemason and pub veteran, as someone to know in south London. The private investigator, says Hanrahan, already had very good contacts in two other police stations, South Norwood and Addington.\n\nAfter the Danny Morgan murder it was widely suspected that Hanrahan knew a lot more than he was letting on. To redeem himself perhaps, he agreed to approach Rees undercover and report back to the murder inquiry on their pub conversations. Nothing overly incriminating ever came of the undercover mission. But when it emerged during the Morgan inquest, Hanrahan became locally known as \"double agent Dunk\". It was never clear, though, which side he was really working for.\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of the Morgan murder, Hanrahan transferred to Kennington police station. The private sector was becoming far more alluring than a career in the Met. Respecting rank, taking orders and biting your tongue were not traits that came naturally to him.\n\nRees was willing to bury the hatchet with Hanrahan and gave him some moonlighting work watching sticky-fingered bar staff at a nightclub in Croydon \u2013 a sign, say some, that his undercover role was really a farce. According to former DS Alec Leighton, a mutual friend, Hanrahan later provided Rees with statements for his civil claim against the police at \"total variance\" to those he provided to the murder squad.\n\nIn September 1991, Hanrahan retired from the Met. The defective detective had been on sick pay for almost a year following an injury sustained on duty. It was not so inhibiting as to curtail his desire to privatise the criminal justice system and, for the next five years, Hanrahan embraced a corrupt lifestyle like an alcoholic embraces a free bar. \"I don't want my kids to think that what I did was really cool. At the time I thought it was the business. We were taking the piss out of the system. We were earning a few quid here and there. But when you look back at it, we were slags. We were the people we in the police would have called slags. We were the villains. I don't like that and I don't find it easy to live with. But that is what I was.\"\n\nHanrahan had his own relationship with Alex Marunchak of the _News of the World_ , but he recalls they fell out over a story about Ms Whiplash, Lindi St Clair, the dominatrix. Her car had been found abandoned in Sussex and Hanrahan had a cop willing to sell him the details. He passed these to the _News of the World_ for an agreed fee but inexplicably the story appeared in the _Mail on Sunday_ instead. Hanrahan says Marunchak denied he had passed it on but was eventually persuaded to pay up.\n\nStill aggrieved, Hanrahan scuppered the Paddy Pantsdown expos\u00e9 the _News of the World_ was working on with Rees and Fillery. While hanging around the office of Southern Investigations, he overheard the location of the rendezvous to buy the stolen Ashdown documents and the name of the broker who was hawking it to the tabloid. Hanrahan called commander Ray Adams who passed the information to the City of London police, presumably because they were dealing with the break-in at Ashdown's solicitors. The City Police registered Hanrahan as an informant and managed to arrest the broker before he met the tabloid representatives. Fillery suspected a leak and put up a sign in the office warning his staff and visitors, \"WHAT YOU HEAR IN HERE STAYS IN HERE\".\n\nAlastair Morgan has what he called \"an uneasy feeling\" that Masonic influence was playing a part in the \"horror story\" slowly unfolding around his brother's gruesome death. This was not some fanciful construct he'd invented to compensate for the official stonewalling of the family. In fact, many of the key players in the Morgan case, from the suspects, the witnesses and even the murder squad detectives were members of the Brotherhood.\n\nAn officer at Norbury set up the Brothers in Law luncheon club in June 1988 for serving and retired members of Scotland Yard and Surrey Police who were Freemasons, says Leighton. Its emblem, a police shield with a sprig of holly in the middle, was on the invitation to the annual Christmas do at the Oakfield Road Masonic Halls in Croydon.\n\nIn December 1993, Leighton, Rees, Fillery and Hanrahan attended. On a nearby table was a familiar face, detective inspector Alan Jones, the number two in the Morgan murder inquiry. \"[Jones] was furious that I was there with Fillery and Rees. It gripped his shit,\" says Leighton, who had recently been suspended over the _Panorama_ expos\u00e9 of corrupt detective John Donald. One of the CIB officers investigating Leighton was also at the luncheon.\n\nAnother ex-south London cop whom Hanrahan worked with in the private sector was Martin King, a man with extensive contacts in the Underworld. King had once worked as a security consultant for bespoke tailors Austin Reed, the one place in the Metropolitan Police area where people were legally fitted up. But when he met Hanrahan, King was providing a special service to heavyweight villains, some of whom he knew through his long association with the crooked Brinks Mat lawyer, Michael Relton.\n\nHanrahan had something King's friends needed: an ability to identify which serving police officers were approachable to sort out a bit of bail or maybe lose some case papers. Together they were a formidable partnership. \"I was impressed by the big lunches. But I was running before I could walk,\" recalls Hanrahan.\n\nIn 1994 Hanrahan set up his own private investigations company. At first it was run from Leighton's converted garage. But their relationship broke down so Hanrahan Associates moved to an accommodation address in Marble Arch. The corrupt opportunities kept coming his way, along with some more freelance work from Rees and Fillery.\n\nHanrahan says it only dawned on him how corrupt he'd really become when he lost his rag because a serving officer had refused to go along with some bent scheme. \"I realised I'd lost all sense of proportion. Corrupting people was a way of life.\"\n\nMost of his skulduggery was planned in one of two south London pubs, The Victory in Thornton Heath or The Prince Frederick in Bromley, where Hanrahan met corrupt detectives from the local drugs squad and the infamous East Dulwich SERCS office. The cash-for-police-favours were usually exchanged in plastic bags in the beer garden.\n\nIn May 1997, Duncan Hanrahan's greed and arrogance finally got the better of him. He and King were arrested in a sting operation trying to corrupt a CIB officer. Their clients were a pair of criminals who hoped to sabotage two prosecutions they were facing for car fraud and grievous bodily harm. The arrest sent shock waves throughout south London. Hanrahan managed to get word to Fillery. And when Leighton heard the news he felt CIB would now recruit Hanrahan as a supergrass against him. \"CIB refer to me as some sort of 'godfather' orchestrating a cell of corruption from my exalted position as leader of the gang. This is absolute nonsense,\" he wrote to his solicitors at the time.\n\nHanrahan admitted his corruption with King; the evidence was too damning to do otherwise. But unlike Hanrahan, King never turned supergrass.\n\nThe Untouchables secretly relocated Hanrahan to Basingstoke for extensive debriefing. He spent the next \"seven months telling lies\". Hanrahan was terrified of getting caught out. But when nothing happened, he settled into a routine. He loved to wind up his debriefers by using obscure words they were forced to look up, and playing one off against the other with bits of gossip he had picked up. But he resented what he regarded as the bullying and threatening manner of Dave Wood and Chris Jarratt, the two senior Untouchables in charge of the debriefing. Anyone who has spent time with Hanrahan, as the authors have, can see he will not be forced to do anything, no matter how bad his circumstances are. He also has an acute bullshit detector. The Untouchables' primitive approach to a complex and very valuable witness was counterproductive and ultimately, he says, encouraged him not to come clean.\n\nIn November, Hanrahan moved to the supergrass wing at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. Here his deception would finally come to an end, but not for another nine months of mendacity. Hanrahan couldn't resist boasting to other supergrasses that he was having over his debriefers by pretending to purge his soul. To earn a reduced sentence he told the Untouchables what he felt they wanted to hear, but not too much that could be independently corroborated. \"You've got to put yourself on offer to get the reduction. If my case continues this way I'll get a reduction without giving evidence,\" he told one inmate.\n\nIn August 1998, he confided in a supergrass called Bob Bown that he had taken part in a major crime CIB knew nothing about. He said it involved getting two detectives to help steal 40,000 ecstasy pills from a drug dealer.\n\nBown was a supergrass in a major guns and explosives trial involving serious gangsters. That month he wrote to his police handler with as much detail as he could remember including the names of the two detectives. The letter was passed to the Untouchables. Wood and Jarratt went ballistic. This was the third supergrass who'd duped the anti-corruption squad. First Brennan and Harvey had over the Ghost Squad. Now Hanrahan had done the same to its supposedly more hardnosed replacement. In all likelihood the Untouchables would never have realised they were being mugged off had it not been for the duplicity of Bob Bown, whose motivation was undoubtedly to earn a further reduction of his sentence.\n\nHanrahan was due to be sentenced with Martin King for his original crimes. He was expecting a substantial reduction. But the Untouchables had other ideas. In secret, an Old Bailey judge granted a delay while Wood and Jarratt set in motion an extraordinary plan that would only backfire and compound their humiliation.\n\nThe Untouchables gave Bown a crash course in the use of sophisticated bugging equipment worn on the body. His mission was to secretly record Hanrahan discussing the \"ecstasy job\" and anything else he was holding back. Between late October and early December, Bown covertly recorded hours of conversations at Parkhurst.\n\nWhen the Untouchables felt they had enough, Hanrahan was arrested on 6 December and sent to a normal prison wing to contemplate how tantalisingly close he had come to getting away with the greatest gamble of his life. Eventually he pleaded guilty to a further eight corruption charges including conspiring with detectives in 1995 to steal the 40,000 ecstasy tablets. He also put his hands up to conspiring with the same officers to rob a Lebanese courier at Heathrow Airport of \u00a31 million. On 19 March 1999, Hanrahan was jailed for eight years and four months. The prosecutor revealed in court the identity of four detectives alleged to be part of his web of crime. They were named as Chris Carter, Len Guerard and Nigel Grayston, who had all since retired into the world of private investigations, and Steven Lee. He was on sick leave at the time.\n\nDetective constable Nigel Grayston was Hanrahan's key contact in the south London police; they'd served together at Kennington. Grayston started off doing checks for him on the Police National Computer but the pair graduated to sabotaging cases for money, according to statements Hanrahan made to CIB.\n\nCIB threw money and manpower at trying to corroborate Hanrahan's allegations about Carter and Guerard's involvement in the ecstasy job. The owner of the drugs, Jason Proctor, at first denied being robbed of his stash. But when he was caught trying to sell to an undercover cop he turned supergrass.\n\nSteve Warner was a key player in the theft of the 40,000 ecstasy pills. Hanrahan met him through a mutual friend of Rees called Barry Nash, aka Barry \"the Fish\". Warner then introduced Hanrahan to two other criminals, Vincent Arneil and John Walter, whom he recruited to sell the stolen ecstasy. Warner was under investigation by the National Crime Squad at the time. He had sold a kilo of cocaine to one of their undercover officers and was introduced to another posing as a hit man when he offered a \u00a310,000 contract to kill a man called Jimmy Cook. Cook was also a friend of Barry \"the Fish\" and very close to Rees. In fact Nash and Cook were repo men for Southern Investigations. On his arrest Warner also turned supergrass and agreed to give evidence.\n\nThe Untouchables still had a serious problem prosecuting Carter and Guerard. How could Hanrahan be presented as a witness of truth when at his recent sentencing prosecution counsel had called him \"a complete fraud\"? Furthermore, a CIB assessment of Hanrahan said this of him: \"He lied from the outset. He cynically manipulated the criminal justice system intending to falsely receive credit from the court that would eventually sentence him.\" Even Hanrahan was amazed when the Untouchables told him they were going to rely on him as a witness. \"I wouldn't have used me,\" he says. His instincts were right. The Old Bailey trial in October 2000 was a fiasco.\n\nThe Untouchables never wanted the transcripts of Bob Bown's secretly recorded conversations with Hanrahan ever to see the light of day. The CPS is tight-lipped about how they were disclosed so late in the day. But when they were, defence barristers put them to lethal effect in cross-examining Hanrahan. The first he knew of their existence, he says, was when the ring binders were produced for him to read aloud in the witness box.\n\nHanrahan told the jury he was just \"bragging\" to pass the time when he had regaled Bown with appalling stories of all the fit-ups, assaults and planted drugs he had been involved with as a cop. The effect of all this and much more was terminal for the prosecution case. Its fate was sealed when Hanrahan was asked to read out a reference he'd made to \"white slags who fuck black men\". The jury included three white women and two black men.\n\nProctor and Warner fared little better in the witness box. Just before Christmas the jury acquitted Carter and Guerard, and a third detective, Colin Evans. It was a black day for the Untouchables. Their risky decision to bug Hanrahan's cell conversations, apparently taken without CPS advice, had totally backfired. Hanrahan returned to the supergrass wing where he served out the rest of his sentence.\n\nAmong the Parkhurst transcripts was one fascinating discussion between Hanrahan and Bown about the Danny Morgan murder:\n\nHanrahan: The Met's investigation of it was fucking crap.\n\nBown: Was it?\n\nHanrahan: Oh fucking terrible. Stephen Lawrence one is a professional investigation compared to that.\n\nClearly Bown had been told to get Hanrahan talking about the Morgan murder. Other than saying he was thankful for being on the \"periphery\" of Rees's circle at the time and that the scandal was \"a fucking nightmare\" for him, it was the one subject Hanrahan appeared naturally most guarded about in an otherwise free-flowing chat where he opined about many things.\n\nBy their nature supergrasses are duplicitous. But if they feel the system 'cleansing them' is riven with double or even treble standards, there is an in-built disincentive to telling it all and telling it truthfully.\n\nHanrahan despised the Untouchables' hypocrisy and sanctimony. On the Bown tapes he alleged that Jarratt once tried to get him to falsely incriminate a detective. Like Keith Green, Hanrahan later separately complained to the PCA that Wood and Jarratt had also told him they weren't interested in noble cause corruption. The PCA did nothing.\n\nNo one doubts Duncan Hanrahan knew a lot. But the way the Untouchables mishandled him ensured what he knew remained buried, like Danny Morgan.\n\n## [14\n\nBad Blood](contents.html#ch14)\n\nJust before Christmas 1996, deputy commissioner Brian Hayes and Roy Clark handed a poisoned chalice to detective superintendent John Coles. In effect, he was asked to untangle Scotland Yard from the compromising position it had got into with Geoff Brennan. As Coles went through the case file, he felt alarm at the \"chaos\" he was inheriting from the Ghost Squad. Coles could foresee many problems with his new assignment, which he would subsequently refer to as \"this nightmare case\".\n\nHe assembled a team with detective inspector Maggie Palmer, his second in command and the first woman (one of the few) to become an Untouchable. The new operation was codenamed Cornwall.\n\nBrennan had played a blinder. He stole \u00a3400,000 from the Chinese government and then made false corruption allegations against detectives John Redgrave and Michael Charman to earn protection from the theft inquiry and from Tall Ted Williams, the gangster he had double-crossed.\n\nThe Ghost Squad cut a sweetheart deal with Brennan in June 1994. He admitted the theft but wasn't arrested. Instead the police helped him launder the money through two house purchases and hid him away from a fraud investigator, hoping he would one day become a witness against the two cops. Brennan of course had no intention of doing so.\n\nIn 1996, the Chinese government started applying diplomatic pressure to get their money back. This forced the Ghost Squad to unpick the secret deal with Brennan and in November, charge him with theft.\n\nThe supergrass responded by exposing the whole scandal to Redgrave and Charman, who by then had been under secret investigation for over two years. The two cops were now demanding answers from Roy Clark and threatening legal action against the Ghost Squad.\n\nMatters escalated when on 27 January 1997 Brennan sent a lengthy letter of complaint to the PCA. In it he formally withdrew the allegation of a \u00a350,000 bung to Redgrave and Charman. He admitted making it up to ensure the Ghost Squad took him into the witness protection scheme. He claimed he was encouraged to do this by his friend, detective sergeant Chris Smith, who he said was acting out of personal enmity towards the two detectives.\n\nBrennan alleged to the PCA that Smith had moonlighted when he was a Ghost Squad officer supposedly looking after him in the witness protection scheme. Brennan explained how he had paid Smith, and named three other detectives also doing private surveillance work. They were Spencer Mott, Alan Moralee and Jimmy Angel.\n\nLastly, Brennan turned on senior Ghost Squad officers Roger Gaspar and David Bailey. The latter had been to see Brennan just before he was charged. The supergrass had secretly recorded the conversation and now complained to the PCA that Bailey had tried to make him give \"false evidence\" about Redgrave and Charman as part of a last ditch new \"deal\" over the theft.\n\nThe explosive letter addressed to PCA deputy chairman John Cartwright arrived on Wednesday, 29 January. It identified a wealth of criminal and disciplinary offences by key members of the anti-corruption squad. On Thursday, Cartwright passed it to them. But both the PCA and Coles would spend the next 18 months denying they had received it. What could explain this?\n\nInternal police documents show that the Untouchables had already decided to suspend Redgrave and Charman and use Smith as a witness against them. So they simply pretended not to know about Brennan's formal withdrawal and fresh allegations.\n\nOn Monday, 3 February, Coles obtained search warrants against Redgrave and Charman. Very early the next morning their homes were raided and the two detectives suspended over allegations that the Untouchables knew had been withdrawn and were totally uncorroborated.\n\nThe raid caused maximum embarrassment. Outside Redgrave's home arc lights, normally used on terrorist incidents, had been erected on tripods, and his son and daughter were searched before leaving for school. The whole operation was \"oppressive and excessive\", says Redgrave, and designed to cower him and recover any tape recordings that compromised the Ghost Squad.\n\nRoy Clark would later claim that the suspensions were designed to \"provoke a reaction\". But 30 months of covert investigation had produced nothing to substantiate the original allegations, so what was he hoping the Untouchables would now discover? As events unfolded, it became clear that the suspension of Redgrave and Charman was used to buy time and protect the Yard and its favoured sons from further embarrassment.\n\nBut the Yard couldn't simply ignore Brennan's complaint. So it asked the PCA to supervise an internal investigation. Had the watchdog not been so captured by the Yard's anti-corruption crusade it should have at least given Brennan's complaint to an outside force to investigate. Instead, Coles and others were effectively investigating their own unit and their own bosses.\n\nThe first tricky problem was how to unravel the history between Brennan and Smith. Coles was also aware of the intense distrust between Smith and detectives Redgrave and Charman. It all goes back to Brinks Mat, but this was a can of worms the Yard had no interest in reopening if it could be avoided.\n\nColes eventually interviewed three retired senior Brinks officers who threw very important light on the situation. Detective chief superintendent Brian Boyce was by then part of a very upmarket private security firm backed by City money and run by two former MI6 officers. Detective chief inspector Peter Mellins was enjoying his retirement, and detective inspector Bob Suckling was still chasing armed robbers, but for the firm Securitas. These interviews and other secret intelligence collated by Operation Cornwall came to be known inside the Untouchables as the \"bad blood papers\". They are a key part of the secret history of Brinks Mat and help explain why Redgrave and Charman had to be destroyed.\n\nAfter Kenny Noye stabbed to death undercover cop John Fordham during a failed surveillance operation in January 1985, the Brinks squad trebled in size to 300 detectives.\n\nDCS Brian Boyce, who led the investigation with SO11 commander Phil Corbett, was concerned about controlling the new informants, who had also increased dramatically from a handful to over 30. \u00a326 million could buy a career criminal a lot of police protection, especially if negotiated through a double agent informant, thought Boyce. He therefore introduced a radical new informant-handling system. The idea was borrowed from his covert work in Northern Ireland with a secret Army unit that ran agents inside Republican and Loyalist movements. The premise behind Boyce's new system was a variant on what hostage negotiators call Stockholm syndrome. To avoid the police handler becoming too close to his informant, he introduced a third party called the controller.\n\nBoyce had become uneasy about the appointment of a detective inspector called Ian Brown as the new head of the intelligence cell, a highly sensitive post with access to all informant logs. A few months before his promotion, Brown ran the surveillance team attached to the intelligence cell. Steve Seton, the son-in-law of Brinks target John Lloyd, had asked him to a meeting where he would hear an offer he might not want to refuse. Boyce was unaware that Lloyd had paid Geoff Brennan and his sister Denise \u00a31,000 to set up the meeting with Brown through a mutual police friend, Chris Smith.\n\nBoyce agreed the meeting between Brown and Seton could go ahead, but on one condition. The venue was a pub in Bromley, Kent. At the local police station Boyce personally fitted Brown with a transmitter in his shoe connected to a body mike. An SO11 surveillance team secretly covered the pub meeting. Boyce also took another extraordinary step, unknown to Brown. He told Suckling \u2013 who also had reservations about Seton's approach \u2013 to handpick a separate Flying Squad surveillance team to watch what went down.\n\nWhen Brown returned he explained to Boyce that the equipment had failed to record the conversation with Seton. \"The essence of the deal,\" recalls one well-placed source, \"was if [Boyce] stopped being quite so aggressive, [Lloyd] could get some of the money returned.\" There was no way Boyce was going to be dictated to by criminals, although clearly the villains thought some cops might go for such a deal, maybe because it had worked in the past. The equipment failure troubled Boyce, but there was no evidence of foul play so he didn't take the matter further. But after telling Corbett about it, he privately marked Brown's card and got on with the job in hand.\n\nSeveral months later Brown sought permission to recruit Smith as his number two on the intelligence cell. Boyce was told Smith had a valuable informant capable of putting away John Fleming. Boyce agreed, but he wanted to know the identity of his informant. He was more than a little taken aback to learn it was Geoff Brennan.\n\nSmith's new posting raised some eyebrows among the original Brinks detectives like Suckling, Charman and Redgrave \u2013 \"the three musketeers\". Brennan's father was already their snout, one of the few before Fordham's death changed everything.\n\nBob Suckling is a compact man who lived and breathed the Brinks Mat investigation. His peers say of him that he couldn't remember what he had for breakfast but he could remember every detail of the Brinks investigation, even 20 years later. Certainly his statement to the Untouchables confirms this.\n\nSuckling had first come across Smith when he was serving on the cheque squad dealing with funny money. He believed Smith had dishonestly claimed an informant's reward. So when Smith joined the Brinks squad with Geoff Brennan as his wonder informant Suckling was already short on trust. Old man Brennan also didn't trust his son's long-standing relationship with Smith and had warned Suckling not to mention they were targeting Lloyd because it would get back.\n\nSuckling told the Untouchables about two incidents in 1985, which he felt confirmed his suspicions.\n\nOld man Brennan had tipped them off that Tall Ted Williams had a safe house in Trinity Church Square, near London Bridge. The police placed a secret camera in a tree opposite and monitored the comings and goings of the Arif crime family and other south-east London faces. Some time later old man Brennan asked Charman how the surveillance operation was going and revealed he knew about the covert camera in the tree from his son who had got it from Smith.\n\nWeeks later, old man Brennan gave an almost verbatim account of an informant log Charman had written of their last meeting. He said Smith had told his son and then Geoff told him to keep his mouth shut, as there was money to be earned.\n\nOld man Brennan feared it was only a matter of time before Lloyd and Williams discovered he was a grass. Suckling was now convinced Geoff Brennan was a \"double agent\" informant working for the gangsters to feed disinformation into the Brinks Task Force. Smith, he suspected, was being used to direct the investigation away from Lloyd.\n\nTony Brightwell, whom Brown had replaced on the intelligence cell, supported Suckling's assessment. If Geoff Brennan had such golden leads on the robbers why did he wait until after the death of Fordham to approach the Brinks investigation, Brightwell wondered. \"When he did start working for the squad in early 1985 his arrival coincided with the very period that Lloyd realised he was in deep shit.\"\n\nBrightwell's analysis is very persuasive. First, he says, Lloyd sent Seton in to the Brinks Task Force to find out if there was a deal. There wasn't. When Fordham is killed, the heat is turned up so Lloyd flees to the United States, where he stays for almost nine years. Williams becomes Lloyd's representative in the UK and used his relationship with the Brennan family to lead the Brinks inquiry down blind alleys and away from the buried gold.\n\nSuckling and Charman immediately told Mellins and Boyce about their concern that \"Smith was leaking information\". They suggested he should be removed from the Brinks investigation rather than force a formal corruption inquiry.\n\nMellins spoke to old man Brennan and was \"satisfied\" there had been a leak, but he didn't know who was responsible. Smith and Brown flatly denied any compromise when Boyce confronted them.\n\nFrom then on the Brinks squad split into two hostile camps. \"There was an awful lot of distrust going on within the squad,\" remembers detective Tony Curtis, who was firmly in the Suckling camp. \"Our little group tried to keep everything we had to ourselves. It was becoming a very strange place to work.\" Charman quipped, \"You had to have wing mirrors to work in that squad from then on.\"\n\nSmith and Brown had also recruited Brennan's sister, Denise, to inform for the Brinks squad. The brother and sister were a poisonous double act earning money from the criminals and the police for their selective information.\n\nPrivately, Boyce felt there was a concerted attempt by south London criminals and police officers to undermine his inquiry. He supported Suckling and Charman over Smith and Brown and felt their information was invariably more substantial. Boyce was also angry that Smith and Brown were handling informants outside his new system.\n\nIt is plain to see from the bad blood papers how almost ten years later when Brennan was in trouble over the Wang theft he would use Smith to make false allegations against Redgrave and Charman, believing his former Brinks handler might even delight in passing them on.\n\nSince the Brinks inquiry, Smith's career in the Flying Squad at Tower Bridge had advanced. According to his boss there, the Kiwi detective had \"powerful protectors within the job\". In 1992, they selected Smith for special attachment to the Organised Crime Group Projects Team, a new surveillance unit targeting serious criminals identified by SO11. This brought him close to John Grieve and Roy Clark, who were setting up the Ghost Squad at the same time. When Brennan turned supergrass in 1994 they took Smith even further into the inner sanctum as his minder.\n\nBrennan's serious allegations to the PCA against Smith 30 months later presented serious difficulties for superintendent John Coles. The Brinks inquiry was a place the Yard didn't want to revisit, not least because of the unfolding Stephen Lawrence scandal. Another factor was Kenny Noye. He had been on the run from a road rage murder since May 1996, and one month later featured large in the police corruption trial of SERCS detective John Donald, who had a relationship with south-east London drug dealers connected to Noye, John Fleming and Ted Williams.\n\nColes had clearly identified what he called a \"Smith camp\" on the Brinks inquiry, many of whom came from the notorious Brixton Robbery Squad. One of them was DCI Peter Atkins, another officer Boyce had serious concerns about. The Brinks inquiry chief wanted to sack Atkins for his unauthorised _liaison dangereuse_ in Paris with bent lawyer Michael Relton. But Boyce came to realise that like Smith, Atkins also had protection from possibly the same very senior officers at the Yard.\n\nAtkins' Brinks past was very much a live issue when Coles was examining the \"bad blood papers\". Another major supergrass we've already mentioned, Maurice O'Mahoney, was still waiting in 1997 for the Yard to resolve a civil action he'd brought in 1994 against Atkins and the commissioner. Mo the grass had claimed that Atkins and a long list of south London detectives tried to kill him because he was about to blow the whistle on their corruption during the Brinks Mat investigation. Interestingly, the Yard settled the case and paid Mo damages and costs.\n\nWe discovered just how selective the Untouchables were about which allegations they investigated when we learned that a former Brinks detective had passed intelligence to the anti-corruption squad about DS Chris Smith that was obviously relevant to Coles' inquiry.\n\nDetective constable John Bull had received information in November 1997 from a former Brinks target called Tommy Farrant, whom he was trying to develop as an informant on a drug murder in Scotland. Farrant was refusing to help because he claimed he had been stuck in an allegedly corrupt relationship with Chris Smith and Ian Brown since the Brinks inquiry. DS Bull says he put the two names on a formal report and passed it to his boss, detective chief inspector Martin Bridger, who shortly afterwards became an Untouchable. Smith and Bridger had served together at the Tower Bridge Flying Squad. We asked the Yard what Bridger had done with the names. They declined to answer. We approached Bridger at the Old Bailey with the same questions. The Untouchable became very annoyed and stormed off, repeating, \"I'm not going to answer that.\" Brown and Smith also declined to discuss these and other matters.\n\nThere was another compelling Brinks-related reason why Smith had to be protected from Brennan's allegations to the PCA. While a member of the Projects Team, he had been involved in a surveillance operation in 1995 that led to the arrest of John Lloyd for an audacious attempt to defraud the British banking system of millions of pounds.\n\nLloyd had returned to the UK in April 1994 after nine years of self-imposed exile in the US. The CPS had agreed to drop the case against him for handling \u00a317.3 million of the stolen Brinks gold on the grounds of insufficient evidence. A few months later he hooked up with his old friend Kenny Noye, who had just finished serving his long sentence for handling the bullion.\n\nIn January 1995, Lloyd started plotting the bank scam. The so-called Hole in the Wall gang plotted to bug cash machine telephone lines with the help of BT insiders and then copy customers' PIN numbers by accessing the banks' mainframe computers. Other members of the gang included Lloyd's son-in-law, Steve Seton, and Martin Grant, the computer expert. He eventually became a participating informant and revealed that Noye had provided some start-up capital for the scam. It appears Lloyd was a bit short because while he was planning the fraud, in June 1995 he concluded an out-of-court settlement with the Brinks Mat insurers, estimated to have been \u00a35 million.\n\nSmith followed the gang throughout the early part of 1995. At the same time he was acting as Brennan's minder in the witness protection scheme, having delivered him to the Ghost Squad the previous year. After Lloyd was arrested in July 1995, Smith started moonlighting with other members of the Projects Team and Brennan in preparation for his retirement the following year.\n\nBrennan claims that in 1996 a relative of Lloyd approached his sister, Denise, to see if a deal could be done over his arrest. Brennan says there was a meeting at the Asda supermarket in Swanley, Kent, which Denise reported back to Smith.\n\nInterestingly, Lloyd pleaded guilty with the rest of the gang on 4 November 1996. Two days later Brennan was charged with his role in the Wang theft. He then went off like a Catherine wheel and revealed the Ghost Squad operation to its principal targets, Redgrave and Charman. When they demanded an inquiry into Smith's role, is it any wonder he had to be protected?\n\nBrennan was losing patience with the PCA and superintendent Coles. He felt their investigation into the moonlighting was ignoring clear evidence he'd provided of payments to Smith. Brennan had never been able to provide similar evidence against Redgrave and Charman, yet the Untouchables were still pursuing them like zombies.\n\nColes claims Brennan refused to co-operate with his inquiry. But this doesn't explain why by August 1997 he still hadn't interviewed Smith or any other detective named in Brennan's complaint to the PCA eight months earlier.\n\nBrennan forced the issue by going to the _Sunday Times_ Insight Team with his evidence. The newspaper published an article on 24 August naming Smith and detective constable Alan Moralee. This led Smith to contact Coles two days later and give a disjointed and partial account of his relationship with Brennan on tape and under caution. Ultimately, Smith lied to Coles, denying he had moonlighted.\n\nBrennan kept in touch with the _Sunday Times_ and a wily freelance journalist, Martin Short, co-author of the great expos\u00e9 in the seventies, _The Fall of Scotland Yard_. Brennan provided further evidence of his payments to Smith for the moonlighting work. Ironically, some of the cheques were issued from a TSB account the Ghost Squad had set up for Brennan under his new identity as Geoff Newman.\n\nThe Insight Team discovered that Smith, although retired, was due to give evidence in a major trial starting on 2 February 1998 at the Old Bailey. The prosecution was a spin-off from Smith's work on the Project Team tracking an armed robber called James Phillips, known to his gang as \"the Ayatollah\" and linked to the Adams crime family.\n\nThe day before the trial started the _Sunday Times_ published a second article \u2013 \"Yard officers sold secrets to criminals\" \u2013 naming Smith in the moonlighting scam and claiming that a circle of officers had been paid to access the police computer to see if criminal contacts of Brennan were under investigation. Roy Clark was quoted as denying there had been a cover-up around Smith.\n\nHowever, almost immediately Coles received authority to carry out a surveillance operation on Insight editor David Leppard and Martin Short. They were videoed and photographed in various London locations over the next six weeks. Surveillance was also set up outside Short's home and while he was at the Old Bailey.\n\nDavid Bate, QC for Phillips, took Smith through a devastating cross-examination over four days. By showing Smith had been dishonest over his dealings with Brennan, Bate hoped to destroy the integrity of the surveillance operation against Phillips. Smith was therefore startled when suddenly Bate asked if he knew a Mr Newman aka Brennan. Smith explained how Brennan had been a police informant for the last 20 years; that he had acted as his \"social worker\" during a \"very secret inquiry\" and then Brennan turned against him.\n\nSmith denied encouraging Brennan to make false allegations against other officers, a reference to Redgrave and Charman although they weren't named. He refuted suggestions of any impropriety with Brennan, denied he had taken \"a penny\" from him, but said he was \"too busy\" to log all his contacts with the supergrass.\n\nBate turned up the heat. He accused Smith of perjury and having \"a totally corrupt relationship\" with Brennan. Smith denied moonlighting, misusing police equipment or fiddling his expenses. He also denied that he or detective Alan Moralee had accessed the police computer on a private surveillance job in return for payment.\n\nWhen Bate persisted, Smith suddenly asked to speak to a lawyer. Witnesses giving evidence can refuse to answer questions only if they believe that to respond truthfully will incriminate them or that by giving an answer they know to be false will constitute perjury. This is called invoking your right against self-incrimination. And it is very rare indeed to see among police officers.\n\nThe following day Bate went in for the kill. He asked Smith if he or other Flying Squad officers had taken money from Brennan. Smith invoked his right and refused to answer. The defence barrister was in his stride. Suddenly, Bate produced two cheques from Brennan to Smith totalling \u00a31,400. An embattled Smith invoked his rights again. So Bate taunted him to deny he had previously committed perjury.\n\nTwo members of Coles' team watched all one thousand cuts Bate had inflicted on Smith's integrity. Luckily there was an eleven-day break before he was back in the box. But in the meantime, Bate had examined Smith's bank accounts, which he used on 16 February to deliver the final _coup de gr\u00e2ce_. Once again Smith invoked his right against self-incrimination, this time when Bate produced a schedule of payments from Brennan's account to his totalling \u00a310,851. The barrister called Smith a liar and perjurer before sitting down.\n\nLuckily the prosecution case didn't rest on Smith. Two of Phillips' gang had turned Queen's Evidence and he was eventually given a twenty-year prison sentence. The prosecution did however recognize that moonlighting was a criminal offence even if the officer had retired, because it involved obtaining money by deception. Incredibly, Smith was never arrested by the Untouchables for this or for perjury.\n\nIt was another three months before Coles got round to interviewing Smith for misconduct in a public office, false accounting and perjury. Smith had been disclosed a lot of evidence to prepare for the interviews in April and May. If he had an explanation this was the time to give it. But once again he invoked his right against self-incrimination when Coles asked the odd incisive question. In the end though, Smith's replies proved he had perjured himself about the moonlighting and receiving money from Brennan. To this day he has never claimed he returned the \u00a310,000 to Scotland Yard.\n\nIf Smith could lie at the Old Bailey about this, then what else was he lying about? What really had gone on during the Brinks Mat investigation? What really happened in those 12 days in June 1994 when Smith took Brennan and Denise to the Ghost Squad? Were the brother and sister now telling the truth when they claimed Smith had \"rehearsed\" them on the way to meet Gaspar? Had Smith taken other money from Brennan over the years? Did the anti-corruption squad have a corrupt officer among them? These and myriad other questions should have been a key feature of Operation Cornwall. But the Untouchables never interviewed Smith again.\n\n\"What is so frightening,\" says Redgrave, \"is that if Bate had not brought all this out in the open, CIB3 would have continued to dry clean Smith and cover up his corrupt relationship with Brennan.\"\n\nBy May 1998, the Untouchables were drinking in the last chance saloon. Their case against Redgrave and Charman was in tatters. Brennan was a liar and a thief who'd had over the Ghost Squad. Smith was a busted flush and the only man who had provably taken money from the supergrass and then lied about it. For their part, senior Yard chiefs had cut an unlawful deal with Brennan and helped him launder the stolen \u00a3400,000.\n\nTo add to the humiliation, the prosecution against Brennan had to be dropped on CPS advice. The CPS, it emerged, had not been consulted when the Untouchables charged Brennan in November 1996. Lead lawyer Stuart Sampson also felt he had been \"kept in the dark\" about the strength of the case against Redgrave and Charman.\n\nIn March 1997, he advised that if the Untouchables continued with Brennan's prosecution then details of the failed covert operation against the two suspended detectives would have to be disclosed. This would mean disaster for the ongoing propaganda efforts to launch the Untouchables to the public and parliament.\n\nThe only hope was to undermine Operation Nightshade as a \"smokescreen\" invented by Redgrave and Charman to prevent their corruption with Brennan and the Wang theft from being discovered. There were two strands to this unsustainable theory: firstly, that Redgrave had sabotaged the theft investigation and secondly, that he invented the arms deal as a diversion.\n\nBy this stage Coles had recruited DC Kevin Maul to the Operation Cornwall team. He was the fraud detective sent halfway around the world between 1994 and 1996 looking for Brennan when the Ghost Squad had hidden their duplicitous supergrass in Kent.\n\n\"When Maul was able to carry out the long overdue financial investigation of Brennan it showed exactly what the supergrass did with the \u00a3400,000 he stole from the Wangs,\" says Charman's combative lawyer, Mark Lake. \"It also made it clear that Brennan didn't have \u00a350,000 before the theft to bung Michael and John.\"\n\nMaul told us the ginger giant had exerted no malign influence over his investigation of the theft. And Coles had statements from five senior officers confirming this.\n\nFurther blows to the smokescreen theory emerged in the US when Coles' team spoke to the Houston Four. If Operation Nightshade was bogus then they had to be innocent businessmen who in no way tried to scam the Wangs. Unfortunately, when the Untouchables met Billy Padon he was in a Texas prison serving four years for six counts of bank fraud.\n\nCPS lawyer Stuart Sampson, who specialises in fraud cases, was not impressed when he read the remaining statements from Butch Jones, Bill Padgett and James Sprouce. He felt their involvement in the mobile phone deal was too suspicious to put them forward as witnesses of truth.\n\nJones, Padgett and Hong Kong broker Walter Le also tried to distance themselves from the arms deal they had negotiated back in 1993 with undercover officers posing as representatives of Loyalist terrorists. A major obstacle to the fabricated arms deal theory was the covertly taped evidence of these encounters and the statements from the very experienced undercover officers, which all confirmed the bona fides of this side of Operation Nightshade. DS Richard Hester had retired from the police when we met. \"As far as I was concerned [Roger Crooks] was the genuine article. This was backed up by other phone calls I had with Padgett,\" he said. Hester found the Untouchables' suggestion that Redgrave had duped him fantastic and unworkable.\n\nRemarkably, Roger Crooks, the central figure in the arms deal, was never interviewed. According to Brennan's solicitor, Phil Kelly, CIB documents he'd seen showed this decision was taken in October 1997.\n\nCrooks told us he voluntarily visited Scotland Yard in 1998 to clear up matters but no statement was taken from him and the detectives he spoke to claimed there was no reference to Operation Nightshade in their files.\n\nColes' trip to the US then was a disaster for those in the Yard who needed evidence of a smokescreen. If Redgrave was guilty of anything it was exaggeration in some of his reports and boastfulness. According to a close police friend of the ginger giant, Redgrave already had a reputation among senior officers of over-selling his operations to get their authority for covert infiltration. Yet it was a further measure of the Untouchables' desperation that they seized on certain inflated phrases in Redgrave's Operation Nightshade reports to continue insisting the whole arms deal was a construct, or \"red herring\" as the PCA called it.\n\n\"I do get the feeling there seems to be with investigations [by CIB] an attempt to prove a point not to investigate the evidence \u2013 all the worst aspects of policing... I believe [Redgrave and Charman] are innocent. I have very good reason to doubt the integrity of those who say otherwise. There isn't a scrap of evidence except from seriously tainted people,\" says retired DI Bob Suckling.\n\nRedgrave goes further. \"I didn't steal the Wangs' money, Brennan did; I didn't launder the money, Gaspar did; I didn't sabotage the theft inquiry, Clark did; I didn't take money from Brennan, Smith did. None of those officers are suspended, I was.\"\n\nMichael Charman was not rank ambitious like Redgrave. He was happy being an effective detective constable. Charman had drifted from a career in hotel catering into policing. Lambeth-born, he was 18 when he joined in 1969.\n\nCharman met Redgrave on the Brinks Mat inquiry when both men were in their early thirties and married with young kids. They became close friends but the stress of suspension was severely testing that relationship.\n\nCharman's marriage fell apart after he was suspended in 1997. He'd already begun a relationship with a young CPS executive officer called Debbie Cahill. Their romance developed while working together preparing his Flying Squad cases for trial. The couple became closer after his suspension and the death of Debbie's mother in April 1998. When she returned to work after a month's sick leave Debbie plunged straight into a sensitive case involving one of the Arif crime family and three others in a conspiracy to supply ninety-six kilos of heroin. It was sensitive because some of the key witnesses were police officers from the Projects Team who had been named in Brennan's moonlighting allegations to the PCA and in the _Sunday Times_ articles. The CPS had a duty to disclose to the defence if any of the officers in the Arif case were under investigation by CIB or had been suspended. Of concern were witnesses, DC Jimmy Angel and DC Spencer Mott. Debbie's boss also wanted to know the position on Chris Smith.\n\nDetective superintendent John Coles was passed the CPS enquiry in mid-June 1998. By then Operation Cornwall was a total failure and the uncomfortable truth about Smith had recently emerged at the Old Bailey. When Coles discovered he was dealing with Charman's girlfriend he seized on the opportunity to mount a sting.\n\nThe operation was codenamed Ambleside. Coles briefed Roy Clark about bugging Debbie's work phone and placing a listening device in her house. The justification for these extremely intrusive measures was flimsy: firstly, that she was suspected of \"leaking\" information about Smith to Charman, and secondly, that Redgrave and Charman were in cahoots with Brennan to undermine Operation Cornwall.\n\nTo execute his sting, Coles deliberately conveyed to Debbie that there were \"immense problems\" around Smith and requested a case conference with the prosecuting barristers, Orlando Pownall, who was in on the sting, and his junior Mark Dennis.\n\nDebbie says that because of her relationship with Charman she'd cleared it internally that if certain matters were mentioned she would leave the case conference, now scheduled for 15 July. Debbie had booked the following day off because she was going out that night with Mark Dennis and another barrister.\n\nAt the end of the case conference Coles' assistant handed out sealed envelopes. Debbie Cahill's one was specially marked. She didn't open it until she was on the late train home and a little tipsy. The envelope contained a transcript of the interview Coles had conducted with Smith a few months earlier. Debbie thought nothing of it. CIB3 surveillance officers watched her all the way to the front door. Another surveillance unit monitored her smoochy goodnight call to Charman. She never mentioned the contents of the envelope.\n\nThe next day Charman came over and they went shopping for fish, oblivious to the surveillance team around them. Charman wanted to invite Redgrave over for supper. He thought the ginger giant might need cheering up. He had only recently been discharged from hospital after a dramatic suicide attempt.\n\nThe search of the family home in January 1997 was the final straw for Redgrave's long-suffering wife. She had also discovered he was having an affair with a policewoman and wanted a divorce. His suspension was a bitter blow to a man who had invested his whole identity and sense of self-worth in being a successful detective. With that gone depression set in and he started drinking heavily. His mood swings at home were sometimes unbearable for his children and now estranged wife, who continued to allow him to live under the same roof. Redgrave continued the affair into 1998 and went on holiday with his lover to Spain that June. The day after returning to the marital home he took a massive overdose of anti-depressants. Redgrave then left a goodbye message on his wife's mobile phone.\n\nAlthough Charman had read the Smith interview before he called Redgrave from Cahill's phone, he made no mention of it when he invited the ginger giant and his son for dinner. After much persuasion Redgrave arrived at Debbie's alone.\n\nThe ginger giant was on strong medication, but they all tucked into the wine as Debbie prepared the meal. Where they sat in the kitchen was right next to the bug. Coles was outside in a police car listening to the conversation, which moved from the TV coverage of the day's Stephen Lawrence inquiry hearings to the Smith transcript. Neither Redgrave nor Charman were overly impressed and Debbie says she then joked about burning the document.\n\nColes decided this was all he needed to make an arrest. His men came crashing through the front door. All three were arrested and bailed. But over the next few months Coles had difficulty finding an A-list London prosecutor who would take the case. Various Treasury Counsel turned it down because they knew Debbie Cahill professionally or personally. But the defence suspect there was another motive: the merits of the prosecution were very weak.\n\nA prosecutor called Richard Latham QC was given the brief. Latham had the air of a frustrated Latin teacher stuck in a provincial public school. His junior was a vampish barrister called Maureen Baker.\n\nThe Yard was hoping they could extricate the Untouchables from the entire mess over Redgrave and Charman. Latham saw boxes of files before giving Coles an effusive opinion in November 1998 that both defendants and Cahill should be charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and breaches of the Official Secrets Act.\n\nLatham wrote that there were several \"tactical reasons\" why Redgrave and Charman should be charged immediately rather than wait for the outcome of Operation Cornwall. He didn't specify, but lawyers representing the two detectives would later assert that the Ambleside charges were rushed through because it was already known that Cornwall was going nowhere.\n\nIn May 1999, we met Redgrave and Charman for the first time at the committal hearing in Bow Street Magistrates Court. Latham was so confident the district judge would commit the case to the Old Bailey for trial that he sent his junior instead.\n\nIn a highly embarrassing ruling, district judge Lorraine Morgan discharged all three defendants. She accepted Cahill had acted in an \"improper and unprofessional\" way in showing the transcript to Redgrave and Charman, but added that the prosecution had failed to go beyond that and show \"aiding and abetting\" by the two suspended detectives. She also ruled that the mere disclosure of the Smith interview transcript (something Redgrave and Charman would have been entitled to see anyway) was unlikely to prevent the detection of crime and did not amount to a conspiracy.\n\nThe humiliation for Latham and the Untouchables was total. It is very, very unusual for a magistrate not to commit a case on its merits especially when involving such serious charges. Having failed the criminal test once, Latham and the Yard resolved to approach a High Court judge to overturn the decision. But on careful study of the papers Mr Justice Eady upheld the district judge's decision, once again questioning Latham's judgement in preferring so serious a charge with so little legal merit.\n\nIn July 1999, the game was up. Having considered the wider corruption case against Redgrave and Charman, Latham advised the Untouchables there was insufficient evidence to prosecute them. However his advice wasn't communicated to the two detectives until December.\n\nRemarkably, Latham also advised against prosecuting Chris Smith for any criminal charges due to \"insufficient evidence\". Smith was not the only Untouchable to conveniently escape censure. Nothing had been done about Brennan's PCA complaint against Commander Roger Gaspar, who by then had been promoted to deputy director of NCIS.\n\nSimilarly, detective superintendent David Bailey was never suspended. He retired in May 1997 while the investigation into him was ongoing. Apparently he was concerned about being made the scapegoat for all the Ghost Squad failures. A CIB source told us Bailey discreetly moved to the MI5 section dealing with positive vetting.\n\nRedgrave, Charman and Cahill made separate complaints to the PCA against Coles for malicious prosecution and conspiring to pervert the course of justice.\n\nOperation Ambleside ultimately had two agendas, lawyers representing Redgrave and Charman argue: to divert attention from Smith by mounting an unlawful entrapment operation in the hope that a successful prosecution would remedy the failures of Operations Wrabness and Cornwall.\n\nThe Yard successfully persuaded the PCA to allow the complaints against Coles to be investigated by his colleagues in CIB. Redgrave protested to the hopelessly captured watchdog demanding an independent inquiry. He wrote: \"I have been suspended for more than two and a half years in relation to a complaint that is almost six years old. This has caused the complete destruction of every aspect of my personal and professional life. Friends, financial security, family, marriage, career, reputation, the building blocks of life have all gone, with no hope of recovery.\"\n\nThe PCA was unmoved. Deputy assistant commissioner Andy Trotter eventually got round to interviewing Coles a year later. The Untouchable was allowed to rant and rave for three hours about how _he_ was the victim of a smear campaign by Redgrave, Charman and Brennan. Coles maintained the two detectives were guilty \u2013 he just couldn't prove it. Despite all the witness statements to the contrary, Coles repeated that the arms deal was fabricated and Redgrave had sabotaged the Wang theft investigation and \"hoodwinked\" everybody; although he admitted for the first time that CIB had \"unfortunately\" laundered the \u00a3400,000.\n\nColes also spoke of an elaborate plan to wreck his marriage. It concerned allegations that were flying around the media about an incident at the Hendon training school. According to the story, Coles had made an impromptu visit to see a young female recruit he was allegedly having an affair with, only to find her with a male recruit. It was further alleged he had assaulted one of them and threatened to ruin their careers if they made a fuss. When asked about this, the Yard replied: \"There has been no complaint of assault (formally or informally) on Samantha Bird or any other person \u2013 therefore the suggestion of an investigation into criminal allegations against DCS Coles is without foundation.\"\n\nBy this time we had written a number of critical articles in the _Guardian_ about the Untouchables' unlawful supergrass strategy and the mishandling of Brennan and protection of Smith. Coles took the opportunity in his interview with Trotter to join us to the \"conspiracy\" against him. He revealed that our \"fabricated\" articles had been referred unsuccessfully to the Attorney General with a view to prosecuting us for contempt of court. He also spoke of how the head of the Untouchables, Commander Andy Hayman, had on several occasions written to the _Guardian_ editor. It was only later that we uncovered this attempt to smear us and derail our investigation. The strategy was complemented with surveillance officers following us to meetings.\n\nPredictably, and after 29 months, the PCA decided not to uphold the complaint against Coles. The CPS sacked Debbie Cahill. And the Yard continued to keep Redgrave and Charman suspended.\n\nThe criminal courts were exhausted so the Yard brought the case into a pseudo-legal forum they controlled absolutely \u2013 disciplinary proceedings. In September 2000 both officers were told they would be disciplined for discreditable conduct, notwithstanding that the same ingredients of this \"offence\" had failed to impress two independent criminal judges.\n\nDetectives Redgrave and Charman would remain suspended for another four years as they fought to clear their name and expose the cover-up.\n\n## [15\n\nManipulating Lawrence](contents.html#ch15)\n\nCommissioner Condon was unhappy with the televised Lawrence Inquiry hearings that ran from March to October 1998. A row of arrogant, surly detectives of all ranks had passed before the Inquiry panel, many with implausible excuses met by boos and derision from the public gallery. Condon moaned that the cross-examination was \"unfair\" to his men. It was also only a matter of time before the Barker Review of the first murder inquiry he had signed off back in 1993 would be publicly exposed as an appalling whitewash.\n\nThe Untouchables were a significant part of Scotland Yard's containment strategy for the Lawrence Inquiry. The corruption intelligence and evidence they had accumulated since 1993 was not freely shared, as the case of Redgrave and Charman showed.\n\nDuring their bugged dinner conversation on 17 July 1998, both suspended detectives had resolved to give evidence to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. Redgrave was particularly riled about references to Brinks Mat and the murdered informant David Norris, which had emerged during the cross-examination of retired commander Ray Adams the previous day. Michael Mansfield QC, the Lawrence family's barrister, was lacking \"raw intelligence\" about corruption in south-east London, Redgrave told Charman. \"It's really a shame they don't know the truth... Mansfield had almost got it right, he's putting the allegations to them but he doesn't know the answers.\"\n\nJust weeks earlier, Doreen Lawrence had called for a separate independent investigation into the aura of police corruption around her son's murder. The Lawrence Inquiry had hoped officers would come forward. But the thick blue line was never crossed. Redgrave and Charman would have been the first. They wanted to speak about their experience of Brinks Mat, suicide cop Alan \"Taffy\" Holmes and the firm within a firm of corrupt detectives in south-east London who they felt were still being protected by the Yard. \"I was going to talk about Brennan, Freemasonry and the allegations of corruption surrounding the Norris murder,\" says Redgrave.\n\nA senior retired Kent officer who was part of the PCA-supervised investigation had already told us: \"If you were to ask me is there corruption in south-east London I would say it was in the past, but that's not to say the people responsible should not be exposed and held to account. The crux of this is David Norris.\"\n\nUndoubtedly, the intervention of Redgrave and Charman would have enabled the Inquiry to better probe the Yard about the Lawrence family's concerns. But it was not to be. Detective superintendent John Coles was outside listening to the bugged conversation. His ears must have pricked up when he heard the name David Norris \u2013 Coles was his controller at the time of the informant's assassination in 1991.\n\nNot once were Redgrave and Charman asked about their secretly recorded comments, neither later that night immediately following their arrest nor in the four interviews that followed over several months. There was no investigation at all.\n\nLawrence Inquiry adviser John Sentamu, the Bishop of Stepney, felt it was a \"serious matter\" that the Yard had said nothing about Redgrave and Charman. Had he known, he said the Inquiry could have organised a private session to hear the two suspended detectives.\n\nEven the original transcripts of the bugged dinner conversation omitted all references to Stephen Lawrence, Ray Adams and David Norris. And when the two detectives were charged in December 1998, the prosecution referred to what was left out as \"inconsequential remarks\".\n\nRedgrave maintains that he was deliberately kept tainted during the final stages of the Lawrence Inquiry to ensure he could not tell what he knew about the corruption management going on in the Yard. \"There are links between south-east London criminal families and policemen, senior policemen, that go way back. That's what all this was about and the Yard couldn't afford for any of this to come out during the Lawrence Inquiry.\"\n\nJust before the cross-examination of retired commander Ray Adams, the Lawrence family received information about his relationship with Kenny Noye and David Norris. There was also a suggestion that the reason he'd given for retiring within days of Stephen's murder was not truthful. Did he really have a bad back or was this an excuse?\n\nSir William Macpherson, the retired high court judge chairing the inquiry, agreed to an adjournment while Mansfield reconsidered his cross-examination of Adams. Macpherson and his three advisers had examined the Yard's files on the controversial commander. Bishop Sentamu, Dr Richard Stone and the retired deputy chief constable of Greater Manchester Police, Tom Cook, were amazed at what they read.\n\nWe spoke to a senior police source who had clearance to read all the sensitive material, not just about Adams but also other detectives involved in the murder inquiry. He had also seen the intelligence file on south-east London drug trafficker Clifford Norris, father of the main suspect in Stephen's murder. The information left him and the Lawrence Inquiry very concerned about how the policing situation in south-east London had been allowed to develop. It \"stank to high heaven\", he said.\n\nThe Lawrence Inquiry was privately amazed how some of these detectives had managed to stay in the force after separate and unconnected internal investigations into their activities. In Adams' case this concerned his relationship with suicide cop Alan \"Taffy\" Holmes during the Brinks Mat investigation. In the case of sergeant Dave Coles, he had been investigated during the late eighties for his relationship with Clifford Norris while serving on the notorious Tower Bridge Flying Squad.\n\nScotland Yard and Ray Adams were clearly concerned about Mansfield's cross-examination because during the adjournment DCS David Wood secretly met Adams at the Star pub in Leatherhead to discuss his forthcoming evidence. Adams had been formally notified of the allegations Mansfield would be putting to him. They concerned claims that he had inveigled his way onto the murder investigation to delay the arrest of the five suspects, and had done so because of his previous links with Noye, who knew Clifford Norris.\n\nAdams \"minced in\" to the Lawrence Inquiry looking like Donald Sinden, a member of the Inquiry team recalls. Mansfield had found out about the secret tryst with Wood and asked Adams to explain. At first he said he couldn't remember whom he met, but after a discreet intervention from the Yard's barrister, Adams admitted he had discussed the \"parameters\" of his evidence around David Norris, the dead informant, and Clifford Norris with the Untouchable.\n\nAdams was reluctant to discuss David Norris with Mansfield but confirmed he'd dealt with him. He denied any contact with Clifford or foreknowledge that he was the father of one of the suspects in the Lawrence murder. The panel found him \"defensive\" and noticed \"strange features\" to his evidence. But in the final analysis they determined there was no evidence of collusion nor that Adams had corruptly held back the prosecution of the suspects. His back problems were also genuine.\n\nAdams had weathered a long and hostile cross-examination. But it appears he was more affected than he publicly let on. According to a senior Lawrence Inquiry source, the beleaguered commander did not leave the building straight away. Apparently he locked himself in a toilet cubicle and later explained to the startled security guard who found him there that he was trying to avoid the press.\n\nSupergrass Duncan Hanrahan would also have been of great interest to the Lawrence Inquiry, had the Untouchables shared what was emerging from his debriefing.\n\nHanrahan rolled over immediately after his arrest with Martin King in May 1997. Hanrahan later made a formal complaint to the PCA that CIB3 officers David Wood and Chris Jarratt weren't interested in him supplying information about his corrupt activities with King because they didn't want to get into commander Ray Adams and Brinks Mat.\n\nHanrahan says King didn't roll over because he knew too many heavy people from south-east London and the corrupt police circles they had mixed in over the last two decades. King, a former detective, was the window between the Brinks Mat era and the Lawrence scandal, which the Yard wanted to brick up, says Hanrahan. He told CIB3 that Adams had introduced him to King and was a guest at his own wedding.\n\nTranscripts of Hanrahan's bugged cell conversations show he talked extensively about the relationship between Adams and King and gave a strong indication it was corrupt, so much so that the inmate who was secretly recording him for the Untouchables felt compelled to tell CIB3 that the retired commander \"definitely should be looked at\".\n\nIn particular, Hanrahan alleged that Adams had helped King get off a drink driving charge. He described Adams effectively as someone who was too clever to be caught and alleged the retired officer had tipped off King about a sting operation over the recovery of a stolen antique. We asked the Yard whether Adams had been under investigation when Wood secretly met him at the Star pub. Commander Andy Hayman of CIB3 replied: \"We are not prepared to discuss whether former commander Ray Adams has been\/is subject to an investigation. DCS Wood met Mr Adams to discuss the parameters of Adams' forthcoming evidence to the Lawrence Inquiry. Assistant commissioner Johnston was aware of the meeting and agreed to it taking place. We are not prepared to comment further.\"\n\nAdams thankfully was. He told us he hadn't seen Norris for years before he was murdered and stressed there was \"zero opportunity\" for him to have acted improperly with the informant. He said he had called Johnston to find out if there was any connection between David and Clifford Norris. Johnston appointed Wood to look into it. Adams then sent Wood a copy of Mansfield's questions unaware he was from CIB3. At the pub Wood told him there was \"no connection\".\n\nAdams said he liked Hanrahan and King but had no knowledge of any allegations they'd made to CIB against him. \"I could tell you a few things about Hanrahan that would make your hair stand on end,\" he offered tantalisingly, but refused to be drawn. He too had heard he was on a list of \"ten names\" floating around the Yard, but said an unnamed senior officer had assured him he wasn't under investigation.\n\nA senior Untouchable once told us that in the eighties and nineties it was well known among officers, including senior ones at the Yard, which squads were bent and to be avoided. The East Dulwich SERCS office was one of them. It had been bent for years, well before the murder of its prolific informant David Norris. His execution gave the Yard a unique opportunity to tackle the corruption. But as we have established, this was ignored. As a result, a cell of corrupt cops remained or moved to other specialist squads to carry on their corrupt ways.\n\nDuring the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry the opportunity once more arose. This time it was manipulated by the Untouchables to ensure the full, appalling picture never emerged.\n\nIt began with a drug dealer called Evelyn Susan Fleckney who turned supergrass in April 1998, weeks after she was sentenced to 15 years. DCS Wood persuaded her to give information on her long-time handler and lover, detective constable Robert Clark, who she felt had sold her out in court. The Untouchable promised help in reducing her sentence on appeal.\n\nFleckney and DC Clark had become involved professionally and personally in 1990 when he helped arrest her for drugs. David Norris had provided East Dulwich with the information that led to Fleckney's arrest and that of her then partner, an armed robber called Billy Pope. Fleckney got a suspended sentence because while on bail, and without Pope knowing, she agreed to became an informant. DC Clark became her handler and secretly wrote to the judge informing him of her fight against crime.\n\nFleckney's arrival at East Dulwich created a bizarre situation where the SERCS office was running two informants at the same time, one of whom had grassed up the other. As informants, Fleckney claimed, Norris dealt her drugs which she believed he was recycling on behalf of someone on the squad. Before his murder in April 1991 she had apparently discovered he was the one who grassed her up.\n\nAfter Norris's death Fleckney became the squad's number one informant and earner. DC Clark gave her the pseudonym \"Jack Higgins\". Their relationship was crooked from the start, she told CIB3. Fleckney would identify dealers, grass them up and recycle the drugs Clark had seized. He would share the money and rewards with her and other officers. The couple even went on holiday as Mr and Mrs Simpson, but the hotel receipts would later sink Clark at his trial.\n\nFleckney claimed Clark twice made her pregnant. The first she aborted, the second she miscarried. At the time, Clark was also going out with the daughter of a senior officer in the Yard. He always denied any affair and later claimed that Fleckney was lying because she couldn't say whether he was circumcised.\n\nClark transferred to the Tower Bridge Flying Squad in October 1995, leaving Fleckney behind. But the following year a drug-dealing friend of hers called \"Guilford\" John Cudworth made a complaint against Clark and his partner DC Chris Drury that they had shaken him down for several kilos of cannabis.\n\nThe CIB investigation got nowhere until Fleckney rolled over in March 1998, just as the Stephen Lawrence public hearings began. Four months later, and off the back of her information, detective superintendent John Yates, a fresh-faced Untouchable, arrested Neil Stanley Putnam, a detective constable at East Dulwich. He took no time to turn supergrass and went into an extensive \"cleansing\" process as part of an operation codenamed Russia. None of Putnam's initial debriefs \u2013 where the \"parameters\" of his evidence were determined \u2013 was tape-recorded. Putnam had apparently found God and become a born-again Christian like his wife. But he had stayed corrupt and unrepentant until Yates arrested him in July 1998. The Untouchable told us Putnam's conversion was genuine, but many still scoff at the cop who found Christ so late.\n\nPutnam corroborated Fleckney against Clark. But he also named a number of his other colleagues as corrupt; in particular a key detective involved in the Lawrence murder inquiry who one year later had joined the East Dulwich SERCS. Detective sergeant John \"OJ\" Davidson was an experienced officer who'd served on the Brinks Mat squad, had mouthed the Yard's official line at the inquest of his friend Alan 'Taffy' Holmes and in 1993 was responsible for tracing witnesses and dealing with the crucial informant \"Grant\", the skinhead who had named the five suspects soon after the Lawrence murder. Ironically, a few weeks after Davidson had given robust evidence to the Lawrence Inquiry denying he was corrupt or that he had mishandled \"Grant\" and held back in his inquiries, Putnam made a range of allegations against Davidson involving drugs and stolen goods.\n\nIn early September 1998, when the Lawrence Inquiry was in summer recess, the Untouchables raided Davidson's home and confiscated various documents. He was released without charge. Davidson had six months earlier retired from the police while suspended for suspected moonlighting. Nothing was proved against him by the time he completed 30 years' service so he left to set up a private detective agency in Croydon.\n\nThe Yard took a strategic decision to tell the Lawrence Inquiry but not the family or its lawyers. The media were also briefed that the raid was unconnected to the Lawrence matter. However, as the unrecorded briefing of Putnam continued it emerged that he had made allegations against Davidson that directly impacted on his handling of the Lawrence murder inquiry.\n\nPutnam is said to have claimed that Davidson had a corrupt association with Clifford Norris. Davidson denies this. However, he was arrested in May 1999, after the Lawrence Inquiry report was published. Then one month later he was told there would be no further action. Davidson left the UK to run a bar with a former police colleague in Spain. He told us shortly before he left that he was innocent.\n\nImran Khan, the Lawrence family solicitor, feels that had the \"Putnam information\" been shared it would have re-shaped the type of cross-examination, not just of Davidson but other police witnesses. He now wants an independent inquiry into the corruption allegations around the Lawrence murder. But of course the strategic point of setting up the Untouchables was to prevent this and keep the corruption allegations separate from the Lawrence Inquiry. Had there been an independent system of investigating corruption the liaison with the Lawrence Inquiry would undoubtedly have provided far greater illumination and ventilation of the persistent and well-founded suspicions of police corruption in south-east London.\n\nEvelyn Fleckney, for example, initially refused to testify against DC Robert Clark fearing she would end up like David Norris. She claimed Clark had warned her in a non-threatening way that if she ever blew the whistle she would be shot dead.\n\nThe Untouchables managed to assuage Fleckney's fears. We don't know how because the cosy prison chats were unrecorded. Eventually, she and Putnam gave strong evidence against Clark and his partner DC Chris Drury, who were subsequently convicted. The Old Bailey judge Mr Justice Blofeld then passed lenient sentences on both supergrasses, but not before making this comment: \"It is with regret I have to say the [East Dulwich SERCS] was not well run and supervision not what it should have been, and supervisors were not themselves adequately supervised. The approach of the squad was that they could do what they wanted.\"\n\nNo serving senior SERCS manager was ever subsequently disciplined for the monumental and systemic failures at East Dulwich. The same was true about the Flying Squad and Stoke Newington. The Untouchables did, though, put two East Dulwich detectives on a secret blacklist. One was DS Peter Blacketer and the other DC Chris Hardy, a motorbike surveillance officer who'd once sold a car to Robert Clark. Hardy was also a close friend of retired DCI Chris Simpson, the detective who ran the squad and handled David Norris. Simpson had retired in 1997 to work as a fraud investigator in the City. The Untouchables informed Hardy he was on the blacklist because of his continued friendship with Simpson, someone they regarded as \"a corrupter of police officers\".\n\nWe later met up with Robert Clark on one of his days out of prison. He said Fleckney had continued to write to him, send him money and a Valentine's card. After a long discussion we said goodbye at the tube station opposite Scotland Yard. He turned and said: \"I've protected a lot of people by keeping my mouth shut.\" One senior officer, he recalled, had turned up in court \"to see if I was keeping quiet\".\n\nSo far he has.\n\n## [16\n\nThe Electricians  \nPlug A Leak](contents.html#ch16)\n\nOn 21 February 1999, Tom Baldwin, political editor of the _Sunday Telegraph_ , produced a mother of a scoop. Five days earlier, in utmost secrecy, a source had shown him a copy of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report. The home secretary, Jack Straw, had only just received it himself under tight security.\n\nStraw had planned to extract maximum credit and impact during a carefully planned speech to Parliament on 24 February. The home secretary was also going to announce some police reforms off the back of the stinging report's 70 recommendations.\n\nBack at his office in Canary Wharf, Baldwin laid out the story to his editors: commissioner Condon's job was on the line if he failed to accept the report's withering personal criticisms of his leadership and of his force's \"institutional racism\". Baldwin assumed the newspaper wanted the story. But because of the Telegraph Group's right-wing views, he set some rather unusual conditions. The newspaper, which he knew was close to the Yard, could not simply use his scoop to rubbish the Lawrence report. He must be free to write the lead stories as he saw fit or he'd take the scoop with him to _The Times_ , who had recently poached him.\n\nNo sooner had the first edition hit the streets than a furious Jack Straw sought an injunction. The next day the media rounded on Straw's heavy-handedness. The home secretary backed down and allowed reprinting by other media of what was already published.\n\nStraw appointed a retired civil servant, John Simon, to conduct the mole hunt. Twenty copies of the report had arrived at the Home Office two days before Baldwin was shown it. So the leak inquiry assumed the mole was someone inside the Home Office or possibly a member of the Lawrence Inquiry.\n\nDozens of Straw's civil servants were aggressively questioned about any contact they may have had with the journalist. But according to a well-placed source there was an unusually tight focus on the tiny handful of black officials in the Home Office, and in particular on Straw's deputy, Paul Boateng MP. This was a rich irony given the Lawrence report's wide-reaching conclusion of \"institutional racism\". The focus, says the source, was convenient for those reactionary elements in the Home Office and the wider political Establishment, including the Tory Party, who wanted to protect Scotland Yard and would later be at the forefront of the Lawrence backlash.\n\nStraw and Boateng were thought to be in favour of letting Condon go early, but it is believed Tony Blair overruled them. It was therefore handy for spin-doctors representing the _ancien r\u00e9gime_ in the Met to be able to blame Boateng for something someone else had done for quite different reasons.\n\nThe leak inquiry was unpleasant in another respect, our source told us. A number of civil servants were pointedly asked whether they had ever taken drugs with Baldwin or been given any by him. The idea of government officials sharing a bong with the Sunday Torygraph's political editor is hilarious, but sadly typical of the grubby pressures that can so badly misfire.\n\nTom Baldwin withstood the government pressure and never revealed his source. The mole hunt was deemed \"inconclusive\" but cleared the Lawrence Inquiry. There was however another possible explanation for the leak. We learned that the Lawrence Inquiry believed Scotland Yard had \"bugged\" and \"burgled\" their offices ahead of the report being sent to the home secretary. If true, this meant the _Sunday Telegraph_ had seen a stolen copy.\n\nWhat follows is a composite of evidence from senior government officials and Lawrence Inquiry sources. It paints a very dark picture of the weeks leading up to publication of the Stephen Lawrence report.\n\nStephen Wells, the secretary to the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, knew there was something seriously wrong as soon as he sat at his desk that morning in late January 1999. A draft of the Lawrence report was in its final stages when Wells noticed the special orthopaedic chair he used because of a bad back had been significantly re-adjusted.\n\nSecurity measures at Hannibal House, the Inquiry headquarters in south London, were in place to guard against unauthorised entry. Inquiry staff were already on edge and had received anti-surveillance training because of a spate of nail-bombings believed to be the work of far-right groups.\n\nNo one was allowed to drift in and out of the secretariat's private rooms where the report was being written. All copies of early drafts were immediately shredded to avoid leaks. There were three computers in Wells' office. But the draft report was written and saved on the only computer with a detachable disc drive. Every night the disk drive was removed by Wells' assistant and locked in an armoured filing cabinet in the anteroom.\n\nWells and his small team trusted one another completely. During a discussion about the chair Wells learned that the Bishop of Stepney, John Sentamu, one of the advisers to the Inquiry, was also worried. He too had noticed a change in the position of his office chair. \"It was as if a person was sitting at my computer,\" the Bishop told us. Documents on his desk had been rifled overnight. Other documents and office equipment had also been disturbed. But most worrying was the sudden development of an identical fault on all three unlinked computers in the secretariat's office.\n\nWells, who came from the Home Office Police Policy Directorate, had also received an alarming call. Someone with extensive contacts in the police warned him \"the Met had a plan to bug the Inquiry\". The Inquiry secretary was horrified. Did someone in the Met want to blunt the impact of the report by leaking an advance copy? Had they already stolen it from his office?\n\nIt was not just the security of the draft report that worried him. After the highly charged public hearings, chairman Sir William Macpherson and his advisers would retire to private rooms and candidly discuss over a dram the quality of the evidence they had just heard from police witnesses and lawyers. As the Inquiry moved into the final phase sensitive and passionate discussions focused on the extent of commissioner Condon's responsibility for the failure to properly investigate Stephen Lawrence's murder in April 1993.\n\nWells knew the Yard had the means and possibly a motive. But would they really bug the private conversations of a Home Office Inquiry chaired by a former High Court judge? The thought had a hidden touch of irony, as Sir William was also the president of the tribunal that investigates official abuses of phone-tapping and mail interception.\n\nAfter a sleepless night, Wells felt he had to do something. He decided to contact DAC John Grieve, the official interface with Scotland Yard. Grieve had just been moved from anti-terrorism to head a new squad, the Racial and Violent Crimes Task Force (CO24), set up to reinvestigate the Lawrence murder. Grieve was still a leading member of the secret anti-corruption management committee and would continue to share intelligence and staff with the Untouchables. His appointment and the launch of the new murder investigation before the Lawrence Inquiry concluded was seen by many outside the police as a cynical damage limitation exercise.\n\nThere was a long silence on 1 February when Wells informed Grieve of his concerns. The senior officer was taken aback and asked Wells to do nothing until he had spoken to commissioner Condon. About 15 minutes later Grieve phoned back and gave Wells a \"specific denial\" that the Yard was bugging the inquiry. Grieve also relayed that Condon was \"furious\" the Inquiry secretary could seriously suspect his force.\n\nRelations between the Lawrence Inquiry and the commissioner were already strained. \"After the Christmas break there was a long, hard discussion about Condon's culpability. Eventually the chairman was persuaded that there were issues about Condon that should be in the report,\" an Inquiry source told us. In December Macpherson had written a private letter to the commissioner outlining those criticisms, in particular Condon's \"lack of vigour\" when signing off the \"deplorable\" Barker Review. The letter was personally delivered because others had been leaked to the media. \"Wells personally took the letter by taxi to Scotland Yard. He had an appointment to see the commissioner and handed him the letter. But Condon has always denied ever receiving it,\" the source added.\n\nThe letter came at a bad time. The commissioner had just launched a \"Corruption and Dishonesty Prevention Strategy\" under the motto: \"INTEGRITY IS NON-NEGOTIABLE\". In his foreword to the glossy launch brochure, Condon promised there would be \"no hiding place for the corrupt, dishonest or unethical\" and everyone in the force had \"a duty\" to internally report instances of it.\n\nBy this logic, failure to do so would be a neglect of that duty. However, it was harder to discern from the new moral order what offence is committed when a senior officer knowingly signs off a document that gives a false and misleading impression to a member of the public. Or when an Untouchable fails to properly investigate a corruption allegation because it would harm the reputation of the force or key individuals within it. For these and other thorny issues, the public were supposed to rest easy because a new self-appointed, self-regulated Ethics Committee would ensure the Untouchables behaved accordingly.\n\nThe Lawrence Inquiry's intended criticisms of Condon were also at odds with a gushing review he had just received from Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), a Home Office body stuffed with senior ex-policemen. It hailed Condon's Untouchables as the yardstick by which every other force should be measured.\n\nGrieve informed Wells that the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) would sweep the Lawrence Inquiry offices for bugs. The following day, 2 February, he was picked up outside Lambeth North tube station and driven to NCIS headquarters.\n\nA detective inspector and several technicians debriefed Wells. He was told a six-man team would present themselves at Hannibal House the next day posing as electricians on an emergency job. It's believed the team came from the Special Project Branch and were part of NCIS's bugging department known as the Operations Support Unit. Officers told Wells that no one other than his staff should know their real purpose.\n\nWhen the \"electricians\" arrived on 3 February Wells and his team were drafting the final report. To avoid any undetected bugs all sensitive communication was restricted to written notes passed from hand to hand. \"It was a truly amazing sight to watch,\" one official told us. \"Until you see it for yourself you have no idea what's involved. They went through everything. Curtains, blinds, light fittings, toilet rolls, kettles, coffee tins, clothing \u2013 everything. Over two days and nights the de-buggers took the offices apart, including every item in the stationery cupboard, each and every biro, every box of Tippex or paper clips. And then picture frames.\" At the end of the lengthy sweep the Inquiry secretary was told no bug had been found. NCIS dismissed the identical computer faults, but provided no reasoned report. None of this reassured the Inquiry's staff. And Wells' own suspicions were heightened when he later spoke to the Bishop.\n\nThe Right Reverend John Sentamu is a former magistrate and lawyer in the Ugandan High Court. In 1976 he left Uganda to study theology at Cambridge University, rising within the Church hierarchy to become the Anglican Bishop of Stepney in 1996.\n\nAfter the sweep of Hannibal House, NCIS offered to sweep the homes of all the advisers and the chairman. They all declined with the exception of Bishop Sentamu. At first the Bishop was unwilling to discuss the matter with us. Then out of the blue he rang to say he would. What had changed his mind? We had John Grieve to thank. The Bishop was angered that Grieve had tried to pressure him into not contributing to the story we were preparing for publication in the _Guardian_. Bishop Sentamu had stood up to security goons before in Idi Amin's Uganda. He was so outraged that he went on the record.\n\nThe Bishop's home computer had developed an inexplicable fault, he said. No server or network linked it to the three terminals at Hannibal House, but they all seized at the same time.\n\nThe Bishop had set aside two weeks in January 1999 to stay at home and write his advice to the Inquiry chairman. His report was highly sensitive. It dealt with institutional racism in the police and outlined the radical reforms he thought were necessary, among them independent investigation of complaints against the police.\n\nDuring these two weeks the Bishop discussed with Wells his growing conviction that his cordless home phones were bugged. \"For four days I could hear these clicks on the line when I made a call as if someone was picking up the phone and listening in,\" he told us. There were also problems with the lock on his front door. \"Suddenly it would not close properly.\" That's why he asked NCIS to sweep his home.\n\nFour men came to his house. One of them kept a lookout from outside. Those inside picked up signals on a scanner, which they said were coming from an embossed book in the Bishop's bookcase, but concluded the fault was with their equipment.\n\nThey then conducted an unusual experiment. One officer went a good distance from the house with equipment that intercepted phone conversations. Another arranged for the cordless phone in the dining-room to be rung from an outside line. The entire conversation was immediately intercepted. The officers told him his phones were \"easily compromised\" and replaced three of them with what they claimed were \"unbuggable\" cordless phones. The team also recommended he change the locks on his front door immediately. A locksmith confirmed the front door lock had been \"interfered with\".\n\nFinally, the officers looked at the home computer. They could not explain the computer crash but suggested it might be a \"software problem\" which he should have examined. The Bishop sent his computer to a security expert who took months to retrieve data from the frozen hard disk. The expert couldn't explain the fault but said it was definitely not virus- or software-related.\n\nWhen the _Guardian_ put all this to Condon he claimed the Lawrence Inquiry had \"overreacted\" and were \"embarrassed\" that the NCIS sweep had found no bugs. He said the decision to change the Bishop's home phones was a \"reassurance\" measure.\n\nBishop Sentamu reacted angrily to Condon's insinuation. \"There were very clear signs that something untoward had happened both at Hannibal House and at my home \u2013 the chairs, the computers, the clicks. I ask myself why did they change my phones, tell me to change the locks, recommend that we check my computer and leave a card should the worrying signs persist,\" he hissed. The Bishop paused, then smiled, as if he'd had a moment of divine inspiration. \"Maybe it was an act of God, but under suspicious circumstances.\"\n\nA senior government official who'd been helpful throughout our investigation of this story said Condon's reaction was precisely the problem of the police investigating themselves. They may say they've found nothing, but how do you know for sure?\n\nOther senior figures inside the Lawrence Inquiry were also adamant there had been a \"burglary\" at their offices. They believe it was carried out to obtain and leak a draft copy of the report to the right-wing press sympathetic to concerns that the debate about racism in the Yard had gone too far. It had not escaped their attention that along with Baldwin's balanced copy, the _Sunday Telegraph_ ran a comment piece claiming institutional racism, the key conclusion, was \"a flawed and dangerous concept\".\n\nThe same edition also carried a report based on an authorised \"leak\" from the Yard of a confidential document setting out DAC John Grieve's \"radical strategy\", codenamed Operation Athena, to convince the public that the police were not racist. The document proposed using undercover black and Asian officers to \"integrity test\" fellow white officers. Undercover white and black officers would also be used against members of the public, like hotel owners, in sting operations to expose racist attitudes; offenders could be \"named and shamed\", it was suggested. There was also talk of a major advertising campaign backed by Asian and black celebrities to show CO24 were serious about prosecuting racist and violent crimes.\n\nWells and his team had done their own sleuthing after the leak. They concluded that the copy seen by Baldwin was not the final draft prepared for the home secretary. The final draft was Version 8 of the report, but the Sunday newspaper had been shown Version 7. It differed in significant respects around language and phrases.\n\nAll copies of early drafts of the report had been shredded immediately. Only the current text was retained. This was stored on a detachable disk drive locked every night in a two-drawer armoured filing cabinet kept in the anteroom. Only one copy of any draft of the report had been printed out and the advisers could not take it home but had to read it at the Inquiry offices under controlled circumstances. It too was locked in the cabinet with the key held in a safe inside a different room with a digital lock.\n\nInquiry sources told us Version 7 was what they were working on at the time of \"the burglary\" but the hard copy had been destroyed. Consequently, they concluded that the stolen copy was obtained by breaking into the anteroom and downloading from the detachable disk drive. It was then leaked.\n\nDuring the meeting at NCIS before the sweep, Stephen Wells was asked an interesting question: \"If it's not the Met, who could it be?\" He named a London-based private security company with a revolving door to the Yard and MI6 called Kroll Associates. Wells had no evidence, just speculation based on his knowledge that three senior officers involved in the first Lawrence murder inquiry had joined Kroll after they left the Yard.\n\nKroll confirmed that a former commander of the Flying Squad called John O'Connor had brought Ray Adams into the company; Adams then recommended Bill Ilsley, who sub-contracted Ian Crampton from time to time. Kroll say references for Adams and Ilsley were taken at the highest level in the Yard and the suggestion of any involvement with the bugging and burglary of the Lawrence Inquiry was \"fantasy\". The firm had previously been linked to a bugging operation against the attorney general of Gibraltar on behalf of MI6. But this was a freelance venture run by Michael Oatley, a former MI6 officer, who at the time was working for Kroll.\n\nWhat about MI5? Its most controversial part is A Branch, and a covert search section known as A1A. The former agent David Shayler claims MI5 has the means to \"copy the entire contents of a computer hard drive\".\n\nOf course the Yard's own Surveillance and Technical Support Unit, part of the Directorate of Intelligence, carries out concealed entry and bugging operations. And the Untouchables have their own covert resource known internally as the Dark Side. Neither unit requires Home Office approval for such spookery.\n\nThe Lawrence Inquiry did not believe Jack Straw was in any way behind the leak to the _Sunday Telegraph_ , because it blunted the impact he was trying to achieve and diverted attention into sideshow debates. We approached him at the inauguration ceremony for the Metropolitan Police Authority in June 2000. We'd heard that privately Straw was \"incandescent\" with NCIS for not giving his department a formal report on the sweep of the inquiry's offices. The home secretary was clearly relying on his own officials, who he said had told him \"there were no bugs found\" and that Baldwin more than likely saw a \"government internal summary\" of the final Lawrence Report. The _Sunday Telegraph_ disagrees. It saw a \"copy\" of the report.\n\nAll of which suggests reactionary elements in the Home Office were misleading their boss.\n\n## [17\n\nThe Selecta' Returns,  \nPolice Babylon Burns](contents.html#ch17)\n\nBy mid-1997 Hector Harvey was an angry and bitter man about to slip back into his old ways as a dandy armed robber.\n\nAfter the failed grenade booby-trap two years earlier, the Yard's witness protection unit (WPU) moved Harvey's family from Luton to rented accommodation in north-west London. He joined them a few months later when he was granted parole in July 1995. There followed a stint of unemployment, then Harvey started working as a chauffeur for the chief executive of Hillsdown Holdings plc, a prestigious company with political connections. Its chairman was the former Tory defence minister, Sir John Nott.\n\nThe WPU kept an eye on the supergrass chauffeur, but from a distance. They took seriously the perceived threat from Chris McCormack, the gangland enforcer Harvey had double-crossed in January 1995 over the \u00a31.4 million Security Express robbery. Police intelligence had linked McCormack to the grenade attack and intercepted the south London hard-nut promising to wage war on Harvey unless he paid him \u00a3200,000 from his share of the robbery.\n\nHarvey wanted as little contact with the anti-corruption squad as possible. He figured he owed them nothing, especially after he was told in January 1997 that the CPS had decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute any of the Flying Squad detectives or the armed robbers he had grassed-up during Operation Spy. As Harvey tells it, he'd put his life on the line to expose police corruption. The Yard had allowed the Flying Squad to investigate itself and naturally nothing came of it; except the criminals he had so handsomely double-crossed now all knew he was a grass because his name was mysteriously disclosed to defence lawyers during the joint investigation.\n\nThe Selecta's recall conveniently ignores how he toyed with the Ghost Squad and spun everyone lies. In fact, two years after the Security Express robbery the anti-corruption squad still believed Harvey had been \"bounced\" by veteran blaggers Gary Ward and Joey Simms into carrying it out during the dry-run, when he had planned it that way all along.\n\nHarvey had almost no contact with the Yard throughout 1997. He had no idea DAC Roy Clark had set up the Untouchables, or that this new anti-corruption squad was working secretly to trap the corrupt detective Kevin Garner, the man they believed had stolen the guard's \u00a3200,000 share and divided it with other Flying Squad colleagues.\n\nAfter a row with his boss, Harvey resigned from his chauffeuring job and set up his own company, Elegant Chauffeur Services. The business was unpredictable, which exacerbated his financial pressures and marital problems. Behind the back of his long-suffering wife, Harvey hooked up with a petty criminal from west London and returned to robbing. This time it wasn't security vans but the capital's massage parlours, where businessmen drop in for executive relief before catching the 7.15 p.m. to Chalfont St Giles and a light supper with the wife.\n\nBetween June and October 1997, Harvey carried out five robberies at knifepoint, netting anything between \u00a380 and \u00a3400 each time. \"I was doing it as a favour to a bird that I knew who worked in that game. She was just telling us the layout and marking our card with the girls that were in there, letting them know that we were coming in,\" says Harvey with his customary gloss.\n\nHis wife eventually found out in the late autumn. \"She wasn't having it, after all we had gone through with prison and with CIB. Don't forget that nothing had come out in the newspapers about all this yet. I was slipping back into criminal mode 'cos I was strapped for cash and other personal things, like arguments in front of the children. So I just packed my bags and moved out in the October\/November of 1997.\"\n\nHarvey lived for the next few months on the couches of his friends and in the beds of various lovers. He was unaware of the recent arrests by CIB3 of Garner, McGuinness and Green. It wasn't until January 1998 after a run of press articles that the new anti-corruption squad walked back into his life. The article that most concerned Harvey was in the _News of the World_ \u2013 BENT COPS' STOOGE IS UNMASKED \u2013 naming him as the supergrass against the Flying Squad.\n\nHarvey met with new CIB3 recruits, detective chief inspector Martin Bridger, detective sergeant Dave Pennant and detective constable Sam Miller from Operation Ethiopia. Bridger described the meeting: \"I was able to tell him that as far as the police were concerned we would not be seeking his prosecution for the robbery but made it clear to him that if the CPS and\/or counsel took a different view in the future he would obviously be informed immediately. He expressed his concerns. I assured him this was a new investigation team and everything would be looked at again.\"\n\nBy this stage Kevin Garner had formally turned supergrass and was telling his CIB3 debriefers how he stole the guard's \u00a3200,000 share and then split it ten ways with his police colleagues.\n\nBridger met Harvey again on 29 January and asked him if he would corroborate Garner by giving evidence. Harvey said he would think about it. They met one week later and Harvey made the first of many written statements for Operation Ethiopia. But the Selecta' had no intention of telling the real truth in any of them. That would involve coming clean that he had planned the Security Express robberies all along. It would also involve admitting he had recently embarked on an armed robbing spree across London to get money to flee the country with his family.\n\nThe first armed robbery took place on 8 January, a few weeks before he was approached by the Untouchables. But two days after making a statement for them, he robbed a CashCo van outside the Asda supermarket in Hendon, north London, on 6 February. That robbery had a touch of the Carry Ons about it. When Harvey got the cash box into his vehicle it started bleeping and then billowing red smoke. He threw it under a parked car and drove off. Most of the \u00a320,000 inside was ruined by the dye.\n\nHarvey didn't trust CIB3, but he could smell their desperation, unaware, as he was, how much Operation Ethiopia meant to commissioner Condon's damage limitation strategy. Once again, Harvey was manipulating the anti-corruption squad for his own ends. Over the next six months he would do to Condon's Untouchables what he had done three years earlier to his Ghost Squad.\n\nBetween 8 January and 13 July 1998 Hector Harvey and his crew secretly carried out over 70 off-licence robberies, netting some \u00a3100,000. All the while he provided his CIB3 handlers with pages of misleading witness statements and was being looked after by the WPU.\n\nHarvey's crew included Ricky Welsh, the driver, and Darren Lewis, who entered the off-licence with Harvey carrying a gun. On occasion they used a Walter PPK, James Bond's weapon of choice, only this one was an imitation cigarette lighter bought for \u00a35 in a market, says Harvey.\n\nThe favoured off-licence was Threshers because the time safe was less secure. The robberies had roughly the same modus operandi. Harvey and Lewis would enter shortly before closing time, close the shutters, threaten the staff with the gun, tie them up with duct tape, seize the security videotape from the machine and then help themselves to cash, cigarettes and on occasion some champagne. They would leave having taken personal details from the staff to scare them into not helping the police. The whole robbery took up to 30 minutes.\n\nHarvey is \"embarrassed\" about the calibre of crime to which he was now resorting. \"I'd gone from using inside agents against Security Express to knocking over Threshers!\" In June, a female member joined the crew. Michelle Niles drew the single salesperson from behind the counter to help choose an expensive wine. This would be the signal for Harvey and Lewis to strike.\n\nThat month Harvey also moved into a west London bedsit in Ladbroke Grove, the heart of the capital's Caribbean community. Relations with his wife were still cool. Harvey called the single room his \"robber's lair\"; a place to store all the spoils of what one lawyer later described as an \"undeclared war on Threshers\".\n\nThroughout this \"war\" Harvey carried on chauffeuring for some top business and celebrity clients. \"I was Jekyll and Hyde; a chauffeur by day and a robber by night. I took a multi-millionaire client to the OXO Tower restaurant [overlooking the Thames] and I had my blagging gear in the boot of the car. I parked up, jumped into another car, went and done a Threshers, got dropped off, changed into work clothes and went and picked [the client] up.\"\n\nThroughout it all Harvey kept in regular touch with the Untouchables, meeting them in a caf\u00e9 by Putney Bridge, near to their new headquarters. In April, for example, with five robberies under his belt, he helped DS Dave Pennant do a reconstruction of the moment when he alleged DI Norris had removed \u00a347,000 from the bag containing his share of the robbery.\n\nBefore robbing another off-licence, Harvey cheekily persuaded CIB3 to pay off \u00a32,600 rent arrears accumulated at the family home. Then in June, days after robbing almost \u00a34,000 from Threshers in South Norwood, he had the front to complain to CIB3 that the squad was not doing enough to relocate his wife and children to a more affordable home. Apparently the local council had started eviction proceedings.\n\nIronically, since January 1998 the Finchley office of the Flying Squad had been investigating the off-licence robberies unaware they were being committed by an informant who was grassing up their colleagues at Rigg Approach to the Untouchables. According to sources at Finchley Flying Squad, there was strong suspicion that CIB3 eventually pulled Harvey out when they realised the robberies he was committing threatened to severely undermine Operation Ethiopia.\n\nThe rude boy supergrass had told CIB3 on 9 June that Finchley were on his tail over \"some armed robberies\" but denied any involvement. Harvey says the Untouchables then gave him a \"veiled warning\" that if he was robbing there was nothing they could do for him. As he was only stringing CIB3 along about co-operating as a witness, he went on to commit several more armed robberies well into mid-July. He maintained contact with the Untouchables throughout. They were desperate for Harvey to make another statement. It is clear from documents we've seen that in the period leading up to Harvey's arrest on 3 August, CIB3 were aware of Finchley Flying Squad's interest in their supergrass, and that tensions between the two squads increased when it came to interview Harvey over the robberies.\n\n\"We were outside the room and CIB3 debriefers would come out and ask us what to ask him and tell us his replies,\" recalls one Finchley detective. \"Harvey was charged and then taken out of our control by CIB3. This case was being run at a high level.\" Do you think CIB3 tipped Harvey off? \"I wouldn't say that. We might as well pack up and all go home if that was the case,\" replied the Finchley detective, a sardonic smile on his face.\n\nAfter Harvey had confessed he was bailed into CIB3 custody and whisked away by senior detectives in charge of Operation Ethiopia. They kept him for several days at a police station in Norwich. If CIB3 bosses didn't already have a headache working out the effect of the Threshers robberies on the integrity of the corruption probe, their tricky supergrass was about to drop another bombshell that sent some senior officers racing for the executive toilets.\n\nHarvey admitted for the first time that he had planned both the failed December 1994 Security Express robbery and the successful January 1995 one. There was no \"double whammy\" pulled on him by Ward and Simms, he confessed. Harvey was coming clean now because he realised that only by co-operating with the Untouchables did he stand a chance of avoiding an automatic life sentence for the Threshers armed robberies under the \"three strikes\" rule.\n\nDetective superintendent Brian Moore came to see Harvey at Norwich. \"He gave me this speech that I had to cleanse myself and if I lied I was out of the [supergrass] programme. He told me, 'If you ever see me again it's because you are out of the programme.'\" From Norwich, Harvey was moved to a police station in Sevenoaks, Kent, where he spent six weeks being debriefed. And then he was moved to New Malden police station in south-west London.\n\nCIB3 was now put straight that the corruption by Rigg Approach detectives was opportunistic not pre-planned. Harvey though reconfirmed his allegations against Norris and that he had helped arrange for other detectives to collect the guard's share.\n\nHowever, his crucial debriefings were done off-tape and involved, he says, the use of two parallel sets of notebooks to record his answers. One, he explains, was an intelligence book, presumably never to be disclosed. The other notebook contained snippets of conversations that were later typed up and disclosed to defence lawyers. But in reality this second notebook could give no meaningful insight into how much pressure had been applied or inducements offered.\n\nDealing this way with a supergrass they knew had been so dishonest in the past is inexcusable, let alone unlawful, especially when CIB3 clearly hoped to use Harvey as a witness of truth in a forthcoming trial. But for the Untouchables it was more important to preserve control of the direction of the internal corruption probe than to abide by the well-defined laws regarding the use of supergrass evidence. Harvey recalls that his legal representative hardly attended any of the debriefings. Our investigation suggests this was typical of an unwritten CIB3 policy of keeping its supergrasses as far away from their lawyers as possible. Achieving this didn't require overt pressure or great bullying but subtle suggestion to the vulnerable supergrass that it would be in his best interests to go along with it.\n\nA good example is what was happening around this time to Kevin Garner. Just before he agreed to turn supergrass, Garner's original lawyer had complained that senior CIB3 detective Chris Jarratt was \"badgering\" his mentally unstable client. After Garner was charged his solicitor went home. Jarratt then twice spoke to his prisoner alone and without tape-recording the conversation. The next day Garner agreed to become a supergrass and, at Jarratt's suggestion, changed his lawyer to someone the CIB3 officer recommended. This new solicitor rarely attended the subsequent and still unrecorded debriefing sessions.\n\nCIB3 had engineered it this way because as the supergrass is a prosecution witness the attendance notes of his solicitor are disclosable to the defence. But if the solicitor is not present then there is no note he can disclose. This leaves the supergrass in the debriefing process without someone to protect his rights. And as the debrief is not tape-recorded CIB3 are able to filter the allegations they want from those they don't want, so that when the supergrass is eventually interviewed on tape his \"evidence\" has effectively been moulded.\n\n\"There is no good reason why the solicitor couldn't be there or shouldn't be present throughout the debriefing of their supergrass client, especially when you know CIB3 are not taping,\" says defence lawyer Mark Lake. \"The only credible answer is that CIB3 don't want them there while they are pulling strokes. However, if everything was above board, the defence team of a cop accused by the supergrass of corruption would be virtually toothless if CIB3 could wheel out in the trial a respected lawyer, who could say he was present throughout the debrief, saw no naughtiness and would not have tolerated it. This would have had the effect of adding some integrity to the supergrass system.\"\n\nHarvey's legal representative, Jeremy Newall, shared his client's distrust of the anti-corruption squad and their ability to investigate themselves. While Harvey was being debriefed, in late August Newall's office in Tottenham, north London, was broken into over four consecutive nights.\n\nA source at the firm, Purcell, Brown & Co, described the events: \"The window at the back by the car park was smashed. We replaced it and it was smashed again. Each time the office was broken into, ransacked but nothing was taken. [Jeremy] didn't have any of his paperwork at the office. It was all at his home. Clearly someone wanted to know what the score was. They even broke into the barrister's car looking for paperwork. After the first break-in we reported it to Tottenham police station. [Jeremy] also spoke to CIB3 and asked them to sweep the office [for bugs], but they refused. Nothing like this had happened before or since.\"\n\nWhether it was CIB3 or bent Flying Squad detectives behind the break-ins remains unresolved.\n\nTerrence Patrick McGuinness was born in Ilford, Essex, on 31 January 1958. His dad had been an amateur boxer. And when he wasn't working as an odd job man for the council, he ran training sessions for the local boys clubs. Terry felt this made him a target for bullies, so after numerous fights he started training at the East Ham Boxing Club under the guidance of an ex-policeman. It was this that later inspired young Terry to join the Met. But first there was the prospect of a professional boxing career. McGuinness reached the ABA semis as a heavyweight. He then started training with Terry Lawless and sparring with British heavyweight champion John L Gardner. Lawless had helped legendary promoter Mickey Duff dominate British boxing in the seventies as manager of world champions John H Stracey, Charlie Magri, Jim Watt, Maurice Hope, Lloyd Honeyghan and then Frank Bruno. However, McGuinness was not a contender. He was knocked on his arse a lot but had a lot of heart.\n\nWhen he wasn't boxing, McGuinness followed West Ham around the country mixing with its notorious racist hooligans, the forerunners of what became the Inter City Firm. His money came from a job as an apprentice metal worker. At 20 he had enough to marry a local girl and moved into a council flat in Canning Town, near to where he would be videoed 18 years later stealing the planted cannabis.\n\nIn November 1979, McGuinness joined the police \"for all the normal reasons: to make a difference, to fight crime, to serve the community\". He was posted to a local East End station where he first met Keith Green.\n\nWhen he got into the detective branch, McGuinness served with and befriended many of the officers he later met on the Flying Squad. He failed his first attempt to get up there so he transferred to Stoke Newington police station in 1988, a stepping-stone to Rigg Approach.\n\nMcGuinness made it onto the Flying Squad in January 1990 as a detective constable, aged 32. He later told CIB3 that almost immediately he noticed \"bad practice\" at Rigg Approach. \"There were certain times that where the circumstances were right, money that itself may have been stolen by criminals or was the proceeds of crime would be stolen.\" The corrupt culture was perverse. McGuinness told us it was only those who sold out jobs to criminals that were regarded as \"bent\". Stealing some recovered proceeds was looked on as compensation for reduced overtime. And those officers who didn't go along with it had their lives made miserable until they left.\n\nIn January 1995, after five years at Rigg, McGuinness transferred to Limehouse police station. According to an anti-corruption squad officer, the old CIB2 were already looking at him \u2013 the allegation concerned conspiring with the legal representative of a fraudster to pervert the course of justice. That investigation was overtaken in December 1997 when McGuinness unexpectedly walked into the CIB3 drugs sting with Kevin Garner and then turned supergrass.\n\nIn July and September 1998, after extensive debriefs, McGuinness and Garner formally pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to a raft of serious criminal offences beyond those involving the theft of 80 kilos of dope. Garner pleaded to 12 additional counts of corrupt activity involving other Flying Squad detectives at Rigg Approach. Like McGuinness, he maintained implausibly that his corruption only began while he was on the Flying Squad and spanned a shorter period, from December 1992 to October 1996.\n\nGarner claimed his first, albeit minor, corrupt act was to accept \u00a3200 cash from a Flying Squad colleague after others had arrested a jewellery thief and stolen some of the recovered proceeds. The detectives, including senior officers, pissed it up in Brighton on champagne, he told CIB3. Garner explained that he took the money because he was beginning to be \"accepted\" after seven months on the squad. He didn't want to be a \"minion\", he said, and if you wanted \"good work\" you had to be \"corrupt\". McGuinness also pleaded to the same charge of handling stolen goods \u2013 he says he received a \u00a350 note from the recovered proceeds.\n\nMcGuinness, who joined the Flying Squad two years before Garner, admitted seven additional corrupt offences. His first corrupt touch came in March 1992 when he was given \u00a3500 of so-called \"soggy fivers\". These were part of a \u00a337,000 load recovered by the Flying Squad from a ditch. The bag of money had been thrown away by one of the robbers' girlfriends. She thought by washing the money it would remove the fingerprints before the police came calling. Again, he alleged this money was shared out with other colleagues.\n\nGarner's first major act of corruption was a \"weed\" from \u00a3300,000 of newly minted ten pence coins the Flying Squad had recovered from some armed robbers in September 1993. He and McGuinness admitted helping themselves to about \u00a33,000 each. They also alleged six other officers were involved.\n\nAnother joint venture involved substituting cash stolen during searches for counterfeit money. Garner suggests he was the unofficial launderer for a corrupt cell of Flying Squad officers, and that he used his contacts with Hackney car ringer Michael Taverner to buy funny money. Garner also pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit a tiger kidnap with Taverner, Irish Mick and a serving officer.\n\nIn many respects Garner was the Untouchables' favoured son. McGuinness could not corroborate Harvey over the January 1995 Security Express robbery. He wasn't involved in the investigation and had transferred off the Flying Squad that month. He was useful though for corroborating who was in the \"cell\" of bent detectives at Rigg.\n\nHector Harvey's debrief was also a drawn-out affair. On 9 October 1998, Harvey pleaded guilty to planning both Security Express robberies. Then, appropriately on Armistice Day, he pleaded guilty to 22 additional offences, asking for 55 others to be taken into consideration. They were. Unlike McGuinness, who was jailed in April 2000 for nine years, later reduced by two years on appeal, Harvey and Garner would not be sentenced until after they gave evidence against the four Flying Squad detectives and the north London lawyer, Les Brown.\n\nThis controversial feature of the Untouchables' supergrass system was not unlawful. But defence lawyers argue that there is an implicit inducement to the supergrass in these terms \u2013 those who help the police by naming names and giving a good show in court will get a persuasive recommendation to the judge for a reduced sentence.\n\nCIB3 say there was no number chasing and that it was \"down to the judge\" to decide whether he sentenced the supergrass before or after giving evidence. But this is simply not how it worked in reality. CIB3 controlled their supergrasses and presented them to the courts when they were ready. Meanwhile, during their debriefing process word was leaked to the media that the two supergrass cops had named a large number of serving and retired officers. This was done in part to generate anxious phone calls between officers whose phones were tapped, but also to give an illusion of the steady march to the all-important figure of 250 bent detectives.\n\nThe first Flying Squad trial started at the Old Bailey six months later on 3 October 2000. It had taken two years since detectives Tim Norris, Eamonn Harris, Fred May, David Howell, Paul Smith and solicitor Les Brown were variously charged with theft, conspiracy to steal and perverting the course of justice. The delay was in part caused by the sickness of Smith and Brown, who were severed from the trial.\n\nSo deeply flawed were the two prosecution witnesses \u2013 Harvey and Garner \u2013 that prosecutor David Waters QC immediately gave strong health warnings to the jury. Harvey was described as someone they should \"hesitate long and hard\" about before believing his unsupported word. But \"exceptionally\", said Waters, a former policeman supported the repentant armed robber. Garner's motivation for giving evidence against his former colleagues was, like Harvey's, the hope of a reduced sentence. But when added with the independent financial evidence against the defendants this was a strong case, Waters argued.\n\nAgainst Norris was Harvey's claim that he saw the detective steal \u00a347,000 from his share, and a financial report by CIB3. This purported to show that a week after the robbery Norris paid off a bank loan with a cheque for \u00a34,400 from severed co-defendant Les Brown. The detective and the solicitor were good friends and Brown had given Norris the cheque from his client account in return for cash. Against Howell, Harris and May were Garner and Harvey plus some cell site analysis of the officers' phone calls which CIB3 claimed showed a conspiracy to steal the guard's share of \u00a3200,000.\n\nThe prosecution opening amply anticipated Garner's evidence that he and Howells had personally divided this money ten ways and shared it out with Harris and Smith. May took the other six shares and the prosecution alleged they had gone to, amongst others, detective chief inspector Michael Fry and detective inspector George Raison. Waters added a caveat to explain why neither officer was in the dock. He said: \"People are only brought before this court if there is sufficient admissible evidence to place them in that position.\" It was clear CIB3 and the prosecution wanted the jury to believe there was a cell of corrupt officers. The word \"admissible\" was an interesting choice because it implied there was incriminating wiretap evidence CIB3 could not put before a court.\n\nIn response to this dramatic opening statement, a battery of eminent defence barristers countered that proven liars had fabricated all the allegations with axes to grind and much to gain from turning supergrass. The four defendants were detectives with untarnished reputations. Full stop.\n\nThe trial was peppered with PII certificates, which the jury knew nothing about. Like the supergrass system, these gagging orders were also discredited after the collapse of the 1992 Matrix Churchill trial, which triggered the Scott Inquiry into the Major government's secret and illegal rearming of Saddam Hussein. Four Tory government ministers, who signed PII certificates blocking disclosure of sensitive intelligence documents, were apparently prepared to see innocent businessmen go to prison rather than reveal their sanction-busting policy.\n\nThe PII certificates in the Flying Squad trial concerned three areas: the role of Michael Taverner and CIB3 informant Irish Mick in the missing 26 kilos of dope, Garner's undercover activities during the Urquhart murder inquiry and the so-called Fleming tape made by Raison of an informant discussing how Chris McCormack had appeared at a money launderer's business with a suitcase of cash days after the Security Express robbery.\n\nCIB3 had a strategy of liberally relying on this sinister weapon in the prosecution's armoury to block disclosure of information that would help unpick the unlawful supergrass system. Its practical effect meant CIB3 and CIBIC were protected by the courts from scrutiny.\n\nThe granting of PII certificates depends on the judge's discretion \u2013 he hears the application in chambers without the defence being present or even entitled to know what areas it covers. If the judge is pro-prosecution, he will almost always favour protecting the modesty of the secret state. More independent-thinking judges have been misled by sexed up intelligence from the police, dramatically presented by the prosecutor. CIB3 can sex up the intelligence picture for a recalcitrant judge to make it seem so prejudicial to the defence of the realm that he will grant the PII application immediately.\n\nThe more political the prosecution the more dangerous PII applications by unaccountable secret units within the police are to the principle of open justice and democratic accountability.\n\nThe set-piece of the Flying Squad trial was always going to be the cross-examination of the two supergrasses. Harvey's was described by court reporter Andrew Cunningham as \"a master class in blagging\". He spent five days in the box. He admitted having everyone over but was unswerving in his claim that he saw Norris steal the money. \"I have admitted all my lies but I saw what I saw,\" he told the detective's barrister, Tony Glass QC, who, unperturbed, went on to dissect the supergrass.\n\nGlass: You have succeeded in keeping the money you have creamed off in the 1995 robbery and the massage parlour and Threshers robberies?\n\nHarvey: Yes.\n\nGlass: You managed to deceive everyone since 1994?\n\nHarvey: Yes.\n\nGlass: Ward and Simms?\n\nHarvey: Yes.\n\nGlass: Norris and Smith?\n\nHarvey: Yes.\n\nGlass: Your own solicitor?\n\nHarvey: Yes.\n\nGlass: CIB2?\n\nHarvey: Yes.\n\nGlass: Mr Bridger of CIB3 from February 1998 until August 1998?\n\nHarvey: Yes.\n\nGlass: And way back in 1990 when you last appeared before a jury you got your friend to lie and try and deceive the jury to save your skin?\n\nHarvey: Yes.\n\nGlass:... for which you have not faced any charge?\n\nHarvey: No.\n\nGarner fared better during some equally heavy cross-examination. But after 52 days of evidence the jury retired. They returned 36 hours later, on 25 January 2001, to find Norris innocent. Harris, Howell and May were all found guilty of conspiracy to steal and perverting the course of justice and sentenced to seven years each.\n\nAmongst all the evidence, there was one witness the jury never got to hear from \u2013 detective inspector George Raison, the man repeatedly accused in the prosecution's opening as someone believed to be part of the corrupt cell in the Rigg Approach office. The jury had asked if Raison and Mick Fry were still serving. They were told both officers had been suspended since January 1998, but were medically unfit to be interviewed by CIB3. This was a serious but unwitting error by the judge.\n\nRaison had waited for three days in the Old Bailey canteen for the defence to decide if they would call him to give evidence about what he had learned during the joint investigation with CIB2 called Operation Spy. \"I was gagging to give evidence. I had answers to everything. I had proof in writing [about CIB3 reluctance to interview me]. I could have produced letters like a rabbit out of a hat to show the jury the truth of the matter and CIB3 would have been buggered and the jury would have looked at the prosecution in a different light entirely.\" In the end he wasn't used because the defence lawyers felt his suspension made him too tainted a witness whose cross-examination would do their case more harm than good. This, says Raison, is exactly what CIB3 had intended when they suspended him.\n\nRaison had every reason not to be a defence witness. In the run-up to the trial a group of about 20 suspended detectives, including the defendants, had met every month at their lawyers' office. Paranoia about double agents was rife. They knew of Raison's role in Operation Spy. He started to notice an undercurrent emerging among the group that he might be \"a mole\" for \"the funny firm\" \u2013 a preferred nickname for CIB3.\n\nThe most intriguing allegation against Raison that \"justified\" his lengthy suspension was that his report to the CPS on Operation Spy was \"a false, misleading and inaccurate written document\". He was also alleged to have had a part of the guard's share. Raison was only notified of the \"misleading report\" allegation in August 1998, seven months after his suspension. He maintains that the Untouchables always had to discredit him because his report was so critical of how the Ghost Squad had mishandled Harvey and the original corruption probe into the Flying Squad.\n\nThis may explain why the prosecution feigned \"surprise\" in front of the jury about how it was Raison came to carry out a joint CIB investigation into the robbery when he was also suspected of having benefited from it. As if the Flying Squad detective had somehow inserted himself and undermined the Ghost Squad's corruption inquiry.\n\nIt must have slipped Waters' mind that the head of the Ghost Squad DAC John Grieve had authorised the appointment, CIB superintendent Dave Niccol had in a statement described the Raison report as \"exceptional\" and the CPS was equally convinced of its integrity. There were after all thousands of supporting documents to prove how incompetently and unlawfully the Ghost Squad had acted.\n\nThirteen months after his suspension, and still not interviewed about the two serious allegations against him, Raison was approached by a fellow Flying Squad detective allegedly acting on the instructions of Untouchable Brian Moore. Raison secretly taped the pub meeting with detective inspector Chris Coomber in February 1999.\n\nCoomber was a work friend and Raison's welfare officer \u2013 someone nominated to represent a suspended detective's concerns to senior management. As a further measure of the muddle CIB3 had got itself into, Coomber had also been named by McGuinness as one of the many detectives aware of corrupt practices at Rigg. Nevertheless, here he was being used by the Untouchables to make a very questionable approach to Raison. It is fair to say Coomber felt uncomfortable about this intermediary role.\n\n\"I was asked to provide CIB3 with a witness statement and be willing to give evidence in court, or provide an intelligence statement on anything I knew about Rigg Approach. In return the allegations of fabricating the report and having a share of the money would disappear,\" says Raison. He turned down the offer and reported the meeting to his lawyers. An internal CIB3 memo makes it clear Raison was seen as a danger to the Untouchables as the trial approached.\n\n\"CIB3 never had any intention of charging me with criminal offences,\" says Raison, a belief borne out by the fact that eight weeks after the Flying Squad trial ended he was interviewed about the allegations underpinning his suspension on full pay. This was now in its fourth year and had cost the taxpayer \u00a3130,000. After ten minutes CIB3 said he would not face prosecution. He was also allowed to retire in July 2001 with all disciplinary matters withdrawn. \"I was never too sick to be interviewed,\" says Raison. \"CIB3 could have done so at any time before the trial started.\" Correspondence we have seen bears this out.\n\nLike that of undercover cop Michael, the case of George Raison raises a serious question. How do you stop an anti-corruption squad using suspension as a tool to prevent an officer giving damaging evidence against the force? And how often has and will this power be abused by the police when a whistle-blower officer's evidence is required by lawyers representing a member of the public who has, say, been fitted-up, beaten up or killed in custody?\n\nRaison couldn't complain to the Yard about it. Nor could he go to the Home Office. And police officers are not allowed to make complaints to the PCA. In effect there is no mechanism for a police officer to have the grounds for his continued suspension independently assessed to ensure there is no malice or hidden agenda to suppress the truth.\n\nKevin Garner was sentenced in February 2001, one month after the trial. When he appeared at the Old Bailey he looked hollow. The corrupt detective had lost over six stone and much of his hair, and was now wearing glasses.\n\nHead bowed throughout, Garner's barrister described him as the \"lynchpin\" in the Untouchables' crusade, without whom the corruption would have continued. The trial judge told him how \"impressed\" he had been with the supergrass's evidence and reaffirmed the highly debatable point that it was the Flying Squad that had made Garner bad. \"It seems those that thought themselves to be the elite were all routinely engaged in corruption... all with the knowledge and approval, and in some cases active participation of officers much senior to yourself.\" Six years.\n\nWhat of the two other defendants too ill to be tried with Norris, May, Howell and Harris? Detective constable Paul Smith was allowed to retire from the police on medical grounds in July 2001 with no finding against him.\n\nThe incredible story of what happened to solicitor Leslie Leonard Brown was further evidence that the anti-corruption crusade in general and Operation Ethiopia specifically was a famine not a feast of clean, successful internal investigations. Fourteen months after the trial ended, Brown pleaded guilty to a money laundering offence that directly implicated Norris in the very crime he had just been acquitted of. The situation was made more bizarre because Norris was about to come off paid sick leave and return to work.\n\nBrown faced four counts of converting and transferring the proceeds of criminal conduct and attempted handling of stolen goods. They all centred on the \u00a34,400 company cheque he gave Norris days after the Security Express robbery in exchange for cash.\n\nWhen Brown arrived at the Old Bailey on 11 March 2002 he looked pasty-faced and had a permanent snivel as if his sinuses were blocked. Drawing hard on his cigarette he gave every impression of taking the case to Europe if necessary. But by lunchtime there had been a dramatic U-turn. Brown pleaded guilty to: \"Having reasonable grounds to suspect that \u00a34,400 in cash directly or indirectly represented Norris's proceeds of criminal conduct, [he] transferred [it] for the purposes of assisting Norris avoid prosecution.\"\n\nOne week later, Brown returned to the Bailey to be sentenced. He looked haunted and still had that trademark snivel. The prosecution told the court Brown had made some important admissions about his close friend, Tim Norris, during an unrecorded intelligence interview with Untouchable Brian Moore in October 1998. They had met when Norris was serving at Tottenham. Their friendship developed over watching Spurs and going to boxing matches. Brown had done conveyancing for Norris, acted for his parents in a boundary dispute and lent his wife money to help start a business, the prosecution explained. Of course a lot of this was familiar to Moore who was also a close friend of Norris.\n\nBrown had told the CIB3 officer that Norris called him to represent Harvey hours after the robbery. In a private consultation Harvey told Brown that Norris had stolen the money. Brown was \"shocked and surprised\" because he saw Norris as a man of \"utmost integrity\". He disbelieved Harvey. But a few days later Norris arrived unannounced at his office with a wad of cash and asked Brown for a company cheque to pay off a loan. At first, Brown was not unduly suspicious. The next day the solicitor left for Las Vegas and spent most of the cash on his holiday. When he returned to London, Brown had a drink with Norris and \"half jokingly\" asked him what he made of Harvey's allegation against him. Norris \"hesitated\" and didn't say no straight away. So Brown asked him, \"Well, did you [steal the money]?\" He told Moore he was shocked when Norris replied, \"Yeah.\"\n\nBrown's barrister, Andrew Trollope QC, said his client's crime was simply not alerting the authorities when he realised the money was stolen, thus enabling his friend Norris to \"escape prosecution\". He said Brown was left in the \"curious and anomalous position\" that he had pleaded guilty when Norris had been acquitted, \"so the man who was the source of tainted funds walks away from the lengthy and tangled investigation scot-free\". Norris, he added, \"bears a very large measure of the blame for putting Brown in a wholly impossible position'. His client, he mitigated, acted out of \"misguided loyalty and an error of judgement\".\n\nThe judge was assured and gave Brown a fifteen-month sentence, suspended for two years. The three other counts were left on file. This seemed remarkably lenient. Asked outside the court how he felt about Norris returning to police work, Brown replied it was \"disgusting\" and walked off, no doubt to get some medication for those blocked sinuses.\n\nA few weeks later we met the disgraced solicitor at his mansion on Forty Hill in leafy Enfield. The property was up for sale to pay his creditors, he explained. The lounge looked like the venue of a number of all-nighters, and the walled grounds were as unkempt as the 58-year-old solicitor, who still hadn't shaken off that cold. The Law Society had struck him off in July 2001 for an unrelated matter, which according to legal sources involved financial impropriety around a missing \u00a330,000 from his client account. Brown described it as a \"shortfall\" after his accounts got \"in a mess\".\n\nThe criminal solicitor had actually started life as a social worker for the local council and then moved into law, establishing a practice opposite Edmonton police station. Over the years he had got to know many officers, including Garner and McGuinness. These loose friendships were lubricated when Brown became a licensee in 1991. Lawyers, clients and policemen frequented his wine bar, like Relton's place a decade earlier. But Brown says he was closed down in 1998 after undercover officers proved he was selling alcohol without food after hours.\n\nBrown described how in October 1998 he agreed a deal with the Untouchables, where he would plead to one charge of laundering and give evidence against Norris. \"If I had wanted to have rolled over I could have given [CIB3] allegations of clients who'd been nicked with an amount of drugs and charged with less.\" But Brown said he later reneged on the deal after receiving a threat from an unnamed ex-cop who \"said I could get lead in my cranium if I rolled over\".\n\nThere followed a period of sickness, genuine he insists, which meant he couldn't be tried with Norris and others. Brown therefore didn't have to explain the \u00a34,400 cheque and left Harvey unsupported in front of the jury. After Norris's acquittal, he says a new deal was finally ironed out between counsel and the judge, behind CIB3's back. The Untouchables had wanted to try him. But instead the judge accepted a plea to the laundering charge in return for a non-custodial sentence.\n\nBefore we parted company, Brown claimed he had lied to Moore during the intelligence interview to get bail. He said Norris never admitted the theft to him. As the interview with Moore was deliberately not tape-recorded, it is impossible to know whether Brown is now telling the truth or just trying to avoid being labelled a grass.\n\nWith Brown's case out of the way, two months later in June 2002 it was Hector Harvey's turn to discover what reduction in sentence he would get for all the, erm, assistance he had given CIB3.\n\nHarvey stood in the dock of Court 18 at the Old Bailey looking every bit the dapper rogue. The Selecta' wore a dark blue suit with a pale purple shirt and tie. He had piled on the pounds in the almost four years he had spent as a CIB3 supergrass. He was now 37 years old.\n\nIn the supergrass suite at HMP Woodhill Harvey was known as Bloggs 72. He had some personality clashes with the guards. Typically, the Selecta' had an explanation. \"They don't know how to deal with an educated black man standing up for his rights. They can't take it. 'Where's this geezer coming from? He should be all blood claat, rass claat.' When I'm saying How Now Brown Cow!\"\n\nProsecutor Ed Brown gave a heavily sanitised version of Harvey's amazing journey from robber to cleansed CIB3 supergrass. The mitigation speech by Harvey's barrister, Sir John Nutting QC, must have made very uncomfortable listening for Tim Norris, who was in the public gallery.\n\nUnless he could point out some \"exceptional circumstances\" Nutting knew the judge would have no alternative but to pass an automatic life sentence on Harvey. His client, he said, had been willing to give evidence against all the people he named, both civilians and police officers, but in the end and \"for tactical reasons\" the prosecution had preserved him solely for the Flying Squad trial. If Harvey had been disbelieved in a previous trial it would have rendered him useless against the Flying Squad defendants. Serious armed robbers were therefore never prosecuted.\n\nLes Brown's recent guilty plea in effect meant Harvey's evidence against Norris was true, Nutting maintained. \"It will be a long, long time if ever that [Harvey] will rid himself of the fear of discovery,\" he told the judge. And with a final dramatic flourish Nutting kept a straight face while he explained how Harvey had turned to robbing the off-licences because he needed to restore his credibility with the Underworld.\n\nThe judge took all this into account, plus a glowing testimonial from a Methodist preacher who had been visiting Harvey inside, before passing a sentence of four years and four months.\n\nOutside court we met up with Norris. His warrant card had been returned and he was waiting for a new posting. During his four-year suspension on full pay, Norris had completed a law degree and masters. He said it had allowed him to spot the \"strokes pulled by CIB3 to manipulate evidence\" in his case. Norris denied he had admitted the theft to his solicitor friend, Les Brown.\n\nHarvey, meanwhile, returned to Woodhill prison very angry. The sentence meant he would have to serve another six months. The bitterness in Harvey had been building up for many months. He had written to the new commissioner, Sir John Stevens, who'd taken over from Condon in February 2000, asking him to intervene and help his wife and children with the \"massive debts\" they had incurred since having to move from their Luton home. \"My head is full of anger and frustration. I implore you, Sir John, help me, help me, help me! I have kept to my end of the bargain, yet I now feel as if I am being shitted on from a great height, knowing that you've now got what you wanted from me. It's not right, Sir John.\"\n\nIt was a warning Scotland Yard ignored at great cost. The Selecta' decided it was time, in the words of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, \"for the big payback\".\n\nHarvey sacked his entire legal team and appointed new solicitors who appealed his sentence on the grounds the judge had got his maths wrong. The judge had used a starting point of twenty-one years and taken two-thirds off for Harvey's guilty plea and supergrass evidence. From the remaining seven years he miscalculated the amount of time Harvey had already spent in CIB3 custody. Had he got his maths right he would have passed a sentence that meant Harvey was immediately eligible for parole, something he almost certainly would have got.\n\nBelieving CIB3 had betrayed him, Harvey pulled up something that would convince them of the error of their ways and encourage them to support his appeal and application for bail. He had \"two aces in the hole\" which the Untouchables didn't know about. He decided to play only one of them. It would involve grassing up someone new and very special.\n\nOn 23 August, Harvey summoned two CIB3 officers to come and see him urgently at HMP Woodhill. Even his new young solicitor, Sarah Brinklow, hadn't a clue what he wanted to tell the Untouchables. She takes up the story: \"Detective chief inspector Simon Cousins, the head of the witness protection unit and a DC [from the intelligence cell] called Alan Cammidge turned up. With a deadpan face H reeled off an address. 'Do you recognise it?' he said to Cousins. 'That's my address!' Cousins replied. I was thinking to myself, 'Well done, H,' and trying not to smile.\"\n\nHarvey then gave the gobsmacked CIB3 officers the home address of another Untouchable, Paul Bennett. They asked how he knew and he dropped the bomb \u2013 he claimed he'd had a mole inside the intelligence cell of Operation Ethiopia.\n\nHarvey was referring to a sexy civilian worker he named as Lisa Cherry who had been attached to CIB from 1992 to 1997. According to her own staff appraisal she had handled \"extremely sensitive information\", especially when she worked in the intelligence cell at the height of Operation Ethiopia from January to August 1997.\n\nPandemonium followed when the CIB3 officers returned to London. Had the entire Flying Squad operation been compromised by a traitor? How safe were the three convictions if the supergrass knew what was going on in the prosecution? What other CIB3 jobs had been sold out? Once again the Selecta' had shown up the Untouchables.\n\nFollowing a series of high-level meetings with commander Hayman and detective chief superintendent Shaun Sawyer, it was arranged for Cammidge and another officer to interview Harvey on tape at Milton Keynes police station on 18 September to ascertain exactly what he knew and what he wanted. The first interview was an \"intelligence-only debrief\". In other words it was meant for CIB3's ears only.\n\nHarvey described over one hour how during the Threshers period he had met Lisa at a club. They had \"danced the night away\" and started a romance. After his arrest in August 1998 Harvey said he was allowed to retrieve his belongings from his bedsit to take with him to New Malden police station for the lengthy debriefing process. He told Cammidge he had buried a pay-as-you-go mobile phone and charger inside a four-kilo bag of American Easy Cook Rice and then sewn it up. He said he had made hundreds of calls on the phone over the last four years, including to Lisa Cherry. Friends would call through the PIN number for a phone voucher so he could constantly top up his credits.\n\nHarvey had moved to Godalming police station, near Guildford, in April 1999. Two cells in the unused custody area were converted into living accommodation and a bedroom and the corridor was made into a kitchenette. Lisa had visited him twice using a false name in November 2000, one month before the Flying Squad trial, he told Cammidge.\n\nHe had found out she used to work in CIB3 and cynically arranged for her to come and see him at this secure, covert location. Harvey had a list of people vetted by CIBIC whom he was allowed to call on the normal phone and receive visits from. He simply told Lisa to use the name of an approved friend, \"Samantha Smith\", who had never visited him. He also substituted her mobile telephone so he could save money calling her from the prison phone without raising suspicion.\n\nHarvey: So that's how the contact continued and when the night got lonely and cold she'd phone me on my mobile....\n\nCammidge: Like a chat line.\n\nHarvey: Something like that.\n\nHe sent her flowers and she sent him a bouquet with a note that read: \"I hope you will always want me like I want you. Love Lisa.\" Harvey manipulated that affection and claimed he asked her for the home addresses of four CIB3 officers, including Brian Moore and Martin Bridger. He wanted to have something to trade with as he awaited his sentence.\n\nWhen Lisa next visited him he claimed she brought two names on a Post-it note and agreed to be photographed with Harvey. It was a test of her loyalty, should he ever need to call on her again, and also a test of the security of CIB3's intelligence system, he told Cammidge. The CIB intelligence officer admitted his colleagues couldn't work out how Harvey had beaten what they thought was a failsafe system.\n\nCammidge agreed that the judge dealing with Harvey's bail application would be told of the latest assistance. The CPS had already been informed. Harvey made it very clear he would never make a statement against Lisa Cherry. It was purely for intelligence and he didn't want his name released to her or anyone else. The CIB3 officer agreed.\n\nAround this time we learned about the mole hunt inside CIB3. But when we rang Martin Polaine, the CPS lawyer in charge of the case, he went silent and then said, \"That's not something I can comment on.\"\n\nNext we called DCS Shaun Sawyer, the operational head of the Untouchables. He claimed there was no mole hunt. \"We are still very secure. Currently I can confirm quite happily on the record I have no evidence of a leak in CIB3 or from CIB3 now or in the past. I'm not inquiring at this time.\"\n\nAlmost three weeks later, on 6 November, Sawyer sent Cammidge back to Milton Keynes to re-interview Harvey about the mole hunt that he wasn't conducting. Legal advice had been taken, especially in light of the fact that the three jailed Flying Squad detectives were now appealing their convictions. A decision was taken to disclose details of Harvey's mobile phone calls and visits from Lisa Cherry, contrary to the agreement with the supergrass.\n\nDuring the second interview Harvey was asked if his past court evidence in the Flying Squad trial was his own or something he had put together by speaking to people on his smuggled phone. He reaffirmed it was his own. But he refused to give Cammidge the SIM card or reveal the second ace.\n\nCammidge: You can't tell me now? Maybe tell me later?\n\nHarvey: When I'm free and sunning myself on the Hawaiian beach, yeah I'll tell ya.\n\nAt the end of the interview Harvey was assured he would \"draw the highest credit\" at his forthcoming appeal hearing on 18 November. In the meantime a CIB3 team were anxiously investigating the allegations against Lisa Cherry. She was now working in the Finance & Resource Unit at Edmonton police station, ironically the place where Harvey had been taken after the Security Express robbery.\n\nThe Appeal court corrected the trial judge's maths and Harvey was immediately released into a witness protection programme run by the very people whose security he had compromised. Government lawyers and CIB3 had gushingly supported their supergrass's appeal.\n\nThat same day Lisa Cherry was arrested at home on suspicion of misfeasance in a public office and suspended from duty. At first she thought this was revenge by her employer for having started a grievance procedure against a female civilian worker whom she accused of racism and belonging to the National Front.\n\nOn legal advice Lisa said little during her interview except to deny leaking the home addresses. She wouldn't say whether she had met Harvey. But CIB3 had already developed the negatives showing her sitting on Harvey's knee. However, fingerprint testing and handwriting analysis proved it wasn't her mark on the Post-it note Harvey had given CIB3. He had lied to them once more.\n\nAny publicity would be a disaster for CIB3, an internal report noted: \"The impact to the resident informant system is far reaching in that the system is supposed to keep the informant sterile whilst being debriefed so that their evidence cannot be contaminated by any other source... The police have assured the courts that this sterile corridor has been maintained. Now we can't... the whole system will now have to be reviewed.\"\n\nCIB3 was still none the wiser who had leaked the home addresses. \"It has not been possible to establish where the details were obtained,\" a secret internal report dated 19 March 2003 recorded. The mole was still out there but it wasn't Lisa Cherry. Criminal charges against her were dropped, though CIB3 still wanted to discipline her for gross misconduct.\n\nShe'd had a nervous breakdown and suffered dramatic weight loss during the investigation. Cherry explained how she had become \"infatuated\" with Harvey but never for one moment knew he was an armed robber. She believed he was in protective custody because he was bravely giving evidence against criminals. No checks were ever done when she came to see Harvey at Godalming. The couple were simply left to their own intimate devices.\n\nAs she prepared for her disciplinary hearing she became convinced her home phone was tapped and she was under surveillance. She knew what the CIB intelligence cell was capable of and how they abused a blanket authorisation to bug and burgle targets.\n\nIn December 2003, Lisa Cherry was found guilty at a disciplinary board of gross misconduct, fined \u00a3500 and put on restricted duties.\n\nThe mole hunt revealed there was a second visitor Harvey had not told them about. Jacqueline Vassell, a black police constable, had befriended Harvey when he was a free man. She later visited him on 11 occasions, between January 2001 and May 2002, when he was a CIB3 supergrass housed at various secret locations. Vassell had used a false name, Jacqueline Bissett (after the actress), to gain entry. According to the Yard she was disciplined for these \"unauthorised visits\".\n\nThe Selecta' is now living under a new identity in rented accommodation originally paid for by Scotland Yard. He says he still has an ace in the hole, just in case things come on top again. It apparently involves a senior serving detective of superintendent or above rank. Harvey says he's turned his back on crime, so there should be no reason to play this card.\n\nBut if he falls... Rewind Selecta'.\n\n## [18\n\nFruit of a Poisoned Tree](contents.html#ch18)\n\nThe first court ruling to formally expose serious malpractice at the heart of the Untouchables' supergrass system was read out to a packed crown court in Maidstone, Kent, on 14 February 2000. The lengthy judgement became known as the Valentine's Day Massacre because of its scathing attack on the integrity of a joint operation codenamed Nectarine between the Kent Police and CIB3. The appropriately named judge, Harvey Crush, threw out the case against eight defendants, including a serving Met detective, jointly accused of conspiracy to supply \u00a312 million of cannabis. In delivering his reasons he remarked he had seen \"nothing like it on the bench\".\n\nDuring the course of legal argument, Judge Crush discovered serious illegalities in the way a drug trafficker turned supergrass called Richard Price had been debriefed. Price, it emerged, was offered a \"sweetening deal\" worth \u00a337,000, which the police hid from the defence and the Court. Price's assets, believed to be the proceeds of drug crime, should have been subject to a confiscation order but instead he was allowed to keep them in return for rolling over. The judge said there was a \"strong suggestion\" of financial inducements to implicate detective sergeant John Bull and other defendants.\n\nCrush's judgement identified \"wholesale breaches\" of PACE and other laws; a failure to tape-record and retain police interviews with the supergrass leading to major doubts about the veracity of his written statement; \"prosecution misbehaviour\" symptomatic of \"a culture of non-disclosure\" of 1,700 pages of \"highly significant\" police documents, despite court orders to do so; and \"oppressive behaviour\" and \"pressure\" by officers when debriefing Price. Operation Nectarine was quite simply the fruit of a poisoned tree.\n\nThe Director of Public Prosecutions ordered an \"unprecedented\" inquiry into the CPS's role. But the report remains secret, a spokeswoman tells us. Apparently it made 21 recommendations around the use of supergrasses, disclosure and confiscation proceedings. The internal inquiry also suggested that in large, complex and serious investigations the police should involve the CPS early, at the planning stage, and include them in the debriefing process too.\n\nThe unjustified secrecy around the internal report's findings is in large part explained by the Untouchables' concern about the repercussion on future trials. CIB3 tried an amateurish distancing exercise from the operation as if the rotten nectarine came from Kent's orchard. Meanwhile a spokesman for the county force took a different approach. He suggested Judge Crush was more schooled in aviation than criminal law!\n\nA year later, in April 2001, the supergrass system was again under attack, only this time at the Appeal Court. Three judges were considering the safety of the conviction of the five East Dulwich Regional Crime Squad detectives jailed in 2000 for major drug corruption. The grounds of appeal centred on CIB3's mishandling of the two supergrasses \u2013 Neil Putnam, their corrupt police colleague who'd found God after CIB3 found him, and drug dealer Evelyn Fleckney, who was serving a fifteen-year sentence at the time she rolled over against her lover and handler, detective constable Robert Clark.\n\nThe supergrass evidence of Putnam in the original trial had been far from clean and free of controversy. He had imploded under cross-examination. Putnam revealed he had told his CIB3 debriefers that one of the defendants, detective sergeant Terry O'Connell, was innocent of the charge and an honest man. Putnam also exposed how CIBIC boss Chris Jarratt had explained to him during an unrecorded prison visit that O'Connell was his friend and not corrupt. Putnam said he took this as a threat. Whatever the motivation behind Jarratt's highly controversial intervention, it exposes the real danger of police officers investigating their own.\n\nThe thrust of the appeal was to question the integrity and lawfulness of the supergrass system and to ask the Appeal Court to rule on this. If it went against them, CIB3 knew the whole anti-corruption crusade would be fatally holed beneath the waterline.\n\nAlun Jones QC led the attack for the defendants. He told the Appeal Court it was \"repugnant\" that having revitalised the discredited supergrass system, none of the debriefs were tape-recorded but relied on derisory handwritten notes, sometimes just a few lines to represent a meeting lasting several hours. Jones also pointed out that had the defence not discovered Putnam kept a private diary they would never have learned about the \"threats and inducements\" during his debrief.\n\nIn his diary Putnam describes how his debriefers took him for hill walks, the odd pint, fish and chips on the beach and to test-drive an Alfa Romeo. He was also given a \u00a350 note and allowed to shop alone at Tesco. Some parts of the diary read like scenes out of _The Sopranos_. In one, Putnam describes how his Italian debriefer, obviously called Vinny, carefully sliced the garlic for a slow-cooking pasta sauce. Only the onions were sweating during this interrogation.\n\nIn Italy supergrasses are called _Pentiti_ \u2013 the repentant one, a phrase steeped in Catholic imagery. Putnam's dairy is not just a _Sopranos_ cookbook, but also a celebration of the Holy Spirit, which the supergrass claimed was inside him as sure as last night's linguini. Very early into the debriefing process, the cop who found Christ wrote: \"My soul and heart have been cleansed. I have no hidden sin. God has vanquished Satan.\" His language complemented the Untouchables' phoney crusade. They later videoed Putnam's fall and redemption to show young recruits around London's police stations.\n\nAnother defence barrister, Anthony Evans QC, was equally contemptuous of the supergrass system. He told the Appeal Court: \"[CIB3] cloaked their investigation in an aura of propriety it did not have... We don't know what went on which caused [Putnam] to name A, B and C, rather than others,\" because none of it was taped. The defence argued there had been \"gross wholesale breaches\" of PACE, its codes and the 1992 Home Office guideline, which therefore made the convictions unsafe.\n\nJohn Yates, the head of this CIB3 operation, had been promoted one rank to detective chief superintendent by this time. Rather implausibly, he told the Appeal Court that tape-recording everything would have been \"impracticable\" and too expensive.\n\nYates' boss, commander Andy Hayman, had defended the supergrass system by resorting to what defence barristers dismissively call \"the uncharted waters\" excuse. Here the argument runs that CIB had no experience of debriefing police supergrasses so it had to invent its own system. Hayman called it a \"cutting edge\" strategy where CIB officers were \"pushing the parameters of the criminal justice system\" while operating within its \"constraints\". Unfortunately, the argument does not bear scrutiny. The 1992 Home Office guidelines on debriefing supergrasses, whether police officers or criminals, could not have been clearer. The simple truth was that these guidelines didn't suit the Yard's agenda and were deliberately flouted.\n\nTo the great surprise of those present, senior Treasury Counsel Orlando Pownall, who originally prosecuted the case, stood up and accepted CIB3 had breached some PACE codes, the Home Office guidelines and the 1996 Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act. He also appeared to rebuke Yates by adding that his personal view was that it was \"best practice\" to tape-record everything because it gave \"a more unassailable record\". Strangely, Pownall had made none of these startling admissions at the original trial and in front of the jury.\n\nIn normal circumstances, these concessions would have been enough to guarantee the appeal. But these were not normal circumstances. The Yard was prosecuting a War on Corruption and as such deliberate and wholesale breaches of key laws in pursuit of those who threatened the fabric of society apparently was not an affront to justice.\n\nThe judges adopted Pownall's admissions in their lengthy judgement but dismissed the appeal against the five convictions. The ruling was a throwback to the seventies and eighties when the Appeal Court refused to accept the appalling vista that the police and security services could do wrong. Individual CIB3 officers did not deliberately act unlawfully, the ruling said. But clearly the supergrass strategy they followed was designed that way, and had been since 1993, although the Appeal Court was silent on this point.\n\nConfirmation came from an unexpected source, the lead CPS lawyer, Martin Polaine, who had prosecuted these corruption cases. During a remarkably candid interview he revealed there was a serious split in the prosecution between the lawyers and the Untouchables.\n\nPolaine accepts the CPS was deliberately shut out of Ghost Squad operations by the Yard. And that it was only five years later, in April 1998, that CIB3 formally invited him to advise it and CIBIC on future covert operations and any prosecution arising from them. The Untouchables, he says, still had concerns about the security of the CPS and the threat of compromise, so a new team called Visa card was set up. Polaine led it with two CPS lawyers who were also vetted.\n\nAlmost immediately, the Visa team realised the acute problems associated with CIB3's debriefing process, which was already well advanced in the cases of Brennan, Harvey, Garner, McGuinness and Fleckney. Astonishingly, and most unusually, Polaine reveals that CIB3 ignored the advice of government lawyers that if they must use supergrasses, then all future debriefs should be taped. He says there was a debate inside the Yard but those against taping, whom he didn't name, won the day. It is apparent that from then on government lawyers acquiesced to an unlawful policy. And like intellectual mercenaries, they did their best to shore up a system they had no faith in by trying to make it \"more acceptable to the courts\", as Polaine puts it.\n\nHe and the defence lawyers we consulted all agree that CIB3's arguments for not taping simply don't bear scrutiny. Not only does taping shorten the debrief period, it also protects the prosecution from allegations of inducement, and therefore any convictions that follow don't suffer from the \"lurking doubt\" syndrome of cover-up that has rightly dogged almost all CIB3 operations. The anti-corruption squad was also the best-resourced unit in the Met, and its supergrasses were debriefed in specially converted police stations with recording facilities. The decision not to tape-record had everything to do with managing corruption allegations to protect the cherished reputation of the Yard and its favoured sons and little to do with saving pennies or protecting the public interest.\n\nThe CPS and the Appeal Court were willing to condone underhand procedures designed by CIB to deceive, mislead and corrupt the administration of justice. \"No light that should show red should be allowed to turn amber or green to suit the circumstances; the ends the police are seeking to achieve can never justify illegitimate means,\" an Old Bailey judge once said. The judicial establishment's tacit acquiescence to the corrupt supergrass system was alarming.\n\nIn late January 2003, it was the turn of the three former Flying Squad detectives convicted over the Security Express robbery to troop to the Appeal Court. Disgraced officers Fred May, Eamonn Harris and Dave Howell had served a little over a year of their seven-year sentences, mostly in Ford open prison. They hoped to capitalise on elements of the two earlier court rulings, but offered no fresh evidence of their own innocence. The Flying Squad appeals were also dismissed and the sentences upheld as \"appropriate\". However, the three different Appeal Court judges did adopt the earlier comments on the unlawfulness of key aspects of the supergrass system.\n\nThe judges were not moved by the defence suggestion that CIBIC boss Chris Jarratt \u2013 who at the time of the appeal was under investigation for dishonesty offences \u2013 and CIB3 case officer Martin Bridger had offered inducements and threats to get Garner to roll over and give evidence against others. Although the judges did accept that these conversations, especially those without a lawyer but with Garner's girlfriend Jackie Buisson present, should have been recorded. It was also conceded she had been paid money by CIB3. But the judges said the mysterious failure to serve a drug trafficking confiscation order on Garner over the missing 26 kilos of dope and the lack of a proper financial investigation into his or Buisson's affairs were not evidence of bad faith by the Untouchables. The point could have been clarified had they allowed the defence to subpoena and cross-examine Buisson. They wanted to explore deposits in her bank account and whether in return for not prosecuting her, Garner had agreed to roll over.\n\nThe judges also recognised there were significant discrepancies in CIB3's case about how the stolen \u00a31,516,000 was distributed, especially the shares taken by Garner and Harvey. But they upheld the PII application over the Fleming tape and said they were \"wholly unpersuaded\" that CIB3 had used suspension to keep DI George Raison tainted as a defence witness. It was not their job, the Appeal judges said, to conduct an inquiry into CIB3 over what the judges downplayed as \"imperfections or irregularities in the intelligence process or preparation for trials\".\n\nBut it was hard to see how having read two statements for the defence from former CIB3 supergrass Terry McGuinness, they didn't recommend that another agency conduct such an investigation. The judgement said:\n\nIn a witness statement dated 29 November 2002 McGuinness describes how under what he claims was improper pressure from CIB3 he decided to give evidence for the Crown... He claimed the officers must have known that Garner was responsible for the disappearance of 26 kilos of cannabis, which was never recovered after the burglary in 1997. In a further witness statement of 24 January 2003 McGuinness enlarged upon his allegations. In particular he claims that suggestions were put to him in interview. He said he was a broken man to whom promises had been made but not kept. He said he had not read his de-briefing notes but had just signed them. Had the PACE Codes been observed, he would never have \"put pen to paper\".\n\nEven this summary underplayed the seriousness of the allegations the former CIB3 supergrass was making. Had the three judges allowed McGuinness to give evidence in front of them in January 2003 \u2013 they ruled it was not relevant to the appeal \u2013 he would have expanded on his allegations that CIB3 had manipulated his evidence.\n\nTo understand the importance of McGuinness's statement we must go back to the latter part of 1999 when he was suddenly and unceremoniously dropped from the supergrass system before the Flying Squad trial. CIB3 still regarded him as a witness of truth, and he was willing to give evidence. But the reason why McGuinness was never used as a prosecution witness against any of the detectives he named explodes the myth of a no-hiding-place anti-corruption crusade.\n\nA large part of CIB3's problem with McGuinness was that Garner had completely contradicted him on a very serious allegation. McGuinness had told his debriefers in May 1998 that there were bags of imitation guns, wigs and balaclavas that the Flying Squad took out on operations to plant on suspects. They were used \"in case an armed officer shot a robber and he wasn't carrying a firearm\" or to increase the chances of a prosecution. Everyone, he said, referred to it as a \"first aid kit\". The point he made, as if this mitigated anything, was that only the guilty career criminal was fitted up this way.\n\nMcGuinness says he became aware of the kits within six months of going to Rigg Approach. Their use was widespread and cavalier, to the point, he maintained, that senior officers referred to them during 50% of the pre-operation briefings he had attended over five years. \"In my mind near nigh every senior officer had asked or knew about that first aid kit,\" McGuinness estimated. They were kept in officers' private cars or in the front foot well of a black taxi the Flying Squad used for surveillance operations.\n\nSuch allegations were not unheard of in older Yard circles. One retired detective, Alec Leighton, told us: \"In my day (the eighties) it was called a happy bag.\" But senior Untouchables, says McGuinness, did not like what he was revealing. Why? Because so-called noble cause corruption was not something in their brief.\n\nThe allegation had slipped out at the end of the long four-month debriefing. Remarkably, CIB3 waited another six months until November 1998 before asking Garner what he knew about the \"first aid kits\". In other words the Untouchables delayed an investigation into whether innocent people were languishing in prison. And when they did get around to asking Garner, he dismissed the claim as \"a load of bollocks\". Garner also denied there was a widespread fit-up culture.\n\nThese protestations however were totally at odds with evidence that emerged six months later in April 1999 when the Appeal Court quashed the conviction of a black man with a withered arm arrested by Garner for conspiracy to commit armed robbery with an imitation gun. Abraham Shakes maintained at his original trial in 1996 that the gun had been planted. Garner claimed it and a glove were tucked into the waistband of Shakes' loose-fitting tracksuit trousers when he made the armed arrest and pistol-whipped him to the ground. The Appeal Court was not convinced and quashed Shakes' conviction. He had already served almost four years of his eight-year sentence and would later receive \u00a3100,000 compensation.\n\nGarner denied fitting up Shakes at the same time he denied to CIB3 the existence of a \"first aid kit\". Who were the Untouchables going to believe \u2013 the police supergrass that could corroborate Harvey and hopefully convict five cops awaiting trial, or Meathead, the police supergrass who was alleging a widespread culture of noble cause corruption?\n\nOver 80 serving and retired officers were interviewed in early 1999 about the \"first aid kits\". They denied any such practice. Some might say, they would, wouldn't they? How far back the Untouchables explored the existence of this practice is unclear.\n\nIn May 1999, the CPS received the last file from CIB3 on the matter and after a month's deliberation decided there was \"no corroborative evidence\" to prosecute officers for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice or misfeasance in a public office. The latter charge related to those officers alleged to have turned a blind eye to the kits. In August the PCA advised that no officers would be disciplined for neglect and\/or discreditable conduct regarding the allegations.\n\nWhen McGuinness was sentenced in April 2000, CIB3 made a point of stressing how they still regarded him as a \"witness of truth\". Given what McGuinness told us later, another more appropriate description would be the canary that fell from his cage when he sang the wrong tune.\n\nMcGuinness now lives on the coast. CIB3 are still in contact with him through their witness protection unit (WPU). When we interviewed him, McGuinness stood by his statements and gave a further disturbing insight into what was really going on during his debrief. He said he offered CIB3 the opportunity to fudge how certain he was that most people in the Flying Squad office knew about the \"first aid kits\". \"I turned round in the interview and said if you want me to say I'm not sure I'll say I'm not sure. They said they want what you know or believe to be correct.\"\n\nBut after a while he noticed a change in CIB3's attitude toward his allegations of widespread noble cause corruption. \"It got so big they couldn't handle it. It was things like that they really didn't want to know about... first aid kits and stuff like that. As soon as it was said it was just brushed over. At the end of the day, I know everybody else knew, even to along the lines of bleeding [prosecution] barristers. Suspected is probably the best word. It was more or less exactly the same every time.\"\n\nMcGuinness had no idea that for six months CIB3 hadn't put his allegation of the \"first aid kits\" to Garner. He was less surprised that Garner had denied their existence. From his own experience he says it is entirely possible Garner was told off-tape not to corroborate him.\n\nWhat was CIB3's logic for not taping the debrief? \"I can't give you one. I personally think they should have been taped.\" What's the advantage of not taping? \"Well, one, they get to, it's like the old contem[poraneous] notes, you get a chance to talk about it and write down what you want to write, and leave out what you want to leave.\" Would you say there were things you said in your debriefs that were never recorded in the notebooks? \"Without a doubt. If there were general chats, it was taken down rough and then re-written into the debrief books. And then sometime later I'd be asked to sign them. I was so used to doing it by then, I was signing stuff that was sometimes a week old if not longer. They kept saying we've got to be whiter than white, and I got sick of hearing it. I said you're breaking everything, every rule and all the rest of it. In the end I thought, get on with it. Within a week [of being in the supergrass system] I was a nodding dog... I knew what they were doing was wrong. All the time it was happening there was no way I could stop it. I've always said this would blow up in CIB's face. That sometime they'd catch a cold, because it does. It always catches up with you.\"\n\nMcGuinness told us CIB3 came to him after his release and asked for a false statement that he \"could be mistaken\" about the \"first aid kits\". Presumably such a document would have helped fight future court cases and civil claims where the planting of evidence was being alleged. McGuinness recalls his reply to the Untouchables' representative: \"You must be fucking joking! You've banged my head against the wall for 21 months and now you are asking me that.\" He says he then informed his probation officer and his lawyer of the illegal approach.\n\nThe PCA had remarked in its 1999 annual report how they were aware of whistle-blowers being asked by senior officers \"to submit false statements or withdraw damaging [ones] about their colleagues' behaviour\". But here was an allegation from McGuinness that the Untouchables were conspiring to pervert the course of justice in the same way. There has been no investigation into McGuinness's allegations, but the Yard says it still regards him as a witness of truth. We asked why the Untouchables had waited six months before putting the \"first aid kit\" allegations to Garner. We are still waiting for a reply.\n\nMcGuinness is not alone in claiming the Yard's no-hiding-place corruption crusade was a sham, uninterested in examining the fit-up culture. Keith Green and supergrass Duncan Hanrahan appear to corroborate him. Hanrahan told the PCA in November 2002 that during his debrief senior Untouchables told him they were not interested in noble cause corruption. In his complaint he wrote: \"[Chris] Jarratt said in the presence of [David] Wood that he didn't want me to talk about what he called God's work. When I asked what he meant by this he said that \u2013 to do with police malpractice to get convictions basically for stitching people up, that side of things.\"\n\nHanrahan also complained that the two officers \"verballed\" him; that Jarratt had tried to get him to change his solicitor after he had agreed to become a supergrass, and that he had been prompted to incriminate John Bull, the detective at the centre of the Operation Nectarine scandal. In short, Hanrahan told the PCA, \"CIB are a law unto themselves.\"\n\nHanrahan asked for an outside force to be brought in to investigate CIB3. But a PCA spokesman told us they had simply acted as a \"post box\" and passed the complaint to the Yard, which, we discovered, did nothing.\n\nIt is difficult to envisage how the public interest in getting to the bottom of these important complaints about the integrity of the supergrass system will be better served now the Independent Police Complaints Commission has replaced the PCA. Were it to take up the two supergrasses' complaints, Roy Clark, as director of investigations for the new IPCC, would have overall responsibility for the probe into the secret unit he set up and at least one of the Untouchables he appointed to the job.\n\nUnquestionably, had the appeal of Eamonn Harris and his two colleagues been allowed, then the Untouchables would have had to abandon a second Flying Squad trial due to start three months later in May 2003 at the Old Bailey. This case also involved Harris as a defendant, alongside detectives Michael Carroll, Dave Thompson and Ian Saunders. They were arrested in December 1998 on suspicion of involvement in a \u00a31 million Post Office robbery four years earlier.\n\nAn Indian gang using a dummy security van, fake uniforms and an inside agent collected \u00a31,065,678 in cash from the Post Office in Romford, Essex, and made their escape. Rigg Approach Flying Squad was given the job of catching them. Once again, it was alleged that the officers stole (\u00a335,000) from the recovered proceeds.\n\nThe chief prosecution witness was Garner. Without him there was no case. During his debrief he claimed he had helped steal the recovered money and shared it seven ways with the four defendants and two unnamed others. Without this confession the Untouchables would never have known about the alleged corruption. It was an \"almost perfect crime\", the prosecution would claim.\n\nAfter Garner was freed in May 2001, he and Jackie Buisson moved into rented accommodation provided by the Untouchables. Slowly Garner tried to rebuild his life and was working in a menial job. But the thought of giving evidence for a second time against Harris was weighing heavily on his already addled mind. It appears he was also harbouring resentment towards CIB3 over the financial resettlement package he expected.\n\nThe second trial did not start until 7 May 2003. The delay was not just down to the defence, as the Crown often maintains, but CIB3 too. Firstly, the anti-corruption squad had decided that the Security Express case was the stronger of the two, so delays in that prosecution had a knock-on effect on this one. Secondly, one of the defendants, Ian Saunders, became very ill and had to be severed from the indictment. Thirdly, Untouchable Chris Jarratt was under investigation for dishonesty offences. Suffice it to say, doubts about his integrity had a bearing on the second trial because he originally arrested Garner and had turned him into a supergrass in disputed circumstances. Finally, there was the mole hunt caused by Harvey's revelations about two lovers in the Met and the smuggled mobile phone.\n\nCIB3 was under no illusion this second trial would be an all-out assault on the \"unlawful\" supergrass strategy and the integrity of leading Untouchables. Some observers thought this was not a prosecution Scotland Yard were looking forward to or even wanted any more. Over the weekend the wheel finally came off.\n\nOn Saturday, 10 May, Garner phoned his witness protection officer to say he had jacked in his job and was too ill to start his evidence next week. The call sparked a major panic at the Yard. The next day Garner produced a doctor's certificate that he was suffering from \"acute anxiety and stress\". At court on Monday, Treasury Counsel Jonathan Laidlaw QC explained the situation to Judge Gregory Stone, who gave the impression he was willing to disrobe there and then and drag Garner to court by the ear.\n\nNotwithstanding the question mark over the supergrass's fitness, the judge was determined to press ahead with the prosecution case, despite defence objections. One of the Indian robbers, Jasvir Jhumat, gave inconclusive evidence. Afterwards, he told us he had been a reluctant witness and said CIB3 had \"threatened\" him back in 1998 that if he didn't give evidence against the Flying Squad detectives he'd face prosecution for bribery.\n\nMeanwhile, when officers from the witness protection unit arrived at Garner's house, they discovered him hiding in the garden, very drunk. A confidential WPU report described Garner as \"very emotional and constantly referring to himself as a wanker\". The attending officer candidly reported how Garner had said, \"Harris was a good bloke and no way could he give evidence. He has had six years of it, the pressure, and he had just had enough.\"\n\nThe following day Garner saw a psychologist he had previously consulted when he was going off the rails shortly before his arrest back in December 1997. He wrote a report in which it emerges that back then Dr Hacker-Hughes diagnosed Garner as suffering from \"severe depression\" and \"chronic and severe post-traumatic stress disorder\". The latter is characterised by, among other things, nightmares, behavioural avoidance and an inability to remember important aspects of traumatic incidents.\n\nHere was the proof that when Garner entered the supergrass system he was an incredibly vulnerable and suggestible witness, whose handling had to be beyond the slightest reproach. Furthermore, the doctor revealed that once in the supergrass system, Garner \"remained untreated\" throughout his debriefing and detention. This ongoing mental illness, combined with the deliberate decision not to tape-record the debriefs, now put a severe question mark over Garner's reliability and CIB3's integrity and professionalism.\n\nThe psychologist re-examined Garner for ninety minutes on 13 May. He concluded his patient was still suffering from the same mental condition he had diagnosed six years earlier. Garner was also now showing signs of alcohol dependence. He told Dr Hacker-Hughes he was drinking three bottles of whisky a week, and that he had \"come to dread continued contact\" with the police. But it was the following clinical assessment that ended the argument over whether to proceed with the second trial. Dr Hacker-Hughes wrote: \"Mr Garner told me he is confused about exactly what he has said over the past six years and is continually haunted by persecutory dreams, often featuring footsteps down corridors, slamming car doors, court appearances and visions of being buried alive. Mr Garner now seems to be very confused about what is right and what is wrong and about what is the truth.\"\n\nNevertheless, the doctor, who now works for the Ministry of Defence, felt that with treatment his patient might recover to give evidence. So on 15 May the trial was aborted and rescheduled for September.\n\nPrivately, the Yard knew its flagship prosecutions were fatally weakened by the psychiatric reports on Garner. But as in life, in death Scotland Yard's anti-corruption crusade would have a carefully choreographed final curtain, presented as a triumph of integrity over dishonesty.\n\nOn Friday, 27 June 2003, at the Old Bailey, Laidlaw told the judge he had no confidence Garner would recover. The matter had been discussed at the top level of the CPS and the Yard, he said. The plug had been pulled, which left the judge no option but to acquit all four defendants.\n\nDCS Shaun Sawyer swiftly walked over to Carroll, 47, and Thompson, 38, and told them to report for duty after the weekend. Sawyer appeared flustered when outside Court 18 we asked what he now thought about the decision to base an anti-corruption crusade on a discredited supergrass system. \"We've moved away from that,\" he replied, before heading off.\n\nAnother Untouchable, Dave Pennant, was also in court. He had risen three ranks to detective superintendent during his almost six years at CIB3 and was about to join Surrey Police as head of proactive operations. Pennant let slip that secretly, before the second prosecution started, there had been a massive U-turn by the Yard concerning its supergrass system.\n\nPennant and other leading lights in CIB3 had now written a paper for ACPO recommending that all debriefs should be tape-recorded. Pennant claimed no knowledge of the 1992 Home Office guidelines. The whole experience had been \"a learning curve\", he said. Indeed. But at whose expense?\n\nThat same day, over at the High Court, a prosecution brought by the Health and Safety Executive against commissioner Stevens and his predecessor, Lord Condon, collapsed. The two top cops had faced embarrassing cross-examination. But in the end Lord Condon told reporters common sense had prevailed. He said his and Sir John's legal costs (paid by the public) had reached \u00a32 million and could have put \"70 police officers on the streets for a year\". Curiously, Scotland Yard is unwilling to put a figure on the cost of its failed Flying Squad probe lasting eight years and described by the press office as \"one of the biggest anti-corruption investigations ever undertaken by a UK police force\". A reasonable estimate would be \u00a330 million. That's over 1,000 police officers.\n\nIn February 2004 Kevin Garner agreed to discuss his reflections on the whole supergrass experience. He was wearing a dark suit and had bulked up since we last saw him at the Old Bailey three years earlier. Gone were the glasses, the gaunt face and sunken expression. Garner looked like his old self, when the former detective and his Flying Squad chums were out of control.\n\nGarner says his \"first taste of corruption was at [police] training school in Hendon\". Recruits were told that when stopping someone for running a set of traffic lights to \"always give 'em ten yards\". The acceptable level of corruption or unethical conduct, he explained, was greater on specialist squads. \"Look at the Regional Crime Squad and their workload over Christmas. They always went for lorry-loads of booze and electrical goods. Then look at what the prizes were during the Christmas raffle!\"\n\nAt Rigg Approach there was little difference. \"Everyone used each other for their own attributes. Me, I was hard, didn't care to frighten people, go into them alone and nick the money. Eamonn Harris, he could do the paperwork.\" There was, he says, no sense among the team that stealing from criminals was wrong. But they drew the line at selling out jobs to villains.\n\nWhen Garner was arrested over the cannabis theft he originally suspected Taverner had grassed him up. It wasn't until after he rolled over that he realised it was a CIB3 sting from beginning to end. It soon became apparent to the supergrass that the Untouchables were far from \"whiter than white\", he says. \"The first question I was asked in the debrief was by Jarratt. He wanted to know what I knew about [corruption] in [the] Tower Bridge [Flying Squad office]. I said I knew nothing. If I had said 'loads' I wouldn't be in the position I am now.\"\n\nGarner couldn't understand why Rigg Approach had been singled out as a corrupt office and not Tower Bridge, Barnes or Finchley. Tower Bridge, he recalled, had in some respects a worse reputation than Rigg. \"What [CIB3] wanted was very clinical. They wanted certain people in the Flying Squad [at Rigg]. They didn't want me to drop any of their mates in the shit.\"\n\nWe then turned to why he thought the Untouchables had waited six months to ask him about the \"first aid kits\" and why he had denied they existed. \"The second thing that was said to me [early in the debrief] was, 'We won't talk to you about God's work.' I told them I wouldn't go down that path.\" Garner does not deny the fit-up culture existed in the Flying Squad but in his warped morality he explained that \"innocent Joe Public walking along the street\" never had anything to fear.\n\nOn a more personal note, Garner can now admit that he had for some time been suffering from \"mental illness\" when he became a supergrass. He will not be drawn on whether his covert activities in Northern Ireland as a soldier contributed to this. Garner does however criticise CIB3 for not ensuring he had a responsible adult during his arrest and subsequent debriefs. Asked why the Untouchables did not ensure the debriefing process was all above board, Garner gave perhaps his most revealing reply: \"They didn't want to get it right, in the same way my team [at Rigg] didn't want to.\"\n\nGarner is unrepentant about grassing up his former colleagues over the Hector Harvey job, and he still maintains his and their guilt. But the retired supergrass says he \"took the dairy [the rap] for a lot of people\" and he feels there are those in the Flying Squad who know he never fully \"cleansed\" himself about their criminality.\n\nThere is a part of himself Garner despises for being a grass. Perhaps this is why he says he tried to be helpful to Harris and others in the first trial by leaving openings in his evidence for the defence to cross-examine him on and raise a reasonable doubt. \"I left the door wide open and they never came at me,\" says Garner.\n\nClearly, something very bad went on at Rigg Approach. There must have been a corrupt cell of detectives operating with Garner and McGuinness. But given the way the Yard conducted its ten-year corruption crusade, by design and default it has obscured the truth about how far that corruption spread outwards and upwards.\n\nThe collapse of the Flying Squad prosecutions and the Geoff Brennan scandal reminds defence solicitor Mark Lake of a scene from the biopic _A Man for All Seasons_ , about the life of Sir Thomas More. \"He is speaking to his future son-in-law, Roper, an enthusiastic Protestant. They are debating chasing Satan. Roper is of the view you must tear down all the barriers to bring him to book. More poses the key question \u2013 but what if Satan is not nailed and comes back to bite his pursuers? Where then are the barriers? The point is that these barriers in the criminal justice system are there to protect the innocent majority in the event they are falsely accused. It is unfortunate that the guilty often profit by society's rules, but this is no justification to tear up the rulebook and act in a worse way than the suspects are alleged to have acted.\n\n\"I go a stage further. Even if one accepts the deterrent-based argument that the ends justify the means \u2013 that it is vital to convey the message to officers contemplating corruption that they will then be hounded to the ends of the earth by any means necessary \u2013 it fails as an effective strategy if trials collapse or convictions are set aside because of malpractice by CIB3. Arguably, guilty officers walk free with loads of compensation, the police has a massive amount of humble pie to eat and the public are rightly indignant about the waste of public funds.\n\n\"The Untouchables appear unable to appreciate that certain supergrasses duped them for their own ends. Instead of being able to admit they were had over, they press on regardless. This is the real scandal, not that mistakes were made. Mistakes will always be made when dealing with treacherous gits like Brennan and Harvey. Cover-ups, to improve the chances of a successful prosecution or hide corruption, are a different matter.\"\n\nThe anti-corruption crusade was based on seven main supergrasses. Undoubtedly, Brennan, Harvey and Hanrahan all made major fools out of the Yard's finest minds. Others like McGuinness and Garner lost trust in the integrity of the debriefing process. All of which leaves born-again Christian supergrass Neil Putnam. But in a private letter to Terry O'Connell, one of his former colleagues whom he helped convict, Putnam raised his own important concerns with the debrief process, which he described as \"a political game\".\n\n\"I will admit their [ _sic_ ] were times I would sign anything just to get them away from me and get some peace.\" He then ends the letter sensationally: \"CIB were desperate to get someone with rank to be prosecuted, you [O'Connell was just a detective sergeant] fitted the bill at the time. It [ _sic_ ] a shame they did not look closer at their own staff, an entire crew from [the Flying Squad at] Tower Bridge for a start.\"\n\n## [19\n\nThe Fall of the  \nGinger Giant](contents.html#ch19)\n\nBy 2000, the three covert operations set up to prove that detective inspector John Redgrave was corrupt had all failed at a great and still undisclosed public cost. He and Michael Charman were in their fourth year of suspension. Scotland Yard had abandoned bringing any criminal prosecution against the pair because there was no evidence of their guilt. It was still open to the Untouchables to bring disciplinary action, but even this was reduced to one minor charge that had already failed the criminal test twice.\n\nWhen we pointed this out to anti-corruption chief, commander Andy Hayman, he tapped his nose judiciously and said there was \"live stuff\" \u2013 secret intelligence \u2013 he couldn't go into that convinced him the Untouchables were still right about the ginger giant. This \"live stuff\" we later learned was unsubstantiated, old intelligence very much designed to linger. Every so often the Untouchables would refer to it when they were under pressure to justify their actions.\n\nIn July, for example, commissioner Stevens offered Redgrave's MP, Andrew Mackinlay, a secret intelligence briefing after he had called for an independent inquiry into this \"unsavoury can of worms\". Mackinlay rejected Stevens' approach as \"improper\" and instead launched a withering attack on the Untouchables during an adjournment debate in the Commons a few months later.\n\nThere was some extraordinary serendipity at work here. Mackinlay is a combative and fiercely independent old Labour politician who believes in holding the executive and its shadow warriors to account through Parliament. He'd distinguished himself in 1998 as a member of the Foreign Affairs select committee's inquiry into Sandline. They were the British mercenary outfit given the nod and wink by the Foreign Office to help restore a friendly ruler in the former British colony of Sierra Leone. It was New Labour's first scandal and helped expose the hypocrisy of its \"ethical\" foreign policy.\n\nMackinlay first heard of Operation Nightshade during these tense committee hearings. At one point the two undercover officers who'd met Roger Crooks posing as representatives of Loyalist terrorists heard they were going to be called as witnesses. For his part, Mackinlay grilled Labour ministers and civil servants with such gusto that the then foreign secretary Robin Cook privately tried to apply a choke chain, he recalls.\n\nOnce Mackinlay had digested his constituent's complex story he posed a series of questions about Crooks to the Home Office, Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence. The MP had come to believe there might be \"sensitive diplomatic and political reasons\" behind Redgrave's plight.\n\nCrooks had provided logistical support to the 1998 British government-sponsored counter coup in Sierra Leone \u2013 he leased his military helicopter. The shadowy businessman also had a close relationship with other western diplomats and spies through his hotel in the capital Freetown. When the coup leaders were ousted Crooks refurbished the Mama Yoko and signed a three-year rental agreement with the United Nations peacekeeping force, which still uses the hotel as its base.\n\nThe official response to Mackinlay's questions was plain wrong and looked like the Yard was deliberately misleading ministers. Charles Clarke, the police minister, said commissioner Stevens had assured him there were \"no details\" revealed by Operation Nightshade of arms dealing involving Sierra Leone. And foreign minister Peter Hain wrote there was \"no reason to believe\" Crooks was involved in an arms deal between Northern Ireland and Sierra Leone.\n\nBefore the adjournment debate in October 2000, Mackinlay wrote to home secretary Jack Straw asking for a judicial inquiry into the Untouchables and Redgrave's case. Straw declined. He too said the commissioner had assured him issues raised by our articles in March were inaccurate and he \"fully supported\" the Yard's efforts to root out bent cops.\n\nMackinlay was unimpressed. His subsequent performance in the adjournment debate dazzled parliamentary sketch writers with its grasp of the twists and turns of his constituent's story. For 15 minutes he lambasted CIB for not alerting the Lawrence Inquiry to Redgrave's information about the \"incestuous relationships\" between bent cops and criminals in south-east London. \"CIB is riddled with people who want to stop further light being shed on those relationships,\" he told the Commons. Again Mackinlay called for an independent inquiry into the \"widespread misfeasance at the highest level in the Met\" and \"malevolence and corrupt practice\" by certain Untouchables involved in Redgrave's case. Singled out were Hayman and Coles, whom the MP accused of acting \"unprofessionally and with maximum spite and deceit\" by continuing to insist Redgrave was corrupt and had fabricated the arms deal.\n\nMackinlay called for the suspension of Redgrave and Charman to be lifted and the \"nonsense\" disciplinary charge withdrawn. He heaped special scorn on the Yard's disciplinary tribunal, which he described as a \"kangaroo court working to a predetermined conclusion\". Charles Clarke responded briefly. He again expressed full support for the anti-corruption crusade but did remark on the \"immense time\" the case was taking to resolve.\n\nAs Coles walked past Redgrave and Charman on his way out of the chamber he was bright red with rage. The poisoned chalice he'd been given back in 1997 was hanging heavy round his neck.\n\nThe key secret intelligence held on Redgrave is believed to be a collection of bugged conversations recorded over 1992 and 1993 between various East End villains. We know that on the strength of these recordings and related intelligence Redgrave was placed on a list of suspect cops around whom the Ghost Squad was formed. The Untouchables will not disclose this secret intelligence to Redgrave's defence team so they can evaluate it. Yet the Yard continues to rely on it when privately briefing politicians and journalists.\n\nBy all accounts, at the time these secret recordings were made Redgrave had gained a reputation in the East End as a very effective and hard detective. A number of well established and up and coming criminal firms were prominent in the Canning Town and Barking area, among them three families, the Sabinis, the Wrights and the Hunts.\n\n\"They had control and there were no-go areas for old bill. Part of my brief was to clean it up,\" says Redgrave. He was drafted on to an anti-protection team to stop local villains extorting money from pubs. The team set up two covert pubs staffed with undercover officers and successfully prosecuted various gangs. Redgrave and his team had a reputation for going into villains' pubs and clubs and physically confronting them. One of his former bosses described him memorably as a detective \"hard as woodpecker's lips\".\n\nHe was often attached to the local 2 Area drug squad, then led by John Grieve. He had recommended Redgrave for a commissioner's commendation for his part in taking down local hero Mickey Ishmael, a feared armed robber turned drug trafficker. Redgrave had a stand-up fight with Ishmael on his arrest and the ginger giant kept a photo of the prisoner in his office drawer as a memento.\n\nIn 1990, Redgrave transferred to the Regional Crime Squad in nearby Barkingside. His appraisal on leaving was glowing: \"DS Redgrave had a compulsive desire to take on and eventually take out major criminals... when he leaves the division many an East End criminal will breath a sigh of relief.\" At Barkingside he targeted several top echelon villains including the Hunts over a multi-million pound armed robbery of travellers cheques. Redgrave was badly hurt in this operation but recovered to arrest Raymond Hunt.\n\nThe ginger giant is also a flawed man. He got too close to informants; he made bad decisions about his father's will; he was intolerant of perceived weakness in others; he showed off and sometimes talked up his achievements. In the Condon era this style of policing had become very unfashionable and open to a pre-conviction that the detective was \"not right\". But it is ironic that John Grieve and Roy Clark, who would become Redgrave's main accusers, were fans of the ginger giant's detective skills until shortly before they turned on him. Clark was on the board that promoted Redgrave to detective inspector in 1992. But everything changed the following year when he and Grieve reinvented themselves as witchfinder-generals from their new base at SO11.\n\nIntelligence on Redgrave came to them from detective chief inspector Dave Woods. He had served under Clark at Stoke Newington. Woods was then part of a little-known failed covert intelligence gathering operation for SO11 looking at East End criminals like the Sabinis and the Hunts. It was during this bugging operation that certain criminals are said to have mentioned Redgrave's name.\n\nAccording to police sources intimately involved in the bugging operation, millions were wasted, including on setting up a covert pub in Canning Town with undercover officers as bar staff and bugs hidden in the dartboard, surrounding tables and bar. \"But when the jukebox came on you couldn't make out what people were saying,\" revealed one detective who debriefed the undercover team.\n\nThis was not the only problem. It appears that the local underworld rather quickly worked out that the pub was \"hooked up\". \"All of a sudden people stopped going there,\" our source recalls. Retired detective chief inspector Norman McNamara explained that this had nothing to do with corruption. \"An undercover officer had inadvertently compromised the whole operation by walking into the Sabinis' portakabin. An internal inquiry questioned him and concluded he had over-enthusiastically gone beyond his brief.\"\n\nThis spooky debacle in the East End was effectively turned into the Ghost Squad intelligence cell with Dave Woods at the helm. Several detectives familiar with this affair suspect that the anti-corruption dimension was in part a way for SO11 to save face over the enormous amount of money \u2013 said to be in excess of \u00a33 million \u2013 lost on these covert operations in the East End.\n\nRedgrave gave us precise details of how he and Woods fell out in the early eighties. The animosity, he says, was maintained up until Woods disappeared with \"cancer\" and joined the Ghost Squad in 1993. Woods, though, remains tight-lipped about his shadowy past and would not be interviewed about this or any bad blood with the ginger giant.\n\nThe Untouchables have also consistently rubbished Redgrave's claim that he was the target of various professional criminals who plotted to discredit him. At first we too were sceptical. Many officers pull this excuse out of the bag knowing how difficult it is to disprove. But slowly and independently we uncovered evidence of a plot hatched well before the Brennan allegations surfaced in June 1994.\n\nThe financier behind it is one of the UK's most sophisticated criminal minds.\n\nIf ever a British criminal deserved the sobriquet 'master criminal' it is Stephen Patrick Raymond. Born in 1945, Raymond came from an average working-class family in Stoke Newington. He is exceptionally bright, charming and without excuses. \"I'm a criminal by design not default,\" he says. \"I didn't do it because I was from fucking deprived circumstances as a child. I did it because I wanted some fucking money.\"\n\nToday Raymond has lots of money. He lives in the south of France, makes Cognac and also owns an expensive Islington home and restaurant. \"Now I've got the money I don't want to do [crime] any more. I'm more royal than a king.\" He says he is 95 per cent legitimate. Between the poetry and cooking, he likes to keep his hand in the Underworld just to show up the police. Every criminal has an Achilles Heel, and Raymond's is narcissism. He sees no point in making fools out of London's finest without leaving his calling card.\n\nRaymond's first serious sentence was the six years he received in 1964 for robbing an actress. While the 19-year-old was inside he initiated voluminous correspondence with Tom Driberg, the Labour MP and well-known prison reformer of the time. In the trendy era of criminology, Raymond learned to manipulate liberal concerns about the prison system. But Driberg's interest in helping him was also rooted in less altruistic fancies: his insatiable desire for troubled young men. Driberg, by then in his mid-sixties, had been a frequent guest at parties thrown by the Krays, where rent boys plucked from the \"Meat Rack\" in Piccadilly were available for some light fellatio.\n\nRaymond, with his slight frame, rugged good looks and dark ginger hair, knew how to manipulate Driberg's desires. As he moved around the prison system he sought the MP's assistance to obtain privileges he maintained were being improperly denied to him. He also asked to be moved to a softer regime where he could continue his education.\n\nAfter obtaining four A Levels, Raymond applied to Surrey University to study catering. In prison he also began writing dark poetry about the rages he experienced. His verse, he told Driberg, was \"the equal of Bunting and others\". On his release in August 1969 Raymond returned almost immediately to crime. After his re-arrest, Driberg wrote a letter to _The Times_ pleading the case of the \"scholar in prison\". Raymond's psychiatric social worker took a more sceptical view, calling her patient \"psychopathic, callously manipulative and [possessing a] destructive exploitation of others and readiness to bite the hand that feeds\".\n\nRaymond regularly betrayed Driberg, yet the lustful MP for Barking kept coming back for more. The unrepentant criminal once stole from Driberg's desk a draft obituary of prime minister Harold Wilson that he'd written for _The Times_ , and sold it to _Private Eye_. More spectacularly, he used Driberg as an alibi for the 1970 murder of south London gang boss Eddie Coleman. Two of Raymond's associates lured Coleman to a shop in Tottenham. They shot him, wrapped him in polythene sheeting and then placed him in a huge trunk that Raymond had bought. The body was disposed of in the New Forest.\n\nThe two killers then fled to Scotland where Raymond joined them after posing as Driberg in the first-class carriage during the train journey there. Scottish shopkeepers tipped off the police when Raymond started caning the MP's stolen credit card. On his arrest, he gave up the whereabouts of his associates and all three were charged with what the tabloids were now calling \"the body in the trunk murder\".\n\nRaymond looked sunk. But at the trial he caused a sensation when Driberg appeared as his chief witness. The MP told the jury that on the night of the murder Raymond had joined him at the Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho for dinner with two Labour grandees, former solicitor general Sir Dingle Foot QC and his brother, Michael. The alibi persuaded the judge to order that Raymond be cleared of murder and manslaughter. But the jury found him guilty of obstructing justice. He was jailed for three years. Raymond however absconded from prison and fled with his girlfriend to Australia where he briefly passed himself off as the features editor of _The Times_. He was re-arrested and deported to Britain to complete his sentence.\n\nIn June 1976, Raymond, now in his early thirties, carried out a particularly audacious heist at Heathrow that earned him the tabloid sobriquet \"the Great Brain Robber\". He'd obtained a job as a clerk with the American security company Purolator. His mother was proud that he appeared to be turning his back on crime. But seven weeks later, Raymond presented himself in a smart suit at the Heathrow strong rooms of British Airways and the Belgian airline Sabena with forged instructions to recover some money. His associate was dressed in a Purolator uniform. Raymond explained that the recently delivered money was improperly packed. The duo worked the con three times in one day making off with a staggering \u00a32 million in foreign currency. They then fled abroad. But Raymond was finally arrested after a few days in Switzerland.\n\nAt his trial, Raymond defended himself. He'd learned law inside prison. The jury didn't accept that heavyweight criminals Roger Denhardt and Mickey Ishmael had threatened to kill him if he didn't participate in the robbery. It transpired that while he and Denhardt were on remand Raymond had helped concoct a fake defence for his chum, who was awaiting trial for an armed robbery. The conspiracy involved fabricating an elaborate paper trial of false companies and invoices to explain how Denhardt had so much money in his bank account. A bent solicitor, Peter Moore, was drawn into the scam and later jailed. Raymond was given the maximum ten years for the Purolator caper. He also admitted the conspiracy with Denhardt.\n\nBehind bars Raymond made case law when the Appeal Court held that a prison governor was in contempt for interfering with the prisoner's mail to stop Raymond bringing a legal action against him. He also knew how to manipulate the supergrass system and internal corruption probes like Operations Carter and Countryman respectively. Raymond spoke to detectives, knowing his corruption allegations would by happy coincidence disrupt the criminal trials of his associates. And at a bankruptcy hearing in 1982, Raymond made a spectacular claim that he had given Driberg \u00a325,000 from the Purolator robbery, knowing the MP could not contradict him. He had died six years earlier.\n\nThree years later and a free man, Raymond was involved in a scam to steal Rolls Royce cars. He also posed as someone from the Department of Education to defraud Granada Television of \u00a3500,000 of electrical goods. For all this he was jailed for a further eight years. Raymond, though, had no intention of completing his sentence and in 1989 absconded. He phoned the local radio station and persuaded the DJ to dedicate a song to a \"friend\", the detective who had put him away. The song he chose was \"Granada\".\n\nWhile on the run, in 1990 Raymond began courting Emma Blackburn Gittings, the wayward daughter of his top criminal lawyer. She was persuaded to impersonate a wealthy American student living in London so they could empty her bank account of \u00a3400,000. Emma was arrested and jailed for nine months. Raymond however evaded capture.\n\nAfter his manipulation of the randy Driberg, it made perfect sense that three decades later Stephen Raymond would use an old Labour Party meeting hall in north London to house an ecstasy factory capable of producing one million tablets of the love drug.\n\nIn 1992, Raymond recruited criminal chemist Geoff Couzens to run the factory. It wasn't Couzens' first venture into producing large quantities of the drug. He had started experimenting as a chemistry graduate at Imperial College in the seventies. Couzens made his first batch of methylenedioxymethylamphetamine (MDMA), the chemical name for ecstasy, in 1979. But it appears he was ahead of his time. In the late eighties, Couzens flew to Yugoslavia to set up an E factory for distribution in the UK and Europe. By then the Acid House scene in London was going nationwide and mutating into an army of ravers dropping millions of Es every weekend. The manufacture of MDMA wasn't a crime in the Balkans republic, and some enterprising local politicians and civil servants were involved with the factory. But on his return to London in July 1989 the British police arrested and jailed Couzens and his accomplice, Sidney Frankel.\n\nIn early 1992, Couzens escaped from prison on the very day he learned his appeal against the six-year sentence had been rejected. While on the run, he hooked up with Terry \"the Pig\" Sansom, a south London criminal. Apparently, there was a fall-out because Sansom was selling amphetamine as ecstasy. Couzens took pride in his work, so he split, taking the tableting machine with him. Couzens joined forces with Raymond, who was also still on the run. They had previously crossed paths in prison, according to a police source.\n\nFollowing a tip-off, in December 1992 Redgrave's Team 13 at New Southgate SERCS began surveillance that linked Couzens to Ray Virciglio, someone of interest to Italian anti-mafia police, and Alex King. Redgrave began Operation Naples. His men watched the tableting machine arrive at The Barnhall in Ponders End. Over two months, Virciglio, a man called James Day and Couzens were filmed coming and going. Couzens was the least visible because he lived inside the drug factory on a makeshift camp bed. Redgrave recalls how one night, while Couzens was away, he accompanied the Yard's bugging unit when they broke into the premises. The ginger giant marvelled at the industrial scale of the set-up as the Technical Support Unit wired up the laboratory.\n\nAt 6.15 p.m. on 2 June, Redgrave called the attack. The Yard had extended a facility to _ITN News_ to cover the arrest because of the propaganda value of dismantling such a large ecstasy factory. At this stage they knew nothing of Raymond's involvement. Detectives rushed Virciglio as he left The Barnhall with a box. The car he was heading towards was found to contain 170,000 ecstasy tablets. Couzens was arrested inside the factory and James Day was arrested trying to drive away from the scene with 11 kilos of MDMA powder in his boot.\n\nMinutes earlier Day had dropped off Raymond, who on this occasion decided to walk the last few hundred yards to the factory. Raymond maintains that when he saw the raid develop he casually strolled away. But not before he gave a cheeky wave to Virciglio, who was being driven off in a police car.\n\nAt Edmonton police station, Couzens gave a full and frank confession. The evidence against him was overwhelming. Couzens revealed the plan was to produce three million ecstasy tablets called \"White Lightning\" every month. Dealers could sell them at around \u00a310 to \u00a315 each. The factory had been going for two months.\n\nVirciglio was not for turning. The bent local solicitor Les Brown, who was friendly with local officers, got him bail. Raymond and Martin Onstead were soon identified from surveillance photographs and warrants were issued for their arrest.\n\nBy then Raymond had fled to Luxembourg. He revealed to us that the E factory was a joint enterprise with two silent partners, Steven Donavan and Brian Wright. Donavan, from the East End, had featured in the Brinks Mat inquiry. Before he was tried and acquitted in 1988 for laundering the proceeds through Dockland acquisitions, Donavan had resisted Redgrave's efforts to turn him into an informant. Brian Wright is an Irishman born in north London who by the early nineties was developing extensive interests in horse racing as a way to make clean money fixing races, and to launder dirty money from the drug trade. His nickname among those jockeys close to him is \"The Milkman\", because he always delivers.\n\nRaymond also confirmed police suspicions at the time that the Adams organisation was distributing the ecstasy. The north London crime family had interests in a number of regular raves within the M25. Terry and Tommy Adams were Wright's \"minders\" in the factory.\n\nWright apparently brought another asset to the table \u2013 dirty cops. Raymond recalls how six weeks before the raid on the factory he conned a Chinaman from Switzerland out of 100 kilos of MDMA powder using cops in Wright's pocket. At the piano bar of a hotel in Gloucester Road, just as Raymond handed over a fake banker's draft for \u00a32.5 million, the bent cops arrived and \"arrested\" everyone. Only the Chinaman thought it was real. He seized the option of returning to Switzerland without the MDMA or any criminal charge.\n\nRaymond says police corruption of this nature is endemic and thankfully so because it made his life a lot easier. \"Like genius verges on insanity, so it is with them. There's so much money flying around you can't expect them not to. There are exceptions obviously. But if you get 100 cozzers you've got to expect at least five to ten per cent will take money.\" In the old days you could simply try your luck and offer money to the arresting officer, he says. But now you need \"a point of entry\". This, he explains, is someone trusted by police officers. Who would fit such a profile? A lawyer, he replies.\n\nIn his interview with us Raymond made a startling admission that puts the intelligence on Redgrave in a very different light. While he was on the run in Luxembourg and France, Raymond says he left \u00a3600,000 of his own money with a trusted associate in London to undermine the prosecution and nobble the jury in the event he was arrested. The amount seems high, but then Raymond claims to have earned \u00a320 million out of the ecstasy factory.\n\nThe first evidence Redgrave received of such a plot came from former detective Duncan Hanrahan. He had been out of the police since 1991 and was working as a private investigator.\n\nIn January 1994, Hanrahan met Redgrave at a pub near Scotland Yard. Also present was detective sergeant Alec Leighton. He was suspended at the time over the BBC _Panorama_ investigation into corruption at the Surbiton office of SERCS.\n\nHanrahan and Leighton were now working together. An informant, who we shall refer to by his pseudonym \"Monty Weeks\", had told Leighton there was a \u00a350,000 contract on offer to discredit Redgrave. The people behind the contract were looking to transfer money from Spain into Redgrave's bank account, says Hanrahan. He told Redgrave that Raymond or those associated with him were said to be behind the contract and it concerned a drugs factory and a forthcoming trial.\n\nRedgrave reported the meeting to his superiors, not least because DS Leighton was on bail at the time. As a security measure, he then split the Operation Naples team, sending a handful of detectives to a secret location in Hertfordshire to prepare for the trial in May and liaise with the CPS. \"I wanted a sterile corridor between myself and my team because of the Hanrahan information. It was an insurance policy for me and for the job because Raymond was still at large. My plan was to relinquish day-to-day control so it could never be said at a later stage that I had the opportunity to influence the case,\" Redgrave explains. A CIB source confirms this.\n\nMeanwhile, Redgrave and the rest of the team concentrated on Operation Nightshade, which had started in July 1993, one month after the raid on the ecstasy factory.\n\nOn 7 April 1994, Raymond was finally arrested in a London hotel for conspiring to supply and manufacture ecstasy and for absconding from HMP Oxford. He told us he'd returned from France for a funeral. His wife had paid by cheque for the tickets from Bordeaux, which he assumed was how he was caught.\n\nIn his pockets, alongside \u00a33,000 and 6,000 francs, officers found a Customs pass in a false name but with Raymond's photograph. In two separate bags the police found another \u00a350,000 in cash. In the wardrobe was a strange array of recently bought cleaning items and biscuit tins. Detectives also found a false Irish passport in the name of Noel Allen Fagan, a fake driving licence and business cards in the name of Simon Noel Alick Price-Fagan. Raymond later explained to us that he would \"befriend\" people who for whatever reason couldn't travel abroad but were entitled to a passport. The pseudonym \"Fagan\" was not a nod by the scholarly criminal to Charles Dickens, but someone he'd befriended from a Sue Ryder home.\n\nWithin days of Raymond's arrest a suspicious approach was made to a member of Redgrave's team. Detective constable Martin Morgan answered a call from former colleague Graham Le Blond with whom he'd once served at Stoke Newington and later at Edmonton. \"I understand an old friend of ours has been nicked,\" Le Blond said down the phone. He was angling for a meeting to discuss \"a big way forward,\" Morgan told us.\n\nHe reported the approach to Redgrave who immediately told CIB. DCS Roger Gaspar jumped at the chance to visit New Southgate. Gaspar knew that Morgan and Le Blond had been targets of the recently failed Operation Jackpot corruption probe at Stoke Newington. But Morgan had no idea he had now become a target of the Ghost Squad, who saw him as a core member of a corrupt cell of ex-Stoke Newington officers who had joined Redgrave's team.\n\nGaspar had reason to doubt Morgan's integrity. But the Ghost Squad had also convinced itself that Redgrave was the boss of the corrupt cell now at New Southgate SERCS. As he engendered great loyalty among those he led, it was assumed he must also be bent. Redgrave had never served at Stoke Newington and Morgan was already on the team he inherited. Redgrave protests, \"By the same logic those in charge of Stoke Newington who allowed this group of detectives to escape the anti-corruption net should also be viewed with suspicion. But instead they were pursuing me to the exclusion of all exculpatory evidence.\"\n\nA few weeks later in June 1994 Brennan became the Ghost Squad's first supergrass. He was unaware how little persuading Gaspar and Roy Clark really needed about the ginger giant. From then on nothing would ever disturb their fixed view that Redgrave was corrupt.\n\nThe trial of Virciglio and others had to be put back to January 1995 so Raymond could be joined as a defendant. In the intervening period, further evidence of a plot by the defendants to undermine the prosecution was presented to Gaspar.\n\nIn a pre-trial hearing, Redgrave asked the judge for jury protection. Intelligence from an informant had come into Operation Naples that there was \u00a3600,000 to nobble the jury, exactly the amount Raymond says he had put aside. The defence objected, Raymond in particular, who screamed across the courtroom that the ginger giant was corrupt and had taken money. This of course was all fed back to Gaspar.\n\nWhen we explored the outburst with Raymond years later he admitted he had never met or paid Redgrave any money. His loaded comments in court were motivated by two factors. Firstly, jury protection would make it very difficult to buy the acquittal he wanted. Secondly, Raymond had fallen out with Brian Wright by the time of the trial. The Milkman owed him \u00a31 million from the ecstasy factory. \"It suited Wright for me not to see the light of day,\" says Raymond. Consequently, he assumed Wright's bent cops were now working with Redgrave to keep The Milkman out of the dock. It annoyed Raymond that the ginger giant, he assumed, would take Wright's money but not his.\n\nRaymond freely shared his misconceived view of the ginger giant with associates in the UK like Donavan. And it is some of these conversations that the Ghost Squad intelligence cell is believed to have intercepted. No evidence has ever been produced that Redgrave was in Wright's pocket. But the suggestion made repeatedly over the phone and in court by Raymond was enough to further convince the Ghost Squad of Redgrave's guilt. After all Gaspar was already being suckered by a similar allegation from Brennan.\n\nIn any event, the judge refused jury protection but held the trial in camera. The jury's verdict was a shock given the quality of the police evidence, a senior CPS lawyer told us. Raymond was acquitted but the jury couldn't decide on Virciglio. This bemused an Italian anti-mafia judge who'd come to London to see if he would turn supergrass against people in Turin.\n\nGaspar spoke privately to the trial judge. It is likely the Ghost Squad chief gave the strongest impression he considered the allegations against Redgrave highly credible. These would have to be disclosed to Virciglio in the event of a retrial, which the Ghost Squad could avoid by pulling the plug on the prosecution. The judge agreed. Virciglio was also acquitted.\n\nSo Brennan's phoney allegations had ruined Operation Nightshade and now Naples. Is it any wonder when the Yard realised it had been duped the whole matter was deep-sixed?\n\nA few years later, in 1997, the Untouchables also ignored confirmation of Raymond's plot against Redgrave from their own supergrass Duncan Hanrahan. \"[My debriefers] were anxious for me to say something bad about Redgrave,\" Hanrahan told us. Instead he told them Redgrave had once rebuffed a corrupt offer from him and Martin King. Senior Untouchable John Coles was heavily involved in the Hanrahan case but he claims he knew nothing about the Raymond revelations. Yet Hanrahan has provided us with evidence that he was never asked to sign a statement containing references to the plot. And Raymond confirms that CIB3 never approached him.\n\nBy 2001, it was clear to the ginger giant that he was never going to be fairly treated. He was living in a cycle of severe depression, excessive exercise followed by alcohol abuse as he tried to fill the days of his fifth year of suspension. His children had stopped all contact with him. This added to his sense of shame and despair and led to a further suicide bid.\n\nRedgrave wrote to Mackinlay asking his MP to get to the bottom of his case in the event anything happened to him. \"I honestly believe that a number of senior officers got their hands dirty and are determined that the truth will never come out,\" he wrote.\n\nIn February 2001, Geoffrey Brennan stood trial at the Old Bailey charged with stealing \u00a3400,000 from the Chinese provincial government. The Yard had given up on him ever coming to its rescue and agreeing to make a statement against Redgrave and Charman.\n\nBrennan wanted to plead guilty and get it over with. He thought he'd only get under two years. The house he had bought with some of the stolen money was safe and in his son's name. The remaining \u00a3200,000 had been spent or salted away. But his legal team, he says, persuaded him there was a fighting chance.\n\nSince Brennan was recharged in 1999, his solicitor Phil Kelly had been squirrelling away on the disclosure front. The Untouchables tried to hide its dark secrets behind PII certificates. But with the help of a fair-minded judge Kelly's tenacity paid off in bundles of sensitive documents never supposed to see the light of day. These laid bare the entire impropriety of Brennan's handling: from the failure to caution, the offer of immunity for evidence against Redgrave and Charman, the laundering of the Wangs' money to the misleading of the fraud inquiry and moonlighting Untouchable DS Chris Smith.\n\nAndrew Trollope QC, Brennan's barrister, tried valiantly to get the case chucked out as an abuse of process. The delay in prosecuting a theft now seven years old was \"unconscionable\", he told Judge Brian Barker QC. The Untouchables had allowed the case \"to collect dust on the shelf\" because the mishandling of Brennan was just too embarrassing to reveal, Trollope argued. Not only that, his client had a reasonable expectation he wouldn't be prosecuted after admitting the theft and being left to his own devices.\n\nTrollope had the unique opportunity to cross-examine the two men behind this scandal, both of whom had operated too long in the black chrysalis of the intelligence world where evidence is unnecessary to achieve a desired result.\n\nWhen Roger Gaspar took the stand he had been deputy director of the National Criminal Intelligence Service since April 1998. He said he knew one day this legal reckoning would come when he had to account for his handling of Brennan.\n\nTrollope believed that documents around the Ghost Squad's dealings with Brennan's sister Denise, who had been pivotal in getting him to turn supergrass, would unlock the offer of immunity extended by Gaspar. How else did a resolute Brennan suddenly agree to make taped admissions to the theft and falsely incriminate Redgrave and Charman? But the judge allowed all this to remain secret.\n\nGaspar's explanation for those 12 days in June 1994 was \"wholly unconvincing\", said Trollope. Still, the barrister cornered Gaspar into making a vital admission that he had \"breached the rules\" by not cautioning Brennan. The former Ghost Squad chief argued that the noble cause of anti-corruption justified it. As if such a consideration excused the appalling vista of police officers secretly putting themselves above parliament and the law. In the end, with neither side wishing to rehash the details, Gaspar admitted Brennan had duped him. \"I always suspected he thought we were a soft touch. I always suspected he thought I was a soft touch,\" he told Trollope meekly.\n\nWhen Roy Clark took the stand he was about to retire after 34 years of loyal service to become director of the Crimestoppers Trust. He trotted out the same line as Gaspar. The theft investigation \"fell into insignificance\" he said because the corruption allegations had to be pursued first. Even the simplest checks would have shown Brennan was leading them on a merry dance. But the Yard's witchfinder-general surpassed himself when explaining why they hadn't been done. He said he was \"hogtied by secrecy\" and a \"policy\" of his own making not to carry out inquiries during the Ghost Squad phase! In other words, false corruption allegations were allowed to linger while Brennan was showcased internally, a trophy supergrass whose evidential value was completely untested.\n\nClark tried to recover ground by blaming Redgrave for making Brennan's theft unprosecutable. He said the detective had \"dressed up\" Operation Nightshade as an arms, drugs and money-laundering inquiry, laying \"onion skin upon onion skin of half truths\". Trollope couldn't believe what he was hearing. Didn't Clark know that significant evidence, which his Untouchables had sat on for years, had now been disclosed making his \"fabrication theory\" wholly false? The barrister told Clark it \"flew in the face\" of the known facts and was \"quite literally fantastic\". Dragged naked and blinking into the light of public scrutiny, Clark admitted there was \"no evidence\" of Brennan's corruption claims and came clean that unnamed senior anti-corruption officers had displayed a \"lack of control and supervision\".\n\nNewly promoted detective chief superintendent John Coles made Clark seem even more ludicrous when he said the information Brennan had provided on Tall Ted Williams' drug scheme in Portugal was genuine. He also confirmed that Brennan's allegations of moonlighting against DS Smith had been \"proved\" by his inquiry.\n\nWhile we waited for the judge to rule, a CIB detective criticised Clark and other Ghost Squad officers for their management decisions: \"The problem was there was a theft and instead of dealing with it simply, they tried to develop it as corruption, looking for links between this and that until it mushroomed out of proportion.\"\n\nJudge Barker refused to chuck out the case. He was concerned about the delay but sided with prosecutor Richard Latham QC that Brennan's later actions had significantly contributed to it. Both sides were now heading towards a jury trial.\n\nCIB felt Brennan would now plead guilty and rely on ample mitigating factors like his role as a police informant to secure a suspended sentence. Brennan says he was willing to do just that, but again his defence team persuaded him otherwise.\n\nFor any defence to succeed Trollope needed to persuade the judge that his client's admissions on the so-called Gaspar tapes should be ruled inadmissible because the confession was improperly obtained. Judge Barker agreed. He didn't criticise Gaspar but neither could he ignore _his_ recent confession that PACE had been deliberately breached.\n\nAnd so to trial. The jury would never know the man in the dock had already admitted the theft. The next six weeks were an expensive charade and once again the public picked up the bill. Both sides cherry-picked facts that supported their unsustainable cases. Like ballerinas Latham and Trollope tiptoed around the truth because it was as deeply unflattering to the Untouchables as it was to Brennan.\n\nThe first prosecution witnesses were the Wang brothers and Mr Hu from GX Impex, the Chinese provincial government company that had ultimately lost the \u00a3400,000 in the phone deal. The Houston Four were conspicuously absent. Latham and the CPS considered them too dodgy to call. One was in prison for fraud, and the others would struggle to explain a forged contract around the phone deal. Also, Trollope now had the Nightshade documents to directly implicate Padgett and Jones in the illegal arms deal.\n\nUnder cross-examination, the Wangs also presented credibility problems for the prosecution. Sam Wang accepted he had tried to do a \"shady deal\" not in accordance with company rules. The jury never heard that the CPS had warned the Untouchables that the Chinese witnesses were unreliable because the whole deal smacked of \"frauds on frauds [and] fraudsters being defrauded\". The jury was also unaware just how spectacularly corrupt the Guangxi Zhuang provincial government was. Beijing had been investigating official corruption among provincial communist party bosses since 1998 and discovered a black hole of a staggering $11 billion. The chairman in Guangxi province was executed five months before the Brennan trial started for taking $5 million in bribes throughout the nineties.\n\nSam Wang confirmed the deadly picture Trollope happily painted of those who crossed the provincial government. \"If Geoff [Brennan] lived in China he dead.\" Wang then made a gun with his hand. \"BANG. Dead long time ago.\" A juror gasped.\n\nWhat the jury made of the prosecution case was hard to tell. However, it was clearly established that \u00a3400,000 went into Brennan's NatWest account and then he withdrew it and spent half on a house. Latham of course didn't tell the jury that the Untouchables had laundered the money for him.\n\nThe defence case was pure theatre, a one-man play with Brennan needing persuading to take the stand. He eventually got into his stride and with an ever more pronounced facial tic told the jury how he'd returned the money at a hotel to nameless men representing the Houston Four, one of whom looked like Barry from _Eastenders_. The lie was unsupported because Brennan's friend Mark Norton, the sacked detective, wasn't prepared to commit perjury by claiming he was there.\n\nBrennan spun a totally dishonest defence to explain his cash wealth and property deals that echoed Kenny Noye during his Brinks trial 15 years earlier. \"I've always dealt in cash,\" he told a sniggering jury. Brennan then cherry-picked the truth about his informant status to say everything he did had been authorised by Redgrave and Charman. He spoke about his help getting undercover officers into an arms deal, which he gleefully revealed involved some of the Houston Four.\n\nBrennan explained that some of his wealth came from informing on Tall Ted Williams. He regaled the jury with details of the Margarita trip and said Williams had repaid him a loan, and it was that money he then used to buy his house in cash, something he'd done many times before. The jury learned that Brennan's informant status was subsequently leaked to Williams, who had an \"awesome reputation\" as an enforcer and drug trafficker.\n\n\"Has he attended this trial?\" asked Trollope.\n\n\"On two occasions,\" replied Brennan.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"The public gallery.\"\n\n\"Can you see the public gallery now?\"\n\nThe judge gave Brennan permission to step out of the witness box. He looked up quickly and returned to the witness box.\n\n\"Anyone you recognise?\" Trollope asked.\n\n\"Yes. That's Ted Williams.\"\n\nThe courtroom buzzed with much-needed excitement. The jurors discreetly glanced at a thin, bald-headed man in his late fifties sitting opposite them. He was wearing a grey suit with a black polo neck and a big grin.\n\nTrollope later asked for Williams to be prevented from attending. Judge Barker felt that would be a dramatic step and said Brennan's role as an informant had been in the public domain for some time. Williams attended for the next few days, sometimes with his son. The Untouchables had briefed the judge that they now had considerable doubts about the threat posed by Williams.\n\nHe agreed to meet for lunch at a Chinese restaurant around the corner from the Old Bailey. Over a bottle of sake, Williams explained how as a \"career criminal\" who had done things that would make a bald man's hair curl it was \"anathema\" for him to speak to journalists. But because Brennan was talking \"bollocks\" he'd make an exception.\n\nWilliams said he had allowed Brennan's sister Denise to get close to him because he was impressed by the way she grieved over her young son who'd died of cancer in April 1992. He says he ignored warnings from John Lloyd's son-in-law, Steve Seaton, that she was a grass working with Smith and others since the Brinks Mat days.\n\nHe talked about the phone deal and said the plan was for him and Brennan to steal the money together. But Brennan did it himself and also nicked \u00a390,000 from the Margarita property sales. Williams claimed he hadn't taken revenge because Brennan went into the witness protection programme one week after the gangster received the Operation Nightshade papers from bent cops. Redgrave? No, he was \"a straightgoer\", said Williams.\n\nWe returned to court to watch the start of Brennan's cross-examination. In Latham's plodding way he tied Brennan in knots over his finances. Every so often Brennan would complain of bowel problems \u2013 \"My arsehole's alight here,\" he once remarked \u2013 to earn temporary respite from the questioning.\n\nUntil this point there had been no suggestion from either side of police corruption. But suddenly Latham changed the case he had originally presented to the jury. He accused Brennan of having corruptly paid Redgrave and Charman \u00a350,000 from the stolen money. In return he claimed the detectives had created a smokescreen of arms dealing and money laundering.\n\nBrennan denied making any corrupt payments to the two officers. Instead he turned on DS Chris Smith, the only man who the prosecution knew had taken money from the supergrass. Brennan said Smith had committed perjury and moonlighted. Latham had not called Smith as a prosecution witness for that very reason. Nevertheless, it was a pitiful sight to see the prosecutor rush to Smith's defence. Latham accepted moonlighting had taken place but not any corruption.\n\nLatham, however, backed down when Trollope intervened to in effect warn his opponent he was dangerously close to misleading the jury by claiming the arms deal was a fabrication. Latham was also forced to admit to the jury there was \"no direct evidence\" of any payments from Brennan to the two detectives. Trollope went further and said there was \"not a scrap of evidence\".\n\nJudge Barker summed up what he called \"this highly unusual case with some highly unusual features\". He said there was \"perhaps little doubt\" that the Houston Four had \"some dishonest scheme in mind\". He also supported Trollope's complaint about Latham's changed case. \"I advise you to ignore suggestions that any money was taken [by Redgrave and Charman] to assist Mr Brennan.\"\n\nThe jury started deliberating on 2 April. It was a gloriously sunny day, the first since the trial began. Brennan was convinced he would be found guilty. DCS John Coles was in a talkative mood. He accepted the Ghost Squad had made mistakes \u2013 \"They forgot they were policemen,\" he remarked, adding that when he took over the case it was in \"chaos\".\n\nAt 12.15 the next day the jury returned with a unanimous guilty verdict. Judge Barker sentenced Brennan to three and a half years for what he said was an \"audacious and opportunist\" theft. Brennan thought he'd had a result. He was expecting seven years. Anything under four meant he only had to serve half. As he entered the prison system, free of the need to lie, he immediately told the probation officer that he was \"guilty as charged\".\n\nMeanwhile, back at the Old Bailey a CIB officer on DCS Coles' team gave an uncensored overview. \"We've been had over\" by Brennan and the Yard felt it would be \"very embarrassing\" if it ever came out and the Wangs sued, said the source. Gaspar had been a \"cunt\" for laundering the stolen money through two house purchases.\n\nThe CIB officer also felt there was something not quite right about the handling of Tall Ted Williams. \"There were a lot of things that we weren't allowed to know about... it was very secret and decisions were made about people's links with others by senior officers and MI5.\" Like many within the Brennan family, our source felt Williams was \"a protected informant for a higher authority\". Even Coles told us that the Ghost Squad's failure to search Williams' home for the Nightshade documents was curious. He also said there was \"no evidence\" that Redgrave or Charman leaked them.\n\nThe evidence of former CIB financial investigator Kevin Maul had been as explosive as his comments to us after the trial. He made a point of describing in his statement how the Ghost Squad had \"laundered\" the stolen money for Brennan. He was angry at the way his fraud investigation had been misled and at the attempts to claim Redgrave had tried to manipulate him. He described the ginger giant as a \"grafter\" who led from the front. He said there was \"no whiff\" around him when they both served at New Southgate SERCS. After joining CIB in 1997 Maul felt some Untouchables were \"obsessional\" about their targets and should have been removed from the anti-corruption squad.\n\nWeeks after Brennan's trial ended, Charman asked to retire. He had completed 30 years' service, but because he was suspended he needed the Yard's permission to go. Redgrave would soon follow suit. Neither detective believed they would ever get a fair hearing at the planned disciplinary tribunal. They were also preparing civil actions against the commissioner.\n\nMinutes of meetings between deputy commissioner Ian Blair, DAC Andy Hayman and DCS John Coles show just how self-serving and cynical the Yard was about covering up its failures at taxpayers' expense. All three Untouchables agreed there was \"no doubt\" that allowing Charman and Redgrave to retire would be a \"cost-effective\" way forward. But it was deemed to be in the Yard's \"best interests\" to keep them suspended to avoid \"criticism of the Met\" in parliament and the press. Hayman also pointed out that a guilty finding in an internal disciplinary tribunal would \"make life easier\" in defending the civil actions. \"A clear media strategy\" was needed to \"put a positive spin on events\". Dick Fedorcio, chief spin-doctor for the Yard, was brought in to ensure the press did a hatchet job on Redgrave and Charman.\n\nUnfortunately, first there was one final humiliation in the Brennan saga for the Untouchables. Latham and Coles had messed up over the confiscation proceedings. The best that could be achieved was a judge's order that Brennan pay back less than half the money he stole, or serve an extra year. He was pleading poverty having cleverly put the house he bought with the Chinese government's money in his son's name and therefore beyond the confiscation process. All this came out when Brennan appeared on 28 August 2002 at the Old Bailey.\n\nThat same day, over at the Yard, commissioner Stevens, Ian Blair and Andy Hayman held a press conference to launch the third phase of the anti-corruption drive, which they claimed had so far made the Met a \"world leader\" in professional standards. Stevens said he was building on the Untouchables' \"successes\" but \"prosecutions had proved difficult\". The Yard had written to the head of the CPS expressing concern that the system allowed officers to avoid going to trial.\n\nThe next day almost all the crime correspondents nosed their story with the example of Redgrave and Charman. \"MET PAYS TWO DETECTIVES TO STAY AT HOME FOR FIVE YEARS\" was a typical headline. Charman's solicitor Mark Lake was unconvinced by the Yard's subsequent assurances it was all coincidental, and that none of the senior officers had actually named either detective.\n\nRedgrave and Charman were effectively kept prisoners in the police for another 20 months. The Yard was forcing them to face a disciplinary hearing but refused almost all disclosure requests, hiding behind PII.\n\nThe discipline hearing started on 19 April 2004, the eleventh year of the investigation, which the Untouchables were still refusing to cost. By then Brennan had completed his sentence and was back home. He had avoided serving an extra year by agreeing to pay the Wangs \u00a3155,000, but only in derisory monthly instalments. Brennan couldn't believe the Redgrave and Charman case was still ongoing. With no reason to lie any more, he admitted making false allegations against the two detectives to save his skin. But there was not a hint of remorse in his voice.\n\nThe detectives' barristers pulled the disciplinary case apart even with limited disclosure. Coles, the main prosecution witness, was bumptious but unconvincing on the stand, still persisting with the fabrication theory. At one point he even suggested the two Met undercover officers in the arms deal were corrupt. But the chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, Glen Smythe, claimed in a statement that Coles had confirmed to him that the continued pursuit of Redgrave was purely to keep him discredited.\n\nOn 6 May the disciplinary board of three senior Met officers found the two detectives guilty of discreditable conduct. Strangely, though, they weren't sacked, which suggested some of the defence's points had registered. The board instead imposed a lesser sanction of requiring the two detectives to resign, something they had offered to do years earlier. A fitting end to the supergrass farce.\n\n## Part Three: The Directorate of Double Standards\n## [20\n\nThe Butcher, The Baker, The Undertaker  \nand his Son](contents.html#ch20)\n\nMay 2003. It was a crisp, sunny day in London. Erkin Guney held hands with his heavily pregnant wife as they crossed the zebra opposite the Appeal Court on the Strand. It is not a London landmark like, say, the zebra crossing on Abbey Road became after the Beatles released their seminal 1969 album. But in its own way, the black and white stripes on the Strand are an important icon in the history of corruption, incompetence and cover-up in our criminal justice system.\n\nThirty-eight year old Erkin Guney walked through the stone portals of the Appeal Court entrance having served half of a fourteen-year sentence for possessing five kilos of heroin and a gun. He has always maintained that powerful business enemies working with corrupt cops had fitted him up.\n\nIt is usual for three appeal judges to explain to an appellant why his or her conviction is unsafe. Perhaps there was an innocent error in the prosecution case, or a forensic clue that the police \"overlooked\". Only rarely, as in the case of _Regina v Guney_ , is it down to police corruption. But the judicial establishment was in no mood for contrition or explanation. The Untouchables had earlier made a PII application to keep the whole matter secret. The key issues of what CIB knew, when they knew it and why they didn't tell the defence have never been answered. In a matter of seconds Lord Justice Kennedy quashed Guney's conviction but refused to explain why or to apologise. He was coldly dispatched from the Appeal Court like a contestant on a tacky game show. The Justice Game.\n\nThe shadow of Stoke Newington darkened much of the prosecution papers. If it had been up to the Untouchables, Erkin Guney would have remained a convicted criminal even though their secret files held compromising information that showed his conviction was unsafe. \"The process of curing any miscarriage of justice must also be to inform that person and society at large why he spent time in prison,\" says defence solicitor Tim Greene. He immediately wrote to the home secretary asking for an inquiry. An official replied saying it was not appropriate for the home secretary to intervene.\n\nWe've uncovered a significant part of what the Yard knew and when they knew it. This is a story of corruption in the police, Customs, MI5 and CIB; of how fugitive fraudster Asil Nadir nurtured friends in the police and the Tory Party; of the Turkish heroin trade and the Cypriot godfathers in north London who control it.\n\nAbove all it is a story of the unacceptable price someone had to pay when the interests of justice were subordinated to the interests of Scotland Yard and its anti-corruption squad. Erkin Guney was born in north London in 1965. His Turkish Cypriot parents had a record shop in the Angel, Islington. \"Jackie, the next door neighbour, could never pronounce my name. She called me Eggin. So since I was four, people started calling me Egg.\"\n\nSchool was not something Egg enjoyed. As a teenager, he was often in trouble with the local Stoke Newington police, usually followed by a beating from his exasperated father. With maturity and reflection Egg says part of his behaviour was a craving for his dad's attention and respect as the youngest but one of three brothers and four sisters. As soon as he could, Egg dropped out of school, a decision as much to do with his dyslexia as general laddishness. By then the family had moved to the Hackney end of Green Lanes, the hub of the entrepreneurial Turkish-Cypriot community.\n\nEgg's passion for cars led him into the moody side of the motor trade. Slowly he picked up a criminal record, though mainly for driving offences, theft of car parts and other bits of dishonesty. Porsches were his weakness. They still are.\n\nIn the mid-eighties, he set up a garage behind Green Lanes where he did legitimate and not so legitimate work. The latter involved chopping up stolen Porsches and selling the parts on. He was also fitting car stereos and phones, a new market with great opportunities to earn cash if you were willing to undercut the authorised dealers. Business grew so fast he leased a shop front with the garage behind it.\n\nEgg made plans to set up a new telecommunications company called Intercell with Greek-Cypriot friend Andy Demitriou and another businessman.\n\nFirst, though, Egg went bankrupt owing creditors around \u00a3700,000. He wanted to be a silent partner with an equal share in the new venture. But before Intercell took off, tragedy struck. Egg's mother died on New Year's Day. Six days later, on his 27th birthday, the family buried her.\n\nEgg found it difficult to accept his mother's death and suffered a mental breakdown, characterised by bouts of severe depression, isolation and unpredictable behaviour. \"I couldn't continue the business,\" he says, \"so I left it to Andy to run.\"\n\nFor over a year, Egg escaped into a world of anti-depressants and paranoia. What happened next is a matter of fierce dispute.\n\nIn essence, Egg claims he was sidelined from the company. Demitriou counters that Intercell had been built up after Egg bailed out, and therefore he was owed nothing. The feud festered for months until December 1993 when Egg was arrested in a van with two others near Demitriou's home. Also found in the van were cable wire, wigs, a knuckleduster and some hats. Egg was carrying a CS gas canister.\n\nFor several months, Egg was held on remand facing attempted kidnap and blackmail charges. But when the case came to court in April 1994, these were reduced to the simple possession of CS gas. Egg was convicted but immediately released because of the time he'd already served.\n\nThe matter didn't end there. Egg launched a civil claim against Intercell and through contacts in the car business he also enlisted the help of the up-and-coming Hunt brothers from Canning Town. He told them that an Ilford-based security company was on his case. Shortly thereafter, and following a visit known in the trade as 'a straightener', the security company backed off.\n\nIn his defence, Egg says he sought the Hunts' protection because he believed there was a contract out on his life for \u00a310,000 \"to iron me out\". He originally reported the matter to Stoke Newington police station, which at the time was gripped by the Operation Jackpot corruption probe. But Egg felt they had not taken him seriously.\n\nThe Pizza Pomodoro was a caf\u00e9 near Spitalfields Market in the East End. A tall, grumpy detective inspector called Bob Skully liked to pop in on his way home. One day in July 1995 the owner asked if Skully would meet Egg.\n\nThe detective loved policing, but after 25 years he was seriously jerked off with the way the force was being run. Skully was serving on SO1, a specialist squad based at the Yard, which dealt with international, diplomatic and political cases. He had investigated some highly sensitive jobs, most recently a $4 million theft from a UN base in Somalia. However, the job he was working on in the summer of 1995 was particularly important to the Yard, because it came out of the corruption-riddled 1983 Brinks Mat gold bullion robbery. Operation Beryk was an investigation into John \"Goldfinger\" Palmer, the money man who in 1987 had been acquitted of handling the bullion. Since then Palmer had invested in the timeshare business operating through a crooked and ruthless company in Tenerife, Spain, where he was ripping off thousands of British pensioners in a multi-million pound fraud.\n\nThe head of SO1, Commander Roy Ramm, was particularly interested in Operation Beryk as Palmer had escaped his clutches during the original Brinks inquiry. The remnants of that squad were drafted onto SO1 to pursue the timeshare operation, which detectives believed was financed by Brinks money.\n\nSkully still found time to research Egg's background before agreeing to meet. He brought along detective constable Dave Johnson, who had served six years at Stoke Newington and knew the value of informants in the close-knit Turkish Cypriot community. A new SO1 unit based at Chalk Farm had recently been set up to investigate Turkish crime and the activities of the Kurdish Workers' Party, or PKK, a guerrilla movement fighting since 1984 for an independent state in southern Turkey. Many unarmed Kurdish refugees, who fled persecution from the Turkish military's bloodlust, ended up in Green Lanes.\n\nSO1 had concerns that PKK representatives in London were extorting local businesses to raise funds for the armed struggle back home. Johnson was not jaded like Skully. He was ambitious and hoped to get onto the new Turkish unit after the Palmer inquiry ended. His chances were assured if he could bag Egg's father, Ramadan, as an informant.\n\nAs a young man Ramadan Guney served in the British Army in Cyprus, Kenya and Egypt. In 1955 he joined the Cypriot police force as a sergeant. That year, the Greek resistance launched a guerrilla campaign to wrest control from the British colonialists. Ramadan decided to take matters into his own hands to defend the Turkish minority on the island. He told us he was one of the founders of an underground and extreme right-wing paramilitary group called VOLKAN secretly set up with the help of the Turkish government. It was through this shadowy background that Ramadan Guney developed strong links with the British and Turkish intelligence communities, something he has maintained throughout his life. Nevertheless, at the end of the dirty war with the Greeks, the British deported Ramadan in 1958. He was \"exiled\" to London, he says, where he worked at the Soho-based Turkish Cypriot Association.\n\nFrom his humble beginnings running a record shop he started to develop a property portfolio in the rundown Green Lanes area. In 1977, for example, he bought a synagogue in Hackney and converted it into a mosque. But Ramadan's most profitable investment was Brookwood Park in Surrey, Europe's largest cemetery, which he bought in 1985. He also has investments in the breakaway republic of Northern Cyprus. The current president, Rauf Denktash, is a close friend. Ramadan's sons say their father harbours his own political ambitions. Certainly by the early nineties he was regarded among the Turkish Cypriot community here as a political godfather, someone they could come to for advice or who could mediate disputes.\n\nBut it was his relationship with the Turkish tycoon Asil Nadir that drew Ramadan Guney out of the shadows and into an unwelcome and probing media spotlight in 1993. Nadir's Polly Peck empire collapsed three years earlier following a dawn raid by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Nadir was charged with multiple counts of theft totalling \u00a334 million. In 1992, Ramadan agreed to provide \u00a31 million bail surety. But in May the following year, just months before a hearing at the Old Bailey, Nadir fled by private plane to the sanctuary of Northern Cyprus, which has no extradition treaty as it is not diplomatically recognised by the British government.\n\nThe Nadir affair was a further scandal for the imploding Major government. Northern Ireland secretary Michael Mates resigned from the cabinet after it was revealed he had given the fugitive a watch with the inscription \"Don't let the buggers get you down\". Nadir had shown his own dubious largesse to the Tories by way of a \u00a3440,000 political donation to their 1987 election war chest.\n\nNadir had also developed 'friends' at Scotland Yard. Among them was said to be assistant commissioner Wyn Jones, who faced an embarrassing internal investigation for allegedly carrying out improper police work for the slippery businessman. The Yard had reportedly received allegations about this from a chief superintendent, himself under investigation. Jones denied any misconduct and the CPS decided not to prosecute. However, the findings of a disciplinary investigation into separate misconduct allegations were passed to home secretary Michael Howard in June 1993. He sacked Jones, who attempted to appeal the decision but left the force the following year.\n\nScotland Yard mounted a full investigation into Nadir's escape. The SFO were also gunning for Ramadan Guney. He faced two years in prison for refusing to pay them \u00a3650,000 of the surety. In February 1995 the Appeal Court ruled in his favour, but the SFO announced it was appealing to the House of Lords. Ramadan says he feared financial ruination if he lost. And Egg recalls flying to Nicosia to confront Nadir for refusing to take his father's calls. He says when he arrived at the villa he told the armed guards to tell their boss, \"Ramadan's mad son is here.\" Nadir got in touch.\n\nOn 31 July 1995, detectives Skully and Johnson took a lengthy statement from Egg about the business feud with Andy Demitriou, now in its fourth year. To the SO1 officers, Egg seemed genuinely frightened, if not a little paranoid. He desperately wanted them to properly investigate the threats against him and to that end provided a copy of a secret tape-recording, which he said supported his claim that there had been a \u00a310,000 contract on his life.\n\nEgg also explained that Demitriou had sold his shares in the disputed mobile phone company Intercell to someone he described as one of London's major heroin traffickers, a Green Lanes godfather he named as Ibrahim \"Jimmy\" Karagozlu. If he had a piece of Intercell, even Ramadan's mad son wouldn't fuck with them, Egg said.\n\nIn 1983, Jimmy Karagozlu was jailed for 6 years for possession of 188 grams of heroin, worth \u00a328,000, with intent to supply. Since then there was nothing to indicate his status in London's drug trade. What caught DS Johnson's eye was Jimmy's expanding business empire. It included a marble business, a new travel agents and a recently acquired airline. He'd come a long way from his roots as a family butcher on Green Lanes. Jimmy represented a new breed of Turkish Cypriot, fully integrated and less politicised and reverential than their parents' generation. He had two brothers, Mehmet, who ran a petrol station in nearby Albion Road, and Hassan, known as Sammy, who took care of the butchers. Jimmy had originally run a minicab firm called Hit Cabs, which gave him the nickname Jimmy Hitman.\n\nSkully is unabashed about his motives for getting involved. \"We were playing Egg to get to his old man,\" he admits. It was cynical, certainly, but not unethical policing. Though Ramadan was no mug. He says he suspected what Skully was up to and played along so they would investigate his son's concerns.\n\nOn 18 September, a meeting was convened between Jimmy and Egg. The \"sit down\" was an attempt to resolve the business dispute once and for all. A special guest, Dogan Arif, head of the notorious south-east London crime syndicate, took the role of mediator.\n\nThe Arifs were another Turkish Cypriot family that had come a long way from their roots as bakers on the Old Kent Road. At the time, two of the Arif brothers were doing 'heavy bird' for a failed armed robbery. Dogan, meanwhile, had been released in 1993 from a seven-year sentence for a massive cannabis importation. The prosecutions severely affected the Arifs' power base and led to gang warfare in south-east London with the Brindles. Soldiers on both sides were killed in tit-for-tat shootings. Dogan was then perhaps best placed to mediate a financial settlement before things got further out of hand between Egg, Jimmy and the police.\n\nHe suggested Egg should be compensated with a \u00a3200,000 settlement plus a \u00a350,000 goodwill gesture from Jimmy Karagozlu. To everyone's surprise, Egg rejected the offer, claiming Intercell was by now worth \u00a35 million. \"It wasn't about the money any more. I was doing good business. I had an exclusive contract fitting trackers for Securicor. Jimmy and that lot were trying to mug me off again. I had a hearing for my civil claim against Intercell coming up so I told them to poke it. I'd see 'em in court and let the whole thing come out.\"\n\nThe SO1 detectives warned Egg he could be fitted up with drugs and advised him to garage his car overnight.\n\nFour days later, on Friday, 29 September, Egg's life changed for ever. At 8.30 a.m. at least six officers from the 3 Area drugs squad arrived with a search warrant. It had been obtained less than 12 hours earlier.\n\nMelanie, Egg's girlfriend, was getting their oldest daughter ready for school. The front door was open as the couple were expecting builders. They had just moved into the five-bedroom house in Clayhill, Essex. Ramadan had recently given the couple \u00a325,000 in cash to pay for essential building work to the property.\n\nThe police swoop was not a dramatic, crash-bang-wallop affair. As soon as Egg saw \"DRUGS\" on the search warrant he said it was a \"set-up\" and urged them to call Skully at Scotland Yard.\n\nOfficers took Egg to his daughter's bedroom. In the wardrobe they found a Dr Martens shoebox containing \u00a324,815. Egg admitted it was his, but lied about its provenance to protect his dad, claiming instead that he had earned the money. Then they found a .22 Star handgun tightly wrapped in clingfilm and three boxes of matching ammunition.\n\n\"What about the gun?\"\n\n\"I don't know nothing about the gun,\" Egg replied. \"It's a set-up.\"\n\nAlso in the wardrobe were five Hessian sacks of 58 per cent pure heroin inside a carrier bag.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"I don't know nothing about that,\" said Egg.\n\nAt 9.04 a.m. he was arrested for possession of drugs with intent to supply and taken with Melanie to Barkingside police station. Meanwhile, detective sergeant Jim Gillan phoned Skully, who gave a brief rundown of Egg's dispute with the Karagozlus and warned the drug squad officer there was nothing straightforward in this case.\n\nIn his police interview, Egg explained the dispute with Karagozlu and mentioned the alleged contract against him. He spoke about the sit-down a few days earlier. Egg insisted the drugs had been planted, not by the cops, but by a mysterious gasman who had turned up the day before his arrest, supposedly on behalf of the kitchen company.\n\nSkully told the CPS lawyer that he was nurturing Egg as an informant and thought the arrest was \"too neat\". The intervention was reported to the Yard as suspicious. Meanwhile, Egg was remanded to Pentonville Prison.\n\nRamadan Guney was at a business conference in Turkey when his son was arrested. He returned at the beginning of October and took a call from a Turkish friend, Halil \"Perry\" Hassan. He was described to us as the conduit, who when the Guney boys were growing up had paid off Stoke Newington cops to square up a few minor offences.\n\nPerry arranged a meeting with a Greek Cypriot community leader from Green Lanes whom we shall call \"Nico\". Detectives who knew both men confirm they were well connected with many police officers, including senior ones from the Flying Squad and Scotland Yard. Nico was also friendly with Jimmy Karagozlu.\n\nRamadan says he was told the problem with his son could be resolved for a payment of \u00a3250,000 to unnamed police officers. The undertaker refused and the next day contacted CIB. Anti-corruption officers came to Ramadan's office in Green Lanes with some equipment to record any more approaches.\n\nThe Guney family had put it on the street that there was an unspecified reward for information that could prove Egg's innocence. The publicity around the \u00a31 million surety for Nadir may have given an indication of how much money the undertaker would pay for his son's freedom.\n\nIt didn't take long before two men called, offering to provide the name of the informant and his police handler. In the hands of a good defence barrister, they said the prosecution would pull the plug rather than identify the informant behind the drugs swoop.\n\nThe negotiations with the anonymous pair took place between October 1995 and 1996. CIB was passed the tapes and encouraged Ramadan to keep the callers talking so they could trace them. One call was traced to a phone box near Scotland Yard, says Ramadan.\n\nThe anonymous callers tried to up the price by letting Ramadan know they had surveillance on some of his family. They also told him the informant was a close associate and was handled by a detective on the secretive National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS).\n\nHowever, the most bizarre approach came in the middle of these phone negotiations. Ramadan and his son Onder were returning from a prison visit to see Egg. As they arrived at Green Lanes, Ramadan says a man followed him into his office. There was no time to get to the tape-recorder provided by CIB, but he later told anti-corruption detectives that his uninvited visitor claimed he was from the Home Office and had fitted up Egg to get Ramadan to work for them.\n\nRamadan didn't believe a word of it, especially after he was asked for \u00a350,000, half up-front, the other half when his son was released. The man tried to suggest he was monitoring the family. To this effect he provided Ramadan with a personal letter, which he said they had intercepted, and a photograph of Egg, which he claimed was taken by a surveillance team. He also reminded Ramadan he had recently withdrawn \u00a396,000 from the Midland Bank.\n\nThe part about the money was true, but the Guneys say the letter and photograph were taken from Egg's house during the raid. Ramadan was convinced \"Home Office man\" was one of the two people he was already negotiating with by phone and quite possibly were part of, or working with, some officers from the drugs squad.\n\nWhoever it was on the other end of the phone, their information was good in one key respect. A NCIS detective was handling the informant who'd fingered Ramadan Guney's son. The handler was none other than DS Keith Green. He was the man who two years later was caught in the CIB3 drug sting that also netted Terry McGuinness and Kevin Garner. Green however didn't turn supergrass and was acquitted in 1998, much to the Yard's annoyance.\n\nDuring his time at NCIS Green was not under investigation. Privately, the Yard is happy to give the impression that doubts about the safety of Egg's conviction are solely down to Green's involvement. But the truth never comes in perfect packages. Green says he can see why the Yard would now want to blame him for everything. But he argues that what happened in the three months immediately after Egg's arrest reveals a far more murky and complex picture. His version of events is told here for the first time.\n\nGreen's posting at NCIS was punctuated by a long period of sickness. In mid-1994 he took six months' medical leave suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He'd had a delayed reaction to a near-fatal shooting accident on the Flying Squad. Green returned to NCIS early in 1995 and was given a very sensitive assignment. The stigma of depression and the need to prove himself had brought him back to work too early, he says.\n\nSince at least 1994 the NCIS south England drug team had been collating intelligence on Turkish organised crime and the importation of heroin through the Balkans route into the UK. This operation was codenamed Centurion. It was the first multi-agency operation with NCIS officers working alongside Customs, the Benefit Agency, Immigration, SO11, MI5 and MI6. The spooks were interested in information on militant organisations like Hamas and the drug trade in the UK. Centurion was also tracking lorries from the Balkans.\n\nGreen reveals that Asil Nadir was among the original targets of Operation Centurion. In the past there had been rumours that the fugitive tycoon was exporting heroin to the UK from his base in Northern Cyprus. Jimmy Karagozlu had once leased the casino in the basement of the Jasmine Court Hotel, which Nadir controlled.\n\nGreen further reveals that Ramadan Guney was also a target of NCIS. This may have been more to do with his surety for Nadir than any evidence of involvement in drug trafficking, which the undertaker denies.\n\nWhile MI6 was listening to communications from the Jasmine Court Hotel complex, in London NCIS had an observation post in the Royal Oak pub on Green Lanes overlooking Ramadan Guney's office. Visitors were photographed and their licence plate numbers logged. Green's job in early 1995 was to turn this intelligence into packages of evidence for police squads to make arrests. The team he inherited lacked knowledge of the Turkish community so he recruited a Stoke Newington officer whose contacts in and around Green Lanes were enviable.\n\nThere was pressure on the Centurion team to get results and prove to the Home Office that NCIS \u2013 set up in April 1992 to improve inter-agency intelligence co-ordination \u2013 was a success. \"We were spending a lot of money and to be honest achieving very little,\" says Green.\n\nHis team began looking at Egg as a result of the surveillance operation on his father. Centurion knew Egg was into car ringing \u2013 stripping stolen cars for parts \u2013 as a sideline to his phone business. Although some in the local community believed he was bringing in drugs using the cars, says Green. Egg fiercely denies this.\n\nGreen had an informant close to the Guneys and to the Karagozlus. One day in late September information was received at NCIS that Egg had access to a gun and was trying to buy some bullets.\n\nGreen says he knew nothing at the time of the business feud with Jimmy Karagozlu. Green briefed the 3 Area drugs squad, but to protect his source he gave the false impression the intelligence had come from phone-taps, not an informant. Centurion had used the same drugs squad before for jobs as small as a few ounces of heroin, he says. But Green can't now remember whether the informant actually mentioned heroin or speculated this was why Egg needed a gun.\n\nWithin days of Egg's arrest, Green says he noticed a big change in his popularity. \"Suddenly people I hadn't spoken to for years wanted to be my best friend.\" Officers would ring him at NCIS offering help and generally sniffing around in a way he found suspicious.\n\nThe informant, fearing Ramadan was getting close, was also making increasingly agitated calls to NCIS. Green was told the undertaker had recordings of men offering to scupper the prosecution for money and a list of names of between three and six police officers said to be on Jimmy Karagozlu's payroll.\n\nRamadan certainly was hunting the informant and accepts he interrogated a number of people based on the information he received from his anonymous callers and his own inquiries. He told us his talks with CIB were not a secret in Green Lanes. Nico was apparently very annoyed and sent a message threatening to shoot Ramadan in the legs. We tried to contact Nico at his business in Green Lanes, but he never responded. Perry died while Egg was in prison.\n\nGreen suspected that some of the leaks were coming from inside NCIS. He says he notified his bosses after one Saturday when two Mediterranean-looking men in a red Mercedes approached him at Blackheath Rugby Club. They offered him money for information on the informant's identity. They talked about being able \"to finish my career, that I was small fry and they could get to DACs\". Green says it was never indicated who they worked for.\n\nGreen also supplied us with a book called _The Cyprus Triangle_ , which he says was posted to his home address around this time. The paperback appeared to have a cryptic inscription from the author, president Rauf Denktash, which reads: \"To him who knows or thinks he knows.\"\n\nGreen then dropped a bombshell. Sometime in the three months after Egg's arrest, he claims he took a call from one of the detectives on the 3 Area drugs squad who had raided Egg's home. He knew the man from their days on the Flying Squad at Rigg Approach and agreed to meet at the Met's sports club in Chigwell. When Green arrived another police officer was also there. He did all the talking and offered him a share of \"a six-figure sum\" to help scupper the prosecution against Egg. Strangely, he was told, the bribe money was coming from Jimmy Karagozlu. Green declined the offer and says he reported it to a CIB superintendent during a brief chat at Tintagel House. \"The whole point was somebody was getting very close to identifying who the informant was. [Approaching CIB] was to try and stop that.\"\n\nIn December 1995, Keith Green went on sick leave. The depression had come back, he says. He never returned to work and officially retired on ill health grounds seven months later.\n\nAs Egg's trial approached in May 1996, his defence team had no idea what had emerged from CIB's investigation of Ramadan Guney's tapes. The lack of communication severely hampered their ability to rely on them in Egg's defence.\n\nAlthough the family didn't know it at the time, the Ghost Squad had decided not to refer Ramadan's complaint of police corruption to the PCA for supervision. This decision was all the more extraordinary because by then Ramadan had identified to the anti-corruption squad the man he said had come to his office posing as a Home Office official. During one of the pre-trial hearings Ramadan pointed out DS Jim Gillan, one of Egg's arresting officers. Had CIB done any analysis to compare Gillan's voice with those on the tape? Had Gillan been interviewed by CIB about the accusation? The family didn't know the answers to these and more questions by the start of the trial and felt CIB was keeping them in the dark.\n\nKeith Green says at no point while he was at NCIS or after he retired did CIB ever ask him about the operation against Egg, or attempt to meet his informant. He points out that Operation Centurion may even have possessed photographs of the mysterious \"Home Office\" official who visited Ramadan's office, because of the surveillance operation from the nearby pub. But as far as he is aware no one from CIB checked the files.\n\nGreen further alleges that DS Gillan was one of the two officers who approached him at the police sports club and whom he reported to CIB. The second detective, who Green named as detective constable Martin Morgan, did all the talking, he says.\n\nMorgan had been a major target of Operation Jackpot. He later served at Edmonton and then New Southgate SERCS. Morgan was friendly with Jimmy Karagozlu and Nico. But crucially, they were also at one time his registered informants. Mehmet Karagozlu told us his family knew Morgan before he joined the police. Morgan's father-in-law was a cutter at Smithfield meat market where the Karagozlus got their supplies. By the time of Egg's trial, Morgan had become a major target of the Ghost Squad as part of its wider investigation into New Southgate and a corrupt cell of ex-Stoke Newington detectives supposedly under DI John Redgrave's control.\n\nThe Guneys' defence team knew nothing about these goings-on. A thorough investigation of the tapes and of the Ghost Squad's secret intelligence files should have been enough to raise serious questions about continuing this prosecution. But as ever with internal investigations, there were other pressing considerations that had nothing to do with the interests of justice.\n\nThe smell of corruption around the Guney case wafted into the Ghost Squad at a very sensitive time for the Yard. One area of particular sensitivity was the ongoing prosecution of corrupt SERCS detective constable John Donald. The Ghost Squad had examined Donald's links with a major south-east drug syndicate led by Kenny Noye and suggestions of a corrupt police network that extended to detectives inside NCIS. The corruption probe into NCIS coincided with Operation Centurion, some of whose senior management were embroiled in the Donald affair. This might further explain why the Ghost Squad was keeping Egg's defence team in the dark.\n\nNone of Egg's fingerprints were on the gun, on the boxes of ammunition or the five hessian sacks of heroin. No drug paraphernalia, like scales or cutting agents, was found at his house, and the clingfilm the gun was wrapped in did not match that found in Egg's kitchen. The prosecution also had to concede, because of the expected evidence from SO1 detectives Skully and Johnson, that Egg feared being set up _before_ his arrest and that his business enemies were well known to the police.\n\nThe judge described the defence in the following way: \"The fit-up is alleged, but by the defendant's enemies and not the police witnesses in this trial. What the defence wish to explore is whether the police knew of that fit-up or perhaps, indeed, connived at it.\"\n\nTo be successful, Egg's defence depended on what disclosure the judge would order from the Ghost Squad's secret files. Rock Tansey QC, his barrister, wanted to explore whether Jimmy Karagozlu was the informant, or if he knew the person who was. But the prosecution asked Judge Elwen nicely to block any disclosure that would identify the sources of intelligence that led to the raid, on the grounds of PII. The judge agreed. Round one to the Ghost Squad.\n\nEgg's lawyers had another poisoned arrow to fire into the heart of the prosecution case. They'd recently discovered that DS Gillan was one of three officers involved in the case who had been investigated by Operation Jackpot.\n\nGillan was one of the officers who had been transferred in January 1992 from the Stoke Newington drugs squad. Operation Jackpot investigated five serious complaints against him and he was finally cleared of any criminal or disciplinary offences by February 1995. Three months later he was posted to the 3 Area drugs squad that soon afterwards arrested Egg.\n\nTansey argued that in the \"highly unusual circumstances of this case the evidence of the arresting officers was not reliable\" because some had been \"intimately involved\" in Stoke Newington cases involving guns and drugs that were dropped or successfully appealed because that evidence was \"tainted\".\n\nThe defence barrister asked for the Operation Jackpot file to be disclosed. The prosecution vehemently opposed. Scotland Yard after all had neatly hidden that failure in the bowels of the Ghost Squad. The prosecution said the Jackpot inquiry report was \"irrelevant\" to the case and, anyway, the three officers had not been disciplined. Without reading the report, the judge agreed. Round two to the Ghost Squad.\n\nNext, the defence asked to cross-examine DS Gillan about some of his Stoke Newington cases. One, involving Maxine Edwards, had only recently been successfully appealed following a rare referral back to the court from the home secretary, no less.\n\nTansey put his argument in these terms: \"[My client] has said from the outset he has enemies, but there are major question marks. Are the police involved in it as well? Are they being paid, or in league with his enemies to do him down? And, therefore, that is the one reason why the whole question of honesty and dishonesty of police officers is relevant. The fact that Mr Gillan plays, in the evidence that we have, a low-key part does not mean that it was not a dishonest operation to which he was a party, and his past is, therefore, relevant. Is he a police officer on whom one can safely rely, is he a totally honest, straight policeman and may he have infected what happened on this occasion? We do not suggest that the police themselves have necessarily planted the drug.\"\n\nGillan denied on the stand that he was \"Home Office\" man or that he had ever been to Ramadan Guney's office let alone tried to extort money from him. But Judge Elwen wouldn't allow cross-examination of Gillan on Jackpot matters. Round three to the Ghost Squad.\n\nThe prosecution's protection of Gillan appeared entirely at odds with what was simultaneously happening in the civil courts, where the controversial detective was bringing libel proceedings against the _Guardian_ over two articles written at the time of his transfer from Stoke Newington, although he wasn't named in either of them.\n\nThe former heads of Operation Jackpot, superintendent Ian Russell and deputy assistant commissioner Mike Taylor, were both prepared to undermine Gillan's libel claim by giving evidence for the _Guardian_. So too was the senior CPS lawyer involved in cleaning up the judicial fallout from the \"Stokey Cokey\" scandal and the PCA chairman.\n\nThe prosecution position in Egg's case was all the more contradictory because after Operation Jackpot Gillan was subject to a little-known and special arrangement whereby the CPS had to assess his credibility before allowing him to give evidence in a trial.\n\nProsecutor David Jeremy was also concerned about the forthcoming evidence for the defence from detectives Skully and Johnson. So he called their boss, the head of SO1, commander Roy Ramm, to rubbish them. Ramm told the court he had bollocked Skully for straying from the John Palmer timeshare inquiry, even though another senior SO1 officer later gave evidence that he had given the two detectives authority to nurture Ramadan as a potential informant.\n\nThe defence asked to see the SO1 file prepared by Skully and Johnson on their dealings with Egg before his arrest. The prosecution opposed. The judge agreed. Round four to the Ghost Squad.\n\nIt was a rare sight indeed to see detectives giving evidence against their own and casting doubt on the \"neatness\" of the police raid. The prosecution accused Skully of moonlighting and seeking some financial benefit from the Guneys for putting \"the frighteners\" on Egg's former business partners and providing him with an \"insurance policy while he dealt in heroin\". Utter rubbish, Skully told the jury and countered that if he was corrupt he could have called Palmer's legal team at any time and named his price. \"They had to rubbish me and Dave to take the spotlight away from the true story, that Egg had been fitted up,\" Skully told us.\n\nHe had retired from the police by the time he gave evidence, but felt there had been an underhand attempt before he left to use trumped-up disciplinary proceedings to prevent him being a credible witness for Egg. Johnson, however, was still a serving officer. He too had been served with disciplinary papers just before the trial, but these resulted in the mildest ticking off, equivalent to a set of lines \u2013 \"I need to concentrate on primary operational objectives.\" The whole exercise appeared to be another abuse of the disciplinary process to smear police witnesses who were off message.\n\nHowever, the most bizarre prosecution strategy was to try and minimise the criminality of Jimmy Karagozlu by arguing that his conviction for heroin trafficking was hardly evidence he was a Green Lanes godfather. In fact, Customs believed Jimmy's syndicate was moving 1,000 kilos of heroin at that time from Pakistan through Turkey and laundering millions of pounds through his casino underneath Asil Nadir's hotel in Cyprus.\n\nOn 23 July 1996, Egg was found guilty and sentenced in all to fourteen years, ten years for the heroin, four for the gun and ammunition. The judge returned the \u00a325,000 because the prosecution hadn't proven it was drug money.\n\nThe family immediately appealed on the grounds that the judge was wrong not to have acceded to their lawyer's disclosure requests. While they waited for the appeal to be heard, a brief letter from CIB arrived informing the solicitors that based \"on the evidence available\" no criminal or disciplinary action would be taken against any officer complained of by the Guneys. This was a reference to the conversations Ramadan had recorded for CIB with two anonymous callers he suspected were cops.\n\nIn February 1997, Gillan lost his libel case against the _Guardian_. The jury did not believe his reputation had been damaged and the Police Federation was left with a hefty legal bill of over \u00a31 million.\n\nThis was also the year DAC Roy Clark restructured the Ghost Squad into the Untouchables and the new intelligence cell CIBIC. The metamorphosis was part of Scotland Yard's public and political manipulation of its image as an organisation capable of reform and self-regulation before the start of the Home Affairs select committee hearings on the discredited disciplinary and internal complaint system and the Stephen Lawrence public inquiry.\n\nEgg's case threatened to expose this confidence trick because it led to so many pockets of corruption the Yard did not want revealed to public scrutiny. However, in light of the allegation of fit-up made so prominently in Egg's trial, a second complaint inquiry began. Here was a perfect opportunity to refer it to the PCA and appoint an outside force to investigate the Yard. Instead the sensitive complaint was kept among the shadow warriors from CIBIC, led by DCI Chris Jarratt.\n\nJarratt sent two of his detectives to re-interview the family, who repeated the allegations against Gillan but added nothing more. The missing pieces were already in the anti-corruption squad's secret files.\n\nThroughout most of 1997, as the full appeal hearing neared, the family learned next to nothing about the progress of this new inquiry. PII was once again used to successfully persuade the Appeal Court there was no merit in the appeal. It was dismissed on 27 February 1998.\n\n\"Up until that day there was light at the end of the tunnel,\" says Egg's girlfriend Melanie. \"But when the Appeal Court judges refused us a certificate to go to the Lords it finally hit me. I was devastated.\"\n\nIn his prison cell, Egg at first thought he was going mad, seeing conspiracy where there was none. But the more he replayed the events in his mind the more convinced he became that there was an almighty police \"cover-up\" in progress. He would spend four more years inside before it started to properly unravel.\n\n## [21\n\nSecret Justice](contents.html#ch21)\n\nIn June 1998, Customs charged Andy Demitriou and Jimmy Karagozlu for orchestrating a multi-million pound VAT fraud on a mobile phone business.\n\nAll was not lost. Two months earlier Demitriou had met two Asian middlemen working with a corrupt Customs officer called Kalaish Sawnhney. He was part of Operation Mamba, the Customs team behind the arrests. After his release on bail, Demitriou helped arrange a burglary to steal the Operation Mamba file. It was made easy because Customs were temporarily working from portakabins in Harmsworth near Heathrow Airport while the main office was renovated. After the files disappeared, Customs rightly suspected an inside job and the main suspect was 52-year-old Sawnhney.\n\nIn great secrecy Customs called in CIB3 to test his integrity. The job was given to Chris Jarratt at CIBIC, who set up a joint covert operation with Customs, codenamed Mongoose.\n\nIn November, a false intelligence report was created on the office computer. The report gave genuine details of Jimmy's criminality but falsely suggested there was a bug in a lamppost outside his house. Sawnhney was filmed printing out the specially marked file. He then sold it to Demitriou through middlemen Nathaniel Das and Gunsul Patel. Meanwhile, secret cameras overlooking Jimmy's house filmed private investigators he had hired to check out the lamppost. The sting was complete, and at dawn on 4 December, Jimmy and the others were arrested at different locations across London. In all, ten people were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and held on remand at Belmarsh top security prison.\n\nSawnhney turned supergrass and spoke about a list of corrupt Customs officers he had given Jimmy at the beginning of their relationship. Jarratt mounted a dramatic search at Belmarsh but didn't recover the list.\n\nThe Karagozlu crime family's money-laundering operation was cute. It had three limbs \u2013 IMK Travel, Air Ops International and the Jasmine Court Casino. The police had also uncovered a highly embarrassing arrangement with an unwitting Thomas Cook in central London, which at one point was regularly exchanging hold-alls with \u00a3100,000 into foreign currency. Key evidence came from Athanasis Apostolopoulos, the Greek manager of IMK Travel. He told Customs how he set up the exchange deal on Jimmy's behalf in 1996.\n\nJimmy had negotiated payment of $1.2 million for one Tristar aeroplane plus parts through ING Barings Bank. Apostolopoulos admitted to Customs personally making a $500,000 payment for the plane which Jimmy's company, Air Ops International, flew under the licence of Holiday Air in Turkey. The travel agents would arrange flights and accommodation at the Jasmine Court Hotel. Some customers would separately give Jimmy cash in his private office above the travel agents in return for a credit note for the casino. Apostolopoulos took the cash to Thomas Cook and exchanged the sterling for US dollars and deutschmarks, which were then transferred to Northern Cyprus.\n\nApostolopoulos told the police he also helped run Jimmy's airline and travel agents from a new base in Sweden where the Green Lanes godfather operated as Nordic European Airlines. He said he bailed out of that venture just before the arrests in June 1998.\n\nCo-operation between Customs and the police against the Karagozlu crime family developed from a memorandum of understanding signed that year. However, the pact obscured an even more sensitive joint enterprise: to investigate corruption in both law enforcement agencies. Before Sawnhney was unmasked, Customs told the Yard that they too appeared to have a dirty cop in a highly sensitive post.\n\nIn April 1998 Customs had arrested a major money launderer and Yard informant called Michael Michael. The Greek Cypriot accountant quickly turned supergrass. During his debrief Michael told Customs he had paid his police handler, named as detective constable Paul Carpenter, \"up to \u00a310,000 per week\" for leaking intelligence to his criminal associates. Michael was the UK representative of British, Dutch and French criminals engaged in massive importations of cannabis (18 tons) and cocaine (71 kilos) into the UK. His British clients included Costa del Sol exiles Mickey Green and Patrick Adams, head of the north London crime family.\n\nCustoms estimated Michael had laundered \u00a358 million. He had also been Carpenter's registered informant since 1991. So Customs alerted the Yard, who sent Jarratt to interview Michael. This apparent compromise was even more serious than it appeared because it threatened to undermine the carefully spun launch of the Untouchables. Carpenter was part of the Yard's Special Intelligence Section, the SO11 offshoot that collated intelligence from taps and informants on London's top-echelon criminals. He was based in the same building in Putney from which the Untouchables operated. Carpenter was part of the SIS team who had been looking at Karagozlu under the control of Terry Pattinson. Worse still, since 1997 Carpenter had been also attached to Jarratt's own intelligence cell.\n\nThe Karagozlu trial began in January 2000. No sooner was the jury selected than they were discharged because of a suspicion there had been an attempt to nobble them. A new jury heard the case for six months. It had round-the-clock police protection from the Yard, but in July the jury was discharged for misconduct \u2013 according to defence solicitors, it was not taking the case seriously.\n\nAnother new jury heard the case afresh in September. But in December disaster struck once more. This time it was less a case of jury nobbling and more of jury nobbing. A member of the police witness protection team stationed at Ilford had taken his job a bit too seriously and was offering some personal close protection to one of the female jurors. CIB3 officers had received a tip-off from one of their colleagues about the sexual relationship. They discovered from his mobile phone he had texted her over 600 times, including at court. In total, 1,119 texts passed between the lovers. The trial collapsed for the second time costing many millions.\n\nA deal was eventually worked out involving the two Karagozlu brothers. Mehmet was only involved in the corruption case, not the VAT fraud. Jimmy pleaded guilty to conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and in return the prosecution offered no evidence against his brother. Mehmet was released after twenty months on remand.\n\nThe main players in the VAT and corruption cases all pleaded guilty in 2001. Jimmy received nine years and six months. Andy Demitriou was given six years. Middleman Nathaniel Das got four years and nine months. He told us: \"I found Jimmy a very nice person, a most religious person, not corrupt, a person who cared about you.\"\n\nIn January 2000, just as the ill-fated Karagozlu trial was starting, the Untouchables began a secret operation codenamed Greyhound against DC Martin Morgan. His phones were bugged and he was put under close surveillance. The timing seemed more than coincidental. Did they suspect Jimmy would turn to his former handler for some help? Certainly by this stage the Untouchables knew the two men had an improper relationship and it is likely the targeting of Morgan was in some way a security measure to protect the Karagozlu trial. The more the anti-corruption squad listened in to the private life of the 37-year-old detective, the more they realised it was another of Morgan's informants who was looking to him for some corrupt help.\n\nThe story begins with Ashley Sansom, a money launderer for some heavy criminals involved in dope smuggling. Sansom was connected to a London drug syndicate headed by a builder called Bob Kean and one in Liverpool. With Kean's help, Sansom formed AJS Financial in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, in May 1997. Kean introduced a number of his criminal associates, who deposited hundreds of thousands of pounds of drug money. Kean had placed somewhere between \u00a3300,000 and \u00a3600,000 with Sansom.\n\nBut in late 1999 his launderer disappeared. At first Kean tried to track him down using the courts and a private investigator. But the pressure from one client got too much. According to friends of Kean, a violent drug dealer called Kenneth Kenny one day turned up at his Norfolk farm threatening to shoot him if he didn't get his \u00a3150,000 back.\n\nKean turned to his old friend and handler Martin Morgan, who had inherited the informant from a mutual police friend. Kean had been grassing since the seventies \u2013 his pseudonym was \"Kevin Churchill\". Morgan ran Kean when he was at New Southgate SERCS office in the early nineties. But as the relationship developed, Kean ended up running Morgan, who he knew was willing to use the cover of the informant-handler relationship to act corruptly. Morgan agreed to help locate Sansom. He recruited two of his chums from Stoke Newington days, detective constables Declan Costello and Paul Goscomb.\n\nMorgan had no idea CIB3 were listening in March 2000 as the plot unfolded. A cool operator, Morgan had time to go on a racing holiday to Scotland with other cops, unaware CIB3 was behind him. Meanwhile, in London the Untouchables came up with a plan. They took Sansom, his girlfriend and her baby into protective custody. As part of the deal, the money launderer agreed to become a supergrass.\n\nAn undercover detective posing as Sansom then left a phone number for Costello at Barkingside police station, where he worked with Morgan. They traced it to a phone box at the Post House hotel in Guildford, Surrey. A receptionist said Mr Sansom was staying in room 179. Morgan spread the word and agreed to meet Kean at the hotel.\n\nKean arrived first with Carl Wood, an affable drug smuggler who had lost \u00a380,000 in the Sansom laundry. Surveillance officers, it is believed from MI5, were everywhere. In addition, CIB3 placed cameras and listening devices in the television and elsewhere around Room 179. These were monitored from an adjacent room.\n\nMorgan arrived later with Costello, who stayed in the car. In the hotel room the talk turned to what violence would be meted out to Sansom if he didn't come up with the cash. Wood had brought some ammonia. Morgan gave Kean some electric cable ties to tether Sansom, presumably during his interrogation. The cop then left. Wood and Kean stayed the night. Wood was overheard referring to a previous conversation where he claimed the \"cozzers\" (Morgan and Costello) had talked about putting Sansom in a \"crusher\". He, of course, never showed at the hotel and on the third day the criminals left.\n\nOn 6 April, the three cops and Kean were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, to falsely imprison Sansom and to cause him serious harm. Wood was on holiday in Spain at the time. He was extradited six months later.\n\nAt first Morgan said nothing to his CIB3 interviewers. Then he gave a statement that was largely invented. He tried to hide behind his informant-handler relationship, disclosing sensitive details of information Kean had given. Morgan argued that his reward for helping one informant was the opportunity to recruit another, Sansom.\n\nIn a fortuitous cock-up, Morgan's explosive statement was accidentally served by the CPS\/CIB on Kean's co-accused. It had a devastating effect when Wood discovered his criminal associate had also been a high-level police informant. Kean was furious. Wood told everyone he was a grass. It was the talk of north London. Kean later confirmed to us one part of the statement where it mentions information he once gave about the IRA. A former police handler says Kean had also given information on the stolen Beit art collection, although the two things may be connected. Morgan and Kean fell out as it became apparent the corrupt cop would have to expose his friend's secret past in front of a jury to stand a chance of getting off.\n\nSlowly, snippets of their corrupt dealings emerged in whispers around the Old Bailey. CIB3 got wind that Kean's brother-in-law, a counterfeiter of funny money, had written from prison threatening to expose his alleged role in nobbling a jury if Kean didn't help him. CIB3 also found witness statements in Kean's home with Morgan's fingerprints on them. The statements concerned a drugs job, Goscomb said. He and Morgan had worked the case when they were at Ilford in 1998.\n\nThe Untouchables watched with glee as Costello and Goscomb fell out with Morgan over his statement. Costello felt Morgan's version made it impossible to go along with.\n\nMorgan's only chance was to have the probe evidence from the hotel room excluded as unlawfully obtained. The prosecution was forced to concede that the authority was lacking, but Judge Graham Boal QC did not rule it unfair. The defence also alleged CIB3 had \"cooked the books\" to legitimise the unlawful operation. An original page from commander Andy Hayman's diary, for example, didn't tally with the photocopy disclosed to the defence. The judge, however, was unmoved and found no bad faith by any of the CIB3 officers.\n\nWhen it dawned upon the defendants that the jury would be entitled to see the hotel video in all its compromising detail it had a domino effect. Six days later, on 13 May 2002, Costello pleaded guilty to conspiracy to cause actual bodily harm. He felt his family had suffered enough. Morgan then pleaded guilty to conspiracy to falsely imprison. And one week later Kean did the same.\n\nThe sentencing on Friday, 7 July, fell on the day of a crucial World Cup match between England and Argentina. The morning session was taken up with mitigation speeches. At 12.21, with nine minutes to kick-off, the judge called half-time to reflect on what he had heard. Wood, who suffered from Crohns Disease, knew he was going down and joked, \"I've got three ounces of puff up my arse.\"\n\nWe returned to court at three p.m. after England's victory. Morgan, just weeks away from his fortieth birthday, had spent half his life in the Met. He gritted his teeth as Judge Boal called him \"a bent police officer\". Seven years. Kean got the same as the co-architect of the conspiracy. Wood received four years and Costello thirty months.\n\nIt was rumoured that Morgan would have been charged with another matter on the steps of the Old Bailey if he had been acquitted, although CIB3 refuses to comment on this.\n\nMorgan had been \"at it\" for years, former co-conspirator Declan Costello told us. He offered a solution to the riddle that hovered over the trial. Was there more than an irresistible inference that Kean had paid him and Morgan for their services? Costello admitted to us he was promised \u00a320,000, the same as Morgan. \"Martin is obsessed with money,\" he added.\n\nA second riddle was why Morgan took the risk going to the hotel room when he knew for years that CIB3 considered him a target. Costello and Goscomb separately said they believed Morgan had deposited around \u00a350,000 with Sansom before he went AWOL, although the prosecution offered no evidence of this.\n\nGoscomb was discharged in the Morgan trial as part of the horse-trading in return for Costello's guilty plea. Senior Treasury Counsel Orlando Pownall had told the court that although there was evidence against him, a \"pragmatic view\" prevailed. Goscomb had little doubt he would be sacked from the police, but said he would try and string out the discipline proceedings on full pay as long as possible.\n\nHe threatens to provide a prepared statement at his disciplinary interview naming Untouchables who he claims were involved in corrupt acts when they served at Stoke Newington. He talked specifically of a senior CIB3 officer who had ordered the planting of a gun on a black man. Costello also named to us another officer whose expertise was said to be planting ammunition at a crime scene.\n\nBefore he and DS Jim Gillan were transferred from Stoke Newington in January 1992, Goscomb says a senior officer tipped him off that he would not face criminal or disciplinary charges. Costello also left Stoke Newington that year. He told us a senior officer had also marked his card he wouldn't be arrested by Operation Jackpot and should quickly apply for a post coming up on the diplomatic protection squad. Costello transferred to 10 Downing Street where his duties included bodyguarding prime minister John Major.\n\nThe failure of Operation Jackpot allowed a number of officers to \"bomb burst\" out of Stoke Newington, says Costello, and continue their corrupt ways on proactive squads in north and east London, like the Flying Squad and SERCS, until the Yard decided it was expedient (or had its hand forced) to do something about them.\n\nWhy hadn't someone as arrogant as Morgan been taken out earlier? Dave Pennant, the senior investigating officer in Operation Greyhound, admits there was \"a certain amount of intelligence that gave serious concerns about [Morgan's] integrity\". However, he maintains this was not enough to bring charges, which is why in January 2000 he mounted a proactive investigation.\n\nBut this doesn't explain why the secret intelligence held by the Untouchables, which was easily good enough to undermine the safety of Egg's conviction, was never disclosed very early on.\n\nWe have pieced together what the anti-corruption squad knew about Morgan and others before Egg's appeal:\n\n_\u2209_ Morgan and his partner, detective sergeant Paul Kelly, had been targets of the Ghost Squad since 1994.\n\n_\u2209_ The two detectives co-handled Jimmy Karagozlu and Nico between 1993 and 1995 at New Southgate SERCS.\n\n_\u2209_ Nico had helped the police for many years before Morgan and Kelly handled him and had friends high up in the Flying Squad and Scotland Yard.\n\n_\u2209_ Kelly and Morgan were suspected of nobbling a trial in June 1997 involving a drugs syndicate connected to Bob Kean.\n\nThis last bullet point is worthy of more examination. When the defence asked for the surveillance logs to be produced in court for electrostatic document analysis (Esda) testing an officer reported back to Judge Fergus Mitchell that they had gone missing. He acquitted the defendants and threatened instead to send the entire SERCS squad to prison for hatching what he called \"a little conspiracy\". Although the judge assumed the cops had destroyed the logs before the forensic test could reveal they had been fabricated, another explanation is that officers working with the defendants stole them to ensure the prosecution collapsed. Kelly denies any involvement, explaining he was having an operation on his varicose veins at the time. But he was later disciplined for his failure of supervision. Goscomb, however, told us Morgan was involved with Kean in the plot to steal the logs.\n\nThe Yard was forced by the judge to launch an inquiry. This was the third of four drugs trials that had collapsed or were successfully appealed between November 1996 and October 1997. Each one had attracted scathing comments from the judges. Several expressed dismay at the slow reaction of the Yard in dealing with some of these officers. One judge was aghast that a particular officer, who the Appeal Court had already branded \"a liar\", had not been suspended but was back on duty arresting more people.\n\nThe judges had no idea this had been a deliberate strategy since the Ghost Squad years. The interests of justice were subordinated to the Yard's management needs, which were to deal secretly with its serious corruption problem at SERCS while outwardly preserving the image of the squad as an effective crime-buster. This meant presenting some detectives to the courts as witnesses of truth when the Ghost Squad and then CIBIC had disclosable intelligence to suggest they were corrupt, dishonest or unethical. By keeping the CPS out of the intelligence cell, anti-corruption chiefs were allowed to continue to mislead the courts and the public. And when all else failed the PII system could be relied on to continue the deception.\n\nBy November 1997, a few months before Egg Guney's appeal, some 23 SERCS officers were listed for interview under caution in relation to allegations ranging from missing exhibits and fabrication of evidence to perjury.\n\nKelly had been put on restricted duties a month earlier and sent to Bethnal Green police station because he was told SERCS had \"lost confidence\" in his integrity. Kelly says he was put on something called \"the Townsend list\" of suspect officers in north and east London. The secret blacklist was named after the area boss, deputy assistant commissioner John Townsend. The Yard is still very sensitive about this because of the employment, judicial and human rights issues associated with secret blacklists. But a number of senior officers in the area confirm a list existed. One source says that in late 1997 he was asked to tell Martin Morgan he had failed his interview to join a proactive drugs squad in east London. The police source confirms it was explained to him that Morgan was on the Townsend list.\n\nMorgan had received four complaints between 1992 and 1998. One concerned \"an allegation of planted evidence\". The most important is dated 6 May 1997 for \"improper relationships\" with informants.\n\nTurning briefly to Keith Green, almost everything about his arrest in December 1997 as part of the 80 kilo cannabis sting was also kept from Egg's defence team in the week before the appeal. The CIB intelligence officer who arrested and interviewed Green was DI Stephen Bazzoni who had also been intimately involved in the first inquiry into the Guney tapes and whether detective DS Jim Gillan was behind any corrupt approaches.\n\nGreen says there was no attempt, throughout his 11 months on remand, or subsequently, to question him about the Guney case, either as a suspect or a witness. Intriguingly, in the same month Green was arrested, the CIB superintendent he says he told about the alleged Morgan\/Gillan approach was removed from the anti-corruption squad. Detective superintendent Norman McNamara told us Roy Clark had expressed doubts about his integrity.\n\nWhen summarised, the way Egg Guney was treated is shocking. Since his arrest in September 1995 anti-corruption squad detectives had made repeated visits to prison to pump Egg for information, while all along allowing him to believe they were investigating his complaint.\n\nFirst the Ghost Squad and then the CIB intelligence cell avoided PCA supervision and treated him as an intelligence source while they managed and manipulated the public image of the Yard's corruption problem.\n\nEgg had given himself an insurance policy because he simply didn't trust the integrity of the anti-corruption crusade to get him out of prison. In June 1998, he wrote to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, a body set up to assume responsibilities that once rested with the Home Office for investigating \"alleged and suspected miscarriages of justice\" in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The CCRC has powers to secure materials from the police and CPS.\n\nThe following year he also changed solicitors to Birnberg & Pierce, the miscarriage of justice specialists. Solicitor Tim Greene took over his case and supplied the CCRC with the limited information his client had from the police.\n\nA lot had happened by mid-2001, but still no word from the CCRC or from Jarratt's investigation of Egg's complaint. Keith Green had been tried and acquitted and the Karagozlu crime syndicate was awaiting sentencing for the corruption and VAT fraud on a mobile phone company. \"Inevitably much is hidden from us,\" solicitor Tim Greene wrote to the CCRC in May that year. He had also complained to the Yard about Jarratt's investigation. It was passed to CIB management, which appointed yet another detective from the Untouchables to investigate themselves.\n\nThe whole thing was absurd. This was now the third investigation since 1995, and again it wasn't being referred to the PCA. Furthermore, in March 2002, Jarratt was removed from his command pending an internal investigation into allegations of bullying, expenses fraud and assault brought by fellow officers. These remarkable events drove Tim Greene to write again to the CCRC asking what exactly was going on and what, if anything, they could disclose from their investigation, now in its fourth year.\n\nOn 18 July the CCRC wrote back, 11 days after Martin Morgan was jailed for his part in the kidnap plot. Egg's case, said the CCRC, would be referred back to the Court of Appeal with a recommendation that the conviction was unsafe. By now he had served half his sentence and was almost eligible for parole. Although the CCRC had sent full reasons to the Appeal Court and CPS in a confidential annexe, Egg was told he could know almost nothing of how the decision was reached because these considerations were \"sensitive\". The Yard and CPS had invoked a law to keep secret all that it and NCIS had shown the CCRC.\n\nThe key phrase in the explanatory letter sent to Egg's lawyer was this: \"The Commission had become aware of information which was available to neither the defence nor the prosecution at the time of Mr Guney's trial and appeal. That information amounts to evidence which substantially discredits the informant's handler... the information concerned might have caused the trial judge to come to a significantly different conclusion at [the PII] hearing.\"\n\nIncredibly the CPS was still opposing the recommendation to quash the conviction. Tim Greene's fear of a cover-up in the making did not abate when the solicitor learned they had asked the Untouchables to make further inquiries into the case.\n\nThis tricky assignment from the CPS was given to detective inspector Adrian Harper. The Untouchable was one of Jarratt's boys who'd been brought onto the anti-corruption squad in 1998 with other members of the David Norris murder inquiry team. Harper had also debriefed supergrass Kevin Garner on Operation Ethiopia and was the number two on the recently concluded Martin Morgan investigation. He had also personally visited Egg in prison with Customs as part of the Karagozlu corruption inquiry. It could not therefore be said of Harper that he had little grasp of the uncomfortable background to Egg's case.\n\nAfter four months the CPS made a remarkable volte-face. They wrote to Egg's lawyer in December 2002, saying \"new sensitive material\" unearthed by Harper had led them to conclude that \"no sensible argument could be mounted to maintain the safety of [the] conviction\". They would now not be opposing the appeal. It was a further three months before the Appeal Court was given that new material, and under very strict security conditions. The Untouchables and the CPS also notified the court of their intention to make a PII application to keep it all from Egg and the public.\n\nOn 15 May, Harper and detective constable Bill Maclean, both from the Intelligence Development Group, a re-branding of the old CIB intelligence cell, went into secret session with three Appeal Court judges.\n\nLord Justice Kennedy had previously indicated that \"a fair amount\" of what the Untouchables wanted kept secret was already in the public domain. This proved a false hope. Ten days later Egg returned, hoping to hear why his conviction was being quashed. It was a bleak day for open justice and democratic accountability of the police and the CPS.\n\nThe judgement indicated in the most guarded terms that \"substantial doubt\" had now been cast on the integrity of the police officers (in the plural) no longer serving, who compiled the intelligence report the day before Egg's arrest. Had the material been available at the time of the trial back in May 1996 it would inevitably have been abandoned, it said. The judgement wasn't read out. There was no apology. Egg emerged from Court 6 angry, confused and depressed. It was clear that had he not gone to the CCRC when he did, he would still be a convicted prisoner.\n\nWhy had CIB not disclosed the information that the CCRC and Court of Appeal found so persuasive? And why wasn't the highly sensitive information Harper found, which led the CPS to change its mind, disclosed earlier? Outside in the corridor Harper wouldn't be drawn on much, other than to confirm that the voices on the Ramadan Guney tapes were serving police officers. It was logical then that the Untouchables knew their names.\n\nMedia inquiries were steered away from the Flying Squad, Martin Morgan and Jimmy Karagozlu. Both the Yard and the CPS were happy to leave the impression the whole matter was to do with \"unsubstantiated\" allegations about Keith Green and not other corruption allegations they had sat on for over seven years.\n\nThis whole scandal is about disclosure, or to be precise, non-disclosure, from the Untouchables to the CPS; from the CPS to Egg's lawyers; and from the Courts to the public, who picked up the whole bill. The CPS is supposed to safeguard the interests of justice from those of the police. But in Egg's case it completely failed. The failure is remarkable because throughout his seven years in prison, disclosure had become the key issue for the criminal justice system.\n\nScotland Yard is a leading opponent of disclosure and nowhere has this been more dominant than in its dealings with the CPS during the anti-corruption crusade. The CPS had to fight to get the Operation Jackpot report into Stoke Newington released to it in 1992. The following year the Ghost Squad simply excluded the CPS from overseeing its secret activities, thereby making the issue of disclosure redundant.\n\nIronically, Egg's appeal in 1996 led the CPS to set up something called \"The Guney Group\". Senior CPS lawyers and anti-corruption squad bosses debated over the next five years what should be disclosed to the defence about police officers who in effect have been disbelieved or criticised during a trial. Yet all the while they sat on intelligence that clearly cast doubt on the safety of Egg's conviction and quite possibly several other men and women wrongly imprisoned.\n\nIt was only when supergrass Terry McGuinness made allegations in May 1998 about the so called \"first aid kits\" that a role for the CPS in anti-corruption work was formalised. It followed a meeting in July that year between the deputy commissioner John Stevens, anti-corruption chiefs and the CPS, represented by Martin Polaine. He was already in charge of the recently created Visa Card team, which had just started advising the Untouchables on its covert operations.\n\nAnti-corruption detectives began working with a new CPS Gold Card team to review the safety of all prosecutions by the Rigg Approach Flying Squad between 1988 and 1998. Superintendent Ian Russell represented the Yard in this endeavour. He had recently returned to the anti-corruption squad from Catford police station, where he served after being in charge of the Operation Jackpot debacle. The plan was that Russell and his men would delve into CIB's intelligence cell, and see what information should be disclosed to the CPS.\n\nPolaine explains: \"Visa Card would [then] feed the information around [suspect] officers to Gold Card in so far as they needed to know things for disclosure purposes. We would agree with them the ambit of disclosure they could give to defence solicitors. [It was a] balancing exercise of ensuring that every potential appellant had all the information they needed for appeal purposes. But equally if there were matters that remained sensitive they weren't made public.\"\n\nHowever, according to a senior CPS source, there were concerns from prosecutors about the way CIB3 and its even more secretive sister, CIBIC, were approaching disclosure matters. Each unit had its own disclosure officer who liaised with Visa. But the CIB3 disclosure officer was not privy to CIBIC information. \"This was a recipe for disaster,\" said the source. So the CPS insisted that there was one disclosure officer for both units. It also drafted a protocol which stated the anti-corruption squad must give Visa \"at an early stage\" information that allows it to address whether there is a conflict between an ongoing corruption operation and the rights of a defendant in a trial where targeted officers were giving evidence.\n\nBut Polaine was keen to stress that ultimately he and his CPS colleagues were entirely dependent on the Untouchables disclosing all that was relevant to any appeal. In other words they had to trust the integrity of the anti-corruption squad to put the interests of justice above its own and those of the Yard. The Guney case proves beyond doubt this trust was misplaced.\n\nFrom the Guney Group came the formalisation of a secret blacklist of officers. It is a refinement of the so-called Townsend List. The blacklist is officially called the Service Confidence Policy and was formalised after a meeting of anti-corruption management on 28 June 2000. It is designed for those officers whose integrity is seriously doubted. These \"concerns\" are based on secret intelligence and information collated by the Untouchables, whether through phone-taps, surveillance, informants or public sources, like court cases.\n\nFor some, the trust of the commissioner is recoverable. For others it is an unofficial way of getting them to resign without embarrassing disciplinary hearings, court cases or employment tribunals, where the public, through the media, can get a better measure of corruption in the Yard.\n\nThose on the secret blacklist are placed on restricted duties and are not allowed near proactive operations, sensitive databases or informants and in some cases the witness box, because the police simply don't regard them as witnesses of truth.\n\nEvery six months or so, the defective detective's case is reviewed by a senior Met civilian who is head of Workforce Deployment. He assesses all the sensitive material. Some officers are taken off. Others are kept on. The entire basis of what led an officer to lose the commissioner's trust is rarely explained. Similarly, defence lawyers and members of the public are not allowed to know which of London's finest are or have been subject to the blacklist.\n\nDS Jim Gillan, we were told by his friends and colleagues, was put on the blacklist while he was serving on the Fraud Squad. In summer 2003, he retired from the police. His friends say he was frustrated that his career in the force was stultified by the commissioner's unexplained loss of trust in his integrity.\n\nWe asked him a series of questions about the Guney case. Was he one of the anonymous callers who'd offered to sabotage the prosecution for money? Was he the mysterious \"Home Office official\"? Had he and Morgan corruptly approached fellow detective Keith Green? Had he tried to help Morgan and Costello onto the Fraud Squad? What relationship did he have with Jimmy Karagozlu? And in what circumstances had he left the police?\n\nJim Gillan did not confirm or deny the corruption allegations. He simply declined to comment. Martin Morgan told us from prison: \"I've got nothing to say. But it didn't happen.\"\n\nThe home secretary David Blunkett has refused an inquiry into this case, ludicrously suggesting Egg Guney could always make a complaint against the Yard and the CPS. Shortly after receiving this response, the Yard launched a fourth internal investigation into itself led by detective inspector Shaun Keep, formerly of the intelligence cell. At least this time there was PCA supervision by Nicola Williams.\n\nAlthough sceptical of the value of making yet another formal complaint, on 11 November 2003 Egg's lawyers submitted a four-page letter to Keep and Williams in essence seeking an explanation for why \"relevant information was withheld\". The letter asked: \"Why [was] there no disclosure at the time of the first appeal of what would form the basis five years later of the successful second appeal?\" This was a reference to the arrest and prosecution of Keith Green. It went on: \"There have been two substantial enquiries into complaints made by Mr Guney. We find it hard to understand why neither investigation uncovered the information which the CCRC, without the benefit of a police investigation, was able to uncover.\" The final paragraph was the most explosive: \"There was an obvious failure to disclose information at the first reasonable opportunity and as a result Mr Guney served the whole of his sentence. We do not accept that no police officer is at fault for the fact that it took the CCRC to find out this information from police files and at no time until then had any police officer seen fit to inform Mr Guney that there was material that impacted upon the safety of his conviction.\"\n\nIt is telling that the Yard only sought supervision from the PCA when the \"watchdog\" was withering on the vine and about to be replaced by the so-called Independent Police Complaints Commission. There will be some continuity because Nicola Williams, a barrister, is now one of the twelve IPCC commissioners who guard its independence from the police. This however brings us to the heart of the paradox where the police are policing the police.\n\nNicola Williams' supervision of the internal inquiry into the Guney case will have to consider Roy Clark's role. But Clark is now the IPCC's director of investigation. All of which would appear to mean he will either be advising on an investigation into himself, or alternatively, Clark's former colleagues in the Met will be investigating him and other colleagues.\n\n## [22\n\nA Lurking Doubt](contents.html#ch22)\n\nIn March 2000 we received an anonymous letter from someone who appeared to be a serving or retired Scotland Yard detective. Our mystery pen pal accepted that some officers under investigation were undoubtedly guilty and that corruption needed rooting out, but took issue with the double standards employed by the Yard and the suitability of some of its gamekeepers. He was also concerned with how the Untouchables were secretly setting the range on their anti-corruption radar so that certain dark corners of Scotland Yard would not be \"scoped\". Of special concern, he said, were those anti-corruption detectives who had once been through the revolving door between Stoke Newington police station and the Rigg Approach Flying Squad.\n\nHe directed us to one case in particular \u2013 the conviction one decade earlier of a black man called Ira Thomas. A cursory glance revealed Thomas had received 12 years for shooting a white drug dealer at point-blank range following a pub dispute.\n\nThis was a Stoke Newington case and after a few calls we discovered something rather interesting. In February 1992, the Appeal Court had wholeheartedly quashed Thomas's conviction by overturning the jury's verdict. This was almost unprecedented. The judgement was scathing of the prosecution case and stopped just short of saying Thomas had been fitted up, something the defendant had maintained all along.\n\nMore intriguingly, the cops involved in this miscarriage of justice were now on opposite sides of the war on corruption. It didn't take long to establish there was a good deal of bad blood over the perceived sanctimony of those ex-Stoke Newington cops who had donned white hats and were now singing from the anti-corruption hymn sheet.\n\nSingled out were DAC Roy Clark and one of his prot\u00e9g\u00e9s, detective superintendent Brian Moore. Both officers were involved with the Ira Thomas case. However, by the time we had received the anonymous note, Moore had left the Untouchables and was by then in charge of the most high-profile murder inquiry in the UK \u2013 the hunt for Jill Dando's killer. The BBC presenter had been shot at close range on her doorstep. Barry George was eventually charged after a forensic scientist found one speck of firearm residue in his coat pocket. The case split the public, the media, the legal establishment and the Yard. Critics of the prosecution argued it was based on half-baked circumstantial evidence and frenzied media and political pressure.\n\nWe then learned that a serving detective had anonymously alerted George's defence to the spooky parallels with the case of Ira Thomas. He too was charged on the basis of a few specks of firearm residue found on his coat, also seized many months after the shooting. Coincidentally, the same forensic scientist had tested both garments.\n\nThe Jill Dando case ran parallel to another high-profile prosecution led by Moore: the conviction of corrupt Flying Squad detectives from Rigg Approach. Their appeal was eventually dismissed in a turgid judgment handed down in February 2003. But buried in the dense legalese was one explosive paragraph. It referred to a recent statement by supergrass Terry McGuinness, who had worked at Stoke Newington on the Ira Thomas case alongside Moore and Clark.\n\nDuring his debriefing, McGuinness had unburdened his soul of every crooked act he knew or did while in the police force. At least that is what the Yard claimed. However the supergrass was now alleging that CIB3 didn't want him to mention his time at Stoke Newington \"to avoid embarrassment to one of his handlers\". McGuinness's soul was tortured, not purged. He felt the Untouchables were not interested in exposing the fit-up culture he and many others had been an integral part of. His allegations against the Untouchables cried out for independent investigation, but the Yard confirms none has ever been launched.\n\nAfter McGuinness was released into a witness protection programme we met with the troubled supergrass and over a modest libation asked him a few clarifying questions.\n\nWhat were you referring to in your statement, Terry?\n\n\"The Ira Thomas case,\" he replied.\n\nWhom did CIB3 want you to avoid embarrassing?\n\n\"Brian Moore.\"\n\nThe Anchor & Hope in Stoke Newington is a tiny pub at the bottom of a dipping cul-de-sac by the River Lea. In the summer, regulars can be found chilling on the towpath overlooking the marshes.\n\nThirty-five-year-old Freddy Brett was not a regular, but he liked a drink. He was a low-level drug dealer who broke the golden rule and got high, too high, on his own supply. He then committed burglaries to feed his habit. But when his shit was together Brett was considered good company. He sometimes worked as a roadie for the Mutant Waste Co, an anarcho-punk band.\n\nThe night of 30 June 1988 was one of those sticky ones where the Anchor & Hope looked more like a bar in Benidorm. Brett was at the top of the cul-de-sac when a man approached him pointing a 9mm automatic pistol. The first three shots missed, so Brett closed on the gunman, shouting cockily, \"You're not much good, you can't even shoot straight.\" The two men fought but the gunman got the upper hand and shot Brett through the thigh at point-blank range. He could have finished him off.\n\nWendy Ellison was watching from her kitchen window while calling the police. And after seeing a tall black man wearing a light-coloured coat walk away, she went to Brett's aid. He was calm and lying on the pavement. \"You knew who that was, didn't you?\" she said to him.\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied. Wendy returned to her kitchen to get a tea towel for the gunshot wound. When two police officers arrived she urged Brett to identify the gunman but he told her to mind her own business and said he'd deal with it himself.\n\nThe next morning detective sergeant Gordon Livingstone, the head of the Stoke Newington crime squad, visited Brett at the local hospital. DC Terry McGuinness went with him.\n\nBrett was already on bail for burglary and drug offences. Livingstone thought the shooting might be related. But the victim refused to name his attacker, claiming he feared for his life and that of his young daughter who lived with his estranged girlfriend.\n\nLivingstone didn't quite believe his story so no security was put around Brett. But after eight weeks of intermittent hospital visits, the detectives eventually got a name from Brett, if still no statement.\n\nA special bulletin was put on the Police National Computer asking officers to look out for: IRA THOMAS, CRO 11060-7BE, b HACKNEY 18-1-61, 5ft 9in, WELL BUILT. IS VIOLENT, ARMED WITH FIREARM, SHOULD BE APPROACHED WITH EXTREME CAUTION AND MAY BE IN UNLAWFUL POSSESSION OF CONTROLLED DRUGS.\n\n\"I could have taken Hackney if I wanted to but I'm not a leader of men,\" says Ira, sitting in his east London council flat, building a spliff. His words aren't the pathetic boasts of a wannabe hard man. As a young man, Ira Thomas was a career criminal \u2013 strong, proud, connected and staunch.\n\nWhen we first met, he'd just turned 40. His criminal past was more than a decade behind him, but the demons are still in his head. The dope takes the edge off his post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition his doctor tells him developed out of his life of violence, crime and looking over his shoulder. Ira's hands are scarred and shaking. His muscular upper body is an ugly patchwork of stab wounds and crooked bones from pointless fights over respect and territory.\n\nHe fears for many of today's young inner-city black kids who've got a gun where their dick should be and dick for brains. He teaches his sons how to look after themselves, but most of all he teaches them to study. His eldest son has just got into drama school and his youngest is shaping up nicely. So too is his 18-year-old daughter, who's in the studio learning to produce some homegrown hip-hop talent.\n\nIra's mum would be proud of the way he brings up his kids. He never gave her much to be proud of when she was alive. When he thinks about it the tears well in his eyes. \"I never told my mum I loved her before she died. She was always there for me, getting me out of trouble. I never said sorry for all the grief I caused her. She travelled all over the country to the different prisons I was in. She kept telling me to give up crime and I ignored her.\"\n\nHer death in March 1999 broke Ira. He was off work and having bereavement counselling. He'd just had a new baby daughter, his fourth, with a new partner with whom he wasn't getting on. One day, one of his closest friends walked into his flat just as he was putting a shotgun in his mouth. \"I had phoned the kids and said goodbye. I opened my eyes and saw Mark. I had the shotgun on a hair trigger. Somehow he snatched it away but the barrel went off. It damaged my hearing in one ear and left a hole in the roof.\"\n\nThe Thomas kids, all ten of them, were known around the Springfield Estate in Hackney as people who didn't take any racist shit. Ira's family were particularly close to an Irish family who lived nearby. \"Old man Quigley taught me everything I know about hunting with dogs, trapping and snares. We used to go after church. Walthamstow Marshes was teeming with wildlife like pheasant and hares.\"\n\nIra became a top-class thief \u2013 of the warehouse kind \u2013 but he blew his money as soon as he got it. If there is one point when he became a serious thorn in the side of Hackney police it was after the \"Battle of Springfield\" in April 1986. Thirty of his mates were drinking at the Robin Hood pub before going to a party. The police turned up and insisted they left. Outside a fight erupted and Ira and some of his friends were arrested for assault and jailed for six months. But the conviction was quashed on appeal when independent witnesses, including the landlord, complained about the police's behaviour.\n\nBy the second summer of love in 1987, Ira and a friend were doing security for raves in north London backed by the Adams crime family. \"They put up the money for the sound system, right down to the space cakes. Our job was to look after their ecstasy dealers and eject the others. There was hardly any trouble, which is a good thing, because everyone was so loved-up and so were we.\"\n\nAround this time the Stoke Newington drugs squad was paying particular attention to the Anchor & Hope. They had an observation post in the barges opposite the pub, a detective told us.\n\nIra knew a lot of serious dealers but says he was not involved. He was trying to go straight in 1988. Fatherhood, the fight with the police and a near-fatal stabbing of two of his friends had caused him to re-evaluate his life. He had started working part-time with his girlfriend's brother renovating hotels and was scaling down his nights out with the boys, opting to live at her place in a neighbouring borough to Hackney. But Ira Thomas's past was about to catch up with him.\n\nOn the afternoon of 25 April 1989 two Stoke Newington officers acting on a tip-off arrested Ira in the Anchor & Hope for the attempted murder ten months earlier of Freddy Brett.\n\nTerry McGuinness had been left with the case when Livingstone transferred to the Flying Squad at Rigg Approach one month after the shooting. McGuinness didn't show out, but privately he felt there was \"little evidence\" against Ira. He searched Ira's flat, in front of his prisoner, looking for a 9mm gun. Nothing was found and on the way back in the car McGuinness told Ira his inquiries were complete. Back at the station he wrote an entry in the custody record at 4.15 p.m. that the matter had been \"dealt with\".\n\nThis was not to everyone's liking. Brian Moore, then an acting detective inspector, had taken over the crime squad from Livingstone. He thought there was more mileage in the case. \"[Moore] was up and coming,\" says one former colleague. \"He had served at Tottenham and was considered competent. Stoke Newington was a good posting for detectives. It was a nice one to have on your CV, like Tottenham, Brixton or Harlesden. If you served successfully in any of those places, then you could work anywhere in London because of the high crime rate, the atmosphere \u2013 sometimes it was like working in Beirut.\"\n\nAt 7.25 p.m. Moore corrected the custody record in bold black ink in a way that looked like he was rebuking McGuinness. It read: \"With reference to the entry timed at 4.15 p.m. I have now traced a number of statements, which were not available to detective constable McGuinness at the time he advised the custody officer that this matter had been dealt with. The grievous bodily harm and firearms offences have NOT been concluded and my enquiries are ongoing.\"\n\nInstead of asking McGuinness to search Ira's flat again, Moore sent two less experienced PCs, Peter McCulloch and Dave Edwards. Their specific instructions were to look for any light-coloured coat of the kind seen by witness Wendy Ellison. Meanwhile, Moore and another officer visited Ira in the cells. What happened next is fiercely contested.\n\nMoore claimed in the custody record that at 9.02 p.m. Ira refused to come out for an interview, admitted to shooting Brett but refused to sign the officers' notes recording the confession and instead demanded to see an unnamed solicitor. Moore called Les Brown & Co. The choice is interesting because ten years later Moore ended up investigating Brown for corruption offences involving one of his closest police friends.\n\nThe custody record states that at 10.48 p.m. Les Brown called the police station and said he would contact Moore in the morning. It also says Ira was checked hourly and recorded as being asleep from midnight until he was given breakfast at 8.45 a.m.\n\nIt is an abiding mystery how Ira's version of what happened on the night of 25 April was so radically different. He denies making any admission and accuses Moore of verballing him. Ira says he also specifically asked him for his usual solicitors Goodman Ray, who'd recently represented him during the \"Battle of Springfield\" trial and appeal. Ira also distinctly remembers three people coming into his cell on the night of 25 April. None of them is recorded on the custody sheet. The first person was Les Brown whom he says he told to \"fuck off\" when he realised he wasn't from Goodman Ray. Ira says a white man claiming to be a fraudster was then placed in his cell. \"He kept asking me what I was in for and did I do it? I was suspicious he was undercover police so after ten or fifteen minutes I demanded that he should be removed. Then at about two a.m. they put this black guy in the cell. He had this big bag of charlie [cocaine] so we sat there and caned it.\" Ira recalls the black man saying he'd been done for theft. He became suspicious when after a few lines his cellmate started asking questions. \"I'd seen him around the area and I just asked him, 'Are you a grass?'\" The man said no and Ira stared him out until he shouted to the custody sergeant he wanted to be removed.\n\nThat night the two PCs entered Ira's flat when no one was there and returned to the station with two garments. One was a Humphrey Bogart-style beige mac, the other a camel-haired coat, which they handed to Moore. The handling of this search would become a key issue at the trial.\n\nThe next morning, 26 April, Ira was interviewed. His chosen legal representative, Anne Chiarini, was present. He gave a full account and denied knowing or shooting Brett. When the two coats were shown, Ira identified them as his flatmate's. The police released him on bail to return in six weeks.\n\nBut on 6 June Moore rang Chiarini to tell her no firearms residue had been found on the two coats. These are the microscopic particles released from the ammunition in a cloud of gas and smoke when a gun is fired. The specks attach to anything, clothing, skin and hard surfaces, in a roughly six-foot radius from the gun. Firearms residue on the outer surface of clothing is only likely to remain for up to twelve hours and then falls away.\n\nNo longer on bail, Ira started working with his dad as a wood-turner earning \u00a3124 per week in a shop on the Hackney Road. But two weeks later the police arrested him again, this time for rape.\n\nIra admitted having consensual sex with a young French woman he'd recently met in the pub, but felt he was being set up. He'd always been puzzled that when she left his flat in the morning two men picked her up in a car parked outside. Chiarini also thought the timing of the rape allegation was somewhat suspicious. Ira was once again bailed awaiting the rape trial. His girlfriend wasn't exactly happy about his infidelity, but she agreed to stand by him.\n\nThen, early on 2 August, Moore arrived at Ira's front door with three other detectives. One was DC Martin Morgan, who re-arrested Ira for the attempted murder of Freddy Brett. At the police station, Moore and superintendent Roy Clark discussed the case. Clark then entered a note in the custody record at 8.43 a.m. It said he had read the file, spoken to Ira and authorised his further detention for questioning.\n\nDuring the interview, Moore explained the developments that led to Ira's re-arrest. Firstly, Brett had recently made a long, detailed statement naming him as the man who shot him. Secondly, a further forensic test on the beige mac had been carried out because apparently the scientist hadn't rolled down the cuffs the first time. Having done so, firearm residue was discovered in each cuff consistent with the bullet casing found at the scene of the crime.\n\nMoore: \"Is there anything you wish to say about this evidence?\"\n\nThomas: \"Yeah. You're talking bullshit, the reason being I don't own a beige coat and you know it.\"\n\nMoore: \"Is there anything else you wish to say, Ira?\"\n\nThomas: \"Yes. I'd like to make a formal complaint that you, DI Moore, are trying to fit me up. I've nothing else to say.\"\n\nMoore: \"Your complaint is noted. You will be charged shortly with the attempted murder of Frederick Brett.\"\n\nChiarini, who was present throughout the interview, had a private consultation with her client and persuaded him not to pursue the allegation against Moore at this stage. Chiarini didn't take to Moore. She remembers him as \"a stereotypical CID officer of that era. The flash suit, he looked like a City trader.\" Relations between Stoke Newington cops and defence lawyers (except Les Brown, of course) were \"more confrontational\" than nowadays, she recalls.\n\nIra was remanded to Pentonville Prison. Moore had opposed bail because of Ira's previous criminal record and told the magistrates he was also investigating him for rape. This, however, came to trial soon afterwards in January 1990. The jury quickly acquitted Ira after the French woman imploded on the stand. \"She also admitted two men had picked her up outside my flat but didn't identify them,\" says Ira, which left his defence wondering if the cops had tried to fit him up.\n\nFor the forthcoming attempted murder trial, Chiarini and defence barrister David Farrer QC set about examining Brett's statement and the forensic scientist's report. It soon became apparent Moore's case didn't bear scrutiny. He had recently transferred to Bethnal Green police station to work under a new mentor, John Grieve. This left McGuinness holding the reins of a prosecution that had never impressed him.\n\nStoke Newington police were initially reluctant to release a full copy of the April 1989 custody report. When they relented, Chiarini passed it to Farrer with a note remarking how it differed significantly from an earlier version they'd seen. It did not have the \"ring of truth\", she wrote. Farrer agreed.\n\nWhen Ira saw the various versions of the custody record he went ballistic. The visit by Les Brown and the two cellmates were missing. Comments had been falsely attributed to him, he told his lawyers.\n\nAs the trial approached, his defence also developed suspicions about the timing of four crucial events in 1989: the second positive forensic test on 14 June, followed by Brett's lenient sentence for the drugs and burglary matter on 28 June, Ira's arrest for rape the same day and then Brett's statement naming him on 18 July.\n\nBrett's solicitor Robert Pryce told us he strongly suspected his client felt he needed to co-operate with the police because of the burglary charges and other matters hanging over him. It emerged Brett had not been pursued over a bag of amphetamine and stolen giro cheques found on him by the police when he was shot.\n\nIra's trial opened on 19 March 1990 at the Old Bailey. He faced three charges of attempted murder, causing grievous bodily harm with intent and possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life.\n\nBrett was the first prosecution witness. There follows a summary of his account.\n\nOn the night of the shooting he was taking his daughter back to her mother Jackie's house. The couple had split in 1986 after three years. During that time Brett claimed Jackie had once confided that Ira raped her when she was fourteen years old. En route to Jackie's, Brett said he stopped at the Anchor & Hope with a friend called Danny. They drank at least four pints. Ira was also there and confronted him over the way he was treating his dog. Brett told Ira to fuck off and said he raped young girls. Ira then left the pub. Brett followed shortly. At the top of the road, he spotted Ira in a distinctive green and cream Mini. Brett told Danny to take his daughter home. The car approached, Ira got out wearing a beige mac and fired a gun across the car roof. Brett thought they were blanks so ran around towards Ira brandishing a bottle of beer. A fight ensued and Ira pinned him to the pavement. He fired at close range into Brett's thigh, although he could have put one between his eyes. Ira then drove off.\n\nDavid Farrer QC dismantled Brett's account, which he suggested was inherently implausible and manufactured with the police's help. For starters, Jackie had died from cancer in December 1988, six months after the shooting. So the core motivation underpinning Brett's account \u2013 the alleged rape by Ira \u2013 could not be corroborated. Also, if her safety was the reason Brett didn't initially name Ira, why did he wait seven months after her death to make a statement to the police?\n\nDanny never appeared as a witness to support Brett. No one in the pub remembered a row over a dog. And the police could not connect Ira to a green and cream Mini. In fact two eyewitnesses said the shooter walked away from the crime scene.\n\nBrett also contradicted police witnesses. He accepted playing a bizarre \"naming game\" with the detectives in hospital. But he said DS Livingstone had got the name by prompting him with photographs and police files, including one with Ira Thomas's name.\n\nLivingstone denied any prompting. However, Farrer pointed out the detective's crime report entry suggested otherwise. It read: \"The victim confirms that is the suspect, Ira Thomas, but he refuses to name him in the statement.\" Whatever the truth, it all looked bad for the prosecution. But much worse was to come.\n\nThe defence had learned that Brett made a compensation claim while he was in hospital directly after the shooting. It was unsuccessful because he hadn't co-operated with the police. But after making his lengthy statement to Brian Moore one year later, Brett re-submitted a new claim. In evidence, Moore accepted it was \"likely\" he discussed with Brett how co-operation could influence the outcome of his compensation claim, but he insisted there was \"no bribery, no deals, no inducements\".\n\nMoore's failure to ensure an independent witness was present during the second search for the coats also caused serious problems for PCs McCulloch and Edwards. They said they entered Ira's flat with front door keys, but couldn't recall how they came by them. Ira maintained he had given the keys to his flatmate when he was arrested. So how did they appear on the custody record?\n\nThe officers also said they were told to go straight to the bedroom where they found the beige mac and camel coat inside an enclosed wardrobe. But Ira and his flatmate produced evidence that the wardrobe was in fact a makeshift rail with no doors.\n\nThe officers said they put the coats in separate brown evidence bags with a transparent panel, but didn't have the means to seal them. Mysteriously, the journey back to the police station took three times longer. The officers claimed they had decided on the spur of the moment to speak for the first time to the landlord of the Anchor & Hope, ten months after the shooting. But this detour and interview was never recorded in any note or report.\n\nMoore told the court he had sealed the evidence bags that night at the police station. All three officers swore the coats were never removed from these bags until the forensic scientist examined them weeks later. But Ira and Anne Chiarini said when the coats were produced in the interview the day after the search they were in clear plastic bags.\n\nThe prosecution had opened its case on the compelling basis that three specks of firearms residue were found in the left and right cuffs. But under cross-examination Robin Keeley, the forensic scientist, dropped a bombshell. Only one speck, he said, was found in the cuff and two on the outer surface of the beige mac, exactly where he'd expect it to have fallen away within twelve hours of a gun being fired. Inexplicably, it had remained there for ten months, an extraordinary feat when considering the evidence from Ira's flatmate, who owned the mac. He said he had worn, been sick on and machine-washed it weeks before the two officers seized it. This was never disputed.\n\nKeeley told the jury he would not have accepted the mac for testing without Moore's assurance it had been seized undisturbed for a long time in the wardrobe. It is hard to understand how anyone could have given the scientist such an assurance.\n\nKeeley had instant recall of the case when we interviewed him 11 years after the trial. The initial test for firearms residue, he told us, had been botched by his assistant and then re-done by him. But this had never been disclosed to the defence at the time of the trial.\n\nIt was Farrer's closing contention to the jury that contamination, accidental or otherwise, could have occurred the night the mac was seized. Judge Herrod QC appeared to agree in large measure, calling the scientific evidence \"insubstantial\" in his highly balanced summing up, which did not shy away from pointing out other major flaws in the prosecution case.\n\nNevertheless, after four and a half hours of deliberations, the jury returned with a remarkable majority guilty verdict. Ira's mum collapsed. \"She was in bits. I shouted across the courtroom, 'Get up, woman! Don't let them see you like this.'\" His girlfriend was also crying as the judge, reluctantly, passed a 12-year sentence.\n\nFarrer told us: \"I was absolutely stunned when he was convicted, and I think the judge was too. He wrote to me saying you will obviously be appealing. It was an extraordinary decision, we tried to get out at half-time and the judge was very concerned that he had let it go... there were grave doubts about the police. We felt the CPS and, I am afraid to say, prosecuting counsel unduly pressed for a prosecution... the whole thing certainly stank.\"\n\nBy the time his appeal was heard on 13 February 1992, Ira had spent two and a half years in prison. He didn't tell his mother about the hearing in case it went against him.\n\nIt was hard to believe the prosecution and police opposed the appeal. Stoke Newington police station was in the middle of the Operation Jackpot corruption crisis and a row of cases were queuing to be quashed by the Appeal Court, largely because of growing doubts around the credibility of certain police officers. One was PC Peter McCulloch, who had found the beige mac. The jury had disbelieved his evidence in a recent trial where the defendant was acquitted after alleging drugs were planted on him.\n\nThe Appeal Court judgement in the Ira Thomas case was withering about the police and the forensic science. Brett's account was dismissed as \"simply ludicrous\" and the \"so-called forensic evidence\" labelled as \"wholly unavailing\".\n\nIt is very rare indeed for the Appeal Court to overturn the jury's verdict, but the three judges were \"very uneasy\" about the case and had \"lurking doubts\" about the way it was put together.\n\nStill, no one in the prosecution saw this stinging judicial criticism as reason enough to investigate how such a miscarriage of justice had occurred. Had there been an independent inquiry into Stoke Newington corruption, investigators would have heard from key eyewitnesses like Wendy Ellison. She told us she felt \"pressured\" by Moore to choose between the two coats he brought to her house weeks after Ira was charged. Neither was the coat she saw on the night of the shooting. But she was asked which one was more like it, and she selected the beige mac because it was lighter than the camel hair coat.\n\nAfter the trial, Ira's solicitors began a civil action against the police. In March 1993 they took a statement from Lee Pritchard, who grew up on the same estate as Ira and was known to Stoke Newington police.\n\nPritchard said two constables detained him at the police station within days of Ira's arrest. He alleged they assaulted him and then offered him heroin in return for giving false evidence against Ira. The two officers wanted Pritchard to say he had seen Ira on the night of the shooting in the same road and carrying a gun. The offer, Pritchard said, was repeated on several occasions as the trial approached.\n\nAt the time the civil action was being prepared, Roy Clark had left Stoke Newington and moved to SO11 on promotion to set up the Ghost Squad. Brian Moore's career similarly took off. He was identified as having the right stuff for anti-corruption work. Moore refuses to discuss claims that when he was posted to the New Southgate SERCS office he acted as a \"sleeper\" for the Ghost Squad.\n\nIn 1998, Roy Clark put Moore in charge of the key corruption probe into the Flying Squad \u2013 Operation Ethiopia. Though he never served at Rigg Approach, Moore knew many of the detectives he was now investigating because they had previously worked at Stoke Newington. Operation Ethiopia would reunite Moore with Terry McGuinness, albeit in very different circumstances since they last worked together on the Ira Thomas case.\n\nThe direction of the corruption probe depended in large measure on the debriefing of McGuinness and his fellow supergrass Kevin Garner. McGuinness had the strong impression the Yard wasn't interested in exposing the fit-up culture of noble cause corruption because there were too many poachers turned gamekeepers in the Untouchables.\n\nA thorough investigation of Rigg Approach had to go back through the revolving door into Stoke Newington. But this had been successfully welded shut during Operation Jackpot. McGuinness, it appears, was willing to help prise it open but says he found little enthusiasm during the debriefing. So he decided to test the Untouchables' integrity and see how far they would go not to revisit Stoke Newington. \"I said [to my debriefers]: 'If you want to speak to me about Stoke Newington, get Brian [Moore] down here to speak to me.' And of course I never saw him after that.\"\n\nIt was the Ira Thomas case that most troubled McGuinness, he told us. \"The [beige] raincoat caused me concern because I hadn't seen it or found it [when I searched the flat]. Going on from that was the concern that I'd heard, be it from Brian [or someone else], about too much [firearms] residue [on the mac] and that it was still there after a long period of time.\"\n\nThese concerns were not new. McGuinness had expressed his reservations at the trial. Eight years later and now a supergrass, supposedly for a \"no hiding place\" anti-corruption squad, he still harboured the same concerns. But McGuinness felt the Untouchables didn't want to know what he had to say and that the man in overall charge, Brian Moore, was avoiding him.\n\nAs part of the Flying Squad corruption probe, Moore was also responsible for investigating three suspended detectives whom he had also worked with on the Ira Thomas case \u2013 Gordon Livingstone, John Moore and Colin Evans \u2013 and the lawyer, Les Brown, whom Moore had originally tried to introduce as Thomas's legal representative.\n\nIn November 1999, Brian Moore eventually left the Untouchables on promotion as a detective chief superintendent. His first job was to oversee the hunt for Jill Dando's killer.\n\nWithin an hour of Dando's murder on 28 April 1999 Downing Street issued a statement of sympathy and shock. William Hague, the opposition leader, added more pathos. Finally, home secretary Jack Straw reminded the Commons how much the BBC presenter had done for the fight against crime. Dando had been the new face of _Crimewatch_ since 1995. Catching her killer quickly was intimately linked to restoring Scotland Yard's reputation, which was in tatters.\n\nThe timing of the murder could not have been worse, coming just two months after publication of the excoriating Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report. Although mainly about institutional racism, the report also exposed severe problems with the way officers investigated murders, regardless of colour.\n\nOne of the post-Lawrence reforms was the creation of a new \"murder\" manual for senior officers and the appointment of a detective chief superintendent to oversee the inquiry. Enter Brian Moore on 6 December. Detective chief inspector Hamish Campbell had day-to-day charge of the murder hunt, codenamed Operation Oxborough, but was answerable to Moore and another shadow warrior in the anti-corruption crusade, DAC Bill Griffiths.\n\nDespite a massive \u00a3250,000 reward from two tabloids and one anonymous businessman, when Moore took over not one of the Yard's thousands of registered informants had produced any valuable intelligence of an Underworld connection. Similarly, Oxborough had largely eliminated Dando's family, friends, lovers and colleagues from its inquiries.\n\nThe murder investigation was at an impasse. Moore's anti-corruption experience was helpful in attempting to plug unauthorised leaks. The Oxborough team were warned, says DCI Campbell, that anyone leaking to the media would be sacked.\n\nJohn McVicar, the armed robber turned scribe, was working at the now defunct _Punch_ , owned at the time of the Dando murder by Harrods boss Mohammed Al-Fayed. McVicar's _Punch_ articles led Moore and Campbell to launch a leak inquiry.\n\nHowever, CIB was already investigating allegations of a so-called \"Hamper Squad\" of serving officers abusing their power to arrest and harass employees whom Fayed suspected of aiding the Lonrho tycoon Tiny Rowland, his bitter rival since the battle to buy Harrods in 1985. CIB were told Fayed had a list of police officers in stations around Harrods \u2013 the Dando inquiry was run from nearby Belgravia police station \u2013 who received free hampers and also shopped without digging too deeply in their pockets. A former member of Fayed's security team, Bob Loftus, told us he gave CIB the names of serving officers who received such bribes. But no one was prosecuted.\n\nLoftus had joined forces with Tiny Rowland after Fayed sacked him. He also told CIB about repeated break-ins of a safety deposit box held by Rowland at Harrods. Fayed and others were arrested in 1998 but not charged. The Harrods owner later paid \u00a31.4 million in damages to Rowland's widow. But the PCA upheld his complaint over the way the security box investigation was conducted.\n\nAll this was occurring while DCS Brian Moore sought to identify _Punch_ 's police source. McVicar properly refuses to identify whether he was the same detective constable later disciplined for disobeying a lawful order and failing to disclose contact with the media.\n\nAt the beginning of 2000, the entire suspect list in the Dando murder was revised. By March, Barry George's name was near the top. He was an obviously delusional, narcissistic suspect who suffered from petit mal epilepsy, characterised by \"absences\" during the day. The epilepsy had caused learning difficulties for George at school and an attention deficit he carried into adulthood.\n\nWhen his flat was searched on 17 April, a three-quarter length Cecil Gee blue overcoat was seized. The flat was a mix between a magpie's nest and rat's lair. It hadn't been cleaned for months. By happy coincidence, the search was ordered days before the first anniversary of Dando's death. The press was briefed that the dominant view of the inquiry was settling on an unnamed gun nut\/obsessive loner. DCI Campbell reinforced this during an anniversary appeal on _Crimewatch_.\n\nInexplicably, the Cecil Gee coat was not delivered to Robin Keeley at the Forensic Science Service until 2 May. Three days later he told Campbell that one speck of firearms residue found inside the left pocket was consistent with those discharged from the gun that killed Dando. The forensic scientist would later tell the court that the speck could have come from the Dando bullet or any other bullet with similar components, which were by no means uncommon.\n\nNo particle of firearms residue is unique like a fingerprint. But it was the break the Yard was looking for. No firearms residue or gun-modification tools were found during a further search of George's flat to support the one, isolated speck found in his coat twelve months after the shooting. This microscopic \"nugget\" was held back until the last moment of George's three-day interrogation. He told the police he had no idea how it got into his coat pocket. The Oxborough team was unmoved and on 28 May charged George with the murder of Jill Dando. The press went crazy. A weight was lifted off the Yard's shoulders.\n\nHowever, the case had a fundamental flaw. Incredibly, before forensic testing the coat was first taken to a police studio where it was photographed on a tailor's dummy. Firearms had previously been photographed at the same studio \u2013 raising the issue of accidental contamination. Whose decision it was to photograph the coat has never been properly resolved. A detective sergeant, Andy Rowell, later said in court that DCI Campbell made the decision, but he denied it. DCS Moore won't discuss his role in the Dando inquiry with us.\n\nIt took another year before the trial of the new Millennium started at the Old Bailey in May 2001. In his opening speech Orlando Pownall, senior Treasury Counsel, told the jury the one speck was \"compelling evidence of [George's] guilt\". A defence expert, however, was produced to say the idea that one particle is evidence was a unique suggestion and in other circumstances forensic scientists would not even have reported its presence to the police. Privately, Keeley felt the police had been \"stupid\" not to take the Cecil Gee coat straight to his lab.\n\nDuring the trial a man who identified himself only as \"Mr February\" called the chambers of George's barrister, Michael Mansfield QC. The caller was a serving detective who had followed the Dando prosecution and wanted to make the defence aware of similarities with the Ira Thomas case. We know the identity of \"Mr February\" but he has asked to remain anonymous. He felt it would have been \"too risky\" to identify himself to Mansfield because \"my life in the force would have been made hell\". In truth, Mr February was motivated in large measure by his dislike for the double standards of certain senior Untouchables. But he did come up with a strong point. He suggested that Mansfield should ask the officers on the search of George's flat whether they were registered to hold firearms at home, because accidental contamination could also come from this route.\n\nWe discovered that DC Martin Morgan \u2013 awaiting trial for kidnap offences \u2013 had also ensured Barry George's defence team knew of the parallels with the Ira Thomas case. Morgan appeared to be sending a barbed signal to CIB3 ahead of his own corruption trial that there was more where that came from.\n\nMansfield understood the significance of the Thomas case and had serious concerns about the way it had been put together. But he couldn't use it in George's defence for some cogent reasons. Firstly, had he attacked the bona fides of the police officers, his own client's criminal record, including a sexual assault on a woman in a doorway, would have to be disclosed to the jury. Secondly, his defence around the one speck found on the Cecil Gee coat was accidental contamination, not plant. As it turned out, in the prosecution's closing speech the speck was relegated from compelling evidence to mere corroboration.\n\nAfter five days of deliberations, the guilty verdict on 2 July came as a shock to Mansfield. There was no confession, no gun, highly circumstantial forensic evidence that could have been contaminated by the police, no positive ID evidence of George, no motive, no evidence of an interest or obsession with Dando and no evidence he had fired a gun of the kind that killed the TV presenter.\n\nGrounds for appeal were drafted within weeks. The police and prosecution were accused of turning non-identifications into positive identifications. The second ground relied on the Ira Thomas case \"because of similarities in relation to the actual forensic evidence and the way it had been used\", George's solicitor, Marilyn Etienne, told us.\n\nJudges called for the dusty Thomas file from storage to consider these points. But on 29 July 2002, the appeal was dismissed and George returned to complete his life sentence with no minimum tariff.\n\nOn 7 March 2003, Ira Thomas's lawyers wrote to the Home Office seeking compensation for his client under a new Miscarriages Ex Gratia Scheme. Tony Murphy of Bindman & Partners argued that Ira's wrongful conviction was due to \"serious default\" by the Stoke Newington police investigation, the Forensic Science Laboratory and the CPS. He wrote: \"The deficiencies in the way in which this [firearms residue] evidence was presented at Court constitutes in our submission serious defaults in itself. What is more concerning however is the fact that the findings of the forensic scientist strongly suggests that the purported positioning of the residue of the fired weapon on a coat supposedly owned by Mr Thomas was fabricated by police officers involved in the investigation. There can be no other explanation as to why two of the three particles found would have remained on this garment so long after the discharge of the firearm.\n\n\"A number of key officers involved in the prosecution of Mr Thomas were subsequently discredited, and in some cases convicted at the Old Bailey. This lends a strong inference to the fact that any concerns regarding police methods in obtaining identification of Mr Thomas and\/or in fabricating ballistic evidence were well founded.\"\n\nMcGuinness aside, the roll call of convicted, disciplined or suspect detectives associated with the Ira Thomas case is extraordinary. Equally extraordinary is that the anti-corruption detectives investigating them are ultimately responsible for this miscarriage of justice.\n\nDS Gordon Livingstone was suspended in January 1998 as part of the Rigg Approach corruption probe, including the first aid kit allegations. He was cleared and reinstated in October 2000. But the Untouchables put him on the secret blacklist without telling him what the doubts about his integrity were. Livingstone carried out restricted duties until retiring in October 2003. He believes he was blacklisted because he continued to support many of his Flying Squad colleagues.\n\nDC Martin Morgan pleaded guilty in July 2002 to a serious corruption offence and is now serving six years. DC John Moore was suspended in January 1998 as part of the Rigg Approach corruption probe. He was later required to resign following disciplinary proceedings concerning a separate investigation.\n\nDetectives Peter McCulloch and Dave Edwards are still serving. Freddy Brett is dead.\n\nBrian Moore was made a commander in October 2003. Weeks later we sent him a detailed list of questions. The Yard's Director of Legal Services, David Hamilton, replied on Moore's behalf. He informed us there would be no answer to any of our 33 questions but commander Moore refuted allegations of corruption and racism.\n\nAt the time of writing Ira Thomas is waiting for a final response from the Home Office. He would like a full investigation into those involved with his miscarriage of justice. But to whom can he complain? The new IPCC?\n\n## [23\n\nW.O.G.S.](contents.html#ch23)\n\nCommander Brian Paddick is Scotland Yard's most senior openly gay policeman. He has endured the playground bullies and police canteen sniggers for most of his forty-three years.\n\nBefore coming out at work in the late eighties, Paddick first had to tell his wife of five years, whom he married while still struggling with his sexuality in an intensely homophobic profession. He has also spoken out about the malicious and baseless allegations sent anonymously and internally to his superiors. On the day of his interview to become a commander in November 2000, a letter arrived alleging he had misused a police car. Later, an anonymous call to Crimestoppers suggested he'd tipped off a gay bar about a drugs raid.\n\nBut nothing prepared the urbane cop for the betrayal and humiliation when a lurid kiss 'n' tell splash appeared in the _Mail on Sunday_. The front-page screamer on 17 March 2002 was the _coup de gr\u00e2ce_ in a whispering campaign by reactionary voices within the Police and Tory Establishment against him.\n\nHowever, Paddick's downfall was a sub-plot within a wider backlash that had begun three years earlier when the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report was leaked to the _Sunday Telegraph_ in February 1999 before being given to Parliament. There was a respectable ceasefire period after publication of the landmark report. It would have appeared crass and counter-productive for even the most atavistic Tories and antediluvian police officers to publicly attack the report and, by inference, the Lawrence family. The mutterings remained behind closed doors and in the shadows until the run-up to the June 2001 general election and the prospect of a second term for Tony Blair when the backlash could voice its venom under the guise of democratic debate.\n\nThe commissioner, Sir John Stevens, really ignited matters in a front-page interview with the _Telegraph_ on 4 December 2000, one month after the fatal stabbing of ten-year-old black schoolboy Damilola Taylor in south-east London. Britain's top cop said his force was in \"crisis\" and attributed blame to the Lawrence report. Stevens talked of a 3,000 shortfall in cops needed to effectively police London's inner cities. Months earlier the government had launched an expensive TV campaign, drafting celebrities like footballer John Barnes and world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis to encourage new recruits, especially \"visible ethnic minorities\", as the Home Office calls them.\n\nTen days after the Stevens interview, Tory leader William Hague launched another more odious attack on the Lawrence report, which he accused of triggering a law and order crisis. He blamed the \"liberal elite\" for using the report as a stick to beat the police. Columnist Simon Heffer, in the _Daily Mail_ , applauded the boy leader for criticising the \"stupid and meaningless\" Lawrence report and its main charge of \"institutional racism\". The _Telegraph_ said Hague deserved the \"highest praise\" for daring to speak the truth that the crisis of morale, recruitment and street crime was down to this \"sacred text\".\n\nThe pendulum had swung too far in favour of criminals and \"coloured folk\" and the white \"liberal elite\" was strangling a debate on this taboo. This, in essence, was the charge. Certainly the self-satisfaction and sanctimony of New Labouristas in politics and certain sections of the media was a valid criticism of the \"liberal elite\".\n\nBut the Home Office under Jack Straw rivalled anything Michael Howard did during the Ghost Squad years of 1993 to 1997. And as the election approached, both parties fought ever harder to appear more illiberal than the other on law and order.\n\nWas it coincidence, therefore, that one week after Hague's speech, Straw reinstated Met police constable Steve Hutt who had been sacked for calling a teenager a \"black bastard\"? Straw was also forgiving when the Yard was caught trying to massage its figures over the number of \"visible ethnic minorities\" recruited in the six-month period before Stevens attacked the Lawrence report in the _Telegraph_. The Yard claimed 218 black and Asian officers had joined the force between March and September 2000. The true figure was four. The others were a mix of mainly Irish, Australians, Canadians and Kiwis!\n\nOnly when New Labour was returned with another landslide was commander Brian Paddick allowed to pilot a new project in Brixton of cautioning, not arresting, people caught with small amounts of cannabis. This, he cogently argued, would free his officers to deal with more serious drugs like crack and heroin that were rife in the inner city borough of Lambeth.\n\nThe \"Brixton Experiment\" had the support of the new home secretary, David Blunkett. His officials were at the time drawing up controversial plans to de-classify dope from a Class B to a Class C drug. The sound economic reasons for this shift in the drug laws would have been too politically damaging had it been mooted before the election.\n\nPublicly, the Yard was still \"wedded\" to the Lawrence report and implementation of its recommendations. But internally, the organisation was seething with resentment through the ranks. Many have told us they felt fettered by political correctness, the stigma of racism and a perennial sense that criminals had too many rights and cops too much paperwork.\n\nBlunkett's new plans to reform police pay and conditions had also sparked a rebellion by rank-and-file officers and the Police Federation, which took a full-page ad in the newspapers saying, \"It's time to cut crime not costs\".\n\nIt was against this backdrop that the _Mail on Sunday_ plotted its attack on commander Paddick. Out came its famed chequebook and a large sum (reportedly \u00a3100,000) was handed over to French model James Renolleau. He was an ex-boyfriend from whom Paddick had acrimoniously split in 2000 after a five-year relationship. \"I SMOKED POT WITH POLICE COMMANDER,\" roared the front page. Inside, Renolleau claimed he had smoked over one hundred spliffs with the newly dubbed \"Cannabis Commander\". The Yard removed Paddick from his job, much to the anger of the local community. He was given a desk to drive while an eight-month investigation was launched.\n\nPaddick did not stay in his corner. He came out fighting, telling supporters he was the victim of a homophobic witch-hunt largely driven by political reasons. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, 35 MPs and the Black Police Association agreed.\n\nPaddick says his \"softly softly\" drug strategy in Brixton had the prior approval of the commissioner. But Stevens, he claims, tried to distance himself, even though the Yard's own figures showed 2,000 hours of police time were saved in the experiment's first six months.\n\nPaddick had previously attracted disproportionate and hysterical criticism when the mainstream press discovered he was a regular visitor to the radical Brixton-based Urban75 website. Comments he'd posted in a chat room as \"Brian the Commander\" about the attractions of anarchy were taken out of context and used to portray him as some limp-wristed, disloyal left-wing maverick.\n\nShortly afterwards, the _Mail on Sunday_ 's \"revelations\" provoked a pointless PCA-supervised investigation by the deputy chief constable of Humberside. He reported to the MPA, which has responsibility for disciplining senior officers of commander and above rank, and the CPS, which would consider whether to prosecute under the Misuse of Drugs Act. Everyone knew, including the plotters, that the criminal and discipline issues were stillborn. But the damage had been done and couldn't be undone. The backlash had its scalp.\n\nDCS Brian Moore's career had moved on swiftly since the Dando murder trial in July 2001. He was being groomed for senior rank in the Met \u2013 commander was the next one up \u2013 and was thought of as a future chief constable.\n\nThat summer Moore started to prepare for the senior command course, which would begin his ascent to the top. His studies were interrupted when the Twin Towers collapsed on 11 September. Moore was appointed silver commander for Operation Exchange, part of the UK response to President Bush's War on Terrorism. His job was to identify the Brits missing or injured in the Al-Qaeda attack.\n\nIn January 2002, Moore received a new assignment. He was posted to Brixton as commander Brian Paddick's number two. Paddick didn't relish the appointment. He had fallen out with Moore over the investigation of an incident at a Brixton nightclub involving the son of Lord Toby Harris, the chairman of the MPA.\n\nPaddick's career was just weeks away from going into freefall. When it did, Moore took control of Lambeth borough and began stamping his authority on Brixton. The red-eyed, cotton-mouthed dope fiend would no longer find sanctuary there.\n\n\"All Change in Brixton\", sighed the _Sun_ with relief. Over the summer months posters went up on the walls of clubs, pubs and bars. \"CANNABIS IS ILLEGAL AND WILL REMAIN ILLEGAL,\" they warned. Moore told a press conference there was no U-turn, just an \"adjustment\" of his predecessor's successful pilot project.\n\nNo Nonsense Moore had his own champion in the _Evening Standard_ , the sister paper to the _Mail on Sunday_. It reported how Brixton's new police chief had single-handedly detained a man who offered him a draw of cannabis as he was walking to the tube station in plain clothes at the end of his shift. A report one week later in a police newspaper said the fifty-two-year-old man had been jailed for three months.\n\nStill, it must have been galling for Moore to watch Paddick, the local hero, step onto the podium of a meeting of the Lambeth Community Police Consultative Committee and take applause from a packed crowd of all colours, ages and creeds clamouring for his reinstatement.\n\nBut Moore's former boss was never coming back. The commissioner had authorised Paddick's appointment to a new intelligence unit, where the most senior openly gay officer in Scotland Yard would work under the most senior Asian officer, assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, and the most senior black officer, deputy assistant commissioner Mike Fuller. Paddick called it \"diversity corner\", a showcase unit for the Yard to point to as a mark of its commitment to minority staff.\n\nThe MPA inquiry eventually cleared Paddick in November 2002. After a year in the wilderness he was promoted to deputy assistant commissioner overseeing criminal justice strategy in territorial policing. Another \"non-job\", he says. Just before Christmas 2003, Paddick received an apology and a large cheque from the _Mail on Sunday_. He would prefer his old job back.\n\nA wry smile crossed Terry McGuinness's face the day he heard Brian Moore had taken charge of Brixton.\n\nThe furore over commander Paddick was all over the news, and McGuinness was now a free man living a new life where no one knew his past. McGuinness never did have that chat with Moore about Stoke Newington during his debriefing as a supergrass. One of the things he wanted to discuss was the Ira Thomas case. The other involved a secret that now threatened Moore's position as Lambeth police chief: Moore had been linked to a football and social club of Scotland Yard detectives collectively known as W.O.G.S.\n\nA story we wrote in _Private Eye_ about W.O.G.S. attracted an instant denial from Moore, which he sent from Brixton police station in April 2002: \"I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Walthamstow Overseas Geographical Society (W.O.G.S.). For your information, I went on four holidays to the Mediterranean and Aegean between 1983 and 1988 as part of a group of police and non-police holidaymakers. Some of this group, myself included, played football against local people. However there was never actually a 'football team'.\" He demanded \"an immediate retraction\". We had to disappoint him.\n\nMoore's testy letter astounded former police members of W.O.G.S., our sources for the original story. The new Brixton commander may not have thought he was going abroad on a W.O.G.S. tour, but his fellow travellers were under no such illusion.\n\nW.O.G.S. was set up in the early eighties as \"a bit of a laugh\" by detectives from the Flying Squad office in Walthamstow, before it was renamed Rigg Approach. W.O.G.S. was not exclusive to this one branch of the Flying Squad. The revolving door with Stoke Newington meant detectives at the north-east London police station, like Moore and McGuinness, were also involved.\n\nNor was W.O.G.S. a secret white supremacist cabal in the police. It was more a Bernard Manning affair that reflected the acceptable racist culture within the Met. As one former W.O.G.S. member, retired detective sergeant Chris Paddle, says: \"In those days you could get away with it. Now, you'd get strung up.\" In 1983, Paddle went on one of the first W.O.G.S. tours to Majorca in Spain. \"We upset every other person in the hotel. If they had found out who we were there would have been a hell of a complaint. How we didn't get nicked I don't know. It was just a massive piss-up. We played football. It was just a big chill-out.\"\n\nLongterm member DC Yan Stivrins apparently designed the \"W.O.G.S. on tour\" posters announcing the forthcoming foreign beanos. These went up at Stoke Newington and Hackney police stations as well as the Flying Squad office in Walthamstow, recalls Paddle. He kept an early photograph of the Majorca trip, where all the boys are in matching blue football shirts and lined up in the goalmouth. One was fellow sergeant Graham Golder. \"Golder was the mad one. He used to go and speak to all the spades down in Stoke Newington. He was the man who would walk in that pub on the Sandringham Road [on the Front Line] and come out without being stabbed. I used to drop him off down the end of the road because he told me he had an informant in there. They all thought he was possessed by the devil.\" Paddle jokingly calls him \"the race relations guy\" for Stoke Newington police station.\n\nGolder was later suspended, tried and acquitted after the _People_ splashed allegations he was taking bribes to protect a prostitution racket in Stoke Newington. The Madame, Maria Thornton, claimed to have paid Golder about \u00a336,000 over a seven-year period as \"insurance\" against prosecution. She turned on him and approached the tabloid after three court appearances and a six-month stretch inside for running a brothel. The journalists set up a sting with a mini tape-recorder concealed in her bra.\n\nRetired detective inspector Peter Wilton gave a big Sid James laugh when we strolled together down memory lane. He recalled going on a W.O.G.S. tour to Rhodes sometime in 1986 or 1987 with at least ten others. Brian Moore was there, he says. In fact there is also a photograph of the W.O.G.S. football team, again all wearing the same football shirts. Someone very like Moore is kneeling in the front row next to Wilton. \"The essential thing was the piss-up,\" says Wilton. \"The football was secondary. We were half-pissed when we were playing football, that's why we lost so heavily.\"\n\nOf all the W.O.G.S. associates, McGuinness was the most gobsmacked by Moore's letter to _Private Eye_. \"If he was sitting here I'd say, you fucking lying cunt.\" McGuinness had a unique position in W.O.G.S.; he was the official keeper of the compromising photographs taken during the piss-up. He provided us with a few snaps of the W.O.G.S. tour to Cyprus in 1988. One, reproduced exclusively in this book, shows Moore and McGuinness with their arms around each other at the airport. Also on the Cyprus trip was W.O.G.S. veteran DCI Mick Lawrence. All three were serving at Stoke Newington at the time. Lawrence was later snapped wearing the group T-shirt, which McGuinness says was designed by Stivrins. The motif on the front said: \"The Eagle has landed\", the bird of prey being the symbol of the Flying Squad.\n\nReturning to Moore's letter, it said: \"These allegations [about W.O.G.S.] were first raised in 1999 when I was leading a major corruption inquiry. A highly respected senior officer, deputy assistant commissioner Roy Clark QPM, looked into the issues raised at the time and found no basis for a disciplinary investigation.\"\n\nThe \"major corruption inquiry\" was of course Operation Ethiopia, into Rigg Approach where Moore's old W.O.G.S. chum, Terry McGuinness, was a key supergrass. McGuinness says he told his debriefers all about W.O.G.S. But the typed statement CIB3 produced for him to sign has almost no detail, and omits any reference to Moore. It says blandly: \"It was whilst I was at Stoke [Newington] that I first went on holiday with a number of my colleagues to Cyprus. There was a group of people known collectively as the Walthamstow Overseas Geographical Society, who annually went away for a jolly up.\" You could be forgiven for thinking this was a ramblers' association.\n\nUntil Moore's letter, we were unaware DAC Clark had \"looked into\" W.O.G.S. McGuinness confirms that the head of the Untouchables never spoke to him as part of his inquiries.\n\nWe wanted to ask Roy Clark other questions about W.O.G.S. Was he the right man to conduct the inquiry? Hadn't he been a detective inspector at Walthamstow when W.O.G.S. started? He was later the chief superintendent at Stoke Newington, and involved with Lawrence, Moore and McGuinness in the Ira Thomas case.\n\nThe lawyers representing Thomas in his compensation claim for the miscarriage of justice incorporated these concerns in their recent letter to the Home Office: \"Another worrying aspect of this case, particularly bearing in mind Mr Thomas is black, is that at least one of the officers, DC McGuinness, was a member of an organisation called 'W.O.G.S.'\"\n\nBrian Moore was not the only member of the Untouchables who had been linked to W.O.G.S. When we first contacted DC Yan Stivrins in June 2000 he refused to comment. We tried again in 2004, by which time Stivrins had been posted to the Telephone Intelligence Unit. He again declined to comment.\n\nWe had hoped Clark would enlighten us about the basis on which he decided in 1999 not to launch an official investigation or refer it to the PCA, and whether the involvement of his own men and the potential embarrassment to Scotland Yard had influenced that decision. After all, 1999 was the year the Lawrence Inquiry report was published.\n\nIt seems inconsistent that PC Steve Hutt was suspended that year for calling a teenager a \"black bastard\" but allegations of a police group called W.O.G.S. merited no formal investigation. The double standard was more apparent when we learned the Untouchables had in 1997 served a disciplinary notice on a serving officer for making a derogatory racist remark to his colleague in a police car.\n\nCENTREX is the centre where police recruits spend 16 weeks in basic training. They are now given race awareness courses where it is strongly emphasised that the words \"Wog\", \"Nigger\", \"Coon\" and \"Paki\" are totally unacceptable and any recruit caught using them is liable to instant dismissal.\n\nOn 21 October 2003 BBC reporter Mark Daly went undercover at CENTREX to see how prevalent racist attitudes were among raw recruits and their trainers. His admirable film, _The Secret Policeman_ , caused a scandal: six recruits resigned and chief constables met hurriedly to discuss how to improve the selection process and weed out racists before they graduated.\n\nThe neo-Nazi British National Party claimed it had serving cops among its members. Scotland Yard's deputy commissioner Ian Blair responded by announcing he hoped to make BNP membership an instant sackable offence. Serving officers formerly involved with W.O.G.S., however, appear to be in a different league. Moore was made a commander during the fall-out over the BBC programme.\n\nThe main force in the firing line following the BBC expos\u00e9 was Greater Manchester Constabulary. The chief constable, Michael Todd, was a former Scotland Yard officer and senior manager of the Untouchables. In a statement broadcast at the end of the BBC documentary, viewers were told Todd had voluntarily referred the matter to the IPCC, the new police watchdog where his former colleague Roy Clark is director of investigations.\n\n## [24\n\n... And the Beating Goes on and on](contents.html#ch24)\n\nIt was a mid-summer day in June 1996 and England was football loopy. London was hosting the European championships and the national squad had reached the semi-finals, against Germany. The _Mirror_ caught the mood with no hint of jingoism. \"ACHTUNG! SURRENDER!\" screamed the front page. It was an update on that old favourite, \"TWO WORLD WARS AND ONE WORLD CUP\".\n\nCabbies, white-van drivers and cars criss-crossed Trafalgar Square all day, with the flag of St George flapping in the wind. Drive-time radio stations belted out the oddly tolerable _Three Lions on a Shirt_ , which had become a new national anthem and number one in the charts.\n\nA mixed Wembley crowd with warrior tones sang it during England's nail-biting path to the semis, defeating Holland, Spain and Scotland on the way. There was a real sense this was it. \"Football's coming home,\" proclaimed the song. No more tears for Gazza; a return to the glory days of '66 when Bobby Moore's side lifted the World Cup.\n\nMost employers suspended any pretence that this was a normal workday. As Wednesday afternoon rolled on, more and more men and women spilled out of offices and into the pub where a mass of their colleagues with moody sick notes in their back pockets and three lions on their chests were convalescing.\n\nChants of \"Ingerland, Ingerland\" soon punched the air as kick-off approached and the lager flowed. The match had an added edge because of a sudden death period called the Golden Goal.\n\nEngland got off to a dream start. Shearer scored with his head from a corner in the first three minutes. Then Germany levelled. There was some consolation when the goal scorer's name, Stefan Kuntz, was announced. Plenty more action followed but no more goals after extra time, so the game went to a penalty shoot-out. The niggling, nightmare scenario every England supporter at one time had entertained was about to come true. It was five-all in penalties when Gareth Southgate stepped up to the spot, and missed. Germany didn't. They were in the final.\n\nLegendary retired German captain Franz Beckenbauer described the match afterwards as the real final. It was, he said, \"the best advertisement for football\". It was also one of the worst advertisements for why Scotland Yard should continue to police itself.\n\nThat night, an officer permanently disabled 16-year-old John Wilson. The anti-corruption squad claimed it could not identify the baton-wielding culprit and none of his colleagues came forward.\n\nMost victims of a police assault do not come from a white, suburban middle-class family. There is a perception among certain inner-city communities that the internal complaints system treats such people better. But when the Wilsons fought for justice, the Yard tried everything to undermine their case, whilst proclaiming a new era of integrity in policing for Londoners. \"This is an everyman case,\" says John Wilson's lawyer. \"It could happen to anyone.\"\n\nJohn was watching the England game with two schoolmates, Tim Gooden and Christian Marsh, in the Crown pub in Twickenham, a well-heeled south-west London suburb. School was out for summer; he'd just taken his GCSEs and was working during the holiday with a market trader selling sports shoes.\n\nAlthough downhearted by England's loss, the three friends headed for Trafalgar Square, where England fans traditionally gather. Their parents weren't exactly thrilled but knew the boys could handle themselves.\n\nWhen they got there, hundreds of fans were milling around. By midnight it turned ugly and the riot squad started to clear the square by forcing fans down the main road to Charing Cross tube station.\n\nJohn and his two friends were corralled in the crowd when the riot cops charged. They say they were not involved in any violence or provocation of the police, but thought it wise to run. Christian and Tim were in front of John as they legged it.\n\nAt the top end of Northumberland Avenue, a group of hooligans started to attack an empty Ministry of Defence car. As the three boys ran past, John foolishly stopped to watch the frenzied vandalism. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye he saw a riot cop carrying a shield running at quite a pace towards him with his baton raised. \"I remember thinking, 'Turn to run', just to get away from him, [when] I felt a cracking blow to my head and that was it. That is my last recollection. It all happened in a split second.\"\n\nA CCTV camera on the top of the National Gallery had captured the incident. As soon as the blow struck, John immediately lost consciousness and collapsed. The back of his head smashed onto the road, fracturing the skull in two places. The stocky riot cop appeared agitated as he stood astride John's prone and deadly still body. For a moment the officer paused, looked down at his victim, then ran off.\n\nJohn's nose was broken and blood splattered across his face. His jaw was also fractured. Blood was pouring down the front of his sweatshirt. Tim says he asked a female riot officer to help, but she ignored him. A man, who happened to be a doctor, eventually persuaded the police to call an ambulance and did what he could for John until it arrived.\n\nThe teenager was rushed to a hospital in nearby Waterloo.\n\n\"I almost fainted when I saw him,\" recalls his mother, Susan. \"One of the nurses had to help me to a chair.\" She was advised against talking to the waiting press or against accusing the police.\n\nJohn regained consciousness after two days. Four days later he was discharged. At home his condition worsened and he experienced his first, major epileptic seizure. Susan rushed her son back to hospital. John had another seizure and was placed on a ventilator. In preparation for surgery, the CT scan showed bleeding on the brain. The doctors decided to postpone the operation to see if it would resolve itself. Susan was beside herself at the sight of her son among the tubes and bleeps of life support machines keeping other head injury patients alive in the High Dependency Unit.\n\nJohn had developed grand mal epilepsy, the severest kind. \"His life really just stopped,\" Susan recalls. \"He tried to go to college [to start his A Levels] in September 1996 and again in 1997. But he couldn't concentrate, he couldn't keep up with the work or take notes because he was having seizures.\"\n\nIt took over two years to find the right dosage of medication to suppress them. \"Every time I left the house I never knew if I would be coming home or ending up in a hospital,\" says John. The uncertainty left Susan in constant fear and today John is slightly embarrassed about his mother's concern. \"I wanted to go to university with all my mates. I liked languages but to be honest I didn't really know what I would have studied. You don't really at 16, do you?\" But the opportunity was lost. John watched his friends move on while his life remained stuck in a nightmare of seizures, medication, lost confidence and a lack of motivation.\n\nSusan was 38 when John was assaulted. She'd split with his father and at the time they were living with her parents. Hers is an average middle-class family. They are not capital P political but when pressed, Susan describes herself as an old-fashioned Tory with an admiration for Margaret Thatcher. Her previous dealings with the police were minimal. She just wanted to know that if needed they'd be there with a professional response.\n\n\"She didn't want to take it to court. It was my idea. Mum was afraid to do it,\" says John. \"I didn't want them to get away with it. I needed... like anyone who suffers, someone to blame. And in my case there was someone, there was a rightful reason to sue. It was more about making the officer accountable for what he'd done than suing the Met.\" He was never a radical student with defined politics or views about the police. \"I'm pretty much apolitical. It's not that I don't care what happens, it's just that there's no one worth believing in.\"\n\nSusan was reticent about \"taking on the Establishment\". While she too wanted to know which officer was responsible, she worried that if they sued, the local police might take revenge on her son one day. \"I think what it is, is having children. I was a shy child. Going to work made me strong, because you have to stand up for yourself. Then when you have a child you want the best for them and then something happens to your son. The very last thing you expect is for your child to be injured by a policeman. When that happens you want to put things right.\" John brought his mother round. \"When we got going, she got so into it we kept each other going.\"\n\nAfter almost two years of legal inaction, in September 1999 a judge ordered the Met to disclose any video or photographic evidence they possessed. Two months later, recalls Susan, the Met \"suddenly discovered\" some CCTV footage and changed their defence to one of \"accidental collision\", claiming the video proved John was never hit with a baton, as he had maintained. Previously the police had suggested the injuries resulted from a drunken fall or an altercation with a member of the public.\n\nThe videotape arrived as Susan's mother was dying. She passed away on Boxing Day, never seeing Scotland Yard apologise for what it had done to her grandson.\n\nSamantha Bird, the Met solicitor, was pushing the family for a response to the video. Meanwhile she tried to get the Legal Aid Board to withdraw funding, claiming the video showed John had \"an unsustainable case\". It worked. John's legal team backed out and legal aid was withdrawn just weeks before a hearing in April 2000 at the High Court.\n\nConvinced this was the end of the road, Susan called commissioner Sir John Stevens' office. \"I thought if we had to drop it I wanted him to know that a 16-year-old boy had been assaulted by one of his men and we haven't been able to do anything.\" A member of the commissioner's staff listened then put the phone down on her, she says.\n\nThe terse response spurred the Wilsons to appear before the High Court judge unrepresented and to plead for an adjournment. John was now 20. The judge agreed to the extra time and said they could represent themselves if necessary. \"That,\" says Susan, \"was when we knew we had a case.\"\n\nBird had sent a legal bundle with a bullish covering letter saying that if they continued their case the Met would pursue John for all costs, which would run into tens of thousands of pounds. \"It's very difficult to come up against the police. You are at an immediate disadvantage. The assumptions they make about you \u2013 he's a thug, he's out for trouble \u2013 you have such a lot to prove.\"\n\nThe Wilsons sought help from Liberty, the legal pressure group, and were put in touch with a young solicitor called James Bell from Christian Khan, a well-known civil liberties law firm in central London with experience taking on the police and other state agencies. Bell had legal aid restored, despite a further intervention by Bird. He also instructed a young barrister who specialised in police actions. \"Leslie [Thomas] was a key figure all the way through,\" says John with rare admiration. \"He had faith in the case.\"\n\nThe Met tried to have it struck out on the grounds of delay. This failed and in July 2001 the case of Wilson v The Commissioner was finally ready to be heard, five years after the assault.\n\nIn that time John had tried to find work without success. His energy levels were suppressed not just by the assault but also by the medication he took twice daily to control the grand mal epilepsy. However, John knew his evidence under cross-examination would make or break the case. \"For some reason I was more nervous until I got up there. The nerves just went [in the witness box]. I switched into automatic mode. Everything I was asked over three hours I'd revised for,\" John recalls with noticeable pride. He loathed the police barrister who was trying to trip him up.\n\nThe Met repeated its \"accidental collision\" claim. But Mr Justice Morland was astonished the officer hadn't come forward or filed a report on the night, unlike another colleague who'd hit a member of the public with his baton near the vandalised MoD car.\n\nThe Met had sent an email to every cop in the force just days before the hearing, asking for the officer who \"inadvertently knocked a youth to the ground who it appears was attacking police vehicles\" to come forward. It was made reassuringly clear that the officer was not at fault and would not face discipline. Judge Morland remarked that this email was circulated surprisingly late. He also called it \"oddly worded\".\n\nThe author of the email, detective inspector Ian Horrocks, gave evidence. Horrocks had discovered the CCTV footage. He then compiled a list of all units the Westminster HQ Public Order Branch believed were on duty that night in Trafalgar Square. He contacted the supervisors of each unit to see if they had been in or around the MoD car when it was attacked. Some officers were even shown the video and other material to help jog memories.\n\nBut Horrocks claimed in a statement that he was unable to identify the riot squad that charged to protect the MoD car and therefore the officer responsible for the attack on John Wilson. In court he said it was his sincere view that John was either attacking the MoD vehicle or part of the group that was. One of the many strange features of this case was that Horrocks and his boss, superintendent Hamish Campbell, were involved in the Wilson case at all. Their plate was already full running the highest profile murder case in Britain \u2013 the hunt for Jill Dando's killer.\n\nOne police constable did present himself at court in answer to the email. He said he couldn't remember who was on his squad that night. Another officer who was not part of the riot squad provided a witness statement describing the night's events and recalled seeing John lying unconscious in the road, but not how he had got there.\n\nFor Mr Justice Morland to find in John's favour it was not enough to believe he had fallen as a result of being pushed aside by a riot cop rushing towards the hooligans attacking the car. \"In my judgement the facts that the officer who collided with the claimant remains unidentified and that no police documents relating to the incident have emerged are consistent with the claimant's case that he was the victim of a deliberate, unlawful assault,\" he ruled.\n\nMorland had no criticism of the police strategy that night. But after repeatedly watching the video he said: \"I have become more and more convinced it was not an accidental collision and was a deliberate attack on the claimant who had innocently but unwisely stopped to watch the attack on the police car... Considering the video in the context of the evidence as a whole I am utterly convinced he was the victim of a deliberate unlawful assault.\"\n\nMorland also commented that he would have expected a serious and detailed investigation and search for documents between February 1998, when the Wilsons first notified the Met of the assault, and November 1999, when Campbell and Horrocks became involved.\n\nHis judgement on 6 July was an enormous relief to the Wilsons. \"We had a High Court judge endorsing how we felt. Surely, we thought, it would now help us get answers to the question we had been asking. Surely, someone would now be held accountable,\" says Susan. She and John had every reason to believe all that was left was to determine the level of damages. But instead of paying up, the Met used even more public funds to appeal the ruling.\n\nSusan thought pressure could be applied by alerting the newly created Metropolitan Police Authority. John was less convinced.\n\nThe MPA chairman was a New Labour devotee whose service to Tony Blair was rewarded in 1998 with a life peerage. Lord Toby Harris was ably assisted by an ex-Home Office civil servant from the _ancien r\u00e9gime_ called Catherine Crawford. She is the chief clerk to the MPA, an unelected position of considerable influence, who liaises between the authority and senior figures in Scotland Yard. An MI5 officer is also secretly attached to the MPA.\n\nDuring his inaugural speech in June 2000, Lord Harris hailed \"a new start for the policing of London\". It was, he said, time to \"discard the baggage of the past\" \u2013 a clear reference to the scathing 1999 Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report. He said he would personally ensure Scotland Yard treated everyone fairly and was open and honest.\n\nBut behind the noble rhetoric, the true mission of the MPA was ultimately revealed as a political one \u2013 to reduce crime. The success or failure of the MPA would be judged by this statistic alone, said the Lord. Thus, the hugely important responsibility of police oversight was, from the start, always going to be trumped by an overtly electioneering agenda \u2013 winning the war on crime.\n\nThe Wilsons were about to discover that with the MPA, preserving the integrity of the Yard's reputation in the war on crime would override holding senior officers to account for serious abuses of power.\n\nIn November 2001, Susan made a formal complaint to the MPA about commissioner Stevens' handling of the matter. She accused Britain's top cop of \"misleading the High Court\"; non-disclosure of documents; failing to identify the 25 riot squad officers and the officer who assaulted John; wasting public funds by appealing and interfering with their legal aid. \"In conclusion, the commissioner's conduct throughout this entire case has been one of delay, undermine, frustrate rather than dealing with the merits of the case to ensure that procedures are followed and the minimum standards met,\" the complaint said.\n\nAfter speaking privately to deputy commissioner Ian Blair and taking legal advice, a month later the MPA rejected the complaint, arguing that as it didn't concern the commissioner's personal conduct but related to his \"direction and control\" of the force it wasn't a matter for them. However, the MPA said it would ask commissioner Stevens to report back to them on the issues raised by the complaint and also offered the Wilsons a meeting with the MPA chairman.\n\nLord Harris told Susan his son was also at Trafalgar Square that night, so he too could understand how she felt. Susan wasn't convinced and replied: \"If this had happened to Tony Blair's son or your son would we still not know who these officers are?\" The Yard was \"protecting someone\", she insisted. \"There's got to be a reason to defend this all the way to the High Court on the basis of an accidental collision, if you haven't even spoken to the officer involved. The justification has got to be somewhere.\"\n\nAccording to the minutes, Lord Harris tried to assuage Susan's frustration by referring to new government proposals to make the police complaints system \"more independent\". He accepted the current system was \"unsatisfactory\". Lord Harris said he \"suspected that in such cases the Met's general reaction was possibly to stonewall\" and that he and his colleagues on the MPA were working with senior officers to change this \"culture\".\n\nBut what of the unidentified riot cop? The Wilsons had no idea the assault had occurred in the middle of the most unprecedented secret intelligence gathering operation inside the Yard to identify corrupt and unethical officers. Yet for all the boasts and gadgetry of the anti-corruption crusade, the officer who assaulted John Wilson on 26 June 1996 remained the real untouchable. CIB3 couldn't even identify any of the 25 riot cops on duty in Trafalgar Square that night, or so the Wilson family were led to believe.\n\nDeputy commissioner Ian Blair suggested Susan met CIB3 commander Andy Hayman. He explained to her what steps his Untouchables had taken to identify the officer involved. \"He said that either the officer was lazy and forgot to fill in his forms or the entire riot squad was suffering from post-traumatic stress and had forgotten the incident. My jaw dropped and I just looked at him. 'Are you seriously expecting me to accept that?' I replied.\"\n\nThe Wilsons and their legal team had done their own sleuthing and discovered something potentially very significant. They tracked down a reporter who filmed the disturbance in Trafalgar Square for local television news. \"He couldn't remember the incident with John but said he was called in to 1 Area headquarters on the Embankment the next day because several policemen were under investigation. He was asked whether his footage could assist the inquiry,\" says Susan.\n\nThis proved there had been an internal inquiry the Wilsons knew nothing about. Someone must have made a complaint on the night against the riot police. Perhaps it was one of the people arrested near the vandalised MoD car where John was assaulted. But when the Wilsons brought this to the attention of the Met's solicitors, they were told it was a separate matter that had been dealt with and had no bearing on their case.\n\nJohn and Susan had by now developed a strong sense they were being stonewalled. When Susan went to see a campaigning organisation called INQUEST she realised they were far from alone. The visit opened her eyes to a whole world of police brutality, racism and official intransigence that challenged her white suburban, middle-class existence for ever.\n\nINQUEST had developed out of the failure of UK police forces and coroners' courts to fully account for the hundreds of deaths in police, prison and medical custody since 1969. A disproportionate number of the victims are black or individuals with mental health problems. No police officer has ever been convicted for a death in custody. The whole internal investigation by the same force is shrouded in secrecy, as are the CPS's deliberations, giving rise to suggestions of a politicised and unhealthy cosiness between the CPS and the police.\n\nSusan was told about the case of Roger Sylvester, a 30-year-old black man from north London who died in January 1999 after being arrested and restrained by eight Met officers. The CPS had declined to charge the officers on the grounds of insufficient evidence.\n\nIt was Hayman's CIB that originally investigated the arresting officers from the Met. But this internal investigation was taken off them after the Sylvester family complained about its lack of integrity. The PCA subsequently supervised an investigation by Essex police into Hayman's men. They concluded that three CIB officers should face discipline for, among other things, failing to preserve potential evidence and failing to keep proper records.\n\nBefore the assault on her son, Susan believed the few cases of police malpractice she had read about in the _Daily Mail_ were isolated incidents. But she soon came to believe they were part of a pattern of police misconduct and an official culture of cover-up. The outpourings of mothers forced to turn off the life support systems keeping their children alive profoundly touched her. \"What a disgrace,\" she says. \"It was heartbreaking. I just sat there in tears. I couldn't believe that this goes on here. Why don't the public know about it?\"\n\nEventually the Yard found a judge who was sympathetic to the view that the CCTV footage was not clear cut. So a full appeal hearing was set for 28 February 2002. However, when three Appeal Court judges revisited the video they upheld the original ruling that John was the victim of \"a deliberate and unlawful assault\".\n\nThe Yard now had no place to go, so it tried to grasp some moral high ground by telling the Press Association it had \"voluntarily referred the matter to the PCA so that an independent force can be appointed to investigate\". But John was unconvinced about aiding yet another internal inquiry. He was unmoved by the fiction of independence just because Northamptonshire police would now conduct a review of the Met. He couldn't see what they would find that Hayman and his Untouchables had apparently missed. \"I thought, 'No, it's still the police investigating the police.'\"\n\nOver the years, as one force is called in to investigate another, a bank of favours builds up between them. Officers transfer between forces, especially with the Met. Police culture and attitudes to the public also transcend regional borders. The public know almost nothing of what goes on \u2013 the leaks and deals \u2013 when an outside force is called in, because the investigation and its report are kept from the victim's family and from the media.\n\n\"We offered to co-operate only if the PCA could guarantee we would see a copy of Northamptonshire Police's final report. The PCA said that wasn't possible,\" Susan explains.\n\nNevertheless, by the spring of 2002 Scotland Yard was facing a substantial six-figure claim for damages, aggravated because it had fought the case and never apologised. Out of the blue, on 23 April John Wilson received an \"unreserved apology\" from deputy commissioner Ian Blair. \"It was a hollow apology that had come far too late and was hardly worth the paper it was written on,\" says John with undisguised contempt.\n\nThe timing could not have been more cynical, their lawyer thought. By saying sorry just weeks before the hearing on damages and costs, the Yard avoided a bigger payout. \"The police had put John and Susan through six years of hell. They had every obstacle put in the way. So the apology was absolutely forced out of them. It was not genuine,\" says James Bell. But what about the commissioner's motto \u2013 Integrity is Non-Negotiable? \"Well, that's not true. The Yard did negotiate its integrity when they agreed to pay John \u00a3500,000 in damages.\" They were also ordered to pay the Wilsons' substantial legal costs.\n\nCoincidentally, that same month deputy commissioner Blair released figures for the damages the Yard had paid over the last five years. It was, he told the press, a good news story. From 1997 to 2002, Blair claimed 1,555 legal actions had cost the Met \u00a313.6 million. As with many official statistics, this rarely told the full story. Blair's maths did not include the figure for defence costs picked up by the police and the costs incurred by its own legal department and by CIB.\n\nNevertheless, the deputy commissioner had this to say: \"We are constantly striving to reach new levels of professionalism in the service we provide to the people of London. These figures suggest that the hard work of people across the Metropolitan Police Service is being rewarded with greater satisfaction from the public. However it would be wrong to become complacent with this success and we are determined to continue trying to reduce complaints and litigation even further. The less we spend on these matters the more of our resources go into supporting frontline policing.\"\n\nWhen added to the Yard's own legal bill the whole Wilson scandal has needlessly cost the taxpayer well in excess of \u00a31 million. It would, of course, have been substantially less had the Yard settled back in 1997.\n\nLord Harris had pledged that \"a major task\" of the MPA was to ensure Scotland Yard delivered \"value for money\" and was efficiently run. The force was not subject to \"the same rigorous financial regimes\" as other public services, and this would change, he promised. Less than a year later the MPA chairman was admitting that financial controls inside the Met were \"shambolic\".\n\nThe MPA confirms the payment to John Wilson was approved under the terms of a protocol with the Yard whereby sensitive cases and settlements over \u00a3100,000 had to be referred to them. This has not always been the case, Lord Harris admitted. However the MPA will not discuss whether the Yard ignored independent legal advice commissioned by the watchdog, which recommended no appeal. The MPA also refuses to give the Wilsons a copy of the Yard's report on its handling of the investigation.\n\nDuring their fight for justice one judge remarked that Susan had become \"obsessed\". She says to get anywhere she had to. \"You shouldn't have to fight so hard for justice against the Metropolitan Police. And if I am obsessed I accept that. I don't think enough is being done. I think these people delude themselves into thinking things have changed, that it won't happen again.\"\n\nSenior CPS lawyer Martin Polaine said getting untainted police officers without axes to grind to come forward and give evidence against their colleagues is not just a problem of top end corruption investigations, but also \"just about every complaint we get\", even death in custody cases. \"There's a culture of loyalty and an unwillingness to put oneself out on a limb, plus a fear of ostracism,\" he says.\n\nBut as the Untouchables are taken from the same pool of detectives, isn't that same culture of loyalty going to permeate anti-corruption work too? \"That's always an ever present concern when you've got the police investigating themselves or a police service investigating itself. The difficulty is there's not really an answer to that.\"\n\nScotland Yard deny that its inability to identify the officer who assaulted John Wilson was due to any lack of political will. But the failure of the Untouchables reflects very badly on commissioner Stevens. It is also a crushing indictment of his much-trumpeted ethical policy on integrity, which imposed a \"duty\" on all 45,000 employees in the Met to come forward and report bad apples in the orchard.\n\nStevens re-launched his ethical policy in August 2002. He told the assembled pack of crime correspondents how he was building on the good work of his anti-corruption squad: \"Much of these successes are attributable to the creation of an environment where people feel able to report suspected wrong-doing, support ongoing inquiries or provide information that leads to an investigation.\" Clearly he was excluding the Wilson case from this backslapping homily.\n\n\"What gets me is that it's an unequal struggle. And you are fighting for justice from the very people who are supposed to provide it. And that to me seems wrong,\" says Susan. \"I've used all the energy I had. Seven years is too high a price to pay.\"\n\nA police complaints system that not only fails to inspire public confidence, but also leaves those who challenge the police with a sense of dread that one day they may suffer repercussions is deeply worrying.\n\nFears about the institutional vindictiveness of Scotland Yard are well founded. And it looks like those who make complaints against the Yard, which it deems \"unjustified\", will now be the subject of a secret investigation using a range of oppressive and intrusive methods.\n\nJohn's barrister warned him he would be under police surveillance. \"I always had an eye out. But I thought, if they were going to do that, fine, it's not like I was smuggling drugs.\"\n\nNo defence lawyer worth his salt would nowadays advise a member of the public to use the internal complaints system. Instead civil actions against the police are on the rise because the complainant has more control over the process. This is why deputy commissioner Ian Blair has set up a secretive new body called the Civil Actions Investigations Unit (CAIU), whose aim is to undermine claims through targeted investigations. This involves liaising with operational police squads \"to build up a full picture of the claimant's background\", surveillance, finding witnesses who can cast a negative light on the claimant's character and \"sharing intelligence\" for possible criminal prosecutions.\n\nThe CAIU works closely with the Untouchables and both units are part of the Directorate of Professional Standards. The well-founded fear is that the CAIU will also be used to secretly undermine legitimate and justified complaints for internal political reasons.\n\nToday, John is twenty-three and on two types of medication twice daily. His epilepsy appears to be under control. He is still sensitive about it because people wrongly associate epilepsy with mental illness. He has now moved out of home and hopes to find a career. Despite his experience, it hasn't stopped him supporting his beloved Chelsea and England.\n\n## [25\n\nThe Dark Side: Undercover 599](contents.html#ch25)\n\nBefriend and betray. These are the two tenets of undercover policing. At any one time there are around sixty top undercover officers in the UK trained for long-term infiltrations at home and abroad. Michael was one of them, a detective constable attached to Scotland Yard's secretive SO10 department.\n\nOn 6 December 2002 commissioner Sir John Stevens honoured him with a long service and good conduct medal. For 22 years, the Met had been Michael's surrogate family.\n\nThe award ceremony should have been one of the happiest days in any police officer's career. But for Michael it was a chance to confront a commissioner he felt had betrayed him by allowing the Untouchables to ruin his life and cut short his career. The medal was a meaningless apology, a bouquet of barbed wire he pretended to want just to get close to Stevens.\n\nMichael is trained not to betray his emotions. An ill-timed nervous smile or furtive glance could be a matter of life or death for an undercover cop infiltrating a gang of villains. A criminal once put a gun in his mouth to see if there was a chink in his psychological armour. Michael kept his cool and because of that he kept his life.\n\nOf late, however, he has lost the self-confidence so vital to undercover work. He is, in his own words, a broken biscuit. The Yard befriended and then betrayed him, a deceit that led to self-doubt, acute depression and, eventually, the brink of suicide.\n\nAs he stood in line waiting to be called onto the podium, his gaze remained fixed on Stevens. But in his mind's eye, Michael replayed all the horrors of the last five years of his needless suspension from the force. In his hand was a well-thumbed white envelope with a personal letter sealed inside. The undercover cop had painfully crafted it that morning.\n\nSir John Stevens QPM  \nBy Hand\n\nWhilst I am fully aware of why I am entitled to this award, the pride I ought to feel is replaced by an acute sense of despair.\n\nAs you know in January 1998 I was suspended from duty, for reasons still unclear. This lasted almost five years. During those years it became abundantly clear that my suspension was ultimately enforced because of my refusal to engage with a small group of [CIB3] officers under your command in a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. My rejection ensured that my wife and I were subjected to the most vicious and sustained campaign of harassment and psychological torture.\n\nThis letter is not a formal complaint, we realise the futility of such action as you have remorselessly demonstrated in the past a total lack of commitment to investigating the criminal and disciplinary offences committed by these officers. I believe you should know the damage caused by those whom you allowed to act with such impunity.\n\nI hoped my father would attend today, unfortunately he died at the age of sixty-nine three weeks ago. The last five years of his life were dominated by the spectre of abuse perpetrated by your officers. He saw his son spend the best part of a year in a psychiatric hospital, the direct result of your officers' actions. He witnessed his daughter-in-law, my wife, suffer a miscarriage so traumatic we remain childless. An incident, and I am not joking, that was celebrated by one officer within the [Untouchables].\n\nYou have blocked every attempt to bring this small group to account and allowed my career to be needlessly destroyed. I weep at the memory of the suffering you allowed my family to endure and for the damage you inflicted on a service I was once proud to serve.\n\nYours sincerely,\n\nMichael\n\nStevens looked very nervous. The man waiting next in line for his award was a wildcard. Unpredictable. As her husband's name was announced, Beth (a pseudonym) focused her telephoto lens on the commissioner, finger poised above the shutter button ready to shoot. Stevens stretched out his hand as Michael came into the frame. The undercover cop gave him the letter.\n\n\"How are you Michael? Is this a Christmas card?\" asked Stevens with nervous jocularity and false bonhomie.\n\nStone-faced, Michael gave no reply. Stevens slid the letter into the side pocket of his ceremonial uniform. He then grabbed the undercover officer's hand like a drowning man grabs a life-jacket and turned him towards the official photographer. Out of the corner of a gottle of geer smile on a face like a smacked arse, the most powerful policeman in the UK whispered: \"Big schmile, Michael. You can do it.\"\n\n\"All I could think of was the miscarriage, my dad's death, the failed IVF and my time in the psychiatric hospital,\" recalls Michael. The photograph shows it. \"Before I walked off the podium, Stevens offered to speak to us at the reception after the ceremony. I said we would like that.\"\n\nThe Yard had laid on a multi-cultural buffet: Jamaican patties, Indian samosas, Turkish kebabs and some ham and cheese for the more traditional palate.\n\nWhile the couple waited they discussed the commissioner's welcoming speech. Like the buffet, it too had something for everyone; a quote from murdered civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King and admiration for the devotion to duty of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. Hold up. Wasn't he an advocate of slavery and an adviser to the Ku Klux Klan? thought Michael.\n\nAs the minutes ticked by without any sign of the commissioner, Michael and Beth wondered if, having read the letter, Stevens couldn't face them. Word had spread among the guests about the commissioner's predicament. A senior officer in the anti-terrorist branch, where Michael had once worked, approached the couple and shook his hand. \"It took a lot of guts to confront Stevens like that,\" said the well-wisher.\n\nThe chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Lord Toby Harris, had also attended the award ceremony. He was the man now supposed to be holding the commissioner to account. For 171 years, Scotland Yard had been responsible to the Home Office. But in June 2000, home secretary Jack Straw told the inaugural meeting of the MPA that it was \"at long last bridging the democratic gap by making the Met locally accountable\". Not on this occasion though. The UK's top cop never showed. He had flown off in a helicopter with Lord Harris.\n\nThe commissioner would soon face allegations in the High Court that his Untouchables fitted up Michael and ruined his life because he rebuffed their unlawful and improper plan to use him against Flying Squad detectives. It wasn't a question of the undercover officer refusing to investigate fellow cops who'd \"gone native\". Michael was already successfully gathering evidence for Merseyside Police against dirty cops and their criminal paymasters.\n\nHis suspension on spurious allegations seriously undermined that entire corruption probe. And when senior Merseyside officers examined the Untouchables' case against Michael, they told Scotland Yard it was baseless.\n\nBut the Untouchables couldn't back down. Not without exposing their own anti-corruption crusade as a sham. So they kept an effective and honest detective suspended for five years and in so doing undermined Merseyside's corruption probe into a group of detectives believed to be in the pocket of the UK's biggest drug trafficker \u2013 Curtis \"Cocky\" Warren.\n\nThis is that story.\n\nAt 33, Curtis Warren made it onto the 1996 _Sunday Times_ rich list. His identifiable assets were valued at \u00a347 million. Not bad for a mixed-race ghetto kid whose apprenticeship in the drug trade began as a \u00a310 dope dealer on the streets of Toxteth in Liverpool.\n\nThe Merseyside police had already been seriously on his case since 1993. Customs and the North West Regional Crime Squad, working secretly from a military installation outside Liverpool, were trying to dismantle his international drug syndicate. Warren was importing something for everyone: Pakistani and Moroccan hash, Dutch ecstasy and amphetamine, Turkish heroin and Colombian cocaine.\n\nThe police operation against him was codenamed Crayfish, which seemed appropriate when Warren decided in 1995 to re-locate his drug empire across the North Sea to the Netherlands. Merseyside Police joined forces with a specialist Dutch Task Force interested in organised South American drug syndicates, some with links to Warren.\n\nThe Dutch parliament takes a different view over the admissibility of telephone taps in criminal trials. Over there the police can rely on them as evidence, whereas British law enforcement uses them for intelligence purposes only, though there are moves to change this.\n\nBy the time the Dutch phone-tappers and buggers were finished, the Warren organisation in Holland resembled a _Big Brother_ reality show. But, given their thick Scouse slang, it was necessary to bring over Operation Crayfish detectives from Merseyside to translate.\n\nIn July 1996, these secret recordings revealed for the first time evidence of something long suspected \u2013 the Warren crime syndicate's corrupt links with Merseyside cops.\n\nCocky and several of his lieutenants in Liverpool were intercepted discussing a thorny problem. The brother of his girlfriend had tried to shoot a bouncer at the Venue nightclub. The police gave chase and claimed he had tried to shoot one of them. The man was arrested for attempted murder. Warren wouldn't normally have cared less, but the shooter was also the son of one of his key associates, Phillip Glennon.\n\nThe Warren gang turned to a well-known detective chief inspector and former deputy head of the drugs squad called Elmore 'Elly' Davies. He had served Warren's entire lifetime in the Merseyside force. Davies was identified as someone who could intervene in the nightclub case without drawing attention because the shooting had occurred on his patch.\n\nWhen the Dutch tipped off Operation Crayfish that one of their own had changed sides, senior officers in Liverpool went into a secret huddle.\n\n\"Liverpool in the 1990s was arguably the principal gateway into the UK for heroin, cocaine and ecstasy smugglers. The vast profits generated made multi-millionaires out of gangsters barely able to read or write. But their wealth corrupted everything it touched, including the police and legal system,\" says investigative reporter Geoff Seed, who examined the problem.\n\n\"By the early nineties both Customs and the North West Regional Crime Squad were telling Merseyside police that corruption in the ranks was so bad, investigations were being compromised. Telephone taps on target criminals showed them ringing tame contacts in the drugs squad and other units. Kickbacks of three to four thousand pounds \"holiday money\" were regularly paid to detectives for information. In this climate of unprecedented corruption, chief constable Sir James Sharples turned to Customs to monitor taps on 31 non-office telephones used by police. He could not trust his senior detectives to do it for fear of operational leaks.\"\n\nThe Elly Davies corruption probe was set up in great secrecy under detective superintendent Phil Jones. The operation, codenamed Admiral, was conducted within a new Professional Standards Unit, an equivalent to the Yard's CIB3 but without the puffery and sanctimony.\n\nTwo associates of the Warren organisation were identified as friends of Elly Davies. One of them was national celebrity Mick Ahearne, aka \"Warrior\" from the ITV series _Gladiators_. He and Davies were once flatmates whilst the Lycra muscle man's mansion was being renovated.\n\nOperation Admiral bugged Davies' more modest flat and his office, where the stocky, balding cop was leading a murder inquiry.\n\nAn independent TV crew were at the time shadowing Davies' team for a fly-on-the-wall documentary series for the BBC called _Mersey Blues_. He came across as witty and engaging. It was a measure of his brass balls that Davies felt his corrupt agreement with Warren could be honoured despite the scrutiny of the television cameras.\n\nBut, like Davies, the TV producers had no idea of their own walk-on part in the corruption video that detective superintendent Phil Jones was now making for an audience of 12 jurors at the Crown Court.\n\nStill, the anti-corruption boss didn't have the luxury of the BBC's deadline for his expos\u00e9. Under Dutch law the police surveillance operation against the Warren drugs syndicate would have to be disclosed to the target after six months.\n\nThe Dutch Task Force believed they had gathered enough admissible evidence, so between September and October 1996, key members of Warren's organisation, including Cocky, were charged and held on remand in Holland.\n\nThe arrests made national news in the UK and of course Liverpool. If Davies was bothered he didn't show it. Days later he applied for promotion to superintendent, oblivious to the corruption probe. When he was rejected, the BBC cameras were there to capture a bitter rant from the Jurassic detective that was a masterpiece of hypocrisy. Davies railed against bean counters in the Merseyside force making it uneconomical to deploy underpaid detectives like him to take out rich criminals with limitless resources. \"So fuck 'em,\" he said.\n\nUnder Dutch disclosure rules it wouldn't be long before Davies discovered from Warren's associates the real reason he was rejected for promotion. Phil Jones needed to know the scope of Davies' betrayal. And whether he was working with others in his force.\n\nThe head of Merseyside's undercover unit, detective chief inspector Chris Jones, helped conceive a plan to infiltrate someone into Davies' circle. A local undercover cop would not be appropriate because of the risk of compromise. So Merseyside approached Scotland Yard's undercover unit, SO10. They asked for the best available man for a very sensitive job. The Yard recommended undercover officer 599.\n\nMichael is a Lancastrian. He was brought up from the age of five in a small fishing town on the north-west coast. His father was a local policeman, a dog handler, and his Welsh mother an estate agent. Their marriage was a \"war zone\", says Michael with obvious melancholy. \"It was a divorce that lasted 20 years.\"\n\nHe has few fond memories as a teenager. One, however, was going to the legendary Wigan Casino on a Northern Soul night \u2013 the music of black artists from small independent US record labels whose stars were sadly outshone by the more mainstream Motown galaxy. Michael likes to dress natty, something essential on the Northern Soul scene, where sharply dressed men in bowling shirts cut up the dance floor with spins and moves.\n\nStill, the emotional scars of family life were enormous for him and his two younger brothers. It had cost him his GCSE results. \"I was a good student and had a lovely teacher. If I'd stayed in education I don't think I would have gone into the police, but the situation at home was intolerable. We all left at the earliest opportunity. I didn't want to become a fisherman, like one of my brothers. Instead I joined the Navy at 16. I saw the service as a family.\"\n\nAt first Michael worked on minesweepers patrolling the craggy coast of Northern Ireland. But it was submarines that most interested him, going deep, running silent on long missions, surfacing only when it was safe, before diving again into an underworld. He served on _Polaris_ , the nuclear submarine programme, playing cat and mouse with the Russians during the Cold War. It was the nearest, he says, to the camaraderie experienced on minesweepers. But the Navy was never a career plan and after five years he applied to join the police in 1980.\n\nThe Met and Lancashire Constabulary accepted him but, after seeking advice from friends already serving in Lancashire, he was told if he wanted to make detective there was more opportunity in London. \"I also didn't want to come back home. I knew when I left that was it. The Met offered the perceived warmth of a family that was missing from my life. It was a mistaken notion, I know now.\"\n\nWithin three years, Michael was promoted to detective constable and working the streets of central London. He had married a Malaysian girl when he was in the Navy but they divorced around this time.\n\nMichael had his own difficulties with detective culture and its blinkered insularity and macho pack mentality. He was a rugged individual and needed the space to be creative and push personal boundaries.\n\nWhen he learned of the undercover unit in the mid-eighties it was very much an informal affair, a fiefdom effectively run by the most powerful detective sergeant in the Met, Peter Holman. It wasn't until 1986 that the Yard created SO10 and placed its undercover work on a formal footing with selection and training courses using the intelligence services and Special Forces' expertise.\n\nMichael applied in 1989. His appraisals as a detective had encouraged this progression. In the meantime he achieved another one of his goals, to join the Flying Squad. He was put on the surveillance team. In those days you were sponsored onto the squad and Michael was given a leg up by a detective chief inspector he'd served under at West Ham police station.\n\n\"In my time on the Flying Squad, from 1990 to 1994, there were five or six major robberies we never dealt with properly. Not out of corruption but because of a lack of focus. There were serious political reasons too. The commissioner then was Condon. He had little interest in organised crime and hated the elitism of the central squads. So instead of looking at serious teams of robbers we were doing things like off-licence robberies. A lot of major teams were not caught in that period and who knows what they went on to do. It was a period of unfulfilment for me.\"\n\nFate intervened, and in 1992, SO10 invited Michael to take the undercover course. His sponsor was Roy Ramm, commander of special operations. He noticed in the young man a thoughtful, loyal officer who was \"slightly out of the mould because of all his outside interests\".\n\nMichael was put on one of the last SO10 courses where the candidates were \"kidnapped\" off the street by Special Forces trainers and put in a metal box for several hours. \"The Met stopped it, I think because they feared civil claims from some of the less hardy recruits,\" he says.\n\nUndercover officers have a mentoring system of 'uncles', who advise new recruits. Michael's uncle was one of the founders of SO10, detective sergeant Richard Hester. He had perfected the legend (false persona) of a money launderer, the sophisticated businessman who would be introduced somewhere along the arms or drugs sting by another undercover officer.\n\nHester's class act excited Michael's imagination. His grandmother and aunt had immersed him as a boy in the world of acting by frequent cinema trips. If there was one film that united his love of British _film noir_ with a fascination for detective work, it was Stanley Baker's gritty portrayal of a Manchester murder detective in Val Guest's 1959 classic _Hell is a City_.\n\nWhen he passed SO10 selection Michael was like a boy in a spy shop. \"Would Sir like to be an arts and antiques dealer, perhaps a merchant banker?\" The roles to learn and perfect were endless and he was charged by the possibilities. \"UC (undercover) work is like working in a pure form of policing, constantly trying to push the parameters.\"\n\nHere was a special group within a wider family where he could really belong. Undercover work was well suited to him. He was already a sponge soaking up cultures viewed with suspicion by his police colleagues. The undercover cop has to move in many worlds.\n\n\"My first undercover assignment was while I was still at the Flying Squad trying to buy illegal guns.\" He was spotted early as someone who could also act as a \"cover man\", a vital support role providing equipment, debriefing the undercover officer and acting as his psychological crutch throughout the operation.\n\nMichael worked on some harrowing assignments. One of the worst, he says, was befriending a paedophile. Before placing a bug in the man's home he had to feign excitement while watching child porn.\n\nIn 1994, an opportunity arose for several SO10 officers to work on a long-range sting operation in the \"Bermondsey Triangle\", so-called because property and people simply disappear in this criminal epicentre of south-east London. The operation, codenamed Sienna, was run from Southwark police station by two detectives who would soon become leading evangelical lights in the anti-corruption crusade \u2013 Dave Wood and Chris Jarratt.\n\nThe idea was to set up a pawnshop near to the train station to recover stolen goods and break up an organised group of professional thieves. The shop was bugged and Michael worked behind the counter as someone prepared to fence almost anything.\n\nDuring the eighteen months he was also deployed in two similar undercover missions. Michael played the part of a second-hand dealer in computer parts living in a squat near the Oval. The operation was a mini-sting on a gang stealing memory chips from office computers. And in Glasgow he posed as a wealthy businessman willing to buy \u00a31 million of microchips stolen in an armed robbery.\n\nOperation Sienna ended successfully in 1996 with over \u00a31 million recovered and over seventy prosecutions, says Michael. Before they parted company, Jarratt advised the undercover cop to hold onto his coat tails because he was going places.\n\nDetective chief inspector Peter North beckoned undercover officer 599 into his office and shut the door. The boss of SO10 looked serious. \"I'm going to say something to you, Michael, and if you don't go with it I know you'll keep your mouth shut even if things get difficult.\"\n\nDCI North explained that Merseyside Police believed the Curtis Warren organisation had taken out a contract on the police constable who was a key eyewitness in the Venue Nightclub shooting. \"Warren's people may have someone on the inside. It will mean infiltrating police officers up there.\"\n\nOn 8 October 1996 Michael was introduced to superintendent Phil Jones of Merseyside police. He was the senior detective investigating Curtis Warren's drug syndicate and corrupt links to DCI Elmore \"Elly\" Davies. Jones briefed Michael about a new covert operation codenamed Florida. He said it would involve infiltrating a group of business people from the Wirral \"who posed a serious threat to the integrity and the safety of individual officers\".\n\nJones had concerns about two officers close to Davies. One of them was detective inspector Steve Ward.\n\nMichael's legend was that of a rich businessman with links to organised crime. To enhance his cover a female undercover officer we shall call Gillian posed as his bit of crumpet. She would later complain of being regularly goosed by those they were trying to infiltrate, especially one dangerous businessman they dubbed \"Sausage Fingers\".\n\nMichael knew this was going to be the most difficult of undercover operations \u2013 a cold infiltration with no one to reference him into the criminal group. Usually that is the role of a police informant. But Jones could not risk the possibility of a treacherous informant blowing 599's cover either to Warren's business associates or to his friends in the police.\n\nMichael's legend had to be impenetrable, more so because he was also infiltrating cops with easy access to sensitive police databases to check for signs he was a plant.\n\nLike all good UCs, he'd been developing several legends over the years. Michael had a love of horses, as both a rider and a punter. The undercover officer had the build of a jockey and was well-suited to the saddle. He'd also developed genuine friendships with two ex-champion jockeys. Graham Thorner was now a trainer and Richard Pitman was a respected TV commentator and pundit. Michael used to visit Graham's farm in the West Country to wind down during his break from the pawnshop undercover job in Bermondsey. As part of his legend he'd also registered at the Jockey Club as Thorner's pupil assistant trainer under the pseudonym Michael Fenwick. He decided to use this for Operation Florida.\n\nIn late October \"Michael Fenwick\" and his girlfriend \"Gillian\" arrived in Liverpool in a flashy Mercedes. They booked into the Bowler Hat Hotel. After relaxing they went downstairs to the restaurant for dinner. Sitting nearby was a group of heavies discussing the recent arrest of Curtis Warren. For a moment the two UCs thought their cover had already been blown.\n\nMichael waited for the men to leave. He clocked their registration numbers and called Jones. The men were well-known to the superintendent and featured prominently on his wall chart of Warren's associates.\n\nMichael was told to concentrate on Elly Davies and Steve Ward. They hung out with Warren's associates at a pub called the Bassett Hound. The first time the couple turned up there it was bingo night. It looked more like an episode of Peter Kay's _Phoenix Nights_ than the haunt of a major drug syndicate. The two flashy Londoners stuck out a mile among the blue-rinse brigade.\n\nWhen they next returned the clientele had more of an air of Peter Flannery's _Our Friends in the North_. To explain their local ignorance and sudden arrival Fenwick claimed he was in Liverpool looking for property to buy. The couple had been to various estate agents in the area to ensure a steady stream of calls on their mobiles over the next few months. The trick was to develop a cover story that allowed you to come back and forth without raising suspicion.\n\n\"I remember talking to one local who was a counterfeiter. He assured me that although cops drank at the pub it was okay. Jones had told me that Davies was gregarious and Ward aloof. But it worked out the other way around. I met both of them at the Bassett Hound but Davies appeared wary of me. It seemed like something was playing on his mind,\" recalls Michael.\n\nThe seething resentment of his promotion knock-back might have been to blame. That November, the newly installed bugs in Davies' flat and office recorded him agreeing to pass information about the Venue nightclub shooting for \u00a310,000. The bribe was paid in cash from one of Cocky's henchmen, Tony Bray, via Gladiator Mick Ahearne.\n\nSlowly Fenwick and Gillian became accepted fixtures at the Bassett Hound. They had seen Davies and Ward on numerous occasions but never spoke. Davies once raised an eyebrow of recognition, but nothing more.\n\nThe first proper contact came from Ward in early January 1997. Davies was still aloof and Operation Florida wondered whether he was using Ward to sound out the newly arrived Michael Fenwick.\n\nSausage Fingers had also recently threatened the undercover cop. He was someone Michael came to realise was obsessed about infiltration. \"I was round his house playing snooker in his den. It was a big house, and I noticed on the shelf a row of videos. He explained how he had a keen interest in police practice and operations.\n\n\"Sometime later Sausage Fingers turned up at my hotel with a driver. I thought we were going for a drink. We got in the car and drove further and further into the darkness. I was talking to him in the back seat when suddenly the driver pulled over at a dark spot. They threatened to kill me if I wasn't who I said I was. It was a test to see if I was an undercover officer. He was satisfied by my reaction and we then went for a drink. For the rest of the evening Sausage Fingers acted as if nothing had happened.\n\n\"It was clear then that these people connected to Ward were very dangerous. Sausage Fingers was in the shipping business. He'd offered me the services of a freighter if I needed it.\"\n\nIt became apparent after a few weeks that Ward was not involved in Davies' efforts to sabotage the Venue nightclub shooting case. But Phil Jones still had serious concerns.\n\nHe briefed his chief constable Sir James Sharples who agreed Jones could mount an elaborate sting on Ward. Michael prepared a package that was worthy of an Oscar. The resourceful undercover cop had already set up a bogus company called Skyline Racing for Mr Michael Fenwick. He suggested using it to rent a hospitality box at Haydock Park Racecourse and throw a party for his new friends. Jones loved it.\n\nWard, Davies and many of their business friends from the Bassett Hound pub, including Sausage Fingers, were invited to the do on 22 February. Also present was the lead singer of a Merseyside Eighties chart-topping band, which gave Fenwick some glamour.\n\nThe hospitality box came with waiting staff. Like the guests, they didn't know it was bugged and transmitting live to a van parked nearby. The plan was for Michael to make a corrupt approach to Ward.\n\nThis centred on someone who had recently been stopped in a taxi on the motorway outside Liverpool with 60,000 ecstasy pills. Fenwick explained to Ward in the kitchen area that the man owed money to criminals in the South who wanted to know whether his arrest was a set up, a lucky stop or whether he had turned informant. According to Operation Florida documents, Ward agreed to help and four days later made the checks. Michael was astounded. \"I had given the impression the information would be used for a contract killing. Ward said he would do the checks but didn't want money. He told me he was disillusioned with the police and suggested I gave him a job as my chauffeur when he retired!\"\n\nJones was happy with Michael's infiltration and Operation Florida looked like it could run for many more months. There was one snag. The Curtis Warren trial in Holland was due to start. This influenced Jones' decision to arrest Elly Davies for corruption.\n\nJones wondered if Ward would now run for cover. So he backed off for six weeks, by which time Warren had been jailed for twelve years.\n\nIn June, Michael called Ward again to see if he was still up for helping out. The undercover cop was surprised when Ward agreed to check the Police National Computer to see if two of his criminal associates were being looked at. The Michael Fenwick legend extended to a false entry on the PNC.\n\nOn 2 July, Michael called Ward at work and asked him if he would do another check on \"an associate of Curtis Warren\" called Mark Quinn. To Michael's further amazement, Ward did checks on the intelligence system there and then. He told Fenwick during the secretly recorded conversation that no one was looking at Quinn. Again he refused money.\n\nThe bond developing between Ward and Fenwick in 1997 suggested there was every possibility that Operation Florida could get into other dark corners where police corruption and organised crime in Merseyside met.\n\nBack in London, 1997 was an important year for Scotland Yard's own fight against corruption. The Ghost Squad, the secret unit set up four years earlier to examine the Yard's exposure to corruption, was being re-organised.\n\nDeputy assistant commissioner Roy Clark's new anti-corruption squad would operate half-in and half-out of the shadows. An intelligence cell called CIBIC replaced the Ghost Squad. It remained in the shadows but moved from a covert location in west London to Tintagel House, an ugly police building overlooking the Thames. CIBIC would secretly service a new proactive squad of detectives designed to operate largely in the twilight, slipping back into the darkness when they needed to. This was CIB3, aka the Untouchables.\n\nThe Ghost Squad was not completely dismantled. Since 1994, it had been developing its own bugging, informant running and undercover capability. This super secret unit within a secret unit was referred to in hushed tones as \"the Dark Side\". It remained under deep cover at the covert west London location.\n\nDetective superintendent Dave Wood and his sidekick detective chief inspector Chris Jarratt were in day-to-day charge of CIB3 and CIBIC respectively. Michael was first aware of the recruitment drive for shadow warriors when Jarratt asked to meet him in April 1997 in a police section house in south London. Michael was immersed at the time in the Merseyside corruption probe and immediately suspected Jarratt was aware of this. The CIBIC boss asked if he would join him as an undercover operative.\n\n\"Jarratt said I should be prepared 'to go that extra mile'. He'd used the expression before during the Bermondsey job we did together. I didn't like the inference.\"\n\nStill, Michael was wary of turning Jarratt down. He had experienced his volatility on previous covert operations and didn't want to make an enemy of the man, especially as he was now in such a powerful position. \"I told him I wanted to finish my final assessment before becoming a full detective sergeant. I left it neither saying yes or no, just hoping the offer would fizzle out.\"\n\nThe following month Michael sat his exam. He was the number one candidate from his police station. His personal life was also going well, an on\/off romance with Beth having been re-ignited. They had met six years earlier. The couple planned to marry in October and had invited Jarratt and his wife.\n\nBut by autumn their lives started to fall apart. In September, Michael was told he had failed in his bid to become a detective sergeant. He appealed, with the support of SO10 boss, Peter North, who had originally recommended him to Merseyside. \"[This] detective constable retains a sense of direction during his [undercover] deployment, maintaining the highest standards... such is the esteem this officer is held in that he is always invited to assist in the training of students,\" wrote North.\n\nThe wedding was looming so Michael put the promotion appeal to one side. Jarratt's wife wrote to say they couldn't attend owing to a family tragedy. Weeks after the wedding, Michael discovered his appeal had failed.\n\nMichael had no idea the CIBIC boss was in the middle of executing a tightly choreographed operation against the Flying Squad using two former detectives who had turned supergrass over Christmas. The operation was used to great effect in the New Year to help the Yard neutralise potential problems from a Commons Home Affairs select committee hearing on the complaints system. There was also concern in the Yard about the forthcoming Stephen Lawrence public inquiry.\n\nOn 27 January 1998 the homes of 20 former and serving Flying Squad officers were raided. Michael's was one of them. Five Untouchables arrived at 6.30am to search the newly-weds' house. Two were men Michael had served with on the Bermondsey covert operation.\n\nThe press were waiting outside Tintagel House to capture the succession of officers going in to be formally suspended and give the Yard the \"get tough\" headlines it desperately needed in launching its Untouchables.\n\n\"I was still deployed on several undercover missions, not least the one in Merseyside, so I asked to be suspended in private,\" says Michael. \"This was agreed at commander level, but CIB3 overruled it.\" It left him staggered by their recklessness. The allegations against him appeared flimsy and riven with double standards. For example, Michael was accused of having police documents at home.\n\nRetired commander Roy Ramm, once in charge of all covert operations at Scotland Yard, says, \"If you searched almost any officer's home there would be a very high possibility you would find police related documents... I would often take documents home to work on them... Good officers always took papers home to do that extra bit of work... I know of one officer who was the most highly commended in the Met. At one stage his wife was single-handedly running the paperwork of the undercover unit.\"\n\nAnother allegation concerned a small terraced house in the North that Michael had inherited from his grandmother. He registered ownership with the local council under his pseudonym Michael Fenwick. The property was used for his undercover work and by other law enforcement agencies. CIB3, by now aware of Operation Florida, nevertheless tried to claim he was seeking to avoid Council Tax. DCI Chris Jones, head of Merseyside undercover unit, had been told about the arrangement and saw \"nothing wrong\" with it. Neither did Michael's boss at SO10. But by making an issue of the second home the Untouchables jeopardised other covert operatives who were using it as an accommodation address.\n\nFor the next ten months Michael waited for the Yard to realise its error and reinstate him. Out of the blue, he received a call on 16 November from his best man, detective inspector Tony Fuller. They had known each other for 15 years. Fuller had also introduced Michael to Beth and both wives shared a circle of friends.\n\nDetective superintendent Brian Moore, the man in charge of the Flying Squad corruption probe, had instructed Fuller to make an \"off-the-record\" approach to Michael with yet another highly suspect offer to join the Untouchables. His second.\n\nMichael secretly tape-recorded his meeting that afternoon at a pub in King's Cross. Fuller explained how Moore was about to meet with government lawyers and the deputy commissioner, who at the time was John Stevens, to discuss criminal proceedings against the suspended Flying Squad officers.\n\n\"My slate would be wiped clean if I agreed to do one of three things: make a statement and give evidence incriminating them; just make a statement; or make an intelligence report that would never be disclosed, detailing everything I knew about my time on the Flying Squad, including gossip. This would have been used to influence their bosses and judges.\"\n\nMichael was desperate to return to work. Moore was showing him a way back. It could all be so easy. But to take up the offer would mean accepting there was substance to the false allegations used to justify his suspension.\n\nMichael would not bend to his tormentors. He was innocent. And though yearning to see through all his undercover jobs, he could not work for the Untouchables. He had seen how Merseyside handled their corruption problem, and this offer just wasn't right. He told Fuller: \"There is a lot I want to say but nothing that I can help them with. I'm being pilloried for something I haven't done by an organisation that isn't really interested in my welfare. They've taken everything from me and I'm not going to allow them to get away with it. [The anti-corruption drive] is a media vehicle to achieve a political objective.\"\n\nFuller explained that Moore was willing to meet and personally make Michael the offer, but under one condition: no solicitor could be present. \"What's he got to hide?\" Michael retorted.\n\nMoore's offer had to be deniable because it drove a coach and horses through the law and exposed the case against Michael as a sham. It is arguable that the Untouchables were actually perverting the course of justice.\n\n\"How could Moore bring me 'back into the fold' if they genuinely believed there was evidence that I was a criminal? And if the offer was so above board, why couldn't my lawyer be there to hear it? My suspension was a softening-up process. I believe the Untouchables wanted me to work undercover and spy on the suspended officers. We all had the same lawyers, Russell, Jones & Walker, and I am convinced they wanted me to report back on legally privileged conversations. This is completely unlawful. I also couldn't believe they had sent Fuller. He had also served at the Flying Squad.\"\n\nIn December 1998, exactly one month after turning down Moore's offer, Michael was arrested at home in front of his distraught wife. CIB3 officers took him away to be interviewed. The couple had been married just over a year. \"Our relationship never had a chance,\" says Beth. She was two months pregnant at the time. Beth started bleeding heavily and later that day she miscarried. Since then, the couple have remained childless.\n\nDetective superintendent Phil Jones went ballistic when he found out Michael had been suspended. Operation Florida, which had looked so promising, now appeared fatally flawed.\n\n\"There were high level calls from Merseyside to the Met accusing SO10 of selling them 'damaged goods', was the phrase,\" recalls Michael. \"I told Phil I've done nothing wrong. I assured him I would not compromise his job. I didn't hear from him for a while but I later learned he was trying to make contact but the Yard was briefing against me, effectively saying I'd be charged and was never coming back to work.\"\n\nMerseyside was led to believe over many months that Michael was a thoroughly corrupt man heroically unmasked by the Untouchables. The impact on Operation Florida was enormous. Unassailable wiretap and probe evidence of Ward's willingness to pass on sensitive police intelligence to someone he must at least have suspected was connected to organised drug and track crime was severely tainted if this was true. The mere suggestion was enough to fatally damage any chance of a criminal prosecution. Consequently, Merseyside was forced to try and sack the now suspended detective inspector through disciplinary proceedings.\n\nMeanwhile in London, the Yard's vindictiveness against Michael was spiralling out of control, with no concern for its devastating effect on his family or Merseyside's corruption probe.\n\nA glimmer of hope came two years later in March 2000 when the Untouchables dropped all criminal proceedings against the debilitated undercover cop because there was simply no evidence he had done anything wrong at the Flying Squad. But of course having spent so much taxpayers' money incapacitating an effective and loyal detective, the illusion of ruthless efficiency needed to be maintained. Michael was therefore told he would remain suspended on full pay and face disciplinary proceedings.\n\nHis mental health was deteriorating fast and in September he went sick with severe depression associated with post-traumatic stress disorder. But Merseyside, having learned that the criminal charges had been dropped against their undercover operative, started to suspect Scotland Yard was misleading them.\n\nThe Untouchables already knew how Merseyside felt about Michael's undercover work. After all, the chief constable, Sir James Sharples, had written to the Yard in 1997 in glowing terms: \"As a consequence of your officer's motivation, effective communication and appropriate decision making whilst under pressure, significant progress has been achieved.\" Something the Yard could hardly say about its own anti-corruption drive. Sharples continued: \"I should like to place on record my personal thanks and appreciation for the conduct of the officer throughout this difficult enquiry.\"\n\nDCI Chris Jones of Merseyside's undercover unit had also later made a statement to the Untouchables that Michael's \"commitment, professionalism and conduct during the [Florida] enquiry was exemplary\". In October, Merseyside asked to see the disciplinary case against him. According to a source close to the discussions, CIB3 at first refused and then delayed.\n\nPhil Jones had another problem closer to home. Ward had discovered that his nemesis, Michael Fenwick, was in fact a suspended undercover officer from the Met. Furthermore, both men were represented by the same firm of Police Federation retained solicitors, Russell, Jones & Walker (RJW). Ward's defence was immeasurably emboldened by the revelation.\n\nEnquiries by Jones revealed the compromise was accidental and had apparently come from someone in Special Branch. Nevertheless, he was determined to press ahead with a disciplinary hearing against Ward and so demanded an immediate briefing from the Untouchables.\n\n\"As I understand it, the deputy chief constable of Merseyside intervened on Jones' behalf with the Yard and CIB3 was forced to give a presentation effectively justifying why I was being kept suspended,\" says Michael.\n\nIn November 2000, Phil Jones and Chris Jones travelled to London for the briefing. Afterwards, they met with Michael and his new solicitor Karen Todner at a caf\u00e9 in Liverpool Street station. Michael had left RJW, as had Ward, because of the conflict of interest.\n\nKaren Todner says: \"The [Merseyside] officers were advised [by the Untouchables] that they should not rely on Michael as a witness. The two officers therefore asked to look at all the papers. They told me that they reviewed all his papers at that time and were happy to rely on him as a witness of truth. They did not consider that his integrity was in question.\"\n\nMerseyside knew about Michael's mental condition and Beth's miscarriage. They approached the matter with a sensitivity so lacking in the Met. \"They asked Michael to strongly consider being a witness for them, otherwise they felt the disciplinary proceedings [against Ward] would be compromised,\" Todner adds.\n\nMichael told them he was willing to see the undercover job through but told Jones he was not the same sharp-eyed officer. The offer was a much-needed boost to his low self-esteem and a massive vindication of his innocence. For the first time in the history of the Untouchables, an outside force had audited its secret intelligence machine and found it seriously unconvincing.\n\nThis case exposes a secret and deniable strategy to use suspension as a tool to destroy and victimise innocent detectives who refuse to do the Untouchables' unlawful bidding or threaten them in some way.\n\nMichael couldn't complain to the Yard about the clear victimisation. Nor could he go to the Home Office. Neither can police officers complain to the watchdog. In effect, no mechanism exists for a police officer to have the grounds for his continued suspension independently assessed to ensure malice or a hidden agenda aren't working to suppress the truth.\n\nDirectly after the meeting at Liverpool Street, Michael's lawyer noticed they were under surveillance. To make sure, Michael alighted from the cab and went for a long walk into Soho. Along the route he photographed a surveillance team of two men and a woman. He then called the two Merseyside detectives who were by now on the train heading home. \"I said: 'I don't believe you would do this but I am being followed.' Chris Jones goes ballistic. He was worried I would feel they had set me up and this would stop me giving evidence. I understand that Phil Jones then spoke to CIB, who denied it was them but said they couldn't speak for another agency.\" It's well known that the Untouchables were occasionally using MI5 surveillance teams.\n\nFinally, in the first week of February 2001, detective inspector Steve Ward's discipline board took place. He was still pleading not guilty. There was a certain gamble that Michael would not show. But when the undercover cop arrived at the police building in Liverpool where the hearing was held, it is understood Ward changed his plea to guilty and was sacked. He had the Untouchables to thank for not having to face a criminal trial like his friend, Elly Davies, who was jailed in 1998 for five years.\n\nSurely now someone in Scotland Yard would recognise how unjust, inhumane even, was Michael's continued suspension? No criminal charges were outstanding and the discipline didn't add up to a hill of beans, an expression used by Phil Jones.\n\nBut the Untouchables had to stand firm. They could not afford to have Michael free of taint and thereby able to give evidence for the defence in the forthcoming Flying Squad trials. What would the Untouchables say if he revealed in court the unlawful attempt to use him as a live bug inside the defendant's legal meetings at RJW? All conversations and correspondence between a client and his solicitor are regarded by the courts as legally privileged and therefore should not be subject to any kind of surveillance.\n\nThe Yard seriously overestimated Michael's affinity for his suspended colleagues. Out of loyalty to SO10 he had kept his undercover involvement in Liverpool secret, even from the ones he liked.\n\nMany of the Flying Squad defendants were already suspicious of Michael's SO10 past. His lawyer, Karen Todner, explains: \"As [Michael] had previously been an undercover officer they could not understand why on earth he had been suspended as there appeared to be no evidence against him. They therefore believed he was in an undercover role to gain information against them and started to ostracise him.\"\n\nThis reached fever pitch when they discovered he was leaving RJW because of a conflict of interest. No one knew the details other than he was giving evidence against another officer \"up North\".\n\nMichael was in no psychological condition to withstand the double isolation from his SO10 colleagues and now those he'd been suspended with for three years. He stopped going to his local pub, where other coppers drank, and bought Sky to watch the football at home instead. But when the engineer came to install the black box, Michael shadowed him as he moved around the house. In his mind he remembered a discussion at the Flying Squad to develop a secret relationship with Sky so they could plant bugs in the box. After the engineer left, Michael ruined the box looking for listening devices. The engineer had to return to fix it.\n\nFor a man so adept at losing his police identity when going undercover, Michael was now desperate to be recognised as a policeman. Like the man made redundant who can't tell his wife and leaves the house every morning for \"work\", he would sometimes don a sharp suit and hang around the arcade near Scotland Yard hoping to \"bump into\" someone who knew him.\n\nKaren Todner realised her client was slipping into darkness. She wrote to Michael's MP, Stephen Timms, who was also junior Labour minister for education. Todner laid out the whole tragic personal cost and emphasised the cost to the taxpayer as well. This was both financial and a security cost, as her client's undercover operations in London had been withdrawn as a result of his suspension.\n\nTimms wrote the next day to home secretary Jack Straw mentioning all these matters and asked the simple question, \"Why does he remain suspended?\" After consulting with the Yard, Lord Bassam replied for Straw. He said Michael remained suspended because of police documents he had at home and \"other associated matters\".\n\nTimms was still frustrated by the injustice and wrote to commissioner Stevens arguing that his constituent's explanation for the documents was \"completely plausible and proper\". When will the matter end, he asked.\n\nCommander Graham James was the senior officer responsible for regularly reviewing Michael's suspension. He replied to Timms on behalf of the commissioner, claiming feebly that the police documents and the Council Tax allegation were \"both serious and question [Michael's] integrity\".\n\nThe undercover cop felt the Yard was \"deliberately misleading Parliament\". If it could do that, no end to his torment appeared in sight.\n\nBeth had known Michael for about six years before they married. Sometimes they would joke before going out about what she would say when asked what her partner did for a living. \"Tell them I'm in art and antiques,\" he'd reply.\n\nShe found the deceit more stressful than sexy. \"However, I was happy to support his career and accepted his belief that the Met was at the cutting edge of undercover work and as such the support offered to those officers who volunteered would be second to none. There have been many occasions I feared for his safety and the demands placed on him put a great strain on our relationship. To find that the organisation so willingly betrayed his loyalty appals me.\"\n\nSince her miscarriage the couple have undergone expensive IVF treatment, but to no avail. Michael carries the guilt of her \"unexplained infertility\" every day. She'd had no problems before the Untouchables ripped their lives apart. Her doctors tell her she is in \"biological meltdown\".\n\nBeth works for a major blue chip company. Her boss was appalled at the Yard's treatment of the couple and agreed to help extend her medical insurance to cover Michael.\n\nIn May 2001, Michael voluntarily admitted himself to a private psychiatric clinic. His psychiatrist believed there was a real risk of suicide. \"As I entered the clinic I still thought the Met would put things right, that I was going back to work, there would be a call any day now. I was contemptuous of other patients and what I felt was their inability to handle things. I was in complete denial,\" says Michael. He thought there were \"plants\" in the clinic and did surveillance on some of them. Eventually the denial gave way to tears and slowly the healing began.\n\nAfter a while, he wrote to us from what he called \"the Cuckoo's nest\": \"I still struggle to shed the skin that clings from a past life. But we can see again, darkness lifted. Each day another shell washes ashore that reminds me of my strengths and weaknesses... I'm afraid there wasn't much left in the tank so I guess it should come as no surprise to me that I find myself domiciled with a rather odd collection of broken biscuits. Yet I am beginning to feel a sense of understanding and warmth in their fractured gaze. For too long I've been in a darkness that became unbearable. Changes had to be made.\"\n\nMichael was released in August. But there was no change in the Yard's entrenched stance. He was told he would still face a disciplinary board, but only when the Flying Squad trials finished. That meant another year or more of darkness.\n\nMichael's psychiatrist was deeply disturbed this would lead to what he called \"regrettable consequences\" and urged the Yard to desist. A week later, on 13 November, the discarded undercover cop disappeared. He was due to be urgently readmitted to the clinic but never turned up. Michael knew the hope of ever regaining his career as a Level One undercover operative was gone. Suicide, he convinced himself, was the only way to break through the cover-up and expose the Untouchables.\n\nMichael drove his distinctive Mini Coup\u00e9 in a dreamlike altered state of consciousness up the M1 to the Yorkshire Moors. It was a place where he and Beth had been on walking holidays. At first he slept rough in the car for a few days, then he checked into a familiar B&B just outside Skipton.\n\nMichael planned his death with military precision. He identified a place on the Moors to park where his asphyxiated body would be found within days. A suicide note for Beth was secreted in the car lining. There was also one for the authors. It urged us to investigate the full circumstances surrounding his suicide, which at that stage were unknown because he had remained so loyal to the police.\n\nMichael elected to die by carbon monoxide poisoning. The next morning, after signing the Visitors' Book, he strolled purposefully around Skipton Market, stopping at an electrical stall where many pieces of hose were hanging from the metal frame like sausages. He selected one he thought would connect to his exhaust but soon realised he'd left his wallet at the B&B.\n\nMichael was undeterred. He turned to retrieve it. \"Suddenly, I could smell fresh fish. It reminded me of the town where I grew up. I followed the waft until I saw George Wilson by his fish hawkers van. He was wearing his white overalls. I hoped he hadn't seen me. He was very friendly with my dad. Suddenly I felt like a kid and my dad was beside me saying, 'What are you doing here, son?' It made me think how sad my suicide would have made him.\"\n\nMichael had enough change to buy a cup of tea in a nearby caf\u00e9. He sat there a while and cried quietly. After retrieving his wallet from the B&B, he drove to the Lake District. Overlooking a spiritual view, he had a further intense moment of clarity and hope. He didn't need to die.\n\nStill in a fugue, Michael headed south for Gosport in Hampshire, where he had once served as a submariner. He sat in the Naval Museum until closing time trying to recover his identity. The usher had to ask him to leave. Michael then attempted to drive to Portsmouth, but ended up dazed and confused in a building society in Brighton. The staff sat him down and found his psychiatrist's business card in his wallet. After a few calls, Met officers came to take him back to the clinic where he had failed to turn up one week earlier.\n\nBeth had imagined so many scenarios. For the first few days she clung to the belief that he was clearing his head and had \"gone to ground\" somewhere. Michael had left his passport and taken his walking boots and a grey V-neck sweater. But when none of his relatives or friends was contacted, it started to dawn on Beth that he was going to harm himself. In the days before he disappeared they had rowed and for the first time he spent the night on the couch.\n\nBeth is not battle hardy like her husband used to be. She avoids confrontation. \"But\", she says with unusual steel in her voice, \"if someone hurts the people I love, I'll go for them.\" After the search of their home she had complained to the PCA. They referred it back to the Untouchables who investigated themselves and found there was no substance to the complaint.\n\nBeth fumed when she learned that the same squad that had caused her husband's breakdown was muscling in on the search for him and no doubt planning a strategy for how his suicide would be spun through the media. She was on the precipice of going public herself when the call came that Michael had been found and was on his way back to the clinic. She didn't find out the details of his suicide plans for many months to come.\n\nAfter Christmas, Michael's solicitor sent an urgent letter to deputy commissioner Ian Blair seeking his immediate intervention to exonerate and let her client medically retire. The Untouchables had destroyed Michael. A well-trained, loyal and honest cop would never be fit for any kind of duty again.\n\nCommissioner Stevens and senior Untouchables vacillated for a further three months until deciding on an exit strategy.\n\nThere was one Untouchable absent from the star chamber \u2013 detective chief superintendent Chris Jarratt, the man who Michael says originally targeted him after he refused to work for the Dark Side. In March 2002, Jarratt was removed from his new post as head of all murder inquiries in south London after allegations from colleagues about bullying, expenses fraud and domestic violence. However, the allegation most relevant to Michael's case was that Jarratt had also abused his power as an Untouchable and its intelligence system to target officers he didn't like or by whom he felt threatened. Jarratt's fall from grace is fully explored in the next chapter.\n\nOn 22 April, after four and a half years, Scotland Yard withdrew all disciplinary proceedings and lifted Michael's suspension. He was allowed to medically retire with no stain on his record.\n\nJust to show there were no hard feelings, six months later he was invited to receive a long service and good conduct medal from Sir John Stevens. It was then that Michael handed the commissioner his letter.\n\nThe following year, Stevens dominated the news agenda when he published his third report into corruption and collusion between Loyalist death squads and British security forces in Northern Ireland. Over 14 years, his team of Scotland Yard detectives had been investigating the activities of a secret unit called the FRU inside the British Army, which had targeted Republicans for assassination.\n\nStevens told journalists that his report concluded there had been unethical and unlawful handling of informants, the withholding of compromising documents, the misleading of politicians and a general culture of cover-up and hostility towards his efforts to get at the truth. The commissioner even criticised the intelligence services for obstructing his inquiry. The media portrayed him as a champion of democratic accountability.\n\nMichael knows something of how the world of shadow warriors works. He accuses Stevens of condoning in London what he is happy to condemn in Belfast. \"The Untouchables are a secret unit inside Scotland Yard that is out of control and its methods should now be examined by a parliamentary inquiry.\"\n\nThe suggestion is gathering pace among a cross-party group of MPs. Not least among them is Andy Burnham, Labour member for Leigh and currently the parliamentary private secretary to home secretary David Blunkett. Burnham became involved through Michael's brother, a soldier in the Army and his constituent. \"He came to me and said this shouldn't be allowed to happen in the UK. And I agree.\"\n\nBurnham took up the case before he was appointed PPS, a stepping-stone to minister. No other issue has frustrated him more than this one, he says. Deputy commissioner Ian Blair briefed the MP and described the Untouchables as a world leader in anti-corruption work. Burnham felt he was \"complacent\".\n\nMany of the key players in this affair are now leading lights in UK policing. Ian Blair was knighted; Andy Hayman appointed chief constable of Norfolk; Brian Moore made a commander; and Tony Fuller has been promoted twice to superintendent and is the current head of the CIB intelligence cell, renamed the Intelligence Development Group.\n\nThe case of Undercover 599 is estimated to have so far cost the taxpayer over \u00a32 million. \"On a human level it is unbelievable what Michael and his family have been through,\" says Burnham.\n\nSir John Stevens never responded to Michael's letter. Undercover 599 left the police and has retrained as an actor.\n\n## [26\n\nIn-House](contents.html#ch26)\n\nOn 15 April 1998, police sergeant Gurpal Virdi reported for duty at Ealing division in west London refreshed from a short family holiday. Before starting work, he first took his young son and daughter to the dentist. As Virdi pulled out of his drive he noticed a strange car parked across the road. His suspicions were further heightened when, on turning the corner, he saw a marked police car. It too slotted in behind him. He took evasive action and returned home. The dentist would have to wait. The kids were so unhappy.\n\nVirdi went to confront the occupants of the car, which was once again parked outside his house. Before he reached them, flustered CIB officers rushed him and he was arrested on the spot. The offence, he could scarcely believe his ears, was sending racist hate mail to himself and other ethnic officers, and perverting the course of justice.\n\nSince late December 1997, 13 of the 15 ethnic officers on Ealing police division had been subjected to a racist hate mail campaign through the internal post. On Christmas Eve, a black officer received the first threatening letter. Below a crude computer-generated image of a black face, it stated: \"NOT WANTED. KEEP THE POLICE FORCE WHITE. SO LEAVE NOW OR ELSE. NF.\"\n\nVirdi had requested an independent inquiry, but senior officers at Ealing initially preferred to keep it in-house using their own officers even though some of them could have been suspects. Five days later the matter was referred to the local CIB unit. This did nothing to deter the racists inside the Met. Four weeks later a second batch of hate mail, designed to look like an official Met memo, was intercepted in the internal post. This time it was directed at eight ethnic civilian workers. Below the police crest the \"memo\" sinisterly stated: \"YOU ARE ORDERED TO LEAVE. YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE HERE. NF.\"\n\nVirdi's home was searched over seven hours in a way usually reserved for anti-terrorist operations. Among items seized was his daughter's new computer, a present for her tenth birthday. Later that day Virdi was suspended after sixteen years of unblemished service.\n\nNews of the arrest of an \"Asian man\" was immediately leaked to two crime correspondents at the _Daily Mail_ , Peter Rose and Steve Wright. Their article, published the following day, offered middle Englanders a digestible motive for the \"offence\" \u2013 the Asian officer had been passed over for selection to the detective branch and was laying the false ground for a racial discrimination claim. The _Mail_ also described commissioner Condon as furious and speculated that the arrest of an Asian officer would \"come as a shock to anti-racism campaigners who claim the police service is riddled with white bigots\".\n\nThis had all the hallmarks of one of those back-scratching exercises that go on between the Yard and its trusties in the media. \"As I fought to clear my name the _Daily Mail_ would feature again and again as the recipient of leaked information from Scotland Yard,\" says Virdi. \"I felt then, as I feel now, that I had lost my life, that I was now just a product on a production line. Regardless of my innocence or the feelings of myself, or my family, I was being used as a deflection device to draw public attention away from the very serious crisis the Met was embroiled in after the murder of Stephen Lawrence. They were expecting a hammering from the [public] inquiry and I firmly believe an element was looking to my case to provide a counterweight. I was picked on because I had complained persistently about racism. And I feel sure that if it hadn't been me then someone else would have been chosen as the fall-guy.\"\n\nA \"Restricted\" Met report reveals that Virdi's arrest was authorised by John Stevens and planned well in advance with an eye on the start of the Stephen Lawrence public inquiry in March 1998. A press strategy was also developed to give Virdi's ethnicity \"if asked\" by journalists.\n\nGurpal Virdi's Sikh father, an ex-policeman in Delhi, had warned his son against joining the Met. But young Virdi was headstrong and idealistic. He believed he could \"make a difference\" to the poorly served black and Asian communities in west London and jacked in his career with a pharmaceutical firm. Almost immediately after joining in 1982, Virdi says he experienced a \"barrage of racism\", bullying by senior officers and thwarted career development. But after a stint at the Yard working in SO11, he was finally promoted to police sergeant and sent to Ealing, a borough with a large Asian community, especially in Southall, where he grew up.\n\nJust before his arrest, Virdi had threatened to go over the head of his superiors at Ealing to Scotland Yard regarding the handling of a racist stabbing of an Iraqi and an Indian by a gang of five white boys. Virdi had arrived on the scene quickly and helped save the life of the most seriously injured victim. But the follow-up investigation had, in his view, been sloppy. The parallels with the Lawrence murder inquiry four years earlier were pointed out to his bosses. Several weeks later he was arrested.\n\nIt took almost a year after Virdi's suspension for the CPS to convince itself there was insufficient evidence to prosecute. Not least because the internal racist mailings had continued while Virdi sat at home. \"There was never any chance of my being found guilty before a proper court. I had a watertight alibi. At 4 a.m. on Christmas Eve, the precise time when I was supposed to be at Hanwell Police Station printing and distributing the racist hate mail, I could prove that I was two miles away at Acton Police Station, covering for their night shift so they could attend the Christmas do.\"\n\nBut the Yard was determined to have a show trial of its own making. The disciplinary board was composed of three white commanders, Richard Cullen, Alan Shave and Graham James. \"I told my wife Sathat that I would unquestionably be found guilty by the Met disciplinary board,\" says Virdi. \"The board was just something we had to go through to get to the employment tribunal. I had already filed a lawsuit ahead of the disciplinary board, and I was determined to prove that the Met had racially discriminated by giving me entirely different treatment from any of the white suspects for the sending of the racist hate mail.\"\n\nIn March 2000, after a four-week hearing, Gurpal Virdi was sacked. Assistant commissioner Michael Todd told the press pack the verdict was an entirely fair result and described the officer's actions as \"despicable\". _Newsnight_ senior reporter Peter Marshall recalls with considerable anger how the Yard's press office targeted him when he started to prepare an unsympathetic report. Todd was the senior Untouchable put up the day of the sacking to savage Virdi in a live studio interview after Marshall's report. \"There was a deliberate plan to fuck me up,\" says Marshall. It included discrediting him behind his back to the producer and BBC bosses.\n\nOne month later, Virdi's father died prematurely. His mother had passed away six months earlier never having seen her son clear his name. For a brief moment, Virdi considered suicide. His life and standing among the local community \u2013 he was a school governor \u2013 was, he believed, in ruins.\n\nHowever, the employment tribunal later found unanimously that he had been racially discriminated against in the way CIB conducted the investigation. Unlike his white colleagues, he had been subject to an entrapment operation, formally interviewed, his house searched, then he was arrested and suspended \"without sufficient evidence to support the allegations\".\n\nThe Yard had relied heavily on what it claimed was incontrovertible computer evidence to sack Virdi. But the employment tribunal now concluded the computer experts for the Yard were wrong.\n\nVirdi had been deeply unsatisfied with the attitude and service from the Police Federation and its retained solicitors, Russell, Jones & Walker (RJW), at the disciplinary hearing. Inexplicably, his legal team didn't challenge the computer evidence from a prosecution expert said to have a large software contract with the Met.\n\nAfter he was sacked, an independent computer consultant, Michael Turner, contacted Virdi with an astonishing story. Turner said he had warned the Federation before the disciplinary hearing about the varying quality of computer evidence but they declined to commission him.\n\n\"It was then that I figured out the Federation were not helping me but were covering up the truth,\" says Virdi. His new lawyers from the Commission for Racial Equality did contact Turner, whose evidence was clearly very persuasive to the employment tribunal. Turner's report argued that the Yard's computer case was \"junk science\". Timings were imprecise; evidence on the internal mail system suggested that the second set of racist letters were posted two days _before_ CIB claimed they were printed; there was widespread password abuse in police stations; there had also been a wholesale failure to secure and duplicate the relevant computer servers in a timely fashion; and by working on the original files it contaminated or erased a great deal of highly relevant evidence. \"No criminal court would have allowed the Virdi case to proceed... [This was] the first miscarriage of justice that resulted directly from the interpretation and misinterpretation of computer evidence,\" Turner concluded.\n\nIn August 2000, the employment tribunal awarded Virdi \u00a3150,000 compensation. The majority was for the \"high-handed\" way the Yard had behaved towards him and manipulated the media coverage. The Independent Advisory Group, a body set up with the Yard's agreement after the Lawrence Inquiry to monitor its performance on race crime, did not mince its words. It described CIB's \"disgraceful\" investigation as \"a high-profile character assassination\".\n\nThe next month the recently inaugurated Metropolitan Police Authority moved to investigate the operation against Virdi. Meanwhile, DAC Roy Clark commissioned an incredible and strictly internal report, which still claimed there was \"strong evidence\" of Virdi's guilt and that the initial investigation was \"thorough\" even though those doing it had \"little or no detective experience\". There had also been no proper record for critical decisions and a failure to follow up officers with possible links to the Far Right.\n\nAfter much delay and obstruction from the Yard, 15 months later the MPA produced its 170-page report. The Yard had denied the so-called watchdog timely access to its media strategy file on Virdi. But on the available evidence, the inquiry concluded there was a smear campaign against the Asian sergeant. The _Daily Mail_ 's crime correspondents had been the chief recipients of the Yard's drip feed. They had even been leaked private legal correspondence during Virdi's settlement negotiations with the Yard, which resulted in the exaggerated headline, \"SACKED RACE CASE POLICE OFFICER SEEKS \u00a32M PAYOUT\". The piece cast Virdi as the greedy exponent of the compensation culture, against more worthy recipients like maimed victims of crime.\n\nThe _Daily Mail_ had already meted out similar treatment earlier in the year to a detective constable called Sarah Locker after the Yard settled her appalling racial and sexual discrimination case.\n\nGurpal Virdi welcomed the MPA report but feels it had significant failings. \"I gave the MPA the names of 15 officers across a range of ranks who had a part in the campaign against me or who gave false evidence. Nothing has been done and some of these officers have even been promoted. My information has never been followed up. And there has never been a proper, professional police inquiry into who sent the racist hate mail... elements within the Met are very frightened of a professional inquiry into this.\"\n\nIn February 2001, Gurpal and Sathat Virdi met commissioner Stevens to hear how after wasting millions of taxpayers' money on a discriminatory and disproportionate CIB probe it was time to let bygones be bygones and feel reassured that lessons had been learned. Virdi had recently been reinstated and received a further \u00a3200,000 settlement from the Yard and a written apology from Stevens. In return he dropped his second employment tribunal for unfair dismissal.\n\nAfter months of agonising family debates on whether to return to the Met \u2013 Sathat was opposed \u2013 Virdi decided that being on the inside was the best way to fight racism and effect change. His decision to return in April 2001 meant foregoing \u00a375,000 of the award for loss of earnings.\n\nGurpal Virdi is now a detective sergeant. But he is considering retiring. He says the report DAC Clark commissioned has \"seriously damaged\" his career. He is also still receiving hate mail.\n\nSathat's complaint to the PCA about the search of her home was finally concluded five years later in January 2004. Again the Yard refused to provide the PCA with its media strategy file. Sathat had previously turned down a serious financial offer from the commissioner to drop her complaint. \"The PCA report was one-sided. I was promised officers would at least get words of advice, but nothing happened to them. We sent the report back to the PCA. There is no justice.\"\n\nGraham James, one of the three commanders who sacked Gurpal Virdi, thereafter joined the Untouchables as Head of Discipline and Civil Actions. He later adjudicated on the cases of undercover cop Michael and of DI John Redgrave, among others.\n\nWhat happened to commander James when his own integrity was called into question shows the arbitrary nature of internal investigations when they involve senior Untouchables.\n\nAfter his stint in the anti-corruption squad, commander James was seconded on promotion to the Immigration & Nationality Department, part of the Home Office, where he took charge of refugee removals. However, on 27 February 2003, the Home Office relieved him of his command and sent him back to Scotland Yard after an allegation of sexual harassment brought by a senior female civil servant he'd worked closely with for many months.\n\nThe Home Office made a reported \u00a3100,000 last-minute, out-of-court settlement to Janet Stewart in return for dropping her damaging employment tribunal case. James denied the allegations and claimed not to have been involved in the negotiated settlement. However, within a few months of being back at the Yard he was suspended, this time by the MPA, on 3 June 2003 over separate allegations of false mileage claims.\n\nJames was apparently due to retire in the summer and take up a job with a private company with police links. Part of the Venson Group's business is fleet management. James was once the commander in charge of the Met's fleet of 3,500 cars, vans and motorbikes. The maintenance and repair contract was privatised and in December 1998 the Met awarded Venson a 7-year contract worth \u00a318 million. But experts raised safety concerns. James found himself having to resolve complaints from police staff about shoddy maintenance, though he was still supportive of Venson's successful bid for a 25-year maintenance contract with Nottinghamshire Police worth \u00a362 million.\n\nHis suspension meant James couldn't retire to Venson until the MPA-supervised inquiry by the commissioner of the City of London police was completed. However, one month into it, the MPA decided to lift his suspension without any meaningful explanation. James was reinstated, but the inquiry into him continued for another five months. Then, on 5 November, he retired. As James was no longer suspended, there was nothing to stop him going before the inquiry had concluded. And once he had gone, the inquiry ended with the allegations unresolved.\n\nAnd what of Janet Stewart? She never returned to the Home Office.\n\nSuperintendent Ali Dizaei joined Scotland Yard on promotion from Thames Valley Police in March 1999, just a few weeks after the landmark Stephen Lawrence Report was published. Commissioner Sir Paul Condon was casting around for high-profile ethnic minority officers to make his force look less institutionally racist. Dizaei, with his law degree and doctorate in race and policing issues, fitted the bill. He was a vocal critic of what he perceived as racist selection processes and wasn't afraid to assert his rights through legal action.\n\nDizaei had come to Britain in 1973, six years before the Islamic revolution deposed the corrupt Shah regime, which his father served as a policeman.\n\nAfter a stint as staff officer to assistant commissioner Ian Johnston, Dizaei was posted to the affluent west London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where the most opulent and influential part of the Iranian community lives.\n\nIt was one of those classic contradictions that Dizaei's arrival at the Met was held up as evidence of the Yard's reformism, while elsewhere in the force Gurpal Virdi was being savaged by the same senior officers. But Dizaei's star did not shine for long. By September 1999 he too was secretly targeted by the Untouchables in a corruption probe that lasted four years and was later described in court as \"Orwellian\".\n\nThe Untouchables had received intelligence linking Dizaei to the recreational use of cocaine and associating with a known drug dealer and prostitutes. DAC Roy Clark gave authority to tap Dizaei's work phone. Clark also wrote on the application form that he had been \"fully briefed\" with \"verifiable and quality information\". Dizaei's barrister, Michael Mansfield QC, would later claim the Untouchables knew this was \"palpably untrue\".\n\nThe secret operation into Dizaei was codenamed Bitten. After listening to hundreds of calls, by October CIBIC officer Stephen Wilkinson was telling his bosses there was \"nothing to suggest\" Dizaei used drugs or was involved in serious crime. A CIBIC report dated 11 November 1999 supports Dizaei's contention that he was being targeted because the Yard feared his new role as vice president of the National Black Police Association (NBPA). It described him as having \"an influential role within the [Met]\" and someone who had \"the ear of many prominent and powerful figures in politics and throughout the BPA\". This included home secretary Jack Straw and Tony Blair.\n\nThe Metropolitan Police chapter of the BPA was set up that autumn with an office inside the Home Office as well as the Yard. Straw attended the inauguration in October and welcomed the BPA as advisers to his department on diversity issues and ethnic recruitment. But to some senior Yard managers they were an enemy within.\n\nDizaei was also the NBPA's legal adviser. By bugging his work phone the Untouchables were in danger of breaking laws preventing the interception of \"legally privileged\" conversations between a client and lawyer. DAC Clark knew this and instructed that CIBIC should not make or pass transcripts of these intercepted calls to the Untouchables. A senior officer in the CIB intelligence cell, Bob Berger, was deputed to keep such calls to himself.\n\nHowever, it later emerged that the anti-corruption officers investigating Dizaei were passed transcripts of these legal conversations, contrary to written assurances from police minister John Denham to Tory MP Peter Bottomley. He had been a vocal critic of the Met over the Virdi scandal and believed the anti-corruption squad was targeting the BPA for political reasons. It has never been revealed which Untouchables were responsible for the leak and for misleading the minister and Parliament.\n\nThe phone-taps did reveal Dizaei had a full sex life with several lovers. But because he was married, this was described in one CIB intelligence report as \"unethical\". His wife knew about the lovers because they had an open marriage and were only staying together for the sake of their three young children. Unorthodox maybe, but the Untouchables were looking every bit as prurient as the Ayatollah Khomeini.\n\nThe sex and drugs allegations were augmented by unsubstantiated \"concerns\" that Dizaei was involved with what the Untouchables called \"major criminals\" carrying out a so-called advance fee fraud. The six men were all given codenames after famous composers. Dizaei was \"Mozart\". This part of the corruption probe, had it been made public, would have provoked a diplomatic incident because one of the five suspects was the Liberian ambassador.\n\nIn January 2000, the corruption probe into Dizaei was taken over by a newly appointed Untouchable, detective superintendent Barry Norman. He was directly responsible to commander Andy Hayman and detective chief superintendent Bob Quick. The flagging Operation Bitten was renamed Helios and received a much needed boost when the mother of one of Dizaei's former lovers, Mandy Darougheh, an Iranian national, raised the spectre of espionage.\n\nDizaei had split acrimoniously with Mandy and left abusive and threatening calls on her answerphone. Her mother told Norman she felt Dizaei knew \"exceptional details\" of her husband's incarceration in Iran on suspicion of working for MI6 and had boasted of high connections \u2013 Dizaei was in fact a personal friend of the Iranian ambassador. Suddenly, he was under investigation for having an \"unhealthy relationship\" with Iranian Intelligence. His barrister would later claim the alleged threat to national security was in effect fabricated to keep Operation Helios burning and to justify 17 months of further intrusive surveillance, as the drugs allegations were going nowhere.\n\nPart of Dizaei's job at Kensington was to liaise with the many embassies in the borough. Had the Untouchables done their homework it would have been clear that his visits to the Iranian Embassy were reported to Special Branch.\n\nOn 25 August 2000, the Operation Helios team met with Hayman and Quick to discuss what they should do about Dizaei. There was a strong hint of panic because two days earlier the employment tribunal had upheld Virdi's claim of victimisation. The Untouchables were concerned that if all its efforts resulted in disciplinary offences and nothing criminal, Operation Helios would also look like a racist witch-hunt.\n\nNorman would later explain to the court how some secret \"new intelligence\" fortuitously emerged around this time, which justified continuing the intrusive surveillance against Dizaei on national security grounds. The trial judge was persuaded by the Untouchables' PII application not to disclose any details. But the so-called \"fresh intelligence\" can't have been very compelling, because Dizaei has never been charged with offences under the Official Secrets Act.\n\nNorman tried on three occasions to trap Dizaei in 2000 using undercover officers, deployed at great expense. He and two Untouchables flew to Los Angeles to brief a Farsi-speaking US undercover cop. His brief was to approach Dizaei at a business conference he was speaking at, with a request for moody visas to the UK. The sting came to nothing.\n\nIn London, plans were drawn up to rent a large flat in Kensington for an undercover cop called \"Billy\". He was to befriend Dizaei at his gym and see if he was involved in drugs, fraud, anything. According to a report by the Untouchables' Integrity Testing Unit, the scheme \"produced nothing\".\n\nThe third attempt involved using a detective investigating the murder of the Adams crime syndicate's money launderer, Solly Nahome. He approached Dizaei and asked what he knew about one of the suspects, a man named in court as Jimmy Sanchez and described by CIB as an associate of the Liberian ambassador. The hope was that Dizaei would alert Sanchez. Again, the Untouchables were forced to concede there was \"no evidence\" of a connection between the two men.\n\nYet in January 2001 Ali Dizaei was suddenly suspended on full pay. The Untouchables now admit they took the decision for two extraordinary reasons: firstly, he was about to go on the senior command course, the gateway to the top tier of British policing, and secondly because it was more than likely he would also be elected the new president of the NBPA.\n\nThe decision to suspend Dizaei was taken at a very high level. Assistant commissioner Michael Todd read out the allegations to Dizaei. These included claims he had perverted the course of justice, was dishonest and lacked integrity. After over a year of no accountability, the internal operation was referred to the PCA, a body which had so frequently demonstrated its political affinity with the commissioner's anti-corruption message. The Yard tried to claim it had previously involved the Independent Advisory Group, who had recently criticised them over the Virdi affair. But a few weeks after Dizaei's suspension, four black and Asian lay members left in protest, saying this was not the case. Their resignation letter on 12 February said:\n\nWe feel that we can no longer remain members of the IAG because it is now explicitly controlled by the police [and] in the past 18 months has lost its critical distance, its capacity to challenge, its independence... All efforts to pull back have been sabotaged from both the police and some members of the IAG. In particular, the chair [Beverley Thompson] has, in our view, become too close to the police to be able to ask difficult questions... We cannot in good faith be part of a group that is supposed to be comprised of the organisation's \"sternest critics\", when this is clearly no longer the case. We cannot remain as nodding dogs who will not speak out for Londoners.\n\nIn December 2001, Dizaei was charged with misconduct in a public office and perverting the course of justice. These charges at first blush appeared to be the top end of corruption and left the impression Operation Helios had finally come across something that would justify all the expense and surveillance. But on further examination, Dizaei and his legal team were amazed to learn the prosecution case related to an incident in September 2000 when someone had carved cross-like shapes on the panels of his distinctive BMW. That same day, black detective constable Delroy Anglin had his car tyres slashed near his south London police station. And over at the Yard, deputy assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, whom Condon had brought from Lancashire Police, received hate mail.\n\nJohn Grieve's CIB spin-off, the Racial and Violent Crimes Task Force (CO24), started an investigation codenamed Operation Athena-Frieze. Grieve told the investigating officer the three attacks could be a reaction to the Virdi case and suggested she liaise with Operation Helios. Norman strained credulity when he later told the court his men didn't mention to CO24 that they had a surveillance team on Dizaei the day his car was attacked. The Untouchables knew Dizaei had lied about where the car was parked when he discovered the damage. He had claimed it was nearer Kensington police station.\n\nThere was no suggestion by the Yard that Dizaei had done this because he caused the damage to his own car. He later explained he had lied because he was on his way to a BPA meeting even though his boss at Kensington had told him not to go. The Untouchables however argued the lie was told to increase Dizaei's profile as a victim of racist police. And as a result, 56 hours of police time were wasted on inquiries and reconstructing the attack in the wrong location, they claimed.\n\nDizaei's behaviour did raise serious questions, but was this really a criminal matter? Or was it, as his barrister suggested, more the case that the Untouchables had seized on this to justify the covert operation? Drugs, prostitutes, major fraud and, of course, espionage had all been whittled down to wasting 56 hours of police time.\n\nMansfield tried unsuccessfully to get the case thrown out during a preliminary hearing in July 2002 and later in February 2003. He accused the Untouchables of acting in \"bad faith\", or at the very least, being grossly negligent.\n\nOver 100 officers were deployed from CIB, SO10, CO24, MI5, Special Branch, NCIS, Forensic Science Services, Forensic Telecom Services, the Inland Revenue, the FBI, the DEA, Beverly Hills Police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Dizaei was kept under surveillance for 91 days using static cameras, bag cameras and old-fashioned photographers. A staggering 3,500 phone calls were monitored, his bank accounts were accessed, his friends, associates and legal team were researched and profiled, people at restaurants he frequented were interviewed and the owners questioned to see if he did anything improper and whether like a good Muslim he ate Halal meat. Every taxi driver he submitted a receipt from was traced. A woman in the public gallery at the Old Bailey started laughing when it was explained that even his dry cleaner was approached to see if he had asked for a discount. The scale of Operation Helios made a mockery of Ian Blair's claim that they had learned lessons from the Virdi affair. It is hard to imagine any of the Untouchables withstanding this level of scrutiny.\n\nMansfield said the Yard had faced a \"proportionality dilemma\": an investigation takes on a life of its own. It becomes self-justificatory, self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating, in that once you have gone so far you have to keep going, keep spending public money to justify what you've done. A focused investigation then becomes a fishing expedition to get anything. The risk, he said, was it then turns into a witch-hunt where there has to be some form of criminality. The Untouchables were \"a law unto itself\", and a \"state within a state\" that became \"obsessed\" with his client.\n\nAnd how much had Operation Helios cost? The Yard came up with a figure of \u00a32.2 million. The BPA say it's nearer \u00a37 million. Norman told Mansfield there was no costing of the operation at the time he took over. \"I was never troubled by the amount of money we were spending,\" he said.\n\nUnder further cross-examination, Norman denied embellishing any surveillance applications or cutting and pasting tired allegations onto new surveillance applications just to keep the operation running. He also used Roy Clark's defence in the Brennan trial \u2013 simple research couldn't be done to test an allegation for fear of alerting Dizaei. Mansfield countered that these \"concerns\" were actually \"designed to linger\" and had been used to brief influential figures against Dizaei, especially Jack Straw and his number two at the Home Office, John Denham.\n\nNorman eventually admitted there was no evidence of Dizaei misusing drugs, just intelligence. Despite the battering, Judge Michael Hyam refused to throw out the case, thereby forcing a jury trial. In his reasoning, Hyam said Operation Helios had made mistakes, but the investigation was necessary, it was by the book and with no element of bad faith or gross negligence.\n\nThe jury didn't see it that way. And even though they heard Dizaei admit lying about his car's location, on 11 April 2003 he was unanimously acquitted after less than one day's deliberation. It was another humiliating blow for the Untouchables, but the media couldn't report it because, remarkably, there was the possibility of a second trial.\n\nThat prosecution was even shakier than the first. It involved allegations of inflated mileage claims totalling a whopping \u00a3270. The Yard asked for more time to consider whether to proceed with the second trial at the Old Bailey, which costs the taxpayer roughly \u00a310,000 per day.\n\nThe play for time meant the tenth anniversary of the murder of Stephen Lawrence would not be marked with media commentary about how the Dizaei and Virdi cases showed Scotland Yard had learned nothing \u2013 a point the BPA and several MPs, including Peter Bottomley, were preparing to make at a press conference. This was cancelled and in its place London TV viewers were treated to a spoon-fed item on commissioner Stevens in riot gear and Lord Toby Harris of the MPA opening a new \u00a35 million riot training centre in Kent.\n\nDizaei's solicitor, Ian Lewis, was amazed to discover two weeks later that the Yard _was_ going to proceed with the second trial. Senior CIB sources told us there had been much debate inside the Yard. The new operational head of the anti-corruption squad, DCS Shaun Sawyer, was opposed to a second bite at the cherry, but had been overruled. Lewis felt the Untouchables needed to convict Dizaei to mitigate the mauling they would expect at his forthcoming employment tribunal.\n\nCertainly the desire to prosecute Dizaei was in stark contrast to how those in charge of Operation Helios had dealt with expenses fiddles by a junior CIB3 detective.\n\nAt the time Dizaei was under investigation, DC Mark Pudney was working on a separate highly sensitive covert investigation. Pudney's line manager was Bob Quick, the senior officer who considered the operation against Dizaei was proportional.\n\nOn 5 October 1999, Pudney was informally disciplined for falsifying his duty logs and falsely claiming overtime and a meal. During an informal interview with CIB officers, Pudney admitted the offence. He then protested, \"But there are other people in the office including supervisors who don't keep up to date with their duty states.\" These are supposed to be accurately filled in to ensure a truthful record of an officer's whereabouts during an investigation. Failure to do so can lead to trials collapsing because of a lack of integrity in the evidence chain.\n\nNevertheless, the Untouchables decided not to bring criminal charges against Pudney for the false expense claims. The CPS and PCA weren't consulted, nor was a formal disciplinary board thought necessary. Instead, DCS David Wood decided \"the most appropriate course of action was to deal with the matter immediately by official caution\" and quietly kick Pudney off CIB3.\n\nWhen these double standards were put to the Yard, we got a totally misleading reply. The press office claimed Pudney had never alleged routine non-compliance with duty logs. Of course, there would be no truth then in the assertion that the Untouchables didn't put DC Pudney on trial or even on a disciplinary board because he was a prosecution witness.\n\nThe Pudney and James cases pale into insignificance when compared to the double standards at work over the special treatment of senior Untouchable, detective superintendent Chris Jarratt, when he was accused of doing the same and a lot worse than Ali Dizaei.\n\nJarratt has served his entire career in south London, starting at Peckham, then Greenwich before his first serious detective posting on the Brixton Robbery Squad in the late eighties. By then it already had a reputation for corruption and racism that predated the riots of 1981. Detectives on the squad had a specially designed tie with five playing cards, all spades. Geddit?\n\nJarratt later transferred to the Tower Bridge office of the Flying Squad, where there was already a terrible stink of corruption, typified when a vital exhibit \u2013 a shotgun \u2013 went missing. In 1991, he became a detective inspector and took charge of the highly sensitive David Norris murder inquiry, working to superintendent Ian Crampton, who was godfather to one of Jarratt's young sons. After a one-year sabbatical at Exeter University, Jarratt returned in 1993 to work in Southwark on a proactive squad under his mentor David Wood. That's when they set up the pawnshop sting using undercover officer Michael. In 1996, Jarratt was appointed staff officer to assistant commissioner David Veness, a sure sign he was working his way into the Yard's inner circle. From there he was recruited the following year by Roy Clark and reunited with David Wood to run the new CIB intelligence cell. As head of intelligence and covert operations, Jarratt was intimately involved in developing stings and participated in assessing the phone-taps on Ali Dizaei.\n\nIn January 2000, Jarratt was given a new post of restructuring the anti-corruption squad. It was an odd posting for such a proactive detective and made some wonder whether it was connected to a complaint that Jarratt had made false allegations of corruption against a detective who refused to break the rules governing the bugging of prisoners.\n\nSergeant Dave Cross was in charge of the Yard's Prison Liaison Unit. His men were based at prisons in the greater London area and facilitated police access through the Home Office and prison governors. A part of his job was highly sensitive. The Prison Liaison Unit, attached to SO11, has responsibility for bugging cells, prison visits and, more controversially, the legally privileged conversations between inmates and their solicitors. One method used is the \"talking table\", so-called because it has an in-built bug and is placed in the prison waiting-rooms or the specially assigned rooms for legal conferences.\n\nCross was a stickler for the paperwork required to authorise this level of surveillance. He had dealt with many police squads during his seven years at the Prison Liaison Unit, but felt the Untouchables displayed an arrogance and total disregard for the rules. It wasn't just Cross. His staff had voiced their concerns since 1997. The Untouchables \"were trying to pull strokes\", he told us. \"Breaking the rules, threatening people, staff and prisoners, trying to make unlawful visits without visiting orders \u2013 you name it, they are doing it. And we said that in the minutes of meetings.\"\n\nCross had complained directly to the Home Office Police Advisers, who promised to do something. But little had changed by 1999, when he had his own run-in with Jarratt. The cause was a rushed request from the CIB intelligence cell to video an ex-cop visiting an inmate. Cross organised the filming but refused to release the video without the paperwork.\n\nJarratt complained to SO11. The resulting investigation cleared Cross. But the matter didn't end there. Some time later Jarratt gave a speech as part of the CIB road show taken to various police stations to explain their work. In the audience was a friend of Dave Cross. He reported back that Jarratt had apparently referred to an operation that was compromised because of an unnamed, corrupt prison liaison officer.\n\nCross believed this was a reference to him and discussed his grievance with a senior officer who discouraged him from pursuing the matter. He refused and made a formal complaint about Jarratt to commander Andy Hayman. But he says Hayman refused to give Jarratt a formal reprimand. Cross's lawyer, Martin Murray, an ex-superintendent in the Met, feels the decision not to formally investigate Jarratt was almost certainly determined by the knock-on effect a more severe reprimand would have had on the anti-corruption squad.\n\nCross complained about Hayman, alleging he was covering up for Jarratt. Fearing reprisals from the Yard and feeling the pressure of the situation, Cross also took sick leave until retiring. He has never tried to sue the police.\n\nJarratt's rise was unaffected. He briefly returned to Brixton as commander Paddick's number two. In a self-assessment of his policing skills, Jarratt claimed the credit for initiating \"the new cannabis debate\". But he was less forthcoming about his role in the loss of 26 kilos of cannabis during the CIB3 sting that netted McGuinness and Garner. In late April 2001, Jarratt was promoted to detective chief superintendent and took responsibility for all murder squads in south London. He never lost contact with the Untouchables and kept a watching brief on Dizaei and other cases. He was also preparing for the final interview before becoming a commander. But a quiet storm was gathering among the 400 detectives and civilian staff he was now responsible for.\n\nOn Friday, 8 March 2002, Jarratt was expecting a performance visit from the head of all of London's detectives, DAC Bill Griffiths. He arrived with commander Andre Baker and instead \"removed\" Jarratt from his post, pending an internal inquiry. When we contacted the press office next day they were tight-lipped, in marked contrast to the private briefings and press releases prepared for crime correspondents when Paddick, Virdi, Dizaei, Locker, Redgrave and other \"targets of the Untouchables\" needed to be publicly humiliated.\n\nJarratt didn't return our call. He wasn't being rude; he was on holiday in Antigua with his new girlfriend, Samantha Bird, the Met lawyer who was dealing at the time with the John Wilson case.\n\nIt escaped no one's attention that, unlike Dizaei, Jarratt had not been suspended. Yet the criminal and disciplinary allegations against the Untouchable were quite extraordinary: financial impropriety, oppressive conduct towards staff, abuse of power in the anti-corruption squad to target people he didn't like, and violent assaults on a former girlfriend.\n\nWhile he was a serving Untouchable, complaints against Jarratt were easy to dismiss as part of a campaign by corrupt cops and their friends to undermine his work. But senior detectives and experienced administration staff with no obvious axe to grind were harder to ignore. The Yard must have considered all options before removing Jarratt, knowing what the implications for ongoing corruption cases would be. Another consideration was a front-page murder trial that the media had made a test case of how much the Yard had really learned since the Lawrence Inquiry.\n\nIn November 2000, Damilola Taylor, a ten-year-old, Nigerian-born boy, was fatally stabbed with a bottle on the North Peckham Estate. Jarratt inherited the high-profile murder inquiry. He was in overall charge when four white boys were arrested and charged. Jarratt had also overseen the debriefing of a key teenage witness known as \"Bromley\", who came forward after the _Daily Mail_ offered a \u00a350,000 reward.\n\nJarratt had boasted to his superiors how, as an \"acknowledged expert on resident source debriefing\", he had taken over the inquiry from detectives he described as \"risk adverse and concerned that their personal credibility would be damaged\". He went on to suggest that his encouragement of the use of \"controversial tactics\" ultimately led to Bromley becoming a prosecution witness.\n\nBut one month after Jarratt fell from grace, the Damilola case ended with all four defendants acquitted and the police on trial in the media and parliament. Bromley had been branded a liar by the judge and her evidence thrown out. The defence tore apart the way she had been debriefed and the use of financial inducements to effectively keep her sweet \u2013 a gerbil, phone calls, a promise of trainers and a holiday, a walkman, a trip to the seaside. No, this wasn't _The Generation Game_ but a replica of the unlawful way the Untouchables secretly debriefed their supergrasses. No wonder that before the trial Bromley, no doubt thinking of the newspaper reward, was once recorded singing, \"I'm in the money.\"\n\nDAC Bill Griffiths had told the media the Damilola Taylor investigation was \"by the book\" and there was no comparison with the Lawrence case. Nevertheless, commissioner Stevens conceded an independent inquiry headed by an old adversary, Bishop John Sentamu, the former adviser to the Lawrence Inquiry.\n\nWhile the Bishop conducted his inquiry over the summer of 2002, the internal investigation into Jarratt was producing some very compromising information about what was really going on inside the south London murder squads responsible for investigating Damilola's killing. None of what follows we understand was shared with the Bishop.\n\nInternal documents show there had been an unprecedented mutiny by Jarratt's detectives before the Damilola trial. His \"dictatorial\" management style had run down staff morale so badly that senior management believed all nine murder teams had been ineffectual during the Damilola investigation. Detective chief inspector Paul McAleenan, for instance, revealed in his statement that over 100 officers had asked to transfer during the ten months of Jarratt's reign. DCI McAleenan and other senior officers suggested Jarratt was more concerned with getting promoted to commander than the core function of murder squads.\n\nFurthermore, just before Damilola's death, all murder squads across London were being cut back because there had been serious mismanagement of the 2001\u20132002 budget, leading to a \u00a320 to \u00a330 million overspend.\n\nThe internal investigation into Chris Jarratt was headed by DAC Steve House and billed by the Yard as \"independent\". House, the press office told us, had come from Staffordshire Police. But he went there from the Met and had been back for some time. So the inquiry was very much in-house and wasn't referred to the PCA.\n\nUnlike the investigation of Dizaei, Jarratt was not put under surveillance. His phones weren't tapped. He was not subject to undercover integrity tests and every facet of his past life was not scrutinised. The House inquiry was reactive and kept within a limited period of ten months when Jarratt was in charge of south London murder squads.\n\nAlthough DAC House was not intending to examine Jarratt's conduct at the anti-corruption squad, there was one allegation that did spill over and was potentially very embarrassing for two other Untouchables \u2013 Brian Moore and Shaun Sawyer. In the autumn of 2001, all three were studying for the last stages of the selection process to become commanders. Jarratt was accused of misleading the head of Bramshill College to get three free rooms and facilities for five days by falsely claiming they were needed for police work. Moore and Sawyer said they were unaware of this, and had expected to pay. But they were eventually persuaded the fee had been waived.\n\nAfter returning from his holiday Jarratt was moved to a desk job at human resources. This was a curious posting given that some of the allegations emerging involved severe bullying and intimidation of staff.\n\nJust over a week before Jarratt was sent home his number two and the personnel manager challenged him about bullying, which he denied. Statements given to DAC House show Jarratt's supervisors at the Yard were aware of the problem months before they finally removed him.\n\nMark Benbow, the detective superintendent in charge of all informants in south London, told the internal inquiry Jarratt operated a climate of fear, was vindictive to officers he didn't like and female staff were \"terrified\" of him. Jarratt's staff officer, detective inspector Kevin Clingham, described how his boss's idea of feedback was to get him to tell a female member of his staff \"she smelt of cigarettes and her feet stank\". Julia Minton, the personnel manager with 17 years in the Met, recalled making a mistake and feeling \"so frightened that Mr Jarratt would be angry that I felt physically sick and was in tears\". She also spoke about a male detective inspector who had confided in her that he was so upset by Jarratt's treatment he felt like harming himself. Another experienced manager, Sally Derbyshire, gave this portrait of Jarratt: \"He looks at you as though you are a complete idiot and makes you feel totally worthless. He is not at all approachable and is in fact a bully who likes to totally control people... He treats people like a commodity and with no respect... The only thing he is interested in is his [commander's exam] and he expects people to sweat blood so that he is successful. I am not afraid of anyone except Mr Jarratt and I hope I never have to meet him again.\"\n\nOne of the most shocking allegations was of actual bodily harm on a former girlfriend, Linda Rolfe, whom Jarratt had left in the eighties for the woman he eventually married, another police officer called Melinda. However, that marriage broke up in 2000 and Jarratt was seeing Met solicitor Samantha Bird when Rolfe made her statement.\n\nRolfe did not seek out the House inquiry. He approached her after collating other statements from serving officers who referred to it being \"common knowledge\" that Jarratt had assaulted Rolfe and his estranged wife. Rolfe's statement was not hearsay and she struck the House inquiry as very measured. She didn't want it used to charge Jarratt with actual bodily harm, but purely for a disciplinary hearing.\n\nThey had lived together from 1982 to 1985. She described Jarratt as ambitious and \"very money orientated\". She said on two occasions he \"seriously assaulted\" her at home. She gave excuses at work of having fallen down the stairs. After one assault she said Jarratt dropped her at the hospital. \"Chris made threats he would use his Masonic links to ruin my father's career if I ever reported the violence.\"\n\nRolfe's best friend and fellow officer Deborah Bott made a supporting statement recalling how Linda had once sought refuge in her flat with bruises on her face. Detective sergeant Gary Flood also made a statement that Jarratt had victimised him since they served at Brixton in the mid-eighties, because he knew about the assaults on Linda Rolfe. Their paths didn't cross again until 2001, when Jarratt became Flood's boss.\n\nFive detectives, including Jarratt's number two, superintendent Adrian Maybanks, supported Flood's account. They all made statements knowing how well connected Jarratt was at the Yard and what the consequence might be for their careers.\n\nFlood says Jarratt smeared him to colleagues as a drunk and a gambler. From then on Flood kept timed and dated notes of every incident. This included the day he noticed a tail on his way to work. He traced the car registration to the Military Police Intelligence Section. \"These were the actions of a man who appears out of control,\" Flood said in his statement.\n\nThe \"vendetta\" also had an effect on his wife who was having IVF treatment at the time. It failed. Flood saw a counsellor because he felt he was losing it. When his transfer was blocked, he went sick. Flood's solicitor unsuccessfully complained to commander Andy Hayman, who already knew about Dave Cross's concerns. The House inquiry had tried to interview Cross. But he suspected another \"damage limitation exercise\" and declined to be interviewed. The request by his MP, Tory John Horam, for an independent inquiry by an outside constabulary fell on deaf ears.\n\nFinally, there was detective sergeant Steve Reeves. He complained Jarratt had unfairly and improperly put him on the Yard's secret blacklist of corrupt and unethical cops out of personal animosity, and then had breached confidence by telling junior officers.\n\nIntelligence documents we've seen give a rare glimpse into the sinister nature of the Yard's secret blacklist and make a compelling case that it should be abandoned immediately as failing to serve the public or the police.\n\nReeves and Jarratt first met at Peckham police station and then on the Tower Bridge Flying Squad. In October 2001, Jarratt notified Reeves he was subject to the Service Confidence Policy and moved him off the murder squad to a non-operational role in Streatham. Reeves was not told (and still does not know) why or on what grounds he had been included under the procedure. He had never been interviewed in respect of any complaint, nor had he been arrested or disciplined. He immediately set about exercising his right to appeal the decision. The matter was eventually referred to Robert Dellegrotti, the senior official who reviews the blacklist.\n\nReeves suspected his inclusion on the blacklist related to his past association with officers, probably from Tower Bridge and later when he served at the Swanley SERCS office. When he appealed, DCS Shaun Sawyer of the anti-corruption squad urged Dellegrotti to turn it down. There was nothing to suggest Sawyer spoke from any personal knowledge when he wrote: \"DS Reeves was first included within the Service Confidence procedure within the first nine months of its initiation. This was based on intelligence sources spanning corrupt activity over nearly a decade, the majority of which was A1 material i.e. indisputable but not in this case discloseable. Other commitments prevented the targeting of Reeves after 1998; however, his not being dealt with overtly, on the balance of probabilities, suggests he maintained corrupt contacts as this was his modus operandi... There is no evidence or intelligence to indicate DS Reeves 'reformed' between 1998 and 2001... The views of the CPS make clear that DS Reeves' currency as a witness of truth is untenable.\"\n\nThe Untouchables had indeed briefed Martin Polaine, the head of the CPS Visa team, but had neither named Reeves nor provided specific intelligence. Polaine just took it on trust that what the Untouchables were telling him was \"very reliable\".\n\nDellegrotti was far less impressed. He granted DS Reeves' appeal in April 2002, but not before saying this in his extraordinary report: \"There is clear intelligence up to early 1998 to show sufficient grounds for the inclusion of the officer... Nevertheless the policy allows the possibility of rehabilitation and there is nothing recorded any later than early 1998.\" He later told the House inquiry he was concerned that \"very strong assertions [about Reeves]... were not fully backed up by current intelligence in the case of 'continued association' and by reliable intelligence in the case of recycling drugs. The form regarding the latter was undated, not signed, not evaluated, poorly written and extremely vague.\"\n\nThe whole episode begs some very important questions. If DS Reeves was really as bad as had been claimed, why was he not prosecuted, or even interviewed under caution? And what were the 'other commitments' that prevented the Untouchables targeting him after 1998? Of course the main preoccupation that year was riding out the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry hearings and the family's insistence that there was a corrupt association between south-east London detectives and drug dealers.\n\nWas it a coincidence that DS Reeves served on the same squad as the infamous Dave Coles, known in the Lawrence Inquiry as Sergeant XX, who was once covertly videoed in highly suspicious circumstances with drug dealer Clifford Norris, the father of the main murder suspect? And how many other cases like that of DS Reeves are there in the Met, which the Untouchables haven't got round to dealing with because of 'other commitments'? Finally, it's clear from Dellegrotti's comments that the blacklist is wide open to abuse not just by an individual officer using it for a personal vendetta, as Reeves suggested, but also as a means of silencing the Yard's internal critics and whistleblowers.\n\nDS Reeves has always denied any wrongdoing and remains a serving detective sergeant with nearly 30 years service.\n\nOn 17 January 2003, DAC House finally interviewed Jarratt under caution, almost one year after he was removed from his post. An Old Bailey judge responsible for the second Flying Squad trial had warned the Yard to get a move on, but this had had little effect. Whatever decision the Yard took on Jarratt would also have an impact on the appeal of the first Flying Squad defendants.\n\nThere have been two rich seams of irony during the course of our investigation. The first is how many detectives suddenly developed a healthy respect for all the rules of evidence gathering and due process when the tables were turned and they became targets of the anti-corruption squad. Jarratt, who had been happy to operate an unlawful supergrass system, is now one of them. In his interview, he accused DAC Steve House of conducting \"a less than balanced inquiry\".\n\nJarratt denied having any longterm vendettas against junior officers. He said he had properly investigated one of the nine teams under his command because of allegations of \"Spanish practices\" which were never properly disclosed. However, he denied using military intelligence resources to follow DS Flood and suggested the officers who had made statements against him were in some sort of conspiracy to undermine his position.\n\nOn the bullying allegation Jarratt showed more contrition. He said he didn't set out to treat his staff unfairly but it was the consequence of having high expectations and, as he is ambitious, the performance of his command mattered to him.\n\nHe described Linda Rolfe's allegations of domestic violence as \"wholly unfounded\". The suggestion of threatening Rolfe's father was \"preposterous\", he said. \"I have never concealed that I am a Freemason\" but such threats would be against the tenets of the Brotherhood. Jarratt said he broke up with Rolfe because he didn't want to marry and because he was already seeing his future wife, Melinda. He said there was an \"amazing fall-out\" with Rolfe, who \"hated\" him.\n\nDAC House didn't see it that way. Two GPs had confirmed Rolfe's account of visiting the surgery in November 1985 complaining of pain and swelling in her limbs. It was made clear to Jarratt that Rolfe didn't appear to House as desperate to \"get\" him. Asked his view on domestic violence, he said it was \"appalling\" and difficult to investigate because there are so many agendas. Jarratt also denied assaulting his ex-wife and claimed she refuted the allegations.\n\nHe then denied misusing police property and claimed he was \"effectively on call permanently\" and therefore entitled to the hire car and petrol. He also refuted misleading the head of the training college to get three free rooms and meals.\n\nHouse did not appear impressed and accused Jarratt of acute double standards. He said: \"What I would suggest is that your approach to work and your own career show that you operate with two sets of rules sometimes. A set of rules for yourself and a set of rules for other people, and they're not a consistent set of rules... you benefit from the set of rules and through you benefitting, others that you work with suffer.\"\n\nJarratt disagreed and then criticised the two men who had removed him, commander Andre Baker and DAC Bill Griffiths, for a failure of supervision. This was the second rich irony. No manager in Scotland Yard has ever been held to account for the failures of supervision in the specialist squads found to have rampant corruption. Roy Clark was never disciplined at Stoke Newington; the bosses of the Flying Squad also escaped any investigation, as did the men in charge of SERCS. And now Jarratt was implicitly asking why no senior Untouchable was facing any disciplinary action.\n\nOn 11 April 2003, the same day superintendent Ali Dizaei was acquitted at the Old Bailey in his first trial, the Yard published an in-house report into the humiliating collapse four months earlier of the prosecution of royal butlers Paul Burrell and Harold Brown.\n\nFormer senior Met officer Bill Taylor wrote a report that was widely regarded as a whitewash. There were no names and no blame attached to the Yard's Special Enquiry Team who had investigated the two butlers for allegedly stealing from Princess Diana's estate. Taylor told the press that commissioner Stevens had set his terms of reference. But he said there were lessons to be learned.\n\nBurrell didn't see it that way. He told the _Mirror_ \u2013 which had bought his story \u2013 the Taylor report was one \"that wants the public to think Scotland Yard is full of Poirots... I am sick of such a fudge.\"\n\nThe senior officer in charge of Burrell's prosecution was a former Untouchable. Commander John Yates had left anti-corruption work and in 2001 was put in charge of the Special Enquiry Team to investigate \"celebrity cases\". Burrell was his first real test.\n\nBut overhanging him was a serious criminal and disciplinary allegation from detective constable Jeff May that Yates and Chris Jarratt had committed perjury and conspired to pervert the course of justice during their investigation of corruption at the East Dulwich SERCS.\n\nThe anti-corruption squad had targeted May for 15 months following self-serving allegations by drug dealers turned supergrasses Diane Blanford and Eve Fleckney. They claimed that May had provided them with 8 kilos of heroin for a \u00a3140,000 payment. The detective was suspended and arrested. Eventually he was cleared and reinstated. But details started to emerge suggesting the two supergrasses had invented the claim to get a reduction in sentence. Furthermore, a CIB officer told May during a tape-recorded conversation that he had warned his superiors both women were unreliable and felt Blanford was a \"fucking liar\", yet the operation continued.\n\nOn 11 July 2001, May formally complained to assistant commissioner Michael Todd and commander Andy Hayman. He alleged he had been kept under investigation by the Untouchables for a simple but unlawful reason: to preserve the \"integrity\" of Fleckney because she was a key prosecution witness in the forthcoming prosecution of two East Dulwich detectives, Robert Clark and Chris Drury.\n\nThe timing of May's complaint could not have been worse for the Yard. Jarratt was in charge of the Damilola Taylor inquiry and Yates was in the middle of sensitive discussions with the CPS about whether to charge Paul Burrell with the theft of Princess Diana's possessions.\n\nBefore he did that, Yates and his number two, detective chief inspector Maxine de Brunner, had an important date with history. On 3 August 2001 they visited Prince Charles and Prince William at Highgrove to discuss their plans to prosecute the royal butler.\n\nThe Yard wanted the Princes' support for the prosecution because the case had large resource implications. But it was at this briefing that the two officers \"grossly misled\" the future Kings of England about the strength of the case against Burrell. Poorly researched intelligence around the butler's finances was presented as evidence he had sold Diana's possessions abroad and was living it up. The Princes were also told an informant had \"shown the police photographs of several staff members dressing up in clothing belonging to Diana\". In fact, Burrell's \"unexplained increase in wealth\" was easily explained had the elite Special Enquiry Team done its job properly. The butler earned good money from speaking engagements and the royalties from a recent book on etiquette.\n\nPrince Charles knew none of this when he consented to the prosecution. Thirteen days later Burrell was charged. The Princes were also unaware of the serious complaint against Yates. How was that progressing? The Yard took five months to appoint a senior officer to take a statement from May in February 2002. By that time he had retired, aged 41, with clinical depression.\n\nA month later Jarratt was removed from his command, but the internal inquiry by DAC House was not given May's complaint to investigate.\n\nFearing a cover-up, May had sought advice from pugnacious defence solicitor Mark Lake, who had plenty of experience taking on the Untouchables through his defence of DC Michael Charman and others. Over the summer of 2002, Lake wrote some searching letters to the Yard, the CPS and PCA. He complained to the CPS that Hayman's excuses for not progressing the investigation of Yates and Jarratt were \"lame\". The solicitor told the PCA the Yard's refusal to disclose any details or update his client \"only serves to cause us to believe there is a conspiracy afoot to cover up Mr May's allegations\". The PCA agreed to take up the issues with Hayman, who mollified the watchdog with assurances that the investigation was serious and well advanced.\n\nMay's MP, the Liberal Democrat, Paul Burstow, followed up with a letter to the home secretary asking for an independent inquiry, but the reply, he says, was \"woefully inadequate\". By the beginning of October there was one question to which Burstow had still received no answer. When was Yates served with an official police notice alerting him to May's allegations? Police regulations say this should be done \"as soon as is practicable\" after the complaint had been made. That was in July 2001, but 14 months later no notice had been served.\n\nThe significance didn't dawn on Lake until the morning of Friday, 25 October, when he was reading the _Daily Telegraph_ 's coverage of the fifth day of the Burrell trial. De Brunner had received a mauling under cross-examination by the butler's barrister, Lord Carlisle QC. She was eventually forced to concede that the Princes had been misled at Highgrove and subsequently about the butler's criminality.\n\nUntil then, Lake had no idea Yates was in charge of the Burrell case. It now made sense why the former Untouchable had not been served with official notification of May's complaint of perverting the course of justice and perjury. \"If the defence knew about the investigation into Yates they would have insisted on calling him to explain about misleading the Princes. Then they could have attacked his credibility as a witness of truth,\" Lake explains.\n\nThe solicitor reviewed his correspondence with the Yard in the run-up to the Burrell trial. He noticed that ten days before it started the Yard had replied saying Hayman did not expect a report on the internal investigation into Yates for six weeks. How convenient, Lake thought. The Burrell trial would have been over by then.\n\nThat Friday, Lake sent Lord Carlisle a thick dossier about the May complaint. Neither lawyer was to know that this was the very day the Queen mysteriously remembered that Burrell had told her he was keeping some of Diana's letters for safekeeping. This damaging recollection was passed to Yates and the CPS the following Monday. It destroyed the prosecution case against Burrell but at least spared commander Yates the humiliation of cross-examination in front of the world's media. The trial collapsed a few days later. Paul Burstow MP told us at the time: \"There is evidence Mr May was set up and now it appears [Paul Burrell] was almost sent down on a similar basis.\"\n\nThe Yard press office claimed, preposterously, there had been \"no grounds\" to serve Yates with formal notification of May's complaint. At best the whole affair showed how flexibly police regulations are applied. \"I don't believe Yates did not know about the May complaint,\" says Lake. \"But because the defence didn't know, de Brunner became the sacrificial lamb.\"\n\nThe whole affair hasn't hurt her career though. After the scandal died down, she was promoted to detective superintendent and then posted to the Untouchables. John Yates was made a deputy assistant commissioner. Meanwhile, the Yard is vigorously defending Jeff May's civil action for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment.\n\nSuperintendent Ali Dizaei's second trial for inflated mileage claims totalling \u00a3270 was scheduled for September 2003. The pressure was on because three months earlier the second Flying Squad trial had collapsed, leaving the whole anti-corruption crusade in tatters.\n\nAfter high-level discussions at the Yard, on 15 September the Untouchables dropped the second prosecution of Dizaei. The CPS said there was \"no realistic prospect of a conviction\".\n\nAt first the Met resisted the call by MPA chairman, Lord Toby Harris, for an independent inquiry into the force's handling of high-profile cases involving ethnic minority officers. The chairman of the Met's Black Police Association, chief inspector Leroy Logan, announced the BPA was warning ethnic people not to join the police. He said the boycott would stand until there was an inquiry into who and what was really behind the Dizaei case and the wider targeting of the BPA.\n\nThe National BPA had already made a formal complaint to the MPA against deputy commissioner Ian Blair (who in the interim had been knighted), Andy Hayman (who had left the Met on promotion as chief constable of Norfolk Constabulary) and Barry Norman (who had left the Untouchables on promotion as borough commander of Islington).\n\nHome secretary David Blunkett was especially concerned about the boycott. It came just as he was preparing to announce at the Labour Party conference that police recruitment was higher than at any time since 1921 and there were 9,000 more cops than in 1997. Blunkett's officials desperately tried to broker a deal before the October party conference. Senior sections of the Yard wanted to discipline and sack Dizaei because they believed he was corrupt. But he had already started employment tribunal proceedings, which had even more chance of success given the two acquittals.\n\nDizaei wanted an apology, reinstatement, the dropping of all disciplinary proceedings and an assurance that he would be allowed onto the senior command course. The talks broke down in the first week of October when, according to Ray Powell, president of the National BPA, the Yard insisted on putting Dizaei on the internal blacklist. \"Ali was distraught and we viewed the whole Service Confidence Policy [the blacklist] as contrary to the Human Rights Act,\" says Powell. \"We took the unprecedented step of proactively not encouraging people to join the Met and we called for the suspension of Ian Blair, Andy Hayman and Barry Norman. This woke a few people up, including the home secretary. It wasn't all about Ali Dizaei. We wanted a national solution to a national problem.\"\n\nThe matter was referred to the arbitration service ACAS. The Dizaei and BPA position was greatly strengthened when the BBC broadcast its undercover expos\u00e9 of racist police recruits, _The Secret Policeman_ , on the first day of negotiations. At first, Blunkett tried to trash the documentary but then withdrew his attack and applied intense pressure on the Yard for a settlement.\n\nFinally, on 30 October a deal was struck. The Yard press release described it as \"groundbreaking\" and designed to prevent the public purse taking a further battering. Dizaei agreed to withdraw his employment tribunal case, as did Leroy Logan. The National BPA agreed to withdraw their complaint against the three Untouchables and lift the boycott on ethnic recruitment. In return, Dizaei was reinstated, assured a place on the senior command course and given a payment of around \u00a380,000. He, in turn, expressed regret that his behaviour had fallen below the standard expected and was given words of advice, a minor sanction. But it was accepted he returned to the force \"with his integrity intact\". The Yard also agreed to review up to 30 other employment tribunal cases it faced from black or Asian officers concerned about the CIB operations into them or harassment at work. It also consented to the independent inquiry proposed by the MPA.\n\nIn a private letter to Dizaei's solicitors, the Met effectively agreed there would be no disciplinary proceedings and any attempt by the PCA to insist would be resisted. But this agreement was cut behind the backs of the PCA, which alone had statutory powers to decide whether to halt disciplinary proceedings. On 30 March 2004, just days before it was due to be replaced by the new Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), the PCA ordered the Met to put Dizaei on a disciplinary board. The PCA was persuaded by a CIB report that claimed to have \"substantiated\" nine disciplinary offences against Dizaei.\n\nThe NBPA threatened strikes, boycotts and marches if the Dizaei deal was unpicked. And immediately it took over on 1 April, the IPCC was lobbied by the Yard to withdraw the PCA's direction.\n\nThe IPCC had been set up the previous year by the Home Office, which supported the Yard's position. Furthermore, the Home Office had also ensured the founder of the Untouchables, Roy Clark, was already inside the new so-called watchdog as its director of investigations. It came as no surpise that the IPCC sided with Blunkett and commissioner Stevens.\n\nThe whole deal left a bitter taste in the mouth of those white police officers targeted unfairly by the Untouchables but who had no political capital with the Home Office. And once again showed just how arbitrary the whole discipline system is.\n\nAt the time of writing, Dizaei has just finished the senior command course, which he attended with DCS Shaun Sawyer. There was a private agreement that he and other CIB3 detectives on Operation Helios would never have to serve with Dizaei.\n\nAnd what of DCS Chris Jarratt? The media, which only saw the Dizaei case as a race issue, completely missed the parallels and double standards with the Untouchables' treatment. In August 2003, exactly one month before the case against Dizaei was dropped, the CPS decided that DCS Jarratt wouldn't be charged with any criminal offences.\n\nOn 2 December the Yard told us he would face disciplinary proceedings for \"five alleged breaches of the police code regarding issues of honesty and integrity around the use of police hire vehicles, overbearing conduct towards colleagues and improper disclosure of information relating to internal staff matters\".\n\nInterestingly, the domestic violence allegations were not included. Yet three days later, the Association of Chief Police Officers announced it was considering a \"formal policy\" to combat domestic violence by cops. This coincided with a poster campaign \u2013 \"Domestic Violence abusers are losing control\" \u2013 in which the Met trumpeted how it could now \"pursue abusers even without evidence from the abused partner\".\n\nAccording to the ACPO press release its new policy would include screening for offenders and schemes to encourage relatives, partners and colleagues to report allegations. It also suggested that the current policy of arresting civilian offenders should \"always\" be applied to police officers \u2013 Jarratt was never arrested \u2013 and their suspension or removal from public duties should also be considered. Jarratt was never suspended. The ACPO policy also suggests that in disciplinary proceedings where for whatever reason no criminal charges have been brought, dismissal from the force should be a sanction.\n\nThe government had also commissioned a parallel study of how police forces deal with domestic violence by members of the public. Astonishingly, it reported that the police failed to record more than half the incidents reported. With this culture was it any wonder the Yard didn't see fit to discipline DCS Jarratt over Linda Rolfe's allegations?\n\nThe disciplinary board was set for June 2004, but in the months leading up to it a deal was struck. The Met dropped the charges relating to the misuse of police cars and improper disclosure because of \"a lack of evidence or the receipt of a satisfactory explanation\" from Jarratt. He agreed to accept a written warning for his overbearing conduct towards staff, thus negating the requirement for a potentially explosive disciplinary hearing. At the time of writing Jarratt remains at Human Resources as a chief superintendent, awaiting a management posting to front-line policing.\n\n## [27\n\n\"We are Subjects Not Citizens\"](contents.html#ch27)\n\nAlastair Morgan lives in a tower block in the north London constituency of Labour MP Chris Smith. One of the first things he did after moving to the capital in the mid-1990s was give Smith a detailed account of the tangled events since his brother's murder. Smith pressed the Tory Home Office and Scotland Yard, but to no avail. A senior south London detective, Bill Griffiths, a Ghost Squad boss, was also unmoved by the Morgan family's entreaties in 1996 to re-open the case.\n\nFollowing the change of government in May 1997, Chris Smith entered the New Labour cabinet as minister for culture. He began to push the Yard again, this time from the inside.\n\nOver the summer, Alastair read an article by a well-informed former Met press officer claiming that the murder inquiry would be re-opened following the arrest of Duncan Hanrahan and Martin King.\n\nChris Smith wrote immediately to his colleague, the new home secretary Jack Straw, who'd just announced a public inquiry into the four-year-old Stephen Lawrence murder. Smith underlined the parallel plight of his own constituent.\n\nMr Morgan's brother was murdered ten years ago and to date no-one has been brought to trial. His family believe that a number of police officers were involved in the murder and that not only have the murderers gone unpunished but that very serious police corruption is being covered up. This case has always caused me a great deal of unease but despite the numerous letters I've written and various meetings I've attended, the authorities have been unwilling to re-open the investigation. I was extremely interested therefore to read the recent report in the _Mail on Sunda_ y... stating that following an anonymous tip-off Daniel Morgan's murder is now being re-investigated. I would be very grateful if you could let me know whether there is truth in this report and if so what progress has been made with the investigation. I do fear that serious police corruption may be uncovered and it is vital therefore that this case is fully investigated without delay.\n\nCommissioner Condon assured the home secretary there was no tip-off and no new investigation. Straw then wrote to Smith: \"The commissioner informs me that there were some allegations that a senior officer was involved in the murder of Daniel Morgan. He has however assured me that those allegations were fully investigated at the time and proved to be incorrect.\" This was the first the Morgans had heard of the allegations, but they were unable to extract more details from officialdom. It was sometimes painful for the family to watch rocketing media interest in the Lawrence case, while the Fourth Estate remained largely indifferent to Danny's murder when there were so many parallels.\n\nAlastair and his ageing mother, Isobel, felt Scotland Yard could not be trusted to investigate itself. She lived in Wales, where the media were far more receptive to the story, as was her local MP, the Liberal Democrat Richard Livesey. He and Smith arranged a meeting with commissioner Condon at the Yard on 7 November. DAC Roy Clark was also present, taking notes.\n\nLivesey upbraided Condon for the obvious impropriety of a detective (Sid Fillery) leaving a murder inquiry, retiring from the force and then immediately filling the dead man's shoes. \"He really laid into Condon, who looked extremely uncomfortable,\" recalls Alastair. Months passed and the family heard almost nothing unless they badgered Clark. \"Even then I couldn't get any answers out of him.\"\n\nA year later, in early December 1998, the Yard's witchfinder-general finally briefed the Morgans that there was a new third inquiry into Danny's murder underway. He gave no real details and Alastair and Isobel left the meeting thinking it was just more of the same lip service they had received since 1987. In fact, Clark was referring to something very unique. For at least the last six months his Untouchables had been bugging the offices of Southern Investigations. This covert operation was codenamed Nigeria.\n\nVery early on, we saw Operation Nigeria intelligence documents, which portray the two Southern Investigations directors Jonathan Rees and Sid Fillery as \"alert, cunning and devious\". The documents include the bi-monthly applications the Untouchables made to senior officers at the Yard for authority to keep the bugging operation going. The 9 December application, one week after the Morgans met Clark, says: \"Both Rees and Fillery have been subjects of interest to CIB for a considerable period of time. Longterm and wide ranging intelligence shows them to be deeply involved in corruption, using a network of serving and retired police officers to access sensitive intelligence for the purpose of progressing crime, frustrating the course of justice and selling sensitive information to the press. Both conduct criminality from the premises... Amongst their clients [they] number criminals and established media contacts. In addition, Reece [ _sic_ ] remains a main suspect in the murder of his business partner Daniel Morgan in 1987.\"\n\nIt is apparent from the Operation Nigeria intelligence documents that the Morgan murder was being used as a pretext to authorise the bugging operation. Its primary purpose, it would appear, was to protect the image of Scotland Yard, whose fate by then was in the hands of the ongoing Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.\n\nWhy had Clark waited all this time to bug Southern Investigations when it had been known for over ten years that the company was at the centre of a web of corruption? The Ghost Squad was more than capable of spying on Rees and Fillery at any time between 1993 and 1997. So why wait until June 1998 to seek the first authority to insert bugs into the private detective agency? It is more than coincidence that this was precisely the month when the long history of police corruption in south-east London was becoming a politically damaging issue for the Yard as the Lawrence Inquiry public hearings progressed.\n\nThe Morgan family of course had no insight into the fascinating detail emerging from the bugging operation at Southern Investigations, which ran from June 1998 to May 1999.\n\nWhat happened next showed that Rees and Fillery clearly didn't suspect they would be subject to the most intrusive surveillance, even though Hanrahan had tipped them off soon after he was arrested in May 1997 that the Untouchables were after them and their mutual friends like retired detectives Nigel Grayston and Alec Leighton.\n\nRees and Fillery had at least six serving police officers they used to obtain stories for the tabloids in return for what Rees euphemistically called \"a few pints\". He was also doing private surveillance and then tipping off friendly cops to make arrests if anything illegal was spotted. The arrangement was to be the undoing of Southern Investigations.\n\nIn May 1999, anti-corruption officers monitoring the bugs were taken aback by hard evidence of a plot Rees was developing to fit up the estranged wife of a client called Simon James, a jeweller. He was separated from Kim James, a former glamour model, and was in the middle of a nasty custody battle with her over their young son. Eventually Rees conceived a plot to plant drugs in her car and get one of his police contacts to make an arrest. This would hopefully persuade a court to turn the boy's care over to his father.\n\nOperation Nigeria had recently been renamed Operation Two Bridges and from then on concentrated on developing a sting to catch Rees and others he had brought into the plot. This included Jimmy Cook, his repo man and someone Rees described as \"a simple soul, who'd done odd jobs [for me] over many years\". Another party to the conspiracy was detective constable Austin Warnes. He then engaged the bouncer turned celebrity gangster, Dave Courtney, to pretend to be the informant who tipped him off about Kim James's supposed involvement with drugs.\n\nThe sting operation to catch Rees meant letting the conspiracy run as far as the Untouchables could, which in turn meant not telling Kim James. She was arrested in June after a local police team, alerted by DC Warnes, found the cocaine Rees's people had planted in her car. The whole operation was being monitored at the highest levels of the Yard from John Stevens through Roy Clark to commander Ian Quinn to DCS Dave Wood and detective superintendent Chris Jarratt, head of the intelligence cell overseeing the bugging operation and sting.\n\nIn September 1999, Rees, Cook, Warnes and Courtney were arrested and charged with perverting the course of justice and other serious offences.\n\nBut what of the re-opened inquiry into the Morgan murder, the original justification for inserting the bugs at Southern Investigations 15 months earlier? An intelligence report at the time put it this way: \"Due to the considerable manpower involved, the strategy to investigate the murder of Daniel Morgan has for the moment been curtailed.\" In fact it had been abandoned, while the family were led to believe it was at the top of the Yard's agenda.\n\nThe firm within a firm had been ignored for a decade. It had been allowed to grow like poison ivy around the police stations of south-east London. But only when it became a serious threat to the Yard and individual officers in the inner circle did the anti-corruption squad move against it. This, however, was very much a secret pruning exercise rather than a wholesale assault on root and branch. The Yard had to steer a careful course that did nothing to undermine its unofficial policy of not sharing with the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry the evidence and intelligence it was accumulating about the endemic corruption in south-east London and how that had also contaminated the murder inquiry, as it had contaminated the earlier murders of David Norris and Daniel Morgan.\n\nThere was another compelling incentive for the Untouchables to \"curtail\" the Morgan inquiry. The bugging operation had caught Rees and Fillery discussing a \"smear campaign to discredit\" leading Untouchables, particularly Chris Jarratt, one of its most important yet vulnerable shadow warriors. He was known to many of the serving and retired cops in Southern Investigation's circle of influence.\n\nOne retired detective alleged to be part of the \"smear campaign\" was detective inspector Keith Pedder. He retired in December 1995 from the Met disillusioned after leading the hunt for Rachel Nickell's killer. The case ended in ignominy for the Yard when a judge threw out the prosecution evidence against Colin Stagg after lambasting the highly controversial undercover honey trap operation.\n\nPedder was a close family friend of Chris Jarratt and his wife. They'd served together in Brixton and Tower Bridge and were Freemasons and godfathers to each other's sons. But the pair fell out when in March 1988 the anti-corruption squad targeted Pedder in a sting operation. The corruption case against Pedder was so poor the Old Bailey judge took no time to throw it out. Pedder says he was being smeared and \"set up\" to prevent publication of a book he had just completed criticising senior Yard figures over their undisclosed role in the Nickell case.\n\nJarratt's continued involvement in Operation Two Bridges was clearly not seen as inappropriate by Roy Clark. Jarratt wrote to his boss: \"Product already obtained confirms that Reece [ _sic_ ] at least harbours ill will against CIB3 personnel. In scanning intelligence around police corruption in London it can be stated that Reece and Fillery are a crucial link between the criminal fraternity and serving police officers. There is nothing that they do that in any way benefits the criminal justice system. I see ongoing intrusion as crucial to our efforts to control corruption within the Metropolitan Police Service. Should we be able to successfully arrest and prosecute Reece and Fillery for corruption matters it will be seen within police circles as 'untouchables' having been touched and in so saying will put off many who are currently engaged in malpractice and indeed those officers who may be contemplating committing crime.\"\n\nBy July 1999 even the Untouchables noted that intelligence from the bug about the murder was \"scarce\". So that month they planted a story in the _Daily Telegraph_ claiming officers had identified the driver of the getaway car used in the murder. It was hoped this would stimulate conversation in the office of Southern Investigations. It didn't. Instead it caught the attention of Alastair who immediately called Scotland Yard, forcing Clark to guardedly explain how the inquiry had been preoccupied with Rees's plot to fit up Kim James.\n\n\"I think the _Telegraph_ thing was done to pretend [Clark] had done something, when in fact it appeared [in the press] when the whole James thing was almost wrapped up. It was a sop,\" says Alastair. He believes Clark would have said nothing until Rees's arrest in September had he not contacted the Yard. And using the murder as a pretext for a self-serving bugging operation to protect the Untouchables was a \"cynical betrayal\".\n\nWhat emerged from the bugging operation as far as the Morgan murder was concerned were claims by the Untouchables that Rees and Fillery appeared troubled when they learned Hanrahan had been jailed for eight years on 19 March 1999. One intelligence report a few weeks later says: \"Fillery is particularly concerned at what Hanrahan might have told police about the association between them, and whether Hanrahan has given information about the murder... implicating him and Reece [ _sic_ ]. Clearly, Fillery is concerned and feels more vulnerable around this issue than many others discussed.\"\n\nThe only thing Rees and Fillery did was change the company name to Law & Commercial.\n\nThe Morgan family had first complained about the handling of the murder investigation back in July 1988. The PCA appointed Hampshire Police to investigate allegations of police involvement in the killing and the derailment of the murder inquiry. The family learned from the television news in February 1989 that Hampshire officers had re-arrested Rees and Paul Goodridge, the man Daniel Morgan thought he was going to meet with Rees at the pub on the night of his murder.\n\n\"Initially I was delighted with this development,\" recalls Alastair, \"because something was happening at long last. But then I rang the police station and no one would talk to me. Then as I thought about the situation I became very worried indeed. No one told us, no one warned us that there would be any developments of any kind. But we were now used to this type of behaviour from the police.\"\n\nHampshire's highly publicised arrests led nowhere. The two men were released from custody and the charges of murder and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice dropped on the instructions of Treasury Counsel. The Morgan family would later learn that these charges were never referred by the police to the Director of Public Prosecutions and had only been brought in the wake of a secret meeting between top Hampshire brass and their opposite numbers at Scotland Yard. The secret meeting had also taken an extraordinary decision to alter the terms of reference of the Hampshire inquiry, thereby moving the focus away from allegations of police corruption and collusion in the murder. The whole manipulative package had been endorsed by the PCA, without a whisper to the Morgan family.\n\nPaul Goodridge successfully sued Hampshire and the Yard for malicious prosecution. Solicitor Russell Miller represented Goodridge. He was simultaneously immersed in the battle for justice as part of the ragamuffin bunch taking on the corrupt Stoke Newington police.\n\nAs he read the Daniel Morgan case papers Miller became increasingly perturbed, and not only about the way his client had been treated. To build his client's compensation case, Miller prepared a damning analysis of the \"very serious irregularities\" made by Hampshire and the Yard in arresting Goodridge. He also underlined how the \"truly extraordinary\" Daniel Morgan case cried out for independent examination because of the \"serious allegations of police corruption and criminality\".\n\nMiller also knew police forces dealing with controversial cases liked positive press coverage because it made them look busy, effective and in control. \"In my view,\" he wrote, \"Goodridge was charged simply to relieve pressure on the inquiry concerning ex-detective sergeant Fillery and other police officers close to Rees... It is my belief that Goodridge was charged in the certain knowledge that he would be acquitted so avoiding a trial in which embarrassing material about police corruption might emerge. But he was also charged in the equally certain knowledge that intense media coverage of the charges and sensationalist comments made by the police would distract attention from police wrongdoing.\"\n\nMiller was the first to notice the secret revision of the terms of reference of the Hampshire inquiry. Unlike the Morgan family, he had obtained on disclosure and read the 80-page Hampshire report. All the Morgan family got was a summary of Hampshire's conclusions in a brusque letter from the PCA in 1990 saying there was no evidence of police impropriety or involvement in the murder. The Hampshire report and the minutes of the police meeting at which the terms of reference were changed were deemed official secrets, fit only for the eyes of state servants and their accomplices in the PCA.\n\nFor a full decade after Daniel's death the Yard had maintained that its original murder inquiry was entirely professional and uncontaminated by Fillery's presence. But the intelligence documents from Operation Nigeria showed how the Untouchables were now accepting everything the Morgan family had been saying for years about Rees and Fillery being at the heart of a network of police corruption. Roy Clark never apologised or explained how the Yard had made such a mistake. Indeed, there was still an element in the police who treated the family as if they were challenging the integrity of the world's finest police force.\n\nIn 1998, for instance, three members of the Morgan family felt that they were simultaneously under surveillance. Isobel was in Wales, Alastair in Glasgow and Jane was working for the British Army in Germany when they spotted people tailing them or taking their photographs. It occurred, says Alastair, soon after a front-page article in the local Hampshire press had quoted him calling for the chief constable to resign.\n\nClark was unhappy about media coverage the family generated. In July 1999, he met with the Morgans' solicitor, Raju Bhatt, another veteran of the struggle against corrupt Stoke Newington cops. Bhatt noted Clark's comments that the original murder inquiry was \"good, honest and thorough\" but \"perhaps not innovative\". Hampshire's re-investigation was also \"good\" and \"well intentioned\", Clark stressed.\n\nThe following year the Morgan family met Clark again to see how he planned to progress the \"curtailed\" murder inquiry. He offered a formal murder review with the possibility of a fourth investigation dependent on the outcome. The family asked to see a copy of the Hampshire report. \"The blood drained from his face,\" Alastair recalls. \"I told him I wanted to see it because I thought it had been done under the old pals' act.\"\n\nThe Yard quickly moved to prevent disclosure. Clark's difficulty was the Lawrence Inquiry report had recommended that relevant internal reports should in most circumstances be disclosed. The Lawrence family had been given access to the Kent\/PCA report into the first murder investigation. The Morgans hoped they'd be treated the same. But they were to be bitterly disappointed. Clark wrote outlining the extraordinary conditions of disclosure: \"I have decided that you should not be provided with a copy but should be allowed to read it under controlled conditions. I am content for you to read it in unredacted form and assume that as is our present agreement you would do nothing to hinder the progress of ongoing inquiries.\"\n\nBut in the run-up to Rees's trial for fitting up Kim James, the Yard suddenly moved the goalposts. In October 2000, Clark informed the family he would read them the report but they could take no notes or tape-record. There was worse to come. The Yard and Hampshire feared a massive compensation claim and all the attendant bad publicity. So Clark insisted the Morgans sign an indemnity against legal action. The family declined the invitation to sign away their right to sue and told Clark that Daniel's mother Isobel, now a frail 72 years old, needed to see the Hampshire report for her peace of mind.\n\nIn the middle of all this, Rees and Simon James were jailed in December 2000 for six years each. Warnes received four years. Unexpectedly, Jimmy Cook and Dave Courtney, who wore a jester's outfit to the Old Bailey, were acquitted. The Untouchables appealed the sentence handed down to the sacked detective Warnes. He received another year. So did Rees and James when they appealed their sentence and conviction.\n\nNegotiations for access to the report passed to commander Andy Hayman in 2001. Alastair wrote to him on 27 March saying the \"lack of openness\" was having an effect on his mother's well-being. He said the \"terms [were] tantamount to blackmail\". In June, Hayman ruled the Hampshire report would not be disclosed in any form and if they took legal action he would no longer brief them about the continuing murder inquiry.\n\nThe family was appalled at this thinly disguised blackmail. In a letter to commissioner Stevens on 10 October Alastair expressed his loss of confidence in Hayman and questioned his fitness to be in overall stewardship of the proposed fourth murder inquiry. \"We have no closure even over past inquiries. One could almost believe that the Lawrence Inquiry had never taken place.\"\n\nOn 25 June 2002, the Yard launched its fourth murder investigation under detective chief superintendent Dave Cook. The new investigation was codenamed Operation Abelard. However this was a cover for what was still a covert inquiry controlled by the CIB intelligence cell. As part of a general re-branding of the anti-corruption squad, the intelligence cell had been renamed the Intelligence Development Group. The detective superintendent in charge of it and the Morgan case was David Zinzan.\n\nThe new targets were Sid Fillery, Jimmy Cook and Rees's brother-in-law, Glen Vian. Zinzan had bugs and taps re-inserted at Law & Commercial and other premises.\n\nThe murder re-inquiry also had a new supergrass, Steve Warner, the criminal implicated by Duncan Hanrahan in the ecstasy job. Warner rolled over after he offered an undercover cop money to kill Jimmy Cook. Warner then made a statement alleging Cook had admitted to him he was the getaway driver in the Morgan murder. Zinzan's team had also arrested Barry Nash, who they believed was involved with Warner in the contract on Cook, although he was never prosecuted for this. According to a CPS report, Nash told the police that Cook had admitted standing over Morgan's dead body, but he refused to make a statement.\n\nCook was arrested for conspiracy to murder. So too was Rees, whom Zinzan had removed from Ford Open Prison and sent to a high-security jail. Fillery was also arrested, but only for offences arising out of the loss of a file in the original murder inquiry. This was eventually dropped. But in a bizarre twist, the police found child pornography on Fillery's office computer. He said he had paid to access it for research purposes but pleaded guilty in 2003 and was subsequently placed on the sex offenders register.\n\nOn the day of the 16th anniversary of the Danny Morgan murder, the Yard sent its file to the CPS recommending Cook, Rees and Vian should be charged with murder or conspiracy to murder. The CPS took five months before deciding in August 2003 there was insufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of a conviction. The reasoning suggests the CPS felt the case CIB had presented was so poor as to raise questions whether the whole exercise was a further sop to the family and evidentially doomed to failure.\n\nFirstly, Warner, the CIB supergrass, was handled like all the others and eventually imploded. He made a serious complaint that he had been \"pressured\" to sign statements naming his criminal associates and Cook. He also alleged that he had received inducements like conjugal visits and a case of beer from his debriefers. He repeated these allegations to DCS Bob Quick of CIB3. But for reasons that remain unclear, and probably unrecorded, Warner decided not to proceed with the complaint. Once again the supergrass system had undermined a prosecution. Warner was already a busted flush because he had tried to kill Cook, so his value as a witness against him was limited from the start.\n\nSecondly, Rees and others made no admissions or incriminating asides during hours of bugged conversations. The government lawyers who reviewed the case seemed to suggest that the whole bugging exercise was evidentially worthless.\n\nDCS Dave Cook was appalled at what he'd learned during Operation Abelard. He totally contradicted Roy Clark's claim that the first murder investigation was good. At a meeting with Isobel and Raju Bhatt on 5 September 2003, Cook told them \"the real mischief\" had occurred during the first murder investigation, which he went on to describe as \"the worst mess he had ever seen\". The role of Fillery, in Cook's view, was \"at the heart of the mischief\" and those around Fillery, including police officers, had protected him.\n\nWith the abandonment of the prosecution, the Morgan family was now informed that the case was being referred to the Yard's Murder Review Group headed by DAC Bill Griffiths, the very man who had refused to re-open the investigation seven years earlier when he was in the Ghost Squad.\n\nThe Morgans took the Yard to the High Court over its decision not to show them the Hampshire report, which had become more important in light of DCS Cook's recent comments. The Yard folded its hand at the court door. The family, however, is prevented by a court order, sought by the Yard, from discussing the contents of the Hampshire report. Alastair Morgan says it is \"a shameless whitewash\".\n\nNo statement was taken from whistle-blowing cop Derek Haslam. He told us Hampshire came to see him but had no real interest in the background. \"I walked out of there thinking their sole agenda was to go through the motions.\" The Hampshire report also says \"nothing sinister should be inferred\" from the relationship between Danny Morgan and detective Alan \"Taffy\" Holmes, who killed himself four months after the murder.\n\nOther shortcomings we've identified in the Hampshire report are:\n\n_\u2209_ No assessment or investigation of police corruption in south and south-east London.\n\n_\u2209_ No examination of the shocking improprieties evident in the first investigation.\n\n_\u2209_ No serious evaluation of the Belmont Car Auctions robbery and moonlighting cops.\n\n_\u2209_ No analysis of Morgan's readiness to expose police corruption.\n\n_\u2209_ No serious effort to test Kevin Lennon's devastating allegations at Danny Morgan's inquest. They are simply dismissed as \"incapable of corroboration\".\n\n_\u2209_ No accounting of the discovery of fibres on the axe handle.\n\n_\u2209_ No reference to an internal investigation into the theft of a Rolex wristwatch from Daniel Morgan's dead body. Police officers, ambulance and mortuary staff were under suspicion.\n\nIn short, the Hampshire report appears as appalling a cover-up as the Barker Review of the first Lawrence murder inquiry.\n\nIn a retrospective interview for this book Alastair Morgan underlines that the Yard's mishandling of his brother's murder is every bit as big a scandal as Stephen Lawrence and can now only be resolved by a full public inquiry.\n\n\"It makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable that the state holds all the cards. We are subjects not citizens. I feel demeaned as a human being and yet the activities of my mother and my family so far have brought to light a morass of corruption already and we still haven't got anywhere near the bottom of it yet. We've been fighting for 17 years. Let that speak for itself. That's how hard it is to get anything done in Britain. What does that tell you about the state of policing in London and the state of Britain? It's been like four people in one family trying to turn a 20,000-ton oil tanker around with their bare hands.\n\n\"We have the right to know if policemen were involved in killing my brother. Now we are at the beginning of a long battle over the disclosure of all the other documentation about the murder. We want openness and we want honesty. We're tired of groping around in a labyrinth of darkness and secrecy. I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that my brother died in the same area as Stephen Lawrence. I believe that the way the case was handled had a profound effect on the growth of corruption in the Met. If they had stamped on them when it happened I'm certain this would have inhibited the corrupt network in south-east London. Instead it developed over the 1990s and felt it was untouchable.\"\n\nA major player in that network was Duncan Hanrahan. On his release in 2001 we asked him whether he felt an independent system of investigating police corruption would have encouraged him to be more forthcoming. He said yes, noble cause corruption was routine throughout the Met. That was why he had no respect for many of the poachers turned gamekeepers at CIB. He knew there were certain areas and certain retired or serving officers they would never touch. There were also entire squads that were out of bounds.\n\nHe is also amazed how little thought had seemingly gone into the best way of approaching someone like him. The overbearing attitude was not conducive to Hanrahan coming clean. He says he would have been prepared to give more had he been debriefed in an ethical, open way with no side, no hidden agenda, no off limits areas, no craven promotion junkies and no leaks.\n\nA thorny question exercised his mind: why should he be truthful with CIB when they were not being truthful with themselves or with the public?\n\nIn May 2004, the CPS told the Lawrence family that the much-vaunted murder re-investigation started by DAC John Grieve in 1999 would not result in any criminal charges. For five years the Lawrence family had their hopes raised. Selective leaks from the Yard produced numerous articles; some of them front-page splashes heralding imminent prosecutions.\n\nWhile the CPS deliberated, reporters spun the Yard's line that Grieve had produced enough evidence to charge some of the five suspects. So when the CPS dropped the case they alone were supposed to look like the bad guys. \"We can't invent evidence,\" one exasperated CPS official told the BBC.\n\nImran Khan, the Lawrence family's solicitor, wanted the CPS to immediately release the reasoning behind their decision so he could consider whether to judicially review it in the High Court. But if the Morgan family's experience of the CPS is anything to go by the Lawrence family has a long wait ahead of them. The Morgans had to complain to the new Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald QC, before the CPS gave its reasons, an incredible nine months after the decision to drop the case against Rees and others.\n\nThere had been careful triangulation between the Yard and CPS about what to tell the Morgan family. The letter finally arrived on 6 May 2004, once the storm over the Lawrence decision had subsided. Alastair Morgan called it \"tripe\". Only a public inquiry, he says, will let his brother's ghost rest.\n\n## Part Four: A Silent Coup\n## [28\n\nWatchdogged](contents.html#ch28)\n\nThe Untouchables were publicly launched to coincide with commissioner Sir Paul Condon's crucial appearance in front of the Commons Home Affairs select committee in December 1997. It was in these august and televised surroundings that Condon declared there were up to 250 bent detectives in his force.\n\nThe commissioner went to Parliament fully briefed by his intelligence chiefs about the \"scale of the problem\". That, after all, is what the Ghost Squad had been \"scoping\" for four years in unprecedented secrecy. However, the Yard now claim that Condon \"made a mistake\" when he spoke of 250. The real figure CIB3 was operating to back in December 1997 was 30 to 40 bent cops, DCS David Wood told us.\n\nLet us assume Condon's \"speculation\" was a dreadful mistake. Why then during his well-orchestrated appearance at the committee hearing did none of his advisers jump up and correct this misleading impression? One senior officer who stayed in his chair was Roy Clark, the architect of the anti-corruption strategy since 1993 and its sole boss since 1996. He more than anyone in Scotland Yard would or should have known the commissioner was talking rubbish and that it could cost the force dearly if the \"mistake\" remained uncorrected. In fact, the public record wasn't corrected the following day or at any time over the next few weeks to ensure the select committee did not repeat the 250 figure in its report, which is exactly what happened when it was published in January 1998. Indeed, for the next 18 months the Yard was content to allow the 250 figure to stand uncorrected and Parliament therefore to be misled.\n\nIt was only in June 1999, during an interview with the _Evening Standard_ , that John Stevens radically downsized the problem by an amazing 400%. He claimed only about 50 dirty cops involved in serious corruption would be prosecuted. Of course, by this time the Yard had weathered the select committee hearing and the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry.\n\nOn any view, Stevens' new maths said a lot about what he thought of the original intelligence given to his predecessor. But the numbers game raises another very important question that goes to the heart of why Scotland Yard conducted such an expertly choreographed anti-corruption crusade in the first place. Did the Yard exaggerate the scale of corruption and mislead Parliament in order to advance its case for an unfettered internal investigation with no independent oversight? And was this done because the Yard feared the select committee and the public inquiry into the Lawrence scandal would take away for ever the power of the police to investigate itself?\n\nThe Yard just can't seem to get its story straight over the true scale of the corruption problem at any one time. In 1993, Roy Clark, when first pitching the Ghost Squad to commissioner Condon, claimed it was \"probably very few\". In 1994, Roger Gaspar was said to be operating a list of 83 detectives. In 1996, Condon told the _Guardian_ there were 200 bent cops in his force. In December 1997 he told Parliament it was up to 250. In June 1999 Stevens reduced that to 50. Then two months later the CIB press office told _The Job_ magazine \"experience and current intelligence suggest the real numbers are much closer to the 100\". And in an interview with commander Andy Hayman in March 2000 we were told there were about \"1,000 entries\" on the CIBIC computer, of which 250 to 300 were \"worth going for\" and over the next three years \"80 to 100 [were] real runners\".\n\nWhat is certain is that the anti-corruption crusade, after ten years of unfettered spending and spying, has only successfully prosecuted about twenty serving and retired officers for serious corruption. Of that figure four are their own supergrasses \u2013 Garner, McGuinness, Hanrahan and Putnam. Alternatively, around twenty serving and retired detectives have been acquitted or discharged because of question marks over the veracity of these supergrasses and the integrity of CIB3 operations.\n\nThere have been nowhere near the mass resignations by suspect officers that the public witnessed when commissioner Sir Robert Mark last cleaned out the stables between 1972 and 1977. Then, some 478 officers left the force. Most jumped before they were pushed.\n\nCondon thought criminal prosecutions were preferable, but disciplinary hearings were, he said, his \"fall-back position\". Yet despite new rules since April 1999 making it easier to sack an officer, under the Condon\/Stevens period (1993\u20132004) the figure for those dismissed for serious corruption is fewer than ten.\n\nGetting exact figures out of the Yard has proved a difficult task. When we asked for a breakdown of figures routinely spun to crime correspondents, the Yard ran into great difficulty as if they were being asked to substantiate someone else's maths.\n\nA special case in point was 28 August 2002. Commissioner Stevens launched the third five-year phase of the anti-corruption crusade. Prevention would be the new focus, he told the assembled crime hacks. He went on to say how \"prosecutions had proved difficult\" and blamed tricky cops who knew how to exploit the criminal justice system. Stevens then issued a set of figures for 1998 onwards. We asked for the full figures since 1993, broken down by name and offence, of officers and civilian support staff who had been prosecuted or disciplined.\n\nInitially, DCS Shaun Sawyer invited us in for a briefing to explain the figures, which otherwise could appear \"misleading\", he said candidly. At the eleventh hour the briefing was cancelled on the instructions of commissioner Stevens. He had already refused to be interviewed for this book and so it was thought no other senior officer should do so.\n\nSeven months passed and with each one our suspicion grew that like so much with the anti-corruption crusade, the Yard's maths just don't add up. Repeated requests were met with silence or false assurances. Only when threatened with a complaint to the MPA over non-compliance with its media policy \u2013 a document peppered with commitments to \"openness, honesty and flexibility\" \u2013 did we finally get a response, but not an answer. We were told the figures for the Ghost Squad phase, 1993 to 1997, would not be provided because the Yard claimed a duty of confidentiality and said it was hogtied by the Data Protection Act. Laughably, it was also suggested it would not be in the public interest to make such a disclosure. This same argument was advanced to refuse us the overall discipline figures.\n\nWhile the Ghost Squad period was completely shrouded in secrecy, there was some limited disclosure of figures for the Untouchables period from 1998 to April 2003. But these figures were not broken down and are impossible to decipher. Criminal convictions and disciplinary rulings for minor misdemeanours like traffic offences on and off duty were lumped in with serious cases of corruption, presumably to bump up the figures.\n\nWe also asked how many Untouchables had been removed from the anti-corruption squad for unethical, dishonest or corrupt behaviour. The Yard doesn't keep those figures, we were told.\n\nThe inescapable conclusion is that preserving the myth of a good score sheet is essential to justifying CIB3's undisclosed budget and to justifying why Scotland Yard should continue to investigate itself.\n\nA government study has shown how an increasingly aggressive performance culture in the police force was \"a major factor affecting integrity\" and had led to \"a trawl of the margins\", \"soft-targeting\" and other unethical means to \"drive up the figures\" and therefore \"portray performance in a good light\". The study was of course referring to normal policing and how everyday crime figures are massaged. But there is every reason to believe this deceit has simply been transferred to the war on corruption.\n\nThe true scale of the corruption problem in Scotland Yard has been deliberately obscured from the public and Parliament. When the Yard needed to appear tough on corruption and launch its Untouchables the figure was high. When the effectiveness of CIB3 became a serious embarrassment, the figure was radically downsized.\n\nIf the 250 figure is accurate, then the anti-corruption squad measured in terms of prosecutions has been a massive failure and many bent cops are still out there. If there never were 250 bent cops then the Yard misled Parliament by sexing up its intelligence to make the case for self-regulation.\n\nOur investigation leads us to conclude that there are dirty cops who've been deliberately allowed to retire or remain in \"the Job\" because to do something about them would lead the Yard to places it had no intention of going, especially during the Stephen Lawrence scandal.\n\nTo mask this secret containment policy the Yard trots out the unsustainable claim that corrupt cops are more difficult to catch than organised criminals. But as one officer points out, the Untouchables can bug a police officer's work phone, his car, they know all his financial details, his circle of friends, they can monitor his movements, set integrity tests and profile him psychologically. Yet the Yard would have us believe that the corrupt cop can somehow avail himself of more loopholes in the criminal justice system than a rich career criminal.\n\nTales of tricky cops too slippery to catch are one of those convenient excuses senior Untouchables use to mask not just a secret containment policy but also their own inadequacies and failures as managers in charge of the best-resourced squad in Scotland Yard.\n\nOne of the ways around the low conviction rate has been the arbitrary use of suspension to falsely inflate the \"success\" rate and to muzzle internal critics and potential whistle-blowers. This strategy has been complemented since 2000 by the introduction of the blacklist. The Yard tells us that 35 unnamed defective detectives were put on the Service Confidence Policy between January 2000 and April 2003. These cops are not suspended, but continue to work on full pay despite doubts about their integrity. They could be dealing with your case now, whether you are the victim or witness to a crime, or even suspected of one. But you will never know. In effect, we are paying for cops who the commissioner believes are corrupt, dishonest or untrustworthy. But if he doesn't trust them, then why should we? If there is sufficient reason to blacklist an officer, why not remove him altogether? And why keep the blacklist hidden from independent scrutiny to ensure it isn't being abused?\n\nAnother totally predictable failure of the Untouchables followed the resurrection of the discredited supergrass system. Their use not only failed to secure the promised convictions, it has also led to a run of appeals and civil actions leaving the taxpayer to pick up a bill that could total several million pounds in compensation payouts.\n\nThe humiliating collapse of the second Rigg Approach trial in summer 2003 was the final nail in the rotten coffin of supergrass-driven prosecutions. Suddenly, after ten years of filtering inconvenient allegations, the Yard has finally implicitly accepted what it knew all along \u2013 the supergrass system was unlawful. But this unpublicised U-turn is too little and too late because in those ten years the Yard was able to manage its corruption problem and present the public and Parliament with a distorted and untruthful picture.\n\nOn 1 April 2004, the PCA was discarded to the dustbin of history as the \"irrelevant fifth wheel to the investigation coach\", just as liberal jurist Lord Scarman rightly predicted back in 1984. In its place is a new police watchdog called the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The IPCC was a seed germinated in the 1998 Home Affairs select committee report. The Blair government subsequently commissioned KPMG to do a feasibility study, although what an accountancy firm knows about the police complaints system is not readily apparent.\n\nLiberty, the pressure group, conducted an alternative study, setting up an advisory committee that included representatives of the PCA, ACPO, the Police Federation, its retained solicitors Russell, Jones & Walker and a chief constable, alongside civil liberties lawyers and barristers with experience in representing victims of police violence and deaths in custody.\n\nThe Liberty report in May 2000 was the more progressive of the two studies. The report dismissed the protectionist mantra of the police Establishment that only cops can investigate cops and that civilian investigators don't have the necessary authority or skills to achieve effective co-operation from police witnesses or suspects. New legal powers of compulsion and good training on police procedure would overcome these objections, the report concluded. However, it recognised the usefulness of some police involvement in the investigation process, \"especially in the early days of the organisation\". But it felt \"strict limits need to be set on the level of police involvement (25 per cent), and the roles that police officers play within the organisation so that the credibility of the IPCC is not damaged\". Crucially, it went on to recommend that the \"investigative teams should _always_ be headed by a civilian team leader\".\n\nThe Lawrence Inquiry report gave added impetus to the movement for change when the government agreed to implement its recommendation to \"ensure serious complaints against police officers are independently investigated [given that] investigation by their own or another police service is widely regarded as unjust, and does not inspire public confidence\".\n\nHome Office mandarins and their police advisers used the two feasibility studies to fashion an IPCC under the 2002 Police Reform Act. There has been no appetite for the radical change championed by legal figures like Michael Mansfield QC. He wanted a European-style pool of investigating magistrates on a four-year tenure in charge of a group of civilian anti-corruption investigators who go through a well-developed training programme. Mansfield says trusted cops can be helpful but they should \"never\" have control of the investigation.\n\nThe main change from the PCA system has been to give the IPCC its own proactive investigative arm of so-called \"civilian\" investigators with powers to interview under caution, enter police premises and seize material. All cases involving deaths in custody, fatal accidents and serious injuries to the public caused by the police, as well as allegations of racist conduct and certain corruption allegations, apparently, will be automatically referred to the new watchdog. The IPCC will also be able to inquire into any area, even if there has been no public complaint. But in reality over 97% of complaints will continue to be internally investigated but with IPCC supervision or direction. The hope is that internal affairs departments will raise their game.\n\nThe IPCC launch literature aims to persuade the public this is radical change. And on paper it is. But as ever the reality is a lot different.\n\nIn December 2002 the Home Office appointed Nick Hardwick as the IPCC's first chairman. By his own admission, 47-year-old Hardwick has no experience in criminal law, police procedure and investigations. He is someone who rose within the management of social work organisations dealing with prisoners, the homeless and latterly refugees.\n\nHardwick says his job is \"to inspire public confidence\" in the police complaints system, something that is at rock bottom in all communities. Crucially, he says the IPCC \"will demonstrate independence by the people we appoint, scrupulously avoiding conflicts of interest\". But as a measure of that public commitment, in July 2003 Hardwick rubber-stamped the appointment of the Home Office's and Scotland Yard's preferred candidate as the IPCC's first director of investigations.\n\nFor 34 years, DAC Roy Clark was the gatekeeper of the Yard's secrets. No more loyal a servant of the police's interests could one find. He is the J. Edgar Hoover of British policing, who has spent so long in the black chrysalis of intelligence work that one of his colleagues says of him: \"He's trained himself not to talk in his sleep.\"\n\nThe justification for Clark's appointment is tied to the fiction that his stewardship of the Yard's anti-corruption crusade was a success. Secrecy and unaccountability have been at the heart of Clark's anti-corruption model so it should be of no surprise his appointment to the IPCC was achieved by stealth. Clark was one of an undisclosed number of candidates who applied for the key post through the headhunters, Veredus. They are part of the Capita group, which has numerous government contracts and also administers the Met's pension fund.\n\nIn March 2003, Mark Turner from Veredus and former senior Met officer Bill Taylor whittled the candidates down to four. At the time, Taylor was also preparing his 'no names, no blame' report for commissioner Stevens on the collapsed royal butler prosecutions led by former Untouchable John Yates.\n\nHardwick refuses to release the list of candidates or to name the final shortlist. So we have no idea how many were civilians. Hardwick was on the final selection panel accompanied by IPCC chief executive Sue Atkins, who had been poached from the Cabinet Office, and an assessor, Zahida Manzoor. A fourth, surprise panel member was DCS Dave Wood, one of Clark's prot\u00e9g\u00e9s whom he handpicked in 1997 as an Untouchable.\n\n\"I asked Dave Wood to be on the interview panel because I had met him when I'd done a visit to the Northern Ireland Ombudsman office. I was impressed by what he did and the approach he'd taken,\" Hardwick told us in a testy interview. The Untouchables were instrumental in setting up the IPCC equivalent in Northern Ireland. In August 2000, the newly appointed Ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, a former PCA member, visited commander Andy Hayman and Ian Russell at the Yard. She was looking for pointers on how to investigate public complaints against the new-look Royal Ulster Constabulary. The RUC, perceived as being anti-Catholic and a key player in the dirty war, was being restructured as part of the peace process. One of Sir John Stevens' key confidants, DAC Hugh Orde, was made the chief constable of the reformed RUC. Orde had worked with the commissioner on his inconclusive inquiry into state collusion with Protestant paramilitary death squads and also helped strategise over the Yard's response to the Lawrence report.\n\nSeveral senior Untouchables were seconded to help O'Loan. In fact, Wood was Northern Ireland Ombudsman executive director of complaints and investigations when he helped select his colleague Roy Clark for the same job covering England and Wales.\n\nHome Office mandarins are driving this silent coup to put former Untouchables in charge of the police complaints system in the UK. Similar shadow warriors are also now overseeing other complaints mechanisms involving the criminal justice system. The former head of MI5, Stephen Lander, for example, was put in charge of public complaints at the Law Society.\n\nAs a further measure of the Labour government's betrayal of true independence, the Home Office ensured Clark was in place _before_ any of the 15 IPCC commissioners were appointed. These are the men and women from different professional backgrounds \u2013 by law they cannot have served in the police \u2013 whose job it is to safeguard the IPCC's independence and oversee impartial and just investigations.\n\nBut what does it tell us about the IPCC and Nick Hardwick that these commissioners, many of whom come from truly independent backgrounds, were given no say in such a key and controversial appointment as Clark's? After all, his is not a temporary post to help ease the transition, far from it. Clark has been given a fixed five-year contract at \u00a365,000 per year, on top of his substantial police pension.\n\nHis appointment violates the spirit and letter of the philosophy underpinning the Liberty report stressing civilian control of investigations. Which is ironic because the pressure group's director, John Wadham, has now been appointed deputy chairman of the IPCC.\n\nThe IPCC commissioners have therefore inherited a system that was moulded before they took up their posts. Clark set up his department in close liaison with an ACPO Working Group and the Home Office. He has been instrumental in selecting his senior management team of five regional directors of investigation. Three of them are also senior ex-cops or Customs officers.\n\nAs with the Yard, it was hard to get the IPCC to come clean about the exact composition of the 75 so-called \"civilian\" investigators it has appointed. From their figures a staggering 84 per cent (63) are former government law enforcement officers: 33 are former police or Customs officers; 25 are former government investigators from agencies like the Inland Revenue and Immigration; 4 are ex-military and one from an unnamed intelligence agency. The remaining 12 are categorised as \"others\".\n\nHardwick will not name the eight ex-cops who once served in internal affairs units. We know that two of them are former Untouchables. One of them is recently retired detective superintendent Simon Cousins, the head of the Witness Protection Unit and the officer at the centre of the Hector Harvey security breach fiasco. He is now a senior IPCC investigator.\n\nHardwick says he has no vision of eventually phasing out the presence of former police and other law enforcement officers by creating a truly independent investigative arm drawn from the highly skilled private sector of lawyers, forensic accountants and those with no obvious conflict of interest. This does not sit well with Liberty, who told us they would like to see a plan to reduce the number of ex-cops below a ceiling limit of 25 per cent. \"The further it can be reduced the better,\" a spokesman said.\n\nWe tried to interview Clark before his IPCC appointment. He said it would be \"inappropriate\" because the Yard had refused to co-operate with our book. The reply showed just how close he still is to the organisation he is now supposed to hold to account. Hardwick also turned down our repeated requests to interview Clark. The watchdog chairman refused to put the matter to the IPCC commissioners \u2013 who, at least on paper, are Clark's line managers.\n\nWe wanted to ask Clark about his anti-corruption record when he served at the Flying Squad. We wanted to know why he felt his management at Stoke Newington made him suitable to set up the Ghost Squad. And how he felt his attacks on community groups that exposed the \"Stokey Cokey\" corruption scandal qualified him as the new people's defender. It struck us as unlikely to inspire public confidence that he had failed to spot at least 13 miscarriages of justice and rampant drug corruption, racism and brutality on his watch.\n\nAsked about Clark's suitability as an anti-corruption crusader, leading CPS lawyer for the Untouchables, Martin Polaine, conceded, \"I accept that some would raise eyebrows as to issues around Clark. I know people have raised eyebrows. Yes, he had a background that touched on those specialist squads that were being looked at. It's a difficulty. They did ensure [at the Untouchables] that those officers who were investigating former colleagues in effect made clear previous association, previous contacts. That was all documented. Yes, it is a problem if you are investigating yourself.\"\n\nThese comments are all the more interesting because Polaine has now been seconded to the IPCC legal department for two years. It could be argued that Polaine himself is conflicted because while at the CPS he acquiesced to Clark's unlawful supergrass strategy. He also shares a history of decision making with many senior Untouchables.\n\nTo round off the picture of independence, Polaine's boss at the IPCC is former Serious Fraud Office assistant director, John Tate, whose biggest case resulted in the failed prosecution of brothers Ian and Kevin Maxwell.\n\nHardwick told us he is \"entirely satisfied\" there are no skeletons in Clark's cupboard because the Home Office (MI5) had vetted him. And it's not just the spooks that are chuffed. Police sergeant Judy Redford, who sits on the Police Federation's National Committee, said Clark's appointment was \"an absolute hoot\" and had made \"a lot of people in the [police] service quite happy\".\n\n\"No disrespect to Roy Clark, but if you look at his career, I do have to say he's very well thought of, very popular, a well-liked bloke. But I can't be the only person that noticed when you look at his career, whenever he left a location very soon after there was a major investigation. He seems to have slipped out of every single job just before it all went wrong.\" It wasn't for nothing that his nickname in the CPS was \"non-stick Roy\", recalls former CPS lawyer at Stoke Newington Mark Jackson, who is also amazed by Clark's appointment.\n\nIt's difficult to underestimate how conflicted Clark is. Many of his Untouchables are now in key positions in other specialist squads at the Yard, like commander John Coles QPM. Coles is currently head of Operation Trident, which investigates shootings within the black community, precisely the area where a truly independent watchdog is vital to restore public confidence. Many of Clark's old anti-corruption colleagues are also in senior management roles in other forces he will now be responsible for investigating. For example, Michael Todd is the chief constable of Greater Manchester, Andy Hayman QPM the chief constable of Norfolk, Barbara Wilding chief constable of South Wales Police and Bob Quick the number two at Surrey.\n\nIt could be argued the IPCC director of investigations is already a lame duck because Clark's conduct and that of the Untouchables is presently subject to several inquiries. The ongoing Sir Bill Morris inquiry, for example, was set up because of mounting internal and external criticism of the way the Untouchables pursued Asian and black officers like DS Gurpal Virdi and Superintendent Ali Dizaei.\n\n\"I do question [Clark's] suitability,\" says National Black Police Association president Ray Powell. \"How can we have somebody who has been the head of a department whose track record speaks for itself \u2013 failures, discriminatory practice, lack of integrity and honesty \u2013 and someone who set this up is taking these horrible values to a new [watchdog]. It's fundamentally flawed.\"\n\nThe PCA was wholly captured by the Yard and its remodelled anti-corruption squad, now called The Directorate of Professional Standards, says Gurpal Virdi. \"The DPS is well known in [ethnic] communities as Defenders of Police Suspects,\" he told the Morris inquiry in June 2004. Changing the PCA's name, he added, \"does not bring about justice to the complainants. Promises are always being made about the future but there is no delivery. I await [a new watchdog] in a few years.\"\n\nMeanwhile the Home Office department dealing with miscarriages of justice is currently assessing a compensation claim from lawyers representing Stoke Newington victim Ira Thomas, whose conviction was overturned by the Appeal Court.\n\nClark also faces some searching questions over the \"Egg Guney affair\". One of the new IPCC commissioners, Nicola Williams, is supervising a DPS investigation into why it allowed Guney to spend seven years in prison when there was credible intelligence that his conviction was unsafe. Clark's appointment puts Williams in the ridiculous position where she must investigate a senior employee of the IPCC while continuing to work with him on other cases.\n\nClark's record will also feature in a number of civil actions to be brought over the coming years against the Yard by former officers whose lives were unfairly savaged by the Untouchables. It remains to be seen how public confidence in the IPCC will be inspired when the Yard's legal department calls on Clark to defend his unlawful supergrass system.\n\nAnother problem will arise if the family of murdered private investigator Daniel Morgan succeed in judicially reviewing the government's decision in June 2004 not to allow a public inquiry. Clark's appointment to the IPCC has denied them the opportunity of looking to the new watchdog as an effective, alternative remedy. How many other potential complainants will feel similarly alienated?\n\nAlastair Morgan wrote to Hardwick on the day of the IPCC inauguration stressing this point. \"Given Mr Clark's aversion to full and open disclosure... we have grave reservations about his position in an organisation reliant on transparency for public confidence.\" The IPCC chairman's reply was a model of bureaucratic stonewalling. He ignored the issues and simply reaffirmed his confidence in Clark. Hardwick's unswerving support for Clark makes it hard not to feel that the IPCC chairman is something of a nodding dog in the back of a coach driven by the Home Office and Scotland Yard.\n\nLess easy to ignore will be the group of cross-party MPs who support the call for a Home Affairs select committee inquiry into Clark's Untouchables. It's been almost seven years since Condon's 250 \"bent cops\" speech. Parliament is entitled to ask what bang the public got for its buck, and whether the independent police watchdog the committee envisaged is the one the government has delivered.\n\nLabour backbencher Andrew Mackinlay MP is no stranger to dissecting sexed-up intelligence from government ministers and mandarins. He led the charge during the recent scandal over government scientist David Kelly and the Iraq war. It's not lost on Mackinlay that like the fabled weapons of mass destruction, the 250 bent coppers have also failed to materialise. He is also an opponent of Clark's appointment. \"In order to demonstrate fresh thinking and a wholly independent approach, the first director of investigations for the IPCC should not have been appointed from within the existing British police fraternity,\" he told us. \"I support the call for a select committee inquiry into the activities over the last ten years of Scotland Yard's Untouchables. It is time parliament reasserted its powers and duty to investigate difficult subjects like police corruption.\"\n\nAndy Burnham MP, the parliamentary private secretary to home secretary David Blunkett, has been deeply disturbed by the treatment of undercover cop Michael and the whole fiasco in Merseyside. Burnham strongly supports a select committee inquiry and is angered by what he calls the \"complacency\" of Scotland Yard.\n\nJohn Denham MP is the current chairman of the Labour-dominated Home Affairs select committee. He was the former police minister who resigned on principle from the government in March 2003 over its decision to go to war in Iraq. Just before he returned to the backbench, Denham had taken a personal interest in John Wilson's story. Denham wrote to the Wilsons' MP, Francis Maude, suggesting the IPCC would put a lot right when it took over. As an example, he said, under the new system the public would have a right of appeal to the new watchdog if the police refuse to record a complaint. \"I had previously set my mind on introducing provisions like these and the Wilson case re-affirmed the need for them and they now form part of the Police Reform Act 2002,\" Denham wrote.\n\nThe Wilson case had clearly moved him. Denham told Maude he had tried to ensure in the new legislation that where an officer's identity cannot be established it wouldn't be an impediment to lodging a complaint. However, there is a significant but. In such circumstances \"no criminal or discipline proceedings can be brought... but that should not prevent the chief officer from acknowledging to the complainant that misconduct by one of his officers has taken place\".\n\nJohn and Susan Wilson are unconvinced by the IPCC. \"We believe our case highlights how it is impossible for the police to police themselves. There must be so many people out there who have suffered at the hands of a policeman and can't do anything about it. If the Met can't identify their own officers how can they possibly be tracking down terrorists?\" says Susan. John was amazed to learn that the man who created the anti-corruption squad that failed to identify the officer who disabled him for life is now at the IPCC. He calls it \"a fatal flaw\". The new body should be dismantled if retired cops are going to be involved, he says. Solicitor James Bell, who battled so valiantly for the Wilsons, called the IPCC \"a typical New Labour re-branding\".\n\nJohn Denham told us that in the light of growing concern about the Untouchables he could see his select committee revisiting the issue of police corruption and self-regulation. \"If the IPCC fails to inspire public confidence and raise the standard of internal investigations it will be very serious,\" he says.\n\nA parliamentary inquiry would trouble the Yard. The Morris Inquiry is less of a worry. Tellingly, a police spokesman described it as \"Huttonesque\" in a reference to the unsatisfactory inquiry into the death of David Kelly.\n\nSir Bill Morris made it clear when he opened his inquiry in January 2004 that he was not going to \"revisit the past\", \"indulge in a culture of blame\" or put anyone in the dock. Critics have complained that the remit, set by the MPA, is too narrow and concentrates predominantly on race and diversity issues, when the wider issue is the massive failure of self-regulation.\n\nNevertheless, Bill Morris has received some powerful submissions from a range of officers and their lawyers about the wider activities of the Untouchables, which should make uncomfortable reading for Clark and his supporters at the IPCC. The recurrent themes have been: a festering mediocrity, cronyism and protectionism in the senior ranks; lip service to reform; a lack of accountability of senior officers while the public pick up the bill for their failings; and an unhealthy cosiness between the Yard and its supposed watchdogs \u2013 the CPS, the MPA, the PCA and sections of the media.\n\nAs we went to press Sir John Stevens announced his retirement in February 2005. By then the Morris Inquiry will have reported. It is likely to recommend an overhaul of the discipline and complaints system to make it quicker, fairer and more transparent. The new head of the Yard's Untouchables, DAC Steve Roberts, is a former Special Branch officer. He told the inquiry he needed even more money to recruit more qualified anti-corruption detectives. A lot of reliance is also being placed on the IPCC to raise the standard of internal investigations of public complaints. But with the Untouchables now inside the regulator, the IPCC looks less of a new dawn and more a New Labour sell-out.\n\n## List of Plates\n\n### The Supergrasses\n\n1. One of the many faces of double agent supergrass, Geoff Brennan\n\n2. Supergrass Hector 'the Selecta' Harvey\n\n3. Duncan Hanrahan with one of his jailers on the supergrass wing in Basingstoke, which he says the Untouchables dubbed the Dorchester Suite\n\n4. Supergrass DC Neil Putnam who gave evidence against five colleagues from the East Dulwich SERCS office\n\n5. Flying Squad supergrass DC Terry McGuiness (right) who says the Untouchables told him they weren't interested in the police fit-up culture\n\n6. Supergrass DC Kevin Garner (left). His evidence helped convict three Flying Squad colleagues\n\n7. Evelyn Fleckney, drug dealer, lover and informant of DC Robert Clark, who later turned supergrass against him\n\n8. Star Yard informant David Norris. Murdered April, 1991\n\n### The Untouchables\n\n9. Commissioner Sir Paul Condon awards DI John Redgrave a long service and good conduct medal in June, 1996. Did Condon know his Ghost Squad was investigating Redgrave at the time? After his retirement in 2000, the Labour Givernment made Condon a People's Peer. He now investigates corruption for the International Cricket Council\n\n10. 'Big Schmile, Michael.' Commissioner Sir John Stevens awards Undercover 559 a long service and good conduct medal after the Untouchables ruined his life and undermined Merseyside Police's corruption probe\n\n11. Commander John Grieve, joint architect with Roy Clark of the Ghost Squad\n\n12. Stoke Newington boss Roy Clark before he left to set up the Ghost Squad and the Untouchables. He then became director of investigations for the new Independent Police Complaints Commission\n\n13. Untouchables Commander Andy Hayman, who tried to undermine our investigation with a secret smear letter to _The Guardian_. He then became the chief constable of Norfolk Police\n\n14. Ghost Squad chief D\/Supt Roger Gaspar after giving evidence at Brennan's trial in 2001: 'I always suspected he thought I was a soft touch.'\n\n15. DS Chris Smith, the Ghost Squad officer corruptly paid \u00a310,000 by Brennan for moonlighting work. Smith later joined Esher Investigations and was secretly filmed in April 1997 offering his services to retired detective, Alec Leighton.\n\n16. DCI Dave 'Cancer' Woods, whose illness was faked so he could run the Ghost Squad intelligence cell\n\n17. D\/Supt Tony Fuller, who became boss of the Untouchables' covert arm, the Intelligence Development Group\n\n18. D\/Supt Chris Jarratt (left), with his then best friend Keith Pedder, the detective who investigated Rachel Nickell's murder and was later wrongly targeted by CIB\n\n19. DCS David Wood, who replaced Gaspar. Wood then became Northern Ireland Deputy Ombudsman, executive director of complaints\n\n### The Victims\n\n20. Ira Thomas, a victim of Stoke Newington policing. Wrongfully convicted for shooting Freddy Brett in 1998.\n\n21. Erkin 'Egg' Guney, freed by the Appeal Court in May 2003 after serving seven years. Scotland Yard suppressed information on police corruption that showed his drug conviction was unsafe\n\n22. 1988 W.O.G.S on tour to Cyprus. Brian Moore has always denied any link to W.O.G.S. Here he is iun themiddle with his arms around Terry McGuiness (left) and DC Yan Stivrins (right). Like Moore, Stivrins later joined the Untouchables\n\n23. (l to r) DS Gurpal Virdi, Superintendent Ali Dizaei, retiored DI David Michael, founder of the BPA, and Inspector Leroy Logan.\n\n24. Daniel Morgan with his children shortly before he was axed to death in March, 1987\n\n25. Alastair Morgan, his mother Isobel, and girlfriend Kirsteen outside the House of Commons in July 2004 after the government had refused a public inquiry\n\n26. Suicide cop DC Alan 'Taffy' Holmes, who died before he could blow the whistle\n\n### The Villains\n\n27. Master criminal Stephen Raymond, who admits putting up \u00a3600,000 to undermine the Ecstasy case against him, put together by DI John Redgrave\n\n28. Tall Ted Williams hailing a cab outside the Old Bailey after his dramatic appearance at Brennan's trial in March 2001\n\n## Acknowledgements\n\n_\"At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question.\"_ George Orwell.\n\nThis was not an easy investigation to complete. It challenged many of the orthodoxies of the time around the relationship between Scotland Yard and its watchdogs, including the media.\n\nWe thank the National Union of Journalists who backed us against police and other pressure. Lawyers Louis Charalambous and Robin Shaw also had our backs, as did our agent, Leslie Gardiner.\n\nThanks Marcello Minale for the inspired cover and Ewan and Rosanne Flynn for research and indexing. Special thanks, however, goes to MJ for Sig and a lot more, and to Mamta Singh with her great laugh.\n\nWe'd also like to thank Bloomsbury for their encouragement and professionalism, in particular Stephanie Duncan and Miranda Vaughan Jones, whose enthusiasm for this project was infectious.\n\nOf course, many people on both sides of the thin blue line have shared their files and often painful experiences with us. Thank you too.\n\nRegrettably, there was a long list who refused to engage. Among them: retired Met Commissioners Lords Paul Condon, John Stevens and Ian Blair; retired senior officers John Grieve, Roy Clark, Brian Moore, Chris Jarratt, John Coles, Dave Woods and former BBC reporter Graeme McLagan.\n\nThis book is dedicated to the memory of our friend Paul Foot and to the victims of police crimes and government intransigence, whom he did so much to help.\n\n## Acronyms\n\nACC | Anti-Corruption Command (part of the DPS)\n\n---|---\n\nACG | Anti-Corruption Group (formerly CIB3)\n\nACPO | Association of Chief Police Officers\n\nBPA | Black Police Association\n\nCAIU | Civil Actions Investigations Unit (part of the DPS)\n\nCCRC | Criminal Cases Review Commission\n\nCIB1\/2 | Complaints Investigation Bureau\n\nCIB3 | Complaints Investigation Bureau 3 aka The Untouchables\n\nCIBIC | Complaints Investigation Bureau Intelligence Cell (formerly the Ghost Squad)\n\nCO24 | Racial and Violent Crimes Task Force\n\nCPS | Crown Prosecution Service\n\nCRA | Crime Reporters Association\n\nDAC | Deputy Assistant Commissioner\n\nDC | Detective Constable\n\nDCI | Detective Chief Inspector\n\nDCS | Detective Chief Superintendent\n\nDEA | US Drug Enforcement Administration\n\nDI | Detective Inspector\n\nDPP | Director of Public Prosecutions\n\nDPS | Directorate of Professional Standards\n\nDS | Detective Sergeant\n\nD\/Supt | Detective Superintendent\n\nEDM | Early Day Motion (in the House of Commons)\n\nEsda | electrostatic document analysis\n\nFBI | US Federal Bureau of Investigation\n\nFRU | Field Research Unit\n\nHCDA | The Hackney Community Defence Association\n\nHMIC | Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary\n\nIAG | Independent Advisory Group\n\nIDG | Intelligence Development Group (formerly CIBIC)\n\nIIC | Internal Investigations Command (formerly CIB1\/2)\n\nIPCC | Independent Police Complaints Commission (formerly the PCA)\n\nMPA | Metropolitan Police Authority\n\nMPS | Metropolitan Police Service\n\nNBPA | National Black Police Association\n\nNCIS | National Criminal Intelligence Service\n\nNCS | National Crime Squad (formerly the Regional Crime Squads)\n\nPACE | Police & Criminal Evidence Act 1984\n\nPCA | Police Complaints Authority (formerly the PCB)\n\nPCB | Police Complaints Board\n\nPII | Public Interest Immunity certificate\n\nPNC | Police National Computer\n\nQPM | Queen's Police Medal\n\nRJW | Russell, Jones and Walker Solicitors\n\nRUC | Royal Ulster Constabulary\n\nSCP | Service Confidence Policy (The Yard blacklist)\n\nSERCS | South East Regional Crime Squad\n\nSFO | Serious Fraud Office\n\nSIS | Special Intelligence Section (part of SO11)\n\nSO | Special Operations (Scotland Yard)\n\nSO10 | Undercover unit\n\nSO11 | Directorate of Criminal Intelligence\n\nSO13 | Anti-Terrorist Branch\n\nUC | Undercover officer from SO10\n\nUDA | Ulster Defence Association\n\nWOGS | The Walthamstow Overseas Geographical Society\n\nWPU | Witness Protection Unit (part of ACG)\n\n## Cast of Characters\n\nTHE UNTOUCHABLES\n\nPaul Condon | Commissioner (1993\u20132000)\n\n---|---\n\nJohn Stevens | Commissioner (2000\u2013 )\n\n|\n\nDeputy Commissioner (1998\u20132000)\n\nBrian Hayes | Deputy Commissioner (1993\u20131998)\n\nIan Blair | Deputy Commissioner (1998\u2013 )\n\nDave Veness | Assistant Commissioner\n\nIan Johnston | Assistant Commissioner\n\nMike Todd | Assistant Commissioner\n\nJohn Grieve | Deputy Assistant Commissioner\n\nRoy Clark | Deputy Assistant Commissioner\n\nBill Griffiths | Deputy Assistant Commissioner\n\nRoger Gaspar | Detective chief superintendent (Ghost Squad)\n\nDave Bailey | Detective superintendent (Ghost Squad)\n\nDave Woods | Detective chief inspector (Ghost Squad)\n\nAndy Hayman | Commander (CIB3\/CIBIC 1999\u20132002)\n\nGraham James | Commander (Discipline & Complaints)\n\nIan Quinn | Commander (CIB2)\n\nIan Russell | Commander (replaced Quinn)\n\nDave Wood | Detective chief superintendent (CIB3, replaced Gaspar)\n\nChris Jarratt | Detective superintendent (CIBIC, replaced Woods)\n\nBrian Moore | Detective superintendent (CIB3 Operation Ethiopia)\n\nJohn Coles | Detective superintendent (CIB3 Operation Cornwall)\n\nJohn Yates | Detective superintendent (CIB3 Operation Russia)\n\nBarry Norman | Detective superintendent (CIB3 Operation Helios)\n\nMartin Bridger | Detective chief inspector (CIB3 Operation Ethiopia)\n\nBob Berger | Detective chief inspector (CIBIC)\n\nChris McHaffey | Detective chief inspector (CIB3)\n\nJill McTigue | Detective chief inspector (CIB3)\n\nDave Pennant | Detective chief inspector (CIB3)\n\nSimon Cousins | Detective chief inspector (CIB3 Witness Protection Unit)\n\nShaun Sawyer | Detective chief Superintendent, (replaced Hayman)\n\nBob Quick | Detective chief superintendent (CIB3, replaced Wood)\n\nBarbara Wilding | Deputy Assistant Commissioner (replaced Sawyer 2004)\n\nSteve Roberts | Deputy Assistant Commissioner (replaced Wilding 2004)\n\nDavid Zinzan | Detective Superintendent (IDG, formerly CIBIC)\n\nTony Fuller | Detective Superintendent (IDG, replaced Zinzan)\n\nSteve Foster | Detective chief inspector (IDG)\n\nMaxine de Brunner | Detective Superintendent (ACG, formerly CIB3)\n\nJack Kelly | Detective Inspector\n\nSteve Bazzoni | Detective Inspector\n\nAdrian Harper | Detective Inspector\n\nMaggie Palmer | Detective Inspector\n\nPeter Ward | Detective Inspector\n\nMark Holmes | Detective Inspector\n\nCRIMINAL SUPERGRASSES\n\nGeoff Brennan\n\nEvelyn Fleckney\n\nHector Harvey\n\nMichael Michael\n\nMaurice O'Mahoney\n\nRichard Price\n\nJason Procter\n\nAshley Sansom\n\nSteve Warner\n\nPOLICE SUPERGRASSES\n\nKevin Garner\n\nDuncan Hanrahan\n\nTerry McGuinness\n\nNeil Putnam\n\nKalaish Sawnhney (Customs)\n\nCRIMINALS\n\nThe Adams crime family (north London)\n\nThe Arif crime family (south-east London)\n\nHenry Burgess\n\nKevin Cressey\n\nJohn 'Goldfinger' Fleming\n\nRay Gray\n\nMicky Green\n\nDean Henry\n\nJimmy Karagozlu\n\nBob Kean\n\nJohn 'Little Legs' Lloyd\n\nChris McCormack\n\nClifford Norris\n\nKenny Noye\n\nStephen Raymond\n\nJoey Simms\n\nMichael Taverner\n\nGary Ward\n\nCurtis Warren\n\n'Tall' Ted Williams\n\nCarl Wood\n\nBrian Wright\n\nCIVILIANS TARGETED BY THE UNTOUCHABLES\n\nLes Brown (solicitor)\n\nDebbie Cahill (CPS)\n\nJon Rees (private investigator)\n\nEX-COPS TARGETED BY THE UNTOUCHABLES\n\nDC Geoff Baldwin (private investigator)\n\nDS John Davidson (private investigator)\n\nDS Sid Fillery (private investigator)\n\nDC Nigel Grayston (private investigator)\n\nDS Keith Green\n\nDS Bob Harrington (private investigator)\n\nDC Martin King (private investigator)\n\nDI Alec Leighton (private investigator)\n\nDI Keith Pedder (private investigator)\n\nCOPS TARGETED BY THE UNTOUCHABLES\n\nDS John Bull\n\nDC Mick Carroll\n\nDC Chris Carter\n\nDC Michael Charman\n\nDC Robert Clark\n\nDC Declan Costello\n\nD\/Supt Ali Dizaei\n\nDC John Donald\n\nDC Chris Drury\n\nDC Colin Evans\n\nDC Paul Goscomb\n\nDS Len Guerard\n\nDS Eamonn Harris\n\nDC Dave Howells\n\nDS Paul Kelly\n\nDC Tom Kingston\n\nDS Gordon Livingstone\n\nDI Fred May\n\nDC Jeff May\n\nDS Denis Miller\n\nDC John Moore\n\nDC Martin Morgan\n\nDI Tim Norris\n\nDC Mark Norton\n\nDS Terry O'Connell\n\nDI George Raison\n\nDI John Redgrave\n\nDC Tom Reynolds\n\nDC Ian Saunders\n\nDC Paul Smith\n\nDC Dave Thompson\n\nDS Barry Toombs\n\nDS Gurpal Virdi\n\nDC Austin Warnes\n\n## Notes\n\n### CHAPTER 1 NOBLE CAUSE CORRUPTION\n\n In this book, \"Scotland Yard\" and \"the Metropolitan Police\" are interchangeable. We shall use \"the Yard\" to denote the senior management around the commissioner, and \"the Met\" to denote the force in general.\n\n _One of Us_ by Hugo Young (Pan, 1990).\n\n _The Outsider_ by Keith Hellawell (HarperCollins, 2002).\n\n _The Guardian_ , 23 October 1992.\n\n _In the Name of the Law \u2013 The Collapse of Criminal Justice_ by David Rose (Vintage, 1996).\n\n The measure was incorporated into the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.\n\n _Panorama_ 'Fair Cops', BBC1, 5 April 1993.\n\n### CHAPTER 2 THE GHOST SQUAD\n\n Interview with DCS David Wood at Scotland Yard, 7 February 2000.\n\n Letter from CIB Commander Andy Hayman, 10 February 2000.\n\n Interview with DCS David Wood.\n\n _Informers: Policing Policy Practice_ edited by Roger Billingsley, Teresa Nemitz, Philip Bean (Willan Publishing, November 2000).\n\n DAC Roy Clark's evidence at the Old Bailey, 6 February 2001.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n DCS Roger Gaspar's evidence at the Old Bailey, 5 February 2001.\n\n Clark. Old Bailey, 8 February 2001.\n\n Clark. Old Bailey, 8 February 2001.\n\n Interview with CPS lawyer Martin Polaine, 25 October 2002, and Stuart Sampson, 21 February 2003.\n\n Clark, Old Bailey, 8 February 2001.\n\n Home Office spokeswoman, 9 April 2003.\n\n Telephone message from Michael Howard QC MP, 17 April 2003, in response to letter 8 March 2003.\n\n MI5 eventually got a significant role in \"the prevention and detection of serious crime.\" This arrangement was formalised by the 1996 Security Service Act.\n\n Interview with DCS David Wood.\n\n Detectives Alan Holmes (1987), Gerry Carroll (1992), Sidney Wink (1994), John Watt (1998).\n\n### CHAPTER 3 THE GHOST OF BRINKS MAT \u2013 A FIRM WITHIN A FIRM\n\n This was chief superintendent Bill Moody. He was later sentenced to 12 years.\n\n Interview by James Morton for his book _Bent Coppers_ (Warner Books, 1993).\n\n For a full account of this case see _The Fall of Scotland Yard_ by B Cox, J Shirley and M Short (Penguin, 1977).\n\n Interview, 25 July 2002.\n\n _Lundy: The Destruction of Scotland Yard's Finest Detective_ by Martin Short (Grafton Books, 1991).\n\n Stephen Knight, in his seminal book _The Brotherhood_ (1983), wrote: \"It is almost certain that the corruption which led to Operation Countryman would never have arisen had a Masonic City of London Police commissioner in the 1970s not turned a blind eye to the activities of several desperately corrupt Freemasons under his command.\"\n\n Details of the bribe came out later, in Noye's murder trial, when Boyce was cross-examined.\n\n _Scotland Yard's Cocaine Connection_ by Andrew Jennings, Paul Lashmar and Vyv Simson (Jonathan Cape, 1990).\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n Even with the evidence of a British money launderer called Patrick Diamond, whose other clients included a hit man for the American Mob, a London magistrate threw out the case against Fleming when he eventually returned home handcuffed to detectives in March 1987.\n\n In _The Brotherhood_ , Stephen Knight reveals how Scotland Yard's detective pool was stacked with Masons who were often in lodges with the very criminals they were supposed to be catching.\n\n### CHAPTER 4 THE GHOST OF BRINKS MAT \u2013 A _LIAISON DANGEREUSE_\n\n Judged on convictions arising from the Brinks Mat investigation, the final tally was not great. Of 28 prosecutions there were 14 acquittals.\n\n One of these involved the suspicious acquittal of Bristol linkman John Palmer. The Task Force had evidence of jury nobbling, the report said, and were investigating the Palmer jury. Palmer was brought back from Spain for the 1987 handling trial. He returned to Tenerife after his acquittal. He admitted melting the bullion but denied knowing its origins. Police believe he set up a crooked and ruthless timeshare operation in the Canary Islands using the money he earned from Brinks Mat. In May 2001, he was convicted for a massive timeshare fraud on British pensioners and given a seven-year sentence.\n\n This was Stephen Donavan, the 34-year-old \"Docklands investment consultant\" to Selective Estates. Donavan was acquitted.\n\n One year after the King trial, Rexstrew was himself tried and acquitted in 1998 of conspiring to sell rhino horn. Three others were convicted following the RSPCA\u2013police sting. Rexstrew is a legal executive in the law firm Law Mooney Lee & Cook.\n\n Soon after Relton was arrested his solicitor and friend, John Blackburn Gittings, contacted Boyce and invited him to dinner at the Carlton Club, the historic watering hole of the Conservative Party. Boyce attended with another officer. But during the meal he became uneasy and left after telling his host to stay out of his way. Boyce later got into trouble during the trial over his decision to ban some defence solicitors and clerks from the police interviews. He explained to the judge that he believed they were \"bent\" and would frustrate his financial inquiries by passing messages to those on the outside. Relton's senior clerk, Ted Wein, was a convicted fraudster.\n\n See Fraser's autobiography _Mad Frank and Friends_ (Warner Books, 1998). Frank was a criminal associate of the father of another of the Gold Conduit defendants, Gordon Parry, who got ten years.\n\n A National Criminal Intelligence Service report seen by the authors said: \"Believing that Parry's release to the UK would strengthen the prosecution's case against himself, Brian Perry sent his son [and two others] out to Spain [in May 1989] to murder Parry. Perry supplied his son with some stolen chemical warfare poison which when in contact with human skin would be painlessly absorbed through the tissue into the body.\" The alleged plan was to bake Parry a special cake to be presented during a prison visit. For unknown reasons \"the plot failed\", the report said. Parry was eventually extradited and stood trial with the others. He got ten years. Yard murder detectives also have old transcripts of official phone taps during the 1992 trial in which criminals discussed asking Patrick to throw a female juror off her commuter train. He declined to be interviewed.\n\n _Lundy: The Destruction of Scotland Yard's Finest Detective_.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n Matters were not helped when, a few months before the writ was served, a retired Met police constable called Sidney Wink blew his brains out in August 1994 shortly after the cops paid him a visit. It was suspected that Wink, who since leaving the Met had set himself up as a gunsmith and dealer, had supplied a reactivated gun to some cop killers. Crime correspondents, quoting anonymous police sources and little else, also claimed Wink may have provided the Brinks robbers with their guns.\n\n John Ross was arrested on 12 July 2004 for \"corrupting\" detective constable David Dougal who was also arrested for malfeasance in a public office and suspended.\n\n### CHAPTER 5: DEATH OF AN EXPERT WITNESS\n\n PCs Peter Foley and Alan Purvis were later compensated for wrongful arrest after they sued the Met. They received substantial damages. The Met admitted that the arrests should never have taken place.\n\n Letter to Paul Keel, 23 January 1988.\n\n Later in his evidence, Lennon confirmed he was awaiting trial on a fraud charge. He was subsequently convicted.\n\n _The Mirror_ , 16 April 1988.\n\n### CHAPTER 6: THE SUICIDE CLUB\n\n _Daily Express_ , 12 August 1987.\n\n _Today_ , 12 August 1987.\n\n _Daily Telegraph_ , 4 August 1987.\n\n _Sunday Times_ , 'Shadow Over the Yard's High Flyer', 9 August 1987.\n\n Gray was not under caution when he made these tapes. They were made purely for intelligence purposes.\n\n Derek Haslam affidavit, 1988.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n _Sunday Times_ , 2 August 1987.\n\n Haslam affidavit, 1988.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n _The Times_ , 15 March 1988.\n\n Haslam Affidavit, 1998.\n\n _Sunday Times_ , 21 January 1990.\n\n _The Guardian_ , 23 January 1990.\n\n A homeless person died when hit by a police car driven by Haslam. He reported the incident and an independent witness confirmed he had not driven recklessly. But Haslam was fined for being over the limit and was returned to uniform duties for one year. Adams says he blocked Haslam's application to return to the detective division at Tooting police station because of the incident. Haslam says Adams used the accident to smear him to CIB2. Haslam is emphatic that he had never applied to join Tooting and was anyway returned to detective duties in another south London crime squad that Adams had no control over. Ray Adams told us on 1 August 2000 he was a member of Blackheath 1302 lodge.\n\n### CHAPTER 7 THE GHOST OF DAVID NORRIS\n\n _Evening Standard_ , 24 May 1993.\n\n Reeves was sentenced with others in July 1997 to 18 years for his role in a 300-kilo Colombian cocaine smuggling plot. Also convicted was south-east London gangster Tony White, the so-called \"King of Catford\", who was previously acquitted of the Brinks Mat robbery in 1984. Reeves had his conviction quashed in 1998 on a technicality. The collapse of the case led to a major inquiry by retired judge Gerald Butler. The Norris murder squad believed Reeves had a printing business in New Cross and business interests with Doherty involving counterfeit money.\n\n It cannot be overlooked that at the time of Norris's murder, the RUC and a secret British Army unit called the Field Research Unit (FRU) had penetrated the UDA. The FRU had an agent, Brian Nelson, in charge of all UDA intelligence. He was also being passed security files on Catholics by his army handlers, which Nelson then passed to Loyalist death squads. In February 1989 UDA gunmen assassinated Pat Finucane, a Belfast lawyer, in front of his family. This led to the beginning of a 14-year inquiry into collusion between state security forces and Loyalist terrorists by the current Met commissioner Sir John Stevens. The Stevens Inquiry was run by a handful of Met detectives who months before Norris's death had arrested Nelson and were debriefing him about his army handlers and involvement in the Finucane killing. Leighton confirms that Special Branch became involved in the Norris murder investigation because of the Loyalist connections. But the question still remains whether a violent drug dealer like McCreery was allowed to operate on the British mainland because of his usefulness to the intelligence services in Northern Ireland. And if so, who from the secret state was running McCreery when he was alleged to have helped plan the murder of David Norris? Did he tell them about the intended hit?\n\n A few weeks after the Norris murder trial mysteriously collapsed, Maurice O'Mahoney took the stand at the Old Bailey in June 1993 to remind the Yard in the most theatrical circumstances about police corruption in south-east London. In his trial for robbery Mo specifically referred to the Norris murder and told the jury he didn't want to end up like him or several other criminal informants and weak links who'd been rubbed out between 1990 and 1992. Great Train Robber Charlie Wilson was shot in Spain in April 1990 and John Moriaty and Nick Whiting were killed two months later. In October that year Roy Atkins, said to have been behind the hit on Wilson, was himself executed.\n\n Letter from commander Andy Hayman dated 10 February 2000.\n\n Response from Crampton's lawyers dated 14 July 2000.\n\n R v Reginald Jones, Anthony Wozny and Henry Page, 14\u201317 June 1990, Croydon Crown Court.\n\n The case of Sergeant Michael Ambizas and Anona Murphy. She pleaded guilty.\n\n Letter from commander Andy Hayman, 10 February 2000.\n\n Warne had his life sentence reduced on appeal and is now out on parole, believed to be living in Canada. Dennison is still appealing.\n\n### CHAPTER 8 \"WHAT? WHAT? NIGGER!\"\n\n _The Police and Society_ by lawyer and former Labour MP Ben Whittaker.\n\n Press release from the Lawrence Family.\n\n Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report (SLIR) Chapter 13, paragraphs 37 and 44.\n\n _The Independent_ , 4 July 1998.\n\n The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry concluded there was no evidence the murder investigation was contaminated over the first weekend.\n\n SLIR Chapter 13, paragraph 69.\n\n Donald registered Cressey under the pseudonym of \"Carol West\". During a meeting on 9 September 1992, Cressey told Donald and his co-handler that a consignment of 50,000 ecstasy tablets from Holland would be arriving by lorry via France to a transport company in Orpington, Kent. \"The firm,\" Donald put in his informant's log, \"is owned by the man who paid some Irishmen to kill David Norris.\"\n\n _The Guardian_ , 1 March 1993.\n\n SLIR Chapter 27, paragraphs 21 and 38.\n\n _The Case of Stephen Lawrence_ by Brian Cathcart (Viking, 1999).\n\n SLIR.\n\n SLIR Chapter 27, paragraph 42.\n\n### CHAPTER 9 A RAGAMUFFIN BUNCH\n\n The DPP refused to prosecute the seven officers but the PCA recommended they face a disciplinary board, where they were all dismissed from the Met in November 1990.\n\n The police pounced on Mrs Burke when she went with a jug of water and some diabetes pills to give to her 79-year-old husband, who she said had been dragged out of the house in his pyjamas. She too was arrested and charged with assault on a police officer. In March 1992, a jury awarded her \u00a350,000.\n\n West Yorkshire police reported to the PCA and the DPP, Barbara Mills, in the late autumn of 1991. The DPP took a further six months before deciding not to prosecute eleven officers, to the great consternation of legal figures and the victims of twelve miscarriages of justice, who had all had their convictions overturned. Even the chief constable of West Midlands, Geoffrey Dear, who disbanded the serious crime squad, took the view that there should have been prosecutions.\n\n Letter from assistant commissioner Peter Winship 24 June 1992.\n\n It wasn't until November 1991 that the PCA stepped in, and only after receiving Pearl's direct complaint against Lewandowski.\n\n Over 300 allegations of police brutality and planting had been received by HCDA since it was set up in 1988, of which 130 cases were taken up.\n\n In September 1991 Michael Lavery and Jeff Eaton were acquitted of attacking five City Road police officers after they arrested them for being drunk and disorderly on New Year's Day. Lavery and Eaton had between them 40 injuries. They said they were assaulted in the police van, custody suite and cells. Independent witnesses supported their version and the jury took just 15 minutes to acquit. A month later, a court overturned the conviction of 19-year-old Clint Nelson for assault on two Stoke Newington officers in a police van, one of whom he had allegedly headbutted despite a height difference of eight inches. Nelson said he was assaulted after going to the aid of his mother.\n\n Letter to Roy Clark, 10 February 1992.\n\n Early Day Motion, 19 June 1992.\n\n A landmark Court of Appeal ruling (R v Edwards) in January 1991 had also imposed a new disclosure obligation on the prosecution concerning an officer's discipline record and adverse judicial findings in similar cases.\n\n Response, 2 March 1994, to a parliamentary question.\n\n There were also 27 allegations of theft, 9 of assault and 27 of conspiring to pervert the course of justice, said the press release. The overwhelming majority of the suspect officers were constables. \"One officer featured in eight cases, one in seven, three in six, two in five, two in four, four in three, and five in two. The remaining twenty-seven officers featured in only one case each.\"\n\n Palumbo, thirty-two, was jailed for ten years on 24 February 1997 for conspiring to import cannabis from Spain in lorries with his father-in-law and two others. He had left the police in 1995.\n\n Early one morning they were walking home from a party when the couple witnessed a mentally ill man being bashed up on the street by police officers. They went to Stoke Newington police station to report it, but ended up being assaulted themselves and charged.\n\n _Police Leadership in the Twenty-First Century \u2013 Philosophy, Doctrine and Developments_ , ed. Roger Adlam & Peter Villiers (Waterside Press, 2003).\n\n### CHAPTER 10 GEOFF BRENNAN \u2013 DOUBLE AGENT SUPERGRASS\n\n John Brennan's pseudonym was \"Terry Allen\".\n\n Detectives Bill Williamson, Frank Lovejoy and Eddy Bathgate.\n\n Drug trafficker Kevin Cressey gave this information to his SERCS handlers on 2 September 1992.\n\n Geoff Brennan's pseudonym was \"John Millwall\".\n\n Osbourne's body was found on Hackney Marshes in east London in December 1980. Brennan says he was \"ironed out\". Others say he had a heart attack and was kept in the deep freezer until his associates decided what to do with him. But his friend, John Fleming, has another take. He told us that the Duke had committed suicide with pills because he couldn't face going back inside over a hash importation from Pakistan intercepted by Operation Wrecker in October 1979 when a Customs officer was shot dead. Customs believed the Duke was the main organiser behind the importation, along with another Kray henchman, Freddie Foreman, who later received two years on a guilty plea. George Francis was acquitted at a retrial. That verdict was dogged by suggestions of jury nobbling.\n\n Detectives Jim Sutherland, Jo Cunningham and Bob Robinson.\n\n According to a Special Branch document, in 1981 the Ayatollah Khomeini government dispatched three colonels to purchase 8,000 TOW anti-tank missiles for their war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The US embargo on Iran meant the arms deal was negotiated through a Swiss intermediary and an Iranian company in London called Metro UK Limited. Arif and Williams were believed to have helped an Iranian exile in London called Behnam Nodjoumi to kidnap the colonels and an Iranian banker, Hassam Moghaddan, and steal the money deposited in a Midland Bank account in the City. The plan was foiled and various members of the gang were arrested and stood trial. Arif and Williams were never prosecuted.\n\n Between 1994 and 1996 a series of High Court judgments were made against 12 members of the Gold Conduit. Some, among them Lloyd, Noye, Clark and Perry made private settlements with Shaw & Croft in this period. By November 2001 most of the \u00a326 million had been recovered. At the time these deals were struck police forces in the UK did not have today's asset confiscation powers. As such only one consideration dominated the settlements, recovering as much money as possible for Lloyds. McCunn is sensitive to the criticism and says on his client's instructions Scotland Yard was kept continually informed. \"No deal was struck until the defendant had been dealt with by the criminal courts,\" he insists. Shaw & Croft recovered about \u00a326 million for Lloyds, but this figure represents only one-half to one-third of the stolen gold, says McCunn. The robbers and their associates have benefited from the rest.\n\n The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Import Export Trading Company.\n\n Sprouce and Jones worked for Gallo Autos.\n\n Most of the money ($479,000) came via GX Impex, but the Wangs, through their companies Lyon Aviation and Kings Automotive, got the balance ($148,000) as an upfront payment for the phones from a Hong Kong buyer called Mainperse Development Co and Nanking Hung Yin Model Company.\n\n A Houston lawyer helped set up Wang Pacific Corp in the BVI. Padgett, Jones and Sprouce used the same lawyer to set up Victory Financial Group Ltd there.\n\n The Switch On Enterprises company account number 113118497 was first set up in 1989 for earlier covert operations.\n\n Smith re-registered Brennan under his old Brinks pseudonym \"Joe Montana\", the famous San Francisco 49ers quarterback. Smith was said to be a great lover of US culture.\n\n The FBI in Houston had already been investigating Padon since early 1992.\n\n This might explain why DC Norton was transferred from Bexleyheath shortly thereafter.\n\n Statement by DC Micky Barr 7 February 1994.\n\n Connally was also wounded and maintained he could have been the intended victim for refusing to overturn a disciplinary discharge on Lee Harvey Oswald's military record when he was Secretary of the Navy during the Kennedy Administration. Connally died in 1993 after bankruptcy.\n\n The joint venture company was called Thames and registered in Texas, but Wyatt pulled out of Sierra Leone after the May 1997 coup. Crooks had his own company, West Africa Holdings.\n\nHouston Customs had investigated and cleared Coastal of sanctions busting with Libya and Iraq in the early nineties. Crooks' partner in Sierra Leone was an intriguing Houston oil baron called Oscar Wyatt. The so-called 'King of Crude' had built up an energy company, Coastal Inc, into one that owned 5% of liquid and gas pipelines in the US. Crooks met Wyatt through another famous Texan, the former state governor, John Connally, who was in the car when President Kennedy was assassinated. After Connally left politics in 1980 he went into business with Crooks and took a seat on the board of Coastal.\n\nCrooks and Wyatt had a joint venture in Sierra Leone to renovate an oil refinery in Freetown using Nigerian and Iranian crude. They later had a diamond mine and Wyatt also invested when Crooks took control of the Mama Yoko, the country's premier hotel. In the grounds he set up a diamond-cutting factory.\n\nWyatt had personal and business relationships with Quaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq. In fact, in 1990, soon after the Iraqi dictator invaded Kuwait, Wyatt and Connally travelled to Baghdad to successfully negotiate the release of 21 American citizens and one Briton whom Saddam was holding as human shields against the expected US counter-offensive.\n\nWyatt opposed the first Gulf War and was very critical of President Bush senior, whose family also controlled Texas. British readers however may only recall Wyatt through the tabloid antics of his stepson Steve, who the society pages had linked to the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson. The couple met during an official engagement in 1989 when Fergie attended a party thrown by Steve's socialite mother in Houston. A year later photographs found by a cleaner in his London flat raised the spectre of an affair and were said to have helped put the skids under Fergie's marriage to Prince Andrew.\n\nOf course Wyatt was not aware of everything Roger Crooks did, legitimate or otherwise. And Scotland Yard never produced evidence that he was arms dealing with the oil baron's say-so. A retired Houston Customs officer who had worked on Crooks says he traded on his relationship with Wyatt.\n\n Official summary by DS Richard Hester of the meeting. The weapons included four GEC mini guns, 2,000 kilos of C4 explosive and 100 M16 assault rifles. At one point the weapons were said to have been stolen from a military base in Miami after a hurricane. According to press reports, in September 1992 Hurricane Andrew led to looting of the National Guard armoury in south Florida.\n\n Statement from FBI agent Michael Mee, 4 June 1997.\n\n Crooks recalled being stopped routinely at Customs as described. But he says he voluntarily told the FBI in Houston about the arms deal after returning from London the first time, and not as part of a trade to save his skin. He says he kept the FBI fully informed and played along with the arms dealers.\n\n Memo from Special Agent in Charge, Leon Guinn, US Customs, dated 9 May 1994.\n\n Senior CPS lawyer Stuart Sampson later gave evidence at the Old Bailey that he had been \"kept in the dark\" by the Ghost Squad management about the Brennan case and the intelligence interviews on 21 June and 28 June.\n\n Statement of Roger Gaspar, 30 November 2000.\n\n The _Mirror_ reported on 31 January 1997 that Colombian police found 750 pounds of cocaine when searching a luxury yacht part-owned by a Mr David Shaw.\n\n A Swiss-based American banker called Robert Keller was also targeted briefly. He had several inconclusive meetings with Hester and a fourth undercover officer from the City of London police as the discussion concerned bonds.\n\n Evidence from Roger Gaspar at the Old Bailey, 5 February 2001.\n\n DC Mark Norton also admits moonlighting with Brennan after he was suspended in May 1995 over a fight in a bar with fellow officers. Norton felt the Yard used this incident as a pretext to sack him in 1997 for the embarrassment caused by his marriage to Debbie Norris.\n\n George Copley made the tape after his arrest with Frank Fraser Jnr and others for the 1976 robbery of \u00a3520,000 from Williams & Glyn Bank in the City.\n\n Interview under caution with retired DS Chris Smith on 26 August 1997.\n\n### CHAPTER 11 HECTOR THE SELECTA' \u2013 RUDE BOY SUPERGRASS\n\n There are four Flying Squad offices. Finchley covers north-west London, Barnes covers south-west, Tower Bridge covers south-east and Rigg Approach covers north-east.\n\n Harvey says Marshall was his father's name and Cook was after a retired detective.\n\n The anti-corruption squad were also told about this but Harvey is unaware of what happened to the two men.\n\n Hepburn was arrested along with others allegedly involved in the robberies, but he was never charged. He denied being the inside agent.\n\n The Flying Squad arrested but never charged Brown.\n\n According to the informant, a fifth man, John Fleming, was also on the job, but got away. The same Flying Squad team later linked him, through the same informant, to the Brinks Mat robbery, which took place one month after the kidnap attempt on the Global Airlines executive. When Gillard visited Fleming in prison in August 2002 he maintained he wasn't involved in either job. However, Fleming's logic was somewhat askew. \"How could I be in two places at once?\" he said.\n\n \"Drug Lords Gave Labour Dirty Cash for Election Fund', by Michael Gillard and David Connett, _The Observer_ , 20 September 1998.\n\n Ironically, Fred Bunn's firm Bark & Co would later represent DS Harris.\n\n These are Hector Selecta', Double H, Swallow, Marshall Cook, Mr Rodgers, Howard Hughes, Leroy Chadwell and Bloggs 72.\n\n At first Henry offered to plead to theft and named Hepburn as the inside agent, but he refused to give evidence against others. Hepburn denied this at trial. Henry didn't name Harvey. He was jailed for seven years. His associates Roy Page and Jo Lydon were also convicted. Harvey says McCormack wanted the \u00a3200,000 to pay the three men's families.\n\n In 1998, a Customs supergrass called Michael Michael told the anti-corruption squad that McCormack had asked him to provide a safe house. McCormack told Michael he and a man called Clifford Hobbs were planning a drive-by shooting of Harvey using a motorbike. Shortly after making this request, Michael said McCormack told him the plan was off because he had sorted out Harvey by placing a grenade on his motorbike. McCormack was never charged with the attempted murder of Hector Harvey.\n\n Green was a member of one of the violent street posses that terrorised Kingston, Jamaica. In the eighties, national political parties recruited these posses to kill their rivals. Green was a killer for the People's National Party, according to the _Guardian_.\n\n They were Steve Cox (\"my best sergeant\") and constables Kevin Hooker (\"because he'd just joined\") and Ian Saunders (\"because he didn't have a lot on\"). It was an acute embarrassment for the Yard when two years later Hooker and Saunders were suspended over corruption allegations relating to their time at Rigg Approach. Hooker was required to resign. Saunders went sick and was unfit to stand trial for corruptly stealing money recovered by the Flying Squad from a Romford Post Office robbery in July 1994. He was acquitted when the trial collapsed. He now serves at Islington police station.\n\n Statement by detective superintendent Dave Niccol, 13 July 1998.\n\n Raison's plan was to offer Henry assistance with an appeal in return for his help on Harvey. In the end the CIB were not interested in the plan, says Raison.\n\n \"[McCormack] was arrested [sometime in 1998] for being suspected of putting the hand grenade on HH's bike. We thought he'd got the hump over the fact that his job [Clapham] went wrong and then Harvey's job came off and they got all the money,\" says detective superintendent David Pennant. \"The point was we had insufficient evidence to charge him on the hand grenade job. There is still an outstanding palm print on the grenade we've never identified and we'd be very interested to know at some stage in the future.\"\n\n The Tower Bridge Flying Squad office was also looking at McCormack and Fleming. There had been a number of armed robberies of Security Express vans in south London since 1990 with the suspected involvement of inside agents, says one detective sergeant.\n\n In 1998, Customs supergrass Michael Michael told CIB that DC Paul Carpenter, his Met handler from 1991 to 1998, was a \"corrupt\" officer to whom he had paid \"up to \u00a310,000 per week\" for leaking intelligence to his criminal associates. DC Carpenter was charged and committed for trial. But the Crown withdrew the case against him, whilst maintaining that he was \"corrupt\". If this is true, Carpenter was therefore in a corrupt relationship with Michael at the precise time the crooked accountant was approached by McCormack to provide a safe house after he plotted to kill Harvey. Also, Raison must have unwittingly alerted Carpenter that the Flying Squad was looking at McCormack and had an informant close to Fleming.\n\n The Raison Report on Operation Spy.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n Detective superintendent Niccol statement, 13 July 1998.\n\n Security Express sacked Hepburn. The company then brought a civil action against Ward and Simms. Soon after the robbery the pair had bought a house and cars and had deposited money in various banks.\n\n DI Tim Norris was the only officer disciplined as a result of Operation Spy. He was given 'words of advice', a mild rebuke, for failing to ensure search records were completed, according to Niccol's statement.\n\n Niccol statement.\n\n### CHAPTER 12 GHOSTBUSTED\n\n In December 2000 Gaspar wrote a report on behalf of NCIS, MI5, MI6, GCHQ, Customs and ACPO advocating government access to every telephone call, email and internet connection for seven years.\n\n Interview with DAC David Wood, _Police Review_ , 2 August 2002.\n\n _Police Integrity_ , HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, June 1999.\n\n _The Job_ , 23 January 1998 \"My Mission, by New CIB2 Head\".\n\n The officer was DS Barry Toombs. He was later reinstated. But while Russell was investigating Toombs, both officers were themselves being investigated following a complaint to the commissioner by an officer called Neil Abercrombie. He claimed he had been subject in the early nineties to a flawed investigation and that CIB2 then corruptly covered up the mistake.\n\n _The Guardian_ , 28 July 1997.\n\n DS Tom Bradley, DS Ian Martin and DC Barry Porter were suspended in 1995 with others for providing bodyguarding and chauffeuring services to Reg Grundy, the producer of the Australian soap _Neighbours_. In late 1995 Grundy had reported an alleged theft to Belgravia police station. Bradley was assigned the job and privately offered to protect Grundy and his family for a fee. The Ghost Squad only discovered the moonlighting because Bradley had used the bugged work phone of DI John Redgrave to conduct his business. Bradley and the other suspended officers denied the moonlighting allegations and nothing was proved against them. In fact Bradley had been previously suspended while at NCIS after _Panorama_ 's 1993 expos\u00e9 of John Donald. He was reinstated in 1994. Bradley was said to be close with John Stevens who had used him as part of his special inquiry in Northern Ireland into state collusion with Loyalist death squads. After retiring in 1996 Bradley and Martin worked together in a private investigation company. Bradley now has a nightclub in central London. The Home Affairs select committee report noted: \"There remains real concern that individuals who are ostensibly mentally strong before their suspension suffer severe psychiatric illness immediately afterwards and yet so quickly recover following their retirement, to the extent that they are able to function in demanding areas of employment.\"\n\n _The Times_ , 8 November 1997.\n\n _Hansard_ , 22 December 1997.\n\n _The Guardian_ , 16 January 1998.\n\n McGuinness told us he was \"close\" to Green and he probably wouldn't have given evidence against him, although he was adamant Green knew they were collecting drugs because he claims they discussed it in the car. Green denies this.\n\n The five officers were DI Tim Norris, DS Eamonn Harris, DC David Howell, DC Paul Smith and retired DI Fred May. Defence lawyer Les Brown was also charged.\n\n Under a 1992 ACPO\u2013PCA voluntary agreement these investigations should be completed within 120 days. Green's complaint of corruption in CIB3 was one of many that took years to finish.\n\n _Hansard_ , 18 January 2001.\n\n Letter from Clarke & Co to Andrew Faires, CPS Central Case Work, 3 March 2000.\n\n### CHAPTER 13 THE SLEAZE MACHINE\n\n _The Ashdown Diaries_ , vol. 1.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n Straw, it was alleged, had been the victim of a mugging in a park.\n\n Rees was unsuccessful but he did successfully sue his solicitors.\n\n DCI Peter Elcock was part of the area complaints unit at Norbury police station.\n\n Leighton resigned on 31 July 1996. He was never prosecuted for any corruption associated with the John Donald case, although he says Donald made a statement implicating him as part of a deal with the CIB for accepting his guilty plea.\n\n 46-year-old supergrass Bob Bown was arrested in October 1997 for his part in the supply of reactivated Mac 10 machine guns to the underworld. He was due to give evidence against Brighton gun nut Tony Mitchell, who was supplying Glasgow gangster Paul Ferris.\n\n King pleaded guilty and had already been sentenced on 27 March 1998 to nine years. This was reduced to six on appeal. Bown and Mahoney were jailed for five and three years respectively. Their sentences were also reduced on appeal to twenty-one months and forty-two months.\n\n Detectives Carter and Guerard investigated a \u00a31 million robbery of a Lebanese courier on 2 August 1994. Hanrahan told CIB the detectives had recommended his firm to the Shouman Exchange Company to protect future couriers who were bringing large sums of cash through Heathrow every week. Hanrahan Associates put in a bid, but Shouman didn't go with it. Hanrahan alleged he and the detectives then plotted to rob a courier. The plan was sacked when the detectives warned Hanrahan that MI5 were looking at the original robbery. Martin King was then brought in with some criminals from Grove Park. They staked out the airport but the robbery was called off at the last moment.\n\n Hanrahan also named two detective constables from the East Dulwich SERCS, Tom Kingston and Tom Reynolds. Grayston was suspended for illegal PNC checks and retired in September 1997 ahead of a disciplinary hearing. He formed a company called Bridge Security. When Gillard met him he admitted he had sold information from the PNC.\n\n CIB intelligence assessment of Hanrahan, 11 February 2000.\n\n The following year Carter and Guerard were unanimously acquitted in a separate second trial of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice and blackmail.\n\n Parkhurst Prison transcript, 3 November 1998.\n\n### CHAPTER 14 BAD BLOOD\n\n Statement of retired DCI Peter Mellins, 1 October 1998.\n\n On one occasion Denise was particularly angry with Williams and she grassed him up, through her brother, to Smith, about some stolen Zhandra Rhodes dresses he had come by. It was another job, involving information about an armed robber called Danny Foye, which first brought Smith and the Brennans to the attention of John Grieve. He was present when a \u00a31,500 reward was paid out at the Yard.\n\n Another member of the \"Smith camp\" who also featured in O'Mahoney's civil action was the notoriously unstable Brixton-based detective Malcolm 'Basher' Howells. After Basher left the police, he worked with Smith and Brennan doing private surveillance work.\n\n See Chapter 19 for more on DS John Bull.\n\n Other members of the gang were brothers Steve and Graham Moore, John Maguire, Paul Kidd and Lloyd's old friend Billy Haward (see Chapter 4).\n\n Lloyd eventually received a light sentence on 16 December 1996 of 5 years.\n\n The judge made no order that there should be an investigation and the CPS also stayed silent even though they accept the sight of a police officer invoking his rights is very rare. Four years later, PC Phillip Davies invoked his rights at Southwark Crown Court on 27 July 2002 after a clever cross-examination by defence barrister Kyriacos Argyropolous exposed some serious police wrongdoing in the case of Roger Gilchrist. The prosecution immediately offered no evidence and Gilchrist was acquitted. Yet again no inquiry was conducted.\n\n Statements by Roy Penrose, Mike McCullagh, Dave Morgan, Bill Ilsley and Ian Crampton.\n\n There had been a coup in May 1997 ousting the West and multinational-friendly Kabbah government of Sierra Leone. Crooks was caught in a fire fight at his hotel, the Mama Yoko, as the RUF rebels advanced on the capital, Freetown. He had support from a former SAS trooper called Will Skully who, like many British ex-Special Forces, was working for mercenary outfits hired by British and Canadian companies to protect their diamond and gold interests. With the help of a US battleship waiting off the coast of Freetown, Crooks fled with the British High Commissioner, Peter Penfold, to neighbouring Guinea. In the capital Conakry Crooks says he had \"a lot of meetings\" with Penfold about restoring the Kabbah government. Crooks claims that he and Skully went on an unofficial mission to Freetown to give the RUF leaders a letter from the US State Department asking them to lay down their arms. The rebels arrested them, but he and Skully were soon released after American and British government \"pressure\", Crooks explained. In Conakry a secret plan to stage a counter-coup using a British mercenary company called Sandline was hatched. Sandline was run by Simon Mann and retired Falklands veteran Lt. Col Tim Spicer. A Canadian diamond company provided Kabbah with $10 million that was funnelled to Sandline for the purchase of 35 tons of Bulgarian arms. Crooks had bought a military helicopter from Sandline in 1996 to shuttle guests between the airport and his hotel. This too was used in the counter-coup, which ended successfully in February 1998 with the help of Nigerian troops. It soon emerged in the British press that the Sandline option had been given the nod and wink by the Foreign Office in contravention of UN arms sanctions. This plunged the New Labour government into its first major scandal, not least because it had come to power promising \"an ethical dimension\" to its foreign policy. Tony Blair ordered a judicial inquiry parallel to the tense Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee hearings, where an old Labour backbench terrier, Andrew Mackinlay MP, was grilling ministers and civil servants with such gusto that Foreign Secretary Robin Cook tried to apply a choke chain. Scant details had already emerged in the press about the role of Crooks and his past involvement in Operation Nightshade. According to Hester, at one stage in 1998 the select committee was going to call him and fellow undercover officer Micky Barr to give evidence. The restored Kabbah government deported Crooks from Sierra Leone in June 1998 ostensibly over his role in Operation Nightshade. However, Crooks says this was a pretext. His business rivals in Freetown wanted control of his hotel and helicopter shuttle franchise so they invented phoney charges that he had been running arms to the ousted RUF rebels. Crooks told us the US government intervened on his behalf with Kabbah and he eventually returned to Sierra Leone in October 1999.\n\n R v Bekir Arif, Patrick Malloy, Les Lucas & Jo Hartfield. Arif was eventually sentenced in May 1999 to 23 years.\n\n In the 18 months since Brennan's complaint to the PCA, Coles hadn't interviewed Angel (who'd retired) or Mott (who was still serving).\n\n CIB also said there was insufficient evidence to prosecute detectives Mott, Moralee and Angel.\n\n### CHAPTER 15 MANIPULATING LAWRENCE\n\n Dave Coles later came in for serious criticism from the Lawrence Inquiry report over his \"association with Clifford Norris\" and the failure to discipline him properly. He went sick in June 1998 on full pay and retired on 10 February 2000 with a pension after 28 years in the force.\n\n Interview with Ray Adams, 1 August 2000.\n\n Lindsay Hewitt, daughter of Commander Hewitt.\n\n This was the 1995 case referred to in Chapter 13 involving Reg Grundy, the Australian TV producer of _Neighbours_.\n\n On 2 February 1999, just before publication of the Lawrence Inquiry report, Hector Harvey told CIB3 that Chris McCormack had boasted about killing David Norris. McCormack had apparently claimed that crooked cops provided Norris's address, who was killed because the informant had \"put a lot of people away\". When CIB3 learned this McCormack was on remand in Belmarsh Prison, coincidentally in a cell next to Bob Clark. McCormack was facing trial for torturing David McKenzie, a financier who the Adams crime syndicate believed had lost \u00a31.5 million of their money. McCormack's co-defendant was John Potter, Terry Adams' brother-in-law. Both defendants were acquitted at the Old Bailey in June 1999.\n\n On 3 February 2000 Clark was sentenced to twelve years and Drury received eleven. Two other officers, DC Peter Lawson and Roger Pearce (retired), were acquitted. A third officer, DC Terry Broughton, Fleckney's co-handler, had the case against him dropped. Putnam gave evidence in a second trial in July 2000 that resulted in the conviction of DC Tom Reynolds (42 months), DC Tom Kingston (42 months) and DS Terry O'Connell (2 years).\n\n Putnam, aged 42, received 3 years and 11 months for admitting 16 corrupt acts between 1991 and 1995. Fleckney, aged 43, was given 4 years and 6 months for 21 counts of drug trafficking, perverting the course of justice and handling stolen goods. Her sentence was to run concurrent with the 15 years she was already serving.\n\n Blacketer was taken off the blacklist. Hardy was still on it at the time of writing.\n\n### CHAPTER 16 THE ELECTRICIANS PLUG A LEAK\n\n _Defending the Realm: MI5 and the Shayler Affair_ by Mark Hollingsworth and Nick Fielding (Andre Deutsch, 2000).\n\n The _Sunday Times_ reported on 9 July 2000 that in 1999 Straw personally signed 1,645 bugging warrants from the police and intelligence services to tap phones, a 60% increase since he became home secretary. A Statewatch report in January 2003 said that under Labour, phone, email and postal intercepts by the police and intelligence services had more than doubled, and were higher than at any time since the Second World War.\n\n### CHAPTER 17 THE SELECTA' RETURNS, POLICE BABYLON BURNS\n\n On 23 April 1996, 13 suspects believed to have been involved with the January 1995 Security Express robbery of \u00a31.4 million were arrested during the joint CIB\/Flying Squad operation. Defence solicitors were all served with a document outlining the evidence against their clients, who included armed robbers Gary Ward and Joey Simms. This revealed that Harvey had been given authority by Scotland Yard to act as a motorbike rider during the robbery. Harvey's barrister would later claim this was a \"deliberate leak\" with no possible justification other than \"revenge\" by the Flying Squad. Much of the finger of suspicion was directed at DI George Raison. But he told the authors that the document had been prepared with CIB2 approval and it was agreed there was no longer any need to disguise Harvey's informant role because he had already disclosed it himself, firstly when he approached the Security Express manager looking for a reward in November 1995, and secondly when he brought Laurel Blake to Tintagel House shortly afterwards to back up his story. According to Raison, phone taps later revealed that Blake called Ward or Simms immediately after he left Tintagel House.\n\n Darren Lewis was jailed at the Old Bailey for ten years. Ricky Welsh got six years on a guilty plea, and Michelle Niles received thirty months. She also pleaded guilty. Harvey was willing to give evidence against them.\n\n The Appeal Court concluded there was \"no impropriety\" in Jarratt's conduct over the change of solicitors.\n\n The officers \u2013 DCI Bob Brown, DS Gordon Livingstone, DS Mick Carroll, DC Colin Evans and retired DCI Mick Newstead \u2013 all denied the charges. They were later told in December 1999 that the CPS had advised CIB3 there was \"insufficient evidence\" to prosecute. No disciplinary action followed.\n\n Raison and Fry strongly denied the allegation. They were never charged with anything but were suspended. Fry says he was never interviewed about the allegations and was subsequently allowed to retire on 16 December 2001.\n\n Evidence of Terry McGuinness in the Pope and Tozer trial, 3 May 2000. Coomber was also cleared of this allegation.\n\n On 12 July 2001 the judge ordered the four counts Paul Smith faced to lie on file, a CIB spokesman explained. There was no plea entered and Smith retired immediately on medical grounds unopposed by the police. He faced no disciplinary charges.\n\n In fact from October 2001 to October 2002 he'd made 4,645 calls, 94 of them to Cherry, according to telephone billing analysis.\n\n The woman was named in Cherry's statement as Nicky Conway. She denied being racist and her manager moved Conway but they remained in the same office. Cherry says she was later followed when picking up her daughter from school. Two men she believed to be plain-clothes police officers called her a bitch and then sped off.\n\n Report by DI Ian Sweet, 26 November 2002.\n\n### CHAPTER 18 FRUIT OF A POISONED TREE\n\n The other defendants included Bull's brother, and informant \"Roger Morley\" (a police pseudonym) who acted as the intermediary in the affair with Tommy Farrant. See Chapter 13. Bull was later sacked. Morley received compensation for the 13 months he'd spent on remand.\n\n Two months later on 10 April a trial against three Derby police officers accused of assault and perverting the course of justice collapsed because of delays laid by the judge at the door of the CPS. Then in November, the Attorney General said police officers and lawyers who fail to comply with guidelines on disclosure should face disciplinary action.\n\n Pownall was later criticised by Alun Jones QC in a letter to the CCRC. The barrister lambasted Pownall and Polaine for their failure to disclose highly relevant material about the supergrasses and a \"lack of control\" of CIB3, whose officers he said had \"suppressed\" evidence damaging to the case. Jones added that CIB3 were under pressure to meet the commissioner's 250 target and in the prosecution of the five East Dulwich SERCS detectives he had never experienced so much pressure to secure a conviction.\n\n Clark had his sentence reduced by two years to ten. Drury, who was not considered the prime mover, had his sentence reduced by two years to eight.\n\n Security Express manager Paul Fullicks told us the total loss to his firm was \u00a31,516,000 of which \u00a318,500 was in unrecovered travellers cheques.\n\n McGuinness also pleaded guilty to supplying a Milbrau imitation pistol for the first aid kit.\n\n \u00a3941,111 is outstanding. On 27 February 1995 Jasvir Jhumat, Sudesh Kararia and Roy Ryan all pleaded guilty. Jhumat got five and a half years and the others four years. Kundan Uppal (the inside man), who fought the case, was sentenced to seven years.\n\n Before he was caught, Garner had received \u00a338,000 in a lump sum and \u00a3600 per month from his pension.\n\n The HSE alleged they had failed to protect officers PC Kulwant Sidhu, who died, and PC Mark Berwick, who was seriously injured, when they fell through the roof in separate incidents while pursuing suspected burglars.\n\n### CHAPTER 19 THE FALL OF THE GINGER GIANT\n\n Clarke response, 16 March 2000. Hain letter 17 April 2000.\n\n Straw letter 20, March 2000. We have repeatedly asked the Yard to supply details of the \"inaccuracies\", but they refuse, claiming \"legal and operational reasons\".\n\n The Hunt brothers \u2013 David, Raymond and Steven \u2013 had interests in scrap metal, cars, bars and a toy company in the North, according to an NCIS officer.\n\n Around 1990, a well-financed operation codenamed Crocus was set up to target a number of East End villains involved in drugs and extortion rackets. DCI Norman McNamara oversaw the covert police budget. He says the origins of Operation Crocus go back to the still unsolved double murder in 1989 of Terence Gooderham and Maxine Arnold, found shot dead in their car in Epping Forest. Gooderham was a financial auditor in the clubs and pubs business. The Underworld grapevine whispered that the execution was connected to stolen drug money. Others claimed it concerned a pub protection racket. By 1991 the money ran out and Operation Crocus closed down to criticisms at division headquarters that it hadn't delivered. Supporters argued that the intelligence picture of criminality in the area was better developed. The following financial year the idea was revived under a new codename, Operation Fairway, which concentrated on the Sabini crime family. Their secretly recorded conversations were fed directly to DI Dave Woods' intelligence cell working from an old cadet centre at Wanstead. This intelligence cell was codenamed Operation Fantasy. The covert pub was codenamed Operation Frantic.\n\n Interview with Raymond, 11 September 2002.\n\n Interview with reporter Jo-Ann Goodwin, who interviewed Couzens for the article \"Professor of Ecstasy\" in the _Daily Mail_ , 5 August 2000.\n\n Raymond's phones in France were tapped. But according to a detective on Team 13, they had also raided the flat of a man signing on at a post office in Archway using his name. The man was found in bed with a young black boy. It was not Raymond, but among items seized were clues to his whereabouts. There was also a series of letters with homosexual overtones from a Lord.\n\n The Ghost Squad had been monitoring Virciglio's efforts to corruptly nurture a police scientist and a detective from the Edmonton area. Gaspar was forced to arrest Peter Hare, the scientist, in November 1994 because a _Mirror_ crime reporter had tipped him off that a private investigator working for CIB was trying to make some extra money by selling compromising videos of Hare to the newspaper. Local solicitor Les Brown, who was already representing Virciglio, took up Hare's case. The scientist was suspended from duty. Weeks later, Brown became a Ghost Squad target when Hector Harvey became its second supergrass.\n\n Raymond says he and \"good friend\" Patrick Adams wanted to kill Wright after Adams got hold of a list of Yard informants from a corrupt CPS clerk, Mark Herbert. The Yard insisted during Herbert's trial that the list of 33 informants was intercepted before it reached the Adams crime family. But Raymond says it got there and Wright's name was on it. Unfortunately for Adams, Wright had already fled to extradition-free Northern Cyprus to avoid questioning over his role in a horse race fixing and betting scam involving high profile jockeys and trainers.\n\n In his formal response to the leaking allegation Redgrave told Coles, \"I am sure that Smith was the officer who took up the contract and succeeded in discrediting me.\"\n\n Smythe statement, 3 October 2002.\n\n### CHAPTER 20 THE BUTCHER, THE BAKER, THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS SON\n\n Ramadan Guney fell out with Mohammed Al-Fayed over payment for the funeral of his son, Dodi, who died with Princess Diana in the Paris car crash in 1997. A woman called Diane Holiday claimed she had Dodi's love child and attempted to exploit the rivalry between Fayed and Tiny Rowland. Holiday had a past as a fraudster. She then befriended Ramadan Guney and eventually bore him a son. Egg's brother Onder says the relationship with Holiday is the reason why his father's political ambitions in Cyprus were thwarted.\n\n The money was channelled through his offshore company to the Conservative Industrial Fund.\n\n According to former DS Alec Leighton, who ran the operation against Arif, the cannabis came from Howard Marks, via Thailand and Australia, to Liverpool. From there it was driven by lorry to London. Dogan Arif maintained he had been fitted up. We have spoken to a drug squad detective who had concerns about the integrity of the prosecution and secretly passed information to the defence. He said there was no payment for his help. For his part, Leighton claimed Dogan planned to discredit him before the trial. \"One scenario was to place drugs in [my] garage at home and a large sum of money in [my] bank account and then arrange for CIB to investigate.\"\n\n Green claims that one of the MI5 officers on Centurion was removed after Customs intercepted heroin he was allegedly receiving through the post from one of his targets.\n\n Two days before his son was arrested Ramadan had indeed bought a gun to take to Turkey \u2013 he says it was for the police. A Turkish Cypriot dry cleaner who had once owned a gun shop had recommended where to go. The gun was sent legally by the shop direct to the airport to be handed over to the captain of the plane, explained Ramadan.\n\n BBC _Panorama_ had secretly recorded Donald agreeing to help a major drug trafficker called Kevin Cressey, an associate of the Arifs, escape prosecution in return for \u00a330,000. The BBC gave CIB its covert tapes in which Donald named at least ten officers. Some of these were on the drugs wing of the Surbiton office of SERCS, while others were working at NCIS. CIB arrested and suspended Donald, his boss at Surbiton, detective sergeant Alec Leighton, and detective sergeant Tom Bradley at NCIS. But in late 1995, during Donald's trial, he completely took the Yard by surprise when his lawyers produced in court the highly sensitive logbooks from the line room at NCIS \u2013 this is the secret phone-tapping section that provides transcripts of target criminals' conversations. The Yard called in the then chief constable of Northumbria, John Stevens, to conduct an inquiry into the security breach at NCIS. Leighton told us CIB always suspected the logbooks came from him. \"I will always deny that,\" he said. But he admits knowing how Donald got them. He says someone in the Surbiton office, whom he refused to identify, knew he had stored the logbooks there and took them at Donald's request. Donald changed his plea to guilty during his trial. He was jailed on 28 June 1996 for 11 years.\n\n Leighton was still suspended when the Donald and Guney trials were progressing in 1996. He had made a lengthy complaint against CIB officers conducting Operation Gallery, including its head, assistant chief constable Ian Blair, then of Thames Valley Police. The complaint \u2013 that CIB had leant on witnesses to give false evidence \u2013 was investigated internally and regarded by the Yard as an attempt to disrupt the prosecution of Donald. Statements, however, had to be taken from former colleagues of Leighton who had worked with him at SERCS. Two had gone on to work at NCIS on Operation Centurion. Detective inspector Mick Conner had been the liaison with MI5 and MI6 on the Turkish investigation. He left NCIS during the Gallery probe and transferred to Belgravia police station. Arthur Gilchrist, a customs officer, was the deputy at NCIS in charge of Operation Centurion. There is no suggestion either officer acted corruptly. Leighton's complaint was dismissed by CIB, although there was some corroboration. Conner made a statement claiming CIB effectively asked him to give perjured evidence about the whereabouts of a police car to corroborate Cressey. The statement was never used because Leighton wasn't charged. Instead he faced minor discipline for disobeying an order and had his wages docked. Leighton believes Cressey went to the BBC to set up Donald in the hope of ruining the prosecution against him for possessing 50 kilos of cannabis and to \"dirty\" Leighton on behalf of his associates, the Arifs. Leighton and detective constable Jim Tucker were part of the team that arrested Dogan Arif in 1989. The two officers' evidence was instrumental in his conviction. Tucker was working for NCIS when Leighton was suspended in 1993 over the Donald matter. He left the Met and is now a barrister. Leighton is a successful private investigator.\n\n Stuart Sampson and Peter Moorhouse respectively.\n\n This was the reason for giving Johnson \"words of advice\" after the trial. It didn't affect his career as he is now serving in a sensitive post.\n\n Up until then, the Federation-funded lawyers, Russell Jones & Walker, had won 95 cases in the last 3 years, earning litigious cops a little over \u00a31.5 million and themselves a lot more in fees.\n\n Detectives Pat Melody and Kevin Harrison.\n\n### CHAPTER 21 SECRET JUSTICE\n\n Sawnhney pleaded guilty to three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. He got five years in January 2001.\n\n Carpenter had participated in the operation against corrupt ex-cops Martin King and Duncan Hanrahan. After a lengthy period of suspension, Carpenter, who denied the bribery allegations, was charged and committed for trial. But the crown withdrew the case against him, whilst still maintaining at court that he was \"corrupt\". A police spokesman explained: \"Despite a rigorous three-year investigation the allegations have not been proved. Advice was sought from Treasury Counsel and the CPS, who advised there was insufficient evidence to warrant criminal proceedings. During the course of the investigation a number of potential disciplinary offences were disclosed. The officer involved resigned from the MPS in August 2002, and had recorded against him findings of guilt for procedural breaches of police regulations.\"\n\n Other sentences were Patel (eighteen months); Tony Anthonakis, the courier in the corruption conspiracy (nine months); brothers Andy and Chris Nicolas (six and five years respectively); Michael Yiannakis, the accountant (seven years three months). Jimmy Karagozlu, the Nicolas brothers, Yiannakis and Attila Kansaran are at the time of writing fighting a \u00a32.5 million confiscation order by Customs for the VAT fraud.\n\n Two National Crime Squad detectives, Keith Clazie and Gary Wapplington, \"fell into\" the surveillance operation. They were on an operation in Scotland. Clazie, Morgan's friend, was reduced in rank following disciplinary proceedings over expenses and overtime claims. No further action was taken against Wapplington, said CIB3 detective Dave Pennant.\n\n He pleaded to laundering \u00a3106,000 believed to belong to Kean. At Reading Crown Court on 11 September 2000 Sansom received 20 months. He was later kicked out of the supergrass system for not being totally truthful. CIB3 charged him with further money laundering, drugs and fraud offences.\n\n Colourful Dublin gangster, Martin Cahill, aka the General, had thieved the paintings in 1986. The recovery of some of them involved a fall-out between the IRA and Protestant gangs, which may have also led to Cahill's murder in 1994.\n\n Stephen Jory, 52, was serving eight years for a \u00a350 million counterfeit operation of fake \u00a310 and \u00a320 notes after his arrest in 1998.\n\n In 2004, Kean and Morgan had their sentences reduced to six years. The Appeal Court agreed they were \"excessive\" compared to other police corruption cases.\n\n The charge of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice was left on file \u2013 until the disciplinary process concluded \u2013 which meant it could be resurrected in the event of fresh evidence. At the time of writing Paul Goscomb is still awaiting a disciplinary hearing.\n\n Operation Jackpot had a statement from corrupt officer Roy Lewandowski alleging Le Blond had told him he was going to approach Morgan on behalf of a Greek Cypriot informant to help plant a shotgun on local black DJ Benny Wilson.\n\n This was part of the covert inquiry into detective John Redgrave. He says he documented his friendship with Nico as a police officer to avoid compromise. Operation Cornwall, the CIB3 inquiry led by John Coles, interviewed Nico about his relationship with Redgrave and Morgan. Nico is believed to have listed all the police officers, including senior ones at Scotland Yard, he has had contact with over the years.\n\n \"He introduced me to Jimmy,\" recalls Kelly. Karagozlu also gave information on his competitors in the drugs trade, but Kelly says they couldn't get into his own organisation because they had \"no leverage\".\n\n David Atkinson, Fred Davy, Jo Gunning, Steve Levy and Arthur Redbourne were arrested in June 1996 with 155 kilos of cannabis. The SERCS operation was codenamed Bank. According to Kelly, the man behind the parcel was hit man and police informer Kenneth Kenny, 55, aka Kenneth Beagle. He was in prison at the time. Kenny was shot dead in Romford on 1 November 2000.\n\n R v Chic Matthews, Joey Pykett & Tommy Hole (27 November 1996, Court of Appeal); R v David Atkinson, Fred Davy, Jo Gunning, Steve Levy & Arthur Redbourne (3 June 1997, Snaresbrook Crown Court); R v Des Copeland & Roger and Benjamin Minall (27 June 1997, Lewes Crown Court); R v Daniel Downs & James Wooley (28 October 1997, Chelmsford Crown Court).\n\n DC Geoff Curd.\n\n Kelly went sick in June 1998 with a bad back and depression. He was disciplined for \"a lack of supervision\" of the surveillance logs in Operation Bank. DAC Townsend told him in November 1999 that after examining his involvement on Operations Nightshade and Bank and the Chic Matthews affair he had lost confidence in his integrity. Kelly took medical retirement.\n\n McNamara was well connected with a senior figure in the Ghost Squad management, Bill Griffiths, who in turn was close friends with Roy Clark. McNamara and Griffiths along with other senior officers started the Malt Whisky Club at the Yard. Every month they'd meet to consume a bottle of scotch. Another member was commander Nial Mulvihill, the man who took over from Roy Clark at Stoke Newington. McNamara suffered a mental breakdown because it was never specified to him what those doubts were, although he subsequently heard informally that it concerned his perceived closeness to certain CIB targets in the Flying Squad and SERCS. He was medically retired in September 1998. Today he says he cannot recollect the conversation with Green about the alleged approach from Morgan and Gillan, but doesn't discount that it happened.\n\n Robert Dellegrotti.\n\n### CHAPTER 22 A LURKING DOUBT\n\n Court of Appeal ruling, 28 February 2002 R v Howell, May and Harris paragraphs 168\u2013170.\n\n Interestingly, in 2001 Scotland Yard's top fingerprint scientist used in the Lockerbie case, Allan Bayle, resigned in order to testify in the appeal case of businessman Alan McNamara because the police wouldn't let him give evidence against another force (Greater Manchester Police). He was quoted in the _Daily Telegraph_ (26 August 2001) saying, \"I realise there has been a slow degradation of standards within the force, and now men are being put into prison on less convincing forensic evidence.\"\n\n The trial concluded on 23 March 1990. Ira Thomas was cleared of the first charge of attempted murder.\n\n The case of Anson King, acquitted at Snaresbrook Crown Court on 22 November 1991. King's defence was that the crack cocaine had been planted on him. He made a complaint after his acquittal. McCulloch was one of the arresting officers. On 3 November 1994 HCDA announced King had been paid \u00a370,000 by the Yard with no admission of liability. McCulloch was also involved in the case of Cyrus Baptiste, whose conviction was overturned by the Appeal Court on 25 May 1993. The prosecution said had they known about the King case and another (Thompson) they would not have proceeded in November 1991 with the prosecution. Operation Jackpot did not lead to any criminal proceedings against McCulloch. He was promoted to detective constable during the corruption probe.\n\n R v Thomas, 13 February 1992 before Lord Justice Watkins and Justices Swinton Thomas and Garland.\n\n Statement of Lee Pritchard, 23 March 1993.\n\n One month after the Dando murder, home secretary Jack Straw rejected Fayed's passport application on the grounds he had made \"improper and unethical\" cash-for-questions payments to Tory MPs and because of his failure to report the deposit box break-ins to the police.\n\n DC Robert McKenzie was required to resign on 12 February 2002, just before Barry George's appeal. McKenzie appealed to commissioner Stevens and was reinstated the following month with a fine of 13 days' pay. Another embarrassment was the affair between a key witness in the Dando trial, Charlotte de Rosnay, and DC Peter Bartlett. He was moved to another murder squad at Barnes, south-west London. De Rosnay then made allegations against Bartlett of harassment. He was charged but the CPS discontinued criminal proceedings on 18 February 2002.\n\n Interview with Keeley, 8 November 2001.\n\n### CHAPTER 23 W.O.G.S.\n\n _Evening Standard_ , 19 September 2002. _The Job_ , 27 September 2002. We asked Moore to provide details of his arrest, just to ensure it wasn't one of those publicity stunts so favoured by the Yard's spin doctors. He declined.\n\n When he was exposed in September 1988, Golder was working on an east London murder squad investigating a suspected Yardie-related killing in Stoke Newington. When he was acquitted of 13 corruption charges in December 1991 he told the press: \"I was only pretending to be a bent copper to get information. I never took a penny off the lady.\"\n\n Also in the photo is DS Jim Gillan.\n\n DS John Bull's police car was bugged. He told us he was served a disciplinary notice concerning the incident on 17 October 1997.\n\n### CHAPTER 24... AND THE BEATING GOES ON AND ON\n\n Germany defeated the Czech Republic 2\u20131.\n\n MPA Minutes, 17 December 2001.\n\n All three were found guilty in April 2003 of neglect of duty.\n\n Scotland Yard Press release, 6 July 2002.\n\n _The Independent_ , \"Met wasting millions with 'shambolic' cash control\", 13 April 2001.\n\n Stafford Solomon was awarded \u00a345,000. His companion, Brian Douglas, was the first man to die after being hit with a long-handled police baton in 1995. The MPA was not told of the settlement, Lord Harris admitted to _The Independent_.\n\n In April 2003 the Met agreed to pay 90% of the Wilsons' legal costs.\n\n### CHAPTER 25 UNDERCOVER 599 \u2013 MICHAEL'S STORY\n\n The home secretary still appoints the commissioner, but must entertain the MPA's recommendations on candidates. It, in turn, is now responsible for setting targets, monitoring performance, managing the \u00a32 billion annual budget and appointing and disciplining senior officers.\n\n For a full account see _Cocky_ by Tony Barnes, Richard Elias & Peter Walsh (Milo Books, 2001).\n\n _Mersey Blues_ : 'A Fair Cop?', BBC1, 2 February 1999 (Hart Ryan Productions).\n\n Detective Superintendent Phil Jones statement, 7 June 2000.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n _Ibid_.\n\n Letter from DCI Peter North, 29 August 1997.\n\n DS Ron Border and DC Alistair Clark also served on the David Norris murder inquiry under Jarratt.\n\n Roy Ramm statement, 30 September 2001.\n\n DCI Chris Jones statement.\n\n Transcript of Michael's covertly taped conversation with Fuller.\n\n Letter from Sir James Sharples QPM to assistant commissioner David Veness, 9 September 1997.\n\n DCI Chris Jones statement.\n\n Merseyside Police declined to comment on Operation Florida or Ward's case.\n\n The Davies trial was held in Nottingham. His co-defendants were Mick Ahearne, Tony Bray, John Newton, John and Jo McCormack and Phil Glennon. Bray (three years) and Ahearne (fifteen months) were also found guilty. The three convicted men lost an appeal in May 2000.\n\n Karen Todner letter to Stephen Timms MP, 14 February 2001.\n\n Lord Bassam to Timms, 13 March 2001.\n\n Timms to Stevens, 19 June 2001.\n\n In fact Commander James' integrity was also in question over allegations of expenses fraud and sexual harassment.\n\n### CHAPTER 26 IN-HOUSE\n\n Employment Tribunal decision, 23 August 2000.\n\n Michael Turner article, _Computers and Law_ , February\u2013March 2001.\n\n DC Sarah Locker is an East End girl born to Turkish Cypriot parents. She joined the Met straight from school in 1980. Eleven years later she brought a racial and sexual discrimination case. Her problems occurred in the late eighties when she worked under John Grieve on the 2 Area Drug Squad. She was one of only two female detectives out of seventeen officers. She was the butt of sexually explicit and personally demeaning jokes. Her main persecutor was undercover cop DC Micky Barr, later involved in Operation Nightshade, and a friend of Grieve's. The Yard settled the claim in 1993 and paid Locker \u00a332,000 plus legal costs. Barr gave a written apology and John Grieve publicly apologised at a special press conference, sealing his sincerity with an unwanted kiss. An agreement was drawn up for her return to work at SO11, run by Grieve and Roy Clark while they secretly oversaw the Ghost Squad. But the new job was a sham and the agreement was breached in other important respects. The pressure led to a breakdown. When she recovered, Locker sued in 1997, this time for breach of contract. The Yard eventually settled in June 2000 rather than submit Grieve and Clark plus others to potentially damaging public cross-examination. Locker left the force on an ill-health pension with a \u00a3215,000 payment. She still sees a psychiatrist and has genuine concerns about reprisals from the Yard.\n\n Old Bailey, 25 February 2003.\n\n Four of the other five were later named in court as Govarni Hussein (Bach), Jimmy Sanchez (Brahms), Irage Kiani (Elgar), Samual Salmassian (Verdi). The fifth man was not identified. The advance fee fraud was apparently under investigation by the Fraud Squad and Dutch police.\n\n CIB sources say Iran has now released Mr Darougheh, who was working for MI6.\n\n Under Norman were DCIs Buttivant and Jill McTigue and DI Mark Holmes. In CIBIC were DS Tim White and DI Stephen Wilkinson.\n\n Law lecturer Ben Bowling, management consultant Andrea Cork, chair of the Lambeth community police consultative group, Jennifer Douglas and Kirpal Sahota, a consultant forensic psychiatrist.\n\n Judge Hyam listed the intelligence areas that existed: cocaine; steroids; threats to an ex-girlfriend; concerns of connections to the Iranian Secret Service; assisting two sisters to remain in the UK for payment; \u00a3500 for assisting a woman's visa application; assisting people suspected of an advance fee fraud; assisting an Iranian who had once tried to deposit \u00a32m in an account; interfering with police investigations into people Dizaei knew; receiving \u00a3800 from a man on bail for advice on a drink-drive charge; receiving 7 tickets for a concert he was responsible for policing.\n\n Disciplinary report on DC Pudney, 14 October 1999.\n\n Letter from Polaine to DI Paul Greenwood, 21 February 2002.\n\n Dellegrotti statement, 11 June 2002.\n\n _Daily Mirror_ , 12 April 2003.\n\n Letter to Martin Polaine, CPS, 5 August 2002.\n\n Only 2.9% (3,915) of the total number of officers (136,386) are from ethnic minorities.\n\n Chief inspector Logan's employment tribunal case went to conciliation. He later reportedly received \u00a3100,000. The Untouchables had investigated him for seven months over allegations he falsely claimed from the BPA a \u00a380 hotel bill. The BPA hadn't complained. It was the Untouchables who brought the case after seizing BPA files as part of the Dizaei investigation. The case of WPC Joy Hendricks was also settled.\n\n### CHAPTER 27 \"WE ARE SUBJECTS NOT CITIZENS\"\n\n _Mail on Sunday_ , 1 June 1997 and 25 August 1997.\n\n Smith letter to Straw, 5 June 1997.\n\n Intelligence report, 5 August 1999.\n\n Hampshire Police investigated Pedder's complaint to the PCA. There were 12 corruption and negligence allegations against CIB superintendent Ian Russell and inspectors Perry Spivey and Jeff Hayes, the director of intelligence, Alan Fry, and chief inspector Brian Battye of the Flying Squad. After almost three years, by which most of those complained of had retired, the PCA didn't uphold the complaint. Pedder says major evidence was ignored.\n\n Intelligence reports, 2 and 11 February 1999.\n\n Bhatt attendance note, 15 July 1999.\n\n Clark letter to Alastair Morgan, 6 June 2000.\n\n We have also established that the Yard lost a female witness who came forward after a 1987 _Crimewatch_ saying she overheard two men in a pub planning a murder.\n\n Hanrahan named to us a member of CIBIC who he claims was feeding information back to the targets around the Morgan case.\n\n### CHAPTER 28 WATCHDOGGED\n\n Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary Report, June 1999.\n\n Two of them were Martin Bridger and Chris Mahaffey. It was rumoured that disgruntled Flying Squad officers had tipped off their colleagues in the RUC of what to expect from the Untouchables. One Met detective claimed the RUC had sent a surveillance team to London to gather dirt on the Untouchables for later use.\n\n Denham letter to Maude, 26 February 2003. \n\n## A Note on the Author\n\nMichael Gillard is a Sunday Times journalist specialising in public sector corruption and organised crime.\n\nLaurie Flynn is the author of the 1992 Bloomsbury book _Studded with Diamonds and Paved with Gold \u2013 miners, mining companies and human rights in Southern Africa_ , and researched and produced many _World in Action_ television documentaries.\nThis electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc\n\nBloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square,  \nLondon WC1B 3DP\n\nFirst published in Great Britain 2004 by Cutting Edge Press\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Michael Gillard & Laurie Flynn, 2004\n\nAll rights reserved  \nYou may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise  \nmake available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means  \n(including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,  \nprinting, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the  \npublisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication  \nmay be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages\n\nISBN 9781448209033  \neISBN: 9781448202645\n\nVisit www.bloomsburyreader.com to find out more about our authors and their books  \nYou will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can [sign up for  \nnewsletters](http:\/\/bloomsburynews.com\/go.asp?\/.pages.subscribe\/bBLM001) to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n##\n\n## The Thirteen Problems\n\n##  \nTo Leonard and Katherine Woolley\n\n## Contents\n\nAbout Agatha Christie\n\nThe Agatha Christie Collection\n\nE-Book Extras\n\n1 The Tuesday Night Club\n\n2 The Idol House of Astarte\n\n3 Ingots of Gold\n\n4 The Bloodstained Pavement\n\n5 Motive v Opportunity\n\n6 The Thumb Mark of St Peter\n\n7 The Blue Geranium\n\n8 The Companion\n\n9 The Four Suspects\n\n10 A Christmas Tragedy\n\n11 The Herb of Death\n\n12 The Affair at the Bungalow\n\n13 Death by Drowning\n\nCopyright\n\nwww.agathachristie.com\n\nAbout the Publisher\n\n## Chapter 1\n\n## The Tuesday Night Club\n\n'Unsolved mysteries.'\n\nRaymond West blew out a cloud of smoke and repeated the words with a kind of deliberate self-conscious pleasure.\n\n'Unsolved mysteries.'\n\nHe looked round him with satisfaction. The room was an old one with broad black beams across the ceiling and it was furnished with good old furniture that belonged to it. Hence Raymond West's approving glance. By profession he was a writer and he liked the atmosphere to be flawless. His Aunt Jane's house always pleased him as the right setting for her personality. He looked across the hearth to where she sat erect in the big grandfather chair. Miss Marple wore a black brocade dress, very much pinched in round the waist. Mechlin lace was arranged in a cascade down the front of the bodice. She had on black lace mittens, and a black lace cap surmounted the piled-up masses of her snowy hair. She was knitting\u2014something white and soft and fleecy. Her faded blue eyes, benignant and kindly, surveyed her nephew and her nephew's guests with gentle pleasure. They rested first on Raymond himself, self-consciously debonair, then on Joyce Lempri\u00e8re, the artist, with her close-cropped black head and queer hazel-green eyes, then on that well-groomed man of the world, Sir Henry Clithering. There were two other people in the room, Dr Pender, the elderly clergyman of the parish, and Mr Petherick, the solicitor, a dried-up little man with eyeglasses which he looked over and not through. Miss Marple gave a brief moment of attention to all these people and returned to her knitting with a gentle smile upon her lips.\n\nMr Petherick gave the dry little cough with which he usually prefaced his remarks.\n\n'What is that you say, Raymond? Unsolved mysteries? Ha\u2014and what about them?'\n\n'Nothing about them,' said Joyce Lempri\u00e8re. 'Raymond just likes the sound of the words and of himself saying them.'\n\nRaymond West threw her a glance of reproach at which she threw back her head and laughed.\n\n'He is a humbug, isn't he, Miss Marple?' she demanded. 'You know that, I am sure.'\n\nMiss Marple smiled gently at her but made no reply.\n\n'Life itself is an unsolved mystery,' said the clergyman gravely.\n\nRaymond sat up in his chair and flung away his cigarette with an impulsive gesture.\n\n'That's not what I mean. I was not talking philosophy,' he said. 'I was thinking of actual bare prosaic facts, things that have happened and that no one has ever explained.'\n\n'I know just the sort of thing you mean, dear,' said Miss Marple. 'For instance Mrs Carruthers had a very strange experience yesterday morning. She bought two gills of picked shrimps at Elliot's. She called at two other shops and when she got home she found she had not got the shrimps with her. She went back to the two shops she had visited but these shrimps had completely disappeared. Now that seems to me very remarkable.'\n\n'A very fishy story,' said Sir Henry Clithering gravely.\n\n'There are, of course, all kinds of possible explanations,' said Miss Marple, her cheeks growing slightly pinker with excitement. 'For instance, somebody else\u2014'\n\n'My dear Aunt,' said Raymond West with some amusement, 'I didn't mean that sort of village incident. I was thinking of murders and disappearances\u2014the kind of thing that Sir Henry could tell us about by the hour if he liked.'\n\n'But I never talk shop,' said Sir Henry modestly. 'No, I never talk shop.'\n\nSir Henry Clithering had been until lately Commissioner of Scotland Yard.\n\n'I suppose there are a lot of murders and things that never are solved by the police,' said Joyce Lempri\u00e8re.\n\n'That is an admitted fact, I believe,' said Mr Petherick.\n\n'I wonder,' said Raymond West, 'what class of brain really succeeds best in unravelling a mystery? One always feels that the average police detective must be hampered by lack of imagination.'\n\n'That is the layman's point of view,' said Sir Henry dryly.\n\n'You really want a committee,' said Joyce, smiling. 'For psychology and imagination go to the writer\u2014'\n\nShe made an ironical bow to Raymond but he remained serious.\n\n'The art of writing gives one an insight into human nature,' he said gravely. 'One sees, perhaps, motives that the ordinary person would pass by.'\n\n'I know, dear,' said Miss Marple, 'that your books are very clever. But do you think that people are really so unpleasant as you make them out to be?'\n\n'My dear Aunt,' said Raymond gently, 'keep your beliefs. Heaven forbid that I should in any way shatter them.'\n\n'I mean,' said Miss Marple, puckering her brow a little as she counted the stitches in her knitting, 'that so many people seem to me not to be either bad or good, but simply, you know, very silly.'\n\nMr Petherick gave his dry little cough again.\n\n'Don't you think, Raymond,' he said, 'that you attach too much weight to imagination? Imagination is a very dangerous thing, as we lawyers know only too well. To be able to sift evidence impartially, to take the facts and look at them as facts\u2014that seems to me the only logical method of arriving at the truth. I may add that in my experience it is the only one that succeeds.'\n\n'Bah!' cried Joyce, flinging back her black head indignantly. 'I bet I could beat you all at this game. I am not only a woman\u2014and say what you like, women have an intuition that is denied to men\u2014I am an artist as well. I see things that you don't. And then, too, as an artist I have knocked about among all sorts and conditions of people. I know life as darling Miss Marple here cannot possibly know it.'\n\n'I don't know about that, dear,' said Miss Marple. 'Very painful and distressing things happen in villages sometimes.'\n\n'May I speak?' said Dr Pender smiling. 'It is the fashion nowadays to decry the clergy, I know, but we hear things, we know a side of human character which is a sealed book to the outside world.'\n\n'Well,' said Joyce, 'it seems to me we are a pretty representative gathering. How would it be if we formed a Club? What is today? Tuesday? We will call it The Tuesday Night Club. It is to meet every week, and each member in turn has to propound a problem. Some mystery of which they have personal knowledge, and to which, of course, they know the answer. Let me see, how many are we? One, two, three, four, five. We ought really to be six.'\n\n'You have forgotten me, dear,' said Miss Marple, smiling brightly.\n\nJoyce was slightly taken aback, but she concealed the fact quickly.\n\n'That would be lovely, Miss Marple,' she said. 'I didn't think you would care to play.'\n\n'I think it would be very intersting,' said Miss Marple, 'especially with so many clever gentlemen present. I am afraid I am not clever myself, but living all these years in St Mary Mead does give one an insight into human nature.'\n\n'I am sure your co-operation will be very valuable,' said Sir Henry, courteously.\n\n'Who is going to start?' said Joyce.\n\n'I think there is no doubt as to that,' said Dr Pender, 'when we have the great good fortune to have such a distinguished man as Sir Henry staying with us\u2014'\n\nHe left his sentence unfinished, making a courtly bow in the direction of Sir Henry.\n\nThe latter was silent for a minute or two. At last he sighed and recrossed his legs and began:\n\n'It is a little difficult for me to select just the kind of thing you want, but I think, as it happens, I know of an instance which fits these conditions very aptly. You may have seen some mention of the case in the papers of a year ago. It was laid aside at the time as an unsolved mystery, but, as it happens, the solution came into my hands not very many days ago.\n\n'The facts are very simple. Three people sat down to a supper consisting, amongst other things, of tinned lobster. Later in the night, all three were taken ill, and a doctor was hastily summoned. Two of the people recovered, the third one died.'\n\n'Ah!' said Raymond approvingly.\n\n'As I say, the facts as such were very simple. Death was considered to be due to ptomaine poisoning, a certificate was given to that effect, and the victim was duly buried. But things did not rest at that.'\n\nMiss Marple nodded her head.\n\n'There was talk, I suppose,' she said, 'there usually is.'\n\n'And now I must describe the actors in this little drama. I will call the husband and wife Mr and Mrs Jones, and the wife's companion Miss Clark. Mr Jones was a traveller for a firm of manufacturing chemists. He was a good-looking man in a kind of coarse, florid way, aged about fifty. His wife was a rather commonplace woman, of about forty-five. The companion, Miss Clark, was a woman of sixty, a stout cheery woman with a beaming rubicund face. None of them, you might say, very interesting.\n\n'Now the beginning of the troubles arose in a very curious way. Mr Jones had been staying the previous night at a small commercial hotel in Birmingham. It happened that the blotting paper in the blotting book had been put in fresh that day, and the chambermaid, having apparently nothing better to do, amused herself by studying the blotter in the mirror just after Mr Jones had been writing a letter there. A few days later there was a report in the papers of the death of Mrs Jones as the result of eating tinned lobster, and the chambermaid then imparted to her fellow servants the words that she had deciphered on the blotting pad. They were as follows: Entirely dependent on my wife...when she is dead I will...hundreds and thousands...\n\n'You may remember that there had recently been a case of a wife being poisoned by her husband. It needed very little to fire the imagination of these maids. Mr Jones had planned to do away with his wife and inherit hundreds of thousands of pounds! As it happened one of the maids had relations living in the small market town where the Joneses resided. She wrote to them, and they in return wrote to her. Mr Jones, it seemed, had been very attentive to the local doctor's daughter, a good-looking young woman of thirty-three. Scandal began to hum. The Home Secretary was petitioned. Numerous anonymous letters poured into Scotland Yard all accusing Mr Jones of having murdered his wife. Now I may say that not for one moment did we think there was anything in it except idle village talk and gossip. Nevertheless, to quiet public opinion an exhumation order was granted. It was one of these cases of popular superstition based on nothing solid whatever, which proved to be so surprisingly justified. As a result of the autopsy sufficient arsenic was found to make it quite clear that the deceased lady had died of arsenical poisoning. It was for Scotland Yard working with the local authorities to prove how that arsenic had been administered, and by whom.'\n\n'Ah!' said Joyce. 'I like this. This is the real stuff.'\n\n'Suspicion naturally fell on the husband. He benefited by his wife's death. Not to the extent of the hundreds of thousands romantically imagined by the hotel chambermaid, but to the very solid amount of \u00a38000. He had no money of his own apart from what he earned, and he was a man of somewhat extravagant habits with a partiality for the society of women. We investigated as delicately as possible the rumour of his attachment to the doctor's daughter; but while it seemed clear that there had been a strong friendship between them at one time, there had been a most abrupt break two months previously, and they did not appear to have seen each other since. The doctor himself, an elderly man of a straightforward and unsuspicious type, was dumbfounded at the result of the autopsy. He had been called in about midnight to find all three people suffering. He had realized immediately the serious condition of Mrs Jones, and had sent back to his dispensary for some opium pills, to allay the pain. In spite of all his efforts, however, she succumbed, but not for a moment did he suspect that anything was amiss. He was convinced that her death was due to a form of botulism. Supper that night had consisted of tinned lobster and salad, trifle and bread and cheese. Unfortunately none of the lobster remained\u2014it had all been eaten and the tin thrown away. He had interrogated the young maid, Gladys Linch. She was terribly upset, very tearful and agitated, and he found it hard to get her to keep to the point, but she declared again and again that the tin had not been distended in any way and that the lobster had appeared to her in a perfectly good condition.\n\n'Such were the facts we had to go upon. If Jones had feloniously administered arsenic to his wife, it seemed clear that it could not have been done in any of the things eaten at supper, as all three persons had partaken of the meal. Also\u2014another point\u2014Jones himself had returned from Birmingham just as supper was being brought in to table, so that he would have had no opportunity of doctoring any of the food beforehand.'\n\n'What about the companion?' asked Joyce\u2014'the stout woman with the good-humoured face.'\n\nSir Henry nodded.\n\n'We did not neglect Miss Clark, I can assure you. But it seemed doubtful what motive she could have had for the crime. Mrs Jones left her no legacy of any kind and the net result of her employer's death was that she had to seek for another situation.'\n\n'That seems to leave her out of it,' said Joyce thoughtfully.\n\n'Now one of my inspectors soon discovered a significant fact,' went on Sir Henry. 'After supper on that evening Mr Jones had gone down to the kitchen and had demanded a bowl of cornflour for his wife who had complained of not feeling well. He had waited in the kitchen until Gladys Linch prepared it, and then carried it up to his wife's room himself. That, I admit, seemed to clinch the case.'\n\nThe lawyer nodded.\n\n'Motive,' he said, ticking the points off on his fingers. 'Opportunity. As a traveller for a firm of druggists, easy access to the poison.'\n\n'And a man of weak moral fibre,' said the clergyman.\n\nRaymond West was staring at Sir Henry.\n\n'There is a catch in this somewhere,' he said. 'Why did you not arrest him?'\n\nSir Henry smiled rather wryly.\n\n'That is the unfortunate part of the case. So far all had gone swimmingly, but now we come to the snags. Jones was not arrested because on interrogating Miss Clark she told us that the whole of the bowl of cornflour was drunk not by Mrs Jones but by her.\n\n'Yes, it seems that she went to Mrs Jones's room as was her custom. Mrs Jones was sitting up in bed and the bowl of cornflour was beside her.\n\n' \"I am not feeling a bit well, Milly,\" she said. \"Serves me right, I suppose, for touching lobster at night. I asked Albert to get me a bowl of cornflour, but now that I have got it I don't seem to fancy it.\"\n\n' \"A pity,\" commented Miss Clark\u2014\"it is nicely made too, no lumps. Gladys is really quite a nice cook. Very few girls nowadays seem to be able to make a bowl of cornflour nicely. I declare I quite fancy it myself, I am that hungry.\"\n\n' \"I should think you were with your foolish ways,\" said Mrs Jones.\n\n'I must explain,' broke off Sir Henry, 'that Miss Clark, alarmed at her increasing stoutness, was doing a course of what is popularly known as \"banting\".\n\n' \"It is not good for you, Milly, it really isn't,\" urged Mrs Jones. \"If the Lord made you stout he meant you to be stout. You drink up that bowl of cornflour. It will do you all the good in the world.\"\n\n'And straight away Miss Clark set to and did in actual fact finish the bowl. So, you see, that knocked our case against the husband to pieces. Asked for an explanation of the words on the blotting book Jones gave one readily enough. The letter, he explained, was in answer to one written from his brother in Australia who had applied to him for money. He had written, pointing out that he was entirely dependent on his wife. When his wife was dead he would have control of money and would assist his brother if possible. He regretted his inability to help but pointed out that there were hundreds and thousands of people in the world in the same unfortunate plight.'\n\n'And so the case fell to pieces?' said Dr Pender.\n\n'And so the case fell to pieces,' said Sir Henry gravely. 'We could not take the risk of arresting Jones with nothing to go upon.'\n\nThere was a silence and then Joyce said, 'And that is all, is it?'\n\n'That is the case as it has stood for the last year. The true solution is now in the hands of Scotland Yard, and in two or three days' time you will probably read of it in the newspapers.'\n\n'The true solution,' said Joyce thoughtfully. 'I wonder. Let's all think for five minutes and then speak.'\n\nRaymond West nodded and noted the time on his watch. When the five minutes were up he looked over at Dr Pender.\n\n'Will you speak first?' he said.\n\nThe old man shook his head. 'I confess,' he said, 'that I am utterly baffled. I can but think that the husband in some way must be the guilty party, but how he did it I cannot imagine. I can only suggest that he must have given her the poison in some way that has not yet been discovered, although how in that case it should have come to light after all this time I cannot imagine.'\n\n'Joyce?'\n\n'The companion!' said Joyce decidedly. 'The companion every time! How do we know what motive she may have had? Just because she was old and stout and ugly it doesn't follow that she wasn't in love with Jones herself. She may have hated the wife for some other reason. Think of being a companion\u2014always having to be pleasant and agree and stifle yourself and bottle yourself up. One day she couldn't bear it any longer and then she killed her. She probably put the arsenic in the bowl of cornflour and all that story about eating it herself is a lie.'\n\n'Mr Petherick?'\n\nThe lawyer joined the tips of his fingers together professionally. 'I should hardly like to say. On the facts I should hardly like to say.'\n\n'But you have got to, Mr Petherick,' said Joyce. 'You can't reserve judgement and say \"without prejudice\", and be legal. You have got to play the game.'\n\n'On the facts,' said Mr Petherick, 'there seems nothing to be said. It is my private opinion, having seen, alas, too many cases of this kind, that the husband was guilty. The only explanation that will cover the facts seems to be that Miss Clark for some reason or other deliberately sheltered him. There may have been some financial arrangement made between them. He might realize that he would be suspected, and she, seeing only a future of poverty before her, may have agreed to tell the story of drinking the cornflour in return for a substantial sum to be paid to her privately. If that was the case it was of course most irregular. Most irregular indeed.'\n\n'I disagree with you all,' said Raymond. 'You have forgotten the one important factor in the case. The doctor's daughter. I will give you my reading of the case. The tinned lobster was bad. It accounted for the poisoning symptoms. The doctor was sent for. He finds Mrs Jones, who has eaten more lobster than the others, in great pain, and he sends, as you told us, for some opium pills. He does not go himself, he sends. Who will give the messenger the opium pills? Clearly his daughter. Very likely she dispenses his medicines for him. She is in love with Jones and at this moment all the worst instincts in her nature rise and she realizes that the means to procure his freedom are in her hands. The pills she sends contain pure white arsenic. That is my solution.'\n\n'And now, Sir Henry, tell us,' said Joyce eagerly.\n\n'One moment,' said Sir Henry. 'Miss Marple has not yet spoken.'\n\nMiss Marple was shaking her head sadly.\n\n'Dear, dear,' she said. 'I have dropped another stitch. I have been so interested in the story. A sad case, a very sad case. It reminds me of old Mr Hargraves who lived up at the Mount. His wife never had the least suspicion\u2014until he died, leaving all his money to a woman he had been living with and by whom he had five children. She had at one time been their housemaid. Such a nice girl, Mrs Hargraves always said\u2014thoroughly to be relied upon to turn the mattresses every day\u2014except Fridays, of course. And there was old Hargraves keeping this woman in a house in the neighbouring town and continuing to be a Churchwarden and to hand round the plate every Sunday.'\n\n'My dear Aunt Jane,' said Raymond with some impatience. 'What has dead and gone Hargraves got to do with the case?'\n\n'This story made me think of him at once,' said Miss Marple. 'The facts are so very alike, aren't they? I suppose the poor girl has confessed now and that is how you know, Sir Henry.'\n\n'What girl?' said Raymond. 'My dear Aunt, what are you talking about?'\n\n'That poor girl, Gladys Linch, of course\u2014the one who was so terribly agitated when the doctor spoke to her\u2014and well she might be, poor thing. I hope that wicked Jones is hanged, I am sure, making that poor girl a murderess. I suppose they will hang her too, poor thing.'\n\n'I think, Miss Marple, that you are under a slight misapprehension,' began Mr Petherick.\n\nBut Miss Marple shook her head obstinately and looked across at Sir Henry.\n\n'I am right, am I not? It seems so clear to me. The hundreds and thousands\u2014and the trifle\u2014I mean, one cannot miss it.'\n\n'What about the trifle and the hundreds and thousands?' cried Raymond.\n\nHis aunt turned to him.\n\n'Cooks nearly always put hundreds and thousands on trifle, dear,' she said. 'Those little pink and white sugar things. Of course when I heard that they had trifle for supper and that the husband had been writing to someone about hundreds and thousands, I naturally connected the two things together. That is where the arsenic was\u2014in the hundreds and thousands. He left it with the girl and told her to put it on the trifle.'\n\n'But that is impossible,' said Joyce quickly. 'They all ate the trifle.'\n\n'Oh, no,' said Miss Marple. 'The companion was banting, you remember. You never eat anything like trifle if you are banting; and I expect Jones just scraped the hundreds and thousands off his share and left them at the side of his plate. It was a clever idea, but a very wicked one.'\n\nThe eyes of the others were all fixed upon Sir Henry.\n\n'It is a very curious thing,' he said slowly, 'but Miss Marple happens to have hit upon the truth. Jones had got Gladys Linch into trouble, as the saying goes. She was nearly desperate. He wanted his wife out of the way and promised to marry Gladys when his wife was dead. He doctored the hundreds and thousands and gave them to her with instructions how to use them. Gladys Linch died a week ago. Her child died at birth and Jones had deserted her for another woman. When she was dying she confessed the truth.'\n\nThere was a few moments' silence and then Raymond said:\n\n'Well, Aunt Jane, this is one up to you. I can't think how on earth you managed to hit upon the truth. I should never have thought of the little maid in the kitchen being connected with the case.'\n\n'No, dear,' said Miss Marple, 'but you don't know as much of life as I do. A man of that Jones's type\u2014coarse and jovial. As soon as I heard there was a pretty young girl in the house I felt sure that he would not have left her alone. It is all very distressing and painful, and not a very nice thing to talk about. I can't tell you the shock it was to Mrs Hargraves, and a nine days' wonder in the village.'\n\n## Chapter 2\n\n## The Idol House of Astarte\n\n'And now, Dr Pender, what are you going to tell us?'\n\nThe old clergyman smiled gently.\n\n'My life has been passed in quiet places,' he said. 'Very few eventful happenings have come my way. Yet once, when I was a young man, I had one very strange and tragic experience.'\n\n'Ah!' said Joyce Lempri\u00e8re encouragingly.\n\n'I have never forgotten it,' continued the clergyman. 'It made a profound impression on me at the time, and to this day by a slight effort of memory I can feel again the awe and horror of that terrible moment when I saw a man stricken to death by apparently no mortal agency.'\n\n'You make me feel quite creepy, Pender,' complained Sir Henry.\n\n'It made me feel creepy, as you call it,' replied the other. 'Since then I have never laughed at the people who use the word atmosphere. There is such a thing. There are certain places imbued and saturated with good or evil influences which can make their power felt.'\n\n'That house, The Larches, is a very unhappy one,' remarked Miss Marple. 'Old Mr Smithers lost all his money and had to leave it, then the Carslakes took it and Johnny Carslake fell downstairs and broke his leg and Mrs Carslake had to go away to the south of France for her health, and now the Burdens have got it and I hear that poor Mr Burden has got to have an operation almost immediately.'\n\n'There is, I think, rather too much superstition about such matters,' said Mr Petherick. 'A lot of damage is done to property by foolish reports heedlessly circulated.'\n\n'I have known one or two \"ghosts\" that have had a very robust personality,' remarked Sir Henry with a chuckle.\n\n'I think,' said Raymond, 'we should allow Dr Pender to go on with his story.'\n\nJoyce got up and switched off the two lamps, leaving the room lit only by the flickering firelight.\n\n'Atmosphere,' she said. 'Now we can get along.'\n\nDr Pender smiled at her, and leaning back in his chair and taking off his pince-nez, he began his story in a gentle reminiscent voice.\n\n'I don't know whether any of you know Dartmoor at all. The place I am telling you about is situated on the borders of Dartmoor. It was a very charming property, though it had been on the market without finding a purchaser for several years. The situation was perhaps a little bleak in winter, but the views were magnificent and there were certain curious and original features about the property itself. It was bought by a man called Haydon\u2014Sir Richard Haydon. I had known him in his college days, and though I had lost sight of him for some years, the old ties of friendship still held, and I accepted with pleasure his invitation to go down to Silent Grove, as his new purchase was called.\n\n'The house party was not a very large one. There was Richard Haydon himself, and his cousin, Elliot Haydon. There was a Lady Mannering with a pale, rather inconspicuous daughter called Violet. There was a Captain Rogers and his wife, hard riding, weather beaten people, who lived only for horses and hunting. There was also a young Dr Symonds and there was Miss Diana Ashley. I knew something about the last named. Her picture was very often in the Society papers and she was one of the notorious beauties of the Season. Her appearance was indeed very striking. She was dark and tall, with a beautiful skin of an even tint of pale cream, and her half closed dark eyes set slantways in her head gave her a curiously piquant oriental appearance. She had, too, a wonderful speaking voice, deep-toned and bell-like.\n\n'I saw at once that my friend Richard Haydon was very much attracted by her, and I guessed that the whole party was merely arranged as a setting for her. Of her own feelings I was not so sure. She was capricious in her favours. One day talking to Richard and excluding everyone else from her notice, and another day she would favour his cousin, Elliot, and appear hardly to notice that such a person as Richard existed, and then again she would bestow the most bewitching smiles upon the quiet and retiring Dr Symonds.\n\n'On the morning after my arrival our host showed us all over the place. The house itself was unremarkable, a good solid house built of Devonshire granite. Built to withstand time and exposure. It was unromantic but very comfortable. From the windows of it one looked out over the panorama of the Moor, vast rolling hills crowned with weather-beaten Tors.\n\n'On the slopes of the Tor nearest to us were various hut circles, relics of the bygone days of the late Stone Age. On another hill was a barrow which had recently been excavated, and in which certain bronze implements had been found. Haydon was by way of being interested in antiquarian matters and he talked to us with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm. This particular spot, he explained, was particularly rich in relics of the past.\n\n'Neolithic hut dwellers, Druids, Romans, and even traces of the early Phoenicians were to be found.\n\n' \"But this place is the most interesting of all,\" he said \"You know its name\u2014Silent Grove. Well, it is easy enough to see what it takes its name from.\"\n\n'He pointed with his hand. That particular part of the country was bare enough\u2014rocks, heather and bracken, but about a hundred yards from the house there was a densely planted grove of trees.\n\n' \"That is a relic of very early days,\" said Haydon, \"The trees have died and been replanted, but on the whole it has been kept very much as it used to be\u2014perhaps in the time of the Phoenician settlers. Come and look at it.\"\n\n'We all followed him. As we entered the grove of trees a curious oppression came over me. I think it was the silence. No birds seemed to nest in these trees. There was a feeling about it of desolation and horror. I saw Haydon looking at me with a curious smile.\n\n' \"Any feeling about this place, Pender?\" he asked me. \"Antagonism now? Or uneasiness?\"\n\n' \"I don't like it,\" I said quietly.\n\n' \"You are within your rights. This was a stronghold of one of the ancient enemies of your faith. This is the Grove of Astarte.\"\n\n' \"Astarte?\"\n\n' \"Astarte, or Ishtar, or Ashtoreth, or whatever you choose to call her. I prefer the Phoenician name of Astarte. There is, I believe, one known Grove of Astarte in this country\u2014in the North on the Wall. I have no evidence, but I like to believe that we have a true and authentic Grove of Astarte here. Here, within this dense circle of trees, sacred rites were performed.\"\n\n' \"Sacred rites,\" murmured Diana Ashley. Her eyes had a dreamy faraway look. \"What were they, I wonder?\"\n\n' \"Not very reputable by all accounts,\" said Captain Rogers with a loud unmeaning laugh. \"Rather hot stuff, I imagine.\"\n\n'Haydon paid no attention to him.\n\n' \"In the centre of the Grove there should be a Temple,\" he said. \"I can't run to Temples, but I have indulged in a little fancy of my own.\"\n\n'We had at that moment stepped out into a little clearing in the centre of the trees. In the middle of it was something not unlike a summerhouse made of stone. Diana Ashley looked inquiringly at Haydon.\n\n' \"I call it The Idol House,\" he said. \"It is the Idol House of Astarte.\"\n\n'He led the way up to it. Inside, on a rude ebony pillar, there reposed a curious little image representing a woman with crescent horns, seated on a lion.\n\n' \"Astarte of the Phoenicians,\" said Haydon, \"the Goddess of the Moon.\"\n\n' \"The Goddess of the Mooon,\" cried Diana. \"Oh, do let us have a wild orgy tonight. Fancy dress. And we will come out here in the moonlight and celebrate the rites of Astarte.\"\n\n'I made a sudden movement and Elliot Haydon, Richard's cousin, turned quickly to me.\n\n' \"You don't like all this, do you, Padre?\" he said.\n\n' \"No,\" I said gravely. \"I don't.\"\n\n'He looked at me curiously. \"But it is only tomfoolery. Dick can't know that this really is a sacred grove. It is just a fancy of his; he likes to play with the idea. And anyway, if it were\u2014\"\n\n' \"If it were?\"\n\n' \"Well\u2014\" he laughed uncomfortably. \"You don't believe in that sort of thing, do you? You, a parson.\"\n\n' \"I am not sure that as a parson I ought not to believe in it.\"\n\n' \"But that sort of thing is all finished and done with.\"\n\n' \"I am not so sure,\" I said musingly. \"I only know this: I am not as a rule a sensitive man to atmosphere, but ever since I entered this grove of trees I have felt a curious impression and sense of evil and menace all round me.\"\n\n'He glanced uneasily over his shoulder.\n\n' \"Yes,\" he said, \"it is\u2014it is queer, somehow. I know what you mean but I suppose it is only our imagination makes us feel like that. What do you say, Symonds?\"\n\n'The doctor was silent a minute or two before he replied. Then he said quietly:\n\n' \"I don't like it. I can't tell you why. But somehow or other, I don't like it.\"\n\n'At that moment Violet Mannering came across to me.\n\n' \"I hate this place,\" she cried. \"I hate it. Do let's get out of it.\"\n\n'We moved away and the others followed us. Only Diana Ashley lingered. I turned my head over my shoulder and saw her standing in front of the Idol House gazing earnestly at the image within it.\n\n'The day was an unusually hot and beautiful one and Diana Ashley's suggestion of a Fancy Dress party that evening was received with general favour. The usual laughing and whispering and frenzied secret sewing took place and when we all made our appearance for dinner there were the usual outcries of merriment. Rogers and his wife were Neolithic hut dwellers\u2014explaining the sudden lack of hearth rugs. Richard Haydon called himself a Phoenician sailor, and his cousin was a Brigand Chief, Dr Symonds was a chef, Lady Mannering was a hospital nurse, and her daughter was a Circassian slave. I myself was arrayed somewhat too warmly as a monk. Diana Ashley came down last and was somewhat of a disappointment to all of us, being wrapped in a shapeless black domino.\n\n' \"The Unknown,\" she declared airily. \"That is what I am. Now for goodness' sake let's go in to dinner.\"\n\n'After dinner we went outside. It was a lovely night, warm and soft, and the moon was rising.\n\n'We wandered about and chatted and the time passed quickly enough. It must have been an hour later when we realized that Diana Ashley was not with us.\n\n' \"Surely she has not gone to bed,\" said Richard Haydon.\n\n'Violet Mannering shook her head.\n\n' \"Oh, no,\" she said. \"I saw her going off in that direction about a quarter of an hour ago.\" She pointed as she spoke towards the grove of trees that showed black and shadowy in the moonlight.\n\n' \"I wonder what she is up to,\" said Richard Haydon, \"some devilment, I swear. Let's go and see.\"\n\n'We all trooped off together, somewhat curious as to what Miss Ashley had been up to. Yet I, for one, felt a curious reluctance to enter that dark foreboding belt of trees. Something stronger than myself seemed to be holding me back and urging me not to enter. I felt more definitely convinced than ever of the essential evilness of the spot. I think that some of the others experienced the same sensations that I did, though they would have been loath to admit it. The trees were so closely planted that the moonlight could not penetrate. There were a dozen soft sounds all round us, whisperings and sighings. The feeling was eerie in the extreme, and by common consent we all kept close together.\n\n'Suddenly we came out into the open clearing in the middle of the grove and stood rooted to the spot in amazement, for there, on the threshold of the Idol House, stood a shimmering figure wrapped tightly round in diaphanous gauze and with two crescent horns rising from the dark masses of her hair.\n\n' \"My God!\" said Richard Haydon, and the sweat sprang out on his brow.\n\n'But Violet Mannering was sharper.\n\n' \"Why, it's Diana,\" she exclaimed. \"What has she done to herself? Oh, she looks quite different somehow!\"\n\n'The figure in the doorway raised her hands. She took a step forward and chanted in a high sweet voice.\n\n' \"I am the Priestess of Astarte,\" she crooned. \"Beware how you approach me, for I hold death in my hand.\"\n\n' \"Don't do it, dear,\" protested Lady Mannering. \"You give us the creeps, you really do.\"\n\n'Haydon sprang forward towards her.\n\n' \"My God, Diana!\" he cried. \"You are wonderful.\"\n\n'My eyes were accustomed to the moonlight now and I could see more plainly. She did, indeed, as Violet had said, look quite different. Her face was more definitely oriental, and her eyes more of slits with something cruel in their gleam, and the strange smile on her lips was one that I had never seen there before.\n\n' \"Beware,\" she cried warningly. \"Do not approach the Goddess. If anyone lays a hand on me it is death.\"\n\n' \"You are wonderful, Diana,\" cried Haydon, \"but do stop it. Somehow or other I\u2014I don't like it.\"\n\n'He was moving towards her across the grass and she flung out a hand towards him.\n\n' \"Stop,\" she cried. \"One step nearer and I will smite you with the magic of Astarte.\"\n\n'Richard Haydon laughed and quickened his pace, when all at once a curious thing happened. He hesitated for a moment, then seemed to stumble and fall headlong.\n\n'He did not get up again, but lay where he had fallen prone on the ground.\n\n'Suddenly Diana began to laugh hysterically. It was a strange horrible sound breaking the silence of the glade.\n\n'With an oath Elliot sprang forward.\n\n' \"I can't stand this,\" he cried, \"get up, Dick, get up, man.\"\n\n'But still Richard Haydon lay where he had fallen. Elliot Haydon reached his side, knelt by him and turned him gently over. He bent over him, peering in his face.\n\n'Then he rose sharply to his feet and stood swaying a little.\n\n' \"Doctor,\" he said. \"Doctor, for God's sake come. I\u2014I think he is dead.\"\n\n'Symonds ran forward and Elliot rejoined us walking very slowly. He was looking down at his hands in a way I didn't understand.\n\n'At that moment there was a wild scream from Diana.\n\n' \"I have killed him,\" she cried. \"Oh, my God! I didn't mean to, but I have killed him.\"\n\n'And she fainted dead away, falling in a crumpled heap on the grass.\n\n'There was a cry from Mrs Rogers.\n\n' \"Oh, do let us get away from this dreadful place,\" she wailed, \"anything might happen to us here. Oh, it's awful!\"\n\n'Elliot got hold of me by the shoulder.\n\n' \"It can't be, man,\" he murmured. \"I tell you it can't be. A man cannot be killed like that. It is\u2014it's against Nature.\"\n\n'I tried to soothe him.\n\n' \"There is some explanation,\" I said. \"Your cousin must have had some unsuspected weakness of the heart. The shock and excitement\u2014\"\n\n'He interrupted me.\n\n' \"You don't understand,\" he said. He held up his hands for me to see and I noticed a red stain on them.\n\n' \"Dick didn't die of shock, he was stabbed\u2014stabbed to the heart, and there is no weapon.\"\n\n'I stared at him incredulously. At that moment Symonds rose from his examination of the body and came towards us. He was pale and shaking all over.\n\n' \"Are we all mad?\" he said. \"What is this place\u2014that things like this can happen in it?\"\n\n' \"Then it is true,\" I said.\n\n'He nodded.\n\n' \"The wound is such as would be made by a long thin dagger, but\u2014there is no dagger there.\"\n\n'We all looked at each other.\n\n' \"But it must be there,\" cried Elliot Haydon. \"It must have dropped out. It must be on the ground somewhere. Let us look.\"\n\n'We peered about vainly on the ground. Violet Mannering said suddenly:\n\n' \"Diana had something in her hand. A kind of dagger. I saw it. I saw it glitter when she threatened him.\"\n\n'Elliot Haydon shook his head.\n\n' \"He never even got within three yards of her,\" he objected.\n\n'Lady Mannering was bending over the prostrate girl on the ground.\n\n' \"There is nothing in her hand now,\" she announced, \"and I can't see anything on the ground. Are you sure you saw it, Violet? I didn't.\"\n\n'Dr Symonds came over to the girl.\n\n' \"We must get her to the house,\" he said. \"Rogers, will you help?\"\n\n'Between us we carried the unconscious girl back to the house. Then we returned and fetched the body of Sir Richard.'\n\nDr Pender broke off apologetically and looked round.\n\n'One would know better nowadays,' he said, 'owing to the prevalence of detective fiction. Every street boy knows that a body must be left where it is found. But in these days we had not the same knowledge, and accordingly we carried the body of Richard Haydon back to his bedroom in the square granite house and the butler was despatched on a bicycle in search of the police\u2014a ride of some twelve miles.\n\n'It was then that Elliot Haydon drew me aside.\n\n' \"Look here,\" he said. \"I am going back to the grove. That weapon has got to be found.\"\n\n' \"If there was a weapon,\" I said doubtfully.\n\n'He seized my arm and shook it fiercely. \"You have got that superstitious stuff into your head. You think his death was supernatural; well, I am going back to the grove to find out.\"\n\n'I was curiously averse to his doing so. I did my utmost to dissuade him, but without result. The mere idea of that thick circle of trees was abhorrent to me and I felt a strong premonition of further disaster. But Elliot was entirely pig-headed. He was, I think, scared himself, but would not admit it. He went off fully armed with determination to get to the bottom of the mystery.\n\n'It was a very dreadful night, none of us could sleep, or attempt to do so. The police, when they arrived, were frankly incredulous of the whole thing. They evinced a strong desire to cross-examine Miss Ashley, but there they had to reckon with Dr Symonds, who opposed the idea vehemently. Miss Ashley had come out of her faint or trance and he had given her a long sleeping draught. She was on no account to be disturbed until the following day.\n\n'It was not until about seven o'clock in the morning that anyone thought about Elliot Haydon, and then Symonds suddenly asked where he was. I explained what Elliot had done and Symonds's grave face grew a shade graver. \"I wish he hadn't. It is\u2014it is foolhardy,\" he said.\n\n' \"You don't think any harm can have happened to him?\"\n\n' \"I hope not. I think, Padre, that you and I had better go and see.\"\n\n'I knew he was right, but it took all the courage in my command to nerve myself for the task. We set out together and entered once more that ill-fated grove of trees. We called him twice and got no reply. In a minute or two we came into the clearing, which looked pale and ghostly in the early morning light. Symonds clutched my arm and I uttered a muttered exclamation. Last night when we had seen it in the moonlight there had been the body of a man lying face downwards on the grass. Now in the early morning light the same sight met our eyes. Elliot Haydon was lying on the exact spot where his cousin had been.\n\n' \"My God!\" said Symonds. \"It has got him too!\"\n\n'We ran together over the grass. Elliot Haydon was unconscious but breathing feebly and this time there was no doubt of what had caused the tragedy. A long thin bronze weapon remained in the wound.\n\n' \"Got him through the shoulder, not through the heart. That is lucky,\" commented the doctor. \"On my soul, I don't know what to think. At any rate he is not dead and he will be able to tell us what happened.\"\n\n'But that was just what Elliot Haydon was not able to do. His description was vague in the extreme. He had hunted about vainly for the dagger and at last giving up the search had taken up a stand near the Idol House. It was then that he became increasingly certain that someone was watching him from the belt of trees. He fought against this impression but was not able to shake it off. He described a cold strange wind that began to blow. It seemed to come not from the trees but from the interior of the Idol House. He turned round, peering inside it. He saw the small figure of the Goddess and he felt he was under an optical delusion. The figure seemed to grow larger and larger. Then he suddenly received something that felt like a blow between his temples which sent him reeling back, and as he fell he was conscious of a sharp burning pain in his left shoulder.\n\n'The dagger was identified this time as being the identical one which had been dug up in the barrow on the hill, and which had been bought by Richard Haydon. Where he had kept it, in the house or in the Idol House in the grove, none seemed to know.\n\n'The police were of the opinion, and always will be, that he was deliberately stabbed by Miss Ashley, but in view of our combined evidence that she was never within three yards of him, they could not hope to support the charge against her. So the thing has been and remains a mystery.'\n\nThere was a silence.\n\n'There doesn't seem anything to say,' said Joyce Lempri\u00e8re at length. 'It is all so horrible\u2014and uncanny. Have you no explanation for yourself, Dr Pender?'\n\nThe old man nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'I have an explanation\u2014a kind of explanation, that is. Rather a curious one\u2014but to my mind it still leaves certain factors unaccounted for.'\n\n'I have been to s\u00e9ances,' said Joyce, 'and you may say what you like, very queer things can happen. I suppose one can explain it by some kind of hypnotism. The girl really turned herself into a Priestess of Astarte, and I suppose somehow or other she must have stabbed him. Perhaps she threw the dagger that Miss Mannering saw in her hand.'\n\n'Or it might have been a javelin,' suggested Raymond West. 'After all, moonlight is not very strong. She might have had a kind of spear in her hand and stabbed him at a distance, and then I suppose mass hypnotism comes into account. I mean, you were all prepared to see him stricken down by supernatural means and so you saw it like that.'\n\n'I have seen many wonderful things done with weapons and knives at music halls,' said Sir Henry. 'I suppose it is possible that a man could have been concealed in the belt of trees, and that he might from there have thrown a knife or a dagger with sufficient accuracy\u2014agreeing, of course, that he was a professional. I admit that that seems rather far-fetched, but it seems the only really feasible theory. You remember that the other man was distinctly under the impression that there was someone in the grove of trees watching him. As to Miss Mannering saying that Miss Ashley had a dagger in her hand and the others saying she hadn't, that doesn't surprise me. If you had had my experience you would know that five persons' account of the same thing will differ so widely as to be almost incredible.'\n\nMr Petherick coughed.\n\n'But in all these theories we seem to be overlooking one essential fact,' he remarked. 'What became of the weapon? Miss Ashley could hardly get rid of a javelin standing as she was in the middle of an open space; and if a hidden murderer had thrown a dagger, then the dagger would still have been in the wound when the man was turned over. We must, I think, discard all far-fetched theories and confine ourselves to sober fact.'\n\n'And where does sober fact lead us?'\n\n'Well, one thing seems quite clear. No one was near the man when he was stricken down, so the only person who could have stabbed him was he himself. Suicide, in fact.'\n\n'But why on earth should he wish to commit suicide?' asked Raymond West incredulously.\n\nThe lawyer coughed again. 'Ah, that is a question of theory once more,' he said. 'At the moment I am not concerned with theories. It seems to me, excluding the supernatural in which I do not for one moment believe, that that was the only way things could have happened. He stabbed himself, and as he fell his arms flew out, wrenching the dagger from the wound and flinging it far into the zone of the trees. That is, I think, although somewhat unlikely, a possible happening.'\n\n'I don't like to say, I am sure,' said Miss Marple. 'It all perplexes me very much indeed. But curious things do happen. At Lady Sharpley's garden party last year the man who was arranging the clock golf tripped over one of the numbers\u2014quite unconscious he was\u2014and didn't come round for about five minutes.'\n\n'Yes, dear Aunt,' said Raymond gently, 'but he wasn't stabbed, was he?'\n\n'Of course not, dear,' said Miss Marple. 'That is what I am telling you. Of course there is only one way that poor Sir Richard could have been stabbed, but I do wish I knew what caused him to stumble in the first place. Of course, it might have been a tree root. He would be looking at the girl, of course, and when it is moonlight one does trip over things.'\n\n'You say that there is only one way that Sir Richard could have been stabbed, Miss Marple,' said the clergyman, looking at her curiously.\n\n'It is very sad and I don't like to think of it. He was a right-handed man, was he not? I mean to stab himself in the left shoulder he must have been. I was always so sorry for poor Jack Baynes in the War. He shot himself in the foot, you remember, after very severe fighting at Arras. He told me about it when I went to see him in hospital, and very ashamed of it he was. I don't expect this poor man, Elliot Haydon, profited much by his wicked crime.'\n\n'Elliot Haydon,' cried Raymond. 'You think he did it?'\n\n'I don't see how anyone else could have done it,' said Miss Marple, opening her eyes in gentle surprise. 'I mean if, as Mr Petherick so wisely says, one looks at the facts and disregards all that atmosphere of heathen goddesses which I don't think is very nice. He went up to him first and turned him over, and of course to do that he would have to have had his back to them all, and being dressed as a brigand chief he would be sure to have a weapon of some kind in his belt. I remember dancing with a man dressed as a brigand chief when I was a young girl. He had five kinds of knives and daggers, and I can't tell you how awkward and uncomfortable it was for his partner.'\n\nAll eyes were turned towards Dr Pender.\n\n'I knew the truth,' said he, 'five years after that tragedy occurred. It came in the shape of a letter written to me by Elliot Haydon. He said in it that he fancied that I had always suspected him. He said it was a sudden temptation. He too loved Diana Ashley, but he was only a poor struggling barrister. With Richard out of the way and inheriting his title and estates, he saw a wonderful prospect opening up before him. The dagger had jerked out of his belt as he knelt down by his cousin, and almost before he had time to think he drove it in and returned it to his belt again. He stabbed himself later in order to divert suspicion. He wrote to me on the eve of starting on an expedition to the South Pole in case, as he said, he should never come back. I do not think that he meant to come back, and I know that, as Miss Marple has said, his crime profited him nothing. \"For five years,\" he wrote, \"I have lived in Hell. I hope, at least, that I may expiate my crime by dying honourably.\" '\n\nThere was a pause.\n\n'And he did die honourably,' said Sir Henry. 'You have changed the names in your story, Dr Pender, but I think I recognize the man you mean.'\n\n'As I said,' went on the old clergyman, 'I do not think that explanation quite covers the facts. I still think there was an evil influence in that grove, an influence that directed Elliot Haydon's action. Even to this day I can never think without a shudder of The Idol House of Astarte.'\n\n## Chapter 3\n\n## Ingots of Gold\n\n'I do not know that the story that I am going to tell you is a fair one,' said Raymond West, 'because I can't give you the solution of it. Yet the facts were so interesting and so curious that I should like to propound it to you as a problem. And perhaps between us we may arrive at some logical conclusion.\n\n'The date of these happenings was two years ago, when I went down to spend Whitsuntide with a man called John Newman, in Cornwall.'\n\n'Cornwall?' said Joyce Lempri\u00e8re sharply.\n\n'Yes. Why?'\n\n'Nothing. Only it's odd. My story is about a place in Cornwall, too\u2014a little fishing village called Rathole. Don't tell me yours is the same?'\n\n'No. My village is called Polperran. It is situated on the west coast of Cornwall; a very wild and rocky spot. I had been introduced a few weeks previously and had found him a most interesting companion. A man of intelligence and independent means, he was possessed of a romantic imagination. As a result of his latest hobby he had taken the lease of Pol House. He was an authority on Elizabethan times, and he described to me in vivid and graphic language the rout of the Spanish Armada. So enthusiastic was he that one could almost imagine that he had been an eyewitness at the scene. Is there anything in reincarnation? I wonder\u2014I very much wonder.'\n\n'You are so romantic, Raymond dear,' said Miss Marple, looking benignantly at him.\n\n'Romantic is the last thing that I am,' said Raymond West, slightly annoyed. 'But this fellow Newman was chock-full of it, and he interested me for that reason as a curious survival of the past. It appears that a certain ship belonging to the Armada, and known to contain a vast amount of treasure in the form of gold from the Spanish Main, was wrecked off the coast of Cornwall on the famous and treacherous Serpent Rocks. For some years, so Newman told me, attempts had been made to salve the ship and recover the treasure. I believe such stories are not uncommon, though the number of mythical treasure ships is largely in excess of the genuine ones. A company had been formed, but had gone bankrupt, and Newman had been able to buy the rights of the thing\u2014or whatever you call it\u2014for a mere song. He waxed very enthusiastic about it all. According to him it was merely a question of the latest scientific, up-to-date machinery. The gold was there, and he had no doubt whatever that it could be recovered.\n\n'It occurred to me as I listened to him how often things happen that way. A rich man such as Newman succeeds almost without effort, and yet in all probability the actual value in money of his find would mean little to him. I must say that his ardour infected me. I saw galleons drifting up the coast, flying before the storm, beaten and broken on the black rocks. The mere word galleon has a romantic sound. The phrase \"Spanish Gold\" thrills the schoolboy\u2014and the grown-up man also. Moreover, I was working at the time upon a novel, some scenes of which were laid in the sixteenth century, and I saw the prospect of getting valuable local colour from my host.\n\n'I set off that Friday morning from Paddington in high spirits, and looking forward to my trip. The carriage was empty except for one man, who sat facing me in the opposite corner. He was a tall, soldierly-looking man, and I could not rid myself of the impression that somewhere or other I had seen him before. I cudgelled my brains for some time in vain; but at last I had it. My travelling companion was Inspector Badgworth, and I had run across him when I was doing a series of articles on the Everson disappearance case.\n\n'I recalled myself to his notice, and we were soon chatting pleasantly enough. When I told him I was going to Polperran he remarked that that was a rum coincidence, because he himself was also bound for that place. I did not like to seem inquisitive, so was careful not to ask him what took him there. Instead, I spoke of my own interest in the place, and mentioned the wrecked Spanish galleon. To my surprise the Inspector seemed to know all about it. \"That will be the Juan Fernandez,\" he said. \"Your friend won't be the first who has sunk money trying to get money out of her. It is a romantic notion.\"\n\n' \"And probably the whole story is a myth,\" I said. \"No ship was ever wrecked there at all.\"\n\n' \"Oh, the ship was sunk there right enough,\" said the Inspector\u2014\"along with a good company of others. You would be surprised if you knew how many wrecks there are on that part of the coast. As a matter of fact, that is what takes me down there now. That is where the Otranto was wrecked six months ago.\"\n\n' \"I remember reading about it,\" I said. \"No lives were lost, I think?\"\n\n' \"No lives were lost,\" said the Inspector; \"but something else was lost. It is not generally known, but the Otranto was carrying bullion.\"\n\n' \"Yes?\" I said, much interested.\n\n' \"Naturally we have had divers at work on salvage operations, but\u2014the gold has gone, Mr West.\"\n\n' \"Gone!\" I said, staring at him. \"How can it have gone?\"\n\n' \"That is the question,\" said the Inspector. \"The rocks tore a gaping hole in her strongroom. It was easy enough for the divers to get in that way, but they found the strongroom empty. The question is, was the gold stolen before the wreck or afterwards? Was it ever in the strongroom at all?\"\n\n' \"It seems a curious case,\" I said.\n\n' \"It is a very curious case, when you consider what bullion is. Not a diamond necklace that you could put into your pocket. When you think how cumbersome it is and how bulky\u2014well, the whole thing seems absolutely impossible. There may have been some hocus-pocus before the ship sailed; but if not, it must have been removed within the last six months\u2014and I am going down to look into the matter.\"\n\n'I found Newman waiting to meet me at the station. He apologized for the absence of his car, which had gone to Truro for some necessary repairs. Instead, he met me with a farm lorry belonging to the property.\n\n'I swung myself up beside him, and we wound carefully in and out of the narrow streets of the fishing village. We went up a steep ascent, with a gradient, I should say, of one in five, ran a little distance along a winding lane, and turned in at the granite-pillared gates of Pol House.\n\n'The place was a charming one; it was situated high up the cliffs, with a good view out to sea. Part of it was some three or four hundred years old, and a modern wing had been added. Behind it farming land of about seven or eight acres ran inland.\n\n' \"Welcome to Pol House,\" said Newman. \"And to the Sign of the Golden Galleon.\" And he pointed to where, over the front door, hung a perfect reproduction of a Spanish galleon with all sails set.\n\n'My first evening was a most charming and instructive one. My host showed me the old manuscripts relating to the Juan Fernandez. He unrolled charts for me and indicated positions on them with dotted lines, and he produced plans of diving apparatus, which, I may say, mystified me utterly and completely.\n\n'I told him of my meeting with Inspector Badgworth, in which he was much interested.\n\n' \"They are a queer people round this coast,\" he said reflectively. \"Smuggling and wrecking is in their blood. When a ship goes down on their coast they cannot help regarding it as lawful plunder meant for their pockets. There is a fellow here I should like you to see. He is an interesting survival.\"\n\n'Next day dawned bright and clear. I was taken down into Polperran and there introduced to Newman's diver, a man called Higgins. He was a wooden-faced individual, extremely taciturn, and his contributions to the conversation were mostly monosyllables. After a discussion between them on highly technical matters, we adjourned to the Three Anchors. A tankard of beer somewhat loosened the worthy fellow's tongue.\n\n' \"Detective gentleman from London has come down,\" he grunted. \"They do say that that ship that went down there last November was carrying a mortal lot of gold. Well, she wasn't the first to go down, and she won't be the last.\"\n\n' \"Hear, hear,\" chimed in the landlord of the Three Anchors. \"That is a true word you say there, Bill Higgins.\"\n\n' \"I reckon it is, Mr Kelvin,\" said Higgins.\n\n'I looked with some curiosity at the landlord. He was a remarkable-looking man, dark and swarthy, with curiously broad shoulders. His eyes were bloodshot, and he had a curiously furtive way of avoiding one's glance. I suspected that this was the man of whom Newman had spoken, saying he was an interesting survival.\n\n' \"We don't want interfering foreigners on this coast,\" he said, somewhat truculently.\n\n' \"Meaning the police?\" asked Newman, smiling.\n\n' \"Meaning the police\u2014and others,\" said Kelvin significantly. \"And don't you forget it, mister.\"\n\n' \"Do you know, Newman, that sounded to me very like a threat,\" I said as we climbed the hill homewards.\n\n'My friend laughed.\n\n' \"Nonsense; I don't do the folk down here any harm.\"\n\n'I shook my head doubtfully. There was something sinister and uncivilized about Kelvin. I felt that his mind might run in strange, unrecognized channels.\n\n'I think I date the beginning of my uneasiness from that moment. I had slept well enough that first night, but the next night my sleep was troubled and broken. Sunday dawned, dark and sullen, with an overcast sky and the threatenings of thunder in the air. I am always a bad hand at hiding my feelings, and Newman noticed the change in me.\n\n' \"What is the matter with you, West? You are a bundle of nerves this morning.\"\n\n' \"I don't know,\" I confessed, \"but I have got a horrible feeling of foreboding.\"\n\n' \"It's the weather.\"\n\n' \"Yes, perhaps.\"\n\n'I said no more. In the afternoon we went out in Newman's motor boat, but the rain came on with such vigour that we were glad to return to shore and change into dry clothing.\n\n'And that evening my uneasiness increased. Outside the storm howled and roared. Towards ten o'clock the tempest calmed down. Newman looked out of the window.\n\n' \"It is clearing,\" he said. \"I shouldn't wonder if it was a perfectly fine night in another half-hour. If so, I shall go out for a stroll.\"\n\n'I yawned. \"I am frightfully sleepy,\" I said. \"I didn't get much sleep last night. I think that tonight I shall turn in early.\"\n\n'This I did. On the previous night I had slept little. Tonight I slept heavily. Yet my slumbers were not restful. I was still oppressed with an awful foreboding of evil. I had terrible dreams. I dreamt of dreadful abysses and vast chasms, amongst which I was wandering, knowing that a slip of the foot meant death. I waked to find the hands of my clock pointing to eight o'clock. My head was aching badly, and the terror of my night's dreams was still upon me.\n\n'So strongly was this so that when I went to the window and drew it up I started back with a fresh feeling of terror, for the first thing I saw, or thought I saw\u2014was a man digging an open grave.\n\n'It took me a minute or two to pull myself together; then I realized that the grave-digger was Newman's gardener, and the \"grave\" was destined to accommodate three new rose trees which were lying on the turf waiting for the moment they should be securely planted in the earth.\n\n'The gardener looked up and saw me and touched his hat.\n\n' \"Good morning, sir. Nice morning, sir.\"\n\n' \"I suppose it is,\" I said doubtfully, still unable to shake off completely the depression of my spirits.\n\n'However, as the gardener had said, it was certainly a nice morning. The sun was shining and the sky a clear pale blue that promised fine weather for the day. I went down to breakfast whistling a tune. Newman had no maids living in the house. Two middle-aged sisters, who lived in a farm-house near by, came daily to attend to his simple wants. One of them was placing the coffee-pot on the table as I entered the room.\n\n' \"Good morning, Elizabeth,\" I said. \"Mr Newman not down yet?\"\n\n' \"He must have been out very early, sir,\" she replied. \"He wasn't in the house when we arrived.\"\n\n'Instantly my uneasiness returned. On the two previous mornings Newman had come down to breakfast somewhat late; and I didn't fancy that at any time he was an early riser. Moved by those forebodings, I ran up to his bedroom. It was empty, and, moreover, his bed had not been slept in. A brief examination of his room showed me two other things. If Newman had gone out for a stroll he must have gone out in his evening clothes, for they were missing.\n\n'I was sure now that my premonition of evil was justified. Newman had gone, as he had said he would do, for an evening stroll. For some reason or other he had not returned. Why? Had he met with an accident? Fallen over the cliffs? A search must be made at once.\n\n'In a few hours I had collected a large band of helpers, and together we hunted in every direction along the cliffs and on the rocks below. But there was no sign of Newman.\n\n'In the end, in despair, I sought out Inspector Badgworth. His face grew very grave.\n\n' \"It looks to me as if there has been foul play,\" he said. \"There are some not over-scrupulous customers in these parts. Have you seen Kelvin, the landlord of the Three Anchors?\"\n\n'I said that I had seen him.\n\n' \"Did you know he did a turn in gaol four years ago? Assault and battery.\"\n\n' \"It doesn't surprise me,\" I said.\n\n' \"The general opinion in this place seems to be that your friend is a bit too fond of nosing his way into things that do not concern him. I hope he has come to no serious harm.\"\n\n'The search was continued with redoubled vigour. It was not until late that afternoon that our efforts were rewarded. We discovered Newman in a deep ditch in a corner of his own property. His hands and feet were securely fastened with rope, and a handkerchief had been thrust into his mouth and secured there so as to prevent him crying out.\n\n'He was terribly exhausted and in great pain; but after some frictioning of his wrists and ankles, and a long draught from a whisky flask, he was able to give his account of what had occurred.\n\n'The weather having cleared, he had gone out for a stroll about eleven o'clock. His way had taken him some distance along the cliffs to a spot commonly known as Smugglers' Cove, owing to the large number of caves to be found there. Here he had noticed some men landing something from a small boat, and had strolled down to see what was going on. Whatever the stuff was it seemed to be a great weight, and it was being carried into one of the farthermost caves.\n\n'With no real suspicion of anything being amiss, nevertheless Newman had wondered. He had drawn quite near them without being observed. Suddenly there was a cry of alarm, and immediately two powerful seafaring men had set upon him and rendered him unconscious. When next he came to himself he found himself lying on a motor vehicle of some kind, which was proceeding, with many bumps and bangs, as far as he could guess, up the lane which led from the coast to the village. To his great surprise, the lorry turned in at the gate of his own house. There, after a whispered conversation between the men, they at length drew him forth and flung him into a ditch at a spot where the depth of it rendered discovery unlikely for some time. Then the lorry drove on, and, he thought, passed out through another gate some quarter of a mile nearer the village. He could give no description of his assailants except that they were certainly seafaring men and, by their speech, Cornishmen.\n\n'Inspector Badgworth was very interested.\n\n' \"Depend upon it that is where the stuff has been hidden,\" he cried. \"Somehow or other it has been salvaged from the wreck and has been stored in some lonely cave somewhere. It is known that we have searched all the caves in Smugglers' Cove, and that we are now going farther afield, and they have evidently been moving the stuff at night to a cave that has been already searched and is not likely to be searched again. Unfortunately they have had at least eighteen hours to dispose of the stuff. If they got Mr Newman last night I doubt if we will find any of it there by now.\"\n\n'The Inspector hurried off to make a search. He found definite evidence that the bullion had been stored as supposed, but the gold had been once more removed, and there was no clue as to its fresh hiding-place.\n\n'One clue there was, however, and the Inspector himself pointed it out to me the following morning.\n\n' \"That lane is very little used by motor vehicles,\" he said, \"and in one or two places we get the traces of the tyres very clearly. There is a three-cornered piece out of one tyre, leaving a mark which is quite unmistakable. It shows going into the gate; here and there is a faint mark of it going out of the other gate, so there is not much doubt that it is the right vehicle we are after. Now, why did they take it out through the farther gate? It seems quite clear to me that the lorry came from the village. Now, there aren't many people who own a lorry in the village\u2014not more than two or three at most. Kelvin, the landlord of the Three Anchors, has one.\"\n\n' \"What was Kelvin's original profession?\" asked Newman.\n\n' \"It is curious that you should ask me that, Mr Newman. In his young days Kelvin was a professional diver.\"\n\n'Newman and I looked at each other. The puzzle seemed to be fitting itself together piece by piece.\n\n' \"You didn't recognize Kelvin as one of the men on the beach?\" asked the Inspector.\n\n'Newman shook his head.\n\n' \"I am afraid I can't say anything as to that,\" he said regretfully. \"I really hadn't time to see anything.\"\n\n'The Inspector very kindly allowed me to accompany him to the Three Anchors. The garage was up a side street. The big doors were closed, but by going up a little alley at the side we found a small door that led into it, and the door was open. A very brief examination of the tyres sufficed for the Inspector. \"We have got him, by Jove!\" he exclaimed. \"Here is the mark as large as life on the rear left wheel. Now, Mr Kelvin, I don't think you will be clever enough to wriggle out of this.\" '\n\nRaymond West came to a halt.\n\n'Well?' said Joyce. 'So far I don't see anything to make a problem about\u2014unless they never found the gold.'\n\n'They never found the gold certainly,' said Raymond. 'And they never got Kelvin either. I expect he was too clever for them, but I don't quite see how he worked it. He was duly arrested\u2014on the evidence of the tyre mark. But an extraordinary hitch arose. Just opposite the big doors of the garage was a cottage rented for the summer by a lady artist.'\n\n'Oh, these lady artists!' said Joyce, laughing.\n\n'As you say, \"Oh, these lady artists!\" This particular one had been ill for some weeks, and, in consequence, had two hospital nurses attending her. The nurse who was on night duty had pulled her armchair up to the window, where the blind was up. She declared that the motor lorry could not have left the garage opposite without her seeing it, and she swore that in actual fact it never left the garage that night.'\n\n'I don't think that is much of a problem,' said Joyce. 'The nurse went to sleep, of course. They always do.'\n\n'That has\u2014er\u2014been known to happen,' said Mr Petherick, judiciously; 'but it seems to me that we are accepting facts without sufficient examination. Before accepting the testimony of the hospital nurse, we should inquire very closely into her bona fides. The alibi coming with such suspicious promptness is inclined to raise doubts in one's mind.'\n\n'There is also the lady artist's testimony,' said Raymond. 'She declared that she was in pain, and awake most of the night, and that she would certainly have heard the lorry, it being an unusual noise, and the night being very quiet after the storm.'\n\n'H'm,' said the clergyman, 'that is certainly an additional fact. Had Kelvin himself any alibi?'\n\n'He declared that he was at home and in bed from ten o'clock onwards, but he could produce no witnesses in support of that statement.'\n\n'The nurse went to sleep,' said Joyce, 'and so did the patient. Ill people always think they have never slept a wink all night.'\n\nRaymond West looked inquiringly at Dr Pender.\n\n'Do you know, I feel very sorry for that man Kelvin. It seems to me very much a case of \"Give a dog a bad name.\" Kelvin had been in prison. Apart from the tyre mark, which certainly seems too remarkable to be coincidence, there doesn't seem to be much against him except his unfortunate record.'\n\n'You, Sir Henry?'\n\nSir Henry shook his head.\n\n'As it happens,' he said, smiling, 'I know something about this case. So clearly I mustn't speak.'\n\n'Well, go on, Aunt Jane; haven't you got anything to say?'\n\n'In a minute, dear,' said Miss Marple. 'I am afraid I have counted wrong. Two purl, three plain, slip one, two purl\u2014yes, that's right. What did you say, dear?'\n\n'What is your opinion?'\n\n'You wouldn't like my opinion, dear. Young people never do, I notice. It is better to say nothing.'\n\n'Nonsense, Aunt Jane; out with it.'\n\n'Well, dear Raymond,' said Miss Marple, laying down her knitting and looking across at her nephew. 'I do think you should be more careful how you choose your friends. You are so credulous, dear, so easily gulled. I suppose it is being a writer and having so much imagination. All that story about a Spanish galleon! If you were older and had more experience of life you would have been on your guard at once. A man you had known only a few weeks, too!'\n\nSir Henry suddenly gave vent to a great roar of laughter and slapped his knee.\n\n'Got you this time, Raymond,' he said. 'Miss Marple, you are wonderful. Your friend Newman, my boy, has another name\u2014several other names in fact. At the present moment he is not in Cornwall but in Devonshire\u2014Dartmoor, to be exact\u2014a convict in Princetown prison. We didn't catch him over the stolen bullion business, but over the rifling of the strongroom of one of the London banks. Then we looked up his past record and we found a good portion of the gold stolen buried in the garden at Pol House. It was rather a neat idea. All along that Cornish coast there are stories of wrecked galleons full of gold. It accounted for the diver and it would account later for the gold. But a scapegoat was needed, and Kelvin was ideal for the purpose. Newman played his little comedy very well, and our friend Raymond, with his celebrity as a writer, made an unimpeachable witness.'\n\n'But the tyre mark?' objected Joyce.\n\n'Oh, I saw that at once, dear, although I know nothing about motors,' said Miss Marple. 'People change a wheel, you know\u2014I have often seen them doing it\u2014and, of course, they could take a wheel off Kelvin's lorry and take it out through the small door into the alley and put it on to Mr Newman's lorry and take the lorry out of one gate down to the beach, fill it up with the gold and bring it up through the other gate, and then they must have taken the wheel back and put it back on Mr Kelvin's lorry while, I suppose, someone else was tying up Mr Newman in a ditch. Very uncomfortable for him and probably longer before he was found than he expected. I suppose the man who called himself the gardener attended to that side of the business.'\n\n'Why do you say, \"called himself the gardener,\" Aunt Jane?' asked Raymond curiously.\n\n'Well, he can't have been a real gardener, can he?' said Miss Marple. 'Gardeners don't work on Whit Monday. Everybody knows that.'\n\nShe smiled and folded up her knitting.\n\n'It was really that little fact that put me on the right scent,' she said. She looked across at Raymond.\n\n'When you are a householder, dear, and have a garden of your own, you will know these little things.'\n\n## Chapter 4\n\n## The Bloodstained Pavement\n\n'It's curious,' said Joyce Lempri\u00e8re, 'but I hardly like telling you my story. It happened a long time ago\u2014five years ago to be exact\u2014but it's sort of haunted me ever since. The smiling, bright, top part of it\u2014and the hidden gruesomeness underneath. And the queer thing is that the sketch I painted at the time has become tinged with the same atmosphere. When you look at it first it is just a rough sketch of a little steep Cornish street with the sunlight on it. But if you look long enough at it something sinister creeps in. I have never sold it but I never look at it. It lives in the studio in a corner with its face to the wall.\n\n'The name of the place was Rathole. It is a queer little Cornish fishing village, very picturesque\u2014too picturesque perhaps. There is rather too much of the atmosphere of \"Ye Olde Cornish Tea House\" about it. It has shops with bobbed-headed girls in smocks doing hand-illuminated mottoes on parchment. It is pretty and it is quaint, but it is very self-consciously so.'\n\n'Don't I know,' said Raymond West, groaning. 'The curse of the charabanc, I suppose. No matter how narrow the lanes leading down to them no picturesque village is safe.'\n\nJoyce nodded.\n\n'They are narrow lanes that lead down to Rathole and very steep, like the side of a house. Well, to get on with my story. I had come down to Cornwall for a fortnight, to sketch. There is an old inn in Rathole, The Polharwith Arms. It was supposed to be the only house left standing by the Spaniards when they shelled the place in fifteen hundred and something.'\n\n'Not shelled,' said Raymond West, frowning. 'Do try to be historically accurate, Joyce.'\n\n'Well, at all events they landed guns somewhere along the coast and they fired them and the houses fell down. Anyway that is not the point. The inn was a wonderful old place with a kind of porch in front built on four pillars. I got a very good pitch and was just settling down to work when a car came creeping and twisting down the hill. Of course, it would stop before the inn\u2014just where it was most awkward for me. The people got out\u2014a man and a woman\u2014I didn't notice them particularly. She had a kind of mauve linen dress on and a mauve hat.\n\n'Presently the man came out again and to my great thankfulness drove the car down to the quay and left it there. He strolled back past me towards the inn. Just at that moment another beastly car came twisting down, and a woman got out of it dressed in the brightest chintz frock I have ever seen, scarlet poinsettias, I think they were, and she had on one of those big native straw hats\u2014Cuban, aren't they?\u2014in very bright scarlet.\n\n'This woman didn't stop in front of the inn but drove the car farther down the street towards the other one. Then she got out and the man seeing her gave an astonished shout. \"Carol,\" he cried, \"in the name of all that is wonderful. Fancy meeting you in this out-of-the-way spot. I haven't seen you for years. Hello, there's Margery\u2014my wife, you know. You must come and meet her.\"\n\n'They went up the street towards the inn side by side, and I saw the other woman had just come out of the door and was moving down towards them. I had had just a glimpse of the woman called Carol as she passed by me. Just enough to see a very white powdered chin and a flaming scarlet mouth and I wondered\u2014I just wondered\u2014if Margery would be so very pleased to meet her. I hadn't seen Margery near to, but in the distance she looked dowdy and extra prim and proper.\n\n'Well, of course, it was not any of my business but you get very queer little glimpses of life sometimes, and you can't help speculating about them. From where they were standing I could just catch fragments of their conversation that floated down to me. They were talking about bathing. The husband, whose name seemed to be Denis, wanted to take a boat and row round the coast. There was a famous cave well worth seeing, so he said, about a mile along. Carol wanted to see the cave too but suggested walking along the cliffs and seeing it from the land side. She said she hated boats. In the end they fixed it that way. Carol was to go along the cliff path and meet them at the cave, and Denis and Margery would take a boat and row round.\n\n'Hearing them talk about bathing made me want to bathe too. It was a very hot morning and I wasn't doing particularly good work. Also, I fancied that the afternoon sunlight would be far more attractive in effect. So I packed up my things and went off to a little beach that I knew of\u2014it was quite the opposite direction from the cave, and was rather a discovery of mine. I had a ripping bathe there and I lunched off a tinned tongue and two tomatoes, and I came back in the afternoon full of confidence and enthusiasm to get on with my sketch.\n\n'The whole of Rathole seemed to be asleep. I had been right about the afternoon sunlight, the shadows were far more telling. The Polharwith Arms was the principal note of my sketch. A ray of sunlight came slanting obliquely down and hit the ground in front of it and had rather a curious effect. I gathered that the bathing party had returned safely, because two bathing dresses, a scarlet one and a dark blue one, were hanging from the balcony, drying in the sun.\n\n'Something had gone a bit wrong with one corner of my sketch and I bent over it for some moments doing something to put it right. When I looked up again there was a figure leaning against one of the pillars of The Polharwith Arms, who seemed to have appeared there by magic. He was dressed in seafaring clothes and was, I suppose, a fisherman. But he had a long dark beard, and if I had been looking for a model for a wicked Spanish captain I couldn't have imagined anyone better. I got to work with feverish haste before he should move away, though from his attitude he looked as though he was pefectly prepared to prop up the pillars through all eternity.\n\n'He did move, however, but luckily not until I had got what I wanted. He came over to me and he began to talk. Oh, how that man talked.\n\n' \"Rathole,\" he said, \"was a very interesting place.\"\n\n'I knew that already but although I said so that didn't save me. I had the whole history of the shelling\u2014I mean the destroying\u2014of the village, and how the landlord of the Polharwith Arms was the last man to be killed. Run through on his own threshold by a Spanish captain's sword, and of how his blood spurted out on the pavement and no one could wash out the stain for a hundred years.\n\n'It all fitted in very well with the languorous drowsy feeling of the afternoon. The man's voice was very suave and yet at the same time there was an undercurrent in it of something rather frightening. He was very obsequious in his manner, yet I felt underneath he was cruel. He made me understand the Inquisition and the terrors of all the things the Spaniards did better than I have ever done before.\n\n'All the time he was talking to me I went on painting, and suddenly I realized that in the excitement of listening to his story I had painted in something that was not there. On that white square of pavement where the sun fell before the door of The Polharwith Arms, I had painted in bloodstains. It seemed extraordinary that the mind could play such tricks with the hand, but as I looked over towards the inn again I got a second shock. My hand had only painted what my eyes saw\u2014drops of blood on the white pavement.\n\n'I stared for a minute or two. Then I shut my eyes, said to myself, \"Don't be so stupid, there's nothing there, really,\" then I opened them again, but the bloodstains were still there.\n\n'I suddenly felt I couldn't stand it. I interrupted the fisherman's flood of language.\n\n' \"Tell me,\" I said, \"my eyesight is not very good. Are those bloodstains on that pavement over there?\"\n\n'He looked at me indulgently and kindly.\n\n' \"No bloodstains in these days, lady. What I am telling you about is nearly five hundred years ago.\"\n\n' \"Yes,\" I said, \"but now\u2014on the pavement\"\u2014the words died away in my throat. I knew\u2014I knew that he wouldn't see what I was seeing. I got up and with shaking hands began to put my things together. As I did so the young man who had come in the car that morning came out of the inn door. He looked up and down the street perplexedly. On the balcony above his wife came out and collected the bathing things. He walked down towards the car but suddenly swerved and came across the road towards the fisherman.\n\n' \"Tell me, my man,\" he said. \"You don't know whether the lady who came in that second car there has got back yet?\"\n\n' \"Lady in a dress with flowers all over it? No, sir, I haven't seen her. She went along the cliff towards the cave this morning.\"\n\n' \"I know, I know. We all bathed there together, and then she left us to walk home and I have not seen her since. It can't have taken her all this time. The cliffs round here are not dangerous, are they?\"\n\n' \"It depends, sir, on the way you go. The best way is to take a man what knows the place with you.\"\n\n'He very clearly meant himself and was beginning to enlarge on the theme, but the young man cut him short unceremoniously and ran back towards the inn calling up to his wife on the balcony.\n\n' \"I say, Margery, Carol hasn't come back yet. Odd, isn't it?\"\n\n'I didn't hear Margery's reply, but her husband went on. \"Well, we can't wait any longer. We have got to push on to Penrithar. Are you ready? I will turn the car.\"\n\n'He did as he had said, and presently the two of them drove off together. Meanwhile I had deliberately been nerving myself to prove how ridiculous my fancies were. When the car had gone I went over to the inn and examined the pavement closely. Of course there were no bloodstains there. No, all along it had been the result of my distorted imagination. Yet, somehow, it seemed to make the thing more frightening. It was while I was standing there that I heard the fisherman's voice.\n\n'He was looking at me curiously. \"You thought you saw bloodstains here, eh, lady?\"\n\n'I nodded.\n\n' \"That is very curious, that is very curious. We have got a superstition here, lady. If anyone sees those bloodstains\u2014\"\n\n'He paused.\n\n' \"Well?\" I said.\n\n'He went on in his soft voice, Cornish in intonation, but unconsciously smooth and well-bred in its pronunciation, and completely free from Cornish turns of speech.\n\n' \"They do say, lady, that if anyone sees those bloodstains that there will be a death within twenty-four hours.\"\n\n'Creepy! It gave me a nasty feeling all down my spine.\n\n'He went on persuasively. \"There is a very interesting tablet in the church, lady, about a death\u2014\"\n\n' \"No thanks,\" I said decisively, and I turned sharply on my heel and walked up the street towards the cottage where I was lodging. Just as I got there I saw in the distance the woman called Carol coming along the cliff path. She was hurrying. Against the grey of the rocks she looked like some poisonous scarlet flower. Her hat was the colour of blood...\n\n'I shook myself. Really, I had blood on the brain.\n\n'Later I heard the sound of her car. I wondered whether she too was going to Penrithar; but she took the road to the left in the opposite direction. I watched the car crawl up the hill and disappear, and I breathed somehow more easily. Rathole seemed its quiet sleepy self once more.'\n\n'If that is all,' said Raymond West as Joyce came to a stop, 'I will give my verdict at once. Indigestion, spots before the eyes after meals.'\n\n'It isn't all,' said Joyce. 'You have got to hear the sequel. I read it in the paper two days later under the heading of \"Sea Bathing Fatality\". It told how Mrs Dacre, the wife of Captain Denis Dacre, was unfortunately drowned at Landeer Cove, just a little farther along the coast. She and her husband were staying at the time at the hotel there, and had declared their intention of bathing, but a cold wind sprang up. Captain Dacre had declared it was too cold, so he and some other people in the hotel had gone off to the golf links near by. Mrs Dacre, however, had said it was not too cold for her and she went off alone down to the cove. As she didn't return her husband became alarmed, and in company with his friends went down to the beach. They found her clothes lying beside a rock, but no trace of the unfortunate lady. Her body was not found until nearly a week later when it was washed ashore at a point some distance down the coast. There was a bad blow on her head which had occurred before death, and the theory was that she must have dived into the sea and hit her head on a rock. As far as I could make out her death would have occurred just twenty-four hours after the time I saw the bloodstains.'\n\n'I protest,' said Sir Henry. 'This is not a problem\u2014this is a ghost story. Miss Lempri\u00e8re is evidently a medium.'\n\nMr Petherick gave his usual cough.\n\n'One point strikes me\u2014' he said, 'that blow on the head. We must not, I think, exclude the possibility of foul play. But I do not see that we have any data to go upon. Miss Lempri\u00e8re's hallucination, or vision, is interesting certainly, but I do not see clearly the point on which she wishes us to pronounce.'\n\n'Indigestion and coincidence,' said Raymond, 'and anyway you can't be sure that they were the same people. Besides, the curse, or whatever it was, would only apply to the actual inhabitants of Rathole.'\n\n'I feel,' said Sir Henry, 'that the sinister seafaring man has something to do with this tale. But I agree with Mr Petherick, Miss Lempri\u00e8re has given us very little data.'\n\nJoyce turned to Dr Pender who smilingly shook his head.\n\n'It is a most interesting story,' he said, 'but I am afraid I agree with Sir Henry and Mr Petherick that there is very little data to go upon.'\n\nJoyce then looked curiously at Miss Marple, who smiled back at her.\n\n'I, too, think you are just a little unfair, Joyce dear,' she said. 'Of course, it is different for me. I mean, we, being women, appreciate the point about clothes. I don't think it is a fair problem to put to a man. It must have meant a lot of rapid changing. What a wicked woman! And a still more wicked man.'\n\nJoyce stared at her.\n\n'Aunt Jane,' she said. 'Miss Marple, I mean, I believe\u2014I do really believe you know the truth.'\n\n'Well, dear,' said Miss Marple, 'it is much easier for me sitting here quietly than it was for you\u2014and being an artist you are so susceptible to atmosphere, aren't you? Sitting here with one's knitting, one just sees the facts. Bloodstains dropped on the pavement from the bathing dress hanging above, and being a red bathing dress, of course, the criminals themselves did not realize it was bloodstained. Poor thing, poor young thing!'\n\n'Excuse me, Miss Marple,' said Sir Henry, 'but you do know that I am entirely in the dark still. You and Miss Lempri\u00e8re seem to know what you are talking about, but we men are still in utter darkness.'\n\n'I will tell you the end of the story now,' said Joyce. 'It was a year later. I was at a little east coast seaside resort, and I was sketching, when suddenly I had that queer feeling one has of something having happened before. There were two people, a man and a woman, on the pavement in front of me, and they were greeting a third person, a woman dressed in a scarlet poinsettia chintz dress. \"Carol, by all that is wonderful! Fancy meeting you after all these years. You don't know my wife? Joan, this is an old friend of mine, Miss Harding.\"\n\n'I recognized the man at once. It was the same Denis I had seen at Rathole. The wife was different\u2014that is, she was a Joan instead of a Margery; but she was the same type, young and rather dowdy and very inconspicuous. I thought for a minute I was going mad. They began to talk of going bathing. I will tell you what I did. I marched straight then and there to the police station. I thought they would probably think I was off my head, but I didn't care. And as it happened everything was quite all right. There was a man from Scotland Yard there, and he had come down just about this very thing. It seems\u2014oh, it's horrible to talk about\u2014that the police had got suspicions of Denis Dacre. That wasn't his real name\u2014he took different names on different occasions. He got to know girls, usually quiet inconspicuous girls without many relatives or friends, he married them and insured their lives for large sums and then\u2014oh, it's horrible! The woman called Carol was his real wife, and they always carried out the same plan. That is really how they came to catch him. The insurance companies became suspicious. He would come to some quiet seaside place with his new wife, then the other woman would turn up and they would all go bathing together. Then the wife would be murdered and Carol would put on her clothes and go back in the boat with him. Then they would leave the place, wherever it was, after inquiring for the supposed Carol and when they got outside the village Carol would hastily change back into her own flamboyant clothes and her vivid make-up and would go back there and drive off in her own car. They would find out which way the current was flowing and the supposed death would take place at the next bathing place along the coast that way. Carol would play the part of the wife and would go down to some lonely beach and would leave the wife's clothes there by a rock and depart in her flowery chintz dress to wait quietly until her husband could rejoin her.\n\n'I suppose when they killed poor Margery some of the blood must have spurted over Carol's bathing suit, and being a red one they didn't notice it, as Miss Marple says. But when they hung it over the balcony it dripped. Ugh!' she gave a shiver. 'I can see it still.'\n\n'Of course,' said Sir Henry, 'I remember very well now. Davis was the man's real name. It had quite slipped my memory that one of his many aliases was Dacre. They were an extraordinarily cunning pair. It always seemed so amazing to me that no one spotted the change of identity. I suppose, as Miss Marple says, clothes are more easily identified than faces; but it was a very clever scheme, for although we suspected Davis it was not easy to bring the crime home to him as he always seemed to have an unimpeachable alibi.'\n\n'Aunt Jane,' said Raymond, looking at her curiously, 'how do you do it? You have lived such a peaceful life and yet nothing seems to surprise you.'\n\n'I always find one thing very like another in this world,' said Miss Marple. 'There was Mrs Green, you know, she buried five children\u2014and every one of them insured. Well, naturally, one began to get suspicious.'\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n'There is a great deal of wickedness in village life. I hope you dear young people will never realize how very wicked the world is.'\n\n## Chapter 5\n\n## Motive v Opportunity\n\nMr Petherick cleared his throat rather more importantly than usual.\n\n'I am afraid my little problem will seem rather tame to you all,' he said apologetically, 'after the sensational stories we have been hearing. There is no bloodshed in mine, but it seems to me an interesting and rather ingenious little problem, and fortunately I am in the position to know the right answer to it.'\n\n'It isn't terribly legal, is it?' asked Joyce Lempri\u00e8re. 'I mean points of law and lots of Barnaby v Skinner in the year 1881, and things like that.'\n\nMr Petherick beamed appreciatively at her over his eyeglasses.\n\n'No, no, my dear young lady. You need have no fears on that score. The story I am about to tell is a perfectly simple and straightforward one and can be followed by any layman.'\n\n'No legal quibbles, now,' said Miss Marple, shaking a knitting needle at him.\n\n'Certainly not,' said Mr Petherick.\n\n'Ah well, I am not so sure, but let's hear the story.'\n\n'It concerns a former client of mine. I will call him Mr Clode\u2014Simon Clode. He was a man of considerable wealth and lived in a large house not very far from here. He had had one son killed in the War and this son had left one child, a little girl. Her mother had died at her birth, and on her father's death she had come to live with her grandfather who at once became passionately attached to her. Little Chris could do anything she liked with her grandfather. I have never seen a man more completely wrapped up in a child, and I cannot describe to you his grief and despair when, at the age of eleven, the child contracted pneumonia and died.\n\n'Poor Simon Clode was inconsolable. A brother of his had recently died in poor circumstances and Simon Clode had generously offered a home to his brother's children\u2014two girls, Grace and Mary, and a boy, George. But though kind and generous to his nephew and nieces, the old man never expended on them any of the love and devotion he had accorded to his little grandchild. Employment was found for George Clode in a bank near by, and Grace married a clever young research chemist of the name of Philip Garrod. Mary, who was a quiet, self-contained girl, lived at home and looked after her uncle. She was, I think, fond of him in her quiet undemonstrative way. And to all appearances things went on very peacefully. I may say that after the death of little Christobel, Simon Clode came to me and instructed me to draw up a new will. By this will, his fortune, a very considerable one, was divided equally between his nephew and nieces, a third share to each.\n\n'Time went on. Chancing to meet George Clode one day I inquired for his uncle, whom I had not seen for some time. To my surprise George's face clouded over. \"I wish you could put some sense into Uncle Simon,\" he said ruefully. His honest but not very brilliant countenance looked puzzled and worried. \"This spirit business is getting worse and worse.\"\n\n' \"What spirit business?\" I asked, very much surprised.\n\n'Then George told me the whole story. How Mr Clode had gradually got interested in the subject and how on the top of this interest he had chanced to meet an American medium, a Mrs Eurydice Spragg. This woman, whom George did not hesitate to characterize as an out and out swindler, had gained an immense ascendancy over Simon Clode. She was practically always in the house and many s\u00e9ances were held in which the spirit of Christobel manifested itself to the doting grandfather.\n\n'I may say here and now that I do not belong to the ranks of those who cover spiritualism with ridicule and scorn. I am, as I have told you, a believer in evidence. And I think that when we have an impartial mind and weigh the evidence in favour of spiritualism there remains much that cannot be put down to fraud or lightly set aside. Therefore, as I say, I am neither a believer nor an unbeliever. There is certain testimony with which one cannot afford to disagree.\n\n'On the other hand, spiritualism lends itself very easily to fraud and imposture, and from all young George Clode told me about this Mrs Eurydice Spragg I felt more and more convinced that Simon Clode was in bad hands and that Mrs Spragg was probably an imposter of the worst type. The old man, shrewd as he was in practical matters, would be easily imposed on where his love for his dead grandchild was concerned.\n\n'Turning things over in my mind I felt more and more uneasy. I was fond of the young Clodes, Mary and George, and I realized that this Mrs Spragg and her influence over their uncle might lead to trouble in the future.\n\n'At the earliest opportunity I made a pretext for calling on Simon Clode. I found Mrs Spragg installed as an honoured and friendly guest. As soon as I saw her my worst apprehensions were fulfilled. She was a stout woman of middle age, dressed in a flamboyant style. Very full of cant phrases about \"Our dear ones who have passed over,\" and other things of the kind.\n\n'Her husband was also staying in the house, Mr Absalom Spragg, a thin lank man with a melancholy expression and extremely furtive eyes. As soon as I could, I got Simon Clode to myself and sounded him tactfully on the subject. He was full of enthusiasm. Eurydice Spragg was wonderful! She had been sent to him directly in answer to a prayer! She cared nothing for money, the joy of helping a heart in affliction was enough for her. She had quite a mother's feeling for little Chris. He was beginning to regard her almost as a daughter. Then he went on to give me details\u2014how he had heard his Chris's voice speaking\u2014how she was well and happy with her father and mother. He went on to tell other sentiments expressed by the child, which in my remembrance of little Christobel seemed to me highly unlikely. She laid stress on the fact that \"Father and Mother loved dear Mrs Spragg\".\n\n' \"But, of course,\" he broke off, \"you are a scoffer, Petherick.\"\n\n' \"No, I am not a scoffer. Very far from it. Some of the men who have written on the subject are men whose testimony I would accept unhesitatingly, and I should accord any medium recommended by them respect and credence. I presume that this Mrs Spragg is well vouched for?\"\n\n'Simon went into ecstasies over Mrs Spragg. She had been sent to him by Heaven. He had come across her at the watering place where he had spent two months in the summer. A chance meeting, with what a wonderful result!\n\n'I went away very dissatisfied. My worst fears were realized, but I did not see what I could do. After a good deal of thought and deliberation I wrote to Philip Garrod who had, as I mentioned, just married the eldest Clode girl, Grace. I set the case before him\u2014of course, in the most carefully guarded language. I pointed out the danger of such a woman gaining ascendancy over the old man's mind. And I suggested that Mr Clode should be brought into contact if possible with some reputable spiritualistic circles. This, I thought, would not be a difficult matter for Philip Garrod to arrange.\n\n'Garrod was prompt to act. He realized, which I did not, that Simon Clode's health was in a very precarious condition, and as a practical man he had no intention of letting his wife or her sister and brother be despoiled of the inheritance which was so rightly theirs. He came down the following week, bringing with him as a guest no other than the famous Professor Longman. Longman was a scientist of the first order, a man whose association with spiritualism compelled the latter to be treated with respect. Not only a brilliant scientist; he was a man of the utmost uprightness and probity.\n\n'The result of the visit was most unfortunate. Longman, it seemed, had said very little while he was there. Two s\u00e9ances were held\u2014under what conditions I do not know. Longman was non-committal all the time he was in the house, but after his departure he wrote a letter to Philip Garrod. In it he admitted that he had not been able to detect Mrs Spragg in fraud, nevertheless his private opinion was that the phenomena were not genuine. Mr Garrod, he said, was at liberty to show this letter to his uncle if he thought fit, and he suggested that he himself should put Mr Clode in touch with a medium of perfect integrity.\n\n'Philip Garrod had taken this letter straight to his uncle, but the result was not what he had anticipated. The old man flew into a towering rage. It was all a plot to discredit Mrs Spragg who was a maligned and injured saint! She had told him already what bitter jealousy there was of her in this country. He pointed out that Longman was forced to say he had not detected fraud. Eurydice Spragg had come to him in the darkest hour of his life, had given him help and comfort, and he was prepared to espouse her cause even if it meant quarrelling with every member of his family. She was more to him than anyone else in the world.\n\n'Philip Garrod was turned out of the house with scant ceremony; but as a result of his rage Clode's own health took a decided turn for the worse. For the last month he had kept to his bed pretty continuously, and now there seemed every possibility of his being a bedridden invalid until such time as death should release him. Two days after Philip's departure I received an urgent summons and went hurriedly over. Clode was in bed and looked even to my layman's eye very ill indeed. He was gasping for breath.\n\n' \"This is the end of me,\" he said. \"I feel it. Don't argue with me, Petherick. But before I die I am going to do my duty by the one human being who has done more for me than anyone else in the world. I want to make a fresh will.\"\n\n' \"Certainly,\" I said, \"if you will give me your instructions now I will draft out a will and send it to you.\"\n\n' \"That won't do,\" he said. \"Why, man, I might not live through the night. I have written out what I want here,\" he fumbled under his pillow, \"and you can tell me if it is right.\"\n\n'He produced a sheet of paper with a few words roughly scribbled on it in pencil. It was quite simple and clear. He left \u00a35000 to each of his nieces and nephew, and the residue of his vast property outright to Eurydice Spragg \"in gratitude and admiration\".\n\n'I didn't like it, but there it was. There was no question of unsound mind, the old man was as sane as anybody.\n\n'He rang the bell for two of the servants. They came promptly. The housemaid, Emma Gaunt, was a tall middle-aged woman who had been in service there for many years and who had nursed Clode devotedly. With her came the cook, a fresh buxom young woman of thirty. Simon Clode glared at them both from under his bushy eyebrows.\n\n' \"I want you to witness my will. Emma, get me my fountain pen.\"\n\n'Emma went over obediently to the desk.\n\n' \"Not that left-hand drawer, girl,\" said old Simon irritably. \"Don't you know it is in the right-hand one?\"\n\n' \"No, it is here, sir,\" said Emma, producing it.\n\n' \"Then you must have put it away wrong last time,\" grumbled the old man. \"I can't stand things not being kept in their proper places.\"\n\n'Still grumbling he took the pen from her and copied his own rough draught, amended by me, on to a fresh piece of paper. Then he signed his name. Emma Gaunt and the cook, Lucy David, also signed. I folded the will up and put it into a long blue envelope. It was necessarily, you understand, written on an ordinary piece of paper.\n\n'Just as the servants were turning to leave the room Clode lay back on the pillows with a gasp and a distorted face. I bent over him anxiously and Emma Gaunt came quickly back. However, the old man recovered and smiled weakly.\n\n' \"It is all right, Petherick, don't be alarmed. At any rate I shall die easy now having done what I wanted to.\"\n\n'Emma Gaunt looked inquiringly at me as if to know whether she could leave the room. I nodded reassuringly and she went out\u2014first stopping to pick up the blue envelope which I had let slip to the ground in my moment of anxiety. She handed it to me and I slipped it into my coat pocket and then she went out.\n\n' \"You are annoyed, Petherick,\" said Simon Clode. \"You are prejudiced, like everybody else.\"\n\n' \"It is not a question of prejudice,\" I said. \"Mrs Spragg may be all that she claims to be. I should see no objection to you leaving her a small legacy as a memento of gratitude; but I tell you frankly, Clode, that to disinherit your own flesh and blood in favour of a stranger is wrong.\"\n\n'With that I turned to depart. I had done what I could and made my protest.\n\n'Mary Clode came out of the drawing-room and met me in the hall.\n\n' \"You will have tea before you go, won't you? Come in here,\" and she led me into the drawing-room.\n\n'A fire was burning on the hearth and the room looked cosy and cheerful. She relieved me of my overcoat just as her brother, George, came into the room. He took it from her and laid it across a chair at the far end of the room, then he came back to the fireside where we drank tea. During the meal a question arose about some point concerning the estate. Simon Clode said he didn't want to be bothered with it and had left it to George to decide. George was rather nervous about trusting to his own judgment. At my suggestion, we adjourned to the study after tea and I looked over the papers in question. Mary Clode accompanied us.\n\n'A quarter of an hour later I prepared to take my departure. Remembering that I had left my overcoat in the drawing-room, I went there to fetch it. The only occupant of the room was Mrs Spragg, who was kneeling by the chair on which the overcoat lay. She seemed to be doing something rather unnecessary to the cretonne cover. She rose with a very red face as we entered.\n\n' \"That cover never did sit right,\" she complained. \"My! I could make a better fit myself.\"\n\n'I took up my overcoat and put it on. As I did so I noticed that the envelope containing the will had fallen out of the pocket and was lying on the floor. I replaced it in my pocket, said goodbye, and took my departure.\n\n'On arrival at my office, I will describe my next actions carefully. I removed my overcoat and took the will from the pocket. I had it in my hand and was standing by the table when my clerk came in. Somebody wished to speak to me on the telephone, and the extension to my desk was out of order. I accordingly accompanied him to the outer office and remained there for about five minutes engaged in conversation over the telephone.\n\n'When I emerged, I found my clerk waiting for me.\n\n' \"Mr Spragg has called to see you, sir. I showed him into your office.\"\n\n'I went there to find Mr Spragg sitting by the table. He rose and greeted me in a somewhat unctuous manner, then proceeded to a long discursive speech. In the main it seemed to be an uneasy justification of himself and his wife. He was afraid people were saying etc., etc. His wife had been known from her babyhood upwards for the pureness of her heart and her motives...and so on and so on. I was, I am afraid, rather curt with him. In the end I think he realized that his visit was not being a success and he left somewhat abruptly. I then remembered that I had left the will lying on the table. I took it, sealed the envelope, and wrote on it and put it away in the safe.\n\n'Now I come to the crux of my story. Two months later Mr Simon Clode died. I will not go into long-winded discussions, I will just state the bare facts. When the sealed envelope containing the will was opened it was found to contain a sheet of blank paper.'\n\nHe paused, looking round the circle of interested faces. He smiled himself with a certain enjoyment.\n\n'You appreciate the point, of course? For two months the sealed envelope had lain in my safe. It could not have been tampered with then. No, the time limit was a very short one. Between the moment the will was signed and my locking it away in the safe. Now who had had the opportunity, and to whose interests would it be to do so?\n\n'I will recapitulate the vital points in a brief summary: The will was signed by Mr Clode, placed by me in an envelope\u2014so far so good. It was then put by me in my overcoat pocket. That overcoat was taken from me by Mary and handed by her to George, who was in full sight of me whilst handling the coat. During the time that I was in the study Mrs Eurydice Spragg would have had plenty of time to extract the envelope from the coat pocket and read its contents and, as a matter of fact, finding the envelope on the ground and not in the pocket seemed to point to her having done so. But here we come to a curious point: she had the opportunity of substituting the blank paper, but no motive. The will was in her favour, and by substituting a blank piece of paper she despoiled herself of the heritage she had been so anxious to gain. The same applied to Mr Spragg. He, too, had the opportunity. He was left alone with the document in question for some two or three minutes in my office. But again, it was not to his advantage to do so. So we are faced with this curious problem: the two people who had the opportunity of substituting a blank piece of paper had no motive for doing so, and the two people who had a motive had no opportunity. By the way, I would not exclude the housemaid, Emma Gaunt, from suspicion. She was devoted to her young master and mistress and detested the Spraggs. She would, I feel sure, have been quite equal to attempting the substitution if she had thought of it. But although she actually handled the envelope when she picked it up from the floor and handed it to me, she certainly had no opportunity of tampering with its contents and she could not have substituted another envelope by some sleight of hand (of which anyway she would not be capable) because the envelope in question was brought into the house by me and no one there would be likely to have a duplicate.'\n\nHe looked round, beaming on the assembly.\n\n'Now, there is my little problem. I have, I hope, stated it clearly. I should be interested to hear your views.'\n\nTo everyone's astonishment Miss Marple gave vent to a long and prolonged chuckle. Something seemed to be amusing her immensely.\n\n'What is the matter, Aunt Jane? Can't we share the joke?' said Raymond.\n\n'I was thinking of little Tommy Symonds, a naughty little boy, I am afraid, but sometimes very amusing. One of those children with innocent childlike faces who are always up to some mischief or other. I was thinking how last week in Sunday School he said, \"Teacher, do you say yolk of eggs is white or yolk of eggs are white?\" And Miss Durston explained that anyone would say \"yolks of eggs are white, or yolk of egg is white\"\u2014and naughty Tommy said: \"Well, I should say yolk of egg is yellow!\" Very naughty of him, of course, and as old as the hills. I knew that one as a child.'\n\n'Very funny, my dear Aunt Jane,' Raymond said gently, 'but surely that has nothing to do with the very interesting story that Mr Petherick has been telling us.'\n\n'Oh yes, it has,' said Miss Marple. 'It is a catch! And so is Mr Petherick's story a catch. So like a lawyer! Ah, my dear old friend!' She shook a reproving head at him.\n\n'I wonder if you really know,' said the lawyer with a twinkle.\n\nMiss Marple wrote a few words on a piece of paper, folded them up and passed them across to him.\n\nMr Petherick unfolded the paper, read what was written on it and looked across at her appreciatively.\n\n'My dear friend,' he said, 'is there anything you do not know?'\n\n'I knew that as a child,' said Miss Marple. 'Played with it too.'\n\n'I feel rather out of this,' said Sir Henry. 'I feel sure that Mr Petherick has some clever legal legerdemain up his sleeve.'\n\n'Not at all,' said Mr Petherick. 'Not at all. It is a perfectly fair straightforward proposition. You must not pay any attention to Miss Marple. She has her own way of looking at things.'\n\n'We should be able to arrive at the truth,' said Raymond West a trifle vexedly. 'The facts certainly seem plain enough. Five persons actually touched that envelope. The Spraggs clearly could have meddled with it but equally clearly they did not do so. There remains the other three. Now, when one sees the marvellous ways that conjurers have of doing a thing before one's eyes, it seems to me that the paper could have been extracted and another substituted by George Clode during the time he was carrying the overcoat to the far end of the room.'\n\n'Well, I think it was the girl,' said Joyce. 'I think the housemaid ran down and told her what was happening and she got hold of another blue envelope and just substituted the one for the other.'\n\nSir Henry shook his head. 'I disagree with you both,' he said slowly. 'These sort of things are done by conjurers, and they are done on the stage and in novels, but I think they would be impossible to do in real life, especially under the shrewd eyes of a man like my friend Mr Petherick here. But I have an idea\u2014it is only an idea and nothing more. We know that Professor Longman had just been down for a visit and that he said very little. It is only reasonable to suppose that the Spraggs may have been very anxious as to the result of that visit. If Simon Clode did not take them into his confidence, which is quite probable, they may have viewed his sending for Mr Petherick from quite another angle. They may have believed that Mr Clode had already made a will which benefited Eurydice Spragg and that this new one might be made for the express purpose of cutting her out as a result of Professor Longman's revelations, or alternatively, as you lawyers say, Philip Garrod had impressed on his uncle the claims of his own flesh and blood. In that case, suppose Mrs Spragg prepared to effect a substitution. This she does, but Mr Petherick coming in at an unfortunate moment she had no time to read the real document and hastily destroys it by fire in case the lawyer should discover his loss.'\n\nJoyce shook her head very decidedly.\n\n'She would never burn it without reading it.'\n\n'The solution is rather a weak one,' admitted Sir Henry. 'I suppose\u2014er\u2014Mr Petherick did not assist Providence himself.'\n\nThe suggestion was only a laughing one, but the little lawyer drew himself up in offended dignity.\n\n'A most improper suggestion,' he said with some asperity.\n\n'What does Dr Pender say?' asked Sir Henry.\n\n'I cannot say I have any very clear ideas. I think the substitution must have been effected by either Mrs Spragg or her husband, possibly for the motive that Sir Henry suggests. If she did not read the will until after Mr Petherick had departed, she would then be in somewhat of a dilemma, since she could not own up to her action in the matter. Possibly she would place it among Mr Clode's papers where she thought it would be found after his death. But why it wasn't found I don't know. It might be a mere speculation this\u2014that Emma Gaunt came across it\u2014and out of misplaced devotion to her employers\u2014deliberately destroyed it.'\n\n'I think Dr Pender's solution is the best of all,' said Joyce. 'Is it right, Mr Petherick?'\n\nThe lawyer shook his head.\n\n'I will go on where I left off. I was dumbfounded and quite as much at sea as all of you are. I don't think I should ever have guessed the truth\u2014probably not\u2014but I was enlightened. It was cleverly done too.\n\n'I went and dined with Philip Garrod about a month later and in the course of our after-dinner conversation he mentioned an interesting case that had recently come to his notice.'\n\n' \"I should like to tell you about it, Petherick, in confidence, of course.\"\n\n' \"Quite so,\" I replied.\n\n' \"A friend of mine who had expectations from one of his relatives was greatly distressed to find that that relative had thoughts of benefiting a totally unworthy person. My friend, I am afraid, is a trifle unscrupulous in his methods. There was a maid in the house who was greatly devoted to the interests of what I may call the legitimate party. My friend gave her very simple instructions. He gave her a fountain pen, duly filled. She was to place this in a drawer in the writing table in her master's room, but not the usual drawer where the pen was generally kept. If her master asked her to witness his signature to any document and asked her to bring him his pen, she was to bring him not the right one, but this one which was an exact duplicate of it. That was all she had to do. He gave her no other information. She was a devoted creature and she carried out his instructions faithfully.\"\n\n'He broke off and said:\n\n' \"I hope I am not boring you, Petherick.\"\n\n' \"Not at all,\" I said. \"I am keenly interested.\"\n\n'Our eyes met.\n\n' \"My friend is, of course, not known to you,\" he said.\n\n' \"Of course not,\" I replied.\n\n' \"Then that is all right,\" said Philip Garrod.\n\n'He paused then said smilingly, \"You see the point? The pen was filled with what is commonly known as Evanescent Ink\u2014a solution of starch in water to which a few drops of iodine has been added. This makes a deep blue-black fluid, but the writing disappears entirely in four or five days.\" '\n\nMiss Marple chuckled.\n\n'Disappearing ink,' she said. 'I know it. Many is the time I have played with it as a child.'\n\nAnd she beamed round on them all, pausing to shake a finger once more at Mr Petherick.\n\n'But all the same it's a catch, Mr Petherick,' she said. 'Just like a lawyer.'\n\n## Chapter 6\n\n## The Thumb Mark of St Peter\n\n'And now, Aunt Jane, it is up to you,' said Raymond West.\n\n'Yes, Aunt Jane, we are expecting something really spicy,' chimed in Joyce Lempri\u00e8re.\n\n'Now, you are laughing at me, my dears,' said Miss Marple placidly. 'You think that because I have lived in this out-of-the-way spot all my life I am not likely to have had any very interesting experiences.'\n\n'God forbid that I should ever regard village life as peaceful and uneventful,' said Raymond with fervour. 'Not after the horrible revelations we have heard from you! The cosmopolitan world seems a mild and peaceful place compared with St Mary Mead.'\n\n'Well, my dear,' said Miss Marple, 'human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at close quarters in a village.'\n\n'You really are unique, Aunt Jane,' cried Joyce. 'I hope you don't mind me calling you Aunt Jane?' she added. 'I don't know why I do it.'\n\n'Don't you, my dear?' said Miss Marple.\n\nShe looked up for a moment or two with something quizzical in her glance, which made the blood flame to the girl's cheeks. Raymond West fidgeted and cleared his throat in a somewhat embarrassed manner.\n\nMiss Marple looked at them both and smiled again, and bent her attention once more to her knitting.\n\n'It is true, of course, that I have lived what is called a very uneventful life, but I have had a lot of experience in solving different little problems that have arisen. Some of them have been really quite ingenious, but it would be no good telling them to you, because they are about such unimportant things that you would not be interested\u2014just things like: Who cut the meshes of Mrs Jones's string bag? and why Mrs Sims only wore her new fur coat once. Very interesting things, really, to any student of human nature. No, the only experience I can remember that would be of interest to you is the one about my poor niece Mabel's husband.\n\n'It is about ten or fifteen years ago now, and happily it is all over and done with, and everyone has forgotten about it. People's memories are very short\u2014a lucky thing, I always think.'\n\nMiss Marple paused and murmured to herself:\n\n'I must just count this row. The decreasing is a little awkward. One, two, three, four, five, and then three purl; that is right. Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes, about poor Mabel.\n\n'Mabel was my niece. A nice girl, really a very nice girl, but just a trifle what one might call silly. Rather fond of being melodramatic and of saying a great deal more than she meant whenever she was upset. She married a Mr Denman when she was twenty-two, and I am afraid it was not a very happy marriage. I had hoped very much that the attachment would not come to anything, for Mr Denman was a man of very violent temper\u2014not the kind of man who would be patient with Mabel's foibles\u2014and I also learned that there was insanity in his family. However, girls were just as obstinate then as they are now, and as they always will be. And Mabel married him.\n\n'I didn't see very much of her after her marriage. She came to stay with me once or twice, and they asked me there several times, but, as a matter of fact, I am not very fond of staying in other people's houses, and I always managed to make some excuse. They had been married ten years when Mr Denman died suddenly. There were no children, and he left all his money to Mabel. I wrote, of course, and offered to come to Mabel if she wanted me; but she wrote back a very sensible letter, and I gathered that she was not altogether overwhelmed by grief. I thought that was only natural, because I knew they had not been getting on together for some time. It was not until about three months afterwards that I got a most hysterical letter from Mabel, begging me to come to her, and saying that things were going from bad to worse, and she couldn't stand it much longer.\n\n'So, of course,' continued Miss Marple, 'I put Clara on board wages and sent the plate and the King Charles tankard to the bank, and I went off at once. I found Mabel in a very nervous state. The house, Myrtle Dene, was a fairly large one, very comfortably furnished. There was a cook and a house-parlourmaid as well as a nurse-attendant to look after old Mr Denman, Mabel's husband's father, who was what is called \"not quite right in the head\". Quite peaceful and well behaved, but distinctly odd at times. As I say, there was insanity in the family.\n\n'I was really shocked to see the change in Mabel. She was a mass of nerves, twitching all over, yet I had the greatest difficulty in making her tell me what the trouble was. I got at it, as one always does get at these things, indirectly. I asked her about some friends of hers she was always mentioning in her letters, the Gallaghers. She said, to my surprise, that she hardly ever saw them nowadays. Other friends whom I mentioned elicited the same remark. I spoke to her then of the folly of shutting herself up and brooding, and especially of the silliness of cutting herself adrift from her friends. Then she came bursting out with the truth.\n\n' \"It is not my doing, it is theirs. There is not a soul in the place who will speak to me now. When I go down the High Street they all get out of the way so that they shan't have to meet me or speak to me. I am like a kind of leper. It is awful, and I can't bear it any longer. I shall have to sell the house and go abroad. Yet why should I be driven away from a home like this? I have done nothing.\"\n\n'I was more disturbed than I can tell you. I was knitting a comforter for old Mrs Hay at the time, and in my perturbation I dropped two stitches and never discovered it until long after.\n\n' \"My dear Mabel,\" I said, \"you amaze me. But what is the cause of all this?\"\n\n'Even as a child Mabel was always difficult. I had the greatest difficulty in getting her to give me a straightforward answer to my question. She would only say vague things about wicked talk and idle people who had nothing better to do than gossip, and people who put ideas into other people's heads.\n\n' \"That is all quite clear to me,\" I said. \"There is evidently some story being circulated about you. But what that story is you must know as well as anyone. And you are going to tell me.\"\n\n' \"It is so wicked,\" moaned Mabel.\n\n' \"Of course it is wicked,\" I said briskly. \"There is nothing that you can tell me about people's minds that would astonish or surprise me. Now, Mabel, will you tell me in plain English what people are saying about you?\"\n\n'Then it all came out.\n\n'It seemed that Geoffrey Denman's death, being quite sudden and unexpected, gave rise to various rumours. In fact\u2014and in plain English as I had put it to her\u2014people were saying that she had poisoned her husband.\n\n'Now, as I expect you know, there is nothing more cruel than talk, and there is nothing more difficult to combat. When people say things behind your back there is nothing you can refute or deny, and the rumours go on growing and growing, and no one can stop them. I was quite certain of one thing: Mabel was quite incapable of poisoning anyone. And I didn't see why life should be ruined for her and her home made unbearable just because in all probability she had been doing something silly and foolish.\n\n' \"There is no smoke without fire,\" I said. \"Now, Mabel, you have got to tell me what started people off on this tack. There must have been something.\"\n\n'Mabel was very incoherent, and declared there was nothing\u2014nothing at all, except, of course, that Geoffrey's death had been very sudden. He had seemed quite well at supper that evening, and had taken violently ill in the night. The doctor had been sent for, but the poor man had died a few minutes after the doctor's arrival. Death had been thought to be the result of eating poisoned mushrooms.\n\n' \"Well,\" I said, \"I suppose a sudden death of that kind might start tongues wagging, but surely not without some additional facts. Did you have a quarrel with Geoffrey or anything of that kind?\"\n\n'She admitted that she had had a quarrel with him on the preceding morning at breakfast time.\n\n' \"And the servants heard it, I suppose?\" I asked.\n\n' \"They weren't in the room.\"\n\n' \"No, my dear,\" I said, \"but they probably were fairly near the door outside.\"\n\n'I knew the carrying power of Mabel's high-pitched hysterical voice only too well. Geoffrey Denman, too, was a man given to raising his voice loudly when angry.\n\n' \"What did you quarrel about?\" I asked.\n\n' \"Oh, the usual things. It was always the same things over and over again. Some little thing would start us off, and then Geoffrey became impossible and said abominable things, and I told him what I thought of him.\"\n\n' \"There had been a lot of quarrelling, then?\" I asked.\n\n' \"It wasn't my fault\u2014\"\n\n' \"My dear child,\" I said, \"it doesn't matter whose fault it was. That is not what we are discussing. In a place like this everybody's private affairs are more or less public property. You and your husband were always quarrelling. You had a particularly bad quarrel one morning, and that night your husband died suddenly and mysteriously. Is that all, or is there anything else?\"\n\n' \"I don't know what you mean by anything else,\" said Mabel sullenly.\n\n' \"Just what I say, my dear. If you have done anything silly, don't for Heaven's sake keep it back now. I only want to do what I can to help you.\"\n\n' \"Nothing and nobody can help me,\" said Mabel wildly, \"except death.\"\n\n' \"Have a little more faith in Providence, dear,\" I said. \"Now then, Mabel, I know perfectly well there is something else that you are keeping back.\"\n\n'I always did know, even when she was a child, when she was not telling me the whole truth. It took a long time, but I got it out at last. She had gone down to the chemist's that morning and had bought some arsenic. She had had, of course, to sign the book for it. Naturally, the chemist had talked.\n\n' \"Who is your doctor?\" I asked.\n\n' \"Dr Rawlinson.\"\n\n'I knew him by sight. Mabel had pointed him out to me the other day. To put it in perfectly plain language he was what I would describe as an old dodderer. I have had too much experience of life to believe in the infallibility of doctors. Some of them are clever men and some of them are not, and half the time the best of them don't know what is the matter with you. I have no truck with doctors and their medicines myself.\n\n'I thought things over, and then I put my bonnet on and went to call on Dr Rawlinson. He was just what I had thought him\u2014a nice old man, kindly, vague, and so short-sighted as to be pitiful, slightly deaf, and, withal, touchy and sensitive to the last degree. He was on his high horse at once when I mentioned Geoffrey Denman's death, talked for a long time about various kinds of fungi, edible and otherwise. He had questioned the cook, and she had admitted that one or two of the mushrooms cooked had been \"a little queer\", but as the shop had sent them she thought they must be all right. The more she had thought about them since, the more she was convinced that their appearance was unusual.\n\n' \"She would be,\" I said. \"They would start by being quite like mushrooms in appearance, and they would end by being orange with purple spots. There is nothing that class cannot remember if it tries.\"\n\n'I gathered that Denman had been past speech when the doctor got to him. He was incapable of swallowing, and had died within a few minutes. The doctor seemed perfectly satisfied with the certificate he had given. But how much of that was obstinacy and how much of it was genuine belief I could not be sure.\n\n'I went straight home and asked Mabel quite frankly why she had bought arsenic.\n\n' \"You must have had some idea in your mind,\" I pointed out.\n\n'Mabel burst into tears. \"I wanted to make away with myself,\" she moaned. \"I was too unhappy. I thought I would end it all.\"\n\n' \"Have you the arsenic still?\" I asked.\n\n' \"No, I threw it away.\"\n\n'I sat there turning things over and over in my mind.\n\n' \"What happened when he was taken ill? Did he call you?\"\n\n' \"No.\" She shook her head. \"He rang the bell violently. He must have rung several times. At last Dorothy, the house-parlourmaid, heard it, and she waked the cook up, and they came down. When Dorothy saw him she was frightened. He was rambling and delirious. She left the cook with him and came rushing to me. I got up and went to him. Of course I saw at once he was dreadfully ill. Unfortunately Brewster, who looks after old Mr Denman, was away for the night, so there was no one who knew what to do. I sent Dorothy off for the doctor, and cook and I stayed with him, but after a few minutes I couldn't bear it any longer; it was too dreadful. I ran away back to my room and locked the door.\"\n\n' \"Very selfish and unkind of you,\" I said; \"and no doubt that conduct of yours has done nothing to help you since, you may be sure of that. Cook will have repeated it everywhere. Well, well, this is a bad business.\"\n\n'Next I spoke to the servants. The cook wanted to tell me about the mushrooms, but I stopped her. I was tired of these mushrooms. Instead, I questioned both of them very closely about their master's condition on that night. They both agreed that he seemed to be in great agony, that he was unable to swallow, and he could only speak in a strangled voice, and when he did speak it was only rambling\u2014nothing sensible.\n\n' \"What did he say when he was rambling?\" I asked curiously.\n\n' \"Something about some fish, wasn't it?\" turning to the other.\n\n'Dorothy agreed.\n\n' \"A heap of fish,\" she said; \"some nonsense like that. I could see at once he wasn't in his right mind, poor gentleman.\"\n\n'There didn't seem to be any sense to be made out of that. As a last resource I went up to see Brewster, who was a gaunt, middle-aged woman of about fifty.\n\n' \"It is a pity that I wasn't here that night,\" she said. \"Nobody seems to have tried to do anything for him until the doctor came.\"\n\n' \"I suppose he was delirious,\" I said doubtfully; \"but that is not a symptom of ptomaine poisoning, is it?\"\n\n' \"It depends,\" said Brewster.\n\n'I asked her how her patient was getting on.\n\n'She shook her head.\n\n' \"He is pretty bad,\" she said.\n\n' \"Weak?\"\n\n' \"Oh no, he is strong enough physically\u2014all but his eyesight. That is failing badly. He may outlive all of us, but his mind is failing very fast now. I have already told both Mr and Mrs Denman that he ought to be in an institution, but Mrs Denman wouldn't hear of it at any price.\"\n\n'I will say for Mabel that she always had a kindly heart.\n\n'Well, there the thing was. I thought it over in every aspect, and at last I decided that there was only one thing to be done. In view of the rumours that were going about, permission must be applied for to exhume the body, and a proper post-mortem must be made and lying tongues quietened once and for all. Mabel, of course, made a fuss, mostly on sentimental grounds\u2014disturbing the dead man in his peaceful grave, etc., etc.\u2014but I was firm.\n\n'I won't make a long story of this part of it. We got the order and they did the autopsy, or whatever they call it, but the result was not so satisfactory as it might have been. There was no trace of arsenic\u2014that was all to the good\u2014but the actual words of the report were that there was nothing to show by what means deceased had come to his death.\n\n'So, you see, that didn't lead us out of trouble altogether. People went on talking\u2014about rare poisons impossible to detect, and rubbish of that sort. I had seen the pathologist who had done the post-mortem, and I had asked him several questions, though he tried his best to get out of answering most of them; but I got out of him that he considered it highly unlikely that the poisoned mushrooms were the cause of death. An idea was simmering in my mind, and I asked him what poison, if any, could have been employed to obtain that result. He made a long explanation to me, most of which, I must admit, I did not follow, but it amounted to this: That death might have been due to some strong vegetable alkaloid.\n\n'The idea I had was this: Supposing the taint of insanity was in Geoffrey Denman's blood also, might he not have made away with himself? He had, at one period of his life, studied medicine, and he would have a good knowledge of poisons and their effects.\n\n'I didn't think it sounded very likely, but it was the only thing I could think of. And I was nearly at my wits' end, I can tell you. Now, I dare say you modern young people will laugh, but when I am in really bad trouble I always say a little prayer to myself\u2014anywhere, when I am walking along the street, or at a bazaar. And I always get an answer. It may be some trifling thing, apparently quite unconnected with the subject, but there it is. I had that text pinned over my bed when I was a little girl: Ask and you shall receive. On the morning that I am telling you about, I was walking along the High Street, and I was praying hard. I shut my eyes, and when I opened them, what do you think was the first thing that I saw?'\n\nFive faces with varying degrees of interest were turned to Miss Marple. It may be safely assumed, however, that no one would have guessed the answer to the question right.\n\n'I saw,' said Miss Marple impressively, 'the window of the fishmonger's shop. There was only one thing in it, a fresh haddock.'\n\nShe looked round triumphantly.\n\n'Oh, my God!' said Raymond West. 'An answer to prayer\u2014a fresh haddock!'\n\n'Yes, Raymond,' said Miss Marple severely, 'and there is no need to be profane about it. The hand of God is everywhere. The first thing I saw were the black spots\u2014the marks of St Peter's thumb. That is the legend, you know. St Peter's thumb. And that brought things home to me. I needed faith, the ever true faith of St Peter. I connected the two things together, faith\u2014and fish.'\n\nSir Henry blew his nose rather hurriedly. Joyce bit her lip.\n\n'Now what did that bring to my mind? Of course, both the cook and house-parlourmaid mentioned fish as being one of the things spoken of by the dying man. I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that there was some solution of the mystery to be found in these words. I went home determined to get to the bottom of the matter.'\n\nShe paused.\n\n'Has it ever occurred to you,' the old lady went on, 'how much we go by what is called, I believe, the context? There is a place on Dartmoor called Grey Wethers. If you were talking to a farmer there and mentioned Grey Wethers, he would probably conclude that you were speaking of these stone circles, yet it is possible that you might be speaking of the atmosphere; and in the same way, if you were meaning the stone circles, an outsider, hearing a fragment of the conversation, might think you meant the weather. So when we repeat a conversation, we don't, as a rule, repeat the actual words; we put in some other words that seem to us to mean exactly the same thing.\n\n'I saw both the cook and Dorothy separately. I asked the cook if she was quite sure that her master had really mentioned a heap of fish. She said she was quite sure.\n\n' \"Were these his exact words,\" I asked, \"or did he mention some particular kind of fish?\"\n\n' \"That's it,\" said the cook; \"it was some particular kind of fish, but I can't remember what now. A heap of\u2014now what was it? Not any of the fish you send to table. Would it be a perch now\u2014or pike? No. It didn't begin with a P.\"\n\n'Dorothy also recalled that her master had mentioned some special kind of fish. \"Some outlandish kind of fish it was,\" she said.\n\n' \"A pile of\u2014now what was it?\"\n\n' \"Did he say heap or pile?\" I asked.\n\n' \"I think he said pile. But there, I really can't be sure\u2014it's so hard to remember the actual words, isn't it, Miss, especially when they don't seem to make sense. But now I come to think of it, I am pretty sure that it was a pile, and the fish began with C; but it wasn't a cod or a crayfish.\"\n\n'The next part is where I am really proud of myself,' said Miss Marple, 'because, of course, I don't know anything about drugs\u2014nasty, dangerous things I call them. I have got an old recipe of my grandmother's for tansy tea that is worth any amount of your drugs. But I knew that there were several medical volumes in the house, and in one of them there was an index of drugs. You see, my idea was that Geoffrey had taken some particular poison, and was trying to say the name of it.\n\n'Well, I looked down the list of H's, beginning He. Nothing there that sounded likely; then I began on the P's, and almost at once I came to\u2014what do you think?'\n\nShe looked round, postponing her moment of triumph.\n\n'Pilocarpine. Can't you understand a man who could hardly speak trying to drag that word out? What would that sound like to a cook who had never heard the word? Wouldn't it convey the impression \"pile of carp\"?'\n\n'By Jove!' said Sir Henry.\n\n'I should never have hit upon that,' said Dr Pender.\n\n'Most interesting,' said Mr Petherick. 'Really most interesting.'\n\n'I turned quickly to the page indicated in the index. I read about pilocarpine and its effect on the eyes and other things that didn't seem to have any bearing on the case, but at last I came to a most significant phrase: Has been tried with success as an antidote for atropine poisoning.\n\n'I can't tell you the light that dawned upon me then. I never had thought it likely that Geoffrey Denman would commit suicide. No, this new solution was not only possible, but I was absolutely sure it was the correct one, because all the pieces fitted in logically.'\n\n'I am not going to try to guess,' said Raymond. 'Go on, Aunt Jane, and tell us what was so startlingly clear to you.'\n\n'I don't know anything about medicine, of course,' said Miss Marple, 'but I did happen to know this, that when my eyesight was failing, the doctor ordered me drops with atropine sulphate in them. I went straight upstairs to old Mr Denman's room. I didn't beat about the bush.\n\n' \"Mr Denman,\" I said, \"I know everything. Why did you poison your son?\"\n\n'He looked at me for a minute or two\u2014rather a handsome old man he was, in his way\u2014and then he burst out laughing. It was one of the most vicious laughs I have ever heard. I can assure you it made my flesh creep. I had only heard anything like it once before, when poor Mrs Jones went off her head.\n\n' \"Yes,\" he said, \"I got even with Geoffrey. I was too clever for Geoffrey. He was going to put me away, was he? Have me shut up in an asylum? I heard them talking about it. Mabel is a good girl\u2014Mabel stuck up for me, but I knew she wouldn't be able to stand up against Geoffrey. In the end he would have his own way; he always did. But I settled him\u2014I settled my kind, loving son! Ha, ha! I crept down in the night. It was quite easy. Brewster was away. My dear son was asleep; he had a glass of water by the side of his bed; he always woke up in the middle of the night and drank it off. I poured it away\u2014ha, ha!\u2014and I emptied the bottle of eyedrops into the glass. He would wake up and swill it down before he knew what it was. There was only a tablespoonful of it\u2014quite enough, quite enough. And so he did! They came to me in the morning and broke it to me very gently. They were afraid it would upset me. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!\"\n\n'Well,' said Miss Marple, 'that is the end of the story. Of course, the poor old man was put in an asylum. He wasn't really responsible for what he had done, and the truth was known, and everyone was sorry for Mabel and could not do enough to make up to her for the unjust suspicions they had had. But if it hadn't been for Geoffrey realizing what the stuff was he had swallowed and trying to get everybody to get hold of the antidote without delay, it might never have been found out. I believe there are very definite symptoms with atropine\u2014dilated pupils of the eyes, and all that; but, of course, as I have said, Dr Rawlinson was very shortsighted, poor old man. And in the same medical book which I went on reading\u2014and some of it was most interesting\u2014it gave the symptoms of ptomaine poisoning and atropine, and they are not unlike. But I can assure you I have never seen a pile of fresh haddock without thinking of the thumb mark of St Peter.'\n\nThere was a very long pause.\n\n'My dear friend,' said Mr Petherick. 'My very dear friend, you really are amazing.'\n\n'I shall recommend Scotland Yard to come to you for advice,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Well, at all events, Aunt Jane,' said Raymond, 'there is one thing that you don't know.'\n\n'Oh, yes, I do, dear,' said Miss Marple. 'It happened just before dinner, didn't it? When you took Joyce out to admire the sunset. It is a very favourite place, that. There by the jasmine hedge. That is where the milkman asked Annie if he could put up the banns.'\n\n'Dash it all, Aunt Jane,' said Raymond, 'don't spoil all the romance. Joyce and I aren't like the milkman and Annie.'\n\n'That is where you make a mistake, dear,' said Miss Marple. 'Everybody is very much alike, really. But fortunately, perhaps, they don't realize it.'\n\n## Chapter 7\n\n## The Blue Geranium\n\n'When I was down here last year\u2014' said Sir Henry Clithering, and stopped.\n\nHis hostess, Mrs Bantry, looked at him curiously.\n\nThe Ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard was staying with old friends of his, Colonel and Mrs Bantry, who lived near St Mary Mead.\n\nMrs Bantry, pen in hand, had just asked his advice as to who should be invited to make a sixth guest at dinner that evening.\n\n'Yes?' said Mrs Bantry encouragingly. 'When you were here last year?'\n\n'Tell me,' said Sir Henry, 'do you know a Miss Marple?'\n\nMrs Bantry was surprised. It was the last thing she had expected.\n\n'Know Miss Marple? Who doesn't! The typical old maid of fiction. Quite a dear, but hopelessly behind the times. Do you mean you would like me to ask her to dinner?'\n\n'You are surprised?'\n\n'A little, I must confess. I should hardly have thought you\u2014but perhaps there's an explanation?'\n\n'The explanation is simple enough. When I was down here last year we got into the habit of discussing unsolved mysteries\u2014there were five or six of us\u2014Raymond West, the novelist, started it. We each supplied a story to which we knew the answer, but nobody else did. It was supposed to be an exercise in the deductive faculties\u2014to see who could get nearest the truth.'\n\n'Well?'\n\n'Like in the old story\u2014we hardly realized that Miss Marple was playing; but we were very polite about it\u2014didn't want to hurt the old dear's feelings. And now comes the cream of the jest. The old lady outdid us every time!'\n\n'What?'\n\n'I assure you\u2014straight to the truth like a homing pigeon.'\n\n'But how extraordinary! Why, dear old Miss Marple has hardly ever been out of St Mary Mead.'\n\n'Ah! But according to her, that has given her unlimited opportunities of observing human nature\u2014under the microscope as it were.'\n\n'I suppose there's something in that,' conceded Mrs Bantry. 'One would at least know the petty side of people. But I don't think we have any really exciting criminals in our midst. I think we must try her with Arthur's ghost story after dinner. I'd be thankful if she'd find a solution to that.'\n\n'I didn't know that Arthur believed in ghosts?'\n\n'Oh! he doesn't. That's what worries him so. And it happened to a friend of his, George Pritchard\u2014a most prosaic person. It's really rather tragic for poor George. Either this extraordinary story is true\u2014or else\u2014'\n\n'Or else what?'\n\nMrs Bantry did not answer. After a minute or two she said irrelevantly:\n\n'You know, I like George\u2014everyone does. One can't believe that he\u2014but people do do such extraordinary things.'\n\nSir Henry nodded. He knew, better than Mrs Bantry, the extraordinary things that people did.\n\nSo it came about that that evening Mrs Bantry looked round her dinner table (shivering a little as she did so, because the dining-room, like most English dining-rooms, was extremely cold) and fixed her gaze on the very upright old lady sitting on her husband's right. Miss Marple wore black lace mittens; an old lace fichu was draped round her shoulders and another piece of lace surmounted her white hair. She was talking animatedly to the elderly doctor, Dr Lloyd, about the Workhouse and the suspected shortcomings of the District Nurse.\n\nMrs Bantry marvelled anew. She even wondered whether Sir Henry had been making an elaborate joke\u2014but there seemed no point in that. Incredible that what he had said could be really true.\n\nHer glance went on and rested affectionately on her red-faced broad-shouldered husband as he sat talking horses to Jane Helier, the beautiful and popular actress. Jane, more beautiful (if that were possible) off the stage than on, opened enormous blue eyes and murmured at discreet intervals: 'Really?' 'Oh fancy!' 'How extraordinary!' She knew nothing whatever about horses and cared less.\n\n'Arthur,' said Mrs Bantry, 'you're boring poor Jane to distraction. Leave horses alone and tell her your ghost story instead. You know...George Pritchard.'\n\n'Eh, Dolly? Oh! but I don't know\u2014'\n\n'Sir Henry wants to hear it too. I was telling him something about it this morning. It would be interesting to hear what everyone has to say about it.'\n\n'Oh do!' said Jane. 'I love ghost stories.'\n\n'Well\u2014' Colonel Bantry hesitated. 'I've never believed much in the supernatural. But this\u2014\n\n'I don't think any of you know George Pritchard. He's one of the best. His wife\u2014well, she's dead now, poor woman. I'll just say this much: she didn't give George any too easy a time when she was alive. She was one of those semi-invalids\u2014I believe she had really something wrong with her, but whatever it was she played it for all it was worth. She was capricious, exacting, unreasonable. She complained from morning to night. George was expected to wait on her hand and foot, and every thing he did was always wrong and he got cursed for it. Most men, I'm fully convinced, would have hit her over the head with a hatchet long ago. Eh, Dolly, isn't that so?'\n\n'She was a dreadful woman,' said Mrs Bantry with conviction. 'If George Pritchard had brained her with a hatchet, and there had been any woman on the jury, he would have been triumphantly acquitted.'\n\n'I don't quite know how this business started. George was rather vague about it. I gather Mrs Pritchard had always had a weakness for fortune tellers, palmists, clairvoyantes\u2014anything of that sort. George didn't mind. If she found amusement in it well and good. But he refused to go into rhapsodies himself, and that was another grievance.\n\n'A succession of hospital nurses was always passing through the house, Mrs Pritchard usually becoming dissatisfied with them after a few weeks. One young nurse had been very keen on this fortune telling stunt, and for a time Mrs Pritchard had been very fond of her. Then she suddenly fell out with her and insisted on her going. She had back another nurse who had been with her previously\u2014an older woman, experienced and tactful in dealing with a neurotic patient. Nurse Copling, according to George, was a very good sort\u2014a sensible woman to talk to. She put up with Mrs Pritchard's tantrums and nervestorms with complete indifference.\n\n'Mrs Pritchard always lunched upstairs, and it was usual at lunch time for George and the nurse to come to some arrangement for the afternoon. Strictly speaking, the nurse went off from two to four, but \"to oblige\" as the phrase goes, she would sometimes take her time off after tea if George wanted to be free for the afternoon. On this occasion, she mentioned that she was going to see a sister at Golders Green and might be a little late returning. George's face fell, for he had arranged to play a round of golf. Nurse Copling, however, reassured him.\n\n' \"We'll neither of us be missed, Mr Pritchard.\" A twinkle came into her eye. \"Mrs Pritchard's going to have more exciting company than ours.\"\n\n' \"Who's that?\"\n\n' \"Wait a minute,\" Nurse Copling's eyes twinkled more than ever. \"Let me get it right. Zarida, Psychic Reader of the Future.\"\n\n' \"Oh Lord!\" groaned George. \"That's a new one, isn't it?\"\n\n' \"Quite new. I believe my predecessor, Nurse Carstairs, sent her along. Mrs Pritchard hasn't seen her yet. She made me write, fixing an appointment for this afternoon.\"\n\n' \"Well, at any rate, I shall get my golf,\" said George, and he went off with the kindliest feelings towards Zarida, the Reader of the Future.\n\n'On his return to the house, he found Mrs Pritchard in a state of great agitation. She was, as usual, lying on her invalid couch, and she had a bottle of smelling salts in her hand which she sniffed at frequent intervals.\n\n' \"George,\" she exclaimed. \"What did I tell you about this house? The moment I came into it, I felt there was something wrong! Didn't I tell you so at the time?\"\n\n'Repressing his desire to reply, \"You always do,\" George said, \"No, I can't say I remember it.\"\n\n' \"You never do remember anything that has to do with me. Men are all extraordinarily callous\u2014but I really believe that you are even more insensitive than most.\"\n\n' \"Oh, come now, Mary dear, that's not fair.\"\n\n' \"Well, as I was telling you, this woman knew at once! She\u2014she actually blenched\u2014if you know what I mean\u2014as she came in at the door, and she said: \"There is evil here\u2014evil and danger. I feel it.\" '\n\n'Very unwisely George laughed.\n\n' \"Well, you have had your money's worth this afternoon.\"\n\n'His wife closed her eyes and took a long sniff from her smelling bottle.\n\n' \"How you hate me! You would jeer and laugh if I were dying.\"\n\n'George protested and after a minute or two she went on.\n\n' \"You may laugh, but I shall tell you the whole thing. This house is definitely dangerous to me\u2014the woman said so.\"\n\n'George's formerly kind feeling towards Zarida underwent a change. He knew his wife was perfectly capable of insisting on moving to a new house if the caprice got hold of her.\n\n' \"What else did she say?\" he asked.\n\n' \"She couldn't tell me very much. She was so upset. One thing she did say. I had some violets in a glass. She pointed at them and cried out:\n\n' \"Take those away. No blue flowers\u2014never have blue flowers. Blue flowers are fatal to you\u2014remember that.\" '\n\n' \"And you know,\" added Mrs Pritchard, \"I always have told you that blue as a colour is repellent to me. I feel a natural instinctive sort of warning against.\"\n\n'George was much too wise to remark that he had never heard her say so before. Instead he asked what the mysterious Zarida was like. Mrs Pritchard entered with gusto upon a description.\n\n' \"Black hair in coiled knobs over her ears\u2014her eyes were half closed\u2014great black rims round them\u2014she had a black veil over her mouth and chin\u2014and she spoke in a kind of singing voice with a marked foreign accent\u2014Spanish, I think\u2014\"\n\n' \"In fact all the usual stock-in-trade,\" said George cheerfully.\n\n'His wife immediately closed her eyes.\n\n' \"I feel extremely ill,\" she said. \"Ring for nurse. Unkindness upsets me, as you know only too well.\"\n\n'It was two days later that Nurse Copling came to George with a grave face.\n\n' \"Will you come to Mrs Pritchard, please. She has had a letter which upsets her greatly.\"\n\n'He found his wife with the letter in her hand. She held it out to him.\n\n' \"Read it,\" she said.\n\n'George read it. It was on heavily scented paper, and the writing was big and black.\n\n'I have seen the future. Be warned before it is too late. Beware of the Full Moon. The Blue Primrose means Warning; the Blue Hollyhock means Danger; the Blue Geranium means Death...\n\n'Just about to burst out laughing, George caught Nurse Copling's eye. She made a quick warning gesture. He said rather awkwardly, \"The woman's probably trying to frighten you, Mary. Anyway there aren't such things as blue primroses and blue geraniums.\"\n\n'But Mrs Pritchard began to cry and say her days were numbered. Nurse Copling came out with George upon the landing.\n\n' \"Of all the silly tomfoolery,\" he burst out.\n\n' \"I suppose it is.\"\n\n'Something in the nurse's tone struck him, and he stared at her in amazement.\n\n' \"Surely, nurse, you don't believe\u2014\"\n\n' \"No, no, Mr Pritchard. I don't believe in reading the future\u2014that's nonsense. What puzzles me is the meaning of this. Fortune-tellers are usually out for what they can get. But this woman seems to be frightening Mrs Pritchard with no advantage to herself. I can't see the point. There's another thing\u2014\"\n\n' \"Yes?\"\n\n' \"Mrs Pritchard says that something about Zarida was faintly familiar to her.\"\n\n' \"Well?\"\n\n' \"Well, I don't like it, Mr Pritchard, that's all.\"\n\n' \"I didn't know you were so superstitious, nurse.\"\n\n' \"I'm not superstitious; but I know when a thing is fishy.\"\n\n'It was about four days after this that the first incident happened. To explain it to you, I shall have to describe Mrs Pritchard's room\u2014'\n\n'You'd better let me do that,' interrupted Mrs Bantry. 'It was papered with one of those new wall-papers where you apply clumps of flowers to make a kind of herbaceous border. The effect is almost like being in a garden\u2014though, of course, the flowers are all wrong. I mean they simply couldn't be in bloom all at the same time\u2014'\n\n'Don't let a passion for horticultural accuracy run away with you, Dolly,' said her husband. 'We all know you're an enthusiastic gardener.'\n\n'Well, it is absurd,' protested Mrs Bantry. 'To have bluebells and daffodils and lupins and hollyhocks and Michaelmas daisies all grouped together.'\n\n'Most unscientific,' said Sir Henry. 'But to proceed with the story.'\n\n'Well, among these massed flowers were primroses, clumps of yellow and pink primroses and\u2014oh go on, Arthur, this is your story\u2014'\n\nColonel Bantry took up the tale.\n\n'Mrs Pritchard rang her bell violently one morning. The household came running\u2014thought she was in extremis; not at all. She was violently excited and pointing at the wallpaper; and there sure enough was one blue primrose in the midst of the others...'\n\n'Oh!' said Miss Helier, 'how creepy!'\n\n'The question was: Hadn't the blue primrose always been there? That was George's suggestion and the nurse's. But Mrs Pritchard wouldn't have it at any price. She had never noticed it till that very morning and the night before had been full moon. She was very upset about it.'\n\n'I met George Pritchard that same day and he told me about it,' said Mrs Bantry. 'I went to see Mrs Pritchard and did my best to ridicule the whole thing; but without success. I came away really concerned, and I remember I met Jean Instow and told her about it. Jean is a queer girl. She said, \"So she's really upset about it?\" I told her that I thought the woman was perfectly capable of dying of fright\u2014she was really abnormally superstitious.\n\n'I remember Jean rather startled me with what she said next. She said, \"Well, that might be all for the best, mightn't it?\" And she said it so coolly, in so matter-of-fact a tone that I was really\u2014well, shocked. Of course I know it's done nowadays\u2014to be brutal and outspoken; but I never get used to it. Jean smiled at me rather oddly and said, \"You don't like my saying that\u2014but it's true. What use is Mrs Pritchard's life to her? None at all; and it's hell for George Pritchard. To have his wife frightened out of existence would be the best thing that could happen to him.\" I said, \"George is most awfully good to her always.\" And she said, \"Yes, he deserves a reward, poor dear. He's a very attractive person, George Pritchard. The last nurse thought so\u2014the pretty one\u2014what was her name? Carstairs. That was the cause of the row between her and Mrs P.\"\n\n'Now I didn't like hearing Jean say that. Of course one had wondered\u2014'\n\nMrs Bantry paused significantly.\n\n'Yes, dear,' said Miss Marple placidly. 'One always does. Is Miss Instow a pretty girl? I suppose she plays golf?'\n\n'Yes. She's good at all games. And she's nice-looking, attractive-looking, very fair with a healthy skin, and nice steady blue eyes. Of course we always have felt that she and George Pritchard\u2014I mean if things had been different\u2014they are so well suited to one another.'\n\n'And they were friends?' asked Miss Marple.\n\n'Oh yes. Great friends.'\n\n'Do you think, Dolly,' said Colonel Bantry plaintively, 'that I might be allowed to go on with my story?'\n\n'Arthur,' said Mrs Bantry resignedly, 'wants to get back to his ghosts.'\n\n'I had the rest of the story from George himself,' went on the Colonel. 'There's no doubt that Mrs Pritchard got the wind up badly towards the end of the next month. She marked off on a calendar the day when the moon would be full, and on that night she had both the nurse and then George into her room and made them study the wallpaper carefully. There were pink hollyhocks and red ones, but there were no blue amongst them. Then when George left the room she locked the door\u2014'\n\n'And in the morning there was a large blue hollyhock,' said Miss Helier joyfully.\n\n'Quite right,' said Colonel Bantry. 'Or at any rate, nearly right. One flower of a hollyhock just above her head had turned blue. It staggered George; and of course the more it staggered him the more he refused to take the thing seriously. He insisted that the whole thing was some kind of practical joke. He ignored the evidence of the locked door and the fact that Mrs Pritchard discovered the change before anyone\u2014even Nurse Copling\u2014was admitted.\n\n'It staggered George; and it made him unreasonable. His wife wanted to leave the house, and he wouldn't let her. He was inclined to believe in the supernatural for the first time, but he wasn't going to admit it. He usually gave in to his wife, but this time he wouldn't. Mary was not to make a fool of herself, he said. The whole thing was the most infernal nonsense.\n\n'And so the next month sped away. Mrs Pritchard made less protest than one would have imagined. I think she was superstitious enough to believe that she couldn't escape her fate. She repeated again and again: \"The blue primrose\u2014warning. The blue hollyhock\u2014danger. The blue geranium\u2014death.\" And she would lie looking at the clump of pinky-red geraniums nearest her bed.\n\n'The whole business was pretty nervy. Even the nurse caught the infection. She came to George two days before full moon and begged him to take Mrs Pritchard away. George was angry.\n\n' \"If all the flowers on that damned wall turned into blue devils it couldn't kill anyone!\" he shouted.\n\n' \"It might. Shock has killed people before now.\"\n\n' \"Nonsense,\" said George.\n\n'George has always been a shade pig-headed. You can't drive him. I believe he had a secret idea that his wife worked the change herself and that it was all some morbid hysterical plan of hers.\n\n'Well, the fatal night came. Mrs Pritchard locked the door as usual. She was very calm\u2014in almost an exalted state of mind. The nurse was worried by her state\u2014wanted to give her a stimulant, an injection of strychnine, but Mrs Pritchard refused. In a way, I believe, she was enjoying herself. George said she was.'\n\n'I think that's quite possible,' said Mrs Bantry. 'There must have been a strange sort of glamour about the whole thing.'\n\n'There was no violent ringing of a bell the next morning. Mrs Pritchard usually woke about eight. When, at eight-thirty, there was no sign from her, nurse rapped loudly on the door. Getting no reply, she fetched George, and insisted on the door being broken open. They did so with the help of a chisel.\n\n'One look at the still figure on the bed was enough for Nurse Copling. She sent George to telephone for the doctor, but it was too late. Mrs Pritchard, he said, must have been dead at least eight hours. Her smelling salts lay by her hand on the bed, and on the wall beside her one of the pinky-red geraniums was a bright deep blue.'\n\n'Horrible,' said Miss Helier with a shiver.\n\nSir Henry was frowning.\n\n'No additional details?'\n\nColonel Bantry shook his head, but Mrs Bantry spoke quickly.\n\n'The gas.'\n\n'What about the gas?' asked Sir Henry.\n\n'When the doctor arrived there was a slight smell of gas, and sure enough he found the gas ring in the fireplace very slightly turned on; but so little it couldn't have mattered.'\n\n'Did Mr Pritchard and the nurse not notice it when they first went in?'\n\n'The nurse said she did notice a slight smell. George said he didn't notice gas, but something made him feel very queer and overcome; but he put that down to shock\u2014and probably it was. At any rate there was no question of gas poisoning. The smell was scarcely noticeable.'\n\n'And that's the end of the story?'\n\n'No, it isn't. One way and another, there was a lot of talk. The servants, you see, had overheard things\u2014had heard, for instance, Mrs Pritchard telling her husband that he hated her and would jeer if she were dying. And also more recent remarks. She had said one day, apropos of his refusing to leave the house: \"Very well, when I am dead, I hope everyone will realize that you have killed me.\" And as ill luck would have it, he had been mixing some weed killer for the garden paths the day before. One of the younger servants had seen him and had afterwards seen him taking up a glass of hot milk for his wife.\n\n'The talk spread and grew. The doctor had given a certificate\u2014I don't know exactly in what terms\u2014shock, syncope, heart failure, probably some medical terms meaning nothing much. However the poor lady had not been a month in her grave before an exhumation order was applied for and granted.'\n\n'And the result of the autopsy was nil, I remember,' said Sir Henry gravely. 'A case, for once, of smoke without fire.'\n\n'The whole thing is really very curious,' said Mrs Bantry. 'That fortune-teller, for instance\u2014Zarida. At the address where she was supposed to be, no one had ever heard of any such person!'\n\n'She appeared once\u2014out of the blue,' said her husband, 'and then utterly vanished. Out of the blue\u2014that's rather good!'\n\n'And what is more,' continued Mrs Bantry, 'little Nurse Carstairs, who was supposed to have recommended her, had never even heard of her.'\n\nThey looked at each other.\n\n'It's a mysterious story,' said Dr Lloyd. 'One can make guesses; but to guess\u2014'\n\nHe shook his head.\n\n'Has Mr Pritchard married Miss Instow?' asked Miss Marple in her gentle voice.\n\n'Now why do you ask that?' inquired Sir Henry.\n\nMiss Marple opened gentle blue eyes.\n\n'It seems to me so important,' she said. 'Have they married?'\n\nColonel Bantry shook his head.\n\n'We\u2014well, we expected something of the kind\u2014but it's eighteen months now. I don't believe they even see much of each other.'\n\n'That is important,' said Miss Marple. 'Very important.'\n\n'Then you think the same as I do,' said Mrs Bantry. 'You think\u2014'\n\n'Now, Dolly,' said her husband. 'It's unjustifiable\u2014what you're going to say. You can't go about accusing people without a shadow of proof.'\n\n'Don't be so\u2014so manly, Arthur. Men are always afraid to say anything. Anyway, this is all between ourselves. It's just a wild fantastic idea of mine that possibly\u2014only possibly\u2014Jean Instow disguised herself as a fortune-teller. Mind you, she may have done it for a joke. I don't for a minute think that she meant any harm; but if she did do it, and if Mrs Pritchard was foolish enough to die of fright\u2014well, that's what Miss Marple meant, wasn't it?'\n\n'No, dear, not quite,' said Miss Marple. 'You see, if I were going to kill anyone\u2014which, of course, I wouldn't dream of doing for a minute, because it would be very wicked, and besides I don't like killing\u2014not even wasps, though I know it has to be, and I'm sure the gardener does it as humanely as possible. Let me see, what was I saying?'\n\n'If you wished to kill anyone,' prompted Sir Henry.\n\n'Oh yes. Well, if I did, I shouldn't be at all satisfied to trust to fright. I know one reads of people dying of it, but it seems a very uncertain sort of thing, and the most nervous people are far more brave than one really thinks they are. I should like something definite and certain, and make a thoroughly good plan about it.'\n\n'Miss Marple,' said Sir Henry, 'you frighten me. I hope you will never wish to remove me. Your plans would be too good.'\n\nMiss Marple looked at him reproachfully.\n\n'I thought I had made it clear that I would never contemplate such wickedness,' she said. 'No, I was trying to put myself in the place of\u2014er\u2014a certain person.'\n\n'Do you mean George Pritchard?' asked Colonel Bantry. 'I'll never believe it of George\u2014though\u2014mind you, even the nurse believes it. I went and saw her about a month afterwards, at the time of the exhumation. She didn't know how it was done\u2014in fact, she wouldn't say anything at all\u2014but it was clear enough that she believed George to be in some way responsible for his wife's death. She was convinced of it.'\n\n'Well,' said Dr Lloyd, 'perhaps she wasn't so far wrong. And mind you, a nurse often knows. She can't say\u2014she's got no proof\u2014but she knows.'\n\nSir Henry leant forward.\n\n'Come now, Miss Marple,' he said persuasively. 'You're lost in a daydream. Won't you tell us all about it?'\n\nMiss Marple started and turned pink.\n\n'I beg your pardon,' she said. 'I was just thinking about our District Nurse. A most difficult problem.'\n\n'More difficult than the problem of the blue geranium?'\n\n'It really depends on the primroses,' said Miss Marple. 'I mean, Mrs Bantry said they were yellow and pink. If it was a pink primrose that turned blue, of course, that fits in perfectly. But if it happened to be a yellow one\u2014'\n\n'It was a pink one,' said Mrs Bantry.\n\nShe stared. They all stared at Miss Marple.\n\n'Then that seems to settle it,' said Miss Marple. She shook her head regretfully. 'And the wasp season and everything. And of course the gas.'\n\n'It reminds you, I suppose, of countless village tragedies?' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Not tragedies,' said Miss Marple. 'And certainly nothing criminal. But it does remind me a little of the trouble we are having with the District Nurse. After all, nurses are human beings, and what with having to be so correct in their behaviour and wearing those uncomfortable collars and being so thrown with the family\u2014well, can you wonder that things sometimes happen?'\n\nA glimmer of light broke upon Sir Henry.\n\n'You mean Nurse Carstairs?'\n\n'Oh no. Not Nurse Carstairs. Nurse Copling. You see, she had been there before, and very much thrown with Mr Pritchard, who you say is an attractive man. I dare say she thought, poor thing\u2014well, we needn't go into that. I don't suppose she knew about Miss Instow, and of course afterwards, when she found out, it turned her against him and she tried to do all the harm she could. Of course the letter really gave her away, didn't it?'\n\n'What letter?'\n\n'Well, she wrote to the fortune-teller at Mrs Pritchard's request, and the fortune-teller came, apparently in answer to the letter. But later it was discovered that there never had been such a person at that address. So that shows that Nurse Copling was in it. She only pretended to write\u2014so what could be more likely than that she was the fortune-teller herself?'\n\n'I never saw the point about the letter,' said Sir Henry. 'That's a most important point, of course.'\n\n'Rather a bold step to take,' said Miss Marple, 'because Mrs Pritchard might have recognized her in spite of the disguise\u2014though of course if she had, the nurse could have pretended it was a joke.'\n\n'What did you mean,' said Sir Henry, 'when you said that if you were a certain person you would not have trusted to fright?'\n\n'One couldn't be sure that way,' said Miss Marple. 'No, I think that the warnings and the blue flowers were, if I may use a military term,' she laughed self-consciously\u2014'just camouflage.'\n\n'And the real thing?'\n\n'I know,' said Miss Marple apologetically, 'that I've got wasps on the brain. Poor things, destroyed in their thousands\u2014and usually on such a beautiful summer's day. But I remember thinking, when I saw the gardener shaking up the cyanide of potassium in a bottle with water, how like smelling-salts it looked. And if it were put in a smelling-salt bottle and substituted for the real one\u2014well, the poor lady was in the habit of using her smelling-salts. Indeed you said they were found by her hand. Then, of course, while Mr Pritchard went to telephone to the doctor, the nurse would change it for the real bottle, and she'd just turn on the gas a little bit to mask any smell of almonds and in case anyone felt queer, and I always have heard that cyanide leaves no trace if you wait long enough. But, of course I may be wrong, and it may have been something entirely different in the bottle; but that doesn't really matter, does it?'\n\nMiss Marple paused, a little out of breath.\n\nJane Helier leant forward and said, 'But the blue geranium, and the other flowers?'\n\n'Nurses alwayshave litmus paper, don't they?' said Miss Marple, 'for\u2014well, for testing. Not a very pleasant subject. We won't dwell on it. I have done a little nursing myself.' She grew delicately pink. 'Blue turns red with acids, and red turns blue with alkalis. So easy to paste some red litmus over a red flower\u2014near the bed, of course. And then, when the poor lady used her smelling-salts, the strong ammonia fumes would turn it blue. Really most ingenious. Of course, the geranium wasn't blue when they first broke into the room\u2014nobody noticed it till afterwards. When nurse changed the bottles, she held the Sal Ammoniac against the wallpaper for a minute, I expect.'\n\n'You might have been there, Miss Marple,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'What worries me,' said Miss Marple, 'is poor Mr Pritchard and that nice girl, Miss Instow. Probably both suspecting each other and keeping apart\u2014and life so very short.'\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n'You needn't worry,' said Sir Henry. 'As a matter of fact I have something up my sleeve. A nurse has been arrested on a charge of murdering an elderly patient who had left her a legacy. It was done with cyanide of potassium substituted for smelling-salts. Nurse Copling trying the same trick again. Miss Instow and Mr Pritchard need have no doubts as to the truth.'\n\n'Now isn't that nice?' cried Miss Marple. 'I don't mean about the new murder, of course. That's very sad, and shows how much wickedness there is in the world, and that if once you give way\u2014which reminds me I must finish my little conversation with Dr Lloyd about the village nurse.'\n\n## Chapter 8\n\n## The Companion\n\n'Now, Dr Lloyd,' said Miss Helier. 'Don't you know any creepy stories?'\n\nShe smiled at him\u2014the smile that nightly bewitched the theatre-going public. Jane Helier was sometimes called the most beautiful woman in England, and jealous members of her own profession were in the habit of saying to each other: 'Of course Jane's not an artist. She can't act\u2014if you know what I mean. It's those eyes!'\n\nAnd those 'eyes' were at this minute fixed appealingly on the grizzled elderly bachelor doctor who, for the last five years, had ministered to the ailments of the village of St Mary Mead.\n\nWith an unconscious gesture, the doctor pulled down his waistcoat (inclined of late to be uncomfortably tight) and racked his brains hastily, so as not to disappoint the lovely creature who addressed him so confidently.\n\n'I feel,' said Jane dreamily, 'that I would like to wallow in crime this evening.'\n\n'Splendid,' said Colonel Bantry, her host. 'Splendid, splendid.' And he laughed a loud hearty military laugh. 'Eh, Dolly?'\n\nHis wife, hastily recalled to the exigencies of social life (she had been planning her spring border) agreed enthusiastically.\n\n'Of course it's splendid,' she said heartily but vaguely. 'I always thought so.'\n\n'Did you, my dear?' said old Miss Marple, and her eyes twinkled a little.\n\n'We don't get much in the creepy line\u2014and still less in the criminal line\u2014in St Mary Mead, you know, Miss Helier,' said Dr Lloyd.\n\n'You surprise me,' said Sir Henry Clithering. The ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard turned to Miss Marple. 'I always understood from our friend here that St Mary Mead is a positive hotbed of crime and vice.'\n\n'Oh, Sir Henry!' protested Miss Marple, a spot of colour coming into her cheeks. 'I'm sure I never said anything of the kind. The only thing I ever said was that human nature is much the same in a village as anywhere else, only one has opportunities and leisure for seeing it at closer quarters.'\n\n'But you haven't always lived here,' said Jane Helier, still addressing the doctor. 'You've been in all sorts of queer places all over the world\u2014places where things happen!'\n\n'That is so, of course,' said Dr Lloyd, still thinking desperately. 'Yes, of course...Yes...Ah! I have it!'\n\nHe sank back with a sigh of relief.\n\n'It is some years ago now\u2014I had almost forgotten. But the facts were really very strange\u2014very strange indeed. And the final coincidence which put the clue into my hand was strange also.'\n\nMiss Helier drew her chair a little nearer to him, applied some lipstick and waited expectantly. The others also turned interested faces towards him.\n\n'I don't know whether any of you know the Canary Islands,' began the doctor.\n\n'They must be wonderful,' said Jane Helier. 'They're in the South Seas, aren't they? Or is it the Mediterranean?'\n\n'I've called in there on my way to South Africa,' said the Colonel. 'The Peak of Tenerife is a fine sight with the setting sun on it.'\n\n'The incident I am describing happened in the island of Grand Canary, not Tenerife. It is a good many years ago now. I had had a breakdown in health and was forced to give up my practice in England and go abroad. I practised in Las Palmas, which is the principal town of Grand Canary. In many ways I enjoyed the life out there very much. The climate was mild and sunny, there was excellent surf bathing (and I am an enthusiastic bather) and the sea life of the port attracted me. Ships from all over the world put in at Las Palmas. I used to walk along the mole every morning far more interested than any member of the fair sex could be in a street of hat shops.\n\n'As I say, ships from all over the world put in at Las Palmas. Sometimes they stay a few hours, sometimes a day or two. In the principal hotel there, the Metropole, you will see people of all races and nationalities\u2014birds of passage. Even the people going to Tenerife usually come here and stay a few days before crossing to the other island.\n\n'My story begins there, in the Metropole Hotel, one Thursday evening in January. There was a dance going on and I and a friend had been sitting at a small table watching the scene. There were a fair sprinkling of English and other nationalities, but the majority of the dancers were Spanish; and when the orchestra struck up a tango, only half a dozen couples of the latter nationality took the floor. They all danced well and we looked on and admired. One woman in particular excited our lively admiration. Tall, beautiful and sinuous, she moved with the grace of a half-tamed leopardess. There was something dangerous about her. I said as much to my friend and he agreed.\n\n' \"Women like that,\" he said, \"are bound to have a history. Life will not pass them by.\"\n\n' \"Beauty is perhaps a dangerous possession,\" I said.\n\n' \"It's not only beauty,\" he insisted. \"There is something else. Look at her again. Things are bound to happen to that woman, or because of her. As I said, life will not pass her by. Strange and exciting events will surround her. You've only got to look at her to know it.\"\n\n'He paused and then added with a smile:\n\n' \"Just as you've only got to look at those two women over there, and know that nothing out of the way could ever happen to either of them! They are made for a safe and uneventful existence.\"\n\n'I followed his eyes. The two women he referred to were travellers who had just arrived\u2014a Holland Lloyd boat had put into port that evening, and the passengers were just beginning to arrive.\n\n'As I looked at them I saw at once what my friend meant. They were two English ladies\u2014the thoroughly nice travelling English that you do find abroad. Their ages, I should say, were round about forty. One was fair and a little\u2014just a little\u2014too plump; the other was dark and a little\u2014again just a little\u2014inclined to scragginess. They were what is called well-preserved, quietly and inconspicuously dressed in well-cut tweeds, and innocent of any kind of make-up. They had that air of quiet assurance which is the birthright of well-bred Englishwomen. There was nothing remarkable about either of them. They were like thousands of their sisters. They would doubtless see what they wished to see, assisted by Baedeker, and be blind to everything else. They would use the English library and attend the English Church in any place they happened to be, and it was quite likely that one or both of them sketched a little. And as my friend said, nothing exciting or remarkable would ever happen to either of them, though they might quite likely travel half over the world. I looked from them back to our sinuous Spanish woman with her half-closed smouldering eyes and I smiled.'\n\n'Poor things,' said Jane Helier with a sigh. 'But I do think it's so silly of people not to make the most of themselves. That woman in Bond Street\u2014Valentine\u2014is really wonderful. Audrey Denman goes to her; and have you seen her in \"The Downward Step\"? As the schoolgirl in the first act she's really marvellous. And yet Audrey is fifty if she's a day. As a matter of fact I happen to know she's really nearer sixty.'\n\n'Go on,' said Mrs Bantry to Dr Lloyd. 'I love stories about sinuous Spanish dancers. It makes me forget how old and fat I am.'\n\n'I'm sorry,' said Dr Lloyd apologetically. 'But you see, as a matter of fact, this story isn't about the Spanish woman.'\n\n'It isn't?'\n\n'No. As it happens my friend and I were wrong. Nothing in the least exciting happened to the Spanish beauty. She married a clerk in a shipping office, and by the time I left the island she had had five children and was getting very fat.'\n\n'Just like that girl of Israel Peters,' commented Miss Marple. 'The one who went on the stage and had such good legs that they made her principal boy in the pantomime. Everyone said she'd come to no good, but she married a commercial traveller and settled down splendidly.'\n\n'The village parallel,' murmured Sir Henry softly.\n\n'No,' went on the doctor. 'My story is about the two English ladies.'\n\n'Something happened to them?' breathed Miss Helier.\n\n'Something happened to them\u2014and the very next day, too.'\n\n'Yes?' said Mrs Bantry encouragingly.\n\n'Just for curiosity, as I went out that evening I glanced at the hotel register. I found the names easily enough. Miss Mary Barton and Miss Amy Durrant of Little Paddocks, Caughton Weir, Bucks. I little thought then how soon I was to encounter the owners of those names again\u2014and under what tragic circumstances.\n\n'The following day I had arranged to go for a picnic with some friends. We were to motor across the island, taking our lunch, to a place called (as far as I remember\u2014it is so long ago) Las Nieves, a well-sheltered bay where we could bathe if we felt inclined. This programme we duly carried out, except that we were somewhat late in starting, so that we stopped on the way and picnicked, going on to Las Nieves afterwards for a bathe before tea.\n\n'As we approached the beach, we were at once aware of a tremendous commotion. The whole population of the small village seemed to be gathered on the shore. As soon as they saw us they rushed towards the car and began explaining excitedly. Our Spanish not being very good, it took me a few minutes to understand, but at last I got it.\n\n'Two of the mad English ladies had gone in to bathe, and one had swum out too far and got into difficulties. The other had gone after her and had tried to bring her in, but her strength in turn had failed and she too would have drowned had not a man rowed out in a boat and brought in rescuer and rescued\u2014the latter beyond help.\n\n'As soon as I got the hang of things I pushed the crowd aside and hurried down the beach. I did not at first recognize the two women. The plump figure in the black stockinet costume and the tight green rubber bathing cap awoke no chord of recognition as she looked up anxiously. She was kneeling beside the body of her friend, making somewhat amateurish attempts at artificial respiration. When I told her that I was a doctor she gave a sigh of relief, and I ordered her off at once to one of the cottages for a rub down and dry clothing. One of the ladies in my party went with her. I myself worked unavailingly on the body of the drowned woman in vain. Life was only too clearly extinct, and in the end I had reluctantly to give in.\n\n'I rejoined the others in the small fisherman's cottage and there I had to break the sad news. The survivor was attired now in her own clothes, and I immediately recognized her as one of the two arrivals of the night before. She received the sad news fairly calmly, and it was evidently the horror of the whole thing that struck her more than any great personal feeling.\n\n' \"Poor Amy,\" she said. \"Poor, poor Amy. She had been looking forward to the bathing here so much. And she was a good swimmer too. I can't understand it. What do you think it can have been, doctor?\"\n\n' \"Possibly cramp. Will you tell me exactly what happened?\"\n\n' \"We had both been swimming about for some time\u2014twenty minutes, I should say. Then I thought I would go in, but Amy said she was going to swim out once more. She did so, and suddenly I heard her call and realized she was crying for help. I swam out as fast as I could. She was still afloat when I got to her, but she clutched at me wildly and we both went under. If it hadn't been for that man coming out with his boat I should have been drowned too.\"\n\n' \"That has happened fairly often,\" I said. \"To save anyone from drowning is not an easy affair.\"\n\n' \"It seems so awful,\" continued Miss Barton. \"We only arrived yesterday, and were so delighting in the sunshine and our little holiday. And now this\u2014this terrible tragedy occurs.\"\n\n'I asked her then for particulars about the dead woman, explaining that I would do everything I could for her, but that the Spanish authorities would require full information. This she gave me readily enough.\n\n'The dead woman, Miss Amy Durrant, was her companion and had come to her about five months previously. They had got on very well together, but Miss Durrant had spoken very little about her people. She had been left an orphan at an early age and had been brought up by an uncle and had earned her own living since she was twenty-one.\n\n'And so that was that,' went on the doctor. He paused and said again, but this time with a certain finality in his voice, 'And so that was that.'\n\n'I don't understand,' said Jane Helier. 'Is that all? I mean, it's very tragic, I suppose, but it isn't\u2014well, it isn't what I call creepy.'\n\n'I think there's more to follow,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Yes,' said Dr Lloyd, 'there's more to follow. You see, right at the time there was one queer thing. Of course I asked questions of the fishermen, etc., as to what they'd seen. They were eye-witnesses. And one woman had rather a funny story. I didn't pay any attention to it at the time, but it came back to me afterwards. She insisted, you see, that Miss Durrant wasn't in difficulties when she called out. The other swam out to her and, according to this woman, deliberately held Miss Durrant's head under water. I didn't, as I say, pay much attention. It was such a fantastic story, and these things look so differently from the shore. Miss Barton might have tried to make her friend lose consciousness, realizing that the latter's panic-stricken clutching would drown them both. You see, according to the Spanish woman's story, it looked as though\u2014well, as though Miss Barton was deliberately trying to drown her companion.\n\n'As I say, I paid very little attention to this story at the time. It came back to me later. Our great difficulty was to find out anything about this woman, Amy Durrant. She didn't seem to have any relations. Miss Barton and I went through her things together. We found one address and wrote there, but it proved to be simply a room she had taken in which to keep her things. The landlady knew nothing, had only seen her when she took the room. Miss Durrant had remarked at the time that she always liked to have one place she could call her own to which she could return at any moment. There were one or two nice pieces of old furniture and some bound numbers of Academy pictures, and a trunk full of pieces of material bought at sales, but no personal belongings. She had mentioned to the landlady that her father and mother had died in India when she was a child and that she had been brought up by an uncle who was a clergyman, but she did not say if he was her father's or her mother's brother, so the name was no guide.\n\n'It wasn't exactly mysterious, it was just unsatisfactory. There must be many lonely women, proud and reti-cent, in just that position. There were a couple of photographs amongst her belongings in Las Palmas\u2014rather old and faded and they had been cut to fit the frames they were in, so that there was no photographer's name upon them, and there was an old daguerreotype which might have been her mother or more probably her grandmother.\n\n'Miss Barton had had two references with her. One she had forgotten, the other name she recollected after an effort. It proved to be that of a lady who was now abroad, having gone to Australia. She was written to. Her answer, of course, was a long time in coming, and I may say that when it did arrive there was no particular help to be gained from it. She said Miss Durrant had been with her as companion and had been most efficient and that she was a very charming woman, but that she knew nothing of her private affairs or relations.\n\n'So there it was\u2014as I say, nothing unusual, really. It was just the two things together that aroused my uneasiness. This Amy Durrant of whom no one knew anything, and the Spanish woman's queer story. Yes, and I'll add a third thing: When I was first bending over the body and Miss Barton was walking away towards the huts, she looked back. Looked back with an expression on her face that I can only describe as one of poignant anxiety\u2014a kind of anguished uncertainty that imprinted itself on my brain.\n\n'It didn't strike me as anything unusual at the time. I put it down to her terrible distress over her friend. But, you see, later I realized that they weren't on those terms. There was no devoted attachment between them, no terrible grief. Miss Barton was fond of Amy Durrant and shocked by her death\u2014that was all.\n\n'But, then, why that terrible poignant anxiety? That was the question that kept coming back to me. I had not been mistaken in that look. And almost against my will, an answer began to shape itself in my mind. Supposing the Spanish woman's story were true; supposing that Mary Barton wilfully and in cold blood tried to drown Amy Durrant. She succeeds in holding her under water whilst pretending to be saving her. She is rescued by a boat. They are on a lonely beach far from anywhere. And then I appear\u2014the last thing she expects. A doctor! And an English doctor! She knows well enough that people who have been under water far longer than Amy Durrant have been revived by artificial respiration. But she has to play her part\u2014to go off leaving me alone with her victim. And as she turns for one last look, a terrible poignant anxiety shows in her face. Will Amy Durrant come back to life and tell what she knows?'\n\n'Oh!' said Jane Helier. 'I'm thrilled now.'\n\n'Viewed in that aspect the whole business seemed more sinister, and the personality of Amy Durrant became more mysterious. Who was Amy Durrant? Why should she, an insignificant paid companion, be murdered by her employer? What story lay behind that fatal bathing expedition? She had entered Mary Barton's employment only a few months before. Mary Barton had brought her abroad, and the very day after they landed the tragedy had occurred. And they were both nice, commonplace, refined Englishwomen! The whole thing was fantastic, and I told myself so. I had been letting my imagination run away with me.'\n\n'You didn't do anything, then?' asked Miss Helier.\n\n'My dear young lady, what could I do? There was no evidence. The majority of the eye-witnesses told the same story as Miss Barton. I had built up my own suspicions out of a fleeting expression which I might possibly have imagined. The only thing I could and did do was to see that the widest inquiries were made for the relations of Amy Durrant. The next time I was in England I even went and saw the landlady of her room, with the results I have told you.'\n\n'But you felt there was something wrong,' said Miss Marple.\n\nDr Lloyd nodded.\n\n'Half the time I was ashamed of myself for thinking so. Who was I to go suspecting this nice, pleasant-mannered English lady of a foul and cold-blooded crime? I did my best to be as cordial as possible to her during the short time she stayed on the island. I helped her with the Spanish authorities. I did everything I could do as an Englishman to help a compatriot in a foreign country; and yet I am convinced that she knew I suspected and disliked her.'\n\n'How long did she stay out there?' asked Miss Marple.\n\n'I think it was about a fortnight. Miss Durrant was buried there, and it must have been about ten days later when she took a boat back to England. The shock had upset her so much that she felt she couldn't spend the winter there as she had planned. That's what she said.'\n\n'Did it seem to have upset her?' asked Miss Marple.\n\nThe doctor hesitated.\n\n'Well, I don't know that it affected her appearance at all,' he said cautiously.\n\n'She didn't, for instance, grow fatter?' asked Miss Marple.\n\n'Do you know\u2014it's a curious thing your saying that. Now I come to think back, I believe you're right. She\u2014yes, she did seem, if anything, to be putting on weight.'\n\n'How horrible,' said Jane Helier with a shudder. 'It's like\u2014it's like fattening on your victim's blood.'\n\n'And yet, in another way, I may be doing her an injustice,' went on Dr Lloyd. 'She certainly said something before she left, which pointed in an entirely different direction. There may be, I think there are, consciences which work very slowly\u2014which take some time to awaken to the enormity of the deed committed.\n\n'It was the evening before her departure from the Canaries. She had asked me to go and see her, and had thanked me very warmly for all I had done to help her. I, of course, made light of the matter, said I had only done what was natural under the circumstances, and so on. There was a pause after that, and then she suddenly asked me a question.\n\n' \"Do you think,\" she asked, \"that one is ever justified in taking the law into one's own hands?\"\n\n'I replied that that was rather a difficult question, but that on the whole, I thought not. The law was the law, and we had to abide by it.\n\n' \"Even when it is powerless?\"\n\n' \"I don't quite understand.\"\n\n' \"It's difficult to explain; but one might do something that is considered definitely wrong\u2014that is considered a crime, even, for a good and sufficient reason.\"\n\n'I replied drily that possibly several criminals had thought that in their time, and she shrank back.\n\n' \"But that's horrible,\" she murmured. \"Horrible.\"\n\n'And then with a change of tone she asked me to give her something to make her sleep. She had not been able to sleep properly since\u2014she hesitated\u2014since that terrible shock.\n\n' \"You're sure it is that? There is nothing worrying you? Nothing on your mind?\"\n\n' \"On my mind? What should be on my mind?\"\n\n'She spoke fiercely and suspiciously.\n\n' \"Worry is a cause of sleeplessness sometimes,\" I said lightly.\n\n'She seemed to brood for a moment.\n\n' \"Do you mean worrying over the future, or worrying over the past, which can't be altered?\"\n\n' \"Either.\"\n\n' \"Only it wouldn't be any good worrying over the past. You couldn't bring back\u2014Oh! what's the use! One mustn't think. One must not think.\"\n\n'I prescribed her a mild sleeping draught and made my adieu. As I went away I wondered not a little over the words she had spoken. \"You couldn't bring back\u2014\" What? Or who?\n\n'I think that last interview prepared me in a way for what was to come. I didn't expect it, of course, but when it happened, I wasn't surprised. Because, you see, Mary Barton struck me all along as a conscientious woman\u2014not a weak sinner, but a woman with convictions, who would act up to them, and who would not relent as long as she still believed in them. I fancied that in the last conversation we had she was beginning to doubt her own convictions. I know her words suggested to me that she was feeling the first faint beginnings of that terrible soul-searcher\u2014remorse.\n\n'The thing happened in Cornwall, in a small watering-place, rather deserted at that season of the year. It must have been\u2014let me see\u2014late March. I read about it in the papers. A lady had been staying at a small hotel there\u2014a Miss Barton. She had been very odd and peculiar in her manner. That had been noticed by all. At night she would walk up and down her room, muttering to herself, and not allowing the people on either side of her to sleep. She had called on the vicar one day and had told him that she had a communication of the gravest importance to make to him. She had, she said, committed a crime. Then, instead of proceeding, she had stood up abruptly and said she would call another day. The vicar put her down as being slightly mental, and did not take her self-accusation seriously.\n\n'The very next morning she was found to be missing from her room. A note was left addressed to the coroner. It ran as follows:\n\n'I tried to speak to the vicar yesterday, to confess all, but was not allowed. She would not let me. I can make amends only one way\u2014a life for a life; and my life must go the same way as hers did. I, too, must drown in the deep sea. I believed I was justified. I see now that that was not so. If I desire Amy's forgiveness I must go to her. Let no one be blamed for my death\u2014Mary Barton.\n\n'Her clothes were found lying on the beach in a secluded cove nearby, and it seemed clear that she had undressed there and swum resolutely out to sea where the current was known to be dangerous, sweeping one down the coast.\n\n'The body was not recovered, but after a time leave was given to presume death. She was a rich woman, her estate being proved at a hundred thousand pounds. Since she died intestate it all went to her next of kin\u2014a family of cousins in Australia. The papers made discreet references to the tragedy in the Canary Islands, putting forward the theory that the death of Miss Durrant had unhinged her friend's brain. At the inquest the usual verdict of Suicide whilst temporarily insane was returned.\n\n'And so the curtain falls on the tragedy of Amy Durrant and Mary Barton.'\n\nThere was a long pause and then Jane Helier gave a great gasp.\n\n'Oh, but you mustn't stop there\u2014just at the most interesting part. Go on.'\n\n'But you see, Miss Helier, this isn't a serial story. This is real life; and real life stops just where it chooses.'\n\n'But I don't want it to,' said Jane. 'I want to know.'\n\n'This is where we use our brains, Miss Helier,' explained Sir Henry. 'Why did Mary Barton kill her companion? That's the problem Dr Lloyd has set us.'\n\n'Oh, well,' said Miss Helier, 'she might have killed her for lots of reasons. I mean\u2014oh, I don't know. She might have got on her nerves, or else she got jealous, although Dr Lloyd doesn't mention any men, but still on the boat out\u2014well, you know what everyone says about boats and sea voyages.'\n\nMiss Helier paused, slightly out of breath, and it was borne in upon her audience that the outside of Jane's charming head was distinctly superior to the inside.\n\n'I would like to have a lot of guesses,' said Mrs Bantry. 'But I suppose I must confine myself to one. Well, I think that Miss Barton's father made all his money out of ruining Amy Durrant's father, so Amy determined to have her revenge. Oh, no, that's the wrong way round. How tiresome! Why does the rich employer kill the humble companion? I've got it. Miss Barton had a young brother who shot himself for love of Amy Durrant. Miss Barton waits her time. Amy comes down in the world. Miss B. engages her as companion and takes her to the Canaries and accomplishes her revenge. How's that?'\n\n'Excellent,' said Sir Henry. 'Only we don't know that Miss Barton ever had a young brother.'\n\n'We deduce that,' said Mrs Bantry. 'Unless she had a young brother there's no motive. So she must have had a young brother. Do you see, Watson?'\n\n'That's all very fine, Dolly,' said her husband. 'But it's only a guess.'\n\n'Of course it is,' said Mrs Bantry. 'That's all we can do\u2014guess. We haven't got any clues. Go on, dear, have a guess yourself.'\n\n'Upon my word, I don't know what to say. But I think there's something in Miss Helier's suggestion that they fell out about a man. Look here, Dolly, it was probably some high church parson. They both embroidered him a cope or something, and he wore the Durrant woman's first. Depend upon it, it was something like that. Look how she went off to a parson at the end. These women all lose their heads over a good-looking clergyman. You hear of it over and over again.'\n\n'I think I must try to make my explanation a little more subtle,' said Sir Henry, 'though I admit it's only a guess. I suggest that Miss Barton was always mentally unhinged. There are more cases like that than you would imagine. Her mania grew stronger and she began to believe it her duty to rid the world of certain persons\u2014possibly what is termed unfortunate females. Nothing much is known about Miss Durrant's past. So very possibly she had a past\u2014an \"unfortunate\" one. Miss Barton learns of this and decides on extermination. Later, the righteousness of her act begins to trouble her and she is overcome by remorse. Her end shows her to be completely unhinged. Now, do say you agree with me, Miss Marple.'\n\n'I'm afraid I don't, Sir Henry,' said Miss Marple, smiling apologetically. 'I think her end shows her to have been a very clever and resourceful woman.'\n\nJane Helier interrupted with a little scream.\n\n'Oh! I've been so stupid. May I guess again? Of course it must have been that. Blackmail! The companion woman was blackmailing her. Only I don't see why Miss Marple says it was clever of her to kill herself. I can't see that at all.'\n\n'Ah!' said Sir Henry. 'You see, Miss Marple knew a case just like it in St Mary Mead.'\n\n'You always laugh at me, Sir Henry,' said Miss Marple reproachfully. 'I must confess it does remind me, just a little, of old Mrs Trout. She drew the old age pension, you know, for three old women who were dead, in different parishes.'\n\n'It sounds a most complicated and resourceful crime,' said Sir Henry. 'But it doesn't seem to me to throw any light upon our present problem.'\n\n'Of course not,' said Miss Marple. 'It wouldn't\u2014to you. But some of the families were very poor, and the old age pension was a great boon to the children. I know it's difficult for anyone outside to understand. But what I really meant was that the whole thing hinged upon one old woman being so like any other old woman.'\n\n'Eh?' said Sir Henry, mystified.\n\n'I always explain things so badly. What I mean is that when Dr Lloyd described the two ladies first, he didn't know which was which, and I don't suppose anyone else in the hotel did. They would have, of course, after a day or so, but the very next day one of the two was drowned, and if the one who was left said she was Miss Barton, I don't suppose it would ever occur to anyone that she mightn't be.'\n\n'You think\u2014Oh! I see,' said Sir Henry slowly.\n\n'It's the only natural way of thinking of it. Dear Mrs Bantry began that way just now. Why should the rich employer kill the humble companion? It's so much more likely to be the other way about. I mean\u2014that's the way things happen.'\n\n'Is it?' said Sir Henry. 'You shock me.'\n\n'But of course,' went on Miss Marple, 'she would have to wear Miss Barton's clothes, and they would probably be a little tight on her, so that her general appearance would look as though she had got a little fatter. That's why I asked that question. A gentleman would be sure to think it was the lady who had got fatter, and not the clothes that had got smaller\u2014though that isn't quite the right way of putting it.'\n\n'But if Amy Durrant killed Miss Barton, what did she gain by it?' asked Mrs Bantry. 'She couldn't keep up the deception for ever.'\n\n'She only kept it up for another month or so,' pointed out Miss Marple. 'And during that time I expect she travelled, keeping away from anyone who might know her. That's what I meant by saying that one lady of a certain age looks so like another. I don't suppose the different photograph on her passport was ever noticed\u2014you know what passports are. And then in March, she went down to this Cornish place and began to act queerly and draw attention to herself so that when people found her clothes on the beach and read her last letter they shouldn't think of the commonsense conclusion.'\n\n'Which was?' asked Sir Henry.\n\n'No body,' said Miss Marple firmly. 'That's the thing that would stare you in the face, if there weren't such a lot of red herrings to draw you off the trail\u2014including the suggestion of foul play and remorse. No body. That was the real significant fact.'\n\n'Do you mean\u2014' said Mrs Bantry\u2014'do you mean that there wasn't any remorse? That there wasn't\u2014that she didn't drown herself?'\n\n'Not she!' said Miss Marple. 'It's just Mrs Trout over again. Mrs Trout was very good at red herrings, but she met her match in me. And I can see through your remorse-driven Miss Barton. Drown herself? Went off to Australia, if I'm any good at guessing.'\n\n'You are, Miss Marple,' said Dr Lloyd. 'Undoubtedly you are. Now it again took me quite by surprise. Why, you could have knocked me down with a feather that day in Melbourne.'\n\n'Was that what you spoke of as a final coincidence?'\n\nDr Lloyd nodded.\n\n'Yes, it was rather rough luck on Miss Barton\u2014or Miss Amy Durrant\u2014whatever you like to call her. I became a ship's doctor for a while, and landing in Melbourne, the first person I saw as I walked down the street was the lady I thought had been drowned in Cornwall. She saw the game was up as far as I was concerned, and she did the bold thing\u2014took me into her confidence. A curious woman, completely lacking, I suppose, in some moral sense. She was the eldest of a family of nine, all wretchedly poor. They had applied once for help to their rich cousin in England and been repulsed, Miss Barton having quarrelled with their father. Money was wanted desperately, for the three youngest children were delicate and wanted expensive medical treatment. Amy Barton then and there seems to have decided on her plan of cold-blooded murder. She set out for England, working her passage over as a children's nurse. She obtained the situation of companion to Miss Barton, calling herself Amy Durrant. She engaged a room and put some furniture into it so as to create more of a personality for herself. The drowning plan was a sudden inspiration. She had been waiting for some opportunity to present itself. Then she staged the final scene of the drama and returned to Australia, and in due time she and her brothers and sisters inherited Miss Barton's money as next of kin.'\n\n'A very bold and perfect crime,' said Sir Henry. 'Almost the perfect crime. If it had been Miss Barton who had died in the Canaries, suspicion might attach to Amy Durrant and her connection with the Barton family might have been discovered; but the change of identity and the double crime, as you may call it, effectually did away with that. Yes, almost the perfect crime.'\n\n'What happened to her?' asked Mrs Bantry. 'What did you do in the matter, Dr Lloyd?'\n\n'I was in a very curious position, Mrs Bantry. Of evidence as the law understands it, I still have very little. Also, there were certain signs, plain to me as a medical man, that though strong and vigorous in appearance, the lady was not long for this world. I went home with her and saw the rest of the family\u2014a charming family, devoted to their eldest sister and without an idea in their heads that she might prove to have committed a crime. Why bring sorrow on them when I could prove nothing? The lady's admission to me was unheard by anyone else. I let Nature take its course. Miss Amy Barton died six months after my meeting with her. I have often wondered if she was cheerful and unrepentant up to the last.'\n\n'Surely not,' said Mrs Bantry.\n\n'I expect so,' said Miss Marple. 'Mrs Trout was.'\n\nJane Helier gave herself a little shake.\n\n'Well,' she said. 'It's very, very thrilling. I don't quite understand now who drowned which. And how does this Mrs Trout come into it?'\n\n'She doesn't, my dear,' said Miss Marple. 'She was only a person\u2014not a very nice person\u2014in the village.'\n\n'Oh!' said Jane. 'In the village. But nothing ever happens in a village, does it?' She sighed. 'I'm sure I shouldn't have any brains at all if I lived in a village.'\n\n## Chapter 9\n\n## The Four Suspects\n\nThe conversation hovered round undiscovered and unpunished crimes. Everyone in turn vouchsafed their opinion: Colonel Bantry, his plump amiable wife, Jane Helier, Dr Lloyd, and even old Miss Marple. The one person who did not speak was the one best fitted in most people's opinion to do so. Sir Henry Clithering, ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, sat silent, twisting his moustache\u2014or rather stroking it\u2014and half smiling, as though at some inward thought that amused him.\n\n'Sir Henry,' said Mrs Bantry at last. 'If you don't say something I shall scream. Are there a lot of crimes that go unpunished, or are there not?'\n\n'You're thinking of newspaper headlines, Mrs Bantry. SCOTLAND YARD AT FAULT AGAIN. And a list of unsolved mysteries to follow.'\n\n'Which really, I suppose, form a very small percentage of the whole?' said Dr Lloyd.\n\n'Yes; that is so. The hundreds of crimes that are solved and the perpetrators punished are seldom heralded and sung. But that isn't quite the point at issue, is it? When you talk of undiscovered crimes and unsolved crimes, you are talking of two different things. In the first category come all the crimes that Scotland Yard never hears about, the crimes that no one even knows have been committed.'\n\n'But I suppose there aren't very many of those?' said Mrs Bantry.\n\n'Aren't there?'\n\n'Sir Henry! You don't mean there are?'\n\n'I should think,' said Miss Marple thoughtfully, 'that there must be a very large number.'\n\nThe charming old lady, with her old-world unruffled air, made her statement in a tone of the utmost placidity.\n\n'My dear Miss Marple,' said Colonel Bantry.\n\n'Of course,' said Miss Marple, 'a lot of people are stupid. And stupid people get found out, whatever they do. But there are quite a number of people who aren't stupid, and one shudders to think of what they might accomplish unless they had very strongly rooted principles.'\n\n'Yes,' said Sir Henry, 'there are a lot of people who aren't stupid. How often does some crime come to light simply by reason of a bit of unmitigated bungling, and each time one asks oneself the question: If this hadn't been bungled, would anyone ever have known?'\n\n'But that's very serious, Clithering,' said Colonel Bantry. 'Very serious, indeed.'\n\n'Is it?'\n\n'What do you mean! It is! Of course it's serious.'\n\n'You say crime goes unpunished; but does it? Unpunished by the law perhaps; but cause and effect works outside the law. To say that every crime brings its own punishment is by way of being a platitude, and yet in my opinion nothing can be truer.'\n\n'Perhaps, perhaps,' said Colonel Bantry. 'But that doesn't alter the seriousness\u2014the\u2014er\u2014seriousness\u2014' He paused, rather at a loss.\n\nSir Henry Clithering smiled.\n\n'Ninety-nine people out of a hundred are doubtless of your way of thinking,' he said. 'But you know, it isn't really guilt that is important\u2014it's innocence. That's the thing that nobody will realize.'\n\n'I don't understand,' said Jane Helier.\n\n'I do,' said Miss Marple. 'When Mrs Trent found half a crown missing from her bag, the person it affected most was the daily woman, Mrs Arthur. Of course the Trents thought it was her, but being kindly people and knowing she had a large family and a husband who drinks, well\u2014they naturally didn't want to go to extremes. But they felt differently towards her, and they didn't leave her in charge of the house when they went away, which made a great difference to her; and other people began to get a feeling about her too. And then it suddenly came out that it was the governess. Mrs Trent saw her through a door reflected in a mirror. The purest chance\u2014though I prefer to call it Providence. And that, I think, is what Sir Henry means. Most people would be only interested in who took the money, and it turned out to be the most unlikely person\u2014just like in detective stories! But the real person it was life and death to was poor Mrs Arthur, who had done nothing. That's what you mean, isn't it, Sir Henry?'\n\n'Yes, Miss Marple, you've hit off my meaning exactly. Your charwoman person was lucky in the instance you relate. Her innocence was shown. But some people may go through a lifetime crushed by the weight of a suspicion that is really unjustified.'\n\n'Are you thinking of some particular instance, Sir Henry?' asked Mrs Bantry shrewdly.\n\n'As a matter of fact, Mrs Bantry, I am. A very curious case. A case where we believe murder to have been committed, but with no possible chance of ever proving it.'\n\n'Poison, I suppose,' breathed Jane. 'Something untraceable.'\n\nDr Lloyd moved restlessly and Sir Henry shook his head.\n\n'No, dear lady. Not the secret arrow poison of the South American Indians! I wish it were something of that kind. We have to deal with something much more prosaic\u2014so prosaic, in fact, that there is no hope of bringing the deed home to its perpetrator. An old gentleman who fell downstairs and broke his neck; one of those regrettable accidents which happen every day.'\n\n'But what happened really?'\n\n'Who can say?' Sir Henry shrugged his shoulders. 'A push from behind? A piece of cotton or string tied across the top of the stairs and carefully removed afterwards? That we shall never know.'\n\n'But you do think that it\u2014well, wasn't an accident? Now why?' asked the doctor.\n\n'That's rather a long story, but\u2014well, yes, we're pretty sure. As I said there's no chance of being able to bring the deed home to anyone\u2014the evidence would be too flimsy. But there's the other aspect of the case\u2014the one I was speaking about. You see, there were four people who might have done the trick. One's guilty; but the other three are innocent. And unless the truth is found out, those three are going to remain under the terrible shadow of doubt.'\n\n'I think,' said Mrs Bantry, 'that you'd better tell us your long story.'\n\n'I needn't make it so very long after all,' said Sir Henry. 'I can at any rate condense the beginning. That deals with a German secret society\u2014the Schwartze Hand\u2014something after the lines of the Camorra or what is most people's idea of the Camorra. A scheme of blackmail and terrorization. The thing started quite suddenly after the War, and spread to an amazing extent. Numberless people were victimized by it. The authorities were not successful in coping with it, for its secrets were jealously guarded, and it was almost impossible to find anyone who could be induced to betray them.\n\n'Nothing much was ever known about it in England, but in Germany it was having a most paralysing effect. It was finally broken up and dispersed through the efforts of one man, a Dr Rosen, who had at one time been very prominent in Secret Service work. He became a member, penetrated its inmost circle, and was, as I say, instrumental in bringing about its downfall.\n\n'But he was, in consequence, a marked man, and it was deemed wise that he should leave Germany\u2014at any rate for a time. He came to England, and we had letters about him from the police in Berlin. He came and had a personal interview with me. His point of view was both dispassionate and resigned. He had no doubts of what the future held for him.\n\n' \"They will get me, Sir Henry,\" he said. \"Not a doubt of it.\" He was a big man with a fine head, and a very deep voice, with only a slight guttural intonation to tell of his nationality. \"That is a foregone conclusion. It does not matter, I am prepared. I faced the risk when I undertook this business. I have done what I set out to do. The organization can never be got together again. But there are many members of it at liberty, and they will take the only revenge they can\u2014my life. It is simply a question of time; but I am anxious that that time should be as long as possible. You see, I am collecting and editing some very interesting material\u2014the result of my life's work. I should like, if possible, to be able to complete my task.\"\n\n'He spoke very simply, with a certain grandeur which I could not but admire. I told him we would take all precautions, but he waved my words aside.\n\n' \"Some day, sooner or later, they will get me,\" he repeated. \"When that day comes, do not distress yourself. You will, I have no doubt, have done all that is possible.\"\n\n'He then proceeded to outline his plans which were simple enough. He proposed to take a small cottage in the country where he could live quietly and go on with his work. In the end he selected a village in Somerset\u2014King's Gnaton, which was seven miles from a railway station, and singularly untouched by civilization. He bought a very charming cottage, had various improvements and alterations made, and settled down there most contentedly. His household consisted of his niece, Greta, a secretary, an old German servant who had served him faithfully for nearly forty years, and an outside handyman and gardener who was a native of King's Gnaton.'\n\n'The four suspects,' said Dr Lloyd softly.\n\n'Exactly. The four suspects. There is not much more to tell. Life went on peacefully at King's Gnaton for five months and then the blow fell. Dr Rosen fell down the stairs one morning and was found dead about half an hour later. At the time the accident must have taken place, Gertrud was in her kitchen with the door closed and heard nothing\u2014so she says. Fr\u00e4ulein Greta was in the garden planting some bulbs\u2014again, so she says. The gardener, Dobbs, was in the small potting shed having his elevenses\u2014so he says; and the secretary was out for a walk, and once more there is only his own word for it. No one has an alibi\u2014no one can corroborate anyone else's story. But one thing is certain. No one from outside could have done it, for a stranger in the little village of King's Gnaton would be noticed without fail. Both the back and the front doors were locked, each member of the household having their own key. So you see it narrows down to those four. And yet each one seems to be above suspicion. Greta, his own brother's child. Gertrud, with forty years of faithful service. Dobbs, who has never been out of King's Gnaton. And Charles Templeton, the secretary\u2014'\n\n'Yes,' said Colonel Bantry, 'what about him? He seems the suspicious person to my mind. What do you know about him?'\n\n'It is what I knew about him that put him completely out of court\u2014at any rate at the time,' said Sir Henry gravely. 'You see, Charles Templeton was one of my own men.'\n\n'Oh!' said Colonel Bantry, considerably taken aback.\n\n'Yes. I wanted to have someone on the spot, and at the same time I didn't want to cause talk in the village. Rosen really needed a secretary. I put Templeton on the job. He's a gentleman, he speaks German fluently, and he's altogether a very able fellow.'\n\n'But, then, which do you suspect?' asked Mrs Bantry in a bewildered tone. 'They all seem so\u2014well, impossible.'\n\n'Yes, so it appears. But you can look at the thing from another angle. Fr\u00e4ulein Greta was his niece and a very lovely girl, but the War has shown us time and again that brother can turn against sister, or father against son and so on, and the loveliest and gentlest of young girls did some of the most amazing things. The same thing applies to Gertrud, and who knows what other forces might be at work in her case. A quarrel, perhaps, with her master, a growing resentment all the more lasting because of the long faithful years behind her. Elderly women of that class can be amazingly bitter sometimes. And Dobbs? Was he right outside it because he had no connection with the family? Money will do much. In some way Dobbs might have been approached and bought.\n\n'For one thing seems certain: Some message or some order must have come from outside. Otherwise why five months' immunity? No, the agents of the society must have been at work. Not yet sure of Rosen's perfidy, they delayed till the betrayal had been traced to him beyond any possible doubt. And then, all doubts set aside, they must have sent their message to the spy within the gates\u2014the message that said, \"Kill\".'\n\n'How nasty!' said Jane Helier, and shuddered.\n\n'But how did the message come? That was the point I tried to elucidate\u2014the one hope of solving my problem. One of those four people must have been approached or communicated with in some way. There would be no delay\u2014I knew that\u2014as soon as the command came, it would be carried out. That was a peculiarity of the Schwartze Hand.\n\n'I went into the question, went into it in a way that will probably strike you as being ridiculously meticulous. Who had come to the cottage that morning? I eliminated nobody. Here is the list.'\n\nHe took an envelope from his pocket and selected a paper from its contents.\n\n'The butcher, bringing some neck of mutton. Investigated and found correct.\n\n'The grocer's assistant, bringing a packet of cornflour, two pounds of sugar, a pound of butter, and a pound of coffee. Also investigated and found correct.\n\n'The postman, bringing two circulars for Fr\u00e4ulein Rosen, a local letter for Gertrud, three letters for Dr Rosen, one with a foreign stamp and two letters for Mr Templeton, one also with a foreign stamp.'\n\nSir Henry paused and then took a sheaf of documents from the envelope.\n\n'It may interest you to see these for yourself. They were handed me by the various people concerned, or collected from the waste-paper basket. I need hardly say they've been tested by experts for invisible ink, etc. No excitement of that kind is possible.'\n\nEveryone crowded round to look. The catalogues were respectively from a nurseryman and from a prominent London fur establishment. The two bills addressed to Dr Rosen were a local one for seeds for the garden and one from a London stationery firm. The letter addressed to him ran as follows:\n\nMy Dear Rosen\u2014Just back from Dr Helmuth Spath's. I saw Edgar Jackson the other day. He and Amos Perry have just come back from Tsingtau. In all Honesty I can't say I envy them the trip. Let me have news of you soon. As I said before: Beware of a certain person. You know who I mean, though you don't agree.\u2014\n\nYours, Georgine.\n\n'Mr Templeton's mail consisted of this bill, which as you see, is an account rendered from his tailor, and a letter from a friend in Germany,' went on Sir Henry. 'The latter, unfortunately, he tore up whilst out on his walk. Finally we have the letter received by Gertrud.'\n\nDear Mrs Swartz,\u2014We're hoping as how you be able to come the social on friday evening, the vicar says has he hopes you will\u2014one and all being welcome. The resipy for the ham was very good, and I thanks you for it. Hoping as this finds you well and that we shall see you friday I remain.\u2014Yours faithfully, Emma Greene.\n\nDr Lloyd smiled a little over this and so did Mrs Bantry.\n\n'I think the last letter can be put out of court,' said Dr Lloyd.\n\n'I thought the same,' said Sir Henry; 'but I took the precaution of verifying that there was a Mrs Greene and a Church Social. One can't be too careful, you know.'\n\n'That's what our friend Miss Marple always says,' said Dr Lloyd, smiling. 'You're lost in a daydream, Miss Marple. What are you thinking out?'\n\nMiss Marple gave a start.\n\n'So stupid of me,' she said. 'I was just wondering why the word Honesty in Dr Rosen's letter was spelt with a capital H.'\n\nMrs Bantry picked it up.\n\n'So it is,' she said. 'Oh!'\n\n'Yes, dear,' said Miss Marple. 'I thought you'd notice!'\n\n'There's a definite warning in that letter,' said Colonel Bantry. 'That's the first thing caught my attention. I notice more than you'd think. Yes, a definite warning\u2014against whom?'\n\n'There's rather a curious point about that letter,' said Sir Henry. 'According to Templeton, Dr Rosen opened the letter at breakfast and tossed it across to him saying he didn't know who the fellow was from Adam.'\n\n'But it wasn't a fellow,' said Jane Helier. 'It was signed \"Georgina\".'\n\n'It's difficult to say which it is,' said Dr Lloyd. 'It might be Georgey; but it certainly looks more like Georgina. Only it strikes me that the writing is a man's.'\n\n'You know, that's interesting,' said Colonel Bantry. 'His tossing it across the table like that and pretending he knew nothing about it. Wanted to watch somebody's face. Whose face\u2014the girl's? or the man's?'\n\n'Or even the cook's?' suggested Mrs Bantry. 'She might have been in the room bringing in the breakfast. But what I don't see is...it's most peculiar\u2014'\n\nShe frowned over the letter. Miss Marple drew closer to her. Miss Marple's finger went out and touched the sheet of paper. They murmured together.\n\n'But why did the secretary tear up the other letter?' asked Jane Helier suddenly. 'It seems\u2014oh! I don't know\u2014it seems queer. Why should he have letters from Germany? Although, of course, if he's above suspicion, as you say\u2014'\n\n'But Sir Henry didn't say that,' said Miss Marple quickly, looking up from her murmured conference with Mrs Bantry. 'He said four suspects. So that shows that he includes Mr Templeton. I'm right, am I not, Sir Henry?'\n\n'Yes, Miss Marple. I have learned one thing through bitter experience. Never say to yourself that anyone is above suspicion. I gave you reasons just now why three of these people might after all be guilty, unlikely as it seemed. I did not at that time apply the same process to Charles Templeton. But I came to it at last through pursuing the rule I have just mentioned. And I was forced to recognize this: That every army and every navy and every police force has a certain number of traitors within its ranks, much as we hate to admit the idea. And I examined dispassionately the case against Charles Templeton.\n\n'I asked myself very much the same questions as Miss Helier has just asked. Why should he, alone of all the house, not be able to produce the letter he had received\u2014a letter, moreover, with a German stamp on it. Why should he have letters from Germany?\n\n'The last question was an innocent one, and I actually put it to him. His reply came simply enough. His mother's sister was married to a German. The letter had been from a German girl cousin. So I learned something I did not know before\u2014that Charles Templeton had relations with people in Germany. And that put him definitely on the list of suspects\u2014very much so. He is my own man\u2014a lad I have always liked and trusted; but in common justice and fairness I must admit that he heads that list.\n\n'But there it is\u2014I do not know! I do not know...And in all probability I never shall know. It is not a question of punishing a murderer. It is a question that to me seems a hundred times more important. It is the blighting, perhaps, of an honourable man's whole career...because of suspicion\u2014a suspicion that I dare not disregard.'\n\nMiss Marple coughed and said gently:\n\n'Then, Sir Henry, if I understand you rightly, it is this young Mr Templeton only who is so much on your mind?'\n\n'Yes, in a sense. It should, in theory, be the same for all four, but that is not actually the case. Dobbs, for instance\u2014suspicion may attach to him in my mind, but it will not actually affect his career. Nobody in the village has ever had any idea that old Dr Rosen's death was anything but an accident. Gertrud is slightly more affected. It must make, for instance, a difference in Fr\u00e4ulein Rosen's attitude toward her. But that, possibly, is not of great importance to her.\n\n'As for Greta Rosen\u2014well, here we come to the crux of the matter. Greta is a very pretty girl and Charles Templeton is a good-looking young man, and for five months they were thrown together with no outer distractions. The inevitable happened. They fell in love with each other\u2014even if they did not come to the point of admitting the fact in words.\n\n'And then the catastrophe happens. It is three months ago now and a day or two after I returned, Greta Rosen came to see me. She had sold the cottage and was returning to Germany, having finally settled up her uncle's affairs. She came to me personally, although she knew I had retired, because it was really about a personal matter she wanted to see me. She beat about the bush a little, but at last it all came out. What did I think? That letter with the German stamp\u2014she had worried about it and worried about it\u2014the one Charles had torn up. Was it all right? Surely it must be all right. Of course she believed his story, but\u2014oh! if she only knew! If she knew\u2014for certain.\n\n'You see? The same feeling: the wish to trust\u2014but the horrible lurking suspicion, thrust resolutely to the back of the mind, but persisting nevertheless. I spoke to her with absolute frankness, and asked her to do the same. I asked her whether she had been on the point of caring for Charles, and he for her.\n\n' \"I think so,\" she said. \"Oh, yes, I know it was so. We were so happy. Every day passed so contentedly. We knew\u2014we both knew. There was no hurry\u2014there was all the time in the world. Some day he would tell me he loved me, and I should tell him that I too\u2014Ah! But you can guess! And now it is all changed. A black cloud has come between us\u2014we are constrained, when we meet we do not know what to say. It is, perhaps, the same with him as with me...We are each saying to ourselves, 'If I were sure!' That is why, Sir Henry, I beg of you to say to me, 'You may be sure, whoever killed your uncle, it was not Charles Templeton!' Say it to me! Oh, say it to me! I beg\u2014I beg!\"\n\n'And, damn it all,' said Sir Henry, bringing down his fist with a bang on the table, 'I couldn't say it to her. They'll drift farther and farther apart, those two\u2014with suspicion like a ghost between them\u2014a ghost that can't be laid.'\n\nHe leant back in his chair, his face looked tired and grey. He shook his head once or twice despondently.\n\n'And there's nothing more can be done, unless\u2014' He sat up straight again and a tiny whimsical smile crossed his face\u2014'unless Miss Marple can help us. Can't you, Miss Marple? I've a feeling that letter might be in your line, you know. The one about the Church Social. Doesn't it remind you of something or someone that makes everything perfectly plain? Can't you do something to help two helpless young people who want to be happy?'\n\nBehind the whimsicality there was something earnest in his appeal. He had come to think very highly of the mental powers of this frail old-fashioned maiden lady. He looked across at her with something very like hope in his eyes.\n\nMiss Marple coughed and smoothed her lace.\n\n'It does remind me a little of Annie Poultny,' she admitted. 'Of course the letter is perfectly plain\u2014both to Mrs Bantry and myself. I don't mean the Church Social letter, but the other one. You living so much in London and not being a gardener, Sir Henry, would not have been likely to notice.'\n\n'Eh?' said Sir Henry. 'Notice what?'\n\nMrs Bantry reached out a hand and selected a catalogue. She opened it and read aloud with gusto:\n\n'Dr Helmuth Spath. Pure lilac, a wonderfully fine flower, carried on exceptionally long and stiff stem. Splendid for cutting and garden decoration. A novelty of striking beauty.\n\n'Edgar Jackson. Beautifully shaped chrysanthemum-like flower of a distinct brick-red colour.\n\n'Amos Perry. Brilliant red, highly decorative.\n\n'Tsingtau. Brilliant orange-red, showy garden plant and lasting cut flower.\n\n'Honesty\u2014'\n\n'With a capital H, you remember,' murmured Miss Marple.\n\n'Honesty. Rose and white shades, enormous perfect shaped flower.'\n\nMrs Bantry flung down the catalogue, and said with immense explosive force:\n\n'Dahlias!'\n\n'And their initial letters spell \"DEATH\", explained Miss Marple.\n\n'But the letter came to Dr Rosen himself,' objected Sir Henry.\n\n'That was the clever part of it,' said Miss Marple. 'That and the warning in it. What would he do, getting a letter from someone he didn't know, full of names he didn't know. Why, of course, toss it over to his secretary.'\n\n'Then, after all\u2014'\n\n'Oh, no!' said Miss Marple. 'Not the secretary. Why, that's what makes it so perfectly clear that it wasn't him. He'd never have let that letter be found if so. And equally he'd never have destroyed a letter to himself with a German stamp on it. Really, his innocence is\u2014if you'll allow me to use the word\u2014just shining.'\n\n'Then who\u2014'\n\n'Well, it seems almost certain\u2014as certain as anything can be in this world. There was another person at the breakfast table, and she would\u2014quite naturally under the circumstances\u2014put out her hand for the letter and read it. And that would be that. You remember that she got a gardening catalogue by the same post\u2014'\n\n'Greta Rosen,' said Sir Henry, slowly. 'Then her visit to me\u2014'\n\n'Gentlemen never see through these things,' said Miss Marple. 'And I'm afraid they often think we old women are\u2014well, cats, to see things the way we do. But there it is. One does know a great deal about one's own sex, unfortunately. I've no doubt there was a barrier between them. The young man felt a sudden inexplicable repulsion. He suspected, purely through instinct, and couldn't hide the suspicion. And I really think that the girl's visit to you was just pure spite. She was safe enough really; but she just went out of her way to fix your suspicions definitely on poor Mr Templeton. You weren't nearly so sure about him until after her visit.'\n\n'I'm sure it was nothing that she said\u2014' began Sir Henry.\n\n'Gentlemen,' said Miss Marple calmly, 'never see through these things.'\n\n'And that girl\u2014' he stopped. 'She commits a cold-blooded murder and gets off scot-free!'\n\n'Oh! no, Sir Henry,' said Miss Marple. 'Not scot-free. Neither you nor I believe that. Remember what you said not long ago. No. Greta Rosen will not escape punishment. To begin with, she must be in with a very queer set of people\u2014blackmailers and terrorists\u2014associates who will do her no good, and will probably bring her to a miserable end. As you say, one mustn't waste thoughts on the guilty\u2014it's the innocent who matter. Mr Templeton, who I dare say will marry that German cousin, his tearing up her letter looks\u2014well, it looks suspicious\u2014using the word in quite a different sense from the one we've been using all the evening. A little as though he were afraid of the other girl noticing or asking to see it? Yes, I think there must have been some little romance there. And then there's Dobbs\u2014though, as you say, I dare say it won't matter much to him. His elevenses are probably all he thinks about. And then there's that poor old Gertrud\u2014the one who reminded me of Annie Poultny. Poor Annie Poultny. Fifty years' faithful service and suspected of making away with Miss Lamb's will, though nothing could be proved. Almost broke the poor creature's faithful heart; and then after she was dead it came to light in the secret drawer of the tea caddy where old Miss Lamb had put it herself for safety. But too late then for poor Annie.\n\n'That's what worries me so about that poor old German woman. When one is old, one becomes embittered very easily. I felt much more sorry for her than for Mr Templeton, who is young and good-looking and evidently a favourite with the ladies. You will write to her, won't you, Sir Henry, and just tell her that her innocence is established beyond doubt? Her dear old master dead, and she no doubt brooding and feeling herself suspected of...Oh! It won't bear thinking about!'\n\n'I will write, Miss Marple,' said Sir Henry. He looked at her curiously. 'You know, I shall never quite understand you. Your outlook is always a different one from what I expect.'\n\n'My outlook, I am afraid, is a very petty one,' said Miss Marple humbly. 'I hardly ever go out of St Mary Mead.'\n\n'And yet you have solved what may be called an International mystery,' said Sir Henry. 'For you have solved it. I am convinced of that.'\n\nMiss Marple blushed, then bridled a little.\n\n'I was, I think, well educated for the standard of my day. My sister and I had a German governess\u2014a Fr\u00e4ulein. A very sentimental creature. She taught us the language of flowers\u2014a forgotten study nowadays, but most charming. A yellow tulip, for instance, means Hopeless Love, whilst a China Aster means I die of Jealousy at your feet. That letter was signed Georgine, which I seem to remember is Dahlia in German, and that of course made the whole thing perfectly clear. I wish I could remember the meaning of Dahlia, but alas, that eludes me. My memory is not what it was.'\n\n'At any rate it didn't mean DEATH.'\n\n'No, indeed. Horrible, is it not? There are very sad things in the world.'\n\n'There are,' said Mrs Bantry with a sigh. 'It's lucky one has flowers and one's friends.'\n\n'She puts us last, you observe,' said Dr Lloyd.\n\n'A man used to send me purple orchids every night to the theatre,' said Jane dreamily.\n\n' \"I await your favours,\"\u2014that's what that means,' said Miss Marple brightly.\n\nSir Henry gave a peculiar sort of cough and turned his head away.\n\nMiss Marple gave a sudden exclamation.\n\n'I've remembered. Dahlias mean \"Treachery and Misrepresentation.\" '\n\n'Wonderful,' said Sir Henry. 'Absolutely wonderful.'\n\nAnd he sighed.\n\n## Chapter 10\n\n## A Christmas Tragedy\n\n'I have a complaint to make,' said Sir Henry Clithering. His eyes twinkled gently as he looked round at the assembled company. Colonel Bantry, his legs stretched out, was frowning at the mantelpiece as though it were a delinquent soldier on parade, his wife was surreptitiously glancing at a catalogue of bulbs which had come by the late post, Dr Lloyd was gazing with frank admiration at Jane Helier, and that beautiful young actress herself was thoughtfully regarding her pink polished nails. Only that elderly, spinster lady, Miss Marple, was sitting bolt upright, and her faded blue eyes met Sir Henry's with an answering twinkle.\n\n'A complaint?' she murmured.\n\n'A very serious complaint. We are a company of six, three representatives of each sex, and I protest on behalf of the downtrodden males. We have had three stories told tonight\u2014and told by the three men! I protest that the ladies have not done their fair share.'\n\n'Oh!' said Mrs Bantry with indignation. 'I'm sure we have. We've listened with the most intelligent appreciation. We've displayed the true womanly attitude\u2014not wishing to thrust ourselves in the limelight!'\n\n'It's an excellent excuse,' said Sir Henry; 'but it won't do. And there's a very good precedent in the Arabian Nights! So, forward, Scheherazade.'\n\n'Meaning me?' said Mrs Bantry. 'But I don't know anything to tell. I've never been surrounded by blood or mystery.'\n\n'I don't absolutely insist upon blood,' said Sir Henry. 'But I'm sure one of you three ladies has got a pet mystery. Come now, Miss Marple\u2014the \"Curious Coincidence of the Charwoman\" or the \"Mystery of the Mothers' Meeting\". Don't disappoint me in St Mary Mead.'\n\nMiss Marple shook her head.\n\n'Nothing that would interest you, Sir Henry. We have our little mysteries, of course\u2014there was that gill of picked shrimps that disappeared so incomprehensibly; but that wouldn't interest you because it all turned out to be so trivial, though throwing a considerable light on human nature.'\n\n'You have taught me to dote on human nature,' said Sir Henry solemnly.\n\n'What about you, Miss Helier?' asked Colonel Bantry. 'You must have had some interesting experiences.'\n\n'Yes, indeed,' said Dr Lloyd.\n\n'Me?' said Jane. 'You mean\u2014you want me to tell you something that happened to me?'\n\n'Or to one of your friends,' amended Sir Henry.\n\n'Oh!' said Jane vaguely. 'I don't think anything has ever happened to me\u2014I mean not that kind of thing. Flowers, of course, and queer messages\u2014but that's just men, isn't it? I don't think'\u2014she paused and appeared lost in thought.\n\n'I see we shall have to have that epic of the shrimps,' said Sir Henry. 'Now then, Miss Marple.'\n\n'You're so fond of your joke, Sir Henry. The shrimps are only nonsense; but now I come to think of it, I do remember one incident\u2014at least not exactly an incident, something very much more serious\u2014a tragedy. And I was, in a way, mixed up in it; and for what I did, I have never had any regrets\u2014no, no regrets at all. But it didn't happen in St Mary Mead.'\n\n'That disappoints me,' said Sir Henry. 'But I will endeavour to bear up. I knew we should not rely upon you in vain.'\n\nHe settled himself in the attitude of a listener. Miss Marple grew slightly pink.\n\n'I hope I shall be able to tell it properly,' she said anxiously. 'I fear I am very inclined to become rambling. One wanders from the point\u2014altogether without knowing that one is doing so. And it is so hard to remember each fact in its proper order. You must all bear with me if I tell my story badly. It happened a very long time ago now.\n\n'As I say, it was not connected with St Mary Mead. As a matter of fact, it had to do with a Hydro\u2014'\n\n'Do you mean a seaplane?' asked Jane with wide eyes.\n\n'You wouldn't know, dear,' said Mrs Bantry, and explained. Her husband added his quota:\n\n'Beastly places\u2014absolutely beastly! Got to get up early and drink filthy-tasting water. Lot of old women sitting about. Ill-natured tittle tattle. God, when I think\u2014'\n\n'Now, Arthur,' said Mrs Bantry placidly. 'You know it did you all the good in the world.'\n\n'Lot of old women sitting round talking scandal,' grunted Colonel Bantry.\n\n'That I am afraid is true,' said Miss Marple. 'I myself\u2014'\n\n'My dear Miss Marple,' cried the Colonel, horrified. 'I didn't mean for one moment\u2014'\n\nWith pink cheeks and a little gesture of the hand, Miss Marple stopped him.\n\n'But it is true, Colonel Bantry. Only I should just like to say this. Let me recollect my thoughts. Yes. Talking scandal, as you say\u2014well, it is done a good deal. And people are very down on it\u2014especially young people. My nephew, who writes books\u2014and very clever ones, I believe\u2014has said some most scathing things about taking people's characters away without any kind of proof\u2014and how wicked it is, and all that. But what I say is that none of these young people ever stop to think. They really don't examine the facts. Surely the whole crux of the matter is this: How often is tittle tattle, as you call it, true! And I think if, as I say, they really examined the facts they would find that it was true nine times out of ten! That's really just what makes people so annoyed about it.'\n\n'The inspired guess,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'No, not that, not that at all! It's really a matter of practice and experience. An Egyptologist, so I've heard, if you show him one of those curious little beetles, can tell you by the look and the feel of the thing what date BC it is, or if it's a Birmingham imitation. And he can't always give a definite rule for doing so. He just knows. His life has been spent handling such things.\n\n'And that's what I'm trying to say (very badly, I know). What my nephew calls \"superfluous women\" have a lot of time on their hands, and their chief interest is usually people. And so, you see, they get to be what one might call experts. Now young people nowadays\u2014they talk very freely about things that weren't mentioned in my young days, but on the other hand their minds are terribly innocent. They believe in everyone and everything. And if one tries to warn them, ever so gently, they tell one that one has a Victorian mind\u2014and that, they say, is like a sink.'\n\n'After all,' said Sir Henry, 'what is wrong with a sink?'\n\n'Exactly,' said Miss Marple eagerly. 'It's the most necessary thing in any house; but, of course, not romantic. Now I must confess that I have my feelings, like everyone else, and I have sometimes been cruelly hurt by unthinking remarks. I know gentlemen are not interested in domestic matters, but I must just mention my maid Ethel\u2014a very good-looking girl and obliging in every way. Now I realized as soon as I saw her that she was the same type as Annie Webb and poor Mrs Bruitt's girl. If the opportunity arose mine and thine would mean nothing to her. So I let her go at the month and I gave her a written reference saying she was honest and sober, but privately I warned old Mrs Edwards against taking her; and my nephew, Raymond, was exceedingly angry and said he had never heard of anything so wicked\u2014yes, wicked. Well, she went to Lady Ashton, whom I felt no obligation to warn\u2014and what happened? All the lace cut off her underclothes and two diamond brooches taken\u2014and the girl departed in the middle of the night and never heard of since!'\n\nMiss Marple paused, drew a long breath, and then went on.\n\n'You'll be saying this has nothing to do with what went on at Keston Spa Hydro\u2014but it has in a way. It explains why I felt no doubt in my mind the first moment I saw the Sanders together that he meant to do away with her.'\n\n'Eh?' said Sir Henry, leaning forward.\n\nMiss Marple turned a placid face to him.\n\n'As I say, Sir Henry, I felt no doubt in my own mind. Mr Sanders was a big, good-looking, florid-faced man, very hearty in his manner and popular with all. And nobody could have been pleasanter to his wife than he was. But I knew! He meant to make away with her.'\n\n'My dear Miss Marple\u2014'\n\n'Yes, I know. That's what my nephew, Raymond West, would say. He'd tell me I hadn't a shadow of proof. But I remember Walter Hones, who kept the Green Man. Walking home with his wife one night she fell into the river\u2014and he collected the insurance money! And one or two other people that are walking about scot-free to this day\u2014one indeed in our own class of life. Went to Switzerland for a summer holiday climbing with his wife. I warned her not to go\u2014the poor dear didn't get angry with me as she might have done\u2014she only laughed. It seemed to her funny that a queer old thing like me should say such things about her Harry. Well, well, there was an accident\u2014and Harry is married to another woman now. But what could I do? I knew, but there was no proof.'\n\n'Oh! Miss Marple,' cried Mrs Bantry. 'You don't really mean\u2014'\n\n'My dear, these things are very common\u2014very common indeed. And gentlemen are especially tempted, being so much the stronger. So easy if a thing looks like an accident. As I say, I knew at once with the Sanders. It was on a tram. It was full inside and I had had to go on top. We all three got up to get off and Mr Sanders lost his balance and fell right against his wife, sending her headfirst down the stairs. Fortunately the conductor was a very strong young man and caught her.'\n\n'But surely that must have been an accident.'\n\n'Of course it was an accident\u2014nothing could have looked more accidental! But Mr Sanders had been in the Merchant Service, so he told me, and a man who can keep his balance on a nasty tilting boat doesn't lose it on top of a tram if an old woman like me doesn't. Don't tell me!'\n\n'At any rate we can take it that you made up your mind, Miss Marple,' said Sir Henry. 'Made it up then and there.'\n\nThe old lady nodded.\n\n'I was sure enough, and another incident in crossing the street not long afterwards made me surer still. Now I ask you, what could I do, Sir Henry? Here was a nice contented happy little married woman shortly going to be murdered.'\n\n'My dear lady, you take my breath away.'\n\n'That's because, like most people nowadays, you won't face facts. You prefer to think such a thing couldn't be. But it was so, and I knew it. But one is so sadly handicapped! I couldn't, for instance, go to the police. And to warn the young woman would, I could see, be useless. She was devoted to the man. I just made it my business to find out as much as I could about them. One has a lot of opportunities doing one's needlework round the fire. Mrs Sanders (Gladys, her name was) was only too willing to talk. It seems they had not been married very long. Her husband had some property that was coming to him, but for the moment they were very badly off. In fact, they were living on her little income. One has heard that tale before. She bemoaned the fact that she could not touch the capital. It seems that somebody had had some sense somewhere! But the money was hers to will away\u2014I found that out. And she and her husband had made wills in favour of each other directly after their marriage. Very touching. Of course, when Jack's affairs came right\u2014That was the burden all day long, and in the meantime they were very hard up indeed\u2014actually had a room on the top floor, all among the servants\u2014and so dangerous in case of fire, though, as it happened, there was a fire escape just outside their window. I inquired carefully if there was a balcony\u2014dangerous things, balconies. One push\u2014you know!\n\n'I made her promise not to go out on the balcony; I said I'd had a dream. That impressed her\u2014one can do a lot with superstition sometimes. She was a fair girl, rather washed-out complexion, and an untidy roll of hair on her neck. Very credulous. She repeated what I had said to her husband, and I noticed him looking at me in a curious way once or twice. He wasn't credulous; and he knew I'd been on that tram.\n\n'But I was very worried\u2014terribly worried\u2014because I couldn't see how to circumvent him. I could prevent anything happening at the Hydro, just by saying a few words to show him I suspected. But that only meant his putting off his plan till later. No, I began to believe that the only policy was a bold one\u2014somehow or other to lay a trap for him. If I could induce him to attempt her life in a way of my own choosing\u2014well, then he would be unmasked, and she would be forced to face the truth however much of a shock it was to her.'\n\n'You take my breath away,' said Dr Lloyd. 'What conceivable plan could you adopt?'\n\n'I'd have found one\u2014never fear,' said Miss Marple. 'But the man was too clever for me. He didn't wait. He thought I might suspect, and so he struck before I could be sure. He knew I would suspect an accident. So he made it murder.'\n\nA little gasp went round the circle. Miss Marple nodded and set her lips grimly together.\n\n'I'm afraid I've put that rather abruptly. I must try and tell you exactly what occurred. I've always felt very bitterly about it\u2014it seems to me that I ought, somehow, to have prevented it. But doubtless Providence knew best. I did what I could at all events.\n\n'There was what I can only describe as a curiously eerie feeling in the air. There seemed to be something weighing on us all. A feeling of misfortune. To begin with, there was George, the hall porter. Had been there for years and knew everybody. Bronchitis and pneumonia, and passed away on the fourth day. Terribly sad. A real blow to everybody. And four days before Christmas too. And then one of the housemaids\u2014such a nice girl\u2014a septic finger, actually died in twenty-four hours.\n\n'I was in the drawing-room with Miss Trollope and old Mrs Carpenter, and Mrs Carpenter was being positively ghoulish\u2014relishing it all, you know.\n\n' \"Mark my words,\" she said. \"This isn't the end. You know the saying? Never two without three. I've proved it true time and again. There'll be another death. Not a doubt of it. And we shan't have long to wait. Never two without three.\"\n\n'As she said the last words, nodding her head and clicking her knitting needles, I just chanced to look up and there was Mr Sanders standing in the doorway. Just for a minute he was off guard, and I saw the look in his face as plain as plain. I shall believe till my dying day that it was that ghoulish Mrs Carpenter's words that put the whole thing into his head. I saw his mind working.\n\n'He came forward into the room smiling in his genial way.\n\n' \"Any Christmas shopping I can do for you ladies?\" he asked. \"I'm going down to Keston presently.\"\n\n'He stayed a minute or two, laughing and talking, and then went out. As I tell you, I was troubled, and I said straight away:\n\n' \"Where's Mrs Sanders? Does anyone know?\"\n\n'Mrs Trollope said she'd gone out to some friends of hers, the Mortimers, to play bridge, and that eased my mind for the moment. But I was still very worried and most uncertain as to what to do. About half an hour later I went up to my room. I met Dr Coles, my doctor, there, coming down the stairs as I was going up, and as I happened to want to consult him about my rheumatism, I took him into my room with me then and there. He mentioned to me then (in confidence, he said) about the death of the poor girl Mary. The manager didn't want the news to get about, he said, so would I keep it to myself. Of course I didn't tell him that we'd all been discussing nothing else for the last hour\u2014ever since the poor girl breathed her last. These things are always known at once, and a man of his experience should know that well enough; but Dr Coles always was a simple unsuspicious fellow who believed what he wanted to believe and that's just what alarmed me a minute later. He said as he was leaving that Sanders had asked him to have a look at his wife. It seemed she'd been seedy of late\u2014indigestion, etc.\n\n'Now that very self-same day Gladys Sanders had said to me that she'd got a wonderful digestion and was thankful for it.\n\n'You see? All my suspicions of that man came back a hundredfold. He was preparing the way\u2014for what? Dr Coles left before I could make up my mind whether to speak to him or not\u2014though really if I had spoken I shouldn't have known what to say. As I came out of my room, the man himself\u2014Sanders\u2014came down the stairs from the floor above. He was dressed to go out and he asked me again if he could do anything for me in the town. It was all I could do to be civil to the man! I went straight into the lounge and ordered tea. It was just on half past five, I remember.\n\n'Now I'm very anxious to put clearly what happened next. I was still in the lounge at a quarter to seven when Mr Sanders came in. There were two gentlemen with him and all three of them were inclined to be a little on the lively side. Mr Sanders left his two friends and came right over to where I was sitting with Miss Trollope. He explained that he wanted our advice about a Christmas present he was giving his wife. It was an evening bag.\n\n' \"And you see, ladies,\" he said. \"I'm only a rough sailorman. What do I know about such things? I've had three sent to me on approval and I want an expert opinion on them.\"\n\n'We said, of course, that we would be delighted to help him, and he asked if we'd mind coming upstairs, as his wife might come in any minute if he brought the things down. So we went up with him. I shall never forget what happened next\u2014I can feel my little fingers tingling now.\n\n'Mr Sanders opened the door of the bedroom and switched on the light. I don't know which of us saw it first...\n\n'Mrs Sanders was lying on the floor, face downwards\u2014dead.\n\n'I got to her first. I knelt down and took her hand and felt for the pulse, but it was useless, the arm itself was cold and stiff. Just by her head was a stocking filled with sand\u2014the weapon she had been struck down with. Miss Trollope, silly creature, was moaning and moaning by the door and holding her head. Sanders gave a great cry of \"My wife, my wife,\" and rushed to her. I stopped him touching her. You see, I was sure at the moment he had done it, and there might have been something that he wanted to take away or hide.\n\n' \"Nothing must be touched,\" I said. \"Pull yourself together, Mr Sanders. Miss Trollope, please go down and fetch the manager.\"\n\n'I stayed there, kneeling by the body. I wasn't going to leave Sanders alone with it. And yet I was forced to admit that if the man was acting, he was acting marvellously. He looked dazed and bewildered and scared out of his wits.\n\n'The manager was with us in no time. He made a quick inspection of the room then turned us all out and locked the door, the key of which he took. Then he went off and telephoned to the police. It seemed a positive age before they came (we learnt afterwards that the line was out of order). The manager had to send a messenger to the police station, and the Hydro is right out of the town, up on the edge of the moor; and Mrs Carpenter tried us all very severely. She was so pleased at her prophecy of \"Never two without three\" coming true so quickly. Sanders, I hear, wandered out into the grounds, clutching his head and groaning and displaying every sign of grief.\n\n'However, the police came at last. They went upstairs with the manager and Mr Sanders. Later they sent down for me. I went up. The Inspector was there, sitting at a table writing. He was an intelligent-looking man and I liked him.\n\n' \"Miss Jane Marple?\" he said.\n\n' \"Yes.\"\n\n' \"I understand, Madam, that you were present when the body of the deceased was found?\"\n\n'I said I was and I described exactly what had occurred. I think it was a relief to the poor man to find someone who could answer his questions coherently, having previously had to deal with Sanders and Emily Trollope, who, I gather, was completely demoralized\u2014she would be, the silly creature! I remember my dear mother teaching me that a gentlewoman should always be able to control herself in public, however much she may give way in private.'\n\n'An admirable maxim,' said Sir Henry gravely.\n\n'When I had finished the Inspector said:\n\n' \"Thank you, Madam. Now I'm afraid I must ask you just to look at the body once more. Is that exactly the position in which it was lying when you entered the room? It hasn't been moved in any way?\"\n\n'I explained that I had prevented Mr Sanders from doing so, and the Inspector nodded approval.\n\n' \"The gentleman seems terribly upset,\" he remarked.\n\n' \"He seems so\u2014yes,\" I replied.\n\n'I don't think I put any special emphasis on the \"seems\", but the Inspector looked at me rather keenly.\n\n' \"So we can take it that the body is exactly as it was when found?\" he said.\n\n' \"Except for the hat, yes,\" I replied.\n\n'The Inspector looked up sharply.\n\n' \"What do you mean\u2014the hat?\"\n\n'I explained that the hat had been on poor Gladys's head, whereas now it was lying beside her. I thought, of course, that the police had done this. The Inspector, however, denied it emphatically. Nothing had, as yet, been moved or touched. He stood looking down at that poor prone figure with a puzzled frown. Gladys was dressed in her outdoor clothes\u2014a big dark-red tweed coat with a grey fur collar. The hat, a cheap affair of red felt, lay just by her head.\n\n'The Inspector stood for some minutes in silence, frowning to himself. Then an idea struck him.\n\n' \"Can you, by any chance, remember, Madam, whether there were earrings in the ears, or whether the deceased habitually wore earrings?\"\n\n'Now fortunately I am in the habit of observing closely. I remembered that there had been a glint of pearls just below the hat brim, though I had paid no particular notice to it at the time. I was able to answer his first question in the affirmative.\n\n' \"Then that settles it. The lady's jewel case was rifled\u2014not that she had anything much of value, I understand\u2014and the rings were taken from her fingers. The murderer must have forgotten the earrings, and come back for them after the murder was discovered. A cool customer! Or perhaps\u2014\" He stared round the room and said slowly, \"He may have been concealed here in this room\u2014all the time.\"\n\n'But I negatived that idea. I myself, I explained, had looked under the bed. And the manager had opened the doors of the wardrobe. There was nowhere else where a man could hide. It is true the hat cupboard was locked in the middle of the wardrobe, but as that was only a shallow affair with shelves, no one could have been concealed there.\n\n'The Inspector nodded his head slowly whilst I explained all this.\n\n' \"I'll take your word for it, Madam,\" he said. \"In that case, as I said before, he must have come back. A very cool customer.\"\n\n' \"But the manager locked the door and took the key!\"\n\n' \"That's nothing. The balcony and the fire escape\u2014that's the way the thief came. Why, as likely as not, you actually disturbed him at work. He slips out of the window, and when you've all gone, back he comes and goes on with his business.\"\n\n' \"You are sure,\" I said, \"that there was a thief?\"\n\n'He said drily:\n\n' \"Well, it looks like it, doesn't it?\"\n\n'But something in his tone satisfied me. I felt that he wouldn't take Mr Sanders in the r\u00f4le of the bereaved widower too seriously.\n\n'You see, I admit it frankly. I was absolutely under the opinion of what I believe our neighbours, the French, call the id\u00e9e fixe. I knew that that man, Sanders, intended his wife to die. What I didn't allow for was that strange and fantastic thing, coincidence. My views about Mr Sanders were\u2014I was sure of it\u2014absolutely right and true. The man was a scoundrel. But although his hypocritical assumptions of grief didn't deceive me for a minute, I do remember feeling at the time that his surprise and bewilderment were marvellously well done. They seemed absolutely natural\u2014if you know what I mean. I must admit that after my conversation with the Inspector, a curious feeling of doubt crept over me. Because if Sanders had done this dreadful thing, I couldn't imagine any conceivable reason why he should creep back by means of the fire escape and take the earrings from his wife's ears. It wouldn't have been a sensible thing to do, and Sanders was such a very sensible man\u2014that's just why I always felt he was so dangerous.'\n\nMiss Marple looked round at her audience.\n\n'You see, perhaps, what I am coming to? It is, so often, the unexpected that happens in this world. I was so sure, and that, I think, was what blinded me. The result came as a shock to me. For it was proved, beyond any possible doubt, that Mr Sanders could not possibly have committed the crime...'\n\nA surprised gasp came from Mrs Bantry. Miss Marple turned to her.\n\n'I know, my dear, that isn't what you expected when I began this story. It wasn't what I expected either. But facts are facts, and if one is proved to be wrong, one must just be humble about it and start again. That Mr Sanders was a murderer at heart I knew\u2014and nothing ever occurred to upset that firm conviction of mine.\n\n'And now, I expect, you would like to hear the actual facts themselves. Mrs Sanders, as you know, spent the afternoon playing bridge with some friends, the Mortimers. She left them at about a quarter past six. From her friends' house to the Hydro was about a quarter of an hour's walk\u2014less if one hurried. She must have come in then about six-thirty. No one saw her come in, so she must have entered by the side door and hurried straight up to her room. There she changed (the fawn coat and skirt she wore to the bridge party were hanging up in the cupboard) and was evidently preparing to go out again, when the blow fell. Quite possibly, they say, she never even knew who struck her. The sandbag, I understand, is a very efficient weapon. That looks as though the attackers were concealed in the room, possibly in one of the big wardrobe cupboards\u2014the one she didn't open.\n\n'Now as to the movements of Mr Sanders. He went out, as I have said, at about five-thirty\u2014or a little after. He did some shopping at a couple of shops and at about six o'clock he entered the Grand Spa Hotel where he encountered two friends\u2014the same with whom he returned to the Hydro later. They played billiards and, I gather, had a good many whiskies and sodas together. These two men (Hitchcock and Spender, their names were) were actually with him the whole time from six o'clock onwards. They walked back to the Hydro with him and he only left them to come across to me and Miss Trollope. That, as I told you, was about a quarter to seven\u2014at which time his wife must have been already dead.\n\n'I must tell you that I talked myself to these two friends of his. I did not like them. They were neither pleasant nor gentlemanly men, but I was quite certain of one thing, that they were speaking the absolute truth when they said that Sanders had been the whole time in their company.\n\n'There was just one other little point that came up. It seems that while bridge was going on Mrs Sanders was called to the telephone. A Mr Littleworth wanted to speak to her. She seemed both excited and pleased about something\u2014and incidentally made one or two bad mistakes. She left rather earlier than they had expected her to do.\n\n'Mr Sanders was asked whether he knew the name of Littleworth as being one of his wife's friends, but he declared he had never heard of anyone of that name. And to me that seems borne out by his wife's attitude\u2014she too, did not seem to know the name of Littleworth. Nevertheless she came back from the telephone smiling and blushing, so it looks as though whoever it was did not give his real name, and that in itself has a suspicious aspect, does it not?\n\n'Anyway, that is the problem that was left. The burglar story, which seems unlikely\u2014or the alternative theory that Mrs Sanders was preparing to go out and meet somebody. Did that somebody come to her room by means of the fire escape? Was there a quarrel? Or did he treacherously attack her?'\n\nMiss Marple stopped.\n\n'Well?' said Sir Henry. 'What is the answer?'\n\n'I wondered if any of you could guess.'\n\n'I'm never good at guessing,' said Mrs Bantry. 'It seems a pity that Sanders had such a wonderful alibi; but if it satisfied you it must have been all right.'\n\nJane Helier moved her beautiful head and asked a question.\n\n'Why,' she said, 'was the hat cupboard locked?'\n\n'How very clever of you, my dear,' said Miss Marple, beaming. 'That's just what I wondered myself. Though the explanation was quite simple. In it were a pair of embroidered slippers and some pocket handkerchiefs that the poor girl was embroidering for her husband for Christmas. That's why she locked the cupboard. The key was found in her handbag.'\n\n'Oh!' said Jane. 'Then it isn't very interesting after all.'\n\n'Oh! but it is,' said Miss Marple. 'It's just the one really interesting thing\u2014the thing that made all the murderer's plans go wrong.'\n\nEveryone stared at the old lady.\n\n'I didn't see it myself for two days,' said Miss Marple. 'I puzzled and puzzled\u2014and then suddenly there it was, all clear. I went to the Inspector and asked him to try something and he did.'\n\n'What did you ask him to try?'\n\n'I asked him to fit that hat on the poor girl's head\u2014and of course he couldn't. It wouldn't go on. It wasn't her hat, you see.'\n\nMrs Bantry stared.\n\n'But it was on her head to begin with?'\n\n'Not on her head\u2014'\n\nMiss Marple stopped a moment to let her words sink in, and then went on.\n\n'We took it for granted that it was poor Gladys's body there; but we never looked at the face. She was face downwards, remember, and the hat hid everything.'\n\n'But she was killed?'\n\n'Yes, later. At the moment that we were telephoning to the police, Gladys Sanders was alive and well.'\n\n'You mean it was someone pretending to be her? But surely when you touched her\u2014'\n\n'It was a dead body, right enough,' said Miss Marple gravely.\n\n'But, dash it all,' said Colonel Bantry, 'you can't get hold of dead bodies right and left. What did they do with the\u2014the first corpse afterwards?'\n\n'He put it back,' said Miss Marple. 'It was a wicked idea\u2014but a very clever one. It was our talk in the drawing-room that put it into his head. The body of poor Mary, the housemaid\u2014why not use it? Remember, the Sanders' room was up amongst the servants' quarters. Mary's room was two doors off. The undertakers wouldn't come till after dark\u2014he counted on that. He carried the body along the balcony (it was dark at five), dressed it in one of his wife's dresses and her big red coat. And then he found the hat cupboard locked! There was only one thing to be done, he fetched one of the poor girl's own hats. No one would notice. He put the sandbag down beside her. Then he went off to establish his alibi.\n\n'He telephoned to his wife\u2014calling himself Mr Littleworth. I don't know what he said to her\u2014she was a credulous girl, as I said just now. But he got her to leave the bridge party early and not to go back to the Hydro, and arranged with her to meet him in the grounds of the Hydro near the fire escape at seven o'clock. He probably told her he had some surprise for her.\n\n'He returns to the Hydro with his friends and arranges that Miss Trollope and I shall discover the crime with him. He even pretends to turn the body over\u2014and I stop him! Then the police are sent for, and he staggers out into the grounds.\n\n'Nobody asked him for an alibi after the crime. He meets his wife, takes her up the fire escape, they enter their room. Perhaps he has already told her some story about the body. She stoops over it, and he picks up his sandbag and strikes...Oh, dear! It makes me sick to think of, even now! Then quickly he strips off her coat and skirt, hangs them up, and dresses her in the clothes from the other body.\n\n'But the hat won't go on. Mary's head is shingled\u2014Gladys Sanders, as I say, had a great bun of hair. He is forced to leave it beside the body and hope no one will notice. Then he carries poor Mary's body back to her own room and arranges it decorously once more.'\n\n'It seems incredible,' said Dr Lloyd. 'The risks he took. The police might have arrived too soon.'\n\n'You remember the line was out of order,' said Miss Marple. 'That was a piece of his work. He couldn't afford to have the police on the spot too soon. When they did come, they spent some time in the manager's office before going up to the bedroom. That was the weakest point\u2014the chance that someone might notice the difference between a body that had been dead two hours and one that had been dead just over half an hour; but he counted on the fact that the people who first discovered the crime would have no expert knowledge.'\n\nDr Lloyd nodded.\n\n'The crime would be supposed to have been committed about a quarter to seven or thereabouts, I suppose,' he said. 'It was actually committed at seven or a few minutes after. When the police surgeon examined the body it would be about half past seven at the earliest. He couldn't possibly tell.'\n\n'I am the person who should have known,' said Miss Marple. 'I felt the poor girl's hand and it was icy cold. Yet a short time later the Inspector spoke as though the murder must have been committed just before we arrived\u2014and I saw nothing!'\n\n'I think you saw a good deal, Miss Marple,' said Sir Henry. 'The case was before my time. I don't even remember hearing of it. What happened?'\n\n'Sanders was hanged,' said Miss Marple crisply. 'And a good job too. I have never regretted my part in bringing that man to justice. I've no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment.'\n\nHer stern face softened.\n\n'But I have often reproached myself bitterly with failing to save the life of that poor girl. But who would have listened to an old woman jumping to conclusions? Well, well\u2014who knows? Perhaps it was better for her to die while life was still happy than it would have been for her to live on, unhappy and disillusioned, in a world that would have seemed suddenly horrible. She loved that scoundrel and trusted him. She never found him out.'\n\n'Well, then,' said Jane Helier, 'she was all right. Quite all right. I wish\u2014' she stopped.\n\nMiss Marple looked at the famous, the beautiful, the successful Jane Helier and nodded her head gently.\n\n'I see, my dear,' she said very gently. 'I see.'\n\n## Chapter 11\n\n## The Herb of Death\n\n'Now then, Mrs B.,' said Sir Henry Clithering encouragingly.\n\nMrs Bantry, his hostess, looked at him in cold reproof.\n\n'I've told you before that I will not be called Mrs B. It's not dignified.'\n\n'Scheherazade, then.'\n\n'And even less am I Sche\u2014what's her name! I never can tell a story properly, ask Arthur if you don't believe me.'\n\n'You're quite good at the facts, Dolly,' said Colonel Bantry, 'but poor at the embroidery.'\n\n'That's just it,' said Mrs Bantry. She flapped the bulb catalogue she was holding on the table in front of her. 'I've been listening to you all and I don't know how you do it. \"He said, she said, you wondered, they thought, everyone implied\"\u2014well, I just couldn't and there it is! And besides I don't know anything to tell a story about.'\n\n'We can't believe that, Mrs Bantry,' said Dr Lloyd. He shook his grey head in mocking disbelief.\n\nOld Miss Marple said in her gentle voice: 'Surely dear\u2014'\n\nMrs Bantry continued obstinately to shake her head.\n\n'You don't know how banal my life is. What with the servants and the difficulties of getting scullery maids, and just going to town for clothes, and dentists, and Ascot (which Arthur hates) and then the garden\u2014'\n\n'Ah!' said Dr Lloyd. 'The garden. We all know where your heart lies, Mrs Bantry.'\n\n'It must be nice to have a garden,' said Jane Helier, the beautiful young actress. 'That is, if you hadn't got to dig, or to get your hands messed up. I'm ever so fond of flowers.'\n\n'The garden,' said Sir Henry. 'Can't we take that as a starting point? Come, Mrs B. The poisoned bulb, the deadly daffodils, the herb of death!'\n\n'Now it's odd your saying that,' said Mrs Bantry. 'You've just reminded me. Arthur, do you remember that business at Clodderham Court? You know. Old Sir Ambrose Bercy. Do you remember what a courtly charming old man we thought him?'\n\n'Why, of course. Yes, that was a strange business. Go ahead, Dolly.'\n\n'You'd better tell it, dear.'\n\n'Nonsense. Go ahead. Must paddle your own canoe. I did my bit just now.'\n\nMrs Bantry drew a deep breath. She clasped her hands and her face registered complete mental anguish. She spoke rapidly and fluently.\n\n'Well, there's really not much to tell. The Herb of Death\u2014that's what put it into my head, though in my own mind I call it sage and onions.'\n\n'Sage and onions?' asked Dr Lloyd.\n\nMrs Bantry nodded.\n\n'That was how it happened you see,' she explained. 'We were staying, Arthur and I, with Sir Ambrose Bercy at Clodderham Court, and one day, by mistake (though very stupidly, I've always thought) a lot of foxglove leaves were picked with the sage. The ducks for dinner that night were stuffed with it and everyone was very ill, and one poor girl\u2014Sir Ambrose's ward\u2014died of it.'\n\nShe stopped.\n\n'Dear, dear,' said Miss Marple, 'how very tragic.'\n\n'Wasn't it?'\n\n'Well,' said Sir Henry, 'what next?'\n\n'There isn't any next,' said Mrs Bantry, 'that's all.'\n\nEveryone gasped. Though warned beforehand, they had not expected quite such brevity as this.\n\n'But, my dear lady,' remonstrated Sir Henry, 'it can't be all. What you have related is a tragic occurrence, but not in any sense of the word a problem.'\n\n'Well, of course there's some more,' said Mrs Bantry. 'But if I were to tell you it, you'd know what it was.'\n\nShe looked defiantly round the assembly and said plaintively:\n\n'I told you I couldn't dress things up and make it sound properly like a story ought to do.'\n\n'Ah ha!' said Sir Henry. He sat up in his chair and adjusted an eyeglass. 'Really, you know, Scheherazade, this is most refreshing. Our ingenuity is challenged. I'm not so sure you haven't done it on purpose\u2014to stimulate our curiosity. A few brisk rounds of \"Twenty Questions\" is indicated, I think. Miss Marple, will you begin?'\n\n'I'd like to know something about the cook,' said Miss Marple. 'She must have been a very stupid woman, or else very inexperienced.'\n\n'She was just very stupid,' said Mrs Bantry. 'She cried a great deal afterwards and said the leaves had been picked and brought in to her as sage, and how was she to know?'\n\n'Not one who thought for herself,' said Miss Marple.\n\n'Probably an elderly woman and, I dare say, a very good cook?'\n\n'Oh! excellent,' said Mrs Bantry.\n\n'Your turn, Miss Helier,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Oh! You mean\u2014to ask a question?' There was a pause while Jane pondered. Finally she said helplessly, 'Really\u2014I don't know what to ask.'\n\nHer beautiful eyes looked appealingly at Sir Henry.\n\n'Why not dramatis personae, Miss Helier?' he suggested smiling.\n\nJane still looked puzzled.\n\n'Characters in order of their appearance,' said Sir Henry gently.\n\n'Oh, yes,' said Jane. 'That's a good idea.'\n\nMrs Bantry began briskly to tick people off on her fingers.\n\n'Sir Ambrose\u2014Sylvia Keene (that's the girl who died)\u2014a friend of hers who was staying there, Maud Wye, one of those dark ugly girls who manage to make an effort somehow\u2014I never know how they do it. Then there was a Mr Curle who had come down to discuss books with Sir Ambrose\u2014you know, rare books\u2014queer old things in Latin\u2014all musty parchment. There was Jerry Lorimer\u2014he was a kind of next door neighbour. His place, Fairlies, joined Sir Ambrose's estate. And there was Mrs Carpenter, one of those middle-aged pussies who always seem to manage to dig themselves in comfortably somewhere. She was by way of being dame de compagnie to Sylvia, I suppose.'\n\n'If it is my turn,' said Sir Henry, 'and I suppose it is, as I'm sitting next to Miss Helier, I want a good deal. I want a short verbal portrait, please, Mrs Bantry, of all the foregoing.'\n\n'Oh!' Mrs Bantry hesitated.\n\n'Sir Ambrose now,' continued Sir Henry. 'Start with him. What was he like?'\n\n'Oh! he was a very distinguished-looking old man\u2014and not so very old really\u2014not more than sixty, I suppose. But he was very delicate\u2014he had a weak heart, could never go upstairs\u2014he had to have a lift put in, and so that made him seem older than he was. Very charming manners\u2014courtly\u2014that's the word that describes him best. You never saw him ruffled or upset. He had beautiful white hair and a particularly charming voice.'\n\n'Good,' said Sir Henry. 'I see Sir Ambrose. Now the girl Sylvia\u2014what did you say her name was?'\n\n'Sylvia Keene. She was pretty\u2014really very pretty. Fair-haired, you know, and a lovely skin. Not, perhaps, very clever. In fact, rather stupid.'\n\n'Oh! come, Dolly,' protested her husband.\n\n'Arthur, of course, wouldn't think so,' said Mrs Bantry drily. 'But she was stupid\u2014she really never said anything worth listening to.'\n\n'One of the most graceful creatures I ever saw,' said Colonel Bantry warmly. 'See her playing tennis\u2014charming, simply charming. And she was full of fun\u2014most amusing little thing. And such a pretty way with her. I bet the young fellows all thought so.'\n\n'That's just where you're wrong,' said Mrs Bantry. 'Youth, as such, has no charms for young men nowadays. It's only old buffers like you, Arthur, who sit maundering on about young girls.'\n\n'Being young's no good,' said Jane. 'You've got to have SA.'\n\n'What,' said Miss Marple, 'is SA?'\n\n'Sex appeal,' said Jane.\n\n'Ah! yes,' said Miss Marple. 'What in my day they used to call \"having the come hither in your eye\".'\n\n'Not a bad description,' said Sir Henry. 'The dame de compagnie you described, I think, as a pussy, Mrs Bantry?'\n\n'I didn't mean a cat, you know,' said Mrs Bantry. 'It's quite different. Just a big soft white purry person. Always very sweet. That's what Adelaide Carpenter was like.'\n\n'What sort of aged woman?'\n\n'Oh! I should say fortyish. She'd been there some time\u2014ever since Sylvia was eleven, I believe. A very tactful person. One of those widows left in unfortunate circumstances with plenty of aristocratic relations, but no ready cash. I didn't like her myself\u2014but then I never do like people with very white long hands. And I don't like pussies.'\n\n'Mr Curle?'\n\n'Oh! one of those elderly stooping men. There are so many of them about, you'd hardly know one from the other. He showed enthusiasm when talking about his musty books, but not at any other time. I don't think Sir Ambrose knew him very well.'\n\n'And Jerry next door?'\n\n'A really charming boy. He was engaged to Sylvia. That's what made it so sad.'\n\n'Now I wonder\u2014' began Miss Marple, and then stopped.\n\n'What?'\n\n'Nothing, dear.'\n\nSir Henry looked at the old lady curiously. Then he said thoughtfully:\n\n'So this young couple were engaged. Had they been engaged long?'\n\n'About a year. Sir Ambrose had opposed the engagement on the plea that Sylvia was too young. But after a year's engagement he had given in and the marriage was to have taken place quite soon.'\n\n'Ah! Had the young lady any property?'\n\n'Next to nothing\u2014a bare hundred or two a year.'\n\n'No rat in that hole, Clithering,' said Colonel Bantry, and laughed.\n\n'It's the doctor's turn to ask a question,' said Sir Henry. 'I stand down.'\n\n'My curiosity is mainly professional,' said Dr Lloyd. 'I should like to know what medical evidence was given at the inquest\u2014that is, if our hostess remembers, or, indeed, if she knows.'\n\n'I know roughly,' said Mrs Bantry. 'It was poisoning by digitalin\u2014is that right?'\n\nDr Lloyd nodded.\n\n'The active principle of the foxglove\u2014digitalis\u2014acts on the heart. Indeed, it is a very valuable drug in some forms of heart trouble. A very curious case altogther. I would never have believed that eating a preparation of foxglove leaves could possibly result fatally. These ideas of eating poisonous leaves and berries are very much exaggerated. Very few people realize that the vital principle, or alkaloid, has to be extracted with much care and preparation.'\n\n'Mrs MacArthur sent some special bulbs round to Mrs Toomie the other day,' said Miss Marple. 'And Mrs Toomie's cook mistook them for onions, and all the Toomies were very ill indeed.'\n\n'But they didn't die of it,' said Dr Lloyd.\n\n'No. They didn't die of it,' admitted Miss Marple.\n\n'A girl I knew died of ptomaine poisoning,' said Jane Helier.\n\n'We must get on with investigating the crime,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Crime?' said Jane, startled. 'I thought it was an accident.'\n\n'If it were an accident,' said Sir Henry gently, 'I do not think Mrs Bantry would have told us this story. No, as I read it, this was an accident only in appearance\u2014behind it is something more sinister. I remember a case\u2014various guests in a house party were chatting after dinner. The walls were adorned with all kinds of old-fashioned weapons. Entirely as a joke one of the party seized an ancient horse pistol and pointed it at another man, pretending to fire it. The pistol was loaded and went off, killing the man. We had to ascertain in that case, first, who had secretly prepared and loaded that pistol, and secondly who had so led and directed the conversation that that final bit of horseplay resulted\u2014for the man who had fired the pistol was entirely innocent!\n\n'It seems to me we have much the same problem here. Those digitalin leaves were deliberately mixed with the sage, knowing what the result would be. Since we exonerate the cook\u2014we do exonerate the cook, don't we?\u2014the question arises: Who picked the leaves and delivered them to the kitchen?'\n\n'That's easily answered,' said Mrs Bantry. 'At least the last part of it is. It was Sylvia herself who took the leaves to the kitchen. It was part of her daily job to gather things like salad or herbs, bunches of young carrots\u2014all the sort of things that gardeners never pick right. They hate giving you anything young and tender\u2014they wait for them to be fine specimens. Sylvia and Mrs Carpenter used to see to a lot of these things themselves. And there was foxglove actually growing all amongst the sage in one corner, so the mistake was quite natural.'\n\n'But did Sylvia actually pick them herself?'\n\n'That, nobody ever knew. It was assumed so.'\n\n'Assumptions,' said Sir Henry, 'are dangerous things.'\n\n'But I do know that Mrs Carpenter didn't pick them,' said Mrs Bantry. 'Because, as it happened, she was walking with me on the terrace that morning. We went out there after breakfast. It was unusually nice and warm for early spring. Sylvia went alone down into the garden, but later I saw her walking arm-in-arm with Maud Wye.'\n\n'So they were great friends, were they?' asked Miss Marple.\n\n'Yes,' said Mrs Bantry. She seemed as though about to say something, but did not do so.\n\n'Had she been staying there long?' asked Miss Marple.\n\n'About a fortnight,' said Mrs Bantry.\n\nThere was a note of trouble in her voice.\n\n'You didn't like Miss Wye?' suggested Sir Henry.\n\n'I did. That's just it. I did.'\n\nThe trouble in her voice had grown to distress.\n\n'You're keeping something back, Mrs Bantry,' said Sir Henry accusingly.\n\n'I wondered just now,' said Miss Marple, 'but I didn't like to go on.'\n\n'When did you wonder?'\n\n'When you said that the young people were engaged. You said that that was what made it so sad. But, if you know what I mean, your voice didn't sound right when you said it\u2014not convincing, you know.'\n\n'What a dreadful person you are,' said Mrs Bantry. 'You always seem to know. Yes, I was thinking of something. But I don't really know whether I ought to say it or not.'\n\n'You must say it,' said Sir Henry. 'Whatever your scruples, it mustn't be kept back.'\n\n'Well, it was just this,' said Mrs Bantry. 'One evening\u2014in fact the very evening before the tragedy\u2014I happened to go out on the terrace before dinner. The window in the drawing-room was open. And as it chanced I saw Jerry Lorimer and Maud Wye. He was\u2014well\u2014kissing her. Of course I didn't know whether it was just a sort of chance affair, or whether\u2014well, I mean, one can't tell. I knew Sir Ambrose never had really liked Jerry Lorimer\u2014so perhaps he knew he was that kind of young man. But one thing I am sure of: that girl, Maud Wye, was really fond of him. You'd only to see her looking at him when she was off guard. And I think, too, they were really better suited than he and Sylvia were.'\n\n'I am going to ask a question quickly, before Miss Marple can,' said Sir Henry. 'I want to know whether, after the tragedy, Jerry Lorimer married Maud Wye?'\n\n'Yes,' said Mrs Bantry. 'He did. Six months afterwards.'\n\n'Oh! Scheherezade, Scheherezade,' said Sir Henry. 'To think of the way you told us this story at first! Bare bones indeed\u2014and to think of the amount of flesh we're finding on them now.'\n\n'Don't speak so ghoulishly,' said Mrs Bantry. 'And don't use the word flesh. Vegetarians always do. They say, \"I never eat flesh\" in a way that puts you right off your little beefsteak. Mr Curle was a vegetarian. He used to eat some peculiar stuff that looked like bran for breakfast. Those elderly stooping men with beards are often faddy. They have patent kinds of underwear, too.'\n\n'What on earth, Dolly,' said her husband, 'do you know about Mr Curle's underwear?'\n\n'Nothing,' said Mrs Bantry with dignity. 'I was just making a guess.'\n\n'I'll amend my former statement,' said Sir Henry. 'I'll say instead that the dramatis personae in your problem are very interesting. I'm beginning to see them all\u2014eh, Miss Marple?'\n\n'Human nature is always interesting, Sir Henry. And it's curious to see how certain types always tend to act in exactly the same way.'\n\n'Two women and a man,' said Sir Henry. 'The old eternal human triangle. Is that the base of our problem here? I rather fancy it is.'\n\nDr Lloyd cleared his throat.\n\n'I've been thinking,' he said rather diffidently. 'Do you say, Mrs Bantry, that you yourself were ill?'\n\n'Was I not! So was Arthur! So was everyone!'\n\n'That's just it\u2014everyone,' said the doctor. 'You see what I mean? In Sir Henry's story which he told us just now, one man shot another\u2014he didn't have to shoot the whole room full.'\n\n'I don't understand,' said Jane. 'Who shot who?'\n\n'I'm saying that whoever planned this thing went about it very curiously, either with a blind belief in chance, or else with an absolutely reckless disregard for human life. I can hardly believe there is a man capable of deliberately poisoning eight people with the object of removing one amongst them.'\n\n'I see your point,' said Sir Henry, thoughtfully. 'I confess I ought to have thought of that.'\n\n'And mightn't he have poisoned himself too?' asked Jane.\n\n'Was anyone absent from dinner that night?' asked Miss Marple.\n\nMrs Bantry shook her head.\n\n'Everyone was there.'\n\n'Except Mr Lorimer, I suppose, my dear. He wasn't staying in the house, was he?'\n\n'No; but he was dining there that evening,' said Mrs Bantry.\n\n'Oh!' said Miss Marple in a changed voice. 'That makes all the difference in the world.'\n\nShe frowned vexedly to herself.\n\n'I've been very stupid,' she murmured. 'Very stupid indeed.'\n\n'I confess your point worries me, Lloyd,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'How ensure that the girl, and the girl only, should get a fatal dose?'\n\n'You can't,' said the doctor. 'That brings me to the point I'm going to make. Supposing the girl was not the intended victim after all?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'In all cases of food poisoning, the result is very uncertain. Several people share a dish. What happens? One or two are slightly ill, two more, say, are seriously indisposed, one dies. That's the way of it\u2014there's no certainty anywhere. But there are cases where another factor might enter in. Digitalin is a drug that acts directly on the heart\u2014as I've told you it's prescribed in certain cases. Now, there was one person in that house who suffered from a heart complaint. Suppose he was the victim selected? What would not be fatal to the rest would be fatal to him\u2014or so the murderer might reasonably suppose. That the thing turned out differently is only a proof of what I was saying just now\u2014the uncertainty and unreliability of the effects of drugs on human beings.'\n\n'Sir Ambrose,' said Sir Henry, 'you think he was the person aimed at? Yes, yes\u2014and the girl's death was a mistake.'\n\n'Who got his money after he was dead?' asked Jane.\n\n'A very sound question, Miss Helier. One of the first we always ask in my late profession,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Sir Ambrose had a son,' said Mrs Bantry slowly. 'He had quarrelled with him many years previously. The boy was wild, I believe. Still, it was not in Sir Ambrose's power to disinherit him\u2014Clodderham Court was entailed. Martin Bercy succeeded to the title and estate. There was, however, a good deal of other property that Sir Ambrose could leave as he chose, and that he left to his ward Sylvia. I know this because Sir Ambrose died less than a year after the events I am telling you of, and he had not troubled to make a new will after Sylvia's death. I think the money went to the Crown\u2014or perhaps it was to his son as next of kin\u2014I don't really remember.'\n\n'So it was only to the interest of a son who wasn't there and the girl who died herself to make away with him,' said Sir Henry thoughtfully. 'That doesn't seem very promising.'\n\n'Didn't the other woman get anything?' asked Jane. 'The one Mrs Bantry calls the Pussy woman.'\n\n'She wasn't mentioned in the will,' said Mrs Bantry.\n\n'Miss Marple, you're not listening,' said Sir Henry. 'You're somewhere far away.'\n\n'I was thinking of old Mr Badger, the chemist,' said Miss Marple. 'He had a very young housekeeper\u2014young enough to be not only his daughter, but his grand-daughter. Not a word to anyone, and his family, a lot of nephews and nieces, full of expectations. And when he died, would you believe it, he'd been secretly married to her for two years? Of course Mr Badger was a chemist, and a very rude, common old man as well, and Sir Ambrose Bercy was a very courtly gentleman, so Mrs Bantry says, but for all that human nature is much the same everywhere.'\n\nThere was a pause. Sir Henry looked very hard at Miss Marple who looked back at him with gently quizzical blue eyes. Jane Helier broke the silence.\n\n'Was this Mrs Carpenter good-looking?' she asked.\n\n'Yes, in a very quiet way. Nothing startling.'\n\n'She had a very sympathetic voice,' said Colonel Bantry.\n\n'Purring\u2014that's what I call it,' said Mrs Bantry. 'Purring!'\n\n'You'll be called a cat yourself one of these days, Dolly.'\n\n'I like being a cat in my home circle,' said Mrs Bantry. 'I don't much like women anyway, and you know it. I like men and flowers.'\n\n'Excellent taste,' said Sir Henry. 'Especially in putting men first.'\n\n'That was tact,' said Mrs Bantry. 'Well, now, what about my little problem? I've been quite fair, I think. Arthur, don't you think I've been fair?'\n\n'Yes, my dear. I don't think there'll be any inquiry into the running by the stewards of the Jockey Club.'\n\n'First boy,' said Mrs Bantry, pointing a finger at Sir Henry.\n\n'I'm going to be long-winded. Because, you see, I haven't really got any feeling of certainty about the matter. First, Sir Ambrose. Well, he wouldn't take such an original method of committing suicide\u2014and on the other hand he certainly had nothing to gain by the death of his ward. Exit Sir Ambrose. Mr Curle. No motive for death of girl. If Sir Ambrose was intended victim, he might possibly have purloined a rare manuscript or two that no one else would miss. Very thin and most unlikely. So I think, that in spite of Mrs Bantry's suspicions as to his underclothing, Mr Curle is cleared. Miss Wye. Motive for death of Sir Ambrose\u2014none. Motive for death of Sylvia pretty strong. She wanted Sylvia's young man, and wanted him rather badly\u2014from Mrs Bantry's account. She was with Sylvia that morning in the garden, so had opportunity to pick leaves. No, we can't dismiss Miss Wye so easily. Young Lorimer. He's got a motive in either case. If he gets rid of his sweetheart, he can marry the other girl. Still it seems a bit drastic to kill her\u2014what's a broken engagement these days? If Sir Ambrose dies, he will marry a rich girl instead of a poor one. That might be important or not\u2014depends on his financial position. If I find that his estate was heavily mortgaged and that Mrs Bantry has deliberately withheld that fact from us, I shall claim a foul. Now Mrs Carpenter. You know, I have suspicions of Mrs Carpenter. Those white hands, for one thing, and her excellent alibi at the time the herbs were picked\u2014I always distrust alibis. And I've got another reason for suspecting her which I will keep to myself. Still, on the whole, if I've got to plump, I shall plump for Miss Maude Wye, because there's more evidence against her than anyone else.'\n\n'Next boy,' said Mrs Bantry, and pointed at Dr Lloyd.\n\n'I think you're wrong, Clithering, in sticking to the theory that the girl's death was meant. I am convinced that the murderer intended to do away with Sir Ambrose. I don't think that young Lorimer had the necessary knowledge. I am inclined to believe that Mrs Carpenter was the guilty party. She had been a long time with the family, knew all about the state of Sir Ambrose's health, and could easily arrange for this girl Sylvia (who, you said yourself, was rather stupid) to pick the right leaves. Motive, I confess, I don't see; but I hazard the guess that Sir Ambrose had at one time made a will in which she was mentioned. That's the best I can do.'\n\nMrs Bantry's pointing finger went on to Jane Helier.\n\n'I don't know what to say,' said Jane, 'except this: Why shouldn't the girl herself have done it? She took the leaves into the kitchen after all. And you say Sir Ambrose had been sticking out against her marriage. If he died, she'd get the money and be able to marry at once. She'd know just as much about Sir Ambrose's health as Mrs Carpenter would.'\n\nMrs Bantry's finger came slowly round to Miss Marple.\n\n'Now then, School Marm,' she said.\n\n'Sir Henry has put it all very clearly\u2014very clearly indeed,' said Miss Marple. 'And Dr Lloyd was so right in what he said. Between them they seem to have made things so very clear. Only I don't think Dr Lloyd quite realized one aspect of what he said. You see, not being Sir Ambrose's medical adviser, he couldn't know just what kind of heart trouble Sir Ambrose had, could he?'\n\n'I don't quite see what you mean, Miss Marple,' said Dr Lloyd.\n\n'You're assuming\u2014aren't you?\u2014that Sir Ambrose had the kind of heart that digitalin would affect adversely? But there's nothing to prove that that's so. It might be just the other way about.'\n\n'The other way about?'\n\n'Yes, you did say that it was often prescribed for heart trouble?'\n\n'Even then, Miss Marple, I don't see what that leads to?'\n\n'Well, it would mean that he would have digitalin in his possession quite naturally\u2014without having to account for it. What I am trying to say (I always express myself so badly) is this: Supposing you wanted to poison anyone with a fatal dose of digitalin. Wouldn't the simplest and easiest way be to arrange for everyone to be poisoned\u2014actually by digitalin leaves? It wouldn't be fatal in anyone else's case, of course, but no one would be surprised at one victim because, as Dr Lloyd said, these things are so uncertain. No one would be likely to ask whether the girl had actually had a fatal dose of infusion of digitalis or something of that kind. He might have put it in a cocktail, or in her coffee or even made her drink it quite simply as a tonic.'\n\n'You mean Sir Ambrose poisoned his ward, the charming girl whom he loved?'\n\n'That's just it,' said Miss Marple. 'Like Mr Badger and his young housekeeper. Don't tell me it's absurd for a man of sixty to fall in love with a girl of twenty. It happens every day\u2014and I dare say with an old autocrat like Sir Ambrose, it might take him queerly. These things become a madness sometimes. He couldn't bear the thought of her getting married\u2014did his best to oppose it\u2014and failed. His mad jealousy became so great that he preferred killing her to letting her go to young Lorimer. He must have thought of it some time beforehand, because that foxglove seed would have to be sown among the sage. He'd pick it himself when the time came, and send her into the kitchen with it. It's horrible to think of, but I suppose we must take as merciful a view of it as we can. Gentlemen of that age are sometimes very peculiar indeed where young girls are concerned. Our last organist\u2014but there, I mustn't talk scandal.'\n\n'Mrs Bantry,' said Sir Henry. 'Is this so?'\n\nMrs Bantry nodded.\n\n'Yes. I'd no idea of it\u2014never dreamed of the thing being anything but an accident. Then, after Sir Ambrose's death, I got a letter. He had left directions to send it to me. He told me the truth in it. I don't know why\u2014but he and I always got on very well together.'\n\nIn the momentary silence, she seemed to feel an unspoken criticism and went on hastily:\n\n'You think I'm betraying a confidence\u2014but that isn't so. I've changed all the names. He wasn't really called Sir Ambrose Bercy. Didn't you see how Arthur stared stupidly when I said that name to him? He didn't understand at first. I've changed everything. It's like they say in magazines and in the beginning of books: \"All the characters in this story are purely fictitious.\" You never know who they really are.'\n\n## Chapter 12\n\n## The Affair at the Bungalow\n\n'I've thought of something,' said Jane Helier.\n\nHer beautiful face was lit up with the confident smile of a child expecting approbation. It was a smile such as moved audiences nightly in London, and which had made the fortunes of photographers.\n\n'It happened,' she went on carefully, 'to a friend of mine.'\n\nEveryone made encouraging but slightly hypocritical noises. Colonel Bantry, Mrs Bantry, Sir Henry Clithering, Dr Lloyd and old Miss Marple were one and all convinced that Jane's 'friend' was Jane herself. She would have been quite incapable of remembering or taking an interest in anything affecting anyone else.\n\n'My friend,' went on Jane, '(I won't mention her name) was an actress\u2014a very well-known actress.'\n\nNo one expressed surprise. Sir Henry Clithering thought to himself: 'Now I wonder how many sentences it will be before she forgets to keep up the fiction, and says \"I\" instead of \"She\"?'\n\n'My friend was on tour in the provinces\u2014this was a year or two ago. I suppose I'd better not give the name of the place. It was a riverside town not very far from London. I'll call it\u2014'\n\nShe paused, her brows perplexed in thought. The invention of even a simple name appeared to be too much for her. Sir Henry came to the rescue.\n\n'Shall we call it Riverbury?' he suggested gravely.\n\n'Oh, yes, that would do splendidly. Riverbury, I'll remember that. Well, as I say, this\u2014my friend\u2014was at Riverbury with her company, and a very curious thing happened.'\n\nShe puckered her brows again.\n\n'It's very difficult,' she said plaintively, 'to say just what you want. One gets things mixed up and tells the wrong things first.'\n\n'You're doing it beautifully,' said Dr Lloyd encouragingly. 'Go on.'\n\n'Well, this curious thing happened. My friend was sent for to the police station. And she went. It seemed there had been a burglary at a riverside bungalow and they'd arrested a young man, and he told a very odd story. And so they sent for her.\n\n'She'd never been to a police station before, but they were very nice to her\u2014very nice indeed.'\n\n'They would be, I'm sure,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'The sergeant\u2014I think it was a sergeant\u2014or it may have been an inspector\u2014gave her a chair and explained things, and of course I saw at once that it was some mistake\u2014'\n\n'Aha,' thought Sir Henry. 'I. Here we are. I thought as much.'\n\n'My friend said so,' continued Jane, serenely unconscious of her self-betrayal. 'She explained she had been rehearsing with her understudy at the hotel and that she'd never even heard of this Mr Faulkener. And the sergeant said, \"Miss Hel\u2014\" '\n\nShe stopped and flushed.\n\n'Miss Helman,' suggested Sir Henry with a twinkle.\n\n'Yes\u2014yes, that would do. Thank you. He said, \"Well, Miss Helman, I felt it must be some mistake, knowing that you were stopping at the Bridge Hotel,\" and he said would I have any objection to confronting\u2014or was it being confronted? I can't remember.'\n\n'It doesn't really matter,' said Sir Henry reassuringly.\n\n'Anyway, with the young man. So I said, \"Of course not.\" And they brought him and said, \"This is Miss Helier,\" and\u2014Oh!' Jane broke off open-mouthed.\n\n'Never mind, my dear,' said Miss Marple consolingly. 'We were bound to guess, you know. And you haven't given us the name of the place or anything that really matters.'\n\n'Well,' said Jane. 'I did mean to tell it as though it happened to someone else. But it is difficult, isn't it! I mean one forgets so.'\n\nEveryone assured her that it was very difficult, and soothed and reassured, she went on with her slightly involved narrative.\n\n'He was a nice-looking man\u2014quite a nice-looking man. Young, with reddish hair. His mouth just opened when he saw me. And the sergeant said, \"Is this the lady?\" And he said, \"No, indeed it isn't. What an ass I have been.\" And I smiled at him and said it didn't matter.'\n\n'I can picture the scene,' said Sir Henry.\n\nJane Helier frowned.\n\n'Let me see\u2014how had I better go on?'\n\n'Supposing you tell us what it was all about, dear,' said Miss Marple, so mildly that no one could suspect her of irony. 'I mean what the young man's mistake was, and about the burglary.'\n\n'Oh, yes,' said Jane. 'Well, you see, this young man\u2014Leslie Faulkener, his name was\u2014had written a play. He'd written several plays, as a matter of fact, though none of them had ever been taken. And he had sent this particular play to me to read. I didn't know about it, because of course I have hundreds of plays sent to me and I read very few of them myself\u2014only the ones I know something about. Anyway, there it was, and it seems that Mr Faulkener got a letter from me\u2014only it turned out not to be really from me\u2014you understand\u2014'\n\nShe paused anxiously, and they assured her that they understood.\n\n'Saying that I'd read the play, and liked it very much and would he come down and talk it over with me. And it gave the address\u2014The Bungalow, Riverbury. So Mr Faulkener was frightfully pleased and he came down and arrived at this place\u2014The Bungalow. A parlourmaid opened the door, and he asked for Miss Helier, and she said Miss Helier was in and expecting him and showed him into the drawing-room, and there a woman came to him. And he accepted her as me as a matter of course\u2014which seems queer because after all he had seen me act and my photographs are very well known, aren't they?'\n\n'Over the length and breadth of England,' said Mrs Bantry promptly. 'But there's often a lot of difference between a photograph and its original, my dear Jane. And there's a great deal of difference between behind the footlights and off the stage. It's not every actress who stands the test as well as you do, remember.'\n\n'Well,' said Jane slightly mollified, 'that may be so. Anyway, he described this woman as tall and fair with big blue eyes and very good-looking, so I suppose it must have been near enough. He certainly had no suspicions. She sat down and began talking about his play and said she was anxious to do it. Whilst they were talking cocktails were brought in and Mr Faulkener had one as a matter of course. Well\u2014that's all he remembers\u2014having this cocktail. When he woke up, or came to himself, or whatever you call it\u2014he was lying out in the road, by the hedge, of course, so that there would be no danger of his being run over. He felt very queer and shaky\u2014so much so that he just got up and staggered along the road not quite knowing where he was going. He said if he'd had his sense about him he'd have gone back to The Bungalow and tried to find out what had happened. But he felt just stupid and mazed and walked along without quite knowing what he was doing. He was just more or less coming to himself when the police arrested him.'\n\n'Why did the police arrest him?' asked Dr Lloyd.\n\n'Oh! didn't I tell you?' said Jane opening her eyes very wide. 'How very stupid I am. The burglary.'\n\n'You mentioned a burglary\u2014but you didn't say where or what or why,' said Mrs Bantry.\n\n'Well, this bungalow\u2014the one he went to, of course\u2014it wasn't mine at all. It belonged to a man whose name was\u2014'\n\nAgain Jane furrowed her brows.\n\n'Do you want me to be godfather again?' asked Sir Henry. 'Pseudonyms supplied free of charge. Describe the tenant and I'll do the naming.'\n\n'It was taken by a rich city man\u2014a knight.'\n\n'Sir Herman Cohen,' suggested Sir Henry.\n\n'That will do beautifully. He took it for a lady\u2014she was the wife of an actor, and she was also an actress herself.'\n\n'We'll call the actor Claud Leason,' said Sir Henry, 'and the lady would be known by her stage name, I suppose, so we'll call her Miss Mary Kerr.'\n\n'I think you're awfully clever,' said Jane. 'I don't know how you think of these things so easily. Well, you see this was a sort of week-end cottage for Sir Herman\u2014did you say Herman?\u2014and the lady. And, of course, his wife knew nothing about it.'\n\n'Which is so often the case,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'And he'd given this actress woman a good deal of jewellery including some very fine emeralds.'\n\n'Ah!' said Dr Lloyd. 'Now we're getting at it.'\n\n'This jewellery was at the bungalow, just locked up in a jewel case. The police said it was very careless\u2014anyone might have taken it.'\n\n'You see, Dolly,' said Colonel Bantry. 'What do I always tell you?'\n\n'Well, in my experience,' said Mrs Bantry, 'it's always the people who are so dreadfully careful who lose things. I don't lock mine up in a jewel case\u2014I keep it in a drawer loose, under my stockings. I dare say if\u2014what's her name?\u2014Mary Kerr had done the same, it would never have been stolen.'\n\n'It would,' said Jane, 'because all the drawers were burst open, and the contents strewn about.'\n\n'Then they weren't really looking for jewels,' said Mrs Bantry. 'They were looking for secret papers. That's what always happens in books.'\n\n'I don't know about secret papers,' said Jane doubtfully. 'I never heard of any.'\n\n'Don't be distracted, Miss Helier,' said Colonel Bantry. 'Dolly's wild red-herrings are not to be taken seriously.'\n\n'About the burglary,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Yes. Well, the police were rung up by someone who said she was Miss Mary Kerr. She said the bungalow had been burgled and described a young man with red hair who had called there that morning. Her maid had thought there was something odd about him and had refused him admittance, but later they had seen him getting out through a window. She described the man so accurately that the police arrested him only an hour later and then he told his story and showed them the letter from me. And as I told you, they fetched me and when he saw me he said what I told you\u2014that it hadn't been me at all!'\n\n'A very curious story,' said Dr Lloyd. 'Did Mr Faulkener know this Miss Kerr?'\n\n'No, he didn't\u2014or he said he didn't. But I haven't told you the most curious part yet. The police went to the bungalow of course, and they found everything as described\u2014drawers pulled out and jewels gone, but the whole place was empty. It wasn't till some hours later that Mary Kerr came back, and when she did she said she'd never rung them up at all and this was the first she'd heard of it. It seemed that she had had a wire that morning from a manager offering her a most important part and making an appointment, so she had naturally rushed up to town to keep it. When she got there, she found that the whole thing was a hoax. No telegram had ever been sent.'\n\n'A common enough ruse to get her out of the way,' commented Sir Henry. 'What about the servants?'\n\n'The same sort of thing happened there. There was only one, and she was rung up on the telephone\u2014apparently by Mary Kerr, who said she had left a most important thing behind. She directed the maid to bring up a certain handbag which was in the drawer of her bedroom. She was to catch the first train. The maid did so, of course locking up the house; but when she arrived at Miss Kerr's club, where she had been told to meet her mistress, she waited there in vain.'\n\n'H'm,' said Sir Henry. 'I begin to see. The house was left empty, and to make an entry by one of the windows would present few difficulties, I should imagine. But I don't quite see where Mr Faulkener comes in. Who did ring up the police, if it wasn't Miss Kerr?'\n\n'That's what nobody knew or ever found out.'\n\n'Curious,' said Sir Henry. 'Did the young man turn out to be genuinely the person he said he was?'\n\n'Oh, yes, that part of it was all right. He'd even got the letter which was supposed to be written by me. It wasn't the least bit like my handwriting\u2014but then, of course, he couldn't be supposed to know that.'\n\n'Well, let's state the position clearly,' said Sir Henry. 'Correct me if I go wrong. The lady and the maid are decoyed from the house. This young man is decoyed down there by means of a bogus letter\u2014colour being lent to this last by the fact that you actually are performing at Riverbury that week. The young man is doped, and the police are rung up and have their suspicions directed against him. A burglary actually has taken place. I presume the jewels were taken?'\n\n'Oh, yes.'\n\n'Were they ever recovered?'\n\n'No, never. I think, as a matter of fact, Sir Herman tried to hush things up all he knew how. But he couldn't manage it, and I rather fancy his wife started divorce proceedings in consequence. Still, I don't really know about that.'\n\n'What happened to Mr Leslie Faulkener?'\n\n'He was released in the end. The police said they hadn't really got enough against him. Don't you think the whole thing was rather odd?'\n\n'Distinctly odd. The first question is whose story to believe? In telling it, Miss Helier, I noticed that you incline towards believing Mr Faulkener. Have you any reason for doing so beyond your own instinct in the matter?'\n\n'No-no,' said Jane unwillingly. 'I suppose I haven't. But he was so very nice, and so apologetic for having mistaken anyone else for me, that I feel sure he must have been telling the truth.'\n\n'I see,' said Sir Henry smiling. 'But you must admit that he could have invented the story quite easily. He could write the letter purporting to be from you himself. He could also dope himself after successfully committing the burglary. But I confess I don't see where the point of all that would be. Easier to enter the house, help himself, and disappear quietly\u2014unless just possibly he was observed by someone in the neighbourhood and knew himself to have been observed. Then he might hastily concoct this plan for diverting suspicion from himself and accounting for his presence in the neighbourhood.'\n\n'Was he well off?' asked Miss Marple.\n\n'I don't think so,' said Jane. 'No, I believe he was rather hard up.'\n\n'The whole thing seems curious,' said Dr Lloyd. 'I must confess that if we accept the young man's story as true, it seems to make the case very much more difficult. Why should the unknown woman who pretended to be Miss Helier drag this unknown man into the affair? Why should she stage such an elaborate comedy?'\n\n'Tell me, Jane,' said Mrs Bantry. 'Did young Faulkener ever come face to face with Mary Kerr at any stage of the proceedings?'\n\n'I don't quite know,' said Jane slowly, as she puzzled her brows in remembrance.\n\n'Because if he didn't the case is solved!' said Mrs Bantry. 'I'm sure I'm right. What is easier than to pretend you're called up to town? You telephone to your maid from Paddington or whatever station you arrive at, and as she comes up to town, you go down again. The young man calls by appointment, he's doped, you set the stage for the burglary, overdoing it as much as possible. You telephone the police, give a description of your scapegoat, and off you go to town again. Then you arrive home by a later train and do the surprised innocent.'\n\n'But why should she steal her own jewels, Dolly?'\n\n'They always do,' said Mrs Bantry. 'And anyway, I can think of hundreds of reasons. She may have wanted money at once\u2014old Sir Herman wouldn't give her the cash, perhaps, so she pretends the jewels are stolen and then sells them secretly. Or she may have been being blackmailed by someone who threatened to tell her husband or Sir Herman's wife. Or she may have already sold the jewels and Sir Herman was getting ratty and asking to see them, so she had to do something about it. That's done a good deal in books. Or perhaps she was going to have them reset and she'd got paste replicas. Or\u2014here's a very good idea\u2014and not so much done in books\u2014she pretends they are stolen, gets in an awful state and he gives her a fresh lot. So she gets two lots instead of one. That kind of woman, I am sure, is most frightfully artful.'\n\n'You are clever, Dolly,' said Jane admiringly. 'I never thought of that.'\n\n'You may be clever, but she doesn't say you're right,' said Colonel Bantry. 'I incline to suspicion of the city gentleman. He'd know the sort of telegram to get the lady out of the way, and he could manage the rest easily enough with the help of a new lady friend. Nobody seems to have thought of asking him for an alibi.'\n\n'What do you think, Miss Marple?' asked Jane, turning towards the old lady who had sat silent, a puzzled frown on her face.\n\n'My dear, I really don't know what to say. Sir Henry will laugh, but I recall no village parallel to help me this time. Of course there are several questions that suggest themselves. For instance, the servant question. In\u2014ahem\u2014an irregular m\u00e9nage of the kind you describe, the servant employed would doubtless be perfectly aware of the state of things, and a really nice girl would not take such a place\u2014her mother wouldn't let her for a minute. So I think we can assume that the maid was not a really trustworthy character. She may have been in league with the thieves. She would leave the house open for them and actually go to London as though sure of the pretence telephone message so as to divert suspicion from herself. I must confess that that seems the most probable solution. Only if ordinary thieves were concerned it seems very odd. It seems to argue more knowledge than a maidservant was likely to have.'\n\nMiss Marple paused and then went on dreamily:\n\n'I can't help feeling that there was some\u2014well, what I must describe as personal feeling about the whole thing. Supposing somebody had a spite, for instance? A young actress that he hadn't treated well? Don't you think that that would explain things better? A deliberate attempt to get him into trouble. That's what it looks like. And yet\u2014that's not entirely satisfactory...'\n\n'Why, doctor, you haven't said anything,' said Jane. 'I'd forgotten you.'\n\n'I'm always getting forgotten,' said the grizzled doctor sadly. 'I must have a very inconspicuous personality.'\n\n'Oh, no!' said Jane. 'Do tell us what you think.'\n\n'I'm rather in the position of agreeing with everyone's solutions\u2014and yet with none of them. I myself have a far-fetched and probably totally erroneous theory that the wife may have had something to do with it. Sir Herman's wife, I mean. I've no grounds for thinking so\u2014only you would be surprised if you knew the extraordinary\u2014really very extraordinary things that a wronged wife will take it into her head to do.'\n\n'Oh! Dr Lloyd,' cried Miss Marple excitedly. 'How clever of you. And I never thought of poor Mrs Pebmarsh.'\n\nJane stared at her.\n\n'Mrs Pebmarsh? Who is Mrs Pebmarsh?'\n\n'Well\u2014' Miss Marple hesitated. 'I don't know that she really comes in. She's a laundress. And she stole an opal pin that was pinned into a blouse and put it in another woman's house.'\n\nJane looked more fogged than ever.\n\n'And that makes it all perfectly clear to you, Miss Marple?' said Sir Henry, with his twinkle.\n\nBut to his surprise Miss Marple shook her head.\n\n'No, I'm afraid it doesn't. I must confess myself completely at a loss. What I do realize is that women must stick together\u2014one should, in an emergency, stand by one's own sex. I think that's the moral of the story Miss Helier has told us.'\n\n'I must confess that that particular ethical significance of the mystery has escaped me,' said Sir Henry gravely. 'Perhaps I shall see the significance of your point more clearly when Miss Helier has revealed the solution.'\n\n'Eh?' said Jane looking rather bewildered.\n\n'I was observing that, in childish language, we \"give it up\". You and you alone, Miss Helier, have had the high honour of presenting such an absolutely baffling mystery that even Miss Marple has to confess herself defeated.'\n\n'You all give it up?' asked Jane.\n\n'Yes.' After a minute's silence during which he waited for the others to speak, Sir Henry constituted himself spokesman once more. 'That is to say we stand or fall by the sketchy solutions we have tentatively advanced. One each for the mere men, two for Miss Marple, and a round dozen from Mrs B.'\n\n'It was not a dozen,' said Mrs Bantry. 'They were variations on a main theme. And how often am I to tell you that I will not be called Mrs B?'\n\n'So you all give it up,' said Jane thoughtfully. 'That's very interesting.'\n\nShe leaned back in her chair and began to polish her nails rather absent-mindedly.\n\n'Well,' said Mrs Bantry. 'Come on, Jane. What is the solution?'\n\n'The solution?'\n\n'Yes. What really happened?'\n\nJane stared at her.\n\n'I haven't the least idea.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'I've always wondered. I thought you were all so clever one of you would be able to tell me.'\n\nEverybody harboured feelings of annoyance. It was all very well for Jane to be so beautiful\u2014but at this moment everyone felt that stupidity could be carried too far. Even the most transcendent loveliness could not excuse it.\n\n'You mean the truth was never discovered?' said Sir Henry.\n\n'No. That's why, as I say, I did think you would be able to tell me.'\n\nJane sounded injured. It was plain that she felt she had a grievance.\n\n'Well\u2014I'm\u2014I'm\u2014' said Colonel Bantry, words failing him.\n\n'You are the most aggravating girl, Jane,' said his wife. 'Anyway, I'm sure and always will be that I was right. If you just tell us the proper names of the people, I shall be quite sure.'\n\n'I don't think I could do that,' said Jane slowly.\n\n'No, dear,' said Miss Marple. 'Miss Helier couldn't do that.'\n\n'Of course she could,' said Mrs Bantry. 'Don't be so high-minded, Jane. We older folk must have a bit of scandal. At any rate tell us who the city magnate was.'\n\nBut Jane shook her head, and Miss Marple, in her old-fashioned way, continued to support the girl.\n\n'It must have been a very distressing business,' she said.\n\n'No,' said Jane truthfully. 'I think\u2014I think I rather enjoyed it.'\n\n'Well, perhaps you did,' said Miss Marple. 'I suppose it was a break in the monotony. What play were you acting in?'\n\n'Smith.'\n\n'Oh, yes. That's one of Mr Somerset Maugham's, isn't it? All his are very clever, I think. I've seen them nearly all.'\n\n'You're reviving it to go on tour next autumn, aren't you?' asked Mrs Bantry.\n\nJane nodded.\n\n'Well,' said Miss Marple rising. 'I must go home. Such late hours! But we've had a very entertaining evening. Most unusually so. I think Miss Helier's story wins the prize. Don't you agree?'\n\n'I'm sorry you're angry with me,' said Jane. 'About not knowing the end, I mean. I suppose I should have said so sooner.'\n\nHer tone sounded wistful. Dr Lloyd rose gallantly to the occasion.\n\n'My dear young lady, why should you? You gave us a very pretty problem to sharpen our wits on. I am only sorry we could none of us solve it convincingly.'\n\n'Speak for yourself,' said Mrs Bantry. 'I did solve it. I'm convinced I am right.'\n\n'Do you know, I really believe you are,' said Jane. 'What you said sounded so probable.'\n\n'Which of her seven solutions do you refer to?' asked Sir Henry teasingly.\n\nDr Lloyd gallantly assisted Miss Marple to put on her goloshes. 'Just in case,' as the old lady explained. The doctor was to be her escort to her old-world cottage. Wrapped in several woollen shawls, Miss Marple wished everyone good night once more. She came to Jane Helier last and leaning forward, she murmured something in the actress's ear. A startled 'Oh!' burst from Jane\u2014so loud as to cause the others to turn their heads.\n\nSmiling and nodding, Miss Marple made her exit, Jane Helier staring after her.\n\n'Are you coming to bed, Jane?' asked Mrs Bantry. 'What's the matter with you? You're staring as though you'd seen a ghost.'\n\nWith a deep sigh Jane came to herself, shed a beautiful and bewildering smile on the two men and followed her hostess up the staircase. Mrs Bantry came into the girl's room with her.\n\n'Your fire's nearly out,' said Mrs Bantry, giving it a vicious and ineffectual poke. 'They can't have made it up properly. How stupid housemaids are. Still, I suppose we are rather late tonight. Why, it's actually past one o'clock!'\n\n'Do you think there are many people like her?' asked Jane Helier.\n\nShe was sitting on the side of the bed apparently wrapped in thought.\n\n'Like the housemaid?'\n\n'No. Like that funny old woman\u2014what's her name\u2014Marple?'\n\n'Oh! I don't know. I suppose she's a fairly common type in a small village.'\n\n'Oh dear,' said Jane. 'I don't know what to do.'\n\nShe sighed deeply.\n\n'What's the matter?'\n\n'I'm worried.'\n\n'What about?'\n\n'Dolly,' Jane Helier was portentously solemn. 'Do you know what that queer old lady whispered to me before she went out of the door tonight?'\n\n'No. What?'\n\n'She said: \"I shouldn't do it if I were you, my dear. Never put yourself too much in another woman's power, even if you do think she's your friend at the moment.\" You know, Dolly, that's awfully true.'\n\n'The maxim? Yes, perhaps it is. But I don't see the application.'\n\n'I suppose you can't ever really trust a woman. And I should be in her power. I never thought of that.'\n\n'What woman are you talking about?'\n\n'Netta Greene, my understudy.'\n\n'What on earth does Miss Marple know about your understudy?'\n\n'I suppose she guessed\u2014but I can't see how.'\n\n'Jane, will you kindly tell me at once what you are talking about?'\n\n'The story. The one I told. Oh, Dolly, that woman, you know\u2014the one that took Claud from me?'\n\nMrs Bantry nodded, casting her mind back rapidly to the first of Jane's unfortunate marriages\u2014to Claud Averbury, the actor.\n\n'He married her; and I could have told him how it would be. Claud doesn't know, but she's carrying on with Sir Joseph Salmon\u2014week-ends with him at the bungalow I told you about. I wanted her shown up\u2014I would like everyone to know the sort of woman she was. And you see, with a burglary, everything would be bound to come out.'\n\n'Jane!' gasped Mrs Bantry. 'Did you engineer this story you've been telling us?'\n\nJane nodded.\n\n'That's why I chose Smith. I wear parlourmaid's kit in it, you know. So I should have it handy. And when they sent for me to the police station it's the easiest thing in the world to say I was rehearsing my part with my understudy at the hotel. Really, of course, we would be at the bungalow. I just have to open the door and bring in the cocktails, and Netta to pretend to be me. He'd never see her again, of course, so there would be no fear of his recognizing her. And I can make myself look quite different as a parlourmaid; and besides, one doesn't look at parlourmaids as though they were people. We planned to drag him out into the road afterwards, bag the jewel case, telephone the police and get back to the hotel. I shouldn't like the poor young man to suffer, but Sir Henry didn't seem to think he would, did he? And she'd be in the papers and everything\u2014and Claud would see what she was really like.'\n\nMrs Bantry sat down and groaned.\n\n'Oh! my poor head. And all the time\u2014Jane Helier, you deceitful girl! Telling us that story the way you did!'\n\n'I am a good actress,' said Jane complacently. 'I always have been, whatever people choose to say. I didn't give myself away once, did I?'\n\n'Miss Marple was right,' murmured Mrs Bantry. 'The personal element. Oh, yes, the personal element. Jane, my good child, do you realize that theft is theft, and you might have been sent to prison?'\n\n'Well, none of you guessed,' said Jane. 'Except Miss Marple.' The worried expression returned to her face. 'Dolly, do you really think there are many like her?'\n\n'Frankly, I don't,' said Mrs Bantry.\n\nJane sighed again.\n\n'Still, one had better not risk it. And of course I should be in Netta's power\u2014that's true enough. She might turn against me or blackmail me or anything. She helped me think out the details and she professed to be devoted to me, but one never does know with women. No, I think Miss Marple was right. I had better not risk it.'\n\n'But, my dear, you have risked it.'\n\n'Oh, no.' Jane opened her blue eyes very wide. 'Don't you understand? None of this has happened yet! I was\u2014well, trying it on the dog, so to speak.'\n\n'I don't profess to understand your theatrical slang,' said Mrs Bantry with dignity. 'Do you mean this is a future project\u2014not a past deed?'\n\n'I was going to do it this autumn\u2014in September. I don't know what to do now.'\n\n'And Jane Marple guessed\u2014actually guessed the truth and never told us,' said Mrs Bantry wrathfully.\n\n'I think that was why she said that\u2014about women sticking together. She wouldn't give me away before the men. That was nice of her. I don't mind your knowing, Dolly.'\n\n'Well, give the idea up, Jane. I beg of you.'\n\n'I think I shall,' murmured Miss Helier. 'There might be other Miss Marples...'\n\n## Chapter 13\n\n## Death by Drowning\n\n### I\n\nSir Henry Clithering, Ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, was staying with his friends the Bantrys at their place near the little village of St Mary Mead.\n\nOn Saturday morning, coming down to breakfast at the pleasant guestly hour of ten-fifteen, he almost collided with his hostess, Mrs Bantry, in the doorway of the breakfast room. She was rushing from the room, evidently in a condition of some excitement and distress.\n\nColonel Bantry was sitting at the table, his face rather redder than usual.\n\n' 'Morning, Clithering,' he said. 'Nice day. Help yourself.'\n\nSir Henry obeyed. As he took his seat, a plate of kidneys and bacon in front of him, his host went on:\n\n'Dolly's a bit upset this morning.'\n\n'Yes\u2014er\u2014I rather thought so,' said Sir Henry mildly.\n\nHe wondered a little. His hostess was of a placid disposition, little given to moods or excitement. As far as Sir Henry knew, she felt keenly on one subject only\u2014gardening.\n\n'Yes,' said Colonel Bantry. 'Bit of news we got this morning upset her. Girl in the village\u2014Emmott's daughter\u2014Emmott who keeps the Blue Boar.'\n\n'Oh, yes, of course.'\n\n'Ye-es,' said Colonel Bantry ruminatively. 'Pretty girl. Got herself into trouble. Usual story. I've been arguing with Dolly about that. Foolish of me. Women never see sense. Dolly was all up in arms for the girl\u2014you know what women are\u2014men are brutes\u2014all the rest of it, etcetera. But it's not so simple as all that\u2014not in these days. Girls know what they're about. Fellow who seduces a girl's not necessarily a villain. Fifty-fifty as often as not. I rather liked young Sandford myself. A young ass rather than a Don Juan, I should have said.'\n\n'It is this man Sandford who got the girl into trouble?'\n\n'So it seems. Of course I don't know anything personally,' said the Colonel cautiously. 'It's all gossip and chat. You know what this place is! As I say, I know nothing. And I'm not like Dolly\u2014leaping to conclusions, flinging accusations all over the place. Damn it all, one ought to be careful in what one says. You know\u2014inquest and all that.'\n\n'Inquest?'\n\nColonel Bantry stared.\n\n'Yes. Didn't I tell you? Girl drowned herself. That's what all the pother's about.'\n\n'That's a nasty business,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Of course it is. Don't like to think of it myself. Poor pretty little devil. Her father's a hard man by all accounts. I suppose she just felt she couldn't face the music.'\n\nHe paused.\n\n'That's what's upset Dolly so.'\n\n'Where did she drown herself?'\n\n'In the river. Just below the mill it runs pretty fast. There's a footpath and a bridge across. They think she threw herself off that. Well, well, it doesn't bear thinking about.'\n\nAnd with a portentous rustle, Colonel Bantry opened his newspaper and proceeded to distract his mind from painful matters by an absorption in the newest iniquities of the government.\n\nSir Henry was only mildly interested by the village tragedy. After breakfast, he established himself on a comfortable chair on the lawn, tilted his hat over his eyes and contemplated life from a peaceful angle.\n\nIt was about half past eleven when a neat parlourmaid tripped across the lawn.\n\n'If you please, sir, Miss Marple has called, and would like to see you.'\n\n'Miss Marple?'\n\nSir Henry sat up and straightened his hat. The name surprised him. He remembered Miss Marple very well\u2014her gentle quiet old-maidish ways, her amazing penetration. He remembered a dozen unsolved and hypothetical cases\u2014and how in each case this typical 'old maid of the village' had leaped unerringly to the right solution of the mystery. Sir Henry had a very deep respect for Miss Marple. He wondered what had brought her to see him.\n\nMiss Marple was sitting in the drawing-room\u2014very upright as always, a gaily coloured marketing basket of foreign extraction beside her. Her cheeks were rather pink and she seemed flustered.\n\n'Sir Henry\u2014I am so glad. So fortunate to find you. I just happened to hear that you were staying down here...I do hope you will forgive me...'\n\n'This is a great pleasure,' said Sir Henry, taking her hand. 'I'm afraid Mrs Bantry's out.'\n\n'Yes,' said Miss Marple. 'I saw her talking to Footit, the butcher, as I passed. Henry Footit was run over yesterday\u2014that was his dog. One of those smooth-haired fox terriers, rather stout and quarrelsome, that butchers always seem to have.'\n\n'Yes,' said Sir Henry helpfully.\n\n'I was glad to get here when she wasn't at home,' continued Miss Marple. 'Because it was you I wanted to see. About this sad affair.'\n\n'Henry Footit?' asked Sir Henry, slightly bewildered.\n\nMiss Marple threw him a reproachful glance.\n\n'No, no. Rose Emmott, of course. You've heard?'\n\nSir Henry nodded.\n\n'Bantry was telling me. Very sad.'\n\nHe was a little puzzled. He could not conceive why Miss Marple should want to see him about Rose Emmott.\n\nMiss Marple sat down again. Sir Henry also sat. When the old lady spoke her manner had changed. It was grave, and had a certain dignity.\n\n'You may remember, Sir Henry, that on one or two occasions we played what was really a pleasant kind of game. Propounding mysteries and giving solutions. You were kind enough to say that I\u2014that I did not do too badly.'\n\n'You beat us all,' said Sir Henry warmly. 'You displayed an absolute genius for getting to the truth. And you always instanced, I remember, some village parallel which had supplied you with the clue.'\n\nHe smiled as he spoke, but Miss Marple did not smile. She remained very grave.\n\n'What you said has emboldened me to come to you now. I feel that if I say something to you\u2014at least you will not laugh at me.'\n\nHe realized suddenly that she was in deadly earnest.\n\n'Certainly, I will not laugh,' he said gently.\n\n'Sir Henry\u2014this girl\u2014Rose Emmott. She did not drown herself\u2014she was murdered...And I know who murdered her.'\n\nSir Henry was silent with sheer astonishment for quite three seconds. Miss Marple's voice had been perfectly quiet and unexcited. She might have been making the most ordinary statement in the world for all the emotion she showed.\n\n'This is a very serious statement to make, Miss Marple,' said Sir Henry when he had recovered his breath.\n\nShe nodded her head gently several times.\n\n'I know\u2014I know\u2014that is why I have come to you.'\n\n'But, my dear lady, I am not the person to come to. I am merely a private individual nowadays. If you have knowledge of the kind you claim, you must go to the police.'\n\n'I don't think I can do that,' said Miss Marple.\n\n'But why not?'\n\n'Because, you see, I haven't got any\u2014what you call knowledge.'\n\n'You mean it's only a guess on your part?'\n\n'You can call it that, if you like, but it's not really that at all. I know. I'm in a position to know; but if I gave my reasons for knowing to Inspector Drewitt\u2014well, he'd simply laugh. And really, I don't know that I'd blame him. It's very difficult to understand what you might call specialized knowledge.'\n\n'Such as?' suggested Sir Henry.\n\nMiss Marple smiled a little.\n\n'If I were to tell you that I know because of a man called Peasegood leaving turnips instead of carrots when he came round with a cart and sold vegetables to my niece several years ago\u2014'\n\nShe stopped eloquently.\n\n'A very appropriate name for the trade,' murmured Sir Henry. 'You mean that you are simply judging from the facts in a parallel case.'\n\n'I know human nature,' said Miss Marple. 'It's impossible not to know human nature living in a village all these years. The question is, do you believe me, or don't you?'\n\nShe looked at him very straight. The pink flush had heightened on her cheeks. Her eyes met his steadily without wavering.\n\nSir Henry was a man with a very vast experience of life. He made his decisions quickly without beating about the bush. Unlikely and fantastic as Miss Marple's statement might seem, he was instantly aware that he accepted it.\n\n'I do believe you, Miss Marple. But I do not see what you want me to do in the matter, or why you have come to me.'\n\n'I have thought and thought about it,' said Miss Marple. 'As I said, it would be useless going to the police without any facts. I have no facts. What I would ask you to do is to interest yourself in the matter\u2014Inspector Drewitt would be most flattered, I am sure. And, of course, if the matter went farther, Colonel Melchett, the Chief Constable, I am sure, would be wax in your hands.'\n\nShe looked at him appealingly.\n\n'And what data are you going to give me to work upon?'\n\n'I thought,' said Miss Marple, 'of writing a name\u2014the name\u2014on a piece of paper and giving it to you. Then if, on investigation, you decided that the\u2014the person\u2014is not involved in any way\u2014well, I shall have been quite wrong.'\n\nShe paused and then added with a slight shiver. 'It would be so dreadful\u2014so very dreadful\u2014if an innocent person were to be hanged.'\n\n'What on earth\u2014' cried Sir Henry, startled.\n\nShe turned a distressed face upon him.\n\n'I may be wrong about that\u2014though I don't think so. Inspector Drewitt, you see, is really an intelligent man. But a mediocre amount of intelligence is sometimes most dangerous. It does not take one far enough.'\n\nSir Henry looked at her curiously.\n\nFumbling a little, Miss Marple opened a small reticule, took out a little notebook, tore out a leaf, carefully wrote a name on it and folding it in two, handed it to Sir Henry.\n\nHe opened it and read the name. It conveyed nothing to him, but his eyebrows lifted a little. He looked across at Miss Marple and tucked the piece of paper in his pocket.\n\n'Well, well,' he said. 'Rather an extraordinary business, this. I've never done anything like it before. But I'm going to back my judgment\u2014of you, Miss Marple.'\n\n### II\n\nSir Henry was sitting in a room with Colonel Melchett, the Chief Constable of the county, and Inspector Drewitt.\n\nThe Chief Constable was a little man of aggressively military demeanour. The Inspector was big and broad and eminently sensible.\n\n'I really do feel I'm butting in,' said Sir Henry with his pleasant smile. 'I can't really tell you why I'm doing it.' (Strict truth this!)\n\n'My dear fellow, we're charmed. It's a great compliment.'\n\n'Honoured, Sir Henry,' said the Inspector.\n\nThe Chief Constable was thinking: 'Bored to death, poor fellow, at the Bantrys. The old man abusing the government and the old woman babbling on about bulbs.'\n\nThe Inspector was thinking: 'Pity we're not up against a real teaser. One of the best brains in England, I've heard it said. Pity it's all such plain sailing.'\n\nAloud, the Chief Constable said:\n\n'I'm afraid it's all very sordid and straightforward. First idea was that the girl had pitched herself in. She was in the family way, you understand. However, our doctor, Haydock, is a careful fellow. He noticed the bruises on each arm\u2014upper arm. Caused before death. Just where a fellow would have taken her by the arms and flung her in.'\n\n'Would that require much strength?'\n\n'I think not. There would be no struggle\u2014the girl would be taken unawares. It's a footbridge of slippery wood. Easiest thing in the world to pitch her over\u2014there's no handrail that side.'\n\n'You know for a fact that the tragedy occurred there?'\n\n'Yes. We've got a boy\u2014Jimmy Brown\u2014aged twelve. He was in the woods on the other side. He heard a kind of scream from the bridge and a splash. It was dusk you know\u2014difficult to see anything. Presently he saw something white floating down in the water and he ran and got help. They got her out, but it was too late to revive her.'\n\nSir Henry nodded.\n\n'The boy saw no one on the bridge?'\n\n'No. But, as I tell you, it was dusk, and there's mist always hanging about there. I'm going to question him as to whether he saw anyone about just afterwards or just before. You see he naturally assumed that the girl had thrown herself over. Everybody did to start with.'\n\n'Still, we've got the note,' said Inspector Drewitt. He turned to Sir Henry.\n\n'Note in the dead girl's pocket, sir. Written with a kind of artist's pencil it was, and all of a sop though the paper was we managed to read it.'\n\n'And what did it say?'\n\n'It was from young Sandford. \"All right,\" that's how it ran. \"I'll meet you at the bridge at eight-thirty.\u2014R.S.\" Well, it was near as might be to eight-thirty\u2014a few minutes after\u2014when Jimmy Brown heard the cry and the splash.'\n\n'I don't know whether you've met Sandford at all?' went on Colonel Melchett. 'He's been down here about a month. One of these modern day young architects who build peculiar houses. He's doing a house for Allington. God knows what it's going to be like\u2014full of new-fangled stuff, I suppose. Glass dinner table and surgical chairs made of steel and webbing. Well, that's neither here nor there, but it shows the kind of chap Sandford is. Bolshie, you know\u2014no morals.'\n\n'Seduction,' said Sir Henry mildly, 'is quite an old-established crime though it does not, of course, date back so far as murder.'\n\nColonel Melchett stared.\n\n'Oh! yes,' he said. 'Quite. Quite.'\n\n'Well, Sir Henry,' said Drewitt, 'there it is\u2014an ugly business, but plain. This young Sandford gets the girl into trouble. Then he's all for clearing off back to London. He's got a girl there\u2014nice young lady\u2014he's engaged to be married to her. Well, naturally this business, if she gets to hear of it, may cook his goose good and proper. He meets Rose at the bridge\u2014it's a misty evening, no one about\u2014he catches her by the shoulders and pitches her in. A proper young swine\u2014and deserves what's coming to him. That's my opinion.'\n\nSir Henry was silent for a minute or two. He perceived a strong undercurrent of local prejudice. A new-fangled architect was not likely to be popular in the conservative village of St Mary Mead.\n\n'There is no doubt, I suppose, that this man, Sandford, was actually the father of the coming child?' he asked.\n\n'He's the father all right,' said Drewitt. 'Rose Emmott let out as much to her father. She thought he'd marry her. Marry her! Not he!'\n\n'Dear me,' thought Sir Henry. 'I seem to be back in mid-Victorian melodrama. Unsuspecting girl, the villain from London, the stern father, the betrayal\u2014we only need the faithful village lover. Yes, I think it's time I asked about him.'\n\nAnd aloud he said:\n\n'Hadn't the girl a young man of her own down here?'\n\n'You mean Joe Ellis?' said the Inspector. 'Good fellow Joe. Carpentering's his trade. Ah! If she'd stuck to Joe\u2014'\n\nColonel Melchett nodded approval.\n\n'Stick to your own class,' he snapped.\n\n'How did Joe Ellis take this affair?' asked Sir Henry.\n\n'Nobody knew how he was taking it,' said the Inspector. 'He's a quiet fellow, is Joe. Close. Anything Rose did was right in his eyes. She had him on a string all right. Just hoped she'd come back to him some day\u2014that was his attitude, I reckon.'\n\n'I'd like to see him,' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Oh! We're going to look him up,' said Colonel Melchett. 'We're not neglecting any line. I thought myself we'd see Emmott first, then Sandford, and then we can go on and see Ellis. That suits you, Clithering?'\n\nSir Henry said it would suit him admirably.\n\nThey found Tom Emmott at the Blue Boar. He was a big burly man of middle age with a shifty eye and a truculent jaw.\n\n'Glad to see you, gentlemen\u2014good morning, Colonel. Come in here and we can be private. Can I offer you anything, gentlemen? No? It's as you please. You've come about this business of my poor girl. Ah! She was a good girl, Rose was. Always was a good girl\u2014till this bloody swine\u2014beg pardon, but that's what he is\u2014till he came along. Promised her marriage, he did. But I'll have the law on him. Drove her to it, he did. Murdering swine. Bringing disgrace on all of us. My poor girl.'\n\n'Your daughter distinctly told you that Mr Sandford was responsible for her condition?' asked Melchett crisply.\n\n'She did. In this very room she did.'\n\n'And what did you say to her?' asked Sir Henry.\n\n'Say to her?' The man seemed momentarily taken aback.\n\n'Yes. You didn't, for example, threaten to turn her out of the house.'\n\n'I was a bit upset\u2014that's only natural. I'm sure you'll agree that's only natural. But, of course, I didn't turn her out of the house. I wouldn't do such a thing.' He assumed virtuous indignation. 'No. What's the law for\u2014that's what I say. What's the law for? He'd got to do the right by her. And if he didn't, by God, he'd got to pay.'\n\nHe brought down his fist on the table.\n\n'What time did you last see your daughter?' asked Melchett.\n\n'Yesterday\u2014tea time.'\n\n'What was her manner then?'\n\n'Well, much as usual. I didn't notice anything. If I'd known\u2014'\n\n'But you didn't know,' said the Inspector drily.\n\nThey took their leave.\n\n'Emmott hardly creates a favourable impression,' said Sir Henry thoughtfully.\n\n'Bit of a blackguard,' said Melchett. 'He'd have bled Sandford all right if he'd had the chance.'\n\nTheir next call was on the architect. Rex Sandford was very unlike the picture Sir Henry had unconsciously formed of him. He was a tall young man, very fair and very thin. His eyes were blue and dreamy, his hair was untidy and rather too long. His speech was a little too ladylike.\n\nColonel Melchett introduced himself and his companions. Then passing straight to the object of his visit, he invited the architect to make a statement as to his movements on the previous evening.\n\n'You understand,' he said warningly. 'I have no power to compel a statement from you and any statement you make may be used in evidence against you. I want the position to be quite clear to you.'\n\n'I\u2014I don't understand,' said Sandford.\n\n'You understand that the girl Rose Emmott was drowned last night?'\n\n'I know. Oh! it's too, too distressing. Really, I haven't slept a wink. I've been incapable of any work today. I feel responsible\u2014terribly responsible.'\n\nHe ran his hands through his hair, making it untidier still.\n\n'I never meant any harm,' he said piteously. 'I never thought. I never dreamt she'd take it that way.'\n\nHe sat down at a table and buried his face in his hands.\n\n'Do I understand you to say, Mr Sandford, that you refuse to make a statement as to where you were last night at eight-thirty?'\n\n'No, no\u2014certainly not. I was out. I went for a walk.'\n\n'You went to meet Miss Emmott?'\n\n'No. I went by myself. Through the woods. A long way.'\n\n'Then how do you account for this note, sir, which was found in the dead girl's pocket?'\n\nAnd Inspector Drewitt read it unemotionally aloud.\n\n'Now, sir,' he finished. 'Do you deny that you wrote that?'\n\n'No\u2014no. You're right. I did write it. Rose asked me to meet her. She insisted. I didn't know what to do. So I wrote that note.'\n\n'Ah, that's better,' said the Inspector.\n\n'But I didn't go!' Sandford's voice rose high and excited. 'I didn't go! I felt it would be much better not. I was returning to town tomorrow. I felt it would be better not\u2014not to meet. I intended to write from London and\u2014and make\u2014some arrangement.'\n\n'You are aware, sir, that this girl was going to have a child, and that she had named you as its father?'\n\nSandford groaned, but did not answer.\n\n'Was that statement true, sir?'\n\nSandford buried his face deeper.\n\n'I suppose so,' he said in a muffled voice.\n\n'Ah!' Inspector Drewitt could not disguise the satisfaction. 'Now about this \"walk\" of yours. Is there anyone who saw you last night?'\n\n'I don't know. I don't think so. As far as I can remember, I didn't meet anybody.'\n\n'That's a pity.'\n\n'What do you mean?' Sandford stared wildly at him. 'What does it matter whether I was out for a walk or not? What difference does that make to Rose drowning herself?'\n\n'Ah!' said the Inspector. 'But you see, she didn't. She was thrown in deliberately, Mr Sandford.'\n\n'She was\u2014' It took him a minute or two to take in all the horror of it. 'My God! Then\u2014'\n\nHe dropped into a chair.\n\nColonel Melchett made a move to depart.\n\n'You understand, Sandford,' he said. 'You are on no account to leave this house.'\n\nThe three men left together. The Inspector and the Chief Constable exchanged glances.\n\n'That's enough, I think, sir,' said the Inspector.\n\n'Yes. Get a warrant made out and arrest him.'\n\n'Excuse me,' said Sir Henry, 'I've forgotten my gloves.'\n\nHe re-entered the house rapidly. Sandford was sitting just as they had left him, staring dazedly in front of him.\n\n'I have come back,' said Sir Henry, 'to tell you that I personally, am anxious to do all I can to assist you. The motive of my interest in you I am not at liberty to reveal. But I am going to ask you, if you will, to tell me as briefly as possible exactly what passed between you and this girl Rose.'\n\n'She was very pretty,' said Sandford. 'Very pretty and very alluring. And\u2014and she made a dead seat at me. Before God, that's true. She wouldn't let me alone. And it was lonely down here, and nobody liked me much, and\u2014and, as I say she was amazingly pretty and she seemed to know her way about and all that\u2014' His voice died away. He looked up. 'And then this happened. She wanted me to marry her. I didn't know what to do. I'm engaged to a girl in London. If she ever gets to hear of this\u2014and she will, of course\u2014well, it's all up. She won't understand. How could she? And I'm a rotter, of course. As I say, I didn't know what to do. I avoided seeing Rose again. I thought I'd get back to town\u2014see my lawyer\u2014make arrangements about money and so forth, for her. God, what a fool I've been! And it's all so clear\u2014the case against me. But they've made a mistake. She must have done it herself.'\n\n'Did she ever threaten to take her life?'\n\nSandford shook his head.\n\n'Never. I shouldn't have said she was that sort.'\n\n'What about a man called Joe Ellis?'\n\n'The carpenter fellow? Good old village stock. Dull fellow\u2014but crazy about Rose.'\n\n'He might have been jealous?' suggested Sir Henry.\n\n'I suppose he was a bit\u2014but he's the bovine kind. He'd suffer in silence.'\n\n'Well,' said Sir Henry. 'I must be going.'\n\nHe rejoined the others.\n\n'You know, Melchett,' he said, 'I feel we ought to have a look at this other fellow\u2014Ellis\u2014before we do anything drastic. Pity if you made an arrest that turned out to be a mistake. After all, jealousy is a pretty good motive for murder\u2014and a pretty common one, too.'\n\n'That's true enough,' said the Inspector. 'But Joe Ellis isn't that kind. He wouldn't hurt a fly. Why, nobody's ever seen him out of temper. Still, I agree we'd better just ask him where he was last night. He'll be at home now. He lodges with Mrs Bartlett\u2014very decent soul\u2014a widow, she takes in a bit of washing.'\n\nThe little cottage to which they bent their footsteps was spotlessly clean and neat. A big stout woman of middle age opened the door to them. She had a pleasant face and blue eyes.\n\n'Good morning, Mrs Bartlett,' said the Inspector. 'Is Joe Ellis here?'\n\n'Came back not ten minutes ago,' said Mrs Bartlett. 'Step inside, will you, please, sirs.'\n\nWiping her hands on her apron she led them into a tiny front parlour with stuffed birds, china dogs, a sofa and several useless pieces of furniture.\n\nShe hurriedly arranged seats for them, picked up a whatnot bodily to make further room and went out calling:\n\n'Joe, there's three gentlemen want to see you.'\n\nA voice from the back kitchen replied:\n\n'I'll be there when I've cleaned myself.'\n\nMrs Bartlett smiled.\n\n'Come in, Mrs Bartlett,' said Colonel Melchett. 'Sit down.'\n\n'Oh, no, sir, I couldn't think of it.'\n\nMrs Bartlett was shocked at the idea.\n\n'You find Joe Ellis a good lodger?' inquired Melchett in a seemingly careless tone.\n\n'Couldn't have a better, sir. A real steady young fellow. Never touches a drop of drink. Takes a pride in his work. And always kind and helpful about the house. He put up those shelves for me, and he's fixed a new dresser in the kitchen. And any little thing that wants doing in the house\u2014why, Joe does it as a matter of course, and won't hardly take thanks for it. Ah! there aren't many young fellows like Joe, sir.'\n\n'Some girl will be lucky some day,' said Melchett carelessly. 'He was rather sweet on that poor girl, Rose Emmott, wasn't he?'\n\nMrs Bartlett sighed.\n\n'It made me tired, it did. Him worshipping the ground she trod on and her not caring a snap of the fingers for him.'\n\n'Where does Joe spend his evenings, Mrs Bartlett?'\n\n'Here, sir, usually. He does some odd piece of work in the evenings, sometimes, and he's trying to learn book-keeping by correspondence.'\n\n'Ah! really. Was he in yesterday evening?'\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\n'You're sure, Mrs Bartlett?' said Sir Henry sharply.\n\nShe turned to him.\n\n'Quite sure, sir.'\n\n'He didn't go out, for instance, somewhere about eight to eight-thirty?'\n\n'Oh, no.' Mrs Barlett laughed. 'He was fixing the kitchen dresser for me nearly all the evening, and I was helping him.'\n\nSir Henry looked at her smiling assured face and felt his first pang of doubt.\n\nA moment later Ellis himself entered the room.\n\nHe was a tall broad-shouldered young man, very good-looking in a rustic way. He had shy, blue eyes and a good-tempered smile. Altogether an amiable young giant.\n\nMelchett opened the conversation. Mrs Bartlett withdrew to the kitchen.\n\n'We are investigating the death of Rose Emmott. You knew her, Ellis.'\n\n'Yes.' He hesitated, then muttered, 'Hoped to marry her one day. Poor lass.'\n\n'You have heard of what her condition was?'\n\n'Yes.' A spark of anger showed in his eyes. 'Let her down, he did. But 'twere for the best. She wouldn't have been happy married to him. I reckoned she'd come to me when this happened. I'd have looked after her.'\n\n'In spite of\u2014'\n\n' 'Tweren't her fault. He led her astray with fine promises and all. Oh! she told me about it. She'd no call to drown herself. He weren't worth it.'\n\n'Where were you, Ellis, last night at eight-thirty?'\n\nWas it Sir Henry's fancy, or was there really a shade of constraint in the ready\u2014almost too ready\u2014reply.\n\n'I was here. Fixing up a contraption in the kitchen for Mrs B. You ask her. She'll tell you.'\n\n'He was too quick with that,' thought Sir Henry. 'He's a slow-thinking man. That popped out so pat that I suspect he'd got it ready beforehand.'\n\nThen he told himself that it was imagination. He was imagining things\u2014yes, even imagining an apprehensive glint in those blue eyes.\n\nA few more questions and answers and they left. Sir Henry made an excuse to go to the kitchen. Mrs Bartlett was busy at the stove. She looked up with a pleasant smile. A new dresser was fixed against the wall. It was not quite finished. Some tools lay about and some pieces of wood.\n\n'That's what Ellis was at work on last night?' said Sir Henry.\n\n'Yes, sir, it's a nice bit of work, isn't it? He's a very clever carpenter, Joe is.'\n\nNo apprehensive gleam in her eye\u2014no embarrassment.\n\nBut Ellis\u2014had he imagined it? No, there had been something.\n\n'I must tackle him,' thought Sir Henry.\n\nTurning to leave the kitchen, he collided with a perambulator.\n\n'Not woken the baby up, I hope,' he said.\n\nMrs Bartlett's laugh rang out.\n\n'Oh, no, sir. I've no children\u2014more's the pity. That's what I take the laundry on, sir.'\n\n'Oh! I see\u2014'\n\nHe paused then said on an impulse:\n\n'Mrs Bartlett. You knew Rose Emmott. Tell me what you really thought of her.'\n\nShe looked at him curiously.\n\n'Well, sir, I thought she was flighty. But she's dead\u2014and I don't like to speak ill of the dead.'\n\n'But I have a reason\u2014a very good reason for asking.'\n\nHe spoke persuasively.\n\nShe seemed to consider, studying him attentively. Finally she made up her mind.\n\n'She was a bad lot, sir,' she said quietly. 'I wouldn't say so before Joe. She took him in good and proper. That kind can\u2014more's the pity. You know how it is, sir.'\n\nYes, Sir Henry knew. The Joe Ellises of the world were peculiarly vulnerable. They trusted blindly. But for that very cause the shock of discovery might be greater.\n\nHe left the cottage baffled and perplexed. He was up against a blank wall. Joe Ellis had been working indoors all yesterday evening. Mrs Bartlett had actually been there watching him. Could one possibly get round that? There was nothing to set against it\u2014except possibly that suspicious readiness in replying on Joe Ellis's part\u2014that suggestion of having a story pat.\n\n'Well,' said Melchett, 'that seems to make the matter quite clear, eh?'\n\n'It does, sir,' agreed the Inspector. 'Sandford's our man. Not a leg to stand upon. The thing's as plain as daylight. It's my opinion as the girl and her father were out to\u2014well\u2014practically blackmail him. He's no money to speak of\u2014he didn't want the matter to get to his young lady's ears. He was desperate and he acted accordingly. What do you say, sir?' he added, addressing Sir Henry deferentially.\n\n'It seems so,' admitted Sir Henry. 'And yet\u2014I can hardly picture Sandford committing any violent action.'\n\nBut he knew as he spoke that that objection was hardly valid. The meekest animal, when cornered, is capable of amazing actions.\n\n'I should like to see the boy, though,' he said suddenly. 'The one who heard the cry.'\n\nJimmy Brown proved to be an intelligent lad, rather small for his age, with a sharp, rather cunning face. He was eager to be questioned and was rather disappointed when checked in his dramatic tale of what he had heard on the fatal night.\n\n'You were on the other side of the bridge, I understand,' said Sir Henry. 'Across the river from the village. Did you see anyone on that side as you came over the bridge?'\n\n'There was someone walking up in the woods. Mr Sandford, I think it was, the architecting gentleman who's building the queer house.'\n\nThe three men exchanged glances.\n\n'That was about ten minutes or so before you heard the cry?'\n\nThe boy nodded.\n\n'Did you see anyone else\u2014on the village side of the river?'\n\n'A man came along the path that side. Going slow and whistling he was. Might have been Joe Ellis.'\n\n'You couldn't possibly have seen who it was,' said the Inspector sharply. 'What with the mist and its being dusk.'\n\n'It's on account of the whistle,' said the boy. 'Joe Ellis always whistles the same tune\u2014\"I wanner be happy\"\u2014it's the only tune he knows.'\n\nHe spoke with the scorn of the modernist for the old-fashioned.\n\n'Anyone might whistle a tune,' said Melchett. 'Was he going towards the bridge?'\n\n'No. Other way\u2014to village.'\n\n'I don't think we need concern ourselves with this unknown man,' said Melchett. 'You heard the cry and the splash and a few minutes later you saw the body floating downstream and you ran for help, going back to the bridge, crossing it, and making straight for the village. You didn't see anyone near the bridge as you ran for help?'\n\n'I think as there were two men with a wheelbarrow on the river path; but they were some way away and I couldn't tell if they were going or coming and Mr Giles's place was nearest\u2014so I ran there.'\n\n'You did well, my boy,' said Melchett. 'You acted very creditably and with presence of mind. You're a scout, aren't you?'\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\n'Very good. Very good indeed.'\n\nSir Henry was silent\u2014thinking. He took a slip of paper from his pocket, looked at it, shook his head. It didn't seem possible\u2014and yet\u2014\n\nHe decided to pay a call on Miss Marple.\n\nShe received him in her pretty, slightly overcrowded old-style drawing-room.\n\n'I've come to report progress,' said Sir Henry. 'I'm afraid that from our point of view things aren't going well. They are going to arrest Sandford. And I must say I think they are justified.'\n\n'You have found nothing in\u2014what shall I say\u2014support of my theory, then?' She looked perplexed\u2014anxious. 'Perhaps I have been wrong\u2014quite wrong. You have such wide experience\u2014you would surely detect it if it were so.'\n\n'For one thing,' said Sir Henry, 'I can hardly believe it. And for another we are up against an unbreakable alibi. Joe Ellis was fixing shelves in the kitchen all the evening and Mrs Bartlett was watching him do it.'\n\nMiss Marple leaned forward, taking in a quick breath.\n\n'But that can't be so,' she said. 'It was Friday night.'\n\n'Friday night?'\n\n'Yes\u2014Friday night. On Friday evenings Mrs Bartlett takes the laundry she has done round to the different people.'\n\nSir Henry leaned back in his chair. He remembered the boy Jimmy's story of the whistling man and\u2014yes\u2014it would all fit in.\n\nHe rose, taking Miss Marple warmly by the hand.\n\n'I think I see my way,' he said. 'At least I can try...'\n\nFive minutes later he was back at Mrs Bartlett's cottage and facing Joe Ellis in the little parlour among the china dogs.\n\n'You lied to us, Ellis, about last night,' he said crisply. 'You were not in the kitchen here fixing the dresser between eight and eight-thirty. You were seen walking along the path by the river towards the bridge a few minutes before Rose Emmott was murdered.'\n\nThe man gasped.\n\n'She weren't murdered\u2014she weren't. I had naught to do with it. She threw herself in, she did. She was desperate like. I wouldn't have harmed a hair on her head, I wouldn't.'\n\n'Then why did you lie as to where you were?' asked Sir Henry keenly.\n\nThe man's eyes shifted and lowered uncomfortably.\n\n'I was scared. Mrs B. saw me around there and when we heard just afterwards what had happened\u2014well, she thought it might look bad for me. I fixed I'd say I was working here, and she agreed to back me up. She's a rare one, she is. She's always been good to me.'\n\nWithout a word Sir Henry left the room and walked into the kitchen. Mrs Bartlett was washing up at the sink.\n\n'Mrs Bartlett,' he said, 'I know everything. I think you'd better confess\u2014that is, unless you want Joe Ellis hanged for something he didn't do...No. I see you don't want that. I'll tell you what happened. You were out taking the laundry home. You came across Rose Emmott. You thought she'd given Joe the chuck and was taking up with this stranger. Now she was in trouble\u2014Joe was prepared to come to the rescue\u2014marry her if need be, and if she'd have him. He's lived in your house for four years. You've fallen in love with him. You want him for yourself. You hated this girl\u2014you couldn't bear that this worthless little slut should take your man from you. You're a strong woman, Mrs Bartlett. You caught the girl by the shoulders and shoved her over into the stream. A few minutes later you met Joe Ellis. The boy Jimmy saw you together in the distance\u2014but in the darkness and the mist he assumed the perambulator was a wheelbarrow and two men wheeling it. You persuaded Joe that he might be suspected and you concocted what was supposed to be an alibi for him, but which was really an alibi for you. Now then, I'm right, am I not?'\n\nHe held his breath. He had staked all on this throw.\n\nShe stood before him rubbing her hands on her apron, slowly making up her mind.\n\n'It's just as you say, sir,' she said at last, in her quiet subdued voice (a dangerous voice, Sir Henry suddenly felt it to be). 'I don't know what came over me. Shameless\u2014that's what she was. It just came over me\u2014she shan't take Joe from me. I haven't had a happy life, sir. My husband, he was a poor lot\u2014an invalid and cross-grained. I nursed and looked after him true. And then Joe came here to lodge. I'm not such an old woman, sir, in spite of my grey hair. I'm just forty, sir. Joe's one in a thousand. I'd have done anything for him\u2014anything at all. He was like a little child, sir, so gentle and believing. He was mine, sir, to look after and see to. And this\u2014this\u2014' She swallowed\u2014checked her emotion. Even at this moment she was a strong woman. She stood up straight and looked at Sir Henry curiously. 'I'm ready to come, sir. I never thought anyone would find out. I don't know how you knew, sir\u2014I don't, I'm sure.'\n\nSir Henry shook his head gently.\n\n'It was not I who knew,' he said\u2014and he thought of the piece of paper still reposing in his pocket with the words on it written in neat old-fashioned handwriting.\n\n'Mrs Bartlett, with whom Joe Ellis lodges at 2 Mill Cottages.'\n\nMiss Marple had been right again.\n\n## E-Book Extras\n\nThe Marples\n\nEssay by Charles Osborne\n\n## The Marples\n\nThe Murder at the Vicarage; The Thirteen Problems; The Body in the Library; The Moving Finger; A Murder Is Announced; They Do It with Mirrors; A Pocket Full of Rye; 4.50 from Paddington; The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side; A Caribbean Mystery; At Bertram's Hotel; Nemesis; Sleeping Murder; Miss Marple's Final Cases\n\n### 1. The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)\n\nThe murder of Colonel Protheroe\u2014shot through the head\u2014is a shock to everyone in St. Mary Mead, though hardly an unpleasant one. Now even the vicar, who had declared that killing the detested Protheroe would be 'doing the world at large a favour,' is a suspect\u2014the Colonel has been dispatched in the clergyman's study, no less. But tiny St. Mary Mead is overpopulated with suspects. There is of course the faithless Mrs Protheroe; and there is of course her young lover\u2014an artist, to boot. Perhaps more surprising than the revelation of the murderer is the detective who will crack the case: 'a whitehaired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner.' Miss Jane Marple has arrived on the scene, and crime literature's private men's club of great detectives will never be the same.\n\n  * Saturday Review of Literature: 'When she really hits her stride, as she does here, Agatha Christie is hard to surpass.'\n\n### 2. The Thirteen Problems (1932)\n\nOver six Tuesday evenings a group gathers at Miss Marple's house to ponder unsolved crimes. The company is inclined to forget their elderly hostess as they become mesmerized by the sinister tales they tell one another. But it is always Miss Marple's quiet genius that names the criminal or the means of the misdeed. As indeed is true in subsequent gatherings at the country home of Colonel and Mrs Bantry, where another set of terrible wrongs is related by the assembled guests\u2014and righted, by Miss Marple.\n\nThe stories: 'The Tuesday Night Club'; 'The Idol House of Astarte'; 'Ingots of Gold'; 'The Bloodstained Pavement'; 'Motive v Opportunity'; 'The Thumb Mark of St Peter'; 'The Blue Geranium'; 'The Companion'; 'The Four Suspects'; 'A Christmas Tragedy'; 'The Herb of Death'; 'The Affair at the Bungalow'; 'Death by Drowning.'\n\n  * Daily Mirror: 'The plots are so good that one marvels...Most of them would have made a full-length thriller.'\n\n### 3. The Body in the Library (1942)\n\nThe very-respectable Colonel and Mrs Bantry have awakened to discover the body of a young woman in their library. She is wearing evening dress and heavy make-up, which is now smeared across her cold cheeks. But who is she? How did she get there? And what is her connection with another dead girl, whose charred remains are later discovered in an abandoned quarry? The Bantrys turn to Miss Marple to solve the mystery.\n\nOf note: Many of the residents of St. Mary Mead, who appeared in the first full-length Miss Marple mystery twelve years earlier, The Murder at the Vicarage, return in The Body in the Library. Mrs Christie wrote Body simultaneously with the Tommy and Tuppence Beresford spy thriller N or M?, alternating between the two novels to keep herself, as she put it, 'fresh at task.'\n\n  * The Times Literary Supplement wrote of this second Marple novel: 'It is hard not to be impressed.'\n\n### 4. The Moving Finger (1943)\n\nLymstock is a town with more than its share of shameful secrets\u2014a town where even a sudden outbreak of anonymous hate-mail causes only a minor stir. But all of that changes when one of the recipients, Mrs Symmington, appears to have been driven to suicide. 'I can't go on,' her final note reads. Only Miss Marple questions the coroner's verdict. Was this the work of a poison pen? Or of a poisoner?\n\nOf note: The Moving Finger was a favourite of its author. From An Autobiography (1977): 'I find that...I am really pleased with...The Moving Finger. It is a great test to reread what one has written some seventeen or eighteen years before. One's view changes. Some do not stand the test of time, others do.'\n\n  * The Times: 'Beyond all doubt the puzzle in The Moving Finger is fit for the experts.'\n\n### 5. A Murder Is Announced (1950)\n\nThe invitation spelled it out quite clearly: 'A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, October 29th, at Little Paddocks, at 6:30 p.m.' Everyone in town expected a simple party game\u2014a secret 'murderer' is chosen, the lights go out, the 'victim' falls, and the players guess 'whodunit.' Amusing, indeed\u2014until a real corpse is discovered. A game as murderous as this requires the most brilliant player of all: Jane Marple.\n\n  * Robert Barnard: 'As good as Agatha Christie ever wrote.'\n  * A.A. Milne: 'Establishes firmly her claim to the throne of detection. The plot is as ingenious as ever...the dialogue both wise and witty; while the suspense is maintained very skillfully...'\n  * The New York Times Book Review: 'A super-smooth Christie...neat murders in an English village...an assortment of her famous red herrings, all beautifully marinated.'\n\n### 6. They Do It with Mirrors (1952)\n\nA sense of danger pervades the rambling Victorian mansion in which Jane Marple's friend Carrie Louise lives\u2014and not only because the building doubles as a rehabilitation centre for criminal youths. One inmate attempts, and fails, to shoot dead the administrator. But simultaneously, in another part of the building, a mysterious visitor is less lucky. Miss Marple must employ all her cunning to solve the riddle of the stranger's visit, and his murder\u2014while protecting her friend from a similarly dreadful fate.\n\n  * Guardian: 'Brilliant.'\n  * The New York Times: 'No one on either side of the Atlantic does it better.'\n\n### 7. A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)\n\nRex Fortescue, king of a financial empire, was sipping tea in his 'counting house' when he suffered an agonising and sudden death. The only clue to his murder: 'loose grain' found in his pocket. The murder seems without rhyme or reason\u2014until shrewd Jane Marple recalls that delightful nursery rhyme, 'Sing a Song of Sixpence.' A playful hint indeed for a murder that is anything but child's play.\n\n  * Times Literary Supplement: 'Ingenious.' \n  * The New York Times: 'The best of the novels starring Miss Marple.'\n\n### 8. 4.50 from Paddington (1957)\n\nFor an instant the two trains ran side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth McGillicuddy stared helplessly out of her carriage window as a man tightened his grip around a woman's throat. The body crumpled. Then the other train drew away. But who, apart from Mrs McGillicuddy's friend Jane Marple, would take her story seriously? After all, there are no other witnesses, no suspects, and no case\u2014for there is no corpse, and no one is missing. Miss Marple asks her highly efficient and intelligent young friend Lucy Eyelesbarrow to infiltrate the Crackenthorpe family, who seem to be at the heart of the mystery, and help unmask a murderer.\n\nOf note: The introduction of Lucy Eyelesbarrow as a side-kick to Miss Marple was lauded by the critics, but her work with the older detective was limited to this novel.\n\n### 9. The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side (1962)\n\nThe quaint village of St. Mary Mead has been glamourized by the presence of screen queen Marina Gregg, who has taken up residence in preparation for her comeback. But when a local fan is poisoned, Marina finds herself starring in a real-life mystery\u2014supported with scene-stealing aplomb by Jane Marple, who suspects that the lethal cocktail was intended for someone else. But who? If it was meant for Marina, then why? And before the final fade-out, who else from St. Mary Mead's cast of seemingly innocent characters is going to be eliminated?\n\n  * Times Literary Supplement: 'The pieces...drop into place with a satisfying click. Agatha Christie deserves her fame.'\n\n### 10. A Caribbean Mystery (1964)\n\nAs Jane Marple sat basking in the tropical sunshine she felt mildly discontented with life. True, the warmth eased her rheumatism, but here in paradise nothing ever happened. Then a question was put to her by a stranger: 'Would you like to see a picture of a murderer?' Before she has a chance to answer, the man vanishes, only to be found dead the next day. The mysteries abound: Where is the picture? Why is the hotelier prone to nightmares? Why doesn't the most talked-about guest, a reclusive millionaire, ever leave his room? And why is Miss Marple herself fearful for her life?\n\nOf note: A Caribbean Mystery introduces the wealthy (and difficult) Mr Jason Rafiel, who will call upon Miss Marple for help in Nemesis (1971)\u2014after his death.\n\n  * Observer: 'Liveliness...infectious zest...as good as anything Mrs Christie has done.'\n  * The New York Times: 'Throws off the false clues and misleading events as only a master of the art can do.'\n\n### 11. At Bertram's Hotel (1965)\n\nWhen Jane Marple comes up from the country for a holiday in London, she finds what she's looking for at Bertram's: a restored London hotel with traditional decor, impeccable service\u2014and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly polished veneer. Yet not even Miss Marple can foresee the violent chain of events set in motion when an eccentric guest makes his way to the airport on the wrong day...\n\nOf note: Bertram's was inspired by Brown's Hotel in London, where the author was a frequent visitor.\n\n  * Saturday Review of Literature: 'One of the author's very best productions, with splendid pace, bright lines.'\n  * The New York Times: 'A joy to read from beginning to end, especially in its acute sensitivity to the contrasts between this era and that of Miss Marple's youth.'\n  * The New Yorker: 'Mrs Christie's pearly talent for dealing with all the words and pomps that go with murder English-style shimmers steadily in this tale of the noisy woe that shatters the extremely expensive peace of Bertram's famously old-fashioned hotel.'\n\n### 12. Nemesis (1971)\n\nEven the unflappable Miss Marple is astounded as she reads the letter addressed to her on instructions from the recently deceased tycoon Mr Jason Rafiel, whom she had met on holiday in the West Indies (A Caribbean Mystery). Recognising in her a natural flair for justice and a genius for crime-solving, Mr Rafiel has bequeathed to Miss Marple a \u00a320,000 legacy\u2014and a legacy of an entirely different sort. For he has asked Miss Marple to investigate...his own murder. The only problem is, Mr Rafiel has failed to name a suspect or suspects. And, whoever they are, they will certainly be determined to thwart Miss Marple's inquiries\u2014no matter what it will take to stop her.\n\nOf note: Nemesis is the last Jane Marple mystery that Agatha Christie wrote\u2014though not the last Marple published.\n\n  * Best Sellers: 'The old charm is still there and a good deal of the old magic in plotting, too.'\n  * Times Literary Supplement: 'Miss Marple is an old lady now, knowing that a scent for evil is still, in the evening of her days, her peculiar gift.'\n\n### 13. Sleeping Murder (1976)\n\nSoon after Gwenda Reed moves into her new home, odd things start to happen. Despite her best efforts to modernise the house, she only succeeds in dredging up its past. Worse, she feels an irrational sense of terror every time she climbs the stairs...In fear, Gwenda turns to Jane Marple to exorcise her ghosts. Between them, they are to solve a 'perfect' crime committed many years before...\n\nOf note: Agatha Christie wrote Sleeping Murder during World War II and had it placed in a bank vault for over thirty years.\n\n  * Chicago Tribune: 'Agatha Christie saved the best for last.'\n  * Sunday Express: 'A puzzle that is tortuous, surprising, and...satisfying.'\n\n### 14. Miss Marple's Final Cases (1979)\n\nDespite the title, the stories collected here recount cases from the middle of Miss. Marple's career. They are: 'Sanctuary'; 'Strange Jest'; 'Tape-Measure Murder'; 'The Case of the Caretaker'; 'The Case of the Perfect Maid'; 'Miss Marple Tells a Story'; 'The Dressmaker's Doll'; 'In a Glass Darkly'; 'Greenshaw's Folly.'\n\n  * The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts): 'When it all becomes clear as day, the reader can only say, \"Now why didn't I think of that?\" But he never does. Mrs Christie at her best.'\n\n## Charles Osborne on The Thirteen Problems\n\n### Alternative Title: The Tuesday Club Murders\n\n### Miss Marple (1932)\n\nHaving successfully introduced her amateur detective, Miss Jane Marple, in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Agatha Christie wrote for a magazine a series of six short stories featuring Miss Marple. In the first story, 'The Tuesday Night Club', the old lady is entertaining a group of friends at her house in the village of St Mary Mead. Her guests are her nephew Raymond West, the novelist, and his fianc\u00e9, an artist named Joyce Lempri\u00e8re; Dr Pender, the elderly clergyman of the parish (what, one wonders, has happened to the Rev. Leonard Clement, the vicar in The Murder at the Vicarage?); Mr Petherick, a local solicitor; and a visitor to St Mary Mead, Sir Henry Clithering, who is a retired Commissioner of Scotland Yard.\n\nThe talk turns to crime, and Joyce Lempri\u00e8re suggests that they form a club, to meet every Tuesday evening. Each week, a different member of the group will propound a problem, some mystery or other of which they have personal knowledge, which the others will be invited to solve. In the first story, Sir Henry is invited to start the ball rolling. Of course, Miss Marple is the one to arrive at the correct solution every time, not because she possesses any brilliant deductive powers but because, as she puts it, 'human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at closer quarters in a village'.\n\nIn a second series of six stories, Mrs Christie repeated the formula, the setting this time being the country house of Colonel and Mrs Bantry, near St Mary Mead, and the assembled company including Sir Henry again, the local doctor, a famous actress and, of course, Miss Marple. A separate, single story, in which Sir Henry visits St Mary Mead yet again, to stay with his friends the Bantrys, and finds himself drawn by Miss Marple into the investigation of a local crime, was added to the earlier twelve, and the collection, dedicated to Leonard and Katherine Woolley, with whom Agatha Christie had stayed in the Middle East, was published in Great Britain as The Thirteen Problems and in the United States as The Tuesday Club Murders, though only the first six cases appear to have been discussed at meetings of the Tuesday Club.\n\nSome of the stories are especially ingenious, and all are entertaining, though if more than one or two are read at one sitting they can become monotonous, for they are all very sedentary stories whose action is recounted in retrospect. Miss Marple solves most of the mysteries without rising from her chair, and almost without dropping a stitch in her knitting. The exception is the final story, 'Death by Drowning', which is also one of the few occasions when Agatha Christie strayed into workingclass territory. Usually, it is only the crimes of the middle and upperclasses which commend themselves to her investigators.\n\nFor all her old-world charm, and the twinkle which is never far from her china-blue eyes, Miss Marple can be stern in her opinions. Talking of a murderer whom she had brought to justice and who had been hanged, she remarks that it was a good job and that she had no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment. Miss Marple is speaking not only for herself but also for her creator, for many years later Mrs Christie was to write:\n\nI can suspend judgment on those who kill\u2014but I think they are evil for the community; they bring in nothing except hate, and take from it all they can. I am willing to believe that they are made that way, that they are born with a disability, for which, perhaps, one should pity them; but even then, I think, not spare them\u2014because you cannot spare them any more than you could spare the man who staggers out from a plague-stricken village in the Middle Ages to mix with innocent and healthy children in a nearby village. The innocent must be protected; they must be able to live at peace and charity with their neighbours.\n\nIt frightens me that nobody seems to care about the innocent. When you read about a murder case, nobody seems to be horrified by the picture, say, of a fragile old woman in a small cigarette shop, turning away to get a packet of cigarettes for a young thug, and being attacked and battered to death. No one seems to care about her terror and her pain, and the final merciful unconsciousness. Nobody seems to go through the agony of the victim\u2014they are only full of pity for the young killer, because of his youth.\n\nWhy should they not execute him? We have taken the lives of wolves, in this country; we didn't try to teach the wolf to lie down with the lamb\u2014I doubt really if we could have. We hunted down the wild boar in the mountains before he came down and killed the children by the brook. Those were our enemies\u2014and we destroyed them.*\n\nImprisonment for life, Mrs Christie goes on to say, is more cruel than the cup of hemlock in ancient Greece. The best answer ever found, she suspects, was transportation: 'A vast land of emptiness, peopled only with primitive human beings, where man could live in simpler surroundings.' Well, yes, but of course the price one pays for that is the Australia of today!\n\nFive minor points about The Thirteen Problems, two concerned with Christie carelessness and three with Christie parsimony: (i) in one of the stories, 'phenomena' is used as though it were a singular, and not the plural of 'phenomenon'; (ii) in The Thirteen Problems, Raymond West's fianc\u00e9e is called Joyce but, in later Christie stories, after they are married, she is always referred to as Joan; (iii) variations on the plot of one of the stories, 'The BloodStained Pavement', will be presented in the story 'Triangle at Rhodes' in Murder in the Mews (1937) and in the novel, Evil Under the Sun (1941); (iv) the plot of another story, 'The Companion', will be made use of again in the novel, A Murder is Announced (1950); (v) an element in the plot of 'The Herb of Death' will re-occur in Postern of Fate (1973).\n\nAgatha Christie always considered that Miss Marple was at her best in the solving of short problems, which did not involve her in doing anything other than sitting and thinking, and that the real essence of her character was to be found in the stories collected together in The Thirteen Problems.\n\n### About Charles Osborne\n\nThis essay was adapted from Charles Osborne's The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among them The Complete Operas of Verdi (1969); Wagner and His World (1977); and W.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world's leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie plays Black Coffee (Poirot); Spider's Web; and The Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.\n\n*Agatha Christie: op. cit.\n\n## About Agatha Christie\n\nAgatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.\n\nAgatha Christie's first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.\n\nIn 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first of Agatha Christie's works to be dramatised\u2014as Alibi\u2014and to have a successful run in London's West End. The Mousetrap, her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin's Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history.\n\nAgatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of her books have been published: the bestselling novel Sleeping Murder appeared in 1976, followed by An Autobiography and the short story collections Miss Marple's Final Cases; Problem at Pollensa Bay; and While the Light Lasts. In 1998, Black Coffee was the first of her plays to be novelised by Charles Osborne, Mrs Christie's biographer.\n\n## The Agatha Christie Collection\n\n### Christie Crime Classics\n\nThe Man in the Brown Suit\n\nThe Secret of Chimneys\n\nThe Seven Dials Mystery\n\nThe Mysterious Mr Quin\n\nThe Sittaford Mystery\n\nThe Hound of Death\n\nThe Listerdale Mystery\n\nWhy Didn't They Ask Evans?\n\nParker Pyne Investigates\n\nMurder Is Easy\n\nAnd Then There Were None\n\nTowards Zero\n\nDeath Comes as the End\n\nSparkling Cyanide\n\nCrooked House\n\nThey Came to Baghdad\n\nDestination Unknown\n\nSpider's Web *\n\nThe Unexpected Guest *\n\nOrdeal by Innocence\n\nThe Pale Horse\n\nEndless Night\n\nPassenger To Frankfurt\n\nProblem at Pollensa Bay\n\nWhile the Light Lasts\n\n### Hercule Poirot Investigates\n\nThe Mysterious Affair at Styles\n\nThe Murder on the Links\n\nPoirot Investigates\n\nThe Murder of Roger Ackroyd\n\nThe Big Four\n\nThe Mystery of the Blue Train\n\nBlack Coffee *\n\nPeril at End House\n\nLord Edgware Dies\n\nMurder on the Orient Express\n\nThree-Act Tragedy\n\nDeath in the Clouds\n\nThe ABC Murders\n\nMurder in Mesopotamia\n\nCards on the Table\n\nMurder in the Mews\n\nDumb Witness\n\nDeath on the Nile\n\nAppointment with Death\n\nHercule Poirot's Christmas\n\nSad Cypress\n\nOne, Two, Buckle My Shoe\n\nEvil Under the Sun\n\nFive Little Pigs\n\nThe Hollow\n\nThe Labours of Hercules\n\nTaken at the Flood\n\nMrs McGinty's Dead\n\nAfter the Funeral\n\nHickory Dickory Dock\n\nDead Man's Folly\n\nCat Among the Pigeons\n\nThe Adventure of the Christmas Pudding\n\nThe Clocks\n\nThird Girl\n\nHallowe'en Party\n\nElephants Can Remember\n\nPoirot's Early Cases\n\nCurtain: Poirot's Last Case\n\n### Miss Marple Mysteries\n\nThe Murder at the Vicarage\n\nThe Thirteen Problems\n\nThe Body in the Library\n\nThe Moving Finger\n\nA Murder Is Announced\n\nThey Do It with Mirrors\n\nA Pocket Full of Rye\n\n4.50 from Paddington\n\nThe Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side\n\nA Caribbean Mystery\n\nAt Bertram's Hotel\n\nNemesis\n\nSleeping Murder\n\nMiss Marple's Final Cases\n\n### Tommy & Tuppence\n\nThe Secret Adversary\n\nPartners in Crime\n\nNor M?\n\nBy the Pricking of My Thumbs\n\nPostern of Fate\n\n### Published as Mary Westmacott\n\nGiant's Bread\n\nUnfinished Portrait\n\nAbsent in the Spring\n\nThe Rose and the Yew Tree\n\nA Daughter's a Daughter\n\nThe Burden\n\n### Memoirs\n\nAn Autobiography\n\nCome, Tell Me How You Live\n\n### Play Collections\n\nThe Mousetrap and Selected Plays\n\nWitness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays\n\n* novelised by Charles Osborne\n\n## www.agathachristie.com\n\nFor more information about Agatha Christie, please visit the official website.\nTHE THIRTEEN PROBLEMS by Agatha Christie\n\nCopyright \u00a9 1932 Agatha Christie Limited (a Chorion company)\n\n\"Essay by Charles Osborne\" excerpted from The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie. Copyright \u00a9 1982, 1999 by Charles Osborne. Reprinted with permission.\n\nAll rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.\n\nePub edition edition published June 2004 ISBN 9780061753916\n\nThis e-book was set from the Agatha Christie Signature Edition published 2002 by HarperCollins Publishers, London.\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2\n\nFirst published in Great Britain by Collins 1932\n\n## About the Publisher\n\nAustralia\n\nHarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.\n\n25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)\n\nPymble, NSW 2073, Australia\n\nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au\n\nCanada\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Ltd.\n\n55 Avenue Road, Suite 2900\n\nToronto, ON, M5R, 3L2, Canada\n\nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.ca\n\nNew Zealand\n\nHarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited\n\nP.O. Box 1\n\nAuckland, New Zealand\n\nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz\n\nUnited Kingdom\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Ltd.\n\n77-85 Fulham Palace Road\n\nLondon, W6 8JB, UK\n\nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk\n\nUnited States\n\nHarperCollins Publishers Inc.\n\n10 East 53rd Street\n\nNew York, NY 10022\n\nhttp:\/\/www.harpercollinsebooks.com\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n# More Praise for\n\n## _On Edge_\n\n\"This remarkable and beautifully written description of Andrea Petersen's lifelong journey with anxiety combines an account of her personal experience with a description of up-to-the-minute research describing what we know about anxiety and its treatment. Everyone dealing with anxiety\u2014the common cold of mental disorders\u2014will benefit from the important information in this entertaining and erudite reflection on coping with the burden of anxiety.\"\n\n\u2014David H. Barlow, professor of psychology and psychiatry emeritus, Boston University, and founder and director emeritus, Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders\n\n\"This story of resilience in the face of enormous challenge powerfully illustrates Andrea Petersen's pathway to recovery from mental illness. Eminently readable and at times controversial, Andrea's story is a beacon in the darkness for those living with anxiety disorders in silence. Stories like hers, shared openly, can change lives by reducing the stigma and discrimination that still surrounds mental illness.\"\n\n\u2014Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, cofounder, The Carter Center\n\n\"Andrea Petersen raises the bar for anyone attempting to explain the complex science of the anxious brain. I was fascinated by the candid, painful, often humorous account of her own struggle and her quest for the best information about anxiety.\"\n\n\u2014Karen Cassiday, president, Anxiety and Depression Association of America\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2017 by Andrea Petersen\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\nPublished in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.\n\ncrownpublishing.com\n\nCROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nNames: Petersen, Andrea.\n\nTitle: On edge : a journey through anxiety \/ Andrea Petersen.\n\nDescription: First edition. | New York : Crown, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.\n\nIdentifiers: LCCN 2016050111 (print) | LCCN 2016059341 (ebook) | ISBN 9780553418576 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780553418590 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780553418583 (ebook)\n\nSubjects: LCSH: Petersen, Andrea\u2014Mental health. | Anxiety disorders\u2014Treatment. | Anxiety\u2014Patients\u2014Biography.\n\nClassification: LCC RC531 .P4227 2017 (print) | LCC RC531 (ebook) | DDC 616.85\/22\u2014dc23\n\nLC record available at https:\/\/lccn.loc.gov\/\u200b2016050111\n\nISBN 9780553418576\n\nEbook ISBN 9780553418583\n\n_Cover design by Na Kim_\n\nv4.1\n\nep\n\n# Contents\n\nCover\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright\n\nDedication\n\nAuthor's Note\n\nPrologue\n\n[Chapter 1: The Anticipation of Pain  \n _Defining Anxiety_](Pete_9780553418583_epub3_c002_r1.xhtml)\n\n[Chapter 2: Scary Clowns and the End of Days  \n _Anxiety in Childhood_](Pete_9780553418583_epub3_c003_r1.xhtml)\n\n[Chapter 3: My Grandmother's Madness  \n _The Genetics of Anxiety_](Pete_9780553418583_epub3_c004_r1.xhtml)\n\n[Chapter 4: From CBT to Karaoke  \n _Nondrug Therapies for Anxiety_](Pete_9780553418583_epub3_c005_r1.xhtml)\n\n[Chapter 5: May Cause Dizziness  \n _Medications for Anxiety_](Pete_9780553418583_epub3_c006_r1.xhtml)\n\n[Chapter 6: Cold Calls, Airplanes, and Indecision  \n _Anxiety at Work and on the Road_](Pete_9780553418583_epub3_c007_r1.xhtml)\n\n[Chapter 7: The Isolation Chamber  \n _Anxiety in Love and Friendship_](Pete_9780553418583_epub3_c008_r1.xhtml)\n\n[Chapter 8: Worries About My Daughter  \n _The Education of an Anxious Parent_](Pete_9780553418583_epub3_c009_r1.xhtml)\n\n[Chapter 9: Staying Grounded  \n _Learning to Live with Anxiety_](Pete_9780553418583_epub3_c010_r1.xhtml)\n\nNotes\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nAbout the Author\nFor my parents\n\nThis is a work of nonfiction. Although Kate, Scott, Brad, Alice, and Michael are pseudonyms, all others who appear in the book are identified by their real names, and none are composites. I have made every effort to be accurate, but memory is fallible and some of the events I and others recall here happened decades ago. Whenever possible, I have corroborated events through medical records and interviews with people who were there.\n\nFear ambushes me.\n\nIt is early on the morning of December 5, 1989. At least early for a college student, which is what I am. A sophomore at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a bucolic campus of creaky A-frame houses, earnest politics, fraternity sweatshirts, and dollar pitchers of beer.\n\nI am in the basement of a 1940s academic building staring at a wall covered in long sheets of dot-matrix printer paper detailing which classes have slots for the upcoming semester: Economics 101, Introduction to Buddhism, a Jane Austen seminar. Other sleepy students, jeans-clad and tousle-headed, are scribbling in notebooks nearby.\n\nI feel fine. Groggy from a late night of studying, yes. Touched by a bit of that midwestern late-fall dread, anticipating another long winter of fierce winds and sleeping-bag-shaped coats. But I'm fine.\n\nAnd then, a second later, I'm not.\n\nA knot of fear erupts at the base of my spine and travels upward. My stomach flips, and I break out in a thin film of sweat. My heart rate shoots up\u2014I feel the erratic _thump thump_ banging against my ears, my stomach, my eyes. My breathing turns shallow and fast. Fuzzy gray blotches appear before my eyes. The letters before me warp, words dip and buckle.\n\nThere is no warning, no prodrome. The onset is as sudden as a car crash. Something in my body or brain has gone dramatically and irrevocably wrong. My noisy internal monologue\u2014usually flitting from school to boys to a laundry list of insecurities\u2014coalesces around one certain refrain: _I'm dying. I'm dying. I'm dying._\n\nI flee the building and somehow make it home, crawling into my bottom bunk in the room I share with two other girls. I hug my knees into my chest and huddle against the cinder-block wall\u2014my breathing still shallow, my heart still racing, the hot terror still there. Remarkably, it seems, I am alive. Any relief that gives me, however, is short-lived: _If I'm not dying, I must be going crazy._\n\nCrazy like my grandmother.\n\nLike the woman who clutched knives and thought Catholics were trying to kill her. Like the woman who spent three years in a mental institution, had electroshock therapy, and tried to burn the house down with my nine-year-old father and his brother and sister in it. Like the woman who died in my grandfather's arms when I was two years old. She had suffered a heart attack but was too terrified to go with paramedics to the hospital.\n\nCrazy like that.\n\nI lie still. Perhaps if I cease all movement, even the tiniest shudder, become frozen, waxlike, I can quiet the torment. My insides feel noisy, in flux. Everything is revved up\u2014as if the blood in my veins were running faster and the synapses in my brain were firing, or misfiring, at warp speed. I can feel the loud, frantic presence of every organ\u2014liver, intestines, spleen. The cells in my body are vibrating, it seems, knocking awkwardly against one another. If I move at all, I will shatter, scattering bits of blood and bone all across the salmon-hued sorority house. I am sure of that.\n\nLater that afternoon my boyfriend drives me to my parents' house, all windows and suburban beige, about ninety minutes away. Over the next five weeks, I barely move from the living room sofa. I spend the days with my fingers pressed against my neck, feeling my pulse, counting the beats, reassuring myself at any given second that I'm alive. I keep still, trying to will my frenzied molecules to quiet. At night I have vivid, violent dreams. I develop weird new symptoms: tingling in my face and feet, chest pain, constant vertigo. The world is flat and out of focus, as if I'm wearing someone else's glasses. My thoughts careen toward heart attacks, stroke, insanity.\n\nI see a doctor. He listens to my story of how I've been transformed from a slightly silly sorority girl to a terrorized shut-in in just a few weeks' time. He examines me, takes blood, does an EKG, and orders an echocardiogram, which details the chambers of my heart. His diagnosis: mitral valve prolapse, an anomaly of the heart that can cause palpitations but is generally benign. He prescribes a beta blocker, which he says will stop my heart from racing.\n\nExcept that it doesn't.\n\nThis doctor is only the first of more than a dozen I will see over the next year. During that time, I will have several more EKGs, countless blood tests, another echocardiogram, a CAT scan and an MRI of my brain, and an EEG to check my brain's electrical activity. I will take multiple trips to the emergency room, each time leaving without a diagnosis. This medical odyssey will cost my parents thousands of dollars. Doctors will suspect multiple sclerosis, a brain tumor, Epstein-Barr virus, and chronic fatigue syndrome. I will be told that I am fine. One doctor will fire me. I will drop most of my classes and barely leave my room. I will peer over the banister of a rooftop parking garage and think of jumping. I will go to a psychiatric emergency room and be sent home. I will have six sessions of psychotherapy, in which I'm asked whether I'm angry with my father. I'll largely stop eating.\n\nAnd still no one will know what is wrong with me.\n\nFast-forward to the beginning of the next school year. I am sitting in a psychiatrist's office at the campus health center, telling the doctor that I won't\u2014I can't\u2014leave until she does something. She says she can prescribe Prozac, an antidepressant, or she can refer me to the anxiety disorders program at the University of Michigan hospital.\n\n_Anxiety disorder_. It is the first time anyone has spoken the words.\n\nEleven different anxiety disorders are listed in the fifth edition of the _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders_ , commonly referred to as the diagnostic bible. I had symptoms of four. I was having panic attacks\u2014sudden, intense periods of blinding terror, rapid breathing, and chest pain\u2014several times a day (diagnosis: panic disorder). The rest of the time I worried, living with the nervous expectation of imminent disaster (diagnosis: generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD). I had developed a long list of particular fears, too: dentists, flying, driving on highways, taking medication, touching dirt, using a new tube of toothpaste, and licking envelopes. I did my best to avoid them all (diagnosis: specific phobia). My world was becoming smaller and smaller as more places became no-go zones: movie theaters, stadiums, lines. The potential for panic attacks\u2014and the difficulty of escape\u2014was too great (diagnosis: agoraphobia).\n\nI had symptoms of a couple of cousin disorders, too. A twisted perfectionism turned the smallest decision into a colossal obstacle; I felt a sense of sinister foreboding if I didn't choose the \"right\" dress to wear, the \"right\" water glass (diagnosis: obsessive-compulsive disorder). I agonized over every odd sensation or twinge of physical pain. A headache was clearly an aneurysm; a bruise, leukemia (diagnosis: illness anxiety disorder, previously called hypochondriasis).\n\nThe estimated number of people who will have at least one anxiety disorder during the course of their lives is staggering: one in three Americans ages thirteen or older. If we look only at women, the number is even higher\u2014about 40 percent. In any given year, about 40 million American adults have an anxiety disorder. And those numbers do not include the millions of garden-variety worriers and insomniacs whose anxiety, though not debilitating, leaches joy and steals peace of mind.\n\nA certain amount of anxiety is good. It motivates us to study for tests, prepare for presentations, and save for retirement. It spurs us to get a physical or check the gas gauge. Too much anxiety, however, can be incapacitating and costly. In a 1999 study, the most recent estimate available, anxiety disorders cost the United States about $63 billion a year, more than half of it attributed to doctor and hospital visits. Other costs included psychiatric treatment, prescription drugs, and the value of lost productivity at work. There's also mounting evidence that out-of-control anxiety wreaks havoc on the body, increasing the risk of heart disease and weakening the immune system. Ironically, being a hypochondriac may actually make you sick.\n\nIt is tempting to think of our era\u2014with its wars, terrorist attacks, rising sea levels, and economic insecurity\u2014as, to borrow the poet W. H. Auden's phrase, \"the age of anxiety.\" But cultural commentators throughout history have viewed their own times as equally fraught. In the 1880s, the telegraph, the steam engine, and even women's intellectual pursuits were blamed for the nation's unease. In the 1950s, it was the atomic bomb. Our world, it seems, always provides ample fodder for fear.\n\nWhat is disconcerting is that rates of anxiety disorders\u2014and depression\u2014seem to be increasing among young people, particularly college students. According to a spring 2016 survey by the American College Health Association, 17 percent of students were diagnosed with or treated for anxiety problems during the previous year, and nearly 14 percent were diagnosed with or treated for depression. That is up from about 10 percent each for anxiety and depression in the fall 2008 survey. Parents and professionals are perplexed. While some of the rise may be because of increased prevalence, it could also be that more people are comfortable asking for help and admitting their troubles to researchers.\n\nDepression may get most of the headlines and the research dollars, but anxiety is more prevalent. In people with a history of both an anxiety and a mood disorder, anxiety usually makes an appearance first. Anxiety disorders strike young, too: They have a median age of onset of fifteen, compared with twenty-six for mood disorders. And while anxiety disorders are pretty miserable in and of themselves, they are increasingly being thought of as gateway illnesses that can lead to a host of other problems, such as depression, substance use, and even suicide.\n\nIn fact, anxiety can be deadly. Depression is the mental illness most strongly associated with suicidal thoughts, but it doesn't often lead to suicidal acts. Recent research has found that it is anxiety disorders and other illnesses, like problems with impulse control and addiction, that are more likely to lead to suicide attempts.\n\nIn most cases, the consequences aren't fatal. Still, anxiety disorders can derail lives. Someone who develops an anxiety disorder at a young age is less likely to attend college. Anxious people who work have lower incomes. They are less likely to marry and, if they do, more likely to divorce. Anxious women face a greater risk of getting into unhealthy relationships and being the victim of domestic abuse.\n\nThat, thankfully, is not my story. If you met me now, you probably wouldn't even notice my anxiety. (When I began telling acquaintances the topic of this book, they almost uniformly said, \"I would never have guessed you're anxious.\") I have a career I love, as a reporter writing stories for the _Wall Street Journal_. I'm happily married, with an adorable seven-year-old daughter. I have friends, laugh a lot, go to parties, and bake pies. My affliction is often invisible.\n\nI have had many advantages. I grew up in a loving home, lived in safe neighborhoods, and went to good schools. I have almost always had health insurance and the ability to pay for therapy and medication. While these privileges didn't prevent me from falling apart, I know they were critical in putting me back together.\n\nBut it has been a struggle. In tough years, I take medication and cycle through new therapies. In easy years, I still have to be diligent: Sleep eight hours. Do yoga. Take it easy on the wine. Pare down my responsibilities. And still I grapple with worry-induced insomnia. I tend to procrastinate, terrified of making the wrong choices. I have odd, unexplained physical symptoms\u2014a tingling arm, chest pain. I can't drive on highways. Anxiety affects how I work, how I love, and how I parent.\n\nSo what is anxiety?\n\nThe _DSM_ calls it \"anticipation of future threat.\" S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher, called it \"the dizziness of freedom.\" But the most cogent definition I've heard comes from Christian Grillon, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). \"Anxiety is the anticipation of pain,\" he told me. \"It could be physical pain or emotional pain.\"\n\nAnxiety is related to fear but is distinct. Whereas fear is concrete and imminent, anxiety is, as Grillon says, \"sustained uncertainty.\" It's a chronic sense of uneasiness about a vague future, a gnawing worry about what may or may not happen.\n\nAnxiety is universal, but the language we use to talk about it varies by culture, and so do its symptoms. The word _anxiety_ comes from the Latin _angere_ , which means \"to choke or throttle.\" In Cambodia, _khy\u00e2l_ (\"wind\") attacks involve neck pain, dizziness, and ringing in the ears. In Vietnam, _tr\u00fang gi\u00f3_ (\"wind-related\") attacks are characterized by headaches. In Latin America, _ataques de nervios_ (\"attacks of nerves\") can include uncontrollable screaming and crying.\n\nDiffering cultural perceptions of anxiety make it difficult to accurately compare rates of anxiety disorders in countries around the world. Yes, studies show that, in Japan, only about 4 percent of the population has an anxiety disorder in a given year, and that the French have a rate (13.7 percent) more than double that of the Spanish (6.6 percent). But these statistics are influenced by everything from how researchers define the word _worry_ to who responds to surveys. (You could argue that the most anxious people are the least likely to answer a stranger's probing questions.)\n\nAnxiety also exists on a continuum. There is no sharp boundary between mental health and mental illness, and no doubt other cultures draw the boundary differently than we do. When I asked Ron Kessler of Harvard Medical School, the country's leading mental health epidemiologist, why so many people have anxiety problems, he said it was because \"we have decided it is a disorder.\" Still, even if we have become alert to the idea that everyday anxieties can be symptoms of a disorder, a formal psychiatric diagnosis requires that the person suffer from \"clinically significant distress or impairment\" in functioning. No matter the symptoms or the name you give it, anxiety is a problem if it keeps you from living\u2014and enjoying\u2014your life the way you want to.\n\n\u2014\n\nI've tangled with severe anxiety for more than twenty-five years. Looking back, my troubles didn't actually begin that December day in college, though it wasn't until then that it spiraled out of control. I had been having strange \"spells\" for months. They started when I was living at home the summer after my freshman year. During the day, I was working as a receptionist at a company that made steel forgings, the kind of place where the women were called by their first names while the men were all Mister So-and-so. At night, I waitressed at an Irish bar in East Lansing, where I checked fake IDs, dodged the advances of horny Michigan State guys, and learned to perfect the head on a pint of Miller Light. Between jobs, I took step aerobics classes.\n\nOne night I was at the apartment of my boyfriend, Scott, a Michigan State student and Christopher Reeve doppelg\u00e4nger I had begun dating in high school. The evening's goal was, to paraphrase him, to get me high. I had tried smoking pot once or twice before but very tentatively. (I, seriously, tried not to inhale.) Frankly, I was afraid of it. I had been around enough of the stuff when I was a kid at my parents' and my friends' parents' parties, the blue sheen of bongs glinting off Pledge-buffed coffee tables. Pot always seemed to make people silly and stupid. But Scott, an enthusiastic stoner, had been touting its effects for month. I was in.\n\nWe started smoking a joint and waited.\n\nNothing.\n\n\"Take another hit,\" Scott said.\n\nI did. And when Scott took one, he grabbed me and kissed me, blowing smoke into my mouth.\n\nSeveral more minutes went by.\n\nThen it hit me.\n\nMy heart beat faster. My mouth went dry. I felt breathless. My equilibrium and vision contorted; it was as if I were on a roller coaster the moment before the big plummet. I lay down on Scott's bed, trying to take deep breaths and calm down. My legs felt like they were stretching, _Alice in Wonderland_ style. I looked down and could have sworn I saw my feet on the other side of the room.\n\nDesperate for distraction and wanting to feel grounded in some way, I reached for Scott and we started having sex. But I could barely feel him. My body was numb, deadened. I panicked.\n\n\"I can't breathe,\" I cried, sitting bolt upright.\n\n\"Sure you can,\" Scott said, taking my hand. \"Just relax.\"\n\n\"I can't. And my heart is beating so fast, too fast,\" I said. \"Something must have been in that pot. It must have been laced with something.\"\n\nI darted around the room, pacing and gulping air. \"Or maybe I'm having an allergic reaction. Something is really wrong. I think I need to go to a hospital.\" I threw on sandals, a T-shirt, and a pair of Scott's boxer shorts. He scrambled to get dressed, too. I was already turning the doorknob to leave. Scott grabbed his car keys and followed.\n\nAt the ER, the bright lights, shiny linoleum, and bureaucratic questions sobered me up fairly quickly. I was not the only college student whose visit was spurred by chemical overindulgence. One drunken kid threw up on the waiting room floor. Another sobbed incoherently. In the exam room, a technician hooked me up to a heart monitor. A few hours later I was told I could go. A doctor scribbled my discharge instructions: \"Avoid THC,\" he wrote of the active chemical in marijuana.\n\nI did that easily. That one episode was more effective than an entire adolescence of antidrug After School Specials. But the spells of breathlessness, racing heart, and, increasingly, fear, recurred every month or so. They seemed to come from nowhere. I had one while eating fried cheese sticks at Bennigan's. I had another in the middle of a women's studies class. I feigned a bathroom emergency and spent the rest of the class crouched in a ladies' room stall. The attacks subsided after twenty or thirty minutes but left me jelly-legged and shaky for hours.\n\nI don't remember thinking much about the episodes during the intervals between them. I brushed them off, telling no one but Scott and hoping they'd vanish as abruptly as they'd begun.\n\nAccording to the _DSM_ , a panic attack is \"an abrupt surge of intense fear or intense discomfort that reaches a peak within minutes.\" After that, it usually subsides. But when I landed on my parents' sofa that December, it felt as though I were having a monthlong panic attack. Sure, my fear had peaks and valleys, but it was always there. Soon I was nearly immobile, a pajama-clad heap with greasy hair, one hand checking my galloping pulse, the other on the TV remote control, switching from MTV videos to _Love Boat_ reruns and back again. I couldn't read. I wasn't actually watching the TV either. The noise was just a soundtrack for my fear.\n\nMy parents were bewildered and scared. My fourteen-year-old sister, Dana, would sometimes sit next to me, but mostly she tried to stay out of the way. \"Nobody really told me what was going on,\" she said recently. \"I just knew that you were sick and needed some time off from school to get better. Everybody was tiptoeing around. I felt like I should not be trouble because Mom and Dad were clearly worried about you.\"\n\nIt was only a few weeks before final exams, but I didn't make it back to school. I took incompletes in my classes and planned to take my tests after winter break, when, I hoped, I'd feel better.\n\nMy dad was alarmed to see me transform overnight from an energetic young adult into a listless lump. \"It scared the shit out of us,\" he recently recalled. \"The next thing you know you're rolled up in a fricking ball in bed.\"\n\nMy parents took me to a doctor. I was terrified that something was wrong with my heart. \"You thought it was going to explode,\" my dad says. I started having strange neurological symptoms, too. Once, when I'd gathered the courage to venture to the mall with my mother, my peripheral vision vanished next to an Orange Julius. I had vertigo, too. The floor would rise up and the walls would tilt at odd angles. But the only diagnosis I was given was a fluttery heart valve, the mitral valve prolapse.\n\nNights were increasingly difficult. I was exhausted but had a tough time falling asleep. When I did, I had terrifying nightmares that became increasingly gory. Sometimes I was being chased by an unknown assailant. I dreamed I was shot in the head. Other times my face was being torn apart by an electric drill. The violence had a Tarantino vividness, but without the humor and gloss. I'd wake up shaking, with tears running down my face.\n\nRules crumbled. My boyfriend started spending the night with me in my high school bed, an almost life-size poster of Morrissey and his pompadour looking over us. Nothing sexual happened. Scott was more of a nocturnal life raft. I'd clutch his arm, hoping the warmth of his healthy twenty-year-old body would somehow heal me.\n\nAfter a couple of weeks of infirmity, and with no real answers from the doctor, my parents began losing patience. It was right before Christmas, and we had plans to drive to the small southern Illinois town where my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and a mess of cousins lived, but I couldn't imagine moving from my sofa. I begged them to let me stay home. They refused. I said I wouldn't leave. They could go without me.\n\nI didn't win that fight. Instead, I ended up in the backseat of our blue Ford Thunderbird for the seven-hour drive to Salem, Illinois, a town of dried-up industry and oil wells, chain fast-food joints, and vast starlit skies. I don't recall much from that trip. Did I eat my grandmother's famous divinity\u2014white sugary blobs topped with a single half walnut? Did I make small talk with cousins? Could anyone tell how scared and screwed up I was? Terror has a way of blacking out the details.\n\nI do know that I took my pulse a lot, trying to will it back down to double-digit-per-minute territory. The vertigo and a growing exhaustion made it difficult for me to stay upright. I leaned against walls and car doors. And I soon found a spot on another sofa, this one in my grandparents' house, and spent most of the time quaking under the orange and brown afghan my grandmother had crocheted. I spoke little and smiled wanly at the parade of relatives.\n\nBack at home in Michigan, winter break was coming to an end. The new semester would be starting soon. The arguing with my parents intensified. I didn't see how I could go back to school. I was too fragile. I still didn't know what was wrong with me. I wanted to stay on that ridiculous beige-striped sofa (who knew there were so many shades of beige?) until I was better.\n\n\"You have to go back,\" my parents said, unified in their decision.\n\n\"This is tough love,\" said my father.\n\nI was furious with them. I felt tossed out. Abandoned.\n\n\"We were concerned that if you stayed in your bedroom much longer, you would never go back to school,\" my mom recalled recently.\n\n\"We wanted to get you off the couch. We wanted you to be normal,\" my dad said. \"Maybe it was a sink-or-swim move on our part.\"\n\nIt took me years to forgive them. Now, after all my research, I know that they did the right thing. If I had stayed on that sofa, I would probably never have risen from it. Avoiding experiences that make you anxious just reinforces your anxiety.\n\n\u2014\n\nI had to move rooms when I returned to school. I had been living with two other women, but now I would be living with three in a single room, a so-called quad. There were two sets of bunk beds, four dressers, four desks, a hodgepodge of sweatshirt-filled milk crates, and all the drama that four nineteen-year-old women can conjure.\n\nIt is awfully difficult to fall apart with no privacy, and I was almost never alone. The four of us lived in a stately, white-columned sorority house with close to a hundred other young women. We ate meals together, cooked by a surly, spice-averse man. We had weekly meetings where we'd debate which fraternities to party with and honor women who'd been \"lavaliered,\" given necklaces graced with the Greek letters of their boyfriends' fraternities, a \"going steady\" move that was only one step away from engagement. It was hard for me to feign the required gushing.\n\nI wasn't alone even in the shower. The house had communal bathrooms, and the shower was a three-person affair, a white-ceramic-tile-covered stall with three metal showerheads. Fear had stolen my appetite, and I had lost fifteen pounds over the previous month. I had started to become afraid of food itself, worrying about unknown allergies or food poisoning. In that shower, I felt so fragile and ashamed as I compared my skeletal nakedness to the spirited curves of my sorority sisters. I did my best to shower at off-peak times\u2014in the very early morning or during happy hour.\n\nTrying to hide my terror and appear \"normal\" was exhausting, so I came up with a cover story. I told my roommates and others I was recovering from mono, the quintessential college \"kissing\" disease. That was meant to explain why I skipped parties, stayed in bed a lot, and escaped to my parents' house on weekends. And to a certain extent, I faked it.\n\nIn pictures from that semester, I don't look haunted or timorous. In fact, apart from the awkwardly layered bangs, I look surprisingly okay. The extra-large men's sweatshirts that were in fashion then hide my skinniness. I pose perched on bunk beds and smile widely with my arms flung around other girls. Flipping through the photos, I'm reminded of something Ned Kalin, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin, told me, that patients with anxiety fascinated him because they often seemed so together, even when they were plagued by intense worry and fear.\n\nI had seemingly normal conversations with friends about boys they liked, about the fall of the Berlin Wall. I attended classes and did some schoolwork. (But only a minimal amount. I completed only two courses that semester.) Yet these efforts were undertaken, it seemed, by no more than a tiny sliver of my brain. The rest was stuffed with a litany of fears: my heart, my breathing, never being well again.\n\nI had always been a quick, voracious reader, but ever since my spell on the couch, I found that I read pages, then had no recollection of their contents. My eyes skipped around, missing entire paragraphs. I'd finish a passage feeling inadequate and confused.\n\nI still had to make up my final exams from the previous semester. I met with the dean in his office, and he explained the process of taking the exams, when and where they would happen. I nodded my head. After we had wrapped up, almost as an afterthought, he asked, \"So what do you have?\"\n\n\"Mitral valve prolapse,\" I said. It was the only diagnosis I had been given, and I didn't want to trot out my mono lie to an authority figure.\n\n\"Really? My wife has that,\" he said, clearly unimpressed.\n\n\"It makes my heart race,\" I mumbled weakly as I left, cheeks burning with shame.\n\nGetting through each day was becoming harder and harder. My heart raced, my fear spiked, and I had difficulty breathing (these were clearly panic attacks, though I still didn't know it at the time) when I stood in a line or went to a movie theater. So I stopped standing in line. Stopped going to see movies. Even more nonsensical things started to scare me, too. I became terrified of contamination, of dirt, of being infected by some ferocious bacterium. Using something new\u2014a bottle of shampoo, a toothbrush\u2014took major effort. (Perhaps it had been tampered with, my paranoia whispered.) I'd panic for a good hour or so afterward, waiting for some dire physical reaction. Choosing a plate or glass at dinner turned into a ten-minute struggle. I'd check carefully for dried food, lipstick marks, chips. Even if I found a pristine cup, it still might not \"feel right.\" Sometimes the easiest thing was not to drink or eat at all.\n\nNew fears cropped up everywhere. I licked an envelope, then recalled reading that LSD was sometimes delivered via paper. _Was there LSD on that envelope?_ I thought. I knew the thought was ridiculous, yet I couldn't shake it. (I haven't licked an envelope since. I heartily thank the inventor of self-sticking ones.) I didn't know it, but I had turned a corner in my anxiety disorder. No longer was anxiety merely rattling around my brain and body; I was now exhibiting multiple \"avoidance behaviors.\" I could no longer do the things I wanted to do when I wanted to do them.\n\nAvoidance behaviors are associated with more serious, harder-to-treat illnesses. Avoidance fuels anxiety in a vicious cycle. By steering clear of the things I was afraid of, I never got a chance to learn that what I feared most\u2014dying, going crazy\u2014wouldn't actually happen. The not knowing made me even more anxious.\n\nI saw many more doctors in the ensuing months in search of a real diagnosis, my mother often making the hour-long drive to Ann Arbor to accompany me to assorted specialists. I also ended up at the ER several times\u2014driven by my ever-patient college friend Susie\u2014when my symptoms became particularly intense. I was convinced I was having a heart attack. My heart beat like an avant-garde jazz number, cacophonous and herky-jerky. It would speed up, slow down, skip. In the waiting room, Susie would try to make me laugh. She had asthma and knew what it was like to feel fragile and breathless. But after each visit, I was sent home without any answers. I think a doctor or nurse or two might have said something about avoiding stress.\n\nI continued to have neurological issues, too: tunnel vision, vertigo, freaky depth perception. My hands and feet were often numb and tingly. A neurologist suspected multiple sclerosis, and I had an MRI of my brain. In the middle of it, I began having trouble breathing, and my heart beat so rapidly and loudly, it seemed to strain my ribs. Spots danced in front of my eyes, and I thought I would pass out. Crying, I had to be pulled out of the clanking, vibrating tube.\n\nThey did a CAT scan instead. The machine was less tomblike so I gave it a go. My mother held my hand, her body shrouded in a lead apron to protect her from the radiation bathing my brain. That scan was \"inconclusive,\" with some vague shadow possibly suggesting a brain tumor. After a completely sleepless night picturing my slow and awful death from brain cancer, back into the MRI machine I went, this time with several milligrams of Valium in my bloodstream. The MRI was fine. My brain, I was told, was normal.\n\nMy dad now says that the scariest thing about that time was that nobody had a clue as to what was wrong with me. With no definitive diagnosis, the expanse of possibilities and prognoses was terrifying.\n\nI was tired all the time, a bone-deep torpor. For a few weeks, I was actually excited to think that I might have chronic fatigue syndrome, a disorder that had suddenly emerged in the zeitgeist. Sure, it didn't sound like fun, there weren't really any effective treatments, and some doctors didn't believe it existed. But at least it had a name.\n\n\u2014\n\nI like to think that none of this would happen now. Today there's a much better chance that a doctor would properly diagnose me, that the school would refer me to the counseling center, or that I would look up my symptoms online and figure it out on my own. But all this happened in an era before large-scale mental health awareness campaigns, when there was greater stigma around psychiatric disorders. In the 1980s, organizations like the National Alliance on Mental Illness and the Anxiety Disorders Association of America (now the Anxiety and Depression Association of America) mailed out their newsletters in plain envelopes. Active Minds, a robust advocacy and support organization with chapters at more than four hundred college campuses, wasn't founded until 2003. I didn't know anyone who had been to a therapist or was taking psychotropic medication.\n\nAnxiety disorders didn't even exist as a category in the _DSM_ until 1980, and it wasn't until 1987 that Prozac was released in the United States. Then in 1989 the World Wide Web was born. The internet and Prozac would dramatically change the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Prozac, a new selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, had far fewer and less onerous side effects than earlier medications. And the internet made a torrent of health information available to anyone with a keyboard and made it possible to anonymously join online support groups. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act spurred colleges to open disability offices that now field requests for academic accommodations like quiet rooms for test taking and extra time for assignments for students with all types of disabilities, including psychiatric ones.\n\nWithout these new supports, I had to tough it out. I did my best to play the role of the free-spirited college student, even heading to Canc\u00fan for spring break with my roommates. Although I was barely hanging on to my student status, my parents were happy to fund the trip. Maybe doing something fun and frivolous would bring me back to health.\n\nIt was a disaster.\n\nThe days were all right. We spent them sunbathing and swimming. But at night my friends headed out to bars, and despite having been an enthusiastic binge drinker my freshman year, I hadn't had a drink since I got sick. My body and brain already felt so haywire, I couldn't imagine doing anything to make it more so. (My reaction was not typical. Many people with anxiety disorders drink to relax, a way of self-medicating.) But I wasn't open about my abstinence. So there I was at Se\u00f1or Frogs, a bar crammed with sunburned spring breakers, with a tequila shot in one hand, desperately trying to figure out how to surreptitiously ditch it. I lowered my hand and poured it down the leg of my chair, figuring it would blend in with the sticky sludge already on the floor.\n\nI managed to dance a little that night, but later on, back at our hotel, I felt a pain in my neck, and my hands and feet went numb. What if I somehow had broken my neck? It was an absurd thought. I hadn't fallen. I could walk. I knew my fear was ridiculous, but I couldn't get logic to prevail. On some primitive, emotional level, I was convinced I must have fractured a vertebra.\n\nI called the front desk and asked for a doctor. They sent someone up. The doctor examined me and said I needed an X-ray. So I got into a taxi with him and rode through the chaotic Canc\u00fan streets to an all-night medical clinic. (Why this didn't freak me out more than a completely hypothetical injury, I have no idea.) Several X-rays revealed\u2014surprise\u2014that I was fine. For a second I was relieved. Then I started worrying about the thyroid cancer I would most likely get because of the radiation from the X-rays.\n\nThe next day I stayed at the hotel while my friends went to the beach. I furtively called my mother, begging her to buy me a plane ticket so I could come home early. As in, that day. She did. Then I left my friends a weird, rambling note, packed my bags, and left. I was back in my parents' house by late evening.\n\nAs the weeks wore on, I became lonelier and increasingly hopeless. Upon waking, I'd have a moment of sunny optimism\u2014 _this_ would be the day I'd feel normal again. But then I'd prop myself up on an elbow, and the heart palpitations and vertigo would return, and the fears would gnaw at me again.\n\nI began to think it would be easier to not wake up at all. I didn't want to die. I'd spent months terrified of dying. But I couldn't see any other way to escape how I felt. The doctors couldn't help me. Nor could my parents or friends. And I increasingly didn't feel strong enough to continue to slog through the days and nights.\n\nFinally, when these dark, desperate thoughts scared the hell out of me enough to share them, I called my father and asked him to come to Ann Arbor and take me to the hospital. This time he didn't tell me to buck up or that things would be better if I got some sleep. He came and got me right away.\n\nWe parked the car in a high-rise parking garage. As we walked to the stairwell, I glanced over the railing to the ground far below and had a sudden, strong impulse to jump. To erase everything. But self-preservation and a slim hope won out. I grabbed my father's hand.\n\nAt the hospital, we bypassed the regular ER and instead went to the psychiatric emergency room. It was a small, quiet waiting room, and I was the only patient in it. I remember giving someone, a psychiatrist or psychologist, a short synopsis of the last three months and my new despondency. The doctors considered admitting me but decided that I wasn't at acute risk of harming myself. (I had no actual suicide plan.) What I needed, they said, was outpatient counseling. The therapist handed me a small card with the words PSYCHIATRIC EMERGENCY SERVICES in all caps and my appointment time written in black pen. A twenty-four-hour emergency phone number was on the back.\n\nI had several therapy sessions, but the treatment seemed irrelevant. The therapist asked me about my childhood and how I felt about my parents, but I wanted to know why my heart raced and why I was always terrified. Scratch that. I had stopped caring why. I only wanted it to stop.\n\n\u2014\n\nFor centuries, excessive anxiety was considered more of a moral failing than a medical problem. The stories of the ancient Greeks and Romans are filled with negative depictions of people who don't cope well with fear. \"The skin of the coward changes color all the time, he can't get a grip on himself, he can't sit still,\" writes Homer in the _Iliad_ , about an anxious man preparing for battle. \"He squats and rocks, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his heart racing, pounding inside the fellow's ribs, his teeth chattering\u2014he dreads some grisly death.\"\n\nSpecific phobias pop up in ancient writings, too. In the third century B.C., Andreas of Charystos described aerophobia, a fear of open spaces. He also defined the apex of all phobias: pantophobia, the fear of everything. In the Classical period, anxiety was considered a component of melancholia, a mental state marked by fear and despondency. The Hippocratic physicians of ancient Greece thought all illness was caused by an imbalance among the four \"humors,\" or bodily liquids: phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile. Melancholy was thought to arise from a surfeit of black bile. Practitioners treated melancholy with everything from special diets and exercise to enemas and bloodletting. The belief in humors persisted for centuries.\n\nReligion tackled anxiety, too. Faith in God was the cure. \"It was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled,\" wrote Saint Augustine in the fourth century A.D. of his experience reading the teachings of Jesus Christ.\n\nBy the seventeenth century, the belief in humors as the cause of melancholia and its attendant anxiety was supplanted by the emerging concept of nervous disorders. Dysfunction in the brain and nerves was now thought to be the cause of a host of mental and physical symptoms. The nervous disorders were generally treated by neurologists and general physicians. In 1869, George Miller Beard, a neurologist from New York, coined the word _neurasthenia_ , literally \"tired nerves,\" to describe a constellation of physical and emotional symptoms, including headaches, rashes, fatigue, insomnia, and phobias. This weakness of the nervous system was caused, Beard thought, by the fast-paced lifestyle of nineteenth-century America. In particular, he blamed the stress of technological advances like the telegraph and steam power, as well as the \"mental activity of women.\"\n\nAnxious women who weren't diagnosed with neurasthenia were likely to be slapped with the label of hysteria. The Greek physician Hippocrates named the disease in the fifth century B.C.; he believed it was caused by the uterus wandering around the body. In Victorian-era women, hysteria was characterized by nervousness, insomnia, \"excessive\" sexual desire (or the complete lack of it), and a panoply of psychosomatic symptoms from headaches to fainting. It was commonly treated with \"pelvic massage,\" with orgasm as the goal. (The development of the vibrator was heralded as a major treatment advance.)\n\nJust two years after Beard introduced the idea of neurasthenia, Jacob Da Costa wrote about a peculiar syndrome he had seen while working as an army doctor during the Civil War. He relayed the story of WWH, a young Union soldier who had survived the bloody battle of Fredericksburg. After the battle, WWH \"was seized with lancinating pains in the cardiac region, so intense that he was obliged to throw himself down upon the ground, and with palpitation. The symptoms frequently returned while on the march, were attended with dimness of vision and giddiness, and obliged him to fall out of his company and ride in the ambulance.\"\n\nDa Costa saw similar symptoms in hundreds of other soldiers, too. The young men complained of chest pain and heart palpitation, difficulty sleeping, dizziness, shortness of breath, and upset stomachs. Finding the soldiers otherwise healthy, Da Costa chalked up their symptoms to an overactive heart. He called the illness \"irritable heart syndrome.\" Today we might call it panic disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Da Costa treated irritable heart with various drugs, including opium, digitalis (derived from the foxglove plant and not dissimilar to medicines used to treat heart failure today), and lead acetate.\n\nIt's impossible to talk about the history of anxiety without mentioning Sigmund Freud. In 1894, he wrote a groundbreaking paper with a cumbersome name, \"The Justification for Detaching from Neurasthenia a Particular Syndrome: The Anxiety-Neurosis.\" Out of the broad bucket of neurasthenia, Freud adroitly defined what we now know as the anxiety disorders. His descriptions of panic attacks (which he called anxiety attacks), generalized anxiety, phobias, and even obsessive-compulsive disorder are vivid and sound incredibly modern. Freud, then working as a neurologist in Vienna, grouped all these symptoms under the diagnosis of \"anxiety neurosis,\" a disorder that existed in the _DSM_ until 1980.\n\nHere's Freud's pitch-perfect characterization of generalized anxiety, or what he calls \"anxious expectation\": \"A woman who suffers from anxious expectation will imagine every time her husband coughs, when he has a cold, that he is going to have influenzal pneumonia, and will at once see his funeral in her mind's eye. If when she is coming towards the house she sees two people standing by her front door, she cannot avoid the thought that one of her children has fallen out of the window; if the bell rings, then someone is bringing news of a death, and so on; whereas on all these occasions there is no particular ground for exaggerating a mere possibility.\"\n\nFreud goes off the rails, however, when he describes the cause of anxiety neurosis. It arises, he asserts, from an accumulation of sexual energy that is inadequately released. Abstinence, premature ejaculation, and coitus interruptus are primarily to blame for anxiety neurosis in both men and women, Freud says. In later works, he abandoned this theory. Eventually, he came to believe that anxiety arose from unconscious threats and conflicts. This view would hold sway for decades.\n\n\u2014\n\nWe've come a long way from bloodletting and opium. Advances in brain imaging and genetics are yielding new insights into the origins of anxiety disorders and what can go awry in the brain. Groundbreaking treatments are on the horizon. Pioneering scientists are experimenting with programs intended to prevent anxiety disorders in children as young as three.\n\nWe now know that the foundation of anxiety is the defense system that nearly every organism has to detect and react to threats. That's what trips off the racing heart, the shallow breathing, and the urge to escape\u2014a response that makes clear sense if you're being chased by a bear. The fight-or-flight response is critical to survival.\n\nWhen that response is initiated, the adrenal glands release the hormone epinephrine. Blood pressure rises and senses become sharper. The hypothalamus, a part of the brain that acts as the control center for the autonomic nervous system, releases corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), which in turn tells the pituitary gland and the adrenal glands to release the stress hormones adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and cortisol. This activation of the so-called HPA axis works together with the sympathetic nervous system to keep the body on high alert for danger. (Some studies have found a range of HPA axis abnormalities in people with anxiety disorders.)\n\nAt the root of this threat detection system is the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the brain that has been called its fear center. Probably no one knows more about the amygdala than Joseph LeDoux, a sixty-six-year-old neuroscientist at New York University and a genuine rock star in the world of anxiety disorders. (He fronts a band called the Amygdaloids.) In the 1980s, he successfully mapped the neurocircuitry of the defensive mechanism in rats.\n\nPeople had speculated before that the amygdala was involved with fear. In the 1930s, Heinrich Kl\u00fcver, a German-American psychologist, and Paul Bucy, an American neurosurgeon, conducted a series of experiments on monkeys. They found that removing both temporal lobes (which include the amygdala) caused monkeys to exhibit bizarre behaviors, including eating anomalies, hypersexuality, and fearlessness. Later scientists noticed similar behavior in people who had sustained damage to the amygdala and nearby brain structures due to strokes, infections, or other ailments. This came to be known as Kl\u00fcver-Bucy syndrome.\n\nBuilding on this work, LeDoux used a common experimental model called fear conditioning to teach his rats to react to an audible tone. When rats are threatened, say by a predator or by an electrical shock to the feet, they freeze, their hair stands on end, and their blood pressure and heart rate shoot up. In his experiments, LeDoux played a tone to the rats and followed it with a shock. After several rounds of this, the animals began to freeze as soon as they heard the tone. They had been conditioned to perceive the sound itself as a threat.\n\nLeDoux's goal was to trace the path in the rats' brains from tone to rodent freak-out. To do this, he damaged different regions of the brain and then fear-conditioned the animals, noting what effect the various lesions had on the rats' behavior. He started with the auditory cortex, which directly receives sensory information, and worked downward to more primitive brain structures. Lesions to the auditory cortex didn't do much; the rats still froze to the tone. Lesions to the caudate-putamen, which is involved in movement and learning, also didn't affect freezing behavior. But when LeDoux made lesions in the amygdala, the rats stopped freezing. No amygdala, no threat response. The locus of fear, it seemed, had been found.\n\nThe tone takes one of two routes to the amygdala, LeDoux found. The more direct route, which he dubs the \"low road,\" sends the stimulus right from the sensory thalamus, which relays sensory and motor information, to the amygdala, a journey that takes 10 to 12 milliseconds. The \"high road,\" by contrast, where the stimulus travels from the sensory thalamus to the sensory cortex and then to the amygdala, takes about twice as long. The low road is a \"quick and dirty processing system,\" LeDoux says. It unleashes the defense system almost instantly, even before a threat is consciously registered. He gives an example of a prairie dog spotting a bobcat. \"The sight or sound of the bobcat goes straight to your amygdala and out comes the freezing response. If you had to make a deliberate decision about what to do...you could get so bogged down in decision making that you might be eaten before you made a choice.\"\n\nThe amygdala itself has different regions that serve different functions. The lateral nucleus, for example, is the part that receives the information. The central nucleus sends that information to the parts of the brain that control the physical responses associated with fear\u2014freezing, respiration, heart rate, and the release of stress hormones. The hippocampus is the region that processes the context of the threat experience. This cage is where you got the shock, it tells the rat.\n\nLeDoux then tackled the question of how animals can shake fear. Rats that have been fear-conditioned by the pairing of a tone with a shock can override that learning when the tone is repeatedly presented without the shock. Eventually they cease to freeze. This process is called extinction. In experiments in the 1990s, LeDoux found that another part of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, is critical to extinction. It acts, he says, by dampening the amygdala's action. \"The medial prefrontal cortex is clamping down the amygdala, sort of like the brakes. The amygdala is the accelerator.\" Stress, however, can undo extinction. \"The brake comes off,\" he says.\n\nLeDoux says that in people, anxiety happens when thoughts interact with this threat-defense mechanism. While our body is going into fight-or-flight mode, our mind conjures catastrophe and dredges up memories of prior peril. The result, LeDoux says, is the conscious experience of anxiety.\n\nOn an October afternoon, I visited LeDoux at his office on the eleventh floor of the Center for Neural Science at NYU, a block from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. His office has a view of the Empire State Building. His desk is cluttered with books, unopened mail, and a baseball cap adorned with the image of a brain. LeDoux is the hippest-looking neuroscientist I've met, sporting dark jeans, a checked shirt, and a gray-blond soul patch. He speaks slowly, with a bit of a Louisiana drawl; he grew up in Eunice, the son of a butcher. (The part of the cow that most intrigued him? \"The slimy, wiggly, wrinkled brain,\" of course.) He played in rock bands throughout high school and college, including one presciently named Cerebellum and the Medullas.\n\nLeDoux takes me on a tour of his lab. We stop in a room lined with shelves, each piled with stacks of slim white boxes. \"Here we have thirty years of rat brains,\" he says, gesturing with an arm. He takes a box down, opening it to reveal dozens of slides, each with a thin slice of brain stained a brilliant cerulean blue.\n\nIn another room, we see an apparatus designed for rodent neurosurgery, a silver bracelike contraption with various arms, knobs, and grooves indicating measurements. Brain lesions, he tells me, are usually made with an electric current. The rats themselves (two hundred or so) are out of sight, in a room that is off-limits to visitors. (After several more interviews with scientists who work with animals, I discover that it's standard policy not to let visitors see their subjects. Scientists are afraid of becoming the targets of animal rights activists.)\n\nAt one point, LeDoux confesses that he has a phobia of snakes. He traces the fear back to a traumatic childhood experience. \"I remember as a kid being taken craw fishing on the bank of a bayou,\" he recalls. \"It seemed like there were thousands of slithering black snakes everywhere. It was so disgusting.\" After that, he did everything he could to avoid them\u2014a challenge given that he was an avid water-skier. \"I would never get in the water ever. I'd be able to jump off the pier as the rope tightened and ski and then ski back up onto the landing.\"\n\nAfter I visited LeDoux, I watched a video of one of his band's songs, \"Fearing,\" based on a poem by Emily Dickinson. The Amygdaloids, which LeDoux formed with other NYU scientists, write and perform songs about emotions and the mind. In the video, LeDoux appears in the dark, ominous attic of a ruined house, wearing opaque black sunglasses and singing these words:\n\n> But recollecting is not forgetting\n> \n> It's vivid rehearsal of pain\n> \n> It reminds me of that day\n> \n> It keeps fear in my brain\n\n\u2014\n\nStudies have found that the amygdala and prefrontal cortex are involved in fear conditioning and extinction in people, too. Our fear response can be measured in a variety of ways, including skin conductance (a method of measuring sweating using electrodes) and fear-potentiated startle, an eyeblink reflex. Tiny sensors are placed under the eye to record the magnitude and intensity of the eyeblink. Researchers have found that people with anxiety disorders have a larger startle response than healthy people to conditioned stimuli\u2014the colored light or tone that precedes an unconditioned stimulus, like an electric shock. And during extinction, the startle response tends to remain elevated. Simply put, anxious people catch fear easily and have a hard time letting go of it, even when there's mounting evidence they're safe. The amygdalae of anxious subjects also tend to be hyperactive even when they are not facing a potential threat. It is as if the anxious brain were always scanning the horizon for danger.\n\nAnxious people aren't just constantly on guard; they actually see more peril in the world. If a situation is ambiguous, they are more likely to perceive it as negative or threatening. That's why when I have a headache, I think of brain tumors. And if my husband, Sean, is being quiet, I don't consider that he might be tired\u2014I think he's mad at me. (Okay. Sometimes he is.) Scientists call this \"attention bias to threat,\" and they think that, like lightning-quick fear conditioning, the bias is linked to a hyperactive amygdala and dampened prefrontal cortex activity.\n\nScientists often use the dot probe task to measure attention bias. It generally works like this: Subjects are shown photos of two human faces side by side, one angry or fearful, the other neutral. The faces disappear, and a small dot or cross (the probe) is shown in place of one of the faces. Subjects need to respond as quickly as possible (often by pushing a button) to the probe. A subject is considered to have an attention bias toward threat if they respond more quickly to the probes that replace the threatening faces versus the neutral ones. In many studies, those with anxiety disorders are shown to have this bias. This is true even when the faces are flashed so quickly that they can't be processed consciously. Nonanxious people, however, don't show this bias.\n\nBesides being constantly ready for crisis, anxious people have a hard time with uncertainty. _What if? What if? What if?_ is the endless refrain of the anxious mind. Uncertainty far too easily morphs into inescapable catastrophe. Scientists call this \"intolerance of uncertainty,\" and it actually makes parts of the brain light up on a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, found that intolerance of uncertainty was linked to activity in the insula, part of the cerebral cortex that plays a role in emotion processing and body awareness. In a small experiment published in 2008, the scientists gave fourteen young adults a task called the Wall of Faces. The study subjects saw a series of pictures of thirty-two faces against a black background. Some faces had ambiguous expressions. Others were clearly happy or sad. The subjects who scored higher on a measure of intolerance of uncertainty had greater activity in the insula when they saw more faces with ambiguous expressions. Other studies have found that people with PTSD, social phobia, and GAD have increased activity in the insula when they anticipate seeing negative pictures.\n\nInterestingly, scientists are finding that fear and anxiety may originate in different parts of the brain. The amygdala, it seems, is more closely tied to fear. It generates the raw, immediate response to an imminent threat. Anxiety, however\u2014longer-lasting, amorphous uneasiness\u2014may be rooted in an adjacent structure with an ungainly name: the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, or BNST.\n\nMichael Davis, a neuroscientist who recently retired from Emory University, has been exploring the BNST for decades. During the 1980s, he and LeDoux were in something of a race to map the neurocircuitry of fear conditioning in rats. At that time, he noticed that the BNST was connected to the same structures as the amygdala: the parts of the brain stem that control blood pressure, heart rate, and freezing. Why, he wondered, would there be a second area of the brain that appeared to serve the same function as the amygdala? Nature didn't usually duplicate itself like that.\n\nWhile LeDoux was measuring fear conditioning by looking at freezing behavior, Davis began studying the startle reflex\u2014specifically, fear-potentiated startle. Rats have a whole-body response when startled: Electrical activity can be detected in the rodent's neck muscles 5 milliseconds after a loud sound. In Davis's lab, first at Yale and then at Emory, rats were fear-conditioned by being exposed to a light followed by a shock. Then researchers elicited the startle response with a series of loud noises. Sometimes sounds followed the light that predicted the shock; other times there was no light, only sound. Not surprisingly, the startle response to the loud noise was bigger when the rats were also exposed to the light. This amplified response is known as fear-potentiated startle.\n\nIt was during these experiments that Davis stumbled on a potential role of the BNST. Over the years, he and his colleagues tested a host of compounds to see how they worked on fear-potentiated startle and, by extension, anxiety disorders. But there is a problem with fear conditioning. It involves learning: The rats have to learn that the light precedes the shock. So if a substance reduces fear-potentiated startle, you don't know whether it is because the substance is actually reducing the fear response or whether it is simply causing amnesia. It's possible, in other words, that the substance caused the rats to forget the link between the light and the shock.\n\nWith that in mind, the lab searched for a way to elicit an amplified startle without learning. Davis's colleague David Walker discovered that exposing rats to bright light for twenty minutes also enhanced startle. No learning was required. (Rats naturally avoid bright light and open spaces, which to a rodent signal danger.) \"When the bright light is on for a long time, you don't know when something bad is going to happen,\" Davis says. Davis and Walker assumed that the amygdala was key for this extended fear conditioning, but it turned out that inactivating the amygdala didn't block the increase in startle after the twenty minutes of light. Deactivating the BNST, however, did.\n\nThe amygdala, it seemed, controlled the lightning-quick response. The BNST was switched on by longer-lasting apprehension\u2014the expectation of pain without any certainty as to when it would occur. Scientists aren't certain when the shift from amygdala to BNST activity occurs in the face of danger, but it seems to be somewhere between four seconds and a minute.\n\nIn the 1990s, Christian Grillon, who was collaborating with Davis at Yale, began doing similar experiments in people. Humans have a whole-body startle reflex, too, but the eyeblink part of it is the most consistent and easiest to measure. Sustained uncertainty, Grillon found, makes people jumpy for a sustained period of time. In one critical experiment, Grillon and Davis recruited fifty-eight Yale students. Most of the subjects underwent repeated rounds where they saw a blue light and received a shock to the left wrist. The students were divided into three groups. In the first group, the shock was predictably delivered a few seconds after the light. In the second, shocks were delivered randomly, with no relation to when the light was shown. (A third group saw the blue light but didn't receive any shocks.) Startle was elicited with a loud sound. Four days later the students underwent the same experiment. After being fear-conditioned, the first group startled more after hearing the sound\u2014despite the four-day break. That wasn't surprising. But the second group had a bigger so-called baseline startle, the startle scientists elicited even before the subjects began this round of the experiment. The unpredictability of the shocks had made them on guard and ready to jump as soon as they were back in the same environment.\n\n\"In a way, anxiety is the opposite of fear. Fear is about something that is in front of you that is predictable and imminent. Anxiety is the opposite. It is worrying about something that is in the future that may or may not happen,\" Grillon says.\n\nBased on the animal data, Grillon is pretty sure that the BNST is behind uncertainty-driven apprehension. One challenge for researchers is that the structure is small and hard to see on an fMRI scan. Grillon is excited about a powerful new scanner that his lab, now at NIMH, has procured. Using the new equipment, Grillon and colleagues have recently mapped the human BNST and its connections to other brain structures. It is a step toward understanding the area and its role in human anxiety. \"Where is the anxious thought of a shock?\" he says. \"It may not be at the same place as the anxious thought of my kid not going to college or losing my job or fear of God.\" Perhaps the BNST will prove to be a fruitful target for new drugs or psychotherapies.\n\nNeuroscientists caution that this kind of imaging work is still in its infancy. Other brain regions are being explored, too, and it's unlikely that there's any single route to an anxiety disorder. Also, developing anxiety is likely a dynamic process, with anxious thoughts and behaviors reinforcing the underlying neurobiology. As researchers Dan Grupe and Jack Nitschke write, \"A patient with an anxiety disorder probably builds up neural pathways of anxiety just as a concert pianist strengthens neural pathways of musicianship\u2014through hours of daily practice.\"\n\nI wonder when things started to go awry in my brain. When did my amygdala go into overdrive? When did my prefrontal cortex cease to keep my body's fight-or-flight response in check? Neuroscientists are starting to see anxiety disorders as disorders of brain development that begin in childhood. And as with other neurological diseases\u2014such as Alzheimer's disease with its telltale plaques and tangles\u2014the brain likely shows signs of the illness long before the first panic attack or paralyzing bout of worry. The trick will be to locate those signs.\n\nI am seven years old, sitting at my desk at school. I have a blank piece of notebook paper in front of me and a number-two pencil at the ready. My teacher, a stony-faced young woman wearing orange kneesocks and brown loafers, is standing in front of the class.\n\n\"What's five times four?\" she says.\n\nBarely a second passes before she opens her mouth again.\n\n\"Nine times six.\"\n\n\"Three times four.\"\n\n\"Eight times two.\"\n\nShe's barking out math problems in an unrelenting monotone. Everyone around me is scribbling down answers. Except me. I'm frozen. My mind is blank. My mouth is dry. My hands are sweaty, tightly gripping the pencil. A hot blush rushes up my cheeks. My heart feels like it is doing penny drops, the flips I love to do on the monkey bars during recess.\n\nI look down at my paper and see a few halfhearted numbers, a stray pencil mark, and lots of blanks.\n\nBut here's the thing. I know all the answers.\n\nI've choked. This happens during every one of these oral math quizzes. I fail them all. So I wasn't that surprised when my first second-grade report card came home with a big U for \"unsatisfactory achievement\" in mathematics. In fact, I even traced over the U in black pen, as if to highlight my shame. My parents, however, were stunned. My math homework and written tests had come home nearly errorless, and I hadn't told them about those awful oral quizzes.\n\nMy father called the teacher, who told him to get me flash cards. (In my parents' telling, the teacher was snippy and unsympathetic. My dad got angry, and the teacher hung up on him.) So he got flash cards. Every evening after dinner, my father would sit in his chair while I sat on the floor in front of him. \"What's eight times nine? What's three times eleven?\" he'd quiz. I swear he mimicked that teacher's impatient bark and pinched, irritated expression, too.\n\nAlthough I dreaded those flash card sessions, the constant repetition boosted my confidence. We didn't know it at the time, but those sessions were very similar to exposure therapy, one of the most effective treatments for anxiety disorders. Little by little I began to dread the school tests less, and my terror subsided. I started passing the quizzes. Then I started acing them.\n\nOn my next report card, I received an S for \"satisfactory achievement\" in math. I got an S on the one after that. And by the last report card of second grade, I was fully vindicated, with an O for \"outstanding achievement.\"\n\nMany childhood events and experiences\u2014from illness to trauma to certain styles of parenting\u2014can contribute to the development of anxiety. Although I'm not sure those mini panic attacks\u2014what scientists call \"fearful spells\"\u2014were the beginning of my anxiety, they were certainly a red flag. Having a panic attack or even several isn't a disorder in and of itself. About one-quarter of the U.S. population will have a panic attack during their lifetime. But scientists are finding that panic attacks are often a harbinger of future mental health problems. In a study that followed more than three thousand young people ages fourteen to twenty-four, German researchers discovered that those who reported having had panic attacks before joining the study were much more likely to develop a wide range of disorders, including specific phobias and social phobia, during the four years that followed. They also had more than double the risk of an alcohol-use disorder and more than ten times the risk of GAD.\n\nFull-blown panic attacks are less common in kids. An adult with a panic attack has to manifest at least four out of thirteen possible symptoms, which include feelings of choking, chest pain, nausea, and fear of dying. Children, however, often experience less severe or more circumscribed attacks, like my fearful spells. A fearful spell is \"a sudden experience of fear and anxiety but it does not have to be associated with all these panic symptoms like heart racing, sweating, feeling that you're losing control,\" says Katja Beesdo-Baum, a coauthor of the German panic attack study and a professor of behavioral epidemiology at the Technische Universit\u00e4t Dresden. Children who experience fearful spells have a higher risk of developing major depression and are more than three times more likely to develop panic disorder, agoraphobia, and GAD within the ten years following the spells. \"Fearful spells might be an early indicator and you can assess it quite easily,\" Beesdo-Baum says.\n\nBut maybe my anxiety took root even earlier.\n\nAt age four, I developed an intense fear of clowns. (Yes, I realize this isn't a particularly original phobia. Clowns are creepy.) At first I was as fascinated as I was afraid\u2014I actually dressed up as a clown for Halloween. My mother sewed the outfit herself, a turquoise suit with fluffy white pom-poms and a conical hat. I also had a deep affection for Ronald McDonald, and when I heard that he was visiting a local McDonald's, I begged my parents to take me. They did, grudgingly, even though my mother was a health nut who tried to pass carob off as chocolate and put wheat germ on just about everything. But when we arrived on that much-anticipated day, I was too scared to get out of the car. My parents cajoled, bribed, and threatened to try to get me to go meet the smiley, yellow-suited guy. I wouldn't budge. Finally, my father turned the car toward home, grumbling.\n\nClown-induced terror was waiting for me at home, too. From the ages of about three to five, I was hooked on _Sesame Street_ , often watching it twice a day. In the 1970s, one recurring segment featured a clown with a curly red wig and painted white face with an oversize red mouth and black triangles above and below his eyes.\n\n\"I don't always look like a clown, you know,\" he would say, sounding sad and stoned. \"I have an everyday face, too.\"\n\nHe'd yank off his nose and wig. Then, accompanied by a frenetic soundtrack of horns, whistles, and a panicked piano, they'd run the tape of him putting on his clown face in reverse. The triangles below his eyes and the red around his mouth were sucked back into their respective makeup pencils. The white of his face disappeared back into a small tube. At the end he was revealed to be a pasty, dour, thin-faced man.\n\n\"This is my everyday face. Which do you like best?\" he would ask in a slow, dispirited voice. The screen split, barefaced man on left, clown on right. The man looked to his clown face and dejectedly said, with a small shrug, \"Me, too.\"\n\nThe frenzied music, the aggressive unmasking, the clown's obvious depression, all of it terrified me. I'd watch _Sesame Street_ in a state of nervous anticipation, one foot literally out the door as each new segment began. As soon as I saw a glimpse of that painted white face or heard the first honk of his red nose, I'd run out of the living room, yelling. I wouldn't go back in until my mother had assured me that the segment was over.\n\nI found the clip of that _Sesame Street_ segment on YouTube recently. Watching it, I wanted to give the guy a hug and hand him some Prozac.\n\nVarious fears, of course, are normal in childhood and adolescence. Separation anxiety in one-year-olds and fear of thunderstorms and the dark in toddlers. Fear of monsters and ghosts in five-year-olds and fear of social rejection in teenagers. These are all typical. According to the _DSM_ , in order for a fear to be classified as a phobia, it should last at least six months and impair a person's life. For example, if you can't go to school because you're terrified of the bus getting into an accident, that's an impairment.\n\nSpecific phobia is one of the earliest of all the anxiety disorders to appear, with an age of onset generally between seven and fourteen years old. It is also the most common of the anxiety disorders, affecting 15.6 percent of Americans ages thirteen and older during their lifetime. People can develop phobias to almost anything. (I came across a case report of a nine-year-old boy who had a phobia of buttons.) The most common involve animals (dogs, spiders, bears), the natural world (heights, water, storms, earthquakes), blood, or situations like flying or being in enclosed places (claustrophobia). There are some gender differences in phobias. For example, phobias of bugs and snakes are more common among women. Both men and women are equally afraid of heights and closed spaces.\n\nThe most common phobias make a lot of evolutionary sense because they can involve real peril. The psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse argues that these fears developed over millennia with the purpose of keeping people safe. Even modern phobias, like those of flying or driving, are primed by the age-old dangers posed by heights, speed, and being stuck in small spaces. \"Our emotions are adaptations shaped by natural selection,\" Nesse writes.\n\nAnyone with a phobia knows that it can be crippling. (My driving-on-highways phobia would be a serious problem if I lived in Los Angeles, for example.) They also can foreshadow even more serious mental health problems. A 2010 study of about fifteen hundred young German women, for example, found that those with specific phobia were twice as likely to develop GAD, depression, or a somatoform disorder (mental illnesses that cause unexplained physical symptoms, including pain and distress) during the next seventeen months compared with those who didn't have a phobia.\n\nMy clown phobia was quickly surpassed by something much more overwhelming and unavoidable: a colossal fear of death. I was terrified of it\u2014the pain, the fear, the blank blackness. I could not handle any depiction, or even mention, of death in books or movies. _Charlotte's Web_ was a horror. If any creature seemed in peril, I would ask my mother, \"Does he die? Does she die?\" I soon became more demanding: \"Promise me she doesn't die.\" The no death edict eliminated many children's classics: No _Bambi_. No _Wizard of Oz_. No _Snow White_.\n\nI became increasingly alarmed by the breathless descriptions of hell\u2014the eternal fires, the screams of the damned\u2014delivered many Sundays by the pastor at our Baptist church. My mother had grown up Southern Baptist, which meant that my sister and I did, too. (For years, my father, who drank beer, cursed, and smoked, didn't accompany us to church, declaring that he wasn't \"good enough\" for it.)\n\nAccording to our church, the only way you could avoid hell was to be \"born again\" or \"saved\" and to accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. At the end of every church service, while the congregation sang the hymn \"Just As I Am,\" the pastor would invite people to come up to pray and be saved. This became my favorite part of the service. Who would escape hell's clutches this week? The pastor, in a dark suit with his hands clasped behind him, would wait expectantly in front of the wooden pulpit, his eyes scanning the congregation. Sometimes one verse, then two, would go by, and no one would stir. The singing would take on more urgency. There were days when someone would scurry up just before the choir started singing the last \"Oh Lamb of God, I Come, I Come.\"\n\nMy favorite Bible verse became John 3:16: \"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.\" Not perish. Woo-hoo!\n\nI became fixated on being born again, not because of true religious fervor but because of its get-out-of-eternal-damnation-free card. But there seemed to be some unspoken rule that you had to wait until a certain age. Nine seemed to be the magic number. That's how old I was when I finally strode down the church aisle. A few weeks later I was baptized in the hidden pool behind the pulpit. It was actually more like a big bathtub. I wore a brand-new baby-blue sundress. The pastor wore black rubber waders under his suit jacket and put a white handkerchief over my mouth and nose as he dunked me under three times: one for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Ghost.\n\nI was elated. Salvation, however, didn't seem to let you escape this whole death thing. Sure, your spirit would live on. But your body would still conk out. Then I found a loophole: the Rapture. From church services, I gleaned that Jesus was supposed to return to Earth and that those who were alive at his second coming would be taken directly up to heaven, bypassing death altogether. What a neat trick!\n\nEvery night before I went to sleep, a stuffed animal menagerie surrounding me, I'd pray for the second coming of Jesus so I wouldn't have to die. \"Please come soon. Please don't let me die, get hurt, get killed, or get scared,\" I'd say, making sure to leave no wiggle room in my request.\n\nA couple of years after that, I learned that the world was supposed to end on March 10, 1982, when I would be eleven. At least that was the prediction set forth by John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann, two Cambridge-educated astrophysicists, in their 1974 book, _The Jupiter Effect_. On that date, major planets would align on the same side of the sun. The gravitational pull of those planets, especially Jupiter, would supposedly cause all sorts of mayhem, from altering Earth's rotation to generating earthquakes, one of which would level Los Angeles.\n\nI never read _The Jupiter Effect._ I was too busy warping my mind\u2014and my future view of romance\u2014with my mother's Danielle Steel novels and with V. C. Andrews's books (arsenic poisoning! incest!), surreptitiously purchased with my allowance money. But I was aware of the apocalyptic date. The prediction and the response to it were being covered by the local news. I recall seeing TV segments and newspaper articles about people\u2014even teachers and their classes\u2014throwing weirdly ebullient \"End of the World\" parties, complete with balloons and Carvel ice cream cakes.\n\nAs the date edged closer, I became more and more nervous. What would it feel like to die in an earthquake? Would I be knocked out immediately by a falling ceiling? Or would my demise be slow and agonizing? Would I be trapped under debris, calling weakly for help until I finally starved? I spent hours mulling over various outcomes, all tragic. There were no world-saving superheroes in my anxious imaginings.\n\nMarch 10 was a Wednesday, so I must have gone to school that day. But what I remember is sitting immobilized in my dad's tan corduroy La-Z-Boy chair with the pop-out footrest that evening, pretending to watch _The Facts of Life_ while monitoring the passing minutes on the clock, trying to will the hour hand past midnight. Then it would be March 11, and I\u2014and the world\u2014would be safe.\n\n\u2014\n\nTrauma during childhood is a strong predictor of psychiatric disorders, including depression, drug and alcohol abuse, ADHD, and anxiety disorders. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and the University of Michigan analyzed data from 5,692 adults, examining the association between a host of childhood adversities\u2014from physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect to divorce, poverty, and the death of a parent\u2014and the onset of a psychiatric disorder. They found that these experiences are remarkably common: More than half of respondents had experienced at least one, with divorce, violence in the family, and the mental illness of a parent among the most typical. The most serious traumas, what researchers dubbed maladaptive family functioning (including mental illness of or substance abuse by a parent, criminal behavior, violence within the family, physical and sexual abuse, and neglect), most strongly predicted psychiatric disorders.\n\nScientists are trying to figure out exactly how childhood trauma can lead to mental health problems. Some studies show that early maltreatment can alter the HPA axis and cause long-term dysfunction in the body's stress response. Childhood stress affects the brain. When researchers at the University of Wisconsin gave sixty-four adolescents MRI scans, they found that a history of abuse and neglect during childhood was associated with altered connections between the hippocampus and the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex. And the adolescents who had these altered connections had more symptoms of anxiety and depression.\n\nInterestingly, the traumas specifically linked to anxiety disorders are childhood physical illness and economic adversity. A study that surveyed nearly seven hundred high school students and their parents found that a serious illness or infection during the first year of life strongly predicted anxiety disorders by the teenage years. The risk of anxiety disorders was also higher among teens whose mothers had a history of pregnancy problems, particularly miscarriages and stillbirths.\n\nMy mother says that when I got a cold, it almost always turned into a nasty bout of bronchitis. Once when I was not quite one year old, I was coughing and then suddenly stopped breathing. My mother tells me that she was holding me and patting me on the back and that I just went limp. For a minute she thought I was dead. My father grabbed my ankles, hung me upside down, and started whacking me on the back. I finally started crying. Later the doctor said that I had nearly drowned on phlegm.\n\nA similar thing happened when I was four, while I was recovering from another spell of bronchitis. I was playing with my Barbie dolls in my room when I started feeling funny, compelled to take deep breaths and hold them. I sat on my pink comforter, hands on knees, arms rigid, focused on pushing the air in and out of a space that soon felt no bigger than a coffee stirrer. I tried to distract myself from the sensation of breathlessness by bundling Barbie and Skipper into their RV camper. (I was never a big fan of Ken, with his suspect intentions and immovable hair.) It didn't help; I felt increasingly desperate, each breath a struggle. Panicked, I ran into the kitchen, where my parents were sitting at the table, and was able to croak out \"I can't breathe\" before passing out on the linoleum floor.\n\nI woke in a car hurtling toward the nearest hospital emergency room, curled on my mother's lap in the front seat. Suddenly I looked up and said, \"Where are we going?\" \"You popped right out of it,\" my father recalls.\n\nIn high school, I was diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma. In college, when I began having panic attacks, the feeling was instantly familiar. Even though I didn't have bronchitis and there was no lung-clogging phlegm, the terror and struggle to breathe were no less real. Anxiety is a fantastic mimic.\n\nResearch today is showing a link between respiratory illnesses and anxiety. A study of nearly one thousand young people by researchers from UCLA and New Zealand revealed that a history of asthma increases the risk of panic disorder in young women. Other studies have found that adults with asthma, emphysema, and bronchitis have higher rates of both anxiety disorders and depression. There's also evidence that lung problems in kids are associated with a greater risk of anxiety disorders by young adulthood. A 2008 study showed that those who had pneumonia, asthma, croup, or bronchiolitis\u2014or a history of it\u2014at age one were nearly three times more likely to be treated for an anxiety disorder by age thirty-four. Those who had respiratory diseases at both age one and age seven were nearly twenty times more likely to have received treatment for an anxiety disorder by thirty-four. The risk was evident even in infants. Babies with a higher breathing rate at just four months old had more than double the odds of being treated for anxiety by thirty-four.\n\nStill, these studies show only an association; they don't prove that breathing disorders _cause_ anxiety. Some scientists speculate that breathing problems and mental disorders could both be at least partly caused by immune system issues. Another hypothesis is that they share an underlying genetic or environmental source. There's evidence that people with anxiety disorders, particularly panic disorder, have an overly sensitive \"suffocation alarm system,\" a mechanism that evolved to help people survive. Recently, scientists have located a gene that creates a protein that acts as a sensor for carbon dioxide (rising CO2 levels can indicate impending suffocation). The gene has been linked to a risk for panic disorder.\n\nIt is not only being ill as a child that can lead to anxiety disorders. Witnessing the serious illness of a parent also increases the risk. In the UCLA and New Zealand study mentioned earlier, young women whose parents had had a stroke, heart attack, or high blood pressure during the women's childhood or early teenage years had an increased risk of panic disorder. It could be that being sick as a child or growing up in close proximity to illness elicited fears about bodily sensations. Perhaps these children were more likely to misinterpret mild shortness of breath or a fluttery heartbeat as impending catastrophe. It's also possible that the parents' ill health and fragility spurred them to become overprotective.\n\n\u2014\n\nOf course, parents do not have to be in ill health to be overly controlling of their children. Overprotective and controlling parenting\u2014telling kids what to think and feel and micromanaging their activities\u2014sends the message that children aren't capable, a belief that can fuel anxiety. But scientists haven't been able to tease out which comes first\u2014the kids' anxiety or the controlling, overprotecting parenting. It could be that moms and dads are molding their parenting style to their already anxious kids rather than shaping their kids' temperaments.\n\nIf a child is anxious from an early age, parental hovering is understandable. Kids who are genetically vulnerable to anxiety disorders may be skittish and sensitive. Parents, in turn, tend to respond to these kids by being overinvolved and overprotecting in an attempt to ease their children's distress. The trouble is, this sends the message that the world is a dangerous place and that kids can't cope on their own. Also, when parents allow their children to avoid scary or distressing situations, the kids have fewer opportunities to learn to master their fear. Thus the fear-overprotection-fear cycle goes on and on. There's also some evidence that parents who are colder, more critical, and less responsive\u2014what researchers call rejecting\u2014are more likely to have anxious kids.\n\nResearchers in Australia wanted to see if and how this played out in real time. They watched 95 children ages seven to fifteen and their mothers in two five-minute experiments: 43 kids had anxiety disorders, 20 had oppositional defiant disorder (characterized by behavioral problems and anger, defiance, and vindictiveness), and 32 had no psychiatric diagnosis. Children were asked to complete two difficult tasks: a tangram puzzle, where geometric shapes need to be arranged to form particular larger shapes, and a Scrabble-type game where kids were given letters and told to form as many words as possible. The mothers were given the answers to the first task and extra letters\u2014which would make the game easier\u2014for the Scrabble task. Moms were told they could help their kids when they felt the children needed assistance.\n\nA researcher rated the mothers' interactions with their children to assess the level of controlling and rejecting parental behavior. Measures included things like \"degree of unsolicited help,\" \"touching of the tangram\/Scrabble pieces,\" \"mother's tension,\" and \"mother's degree of verbal and non-verbal encouragement\/criticism.\" Mothers of anxious children were significantly more controlling than mothers of children without a psychiatric diagnosis. They were also more negative. Mothers of oppositional children were about equally as controlling and negative as the mothers of anxious kids. The researchers speculated that this style of parenting might be a reaction to not just anxiety but psychiatric problems in kids in general.\n\nOn the whole, though, the effect of parenting on the development of anxiety is thought to be relatively modest. In a big 2007 review of the scientific literature looking at the link between parenting and anxiety in kids, researchers found that parenting explained only about 4 percent of the variation in anxiety issues among children. Controlling parenting behaviors fueled anxiety slightly more than rejection did. The one parenting behavior that did appear to have a strong impact on a child's anxiety was \"granting autonomy,\" which explained 18 percent of the variance in childhood anxiety. \"When parents fail to provide children with the opportunity to experience control in age-appropriate contexts, it is possible that children may not develop a strong sense of self-efficacy, thereby increasing their sense of vulnerability to threat and heightening anxiety,\" the scientists wrote.\n\n\u2014\n\nI'm apt to buy that parenting doesn't contribute much to anxiety because my parents weren't controlling or overprotective at all.\n\nMy mother was twenty, my father twenty-one when I was born. They had gone to high school together in Salem, Illinois, but didn't get to know each other until 1969, as students at Kaskaskia College. My mother was pretty, studious, and very shy. My father was a cutup, boisterous and popular. He had long hair and lamb-chop sideburns, and he carried a beat-up leather briefcase to classes. (This was exotic. Hippie style had yet to hit Salem.) He strode up to my mother's table in the library while she was studying, sat across from her, stared at her, and declared, \"If you don't talk to me, I'm going to play with your leg.\" She talked to him. They fell in love. She got pregnant. And then they eloped. My mother didn't tell her parents about the pregnancy or the marriage until months later.\n\nDuring the first few months of my life, I lived with my mother, her parents, and five of her six siblings in her childhood home, an old converted schoolhouse where chalkboards still lined the walls. My father lived a few hours away at the University of Illinois, in a fraternity for engineering students\u2014then a hotbed of loud music, marijuana, and geekdom. On weekends, my mom and I took a bus there. During one visit, my parents ran out of diapers. The fraternity's housemother wrapped me in an old dishcloth.\n\nMy parents eventually landed a two-bedroom apartment in a married-student housing complex. Still, they were young and broke. One night while my father was watching me and my mother was working her job at a pharmacy, he and a friend were high on hash. My dad turned around to find me, about a year old, with a mouth full of the stuff. He force-fed me mayonnaise to make me vomit. More than once we had no food in the apartment except for baby formula and a jar of peanut butter. For my first birthday, my mother broke a piggy bank and took five hundred pennies to the bank, swapping it for a crisp bill. She had just enough to buy a cake mix and party hats.\n\nAfter my dad graduated from Illinois, we bounced around the country as my father built a career as an industrial engineer: to Neenah, Wisconsin; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Appleton, Wisconsin; and Danbury, Connecticut, all by the time I was ten.\n\nMy childhood was warm and loving. I have fond memories of family sing-alongs and camping trips. But Mom and Dad's parenting style was decidedly laissez-faire. In Pennsylvania, at age seven or so, I spent weekends riding bikes and playing Red Rover with a pack of other kids. We'd stop home for dinner, then dash back outside to play Flashlight Tag until long after dark. As a teenager in Connecticut, I'd break curfew to drive around with friends in my silver Chevy Sprint, go skinny-dipping in Candlewood Lake, or head to Images, a teen dance club where kids slam-danced to Big Audio Dynamite and the Jesus and Mary Chain and gave each other Mohawks in the parking lot. I don't remember ever getting grounded.\n\nMy dad was transferred to Michigan the summer before my senior year of high school. My parents let me move in with my best friend, Kate, her mother, and their cat for the rest of the school year so I could graduate with my class. Kate and I were both obsessed with books and music. As preteens, we had spent hours making up dances to the songs we loved like Joan Jett's \"I Love Rock and Roll\" and Queen's \"Another One Bites the Dust.\"\n\nBut the new living arrangement was difficult from the start. Kate's mother was dating a ringer for Moses who blared organ music through the T-top of his red Camaro Z-28. The couple practiced jujitsu in the living room and left violent, pornographic comic books on the coffee tables. Kate's mom read my mail, listened in on my phone conversations, and called my boyfriend's mother when he cut baseball practice to hang out with me. My best friend and I fought. I was allergic to the cat. At Thanksgiving, my boyfriend and I drove my Chevy to Okemos, Michigan, where my parents had moved. A week later I sent him back to Connecticut on a Greyhound bus. I stayed.\n\nAfter the chaos and intrusiveness of my friend's home, I was thrilled to be back with my family, even though it meant starting over in a new school and making new friends a third of the way through senior year. The truth was that I craved a bit more parental guidance and a few more rules. I felt like I was winging it too often. And I felt unmoored by typical teen feelings of anger and sadness.\n\nI didn't have much of a model for dealing with negative emotions. My family didn't talk about them, or even acknowledge that such feelings existed. My father was usually jovial and a goof, my mother sunny and optimistic. They almost never fought. The only time I saw my father yell at my mother was after she drove our Oldsmobile through the garage door. The maddest I saw my mother was once when my sister and I were arguing; she jumped up and down and yelled, \"Stupid, stupid kids,\" and slammed a cabinet door, which broke off the hinges and clattered to the ground. (The three of us laughed for a long time afterward.) Her most serious curse was \"gosh darn it.\" When I was mopey or sad, she would tell me to \"just be happy.\"\n\nSo I learned to bury bad feelings. And I didn't divulge teen friend and boyfriend dramas, like the time a friend was kicked out of her house and we stuffed her belongings in my hatchback. Or the times when one early high school boyfriend became psychologically manipulative (\"You would if you loved me,\" he actually said) and even physically scary, pushing me and blocking doors when we fought.\n\nI don't have the scientific studies to back this up, but now\u2014after years of therapy\u2014I think my college breakdown was, in part, my body's way of saying, _Enough already! You have to pay attention to how you feel. And that means the tough stuff, too._\n\n\u2014\n\nSome of the most promising research is looking into what goes on in the brains of anxious kids. About half of kids with anxiety disorders won't go on to have anxiety problems as adults. But half will. So scientists are trying to identify markers in the brain that might reveal which kids will remain anxious.\n\nDaniel Pine, chief of the section on development and affective neuroscience in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institute of Mental Health, believes that the key to tackling anxiety is to start early in the lifespan. \"If we think of mental disorders as disorders of brain development, most of the keys are going to be found by working with kids,\" Pine says.\n\nStudying kids will also help scientists overcome a problem inherent in looking at the brains of anxious adults: untangling whether the dysfunctions that have been identified in mature brains are evidence of the disease or simply the brain's way of compensating for the disorders.\n\n\"Anxiety is a normal part of childhood,\" Pine observes. \"But among that large mass of normal anxiety, hidden in there somewhere, are the seeds of most chronic emotional problems in adults. Most adult emotional problems\u2014anxiety disorders definitely, but also depression and even bipolar disorder\u2014will start as elevated levels of anxiety.\" But because anxiety is a normal part of being human, the line between illness and health is fuzzy. \"The thing that keeps me up at night,\" he says, \"is how do you sort out what's normal and what's not normal?\"\n\nPine is perhaps the most influential person in the world when it comes to pediatric anxiety disorders and their development. His lab has scanned the brains of hundreds of anxious children and launched the careers of many anxiety experts. His arm of the NIMH has partnered with scientific institutions all over the world and funded hundreds of studies.\n\nI visit Pine on a balmy June day. The NIMH building looks like a strange, small afterthought on the sprawling NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland. It is tucked away on a tree-covered hill, a cream-colored house with a brown roof and accents, looking vaguely like a Swiss chalet. A flimsy, curling piece of copy paper with NIMH printed on it is taped to the door\u2014the only indication I see of what's inside.\n\nDanny (everyone calls him Danny) Pine's office is on the first floor, a spacious corner spot filled with beige-striped furniture that looks like castoffs from a conference room at a Sheraton. Chicago Cubs and Bruce Springsteen memorabilia dot the room; a framed _Darkness on the Edge of Town_ album, a poster from _Magic_. Pine is wearing khakis, a blue polo shirt, and gold wire-rimmed glasses. He is a fifty-three-year-old father of three and has a full reddish beard. He's enthusiastic and informal, with the demeanor of a beloved professor. \"That's a great question,\" he says, often.\n\nPine and his colleagues are finding that many areas of brain dysfunction are similar in anxious adults and kids. As in an anxious adult, in an anxious kid something is often amiss in the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. The amygdala of an anxious child tends to be overactive, the prefrontal cortex underactive. One of Pine's major areas of research is on the relationship between anxiety and attention. He uses the dot probe task with kids to measure attention bias. \"Attention is very tightly related to anxiety,\" Pine says. But the relationship is fuzzy. \"In some situations, anxious people pay more attention to threat. In other situations, they pay less attention.\"\n\nWhile we talk, Pine walks me over to the NIH's clinical building, where his research studies are conducted. Two young NIMH research fellows take me to a room where they conduct a fear-conditioning task using the \"screaming lady\" paradigm. It is a way to fear-condition kids without using electric shocks (used with adults but not kids, for ethical reasons). Children are presented with two different female faces\u2014one blonde, the other brunette\u2014via a black-and-white video screen and are told that one of the faces will be accompanied by a loud sound. \"The scream happens 80 percent of the time,\" says Liz Ivie, one of the fellows. \"The uncertainty makes the arousal higher.\" Various physiological measures are taken, including heart rate, skin conductance, eyeblinks, and startle response.\n\nIvie and Laurie Russell, another fellow, demonstrate the experiment.\n\nAs they set things up, we debate which woman is creepier. Honestly, neither one looks very pleasant even with their faces resting, but we settle on the brunette. Russell says she \"looks like she's plotting someone's demise.\" As I await the scream, I can feel myself getting anxious; my heart rate jumps, and my stomach feels buzzy. \"Just get it over with. The anticipation is horrifying,\" says Russell, who, like me, will be hearing the scream for the first time. When it finally accompanies the blonde, I jump. It sounds slightly strangled, and the face contorts into a twisted shriek. (NIMH has had a problem with the screaming lady being too terrifying, so much so that they lost about a third of the studies' participants. They are now working on a new paradigm that uses bells.)\n\nIn some studies, participants are also shown merged images of the two faces. After the kids are conditioned, they undergo extinction, which entails being shown the faces without the scream.\n\nIn a small study using this paradigm published in 2008, adolescents with anxiety disorders developed more fear of both women's faces, whether they were coupled with the scream or not. This speaks to the tendency of anxious people to generalize threat; fear of a situation that is genuinely scary can spill over to one that is safe, too.\n\nAnother larger study published in 2013 used fMRI scans to see what happened to two parts of the prefrontal cortex, the subgenual anterior cingulate and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), three weeks after anxious adults and adolescents underwent fear conditioning and extinction with the screaming women. These parts of the brain are critical for extinction and dampen the activity of the amygdala. Both anxious adolescents and adults had less activity in the subgenual anterior cingulate than healthy people when they were asked whether or not they were afraid while viewing the women's faces during the three-week follow-up, so this pattern may be a common feature of both adolescent and adult anxiety disorders. But anxious adolescents and adults differed in the activity of the vmPFC. The researchers conjecture that certain patterns of activity in this brain region might help identify those young people most at risk of remaining anxious in adulthood.\n\nChildren tend to classify more things as dangerous, but \"when kids mature they get better at recognizing the nuanced boundaries between things that are safe and things that are dangerous,\" says Pine. It is the prefrontal cortex that helps us do that. Pine thinks that the development of anxiety has something to do with prefrontal maturation. He explains that one of the things that separates healthy from unhealthy development is learning how to appropriately classify things that are ambiguous.\n\nAfter I've been spooked by the screaming blonde, Russell takes me to a room with a fake MRI machine designed to acclimate kids to being in an actual scanner. There she shows me one of the newest research paradigms, dubbed \"Virtual School.\" Virtual School \"enrolls\" subjects aged eight to seventeen and tries to replicate the treacherous social waters they have to navigate, which are particularly terrifying for children with social anxiety disorder.\n\nSocial anxiety disorder (SAD) or social phobia is one of the most common anxiety disorders, affecting more than 10 percent of the U.S. population during their lifetime. Children and adults with SAD fear meeting new people, being at parties, and other situations where they are expected to interact with strangers. Terrified of embarrassment, they often avoid such situations entirely. Some evidence shows that the brain dysfunction in social anxiety disorder may be different than in other anxiety disorders.\n\nIn Virtual School, kids are told that they will be chatting online with six other kids in a virtual school. In preparation for that, they make an avatar and answer questions about their favorite subject, color, actor, and type of music, among others. Once the experiment starts, they \"attend\" the virtual school while in an fMRI scanner, as their brain is being scanned. They are told that two of the other kids are mean, two are nice, and two are sometimes mean and sometimes nice. (In reality, there are no other children in the experiment. A computer generates the responses.)\n\nKids see an electronic rendering of a schoolroom, with various avatars sitting at desks. Bubbles appear above the avatars' heads when they are about to chat. Some of the other kids taunt them, and the information they provided about their personal likes and dislikes is used to make the teasing more pointed. A mean kid might say something like, \"You like Miley Cyrus? Wow, you're such a loser.\"\n\nThe researchers are particularly interested in what happens in anxious kids' brains as they anticipate comments from the kids who are sometimes mean and sometimes nice, which is known as ambiguous social feedback. Other studies have shown that kids with SAD tend to interpret ambiguous social feedback as negative.\n\nAfterward kids are debriefed and told that they weren't chatting with real kids after all. \"The anxious kids are usually pretty sad,\" says Russell. \"They usually say, 'I can't believe I didn't figure it out.' That they weren't smart enough to know that we were tricking them.\n\n\"Some of the kids come out of the scanner really upset because they got bullied.\" Other kids are relieved when they find out they weren't actually talking to real kids. \"It actually makes a lot of them feel better,\" says Russell. \"Some say, 'I'm glad kids aren't that mean in real life.' \"\n\nThe goal of these NIMH experiments is to figure out the \"neural signature\" of nascent anxiety disorders. Identifying the signature could allow doctors to identify at-risk children and develop treatments to prevent the anxiety from becoming entrenched.\n\nIt was in the middle of the night sometime in the fall of 1958 when my grandmother Gladys Schneidervin Petersen, a thirty-nine-year-old Wisconsin housewife, tried to kill her family.\n\nShe began by crumpling some papers and putting them under the beds of her two sleeping sons, nine-year-old Gary, my father, and eleven-year-old Bill. Next, she crumpled more papers, placed them between the stove and the refrigerator, and arranged a tower of garbage in a back storage room. Then she collected her thirteen-year-old daughter Susan's schoolbooks and stacked them at the bottom of the sleeping girl's bed. Finally, she moved through the house and set each spot aflame.\n\n\"I woke up and the bottom of my bed was on fire,\" my aunt Susan recalls. She ran to wake up her father and then her brothers; my grandfather screamed for them to leave the house. \"Mom just kept saying she needed to protect us and if we were dead nobody could hurt us. That made sense to her.\"\n\n\"That's when Dad took her to the hospital, and she didn't come back for a long, long time,\" my father said recently. Gladys would spend the next three years at Mendota State Hospital, a mental institution in Madison that opened in 1860 as the Wisconsin State Hospital for the Insane.\n\n\u2014\n\nThroughout my childhood, my grandmother was a specter. She died when I was two, and I have no memory of her. But I heard bits of stories\u2014of the fire, of the mental hospital, of how my mother was afraid of the knives Gladys carried. While my parents were dating, my father told my mother that the only thing she could do to make him leave her would be to \"go crazy.\"\n\nWhen I got sick in college, I was terrified that I was following in my grandmother's footsteps\u2014beginning my own descent into psychosis. My father was worried, too. \"It got stuck in my head that somehow you ended up with a little bit of the wrong Petersen DNA,\" he said.\n\nMental illness is at least partly genetic. Studies of twins have found that genes are responsible for 30 to 40 percent of the variation in the individual risk for anxiety disorders. For schizophrenia, Gladys's diagnosis, the genetic toll is much higher: Genes contribute close to 80 percent of the variation in risk. Having a first-degree relative\u2014a parent, sibling, or child\u2014with an anxiety disorder bumps a person's risk of developing one up to five times that of the general population.\n\nNew research is showing that some of the same genes underlie different mental disorders. In a 2013 study, genetic overlap was found between five different illnesses: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, autism, and ADHD. The overlap was highest (about 15 percent) between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and lowest (about 3 percent) between schizophrenia and autism. Researchers suspect that the genes implicated in anxiety disorders also overlap.\n\nScientists believe that a set of genes crucial to brain development can go wrong in many different ways, says Francis McMahon, chief of the Genetics Basis of Mood and Anxiety Disorders Section of the Human Genetics Branch at the NIMH Intramural Research Program. \"The more severe mutations are more likely to be seen in cases of autism, the less severe in cases of schizophrenia, and perhaps the more subtle defects we'll see in the mood disorders and the anxiety disorders.\" So some of the same genes may be behind both Gladys's breakdown and my own struggles.\n\nGenetic research into anxiety disorders has been hampered by small sample sizes, says McMahon. Some scientists believe this is because of inadequate funding. Also, anxiety disorders often coexist with other mental illnesses, such as depression, which muddies the waters. A further complication is that patients with the same diagnosis can show great variation in symptoms and severity, which means that scientists risk comparing apples to oranges. And since anxiety is a normal human emotion, it can be difficult to ascertain where disorder begins.\n\nMcMahon believes that the number of genes involved in anxiety disorders is \"probably going to be in the many hundreds.\" Each one likely contributes a tiny amount to the overall risk.\n\nGladys had been deteriorating for years before the fire. Indeed, her children can't remember a time when she was healthy. However, old friends of my grandmother told my aunt Susan that, in her youth and when she first married, Gladys was \"a wonderful woman. She cared about people, taught Sunday school, was active in church, and was there to help anybody that needed it.\" In my favorite photo of my grandparents, from the early 1940s, my grandfather Pete Petersen is dashing in his army uniform. (He was a fighter pilot in the Pacific during World War II.) My grandmother, wearing a chic white suit and dark blouse, her brown hair lustrous and curled, leans tenderly into him. They look joyous and hopeful.\n\nIn 1950, when the children were five, three, and one, my grandfather had a tragic accident. He had become a carpenter after the war and was making repairs on a church roof when he fell thirty feet and punctured a lung. Then, while recuperating in the hospital, he caught polio. He spent several months in an iron lung, a cylindrical respirator that did the work of his paralyzed chest muscles, and was not expected to survive. Although he ultimately recovered, he used crutches because of his weakened legs until his death in 1979.\n\nEven before the accident, the family's lifestyle was hardly luxurious. The family lived in a one-bedroom home (the boys slept in a screened-in porch and Susan slept in the living room) on the banks of Eagle Spring Lake in Eagleville, Wisconsin. There was no indoor plumbing, and my grandmother hauled water down from the lake so that she could wash clothes and the family could bathe. \"Mom would do the laundry, then she'd do us,\" my dad recalls. As the youngest, he went last and \"got the grimiest stuff\" at bath time. There was an outhouse and a jerry-rigged contraption to fall back on during the cold Wisconsin winters\u2014a wicker chair with a hole and a bucket under it. But on idyllic summer days they swam in the lake and picked wild black raspberries, asparagus, and rhubarb.\n\nBecause of Pete's polio, the whole family was under quarantine for weeks. \"There was a big colored piece of paper on our front door that boldly said QUARANTINED and warned people not to approach us or the property,\" my aunt Susan relays in a life history she wrote for her daughter. My aunt was barred from attending first grade for several weeks. Food was dropped off outside the fence surrounding the yard, including a piece of birthday cake left over from a party she had to miss. Money dried up. \"Our relatives called us the 'poor Petersen kids,' \" my dad says.\n\nPete's illness seems to have been the catalyst for Gladys's decline. \"It kind of ripped her to shreds. She was never the same again,\" my dad recalls.\n\nGladys spent two months at Waukesha County Hospital near her home, where she underwent insulin coma therapy (ICT), a widely used psychiatric treatment from the 1930s to the 1950s. Patients were injected with large doses of insulin that sent blood sugar levels plummeting, inducing temporary comas. The comas\u2014characterized by profuse sweating, muscle twitching, and sometimes seizures\u2014were ended with infusions of glucose. Higher doses of insulin were used for schizophrenia, lower doses for \"nervousness.\" ICT would not be discredited until the 1960s, when it was supplanted by new antipsychotic drugs and electroconvulsive shock therapy.\n\nThe records are sketchy, but it's likely that doctors saw little improvement, because she was transferred to Mendota on July 12, 1955, and stayed there for more than a month. In her medical records from that stay, under \"present illness,\" it says: \"Symptoms she recalls are loss of memory, of articles just read and program [ _sic_ ] just seen on T.V. and crying herself to sleep at night after working continuously day after day....She also remembered being alarmed about reading an article in a newspaper in which the names, Sharon [ _sic_ ], Gary and Bill, appeared being killed by a truck backing over them, the names being those of her children.\" The notes give two potential diagnoses: \"schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type\" and \"SIMPLE SCHIZOPHRENIC or REACTIVE DEPRESSION.\" On August 3, doctors wrote that she \"went into remission.\" She was released on August 17.\n\nReading the records from her first Mendota admission, I feel like I'm trespassing. There are weirdly intimate details: when she learned about sex and how many sanitary pads she used during her period. At times I sense a tone of disapproval, as in the first line of the case summary: \"The patient [is] a dependent individual with little self-confidence.\"\n\nIt is eerie how similar my grandmother's early symptoms were to some of mine: fuzzy memory, strange superstitions, and a fixation on catastrophe. My own doctors have hypothesized that, if she were treated today, Gladys might have initially been diagnosed with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and GAD.\n\nIn the 1950s, schizophrenia was a bit of a catchall diagnosis. In Mendota's 1955 annual report to the State Board of Public Welfare, patients are given only a handful of diagnoses, such as schizophrenia, syphilis, alcoholism, \"senility,\" and \"psychoneuroses.\" Until 1960, Mendota patients were divided into \"quiet\" and \"disturbed\" groups.\n\nAfter my grandmother's first hospitalization, she declined further. She was so afraid of something terrible befalling her children that she had trouble letting them out of her sight. She forbade Susan to see friends and followed her to the school bus stop. Then the fear curdled into psychosis. She became terrified of Catholics and \"bad spirits.\" (My grandparents were Lutheran. My aunt says my grandfather told her that Gladys had been raped by a boyfriend who was Catholic.) She was afraid of being poisoned. She tucked a screwdriver into her purse for self-defense. She also carried a pocket mirror and would tilt it to catch the sunlight, a habit she thought would protect her family. Once she tried to force Susan to take the pills she had been prescribed at Mendota.\n\n\"I was afraid to go to sleep,\" Susan says. \"I would lie on my stomach with my face to the wall and the covers over my head so I couldn't see her. I knew she was going to come and kill me.\"\n\nThen Gladys set the fires.\n\n\"She was trying to save us from all the terrible things that were going through her mind. She was going to send us to heaven. She thought that's what needed to be done to protect us,\" my dad says.\n\nMy grandfather put out the fires, and it seems that no authorities were notified. Pete took Gladys back to Waukesha County Hospital, and she was transferred to Mendota on November 28, 1958. In the admissions report from her second stay, under \"mental status,\" it says: \"Heard rumblings under floor, threatening voices, both male and female. Became doubled over in the middle\u2014'they were putting the screws on me' and believed her 'insides were empty.'...Has expressed fears about being placed in a pinball machine.\" This time the diagnosis is more definitive: \"SCHIZOPHRENIC REACTION, CHRONIC UNDIFFERENTIATED IN TYPE.\"\n\nIn 1958, my grandmother was one of 936 patients at Mendota. The most common diagnoses that year were \"schizophrenic reactions\" and alcoholism. About 28 percent of patients had been at Mendota for less than three months; 8 percent had been there for a decade or more. Space was tight, and resources were taxed. The original main building had become a drafty firetrap, and there were plans to abandon it. Goodland Hall, a new building for \"chronic disturbed patients,\" opened that year.\n\nThe year of her admission marked the beginning of a movement to provide more freedom for Mendota patients. Six locked wards were now unlocked during the day, and the administration gave some say to an advisory board made up of patients. There was swimming, archery, and field trips to sporting events at the University of Wisconsin. The hospital received a new 35-millimeter projector for watching movies. Attendance at the Sunday worship service reached nearly two hundred, and communion was given every twelve weeks. A volunteer group, the Gray Ladies, came each week to visit patients and write letters for them.\n\nDuring her time in the hospital, Gladys was treated with psychotherapy. In her records are several notations about her level of \"insight\" into her problems, a reflection of the supremacy of Freudian psychoanalysis at the time. My grandmother was also prescribed a few of the new antipsychotic medications just coming to market. At various times, she was on Thorazine, first synthesized in 1950, and Mellaril, a medication that largely disappeared from the market in 2005 over concerns about cardiac arrhythmias. During at least one period, the medication seemed to be helping her. The records say her thinking was better \"organized\" after the dose of one drug was raised.\n\nAntipsychotic drugs were instant hits at mental hospitals like Mendota. In February 1955, 147 patients were being treated with the new \"tranquilizing\" medications. Less than a year later, by May 1956, four hundred patients were on the drugs. By 1960, staff members were complaining that some patients whom the hospital relied on to work in the facility\u2014particularly in food service and the laundry\u2014were \"so heavily sedated that their work output is limited.\"\n\nGladys herself worked in Mendota's kitchen. But at some point, she developed paranoid fears about the job and refused to continue. Later hospital staff encouraged her to do a shift in the laundry, but she refused to go, saying she was worried about her heart. At least one staffer was downright grumpy about her noncompliance, noting in her records that \"she always uses her health as an excuse for not doing something.\"\n\nIn May 1961, doctors noted that my grandmother had begun to experience a disturbing new hallucination and decided that shock therapy, also referred to as ECT or EST, was imperative. \"Her hallucinations stem from the fact that she feels that her son is someplace in the hospital. She takes walks around the grounds hoping to find him. It is recommended that the patient have EST. If we do not obtain permission for shock therapy it is recommended that the patient be transferred to the county hospital.\" The message was clear: Undergo shock therapy or be kicked out of the hospital. Gladys was terrified of ECT, but she did ultimately have the treatments.\n\nElectroconvulsive therapy was first employed in Rome in 1938. Ugo Cerletti, a psychiatry professor, had been tinkering with electricity in his research on epilepsy, using it to induce seizures in dogs. (About half the dogs died; their hearts stopped.) Cerletti became intrigued by the use of insulin and other compounds to induce convulsions in psychiatric patients and wanted to see whether electricity could be safely applied to people to similar therapeutic effect. His assistant, Lucio Bini, built the first ECT machine for humans, which delivered 80 to 100 volts of electricity via electrodes placed on the temples. The first patient was a thirty-nine-year-old engineer with hallucinations. Not only did the patient survive the treatment, he seemed to get better. ECT spread rapidly to mental hospitals around the world, used primarily to treat patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and depression.\n\nIn its early years, ECT caused violent convulsions, and it was not uncommon for patients to fracture their spines as they thrashed about. Soon doctors began using muscle relaxants and short-acting anesthesia to keep patients still and prevent broken bones. By the time my grandmother underwent ECT, the treatment was considerably safer, although some patients were troubled by aftereffects such as headaches and short-term memory loss. (Today ECT has been largely redeemed: It is one of the most effective therapies for treatment-resistant depression and suicidal ideation.)\n\nAccording to my grandmother's doctors, the treatment was effective. A note from September 26, 1961, says: \"The patient has also completed a series of 18 EST Treatments\" and states that she is hallucinating less and seems less suspicious and paranoid.\n\nDuring Gladys's time at Mendota, my grandfather made the hour-and-a-half trip every weekend to visit her. Often he would take their children. \"All I remember is people screaming,\" Susan says. \"That just frightened the heck out of me. Mom didn't [scare me]. But in the background you could hear the screaming.\" On the way home, as a reward, my grandfather would stop and buy the kids Neapolitan ice cream.\n\n\u2014\n\nIt's a chilly October night, and Aunt Susan and I are going through hundreds of family photos in her office at home in Waukesha. We stop at a haunting picture of my grandmother shot during a weeklong visit home from Mendota in the fall of 1960. Gladys is staring at the camera, grim-faced and weirdly vacant, her dark hair tightly curled. She's wearing a checked dress and a black cardigan and holding a white stuffed dog she made at the hospital. \"What a sad face,\" my aunt says.\n\nMy grandmother was released from Mendota on January 3, 1962. During the 1960s, a movement arose to shift treatment away from inpatient psychiatric facilities to outpatient programs, and Mendota, like many other mental hospitals, was aggressively looking to discharge patients. The final note in her medical records reads, \"The patient shows some improvement over her status previously, but she is not well by any means.\" She was transferred to the county hospital and then sent home. She didn't take medication or have any outpatient treatment after her release.\n\nFor the first six months or so after she was back, Gladys seemed better, but soon enough the intense fear and paranoia returned. By then Susan had graduated high school and studied keypunch, an early form of computer data entry. She moved to Racine and married. \"I wanted out,\" she recalls. The rest of the family moved to Salem, Illinois, where my grandfather, an actuary at an insurance company, had been transferred.\n\nMy grandmother never recovered. \"She talked to herself all day,\" my dad says. \"She'd rail against the Catholics and just crazy shit.\" As a teenager, my father never invited friends over. Still, Gladys made rhubarb pies and sticky buns that my father still raves about, and she was able to take care of the house. She also liked to walk to downtown Salem and visit the shops. Her favorite was one that sold yarn, thread, and material.\n\nDespite her delusions, my father was always able to make my grandmother laugh. She loved it when my father would come up behind her while she was washing dishes and give her bear hugs. He would talk in silly voices, make up nonsense words, and snap a towel on her behind. \"She was usually so serious because she was so worried,\" my mom recalls. \"But when your dad was around, she really brightened up.\"\n\nWhen I was a baby, my grandmother doted on me. She would sit next to whoever was holding me and coo and smile. She was particularly delighted when I began walking, dragging a Raggedy Ann doll around by its tuft of red hair. But my grandfather never allowed Gladys to hold me. She had started carrying knives again. No matter where she was in the house, no matter what she was doing, she kept a large kitchen knife nearby.\n\nGladys died in 1972, when she was fifty-two years old. She had long had heart problems, perhaps caused by the rheumatic fever she'd had as a child. On the night she died, she had chest pains, and my grandfather called an ambulance. When it arrived, however, she wouldn't let EMS take her to the hospital. My grandfather pleaded with her, and so did the emergency responders. No. She wouldn't go. She was terrified of doctors and of being confined to a hospital again. Terrified of more shock treatments.\n\nMy grandfather stayed with her to the end. \"He loved what she was and she loved him, too,\" my father says. \"But she was living in a whole different world.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nI visit what is now called Mendota Mental Health Institute for the first time on a sunny fall afternoon. Because of my panic around driving on highways, I take the back roads from my sister Dana's house in nearby Janesville. I drive past dairy farms and drying cornfields, ignoring the incessant \"recalculating\" pleas from the GPS trying to nudge me back on the highway. I had originally planned on asking Dana to be my driver, but she had scheduling issues. And, it turns out, in the last few years she's started to panic on expressways, too. Genes indeed.\n\nThe street leading up to Mendota's entrance is lined with modest vinyl-sided homes that look to be from the 1940s and 1950s\u2014many probably built during the time period when my grandmother was inside. Mendota isn't what I expected. I'm not sure what I thought it would be like, exactly\u2014something more foreboding, perhaps, that portended the human misery inside. But the original building was razed in the 1960s, and nothing of it remains but a stately line of trees. Now Mendota looks like a graceful college campus. I can see Wisconsin's capitol building across Lake Mendota, which abuts the four-hundred-acre campus. Sunlight glints off the water and dapples the gold and orange leaves overhead. Burial mounds from the Ho-Chunk Indians dot the grounds, graceful green hills in the shape of a deer, panther, and eagle. Banners proclaiming HEAL, RESPECT, HELP, and HOPE line the roads.\n\nMendota now has 315 inpatients and 825 staff members. Almost all are so-called forensic patients, part of the criminal justice system. People are taken here so that clinicians can assess whether they are competent to stand trial. If they are found not to be, Mendota treats them until they are deemed competent. About 150 residents are long-term patients who have been acquitted of their crimes\u2014almost all violent\u2014by reason of insanity. (The vast majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent. In fact, those with psychiatric disorders are far more likely to be the _victims_ of violence than the perpetrators.) There's also a small geriatric ward for patients with dementia and an innovative juvenile treatment program housing twenty-nine teenagers. Most patients in the facility are men; female forensic patients are sent to a different state hospital.\n\nI'm here to meet with Gregory Van Rybroek, Mendota's director. Van Rybroek is fifty-nine years old with close-cropped gray-blond hair and small, rimless rectangular glasses. He's dressed in a gray polo shirt featuring the word MENDOTA and an image of an eagle. His baseball cap also sports an eagle and the word MENDOTA, along with 1860, the year the hospital was founded. The employee badge around his neck says HOW CAN I HELP YOU? He looks like a college athletic director and is both self-deprecating (\"I'm not that smart,\" he jokes periodically and very unconvincingly) and profane. He has a Ph.D. in psychology and a law degree and started working at Mendota as a student in 1980.\n\nWe get into Van Rybroek's decade-old silver Acura, and he gives me a tour of the grounds. Mendota divides its facilities into maximum security, medium security, minimum security, and \"minimum plus.\" Patients are assigned to a facility based not on the severity of their crimes but on how well they are recovering. (You're just as likely to find a killer in minimum plus, where residents have jobs mowing the lawn, are allowed to make excursions into town, and can attend college, as you are in maximum security.) Most patients come in with psychotic symptoms and are diagnosed with disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression.\n\nVan Rybroek points out a new greenhouse where some patients work and that provides flowers to the governor's mansion. He tells me about plans to build a new \"skilled learning center\" that will include a house where patients can practice the skills they'll need to live independently. \"You should be able to make a bed and fry an egg,\" he says.\n\nWe drive by Goodland Hall, a beige brick building that houses maximum and medium security wings. There are bars on its windows. In a grassy courtyard hemmed in by a barbed-wire fence, a young bearded guy in jeans and a tie-dyed shirt runs around a track. Other men sit at picnic tables near an unused volleyball net. One man in a blue short-sleeved shirt leans back to catch the sun on his upturned face.\n\nWe move on to Stovall Hall, which houses minimum-security and geriatric psychiatric patients. In its courtyard, there's an incongruous white gazebo and red flowers. Men play basketball and sit in lounge chairs. The \"minimum plus\" facility is a low-slung brown and white building that looks faintly Swiss. RECOVERY THROUGH INDEPENDENCE says a plaque above its front door. The perky language and bucolic setting should not lead to any misperceptions, though, Van Rybroek says. \"You try to help people who are sick. These people can be dangerous. It is not Disney here.\"\n\nContrary to the perception (which, I admit, was mine) that criminals who enter a psychiatric facility are never released, Van Rybroek says that currently four hundred former inpatients have been released \"on conditions\"\u2014meaning that their housing, medication, and future treatment have been planned in detail. Those who have been acquitted of their crimes because of insanity have the right to petition the court for release every six months. Van Rybroek says the recidivism rate of those released is just .25 percent.\n\nWe stop at a building that houses an employee conference center and a cafeteria for employees and minimum-security patients. In the hallway, Van Rybroek stops to congratulate a pleasant white-haired man who looks to be in his sixties. I take him for an employee who is moving to a new job, but after the man walks away, Van Rybroek says, \"He killed his mother twenty years ago.\" After about a dozen years at Mendota and successful treatment, the man is about to be released. Van Rybroek was congratulating him on overcoming a hurdle to his release by finding a place to live near a sister who was willing to check in on him.\n\nIn the employee conference center, where staffers are participating in a \"leadership seminar,\" historical photos and maps of Mendota line the walls: The grand 1860 main building with its striking cupola and white terraces. A steam yacht outing to a Norwegian Sunday school picnic in 1879, complete with boat schedule. Boats \"to asylum for insane and maple buff\" depart at one, three, and five, it says. Rows of nurses in starched white hats and cat-eye glasses, circa 1960.\n\nA glass cabinet in a corner holds artifacts: A photo of the \"1901 Wisconsin Hospital for the Insane Band,\" a group of grim-faced men with natty ties, tubas, and trombones. A prescription dated 1927. A photo of the \"dayroom\" in 1870 with rocking chairs, upright piano, easel, and chandelier. My eyes fix on a foot-long brown box with black knobs and gray plastic tubing: a vintage Medcraft Mark II ECT machine. So this is the device my grandmother was so afraid of. It looks no more sophisticated than my childhood Lite-Brite.\n\n\"In college I spent a lot of time holding people down\" while they were getting electroshock, Van Rybroek says. He says he would hold one arm and one leg of a patient. Someone else would pin down the patient's other arm and leg, and a third person would hold the patient's head still. (The first time, Van Rybroek didn't hold tight enough and when the electric current was switched on the patient socked him on the side of the head.) Afterward, ECT patients often had short-term memory problems. \"They didn't remember who I was or where they were,\" Van Rybroek says. Gradually, their memories returned and some patients got better, though he's not certain it was solely because of the shock treatments.\n\nWe drive past a boarded-up brown brick building constructed in 1922 for World War I vets with \"shell shock,\" or what we now call PTSD. Van Rybroek wants to turn it into a drug and alcohol treatment facility. As we drive around more, with Van Rybroek pointing out some of the burial mounds and the view to the calm, shimmering surface of Lake Mendota, he sighs and says, \"All the terrible tragedy all mixed up with the beauty.\"\n\nMy grandmother's records don't reveal where she lived while she was here. But Van Rybroek thinks she most likely was in Stovall Hall or Lorenz Hall. Lorenz was built in 1953 and housed adult civil patients until the 1970s. I'm not allowed into any of the occupied patient zones, but one wing is empty. It is being transformed into a forensic wing, so security must be added before patients can move in. Lorenz is yet another low-slung beige brick building, but there's a chic Mad Men\u2013like concrete entrance and steel-rimmed walls of windows. Van Rybroek takes me inside.\n\nWe head down a series of hallways, through two sets of doors. The ceiling is low, with white perforated squares. Fluorescent lights illuminate a floor made up of yellowish-green tiles. The hallway opens into a dayroom filled with tables and modular chairs like those in an airport terminal, where patients relaxed between treatment sessions. Big windows offer views of the autumn trees. An enclosed nurses' station\u2014shrouded in steel and tempered glass\u2014sits in the center. There's also a smaller \"secure\" dayroom with a locking door for patients who couldn't handle being around so many other people. Along one wall are five \"seclusion\" rooms for patients who behaved violently\u2014nine-by-twelve-feet cinder-block cells (stained with a slight green tinge) illuminated by fluorescent lights. Each has a steel door with a small window. A camera beamed video to the nurses' station.\n\nOne of the seclusion rooms has a \"restraint\" bed, a low silver metal platform with small circular holes punched into it that's used to prevent self-harm. The bed is bolted to the floor. Green, blue, and purple leather straps lie across it, the cheerful colors incongruous given their function.\n\nWe walk down another hallway with patient rooms, small cinder-block spaces with dressers bolted to the walls. A bulletin board offers suggestions for things patients can do when they're bored. Among them: Draw pictures. Play Yahtzee. Clean your room. Make paper airplanes.\n\n\u2014\n\nIn the days after my visit to Mendota, I often think about the march of mental illness across my family tree. Gladys's brother, Harold, spent years at a psychiatric hospital in Utah; he died there in the late 1980s, of lung cancer. Susan thinks that he, too, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Susan herself has bipolar disorder. Her daughter, my cousin Renee, has GAD and for years self-medicated with alcohol. My father struggles with depression. About fifteen years ago he asked his doctor for Zoloft because \"maybe I've just never been happy,\" he says.\n\nSusan muses hopefully that as time has passed, the illnesses have become less severe\u2014that in three generations we've gone from psychosis to anxiety. Maybe my daughter and Renee's three children will be even more lightly touched.\n\nMy mother's side isn't completely even-keeled. My mother is a worrier with frequent insomnia and an anxiety-fueled cleaning compulsion. Growing up, Dana and I knew that if we heard the vacuum cleaner running before seven a.m., we needed to tread carefully. My mom's siblings can be tightly wound, too. Their group texts are a constant volley of concerns and comfort. Two of my cousins deal with recurrent panic attacks.\n\nOver time anxiety has become an issue for my sister Dana, too. She's always been introverted and shy, more comfortable one on one than in big groups, and she's dealt with a bit of social anxiety, but none of these things ever impaired her life in a significant way. She always had friends and boyfriends. And I still remember her, age seven or so, decked out in a red satin and silver-sequined outfit, shaking it onstage to Prince's \"Little Red Corvette\" at one of our yearly dance recitals. Then, during her twenties, Dana had a handful of panic attacks while driving. Bridges and interstates were the triggers. More recently, she says that anxiety has taken up permanent residence.\n\n\"I feel like my nervous system is on overload compared to normal people,\" she says. \"Sometimes I just don't feel calm, don't feel present or as able to interact. I feel like I just drank coffee even when I haven't.\" She's started to avoid highways (not an easy thing to do in Wisconsin) and driving at night. She's afraid of flying.\n\nAt the time Dana and I have this conversation, she knows that I've been dealing with a serious set of anxiety disorders for more than twenty-five years and that I've been working on this book for the last three. Yet this is the first time she's ever talked to me about her own anxiety. She hasn't told her husband about it either. And she's had a hard time even admitting it to herself. \"For a long time, I didn't think about anxiety in terms of myself. You were always the one who had that, and I didn't,\" she says. \"I think it kind of crept up on me. It's scary to talk about because that means admitting you have an issue. I was in denial.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nScientists have been searching for the genes behind anxiety disorders for at least twenty years. For the first decade or so, researchers focused on individual \"candidate genes.\"\n\nOne of the most extensively researched is the SLC6A4 gene, which makes a protein called the serotonin transporter. The protein's job is to pick up excess serotonin from the space between neurons (the synapse) and suck it back into the neuron. It isn't particularly surprising that scientists landed on this gene: SSRI drugs like Prozac, which alleviate depression and anxiety, block the serotonin transporter so more serotonin remains in the synapses. This extra serotonin is thought to account for the drugs' therapeutic effects. So for scientists trying to home in on the genes that might confer risk for anxiety disorders, zeroing in on the serotonin transporter gene was as good a guess as any.\n\nThe SLC6A4 gene has a \"promoter region\" that regulates how active it is and how much serotonin transporter protein it makes. Some studies found that people who had one or two copies of the \"short\" version (or allele) of this region were more likely to have anxiety symptoms than those who had two copies of the \"long\" allele. Researchers also discovered that when people with at least one short allele were put into an fMRI scanner, their amygdalae had stronger responses to angry and fearful faces than those with two long alleles.\n\nUnfortunately, the science isn't consistent. Other studies haven't shown an association between the variation of short and long alleles and anxiety disorders.\n\nMany other individual genes have been implicated in anxiety disorders, too. Indeed, there's a veritable alphabet soup of genes that have been explored, some with a heftier body of evidence behind them than others. However, geneticists say that much of the research on candidate genes isn't that useful. Even in the best-case scenario, it just confirms preexisting hypotheses.\n\nThankfully, about a decade ago technology evolved to enable genetic research that is likely to be more fruitful. Genome-wide association (GWA) studies let scientists cast a wide net and scan across the genome. GWA studies are leading researchers to genes they never even suspected might contribute to anxiety disorders. The hitch is that very large sample sizes are needed for this research. Groups of scientists are now collaborating to build these big data sets.\n\nStill, genetic research on anxiety disorders lags behind other psychiatric illnesses.\n\n\"There's been very little funding for anxiety genetics despite the fact that it is a massive public health problem,\" says Jordan Smoller, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a leading genetic researcher. \"Anxiety disorders don't quite have the visibility\" of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and autism. \"People underrecognize the toll that [anxiety] takes on people's lives.\"\n\nOne of the most exciting areas of research is the interaction of genes and the environment. We already know that childhood trauma increases the risk of anxiety disorders, but it turns out that the level of that risk depends, at least in part, on your genes. Some scientists are focusing on the gene FKBP5, which makes a protein that regulates the cellular response to stress hormones like cortisol. People with a certain version of the gene\u2014the T allele\u2014who are exposed to trauma during childhood, may be more likely to later develop PTSD and major depression than those with a different version of the gene.\n\nThe hope is that genetics will be able to guide patients to the most appropriate treatments. One person's genetic profile might make her responsive to CBT, for example, while another person might be more responsive to an SSRI. Also, genetic research could lead to entirely new ways of understanding the biology of anxiety disorders, which could lead to better treatments.\n\n\u2014\n\nThere is no greater risk factor for anxiety disorders than being born female. Women are about twice as likely as men to develop one, and women's illnesses generally last longer, have more severe symptoms, and are more disabling. The bad news doesn't stop there. Anxious women are also more likely to develop an additional anxiety disorder, an eating disorder, or depression. In general, women worry and ruminate more than men.\n\nWhat is it about being female that makes women vulnerable to anxiety? Are women born anxious, or are we raised to be that way? Scientists are looking at how gender differences in upbringing can fuel anxiety. Intriguingly, as newborns, it is boys who are more fussy and irritable. Michelle Craske, director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at UCLA, says that boys' cantankerous early temperaments may actually protect them from developing anxiety later on. Several studies have noted that mothers are more likely to match their sons' facial expressions and the direction of their gazes, which makes them more in sync with sons than with daughters. Craske conjectures that irritable baby boys may be better able to harness their mothers' attention than more placid baby girls. Mothers' greater harmony with sons may give boys the sense that the world is a predictable place, one over which they have some degree of control.\n\nBy the time babies are a few months old, however, the temperaments of boys and girls don't differ as much. And when girls hit age two, they start to show more \"negative affect,\" expressing more fear and acting more inhibited than boys. Researchers note that two is also the age when kids begin to exhibit traditional gender role behaviors\u2014stereotypically, boys gravitate to trucks and soccer balls, girls to dolls and dress-up clothes. By this age, parents have also begun encouraging their daughters\u2014more than their sons\u2014to exhibit empathy and help others; they urge their daughters to share toys with other children and consider others' points of view more often than they do their sons.\n\nIt could be that instilling empathy in very young girls has a downside. There's evidence as early as toddlerhood that girls \"catch\" fear more easily. Girls and women are better able to identify facial expressions, so scientists conjecture that they may be more vulnerable to internalizing the threats they see reflected on others' faces.\n\nIn one study, mothers presented two toys\u2014a rubber snake and spider\u2014one at a time to their toddlers. In one trial, the mothers were instructed to make fearful or disgusted faces and describe the toy as \"horrible, scary, or yucky.\" In the other trial, they made positive, joyful expressions and described the toy as \"fun, cute, and nice.\" Ten minutes after completing both rounds, mothers showed their children the spider and snake again. (This time moms were told to hold a neutral expression.) Both boys and girls were warier of the toys in the trials when mothers made frightened expressions and used negative words. And the effects of the moms' words also stuck: The kids continued to be fearful and avoided the toys even after the ten-minute delay. Girls generally had more extreme avoidant responses and seemed more afraid of the toys than the boys did.\n\nPeople\u2014particularly parents\u2014respond to children's fears in markedly different ways, too, depending on gender. When girls are anxious, adults are more likely to be protective and allow them to avoid scary situations. Boys are told to suck it up. \"There's an assumption that boys should be courageous and they should overcome their fears and face their fears. With girls, we are a little bit more accommodating, and we permit this sort of reluctance or avoidance of situations,\" says Carmen McLean, an assistant professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine who has studied gender and anxiety. But this protection, she says, has lasting consequences. \"You are teaching the girl, 'If I feel a little bit nervous, that means I should not do something.' A boy learns, 'If I feel this way, I should act anyway.' He learns, 'I can do it, and my anxiety goes down.' He feels more confident and has more efficacy. A little girl doesn't learn that lesson.\" It is as if boys are engaged in continual exposure therapy. Perhaps this inoculates them from future anxiety disorders.\n\nA large body of dispiriting research shows just how much boys are encouraged to be independent and brave while girls are dissuaded from the same behavior. Parents have been found to be more controlling with daughters than with sons, which puts girls at greater risk of an anxiety disorder. In a University of California, Berkeley study, researchers videotaped ten-minute interactions of mothers and fathers with their preschool-age children. The families were told to \"create a world\" out of a sand tray and small toys. When boys asserted themselves by, for example, telling their parents where to put a toy, parents were more likely to praise them. When girls were assertive, parents were more likely to interrupt, talk over, or disregard them. This gives girls the message that they don't have control over their environment. Feeling out of control is, of course, a core belief in the anxious mind.\n\nI take some solace from the fact that this particular study was conducted in 1993. Surely we must be more enlightened now?\n\nI pose that hopeful question to McLean, and she quickly shuts it down. She tells me about a conversation she recently had with the father of a newborn daughter and an older son. \"He was telling me how having a girl is so different than having a little boy. He said he felt a lot more protective, like his daughter was more fragile,\" she recalls.\n\nBarbara Morrongiello, a professor of psychology at the University of Guelph, has conducted a fascinating series of studies looking at how parenting interacts with gender to affect children's risk-taking behaviors. When Morrongiello was on maternity leave in the early 1990s, after her oldest son was born, she spent a lot of time at playgrounds and noticed huge differences in what boys and girls were encouraged to do\u2014and not to do. In the sandbox and on the jungle gym, \"I saw much more encouragement [expressed] to boys and caution to girls,\" she says. Morrongiello had a hunch that these different messages might be contributing to high injury rates for boys: After age two, boys have two to four times more injuries than girls. Their injuries also tend to be more serious.\n\nAlthough Morrongiello isn't an anxiety researcher, her findings may be critical for understanding the gender disparity in rates of anxiety disorders. Morrongiello and her colleague Theresa Dawber conducted a study that observed forty-eight sets of parents and toddlers on a playground. Parents and kids first played freely on a slide, swings, and jungle gym for ten minutes. Then the grown-ups were instructed to teach their children how to slide down a pole similar to what you'd see at a fire station.\n\nBoth boys and girls were just as skilled at navigating the playground equipment. Still, parents more often warned girls about safety and the risk of getting hurt, whereas they tended to encourage independence in boys. They also were more likely to physically help girls, even when girls didn't ask for assistance. For example, parents spontaneously helped girls during 67 percent of their attempts to slide down the pole. By contrast, they physically helped boys only 17 percent of the time. Incredibly, even when boys requested help, parents often initially denied their requests and urged them to try again on their own. Parents were so hands-off with their sons that several boys tumbled off the pole and onto the ground.\n\nIndeed, by school age, girls seem to have learned to be vigilant to threat. In other research, Morrongiello and colleagues found that when six-to-ten-year-old girls and boys assessed the same potentially dangerous scenario\u2014such as riding a bicycle without a helmet\u2014girls tended to see it as riskier than boys.\n\nParents also have different emotional reactions when sons and daughters do things that could get them hurt. When girls engage in risky behaviors, mothers, in particular, respond with disappointment and surprise. When boys do it, mothers react with anger. Parents are also more likely to chalk up their sons' injuries to personality, a \"boys will be boys\" mentality. When girls are injured, however, parents are more likely to blame the child. They are more likely to think that if only their daughters were more careful or listened better, they wouldn't get hurt.\n\nWhile these messages may protect girls from physical injury, Morrongiello conjectures that they could pave the way for feelings of vulnerability and self-blame. Boys are told that being a daredevil is just part of being a boy, whereas girls are taught that if something bad happens, it is their fault. \"To the extent you're telling girls you are responsible for your own negative outcomes, you can see girls being more anxious and more self-evaluative and self-critical,\" she says.\n\nBy late elementary school, girls are less likely to expect that they will succeed and more anxious about the prospect of failing. When facing stressful events, boys are more likely to problem solve on their own. Girls are more likely to seek support from their friends.\n\nThere is, however, one \"equal opportunity\" type of anxiety: social anxiety disorder. McLean tells me that this makes sense given how boys and girls are socialized. Girls are expected to master small talk, be charming, and make friends. Parents may consider it socially acceptable for a daughter to be afraid of snakes or dogs and avoid them, but they likely communicate that it's _not_ all right to refuse to say hi to a teacher or withdraw during a playdate.\n\nSurprisingly, men's _physiological_ reactions to stressful events are stronger than women's. Levels of the stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine tend to spike higher in men when they undergo stress-inducing laboratory experiments, like taking a difficult test. Researchers say this makes evolutionary sense since a hair-trigger fight-or-flight response would have been adaptive when hunting or fighting adversaries. Women, on the other hand, have a more muted fight-or-flight response, which scientists have dubbed \"tend and befriend.\" According to this model, women respond to stress by producing more oxytocin, a hormone thought to promote attachment, which spurs them to tend to their young and befriend other members of their group. The disadvantage to the tend-and-befriend response is that it could fuel anxiety by reinforcing worry and a pattern of avoiding threats.\n\nMen and women also often try to ease their anxiety in different ways. Anxious men, for example, are more likely to self-medicate with alcohol or drugs and develop a substance-use disorder. For years my friend Mike, a fellow journalist, turned to alcohol and drugs to try to ease his anxiety and depression. Mike is handsome, smart, and wickedly funny, but when his anxiety is full throttle, he constantly churns over conversations with editors and friends, worrying that he's offended someone or said something stupid. The physical symptoms of anxiety are even more debilitating: His stomach churns, his skin tingles, and he feels constantly light-headed.\n\nFor Mike, marijuana and narcotics like Vicodin were a revelation. They took away the worrying. They calmed his twitchy body. \"When you find something that makes that go away, you'll do anything,\" he says. But after a while, the marijuana turned on Mike. It started making him more anxious. His drinking and use of narcotics slid into addiction. He went to rehab. He relapsed. He kicked the drugs and alcohol again. Now he combats anxiety with an SSRI, daily exercise, and a strong spiritual practice.\n\nThere's evidence that estrogen and other sex hormones affect how women learn fears and how they override them. Women with anxiety disorders often say their symptoms worsen before their periods. Fluctuating estrogen levels could be partly to blame. Some studies show that when estrogen is high, fear responses are lower and vice versa. In one study, thirty-four women underwent a fear-conditioning procedure in which a picture of a lamp was paired with a shock to the hand. The women later underwent extinction, where the lamp picture was followed by no shock. Level of fear was measured by skin conductance. Women with higher levels of estradiol, a form of estrogen, had stronger extinction recall (meaning that they maintained a lower level of fear) than women with lower levels of estradiol. The women with high estrogen also had greater activation in the brain network implicated in fear extinction, the vmPFC, and amygdala.\n\nIt isn't just genes, hormones, and socialization that contribute to women's greater vulnerability to anxiety disorders. The risk of sexual assault and abuse does, too. Men generally encounter more traumatic events\u2014such as serious accidents and experiencing or witnessing violence\u2014in their lives than women. Women, however, are more likely to be the victims of sexual abuse and assault. Because sexual trauma is so uncontrollable and unpredictable, Craske argues, it is more likely to lead to PTSD and other anxiety disorders.\n\n\u2014\n\nScientists can identify some people at increased risk for anxiety disorders when they are infants. Researchers do it by assessing temperament, that unique, innate fingerprint of personality.\n\nTemperament is a \"biologically-based bias, usually inherited, that affects the chemistry of the brain,\" Jerome Kagan, a professor emeritus of psychology at Harvard University, tells me. \"It is analogous to the behavior and mood of a dog breed. You know the difference between a laid-back Labrador and a Pekingese or a pit bull?\"\n\nKagan, who is now eighty-seven, has spent his career studying two particular temperaments\u2014what he calls high-reactive and low-reactive\u2014that relate to how we respond to new objects, situations, or sounds. High-reactive babies thrash their arms and legs, arch their backs, and cry when confronted with novelty. Low-reactive babies remain relatively quiet and relaxed. Kagan has found that, as toddlers, high-reactive babies tend to be shy, quiet, socially reticent, and fearful, or what he calls behaviorally inhibited. Low-reactive babies, by contrast, generally become more boisterous, outgoing, and daring. Kagan calls them uninhibited. Studies by Kagan and others have found that inhibited children are much more likely than uninhibited kids to develop anxiety disorders. About one-third to one-half of inhibited kids develop anxiety disorders\u2014most often social anxiety disorder\u2014by adolescence. Behavioral inhibition (BI) is largely genetic. Twin studies have found that the heritability of BI is anywhere from 40 to 75 percent.\n\nKagan started his temperament work in 1957 at the Fels Research Institute at Antioch College in Ohio. At the time, the institute was conducting a longitudinal study of children born between 1929 and 1939. The researchers noticed that a small group of participants who were very fearful as small children remained cautious and introverted into adulthood. Kagan, along with colleagues at Harvard, where he began teaching in 1964, hypothesized that the root of our differing reactions to novelty lay in the amygdala. Since the amygdala projects to brain regions that control motor activity and the autonomic nervous system, the theory was that babies with more excitable amygdalae would thrash and cry more and have higher heart rates and blood pressure. In 1989, Kagan and colleagues recruited five hundred four-month-old infants. The researchers conducted a series of experiments (what scientists now call the Kagan paradigm) to assess how the infants reacted to new things.\n\nEach baby was put in an infant seat for the forty-five-minute assessment. First, the mother was told to look at her baby and smile but not talk, while researchers took the infant's resting heart rate via electrodes. The baby was then presented with a series of noises, including a taped female voice reading sentences and nonsense syllables and a balloon popping behind the child's head. Mobiles with colorful toys were dangled in front of the baby's face. A researcher placed a cotton swab dipped in alcohol in front of the baby's nose.\n\nThe researchers characterized about 20 percent of the babies as high-reactive, meaning they cried and moved their arms and legs around during at least 40 percent of the experiments. About 40 percent were low-reactive. (The rest were a mix of the two.)\n\nKagan and colleagues continued to assess the children every few years.\n\nWhen the babies were two years old, each toddler was asked to put a finger in a glass of black liquid and to let a researcher put a drop of water on his or her tongue. The child was approached by a stranger wearing a white lab coat and gas mask, a moving toy robot, and a person dressed as a clown. Toddlers who were fearful, cried, and avoided at least four of the objects or situations were tagged as behaviorally inhibited (BI).\n\nAbout 46 percent of the high-reactive infants went on to become inhibited four-year-olds. Two-thirds of the low-reactive infants became uninhibited kids. When the kids were seven, they were assessed for anxiety symptoms. About 45 percent of high-reactive babies developed anxiety problems by age seven. Only 15 percent of low-reactive babies, however, became anxious. Kagan also discovered that blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned children were more likely to be inhibited, a finding that, he believed, may indicate that the same genes influence both eye color and temperament.\n\nOf course, if nearly half of BI kids will go on to have problems with anxiety, it means that half won't. Nathan Fox, a developmental psychologist at the University of Maryland and a former graduate student of Kagan's, is trying to discern which kids are most at risk. Fox notes that BI kids can still be shy without developing a disorder. \"They are not your cheerleaders and football captains. But they end up being professors or computer scientists.\"\n\nFox is leading two longitudinal studies of behavioral inhibition. The first began in 1991 with 156 four-month-old babies. By the time they were fifteen, he discovered that about half the BI babies had developed an anxiety disorder; 40 percent had developed social anxiety disorder. By age twenty-three, about 19 percent had a mood disorder.\n\nOne October morning, I head to College Park, Maryland, to see Fox. Meeting me in his office, he looks professorial, with a graying mustache and wire-rimmed glasses. A toy Oscar the Grouch, complete with garbage can, sits on his desk, a relic from his years as a consultant for _Sesame Street_. Idyllic photos of Lake Como, Italy, are blown up on his walls, souvenirs of a trip he took while writing a book about his work in Romania with orphan children.\n\nFox brings a laptop over to a table and shows me a video. A little blond boy I'll call Michael, fourteen months old, leans against the legs of his mother, who sits behind him in a chair. The boy, Fox tells me, was a high-reactive baby. Meanwhile a research assistant, off camera, plays with blocks and tries to entice the child to join her. The toddler rebuffs the advances, clutching his mother's legs and burrowing his head in her lap. While this is happening, we can hear the mother telling the researcher about the boy's first birthday party. \"We had a bunch of people over. He wouldn't open his presents. He wouldn't eat his cake. He cried the whole time. That was a fiasco.\" He's scared, she says, of most adults but is fine around children.\n\nFox shows the next video, which features Michael at age four. The study paradigm is a \"play quartet\" with the target child and three unfamiliar children. I see three boys playing in a room strewn with action figures, cars, and dolls, but no Michael. Then I hear crying and then a loud, plaintive \"Nooooo!\" coming from off camera. A woman, his mother, then carries a flailing Michael into the room. He tries to run out the door, but she drags him back in. He sobs and sobs. After a few minutes, he stops crying and slumps in a corner, defeated.\n\n\"He's just going to watch the other three kids for the rest of the time. He's not going to play by himself,\" Fox says. At one point, a little boy comes over to Michael and says, \"You don't like being here.\"\n\nThe third video Fox shows me is of Michael at age seven. The paradigm is again a play quartet that includes the target child and three unfamiliar peers. Three of the boys walk into the room and immediately start exploring the toys on the floor (Legos, action figures). Michael, on the other hand, simply looks around and doesn't pick up any of the toys. \"He's going to go and stand in the corner of the room for the entire fifteen minutes,\" Fox tells me. Indeed, Michael does just that. He looks miserable, as if he's hoping the floor will swallow him up. At one point, a boy walks over to Michael and puts his arm around him, but Michael shrugs the arm off. The other boy walks away.\n\nI ask Fox if he knows what became of Michael, who now must be about twenty-three. Michael, he says, did develop an anxiety disorder and, later, depression. Fortunately, he got treatment and was prescribed medication. He graduated college and seems to be coping reasonably well.\n\nFox and colleagues have found that, while parenting may not contribute much to the development of anxiety disorders for children who aren't inhibited, it matters a lot for BI kids. In one study, the researchers found that only those BI kids whose mothers were overcontrolling developed greater social anxiety symptoms by adolescence. They cited various examples of this kind of parenting behavior during playtime including mothers dominating the conversation, giving frequent and unnecessary instructions, interrupting the child, or taking away a toy. In other studies, the researchers found that BI kids who are put in day care during the first few years of life became less inhibited. Being exposed to new people and experiences at day care\u2014and possibly getting a break from controlling parenting at home\u2014helps kids become less fearful.\n\nFox and his fellow researchers are finding that particular cognitive processes of some BI kids raise the risk of anxiety disorders. They have found that behaviorally inhibited toddlers who have an attention bias to threat are more socially withdrawn at five years old and are more anxious in adolescence. BI kids who don't have an attention bias to threat don't end up socially withdrawn and anxious. \"We find that BI kids way before they show any signs of anxiety are showing this attention bias to threat,\" Fox says. \"So it is not a symptom of an anxiety disorder. It is an underlying mechanism which facilitated the emergence of anxiety.\"\n\nFox and his colleagues have found that some cognitive processes protect BI kids from developing anxiety disorders. Kids with BI who are adept at attention shifting (being able to shift one's attention in order to complete a task or to achieve a goal) are less likely to develop anxiety disorders. This skill could help kids divert their attention away from threatening stimuli.\n\nBI kids who have higher levels of inhibitory control, however, are more likely to develop anxiety disorders. Inhibitory control is the ability to override an ingrained response that is maladaptive and respond in a more beneficial way. For kids without BI, this is thought to be adaptive, but it doesn't seem to be for BI kids. Scientists aren't quite sure why. One hypothesis is that, because BI kids already have a trigger-happy fear system (that twitchy amygdala), having a strong voluntary control system on top of it leads to overcontrol and inflexibility. In other words, researchers say, such kids \"may be better able to monitor their response and reflect on past errors, leading to increased levels of rumination and increased anxiety symptoms.\"\n\nIn one study, Fox and colleagues assessed inhibitory control by asking behaviorally inhibited four-year-olds to say the word _day_ when shown a picture of a white moon and stars with a black background and _night_ when shown a picture of a yellow sun on a white background. This is known as a Stroop task, and it requires participants to override a powerful response. Kids who were more accurate in the task were considered higher in inhibitory control. Researchers assessed attention shifting by asking the children to sort a set of cards based on a given rule by color. Then they were asked to sort the cards according to a new rule, by shape. The greater a child's accuracy, the greater their ability to attention shift. The study found that BI kids who had lower levels of attention shifting and higher levels of inhibitory control had anxiety problems. But BI kids who had higher levels of attention shifting and lower levels of inhibitory control seemed to be protected from excess anxiety. The hope is that this research might lead to new interventions for BI children that could prevent anxiety disorders from developing. A therapy that increases attention shifting and decreases inhibitory control is one possibility.\n\nI ask Fox what his personal temperament is. \"I don't think I was highly inhibited, but I think I was somewhat inhibited,\" he says. \"I think I was\u2014more so than I needed to be\u2014an overly sensitive kid, just in terms of friendships and entering into peer groups and all that. High school was not a pleasant time as I remember.\" What helped him was having a best friend. \"I had one very good friend, and I think that was a very important anchor for me.\" Not all BI kids have this. In his studies, when the children come in for their nine-year-old assessments, researchers ask them to bring in their best friend. \"We had some kids where the mom said, 'Can he bring his cousin?' \"\n\nI was not an inhibited child. I made friends easily, was independent, and could be a bit of a show-off, dancing and making up skits for any audience I could find. My mother says that once, at age two, I walked by myself from our house to the park\u2014a distance of several blocks. My father, who was supposed to be keeping an eye on me, was washing his lemon-yellow Ford Torino in the driveway and didn't see me leave. \"I just wanted to go to the park,\" I said calmly when my parents found me after a frantic search.\n\nA couple of years later I got lost in a department store while shopping with my mother. \"There's a little lost girl named Andrea,\" my mother heard over the loudspeaker, with directions on where to collect me. She found me sitting happily on top of a checkout counter, a lollipop in my mouth, being fawned over by a group of young saleswomen. We continued shopping and I quickly vanished again, this time deliberately, in search of more sweets and attention.\n\nIn doing this research, I have realized that my temperament is probably not the root of my anxiety disorders. It is doubtful that I'll ever find a single smoking gun, although genes most likely play a part. Mental illness isn't like tuberculosis, which is always caused by one particular bacterium. Anxiety disorders almost certainly have multiple causes\u2014from genetics to childhood trauma to how your parents interact with you. And for any given person, the mix of these factors will be as singular as a fingerprint.\n\n> Anxiety Disorders Program, Evaluation Summary, November 20, 1990\n> \n> Ms. Peterson [ _sic_ ] is a 20-year-old single student who is a junior at the University of Michigan who was referred to the anxiety disorders clinic by Dr. Pitt. She comes with a chief complaint of a one-year history of panic attacks....The patient presented as an attractive young women [ _sic_ ] who was appropriately dressed and presented as mildly anxious. Thoughts were fluid and coherent, affect was appropriate to the content of discussion. There was no evidence of impairment of memory or judgment. Our conclusions are as follows: Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia. OCD (mild).\n\nIt is the fall of 1990, nearly one year since that December day I fell apart, and I'm sitting in a small, nondescript conference room with about ten other people\u2014all women, all anxious. We are in a group therapy session in the Anxiety Disorders Program at the University of Michigan Health System. At twenty, I'm decades younger than most of the other participants. Looking around the room, I glimpse the sad progression of my own life if I let anxiety control me. Plagued by panic attacks, several of the women have been practically homebound for years, their trips to \"group\" one of their few (white-knuckled) outings each week.\n\nWe go around the room and talk about our \"homework\" for the next week. One of the homebound women has an assignment to leave the house each day and walk to the mailbox. Mine is to buy multiple travel-size tubes of toothpaste and open a new one every day. This is exposure therapy, the most effective\u2014and most excruciating\u2014treatment for anxiety problems. The idea is for us to actively face our fears by eliciting anxiety symptoms and gathering evidence that experiencing them won't lead to whatever catastrophe we've conjured. Gradually, week by week, the assignments become more difficult. The goal is to scale our emotional Everests.\n\nExposure therapy is the workhorse of what is known as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Remember the fear-conditioned rats that stopped freezing when the tone was no longer followed by the shock? Learning that the tone was safe overrode the association of the tone with the shock. Some scientists think exposure therapy does the same thing in people. Each time I used a new tube of toothpaste and didn't drop dead reinforced the reality that it wasn't, in fact, dangerous.\n\nThe toothpaste was item one on the \"fear hierarchy\" my therapist had me create, a list of things and situations I avoided because of anxiety. As the weeks went by, I tackled each one. Standing in line at a coffee shop. (Lines made me feel trapped.) Taking a vitamin. (I was afraid it would make me sick.) Running up a flight of stairs. (I panicked when my heart rate went up.) My therapist even had me breathe rapidly to induce hyperventilating, one of the classic symptoms of my panic attacks.\n\nMy therapist also helped me tackle my catastrophic thoughts. This was called cognitive reappraisal. Each time I had a calamitous thought, I was to challenge my negative beliefs by amassing evidence and then calculating the actual odds of disaster on a scale from 0 to 100. For example, say my heart rate kicked up suddenly. Typically, my first thought was: \"Maybe I'm having a heart attack.\" Cognitive reappraisal went something like this: \"This has happened before, and I've never had a heart attack. I'm only twenty years old, and I've had several tests to rule out heart disease. The symptoms I'm having are also the same as a panic attack. What is the actual likelihood that I'm having a heart attack? Maybe 3 percent.\"\n\nI can't say I was always persuaded by these arguments. The tiny voice of rationality was often drowned out by the loud, demanding symptoms of my body. In the battle between my racing heart and logic, the heart usually won.\n\nBut as time went on, as I exposed myself to more scary situations and continued not to die, the symptoms became slightly less urgent, the rational thoughts a little sturdier. By the end of the group sessions, I certainly wasn't back to my old self, but I was more functional. My world\u2014which had pretty much narrowed to a few classes and my room\u2014expanded. I took on a full course load. I ventured out for pizza. I remembered more of what I read. I even made it to a fraternity party and had an energetic dance-off to Madonna with my friend Lisa.\n\nCBT, which usually involves twelve to fifteen weekly sessions with a therapist plus daily homework, is effective: About half of anxiety disorder patients experience clinically significant improvement. In a meta-analysis of twenty-seven studies comparing CBT for adult anxiety disorders to a placebo, CBT was found to have a \"medium to large\" effect on the severity of anxiety symptoms. Neuroimaging studies show that successful CBT treatment changes the brain\u2014some reveal reduced activity in the hyperactive amygdala and increased activity in the listless prefrontal cortex. In one 2016 study, CBT actually shrank the amygdala.\n\n\u2014\n\nNondrug treatments for anxiety have a colorful history. In the nineteenth century, people flocked to spas to ease their anxiety, a practice that had begun earlier but was now booming. Hydrotherapy was used to treat all manner of chronic illnesses, including psychological ones. Charles Darwin, for example, frequented Malvern in England for his hypochondriasis. The Italian and French Rivieras were recommended for the treatment of nervous problems. In the major cities, \"hydros,\" private mini-spas, cropped up. Paris had dozens. Depending on the diagnosis, patients were sprayed with water, alternately hot and cold, and then dunked into arctic swimming pools. Massage and electrotherapy were on offer, too. Hydros competed with private \"nervous clinics,\" which were overseen by a growing cadre of \"nerve doctors,\" usually neurologists or general physicians. Psychiatrists, by contrast, who were called alienists, worked almost exclusively in asylums, grim places that housed the psychotic and the criminal. Treatment there was generally limited.\n\nOne of the most popular therapies for neurasthenia, the \"tired nerve\" disease of the late 1800s, was the rest cure. In 1875, Silas Weir Mitchell, a nerve doctor in Philadelphia, popularized a souped-up rest cure: a stringent regimen of bed rest, massage, and a high-fat diet rich in milk. Patients often took the cure in spa clinics, staying for as long as three months. (Needless to say, this was a therapy available only to the well-off.)\n\nSome found the cure more harrowing than the illness. The writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman described her experience with the rest cure in the autobiographical short story _The Yellow Wallpaper_ , published in 1892. In the story, the heroine is separated from her baby and mostly confined to a room in a rented summerhouse. She is forbidden to write or do housework and is admonished not to even think or imagine too much. \"So I take phosphates or phosphites\u2014whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to 'work' until I am well again,\" Gilman writes. \"Personally I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?\" Deprived of distraction and any intellectual life, the heroine spends hours staring at the yellow wallpaper in her room, gradually descending into madness, her unraveling revealed through her hallucinatory descriptions of the wallpaper.\n\nThe rest cure was primarily prescribed to women. When Theodore Roosevelt was diagnosed with neurasthenia, his doctor sent him to a dude ranch in the Dakotas for a spell of riding and hunting.\n\nThe seeds of CBT were also planted around this time. The origins of the treatment go back to the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov and his concept of the conditioned reflex, an automatic form of learning. In his famous experiments with dogs in the 1890s, Pavlov found that if the sound of a buzzer was followed by food, the animals eventually learned to associate the buzzer with food and would salivate as soon as they heard the sound, even before they saw the food.\n\nJohn Watson, an American psychologist, expanded upon Pavlov's ideas. In 1913, he published a paper delineating his belief that psychology must be rooted in observable behavior. In the 1920s and 1930s, pioneering psychologists like Hans Eysenck and B. F. Skinner fleshed out the approach. Skinner asserted that people act to gain a reward or avoid pain and behavior changes through either reinforcement or discouragement. Eysenck said people become neurotic through learning experiences undertaken to avoid anxiety. Healing happens when these experiences are \"unlearned.\" The behaviorist school of psychology was born.\n\nMeanwhile psychiatrists continued their love affair with Freud, who had trained as a neurologist and studied hysteria with Josef Breuer. Working with Breuer, Freud claimed he was able to bring relief to hysterical patients by hypnotizing them and having them zero in on the psychological origins of their symptoms, a process the duo called \"catharsis.\" Over time, his psychoanalytic method evolved. Instead of relying on hypnosis, patients\u2014with the help of their analysts\u2014could supposedly uncover the unconscious conflicts that were the origin of their distress simply by talking, saying whatever came to mind. Psychiatrists throughout Europe and the United States adopted his \"talking cure\" to treat people with anxiety problems and other mental illnesses.\n\nIn the 1950s, while Freudian psychoanalysis reigned, therapy for anxiety disorders took a huge step forward with Joseph Wolpe, a South African psychiatrist. Wolpe began his career as a staunch follower of Freud. But when he began working with soldiers suffering from \"war neurosis\" (what we now know as PTSD), he was disillusioned to discover that the treatments he had been trained to provide\u2014talk therapy and medication\u2014didn't seem to work. He began exploring alternatives. Eventually Wolpe developed a treatment called \"systematic desensitization,\" an early form of exposure therapy. The treatment rested on his belief that it was impossible to simultaneously feel anxious and relaxed. It entailed teaching people with phobias relaxation techniques, then gradually exposing them to the things they feared while they employed the relaxation tools they had learned. Soon Wolpe's teachings spread to psychologists around the world.\n\nIn the 1960s, Aaron T. Beck, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, developed cognitive therapy, initially as a treatment for depression. Beck said that psychopathology was largely the result of distorted thinking. Treatment focused on identifying maladaptive thoughts, challenging them, and replacing them with more realistic ones.\n\nFrustrated at the dismal success rates of traditional analysis and psychotherapy, a handful of renegade psychiatrists and psychologists took the behaviorist and cognitive theories and began to experiment further with new ways of treating anxiety. Like Wolpe, they largely abandoned the idea of trying to uncover the root cause of a patient's anxiety, focusing instead on relieving the symptoms. In the 1960s, they were dismissed as quacks and charlatans by the psychiatric establishment.\n\nIn 1971, psychiatrist Manuel Zane opened the country's first phobia treatment center at White Plains Hospital in New York. He treated his patients in the community, driving over bridges with those with bridge phobias, riding elevators with those with elevator phobias, and tape recording every panicky pronouncement. Soon he began sending patients out to tackle their fears with \"phobia aides,\" trained people who had recovered from their own phobias.\n\nMeanwhile in California, psychiatrist Arthur Hardy was taking a similar approach. He developed a behavioral treatment for agoraphobia (which he dubbed territorial apprehension) and generated a huge amount of press coverage.\n\nThese iconoclasts and others eventually banded together and formed an organization to educate other clinicians and raise money for research. In 1977, about three hundred patients, psychiatrists, and psychologists convened in an auditorium at White Plains Hospital for the first meeting of the Phobia Society. Since renamed the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, the group now publishes one of the field's key scholarly journals and holds a yearly research conference that attracts more than a thousand scientists and clinicians from around the world. Neuroimaging experts mingle with CBT trainees. Geneticists chat with mindfulness experts. All are focused on improving the lives of the chronically anxious.\n\n\u2014\n\nIt took nearly a year and numerous doctors for me to be diagnosed and treated. I'm unusual, however, in that I sought help from the medical system at all. People with panic disorder wait an average of ten years before discussing their symptoms with a doctor, psychologist, or other professional (including an acupuncturist or \"spiritual advisor\"). Those with social phobia delay sixteen years; those with generalized anxiety disorder, nine years. With specific phobia, the wait is twenty years. And when they do seek help, patients may not receive appropriate treatment. This is particularly true of African Americans. Though they have lower rates of anxiety disorders than whites, studies have found, their illnesses are more chronic and severe and the quality of care they receive is generally lower.\n\nIn the months after my stint in group therapy, I continued to get better. The panic attacks and overall anxiety abated. I went to class and started working part time at a funky clothing store called Splash where our manager judged employees' success not by how much we sold but by how much we flirted with customers. Scott and I broke up. During spring break in South Padre Island, Texas, I met Joel, a sweet, goofy MBA student. I stayed in Ann Arbor for most of the summer to spend time with my new boyfriend before he moved to San Francisco. Throughout the fall of my senior year, I felt pretty good. I was taking a full load of classes again, going dancing with friends, and flying to visit Joel when time\u2014and cash\u2014allowed.\n\nThen the day after Christmas, I relapsed.\n\nI am in my parents' car, sitting in the backseat. It is the middle of the night. My sister is sleeping next to me, my mother nodding off in the passenger seat. My father is driving, blasting Led Zeppelin on a classic rock radio station to keep himself awake. We are in the middle of the fourteen-hour drive from San Antonio, Texas, where my parents had moved more than a year earlier, to Salem, Illinois, on our way to visit family.\n\nSuddenly I feel a slight pressure on my chest. I try to ignore it, silently singing along to the radio: \"Oh oh oh oh oh oh. You don't have to go oh oh oh oh oh.\" It quickly becomes a weight. The air in my lungs seems to have turned from a gas to something more solid. Breathing starts to feel like a struggle or at least a conscious action. If I stop paying attention, I think, it will stop. And I will die.\n\nI try to use some of the techniques I learned in group therapy. _I'm okay_ , I tell myself. _I'm still breathing. This is just a panic attack._ But my puny thoughts are no match for the powerful, catastrophic sensations. For the rest of the ride, I huddle against the car door and focus on moving the air in and out of my lungs. When we arrive at my grandparents' house, I head right for the afghan-strewn sofa. The terror abates enough\u2014or I am able to mask it enough\u2014for me to get through the trip without a visit to the ER, but when we get back to San Antonio, I crumble.\n\nThe weight on my chest is constant. Sometimes it feels like my ribs have shrunk a few sizes. Other times I imagine the pressure as the anvil that eternally drops on Wile E. Coyote. I am too scared to sleep. If I sleep, I can't concentrate on breathing. In my mixed-up mind, sleep equals death. All night I lie on the sofa in my parents' living room, the TV turned to Nick at Nite's _My Three Sons_ marathon. At times my mother stumbles half-asleep out of her bedroom, sits next to me, and silently strokes my hair. I nod off for a half hour, an hour, and wake up with a heart-racing start. The weight on my chest is always there.\n\nI see my mother's doctor, who thinks I might be having an asthma flare-up. She puts me on an oral steroid, which makes me jittery and does nothing to lift the burden on my chest. That doctor sends me to a pulmonologist and a cardiologist. They find nothing wrong. When I tell the cardiologist that I have had perhaps ten hours of sleep over the entire week, he prescribes Xanax. I'm still afraid of taking medication, but I'm so desperate that I swallow half a tablet and zonk out for fourteen hours.\n\nMy parents call my therapist back in Ann Arbor.\n\n> # ANXIETY DISORDERS PROGRAM: Progress Note\n> \n> ## PETERSON [ _sic_ ], Andrea\n> \n> ### January 16, 1992\n> \n> Andrea comes in after a 6-month absence from the clinic....She comes complaining of difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, light-headedness, dizziness, occasionally experiences derealization, depersonalization, and describes anxiety over many catastrophic thoughts that she has about her physical well being. We reviewed her symptoms and again reviewed the behavioral and cognitive interventions that have helped her in the past.\n\nBack in Ann Arbor for the winter term, I resumed weekly therapy. Because the fears of food and contamination had reappeared, causing me to lose ten pounds, my first homework was to eat four to six small meals and drink eight glasses of water a day. I was also to take a vitamin pill.\n\nI also embarked on another medical odyssey, looking for some reason other than anxiety\u2014and the mild asthma I already knew I had\u2014for my shortness of breath and weight on my chest. Through the winter and spring, I was a regular at the Pulmonary Function Laboratory at the University of Michigan Hospital. I had multiple spirometry tests to see how much air I could quickly blow in and out of my lungs and a methacholine challenge test, where I had to breathe in a substance that makes the airways constrict in people with asthma. I had a test to measure my blood gases during exercise: I jogged on a treadmill while blood was taken from an artery in my wrist. The diagnosis? Mild asthma.\n\nThe fatigue and constant fear returned, along with weird new physical symptoms. The tingling in my feet that I had felt off and on before settled into a constant throb. It slowly crept up from the soles to the tops of my feet, to my ankles, then licked the bottoms of my shins. I had a test to assess the nerves in my feet and legs using pinpricks, electric currents, and vibrations. I visited the Chronic Fatigue Clinic and even the Infectious Disease Clinic. I was convinced that I had some rare fatal disease the doctors just couldn't identify. I started to sneak around. I'd make an appointment with a new doctor without telling the previous one. (I was mortified when my doctor at the University Health Service received a detailed letter from a doctor I had seen at the Infectious Disease Clinic.)\n\nWhy didn't the CBT techniques prevent this? Maybe it was because, after two years, the major physical symptom of my anxiety had changed from a racing heart to chest pressure. Or maybe it was simply because the effects of CBT can wear off. One study followed sixty-three panic disorder patients, most of whom had responded well to a course of CBT; nine of them relapsed during the following two years. And more than one in four participants sought additional treatment within those two years because of persistent symptoms.\n\nPsychologists are tweaking CBT to boost its performance. Very simple adjustments, such as scheduling appointments in the morning or asking that patients nap or run after therapy, may make it more effective. A 2016 study found that exposure therapy appointments in the morning were more helpful than those later in the day. Higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol occur naturally in the morning, and researchers concluded that they were responsible for at least part of the benefit of the earlier sessions. A surge in cortisol can facilitate learning, they said.\n\nNapping after therapy was shown to be beneficial in a 2014 study of people with spider phobias. The subjects did a session of exposure therapy using virtual reality: Using a head-mounted display, they moved through simulated rooms containing virtual spiders. After the session, some subjects were given ninety minutes to nap. Others watched a video. Then they were asked to approach a live tarantula in a cage. At that point, there were no significant differences in anxiety symptoms between the groups. However, an appointment a week later yielded different results. Compared to those who didn't sleep after exposure therapy, the people who had napped had a greater reduction in anxiety and catastrophic thoughts about spiders as they moved toward the tarantula. Scientists believe that sleep can strengthen the memories of new learning that occurs during therapy.\n\nPsychologists are also adding other components to improve CBT. In a 2016 study of patients with severe GAD, CBT was augmented by motivational interviewing, an approach where therapists focus on expressing empathy and validating patients' feelings. Those who got the combined therapy saw a greater reduction in worry and distress over the one-year period after the treatment ended, compared to those who got only CBT. In addition, far fewer patients who had the combined therapy\u2014about half as many\u2014dropped out of treatment. David H. Barlow, a CBT pioneer and founder of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University, has, along with colleagues, developed a treatment called the Unified Protocol that they are using to treat a range of anxiety disorders and depression. It builds on CBT and includes sessions to teach patients to fully experience their emotions. Barlow says the dropout rate is much lower than traditional CBT.\n\nMichelle Craske and colleagues at UCLA are finding that asking patients to vividly imagine happy scenes before therapy may improve learning during exposure and make the treatment work better. Craske is also finding success in modifying exposure therapy. Modifications include varying where and how patients do the therapy and intensifying exposure to the feared object or situation. For example, a person with a dog phobia might encounter two dogs at one time.\n\nCraske will soon launch a study to see whether exercise after exposure therapy boosts its effectiveness, since exercise increases the level of a protein that is critical for the consolidation of memories.\n\nAnne Marie Albano, director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders, says that it is important to do periodic booster sessions of CBT, particularly during times of stress and big life changes, like getting married, getting divorced, having a child, or losing a parent. \"Demands become different over time. The person's ability to adapt to that is challenged,\" she says.\n\nPsychologists have also developed a number of other therapies for anxiety disorders. The most heavily researched is acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). Whereas in CBT you're taught to challenge your anxious thoughts, weigh the evidence, and modify them so that they are more realistic, in ACT you're taught to accept your thoughts and feelings. \"Trying to get rid of your pain only amplifies it, entangles you further in it, and transforms it into something traumatic,\" writes clinical psychologist Steven Hayes, one of the creators of ACT.\n\nAcceptance doesn't mean succumbing to anxiety, though. Rather, you're taught to distance yourself from your anxious thoughts and feelings, to see them more objectively. This is known as cognitive defusion or a way, as Hayes writes, to \"look _at_ thought, rather than _from_ thought.\" ACT therapists use dozens of different defusion techniques, including having clients say one word over and over for twenty to forty-five seconds until it seems stripped of its meaning. Patients do this for benign words like _milk_ and then move on to emotionally charged words like _weak_ or _stupid_. Other exercises include visualizing thoughts as leaves floating by on a stream or stating fears in a silly voice or as lyrics to a song.\n\nACT involves a variety of mindfulness techniques. Derived from ideas from Zen Buddhism and yoga, mindfulness, says Hayes, is the \"nonattached, accepting, nonjudgmental, deliberate awareness of experiential events as they happen in the moment.\" ACT includes meditations on bodily sensations, walking meditation, and such exercises as mindfully eating a raisin or drinking a cup of tea.\n\nLike CBT, ACT also includes exposure. But in ACT, exposure is presented as a way to achieve personal goals. Therapists have patients identify core values through exercises such as writing their own eulogies and epitaphs. Clients are encouraged to see exposure as helping them move toward what they find personally meaningful.\n\nHayes was already working with anxiety patients when he had his own first panic attack in 1978. He was in a contentious meeting with colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro when he moved to ask his coworkers to \"stop fighting and to start cooperating.\" \"I couldn't make sound come out of my mouth,\" he told me. \"My heart rate was going so fast.\" Over the next three years, the panic attacks worsened. He tried relaxation tapes and exposure therapy, but nothing worked, and he felt himself spiraling downward.\n\nIt was only when he went back to the influences of his hippie youth, he says, that he started feeling better. He had dabbled in meditation, lived in a spiritual commune, and gotten involved in the so-called human potential movement that came out of the Esalen Institute in California. He began combining what he had learned from these experiences with the behavioral therapies he had studied and, with like-minded colleagues, launched the research that would lead to the development of ACT.\n\nA 2012 study revealed that twelve sessions of ACT or CBT were about equally effective at reducing the symptoms of anxiety disorders. Another 2012 paper found that ACT was more effective for anxiety patients who also suffered from depression, while CBT was better for those without depression and those with \"moderate levels\" of anxiety sensitivity. Anxiety sensitivity is the belief that anxiety symptoms like a fast heartbeat and dizziness are dangerous.\n\n\u2014\n\nAnxiety is a future-oriented state, so it's not surprising that learning to focus on the present would help to subdue it. Not only ACT but mindfulness practices of all kinds are increasingly being used to treat anxiety disorders. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) focuses on meditation and yoga. Applied relaxation (AR) teaches people to identify early symptoms of anxiety and quell them using fast-acting relaxation techniques. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and emotion regulation therapy (ERT) combine meditation with practices from CBT.\n\nThese treatments are effective for many patients. In a meta-analysis of thirty-nine studies involving more than a thousand people in total, mindfulness-based therapies significantly reduced symptoms in patients with anxiety disorders.\n\nKnowing what a magic bullet they can be for some people with anxiety disorders, I've tried meditation. _How hard can it be?_ I asked myself. It's incredibly popular. Kids learn it in school. You can download meditation apps on your smartphone. There's even a book that teaches you to meditate with your dog.\n\nIt is very unfashionable to say that you suck at meditation.\n\nI suck at meditation.\n\nI know that one can't really be awful at meditation. It is, devotees tell me, all about the practice. Still, I can't get into it. I've tried. But my mind jumps around so much, from worries to the ache in my hip to the dust on the carpet. I usually abandon the practice after a few days.\n\nI decided to visit Jeffrey Rossman, a clinical psychologist and the \"director of life management\" at Canyon Ranch, a luxury spa and health resort in Lenox, Massachusetts. Rossman treats anxiety with mindfulness and a range of other alternative therapies including biofeedback and EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), which entails having clients recall traumatic memories while moving their eyes rapidly back and forth. The treatment is supposed to ease the intensity of the memories and reduce anxiety.\n\nRossman is trim and youthful with a wide, toothy smile and voluminous salt-and-pepper hair. He tells me that anxiety (and its cousin, stress) is what brings most people to Canyon Ranch. \"You would think people are coming to lose weight,\" he says, \"but we have more people coming to deal with stress in their lives than any other reason. People working seventy, eighty hours a week, commuting two hours a day, sleeping four hours a night. That's an extreme version, but I see it.\"\n\nAfter chatting for a while, Rossman does a biofeedback session with me. With biofeedback, you're hooked up to sensors that monitor functions like heart rate, skin temperature, and muscle tension, and you're then taught strategies to modify those functions. Rossman attaches a sensor to my ear, and a digital chart of my heart rate shows up on his computer screen. He has me close my eyes and guides me through a brief meditation. \"Breathe peacefulness in,\" he says over and over.\n\nAfter a few minutes, he says \"good\" and tells me to open my eyes. He points to a line on my chart that is sharp and jagged with abrupt peaks and deep valleys. That is my heart rate before the meditation, when it was jumping from one hundred beats a minute down to sixty and all points in between. The good news, according to him, is that my heart rate variability means that my heart is \"very dynamic. You've got a healthy young heart,\" he says. \"My guess is you have a lot of adrenaline in your system.\" Then he shows me a different part of my chart, where the jagged peaks become rolling hills. If this were a ski run, it would go from black diamond to easy green. This, he says, is my heart rate during meditation. \"You need some of this,\" he says, pointing to the smooth hills. \"People need recovery time.\" As soon as I open my eyes and begin asking questions again, the jagged peaks have returned. Rossman points to them and says, \"If somebody stays in this state for a long period of time...\" His voice trails off. I know that whatever he left unsaid isn't good.\n\nRossman advises people to \"punctuate the day with many moments of mindfulness\" so that over time they can rewire their nervous system. \"There are some people who are on medication who don't need to be,\" he assures me. \"If they practiced mindfulness, yoga, and meditation, they could train their brains.\"\n\nYoga and massage: They help tremendously when I'm relatively healthy. They keep me on an even keel and make relapses less likely. However, when anxiety has a tight hold on me, I turn to CBT and medication. These other things don't help at all. In fact, they seem to make things worse. I've had panic attacks while having my shoulders kneaded and while in Downward Dog. I've had to clamber off massage tables while mumbling apologies to a surprised therapist, slink off to the locker room, and down some Klonopin.\n\nI've had mixed results with other \"alternative\" therapies as well. I'm still traumatized from my first acupuncture treatment, with a doctor who practiced \"integrated medicine,\" which combines Western approaches with mindfulness, herbs, and acupuncture. (There's emerging research that acupuncture can ease anxiety before surgery and reduce the symptoms of GAD.) My amygdala feels like it has been on overdrive for months. Brad, the man I'm living with, is emotionally distant and critical, and the stress of the relationship is taking a toll. I'm having trouble sleeping and experiencing near-daily episodes of a racing heart. I've lost ten pounds.\n\nThat's why I'm lying on a table in a dark room with needles in my ankles, arms, and face.\n\n\"I've had great success helping people with anxiety with acupuncture,\" the doctor says as he works. I barely feel a pinch as the needles pierce my skin.\n\n\"Don't put too many needles in. I've never done this before, and I'm pretty nervous,\" I say.\n\n\"We'll go slowly. You'll be fine,\" he says. \"You should start to feel very relaxed.\" Then he leaves the room.\n\nI close my eyes and scan my body. I notice that my heart rate has slowed; the beats feel more regular and even. The tension in my muscles eases slightly. I sink lower into the table.\n\nMy mind, however, is whirring just as swiftly. The worries mount and collide, interrupting one another like rude dinner guests.\n\n_Where is the doctor? Is he ever coming back? Am I stuck here? I'm alone. I'm alone and I'm trapped._\n\nThe mismatch between my torpid body and my frenetic mind makes me even more freaked. It is as if the telephone wire between body and mind has been severed. I feel completely out of control.\n\n\"Excuse me. Excuse me!\" I call.\n\nNo answer.\n\n\"Excuse me! Excuse _me_!\" I yell.\n\nThe doctor comes back into the room.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" he asks.\n\n\"No. Please take the needles out. This isn't working for me,\" I say. As soon as they're out, I hurry off the table. Needless to say, I don't make another appointment.\n\nIt turns out that I'm not the only anxious person who loses it while trying to chill out. A phenomenon called relaxation-induced anxiety appears in the scientific literature at least as far back as the 1980s. In one admittedly tiny study of fourteen people with chronic anxiety, four felt increased tension during progressive relaxation, a technique where people tense and then relax various muscle groups in the body. Seven became more tense during a meditation exercise. Another small study of college students who said they felt anxious at least half the time incorporated similar relaxation techniques. Again the findings were counterintuitive: A handful of subjects felt increased anxiety during the relaxation exercises, and their heart rates jumped by ten to twelve beats per minute.\n\nResearchers have various theories about relaxation-induced panic. The physical changes caused by relaxation, such as floating sensations and muscle twitches, can be jarring for anxious people. It can feel like a loss of control. Practices like meditation and muscle relaxation encourage people to focus on their bodies and breath, which can make anxious people overly aware of their revved-up thoughts and distressing bodily sensations. And calming the body and mind can, paradoxically, open up more mental space for worrying.\n\nThere's been a flurry of research activity recently around yoga in particular. A 2016 meta-analysis of seventeen studies found that yoga had a medium effect on anxiety symptoms. Stefan Hofmann, a professor of psychology at Boston University, is in the middle of a $4 million NIH-funded study of yoga as a treatment for GAD. The study compares the effectiveness of CBT to Kundalini yoga and a stress-education program. Kundalini, sometimes called \"the yoga of awareness,\" focuses on breathing techniques and mindfulness. Hofmann says that the results from a pilot study are encouraging. \"The effects we observe with Kundalini are actually quite strong,\" he tells me. The deep, slow breathing that is a hallmark of Kundalini can modify the level of CO2 in the blood and kick-start the parasympathetic nervous system, and mindfulness counteracts the excessive worrying that plagues those with GAD.\n\n\"GAD is a disorder where people are overly focused on the future, on what could go wrong. They are in this loop that is the essence of worrying\u2014what could happen?\" says Hofmann. \"Mindfulness encourages individuals to stay in the here and now. The present-moment awareness at the heart of mindfulness works directly against these worrisome cognitive tendencies.\" Hofmann's study will measure changes in how focused the mind is on the current moment and on \"respiratory sinus arrhythmia,\" or variation in the heart rate that occurs with breathing. Hofmann says certain heart rate patterns are linked to GAD; they are one of the few biomarkers scientists have associated with worry.\n\nFor me, attending yoga classes sounds definitely more palatable than slogging through sessions of CBT and daily exposure therapy homework. I've done yoga fairly regularly for more than fifteen years. I stumbled onto it when I was in my twenties, living in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. I used to walk by the local Sivananda yoga studio and see relaxed-looking, clear-eyed patrons milling about after their classes, yoga mats tucked under their arms. I started going to beginner classes and immediately liked the low-key vibe and the emphasis on strength and stretching.\n\nThe habit took, and I soon began exploring other studios. I went to midnight yoga, where class was accompanied by live drumming and frantic flirting. I went to packed popular classes frequented by models and got used to being splashed with other people's sweat. I went to my first ashram in upstate New York, where I was awakened by a gong at five-thirty a.m. and shoveled manure as part of \"karma yoga.\" I went to a conference filled with celebrity yogis: One teacher autographed students' mats after class. Taking a challenging yoga class grounds me in the present moment. If I don't concentrate on what I'm doing, I might literally fall over. There's a reason many teachers call yoga a \"moving meditation.\"\n\nThere are only a handful of Kundalini studios in New York. Online reviews of one of them mentioned the dirty light-blue carpet and cultlike environment, with most participants wearing white. One reviewer even said she'd had a panic attack midclass! I passed on that one. Instead I went to Golden Bridge Yoga in Nolita one bright and balmy fall afternoon. Until then my yoga experience had been mostly secular, the only nod to the spiritual practice a few _oms_ chanted at the beginning and end of class and maybe a photo of a guru stashed in the corner. From that vantage point, Kundalini seems pretty eccentric. The name _Kundalini_ refers to a coiled-up energy shaped like a serpent that is housed in the base of the spine. The yoga practice is supposed to unwind this energy along the chakras, energy centers in the body.\n\nWhen I peeked into the studio, I saw a woman sitting cross-legged on a platform flanked by several photos of serene-looking elderly men. She was wearing a white scarf over her long curly dark hair and had her eyes closed while chanting in Sanskrit. She opened her eyes and welcomed me, saying I might be the only student that day. Thankfully, five others soon arrived.\n\nMany yoga classes include some kind of breath work, called _pranayama_ in Sanskrit. Kundalini takes this to the extreme. We did seven minutes of \"breath of fire\": You suck in your belly sharply while you exhale audibly through your nose. After only a couple of minutes, my hands and the skin around my mouth began tingling, and I felt light-headed. No way was I going to make it. I stopped, then started again. It went on and on. Everyone around me seemed fine. I, however, felt as if I were going to pass out. The sound of everyone exhaling puffs of air was accompanied by a recording of a woman singing \"Guru Ram Dass\" over and over at high volume. Very trippy. This is what a yoga rave would be like, I thought.\n\nWe followed that with some deep breathing, then countless leg lifts and stomach crunches. Chakras were mentioned several times. During one move, the teacher said we were going to \"make our auras all shiny.\" Next we sat on our heels, raised our arms, clasped our hands behind our head, elbows pointing outward, and chanted _HUD_ (the acronym for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, I thought) over and over, thrusting our elbows back with each _HUD_. The music (still Guru Ram Dass) seemed to swell and fill the room. After a couple of minutes, my arms started aching; a few minutes more, and they were throbbing. The muscled, heavily tattooed guy on the mat in front of me lowered his arms and massaged them. I dropped mine, too. I felt a faint euphoria.\n\nAs I was leaving, thrust back into the reality of a downtown New York City afternoon (a guy was slurping soup on the front stoop next door), I realized that my mind had not wandered once during the class. Despite the ridiculously sore muscles I knew were in store, I felt genuinely peaceful.\n\n\u2014\n\nI'm lying on a mat with a tennis ball under my butt trying to learn to relax. I'm in Lenox, just a few minutes away from Canyon Ranch, at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health for a weekend Yoga for the Nervous System workshop with Bo Forbes, a Boston-based clinical psychologist who has developed a yoga practice that she says can heal anxiety and depression.\n\n\"This is a release,\" says Forbes, as I and about ninety other anxious people roll around on our tennis balls, attempting to massage our piriformis, a muscle deep in the hip. The woman on the mat next to me and I look at each other and giggle.\n\nLater we're all walking around the room trying to find a particular spot on the scalene muscles in our neck. \"This is a direct release valve, a direct pathway to our nervous system,\" says Forbes, clad in snakeskin-print yoga pants and a red top adorned with a silver lotus flower. (Sunday's pants feature an image of a cow skull.) Three gold earrings dangle from each ear. Three gold necklaces encircle her neck. Her long, straight red hair is pulled back in a black scrunchie. She's wearing a headset microphone, a black foam ball a few inches from her mouth, like Lady Gaga.\n\nI'm confused, and I must look it, because Forbes strides over to me, puts her fingers on my neck, and pushes. I gasp. It hurts!\n\nThe workshop takes place in what must have been the church of this former Jesuit seminary, with soaring ceilings, eight modern chandeliers, and a grand piano on a dais. Instead of a cross, there is a screen to project Forbes's PowerPoint presentation and a fabric scrim in soothing pink, orange, and gold. A metal statue of Shiva, standing on one leg, four arms outstretched, stands by it. We're in the middle of an early September heat wave (upper eighties and high humidity), and the room has no air-conditioning. An industrial fan and several white boxy models have been brought in. A few participants were savvy enough to bring paper fans and are waving them wanly.\n\nForbes is thin and punctuates her sentences with big smiles. She tells the story of a woman who recently attended the workshop and said that her husband had sent her there with an ultimatum: She must learn to be calm, or he would divorce her. Yikes! As she talks, I start to get her quirky Bo-isms. When she wants us to explain something, she asks us to \"language it.\" She's going to \"curate\" some tools to help with our anxiety. She speaks a lot of the various \"boxes\" she says we put ourselves in.\n\nForbes began her career doing traditional talk therapy. After she became a yoga teacher, she started integrating yoga poses, fascia release, and breath work into her sessions. She soon realized, she says, that it was the yoga, not the talk, that was making her patients better. Now she believes that the body, not the mind, is the key to relieving anxiety and depression. \"Breath and simple restorative poses are most effective in our clinic for anxiety and depression,\" she says. Telling our \"stories\" too often, she says, can exacerbate anxiety. She's critical of current mindfulness practices, too, saying they have become too removed from the body. No clinical trials have been published to assess Forbes's specific methods, though she makes several references during the weekend to neuroscience and to others' scientific studies.\n\nIn one exercise, she has us pair off and tell our partner a difficult story from our life. A fashion designer from Manhattan tells me of the engagement she regrets breaking off several years ago. I tell her about an awful fight my husband and I had in the presence of our baby daughter\u2014one that made her cry. Forbes has us notice how our bodies feel after telling our stories. My stomach feels tight, my heart beats faster.\n\nThen she has us use one of our new tools. I lie in Child's Pose, head resting on a block, breathing slowly through my nose. I do feel better. She teaches us about interoception, our sense of the physiological condition of our body. \"Being with the changes in our bodies moment to moment is most calming to the nervous system,\" she says.\n\nAt Kripalu, breakfast in the main dining room is a silent meal. (When I forget that one morning, I get a stern lecture from one of the volunteer staff members.) We wear name tags and collect our food from metal vats, piling it onto too-small, scuffed black plastic trays. It is a cross between grade school and _Orange Is the New Black_ , except with delicious food and middle-aged women in lululemon yoga pants and tank tops. During dinner\u2014when we're allowed to speak\u2014I meet a neurologist and several therapists, all of whom struggle with anxiety. I debate the merits of Klonopin versus Xanax with a massage therapist from Nyack.\n\nForbes doesn't teach typical yoga here, the very physical vinyasa classes that are popular in most gyms and yoga studios, the ones that can lead to taut arms and tight abs. Her approach is subtle. In one exercise, she has us count our pulse for one minute. Mine is galloping along at ninety-six. Then she has us clasp our hands together and press them to our forehead, stimulating our vagus nerve, she says, while we breathe slowly. After a few minutes, she has us check our pulse again. Mine has slowed to a more respectable eighty-three.\n\nAfter the weekend, when I feel twitchy or sleepless at one a.m., I find myself doing this, and it seems to have a calming effect. While the workshop didn't hand me any cures, I did learn a few useful tricks. And it felt freeing to be surrounded by so many of my fellow anxiety sufferers. Every so often, I wonder what became of the woman whose husband gave her the ultimatum. Did she learn enough to save her marriage?\n\n\u2014\n\nCBT and ACT were developed decades before the latest advances in neuroimaging and genetics. New technologies are spawning treatments that aim to directly target the brain dysfunctions that underlie anxiety disorders. One such approach is called attention bias modification (ABM). It often uses a simple\u2014actually quite boring\u2014computer task to try to normalize the attention bias toward threat that many anxious people have.\n\nOne version of ABM is a variation on the dot probe task that scientists use to assess attention bias. In this version, however, subjects are trained to attend to _non_ threatening stimuli. In the task, participants might see two faces side by side\u2014one with a neutral expression, the other with an angry or scared expression. There are also two buttons, one corresponding to each face. The faces vanish, and a probe (it could be one dot or two) appears in the same position as one of the faces. Participants must then push the button that corresponds to the placement of the probe. In ABM the probe always appears in the same spot as the nonthreatening face. Sometimes, instead of faces, ABM uses threatening words (such as _explosion_ or _humiliation_ ) and neutral ones.\n\nTreatment varies, but participants often spend ten to fifteen minutes doing the task twice a week for a month, says Yair Bar-Haim, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Tel Aviv University in Israel and a leading researcher on attention bias modification in anxiety disorders.\n\nIn a small study with GAD patients, half the patients no longer met _DSM_ criteria for their disorder after eight sessions of ABM. By comparison, only 13 percent of patients who had the control treatment no longer met criteria for GAD. A study with social phobia patients yielded similar results: Half the patients who got ABM treatment no longer met criteria for social phobia, compared with 14 percent of those who got the control treatment.\n\nI spent a week playing with one ABM app called Personal Zen, a free download available at the Apple iTunes app store. On a field of green grass, two little blue heads pop up: One creature wears a cheerful expression while the other has an angry scowl. The heads appear for only a second, but a trail of waving grass lingers where the happy creature was. Players have to trace the trail of grass with a finger as quickly as possible. After using the app, I didn't feel noticeably more relaxed, but I did get quicker at the game. And I was better able to ignore the grumpy guy.\n\nABM doesn't seem to work as well as CBT or ACT, although some evidence shows that combining ABM and CBT has benefits. In a 2015 meta-analysis, ABM had a \"medium effect\" in reducing anxiety symptoms. ABM appears to be most beneficial for GAD, social anxiety disorder, and PTSD. The meta-analysis also found that the treatment didn't work well when participants used it online on their own. Instead, ABM seems to ease anxiety primarily when mental health professionals oversee the treatment.\n\n\"You don't know how the people on the internet were doing the treatment,\" Bar-Haim, one of the authors of the meta-analysis, told me. He speculates that they might have been \"sitting on the bus and paying half of their attention to doing the task and half on 'where's the next bus stop and where do I get off?' \"\n\nBar-Haim also notes that not all anxious people have attention bias to threat, so the treatment isn't likely to work for everyone. Researchers are also trying to figure out the appropriate \"dose.\" Could a person overdose on ABM? And what would overdosing mean\u2014becoming too blas\u00e9 in the face of real danger? Bar-Haim reminds me that our threat-detection system is critical to survival.\n\nThere's also the issue of boredom. Bar-Haim's group is collaborating with others to try to jazz up the ABM tasks. \"We have color versions, but it doesn't help with the boredom,\" he says. \"It would be great if we could create a Candy Crush version.\"\n\nAnother relatively new technology is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which has been approved by the FDA as a treatment for migraines and for treatment-resistant major depression. Now researchers are exploring whether it could effectively treat anxiety disorders. TMS is noninvasive; a device that generates a magnetic field is placed above the scalp directly over the part of the brain researchers want to stimulate. While the science is preliminary, TMS has shown benefits for people with GAD, PTSD, and panic disorder. It can cause some transient side effects like headaches and light-headedness.\n\nProbably the coolest, most sci-fi-sounding new treatment is fMRI neurofeedback. Patients can see the workings of their own brains and then\u2014in real time\u2014modify the dysfunctions. In neurofeedback's newest iterations, patients lie in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. (Older methods use EEG, a test that records electrical activity in the brain, but EEG cannot target brain structures as precisely as fMRI.) They're told to conjure memories or look at pictures while their brains are being scanned, and a computer analyzes the activity of the relevant brain regions. Patients see real-time feedback from their brain activity, often presented in the form of a thermometer or colored bar. Depending on what their brain is doing, the subject is told to enhance or suppress that activity. Patients \"need to train their brain like they train their muscles when they want to be fit,\" says Anna Zilverstand, a postdoctoral researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.\n\nIn a 2015 study, Zilverstand and colleagues used neurofeedback to treat women with a phobia of spiders. Patients in the scanner saw a series of spider images. The pictures got progressively scarier\u2014from a tiny spider on a green leaf, to a larger, hairier one on a computer keyboard, to a giant iridescent spider crawling on a man's face. The subjects in the active treatment group were also shown an image of two thermometers: a blue one that reflected the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), which helps to regulate emotions, and a red one that signified activity in the insula, which is implicated in sustained anxiety. They were told to enhance the activity of the dlPFC and dampen the activity of the insula by using cognitive strategies, such as describing the physical attributes of the spider or imagining it as small and powerless. The control group saw the same spider photos and were told to use the same reappraisal strategies but didn't get the neurofeedback. At the end of the treatment, the women who received the active training had lower anxiety scores. They also had lower insula activity during the treatment.\n\nIn another study, researchers at Yale tested two sessions of neurofeedback in people with high levels of contamination anxiety. (Now this is a study I wish I could have joined!) The scientists focused on activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain implicated in emotion regulation. Participants saw a series of images meant to induce contamination anxiety: pictures of cockroaches, feces, blood, and dirty needles. \"It had to be something where you'd think, 'I could get sick from that, or somebody could get sick from that,' \" says Michelle Hampson, an assistant professor of radiology and biomedical imaging at Yale University School of Medicine and a coauthor of the study. The subjects in the active arm of the study got neurofeedback in the form of a line graph. The control group saw so-called sham feedback\u2014activity from another person's brain rather than their own.\n\nSeveral days after the study ended, the subjects who received active neurofeedback had reduced contamination anxiety. They also showed increased connections in regions of the brain linked to the regulation of emotion and decreased connections in regions linked to the processing of emotions, such as the quick appraisal of whether something is threatening. One exciting message of this study is that the effects of neurofeedback persist, perhaps causing lasting changes in the brain.\n\nThe science on neurofeedback for psychiatric disorders is still in its early days. So far studies are very small, and researchers are still figuring out which brain areas to target and how many sessions will be needed. Results are modest, and it is unclear how long the effects of the treatment will last. Also, fMRI scans are expensive, costing hundreds of dollars. Because of this, some researchers believe that neurofeedback will most often be used as an adjunct to medication and talk therapy.\n\n\u2014\n\nTherapy doesn't only happen with a therapist.\n\nThe New York Shyness and Social Anxiety Meetup Group has more than eight thousand registered members. Founded in 2006, the group arranges a dizzying array of activities\u2014from hikes and museum outings to game nights. The events give socially anxious people a safe space in which to pursue friendships and practice social skills. Basically, it is a support group and exposure therapy wrapped together.\n\nI have a tinge of social anxiety, mostly when I'm around someone in authority or someone who I perceive as \"cooler\" than me. I also consider myself an introvert in that I prefer to spend time with friends one on one instead of in large groups, and I can feel drained by big social gatherings. That said, I'm generally gregarious and comfortable meeting new people, and I don't fit the criteria for social anxiety disorder. Still, I want to understand it better. It is one of the most prevalent of the anxiety disorders and the only one that affects men and women in equal numbers. I'm also intrigued by the idea of anxious people taking charge of their own exposure treatment.\n\nSo on a frigid February evening, I join one of Meetup's social anxiety (SA) support groups. When I arrive at the Sony Atrium, an indoor public space in Manhattan filled with metal tables and chairs, about twenty-five people have gathered for the meeting. Nearby a few homeless people, weighed down with bags of belongings, doze.\n\nMost of the SA group participants on this night are in their twenties and thirties, and all but five are men. The organizer, a slightly harried but friendly guy named Steven, divides us into small groups. We go around the table, introduce ourselves, and say a bit about what brought us to the meeting. One aspiring computer programmer says he's \"anxious all the time\" about making money and someday having to support his parents. A clean-cut young man who works in finance says he's looking to make friends. He tells a sad story about lunchtime during his middle school days. \"I would stand in the lunch line, and when I got to the register, I'd pretend that I forgot my wallet in my locker,\" he says. \"I'd go to my locker and then have to wait in line again. It killed time and hid the fact that I was always alone.\" A veteran of the group, a guy in his forties, says that during his travels around the city, he looks for groups of tourists who appear to be lost and asks if they need directions. \"It is a way for me to practice approaching people,\" he says. \"They're usually really grateful, so it makes me feel good.\"\n\nI'm perplexed as to why one older man is here. He dominates the conversation and repeatedly pounds the table when making a point. \"I used to be shy, but I overcame it,\" he says. I wonder if he's shouting to drown out his anxiety.\n\nWe pass around a pile of notecards and are instructed to write down a fear related to social anxiety. Then we share them. The guy who talks to lost tourists says he's afraid of conflict. The aspiring computer programmer says he's afraid of looking incompetent. I write that I'm afraid of saying something stupid.\n\nI'm heartened to see these people bravely sharing their vulnerabilities. There's a real sense of warmth and camaraderie in the room. But I'm also struck by how much pain there is, and how much anxiety has robbed them of.\n\nFor months afterward, I receive emails from the SA group about its activities. Then an invitation lands in my inbox that I can't ignore. It comes with a disclaimer: \"WARNING: This is high-level exposure, so if you're not ready to be thrown into the pool of sharks then please reconsider coming.\"\n\nThe SA group is doing karaoke.\n\nI'd never visited a karaoke bar. I can carry a tune and like to sing; I was in an a cappella show choir in high school. But I loathed doing solos. The one time I did\u2014during a performance at a senior center\u2014I was so nervous that my voice came out in thin, breathy puffs. But if I am ever going to do karaoke, doing it with a bunch of other anxious people seems like the way to go.\n\nA few days later I'm belting out Madonna's \"Holiday\" at Planet Rose, a karaoke joint in the East Village. I have a microphone in one hand and a bottle of Brooklyn Lager in the other. \"It's time for the good times. Forget about the bad times,\" I sing, and do a little dance, stamping my boots on the leopard-patterned rug. Members of the SA group lounge on zebra-print couches. The room is mercifully dark, and strings of Christmas lights ring the walls. During the chorus, two guys jump in and sing backup. \"Celebrate,\" we wail.\n\nI feel ridiculous. And exhilarated.\n\nWhen I'm finished, an SA member, a thin blond man who has spent most of the evening nursing a beer by himself, steps up and sings a Metallica song. Ultimately, about half the group ends up singing. Everyone is friendly and welcoming. \"People here are really nonjudgmental,\" says one woman. While the support group I attended was made up of a lot of new members, this night is dominated by veterans. Several have been coming to SA Meetups for years and have made their closest friends in the group. Steven, the organizer, says the group has been life-changing for him.\n\nI think about the guy I met at the Sony Atrium, the one who pretended to forget his wallet at lunch. In a year or two\u2014after more support group meetings and other outings\u2014maybe he'll be ready for a karaoke outing, too.\n\nAfter I relapsed during my senior year of college, my therapist encouraged me to take Prozac.\n\nWell, at first she encouraged. But after I kept saying no, she outright begged.\n\n\"I'll meet you on campus every day and watch you take it,\" she said.\n\nNo, I told her.\n\n\"I'll take it, too,\" she offered. (In retrospect this seems pretty strange, but maybe she was already taking it.)\n\nStill no, though I let her give me the prescription.\n\nMy resistance was largely part of my illness. I still had a tough time eating. I avoided anything that looked or tasted slightly weird (and weird was a very broad category). I was gripped by fears of salmonella, _E. coli_ , listeria, or some other nameless bacterium. I worried about out-of-the-blue allergic reactions. When the fear was too strong, I didn't eat at all. More often the fear would surge after I'd swallowed a bite. Then I'd rush to a bathroom, scan for feet under the other stalls to ensure I was alone, and make myself throw up.\n\nThere was no way I was going to be okay with taking a psychotropic drug. Whatever grip on reality I had, whatever fragile equilibrium I had found, would never withstand the manipulation of my brain's neurotransmitters. I never even filled the prescription.\n\nProzac (or its generic equivalent, fluoxetine) is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), a class of drugs that also includes Paxil (paroxetine), Zoloft (sertraline), Celexa (citalopram), and Lexapro (escitalopram). Although the SSRIs are best known as antidepressants, if you complain to a doctor about excessive anxiety, you'll almost certainly be given a prescription for one of them. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that transmits signals between neurons in the brain and is believed to play an important role in mood and anxiety. SSRIs block the reabsorption of serotonin. That leaves more of the chemical hanging around the synapses, the spaces between neurons. That action is thought to account for SSRIs' mood-boosting and anxiety-reducing effects.\n\nSerotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) like Effexor (venlafaxine) are also used in anxiety disorders. These drugs act on serotonin and on norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter that is involved in the stress response.\n\nDoctors call SSRIs a \"first line\" treatment, and reams of studies have shown them to be at least modestly effective in treating the various anxiety disorders. But there's one wrinkle: Placebos have been shown to work almost as well. In a 1998 study of panic disorder patients who took either sertraline (Zoloft) or a placebo for ten weeks, those on the drug saw their mean number of panic attacks per week drop by 88 percent. Those taking the placebo had a 53 percent fall in their number of attacks. In a 2004 study looking at escitalopram (Lexapro) for GAD, patients on the drug saw their scores on an anxiety symptom scale drop by about 29 percent after eight weeks. The scores of those on placebo fell by about 19 percent.\n\nEven the relatively lackluster effects of antidepressants are likely overstated. Research on the efficacy of medications is often paid for by the pharmaceutical companies that stand to profit from their drugs' sales. Studies that reveal that a drug _isn't_ beneficial\u2014so-called negative clinical trials\u2014are frequently not published. Also, in some positive trials, research results are written up in a way that inflates a treatment's benefits. This reporting bias is evident in write-ups of studies on both depression and anxiety disorders.\n\nIf placebos work almost as well as the drugs, and if even those modest effects are embellished, what's the point of taking an SSRI? The real benefit, it turns out, may be not in treating acute illness but in preventing relapses, says Robert Temple, deputy director for clinical science at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He is a coauthor of a review paper that found that, for people with a history of major depression, continuing on antidepressants cut the risk of relapse in half. Temple says the FDA has unpublished data showing similar results for GAD.\n\nIn college, I eventually recovered without medication. CBT, and maybe just the passage of time, got me to some sort of stability. After graduation, I moved to Washington, D.C., and spent a little more than two years working in politics, writing speeches and press releases for a U.S. senator. Then I moved to New York City to take a job as an administrative assistant at the _Wall Street Journal_ \u2014answering phones, fetching faxes, and in my spare time, writing brief articles, focused on the dream of becoming a full-fledged reporter there. I worked hard, had eccentric roommates, traveled, dated both appropriate and inappropriate men, and spent lots of time drinking red wine and dancing in dark velvet-walled bars. I was doing the things you're supposed to do in your twenties.\n\nMy anxiety didn't disappear. I still had frequent chest pain and episodic fears of heart attacks. I occasionally visited a cardiologist, a family friend of my college boyfriend. He would hook me up to an EKG and tell me I was fine. I'd be reassured until a few months later, when pain and doubt would land me back in his office. I fretted more than most about dating disasters and setbacks at work. But I remember those first six years after graduation as a period of relative health and equanimity.\n\nBy the summer of 1998, I had landed a junior reporter position at the _Journal_ , writing, ironically, about the pharmaceutical industry. The big story then was the launch of Viagra, the little blue pill to treat impotence. It became a huge seller for Pfizer, its manufacturer, and a controversial cultural story as well. Why were insurance companies paying for an anti-impotence pill when many didn't pay for birth control? Would it unravel marriages? I spent my days talking to Wall Street analysts, urologists, and formerly impotent men, asking them about their new and improved erections. For a story on the burgeoning recreational Viagra market, I visited clubs with names like Hell and the Tunnel and bought rounds of cosmopolitans for groups of men. I was on the lookout for recreational users and for stories of the drug dealers I had heard were peddling Viagra alongside cocaine and ecstasy, the former used to counteract the erection-deflating effects of the latter.\n\nI loved asking people questions and hearing their stories. I did an actual jig each time I saw my name in print followed by the words \"Staff Reporter of the _Wall Street Journal_.\"\n\nI had a new boyfriend, too. Alan was also a journalist, tall, lanky, and adorable with a lack of style and a social awkwardness that was boldly\u2014and refreshingly\u2014out of step with most men I had met in New York. He was a terrific writer and had a background that I greatly admired, having worked as a freelance reporter in Africa covering the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda. We were in that giddy stage of new love, just five or so months in, and deep in the emotional striptease of joyful declarations and new confidences. And then I began to unravel.\n\n\u2014\n\nIt is a brilliant warm Saturday in June. I am walking down Seventh Avenue in Greenwich Village, tired and a little exhilarated, heading to a deli to grab a snack. I have just left the gym where I have taken a class in capoeira, a Brazilian martial art, an intense ninety minutes of kicks and spins, and my legs are already starting to ache. I am looking straight ahead at the pavement and pedestrians in front of me. In my peripheral vision I see a whizzing blur of yellow as the taxis head down Seventh Avenue, tender green splotches of early summer leaves on the trees above, and the architectural lines of nearby buildings.\n\nSuddenly a chunk of the landscape disappears. A black smudge with jagged edges appears in my field of vision, blocking out the taxis, leaves, and buildings. I stop in the middle of the sidewalk and rub my eyes. Close them tightly and open them. The smudge is still there, blocking the upper-right quadrant of my field of vision.\n\nDid I get something in my eye? I put a palm over one eye and look up. I change eyes. The splotch is in both eyes.\n\nI know what that means. Something is wrong with my brain. I am having a stroke.\n\n_I am having a stroke. And I have to get to a hospital._\n\nSt. Vincent's, thankfully, is only a few blocks away. But I can't get there on my own. I may be seconds away from losing the ability to walk. I'll crumble onto the sidewalk. Baffled tourists will dodge the heap of me. A twenty-seven-year-old woman in yoga pants and a ponytail collapses in the middle of the day? She must be drunk.\n\nIn a panic, I scan the sidewalk around me and grab the nearest forearm. It is smooth and sinewy and pale. It belongs to a tall, freckled blond guy about my age. He looks surprised but doesn't blanch or shake me off.\n\nMy explanation comes out in a rush: \"I think I'm having a stroke. I can't see. There's a hospital two blocks away. Can you please walk me there?\"\n\nHe says okay.\n\nI grip his forearm the entire way there. He deposits me in St. Vincent's ER and disappears. I hope I remembered to say thank you. (I'll say it now: thank you.)\n\nI go up to a man doing intake. \"A huge chunk of my vision just vanished. I can't see,\" I say.\n\nHe tells me to sit down in the waiting room. I sit for five minutes, closing and opening my eyes, trying to will the black smudge away.\n\nI rush back to the man. \"I need to see someone now. I think I'm having a stroke.\"\n\nEither my urgency or the word _stroke_ sets things in motion. I'm taken inside and put into a bed: White sheets hang from a metal rod to offer some semblance of privacy. A nurse hooks me up to a heart monitor.\n\nThen all hell breaks loose. The nurse starts pulling my shirt apart. She yells for assistance. Someone else rushes in.\n\n\"What is it? What's happening?\" I plead.\n\n\"You're having a hypertensive episode,\" the nurse says.\n\nThe next few minutes are a blur of hands and movement. _This is it. I really am dying._\n\nThen, abruptly, the activity stops. The nurse begins pulling the cardiac leads off my body. Her helper disappears behind the white sheet.\n\n\"What's going on?\" I say.\n\n\"Your blood pressure is normal. When we measured it again, it was fine,\" she says.\n\n\"So I'm _not_ having a hypertensive episode?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nThe initial high reading, the nurse says, must have been an error. It is then that I realize that I can see perfectly again. The black smudge is gone.\n\nI'm discharged from the ER a little while later, with no explanation for the sudden blind spot or its speedy resolution.\n\nLater that day, when I talk to my regular doctor, he says I must have had an ocular migraine, a type of headache where funky visual changes are the primary symptom. \"You should have called me instead of going to the ER,\" he scolds. \"I would have told you you were fine.\" I feel chastised and a bit sheepish but also a little angry. It seems like losing your vision should be an acceptable reason to go to the ER, even by the standards of a nonanxious person.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe migraine episode triggers a swift slide into constant worry about my health\u2014and everything else. What if something really is wrong with my brain? My mind feels sluggish. I think I can feel the neurons stalling. I handwring about my memory and start writing down conversations for fear I'll forget. I feel cut off from my boyfriend and my friends. My body may be at a museum or at a party, but my mind is elsewhere, caught in a loop of dread.\n\nI worry that my worry will scare away those I love.\n\nUnlike in college, I can't retreat to my parents' sofa or drop a few classes until I feel better. I will lose my job. I will lose my boyfriend. I will have to leave New York.\n\n_No. I will not hit the pause button on my life._\n\nI call my therapist, Dr. D, and tell her what is going on. I have been seeing her for about a year now. She's a psychologist who practices psychodynamic therapy, which aims to help people understand how their past history and relationships influence their current behavior. I started therapy with the goal of figuring out why I had the breakdowns in college and why I'm so anxious. Now she gives me the name and number of a psychiatrist. It's time for medication.\n\nThe psychiatrist, Dr. I, has frizzy, haphazard gray hair and wears colorful ankle-dusting skirts and macram\u00e9 necklaces. While she speaks with authority about psychotropic drugs, she looks as if she should run a feminist bookstore in Seattle. I'm relieved when she prescribes Zoloft. After years of fear and trepidation, the little pill doesn't look quite so dangerous anymore. Besides, I feel like I have no choice but to take it. The only other option I see is months of infirmity.\n\nSo I start taking Zoloft. My head doesn't explode. I don't instantly feel different, but I know better than to hope for that. SSRIs can take anywhere from four to six weeks to work. When they work at all, that is.\n\nI feel the side effects, however, almost immediately.\n\nIt is a few days after I've taken my first pill. I'm sitting in the Bubble Lounge, a silly, expensive champagne bar in Tribeca, with friends from work. We're surrounded by finance types, groups of clean-cut men in dark suits and a handful of serious-looking women. Our group of journalists is a bit scruffy in comparison. I'm chatting with friends, a champagne flute in my hand, when I feel a chill run up and down my forearms. I rub my arms with my hands and pull on a sweater, but the chill doesn't stop. It's not a chill exactly. No, it feels like something is moving up and down my arms. Soon it reaches farther, dancing up the back of my neck and across my scalp.\n\nMy skin is crawling.\n\nThe medical term for this is _formication_. It is a type of paresthesia, a sensation on the skin that can also include tingling, numbness, and itching. In clinical trials by Pfizer, Zoloft's manufacturer, about 2 percent of people who took the drug experienced it. (Oddly, 1 percent of those taking a placebo did, too.)\n\nThe next day I call my psychiatrist and tell her what I'm feeling. According to her, it's my anxiety and not the drug that is making my skin crawl. She recommends that I double the dose of Zoloft. I do what I'm told and pop two tablets.\n\nWithin a few hours, my entire body erupts in waves of sensation\u2014tingling, crawling, and something almost electric. The tiny hairs on my body feel charged, as though they're standing on end. My skin seems to move. It is as if an ant farm has been let loose on my body. My anxiety has never felt like this. Those are the last Zoloft pills I'll ever take.\n\nI try Paxil next. Even though the SSRIs are all similar, individual patients often react differently to each drug. With Paxil, my skin doesn't crawl. I don't, in fact, feel much of anything. But slowly, over several weeks, some space seems to open up in my brain. Instead of the worry occupying, say, 70 percent of my mind, it now seems to take up 40 percent. And the volume of my anxiety is turned down a bit, too. I'm better able to set it aside. I'll come home from dinner with friends and realize that I was able to concentrate on a conversation for several hours, that I was truly present.\n\nIf I miss a pill, however, I am light-headed and dizzy. I get a woozy feeling even if I take my dose a few hours later than I did the day before. It is a daily reminder that the drug is playing with my brain chemistry. Though I have ample evidence that this is a good thing, it makes me uneasy. Other side effects sneak up on me, taking several months to make themselves known. My sex drive plummets. Having an orgasm requires Herculean effort. I become ravenously hungry. It is a needy, demanding hunger, impossible to ignore. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, starving, and clandestinely scarf down a bowl of cereal. My weight inches upward. (Both \"increased appetite\" and \"decreased appetite\" are among the long list of Paxil's potential side effects.)\n\nStill, I'm lucky that I've found a medication that works for me. At least a third of people with anxiety disorders don't get much relief from the available drugs. Even when drugs do help, there's the lag time before they alleviate symptoms, and patients often have to cycle through multiple drugs before they find the right one.\n\nThis may change soon. A flurry of research is looking at whether brain scans or other tests can predict which patients will respond to a particular treatment. The hope is to uncover biomarkers, such as patterns of activity in the brain or levels of hormones in the blood, that can direct patients to the medication or therapy that will help the most. However, the research is still in its early stages, and it could be years before such tests are available. But if it shakes out, biomarkers could save patients time, money, and a lot of misery.\n\nScientists have homed in on a number of potential biomarkers for a range of disorders, including PTSD, social anxiety disorder, and OCD. Many studies have found distinct patterns of brain activity that can predict how well someone will do with a specific treatment. In one study, fourteen people with GAD underwent fMRI scans while looking at pictures. Some pictures were revolting, showing mutilated bodies or violent scenes; others were benign. Subjects were warned as to whether they were about to see a disturbing or benign picture. The participants then took the SNRI Effexor for eight weeks. The people who had higher levels of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex when they were anticipating seeing either kind of picture had a better response to Effexor. The anterior cingulate cortex is thought to be involved in detecting and resolving emotional conflict.\n\nIn another study, researchers in Oxford, England, gave MRI scans to fourteen patients with panic disorder while they viewed anxiety-provoking pictures of accidents, funerals, and hospitals. The subjects then had four sessions of CBT. The study found that those who had increased gray matter volume in the hippocampus and increased activity in the insula and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex while viewing the disturbing pictures before their treatment had greater reductions in their symptoms.\n\nI was on Paxil for about two years. Since then I've cycled on and off SSRIs. I had another year's stint on Paxil. A few years on Prozac. Most recently I've taken a daily dose of five milligrams of Lexapro, one of the newer SSRIs. They've all worked similarly well for me, but I've switched in a search for the fewest side effects. Paxil, for me, was the worst. Prozac was a huge improvement. Lexapro has gone down the easiest, although I still feel dizzy when I miss a dose. Hopping off and on medication has been fairly easy for me. I know I'm lucky in that regard. The internet is full of horror stories of immediate relapses and awful withdrawal symptoms.\n\nI've been on SSRIs for eight of the past eighteen years. I've usually gone on them during crises, when the anxiety is unrelenting and prevents me from experiencing much else. But they have never cured my out-of-whack anxiety. Even on medication, I'll get the occasional panic attack. And when things are very stressful, drugs seem to be no match for my amped-up amygdala. What they do, however, is give me space and opportunity. They are like an air pocket for a drowning woman. They aren't the solution, but they keep me conscious long enough to figure out my next move.\n\n\u2014\n\nI keep my childproof bottle of Lexapro in a silver bowl on top of my dresser, but there's another orange-hued bottle I keep much closer. This one I have with me always, tucked into my handbag. It is my security blanket, my good luck charm, my talisman.\n\nThe bottle is slapped with three warning stickers.\n\n> May Cause Drowsiness and Dizziness. Alcohol May Intensity This Effect. Use Care When Operating A Car Or Dangerous Machines.\n> \n> If You Are Pregnant Or Considering Becoming Pregnant You Should Discuss The Use of This Medicine With Your Doctor Or Pharmacist.\n\nAnd this one, in bright, traffic-cone orange:\n\n> CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE. DANGEROUS UNLESS USED AS DIRECTED. CAUTION: Federal law prohibits the transfer of this drug to any person other than the patient for whom it was prescribed.\n\nThe bottle is filled with pale orange pills with the letter K cut out of the center. It's Klonopin. And it's fantastic.\n\nKlonopin can melt my anxiety and many of its annoying accoutrements\u2014racing heart, shallow breathing, twisted thoughts\u2014in about thirty minutes. It can even derail a full-blown panic attack if I take enough. When I wake at four a.m. with a churning litany of what-ifs and must-dos, half of a .5 milligram tablet eases me back to blank sleep. It is literally a chill pill.\n\nKlonopin (or the generic clonazepam) is a benzodiazepine, one of the class of drugs that also includes Valium and Xanax. Benzos enhance the activity of the central nervous system's main inhibitory neurotransmitter, GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid). Its primary function is to reduce the activity of neurons. Benzos are used not only for anxiety and panic attacks but also to treat seizure disorders and insomnia. Doctors wrote more than ninety-three million prescriptions for benzodiazepines in 2015, according to QuintilesIMS, which tracks pharmaceutical sales. That is up 16 percent since 2006.\n\nWeirdly, I don't remember taking my first Klonopin. I had tried other benzos a handful of times\u2014a Xanax that knocked me out after a nearly sleepless week, a Valium before an MRI. But my life \"before K\" and \"after K\" is starkly delineated. Klonopin is a safety net, a panic button. The difference between having it in my purse and not is like the difference between rock climbing with a harness and ropes and free climbing, an insane practice in which climbers use no safety equipment whatsoever.\n\nMy dose of Klonopin has always been \"p.r.n.\" or \"as needed.\" Over the years, \"as needed\" has meant different things. Some instances are clear-cut, like the time I had a terrifying panic attack on an airplane. (Hands down, a metal tube hurtling through space thirty thousand feet above the ground is the absolute worst place to have a panic attack. No escape. Dozens of onlookers.) I fled to the galley near the back of the plane and clutched the arm of a surprised flight attendant. She gave me a cup of water, and we sat in side-by-side jump seats while I tried, pitifully, to breathe deeply and ride the panic out. I gulped down two full Ks, four times my usual dose, and within an hour I was sprawled across three seats and slept until touchdown.\n\nI've used it as a prophylaxis. I'll pop half of a .5 milligram tablet before I go into a high-anxiety situation: a big meeting or interview at work, or a daunting party, or when getting behind the wheel of a car. (A twenty-year resident of New York City, I rarely drive. I'm nearly assured of a panic attack when I have to take a highway.) Many CBT therapists would _tsk tsk_ at this approach, saying that I'm not allowing myself to master my anxiety. But hell, sometimes I just need to get through the day\u2014or the next hour.\n\nI've used K to play medical detective. When I'm plagued by weird physical symptoms, I'll take a benzo to see if the feeling\u2014an odd pain or numb limb\u2014goes away. If it does, I'll chalk it up to anxiety.\n\nDuring times of sky-high anxiety, I've taken K daily for weeks. Sometimes this means I'm headed for a relapse, and it's a sign that I need to return to therapy and go back on an SSRI. Other times there's a clear, time-limited cause. For a few weeks two winters ago, my husband and I thought our daughter might have a brain tumor. She had been complaining of headaches, smacking her hand against her forehead, and whimpering pitifully. A round of antibiotics for a potential sinus infection didn't help. We were sent to a neurologist who saw something worrying in our daughter's exam. (There aren't many things sadder than the waiting room of a pediatric neurologist's office.) The doctor scheduled our daughter for an MRI. During those two weeks of awful uncertainty\u2014until the neurologist called and said the only thing abnormal on the MRI was, in fact, a tenacious sinus infection\u2014I took Klonopin twice, sometimes three times, a day.\n\nStill, it was no match for my terror. I had vivid images of a grim future. I worried constantly and formulated elaborate plans. How I'd take a leave from my job to care for my ailing child. How I'd cope with the divorce that would be the result of my husband's and my eventual grief. I took videos of my daughter chatting, so I could remember her healthy. I had trouble sleeping. How much worse would it have been if my brain weren't being bathed in benzos?\n\nAt other times I've used K more casually, even under questionable circumstances. I'll sometimes take it when I have trouble sleeping and have a big day of work ahead. I'll (very rarely) use it as a chaser after a glass or two of red wine, though not for fun. After I turned forty, I found that if I drank a glass of wine, my heart rate would rise, and that night my sleep would be unsettled. A teensy bit of Klonopin counteracts that.\n\nKlonopin can cause a daunting list of side effects: depression, coordination problems, dizziness, and my favorite, \"intellectual ability reduced,\" according to the manufacturer, Genentech. But what makes some doctors skittish about prescribing benzos is the potential for addiction and abuse. Combined with enough alcohol and other drugs, they can be lethal. People can just stop breathing. Benzos were implicated in the deaths of the actor Heath Ledger, the singer Whitney Houston, and the model Anna Nicole Smith.\n\nBenzos can also be hell to withdraw from, especially for people who have taken them regularly for years. Entire workbook programs have been designed to ease benzo withdrawal, with names like \"Stopping Anxiety Medication: Panic Control Therapy for Benzodiazepine Discontinuation.\" The forums on BenzoBuddies.org, one of several online withdrawal support groups, contain desperate descriptions of horror show symptoms: nausea, a burning tongue, ringing ears, crying jags, depression. People's sign-offs are often long litanies of their benzo use and their slow, agonizing attempts to get off them. Some people posting have been on the drugs for more than twenty-five years. There are chronicles of lost jobs and lost relationships because of addiction.\n\n\"Absolute hell on Earth\" is the title of one recent post from a BenzoBuddies member who had stopped Xanax cold turkey after taking it daily for three years. She says the withdrawal left her with no energy, no appetite, headaches, and a racing heart. She lost fifteen pounds in two weeks. The anxiety has come roaring back, too. \"Talk about wanting and feeling DEATH....I could barely take 10 steps without feeling like my heart was going to beat out of my chest,\" she writes. \"I had depersonalization, insomnia, constant tremors, pain in my limbs, tingling in my limbs, felt detached from my body, I couldn't cry or laugh, I couldn't form complete sentences. I was truly a walking zombie.\"\n\nThe number of American adults who filled prescriptions for benzos jumped 67 percent between 1996 and 2013, up from 8.1 million to 13.5 million people. During that same period, the quantity of medication doled out per person more than doubled and overdose deaths involving benzos quadrupled. The most lethal combination is benzos and opioids: About three-quarters of the deaths involving benzos also involved drugs like OxyContin and Percocet.\n\nI've never felt addicted to Klonopin. I often go months without taking it. And most people on benzos for anxiety disorders don't abuse them or develop a tolerance.\n\nHowever, lately I've become much more conflicted about my Klonopin use. In the last few years, several studies have found an alarming link between benzos and Alzheimer's disease and dementia. One study published in the journal _BMJ_ in 2014 found that older people who had taken benzos daily for more than three months were 32 percent more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease. Not only that, the greater the exposure, the greater the risk. Those who took daily doses for more than six months had an 84 percent greater risk. The risk was greater for benzos with a longer half-life, like Klonopin, than for those with a shorter one, like Xanax and Ativan.\n\nI'm reassured by a more recent study, published in the same journal in 2016, that does not support the hypothesis that benzo use causes dementia. Researchers followed more than 3,400 people older than sixty-five. Over approximately seven years, about 800 subjects developed dementia. People who had used benzos lightly (defined as about 120 or fewer daily doses) during a ten-year period before the study were slightly more likely to be diagnosed with dementia in the follow-up period. Surprisingly, those who had the heaviest use during the ten-year period were no more likely to develop dementia than those who didn't take the drugs at all. The researchers conjecture that the slight risk associated with light use may simply reflect the fact that people with early symptoms of dementia, which include anxiety and insomnia, are more likely to be prescribed benzos. But these results, at least, suggest that benzos don't lead to dementia.\n\nSo the science is mixed. Which is why, lately, I pause before opening my bottle of Klonopin and do a silent cost-benefit analysis. Is my anxiety that bad? Is easing my mind now worth ruining it later on? Sometimes\u2014though not as often as I wish I did\u2014I put the bottle away.\n\n\u2014\n\nA range of pharmacological treatments for anxiety was available in the nineteenth century, particularly bromides and chloral hydrate, a popular sedative introduced in 1869. Lily Bart, the tragic heroine of Edith Wharton's _The House of Mirth_ , dies from an overdose of chloral hydrate. Just before nodding off for her final sleep, Lily describes the sedative's initial effects, \"the gradual sensation of the inner throb, the soft approach of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over her in the darkness.\"\n\nIn 1903, the first barbiturate, barbital, was launched in the United States under the brand name Veronal. Barbiturates were safer than the earlier bromides and were primarily prescribed for insomnia and anxiety. In the first half of the twentieth century, sales soared, and dozens of variations flooded the market. The pills' many colors earned them nicknames like blue angels, pink ladies, and yellow jackets. On the street, they were dubbed goofballs, explains medical historian Andrea Tone.\n\nBarbiturates were dangerous and addictive. It was easy to overdose: The same amount of medication that was sleep-inducing and safe for one person could kill another. And you could build up a tolerance; over time people often needed more of the drug to get the same effect. It was tough to get off barbiturates, too. Stopping them suddenly could lead to a host of awful side effects like rapid pulse, high blood pressure, sweating, and convulsions. Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her Brentwood, California, home with an empty bottle of barbiturates by her side. Judy Garland also died of an overdose of barbiturates.\n\nIt was not until 1955 that a safer\u2014and revolutionary\u2014anti-anxiety drug came to market: Miltown.\n\nMiltown was developed by Frank Berger, a scientist from Czechoslovakia. In 1938, he and his new wife fled the Nazis and settled in England, where he began working on methods to boost the production of penicillin, which was desperately needed on the battlefields of World War II. Berger was testing compounds that might serve as a preservative for penicillin and noted something striking about mephenesin, a substance that was typically used, in modified form, as a disinfectant. When he injected mice with mephenesin, their muscles went limp, but the animals remained conscious and alert. Unlike barbiturates, mephenesin didn't induce a zoned-out state.\n\nIn 1949, Berger took a job at Wallace Laboratories, a division of Carter Products, in New Jersey. Carter's cash cow was Carter's Little Liver Pills, a laxative. (It also made Arid deodorant and Nair, the hair-dissolving cream.) But Carter wanted to push forcefully into the prescription drug business. Berger's first project at Wallace was to create a version of mephenesin that was long-lasting and could be taken in pill form. He and his colleagues synthesized five hundred compounds and tested a dozen on animals. One of them, meprobamate, made the muscles of mice go limp and made rhesus and Java monkeys docile. Normally the monkeys were vicious and violent, so much so that \"you've got to wear thick gloves and a face guard when you handle them,\" Berger said. But after a shot of meprobamate, they became \"very nice monkeys\u2014friendly and alert.\"\n\nAfter a few studies in humans found that meprobamate was safe, eased anxiety, and promoted sleep, Berger submitted an application to the FDA to authorize its sale. The new drug, now named Miltown after a sleepy little town not far from Wallace's headquarters, came to market in May 1955. The pharmaceutical behemoth Wyeth bought a license to manufacture meprobamate, too, and a few months later started selling the drug under the name Equanil. It was the first of what are known as the minor tranquilizers. By 1957, a full third of all prescriptions filled in the United States were tranquilizers.\n\nMiltown became a Hollywood sensation. Lucille Ball was a fan, and so was Tennessee Williams. Milton Berle was so enamored of it that he sometimes called himself Uncle Miltown. \"Movie stars and television personalities gushed about Miltown,\" writes Tone, \"gossip reporters wrote treatises on it, and at celebrity galas, illicit Miltown was passed around as casually as canap\u00e9s.\" People drank Miltinis, a martini garnished with a Miltown pill instead of an olive. The drug was invoked in ads for everything from ice cream to vacations. It was nicknamed \"Executive Excedrin\" for its popularity among overworked businessmen. Athletes used it to calm precompetition jitters. The team doctors for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Cincinnati Redlegs (as the Reds were known for a time in the 1950s) prescribed it.\n\nCarter and Wyeth aggressively courted doctors, too. One ad published in the _American Journal of Psychiatry_ touted Miltown for a broad swath of people, including \"the tense, nervous patient,\" \"the agitated, senile patient,\" \"the alcoholic,\" and \"the problem child.\" Carter hired the surrealist painter Salvador Dal\u00ed to create an installation for the 1958 annual meeting of the American Medical Association depicting the experience of being on Miltown. (Dal\u00ed's wife took the drug.) The work, titled _Crisalida,_ was a silk-walled tunnel weighing two and a half tons and adorned with murals representing the journey from anxiety (depicted as a twisted hollow figure) to tranquillity (a diaphanously dressed woman with a crown of flowers).\n\nWith this success, pharmaceutical companies scrambled to find new anxiety-lifting blockbusters. At Hoffmann\u2013La Roche, Leo Sternbach was a Jewish scientist from Eastern Europe who had left Switzerland in 1941 to escape the growing Nazi threat. Instead of creating a me-too drug like Miltown and its ilk, Sternbach wanted to develop an entirely new tranquilizer. He started tinkering with substances called benzheptoxdiazines, which, years earlier, he had explored while searching for new dyes, creating dozens of derivatives. But when he tested them, none worked as tranquilizers. Disappointed, Hoffmann\u2013La Roche tasked Sternbach with researching antibiotics instead. That could have been the end of the story, but a year later a colleague found a sample that Sternbach had failed to test, numbered Ro 5-0690.\n\nRo 5-0690 was tested in mice and cats. Mice given the drug hung limply when researchers held them by the ear. When medicated mice were put at the bottom of a tilted screen, they slid down. (Normally mice can easily run to the top.) Cats held by the nape of the neck were relaxed and placid. The animals weren't zonked, however, but remained aware and were able to walk normally. Sternbach even tested it on himself. About an hour and a half after taking fifty milligrams (a bit higher than a therapeutic dose today), Sternbach felt, as he wrote in his journal, \"slightly soft in the knees.\" Later that day he felt sleepy, but by dinnertime he was back to normal. Ro 5-0690 seemed to be the holy grail of tranquilizers\u2014less deadly, more powerful, and not as sedating as competitors. The drug was named Librium (for equilibrium). Within three months of its introduction in 1960, it became the bestselling tranquilizer on the market.\n\n\u2014\n\nWhile tranquilizers and benzos generated most of the excitement, the drug treatment of anxiety disorders took another, quieter leap forward in the 1960s, too.\n\nIn 1961, Donald Klein was working at Hillside Hospital in Queens, New York, which was then a two-hundred-bed long-term psychiatric facility. He worked with Max Fink, who was an expert in shock therapy. Imipramine, the first of the tricyclic antidepressants, had just recently become available for research, and Fink was eager to experiment with it. Hillside began giving imipramine to some of the depressed patients. \"You give it to patients, and they slept a little better, they started eating, and three or four weeks into the treatment, some would come into the office and say, 'Doc, the veil is lifted. I'm okay,' \" Klein recalls. Some of the depressed patients were also anxious. Klein noticed that imipramine seemed to be easing the anxiety, too. So Hillside started an experiment, giving imipramine to patients with anxiety, including those who were not depressed.\n\nKlein recalls one pivotal case. The man had been staying at the hospital nearly a year, but he was still terrified of being alone. He wouldn't walk anywhere without a chaperone, and about three or four times a day he ran to the nurses' station in a panic, convinced that he was dying. Klein offered the man the new drug.\n\nEach week Klein increased the patient's dose. For a while, things were status quo. The patient kept having several panic attacks each day. During their appointments, the man would tell Klein what a \"lousy\" doctor he was. After a few weeks, though, one of the nurses remarked that the patient seemed better. He had made no dramatic appearances at the nurses' station that week. Not one. The patient was as shocked as Klein.\n\nThe man wasn't totally cured. He was still afraid to be alone, and his amorphous, free-floating anxiety remained. But the imipramine did block his panic attacks.\n\nKlein and Fink published a paper on their work in 1962 in the _American Journal of Psychiatry_. \"It became apparent that anxiety was at least two different things,\" Klein said. \"You had these terrible crises of anxiety which drove him to the nurse's station and this anticipatory anxiety that everything is lousy and is going to get worse. And the drug had dissected those things out.\"\n\nToday Klein lives in a grand building across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. He greets me at the door of his apartment, accompanied by his small, energetic dog, Koko. He has a shock of white hair and is wearing a blue-and-white-checked dress shirt and navy corduroys. His stocking feet are covered in Koko's hair. At eighty-eight, he is still working. Though he retired from the psychiatry department at Columbia in 2003, he still sees private patients one day a week, publishes papers, and consults on grant proposals.\n\nKlein's imipramine discovery revolutionized psychiatric thinking. It showed that anxiety wasn't a single, amorphous disorder and that patients' responses to medication could help science define the boundaries of illnesses. Of his breakthrough, Klein says, \"Pasteur had it right. He says for discovery, it is chance and a prepared mind.\"\n\nKlein's success with imipramine prompted Robert Spitzer, chairman of the task force working on the _DSM_ -III, to invite him to join the group.\n\nToday the _DSM_ is arguably the most powerful book in the field of psychiatry. Insurance companies use it to determine coverage. The government uses it to allocate benefits. Scientists use it to plan their research studies. Lawyers use it to defend their clients.\n\nBut it was not always so influential. The first edition of the _DSM_ was published in 1952, primarily so that doctors in state mental hospitals could more easily compile statistics about their patients. It was firmly under the sway of Freudian ideas. In that edition, anxiety was the star. It was thought to fuel all of the so-called psychoneurotic disorders, comprising what we now consider the various anxiety disorders, depression, and somatoform disorders. \"The chief characteristic of these disorders is 'anxiety' which may be directly felt and expressed or which may be unconsciously and automatically controlled by the utilization of various psychological defense mechanisms (depression, conversion, displacement, etc.),\" it reads. Disorders included anxiety reaction, obsessive-compulsive reaction, depressive reaction, and phobia reaction, among others.\n\n_DSM_ -II, published in 1968, didn't depart dramatically from the original version. The term _reaction_ was dropped, and certain historical terms, like _anxiety neurosis_ , _hysterical neurosis_ , and _neurasthenic neurosis_ , came back. But these were largely semantic changes. The illnesses were still considered to be the result of anxiety produced by unconscious conflicts.\n\nOverseen by Spitzer, the _DSM_ -III, published in 1980, was revolutionary. Spitzer was a psychiatrist at Columbia. Although trained as a psychoanalyst, he wanted the new edition of the _DSM_ to be based as much as possible on empirical data and to include detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria that would be more useful to clinicians than the vague soup of the two earlier editions. The new book jettisoned the idea that disease had its origins in unconscious conflicts.\n\nKlein was part of both the task force and the working group on \"anxiety and dissociative disorders.\" His experiments with imipramine had convinced him that panic attacks were a distinct disorder. With that in mind, he pushed to create a separate entry for panic disorder, which had previously been lumped in with anxiety neurosis. Anxious expectation became generalized anxiety disorder. Social phobia and post-traumatic stress disorder made their first appearances in _DSM_ -III, too.\n\nPsychoanalysts pushed back, deriding the new approach as simplistic and dismissive of their work. A heated controversy erupted over the category of \"neurotic disorders.\" Spitzer wanted it gone, saying it was too tied up with the psychoanalytic views on the origin of mental disorders. But for many psychiatrists, neurosis was their bread and butter. It encompassed their most common diagnoses. They worried that if it disappeared from the _DSM_ , insurance companies might stop paying for their services. In the end, the task force compromised, keeping neurosis but demoting it to a few parenthetical phrases, such as \"phobic disorders (or phobic neuroses).\"\n\nPsychoanalysis was under attack elsewhere in the scientific community, too. One study compared two groups of anxious patients: one that underwent psychoanalysis and another that was kept on a waiting list and did not. The rates of improvement for the two groups were the same. It did not help that psychoanalysis was costly and time-consuming and that there weren't enough practitioners for every anxious person. Of course, medications, which offered the potential of a quicker fix, also hastened its decline.\n\n\u2014\n\nDespite the runaway success of Librium, Sternbach was not satisfied. He was determined to create a stronger benzodiazepine with even fewer side effects. Valium, from the Latin _valere_ , \"health,\" was unveiled in 1963, followed by several others. (I have Sternbach to thank for my Klonopin.) In 1968, Librium, the most frequently prescribed medication in the United States, was dethroned by Valium. From 1968 to 1981, Valium was the most popular drug in the Western world.\n\nBy the late 1960s, the market for tranquilizers was overwhelmingly composed of women. A 1968 study, for example, found that women were twice as likely as men to use them. In the 1970s, women made up two-thirds of tranquilizer users. A Valium ad published in 1970 in the _Archives of General Psychiatry_ introduces a woman named Jan, \"35, single, and psychoneurotic.\" \"You probably see many Jans in your practice,\" the ad tells doctors. \"The unmarried with low self-esteem. Jan never found a man to measure up to her father. Valium (diazepam) can be a useful adjunct in the therapy of the tense, over anxious patient who has a neurotic sense of failure, guilt or loss.\"\n\nIt was not long, however, until benzodiazepines were revealed to have a dark side. Throughout the 1970s, scientific research and stories mounted\u2014in complaints to the FDA and articles in the press\u2014of benzo addiction and patients who suffered awful side effects when going off the drugs. In 1978, former first lady Betty Ford went to rehab for her addiction to alcohol and medications, including Valium. The following year Barbara Gordon released a memoir, _I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can_ , about her panic disorder and her horrific withdrawal from Valium. In 1979, Senator Edward Kennedy convened Senate hearings on the dangers of benzodiazepines. Federal and state regulations were changed to rein in refills of benzos and stiffen the penalties for illegal use. Sales slid: Valium prescriptions fell from 61.3 million in 1975 to 33.6 million in 1980. Some people returned to older, even more dangerous drugs, like barbiturates, for relief.\n\nMeanwhile pharmaceutical companies kept churning out new drugs. In 1981, Upjohn introduced Xanax, touting it as safer than Valium, in part because of its shorter half-life. Xanax also benefited from being FDA-approved for panic disorder, which _DSM_ -III had recognized as a separate disorder a year earlier. Soon sales of Xanax overtook those of Valium.\n\nThen came the SSRIs. While the drugs, including Prozac, Paxil, and Zoloft, were initially approved for depression, manufacturers quickly sponsored trials showcasing the drugs' efficacy in treating anxiety, too. By 1998, major organizations like the American Psychiatric Association began recommending the SSRIs as first-line medications for anxiety disorders.\n\nIn the 1990s, consumer advertising of prescription drugs exploded. GlaxoSmithKline won FDA approval for Paxil as a treatment for social anxiety disorder in 1999. The company spent more than $92 million in one year on a marketing campaign to educate consumers about the disorder and sell them on the new drug to treat it. \"Imagine Being Allergic to People,\" ads said. One TV spot featured a businessman leaning against a wall in despair; a student watching TV alone, bathed in blue light; and a woman gazing forlornly out a window. After Paxil, needless to say, the sun was always shining. The student is playing football with friends and graduating from college. The woman is smiling and joining a party. The businessman is being feted at a dinner while his father smiles proudly. \"Paxil, Your Life Is Waiting,\" the ad proclaimed.\n\n\u2014\n\nIn recent years, traditional pharmaceutical companies have scaled back their development of drugs for psychiatric illnesses. In 2009, GlaxoSmithKline said it was shutting down its neuroscientific research into depression and pain. That same year AstraZeneca said it would stop trying to develop medications for anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. With so many patients getting little relief from current drugs, the market\u2014and potential profits\u2014for new medicines for anxiety and depression would seem to be huge. So why the retreat?\n\nIt turns out that new psychiatric drugs take a lot more time and money to bring to market than other medications, for a number of reasons. Symptoms of mental illness can be incredibly heterogeneous, and many people have more than one disorder. Early scientific work is usually done on animals such as rats, but rat brains do not mirror the complexity of the human mind. Also, despite advances in imaging, the human brain usually can't be directly observed. In cancer research, for example, scientists can work directly on tumor cells removed from living patients. No one, thankfully, is going to be slicing into an anxious person's brain.\n\nThe next hurdle after development is gaining approval from the FDA. Between 1993 and 2004, however, only 8 percent of medicines developed for the central nervous system passed muster. Potential psychiatric drugs have sometimes failed because of toxic side effects, but usually they've been doomed because they didn't work well enough.\n\nA few years ago scientists and drug companies thought they were on the verge of a breakthrough. A new class of medications for patients with depression and a variety of anxiety disorders was being studied in large-scale clinical trials. The drugs worked completely differently from existing ones, offering hope to people who didn't respond to SSRIs and other available antidepressants. The new medications acted on a receptor in the brain named corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) receptor 1. CRF is an amino acid peptide that is involved in the body's response to stress: It activates the HPA axis and spurs the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), kicking off the fight-or-flight response. It made sense that blocking the CRF1 receptor could alleviate anxiety, and in a series of animal studies, it seemed to do just that. Rats injected with the CRF1 antagonists spent more time in open spaces, froze less during fear conditioning, and when subjected to shocks, were less likely to try to bury themselves in the wood shavings and fluffy bedding in their cages.\n\nEarly studies with people were encouraging, too. But in larger trials, the kind needed to secure FDA approval and bring the medications to market, the drugs faltered. One medication, saddled with the name Pexacerfont, was no better at treating GAD than a placebo. Another, Verucerfont, didn't help patients with depression. Two others were abandoned when they were found to dangerously raise the levels of subjects' liver enzymes.\n\nThe book isn't completely closed on CRF1 antagonists. Some scientists think that perhaps the drugs may be better suited to PTSD, panic disorder, and alcohol and drug addiction. In these disorders, anxiety spikes and dips as opposed to being more chronic, as with GAD.\n\nIn the hope of jump-starting drug development, the NIMH launched a program dubbed \"Fast-Fail.\" The federal government is funding small trials to test new compounds as well as existing drugs that scientists think could be repurposed for use in psychiatric illnesses. Instead of starting with studies in animals, Fast-Fail will go straight to human trials.\n\n\u2014\n\nResearchers are also exploring medications that might boost the efficacy of nondrug therapies. In the early 1990s, Michael Davis (the same neuroscientist who had been engaged in a friendly competition with Joe LeDoux, whom we met in chapter 1), then at Yale, found that NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) receptors were critical for extinction, which some scientists believe underlies exposure therapy. NMDA receptors are activated when glutamate, the main excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain, binds to them. In a pivotal study, Davis and colleagues discovered that when they injected an NMDA antagonist, which blocked the receptor's activity, into the amygdalae of rats, extinction learning didn't occur. The rats continued to freeze and startle even when there was no shock.\n\nIf blocking NMDA activity prevented learning, then scientists theorized that perhaps something that enhanced NMDA activity would propel learning, recalls Kerry Ressler, a neuroscientist who was a fellow in Davis's lab at the time. The group considered a host of NMDA agonists and partial agonists and quickly zeroed in on D-cycloserine (DCS). Long used to treat tuberculosis, the drug was safe for humans. At low doses, it sticks to the NMDA receptor, changes its shape, and allows more calcium into the cells so that \"a little bit more learning happens,\" says Stefan Hofmann of Boston University.\n\nIn 2002, Davis, Ressler, and colleagues published their first study using DCS in rats. They found that injections of DCS indeed enhanced extinction learning. The higher the dose, the greater the effect.\n\nDavis and Ressler then teamed up with Barbara Rothbaum, a pioneer in using virtual reality to treat psychiatric disorders, to test the drug in people with a fear of heights (acrophobia). Two to four hours before each of two exposure sessions, the researchers gave one group DCS and another a placebo. The participants then donned a virtual reality helmet and spent thirty-five to forty-five minutes in a simulated glass elevator gazing over a railing. Every few minutes, the virtual elevator rose. The subjects could control how high it went. After two sessions, the people who got DCS were \"much better, as if they'd had six or seven sessions [of exposure therapy] relative to placebo,\" says Ressler. The improvement was evident even three months later, when researchers put the participants through a battery of tests. Those who had taken DCS said their fear of heights was dramatically diminished. And compared to those who had gotten the placebo, they willingly exposed themselves to heights more readily in their daily life.\n\nWhen Davis presented preliminary findings of the study during a NIMH meeting on extinction learning, Hofmann was in the room. \"Everybody was speechless,\" he recalled. A drug that dramatically boosted the effectiveness of exposure therapy could slash the cost of treatment and transform the lives of patients. Many people drop out of therapy after just a few sessions because they find it too difficult or don't see the benefits. DCS may bring relief to those people, too.\n\nHofmann went back to Boston and started a trial with his social anxiety disorder patients. Other scientists tested DCS in panic disorder, PTSD, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Davis and Ressler also obtained a patent for the use of DCS in psychotherapy.\n\nBut although the results of the early trials were promising, later studies were disappointing. In one trial, DCS failed to help OCD patients. A larger study of people with social anxiety disorder found that DCS sped up improvement with exposure therapy, without boosting the rates of treatment response or remission. One study of veterans who returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD found that those who got DCS fared worse than those who got the placebo.\n\nHofmann, who had done the trials in social anxiety, tried to make sense of these results. He went back through his data and found that a patient's experience during exposure therapy was critical to whether DCS helped. DCS worked when participants had a \"good\" exposure, meaning that their fear rose initially then plummeted during the task. It didn't work, however, when people had a \"bad\" exposure, meaning that their fear didn't fall during the sessions, or fell only slightly. In some cases, the anxiety got worse with DCS. The timing and dosing of DCS is critical to its efficacy as well. If given in too big of a dose or too long before exposure therapy, it is less likely to work. Now Hofmann is experimenting with administering DCS after therapy, rather than before, and only to patients who had a \"good\" session.\n\nScientists are studying other substances that, like DCS, seem to act as cognitive enhancers when combined with therapy. Yohimbine is derived from the bark of a tree typically found in parts of central and western Africa. (It is also used for erectile dysfunction and weight loss.) In a few small trials, it has been found to reduce fear in patients who have undergone exposure therapy. Hydrocortisone, better known as an anti-itch cream, has been shown to boost fear extinction in people with a spider phobia when used in pill form before exposure therapy.\n\nAnother promising drug is ketamine, most commonly used as an anesthetic but also known as the street drug Special K, which acts on NMDA receptors as well. Ketamine has been shown to relieve symptoms of depression within hours, and there have already been small positive trials with PTSD and OCD patients. A few scientists are even starting to look at MDMA, better known as ecstasy, as a way to augment treatment, particularly for PTSD. The euphoria and disinhibition the drug induces seem to help people process terrifying memories. In a few small studies, people have taken MDMA and then had daylong therapy sessions. In a small study with PTSD patients, two MDMA-enhanced therapy sessions were much more effective than a placebo, and the benefit was still evident three years later.\n\n\u2014\n\nAlmost as fraught as the decision to go on psychiatric medication is the decision to go off it. There are no fixed rules for when to stop. Psychiatrists I've spoken to generally suggest that people with anxiety disorders stay on an SSRI for at least one year after their anxiety has remitted. That gives patients time to get through one full cycle of stressors: the holidays, the anniversary of a divorce or the death of a loved one, the start of their children's school year. After that \"you almost have a muscle memory\" of how to handle those experiences without anxiety exerting control, says Beth Salcedo, a psychiatrist in Washington, D.C. She also recommends doing a course of CBT either before or while going off medication.\n\nI had planned to stop taking my daily 5 milligrams of Lexapro almost a year ago, after I finished the first draft of this book. But then I had to write a second draft. And a third. I was also juggling the book writing with my job at the _Journal_. My daughter started a new school. My father's health faltered. Our bank balances dipped. And my to-do list seemed endless. Little things\u2014like picking up a birthday present or deciding what to make for dinner\u2014made me panicky.\n\nI simply felt too stressed out. The waters of my life were too choppy to travel without my chemical life vest. I kept refilling my prescription.\n\nStopping an SSRI is always a leap of faith. Without that excess serotonin floating around my synapses, will I fall apart? And if I do, and I need to reach for medication again, will it work? There is no guarantee.\n\nIt may seem strange that I've chosen to be a reporter, a profession characterized by deadlines, not to mention one that requires cold-calling sometimes hostile strangers. My job often makes me anxious. During my years covering technology news, I lived in fear of being beaten on a story by competitors. I opened the _New York Times_ with dread.\n\nBut this kind of anxiety is rooted in reality. And it has helped me to cope with the amorphous anxiety that doesn't seem to have a good reason.\n\nLooking through the data on anxiety disorders and the workplace, I feel extraordinarily lucky. Many people don't fare so well. A 2005 study by Australian researchers found that a staggering 47 percent of those aged fifteen to sixty-four with anxiety disorders were not working. By comparison, about 20 percent of those in a control group (people without disabilities or chronic health problems) weren't in the labor force. People with anxiety disorders were also more likely to work from home, to be self-employed, or to be employed by the government. They also more often said that they \"accomplished less\" and \"took less care than usual\" in their jobs during the previous month.\n\nMaybe that study is an outlier. While both anxiety disorders and depression are associated with short-term and long-term absences from work, once people get better, only past depression is still linked to absenteeism. After people's anxiety disorders remit, they don't miss more work than healthy people do. (Of course, many people suffer from both depression and anxiety.)\n\nThis reality is reflected in data on disability benefits. Of the more than ten million Americans receiving disability benefits in 2015, less than 3 percent got them because of an anxiety disorder, whereas about 14 percent received them because of mood disorders, and about 29 percent (the biggest chunk by far) for musculoskeletal and connective tissue problems.\n\nIn a lot of ways, my work has been like constant exposure therapy. I've used it to get close to what scares me the most: illness, madness, and death. I've sought out stories about hospice patients and spent many hours with the dying. There have been ridiculous episodes, too: me, working on a story about carbon monoxide poisoning, conducting an interview with my head between my knees. It was via phone, thankfully. During the conversation, I could have sworn that I felt every symptom the doctor I was talking to described.\n\nWhen I was younger, anxiety sometimes flat-out crippled my ability to work. In second grade that took the form of those math-fueled panic attacks. In college, I had to drop classes when I had my breakdown and relapse. The only reason I was able to graduate on time was because I took a couple of classes during the summer and received college credit for AP courses I'd taken in high school.\n\nAnxiety has also had subtler, more insidious effects on my work. During my school years, it fueled procrastination. For me, procrastination seems tied up with perfectionism. Scientists define perfectionism as the will to achieve high standards combined with excessive self-criticism. Perfectionists expect, well, perfection. Anything less won't do. In their minds, a mistake equals failure. Perfectionists also tend to doubt their actions.\n\nIt isn't tough to see similarities between perfectionism and anxiety: the self-doubt, the self-criticism, the fears of catastrophe. Indeed, people with panic disorder, OCD, and social phobia all score higher on certain measures of perfectionist thinking than do people without those disorders. Research shows, however, that anxiety is linked to some aspects of perfectionism but not others. Specifically, while anxious people are concerned about mistakes and doubt their actions, they don't necessarily have superhigh personal standards. Worriers actually tend to lower their standards when stressed out. It isn't that they want to be the best. They just don't want to mess up.\n\nPerfectionism, in my case, is really just the fear of screwing up. And until I get started on something, I can't fail at it. This is not a useful way to go about life.\n\nIn eighth grade, my history class had a series of assignments due. I didn't turn them in on time. I don't think I had even started the project by the deadline. A day went by. Then two. Then a week. Every morning I said I would start the assignment, and every morning I made some excuse to myself. I didn't yet know how to tackle it. I was too tired. I was too anxious. I was too ashamed. I didn't tell my parents about my predicament or ask my teacher for an extension. Instead, I quickly slunk out of class each day to avoid an awkward encounter.\n\nOne day at the end of class, the teacher announced that he would leave his grade book open on his desk and we could all take a look to see how our projects had fared. \"There were a handful of A's,\" he said. \"And one F.\" My humiliation was on display for the entire class. As my fellow students crowded around his desk, I busied myself putting my books in my backpack. My heart raced, and hot shame rushed to my cheeks. There was no need for me to join the scrum.\n\nAs my friend Mark walked by, he said with a bewildered shake of his head, \"Congratulations. You got an F.\"\n\nI wish I could say that this experience cured my problem, but I continued to struggle with it. Although I never outright didn't do an assignment again, I became a crammer, an extreme deadline student. I finished papers in the car on the way to school, desperately trying to steady a shaking pen as my mother drove up the steep hill that was home to Danbury High. I was a good, but not stellar, student, earning A's and B's.\n\nProcrastination is often defined as voluntarily delaying action despite the knowledge of future negative consequences. A review of more than two hundred journal articles and other scientific sources found that one feature of anxiety\u2014fear of failure\u2014was slightly associated with procrastination. And one aspect of perfectionism\u2014the belief that loved ones have high standards for you\u2014was tied to procrastination. Procrastination was much more strongly linked, however, with impulsiveness. Depression also fueled procrastination.\n\nMaybe I was just a typical student. After all, about 75 percent of college students say they are procrastinators. Half say their procrastination is chronic and problematic. Students say they spend about one-third of their day procrastinating (by, say, sleeping and eating instead of studying). Fortunately, procrastination tends to wane with age: Only about 15 to 20 percent of adults say they chronically procrastinate.\n\nIndeed, procrastination became much less of an issue when I hit the working world. Letting myself down was one thing. But letting other people down\u2014bosses, colleagues\u2014was quite another. I couldn't do it.\n\nI still am a deadline writer. I turn in my stories for the _Journal_ pretty much exactly when they're due. I need the urgency of a deadline, the clock ticking down, the specter of a disappointed editor or a blank space in the paper's lineup of stories. It is a duel between anxieties, and only my fears of judgment or failure surmount my fears of writing imperfect words and clumsy sentences.\n\n\u2014\n\nI've loved reading, writing, telling, and hearing stories since I was a child. I was that kid who always had her nose in a book, oblivious to the world. My mother would call from the kitchen, summoning me to get ready for school, to come for dinner, her voice rising until finally I'd tear myself away from _A Wrinkle in Time_ or the latest _Sweet Valley High_ and answer her with a mumbled monosyllable. I'd walk down hallways holding a book in front of me, once slamming into a concrete pole at the Danbury Fair Mall. My childhood best friend, Kate, and I would call each other and say, \"Want to come over and read?\" Our play dates consisted of both of us splayed on a sofa, books in hand and boxes of cookies within reach.\n\nI wrote earnestly in diaries, thrived in English classes, and scribbled short stories and poems, but I knew nothing about journalism. Some of my _Wall Street Journal_ colleagues idolized Woodward and Bernstein and had quoted _All the President's Men_ in junior high. I didn't regularly read a newspaper until college.\n\nBy the time of college graduation, my ambitions were still fuzzy. I had a degree in political science and wanted to do something with \"writing\" and \"politics,\" but what? Sidelined by anxiety, unpreparedness, and the need to earn money, my r\u00e9sum\u00e9 was skimpy. No fancy internships in D.C. or New York, let alone overseas\u2014just babysitting and waitressing, summers working at a day care center, and filing and answering phones in offices.\n\nMy good friend Vanessa was already living in D.C. and had an extra bedroom. It was 1992, and a presidential campaign was going on. That was good enough for me. I piled my books, sorority sweatshirts, and diploma into my red Honda Civic and drove from Ann Arbor to Washington, fending off panic attacks all through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and into Maryland. I'd pull over at rest stops and call my dad from roadside pay phones, crying over the din of eighteen-wheelers. \"I'm so scared. I can't do this,\" I'd say. He'd give me pep talks. \"Just breathe. You're doing great,\" he'd say. I'd be bolstered enough to get back in the driver's seat for another half hour, maybe an hour. And then I'd find another pay phone. The eight-hour drive took me more than fifteen hours.\n\nI found an internship in an office that handled direct mail for political campaigns\u2014those pamphlets of smiling candidates and their families and their promises that flood people's mailboxes at election time. Through connections I made there, I landed a job in the press office for Senator Harris Wofford, an inspiring liberal Democrat from Pennsylvania who had advised Martin Luther King, Jr., and JFK and cofounded the Peace Corps. I worked twelve-hour days, writing press releases and speeches and traveling to little towns all over Pennsylvania\u2014meetings with former steelworkers in Johnstown, rallies with teachers in Altoona. I went to one of Bill Clinton's inaugural balls and watched Bill and Hillary groove to Fleetwood Mac. (You couldn't escape \"Don't Stop\" during the campaign.) I rode the underground train that whisked senators from their office buildings to the Capitol: Yes, that was Ted Kennedy sitting across from me. In this age of political cynicism, my excitement might sound ridiculous and na\u00efve. But I was twenty-two, and those were my words being quoted in newspapers, my words\u2014one exhilarating time\u2014the senator was speaking on the Senate floor.\n\nI wrote constantly. I loved to experiment with words and phrases, loved the challenge of crafting something clear and compelling. But I quickly realized a truth about political writing. You have to cover the same topics\u2014using essentially the same words\u2014over and over again. It's called \"being on message.\" I was also becoming more intrigued by journalism. I spoke to reporters every day as part of my job. They called for comments from Senator Wofford. I met them at political events in Pennsylvania and saw their bylines in newspapers\u2014the _Pittsburgh Post-Gazette_ , the _Harrisburg Patriot-News_. They jumped from topic to topic: They might write about health care reform one day, the State of the Union Address the next. But what really awed me was the simple fact that if they were curious about something\u2014anything\u2014they could call someone on the phone, and most likely that person would talk to them. A job where you got to satisfy an insatiable curiosity and write was, I decided, the job for me.\n\nIn November 1994, Senator Wofford was voted out of office, and I was out of a job. I decided to look for a journalism job in earnest. There was just one problem: I had zero experience. I had written reams of press releases and speeches, but I'd never written a news article. Blogs barely existed. Serendipity arrived in the form of a phone call. My boss from Wofford's office had a friend who was an executive at the _Wall Street Journal_ in New York. He was looking for an assistant. The job wouldn't be glamorous. I would be answering phones and picking up faxes. I'd even have to take a pay cut. But I'd at least be in the same building with people who were doing the jobs I wanted. Maybe I would get an opportunity to write.\n\nI was offered the job and moved to New York two weeks later. I rented a U-Haul with the boyfriend I was leaving back in D.C., and we argued the entire trip there. I didn't know anyone in New York and had no place to live, so I bounced around on the couches at friends' parents' places until I found a room in Chelsea. My new roommates were a New England prep school boy turned composer and a drugged-out Minnesota girl who worked in a SoHo shop during the day and danced on a box at the Limelight nightclub at night. She often got home just as I was waking to get ready for work.\n\n\u2014\n\nIn many ways, anxiety has fueled my work. Fear of hurting my career was what finally drove me to take medication in my twenties. In college, I could drop classes and make up tests, but there are no time-outs in the working world. Fear of messing up is what drives me to triple-check that spelling and do one last interview. Many reporters are dilettantes, bouncing between disparate topics. We often have to learn new subjects quickly, synthesize the information, and make it understandable to readers. Mistakes are all too easy to make. (For one of my first feature stories as a cub reporter, I thought someone I interviewed had said his name was Kurt. Alas, it was Knut.) Twitter and Facebook have amplified the reach of our stories\u2014but social media also means that a screw-up can be very public. Insecurity and paranoia can be useful qualities.\n\nAnxiety has made me braver and more tenacious. Fear of not getting the story has overridden my other anxieties\u2014about rejection, about bothering people. One story in particular sticks with me. I was still an administrative assistant at the _Journal_ , writing stories after my other duties were done, when an editor gave me an idea for an article. His Sunday _New York Times_ had included a packet of salad dressing, a promotional giveaway. But the weight of the paper slamming against his front porch had caused the packet to burst, leaving his paper dripping with dressing. Maybe, he said, there was a story in this advertising message gone awry.\n\nI called the circulation department at the _Times_ , and a clerk confirmed that the exploding dressing was not an isolated incident. She herself had received several complaints. Now I just needed to find a subscriber with a sticky paper. With the help of our librarian, I got a list of addresses and phone numbers of people who lived near the editor. The salad dressing promotion had gone only to certain subscribers, so I figured the editor's neighbors were likely suspects. Then I proceeded to cold-call strangers, during dinnertime.\n\n\"Do you get the _New York Times_?\" I asked.\n\n\"Did you get a package of salad dressing in your paper last Sunday?\"\n\n\"Did it explode?\"\n\nI was nervous. I knew how absurd this sounded. As I dialed, my hands shook, and my stomach did flip-flops. I recalled prank calls that friends and I had made during preteen slumber parties: \"Is your refrigerator running? You better go get it,\" we'd giggle.\n\nFor four hours, I was hung up on and yelled at. Finally, at nearly nine p.m., someone said yes. After I hung up the phone, I did a little dance in my chair.\n\nMy story ran on May 7, 1996. \"Greg Kauger would like to try the new Hellmann's salad dressing. If only he could scrape it off his newspaper,\" it began. \"Mr. Kauger, of Short Hills, New Jersey, was among the lucky recipients of 170,000 packets of Hellmann's salad dressing tucked into _New York Times_ home deliveries last week. And one of the unlucky ones whose samples exploded when the paper landed on the driveway.\"\n\n\u2014\n\nPsychologists have long asserted that a certain amount of anxiety can be helpful. More than a century ago, in 1908, the Harvard psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson published the results of an experiment showing that performance on a difficult task is enhanced by anxiety (often referred to as arousal by researchers) but only up to a certain point. Too much anxiety causes performance to suffer. The so-called Yerkes-Dodson law is portrayed as a bell-shaped curve: As arousal increases, so does performance. Until it hits the peak, that is. If arousal continues to rise beyond this point, performance slides.\n\nYerkes and Dodson's experiments were with mice, but a range of studies in people has supported their conclusions, finding that memory and learning are best achieved when the levels of stress hormones are neither too high nor too low.\n\nBut the relationship between anxiety and success remains murky. Some scientific studies show that anxiety interferes with achievement. Others show the opposite. A study of beginning nursing students in Canada, for example, found that those who had more anxious temperaments had higher first-semester grade point averages.\n\nThere's an enduring stereotype of the addled, anxious intellectual, but the research into the relationship between anxiety and intelligence is also quite contradictory. Canadian researchers, for example, have found that people who worry and ruminate have higher scores on a verbal intelligence test. Those who tend to process past social events, however\u2014a hallmark of social anxiety disorder\u2014score lower on a test of nonverbal intelligence. A small 2012 study looked at the intelligence of people with GAD compared with controls. Among GAD patients, those with the most severe symptoms had the highest IQs. But among the controls, those with the least anxiety had the highest IQs. The researchers argue that this may make evolutionary sense. Society needs smart, relaxed people, but it needs intelligent, high-strung ones, too.\n\nThe high-strung people are the sentinels, says Israeli psychologist Tsachi Ein-Dor, the ones constantly scanning the horizon for danger. They'll sound a warning or mobilize a retreat, thus saving the hides of their more Zen-like neighbors. Ein-Dor and his colleague Orgad Tal conducted an experiment that revealed the role of the sentinel in action. First, the scientists had the subjects fill out surveys that assessed various psychological measures. The subjects, eighty undergraduate students, were then told that they would be rating how much they liked a series of artworks displayed on a computer screen. Each subject was given instructions and left alone in a room with the computer. After a few minutes, the subject was prompted to press \"okay.\" Then a series of frantic error messages flashed on the screen, warning of a virus and stating that the files on the computer's hard drive were being erased. When the subject told a study staffer\u2014a trained actress in on the ruse\u2014about the virus, the staffer pretended to panic and told the subject to go get help from another employee.\n\nDuring their trek to get help, the subjects encountered several obstacles. A person asked them to complete a survey. Someone else asked for help photocopying a document. Another person dropped a big pile of papers at their feet. This series of events was intended to test how well subjects remained focused on the original goal: to deliver the news about the dangerous computer virus. The researchers found that subjects who scored higher on measures of anxiety were less likely to let themselves be delayed by the obstacles (i.e., they didn't take the survey or help pick up papers). Anxious people were \"eager to spread the word of a troubling, socially threatening incident, a tendency that, in many real world situations, might save others from serious threat,\" the researchers wrote.\n\nIt takes a lot of creativity to envision vivid catastrophes and spin doomsday narratives. Worriers often fashion elaborate contingency plans to avoid disaster. They may create cover stories to hide their anxiety. It isn't hard to see that this requires some smarts.\n\n\u2014\n\nFor many of my years at the _Journal_ , our offices were in the World Financial Center, a warren of buildings in Manhattan's financial district directly across the street from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was leaving for work, heading down the stairs of the Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, brownstone where I rented an apartment on the top floor. My landlords, a couple of documentary filmmakers, were heading up the stairs, looking for me.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" the woman asked.\n\n\"To work,\" I said.\n\n\"Haven't you heard the news?\" the man asked. \"A plane crashed into the Trade Center. You can probably see it from your window.\"\n\nThe three of us raced up the stairs to my apartment. Indeed, the twin towers were perfectly visible from my living room window on that bright, clear day. Thick gray smoke encircled both towers.\n\nI flipped on the television. The next half hour or so was surreal; our heads whipped back and forth between the news coverage and the real thing. Then we heard a rumble, like slow rolling thunder, and one of the towers crumbled, the whole edifice sliding down with a billowing roar. The newscaster's voice turned shrill, unbelieving. It was a weekday morning, and those buildings were filled with offices. How many hundreds, thousands were dead? Then the second tower fell.\n\nI received three phone calls in quick succession. My mother. My ex-boyfriend Alan, phoning from Mexico City. And a new guy I was dating, a photojournalist named Brad who lived in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side. He was already heading downtown on his bicycle to see what he could shoot.\n\nBrad's phone call jarred me. I was a journalist, too, and here was a huge, tragic story. There was actually something I could do. So why the hell was I still sitting in my apartment?\n\nMy BlackBerry was buzzing nonstop with emails from my colleagues in the _Journal_ 's technology group. I covered wireless telecommunications. Our team started planning stories on how New York's technological infrastructure was holding up during the crisis. It was clear that cell phone service was crippled. I hadn't been able to make a call in hours. I grabbed a notebook and a pen and headed outside.\n\nBy then the sky had darkened. The air around me was thick with smoke, ash, and millions of tiny bits of paper. The winds had blown Trade Center debris across the East River and over to Brooklyn. I ran back inside to grab an old T-shirt to cover my face, then walked toward the Brooklyn Bridge. I interviewed a few people lined up at pay phones, asking them when they lost cell phone service and who they had been calling. Then, approaching the bridge, I saw a couple of dazed people covered in gray soot. Then tens more. The Brooklyn Bridge, usually a joyful, cacophonous parade of cyclists, stroller-pushing locals, and tourists, was now a solemn march away from destruction. Volunteers handed out cups of water. One man yelled at me, \"You're walking the wrong way.\" The twin towers were now just a smoky blot on the Manhattan skyline.\n\nI didn't get far into Manhattan. By then police and firefighters had cordoned off the Trade Center site and the surrounding blocks. So I walked back to my apartment, wrote up my interviews, and sent them to my editor. Only hours later did I find out that the _Journal_ 's offices were now a toxic crime scene. Weeks later we would learn that more than 2,600 people died in the towers that day.\n\nIn the days after the towers fell, I threw myself into work. I wrote a story about New Yorkers who had heard from old lovers, schoolteachers, and even therapists on 9\/11. I wrote another about local businesses that weren't sure whether they should remove the Trade Center from their logos. I wrote about residents of the financial district who, having lost access to their apartments, were being put up in fancy boutique hotels. One man had hotel employees remove a picture above the bed that reminded him of the desperate men and women he had seen jumping from the burning towers.\n\nWe set up a temporary newsroom in SoHo, and I was asked to join a group of reporters who would continue writing about the aftermath of 9\/11. One of my first assignments was to cover the anthrax attacks in New Jersey. I can't think of a story more tailor-made to unhinge an anxious person: an unknown assailant sending white powder through the mail that could be lethal when inhaled.\n\nI spent several days camped out front of one of the target post offices in Trenton in a scrum of other reporters. Periodically a spokesman would appear to deliver a bit of news. There was a 7-Eleven across the street, and one day I picked up a bottle of orange Gatorade, took a swig, and put the rest in my purse. I must not have closed the cap securely because the bottle leaked, sending sticky liquid all over the lip balms, crumpled receipts, and other detritus at the bottom of my bag. And my cell phone. When I pulled it out, it was drenched and dead. A little wave of orange sloshed back and forth within the display like a mini lava lamp. To file my story that day, I had to run back and forth across the busy road between the post office and a pay phone, dictating the words to my editor in New York.\n\nSometimes I spent the night at a hotel in New Jersey, but usually I'd drive the ninety minutes or so back to my apartment in Brooklyn. I wanted to see Brad. He was also becoming irritated by my constant absence. I'd spend the night in Brooklyn or at Brad's apartment and then drive back to Trenton in my rental car in the morning.\n\nThe stresses were mounting. Brad. The driving. Long hours pursuing stories. Anthrax.\n\nIt is late at night, after eleven p.m., and I'm driving from Trenton to my hotel in a nearby town after a long day of reporting, when I start to feel breathless. A slight pressure builds in my chest. My heart beats quickly. Spots dance in front of my eyes. My grip on the steering wheel tightens.\n\nI try to breathe slowly, deeply. _You're just having a panic attack,_ I say to myself. I keep driving down the dark highway, but the symptoms are getting worse. My hands sweat. The edges of my vision are fuzzy. Every muscle tenses. Then I see a sign with a capital H and an arrow. There's a hospital nearby.\n\nI drive straight to the emergency room, leave the car in the driveway, and race up to the triage nurse on duty. \"I'm a journalist, and I've been writing about anthrax,\" I say in a rush. \"I've been at the post office where the letters came through, the ones with anthrax in them. I'm scared that I could have it.\"\n\n\"You think you have anthrax?\" the nurse says, looking alarmed. \"I'm sorry, but you'll have to wait outside. Someone will meet you there.\"\n\nI'm hustled out of the hospital and dumped in the driveway. Standing there alone, bathed in the spotlight of the red and white EMERGENCY ROOM sign, I start to feel ridiculous. I haven't actually been inside the post office. I haven't touched any anthrax-laced letters. I haven't touched anyone who has touched an anthrax-laced letter. There's really no way I could have contracted it. I'm just having a panic attack about the very _idea_ of having anthrax.\n\nA few minutes later an ambulance appears, and a guy in an orange hazmat suit jumps out. I sheepishly explain that I've been reporting a story on anthrax but don't have it myself. The man gets back in, and the ambulance drives away.\n\nAfter that I hit a wall. I was working on a feature story about a small-town New Jersey mayor who had become an unlikely force in the anthrax attack response. It was slated for page one, for the coveted \"A-hed\" center column. (The name _A-hed_ has to do with the stars and dashes around the headline.) The A-hed and the \"leders\" were the most sought-after slots in the paper, reserved for the best stories, and competition was fierce. I had only a couple of days to turn the story around.\n\nFor the first time in my career, I couldn't do it. When I sat down to write, I felt strangely lost. I couldn't find my focus, couldn't see how the story should unfold. I'd write a sentence, then delete it, the blinking cursor a pulsing reproach. With the deadline bearing down at me, I panicked and strung together random vignettes. I felt nauseous as I hit the send button on the email to my editor.\n\nIt wasn't a surprise when she called, sounding disappointed and confused. I was usually a reliable reporter and writer. \"Try it again,\" she said.\n\nI did. And again I failed. The story was killed.\n\nWhen my anxiety soars, I have a hard time concentrating. My mind overflows with worries, leaving scant room for information of the nondoomsday variety. For decades, psychologists have theorized that anxiety hijacks some of the brain's cognitive capacity, even in people without full-blown anxiety disorders. The idea is that there's a battle of resources and that worry gobbles up prime real estate. If your attention is focused on potential threats, you have fewer resources to devote to your goal\u2014whether it is getting your point across in a meeting with the boss or, in my case, writing a story about a New Jersey mayor.\n\nResearch has not always borne out these theories, however. In fact, the research into anxiety's effects on cognition is mixed and inconclusive. We know that in people with anxiety disorders, planning is generally unaffected. However, they show deficits in spatial navigation and working memory (short-term memory that allows us to process and manipulate information). Working memory is what lets us follow the thread of a conversation and tally a running bar tab. It is critical for reasoning and decision making.\n\nFor those without disorders, new research is showing that situational anxiety\u2014the kind many of us feel before a big presentation\u2014may actually enhance working memory when the task is difficult. In a 2016 study, researchers at the NIMH had thirty people with GAD and thirty people in a control group do a working memory task called the \"n-back.\" The task has several versions. In the 1-back, people are given a string of numbers and have to indicate if the one they are seeing is the same as or different from the number just before. In the 2-back, they need to remember the number two places before. As you can imagine, the 1-back is easy and the 3-back is quite difficult. To induce anxiety, subjects are sometimes told they might receive a shock to the wrist. At other times, participants are told that they are safe and that no shock is forthcoming.\n\nIn the study, the healthy controls did more poorly during the 1-back and 2-back when they were threatened with a shock. But during the tougher 3-back task, anxiety actually helped them do better. In the GAD patients, however, the threat of shock disrupted working memory whether the task was easy or hard. Another study by the same NIMH research group had people with GAD, social anxiety disorder, and healthy controls do the same n-back task while in an fMRI scanner. The anxious subjects had a markedly different pattern of brain activity than the nonanxious ones, which could explain the difference in performance: They had less activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And the wonky brain activity in those subjects was similar whether they were threatened with shocks or not.\n\nThe anxiety prone, however, may not be doomed to suffer lackluster performance. They may not even have to learn to jettison the anxiety. Instead, a simple mind trick could help.\n\nYou simply tell yourself that you're excited.\n\nIt sounds absurd, but a series of studies by Alison Wood Brooks, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, has found that when people think of their anxiety as excitement, they perform better on a range of tasks. (True, the subjects in Wood Brooks's studies weren't screened for full-blown anxiety disorders, so it is unclear how well the tactic would work for those of us whose amygdalae are already on overdrive.) Wood Brooks put young people in a variety of stressful situations. For example, some had to sing Journey's \"Don't Stop Believin' \" in front of a researcher. To ratchet up their anxiety, they were told that they were performing in front of a karaoke expert and would be paid based on how well they did.\n\nIn the singing study, some of the participants went right to the task. Others were told to first say \"I am anxious\" and to try to believe it. A third group was prompted to say \"I am excited.\" It turns out that the participants who said \"I am excited\" before their performances were better at matching the pitch, tempo, and volume of the song than those in the other two groups. They also said they felt more excited than the other two groups. It wasn't that the excited group wasn't on edge: They reported that they felt as anxious as everyone else, and their heart rates were just as elevated. But simply reframing that anxiety as excitement made them sing better.\n\nWood Brooks got similar results when she had people give a speech and take a challenging math test. The subjects who were prompted to reappraise their anxiety as excitement scored better on the test and were judged to be more persuasive and confident speakers. In these experiments, she had some participants try to relax by stating \"I am calm\" before the speech task and \"Try to remain calm\" before the math task. But doing that didn't seem to help. Wood Brooks conjectures that it is a lot harder to transform anxiety into tranquillity than it is to convert it to excitement. With the former, you have to fight anxiety's effect on the body\u2014the jacked-up heart rate, the butterflies in the stomach\u2014whereas in the latter you have only to change your attitude. She calls it moving from a threat mind-set to an opportunity mind-set.\n\n\u2014\n\nThankfully, my blown front-page story was not the start of a professional downward slide. Back in New York, I redeemed myself with a string of solid articles. After another few months, the special post-9\/11 group was disbanded, and I soon moved over to write about health for our then-new Personal Journal section.\n\nMy new assignment seemed both perilous and therapeutic. A lot of my anxieties revolved around illness and death. If I could somehow overcome my fear of death, or even ease it a bit, I told myself, I would not be so captive to my anxiety. I asked myself what it was about death that I feared so much. Was it the pain? The separation from those I love? The physical erasure, the nonbeing? I mulled it over, on my own and with my therapist, until I realized that I was afraid of the fear itself. When I envisioned death, I saw terror, pain, and breathlessness. I couldn't imagine a peaceful ending.\n\nDeath, I thought, would be the ultimate panic attack.\n\nSo I started spending time with people who were dying. I volunteered to write stories about aging, Alzheimer's disease, and hospice\u2014a sort of self-imposed exposure therapy. I spent days with hospice programs in Kentucky, Washington, D.C., and California, shadowing nurses as they made home visits. I expected the patients to be bedridden, vacant, and gaunt, but many were vibrant and brimming with life. I met an elderly man with terminal leukemia who was joyfully planning a trip to visit his nephew in California. One man told me that he and his wife, both terminally ill, went to their favorite restaurant every day to eat ice cream sundaes. A nurse relayed the story of a woman dying in an inpatient hospice unit who summoned each of her family members into the room to tell them what they meant to her. Dying, it seemed, wasn't only fear and pain. I was awestruck by patients' generosity in spending even a few moments of their limited time with a nosy stranger.\n\nNot all the stories I encountered were uplifting. In an inpatient hospice unit in California, I met a man in his forties dying of brain cancer. The nurses were tinkering with his medication in an attempt to control his searing pain. His exhausted wife by his side, the man was hoping the nurses could lessen the pain enough so he could achieve his goal of dying at home. In Lexington, Kentucky, an elderly cancer-stricken man caring for his wife with dementia sat in an afghan-strewn chair in his cozy living room. \"I never thought dying would take so long,\" he said sadly. He wanted to hasten what I desperately feared.\n\nI met another man, just a few years older than me, dying of ALS. His face was friendly, with the vague handsomeness of a former jock. He could talk and breathe on his own but was otherwise completely immobile, lying in a hospital bed. Photos on a dresser showed him well and smiling with friends, a can of beer in his hand. I couldn't imagine a worse way to die.\n\nStill, seeing dying patients' regret, acceptance, and vitality gave me a way to work out some of my fears. I even wrote a story during this time entitled \"Negotiating the Terms of Your Death,\" about how advances in pain medication and new hospice practices were giving patients more control over how and when they died. And just a few weeks before I wrote these words, I received an up-close lesson in a good death when my ninety-three-year-old grandmother passed away from kidney failure. She was lucid up until the day before she died, reminding those of us keeping vigil to eat and telling me\u2014completely seriously\u2014that she didn't want to take pain pills because they are \"habit forming.\" _Hell, now's the time to try heroin if you want to, Grandma,_ I thought. She was luckier than most: She got progressively sleepier and then just slipped away.\n\n\u2014\n\nWhy hasn't anxiety derailed my career? I've been lucky, I think. I've never had a relapse serious enough to require me to take a leave from work. I love being a journalist. Medication helps me. For years, I took a Klonopin about thirty minutes before every one of my live TV or video appearances, part of my job as a _Journal_ writer.\n\nI also built a support system at the office\u2014always clueing in a few close work friends about my anxiety. Having an ally at work, someone I know I can reach out to, eases my anxiety. I don't feel trapped by my panic. I know that there is at least one person I can be authentic with, can be weak with. It is tough enough to get through a panic attack without the pressure of having to fake composure, too.\n\nFor several years, Jeff was one of my closest work friends. He was from Baton Rouge and was blunt and folksy. Newspaper reporters are not known for their fashion sense, but Jeff was in another league. He wore ripped, faded jeans and 1980s-era leather boat shoes held together by duct tape. There was a group of us at the _Journal_ then, all thirtyish, no kids, most of us single. We'd hang out after work, meeting up at Fox Hounds, a generic Irish bar with cheap beer and greasy food, to swap stories, gossip about the office, and debate the legacies of dead presidents. (Yes, we were geeks.) Even though Jeff was married with a kid and living in suburban New Jersey, he bounced around with us.\n\nJeff and I worked for the same section. He covered personal finance and was amazingly prolific, churning out stories at a swift pace and writing books at night. He taught me to be more efficient in my reporting. \"You only need one interview to make that point,\" he'd say. I'd run stories by him, asking him his thoughts about this lead or that anecdote.\n\nWhen I felt a panic attack coming on, I'd email Jeff: \"Let's go walking.\" Then we'd meet in the lobby to head to Starbucks (always decaf for me) or simply to stroll around the Habitrail-like hallways of the _Journal_ 's old office complex. He would walk beside me, talking if I wanted to talk. Or we'd just wander silently, stopping if I needed water to wash down a Klonopin. He'd check in every so often. \"How are you feeling?\" he'd ask. \"You doing okay?\" It wasn't that he could relate. Jeff never seemed anxious. He was confident about his writing and didn't even seem to have a very strong sense of self-preservation. While living in California in his twenties, he had broken his neck surfing and kept right on riding the waves. But even if my anxiety was foreign to him, he never made me feel silly or absurd.\n\nWhen Jeff moved back to Louisiana, I was bereft.\n\nFor years, I didn't tell my bosses about my anxiety. I knew I worked in a place with sensitive, caring people. I had seen senior editors rally around colleagues with cancer and other illnesses. One editor was very open about his OCD, and it didn't seem to stop his ascent through the company. Still, I was afraid of being judged and labeled. Of being thought less capable, of having my assignments limited. I didn't want my editors feeling like they had to protect my fragile psyche. In fact, I outed myself to my current editors only when I handed them the proposal for this book. And I could never have done that, or written this book, without the confidence of knowing that I had two decades of work experience and a solid track record.\n\nThe majority of anxious people conceal their disorders at work. Only one in four people with an anxiety disorder has told their employer, according to a 2006 survey by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. People cited various reasons: that the disclosure would limit promotions, would be recorded in their employee file, or would be perceived as a lack of willingness to do the job.\n\nThey may have good reason to be tight-lipped. The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits employers from discriminating against job applicants or employees with a disability, including psychiatric ones. Still, one study published in 1999 revealed that employers were seven times more likely to consider hiring someone who used a wheelchair than someone taking medication for anxiety and depression. A 1996 survey conducted by Mind, a mental health support and advocacy group in Britain, found that more than one-third of the respondents had been fired or forced to resign from a job because of their illness. Then again, these studies are about two decades old\u2014I would like to think that we have become more enlightened since then.\n\nI can tell how much the cultural climate has changed when I interview college students and they let me use their names, pictures, and the details of their illnesses in my stories. Many of these young people are campus mental health activists involved with advocacy groups like Active Minds and the Jed Foundation. They are driven by the desire to lessen the stigma around mental illness. And they are much braver than I am.\n\nI will never know exactly how anxiety has affected my career. Even if I didn't struggle with it, I probably wouldn't have become a war correspondent. I haven't won a Pulitzer. I haven't been a huge risk taker in my work life. But I love what I do and have built a solid, rewarding career.\n\n\u2014\n\nAnxious people often have a tough time making decisions. Not just the big ones, like should I quit this job or marry that person, but also the small, quotidian ones, like which email should I respond to first? That's because we are excellent at anticipating and visualizing bad outcomes. We also tend to interpret ambiguous information in a negative way, which psychologists call interpretation bias. On top of that, we also tend to hate uncertainty, which means we are apt to choose the safest option. If, that is, we can choose at all.\n\nIndeed, anxious people tend to be risk averse. A number of studies have looked at the link between anxiety, decision making, and so-called risk taking behavior. Several use a psychological research tool known as the Iowa gambling task. Participants play a virtual card game where they are told they can win or lose money. Anxious players tend to make fewer risky moves.\n\nWhen my husband, Sean, and I were debating where to take our honeymoon, I was editing travel stories for the _Journal_. I had the inside scoop on the hottest new hotels and destinations. Friends often asked me for vacation advice. Still, I could not decide where Sean and I should go. I spent hours on TripAdvisor, reading hundreds of hotel reviews. I bought guidebooks to France, Greece, and Italy. I quizzed nearly everyone I encountered about their favorite destinations.\n\nWe went to Ireland.\n\nNow, I love Ireland. But we had gone there exactly one year earlier. And stayed at the same hotel, where the same Enya CD was on endless repeat in the breakfast room.\n\nTalk about risk averse.\n\nI don't usually have that much trouble making vacation plans. But this was my honeymoon\u2014the trip I'd be asked about for the rest of my life. In my mind, the stakes were too high to gamble. (As if Provence would have been a gamble!)\n\nSome studies indicate that anxious people also make less optimal decisions. In one gambling experiment, for example, highly anxious subjects lost more money than mellower ones. And when choices are clouded with uncertainty, anxious people fare even worse. It looks like the slothful prefrontal cortex activity that is implicated in anxiety disorders may be to blame for these decision-making difficulties. When scientists at the University of Pittsburgh injected an anxiety-inducing drug into rats, the rodents had more trouble with a task that required them to switch between two rules in order to obtain a reward (a tasty sugar pellet) compared to when they were given a placebo. When the anxious rats were making a difficult choice, certain neurons in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex actually fired more slowly.\n\nSo some numbed neurons may have sent me back to Ireland.\n\nIt is no surprise that wanderlust and anxiety do not mix well. Unfortunately, I have both. I love to travel, especially in the developing world, and yet I'm terrified of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, typhoid-infused water, and dodgy hospitals. Here are just a few of the places where I've had panic attacks: on the back of a motorbike in Vietnam; in a basement tango _milonga_ in Buenos Aires; along the seaside walkway (the Malec\u00f3n) in Havana; and on a massage table in Nicaragua. And on airplanes. Many, many airplanes. Anxiety is a thief that steals the present moment. So some of my headiest travel experiences\u2014visceral, beautiful moments of strangeness\u2014have been muted, dulled by a steady drumbeat of anxious thoughts. Still, a tenacious desire for these moments propels me on to new spots on the globe.\n\nI did not come from a family who traveled to exotic locales. My childhood vacations mainly consisted of long car rides to southern Illinois to visit family. My sister and I fought vociferously over inches of backseat space. When our fighting got too loud or went on too long, my mother would reach back and swat the air as my sister and I ducked and weaved to elude contact. We were also big campers, heading to various state parks in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. My family did not travel lightly. Our tent was enormous, with a turquoise-and-white-striped roof, like a circus big top, and room for four sleeping bags and my sister's playpen. Our cavernous blue cooler held seemingly endless supplies\u2014from fixings for s'mores to boxed wine for the grown-ups.\n\nIn high school, I was incredibly lucky to go on a couple of weeklong overseas school trips, one to Greece and another to France and Spain, but those were mostly about kissing my boyfriends and sneaking sips of ouzo and red wine. But just before my freshman year of college, I spent the summer in England at a study abroad program. I studied British politics, learned to drink tea with milk, and went to plays and antiapartheid rallies in London. In this program, I met kids from all over the United States, many of whom already had dog-eared passports and told me stories about castles and nightclubs in France and concerts and art in the Netherlands. I pined for my own Eurail pass.\n\nBut anxiety derailed my travel plans. In college, I was too sick to study abroad. After graduation, I optimistically planned a two-month European backpacking trip with my roommate, Lisa. But I backed out in the end. I still felt too fragile.\n\nIt wasn't until a few years after graduation, when I was between jobs, that I was able to start satisfying my wanderlust. I took a three-week trip to Ecuador with my friend Sarah. We had no real plan, just traveler's checks, my high school Spanish, and a _Lonely Planet_ guidebook stuffed into our backpacks. We crisscrossed the country in buses and planes and stayed in ten-dollar-a-night guesthouses, visiting Incan ruins near Cuenca, listening to Andean music, haggling in markets in Otavalo, and seeing the haunting paintings of Oswaldo Guayasam\u00edn in Quito. I was dazzled by the majestic mountains, the Technicolor reds and blues of the indigenous women's woolen shawls, and the glossy waist-length hair of some of the Quechua men. It was during this trip that I became infatuated with the surprise and discovery of travel, the chance meetings and serendipitous turns. In Otavalo, I wandered into the middle of a water fight between groups of laughing uniform-clad schoolchildren, bumped into a cute Canadian guy, then spent the afternoon hiking with him and his Quechua friends to a remote waterfall. Uncertainty had never been so thrilling.\n\nFrom then on, I traveled as much as time and money would allow: to volcanoes in Costa Rica, beaches in Spain, and museums in Italy. Between jobs at the _Journal_ , I took a month off and went traveling through Turkey with my friend Dave, eating just-caught fish in outdoor restaurants in Istanbul, exploring the fairytale landscape of Cappadocia, and sailing around the Mediterranean in a traditional _gulet_ boat, where we slept outside on deck and dove off the bow to swim. Each day\u2014like an apparition\u2014a couple of young boys in a small motorboat would appear wherever we docked to sell us overpriced ice cream. I left Dave, bounced up to Berlin to visit a friend and sample the city's techno scene, then took an all-night train to Copenhagen. When I awoke, we were waterborne: Sometime in the night the train had been loaded onto a ferryboat. I walked upstairs to an outdoor deck and saw the Baltic Sea.\n\nIn my early thirties, I started traveling alone. At first it was for only a few days at a time, but even so it was transformative. Without a traveling companion, there was no buffer, no distraction from experience. I met people easily. And perhaps unexpectedly, I was sometimes less anxious on these excursions. If anxiety overwhelmed me, I didn't have to pretend I was okay, because there was no one to disappoint.\n\nI visited an ashram in the Bahamas, one where alcohol, garlic, and onions were banned (too stimulating) and participants did four hours of yoga each day. Yogis dashed to the resort next door for contraband beer and ice cream. Revelers on party boats heckled us as we chanted in Sanskrit near the shore. \"Can you believe these people come here to do yoga?\" yelled a wrangler. In Buenos Aires, I took tango lessons and ate steak with young Argentines.\n\nAs intoxicating as it can be, travel can also make me feel ridiculous and ashamed. The poverty in Chiapas, garbage-strewn roadways in Nicaragua, political oppression in Cuba, begging children in Hanoi\u2014witnessing these things makes me feel self-involved and absurd. My life is so privileged. Do I have the right to be anxious and fearful?\n\n\u2014\n\nAfter the relapse in my late twenties, travel became more challenging. For one thing, I was doing much more of it. My boyfriend, Alan, had moved to Mexico City to take a job as a foreign correspondent, and I visited him every couple of months. Eventually I moved there for six months. To me, Mexico City in the late 1990s was fabulous. Yes, the pollution and traffic were terrible. But it was also a riot of delicious food ( _chilaquiles_ , which is basically cheese-covered Doritos, for breakfast!), welcoming people, and gobsmacking sights. I once saw a man hawking six-foot-tall crucifixes near a highway tollbooth. ( _Are those ever an impulse buy?_ I wondered.) But the reports of crime and violence made me uneasy. Several of the foreign correspondents we knew had been carjacked in taxis and then forced\u2014at gunpoint\u2014to take money out of ATMs.\n\nI began to dread flying and missed more than a few flights. I would stand at the gate, panicking, as passengers boarded\u2014sometimes with my confused and, increasingly, frustrated boyfriend beside me\u2014unable to move. I had an overwhelming fear, an absolute superstition that _this_ flight, _this_ plane would go down.\n\nI continued to fly. I really had no choice. I was writing about technology and often had to be in San Francisco or New York. Alan was reporting stories all over Mexico and Central America, so if I wanted to spend time with him, I had to go along. Eventually each flight got a little easier.\n\nI'm not afraid to fly anymore. If anything, travel is an antidote to my anxiety. Anxiety shrinks my world, but travel expands it. The heightened sensations of travel, the extremes in colors and tastes, can sometimes drown out the worries and obsessions.\n\nThe most frustrating\u2014actually heartbreaking\u2014fallout from my anxiety is that, when I'm in the thick of it, it separates me from those I love. Anxiety is an isolation chamber where worry and fear elbow out human connection. The frenetic internal monologue of catastrophe blocks out conversation. It is as if the narrative of my life has been dubbed in a language I don't understand.\n\nIn college, during one of my breakdowns, I remember talking with my aunt Gail. \"I have mitral valve prolapse,\" I said. \"One of the valves in my heart doesn't close all the way.\" She looked at me strangely, her sunny smile freezing. I was confused. That is, until I realized that I had told her the exact same thing just minutes before. I had anxiety-induced amnesia. I could walk and talk but nothing held. Like booze, anxiety can cause blackouts.\n\nIt is not just a matter of forgotten conversations. I can be selfish, deaf to the needs of others. Anxiety can breed self-absorption, and it is tough to nurture relationships when you're only half there. Wracked with my own fears, what help can I be to anyone else?\n\nI literally hide, too. I don't go out. I don't see friends. Parties, dinners, and long conversations come to an abrupt halt. There's simply no room in my head for anything besides worry. I barely have the energy to respond to texts or emails. The anxiety makes me feel so shaky, so weak, so tired, and so inept, that even that tiny effort is overwhelming. I see incoming phone calls\u2014the names of family or friends\u2014and watch sadly, but with a whiff of relief, as they disappear into voice mail. My world shrinks as my emotional defensive crouch becomes a physical one.\n\nAnd that is with people I'm close to. It is a different kind of excruciating with acquaintances. Wearing a mask is exhausting. I feel like a fraud. I can become socially anxious, too. I'll lie in bed, replaying the conversations of the day, worrying that I've offended someone; berating myself for talking too much, talking too little, or making a stupid comment.\n\nEven when my anxiety is at a lower volume, it is still a pushy neighbor: chatty, intrusive, and often boring as hell.\n\nThere is an upside, though. Anxiety has given me incredible moments of intimacy and love. I've been the recipient of enormous kindness and care. My college friend Susie taking me to the ER in the middle of a panic attack and making me laugh. My dear friend Leslie, walking me around the streets of the Mission in San Francisco after I fled a bar, midbeer, with a racing heart. Lovely Amy holding my hand on a bench near my office while I waited for a Klonopin to kick in. My friends' support, sensitivity, and steadfastness make me cherish them all the more.\n\nAnd when anxiety is at its usual low hum, I feel like my experience with it has given me a point of connection with other people in pain, that it has made me more empathetic. That is especially true now that I'm more open about it. Among friends and colleagues, I've become the go-to girl for anxiety issues.\n\nI've found only one study that has looked at the relationship between empathy and anxiety; Israeli researchers uncovered a link between empathy and social anxiety. However, if we look at it more broadly, a large body of research shows the upside of trauma and pain. Psychologists even have a term for this: post-traumatic growth. It refers to the potential to develop a greater appreciation for life, see new possibilities, and deepen relationships after adversity. Most often it is studied in relation to physical illnesses like cancer or to tragedies like the death of a child. But I'd argue that grappling with mental illness can lead to growth, too.\n\n\u2014\n\nI rely on my girlfriends more than I do any therapist or doctor. Ianthe and Roe have been my confidantes and cheerleaders for more than a decade. We met at work. Ianthe, a dogged investigative reporter, newly hired from the _Washington Post_ , walked up to my cubicle and introduced herself. Roe, who headed up the _Journal_ 's book division, sat less than fifty feet away from me.\n\nThe three of us have had loads of fun over the years. There have been late nights dancing at East Village clubs, trips to France and Florida, country hikes\u2014and hundreds of long dinners filled with laughter and extreme silliness. We've supported one another through cancer, the deaths of parents, job changes, breakups, and miscarriages. If I ever need to post bail, I'll call them.\n\nThey are both beautiful and brilliant. Ianthe, who grew up in New York and Colorado with four sisters, is a whirling dervish of activity and, I'm certain, could convince almost anyone to do her bidding. She can talk her way out of parking tickets and snare discounts on hotel rooms. In a hostage situation, I'd pick her to negotiate. If we're out to dinner and I find a speck floating in my glass of wine (no _way_ will I drink that!), Ianthe will simply reach over and swap glasses with me. Roe grew up in a big Italian-American family in Brooklyn. She's an epic cook whose loves are good wine, good stories, her wacky family, and her large, loyal circle of women friends. When I'm anxious, sending her texts with a litany of worries, she is there to comfort me whether it is noon or midnight.\n\nMost research on the effects of anxiety disorders on adult relationships focuses on romantic ones. But one interesting 2013 study looked at relationships with relatives and friends, too. The results make me realize how lucky I am. People with lower quality relationships with friends and relatives, those researchers found, had higher rates of anxiety disorders. And the researchers theorized that there's a bidirectional relationship between anxiety disorders and support and intimacy in relationships: struggling relationships fuel anxiety, and anxiety stresses relationships. In another study, socially anxious women said they reveal less in their friendships.\n\nThe scientific literature on anxiety's effects on friendship in childhood and adolescence is much more robust. This makes sense, since friendships are critical to kids' social and emotional development. For anxious kids, having supportive and intimate friendships leads to reduced anxiety over time. Indeed, being part of a group (any group, not just the \"popular\" one), and having a close and upbeat best friendship, protects kids from feeling social anxiety.\n\nSupportive friendships also seem to prevent anxious kids from becoming depressed adults. In a 2016 study, anxious teens who said they felt loved or part of a group were much less likely to be depressed more than a decade later. By contrast, a paucity of loving relationships and little sense of belonging and being accepted during the teen years led to depression in adulthood. Good friends also enhance treatment for anxious kids: Those with caring friends respond better to cognitive behavioral therapy.\n\nFor kids, too, there is a bidirectional relationship between anxiety and the quality of friendships. Anxious kids tend to avoid social situations. But skipping sleepovers and soccer games means they have fewer opportunities to develop social skills. The ensuing social awkwardness fuels more anxiety. And so on.\n\nAnxious kids generally have fewer friends and feel less well liked than their peers. Kids with social anxiety, in particular, tend to have more social challenges. In experiments designed to assess social skills, they've been found to be less assertive and effective. Socially anxious girls report less acceptance and support from peers. Anxious kids more often expect to be rejected. Research has found at least some of the chill they anticipate from peers is well-founded. One study had nine-to-thirteen-year-old kids rate videotaped speeches of other children, some of whom had anxiety disorders. The raters were then asked whether they liked the kids in the videotapes and whether they thought they would make good friends. Kids with social anxiety disorder were rated the most harshly. A study from 1999 found that 75 percent of children with social phobia said they had few or no friends; half did no extracurricular activities.\n\nAnxious kids are more likely to be bullied. In one study, a staggering 92 percent of adults with social phobia said they had been severely teased in the past. Half of the subjects with OCD and 35 percent of those with panic disorder did. Boys with social anxiety may be more vulnerable to bullying than girls, since being quiet and withdrawn goes against traditional gender roles. And in another example of a negative feedback loop, bullying can lead to increased social anxiety. Adolescents who are frequently picked on are two to three times more likely to develop an anxiety disorder, according to one 2014 study.\n\nAnxiety has cost me at least one friend. In my early thirties, I spent a lot of time with a group of five women, all a few years older than me. They were smart and accomplished, opinionated and fun. We'd meet about once a month for potluck dinners, rotating apartments. I bonded, in particular, with a woman named Alice. She was passionate about yoga and had a ballsy way of talking about her emotions and her relationship deal breakers. I was astonished by how assertive and definite she was. Like most young women I knew, I was much more timid, even apologetic, about my desires. She was a veteran of the Landmark Forum, a self-help seminar that was an outgrowth of the 1970s \"est\" movement. (One of its core goals is \"freedom from anxiety.\") We'd have long conversations over tea about love, work, and meaning.\n\nOne weekend Alice joined me at the country house I'd rented with friends, a spare place in the Catskill Mountains, a couple of hours north of New York City. We hiked, cooked, and talked. One evening we decided to go to the tiny movie theater in a nearby town where an action movie was playing. I remember finding our seats in the already darkened theater to a booming soundtrack of gunfire and explosions.\n\nTen or fifteen minutes in, my heart rate kicked up, and I felt hot and slightly breathless: the telltale signs of a panic attack. I turned to Alice. \"I need to walk around the block. I'm feeling anxious, like I might have a panic attack. Can you come with me?\"\n\n\"You want to leave the movie right now?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes, I need to go,\" I said.\n\nShe did come with me, and she did walk with me. I paced around the block, Alice silent beside me, for a good half hour or so. Then I drove us back to the house. I tried to explain what a panic attack feels like and how I dealt with them.\n\nThe next morning I felt embarrassed. I apologized for aborting the movie. \"Don't worry about it,\" Alice said, yet I felt a subtle shift, a new distance. I made an extra effort to be sunny and calm. I took a series of portraits of her next to a blooming magnolia tree, then drove us back to the city.\n\nAfter that she retreated. There were no more tea dates or long talks. We still saw each other at the potlucks, but it became clear that that was as close as she wanted to get.\n\nThe truth is that some people are spooked by out-of-control anxiety. Emotional states, neuroscientists have found, are contagious, and some people don't want to catch what I have. Scientists call this \"emotional contagion,\" based on findings that we tend to automatically mimic the expressions of others. Making a particular expression can actually induce that emotion, which means that being around an anxious person can make you feel anxious, too. In fact, it can cause levels of the stress hormone cortisol to spike.\n\nWhen the anxious person is someone you love, this emotional contagion is even more pronounced. In a 2014 study, researchers in Germany and Boston had subjects perform stress-inducing tasks while they were watched via a one-way mirror or live video feed by someone of the opposite sex. In some cases, the observers were strangers; in others, the observers were the subjects' romantic partners. The tasks\u2014giving a short speech and doing some difficult math problems\u2014made the participants stressed and anxious; most of them saw their cortisol levels at least double. That was no surprise. But about 26 percent of the _observers_ had significant increases in cortisol, too. If they were watching a romantic partner rather than a stranger, the number jumped to 40 percent.\n\nThis might be one reason why adults with anxiety disorders are more likely to be single. With dating, the goal is usually to present your best, most confident, most alluring self, and anxiety is no aphrodisiac. Those with anxiety disorders who do marry are more likely to divorce.\n\nI've had boyfriends who were caretakers and others who were much less supportive or indulgent. Some were clearly afraid of my fear, worried they'd be sucked into a vortex and that their lives would become as constrained and small as my own sometimes was.\n\nWhen I was sixteen, I met Scott at Images, a nightclub in Brewster, New York. It was teen night, an evening for kids who were into New Wave music to flirt, dive into mosh pits, and see bands with names like Cerebral Meltdown. We got to talking, and our two groups of friends ended up at the Windmill Diner, a cheap, brightly lit twenty-four-hour spot. Scott said he was charmed by the way I ate pancakes with my fingers. I thought he was ridiculously cute.\n\nWe were an unlikely pair. Six feet tall, handsome, and dark-haired, Scott was a sports star\u2014starter on the football team, ace pitcher in baseball\u2014at the Catholic high school in town. He was confident and popular but an average student. I was a bit of an oddball. While I was in honors classes, ran track, and sang in an a cappella choral group, I also bought my clothes at the Salvation Army (five dollars for a grocery bag full of vintage stuff) or dressed in flannel pajama bottoms and one of my dad's suit jackets, his silk tie wrapped around my ponytail. I defined myself by the music I listened to: the Smiths, Love and Rockets, Siouxsie and the Banshees. In 1987 western Connecticut, this was not mainstream: Boston, Def Leppard, and AC\/DC dominated the mixtapes of most of my schoolmates. When someone in my sociology class hissed at me, \"I bet you like U2,\" it was not a compliment.\n\nBut it was summer, and we went to different schools, and so our disparate places in the high school pecking order didn't seem to matter. We had an idyllic few months, roaming the streets in my little Chevy with a carload of friends, singing along to music, swimming in the lake, and drinking wine coolers in assorted fields and backyards.\n\nThen Scott left for college. I moved to Michigan, and Scott and I broke up. But by the following year, I was a freshman at Michigan, and Scott had transferred to Michigan State. We started dating again, off and on. When I got sick, Scott became the \"nocturnal life raft\" I described in the first chapter of this book, when my panic disorder hadn't yet been diagnosed.\n\nLooking back, I'm astonished by his unwavering support. He was twenty years old and a full-time student at what was known as an epic party school. He had pledged a fraternity. He liked to drink, smoke pot, and hang out with his friends. I would not have pegged him as a steadfast partner in the face of mental illness.\n\nWhen I got sick my senior year, Scott came through once more. What's remarkable is that by this time we weren't even dating. In fact, I had another boyfriend, although that relationship was long distance. My parents had moved to Texas, and Scott was one of the only people nearby I could count on. He was, once again, my anxiety car service, taking me to therapy appointments, doctors' visits, and the ER. I spent many weekends in his room in the beat-up apartment he shared with several of his fraternity brothers. I'd lie huddled in his bed\u2014really just a mattress thrown on the floor\u2014as a party swirled in the apartment beyond Scott's closed door. I'd hear girls giggling, boys boasting, and music blaring and hunch farther under the covers, feeling embarrassed and fragile.\n\nI became physically weak. I was barely eating, and the churning anxiety zapped my energy. One episode from this time is seared into my memory. I'm in Scott's bathroom, leaning against the white-tiled wall and clutching the towel bar. I need to take a shower but I'm too wobbly to stand on my own. Tenderly, as if I'm a child, Scott undresses me and leads me under the water. Keeping a steadying grip on my elbow, he shampoos my hair, cupping a hand at my forehead so the soap doesn't run into my eyes.\n\nI'm certain that I would not have stayed in school if it weren't for Scott. His support and care kept me from phoning my parents in Texas and demanding that they let me come home. When things got too tough in Ann Arbor, he'd whisk me back to his darkened bedroom, a cocoon where I felt safe. Scott was one of the few people with whom I could be truly authentic. No matter how scared or self-involved I was or how much of an invalid I became, he stayed. I don't remember him ever criticizing me or telling me to toughen up.\n\nI had the immense good fortune in college to move from one understanding boyfriend to another. I met Joel during spring break of my junior year. This spring break was unusual. I still felt shaky and anxious. I did not want a repeat of the prior year's truncated and disastrous trip to Canc\u00fan, so I had a strange hybrid vacation. Several of my sorority sisters planned to travel to South Padre Island, Texas. My parents lived in San Antonio, about a four-hour drive away, so I convinced them to stay a few days in South Padre, too. That way I could hang out with my college friends during the day but retreat to the safety of my family at night or when I got too anxious.\n\nI was on the beach when my friends and I noticed a group of guys smiling our way and generally trying to get our attention. We engaged in a volley of whispering and glances but didn't actually meet. Later that night, though, I was at a bar, one of those open-air fishing-themed spots with plastic starfish on the walls and Jell-O shots on the menu. One of the guys from the beach\u2014tall and cute, olive-skinned with sandy brown hair arranged in an artful bedhead\u2014walked over to me and told me his name was Joel.\n\nHe bought me a Coke. We danced to \"Just Like Heaven\" by the Cure. He asked for my phone number. Joel was twenty-five and an MBA student at Michigan, and we began seeing each other as soon as we got back to Ann Arbor. I fell in love with his goofiness and kindness. But Joel graduated just a few months after we met and left for a job in San Francisco. I flew to see him every few months\u2014as often as I could pay for plane tickets with the money I made at my part-time job in a clothing store. I was still struggling with anxiety, but I remember our early relationship as light and fun, filled with dance parties with friends and meandering strolls around the Marina district.\n\nJoel, however, recalls that anxiety reared its head as early as our third date. We were at his grad student apartment in Ann Arbor, and I started to feel panicky. I told him I needed to get some air, and we walked around the triangle-shaped block outside about ten or twenty times. \"I thought it was a little weird, but okay,\" he told me recently.\n\nAfter my December relapse, Joel bought a pager so that I could reach him anytime. (This was 1992, before cell phones were ubiquitous.) I was the only one with the number. He left the device on all night, sitting on the nightstand, so he'd wake if I needed him. I'd buzz him mid-panic attack, and he'd call and calm me down, telling me I'd be okay, that he loved me and wouldn't let anything happen to me.\n\nJoel researched my various physical symptoms and always made sure we were close to an emergency room. One day I called him and told him my legs felt tingly and numb. He walked to a bookstore across the street from his office and began paging through a medical reference book. \"Everything just kept coming up MS,\" he says. \"That was the scariest incident, thinking that you'd have this progressive downward spiral.\"\n\nIt is spring break 1992, a glorious blue-sky day in San Francisco. I'm lying on Joel's bed struggling to breathe. There's a weight on my torso. Pushing my chest out to inhale seems to take formidable effort. Then I exhale in a big rush. At the time, I'm in therapy at the Anxiety Disorders Clinic, but I still think it might be something terrible. Joel has been trying to reassure me for days. \"You've been able to have sex,\" he points out. \"You couldn't do that if you were dying.\" But my doomsday forecasts have spawned a seed of doubt. Could it be a pulmonary embolism? Joel finds a well-regarded pulmonologist at a local hospital and gets me an emergency appointment. I lie on a cold, metal table, and a technician injects a radioactive substance into a vein in my arm.\n\nThere's no blood clot. Joel drives me to a bed and breakfast in Santa Barbara to celebrate. We drink wine and eat chocolate in bed.\n\nYears later Joel says my anxiety sometimes made him feel helpless and scared. But it was never a drag to him, he says. \"It actually drew me closer to you,\" he says. \"I felt very protective. You were going through something really hard, and I wanted to help in any way I could.\"\n\nJoel and I broke up not long after I graduated from college and moved to Washington, D.C. During my twenties, I had several boyfriends. While my anxiety was mostly under control during those years, I still felt its effects. I stayed in some relationships\u2014like one with a controlling and belittling editor thirteen years older than me\u2014too long. I became emotionally dependent on, and romantically entangled with, my best male friend. The relationship\u2014marooned in that awkward gray zone between friend and boyfriend\u2014was unfair to him and ended painfully. The friendship was destroyed. I was like a trapeze artist flinging myself from one relationship to another, sometimes keeping my grip on one guy while transitioning to another.\n\nThe thing was that I was awful at making decisions. I was petrified of making the \"wrong\" choice. It wasn't, I don't think, that I was afraid of being alone. I was more afraid of regret. I didn't trust myself not to change my mind about someone.\n\nNumerous studies have shown a link between mental illness and problems in romantic relationships. While depression seems to dampen relationship quality the most, anxiety wreaks its own havoc, contributing to a glass-half-empty view of relationships. In one 2012 study of heterosexual couples in which one or both partners suffered from panic disorder or GAD, the partners with anxiety disorders judged their relationships to be of lower quality than those without disorders. This was especially true of women. Men with anxiety problems judged their relationships harshly only if their female partners also had anxiety disorders.\n\nSome anxiety disorders seem to cause more relationship turbulence than others. In one study, men whose wives had panic disorder reported lower-quality marriages than men whose wives had other anxiety disorders. Relationship issues exacerbate anxiety, too. A 1985 study following people with agoraphobia found that those with marital problems didn't respond as well to treatment for their anxiety.\n\nOf all the anxiety disorders, social anxiety tends to be most disruptive to relationships. Women with high levels of social anxiety say they both give to and receive from their partners less support. They say they disclose less and tend to be less satisfied in their relationships, too.\n\nAs I entered my late twenties, anxiety seemed to be more of an occupying force in my relationships. While I wasn't debilitated as I'd been in college, these relationships were more serious. They were the ones that might conceivably lead to marriage and children. The stakes were higher.\n\nI met Alan at a nondescript restaurant on the Upper West Side during lunch with a mutual friend who was not so subtly trying to set us up. The lunch was awkward, filled with long pauses. Alan had just moved to New York from Africa, where he had been living and working as a freelance journalist for several years. He was having a tough time making the transition to New York and the seeming frivolity of life in such a peaceful, affluent place. \"People here talk about going to the gym,\" he grumbled.\n\nWe met again, at a party a month later, and the conversation flowed more easily. A few months after that, he called and asked me out. We ended up going to an awful play and having dinner at a cheap Italian joint, now long gone, in the West Village. We laughed and talked late into the night. On our second date, we wandered around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and kissed in a hammock on the rooftop of his apartment building. A few weeks after that, he shyly asked if he could call me his girlfriend.\n\nI fell hard for him. We bonded over reporting and writing. We read each other's stories and gave each other advice. I was wowed by his fearlessness, how he had flown to Africa with a laptop and almost no journalism experience and made his way as a freelance reporter. He told me of grim experiences: seeing bones at a church in Rwanda, seeing a mass grave of Tutsis who had been slaughtered in the country's genocide. He joked about the various parasites he'd contracted in Africa, about the worm he'd passed during a fancy dinner with diplomats. He put it in a film canister so that a doctor could identify it later. He had done things I wished I were brave enough to do.\n\nBut he wasn't cocky about it. In fact, he was often wracked by self-doubt. It was that combination of fearlessness and vulnerability that hooked me.\n\nIn New York, we threw parties, saw bands, and lounged around in Central Park. Alan taught me how to Rollerblade and rock climb, helping me pick out a bright orange harness and purple climbing shoes. But five months into our relationship, he was offered the job in Mexico City.\n\nI told him he had to do it, but there was never any doubt that he'd go. He was miserable as an office-bound editor. He wanted to travel and cover stories. He asked me to come with him to Mexico, but at the time I was close to being made a staff reporter at the _Journal_ and felt I'd being saying goodbye to a journalism career if I left New York. We decided we'd stay together and have a long-distance relationship. After all, we still had six months before Alan had to make the move.\n\nWithin weeks of Alan accepting the new job, I had a relapse, spawned by the episode of blind spots while walking down Seventh Avenue. While Alan was throwing himself into Spanish lessons and Mexican history, I was swiftly sliding back into hypochondria. Because my doctor thought the blind spots were an ocular migraine, he had me see an ophthalmologist. The eye doctor said he thought he saw some \"bulging\" behind one of my eyes. (This can be a sign of a brain tumor.) He sent me to a neurologist, who did an MRI. (Was this the third\u2014no fourth\u2014brain MRI I'd had in my not-yet-three decades of life?) There was no tumor.\n\nEven with the clean MRI results, I became fixated on the idea that something was wrong with my brain. I worried especially about my memory. I furtively wrote down conversations shortly after they happened, then tested myself at night to see how much I could remember. I'd wring my hands when I discovered a lapse. I tried to keep most of these worries from Alan, but I wasn't that successful. \"We would be out, and you'd say 'I have a headache' or 'I feel weird, I think I have a brain tumor,' \" Alan recalls. \"I'd think, 'Seriously? You had one last week.' You were often imagining that you had a terminal illness.\"\n\nI felt ridiculous and ashamed. Alan had seen some truly horrible things in his work. My own concerns seemed petty and small. So I did my best to hide emotionally. Between that and Alan's impending move, I felt increasingly cut off from him.\n\nThe anxiety built all summer. That August Alan and I planned a trip to Maine. We'd spend three days hiking along the Appalachian Trail, traversing three mountains more than four thousand feet high, and a few days relaxing at a rustic cabin on a lake. This would be my first real backpacking trip\u2014carrying my gear, drinking water from streams (after adding a dose of iodine), and sleeping in a tiny tent or bunking in primitive lean-tos.\n\nThe trouble started with my tortured attempt to buy a sleeping bag for the trip. I could not do it; in my addled mind, selecting the \"right\" bag would magically protect me from dehydration, broken bones, homicidal bears, and other sinister scenarios. Choose the wrong bag, and I was screwed. I bought two bags and laid them out in Alan's bedroom, climbing into one and then the other over and over again. \"Just pick one,\" Alan said, growing frustrated and confused.\n\nMy experience of that trip was like a split screen. On one side, I worried about having an asthma attack and dying. I thought about how far we were from a hospital and how long it would take help to arrive. On the other side, I marveled at a moose drinking from a pristine mountaintop lake. Alan and I made love on top of a picnic table. We laughed about the \"thru-hikers\" we met (people who had been hiking the trail for months) with trail names like Mousetrap and Stickman. One guy was proud that he was still wearing his original boots, now held together with duct tape. The thru-hikers dubbed Alan and me \"the Weekenders.\" There's a photo of me from that trip: topless with khaki shorts and brown leather hiking boots, triumphant on the apex of a mountain. I look healthy and strong.\n\n\u2014\n\nSeveral days later Alan and I are eating at a fish shack in Bar Harbor. Chattering sunburned families, red plastic baskets of lobster tails and crab claws in front of them, are all around us.\n\nSuddenly I feel a lump in my throat. I cough. Take a swig of water. The lump is still there.\n\nMy skin feels hot. My heart beats faster.\n\nI'm having an allergic reaction to the shellfish, I decide. My throat will close up. My throat will close up, and I will die.\n\n\"I feel like I can't breathe,\" I tell Alan. \"I think I'm allergic to the crab. I need to get to a hospital.\"\n\nHe asks whether I'm sure, and when I say yes, he grabs my hand, and we run to the car. Mount Desert Island Hospital is a twenty-minute drive away.\n\nIt is getting dark. Alan is speeding along the twisting roads, glancing worriedly over at me, his arms taut on the steering wheel. I am motionless in the passenger seat. My entire focus is on moving air through the viselike grip of my constricted throat.\n\n\"Please don't let me die. Please don't let me die,\" I beg.\n\n\"We're almost there. You'll be okay,\" Alan says. He does not sound convinced.\n\nAs we pull up to the small hospital, a tiny doubt pierces the fear: _Maybe I'm having a panic attack._\n\nThe building is almost entirely dark. The few visible lights point the way to the emergency room. Alan is breathing fast, too, hopped up on adrenaline. I lean into him. \"Maybe I'm just having a panic attack,\" I say.\n\nMy doubt grows. When I check in with a nurse, I tell her my symptoms but also that I'm prone to panic attacks. Instead of seeing a doctor right away, I pace around the waiting room. My symptoms begin to subside. Alan is quiet, shoulders slumped. He looks drained. Later he tells me that during the drive he was making plans. If I stopped breathing, he'd pull over to the side of the road and jam a hole in my trachea with one of the tools on his Leatherman, which is something like a Swiss Army knife.\n\nMy anxiety shrouds the rest of the trip. It is now an uncaged thing, ready to land on any uncertainty. On the drive home, the lump in my throat returns, and my skin feels itchy. I make Alan exit the interstate to stop at another emergency room, where I get a shot of Benadryl.\n\n\u2014\n\nBack at home, I started taking Paxil, and my anxiety abated somewhat. Alan left for Mexico a few months later. For the next year and a half, we had a long-distance relationship. In some ways it was idyllic. We traveled all over Mexico. We met up for road trips to California and Nevada and Mississippi and Louisiana, fishing for crawfish off the deck of a rented house on a bayou. We visited Culebra, an island in Puerto Rico, just in time for a hurricane. We raided the grocery store for food along with the locals and huddled around a battery-powered radio in a cinder-block-walled hotel with new friends.\n\nMy anxiety waxed and waned. Alan, for the most part, tried to ignore it. He told me recently that he hadn't known what to do. \"I think my instinct and the instinct of a lot of men is to solve problems, and this one didn't seem like a solvable problem. Usually, I just tried to pretend it didn't exist,\" he said. He did sometimes try to talk me out of my anxiety, to convince my revved-up amygdala to listen to logic. Like during the Oreo Incident.\n\nDuring our vacation in Culebra, we were staying in a small wooden bungalow near the beach. I was in the kitchen eating Oreos, a treat I'd loved since childhood. I had eaten maybe two or three and reached my hand into the bag for another.\n\nThat's when I saw them.\n\nAnts. Dozens\u2014no, hundreds!\u2014of ants. A mob of ants. They were swarming inside the bag, crawling on the cookies, their wiggling black bodies stark against the white filling. An intrepid few had started the trek up my hand.\n\nI shrieked and dropped the bag. I grabbed a paper towel and spat out the cookie sludge in my mouth. But I knew it was too late. I had definitely already eaten some. Ants were now making their way down my esophagus. They were moments away from my bloodstream.\n\n\"Oh, my God, there are ants in here. I've eaten ants!\" I wailed to Alan. \"I need to throw up.\"\n\nAlan looked inside the bag. \"Okay, maybe you've eaten a couple of ants. But it doesn't seem like such a big deal. They're protein.\"\n\n\"No, I need to get rid of the ants. I could get sick. They could be carrying some awful disease,\" I said, and moved toward the bathroom.\n\n\"Look, I'll prove it to you. I'll put myself at the same risk.\" He reached into the bag, grabbed an ant-covered cookie, and popped it into his mouth. \"Mmm, that was tasty,\" he said, chewing.\n\nHe swallowed and reached in and grabbed another one. \"That was good protein,\" he said, downing the second ant-strewn Oreo. \"These are really good,\" he said as he ate a third cookie.\n\nI laughed. \"You really are crazy.\"\n\nStill, Alan's antics weren't enough to defeat my anxiety. I went to the bathroom, stuck my finger down my throat, and made myself vomit.\n\nThe time apart\u2014me in New York, him in Mexico\u2014was a strain. There were anguished email exchanges, flirtations with other people, and angry silences during our brief times together. Our emotional bond frayed. Finally I got permission from the _Journal_ to work from Mexico City for six months. I arrived with a six-foot-long blue duffel bag stuffed with clothes and books and moved into Alan's house in the lovely Coyoac\u00e1n neighborhood, not far from the onetime home of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. I was twenty-nine, and it was the first time I'd lived with a boyfriend.\n\nI loved Mexico City. The early morning call of the tamale carts: \" _Tamales, tamales_.\" The circus acts\u2014acrobats, flamethrowers\u2014performing on the streets during red lights. The riot of colors in the plaza during the Day of the Dead celebration. Even the catcalls\u2014 _gringa, gringa, rubia, rubia_ (blondie)\u2014I heard en route to my favorite coffee spot. And always the lilt of Spanish.\n\nI wasn't blind to the poverty and corruption. And I did notice that people with darker skin were more likely to wear the cheap blue uniforms of nannies and housekeepers, while the lighter-skinned shopped at Gucci and Zara in the tony Polanco neighborhood. Because of the pollution, I had to stop running. My asthma was kicked up by Mexico City's air, and I didn't have the money to pay for access to one of the pricey health clubs that circulated filtered air.\n\nWhen Alan and I were in Mexico City, we did normal things: We rented movies, went grocery shopping, and worked in our side-by-side offices. I loved being able to pop next door to see him, still in my bathrobe, and run part of a story by him. We also kept traveling. To Panama. To Cuba. To the pyramids of Teotihuacan and the Mayan ruins of Palenque. The frenzied travel was partly anxiety-driven. I had promised the _Journal_ that I would return in January, and the specter of my departure was on my mind. Alan and I didn't talk much about what my return to New York would mean for our relationship. In hindsight, I wish I had been less focused on ticking off destinations in my _Lonely Planet_ guidebooks and rooted myself a bit more, made my own friends, and carved out more of a routine in Mexico City.\n\nAt the same time, Paxil's side effects mounted and took a toll on my relationship. My sex drive ebbed. Alan was frustrated, saying he felt rejected. I went off the medication.\n\nWhen I moved back to New York, Alan and I had a vague understanding that I would stay for a few months to fulfill my commitment to the _Journal_ , then quit and move back to Mexico City. I'd freelance. We'd get engaged. But a few weeks later, during a phone call, he broke up with me. He wasn't ready for a big commitment, he said. He wanted to date other people.\n\nYears later he told me that my anxiety was a big part of why he ended things. \"I wanted an adventurous life,\" he said. \"I worried that your issues would hold us back, that our lives would be controlled by your fears and anxieties.\" Because I was scared of driving on highways, Alan thought we'd be limited in where we could live or that I would be too dependent on him. He also worried that I wouldn't be able to handle the pressures of motherhood, that I'd \"freak out in moments when I needed you to be in charge with a kid.\"\n\nI was devastated by the breakup. My emotional whiplash quickly devolved into the rom-com version of grief. I wrote pleading letters, dialed Alan's number, and hung up. I cried to my friends. I drank too much. I kissed cute strangers. I lost weight. (The misery diet is just as effective as the anxiety diet, I discovered.)\n\nWhat I didn't do was have a relapse.\n\nIn some ways, heartbreak is antithetical to anxiety. Anxiety is all about the future, about the tragedies around the corner. Grief is about the awful thing that has already happened. I sank deeply into my messy present. (Years later I cyberstalked Alan on a dating website. In the section that asks \"What have you learned from past relationships?\" he had written: \"How to diagnose panic disorder.\")\n\nI did obsess some about the past, about all the ways I'd failed as a girlfriend. The next time, I vowed, I'd be the most loving, the most patient, the most giving girlfriend around. That vow must have been why I ignored the endless red flags about Brad.\n\nI had met Brad several times during my relationship with Alan, but it was not until a party for a mutual friend, just a month or two after I arrived back in New York, that we had our first real conversation, filled with light teasing and easy verbal volleys. He was thirty-five, with sandy brown hair, sexy crow's-feet, and impish blue eyes. A freelance photographer and avid rock climber, he was funny and wry and smart, with a quiet confidence. But I also found him emotionally opaque. His expressions and inflections could be tough to read. Despite that (or maybe because of it), I was instantly, wildly attracted to him.\n\nThe day after the party, I emailed my friend Anne, who was Brad's roommate, to debrief about the evening. \"It was so nice to see your roommate Brad again,\" I wrote. \"He's adorable, by the way.\" She wrote back saying that, funnily enough, Brad had said I was adorable, too. \"Actually 'lovely' was the word he used,\" she wrote. Later that afternoon, my phone rang at work. It was Brad, calling to ask me out.\n\nOn our first date, I was nervous. I hadn't been on a first date in more than three years, and I was still wobbly from the breakup with Alan. I drank too much and talked too much, firing off probing questions like \"Do you believe in God?\" We kissed good night, but Brad didn't call me again.\n\nOver the next few months, we saw each other at parties and emailed a little. In one exchange, he reminded me that we had promised to get together over dessert. We made another date.\n\nWe started seeing each other casually, meeting up for a bike ride, an outdoor movie, or a drink. The dates were fun, but he deflected personal questions. He was stingy with compliments and gave me few clues as to how much he liked me. Each time we parted, I wondered if he'd call again.\n\nThen September 11 happened.\n\nBrad hopped on his bike and rode to the twin towers with his cameras immediately after the attack. His photographs from that day\u2014of the wreckage, the firefighters, the soot-covered survivors\u2014were featured in magazines and newspapers. Meanwhile I was writing about the aftermath for the _Journal_. We'd work all day in a frenzy and meet up at night. The tragedy around us, the shared purpose, and the disruption of any normal routine shredded any resistance. We fell into a war zone romance.\n\nWe were sitting in his bathtub when he looked at me and said: \"I love your eyes.\" He paused. \"I love you,\" he continued. I was elated. \"I love you, too,\" I replied.\n\nStill, even in those first few months, I noticed something distressing. He was nit-picking and critical. He admonished me for clanging my spoon against my cereal bowl, for laughing at my own jokes, for talking about work too much. He criticized the way I ate and the way I kissed. One night after a dinner party, I confronted him. \"I know I have a lot of issues, but the way I eat my cereal isn't one of them,\" I began.\n\nHe apologized. \"I know I have a problem.\"\n\nI stayed.\n\nBut the criticisms continued. We'd be having a good time, laughing and chatting, and then he'd pull away and get quiet. \"What's wrong?\" I'd ask.\n\nI used the word _basically_ too much. I kicked his shin. I spoke too loudly. Brad seemed to seethe with a quiet anger. \"It must be hard to be so annoyed by so many little things,\" I said. The digs fueled my anxiety, which just made me clumsier, more unnatural, and I'm guessing, romantically unappealing. I'd oscillate between fury and despondency, between anger at his unreasonableness and shame at my own flaws.\n\nThen I moved in with him.\n\nThis may sound crazy, but there was a strange logic to my actions. I had a strong suspicion that this relationship wasn't good for me and that it had to end. But I knew I couldn't quit him yet. There was too much physical attraction, and I clung to the misguided belief that if I just tried harder and was more loving, he would be less critical. Part of me couldn't believe that someone could truly be so hung up on silly and inconsequential things. It must signal something else, some core unhappiness. If I could get to the bottom of that unhappiness, he would change.\n\nSo I held out a slim hope that things would get better. But I also figured that if we moved in together, things could get much, much worse. So bad, in fact, that I would have to leave. Moving in with him, in this scenario, would actually be a huge time-saver. Instead of frittering away several more years of my life, I would sacrifice only months.\n\nI put almost all my furniture in storage and brought nothing to Brad's apartment in Gramercy Park other than some clothes, books, and a couple of bookcases. My first week there, Brad barely spoke to me. Did he regret asking me to move in? Did he feel ambushed by my stuff? (Living together had been his idea, I reminded him.) He wouldn't tell me. Instead, he complained to his sister: My towels didn't match. My bookcases were cheap.\n\nOver the next several months, we did have some fun. We went dancing in East Village dive bars, had friends over for dinner, and went for long, beautiful hikes in the Catskills. But Brad was icy and aloof much of the time. And without my own apartment to retreat to, I had little respite from his moods. I became increasingly nervous. After waking, my heart would race for several hours. I lost weight. I became consumed with my relationship troubles and spoke with friends about little else. My panic attacks returned with a vengeance.\n\nI had one in the kitchen of a Catskill rental house. My heart rate shot up, my arms went numb, and my breath came in gasps. I was convinced I was dying and asked Brad to call 911. (He did. I was loaded into an ambulance and checked out at a tiny country hospital.) I had another during an ocular migraine. Brad and I had spent a long day rock climbing. On the drive home, a chunk of my vision disappeared. Yes, this had happened before, but I still panicked. Maybe this time it really was a stroke. We passed a fire station, and I asked Brad to stop so that I could wait out the symptoms within arm's reach of medical help. Two sympathetic young firefighters sat me in a metal folding chair and chatted with me until my vision returned.\n\nThe attacks became more frequent. I was a repeat visitor to the ER at NYU Hospital. It wasn't often that I actually went inside and saw a doctor; I felt safer just being on the sidewalk out front. I could frequently be found skulking around the ER entrance mid-panic attack. I'd pace up and down First Avenue, trying to breathe deeply and talk myself down from whatever medical emergency I thought I was having.\n\nWith each panic attack, Brad retreated a little further. The warm moments between us became increasingly rare, and it was only when we were with friends that I saw the funny, charming guy I had fallen for. \"You hardly ever smile anymore,\" I said to him one morning. Brad looked at me, stone-faced, and flashed an aggressive, over-the-top grin. \"Is that better?\" he barked.\n\nIt is September, and I'm on the top of a mountain in New Hampshire. It is a glorious early evening. Dark shadows shift as clouds dance above the rolling green vista. My worn-in leather boots dodge the delicate white wildflowers along the rocky trail. Brad and I are on day one of a three-day hiking trip in the White Mountains. We've hiked steeply uphill all day.\n\nI've been nervous about this trip for weeks. By now, I love backcountry backpacking\u2014the quiet, the beauty, the physical exertion\u2014but I'm still afraid of it, too. There's always the potential for broken bones, snakebites, and asthma attacks, all of it miles from hospitals and help. And my anxiety has been so much worse lately.\n\nWe drop our packs off at the hut where we'll stay that night and continue farther along the trail to catch more mountaintop views. I start to feel a little woozy. The rocks under my feet rear up; the undulating mountains flatten. I stop walking. \"Wait,\" I call to Brad. \"I don't feel well.\"\n\nBrad stops. \"Maybe you need some water,\" he says. He opens the top of his Nalgene bottle and hands it to me. I tell him I want to go back to the hut.\n\nThen my dizziness turns into a full-blown panic attack. My heart gallops, and my breath shortens. _You're okay, you're okay, you're okay_ , I repeat silently to myself, like a mantra.\n\nIt's dinnertime back at the hut. Fleece-clad families sit at long wooden tables and young staffers cheerfully pass out platters of freshly baked bread. While hikers eat hungrily, the staffers sing camp songs and act out silly skits. Brad and I sit across from each other in silence. He looks exasperated. My heart thumps wildly.\n\nWe sleep in bunk beds in a room with several others. All night I huddle in a ball on my top bunk, swallowing bits of Klonopin every few hours. But this time it fails me. It doesn't calm my racing heart. Brad disappears. I don't see him for hours.\n\nIn the morning, I tell him that I just can't continue the trip to the next hut, as planned. We hike down the mountain. As I descend, the anxiety eases. By the time I reach the trailhead, I feel almost fine.\n\nA few nights later Brad and I were sitting on the sofa in our apartment. \"You lost me on top of that mountain,\" he said.\n\nA few weeks later I started looking for an apartment of my own. I signed a lease. Then I told Brad I was moving out.\n\nThe days leading up to my move were both banal and surreal. We didn't fight. Nor did we talk about what was happening. Finally I asked Brad, \"Do you want to process this with me at all?\"\n\n\"I'm sad you're leaving,\" he said.\n\nSettling into my new apartment in an old brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, I was relieved but emotionally exhausted. I went on my own version of a relationship detox. I fell asleep early on Saturday nights. I binge-watched the entire six seasons of _Sex and the City_. I painted my bedroom walls a sprightly chartreuse. I found a new therapist, whom I have seen off and on ever since, the fabulous Dr. L. I went back on Paxil. And I took stock of what I wanted in a relationship. To my usual criteria of smart, funny, and cute, I added several more must-haves: kind, emotionally available and consistent, and able to handle my anxiety.\n\nFrom then on, I made it a policy to tell every man I dated\u2014no later than the second meeting\u2014about my anxiety. I treated it almost like having an STD.\n\nBecause the reality is that anxiety affects partners. One study followed thirty-three heterosexual couples in which the women had anxiety disorders. On the days when the women experienced high levels of anxiety, the men reported less positive relationship quality (measured by things like \"partner showed concern\" and \"partner was dependable\") and more anxiety, anger, and depression. The more the men accommodated their wives' anxiety, the angrier they were. On women's highly anxious days, they reported higher negative relationship quality (measured by, among other things, \"partner was demanding\" and \"partner was critical\").\n\nI met Sean online, on Nerve.com. It was 2005, way before OkCupid became popular and aeons before Tinder. In the mid-2000s, Match.com and Nerve.com were the online dating behemoths. Match was more mainstream. Nerve, which was initially founded as a racy online magazine that covered sex and relationships, was where you could find musicians, film editors, and graphic designers, many of whom had a penchant for artful eyewear.\n\nSean and I joke that it was his hat that hooked me. Among the pictures he posted on his profile was one of him wearing a Tibetan knit hat that fanned out in an enormous black yarn Mohawk. (There was no false advertising. Another photo revealed his completely bald head.) His note to me was sweet, complimentary, and clever. But it was the slightly weird, goofy photo that compelled me to answer and make a date.\n\nWe met at a caf\u00e9 in Nolita. He had lovely blue eyes, strong features, and a slim gym-going build. While he had the look of the hipster Brooklyn artist\/professor he in fact was (black jeans, green leather jacket, black wool beanie), he was also warm, funny, and direct. He exuberantly talked up his lifelong obsession with the Beatles and chastised me for suggesting that the Rolling Stones were in the same league.\n\nOn our second date, at a wine bar in Williamsburg, I told him about my panic attacks and my college breakdowns. I did not put a rosy spin on things: I told him that my anxiety was chronic and would likely return. Sean was empathetic; he didn't seem put off at all. And he had a secret of his own to tell me that night. Although he had listed himself as \"single\" on his profile, he had been married before. Six years earlier his first wife had collapsed suddenly of a heart arrhythmia brought on by a long struggle with anorexia and bulimia. She died in his arms. They were both thirty-three.\n\nAt nearly every date that spring and summer\u2014to museums, galleries, and concerts\u2014Sean brought me roses. Actually, they were drawings and screenprints he made of roses. \"For beautiful Andrea,\" they were inscribed. He called when he said he would. He showed up on time. He told me how much he liked me, then how much he loved me. He drove me to IKEA when I wanted bookcases, then put them together for me. When my father was diagnosed with cancer and given a grim diagnosis, he researched treatment options. He could also be refreshingly unself-conscious and silly. I knew I loved him when I saw him sitting in his underwear eating a huge bowl of grapes and guffawing to the movie _This Is Spinal Tap_. I admired his certainty, steadfastness, and directness. And it freaked me out, too.\n\nIt is fall, and Sean and I are hiking up Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire. (Yes, it seems that the pivotal moments in all my relationships happen on mountains.) We're close to the summit when I trip on a tree root and go down. As I fall, I brace myself with my left hand. My wrist bends back alarmingly when I hit the ground, and my forehead bounces off a rock. Sean reaches out to steady me as I stand up. My arm and head throb. Within minutes, my wrist and hand turn red and swell. A large bump erupts on my forehead.\n\nSean is calm. \"Let's get you back to the car,\" he says.\n\nWe walk quickly down the mountain. As we descend, I start to panic. I'm not so worried about my wrist. But the bump on my head really hurts. I feel dizzy. Maybe I have a head injury. Maybe my brain is bleeding right now. I focus on my feet, dodging rocks and fallen tree branches. The car seems so far away.\n\nThe trail begins to level off. My breath comes in sharp gasps. My arms tingle. \"My arms feel numb,\" I say. \"I think something is really wrong with my head.\"\n\nWhen we get to the car, Sean calls 911. An ambulance picks us up and takes me to a small hospital. Sean sits beside me, stroking my hair the whole way. Crutches and casts line the exam room wall. (A nurse tells us that hiking injuries on Mount Monadnock keep them in business.) My head is fine. My wrist, however, is broken. I leave with a plastic splint and instructions to see a hand specialist when I return to New York.\n\nOn the drive home, Sean stops and gets me ice cream. When we get to my apartment, he heads to a grocery store to pick up milk and other essentials, then props me up in bed, placing a pillow under my sore wrist and a bottle of Tylenol and a book within easy reach.\n\nA year later Sean proposed to me at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his favorite place in New York, in front of a Van Gogh painting of white roses. We married six months later.\n\nA couple of months after our wedding, Sean and I started trying to get pregnant.\n\nI had always yearned to have a child. I thought it would be fascinating to have a ringside seat as a little person developed. And I wanted to feel that kind of immersive, unconditional love. You could abandon any other relationship, it seemed: with friends, boyfriends, a spouse, even with siblings or parents. But not with a child. That was eternal. I was awed by the thought of it.\n\nI didn't, however, think I would actually be able to do it. After all, pregnancy is basically a ten-month dive into uncertainty. The scary tests, the strange symptoms, and the deep unknown of first-time childbirth can rattle even women without anxiety disorders. And there was a bigger question, too: With my marked genes, would it be fair to potentially doom a child to a life of anxiety and depression?\n\nI am now a mother. These days I often think of my genetic albatross at the playground, while goofing around with my daughter, Fiona, who is now seven. Fiona is a delight\u2014funny, bright, and kind. She loves to draw and read ( _Pippi Longstocking_ is a favorite) and play elaborate pretend games with her friends. She can also be shy and sensitive. She's petrified of many kids' movies. Playdates have sometimes ended with her in a heaving heap because of some perceived slight. I try not to see every personality quirk through _DSM_ -colored glasses, as some sort of burgeoning psychiatric illness, but I'm not always successful. I've read the research. Studies of preschoolers have shown that young children who are clingy and don't explore their surroundings\u2014who are behaviorally inhibited\u2014are three times more likely to develop an anxiety disorder by adolescence than kids with other temperaments.\n\nAnxiety is a disease of doubt. Pregnancy and new motherhood are almost defined by uncertainty and unease. I did not have an easy time of it. Almost as soon as I knew I was pregnant, my anxiety soared. I worried about everything from amnios to autism. I'd wake suddenly at three or four in the morning, my mind overflowing with catastrophe. _This is the week when neural tube defects occur,_ I'd think. _Is it happening to my baby now?_ I was obsessed with miscarriage. I'd run to the bathroom to scrutinize my underwear for blood. My heart rate was constantly elevated. My breathing was quick and shallow. I was both exhausted and jittery\u2014as though I had pulled several all-nighters in a row but was jacked up on a pot of coffee. I lost weight when I should have been gaining.\n\nMy bottle of Klonopin was still tucked into my bag, but I couldn't take any. My psychiatrist had told me it was too dangerous, that benzodiazepines during pregnancy were linked to birth defects. So I took walks in Fort Greene Park. I tried the breathing exercises I had learned in cognitive behavioral therapy. I weighed the evidence of my worries, telling myself that most babies are healthy, that most women get through pregnancy without dying or going crazy.\n\nIt didn't work. I called my psychiatrist on his cell phone. \"How am I going to get through the next nine months like this?\" I wailed.\n\nAt one point my husband was so concerned, he said, \"We don't have to go through with this.\"\n\nAnd we didn't.\n\nI was ten weeks pregnant and getting an NT scan, a detailed ultrasound. The technician, a smiling middle-aged woman, was chatty as she wielded the wand and looked at a screen. I heard the even _whoosh, whoosh, whoosh_ of the baby's heartbeat.\n\nThen her brow furrowed, and she fell silent. She stared intently at the screen while moving the wand around.\n\n\"Is everything okay?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'll have to get the doctor,\" she said, taking off her rubber gloves.\n\n\"Please, can you tell me? Is everything okay?\" I asked again.\n\n\"I need to talk to the doctor,\" she insisted.\n\nI pressed further. \"Can you just tell me if it's something bad? I'm here alone. My husband is working out of state. Should I tell a friend to come meet me here? If it's bad news, I don't want to be alone.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. I can't give any results. The doctor will see you shortly, I promise,\" she said.\n\nIt was bad. I knew it. I'd seen enough hospital shows and movies to know that this is how it goes: the silence, the look of concern, the wait for the doctor, the awful news. I sat in the waiting room and texted my husband and my friend Ianthe. \"Something is wrong with the baby,\" I wrote.\n\nI was ushered into a small windowless room with a doctor. \"Your fetus has a cystic hygroma,\" the doctor said flatly. \"This can mean a genetic disorder or some other defect.\" I began to cry hard, catching tears and snot on my sleeve. _Couldn't they have put a box of tissues in this room?_ I thought angrily.\n\nLater that afternoon another doctor, this one softer and kinder, explained that cystic hygromas are fluid-filled cysts caused by a blockage in the lymphatic system. My baby's case was severe: Many cysts lined the neck and spine. The doctor drew me a chart. Fifty percent of fetuses with a cystic hygroma have some chromosomal abnormality. Of the other 50 percent, one-third have a major structural birth defect, such as a heart anomaly. Some pregnancies end in miscarriage or stillbirth. Babies who survive might have cerebral palsy and developmental delays. In the far right corner of the chart, in small letters, she had written 17 percent. That was our chance of having a healthy baby.\n\nBut no test she or any other doctor could order would ever tell us for sure. Even if our baby's chromosomes, organs, arms, and legs were normal, there could be some stealth syndrome. The what-ifs were endless. It was uncertainty writ large.\n\nWe terminated the pregnancy.\n\nWeeks later I started corresponding with a woman I met on a \"pregnancy loss\" online message board. Her fetus had recently been diagnosed with a severe cystic hygroma. She was told that the baby would likely die before birth. Deeply religious, she decided to carry the baby to term. I followed the blog she kept about her pregnancy. She wrote about the clothes she picked out for her son's funeral, about the memorial service she was planning, even as the baby was kicking inside her. Her son lived less than an hour after delivery.\n\nEven though I wholeheartedly wanted a child, I was relieved not to be pregnant anymore. But I felt guilty about my relief. Had my anxiety somehow caused the cystic hygroma? I wondered. Was it the Prozac? I was taking 10 milligrams daily.\n\nStudies have indicated that about 10 percent of pregnant women in the United States receive prescriptions for SSRIs. On the advice of my psychiatrist, I had switched from Paxil to Prozac before I got pregnant. In the mid-2000s, studies had linked mothers' Paxil use during pregnancy to heart defects in their babies. At the time, many doctors considered Prozac to be the safest SSRI during pregnancy. It had been around the longest, and thousands of babies had already been exposed to it.\n\nHowever, Prozac was no match for my anxiety during my own brief pregnancy. I went to see a reproductive psychiatrist, one of a growing number who specialize in treating depressed and anxious pregnant women and their vulnerable fetuses. She reassured me that Prozac was safe to take during my next pregnancy. She told me I should take Klonopin, too, if my anxiety escalated again; the risk to the baby was minimal, she said. What I shouldn't do, she said, was try to go off meds. \"She merits long-term prophylaxis with an SSRI to minimize the risk of relapse including during pregnancy and lactation,\" the psychiatrist's report read. \"Many patients require a dosage increase during pregnancy to maintain remission.\"\n\nI stayed on the Prozac and hoped for the best.\n\nLater studies emerged showing that Prozac, too, was linked to a higher risk\u2014about double\u2014of heart defects and skull malformations in babies exposed to the drug during the first trimester of pregnancy. There were reports of birth defects among babies whose mothers took other SSRIs as well, but more recent research seems to exonerate Zoloft and Lexapro. There is a small increased risk of neural tube defects with Celexa. Some studies have shown that babies exposed to SSRIs in utero are more likely to be born prematurely and at lower birth weights. They are also more at risk of facing a serious lung condition called pulmonary hypertension.\n\nHowever, the risks of all these outcomes are very small. Most women will have unaffected babies. And studies conflict, too. One 2016 analysis involving more than 2,700 women who took SSRIs during pregnancy found that their babies were no more likely to have heart defects than women who didn't take the drugs.\n\nAfter my termination, my doctor had some of the fetal cells tested to see if there was a genetic reason for the cystic hygroma. The chromosomes were normal. Although I hadn't wanted my doctor to tell me the gender, there it was, typed on the lab report: XY. A boy.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe road to getting pregnant again was not smooth. I was thirty-seven at the time of my D&C, a uterine surgery commonly performed after a miscarriage or to terminate a pregnancy. My doctor told me to wait until my period returned and then try again. I was exhausted, emotionally drained, and terrified of another pregnancy, but I had no time to waste. I still wanted a baby. About a month after my D&C, my period returned. It was light and short. I called my doctor, who said this was typical, that it might take a while for my body to heal and my cycle to return to normal. Another month went by. The next period was similar, barely there, this time accompanied by intense cramping. I called my doctor again. She reassured me again. I made an appointment with another gynecologist. And another. They, too, said I had to be patient. It could take several months for my body to reset.\n\nBut I wasn't reassured. I posted questions on an online pregnancy loss support group and Googled \"light periods after D&C.\" Eventually I found my way to Ashermans.org, a site devoted to Asherman's syndrome, a condition characterized by scar tissue in the uterus. The symptoms? Light\u2014or absent\u2014periods and cramping. The cause? Usually a D&C or other uterine surgery. I read haunting entries from desperate women made infertile by the scarring. I posted questions, describing my periods in gory detail. Kind, helpful women wrote back, advising me on the exact tests to request to secure an accurate diagnosis. I called one of the doctors I had seen and asked for an HSG, a type of X-ray where a dye is injected into the uterus.\n\nSure enough, the test revealed scar tissue nearly blocking my cervix. The cause of Asherman's\u2014uterine surgery\u2014is, ironically, also the cure. Sean and I traveled to a specialist in suburban Boston recommended by the Ashermans.org ladies. After three surgeries and a month on estrogen pills, I was cleared to try to get pregnant again. It was early June.\n\nBy July, I had a positive pregnancy test.\n\nI braced myself for a resurgence of anxiety, but it didn't happen. During my first trimester, I was queasy and exhausted. In my third, I was achy and had trouble sleeping. But I wasn't extraordinarily anxious. I don't know why this pregnancy was different. The bout with Asherman's, I think, overrode some of my earlier fears. I had spent months desperately afraid I wouldn't get pregnant again. I had started to research surrogacy and adoption. So this time the positive test was a relief. Part of me also wonders if my body knew on some primitive level that my first pregnancy was doomed.\n\nAs my due date approached, I became scared of birth itself. My husband and I hired a doula. Many couples employ a doula to help them have an unmedicated birth. My own sister gave birth twice at home with no drugs. My goal, however, was much more modest: I just wanted to survive the ordeal without losing my mind.\n\nI went into labor three days after my due date. It was a warm March day, and Sean and I walked the streets of our Brooklyn neighborhood. I paused and leaned on him during contractions. The pains were close together but not particularly intense. Our doula met us at home, and the three of us drove to the hospital together. For several hours, I wandered the halls of the labor and delivery unit, climbed in and out of the shower, and at one point took my husband's hand and banged it against my forehead to distract myself from the pain.\n\nI got an epidural, and the pain vanished. Unfortunately, this opened up space for anxiety to come roaring in. Without the pain to focus on, I worried. Was the baby okay? Was I okay? I had heard about women having strokes after delivery. Would that happen to me? My legs felt heavy and numb from the epidural. Would it leave me paralyzed? I heard a _beep, beep, beep_. An alarm rang notifying the nurses that my heart rate was markedly high. I lay motionless in the hospital bed, staring at the clock. Worrying. Worrying. My husband and my doula dozed in straight-backed chairs.\n\nMy labor stalled. The doctor gave me Pitocin to try to kick-start it. Two hours went by, then four. Nothing was happening. My doctor decided that I needed a cesarean section.\n\nI know women have C-sections every day, but for me, the surgery was horrifying. My epidural was upped so far, it felt difficult to breathe. My arms were strapped down to padded supports on either side of me. A blue plastic sheet went up in front of me, and a team of blue-cap-and-gown-shrouded doctors and nurses milled about. There was a jarring juxtaposition between my whirring mind and my paralyzed body. I've never felt so out of control.\n\n\"I don't think I can do this,\" I said to my husband.\n\n\"Help me,\" I said to the doctors.\n\nThe anesthesiologist bent down. \"We can give you a sedative,\" he said. \"But we want to get the baby out first.\"\n\nI wish I could say that I felt a rush of love or awe when I saw my daughter's wriggling, blood-streaked body emerge above the blue sheet. \"It's a nine pounder!\" I heard someone exclaim. But I just felt desperation. I looked to the anesthesiologist. He was pushing a syringe into my IV. I felt the balled-up muscles in my neck ease a bit. The sedative was in.\n\nFiona was healthy and beautiful. She was also a tough baby. For the first few months, we had feeding challenges. She wouldn't latch onto my breast. When I tried to nurse, she would ball up her hands into fists and put them in front of her face. I took to yelling \"hands\" to my mother, mother-in-law, and husband, a signal for them to come over and pull the baby's hands away so I could push her mouth onto me. I had rounds of painful clogged milk ducts. My daughter and I passed thrush, a yeast infection in my breasts and her mouth, back and forth. I visited a lactation consultant, who ordered me to drink raspberry leaf tea (good for milk production), stop eating dairy, and do various mouth exercises with my daughter. (Smooshing her cheeks together to make a fish face was one.)\n\nAlmost as soon as we got the feeding thing down, the crying escalated. Fiona was colicky, which is just a euphemism for what seemed like nonstop screaming. We swaddled her, shushed her, and held her while bouncing up and down on an exercise ball. Still, she cried five, six, seven hours a day. Nothing seemed to work except for Marvin Gaye's \"What's Going On\" on endless repeat. It was her aural pacifier.\n\nI joined a group of new moms and met up with them and their newborns at neighborhood caf\u00e9s and, sometimes, bars. Early evening at one was dubbed \"Nappy Hour\" because of all the diaper-clad infants and pilsner-sipping moms. The other women chatted as their babies slept, nursed, or lay passively in baby slings. It seemed as though I was always on the periphery, bouncing and swaying in a futile attempt to stop Fiona from bawling.\n\nSince I was breastfeeding, Fiona was still getting a daily dose of Prozac. But when she was nearly three months old, we were in Florida, at my parents' house. I had run out of Prozac, and my psychiatrist had called in a prescription to a nearby Walgreens. When I got the bottle, there was an orange warning label, one I had never seen before: \"Do not take this medication while breastfeeding.\" I stopped taking Prozac that day.\n\nAs with the emerging evidence about heart defects, scientists were finding that SSRIs had varying degrees of safety during breastfeeding. Prozac, it turns out, is found in breast milk in much higher levels compared to other drugs in its class. There have been some reports of excessive crying, irritability, and feeding problems in nursing infants whose moms were taking it. Other studies link Prozac to slow weight gain in infants. Paxil and Zoloft, which are nearly undetectable in infants' blood, are considered a safer choice.\n\nMore worrisome are the potential long-term effects on kids exposed to antidepressants in utero. The science is decidedly mixed: Some studies have found an increased risk of autism and ADHD. A 2016 study, for example, found that children born to women who took SSRIs during the second and\/or third trimester of pregnancy were twice as likely to develop autism as those who weren't exposed to the drugs. Other studies have found no link between antidepressants and autism.\n\nAnother set of studies has found that exposure to SSRIs can lead to behavior problems and subtle defects in motor function and language development. In a 2016 study of preschoolers, some whose mothers had taken SSRIs during pregnancy had more behavioral issues and lower scores on an assessment of expressive language. Other studies, however, found no long-term effects. One 2015 study compared children exposed to SSRIs in utero with their unexposed siblings. When it came to certain measures of intelligence and behavior, there was no difference between them.\n\nSome doctors say that the mixed findings should be reassuring to women who take SSRIs during pregnancy. \"If there was a definite problem, it should show up consistently,\" says Marlene P. Freeman, associate director of the Perinatal and Reproductive Psychiatry Program at Massachusetts General Hospital.\n\nStill, some recent research has raised new concerns. A large study published in 2016 found that adolescents whose mothers took SSRIs while pregnant with them are more than four times as likely to become depressed by age fifteen, compared to children whose mothers had psychiatric disorders but didn't take SSRIs during pregnancy. The study is one of very few to follow children beyond the age of six. And it is the first to link SSRI exposure in utero to a later risk of depression.\n\nThe results are \"a bit worrisome,\" says Heli Malm, an obstetrician at Helsinki University Hospital and lead author of the study. She notes that the oldest children in the study are just entering the ages when mood disorders tend to arise, so the number of them with depression could increase. She also cautions that the results are preliminary.\n\nThe impetus for the study was work that researchers at Columbia University had done on rodents. Mice who were given Prozac during the first week or two of life exhibited anxious and depressed behavior when they became adults. (The first few weeks of the life of a mouse are roughly equivalent to the second and third trimesters in utero for human babies.) For example, normal mice run away when mild shocks are delivered to their feet. But the Prozac-exposed mice moved very slowly or didn't escape at all when shocked. The mice \"look perfectly normal until they reach the mouse equivalent of adolescence,\" says Jay A. Gingrich, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University Medical Center, who led the rodent research.\n\nThe early-life exposure led to slowed firing of neurons that respond to serotonin in the prefrontal cortex. In mice, higher doses and exposure during the equivalent of the second and third trimester were linked to the most severe behavioral effects. Gingrich is exploring whether non-SSRI antidepressants lead to the same problems. Most distressing to Gingrich was that administering antidepressants to the adult mice didn't reverse the anxious or depressed behavior. \"That is what keeps me awake at night,\" he says.\n\nAfter I got off the phone with Gingrich, I walked to a quiet corner of the _Journal_ newsroom and cried. By treating my anxiety, had I sentenced my daughter to depression? I felt waves of guilt and regret. I tried to reassure myself: Fiona is not a mouse. I took a small dose\u2014only 10 milligrams\u2014while pregnant. (The mice were given the equivalent of 40 milligrams.) Still, wouldn't it have been more logical simply not to take antidepressants during pregnancy?\n\nBut it isn't so simple. Mothers' anxiety and depression during pregnancy have been linked to problems in babies and kids, too. And many of those are the same conditions that are associated with exposure to SSRIs in utero. Some studies have shown that depression during pregnancy increases the risk of autism. It is also linked to preterm birth and lower birth weight in babies. And high anxiety during pregnancy has been linked to ADHD symptoms in children. It can be tough to tease apart the effects of the disease and the effects of the medication.\n\nIt wouldn't be ethical to conduct a randomized-controlled clinical trial with pregnant women, choosing some to get treatment and others to go without, which means that all this research is \"observational.\" It is impossible to control all the factors that might confound the results. It could be, for example, that women who take SSRIs during pregnancy have more serious and more chronic illnesses than women who don't take SSRIs\u2014illnesses that are likely to persist after their babies are born. Being exposed to a parent's depression during childhood ups the risk of developing mood and anxiety disorders.\n\nThe Belgian researcher Bea Van den Bergh has been studying the long-term effects of anxiety during pregnancy since the late 1980s. She initially recruited eighty-six pregnant women and has followed them and their children ever since. None of the mothers were being treated for anxiety disorders, but some were highly anxious. In a series of studies, she and colleagues found that the children of women who were highly anxious during pregnancy were more likely to be difficult babies, with more fussiness and sleeping and eating issues. By age eight or nine, they had higher rates of anxiety, aggressive behavior, restlessness, and difficulty focusing their attention.\n\nWhen the children reached their teens, the ones whose moms had been anxious during pregnancy showed an atypical pattern in their levels of the stress hormone cortisol. In girls, that was associated with higher rates of depression. When the kids were seventeen years old, mothers' high anxiety during pregnancy was linked to specific cognitive issues in both boys and girls: These offspring had a tougher time on tasks that measured \"endogenous cognitive control,\" a way of processing information that allows you to successfully adapt your behavior to changing goals without the help of external cues.\n\nVan den Bergh found that babies were particularly vulnerable to their mothers' anxiety during the second trimester\u2014from about the twelfth to the twenty-second week of pregnancy. High anxiety later in pregnancy didn't seem to affect children much. Researchers at the University of California at Irvine have found that mothers' anxiety during the nineteenth week of pregnancy (yes, that specific week) might actually reduce the volume of parts of the brain related to working memory and language processing. Since the women in this research weren't being treated for psychiatric illnesses, the negative impact could be even more severe for children of women with actual anxiety disorders.\n\nScientists in Dresden, Germany, are following more than three hundred women and their babies to see the effect of women's anxiety disorders and depression on themselves and their children. They've found that women who had an anxiety disorder anytime during their lifetime are more likely to have babies that cry excessively. (By excessive, they mean more than three hours per day, at least three days per week and for three weeks or more.) The researchers have also found a link between mothers' history of anxiety disorders and feeding problems in their babies.\n\nThis research bolsters what is known as the fetal programming hypothesis. There's growing evidence that the uterine environment can alter the development of the fetus, especially during certain particularly sensitive time periods. This means that children of anxious moms don't just have a genetic predisposition to anxiety; anxiety may actually be transmitted to them in utero.\n\n\"Normally a child is pretty protected\" during pregnancy, says Hans-Ulrich Wittchen, a coauthor of the Dresden studies. \"But in the later developmental months, there are stronger environmental factors. The unborn child is very sensitive to learning.\"\n\nHow does the transmission occur? Researchers think that one way is that high levels of cortisol in anxious or stressed pregnant women can cross the placenta and affect the developing fetal brain. There's also evidence that anxiety can restrict blood flow to the fetus. In a fascinating study by Columbia University researchers published in 2016, stress during pregnancy was found to turn off a gene in the placenta that helps to deactivate a mother's cortisol before the stress hormone reaches the fetus. This genetic change in the placenta had effects on the fetus: The offspring with the change had lower synchronicity between their movements and heart rates, which is known as fetal coupling. Increased fetal coupling is a marker of healthy neurodevelopment.\n\nIdeally, babies would not be exposed to either SSRIs _or_ anxiety and depression while in utero. But that can be difficult to achieve. One study found that about two-thirds of women with a history of depression who stopped their medication just before getting pregnant or early in pregnancy relapsed. Women need more choices for treatment, and doctors need to encourage women to try nondrug therapies. (The reproductive psychiatrist I saw did not mention alternatives to me.) Perhaps women could do a course of CBT while tapering their drugs before trying to become pregnant and continue therapy during their pregnancies to deal with symptoms and prevent relapse.\n\n\u2014\n\nDuring the early months of Fiona's life, I don't think I was more anxious than any other new parent. I had quotidian worries: Was she eating enough? Was she warm enough? Too warm? Was that bottle really BPA-free? Is that a choking hazard? Should I let her gnaw on that toy that says \"Made in China\"? My circumstances, it seemed, had finally caught up with the natural workings of my mind. It is socially acceptable, even encouraged, for new parents to worry: The \"new mom\" message boards I visited were a marketplace of anxiety and reassurance.\n\nI only had one ER visit with Fiona during her first year. Desperate to use the bathroom, I had left her asleep in the middle of our queen-size bed. A minute later I heard a thump and a cry. She had fallen onto the floor, a distance of maybe a foot. With thoughts of head injuries and brain bleeds, I scooped her up, grabbed her car seat, hustled out to a cab, still in my pajamas, and took her to the ER at Columbia University Medical Center. I had heard that they had the best pediatric neurosurgery department in the city. She was fine.\n\nMy daughter seemed to hate sleep. For the first seven months of her life, nearly every daytime nap was taken on someone's body, usually mine. I held her on my lap or wore her in a baby carrier while she dozed. I'd drape a napkin over her head while I ate but still found crumbs and the occasional blueberry in her hair. At night, I could usually get her to sleep in her crib, at least for a few hours. She would fall asleep on me, and then I would gently, gently lower her to the bed, holding my breath and willing her eyes to stay shut. Yet too often she would wake and cry as soon as her body brushed the mattress. Even after the newborn sobbing abated, Fiona seemed chronically pissed off. Until just before her first birthday, she had the air of a disgruntled old man.\n\nSean and I were fried. We had no family nearby to help and, with me on unpaid maternity leave, little money to hire a babysitter. We argued. If one of us stayed minutes too long in the laundry room or in the shower, we'd be welcomed back with an accusing, \"Where _were_ you?\"\n\nThere's a rash of new studies looking at the ill effects of sleep problems in children, such as insomnia and chronically insufficient shut-eye. Poor sleep has been linked to aggressive behavior, learning and memory problems, and obesity. It also appears to increase the risk of the later development of mental illness, including anxiety and depression: There's some evidence that sleep deprivation weakens the connection between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.\n\nLike so many parents, I read the baby sleep guides and periodically tried to \"sleep train\" Fiona. That invariably meant hours of screaming (the baby) and knocked-back glasses of wine (me). When as a two-year-old, she wouldn't nap outside the stroller, I wheeled her back and forth in the hallway of our apartment building until she nodded off and then parked her in the bedroom.\n\nAs Fiona grew into a toddler, she became sunny, affectionate, and funny. Parenting became much less of a grind when it was accompanied by giggles, hugs, and silly impromptu dancing.\n\nAs a preschooler, Fiona was spirited and joyful, obsessed with Mary Poppins and her hot-pink scooter. She was also reserved and cautious. She hovered along the perimeter of birthday parties and music classes. At the playground, if there were more than a few children on the jungle gym, she wouldn't budge from my side. At school, she struggled when making mistakes. \"I'm terrible at G's,\" she'd wail when practicing her letters. She took rejection hard. At her fourth birthday party, she collapsed in sobs. \"Leila told me not to look at her,\" she cried, her mouth still ringed with chocolate frosting.\n\nI fretted and wrung my hands. Was this evidence of an anxiety disorder in the making? The future isn't exactly rosy for anxious kids. In a 2007 study, young people ages fourteen to twenty-four who had social anxiety disorder were almost three times as likely to later develop depression than those without anxiety. Another study, published in 2004, followed children ages nine to thirteen who had been treated for an anxiety disorder. Those who still had the disorder seven years after treatment drank alcohol more frequently and were more likely to use marijuana than those whose disorders had resolved.\n\nNew research shows that serious anxiety disorders can likely be prevented if they are caught and treated when kids are still young. Children can be taught to cope so that they don't later self-medicate with drugs and alcohol or screw up plans for college and careers.\n\nThere are also new therapy programs specifically designed for healthy kids with a genetic predisposition like my daughter's. Researchers at the University of Connecticut Health Center and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine tested an eight-week program for 136 healthy kids ages six to thirteen who each had at least one parent with an anxiety disorder. During the following year, 31 percent of kids who didn't receive the therapy developed an anxiety disorder, whereas only 5 percent of the kids who received treatment developed one.\n\nWith evidence like that, how am I going to feel if I don't do something now and my daughter falls apart when she's a teenager?\n\nPsychology professor Ronald Rapee began treating behaviorally inhibited preschoolers more than a decade ago, with the aim of forestalling anxiety disorders. More accurately, he began treating the _parents_ of behaviorally inhibited kids. Many parents of shy, skittish children fall into the trap of being overprotective of their emotionally fragile progeny. While understandable, this just reinforces kids' burgeoning feelings of vulnerability and inadequacy, which leads to more anxiety. In a six-session program called Cool Little Kids, Rapee teaches parents to reverse that pattern by fostering \"bravery.\" Parents are told to resist the urge to allow their kids to avoid stressful situations or rescue them when they're afraid. Moms and dads are taught to deal with their own anxieties, too, since children model the behavior they see. (Parents are the only ones seen in the program. Children aren't treated directly.)\n\nThe program started at Macquarie University, where Rapee is the founder of the school's Centre for Emotional Health. I traveled to Sydney, Australia, to meet him. The Macquarie campus, a sprawling, leafy space dotted with buildings in a cacophonous hodgepodge of architectural styles, was quiet. Most of the thirty thousand students were on their summer break. I saw only a few slightly scared-looking young people with adults in tow, perhaps prospective students.\n\nRapee, who is fifty-five, is soft-spoken, with little of the swagger often encountered in world-renowned scientists. His office contains a shrine to his now-teenaged daughters' childhood. A bulletin board on one wall is filled with their preschool artwork: a painting of a rainbow, a drawing of butterflies, and a portrait of their father. A note says \"I love my dad.\"\n\nWe speak candidly about the efficacy of Cool Little Kids. There's evidence that the program does prevent some anxiety disorders, particularly in girls. One study followed 146 behaviorally inhibited preschoolers. Half the parents attended six ninety-minute sessions of the Cool Little Kids program; the other half did not. The children were assessed again eleven years later, when they were, on average, fifteen years old. Thirty-nine percent of the teenage girls whose parents had gone through Cool Little Kids had an anxiety disorder, versus 61 percent of girls in the control group. The program didn't, however, make much of a difference for boys.\n\nTechnically, Rapee's work isn't prevention. Most of the children in the Cool Little Kids program, even the three-year-olds, were already clinically anxious. \"The overlap between temperament and diagnosis is all just a big messy blob,\" he tells me.\n\nTalking to Rapee is sometimes disorienting. He vacillates. Parenting matters when it comes to anxiety. Parenting doesn't matter. I feel as though I am seeing scientific uncertainty\u2014or maybe scientific rumination\u2014up close. His latest thinking seems to boil down to this: Parenting doesn't generally make kids anxious. But if a child is already anxious, then controlling, overprotective parenting can fuel and maintain kids' anxiety.\n\nOver the years, Rapee has become more inclined to see the controlling hand of genes. The notion scares me. My genes, my grandmother's genes, may determine my daughter's trajectory. And there may not be much I can do about it.\n\n\u2014\n\nSix preschoolers sit in a circle, legs crisscrossed on colorful foam mats. It is the final meeting of the Turtle Program, an intervention for behaviorally inhibited preschoolers. A shiny gold sign exclaiming CONGRATS GRAD! hangs on the wall.\n\n\"Can anyone remind us about some of the new things we've learned in circle time?\" asks Danielle Novick, one of the program's leaders.\n\nMarie, a little girl with curly brown hair and silver sneakers, shyly raises her hand. \"Being brave,\" she says.\n\n\"Good job,\" replies Novick. \"Thank you.\" She leans over and puts a sticker on Marie's knee, a reward for speaking up. \"And we learned something about our eyes. What did we learn about our eyes?\" Novick continues.\n\n\"Eye contact,\" says a little girl with honey-blond hair and a blue skirt.\n\n\"Yes, it's good to look in someone's eyes when you're talking to them,\" Novick says. \"They can tell that you're listening to them and that you're being friendly.\"\n\nI'm watching this exchange from an adjacent room via a one-way mirror. The program is actually a study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland on the efficacy of an eight-week treatment to prevent anxiety disorders in behaviorally inhibited preschoolers. The children in this group have all scored in the top 15 percent on a scale of behavioral inhibition. Many already have difficulties making friends, going to birthday parties, and speaking up in preschool.\n\nIn the group, the children learn social skills. They practice introducing themselves, asking another kid to play, and asking and answering questions. They learn to express their emotions and to negotiate conflict\u2014first using puppets, which can be less stressful. The children also learn deep breathing, or what the program calls \"balloon breathing,\" to help cope with anxiety. Ken Rubin, one of the lead investigators of the study, says that even as early as age four, behaviorally inhibited kids often have poor social skills, are being rejected by their peers, and are internalizing negative feelings about themselves. \"We're trying to interrupt that whole process,\" says Andrea Chronis-Tuscano, the other principal investigator.\n\nWhile the children are in circle time, their parents are in a room across the hall, where they are taught to ignore anxious and avoidant behavior and to praise brave behavior. The treatment is based on parent-child interaction therapy, an approach originally created for kids with behavior problems. Parents first learn child-directed interaction (CDI), a form of play where children lead. This aims to strengthen the parent-child relationship, bolster the kids' self-esteem, and combat some parents' impulse to control situations with their inhibited children.\n\nParents are also taught to create a fear hierarchy for their children consisting of incremental steps culminating in an ultimate goal. (Rapee's Cool Little Kids teaches this, too.) For example, if the ultimate goal is to ask another child to play, a first step might be to say hello to another child. The idea is for each step to be achievable, so that children have success and can gain confidence. The parents are coached on how to set up bravery practice (which is basically exposure therapy). They help their children to practice things like talking to a teacher or doing show-and-tell during the group. Therapists coach parents in the moment via earpieces, secret service style.\n\nOn this day, nine parents and two program leaders are preparing for the scavenger hunt that will be today's bravery practice. Each family is assigned an animal. Group leader Christina Danko passes out a piece of paper with pictures of six animals; the goal is to find all the critters shown. To do that, the children will need to approach each of the other families to ask the name of their animals so that they can check them off. For these kids, the task is going to be difficult. It will be the first time that all the parents and kids have been together, and each child will be exposed to ten new adults.\n\nThe parents\u2014with help from Danko\u2014decide on goals for their children. One mother says that she thinks her son will be able to say \"Hi,\" and then \"Monkey\" when asked which animal he has. But Danko doesn't think the child is quite ready to ask other families a question, so Mom will make the inquiries. Kids who aren't ready to respond to questions verbally are allowed to point to the pictures of their animals instead.\n\nThe parents file across the hall and into the children's room, where they tell their kids the goals and role-play interactions. Then Danko calls for the hunt to begin. The noise volume in the room rises. Soon kids are covered in stickers: 1ST RATE, COOL, TOP NOTCH, they say. Marie has one in her hair. Another little boy has one on his forehead.\n\nThe din is joyful.\n\nThen, crying.\n\nOne boy has tears running down his face. He's hiding behind his mother, clinging to her leg, \"Mommyyy. I want to leaavvee!\" he yells. His mother looks panicked, as if she'd love nothing more than to escape, too. Danko stands beside her, coaching her. \"Tell him to stand next to you,\" Danko says. \"Stand next to me,\" the mom says to her son. When the boy does as he's told, Danko reminds the mom to praise him for it.\n\nAfter a snack of mini donuts, the wailing little boy calms down. Danko congratulates the parents for hanging in there. By not leaving, they've communicated to their son that they won't back down and that he can survive uncomfortable situations.\n\nUltimately, the Maryland study will include 150 kids. Half will be enrolled in the Turtle Program and half, the control group, will do Rapee's less-intensive Cool Little Kids. The study is gathering physiological data on the children, like heart rate variability. And researchers are observing parents and kids together to assess such aspects of parenting as overcontrol, warmth versus negativity, and fostering independence. The kids will be observed at school, too. The study hopes to discern which kids benefit most from the program and whether a parent's anxiety, parenting style, or the child's own physiology affect how much the kids improve.\n\nThe researchers take pains to emphasize that they are not trying to change these kids' personalities\u2014to turn shy and introverted children into extroverts. \"Impairment is really the key,\" says Chronis-Tuscano. \"We know how important social relationships are to people's happiness and success in life, and we don't want their inhibition to hold them back from doing anything.\" In an earlier small pilot study, the Turtle Program reduced anxiety symptoms in behaviorally inhibited kids. Before the treatment, nearly three-quarters of the kids met criteria for social anxiety disorder. Afterward less than a third did.\n\nMarie's parents, Nancy and Brandon, say they knew they needed to get help for their daughter after a birthday party for another child. Marie, who was three at the time, was excited for the party and looking forward to seeing her friends in her playgroup. But during the celebration Marie spent the entire time clinging to her mother's leg. \"She loves other kids. But she just freezes and gets very scared. The fear and anxiety were really holding her back and preventing her from being herself and enjoying her life,\" Nancy says.\n\nThis behavior was typical. At home, Marie sang and danced and chattered nonstop, but around other people she was painfully shy, almost silent. Once when Nancy had a friend over who Marie had met before, Marie hid under the dining room table and cried. Nancy and Brandon were worried about the future, too. Both describe themselves as socially anxious. Nancy had been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder in her thirties; she had a tough time mingling at parties and says her anxiety limited her friendships. Medication and therapy helped tremendously. \"I didn't want Marie to struggle with it for decades like we did,\" Nancy says.\n\nOn Nancy and Brandon's fear hierarchy, the top spot\u2014their main goal for Marie\u2014was to attend a birthday party and play with the other children. Nancy and Brandon broke that goal down into small steps: making eye contact with a new child, saying hello, saying her name. At their weekly excursion to the farmer's market, Marie's parents told her if she waved to three other kids, they'd buy her a Popsicle. \"She started waving to everyone,\" Nancy says.\n\nNancy and Brandon changed their own behavior, too. They used to apologize for Marie's silence or answer for her. They'd pull her out of situations where she was uncomfortable. They let Marie quit a ballet class when she had trouble separating from them at drop-off. Now they push her to be brave and have stopped using the word _shy_ in her presence. Recently, she has taken to calling herself Brave Marie. The program has made a real difference, the couple says. Indeed, Marie made a triumphant appearance at a birthday party just the week before. Now four, Marie clung to Nancy at the party at first, but soon she was doing crafts with the other kids and playing with the birthday girl. Although she didn't engage with kids she didn't know, Nancy and Brandon say this is huge progress.\n\nBack in the Turtle Program the graduation ceremony begins. Novick calls each child forward to receive a diploma. CERTIFICATE FOR BEING BRAVE, it reads. One little boy skips across the room and beams as he shows his mom his diploma. Then he turns to me\u2014an adult he doesn't know\u2014and waits for me to congratulate him, too.\n\n\u2014\n\nThese days I'm much less worried about my daughter. In the last couple of years, she's become markedly more confident. She's still sensitive to shame and rejection, but she's more likely to stand up for herself. At her kindergarten graduation performance, she even stepped in and delivered the lines of another little girl overcome by stage fright. And when her class decided to sing \"Happiness\" from _You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown_ at the first-grade talent show, she volunteered to be Charlie Brown.\n\nIn a funny twist, it has become clear to me that my husband, Sean, is sometimes the more anxious parent. He's the one who panics when Fiona has a fever and admonishes her to be careful on the playground. If there's anything that worries me, it's Fiona's outsize fear of many kids' movies. Is it the equivalent of my childhood clown phobia\u2014an omen of greater anxiety to come? Since prevention programs now exist for a range of mental health issues (not just anxiety disorders, but depression and psychosis, too), and since we know that mental illness is at least partly genetic, am I being neglectful by not enrolling Fiona in an intervention while she's still young?\n\nWhile I was in Sydney, I tried to get some free advice. I told Rapee about my daughter's fears\u2014that she's not only petrified of movie monsters and villains but also hates it when anyone in a movie is nasty or mean. We got through only a few minutes of _The_ _Wizard of Oz_ , I told him. She made me turn it off at the appearance of Miss Gulch, the nasty woman who snatches Toto and later transforms into the Wicked Witch.\n\nI told Rapee that I wanted to take my daughter to see _Paddington_ , a movie about the talking bear that loves marmalade, so I showed her the trailer. It was frenetic. Paddington floods the bathroom and whooshes down a staircase in a bathtub. \"I'm not seeing that movie,\" Fiona said. \"It's too scary.\" I asked Rapee whether I should push her to see it. If the _Paddington_ avoidance was part of a bigger picture, I could work on it, he said. \"Will it scar her?\" I asked. The only downside, he said, was that she might have nightmares afterward.\n\nSo a couple of weeks after I returned to Brooklyn, during a frigid Presidents' Week when Fiona didn't have school, I took her to our local theater, a beat-up old place where the screens don't seem much bigger than some TVs. When I told her where we were headed, Fiona said she didn't want to go. \"We can leave if it's too scary,\" I promised.\n\nI could feel Fiona bracing for fear from the movie's first scenes. By the time an earthquake leveled Paddington's home in \"darkest Peru\" and killed his uncle, she had left her seat and scrambled onto my lap. When the villain, an icy Nicole Kidman, captured Paddington and threw him into a black van with TAXIDERMIST on the side, Fiona began to sob uncontrollably. \"We can go,\" I said, and moved to get up. \"No,\" she wailed, tears and snot running down her face.\n\nWe stayed. But Paddington's escape was drawn out and perilous. He nearly fell into a fiery pit. He was almost shot. Fiona's sobbing escalated, then abated. I asked her again whether she wanted to leave. An emphatic no. \"Paddington will be okay,\" I whispered to her. And he was.\n\nWhen the lights went up, I heard another mother say, \"That poor kid got so scared.\" I felt awful and embarrassed, like I was a terrible parent. I told Fiona how proud I was of her.\n\nThat night and the next day Fiona talked incessantly about the movie. Not the scary parts but the parts she liked. Paddington making marmalade. And especially about the villain's eventual comeuppance: The taxidermist played by Kidman is arrested and sentenced to community service at a petting zoo, where a monkey she had planned on stuffing gets his revenge. He pushes a button, and hay and manure fall on Kidman's head. Fiona tells that part of the story over and over.\n\nBut when my husband asks her if she liked the movie, Fiona shakes her head. \"It was too scary.\"\n\nI'm still not sure what, if anything, I accomplished. As with everything else in parenting, I'm winging it.\n\nAfter more than twenty-five years of living with anxiety disorders, I know better than to hope for a cure. I have easy years and tough years. When things are rough and anxiety threatens to derail my life and keep me from my family and work, I reach for medication (now Lexapro and my ever faithful Klonopin). I see my longtime psychologist. I try new forms of therapy.\n\nEven when things are going smoothly, I'm careful. I arrange my life so I can sleep eight hours a night (sometimes nine). I rarely drink. I do yoga and take walks in the park.\n\nI had always worried that when something truly terrible did happen (and if you live long enough, it always does), I wouldn't be able to handle it, that it would paralyze me. But that hasn't happened.\n\nTen years ago my father called to tell me he wasn't feeling well. He was achy and tired. Maybe he had the flu, he said. My mother was away visiting my sister, and my father often falls into a slight funk when he's alone, so I wasn't worried. A few weeks later, though, my mother called to say that my dad was in the hospital with kidney failure. I flew to Florida, where my parents had moved years earlier.\n\nAfter a few days of tests, we learned that Dad had multiple myeloma, a virulent and incurable cancer of the blood.\n\nHe was put in the ICU and immediately began an intense regimen of chemotherapy. The hospital also tried an experimental course of continuous dialysis. It was terrible and surreal to see him so pale and supine in that hospital bed. At fifty-seven, he had been biking and Rollerblading just weeks before.\n\nBack in New York, I put on my reporter's hat and researched his condition and its treatments for hours each day. While at work one evening, I stumbled upon one study that gave the life expectancy for patients with multiple myeloma that presents with kidney failure: three months. I broke down and called Sean. He drove to pick me up and held me while I cried.\n\nAfter that I pulled myself together. I pushed my father to get a second opinion at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. Data I found showed that their aggressive approach\u2014which then involved two stem cell transplants\u2014seemed to yield the longest survival rates.\n\nWe have no idea whether moving my father's treatment to Little Rock made a difference. But after many grueling months of treatment and one nearly fatal bout of sepsis, he has been in remission ever since.\n\nI had my own cancer scare four years ago after I noticed that a mole on my cheek looked a little funny. What had been a flat brown spot was now raised and tinged with red. I went to my dermatologist, who said it was nothing, but I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off. I obsessively checked it in the mirror. I went back to the dermatologist. Still fine, she said. Still not reassured, I decided to see a more senior partner in the practice. She biopsied it and, a few days later, called me. \"It's melanoma,\" she said, with urgency in her voice. \"It has to be removed now.\"\n\nThankfully, the cancer seemed to be contained. Still, I got a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. The problem was that the doctors didn't agree on a course of treatment. A few thought I could get away with cutting out just the spot. Others recommended a more aggressive approach that would involve removing a larger patch of skin. I decided to be cautious and then developed a huge crush on the plastic surgeon who dug a two-inch hole in my face.\n\nThe cancer dramas were overwhelming and nerve-wracking, but they didn't crush me. Real peril, I have found, galvanizes me. I make decisions and get stuff done. It's fear\u2014not danger\u2014that shuts me down.\n\n\u2014\n\nI take some solace in the fact that anxiety may dissipate as we get older. Indeed, the rates of anxiety disorders dip as people enter their fifties. Is it wisdom or the growing awareness of our mortality that causes us to chill out? \"Anxiety disorders have a tendency to burn out. You just can't stay anxious your whole life,\" says Harvard's Ron Kessler.\n\nBut after all my reporting and all my interviews with scientists, one major question still nagged at me: Why do the rates of anxiety disorders seem to be rising among young people? The numbers are particularly troubling for college students. Between 2008 and 2016, the number of college students diagnosed with or treated for anxiety problems jumped from 10 to 17 percent. Are we facing some generational mental health apocalypse?\n\nI went back to the site of my own college breakdowns\u2014the University of Michigan\u2014to try to find out. I arrived in Ann Arbor in late April, in the middle of finals, which seemed a fitting time to be asking questions about anxiety. The libraries and caf\u00e9s were filled with students hunched over laptops and scribbling in notebooks.\n\nI met with student mental health advocates in the local Starbucks. Grant Rivas and Shelby Steverson are nineteen-year-old first-year students. Anna Chen is twenty-three and a graduating senior. All three are articulate, passionate, and slightly formal, rebuffing my offers to buy them coffee.\n\nI asked them why they thought their generation seemed so prone to anxiety. They felt, they said, a relentless pressure to succeed academically. Their middle and high school years had been filled with talk of the recession, they told me, and a bachelor's degree is no longer any guarantee of a job, so they and many of their friends were gunning for graduate school and competitive internships. Every class, every test, every paper is high stakes. Rivas, who was wearing a yellow T-shirt that said MAIZE RAGE, said he was planning to apply for a spot in the undergraduate public policy program. \"You've got to be really on top of your game from day one,\" he said. \"If you get a B plus instead of the A minus, that little GPA difference can matter.\" He said a friend applying to the undergrad business program was so stressed out about an economics grade that he landed in the hospital with a panic attack. He could think of at least a dozen friends who were on psychotropic medications.\n\nSteverson, who grappled with anxiety, depression, and ADHD, started feeling the pressure in middle school in Crystal Lake, Illinois, when students were first put on academic tracks. If you weren't in the top level in middle school, you wouldn't qualify for honors classes in high school, which meant that you wouldn't be prepared for Advanced Placement tests. And competitive colleges want to see AP classes. \"If you want to get into these top schools, all of a sudden your r\u00e9sum\u00e9 for college is gone,\" Steverson said. \"So in sixth grade, kids were freaking out.\"\n\nThe students said social media has only amplified the stress. They knew that Facebook and Instagram were highlights reels\u2014the party photos and boasting only a sliver of real life. But when they're feeling lonely or down, \"it can be easy to compare the bad day you just had to everyone's smiling pictures,\" said Chen, the president of Michigan's chapter of Active Minds, the national student mental health advocacy group.\n\n\"You know how you can edit your education on Facebook, and it shows up in people's news feed? And people will like or comment on it and congratulate you?\" Chen asked the group.\n\n\"You're going to so-and-so university,\" chimed in Steverson.\n\n\"Or you're going to intern at Microsoft,\" said Chen.\n\n\"And you get one hundred likes on it,\" said Steverson.\n\n\"And you feel really good about yourself,\" finished Chen.\n\nUnless, of course, you're the one staying home and scooping ice cream for the summer.\n\nRivas argued that the culture of social media self-promotion has infected real-life interactions. \"There's a very big push to seem like you have it all together,\" he said. Studies looking at the relationship between the use of social media and psychological well-being are mixed, but some do show a link to anxiety and depression. And certain types of behavior\u2014like passively scrolling through Facebook news feeds without posting status updates\u2014appear more likely to lead to feelings of loneliness.\n\nThe Michigan these students describe is a Darwinian pressure cooker, with kids obsessed with grades and routinely pulling all-nighters. This is not how I remember it. But the school is a lot harder to get into\u2014and a lot more expensive\u2014than when I went there. When I was a student in 1990, in-state tuition at Michigan was $3,502 a year. Now it's $16,218 for juniors and seniors. Even taking into account inflation, tuition has jumped nearly two and a half times. Adding room and board and books pushes the in-state cost to about $30,000 a year. The out-of-state cost is more than double that. In the United States, the average college senior who has taken out student loans will graduate with about $29,000 in debt, a figure that has jumped more than 50 percent in a decade.\n\n\"I see a lot more stress and anxiety and striving for perfectionism,\" said Todd Sevig, a psychologist and the director of Michigan's Counseling and Psychological Services, known as CAPS. Because of all the pressures in middle school and high school, \"they are pretty fried when they get here. Sometimes I think students feel like they can't fail.\"\n\nI met with Sevig and Christine Asidao, CAPS's associate director of community engagement and outreach education. CAPS provides individual and group therapy to Michigan students. Since arriving in Ann Arbor, I had heard several students grumble about wait times to see a therapist and about the pressure to end treatment before they're ready, but they universally had good things to say about Sevig, noting his commitment and approachability. Soft-spoken, gray-bearded, and bespectacled, Sevig has been working at CAPS since 1989, the year I had my first breakdown.\n\nI posed the same question to Sevig and Asidao that I had to the students: Why are young adults now so much more anxious?\n\n\"When I was here, getting a B wasn't the end of the world,\" I told them.\n\n\"But it is now,\" said Asidao.\n\nBesides the increased pressure to get good grades, Sevig and Asidao said students also might be more anxious because their parents didn't allow them to fail or flounder earlier: Some young adults face their first real defeats only after getting to college. But they also believe that much of the apparent rise in anxiety issues is an illusion. Reduced stigma around mental health issues is leading to an increase in help-seeking behavior, they said, and the success of their own outreach is causing more students to ask for assistance, too.\n\nStarting in about 2008, CAPS dramatically ramped up its prevention programs. A year earlier, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech with a history of mental health problems, had shot and killed thirty-two people and wounded seventeen others. Then in February 2008, a graduate student at the University of Illinois killed five people and injured twenty-one in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University. He, too, had previously been treated for psychological issues. All of a sudden, the mental health of college students and the responsibilities of universities were heavily covered by the media.\n\nCAPS became a robust and highly visible presence on campus. It now does dozens of \"tabling\" events at university gatherings and festivals; staff members talk to students and hand out pamphlets about anxiety, depression, and stress. It jazzed up its website, adding quick screening questionnaires for GAD, depression, PTSD, and other psychiatric illnesses, and a series of videos of students talking about their own mental health issues. It created a YouTube channel and Facebook and Instagram accounts, and launched a Stressbusters app with inspirational quotes and relaxation exercises. It hosts a biannual Play Day, with balloon animals, chair massages, and Legos, to encourage students to take breaks and relax.\n\nCAPS staffers are also trying to boost resilience among students, teaching them that it is okay to mess up, that obstacles will come up and they can learn how to cope with them. To that end, CAPS launched the \"Wellness Zone\" in 2011\u2014a darkened room with three massage chairs, a light therapy machine, and meditation cushions. Between 3,000 and 4,000 students use the zone each year.\n\nAround campus, I noticed small wooden plaques hanging from trees. DO SOMETHING: STOP STUDENT SUICIDE, they read. Underneath students wrote uplifting or imploring messages. \"I lost someone to suicide. I've wanted to commit suicide. They both suck. Please don't,\" one pleaded. This was a CAPS effort, too.\n\nWhen I was a student, I didn't know anyone who had visited CAPS. I didn't even know it existed. \"When you were here, we primarily stayed in our offices and did a lot of individual therapy, along with the occasional workshop with RAs or student groups,\" said Sevig. Back then CAPS had one training program and one psychiatrist who came in for only a few hours a week. Now it has eight training programs and three psychiatrists working full-time. The increase in staff is a necessity: During the fall of 2015, CAPS faced an unprecedented 40 percent increase in the number of students visiting over the previous year. Between 2009 and 2016, demand for CAPS services increased by 36 percent.\n\n\"Previous generations would never touch the door of a therapist, that was the worst thing in the world,\" says Sevig. \"That has really changed, and that's a beautiful thing.\"\n\nCAPS sees many students who have already been treated for mental health problems in middle school or high school. By 2009, about 22 percent of students arriving on campus had had some previous counseling. Some students have had IEPs, or independent education plans, and received various types of services, so they feel comfortable asking for similar help in college. Indeed, like many other colleges, Michigan has seen soaring numbers of students formally requesting academic accommodations\u2014like extra time to take tests, or permission to take exams in a smaller, separate room\u2014because of psychiatric illnesses. Of course, not all students who seek help at CAPS have a psychiatric diagnosis. Plenty of students come in looking for support after an event like a fight with a boyfriend or girlfriend. But since 2008, anxiety has been the number-one issue for students visiting CAPS.\n\nTo accommodate larger numbers of students, CAPS does more group therapy. During the school year, they run thirty groups on topics from social anxiety to eating disorders, and for specific communities like women of color and LGBT students. CAPS has also added after-hours phone counseling. Students can call at three a.m. if they need to talk to someone. In tandem with these changes, the number of student advocacy groups devoted to mental health has skyrocketed over the last year at Michigan, from two to ten. The last few student government presidents have made mental health a center of their platforms, too.\n\nI wish I could say that Michigan is typical, but in fact it has more mental health resources than many other colleges around the country. Almost 30 percent of schools don't provide psychiatric services to students, only referrals to outside practitioners.\n\n\u2014\n\nThe student mental health advocates I met say there is still stigma in some corners of campus, especially in the Greek system, among certain groups of international students, and in some communities of color. But most said they felt incredibly supported by friends, family, and the larger university community. Indeed, in a 2015 survey, 60 percent of young adults said seeing a mental health professional is a sign of strength; only 35 percent of adults older than twenty-five did.\n\nI admit that I am nervous for these young people. I wonder what will happen when they leave this cocoon and enter the working world. Will their openness about their mental illnesses limit their career prospects?\n\nI asked Cheyenne Stone, a freckled, smiley twenty-two-year-old senior who is heading to graduate school at Michigan. She is the executive director of the Wolverine Support Network, a student organization that runs peer support groups. (Students talk about everything from social anxiety to failing a test.) She's dealt with depression, OCD, and substance abuse and has written blog posts about her experiences.\n\n\"Mental health is a huge part of who I am. I would need an employer who understands that,\" Stone said. \"I think if there is an employer who has a problem with the facts of my advocacy work, I don't want to work there anyway.\"\n\nAnna Learis, an eighteen-year-old freshman, is equally unapologetic. She told me that when she decided to speak publicly about her panic attacks, her mother tried to dissuade her. \"She's like, 'One day your possible employers are going to Google your name, and they're going to see that and then they're not going to want to hire you,' \" Learis said. \"I was like, 'Mom, the whole point of it is to address the stigma of mental health so people don't do that.' \"\n\nLearis, who says she's been anxious since she was about five years old, performed at Michigan's yearly _Mental Health Monologues_ , a show that features about a dozen students talking about mental health. She spoke about how her anxiety affects her boyfriend, whom she summons when she has panic attacks and who took her to the psychiatric ER a few months ago. When Learis has an attack, she scratches her arms until they bleed. \"My skin feels like it's crawling. I don't notice I'm scratching until afterward when I see my hand bleeding,\" she says. On her wrists, jagged purple scars peek out from the long sleeves of her black-and-white-striped dress.\n\nLearis, an engineering major, has an academic scholarship, which means she has to maintain a 3.0 grade point average. The stress fuels her anxiety. \"If I don't do well on a test, I could fail a class. I'll lose the scholarship. We'll have to find the money to pay for it. I'll have to transfer schools. All about one test.\" She's trying to get approval to take tests in a smaller, quieter room. One of her friends who had a broken arm got to take a test in the smaller room. (The seats were bigger.) Learis doesn't see why her anxiety should be treated any differently.\n\nI can't help but wonder\u2014enviously, if I'm honest about it\u2014what my college years would have been like if I had known about CAPS, if I had gone to the Wolverine Support Network meetings, if I had been able to participate in the _Mental Health Monologues_. These young people are energetic, passionate, and fearless. They, along with the adult leaders who support them, have transformed their campus into a place where mental health is a priority and mental illness isn't shameful. I have no doubt that in the years ahead, they'll revolutionize our workplaces, too.\n\n\u2014\n\nSince my own college days, I've done two more rounds of CBT. I pursued the last one a couple of years ago, after spending months dealing with a strange tingling on the left side of my body. The tingling ran from my thigh to my knee, from my shoulder to my wrist, and sometimes from my cheek to my forehead. I worried about strokes and rare cancers. I visited a neurologist and had MRIs of my brain and my neck. I spent far too much time with Google.\n\nIt wasn't the first time I'd had weird neurological symptoms, but my new psychiatrist, Dr. S, gave me two new diagnoses: conversion disorder and somatic symptom disorder. Conversion disorder is characterized by medically unexplained neurological symptoms, coupled with \"significant distress or impairment,\" according to the _DSM_. (Freud would have called it hysteria.) It often occurs alongside panic disorder and depression. Somatic symptom disorder involves distressing physical symptoms and significant worry about them. People with somatic symptom disorder \"appraise their bodily symptoms as unduly threatening, harmful or troublesome and often think the worst about their health,\" says the _DSM_.\n\nMedically unexplained symptoms are strikingly common. One study of primary care patients in Germany found that mystery symptoms made up two-thirds of all symptoms. For most people, however, the reassuring words of a doctor or a negative test result are enough to ease their minds.\n\nThe goal of CBT this time was not to make the weird symptoms go away but to teach me to live with them, to see them as benign and ignore them. I wrote down my irrational fears: that I was having a stroke, that I had ALS. Then I wrote down the evidence that these thoughts were likely false. (All my test results had come back normal.) I was given relaxation exercises and encouraged to meditate. (A confession, Dr. S: I didn't meditate.) I compiled lists of things that made me happy\u2014reading to my daughter, calling a friend\u2014and picked one to do when the symptoms surged.\n\nThe CBT worked. After several months, I was less worried. And while I still get a tingly leg or arm every once in a while, the symptoms are largely gone.\n\nWhen people ask me which therapy they should choose for anxiety, I always recommend CBT. But I've also dipped in and out of psychodynamic therapy, a school that views anxiety as originating from relationship experiences. I did a stint in my twenties, and I've seen my most recent therapist, Dr. L, who practices a mix of psychodynamic therapy and CBT, off and on since my early thirties. We've talked about how, as a child, I yearned for more rules and guidance. About how I struggled to be comfortable with anger, both my own and others'. She's helped me navigate relationships with friends and family.\n\nPsychodynamic therapy may sound like self-indulgent navel-gazing, but there is some evidence that it is beneficial for anxiety disorders. A 2014 meta-analysis found that after a course of psychodynamic therapy almost half of patients had their anxiety disorders go into remission. And it has had a monumental impact on me. I've gotten better at noticing my feelings and figuring out where they come from. I've gotten to know my emotional minefields and become braver and more authentic in relationships. Psychodynamic therapy has helped me grow up. And when anxiety hits, I feel less sideswiped. I have an emotional home base.\n\n\u2014\n\nGrounding myself in the present moment also helps to keep anxiety at bay. Even dusting or scrubbing the toilets can quiet my worrying. (Yes, I am becoming my mother.)\n\nBaking is one of my favorite soothing activities. The tactile pleasure of kneading flour into butter. The focus, but also slight mindlessness, of following a recipe. The wonderful alchemy of transforming a collection of ingredients into a pie or cake. And of course the accolades from family and friends. The closest I've ever felt to being a celebrity was when I rode the New York City subway with a still-steaming blueberry pie on my lap, my hands in oven mitts. \"Can I have a piece?\" passengers shamelessly asked.\n\nHealthy habits\u2014getting enough sleep, eating well, reducing stress, exercising regularly\u2014aren't especially novel, and they are decidedly unglamorous. But they are critical to keeping my anxiety in check. The leeway for neglect is very slim.\n\nInsomnia and other sleep problems are common in people with anxiety disorders. Sleeping fewer hours than normal is associated with anxiety in teenagers. Going to sleep late, not getting enough sleep, and being drowsy during the day is linked to anxiety in kids. Depressed or anxious people who sleep too much (ten hours or more) or too little (six hours or less) are at greater risk of having more chronic illnesses.\n\nSome studies have found that difficulty sleeping is a precursor to a bout of anxiety or depression. There's evidence that sleep problems increase the risk of developing PTSD after trauma. Poor sleep may also weaken the effects of CBT: Research indicates that good sleep is critical for consolidating memories in extinction learning.\n\nVarious theories explain the relationship between sleep and anxiety. Scientists have discovered that when people without psychiatric disorders are deprived of sleep, their amygdala activity in response to negative stimuli increases and the connections between the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex are weakened. Since an anxious person already has a revved-up amygdala, it could be that sleep problems turn up the volume even further.\n\nSo I go to bed early enough to make sure I get my eight hours. But that doesn't mean I stay asleep. I'm prone to waking up\u2014and staying up\u2014at two a.m. or three a.m., dark, solitary times that are ripe for anxiety. Without the tethers of the day's routines, my mind hopscotches: I must remember to call my niece to wish her a happy birthday. How will I possibly get all my work done before my next deadline? Am I spending enough time with my daughter? My friend Amy never responded to my email. Have I done something to upset her? Should I cook fish or chicken for dinner tomorrow? How will we pay for college? Is the tightness in my belly cancer?\n\nMy husband and daughter are still and asleep. I skulk around the apartment, from bed to sofa to bathroom.\n\nExercise seems the easier fix, though it took me a while to figure out what I enjoyed and how to fit it into my life. I'm not keen on running or lifting weights. I love yoga but I rarely have time to schlep to a studio for a ninety-minute\u2014or even an hour-long\u2014class. Then I found online yoga. Now I do anywhere from fifteen minutes to a half hour in the morning before my daughter wakes. I feel stronger. And I've noticed that, since starting it, my Klonopin use has taken a nosedive. I don't think it's a coincidence.\n\nCardio is important for me, too, and not just because it's good for my body. A lot of my anxiety has involved worries about my heart. So I take the stairs and use a seven-minute workout app on my phone. They are short bursts of exposure therapy. Indeed, this interoceptive exposure, or exposure to feared bodily sensations, is a core element of CBT for panic disorder. In scientific studies, exercise is modestly effective at reducing anxiety symptoms. It is best at reducing so-called anxiety sensitivity, or the fear of the bodily sensations caused by anxiety. There are many theories about why exercise helps. Some scientists have pointed to exercise's ability to boost brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein important for maintaining mood that is sometimes reduced in people with anxiety disorders. Regular aerobic exercise also lowers activity in the HPA axis.\n\nIt's even better if I can get that exercise in a park. Spending time in nature can reduce stress and even improve cognition. It may also calm anxiety. Researchers at Stanford and the University of San Francisco had people take a fifty-minute walk. One group walked in a grassy park; the other along a busy street. After the stroll, the people who spent time in the park had decreased anxiety compared to those who walked along the street.\n\nOne meta-analysis found that rates of anxiety disorders were 21 percent higher in urban areas than in rural ones.\n\nI'm not ready to move to the country yet. I'm also convinced that there is no one best way to deal with anxiety. Everyone finds his or her own salves. A neighbor with GAD finds solace in music and meditation apps. For Cheyenne Stone, it is sleeping eight hours a night and surrounding herself with supportive friends. For Anna Learis, it is spending thirty minutes doing her makeup in the morning, a ritual she finds calming.\n\nSince my anxiety often seems to manifest itself in weird physical symptoms, I've needed to find some way to discern when I need an MRI versus a dose of Klonopin. I've been down the rabbit hole of specialists and expensive tests before. I need a guide to interpret my noisy body. My primary care physician, Dr. G, does this. She's warm, thoughtful, and supersmart. She doesn't dismiss my concerns out of hand or use my anxiety as a knee-jerk scapegoat, but she's not an alarmist either. And she doesn't kick the can by immediately sending me to a specialist, leaving the problem for someone else to figure out. Most important, I trust her. She helps me manage my hypochondria. She asks me specifically what my worst fear is about a particular symptom. Then she'll tell me why she's ruled that out.\n\nA few months ago I had a persistent burning feeling in my lungs. It lasted for weeks. Dr. G first had me use my asthma inhaler. When that didn't help, she had me try Klonopin for several days to see if reducing my anxiety level would lessen the symptom. Only when that didn't work did she send me to a pulmonologist. His assessment? Probably a postviral syndrome that would go away within a few weeks. And it did.\n\nAnother time I called her with a frantic question. \"I think I have a leptomeningeal carcinomatosis,\" I said in a rush. \"I'm dizzy sometimes. I have that tingling on the left side of my body.\"\n\n\"That is a very rare cancer,\" she said. \"Where did you hear about it?\"\n\nI blushed and stammered. \"I was looking at People.com and read that this actress Valerie Harper has it. I looked up the symptoms, and I have a bunch of them.\"\n\n\"You had a normal neurological exam the last time I saw you,\" she said. \"We would have seen some abnormality if you had this type of cancer.\"\n\nThis kind of hand-holding takes time. And it isn't cheap. Dr. G doesn't take insurance. I pay out of pocket and then hope my insurance company will reimburse me. Unfortunately, this quality of care is not available to many.\n\nAs I've conducted the research for this book, I've been mulling a question. If I could wish my anxiety away, would I?\n\nI certainly don't see my anxiety as a gift. And I don't buy the platitude that everything happens for a reason. When my anxiety is at its worst, it's deeply painful, erasing love and life. Even when it's more moderate, anxiety is a huge energy and time suck.\n\nStill, I've come to realize that the question is unanswerable. When I try to envision my life without all the experiences anxiety has given me\u2014as well as the ones it has taken away\u2014I don't recognize myself. At this point, anxiety and I are too tightly bound. Take my struggles with anxiety away and I'm someone else.\n\nAnxiety has been good to me, too. Without it, I might have listened to the first doctor who told me that the spot on my cheek was nothing.\n\nAnxiety is a great bullshit detector. Reams of studies have looked at the mind-body connection. In anxious people, that link seems amplified. When my marriage feels off-kilter, when I'm avoiding some necessary confrontation or saying yes to too many superfluous obligations, I feel it in my hopped-up amygdala. Weirdly, anxiety makes me live a more authentic life. And a more empathic one. Anxiety has made me ask for help, made me vulnerable, and thereby deepened my friendships.\n\nA background hum of uneasiness has motivated me to work harder, travel farther, speak more honestly, and curiously, take more risks than I might have otherwise. People who have a brush with death often talk of how it has given them a sense of what really matters. An omnipresent fear of disaster, a constant bracing for catastrophe can do that, too. Time takes on more urgency.\n\nAnxiety means I'm simply not mellow enough to take things for granted. And that has made my life all the richer.\n\n# 1. THE ANTICIPATION OF PAIN\n\nestimated number of people: Ronald C. Kessler et al., \"Twelve-Month and Lifetime Prevalence and Lifetime Morbid Risk of Anxiety and Mood Disorders in the United States,\" _International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research_ 21, no. 3 (2012): 169\u201384.\n\nabout 40 million American adults: \"Facts and Statistics,\" Anxiety and Depression Association of America, https:\/\/www.adaa.org\/\u200babout-adaa\/\u200bpress-room\/\u200bfacts-statistics.\n\nanxiety disorders cost the United States: Paul E. Greenberg et al., \"The Economic Burden of Anxiety Disorders in the 1990s,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ 60, no. 7 (1999): 427\u201335.\n\nAccording to a spring 2016 survey: American College Health Association National College Health Assessment, _Spring 2016 Reference Group Executive Summary_ (American College Health Association, 2016).\n\nup from about 10 percent: American College Health Association National College Health Assessment, _Fall 2008 Reference Group Executive Summary_ (American College Health Association, 2008).\n\nDepression may get most of the headlines: In 2015 the National Institutes of Health spent $156 million for research on anxiety disorders and $390 million on depression. _Estimates of Funding for Various Research, Condition, and Disease Categories_ , National Institutes of Health, https:\/\/report.nih.gov\/\u200bcategorical_spending.aspx.\n\nIn people with a history: Ronald C. Kessler, \"The Global Burden of Anxiety and Mood Disorders: Putting ESEMeD Findings into Perspective,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ 68, suppl. 2 (2007): 10\u201319.\n\ndoesn't often lead to suicidal acts: Matthew K. Nock et al., \"Mental Disorders, Comorbidity and Suicidal Behavior: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication,\" _Molecular Psychiatry_ 15, no. 8 (2010): 868\u201376.\n\nSomeone who develops an anxiety disorder: Ronald C. Kessler, Harvard Medical School, interview by author.\n\n\"the dizziness of freedom\": S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, _The Concept of Anxiety_ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 61.\n\nvaries by culture: American Psychiatric Association, _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,_ 5th ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013), 216. Cited hereinafter as _DSM_ -5.\n\nstudies show that, in Japan: Ronald C. Kessler et al., \"The Global Burden of Mental Disorders: An Update from the WHO World Mental Health (WMH) Surveys,\" _Epidemiologia e psichiatria sociale_ 18, no. 1 (2009): 23\u201333.\n\nAndreas of Charystos: Allan V. Horwitz, _Anxiety: A Short History_ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 27.\n\npantophobia: I can't read the word _pantophobia_ without thinking of the scene in _A Charlie Brown Christmas_ when Charlie Brown consults Lucy's \"Psychiatric Help, 5 cents\" booth. Trying to get to the bottom of his despair, Lucy asks him about a litany of phobias, including fears of crossing bridges (gephyrophobia) and of the ocean (thalassophobia). \"Do you think you have pantophobia?\" she finally asks. \"What's pantophobia?\" says Charlie Brown. \"The fear of everything,\" Lucy says. \"That's it!\" Charlie Brown yells, sending Lucy somersaulting back across the snow.\n\nIn the Classical period: Andrea Tone, _The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers_ (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 6\u20137.\n\n\"It was as if a light of relief\": Quoted in Horwitz, _Anxiety_ , 37.\n\nemerging concept of nervous disorders: Ibid., 48\u201349.\n\nIn 1869, George Miller Beard: Ibid., 64\u201366.\n\nThe Greek physician Hippocrates: Cecilia Tasca et al., \"Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health,\" _Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health_ 8 (2012): 110\u201319.\n\n\"irritable heart syndrome\": Andrea Tone, \"Listening to the Past: History, Psychiatry and Anxiety,\" _Canadian Journal of Psychiatry_ 50, no. 7 (2005): 373\u201380.\n\na groundbreaking paper: Sigmund Freud, _Collected Papers_ (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 1:76\u2013106.\n\nhe abandoned this theory: Horwitz, _Anxiety_ , 85\u201391.\n\nWhen that response is initiated: Harvard Medical School has done a nice write-up of the stress response and the HPA axis. \"Understanding the Stress Response,\" Harvard Medical School, http:\/\/www.health.harvard.edu\/\u200bstaying-healthy\/\u200bunderstanding-the-stress-response.\n\nIn his experiments, LeDoux: Two major papers detailing LeDoux's 1980s lesion work are Joseph E. LeDoux et al., \"Subcortical Efferent Projections of the Medial Geniculate Nucleus Mediate Emotional Responses Conditioned to Acoustic Stimuli,\" _Journal of Neuroscience_ 4, no. 3 (1983): 683\u201398; and Jiro Iwata et al., \"Intrinsic Neurons in the Amygdaloid Field Projected to by the Medial Geniculate Body Mediate Emotional Responses Conditioned to Acoustic Stimuli,\" _Brain Research_ 383 (1986): 195\u2013214.\n\none of two routes: Joseph LeDoux, _The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). Also see LeDoux's most recent book, _Anxious: Using the Brain to Understand and Treat Fear and Anxiety_ (New York: Viking, 2015).\n\nThe part of the cow that most: Ibid., 11.\n\nStudies have found that the amygdala: Shmuel Lissek et al., \"Classic Fear Conditioning in the Anxiety Disorders: A Meta-Analysis,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 43, no. 11 (2005): 1391\u2013424.\n\nIn many studies, those with anxiety disorders: Here's a good summary of the attention bias literature: Yair Bar-Haim et al., \"Threat-Related Attentional Bias in Anxious and Nonanxious Individuals: A Meta-Analytic Study,\" _Psychological Bulletin_ 133, no. 1 (2007): 1\u201324.\n\n\"intolerance of uncertainty\": Dan W. Grupe and Jack B. Nitschke, \"Uncertainty and Anticipations in Anxiety: An Integrated Neurobiological and Psychological Perspective,\" _Nature Reviews Neuroscience_ 14 (2013): 488\u2013501.\n\nResearchers at the University of California: Alan Simmons et al., \"Intolerance of Uncertainty Correlates with Insula Activation During Affective Ambiguity,\" _Neuroscience Letters_ 430, no. 2 (2008): 92\u201397.\n\nIn Davis's lab: Michael Davis et al., \"Phasic vs Sustained Fear in Rats and Humans: Role of the Extended Amygdala in Fear vs Anxiety,\" _Neuropsychopharmacology_ 35, no. 1 (2010): 105\u201335.\n\nIn the 1990s, Christian Grillon: Christian Grillon, \"Models and Mechanisms of Anxiety: Evidence from Startle Studies,\" _Psychopharmacology_ 199, no. 3 (2008): 421\u201337.\n\nIn one critical experiment: Christian Grillon and Michael Davis, \"Fear-Potentiated Startle Conditioning in Humans: Explicit and Contextual Cue Conditioning Following Paired Versus Unpaired Training,\" _Pschophysiology_ 34 (1997): 451\u201358.\n\nUsing the new equipment: Salvatore Torrisi et al., \"Resting State Connectivity of the Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis at Ultra-High Field,\" _Human Brain Mapping_ 36 (2015): 4076\u201388.\n\nAs researchers Dan Grupe: Dan W. Grupe and Jack B. Nitschke, \"Uncertainty and Anticipations in Anxiety.\"\n\n# 2. SCARY CLOWNS AND THE END OF DAYS\n\nmore likely to develop a wide range of disorders: Renee Goodwin et al., \"Panic Attack as a Risk Factor for Severe Psychopathology,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 161, no. 12 (2004): 2207\u201314.\n\nfour out of thirteen possible: _DSM_ -5, 208.\n\nChildren who experience fearful spells: Eva Asselmann et al., \"Associations of Fearful Spells and Panic Attacks with Incident Anxiety, Depressive and Substance Use Disorders: A 10-Year Prospective Longitudinal Community Study of Adolescents and Young Adults,\" _Journal of Psychiatric Research_ 55 (2014): 8\u201314.\n\n_Sesame Street_ segment on YouTube: \" _Sesame Street_ : A Clown's Face,\" https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/\u200bwatch?v=Vs5VYOnpMrw.\n\nThese are all typical: For an excellent chart detailing normal fears in childhood and adolescence, see Katja Beesdo et al., \"Anxiety and Anxiety Disorders in Children and Adolescents: Developmental Issues and Implications for DSM-V,\" _Psychiatric Clinics_ 32, no. 3 (2009): 483\u2013524.\n\nSpecific phobia is one of the earliest: Ronald C. Kessler et al., \"Age of Onset of Mental Disorders: A Review of Recent Literature,\" _Current Opinion in Psychiatry_ 20, no. 4 (2007): 359\u201364.\n\nphobia of buttons: Lissette M. Saavedra and Wendy K. Silverman, \"Case Study: Disgust and a Specific Phobia of Buttons,\" _Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry_ 41, no. 11 (2002): 1376\u201379.\n\nThe most common involve animals: National Alliance on Mental Illness, _Specific Phobias_ , fact sheet.\n\nthese fears developed over millennia: Randolph M. Nesse and George C. Williams, _Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine_ (New York: Vintage, 1994), 210.\n\nA 2010 study of about fifteen hundred: Julia Trumpf et al., \"Specific Phobia Predicts Psychopathology in Young Women,\" _Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology_ 45, no. 12 (2010): 1161\u201366.\n\nthe prediction set forth: John R. Gribbin and Stephen H. Plagemann, _The Jupiter Effect_ (New York: Walker & Co., 1974).\n\nearly maltreatment can alter the HPA axis: Carlo Faravelli et al., \"Childhood Stressful Events, HPA Axis and Anxiety Disorders,\" _World Journal of Psychiatry_ 2 _,_ no. 1 (2012): 13\u201325.\n\nWhen researchers at the University of Wisconsin: Ryan J. Herringa et al., \"Childhood Maltreatment Is Associated with Altered Fear Circuitry and Increased Internalizing Symptoms by Late Adolescence,\" _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_ 110, no. 47 (2013): 19119\u201324.\n\nphysical illness and economic adversity: Jennifer Greif Green et al., \"Childhood Adversities and Adult Psychopathology in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) 1: Associations with First Onset of DSM-IV Disorders,\" _Archives of General Psychiatry_ 67, no. 2 (2010): 113.\n\nA study that surveyed nearly seven hundred: Nicholas B. Allen et al., \"Prenatal and Perinatal Influences on Risk for Psychopathology in Childhood and Adolescence,\" _Development and Psychopathology_ 10 (1998): 513\u201329.\n\na history of asthma: Michelle G. Craske et al., \"Paths to Panic Disorder\/Agoraphobia: An Exploratory Analysis from Age 3 to 21 in an Unselected Birth Cohort,\" _Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry_ 40, no. 5 (2001): 556\u201363.\n\nadults with asthma, emphysema, and bronchitis: See, for example, R. D. Goodwin et al., \"A 10-Year Prospective Study of Respiratory Disease and Depression and Anxiety in Adulthood,\" _Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology_ 113, no. 5 (2014): 565\u201370.\n\nA 2008 study showed that those: Renee D. Goodwin et al., \"Childhood Respiratory Disease and the Risk of Anxiety Disorder and Major Depression in Adulthood,\" _Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine_ 162, no. 8 (2008): 774\u201380.\n\nThere's also some evidence: Jordan W. Smoller et al., \"The Human Ortholog of Acid-Sensing Ion Channel Gene ASIC1a Is Associated with Panic Disorder and Amygdala Structure and Function,\" _Biological Psychiatry_ 76, no. 11 (2014): 902\u201310.\n\nIn the UCLA and New Zealand study: Craske et al., \"Paths to Panic Disorder\/Agoraphobia.\"\n\nResearchers in Australia wanted to see: Jennifer L. Hudson and Ronald M. Rapee, \"Parent-Child Interactions and Anxiety Disorders: An Observational Study,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 39 (2001): 1411\u201327.\n\nIn a big 2007 review: Bryce D. McLeod et al., \"Examining the Association Between Parenting and Childhood Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis,\" _Clinical Psychology Review_ 27 (2007): 155\u201372.\n\nIn a small study using this paradigm: Jennifer Lau et al., \"Fear Conditioning in Adolescents with Anxiety Disorders: Results from a Novel Experimental Paradigm,\" _Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry_ 47, no. 1 (2008): 94\u2013102.\n\nAnother larger study published in 2013: Jennifer C. Britton et al., \"Response to Learned Threat: An fMRI Study in Adolescent and Adult Anxiety,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 170, no. 10 (2013): 1195\u20131204.\n\n# 3. MY GRANDMOTHER'S MADNESS\n\ngenes are responsible for 30 to 40 percent: John M. Hettema et al., \"A Review and Meta-Analysis of the Genetic Epidemiology of Anxiety Disorders,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 158, no. 10 (2001): 1568\u201378. In twin studies, scientists compared the similarities of a trait (which could also be an illness such as anxiety disorders) in pairs of identical twins to those of fraternal twins. Since both kinds of twins grow up in similar environments, the greater similarity in the trait among identical twins can be largely attributed to genes. Jordan Smoller's _The Other Side of Normal_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2012) has a nice explanation of twin studies on page 63.\n\nFor schizophrenia, Gladys's diagnosis: Ming T. Tsuang et al., \"Genes, Environment and Schizophrenia,\" _British Journal of Psychiatry_ 40, Suppl. (April 2001): s18\u2013s24.\n\nHaving a first-degree relative: Jordan W. Smoller et al., \"The Genetics of Anxiety Disorders,\" in _Primer on Anxiety Disorders: Translational Perspectives on Diagnosis and Treatment_ , ed. Kerry J. Ressler et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 61.\n\nIn a 2013 study, genetic: Cross-Disorder Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, \"Genetic Relationship Between Five Psychiatric Disorders Estimated from Genome-Wide SNPs,\" _Nature Genetics_ 45, no. 9 (2013): 984\u201394.\n\ninsulin coma therapy: There's a terrific description of ICT by Max Fink, the former head of an ICT unit at a New York mental hospital, on the website for the documentary _A Brilliant Madness_. The film tells the story of the mathematician John Nash, who was treated with ICT for schizophrenia: http:\/\/www.pbs.org\/\u200bwgbh\/\u200bamex\/\u200bnash\/\u200bfilmmore\/\u200bps_ict.html. Also see Edward Shorter and David Healy, _Shock Therapy: A History of Electroconvulsive Treatment in Mental Illness_ (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007).\n\nIn Mendota's 1955 annual report: Mendota State Hospital, _Report to State Board of Public Welfare_ , March 23, 1955.\n\ndivided into \"quiet\" and \"disturbed\": Mendota State Hospital, _Report to State Board of Public Welfare_ , June 14, 1961.\n\na movement to provide more freedom: Mendota State Hospital, _Report to the State Board of Public Welfare_ , May 14, 1958, and May 27, 1959.\n\nAntipsychotic drugs were instant hits: Mendota State Hospital, _Report to the State Board of Public Welfare_ , May 23, 1956.\n\nstaff members were complaining: Mendota State Hospital, _Report to State Board of Public Welfare_ , May 25, 1960.\n\nElectroconvulsive therapy was first employed: Edward Shorter, _A History of Psychiatry_ (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 218\u201324.\n\nDuring the 1960s, a movement arose: In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act, legislation that aimed to build a network of community mental health centers. The goal was for people to receive treatment at home; many patients would no longer have to spend years in crowded psychiatric institutions, some of which were rife with abuse and neglect. But only half the community centers were built and most were not fully funded. See \"Kennedy's Vision for Mental Health Never Realized,\" Associated Press, October 20, 2013.\n\nThe vast majority: \"Mental Health Reporting,\" fact sheet, University of Washington School of Social Work, http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/\u200bmhreport\/\u200bfacts_violence.php.\n\nOne of the most extensively researched is the SLC6A4 gene: For a nice, clear write-up of the serotonin transporter story, see Smoller, _Other Side of Normal_ , 68\u201370.\n\nWomen are about twice as likely: Carmen P. McLean et al., \"Gender Differences in Anxiety Disorders: Prevalence, Course of Illness, Comorbidity and Burden of Illness,\" _Journal of Psychiatric Research_ 45, no. 8 (2011): 1027\u201335.\n\ngirls \"catch\" fear more easily: Michelle G. Craske, _Origins of Phobias and Anxiety Disorders: Why More Women Than Men?_ (Oxford: Elsevier, 2003), 176\u2013203.\n\nIn one study, mothers presented two toys: Friederike C. Gerull and Ronald M. Rapee, \"Mother Knows Best: Effects of Maternal Modelling on the Acquisition of Fear and Avoidance Behaviour in Toddlers,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 40, no. 3 (2002): 279\u201387.\n\nIn a University of California, Berkeley study: Patricia K. Kerig et al., \"Marital Quality and Gender Differences in Parent-Child Interaction,\" _Developmental Psychology_ 29, no. 6 (1993): 931\u201339.\n\nMorrongiello had a hunch: Barbara A. Morrongiello and Tess Dawber, \"Mothers' Responses to Sons and Daughters Engaging in Injury-Risk Behaviors on a Playground: Implications for Sex Differences in Injury Rates,\" _Journal of Experimental Child Psychology_ 76 (2000): 89\u2013103.\n\nMorrongiello and her colleague: Barbara A. Morrongiello and Theresa Dawber, \"Parental Influences on Toddlers' Injury-Risk Behaviors: Are Sons and Daughters Socialized Differently?\" _Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology_ 20, no. 2 (1999): 227\u201351.\n\ngirls tended to see it as riskier than boys: Barbara A. Morrongiello and Heather Rennie, \"Why Do Boys Engage in More Risk Taking Than Girls? The Role of Attributions, Beliefs, and Risk Appraisals,\" _Journal of Pediatric Psychology_ 23, no. 1 (1998): 33\u201343.\n\nWhen girls engage in risky behaviors: Barbara A. Morrongiello et al., \"Understanding Gender Differences in Children's Risk Taking and Injury: A Comparison of Mothers' and Fathers' Reactions to Sons and Daughters Misbehaving in Ways That Lead to Injury,\" _Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology_ 31 (2010): 322\u201329.\n\nBy late elementary school, girls: Craske, _Origins of Phobias and Anxiety Disorders_ , 185.\n\nSurprisingly, men's _physiological_reactions: Ibid., 194\u201395.\n\nIn one study, thirty-four women: Mohamed A. Zeidan et al., \"Estradiol Modulates Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Amygdala Activity During Fear Extinction in Women and Female Rats,\" _Biological Psychiatry_ 70, no. 10 (2011): 920\u201327.\n\nMen generally encounter more traumatic events: Naomi Breslau et al., \"Trauma Exposure and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: A Study of Youths in Urban America,\" _Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine_ 81, no. 4 (2004): 530\u201344.\n\nmore likely to be the victims: Craske, _Origins of Phobias and Anxiety Disorders_ , 179\u201380.\n\nStudies by Kagan and others: K. A. Degnan and N. A. Fox, \"Behavioral Inhibition and Anxiety Disorders: Multiple Levels of a Resilience Process,\" _Development and Psychopathology_ 19 (2007): 729\u201346, referred to in Lauren M. McGrath et al., \"Bringing a Developmental Perspective to Anxiety Genetics,\" _Development and Psychopathology_ 24, no. 4 (2012): 1179\u201393.\n\nTwin studies have found: Jordan W. Smoller et al., \"Genetics of Anxiety Disorders: The Complex Road from DSM to DNA,\" _Depression and Anxiety_ 26 (2009): 965\u201375.\n\nKagan started his temperament work: Kagan details his studies in the following books, among others: Jerome Kagan, _Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature_ (New York: Basic Books, 1994); and Jerome Kagan and Nancy Snidman, _The Long Shadow of Temperament_ (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). Also see Robin Marantz Henig, \"Understanding the Anxious Mind,\" _New York Times_ , September 29, 2009.\n\nonly those BI kids whose mothers were overcontrolling: Erin Lewis-Morrarty et al., \"Maternal Over-Control Moderates the Association Between Early Childhood Behavioral Inhibition and Adolescent Social Anxiety Symptoms,\" _Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology_ 40, no. 8 (2012): 1363\u201373.\n\nBI kids who are put in day care: Nathan Fox, interview by author.\n\nwho have an attention bias to threat: Koraly P\u00e9rez-Edgar et al., \"Attention Biases to Threat Link Behavioral Inhibition to Social Withdrawal over Time in Very Young Children, _Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology_ 39, no. 6 (2011): 885\u201395; and Koraly P\u00e9rez-Edgar et al., \"Attention Biases to Threat and Behavioral Inhibition in Early Childhood Shape Adolescent Social Withdrawal,\" _Emotion_ 10, no. 3 (2010): 349\u201357.\n\nKids with BI who are adept at attention shifting: Lauren K. White et al., \"Behavioral Inhibition and Anxiety: The Moderating Roles of Inhibitory Control and Attention Shifting,\" _Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology_ 39, no. 5 (2011): 735\u201347.\n\n# 4. FROM CBT TO KARAOKE\n\nThis was called cognitive reappraisal: David H. Barlow and Michelle G. Craske, _Mastery of Your Anxiety and Panic_ (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).\n\nAbout half of anxiety disorder patients: Amanda G. Loerinc et al., \"Response Rates for CBT for Anxiety Disorders: Need for Standardized Criteria,\" _Clinical Psychology Review_ 42 (2015): 72\u201382.\n\na meta-analysis of twenty-seven studies: The effect size was .73. Effect size is a statistical definition that allows scientists to compare the results of many different studies. In general, an effect size of .2 is considered small, .5 is medium, and .8 or greater is large. In the studies included in the meta-analysis, the placebo conditions involved contact with therapists and education about anxiety\u2014things that alone can help patients and skew research results\u2014but excluded other treatment that scientists thought could be effective. See Stefan G. Hofmann and Jasper A. J. Smits, \"Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Adult Anxiety Disorders: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trials,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ 69, no. 4 (2008): 621\u201332.\n\nCBT actually shrank: K.N.T. M\u00e5nsson et al., \"Neuroplasticity in Response to Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder,\" _Translational Psychiatry_ 6 (2016): e727.\n\nhave a colorful history: Edward Shorter, _A History of Psychiatry_ (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 119\u201336.\n\nJohn Watson, an American psychologist: Edward Shorter, _A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 57, 102\u20133.\n\nFreud claimed: Ibid., 113.\n\nIn 1971, psychiatrist Manuel Zane: Kate Stone Lombardi, \"Phobia Clinic, 1st in U.S., Offers Road to Recovery for 25 Years,\" _New York Times_ , November 24, 1996.\n\npsychiatrist Arthur Hardy: \"Arthur B. Hardy, 78, Psychiatrist Who Treated a Fear of Going Out,\" _New York Times_ , October 31, 1991.\n\nThese iconoclasts: Dr. Martin Seif, interview with the author.\n\nPeople with panic disorder wait: Philip S. Wang et al., \"Failure and Delay in Initial Treatment Contact After First Onset of Mental Disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication,\" _Archives of General Psychiatry_ 62 (2005): 603\u201313.\n\nThis is particularly true of African Americans: See, for example, Joshua Breslau et al., \"Lifetime Risk and Persistence of Psychiatric Disorders Across Ethnic Groups in the United States,\" _Psychological Medicine_ 35, no. 3 (2005): 317\u201327, and Joseph A. Himle et al., \"Anxiety Disorders Among African Americans, Blacks of Caribbean Descent, and Non-Hispanic Whites in the United States,\" _Journal of Anxiety Disorders_ 23, no. 5 (2009): 578\u201390.\n\nOne study followed sixty-three panic disorder patients: T. A. Brown and D. H. Barlow, \"Long-term Outcome in Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Panic Disorder: Clinical Predictors and Alternative Strategies for Assessment,\" _Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ 63, no. 5 (1995): 754\u201365.\n\nexposure therapy appointments in the morning: Alicia E. Meuret et al., \"Timing Matters: Endogenous Cortisol Mediates Benefits from Early-Day Psychotherapy,\" _Psychoneuroendocrinology_ 74 (2016): 197\u2013202.\n\nhad a greater reduction in anxiety: B. Kleim et al., \"Sleep Enhances Exposure Therapy,\" _Psychological Medicine_ 44 (2014): 1511\u201319.\n\nIn a 2016 study of patients: Henny A. Westra et al., \"Integrating Motivational Interviewing with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Severe Generalized Anxiety Disorder: An Allegiance-Controlled Randomized Clinical Trial,\" _Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ 84, no. 9 (2016): 768\u201382.\n\nthe Unified Protocol: David H. Barlow and Katherine Ann Kennedy, \"New Approaches to Diagnosis and Treatment in Anxiety and Related Emotional Disorders: A Focus on Temperament,\" _Canadian Psychology_ 57, no. 1 (2016): 8\u201320.\n\nasking patients to vividly imagine: Tomislav D. Zbozinek et al., \"The Effect of Positive Mood Induction on Reducing Reinstatement Fear: Relevance for Long Term Outcomes of Exposure Therapy,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 71 (2015): 65\u201375.\n\nsuccess in modifying exposure therapy: Michelle G. Craske et al., \"Maximizing Exposure Therapy: An Inhibitory Learning Approach,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 58 (2014): 10\u201323.\n\nin ACT you're taught to accept: Steven C. Hayes, _Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life_ (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2005).\n\ntwelve sessions of ACT or CBT: Joanna J. Arch et al., \"Randomized Clinical Trial of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Versus Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Mixed Anxiety Disorders,\" _Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ 80, no. 5 (2012): 750\u201365.\n\nAnother 2012 paper: Kate B. Wolitzky-Taylor et al., \"Moderators and Non-Specific Predictors of Treatment Outcome for Anxiety Disorders: A Comparison of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy,\" _Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ 80, no. 5 (2012): 786\u201399.\n\nIn a meta-analysis of thirty-nine studies: In patients with anxiety disorders, the treatment had a large effect size of .97. See Stefan G. Hofmann, \"The Effect of Mindfulness-Based Therapy on Anxiety and Depression: A Meta-Analytic Review,\" _Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ 78, no. 2 (2010): 169\u201383.\n\nThere's even a book: James Jacobson, _How to Meditate with Your Dog_ (Kihei, HI: Maui Media, 2010).\n\nThere's emerging research that acupuncture: See, for example, Nick Errington-Evans, \"Randomised Controlled Trial on the Use of Acupuncture in Adults with Chronic, Non-Responding Anxiety Symptoms,\" _Acupuncture in Medicine_ 33, no. 2 (2015): 98\u2013102; Hyojeong Bae et al., \"Efficacy of Acupuncture in Reducing Preoperative Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis,\" _Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine_ (2014); and Karen Pilkington et al., \"Acupuncture for Anxiety and Anxiety Disorders: A Systematic Literature Review,\" _Acupuncture in Medicine_ 25 (2007): 1\u201310.\n\nIn one admittedly tiny study: Frederick J. Heide and T. D. Borkovec, \"Relaxation-Induced Anxiety: Mechanisms and Theoretical Implications,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 22, no. 1 (1984): 1\u201312.\n\nAnother small study of college students: G. R. Norton et al., \"Characteristics of Subjects Experiencing Relaxation and Relaxation-Induced Anxiety,\" _Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry_ 16, no. 3 (1985): 211\u201316.\n\nA 2016 meta-analysis: Stefan Hofmann et al., \"Effect of Hatha Yoga on Anxiety: A Meta-Analysis,\" _Journal of Evidence-Based Medicine_ 9, no. 3 (2016): 116\u201324.\n\nIn a small study with GAD patients: In the control treatment, half the time the probe replaced a threatening word; half the time it replaced a neutral word. So there was no attention training. See Nader Amir et al., \"Attention Modification Program in Individuals with Generalized Anxiety Disorder,\" _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_ 118, no. 1 (2009): 28\u201333.\n\nA study with social phobia patients: Nader Amir et al., \"Attention Training in Individuals with Generalized Social Phobia: A Randomized Controlled Trial,\" _Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ 77, no. 5 (2009): 961\u201373.\n\nsome evidence shows: T. Shechner et al., \"Attention Bias Modification Treatment Augmenting Effects on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Children with Anxiety: Randomized Controlled Trial,\" _Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry_ 53, no. 1 (2014): 61\u201371.\n\nIn a 2015 meta-analysis, ABM: The effect size was .42. See Marian Linetzsky et al., \"Quantitative Evaluation of the Clinical Efficacy of Attention Bias Modification Treatment for Anxiety Disorders,\" _Depression and Anxiety_ 32, no. 6 (2015): 383\u201391.\n\nIn a 2015 study, Zilverstand: Anna Zilverstand et al., \"fMRI Neurofeedback Facilitates Anxiety Regulation in Females with Spider Phobia,\" _Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience_ (June 8, 2015).\n\nIn another study, researchers at Yale: D. Scheinost et al., \"Orbitofrontal Cortex Neurofeedback Produces Lasting Changes in Contamination Anxiety and Resting-State Connectivity,\" _Translational Psychiatry_ 3, no. 4 (2013): e250.\n\n# 5. MAY CAUSE DIZZINESS\n\nIn a 1998 study of panic disorder: Robert B. Pohl et al., \"Sertraline in the Treatment of Panic Disorder: A Double-Blind Multicenter Trial,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 155, no. 9 (1998): 1189\u201395.\n\nIn a 2004 study looking at escitalopram: Jonathan R. T. Davidson et al., \"Escitalopram in the Treatment of Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Double-Blind, Placebo Controlled, Flexible-Dose Study,\" _Depression and Anxiety_ 19 (2004): 234\u201340.\n\nStudies that reveal that: Annelieke M. Roest et al., \"Reporting Bias in Clinical Trials Investigating the Efficacy of Second-Generation Antidepressants in the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders: A Report of 2 Meta-Analyses,\" _JAMA Psychiatry_ 72, no. 5 (2015): 500\u201310.\n\nHe is a coauthor of a review paper: S. Borges et al., \"Review of Maintenance Trials for Major Depressive Disorder: A 25-Year Perspective from the US Food and Drug Administration,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ 75, no. 3 (2014): 205\u201314.\n\nIn clinical trials by Pfizer: \"Zoloft,\" Pfizer, October 2016, http:\/\/labeling.pfizer.com\/\u200bShowLabeling.aspx?id=517#page=1.\n\nAt least a third of people: Eduard Maron and David Nutt, \"Biological Predictors of Pharmacological Therapy in Anxiety Disorders,\" _Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience_ 17, no. 3 (2015): 305\u201317.\n\nIn one study, fourteen people: Jack B. Nitschke et al., \"Anticipatory Activation in the Amygdala and Anterior Cingulate in Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Prediction of Treatment Response,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 166, no. 3 (2009): 302\u201310.\n\nIn another study, researchers in Oxford: Andrea Reinecke et al., \"Predicting Rapid Response to Cognitive-Behavioural Treatment for Panic Disorder: The Role of Hippocampus, Insula, and Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 62 (2014): 120\u201328. For a nice summary of the state of biomarker research for anxiety disorders, see Maron and Nutt, \"Biological Predictors of Pharmacological Therapy.\"\n\nKlonopin can cause: \"Klonopin Tablets,\" Genentech, 2013, www.gene.com\/\u200bdownload\/\u200bpdf\/\u200bklnopin_prescribing.pdf.\n\nEntire workbook programs: Michael W. Otto et al., _Stopping Anxiety Medication: Panic Control Therapy for Benzodiazepine Discontinuation_ (Psychological Corp., 2000).\n\nThe number of American adults: Marcus A. Bachhuber et al., \"Increasing Benzodiazepine Prescriptions and Overdose Mortality in the United States, 1996\u20132013,\" _American Journal of Public Health_ 106, no. 4 (2016): 686\u201388.\n\nAnd most people on benzos: M. J. Garvey and G. D. Tollefson, \"Prevalence of Misuse of Prescribed Benzodiazepines in Patients with Primary Anxiety Disorder or Major Depression,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 143, no. 12 (1986): 1601\u20133.\n\nOne study published in the journal _BMJ_ : Sophie Billioti de Gage et al., \"Benzodiazepine Use and Risk of Alzheimer's Disease: Case-Control Study,\" _BMJ_ 349 (2014).\n\nI'm reassured by a more recent study: Shelly L. Gray et al., \"Benzodiazepine Use and Risk of Incident Dementia or Cognitive Decline: Prospective Population Based Study,\" _BMJ_ 352 (2016).\n\nA range of pharmacological treatments: Andrea Tone, _The Age of Anxiety: A History of America's Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers_ (New York: Basic Books, 2009) _,_ 21\u201324.\n\nMiltown was developed by Frank Berger: Ibid., 35.\n\nIn 1949, Berger took a job: Ibid., 43.\n\nAfter a few studies in humans: Ibid., 48\u201352.\n\na full third of all prescriptions: Ibid., xvi.\n\na Hollywood sensation: Ibid., 55\u201363.\n\nThe team doctors: Ibid., 114.\n\nOne ad published: Ibid., 75\u201376.\n\nAt Hoffmann\u2013LaRoche: Ibid., 120\u201330.\n\nit became the bestselling: Ibid., 137.\n\nKlein and Fink published a paper: Donald F. Klein and Max Fink, \"Psychiatric Reaction Patterns to Imipramine,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 119, no. 5 (1962): 432\u201338.\n\n\"The chief characteristic of these disorders\": _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders_ (American Psychiatric Association Mental Hospital Service, 1952), 31\u201334.\n\n_DSM_-II, published in 1968: _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders_ , 2nd ed. (American Psychiatric Association, 1968).\n\nhe wanted the new edition: Hannah S. Decker, _The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual's Conquest of American Psychiatry_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).\n\nPsychoanalysts pushed back: Ibid., 278.\n\nOne study compared two groups: Tone, _Age of Anxiety_ , 90.\n\nDespite the runaway success: Ibid., 153.\n\nA 1968 study, for example: Ibid., 179.\n\nA Valium ad published in 1970: Reprinted in ibid., 157.\n\nformer first lady Betty Ford: Donnie Radcliffe, \"Betty Ford Dies at 93: Former First Lady Founded Iconic Clinic,\" _Washington Post_ , July 8, 2011.\n\nSenator Edward Kennedy convened: Tone, _Age of Anxiety_ , 204\u20135.\n\nbegan recommending the SSRIs: American Psychiatric Association, \"Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Patients with Panic Disorder,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 155 (1998).\n\nGlaxoSmithKline won FDA approval: Tone, _Age of Anxiety_ , 217\u201318.\n\nOne TV spot featured a businessman: Paxil social anxiety ad, https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/\u200bwatch?v=rR8rBEFulw4.\n\nIn 2009, GlaxoSmithKline said: Greg Miller, \"Is Pharma Running Out of Brainy Ideas?\" _Science_ 329 (2010): 502\u20134. A good summary of the recent retreat by pharmaceutical companies can be found at Steven E. Hyman, \"Revolution Stalled,\" _Science Translational Medicine_ 4, no. 155 (2012): 155cm11.\n\nPexacerfont: Vladimir Coric et al., \"Multicenter, Randomized, Double-Blind, Active Comparator and Placebo-Controlled Trial of a Corticotropin-Releasing Factor Receptor-1 Antagonist in Generalized Anxiety Disorder,\" _Depression and Anxiety_ 27 (2010): 417\u201325.\n\nVerucerfont: \"Neurocrine Announces Top-Line Results of Corticotropin Releasing Factor Antagonist GSK561679 for Treatment of Major Depressive Disorder,\" press release, Nuerocrine Biosciences, September 14, 2010, http:\/\/phx.corporate-ir.net\/\u200bphoenix.zhtml?c=68817&p=irol-newsArticle&highlight=&ID=1471129.\n\nSome scientists think that: George F. Koob and Eric P. Zorilla, \"Update on Corticotropin-Releasing Factor Pharmacotherapy for Psychiatric Disorders: A Revisionist View,\" _Neuropsychopharmacology Reviews_ 37 (2012): 308\u20139.\n\nlaunched a program dubbed \"Fast-Fail\": \"FAST: Fast-Fail Trials,\" fact sheet, National Institute of Mental Health, http:\/\/www.nimh.nih.gov\/\u200bresearch-priorities\/\u200bresearch-initiatives\/\u200bfast-fast-fail-trials.shtml.\n\nIn a pivotal study, Davis: William A. Falls et al., \"Extinction of Fear-Potentiated Startle: Blockade by Infusion of an NMDA Antagonist into the Amygdala,\" _Journal of Neuroscience_ 12, no. 3 (1992): 854\u201363.\n\nIn 2002, Davis, Ressler, and colleagues: \"Facilitation of Conditioned Fear Extinction by Systemic Administration or Intra-Amygdala Infusions of D-Cycloserine as Assessed with Fear-Potentiated Startle in Rats,\" _Journal of Neuroscience_ 22, no. 6 (2002): 2343\u201351.\n\nDavis and Ressler then teamed up: Kerry J. Ressler et al., \"Cognitive Enhancers as Adjuncts to Psychotherapy: Use of D-Cycloserine in Phobic Individuals to Facilitate Extinction of Fear,\" _Archives of General Psychiatry_ 61, no. 11 (2004): 1136\u201344.\n\nIn one trial, DCS failed: Eric A. Storch et al., \"D-cycloserine Does Not Enhance Exposure-Response Prevention Therapy in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,\" _International Clinical Psychopharmacology_ 22, no. 4 (2007): 230\u201337.\n\nDCS sped up improvement: Stefan G. Hofmann et al., \"D-cycloserine as an Augmentation Strategy with Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 170, no. 7 (2013): 751\u201358.\n\nOne study of veterans: Brett T. Litz et al., \"A Randomized Placebo-Controlled Trial of D-cycloserine and Exposure Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,\" _Journal of Psychiatric Research_ 46 (2012): 1184\u201390.\n\nHofmann, who had done the trials: Stefan G. Hofmann, interview by author; and S. G. Hofmann, \"D-cycloserine for Treating Anxiety Disorders: Making Good Exposures Better and Bad Exposures Worse,\" _Depression and Anxiety_ 31 (2014): 175\u201377.\n\npeople have taken MDMA: For an in-depth survey of compounds being studied in anxiety disorders, see Boadie W. Dunlop et al., \"Pharmacological Mechanisms of Modulating Fear and Extinction,\" in _Primer on Anxiety Disorders: Translational Perspectives on Diagnosis and Treatment_ , ed. Kerry J. Ressler et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 367\u2013431.\n\n# 6. COLD CALLS, AIRPLANES, AND INDECISION\n\nA 2005 study by Australian researchers: Geoff Waghorn et al., \"Disability, Employment and Work Performance Among People with ICD-10 Anxiety Disorders,\" _Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry_ 39 (2005): 55\u201366.\n\nWhile both anxiety disorders and depression: Inger Plaisier et al., \"Depressive and Anxiety Disorders On-the-Job: The Importance of Job Characteristics for Good Work Functioning in Persons with Depressive and Anxiety Disorders,\" _Psychiatry Research_ 200 (2012): 382\u201388.\n\nOf the more than ten million Americans: _Annual Statistical Report on the Social Security Disability Insurance Program_ , 2015, Social Security Administration, 2015, table 6, http:\/\/www.socialsecurity.gov\/\u200bpolicy\/\u200bdocs\/\u200bstatcomps\/\u200bdi_asr\/\u200b2015\/\u200bsect01b.html#table6.\n\nIndeed, people with panic disorder: Martin M. Antony et al., \"Dimensions of Perfectionism Across the Anxiety Disorders,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 36 (1998): 1143\u201354.\n\nResearch shows, however, that anxiety: Joachim St\u00f6ber and Jutta Joormann, \"Worry, Procrastination, and Perfectionism: Differentiating Amount of Worry, Pathological Worry, Anxiety and Depression,\" _Cognitive Therapy and Research_ 25, no. 1 (2001): 49\u201360.\n\nA review of more than two hundred: Piers Steel, \"The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure,\" _Psychological Bulletin_ 133, no. 1 (2007): 65\u201394.\n\nMore than a century ago, in 1908: In Yerkes and Dodson's famous experiment, mice presented with two boxes, one black and one white, were taught to go only into the white box. The researchers did this by giving the mice shocks each time they began to enter the black box. When the task was difficult, the mice learned best when the shocks given were medium strength. When the shocks were weaker or stronger, the mice learned more slowly and made more errors. Only when the task was really easy did the mice continue to perform better as the shocks increased in strength. The researchers made the task harder by decreasing the amount of light shining on the boxes, making it tougher for the mice to tell the difference between the colors. See Robert M. Yerkes and John D. Dodson, \"The Relation of Strength of Stimulus to Rapidity of Habit-Formation,\" _Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology_ 18, no. 5 (1908): 459\u201382.\n\na range of studies in people: S. J. Lupien et al., \"The Effects of Stress and Stress Hormones on Human Cognition: Implications for the Field of Brain and Cognition,\" _Brain and Cognition_ 65, no. 3 (2007): 209\u201337.\n\nA study of beginning nursing students: L. McEwan and D. Goldenberg, \"Achievement Motivation, Anxiety and Academic Success in the First Year Master of Nursing Students,\" _Nurse Education Today_ 19, no. 5 (1999): 419\u201330.\n\nCanadian researchers, for example: Alexander M. Penney et al., \"Intelligence and Emotional Disorders: Is the Worrying and Ruminating Mind a More Intelligent Mind?\" _Personality and Individual Differences_ 74 (2015): 90\u201393.\n\nA small 2012 study: Jeremy D. Coplan et al., \"The Relationship Between Intelligence and Anxiety: An Association with Subcortical White Matter Metabolism,\" _Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience_ 3, no. 8 (2012): 1\u20137.\n\nEin-Dor and his colleague Orgad Tal: Tsachi Ein-Dor and Orgad Tal, \"Scared Saviors: Evidence That People High in Attachment Anxiety Are More Effective in Alerting Others to Threat,\" _European Journal of Social Psycholog_ y 42, no. 6 (2012): 667\u201371.\n\nFor decades, psychologists have theorized: Michael W. Eysenck et al., \"Anxiety and Cognitive Performance: Attentional Control Theory,\" _Emotion_ 7, no. 2 (2007): 336\u201353. Also see also Oliver J. Robinson et al., \"The Impact of Anxiety upon Cognition: Perspectives from Human Threat of Shock Studies,\" _Frontiers in Human Neuroscience_ 7 (2013).\n\nThe idea is that: Michael W. Eysenck, \"Anxiety, Learning, and Memory: A Reconceptualization,\" _Journal of Research in Personality_ 13, no. 4 (1979): 363\u201385.\n\nIn a 2016 study, researchers at the NIMH: Katherin E. Vytal et al., \"Induced-Anxiety Differentially Disrupts Working Memory in Generalized Anxiety Disorder,\" _BMC Psychiatry_ 16 (2016): 1\u20139.\n\nAnother study by the same NIMH: Nicholas L. Balderston et al., \"Anxiety Patients Show Reduced Working Memory Related DLPFC Activation During Safety and Threat,\" _Depression and Anxiety_ (2016): 1\u201312.\n\nIt sounds absurd, but a series of studies: Alison Wood Brooks, \"Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement,\" _Journal of Experimental Psychology: General_ 143, no. 3 (2014): 1144\u201358.\n\nOnly one in four people: \"Workplace Stress and Anxiety Disorders Survey,\" Anxiety and Depression Association of America, http:\/\/www.adaa.org\/\u200bworkplace-stress-anxiety-disorders-survey.\n\nStill, one study published in 1999: D. A. Koser et al., \"Comparison of a Physical and Mental Disability in Employee Selection: An Experimental Examination of Direct and Moderated Effects,\" _North American Journal of Psychology_ 1 (1999): 213\u201322, referenced in Kay Wheat et al., \"Mental Illness in the Workplace: Conceal or Reveal?\" _Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine_ 103, no. 3 (2010): 83\u201386.\n\nA 1996 survey: Jim Read and Sue Baker, \"Not Just Sticks and Stones: A Survey of the Stigma, Taboos and Discrimination Experienced by People with Mental Health Problems,\" _Mind_ (1996).\n\nAnxious people often have a tough time: C. Giorgetta et al., \"Reduced Risk-Taking Behavior as a Trait Feature of Anxiety,\" _Emotion_ 12, no. 6 (2012): 1373\u201383. And for an overview, see Catherine A. Hartley and Elizabeth A. Phelps, \"Anxiety and Decision-Making,\" _Biological Psychiatry_ 72, no. 2 (2012).\n\nIn one gambling experiment: Andrei C. Miu et al., \"Anxiety Impairs Decision-Making: Psychophysiological Evidence from an Iowa Gambling Task,\" _Biological Psychology_ 77 (2008): 353\u201358.\n\nWhen scientists at the University of Pittsburgh: Junchol Park et al., \"Anxiety Evokes Hypofrontality and Disrupts Rule-Relevant Encoding by Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex Neurons,\" _Journal of Neuroscience_ 36, no. 11 (2016): 3322\u201335.\n\n# 7. THE ISOLATION CHAMBER\n\nI've found only one study: Y. Tibi-Elhanany and S. G. Shamay-Tsoory, \"Social Cognition in Social Anxiety: First Evidence for Increased Empathic Abilities,\" _Israel Journal of Psychiatry_ 48, no. 2 (2011): 98\u2013106.\n\nHowever, if we look at it more broadly: For a good primer on post-traumatic growth, see Posttraumatic Growth Research Group, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, <https:\/\/ptgi.uncc.edu>.\n\nBut one interesting 2013 study: Jacob A. Priest, \"Anxiety Disorders and the Quality of Relationships with Friends, Relatives, and Romantic Partners,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychology_ 69, no. 1 (2013): 78\u201388.\n\nIn another study, socially anxious women: S. Cuming and R. M. Rapee, \"Social Anxiety and Self-Protective Communication Style in Close Relationships,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 48, no. 2 (2010): 87\u201396.\n\nFor anxious kids, having supportive: Julie Newman Kingery et al., \"Peer Experiences of Anxious and Socially Withdrawn Youth: An Integrative Review of the Developmental and Clinical Literature,\" _Clinical Child and Family Psychological Review_ 13 (2010): 91\u2013128.\n\nbeing part of a group: A. M. La Greca and H. M. Harrison, \"Adolescent Peer Relations, Friendships, and Romantic Relationships: Do They Predict Social Anxiety and Depression?\" _Journal of Clinical and Child Adolescent Psychology_ 34, no. 1 (2005): 49\u201361.\n\nIn a 2016 study, anxious teens: N. C. Jacobson and M. G. Newman, \"Perceptions of Close and Group Relationships Mediate the Relationship Between Anxiety and Depression over a Decade Later,\" _Depression and Anxiety_ 33, no. 1 (2016): 66\u201374.\n\nGood friends also enhance treatment: J. R. Baker and J. L. Hudson, \"Friendship Quality Predicts Treatment Outcome in Children with Anxiety Disorders,\" _Behaviour Research and Therapy_ 51, no. 1 (2013): 31\u201336.\n\nAnxious kids generally: Julie Newman Kingery et al., \"Peer Experiences.\"\n\nResearch has found at least: Timothy L. Verduin and Philip C. Kendall, \"Peer Perceptions and Liking of Children with Anxiety Disorders,\" _Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology_ 36, no. 4 (2008): 459\u201369.\n\nA study from 1999: D. C. Beidel et al., \"Psychopathology of Childhood Social Phobia,\" _Journal of American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry_ 38, no. 6 (1999): 643\u201350.\n\nAnxious kids are more likely to be bullied: A. M. Crawford and K. Manassis, \"Anxiety, Social Skills, Friendship Quality, and Peer Victimization: An Integrated Model,\" _Journal of Anxiety Disorders_ 25, no. 7 (2011): 924\u201331.\n\nIn one study, a staggering 92 percent: Randi E. McCabe et al., \"Preliminary Examination of the Relationship Between Anxiety Disorders in Adults and Self-Reported History of Teasing or Bullying Experiences,\" _Cognitive Behaviour Therapy_ 32, no. 4 (2003): 187\u201393.\n\nBoys with social anxiety: Kingery, \"Peer Experiences.\"\n\nAnd in another example of a negative feedback: R. R. Landoll et al., \"Cyber Victimization by Peers: Prospective Associations with Adolescent Social Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms,\" _Journal of Adolescence_ 42 (2015): 77\u201386.\n\nAdolescents who are frequently picked on: Lexine A. Stapinski et al., \"Peer Victimization During Adolescence and Risk for Anxiety Disorders in Adulthood: A Prospective Cohort Study,\" _Depression and Anxiety_ 31, no. 7 (2014): 575\u201382.\n\nEmotional states, neuroscientists have found: Elaine Hatfield et al., \"Emotional Contagion,\" _Current Directions in Psychological Science_ 2, no. 3 (1993): 96\u2013100.\n\nIn a 2014 study, researchers in Germany: Veronika Engert et al., \"Cortisol Increase in Empathic Stress Is Modulated by Emotional Closeness and Observation Modality,\" _Psychoneuroendocrinology_ 45 (2014): 192\u2013201.\n\nThis might be one reason why adults: Priest, \"Anxiety Disorders and the Quality of Relationships.\"\n\npartners with anxiety disorders judged: Piotr Pankiewicz et al., \"Anxiety Disorders in Intimate Partners and the Quality of Their Relationship,\" _Journal of Affective Disorders_ 140 (2012): 176\u201380.\n\nmen whose wives had panic disorder: Jane D. McLeod, \"Anxiety Disorders and Marital Quality,\" _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_ 103, no. 4 (1994): 767\u201376.\n\nA 1985 study: W. Monteiro et al., \"Marital Adjustment and Treatment Outcome in Agoraphobia,\" _British Journal of Psychiatry_ 146 (1985): 383\u201390.\n\nWomen with high levels of social anxiety: E. Porter and D. L. Chambless, \"Shying Away from a Good Thing: Social Anxiety in Romantic Relationships,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychology_ 70, no. 6 (2014): 546\u201361.\n\nfollowed thirty-three heterosexual couples: Talia I. Zaider et al., \"Anxiety Disorders and Intimate Relationships: A Study of Daily Processes in Couples,\" _Journal of Abnormal Psychology_ 119, no. 1 (2010): 163\u201373.\n\n# 8. WORRIES ABOUT MY DAUGHTER\n\nAbout 10 percent of pregnant women: William O. Cooper et al., \"Increasing Use of Antidepressants in Pregnancy,\" _American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology_ 196, no. 6 (2007).\n\nIn the mid-2000s, studies had linked: See, for example, G. M. Thormahlen, \"Paroxetine Use During Pregnancy: Is It Safe?,\" _Annals of Pharmacotherapy_ 40, no. 10 (2006): 1834\u201337; and B. Bar-Oz et al., \"Paroxetine and Congenital Malformations: Meta-Analysis and Consideration of Potential Confounding Factors,\" _Clinical Therapeutics_ 29, no. 5 (2007): 918\u201326.\n\nlinked to a higher risk\u2014about double: Jennifer Reefhuis et al., \"Specific SSRIs and Birth Defects: Bayesian Analysis to Interpret New Data in the Context of Previous Reports,\" _BMJ_ 351 (2015).\n\nmore likely to be born prematurely: Rita Suri et al., \"Effects of Antenatal Depression and Antidepressant Treatment on Gestational Age at Birth and Risk of Preterm Birth,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 164, no. 8 (2007): 1206\u201313; and T. F. Oberlander et al., \"Neonatal Outcomes After Prenatal Exposure to Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants and Maternal Depression Using Population-Based Linked Health Data,\" _Archives of General Psychiatry_ 63, no. 8 (2006): 898\u2013906.\n\nserious lung condition: Sophie Grigoriadis et al., \"Prenatal Exposure to Antidepressants and Persistent Pulmonary Hypertension of the Newborn: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,\" _BMJ_ 348 (2014).\n\nno more likely to have heart defects: Irene Petersen et al., \"Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Congenital Heart Anomalies: Comparative Cohort Studies of Women Treated Before and During Pregnancy and Their Children,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ 77, no. 1 (2016): e36\u2013e42.\n\nis found in breast milk: Tiffany Field, \"Breastfeeding and Antidepressants,\" _Infant Behavior and Development_ 31, no. 3 (2008): 481\u201387; and Jan Oystein Berle and Olav Spigset, \"Antidepressant Use During Breastfeeding,\" _Current Women's Health Review_ 7 (2011): 28\u201334.\n\nlink Prozac to slow weight gain: C. D. Chambers et al., \"Weight Gain in Infants Breastfed by Mothers Who Take Fluoxetine,\" _Pediatrics_ 104, no. 5 (1999).\n\nincreased risk of autism and ADHD: C. C. Clements et al., \"Prenatal Antidepressant Exposure Is Associated with Risk for Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder but Not Autism Spectrum Disorder in a Large Health System,\" _Molecular Psychiatry_ 20, no. 6 (2015): 727\u201334.\n\ntwice as likely to develop autism: T. Boukhris et al., \"Antidepressant Use During Pregnancy and the Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorder in Children,\" _JAMA Pediatrics_ 170, no. 2 (2016): 117\u201324.\n\nno link between antidepressants and autism: Merete Juul S\u00f8rensen et al., \"Antidepressant Exposure in Pregnancy and Risk of Autism Spectrum Disorders,\" _Clinical Epidemiology_ 5 (2013): 449\u201359.\n\nmore behavioral issues: Katrina C. Johnson et al., \"Preschool Outcomes Following Prenatal Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor Exposure: Differences in Language and Behavior, but Not Cognitive Function,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ 77, no. 2 (2016): e176\u2013e182.\n\nno long-term effects: See for example, Rita Suri et al., \"Acute and Long-Term Behavioral Outcome of Infants and Children Exposed in Utero to Either Maternal Depression or Antidepressants: A Review of the Literature,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ 75, no. 10 (2014): e1142\u2013e1152.\n\nno difference between them: Irena Nulman et al., \"Neurodevelopment of Children Prenatally Exposed to Selective Reuptake Inhibitor Antidepressants: Toronto Sibling Study,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ 76, no. 7 (2015): e842\u2013e847.\n\nto become depressed by age fifteen: Heli Malm et al., \"Gestational Exposure to Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Offspring Psychiatric Disorders: A National Register-Based Study,\" _Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry_ 55, no. 5 (2016): 359\u201366.\n\nBeing exposed to a parent's depression: Myrna M. Weissman et al., \"Offspring of Depressed Parents: 20 Years Later,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 163 (2006): 1001\u201308.\n\nhigher rates of anxiety, aggressive behavior: Bea R. Van den Bergh and Alfons Marcoen, \"High Antenatal Maternal Anxiety Is Related to ADHD Symptoms, Externalizing Problems, and Anxiety in 8- and 9-Year-Olds,\" _Child Development_ 75, no. 4 (2004): 1085\u201397.\n\nlevels of the stress hormone cortisol: Bea R. H. Van den Bergh et al., \"Antenatal Maternal Anxiety Is Related to HPA-Axis Dysregulation and Self-Reported Depressive Symptoms in Adolescence: A Prospective Study on the Fetal Origins of Depressed Mood,\" _Neuropsychopharmacology_ 33, no. 3 (2008): 536\u201345.\n\ntougher time on tasks: Maarten Mennes et al., \"Long-Term Cognitive Sequelae of Antenatal Maternal Anxiety: Involvement of the Orbitofrontal Cortex,\" _Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review_ 30 (2006): 1078\u201386; and Maarten Mennes et al., \"Developmental Brain Alternations in 17 Year Old Boys Are Related to Antenatal Maternal Anxiety,\" _Clinical Neurophysiology_ 120 (2009): 1116\u201322.\n\nreduce the volume of parts of the brain: Claudia Buss et al., \"High Pregnancy Anxiety During Mid-Gestation Is Associated with Decreased Gray Matter Density in 6\u20139 Year-Old Children,\" _Psychoneuroendocrinology_ 35, no. 1 (2010): 141\u201353.\n\nbabies that cry excessively: Johanna Petzoldt et al., \"Maternal Anxiety Disorders Predict Excessive Infant Crying: A Prospective Longitudinal Study,\" _Archives of Disease in Childhood_ 99, no. 9 (2014): 800\u2013806.\n\nfeeding problems in their babies: J. Petzoldt et al., \"Maternal Anxiety Versus Depressive Disorders: Specific Relations to Infants' Crying, Feeding and Sleeping Problems,\" _Child: Care, Health and Development_ 42, no. 2 (2015): 231\u201345.\n\ntransmitted to them in utero: Bea R. H. Van den Bergh et al., \"Antenatal Maternal Anxiety and Stress and the Neurobehavioural Development of the Fetus and Child: Links and Possible Mechanisms. A Review,\" _Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews_ 29 (2005): 237\u201358.\n\ncan cross the placenta: Michael T. Kinsella and Catherine Monk, \"Impact of Maternal Stress, Depression and Anxiety on Fetal Neurobehavioral Development,\" _Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology_ 52, no. 3 (2009): 425\u201340.\n\nstress during pregnancy: Catherine Monk et al., \"Distress During Pregnancy: Epigenetic Regulation of Placenta Glucocorticoid-Related Genes and Fetal Neurobehavior,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 173, no. 7 (2016): 705\u201313.\n\njust before getting pregnant: L. S. Cohen et al., \"Relapse of Major Depression During Pregnancy in Women Who Maintain or Discontinue Antidepressant Treatment,\" _Journal of the American Medical Association_ 295, no. 5 (2006): 499\u2013507.\n\nalmost three times as likely: Katja Beesdo et al., \"Incidence of Social Anxiety Disorder and the Consistent Risk for Secondary Depression in the First Three Decades of Life,\" _Archives of General Psychiatry_ 64, no. 8 (2007): 903\u201312.\n\ndrank alcohol more frequently: Philip C. Kendall et al., \"Child Anxiety Treatment: Outcomes in Adolescence and Impact on Substance Use and Depression at 7.4 Year Follow-Up,\" _Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ 72, no. 2 (2004): 276\u201387.\n\ndeveloped an anxiety disorder: Golda S. Ginsburg et al., \"Preventing Onset of Anxiety Disorders in Offspring of Anxious Parents: A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Family-Based Intervention,\" _American Journal of Psychiatry_ 172, no. 12 (2015): 1207\u201314.\n\nThirty-nine percent of the teenage girls: Ronald M. Rapee, \"The Preventative Effects of a Brief, Early Intervention for Preschool-Aged Children at Risk for Internalizing: Follow-Up into Middle Adolescence,\" _Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry_ 54, no. 7 (2013): 780\u201388.\n\nmet criteria for social anxiety disorder: Andrea Chronis-Tuscano et al., \"Preliminary Evaluation of a Multimodal Early Intervention Program for Behaviorally Inhibited Preschoolers,\" _Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology_ 83, no. 3 (2015): 534\u201340.\n\n# 9. STAYING GROUNDED\n\nnumber of college students diagnosed with: American College Health Association National College Health Assessment, _Spring 2016 Reference Group Executive Summary_ (American College Health Association, 2016); and American College Health Association National College Health Assessment, _Fall 2008 Reference Group Executive Summary_ (American College Health Association, 2008).\n\na link to anxiety and depression: See, for example, H. C. Woods and H. Scott, \"#Sleepyteens: Social Media Use in Adolescence Is Associated with Poor Sleep Quality, Anxiety, Depression and Low Self-Esteem,\" _Journal of Adolescence_ 51 (2016): 41\u201349.\n\nfeelings of loneliness: Moira Burke et al., \"Social Network Activity and Social Well-Being,\" _CHI '10 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems_ (2010): 1909\u201312.\n\ntuition at Michigan: \"Cost of Attendance,\" Office of Financial Aid, University of Michigan, https:\/\/finaid.umich.edu\/\u200bcost-of-attendance\/.\n\nabout $29,000 in debt: _Student Debt and the Class of 2014,_ Institute for College Access and Success, October 2015, http:\/\/ticas.org\/\u200bsites\/\u200bdefault\/\u200bfiles\/\u200bpub_files\/\u200bclassof2014.pdf.\n\nhad had some previous counseling: _College Student Mental Health Survey,_ Phase III, Counseling and Psychological Services, https:\/\/caps.umich.edu\/\u200bfiles\/\u200bcaps\/\u200bCSMHSfinal.pdf.\n\ndon't provide psychiatric services: _Annual Survey 2015_ , Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors. http:\/\/www.aucccd.org\/\u200bassets\/\u200bdocuments\/\u200baucccd%202015%20monograph%20-%20public%20version.pdf.\n\na sign of strength: \"A Survey About Mental Health and Suicide in the United States,\" by Harris Poll on behalf of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, 2015, https:\/\/www.adaa.org\/\u200bsites\/\u200bdefault\/\u200bfiles\/\u200bCollege-Aged_Adults_Survey_Summary-1.14.16.pdf.\n\nConversion disorder is characterized: _DSM_ -5, 318\u201321.\n\nsomatic symptom disorder: Ibid., 311\u201315.\n\nmystery symptoms made up two-thirds: Natalie Steinbrecher et al., \"The Prevalence of Medically Unexplained Symptoms in Primary Care,\" _Psychosomatics_ 52, no. 3 (2011): 263\u201371.\n\nevidence that it is beneficial: John R. Keefe et al., \"A Meta-Analytic Review of Psychodynamic Therapies for Anxiety Disorders,\" _Clinical Psychology Review_ 34, no. 4 (2014): 309\u201323.\n\nassociated with anxiety in teenagers: M. Sarchiapone et al., \"Hours of Sleep in Adolescents and Its Association with Anxiety, Emotional Concerns, and Suicidal Ideation,\" _Sleep Medicine_ 15, no. 2 (2014): 248\u201354.\n\nis linked to anxiety in kids: F. E. Fletcher et al., \"The Association Between Anxiety Symptoms and Sleep in School-Aged Children: A Combined Insight from the Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire and Actigraphy,\" _Behavioral Sleep Medicine_ (2016): 1\u201316.\n\ngreater risk of having more chronic illnesses: Josine G. van Mill et al., \"Sleep Duration, but Not Insomnia, Predicts the 2-Year Course of Depressive and Anxiety Disorders,\" _Journal of Clinical Psychiatry_ 75, no. 2 (2014): 119\u201326.\n\ndifficulty sleeping is a precursor: M. L. Jackson et al., \"Sleep Difficulties and the Development of Depression and Anxiety: A Longitudinal Study of Young Australian Women,\" _Archives of Women's Mental Health_ 17, no. 3 (2014): 189\u201398.\n\nincrease the risk of developing PTSD: Rebecca C. Cox and Bunmi O. Olatunji, \"A Systematic Review of Sleep Disturbance in Anxiety and Related Disorders,\" _Journal of Anxiety Disorders_ 37 (2016): 104\u201329.\n\ngood sleep is critical for consolidating memories: A. K. Zalta et al., \"Sleep Quality Predicts Treatment Outcome in CBT for Social Anxiety Disorder,\" _Depression and Anxiety_ 30, no. 11 (2013): 1114\u201320.\n\ntheir amygdala activity in response to negative: Cox and Oltunji, \"A Systematic Review of Sleep Disturbance in Anxiety and Related Disorders.\"\n\nexercise is modestly effective: K. Jayakody et al., \"Exercise for Anxiety Disorders: Systematic Review,\" _British Journal of Sports Medicine_ 48, no. 3 (2014): 187\u201396.\n\nboost brain-derived neurotrophic factor: Lindsey B. DeBoer et al., \"Exploring Exercise as an Avenue for the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders,\" _Expert Review of Neurotherapuetics_ 12, no. 8 (2012): 1011\u201322.\n\nlowers activity in the HPA axis: Elizabeth Anderson and Geetha Shivakumar, \"Effects of Exercise and Physical Activity on Anxiety,\" _Frontiers in Psychiatry_ 4 (2013).\n\ntime in nature can reduce stress: David G. Pearson and Tony Craig, \"The Great Outdoors? Exploring the Mental Health Benefits of Natural Environments,\" _Frontiers in Psychology_ 5 (2014).\n\ntime in the park had decreased anxiety: Gregory N. Bratman et al., \"The Benefits of Nature Experience: Improved Affect and Cognition,\" _Landscape and Urban Planning_ 138 (2015): 41\u201350.\n\n21 percent higher in urban areas: J. Peen et al., \"The Current Status of Urban-Rural Differences in Psychiatric Disorders,\" _Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica_ 121 (2010): 84\u201393.\n\n_On Edge_ was a team endeavor. I could never have written it without the encouragement, support, and guidance of so many friends, family members, and colleagues. My agent, Gary Morris at the David Black Agency, believed in the book when it was only a few hurried paragraphs sent to him in an email. Through the years it took me to report and write it, Gary has been a fierce advocate, a stalwart sounding board, and a true mensch.\n\nI had the good fortune to land at Crown Publishing, where the brilliant Molly Stern helms an outfit filled with the best in the business. My editor, the incredibly gifted and sharp-eyed Rachel Klayman, smoothed out my language, untangled my logic, and always pushed me to make this book better. Sarah Breivogel and Alaina Waagner got the word out about _On Edge_ with creativity, tenacity, and passion. Claire Potter brought tremendous hard work and enthusiasm to the project. Jon Darga made things run smoothly and good-naturedly answered my many questions. Thanks also to Lance Fitzgerald, Robert Siek, Courtney Snyder, and everyone else on the _On Edge_ team.\n\nAt the _Wall Street Journal_ , editors Mike Miller and Emily Nelson have allowed me to pursue the most fun, most rewarding hybrid beat of psychology, health, and travel and gave me crucial time off to work on this book. Adam Thompson's deft editing makes me look good. Thanks to Elizabeth Bernstein, Elizabeth Holmes, and Sumathi Reddy for commenting on drafts of the manuscript. They, along with Rachel Bachman, Ellen Byron, Ray Smith, and the entire Personal Journal crew, made it a joy to go to work every day. Former editors John Blanton and Hilary Stout were early supporters of _On Edge_ and taught me so much about writing and editing and always did so with incredible generosity, humor, and grace. Thanks also to Dick Tofel, who first hired me at the _Journal_ , and Jim Pensiero, who sent me on my way to becoming a reporter. Rebecca Blumenstein, Cynthia Crossen, Kathy Deveny, Laurie Hays, Dan Hertzberg, Dennis Kneale, and Paul Steiger were important early mentors. Wendy Bounds, Sam Walker, and Jeff Zaslow helped me when I was first contemplating the proposal for this book.\n\nAnxiety researchers and clinicians are among the most generous and patient people around. Danny Pine has steered me to the best research, introduced me to important contacts, and saved me from making several mistakes. I am lucky to count him as a mentor and friend. Jordan Smoller is not only a remarkable scientist, but a wonderful writer as well: He read an early draft of the manuscript and provided important feedback.\n\nThank you also to Anne Marie Albano, Christine Asidao, Yair Bar-Haim, David Barlow, Katja Beesdo-Baum, Andrea Chronis-Tuscano, Michelle Craske, Christina Danko, Michael Davis, Nathan Fox, Jay Gingrich, Christian Grillon, Michelle Hampson, Steven Hayes, Stefan Hofmann, Jerry Kagan, Ned Kalin, Ron Kessler, Don Klein, Joe LeDoux, Heli Malm, Carmen McLean, Francis McMahon, Barbara Morrongiello, Danielle Novick, Ron Rapee, Kerry Ressler, Jeff Rossman, Ken Rubin, Todd Sevig, Robert Temple, Bea Van den Bergh, Greg Van Rybroek, Ulli Wittchen, and Anna Zilverstand.\n\nI'm also very grateful to the late Alies Muskin and her staff at the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.\n\nI'm in awe of the passion, commitment, and openness of the college mental health advocates I've met. Thank you for sharing your stories with me, supporting each other, and fighting for mental health every day. Thanks to Sara Abelson, Alison Malmon, Pam McKeta, and everyone at Active Minds. Also to Victor Schwartz and the crew at the Jed Foundation. A big shout-out to Anna Chen, Anna Learis, Grant Rivas, Shelby Steverson, and Cheyenne Stone at Michigan. Go Blue!\n\nReceiving a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism allowed me to really launch this project. Our initial meeting in Atlanta was the first time I spoke about my anxiety in a professional public setting. Thank you to Mrs. Carter, Rebecca Palpant Shimkets, and the Carter Center staff, mentors, and fellows for the work you do supporting journalism and combating stigma.\n\nSo many friends have encouraged and supported me along the way. Roe D'Angelo and Ianthe Dugan read my drafts, steadied my nerves, and were the very best cheerleaders. A huge thank you also to Amy Bennett, Sabina Broadhead, Mike Cronin, Elisabeth Eaves, Chelsea Emery, Francis Freisinger, Susie Hassan, Gabrielle Kahn, Ron Lieber, Anna Loengard, Jeff Opdyke, Annie Murphy Paul, Josh Prager, Richard Robb, David Roche, Joel Smernoff, David Stone, Johannes and Karin Weidenmueller, Rubina Yeh, Leslie Wright, and Alan Zarembo. The members of the Invisible Institute are a continual source of wisdom and inspiration.\n\nI wrote most of this book at the Ditmas Workspace in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, where Ben Smith and Liena Zagare created a wonderful home for neighborhood writers and the indefatigable Gina, Tom, and Erica Anderson now nurture a growing creative community. Thanks to my fellow quiet room denizens Gabe Heller, David Rogers, and Adam Sternbergh for the camaraderie and conversation. We're lucky to have the Milk & Honey caf\u00e9 a short walk away where Max and the baristas have kept me fueled with decaf.\n\nThank you to the therapists and doctors\u2014especially Dr. G and Dr. L\u2014who have helped keep me healthy.\n\nMost of all, I thank my family. My parents, Anita and Gary Petersen, have put me back together more times than I can recall. My immensely talented sister, Dana Petersen Murphy, talked to me about her own anxiety, and she and her husband, Sean Murphy, fed and housed me during my Wisconsin reporting trips. My aunt Susan Koeferl provided crucial details about my grandmother's illness and was so open about a very painful period in her life. My cousin Renee Jahnke secured our grandmother's records from Mendota. Beverly and Bob Gallagher are the most generous, loving in-laws. Ditto to my fabulous sisters-in-law and their husbands: Jennifer and Sean Briody and Rose and Patrick Gallagher. The Bisel clan in Salem and elsewhere has been this book's unofficial marketing team. Denise Paul has taken such good care of Fiona since she was a baby and gives me the peace of mind I need to work.\n\nIf this book had an MVP, it would be my husband, Sean Gallagher. He talked me through setbacks, kept the music playing, made me pizza, and tore up his own schedule so I had the time to report and write. And he gave me Fiona. My heart, my joy. I missed out on a lot of adventures during the years I've been working on this book. But, yes, Mama can go play now.\n\n# ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nAndrea Petersen is a contributing writer at the _Wall Street Journal,_ where she reports on psychology, health, and neuroscience. She is the recipient of a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http:\/\/links.penguinrandomhouse.com\/type\/prhebooklanding\/isbn\/9780553418583\/display\/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. Copyright\n  4. Contents\n  5. Dedication\n  6. Author's Note\n  7. Prologue\n  8. Chapter 1: The Anticipation of Pain: Defining Anxiety\n  9. Chapter 2: Scary Clowns and the End of Days: Anxiety in Childhood\n  10. Chapter 3: My Grandmother's Madness: The Genetics of Anxiety\n  11. Chapter 4: From CBT to Karaoke: Nondrug Therapies for Anxiety\n  12. Chapter 5: May Cause Dizziness: Medications for Anxiety\n  13. Chapter 6: Cold Calls, Airplanes, and Indecision: Anxiety at Work and on the Road\n  14. Chapter 7: The Isolation Chamber: Anxiety in Love and Friendship\n  15. Chapter 8: Worries About My Daughter: The Education of an Anxious Parent\n  16. Chapter 9: Staying Grounded: Learning to Live with Anxiety\n  17. Notes\n  18. Acknowledgments\n  19. About the Author\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Cover\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Contents\n  5. Start\n\n  1. i\n  2. iii\n  3. iv\n  4. v\n  5. ix\n  6. \n  7. \n  8. \n  9. \n  10. \n  11. \n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223. \n  224. \n  225. \n  226. \n  227. \n  228. \n  229. \n  230. \n  231. \n  232. \n  233. \n  234. \n  235. \n  236. \n  237. \n  238. \n  239. \n  240. \n  241. \n  242. \n  243. \n  244. \n  245. \n  246. \n  247. \n  248. \n  249. \n  250. \n  251. \n  252. \n  253. \n  254. \n  255. \n  256. \n  257. \n  258. \n  259. \n  260. \n  261. \n  262. \n  263. \n  264. \n  265. \n  266. \n  267. \n  268. \n  269. \n  270. \n  271. \n  272. \n  273. \n  274. \n  275. \n  276. \n  277. \n  278. \n  279. \n  280. \n  281. \n  282. \n  283. \n  284. \n  285. \n  286. \n  287. \n  288. \n  289. \n  290. \n  291. \n  292. \n  293. \n  294. \n  295. \n  296. \n  297. \n  298. \n  299. \n  300.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nTable of Contents\n\nFROM THE PAGES OF AESOP'S FABLES\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright Page\n\nAESOP\n\nTHE WORLD OF AESOP AND HIS FABLES\n\nIntroduction\n\nI. THE FOX AND THE GRAPES\n\n2. THE GOOSE THAT LAID THE GOLDEN EGGS\n\n3. THE CAT AND THE MICE\n\n4. THE MISCHIEVOUS DOG\n\n5. THE CHARCOAL BURNER AND THE FULLER\n\n6. THE MICE IN COUNCIL\n\n7. THE BAT AND THE WEASELS\n\n8. THE DOG AND THE SOW\n\n9. THE FOX AND THE CROW\n\n10. THE HORSE AND THE GROOM\n\nII. THE WOLF AND THE LAMB\n\n12. THE PEACOCK AND THE CRANE\n\n13. THE CAT AND THE BIRDS\n\n14. THE SPENDTHRIFT AND THE SWALLOW\n\n15. THE OLD WOMAN AND THE DOCTOR\n\n16. THE MOON AND HER MOTHER\n\n17. MERCURY AND THE WOODMAN\n\n18. THE ASS, THE FOX, AND THE LION\n\n19. THE LION AND THE MOUSE\n\n20. THE CROW AND THE PITCHER\n\n21. THE BOYS AND THE FROGS\n\n22. THE NORTH WIND AND THE SUN\n\n23. THE MISTRESS AND HER SERVANTS\n\n24. THE GOODS AND THE ILLS\n\n25. THE HARES AND THE FROGS\n\n26. THE FOX AND THE STORK\n\n27. THE WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING\n\n28. THE STAG IN THE OX STALL\n\n29. THE MILKMAID AND HER PAIL\n\n30. THE DOLPHINS, THE WHALES, AND THE SPRAT\n\n31. THE FOX AND THE MONKEY\n\n32. THE ASS AND THE LAPDOG\n\n33. THE FIR TREE AND THE BRAMBLE\n\n34. THE FROGS' COMPLAINT AGAINST THE SUN\n\n35. THE DOG, THE COCK, AND THE FOX\n\n36. THE GNAT AND THE BULL\n\n37. THE BEAR AND THE TRAVELERS\n\n38. THE SLAVE AND THE LION\n\n39. THE FLEA AND THE MAN\n\n40. THE BEE AND JUPITER\n\n41. THE OAK AND THE REEDS\n\n42. THE BLIND MAN AND THE CUB\n\n43. THE BOY AND THE SNAILS\n\n44\u00b7 THE APES AND THE TWO TRAVELERS\n\n45. THE ASS AND HIS BURDENS\n\n46. THE SHEPHERD'S BOY AND THE WOLF\n\n47. THE FOX AND THE GOAT\n\n48. THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPRAT\n\n49\u00b7 THE BOASTING TRAVELER\n\n50. THE CRAB AND HIS MOTHER\n\n51 . THE ASS AND HIS SHADOW\n\n52. THE FARMER AND HIS SONS\n\n53. THE DOG AND THE COOK\n\n54. THE MONKEY AS KING\n\n55. THE THIEVES AND THE COCK\n\n56. THE FARMER AND FORTUNE\n\n57. JUPITER AND THE MONKEY\n\n58. FATHER AND SONS\n\n59. THE LAMP\n\n60. THE OWL AND THE BIRDS\n\n61. THE ASS IN THE LION'S SKIN\n\n62. THE SHE-GOATS AND THEIR BEARDS\n\n63. THE OLD LION\n\n64. THE BOY BATHING\n\n65. THE QUACK FROG\n\n66. THE SWOLLEN FOX\n\n67. THE MOUSE, THE FROG, AND THE HAWK\n\n68. THE BOY AND THE NETTLES\n\n69. THE PEASANT AND THE APPLE TREE\n\n70. THE JACKDAW AND THE PIGEONS\n\n71. JUPITER AND THE TORTOISE\n\n72. THE DOG IN THE MANGER\n\n73. THE TWO BAGS\n\n74. THE OXEN AND THE AXLETREES\n\n75. THE BOY AND THE FILBERTS\n\n76. THE FROGS ASKING FOR A KING\n\n77. THE OLIVE TREE AND THE FIG TREE\n\n78 . THE LION AND THE BOAR\n\n79. THE WALNUT TREE\n\n80. THE MAN AND THE LION\n\n81. THE TORTOISE AND THE EAGLE\n\n82. THE KID ON THE HOUSETOP\n\n83. THE FOX WITHOUT A TAIL\n\n84. THE VAIN JACKDAW\n\n85. THE TRAVELER AND HIS DOG\n\n86. THE SHIPWRECKED MAN AND THE SEA\n\n87. THE WILD BOAR AND THE FOX\n\n88. MERCURY AND THE SCULPTOR\n\n89. THE FAWN AND HIS MOTHER\n\n90. THE FOX AND THE LION\n\n91. THE EAGLE AND HIS CAPTOR\n\n92. THE BLACKSMITH AND HIS DOG\n\n93\u00b7 THE STAG AT THE POOL\n\n94. THE DOG AND HIS REFLECTION\n\n95. MERCURY AND THE TRADESMEN\n\n96. THE MICE AND THE WEASELS\n\n97. THE PEACOCK AND JUNO\n\n98. THE BEAR AND THE FOX\n\n99. THE ASS AND THE OLD PEASANT\n\n100. THE OX AND THE FROG\n\n101. THE MAN AND THE IMAGE\n\n102. HERCULES AND THE WAGONER\n\n103. THE POMEGRANATE, THE APPLE TREE, AND THE BRAMBLE\n\n104. THE LION, THE BEAR, AND THE FOX\n\n105. THE BLACKAMOOR\n\n106. THE TWO SOLDIERS AND THE ROBBER\n\n107. THE LION AND THE WILD ASS\n\n108. THE MAN AND THE SATYR\n\n109. THE IMAGE SELLER\n\n110. THE EAGLE AND THE ARROW\n\nIII. THE RICH MAN AND THE TANNER\n\n112. THE WOLF, THE MOTHER, AND HER CHILD\n\n113. THE OLD WOMAN AND THE WINE JAR\n\n114. THE LIONESS AND THE VIXEN\n\n115. THE VIPER AND THE FILE\n\n116. THE CAT AND THE COCK\n\n117. THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE\n\n118. THE SOLDIER AND THE HORSE\n\n119. THE OXEN AND THE BUTCHERS\n\n120. THE WOLF AND THE LION\n\n121. THE SHEEP, THE WOLF, AND THE STAG\n\n122. THE LION AND THE THREE BULLS\n\n123. THE HORSE AND HIS RIDER\n\n124. THE GOAT AND THE VINE\n\n125- THE TWO POTS\n\nI26. THE OLD HOUND\n\n127. THE CLOWN AND THE COUNTRYMAN\n\n128. THE LARK AND THE FARMER\n\n129. THE LION AND THE ASS\n\n130. THE PROPHET\n\n131. THE HOUND AND THE HARE\n\n132. THE LION, THE MOUSE, AND THE FOX\n\n133. THE TRUMPETER TAKEN PRISONER\n\n134. THE WOLF AND THE CRANE\n\n135. THE EAGLE, THE CAT, AND THE WILD SOW\n\n136. THE WOLF AND THE SHEEP\n\n137. THE TUNA FISH AND THE DOLPHIN\n\n138. THE THREE TRADESMEN\n\n139. THE MOUSE AND THE BULL\n\n140. THE HARE AND THE HOUND\n\n141. THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE\n\n142. THE LION AND THE BULL\n\n143. THE WOLF, THE FOX AND THE APE\n\n144. THE EAGLE AND THE COCKS\n\n145. THE ESCAPED JACKDAW\n\n146. THE FARMER AND THE FOX\n\n147. VENUS AND THE CAT\n\n148. THE CROW AND THE SWAN\n\n149. THE STAG WITH ONE EYE\n\n150. THE FLY AND THE DRAFT MULE\n\n151. THE COCK AND THE JEWEL\n\n152. THE WOLF AND THE SHEPHERD\n\n153. THE FARMER AND THE STORK\n\n154. THE CHARGER AND THE MILLER\n\n155. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE OWL\n\n156. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANTS\n\n157. THE FARMER AND THE VIPER\n\n158. THE TWO FROGS\n\n159. THE COBBLER TURNED DOCTOR\n\n160. THE ASS, THE COCK, AND THE LION\n\n161. THE BELLY AND THE MEMBERS\n\n162. THE BALD MAN AND THE FLY\n\n163. THE ASS AND THE WOLF\n\n164. THE MONKEY AND THE CAMEL\n\n165. THE SICK MAN AND THE DOCTOR\n\n166. THE TRAVELERS AND THE PLANE TREE\n\n167. THE FLEA AND THE OX\n\n168. THE BIRDS, THE BEASTS, AND THE BAT\n\n169. THE MAN AND HIS TWO MISTRESSES\n\n170. THE EAGLE, THE JACKDAW, AND THE SHEPHERD\n\n171. THE WOLF AND THE BOY\n\n172. THE MILLER, HIS SON, AND THEIR ASS\n\n173. THE STAG AND THE VINE\n\n174. THE LAMB CHASED BY A WOLF\n\n175. THE ARCHER AND THE LION\n\n176. THE WOLF AND THE GOAT\n\n177. THE SICK STAG\n\n178. THE ASS AND THE MULE\n\n179. BROTHER AND SISTER\n\n180. THE HEIFER AND THE OX\n\n181. THE KINGDOM OF THE LION\n\n182. THE ASS AND HIS DRIVER\n\n183. THE LION AND THE HARE\n\n184. THE WOLVES AND THE DOGS\n\n185. THE BULL AND THE CALF\n\n186. THE TREES AND THE AX\n\n187. THE ASTRONOMER\n\n188. THE LABORER AND THE SNAKE\n\n189. THE CAGED BIRD AND THE BAT\n\n190. THE ASS AND HIS PURCHASER\n\n191. THE KID AND THE WOLF\n\n192. THE DEBTOR AND HIS SOW\n\n193. THE BALD HUNTSMAN\n\n194. THE HERDSMAN AND THE LOST BULL\n\n195. THE HOUND AND THE FOX\n\n196. THE MULE\n\n197. THE FATHER AND HIS DAUGHTERS\n\nI98. THE THIEF AND THE INNKEEPER\n\n199. THE PACK ASS AND THE WILD ASS\n\n200. THE ASS AND HIS MASTERS\n\n201. THE PACK ASS, THE WILD ASS, AND THE LION\n\n202. THE ANT\n\n203. THE FROGS AND THE WELL\n\n204.. THE CRAB AND THE FOX\n\n205. THE FOX AND THE GRASSHOPPER\n\n206. THE FARMER, HIS BOY, AND THE ROOKS\n\n207. THE ASS AND THE DOG\n\n208. THE ASS CARRYING THE IMAGE\n\n209. THE ATHENIAN AND THE THEBAN\n\n210. THE GOATHERD AND THE GOAT\n\n211. THE SHEEP AND THE DOG\n\n212. THE SHEPHERD AND THE WOLF\n\n213. THE LION, JUPITER, AND THE ELEPHANT\n\n214. THE PIG AND THE SHEEP\n\n215. THE GARDENER AND HIS DOG\n\n216. THE RIVERS AND THE SEA\n\n217. THE LION IN LOVE\n\n218. THE BEEKEEPER\n\n219. THE WOLF AND THE HORSE\n\n220. THE BAT, THE BRAMBLE, AND THE SEAGULL\n\n221. THE DOG AND THE WOLF\n\n222. THE WASP AND THE SNAKE\n\n223. THE EAGLE AND THE BEETLE\n\n224. THE FOWLER AND THE LARK\n\n225. THE FISHERMAN PIPING\n\n226. THE WEASEL AND THE MAN\n\n227. THE PLOWMAN, THE ASS, AND THE OX\n\n228. DEMADES AND HIS FABLE\n\n229. THE MONKEY AND THE DOLPHIN\n\n230. THE CROW AND THE SNAKE\n\n231. THE DOGS AND THE FOX\n\n232. THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE HAWK\n\n233. THE ROSE AND THE AMARANTH\n\n234. THE MAN, THE HORSE, THE OX, AND THE DOG\n\n235. THE WOLVES, THE SHEEP, AND THE RAM\n\n236. THE SWAN\n\n237. THE SNAKE AND JUPITER\n\n238. THE WOLF AND HIS SHADOW\n\n239. THE PLOWMAN AND THE WOLF\n\n240. MERCURY AND THE MAN BITTEN BY AN ANT\n\n241. THE WILY LION\n\n242. THE PARROT AND THE CAT\n\n243. THE STAG AND THE LION\n\n244. THE IMPOSTER\n\n245. THE DOGS AND THE HIDES\n\n246. THE LION, THE FOX, AND THE ASS\n\n247- THE FOWLER, THE PARTRIDGE, AND THE COCK\n\n248. THE GNAT AND THE LION\n\n249. THE FARMER AND HIS DOGS\n\n250. THE EAGLE AND THE FOX\n\n251. THE BUTCHER AND HIS CUSTOMERS\n\n252. HERCULES AND MINERVA\n\n253. THE FOX WHO SERVED A LION\n\n254. THE QUACK DOCTOR\n\n255. THE LION, THE WOLF, AND THE FOX\n\n256. HERCULES AND PLUTUS\n\n257. THE FOX AND THE LEOPARD\n\n258. THE FOX AND THE HEDGEHOG\n\n259. THE CROW AND THE RAVEN\n\n260. THE WITCH\n\n261. THE OLD MAN AND DEATH\n\n262. THE MISER\n\n263. THE FOXES AND THE RIVER\n\n264. THE HORSE AND THE STAG\n\n265. THE FOX AND THE BRAMBLE\n\n266. THE FOX AND THE SNAKE\n\n267. THE LION, THE FOX, AND THE STAG\n\n268. THE MAN WHO LOST HIS SPADE\n\n269. THE PARTRIDGE AND THE FOWLER\n\n270. THE RUNAWAY SLAVE\n\n271. THE HUNTER AND THE WOODMAN\n\n272. THE SERPENT AND THE EAGLE\n\n273. THE ROGUE AND THE ORACLE\n\n274. THE HORSE AND THE ASS\n\n275. THE DOG CHASING A WOLF\n\n276. GRIEF AND HIS DUE\n\n277. THE HAWK, THE KITE, AND THE PIGEONS\n\n278. THE WOMAN AND THE FARMER\n\n279. PROMETHEUS AND THE MAKING OF MAN\n\n280. THE SWALLOW AND THE CROW\n\n2SI. THE HUNTER AND THE HORSEMAN\n\n282. THE GOATHERD AND THE WILD GOATS\n\n283. THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE SWALLOW\n\n284. THE TRAVELER AND FORTUNE\n\nGLOSSARY OF NAMES AND TERMS FROM CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY\n\nAPPENDIX\n\nINSPIRED BY AESOP'S FABLES\n\nCOMMENTS & QUESTIONS\n\nFOR FURTHER READING\n\nALPHABETICAL INDEX OF FABLES\n**FROM THE PAGES OF AESOP'S FABLES**\n\nHonesty is the best policy.   \n(page 30)\n\nNecessity is the mother of invention.   \n(page 32)\n\nDo not count your chickens before they are hatched.   \n(page 40)\n\nLook before you leap.   \n(page 58)\n\nExample is better than precept.   \n(page 60)\n\nWhat is worth most is often valued least.   \n(page 93)\n\nA hypocrite deceives no one but himself.   \n(page 99)\n\nHeaven helps those who help themselves.   \n(page 102)\n\nQuality, not quantity.   \n(page 111)\n\nSlow and steady wins the race.   \n(page 114)\n\nPride comes before a fall.   \n(page 135)\n\nRevenge is a two-edged sword.   \n(page 137)\n\nA man is known by the company he keeps.   \n(page 173)\n\nThink twice before you act.   \n(page 182)\n\nBe content with your lot.   \n(page 182)\n\nWhen you hit back make sure you have got   \nthe right man.   \n(page 194)\n\nOnce bitten, twice shy.   \n(page 197)\n\nOut of the frying pan into the fire.   \n(page 213)\n\nOne good turn deserves another.   \n(page 235)\n\nPublished by Barnes & Noble Books   \n122 Fifth Avenue   \nNew York, NY 10011\n\nwww.barnesandnoble.com\/classics\n\nThe present text of Aesop's Fables derives from V.S. Vernon Jones's edition published by W. Heinemann in 1912. Spelling and punctuation have been Americanized, printer's errors corrected, and capitalization standardized throughout.\n\nPublished in 2003 by Barnes & Noble Classics with new Introduction,   \nNotes, Biography, Chronology, Map, Inspired By, Comments & Questions,   \nand For Further Readingl\n\nIntroduction, Notes, and For Further Reading\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2003 by D. L. Ashliman.\n\nNote on Aesop, The World of Aesop and His _Fables,_   \nInspired by _Aesop's Fables,_ and Comments & Questions   \nCopyright \u00a9 2003 by Fine Creative Media, Inc.\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.\n\nBarnes & Noble Classics and the Barnes & Noble Classics colophon are trademarks of Barnes & Noble, Inc.\n\n_Aesop's Fables_\n\nISBN-13: 978-1-59308-062-4 ISBN-10: 1-59308-062-X\n\neISBN : 978-1-411-43171-3\n\nLC Control Number 2003108022\n\nProduced and published in conjunction with:   \nFine Creative Media, Inc.   \n322 Eighth Avenue   \nNew York, NY 10001   \nMichael J. Fine, President and Publisher\n\nPrinted in the United States of America   \nQM   \n9 10 8\n**AESOP**\n\nAesop may not be a historical figure but rather a name that refers to a group of ancient storytellers. And if a man named Aesop did exist, it is unlikely that he committed any of his immortal fables to paper. After his presumed date of death several centuries passed before the first reliably known written collection of the stories appeared. What, then, is known of this elusive author, of whose true identity, like Homer's, we have but a hazy impression?\n\nTradition says that around 620 B.C., Aesop was born a slave in one of the ancient city-states in Asia Minor, on the Greek island of Samos, or in Ethiopia or another locale. A man named Xanthus owned him first, and then Iadmon; because of Aesop's marvelous wit and capacious intellect, Iadmon gave him his freedom. According to Plutarch, Aesop served as a shrewd and capable emissary to the wealthy Croesus, king of Lydia, who employed the fabulist in his court, where he dined with philosophers and from which he traveled on ambassadorial missions. The brilliant storyteller reportedly journeyed throughout Greece, doing business for Croesus and delighting the citizens of many cities with his fables.\n\nAs the fables that bear his name suggest, Aesop must have been a clever and wisely observant man, but according to one account of his death, his keen sense of human behavior was his undoing. Croesus had entrusted Aesop with a fortune in gold and sent him as an emissary to Delphi, with instructions to spread the sum throughout the land. But the avarice of the citizens disgusted Aesop, and he declined to hand out the money. Sadly, his mistrust of the people was well founded, for they executed Aesop, some say by hurling him from a cliff-top.\n\nThe death of Aesop the man had little impact on the life of his works, and collections of \"Aesop's fables\" grew and flourished through the ages, in both written and oral form. They were among the first printed works in the vernacular European languages, and writers and thinkers throughout history have perpetuated them to such an extent that they are embraced as among the essential truths about human beings and their ways.\n**THE WORLD OF AESOP AND  \nHIS FABLES**\n\nc. 2000 B.C| In ancient Mesopotamia proverbs and fables featuring animals are recorded on clay tablets. Probably based on older material, now lost, such stories were most likely invented independently in more than one place; prehistoric travelers car ried them back and forth across the world.  \n---|---  \nc. 620| Aesop was born a slave or possibly captured into slavery at an early age; his birthplace might have been Thrace, Phrygia, Samos, Athens, Sardis, or Ethiopia. As a young man he was taken by a slave trader to what is now Turkey. When no one would buy him, he was taken to the island of Samos, where a man said to be a philosopher called Xanthus purchased him as a servant for his wife. Later he was owned by Iadmon, a Samian, who gave Aesop his freedom.  \nSeventh-sixth centuries| The Seven Sages of Greece\u2014Solon of Athens, Chilon of Sparta, Thales of Miletus, Bias of Pri ene, Cleobulus of Lindos, Pittacus of Mitylene, and Periander of Corinth\u2014are revered as the source of the highest practical wisdom. Accord ing to Plutarch, Aesop is a guest at one of the sages' banquets.  \nc. 560| Aesop's cunning, wisdom, and oratory had freed him from slavery, but this year they will cost him his life. The citizens of Delphi, offended by perceived insults to their aristocracy and the god Apollo, plant a golden cup in his baggage, then accuse him of having stolen it; they execute Aesop by throwing him off a cliff.  \n425| In his _History_ of the Greco-Persian wars, the Greek historian Herodotus writes about Aesop.  \n422| In his comedy _Wasps,_ Aristophanes notes that, at banquets in ancient Athens, a common entertainment was the telling of anecdotes and comic stories in the style of Aesop.  \n360| Plato records in his dialog _Phaedo_ that Socrates, in prison awaiting execution, had diverted him self by writing some of Aesop's fables in verse.  \nc. 300| In Athens, Demetrius Phalareus may compile the first collection of fables attributed to Aesop, but it will not survive after about 900 A.D. In India, the first of the didactic _Jataka_ tales are written and will continue to be recorded until about 400 A.D.; many are based in ancient folklore and have close parallels in Aesop. Part of the canon of sacred Buddhist literature, the col lection\u2014some 550 anecdotes and fables\u2014de picts early incarnations of the Buddha.  \nc. 100| In India, a Sanskrit collection of tales is col lected that will form the basis for the _Panchatantra_ (see third and fourth centuries A.D.).  \nFirst century| The Roman poet Horace records, in his _Satires,_ one of the most famous of Aesop's fables, \"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse\" (no. 141).  \nc. 15 B.C.| Phaedrus is born as a slave in Thrace; at a young age he moves to Italy, where he gains his free dom. He will live until 50 A.D.  \nFirst century A.D.| In Rome, Phaedrus records the oldest surviving collection of Aesopic fables in Latin iambic verse; the five books of his collection contain some 94 fables. Later editors will rely heavily on Phaedrus as a source for their \"Aesop's fables.\"  \nSecond century| Babrius, probably a Hellenized Roman, assem bles the oldest extant collection of Aesopic fa bles in Greek. It includes more than 200 fables, 143 of which are still extant in verse form; 57 others have survived paraphrased in prose. Ba brius's Aesopic fables will also serve as a source for later editors.  \nThird-fourth centuries| In India, the _Panchatantra_ is compiled; many of these 87 animal fables were ancient oral folk tales.  \n400| Flavius Avianus rewrites in Latin verse 42 of the Greek fables from the Babrius collection. Although these stories are not as succinct as the best fables, the collection will be influential in medieval Europe and often used in schools.  \nc. 1000| The great collection of Arabic short fiction _The 1001 Nights,_ also known as _The Arabian Nights' Entertainment,_ is compiled; based on Indian, Persian, and Arabic folklore, many of the in dividual stories are undoubtedly even older. In addition to romantic tales of fantasy and magic, _The 1001 Nights_ also contains a number of Aesop-like animal fables.  \nc. 1160-1190| Marie de France, the greatest woman author of the Middle Ages, composes 103 original fables in French verse; called _ysopets,_ they are in the Aesopic tradition.  \nc. 1300| The Byzantine scholar Planudes Maximus com piles a well-regarded collection of Aesop's fables and writes the earliest known biography of Ae sop. His most likely fictional descriptions of Ae sop portray him as monstrously deformed. However, ancient texts that refer to Aesop make no mention of any such deformity.  \n1330| The popularity of fables attributed to Aesop leads to new literary creations in the same tradition. This year, an anonymous English scribe writes _Gesta Romanorum_ (Deeds of the Romans) ; among the 283 recorded \"deeds\" are a dozen animal fables similar to those of Aesop.  \nc. 1450| Movable-type printing is developed, greatly facilitating the publication of fable collections in vernacular languages throughout Europe.  \n1461| The first book printed in German is a collection of fables attributed to Aesop and Flavius Avi anus ; compiled by Ulrich Boner, it is titled _Der Edelstein_ (The Precious Stone).  \nc. 1476| Heinrich Steinh\u00f6wel publishes _Esopus,_ a collection of fables in Latin and German; translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Czech, it will become an international best seller.  \n1484| William Caxton publishes an English transla tion of the French version of Steinh\u00f6wel's _Eso pus;_ it is among the first books published in English.  \n1668-1694| Jean de La Fontaine publishes about 240 poems in the Aesopic tradition; many readers today know Aesopic fables primarily through La Fon taine's rendition.\n**INTRODUCTION**\n\n\"Don't count your chickens before they are hatched!\" \"He is a wolf in sheep's clothing.\" \"She has a sour-grapes attitude.\" \"They are killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.\" \"He demands the lion's share.\" \"Don't be like the boy who called 'wolf!' \" These expressions are so much a part of our everyday language and culture that they seem to have been with us forever, and that is almost the case, for the fables that produced these proverbial sayings are indeed even older than (to name but three) the modern English, French, and German languages where today they are so much at home. The fables behind these sayings are those of arguably the most famous storyteller of all time, the legendary Aesop. Who was the man who created these timeless literary gems?\n\n#  _**The Man Aesop**_\n\nAesop (sometimes spelled \u00c6sop, \u00c6sopus, Esop, Esope, or\u2014using the Greek form of his name\u2014Aisopos) has been known in history and in legend since the fifth century B.C., or earlier, as a gifted Greek storyteller and the author of the world's best-known collection of fables. However, it cannot be proven with any degree of certainty that he existed as a real person. Most modern scholars believe that Aesop was instead a name invented, already in antiquity, to provide attribution for a body of oral tales whose true authors were a number of anonymous storytellers. Martin Luther expressed this view some 500 years ago: \"Attributing these stories to Aesop is, in my opinion, itself a fiction. Perhaps there has never been on earth a man by the name of Aesop\" (quoted in Jacobs, _History of the Aesopic_ Fable, p. 15; see \"For Further Reading\").\n\nAlthough it is possible that there was indeed a gifted Greek storyteller by the name of Aesop, his reputation expanded to legendary proportions in the decades and centuries following his death, and with time many more stories and deeds were credited to him than he could have composed and performed. Supporting this view, many of the earliest references to the stories of Aesop refer to Aesopic (or Aesopian) fables rather than Aesop's fables. In other words, Aesopic, an adjective, describes a kind of story and a literary tradition but does not claim to identify a specific author.\n\nOne thing is certain: Aesop, if he existed at all, did not leave behind a collection of written fables. His reputation is that of an oral storyteller, not an author of written literature. The oldest references to his fables refer to tales memorized and retold, not written and read. For example, from Aristophanes' comedy _Wasps_ (written in 422 B.C.) we learn that telling anecdotes and comic stories in the style of Aesop was common entertainment at banquets in ancient Athens. More seriously, in 360 B.C. Plato recorded in his dialog _Phaedo_ (section 61b) that Socrates, under sentence of death in prison, diverted himself by reformulating some of Aesop's fables. Plato's Phaedo quotes Socrates himself: \"I took some fables of Aesop, which I had ready at hand and knew, and turned them into verse.\" The doomed philosopher did not have a book or manuscript of Aesop's fables in prison with him, if such a book or manuscript even existed at the time. He knew the fables from memory, as did the partygoers in Aristophanes' comedy.\n\nThe most frequently cited ancient reference to the man Aesop is found in the _History_ of the Greco-Persian Wars written by the Greek historian Herodotus about 425 B.C. Here we learn that Aesop, the fable writer, was a slave of Iadmon, son of Hephaestopolis, a Samian, and that Iadmon's grandson (also named Iadmon) claimed and received compensation for the murder of Aesop. If this account is true, Aesop would have lived during the sixth century B.C. Apart from this sketchy biography, Herodotus recorded essentially no additional details about the fable writer.\n\nHowever, later Greek and Roman writers were not so reticent. One body of literature is particularly relevant in this regard. Usually referred to as The Life _of Aesop,_ this work has survived in a number of medieval manuscripts by different anonymous compilers and is based on earlier accounts, now lost. The statements about Aesop's life history contained in the different versions of this work often contradict one another, or they are so miraculous and fantastic as to be unbelievable by modern standards.\n\nThe ultimate source of these accounts is undoubtedly folklore: anonymous legends told and retold by generations of oral storytellers. _The Life of Aesop_ is today generally held to be fiction, but as is the case with many legends, there could be at least a kernel of truth in one or more of the episodes. The following biographical outline has been gleaned from different versions of _The Life of Aesop,_ most prominently the accounts published by Lloyd W. Daly in his _Aesop without Morals_ (pp. 31-90) and the _Everyman's Library_ version of _Aesop: Fables_ (pp. 17-45).\n\nAesop was born a slave, or possibly was captured into slavery at an early age. His birthplace is variously stated as Thrace, Phrygia, Ethiopia, Samos, Athens, or Sardis. He was dark-skinned. In fact, it is said that his name was derived from _Aethiop_ (Ethiopian). He was physically deformed: a hunchback, pot belly, misshapen head, snub nose, and bandy legs are often mentioned. Although in his early years he suffered from a serious speech impediment, or\u2014according to some\u2014the inability to speak at all, he was cured through the intervention of a deity and became a gifted orator, especially skillful at incorporating fables into his speeches.\n\nAs a young man Aesop was transported by a slave trader to Eph esus (in modern Turkey). Because of his grotesque appearance, no one there would buy him, so he was taken to the island of Samos, where he was examined by Xanthus, identified in the manuscripts as \"an eminent philosopher,\" but a person whose existence cannot be verified historically. At first repulsed by Aesop's appearance, Xanthus changed his mind when the slave proclaimed, \"A philosopher should value a man for his mind, not for his body.\" Impressed with Aesop's astuteness, Xanthus purchased him as a manservant for his wife.\n\nAesop soon proved himself to be an irreverent and sarcastic trickster with a clever retort for every occasion. The following episode is typical of many others illustrating how Aesop's quick wit saved him from punishment, sometimes deserved, sometimes not. Xanthus, wanting to know what fate awaited him on a particular day, sent Aesop to see if any crows were outside the door. According to popular belief, two crows would portend good fortune, whereas a single crow would be an omen of bad luck. Aesop saw a pair of crows and reported this to his master, who then set forth with good cheer. Upon opening the door, Xanthus saw only a single crow, for one of them had flown away, and he angrily turned on his slave for having tricked him into beginning a dangerous venture. \"You shall be whipped for this!\" said Xanthus, and while Aesop was being readied for his punishment a messenger arrived at the door with an invitation for Xanthus to dine with his friends. \"Your omens have no meaning!\" cried Aesop. \"I saw the auspicious pair of crows, yet I am about to be beaten like a dog, whereas you saw the ominous single crow, and you are about to make merry with your friends.\" Perceiving the irony and the wisdom of this observation, Xanthus released Aesop and spared him the threatened punishment.\n\nAesop's cleverness extended from word to deed. An unrepentant trickster, his pranks ranged from tricking his fellow slaves into carrying the heavier burdens, to seducing his master's wife with her unwitting husband's apparent blessing. His tricks often were masked by feigned stupidity on his part, which has led commentators to compare him to the German Till Eulenspiegel and the Turkish Nas reddin Hoca, two of the world's most rascally, but beloved tricksters.\n\nAesop's legendary wisdom and shrewdness sometimes moved into the realm of the supernatural. He could solve seemingly impossible riddles and conundrums, foretell the future with uncanny accuracy, and unerringly discover hidden treasures. A master of human psychology, he understood what motivated people to act, and used this knowledge to manipulate them to his advantage. As his life progressed he moved to ever greater venues: from a trickster in a slave's workroom to a lecturer in a philosopher's auditorium to a diplomat and councilor in the courts of governors and kings.\n\nWith time his cunning, wisdom, and oratory skills brought him freedom from slavery, but in the end they cost him his life. At Delphi the citizens, offended by his lack of respect for their aristocracy and for their principal deity Apollo, planted a golden cup in his baggage, then accused him of temple theft.\n\nSentenced to die by being thrown over a cliff, Aesop pleaded his case with a series of fables, one of which was the story of \"The Mouse, the Frog, and the Hawk\" (no. 67 in the present collection). In this tale a frog and a mouse go swimming together in a pool with their feet tied together, but the mouse drowns. The frog, burdened by the dead mouse, is now an easy prey for a hawk, which forthwith captures and devours him.\n\nAesop compared himself to the mouse and the Delphians to the frog. \"You may kill me,\" he predicted, \"but my unjust death will bring you great misfortune.\" Aesop was executed near Delphi, and his dire prediction came true. Shortly after his death the region was visited with famine, pestilence, and warfare. The Delphians consulted the Oracle of Apollo as to the source of these calamities, and they received the answer that they were to make amends for the unjust death of Aesop. Accordingly they built there a pyramid in his honor.\n\n#  _**Ancient Greek and Latin Collections**_\n\nUnlike with later collectors, editors, and authors of tales, such as Charles Perrault, the Grimm brothers, and H. C. Andersen, it is not possible to establish an authoritative canon of stories attributable to Aesop, nor does there exist a standard version of Greek or Latin fables in the Aesopic style.\n\nThe first mentioned collection of fables attributed to Aesop is said to have been compiled in Athens by one Demetrius Phalareus about 300 B.C., but this work is no longer extant. It did not survive later than about 900 A.D., and it is not known how many stories this collection contained, nor which specific fables it included.\n\nThe oldest surviving collection of Aesopic fables was recorded in Rome in Latin iambic verse by Phaedrus during the first century A.D. Phaedrus was born as a slave about 15 B.C. in Thrace; at a young age moved to Italy, where he gained his freedom; and died about 50 A.D. Divided into five books, Phaedrus's collection contains some 94 fables. The opening lines of his prologue are instructive : \"Aesop is my source. He invented the substance of these fables, but I have put them into finished form.... A double dowry comes with this, my little book: it moves to laughter, and by wise counsels guides the conduct of life. Should anyone choose to run it down, because trees too are vocal, not wild beasts alone, let him remember that I speak in jest of things that never happened\" (Perry, _Babrius and Phaedrus,_ p. 191). Later editors relied heavily on Phaedrus as a source for their \"Aesop's fables.\"\n\nThe oldest extant collection of Aesopic fables in Greek was authored by Babrius (sometimes identified as Valerius Babrius) in the second century A.D. Apart from the deduction from his linguistic style that he was a Hellenized Roman, nothing is known about the person Babrius. His collection included more than 200 fables, 143 of which are still extant in their original verse form, with an additional 57 having survived in prose paraphrases. Like the collection of his predecessor Phaedrus, Babrius's Aesopic fables also served as a source for later editors.\n\nAmong the many classical authors who used Aesop-like stories in their own works, none is more important than the Roman satirist and poet Horace (65-8 B.C.). In fact, one of the most famous of all fables attributed to Aesop, \"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse\" (no. 141), was first recorded by Horace in his _Satires_ (book 2, no. 6). The context is revealing, showing how traditional fables were used in classical Roman society. The narrator relates that from time to time a man named Cervius would tell fables to his friends, and whenever one of them would \"forget the dreads of wealth, he'd tell this one.\" The narrator continues by recounting the now-familiar fable in full. Some 200 years later Babrius recorded \"The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse\" in his collection of Aesopic fables, and it has been credited to Aesop from that time forth.\n\n#  _**From the Middle Ages to the Present**_\n\nAesopic fables were highly valued in medieval and renaissance Europe for their ethical qualities, and many collections were assembled for educational use. The first of these were compilations in manuscript form and in Latin. An early and prominent example of these school texts was the compilation created in about 400 A.D. by Flavius Avianus, who rewrote in Latin verse 42 of the Greek fables from the Babrius collection. Although his stories lacked the compactness and the sharp focus of the best fables, his collection was nonetheless very influential in medieval Europe, and was often used in schools.\n\nThe development of movable-type printing, beginning about 1450, greatly facilitated the publication of fable collections in vernacular languages throughout Europe. In fact, apparently the first book printed in the German language was a collection of fables. (The famous Gutenberg Bible of 1455 was in Latin.) This collection was the work of Ulrich Boner, a Swiss Dominican monk, who in about 1350 compiled a manuscript collection of fables titled _Der Edelstein_ (The Precious Stone) and attributed to Aesop and Flavius Avianus. After circulating for more than a century in manuscript form, Der _Edelstein_ was printed as a book in 1461, and is reputed to be the first book printed in the German language.\n\nAnother German-language author, Heinrich Steinh\u00f6wel (1412- 1483), contributed even more to the European distribution of Aesopic fables in the vernacular. His _Esopus,_ a bilingual collection of fables in Latin and German, was published in about 1476 and soon became, relatively speaking, an international bestseller. This book was translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Czech. The French-language version of Steinh\u00f6wel's _Esopus_ was translated into English and published in 1484 by William Caxton, the pioneering English printer. Thus a collection of Aesopic fables was also among the very first books published in the English language.\n\nThe popularity of fables attributed to Aesop from the Middle Ages onward led quite naturally to new literary creations in the same tradition. One such work was the so-called _Gesta_ Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans), written in Latin by an anonymous English scribe about 1330. Only a few of the 283 recorded \"deeds\" relate to the Romans. Instead, the work presents a mixture of anecdotes, legends, and fables, all with appended morals, called \"applications.\" About a dozen of the stories are animal fables, similar in content, form, and function to those of Aesop.\n\nMedieval imitations of Aesop led to a new word in French, _ysopet_ (also spelled _isopet),_ referring to a collection of freshly minted fables in the Aesopic tradition. The most famous of these _ysopets_ are the _Fables_ of Marie de France, numbering 103 and composed in French verse between about 1160 and 1190. Although she is celebrated as the greatest woman author of the Middle Ages, almost nothing is known about the person Marie de France, except that she lived in French-speaking Norman England.\n\nThe re-creation of Aesopic fables in verse form was brought to its highest level some 500 years later by another French-language poet, Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695). In about 240 poems, published in twelve books between 1668 and 1694, La Fontaine captured the essence of the Aesopic tradition with wit and charm. In fact, many readers of our era know Aesopic fables primarily through the graceful renditions of La Fontaine. The didactic nature of the fable, its pragmatic this-worldly view, and its roots in classical antiquity appealed to many other gifted European writers of the Age of Reason. Three additional names stand out: John Locke (1632- 1704) and John Gay (1685-1732) from England, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) from Germany.\n\nThe nineteenth century produced two writers of beast stories deserving special notice. Possibly the greatest nineteenth-century author to rewrite Aesopic fables was Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), who incorporated both traditional and original material into fables and fairy tales for primers and readers that he wrote in the 1870s to teach Russian peasants' children how to read. From a different world, but still drawing on the same traditional material, was Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908), whose _Uncle Remus_ stories contain many episodes also found in Aesopic fables. The prevailing view that African-American folklore provided much of Harris's raw material opens up the possibility that Africa may have played a substantial, but largely unheralded role in the development and transmission of Aesopic fables from the earliest times. Remember that according to some sources the man Aesop was a native of Ethiopia.\n\nMany writers in the twentieth century have written imitations and parodies of traditional fables for their own social-critical purposes, but no one more successfully than the American humorist James Thurber (1894-1961) in his witty and ironic _Fables for Our Time_ (1940). Also following in the satirical spirit of Aesop, if not imitating his terse style, was George Orwell (1903-1950), whose _Animal Farm_ (1945) is often referred to as a \"political fable.\"\n\nThe preceding list of editors and authors, covering more than 2,000 years of time and extending across the length and breadth of Europe, and beyond, illustrates the timeless appeal of the Aesopic tradition. Many additional names could be added to the list. Aesopic fables are a cultural legacy whose importance can hardly be overstated.\n\n#  _**Oriental Fables**_\n\nThe history of Aesopic and Aesop-inspired fables in Europe outlined above follows a tradition beginning in Greece, nurtured in Rome, then expanded and brought to maturity throughout Europe, but this summary has not addressed the questions: Are similar didactic animal fables also native to cultures outside of Greece? And did such tales exist before Aesop? Both questions have affirmative answers, but supporting details are sketchy and sometimes ambiguous, as would be expected of evidence from the very distant past.\n\nClay tablets from ancient Mesopotamia have revealed the existence of collections of proverbs and fables featuring animals as actors some 4,000 years ago, and it is assumed that these tablets are based on even older material no longer extant. Did these Mesopotamian stories find their way to Greece and elsewhere in undisclosed prehistoric times, carried orally by ancient travelers? Or did the tales travel from Greece to Mesopotamia? These questions cannot be answered definitively, although experience with other forms of folk lore and common sense itself suggest that some stories with universal application may well have been invented independently in more than one area, a process called polygenesis by folklorists. Furthermore, prehistoric travelers, like their modern counterparts, carried both material goods and intellectual property in all directions, both coming and going.\n\nA large number of European folktales (especially the magic stories commonly called fairy tales) have their origin on the Indian subcontinent. Although the prevailing scholarly opinion of today is that Greece, not India, was the ancestral home of most animal fables, some of the latter country's most venerable literary works feature fables similar to those attributed to Aesop, and I find it hard to conceive that ancient Indian storytellers traveling abroad would omit animal fables from their repertory. In my judgment, the storytelling paths between ancient India and the Mediterranean world were two-way streets, to the mutual benefit of both cultures.\n\nIndia's arguably most influential contribution to world literature is the _Panchatantra_ (also spelled _Pa\u00f1catantra_ or _Pa\u00f1ca-tantra_ ), which consists of five books of animal fables and magic tales (some 87 stories in all) that were compiled, in their current form, between the third and fifth centuries A.D. This work was based on an older Sanskrit collection, no longer extant, dating back as early as 100 B.C. It is believed that even then many of the stories were already ancient, having lived long lives as oral folktales. The anonymous compiler's self-proclaimed purpose was to educate his readers, a goal shared by publishers of Aesopic fables from the very beginning. Although the original author's or compiler's name is unknown, an Arabic translation from about 750 A.D. attributes the _Panchatantra_ to a wise man called Bidpai. His name implies \"court scholar\" in Sanskrit, but nothing else is known about Bidpai as a person. Discussions of the fables in the _Panchatantra_ inevitably lead to comparisons with Aesop, and indeed, about a dozen tales (or close variants) are found in both collections. Did the ancient Greeks learn these fables from Indian storytellers? Or was it the other way around? Again, a definitive answer probably will never be known, but given the rich narrative traditions of both cultures, it is unlikely that the influence was not mutual, with each side learning from and giving to the other.\n\nAnother great collection of didactic stories from India are the _Jataka_ tales. Part of the canon of sacred Buddhist literature, this collection of some 550 anecdotes and fables depicts earlier births and incarnations\u2014sometimes as an animal, sometimes as a human\u2014of the being who would become Siddhartha Gautama, the future Buddha. Traditional birth and death dates of Gautama are 563-483 B.C. The _Jataka_ tales are dated between 300 B.C. and 400 A.D., but many of them undoubtedly have antecedents in older folklore. A number of the _Jataka_ fables have close parallels in Aesop.\n\nBorn and nurtured somewhat closer to Europe, and ultimately of even greater influence worldwide than the previously discussed two collections, is the great compilation of Arabic short fiction _The 1001 Nights_ , also known as _The Arabian Nights' Entertainment._ Based on Indian, Persian, and Arabic folklore, this work dates back about 1,000 years as a unified collection, with many of its individual stories undoubtedly being even older. Although heralded primarily for its romantic tales of fantasy and magic, _The 1001 Nights_ also contains a number of Aesop-like animal fables.\n\n#  _**The Fable as a Literary Genre**_\n\nThe fable, in keeping with its simple form, is easily defined. It is a short fictitious work, either in prose or in verse, frequently (but not necessarily) using animals or even inanimate objects as actors, and having the exposition of a moral principle as a primary function. It has an obvious relationship with other simple forms of literature such as the folk or fairy tale, the proverb, and the riddle. At their best, fables are compactly composed and, like all allegories, gain extended, unwritten meaning through the use of symbols.\n\nBrevity is the fable's first requirement, with many of the best samples of the genre comprising only three or four sentences. \"The Fox and the Grapes\" (no. 1), with its mere three sentences, is exemplary in this regard. The first sentence sets the stage and introduces the problem: \"A hungry fox saw some fine bunches of grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air.\" The second sentence emphasizes the futility of the fox's efforts: \"But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach.\" And the final sentence describes how he salvaged psychological victory from physical defeat: \"So he gave up trying and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, 'I thought those grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.' \"\n\nViewed as an allegory\u2014and to an extent all fables are simple allegories\u2014the grapes represent any unattainable goal, and because from time to time all humans are confronted with impossibilities, the story assumes universal applicability. Interpreted symbolically, the story is thus more than the description of one individual seeking a single goal; it is the account of everyone pursuing fulfillment.\n\nThe crux of \"The Fox and the Grapes\" obviously is not the fox's failure to get the grapes, but rather his response to that failure. In essence, he rescues his dignity by lying to himself. However, the narrator makes no value judgment here, and precisely therein lies this fable's universal appeal. Each individual reader can respond to the fox's self-deception according to his or her own expectations and needs. We can criticize the fox for his dishonesty and inconsistency, or we can congratulate him for his pragmatism and positive self-image.\n\n#  _**The Moral of the Story**_\n\nThe essential quality of a fable is that it delivers a moral teaching, or, at the very least, that it presents an ethical problem, with or without a suggested solution. Modern readers have come to expect a fable to end with a succinct, proverb-like restatement of the moral illustrated by the tale. However, there is good reason to believe that in their original oral form, Aesopic fables stopped short of this restatement. After all, a well-crafted story does not require a summary any more than a well-told joke needs an explanation of the punch line. It could thus be argued that restating \"the moral of the story\" at the end of a fable is an insult both to the intelligence of the reader and to the skill of the author. Nevertheless, collectors and editors of Aesopic fables, almost from the beginning, have provided their readers with tacked-on explanations of some, if not most, of the fables in their collections.\n\nIn many of the oldest collections this statement comes at the beginning of the tale and describes its moral application. For example, in _The Aesopic Fables of Phaedrus_ the familiar tale of \"The Dog Carrying a Piece of Meat Across the River\" is prefaced with the sentence \"He who goes after what belongs to another deservedly loses his own\" (Perry, p. 197). Such a preface, known to specialists as a _promythium_ (plural, _promythia),_ was probably not intended to be read or recited with the fable itself, but provided the readers with a suggestion as to how they might best use the fable to illustrate a point in a speech or literary composition. Furthermore, these succinct summaries served as guide words in published collections, helping the reader to find a fable illustrating a particular point of view.\n\nAttached to the end of a fable, the moral application is called an _epimythium_ (plural, _epimythia),_ and this is the position favored by most editors during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In some instances the epimythium is not appended to the completed story, but constitutes a final statement by one of the characters. I offer but two from dozens of possible examples of this technique: \"The Old Hound\" (no. 126) ends with the old dog's complaint, \"You ought to honor me for what I have been instead of abusing me for what I am.\" And \"The Miller, His Son, and Their Ass\" (no. 172) ends with the narrator's conclusion that the unfortunate miller was now convinced \"that in trying to please all, he had pleased none.\"\n\n#  _**Moral Philosophy**_\n\nWhat is the moral philosophy preached by the ancient Greek creators of Aesopic fables? \"The Man and the Lion\" (no. 80) concludes that \"There are two sides to every question,\" a view that could serve not only as a moral for this one story, but also as a motto for almost the entire body of Aesopic fables. Given the prevailing view that these tales were actually composed and assembled by many different storytellers and editors, it should come as no surprise that the fables, in spite of their nearly unanimous interest in moral issues, do not form a self-consistent ethical system. In fact, quite the contrary is the case. Paradox, ambiguity, and irony permeate the collection.\n\nFolklore wisdom often contradicts itself from one expression to another. \"Absence makes the heart grow fonder\" is a familiar and ostensibly time-proven proverb, but then so is its opposite, \"Out of sight, out of mind.\" Some proverbs promote caution (\"Look before you leap\"), while others preach aggressiveness (\"Nothing ventured, nothing gained\"). \"He who is not with me is against me\" and \"He who is not against me is with me\" are equally familiar proverbial formulations with a biblical background.\n\nSimilarly, numerous pairs of Aesopic fables can be found that seemingly contradict each other. Are the contradictions unintentional oversights? Or do they represent the cynical view that there are no universal rules for ethical behavior? Here each individual reader must reach his or her own conclusion, and once again, that is part of the universal appeal of these fables.\n\nMy first example deals with the problem of vengeance. In \"The Horse and the Stag\" (no. 264) a horse recklessly avenges himself against a stag, but in the process loses his freedom. However, vengeful or hasty behavior does not always lead to injury. In \"The Lion, the Wolf, and the Fox\" (no. 255) a quick-thinking fox successfully takes revenge against a spiteful wolf by telling a sick lion that he can be cured by wrapping himself in the skin of a freshly killed wolf. Thus the morality proposed by these two stories, taken as a pair, is neither always to forgive one's enemies, nor to be consistently harsh in retribution, but rather, if the opportunity presents itself, to be cunningly clever in planning revenge.\n\nThe traditional virtue of loyalty presents another pair of examples. In \"The Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat\" (no. 168) a bat sides first with the birds, then with the beasts, and in the end is rejected by both groups as a double-faced traitor. On the other hand, in the fable \"The Bat and the Weasels\" (no. 7) a bat escapes from a weasel two times, first by claiming to be a mouse and later by claiming to be a bird.\n\nThe time-honored virtue of honesty provides yet another pair of contradictory fables. In \"The Wolf and the Boy\" (no. 171) a wolf captures a boy, but then spares his life as a reward for the boy having told the truth. \"The Apes and the Two Travelers\" (no. 44) reflects the opposite view. Here two strangers in the land of the apes are asked what they think of the king and his subjects. One of them lies, and is given a handsome reward; the other tells the truth (they are \"fine apes\"), and he is clawed to death for his honesty.\n\nThe view that \"might makes right\" is reflected in many animal fables, arguably offering license to the powerful to follow their own self-interests and urging the weak to remain submissive. Examples include \"The Lion and the Wild Ass\" (no. 107), \"The Lion, the Fox, and the Ass\" (no. 246), \"The Wolf and the Lamb\" (no. 11), and \"The Cat and the Cock\" (no. 116). But the opposite view is also represented. In one of the best-known of all Aesopic fables, \"The Hare and the Tortoise\" (no. 117), it is not the speedy hare who wins the race, but instead the contestant who, by racing standards, is seriously handicapped. Likewise, in the lesser-known fable \"The Mouse and the Bull\" (no. 139) a battle between very unevenly matched opponents does not go to the stronger of the two.\n\n#  _**Be True to Yourself**_\n\nThe previous section emphasizes fables, taken in pairs or small groups, that illustrate the unreliability, or at best the relativity of traditional moral rules. However, there are few, if any contradictions within the Aesopic collection to the Socratic admonition to know oneself and to be true to oneself. And in the Aesopic tradition knowing oneself also implies a resigned acceptance of that which cannot be changed about one's being and one's fate. Dozens of fables preach these views.\n\nMy first examples describe individuals who vainly try to assume the attributes of another (and presumably superior) group, only to be exposed, subjected to ridicule, or even put to death. In \"The Ass and the Lapdog\" (no. 32) an ass is severely beaten when he tries to imitate a pet dog by jumping into his master's lap. The fable ends with the ass's recognition of his own foolish behavior. In his own words, \"Why could I not be satisfied with my natural and honorable position, without wishing to imitate the ridiculous antics of that useless little lapdog?\" Similarly, in \"The Monkey and the Camel\" (no. 164) a camel tried to dance like a monkey, \"but he cut such a ridiculous figure as he plunged about, and made such a grotesque exhibition of his ungainly person, that the beasts all fell upon him with ridicule and drove him away.\"\n\nNumerous fables deride individuals who attempt to change their appearance by dressing in the clothes (or skin) of another. Such charades fail almost from the beginning. \"The Ass in the Lion's Skin\" (no. 61), \"The Jackdaw and the Pigeons\" (no. 70), and \"The Vain Jackdaw\" (no. 84) all conclude with the disguised individuals quickly being exposed and ridiculed. A character's altered appearance does not need to represent a desired change of identity. In \"The Mice and the Weasels\" (no. 96) the mice soldiers who before battle decorate themselves with large plumes are easily captured and killed by their opponents.\n\nFables about trying to change one's appearance often have racial (even racist) overtones. In two stories, \"The Crow and the Swan\" (no. 148) and \"The Blackamoor\" (no. 105), attempts are made to wash black individuals white, with predictably unhappy results. These particular stories take on a special poignancy when one recalls that Aesop himself was said to have had very dark-colored skin.\n\nFailure to know and to accept oneself as one is does not always manifest itself in altered appearance. Often it is vain, pretentious behavior alone that exposes the character to ridicule. In \"The Eagle, the Jackdaw, and the Shepherd\" (no. 170) a jackdaw tries to perform like an eagle. In \"The Crow and the Raven\" (no. 259) a crow imitates a raven. In \"The Ox and the Frog\" (no. 100) a mother frog tries to puff herself up to the size of an ox. In \"The Wolf and His Shadow\" (no. 238) a wolf sees his long shadow when the sun is low in the sky, perceives himself to be very large, then struts about in a manner befitting a giant. And in \"The Tortoise and the Eagle\" (no. 81) a tortoise tries to learn to fly. All these attempts end with ridicule or death for the pretenders.\n\nAesopic fables reflect a society structured by class and privilege, and although the stories seem to have come from the lower classes (remember that both Aesop and Phaedrus were reputed to have been born as slaves), they do little to encourage an individual to rise above his or her original station in life. To the contrary, a number of fables illustrate the moral \"Better servitude with safety than freedom with danger\"\u2014for example, \"The Fox Who Served a Lion\" (no. 253) and \"The Pack Ass, the Wild Ass, and the Lion\" (no. 201). Similarly, in \"The Ass and His Masters\" (no. 200) a beast of burden, overworked and abused by his owner, prays for a new master, only to find himself in a worse situation, then prays again for another new master, and his situation worsens again. Finally, in \"The Runaway Slave\" (no. 270) the fugitive is soon recaptured, and we are given to believe that he too will henceforth be much worse off than before his attempted escape.\n\n#  _**Practical Everyday Advice**_\n\nIn keeping with their folklore heritage, Aesopic fables reflect the lifestyle, the values, and the frustrations of ordinary people in classical antiquity: slaves, peasants, workers, and tradespeople. These stories are not liberal treatises about self-determination and upward mobility. To the contrary, they more often preach a philosophy of acceptance and resignation. However, they do offer consoling, pragmatic advice that can make life easier even for the disenfranchised and the poor.\n\n\"Do not grieve too long at the death of a loved one\" is the message of \"Grief and His Due\" (no. 276). \"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush\" is the proverbial sentiment embodied in a number of fables, including \"The Dog and His Reflection\" (no. 94) and \"The Lion and the Hare\" (no. 183). \"Do not trust the words of your enemies\" is the lesson that emerges from \"The Wolf, the Mother, and Her Child\" (no. 112). \"Father and Sons\" (no. 58) and \"The Lion and the Three Bulls\" (no. 122) emphasize the value of unity. \"The Grasshopper and the Ants\" (no. 156) shows the utility of thrift and industry. \"The Shepherd's Boy and the Wolf (no. 46) admonishes honesty, not so much as an absolute ethical standard, but more as a pragmatic practice, because, as the moral of the story states, \"You cannot believe a liar even when he tells the truth.\" \"The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs\" (no. 2) preaches against greed, but again, not as an abstract principle, but rather as a practical way to avoid catastrophic loss.\n\n\"The Oak and the Reeds\" (no. 41) perhaps provides the capstone to the pragmatic moral philosophy of Aesop. An oak tree, sturdy and unwavering, is uprooted by a severe storm, whereas some reeds, bowing and yielding to every breeze, survive without injury. The moral of this story is too obvious to require restatement.\n\n#  _**Reflection of Human Psychology**_\n\nMany of the best-known Aesopic fables refrain from overt preaching, depicting instead selected episodes of human behavior, without comment. Aesop thus holds a mirror up to humanity, and he does not always like the reflection that he sees. However, he does not need to burden his depictions with explicit value judgments. The perceptive reader will understand.\n\n\"The Sick Stag\" (no. 177) is the timeless tale of a sick animal surrounded by well-wishers who thoughtlessly eat all the nearby grass, thus inadvertently causing their friend to perish from hunger. The central character in \"The Miser\" (no. 262) gloats over his treasure but makes no practical use of it. The fox without a tail, in the fable bearing that title (no. 83), having lost his own tail in a trap, tries to talk all his fellow foxes into cutting off their tails to divert attention from his own loss. Another fox, in \"The Foxes and the River\" (no. 263), recklessly steps into a river and is swept away, but he refuses to admit that he has made a mistake and pretends to be going for a leisurely swim. Open a collection of Aesop's fables at random, and you will almost certainly find a tale reflecting an unpleasant aspect of human behavior and psychology.\n\n#  _**Etiological Tales**_\n\nAn important function of folklore and mythology in all cultures is to offer explanations as to why things are as they are. Specialists refer to such explanatory tales as etiological tales, stories about causes. They are also called _pourquoi_ tales from the French word for \"why.\" These accounts can be religiously serious or playfully fictitious. There are many etiological tales among the fables of Aesop, and they belong almost exclusively to the playful category. The previously quoted admonition of Phaedrus, the compiler of the oldest Aesop collection still extant, is of special significance with reference to etiological tales: \"Remember that I speak in jest of things that never happened.\"\n\nEtiological tales by a different author and in another context can take on the gravity of a creation myth, but it is unlikely that the ancient Greeks took very seriously the humorous Aesopic account as to why the tortoise carries his house on his back as recorded in \"Jupiter and the Tortoise\" (no. 71). Similarly, \"Mercury and the Tradesmen\" (no. 95), an explanation as to why all tradesmen lie, but especially the horse dealers, is much more of a \"used-car salesman joke\" than it is a theological treatise, in spite of its reference to one of the classical deities. Yet another lighthearted Aesopic etiological fable invoking a deity is \"The Bee and Jupiter\" (no. 40), which explains why bees have barbed stingers that cost them their lives when they use them.\n\nEven those etiological fables that comment on grave philosophical issues do so in a playful manner. I let three examples suffice: \"The Man, the Horse, the Ox, and the Dog\" (no. 234) justifies the increasingly difficult stages of human life as one ages. \"The Goods and the Ills\" (no. 24) shows why there appears to be more evil than good on earth. And \"Prometheus and the Making of Man\" (no. 279) explains why some people have the bodies of men but the souls of beasts. These are weighty topics, and the brief fables that address them do not claim to solve the problems that they embody, but then neither do they simply brush such problems aside, pretending that they do not exist.\n\n#  _**Religion**_\n\nMoral involvement is a quintessential function of the fable, which will often translate into discussions of religion, given the close association in most, if not all cultures between morality and religion. It should thus come as no surprise that religion plays a central role in many of the Aesopic fables.\n\nThe religion in question is, of course, that of the ancient Greeks, as interpreted by the Romans, through whose intermediacy the fables have come to us. Thus most of the deities mentioned are identified by their Roman instead of their Greek names. (At the end of this book is a glossary describing the classical gods and heroes featured in the present collection of Aesopic fables.)\n\nThe Greeks and Romans did not worship a single, all-powerful, all-benevolent god, but instead recognized an assemblage of deities with varying degrees of power and sometimes bewildering and seemingly contradictory aims and expectations. The resulting ambivalence in the relationship between mortals and the deities surfaces repeatedly in Aesopic fables, some of which depict the great power of the gods, whereas others emphasize their apparent impotence.\n\nTypical of fables reflecting the deities' weakness is \"The Man Who Lost His Spade\" (no. 268), in which a farmer goes to a temple in the city, hoping there to gain information from the gods about a stolen spade. Upon his arrival he learns that a reward is being offered for the return of goods stolen from the temple. He concludes, \"If these town gods can't detect the thieves who steal from their own temples, it's scarcely likely they can tell me who stole my spade.\" Even more cynical is \"The Man and the Image\" (no. 101), in which a man destroys a sacred idol for its unwillingness or inability to grant him riches, and then is rewarded as a direct consequence of his sacrilegious act. Additional fables depicting the weakness of the gods and their prophets include \"Mercury and the Sculptor\" (no. 88), \"The Image Seller\" (no. 109), \"The Prophet\" (no. 130), and \"The Eagle and the Beetle\" (no. 223).\n\nIn other fables the opposite claim is made, namely that omniscient gods will indeed reward moral behavior and punish evil. For example, in \"The Butcher and His Customers\" (no. 251) a butcher, having lost a piece of meat to two lying thieves, concludes, \"You may cheat me with your lying, but you can't cheat the gods, and they won't let you off so lightly.\" Nor do the gods necessarily wait until the next life to reward virtue and punish vice, as evidenced in the fable \"Mercury and the Woodman\" (no. 17), in which a god rewards an honest woodcutter with a golden ax and a silver ax, in addition to the ordinary one that he had lost in a river, while a dishonest companion loses everything. Other examples of omniscient divine intervention are found in \"The Rogue and the Oracle\" (no. 273), where the Oracle at Delphi exposes a scoundrel who attempts to ridicule a venerable religious institution, and in \"The Eagle and the Fox\" (no. 250), with its conclusion that \"False faith may escape human punishment, but cannot escape the divine.\"\n\nThe examples from the previous paragraph notwithstanding, the moral view reflected in most of the Aesopic fables is human-centered and of this world. In \"The Astronomer\" (no. 187) the leading character is so absorbed by his vision of the sky that he falls into a dry well. Adding insult to injury, a cynical passerby chides him, \"If you ... were looking so hard at the sky that you didn't even see where your feet were carrying you along the ground, it appears to me that you deserve all you've got.\" Mortals themselves, not the gods, bear the primary responsibility for their own welfare. Only rarely do the deities of these fables intervene on man's behalf. Even if they were able to, which is no sure thing, the gods could not possibly answer all of humankind's prayers, for they often contradict one another, as stated explicitly in \"The Father and His Daughters\" (no. 197), when a father, desiring to pray for his two daughters' happiness, learns that one of them, a gardener's wife, wants rain, while the other one, a potter's wife, wants dry weather. In the end, as we learn either implicitly or explicitly from \"The Snake and Jupiter\" (no. 237) and \"Hercules and the Wagoner\" (no. 102), the gods help those who help themselves.\n\n#  _**Fables and Folklore**_\n\n\"I already know this story\" is a common response, even to first-time readers of Aesop. And for good reason, for many of these fables have found their way back into the repertories of oral storytellers, thus creating for themselves a new life independent of paper and ink. Most of these tales probably came from the folk in the first place, having long circulated as retold stories before they were committed to parchment or paper. The first creation of these fables lies too far in the past for us to be able to ascertain whether a particular tale was originated by a Greek scholar, quill pen in hand, or by an illiterate grandmother entertaining her extended family with bedtime stories. Whatever their origin, many of Aesop's fables have had a life of their own as orally told folktales, some having escaped the boundaries of the printed page at a relatively late date, others having followed unwritten folkways from the very beginning.\n\nFolklorists use a cataloging system devised by the Finnish scholar Antti Aarne and his American counterpart Stith Thompson. The final version of this system was published in 1961 under the title _The Types of the Folktale,_ and has proven itself an indispensable tool for the comparative study of international folktales. In essence, Aarne and Thompson identify some 2,500 basic folktale plots, assigning to each a type number, sometimes further differentiated by letters or asterisks. Only those Aesopic fables that have been found in folklore sources apart from Aesop have been assigned Aarne-Thompson type numbers. These fables, characteristically and understandably among the best known, are identified by their type numbers in an appendix to the present collection.\n\n#  _**Modern Translations of Aesop**_\n\nEditors and translators of every age must come to terms with essentially the same questions: What text shall I use for my source? And what style shall I adopt for the finished product? As already noted, the absence of any canon or standard edition of Aesop's fables has made the first question particularly problematic. Most modern editors use a combination of fables found in the classical editions of Phaedrus and Babrius, supplemented by various medieval and renaissance collections. As to style, well into the twentieth century most English translators of Aesop have seemed to prefer intentionally antiquated language, sprinkling their texts with archaic words and outdated grammar. Fortunately, V. S. Vernon Jones, the translator of the present collection, resisted this temptation. His English is sprightly, concise, and idiomatic, just as the everyday Greek used by the original storytellers must have been. Jones's translation was published under the title _\u00c6sop's Fables_ in 1912 by W. Heinemann of London. I have added footnotes, cautiously modernized the punctuation, and brought the spelling to contemporary American standards, but have made essentially no other revisions to his admirable text.\n\n**D. L. Ashliman** received a B.A. degree from the University of Utah, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Rutgers University, with additional studies at the Universities of Bonn and G\u00f6ttingen in Germany. He taught folklore, mythology, German, and comparative literature at the University of Pittsburgh for thirty-three years and was emeritized in the year 2000. In addition to teaching, he held a number of administrative positions at the University of Pittsburgh, including Academic Dean for the Semester at Sea program. He also served as a guest professor in the departments of comparative literature and folklore at the University of Augsburg in Germany. D. L. Ashliman is the author of _A Guide to Folktales in the English Language,_ published by Greenwood Press in 1987, as well as numerous articles and conference reports.\n**I. THE FOX AND THE GRAPES**\n\n**A** hungry fox saw some fine bunches of grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air. But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach. So he gave up trying and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, \"I thought those grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.\"\n**2. THE GOOSE THAT LAID THE GOLDEN EGGS**\n\n**A** man and his wife had the good fortune to possess a goose which laid a golden egg every day. Lucky though they were, they soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough, and, imagining the bird must be made of gold inside, they decided to kill it in order to secure the whole store of precious metal at once. But when they cut it open they found it was just like any other goose. Thus, they neither got rich all at once, as they had hoped, nor enjoyed any longer the daily addition to their wealth.\n\nMuch wants more and loses all.\n**3. THE CAT AND THE MICE**\n\n**T** here was once a house that was overrun with mice. A cat heard of this and said to herself, \"That's the place for me.\" And off she went and took up her quarters in the house and caught the mice one by one and ate them. At last the mice could stand it no longer, and they determined to take to their holes and stay there. \"That's awkward,\" said the cat to herself. \"The only thing to do is to coax them out by a trick.\" So she considered awhile, and then climbed up the wall and let herself hang down by her hind legs from a peg and pretended to be dead. By and by a mouse peeped out and saw the cat hanging there. \"Aha!\" it cried. \"You're very clever, madam, no doubt; but you may turn yourself into a bag of meal hanging there, if you like, yet you won't catch us coming anywhere near you.\"\n\n**If you are wise you won't be deceived by the innocent airs of those whom you have once found to be dangerous.**\n**4. THE MISCHIEVOUS DOG**\n\n**T** here was once a dog who used to snap at people and bite them without any provocation, and who was a great nuisance to everyone who came to his master's house. So his master fastened a bell round his neck to warn people of his presence. The dog was very proud of the bell, and strutted about tinkling it with immense satisfaction. But an old dog came up to him and said, \"The fewer airs you give yourself the better, my friend. You don't think, do you, that your bell was given you as a reward of merit? On the contrary, it is a badge of disgrace.\"\n\n**Notoriety is often mistaken for fame.**\n**5. THE CHARCOAL BURNER AND THE FULLER**\n\n**T** here was once a charcoal burner who lived and worked by himself. A fuller, however, happened to come and settle in the same neighborhood; and the charcoal burner, having made his acquaintance and finding he was an agreeable sort of fellow, asked him if he would come and share his house. \"We shall get to know one another better that way,\" he said, \"and, besides, our household expenses will be diminished.\" The fuller thanked him, but replied, \"I couldn't think of it, sir. Why, everything I take such pains to whiten would be blackened in no time by your charcoal.\"\n**6. THE MICE IN COUNCIL**\n\n**O** nce upon a time all the mice met together in council and discussed the best means of securing themselves against the attacks of the cat. After several suggestions had been debated, a mouse of some standing and experience got up and said, \"I think I have hit upon a plan which will ensure our safety in the future, provided you approve and carry it out. It is that we should fasten a bell round the neck of our enemy the cat, which will by its tinkling warn us of her approach.\" This proposal was warmly applauded, and it had been already decided to adopt it, when an old mouse got upon his feet and said, \"I agree with you all that the plan before us is an admirable one. But may I ask who is going to bell the cat?\"\n**7. THE BAT AND THE WEASELS**\n\n**A** bat fell to the ground and was caught by a weasel, and was just going to be killed and eaten when it begged to be let go. The weasel said he couldn't do that because he was an enemy of all birds on principle. \"Oh, but,\" said the bat, \"I'm not a bird at all. I'm a mouse.\" \"So you are,\" said the weasel, \"now I come to look at you.\" And he let it go. Some time after this the bat was caught in just the same way by another weasel, and, as before, begged for its life. \"No,\" said the weasel, \"I never let a mouse go by any chance.\" \"But I'm not a mouse,\" said the bat. \"I'm a bird.\" \"Why, so you are,\" said the weasel. And he too let the bat go.\n\n**Look and see which way the wind blows before you commit yourself.**\n**8. THE DOG AND THE SOW**\n\n**A** dog and a sow were arguing, and each claimed that its own young ones were finer than those of any other animal. \"Well,\" said the sow at last, \"mine can see, at any rate, when they come into the world; but yours are born blind.\"\n\n**THE FOX AND THE CROW**\n\n**9. THE FOX AND THE CROW**\n\n**A** crow was sitting on a branch of a tree with a piece of cheese in her beak when a fox observed her and set his wits to work to discover some way of getting the cheese. Coming and standing under the tree he looked up and said, \"What a noble bird I see above me! Her beauty is without equal, the hue of her plumage exquisite. If only her voice is as sweet as her looks are fair, she ought without doubt to be queen of the birds.\" The crow was hugely flattered by this, and just to show the fox that she could sing she gave a loud caw. Down came the cheese, of course, and the fox, snatching it up, said, \"You have a voice, madam, I see. What you want is wits.\"\n**10. THE HORSE AND THE GROOM**\n\n**T** here was once a groom who used to spend long hours clipping and combing the horse of which he had charge, but who daily stole a portion of its allowance of oats, and sold it for his own profit. The horse gradually got into worse and worse condition, and at last cried to the groom, \"If you really want me to look sleek and well, you must comb me less and feed me more.\"\n**II. THE WOLF AND THE LAMB**\n\n**A** wolf came upon a lamb straying from the flock, and felt some compunction about taking the life of so helpless a creature without some plausible excuse. So he cast about for a grievance and said at last, \"Last year, sirrah, you grossly insulted me.\" \"That is impossible, sir,\" bleated the lamb, \"for I wasn't born then.\" \"Well,\" retorted the wolf, \"you feed in my pastures.\" \"That cannot be,\" replied the lamb, \"for I have never yet tasted grass.\" \"You drink from my spring, then,\" continued the wolf. \"Indeed, sir,\" said the poor lamb, \"I have never yet drunk anything but my mother's milk.\" \"Well, anyhow,\" said the wolf, \"I'm not going without my dinner.\" And he sprang upon the lamb and devoured it without more ado.\n**12. THE PEACOCK AND THE CRANE**\n\n**A** peacock taunted a crane with the dullness of her plumage. \"Look at my brilliant colors,\" said she, \"and see how much finer they are than your poor feathers.\" \"I am not denying,\" replied the crane, \"that yours are far gayer than mine. But when it comes to flying I can soar into the clouds, whereas you are confined to the earth like any dunghill cock.\"\n\n**THE CAT AND THE BIRDS**\n\n**13. THE CAT AND THE BIRDS**\n\n**A** cat heard that the birds in an aviary were ailing. So he got himself up as a doctor, and, taking with him a set of the instruments proper to his profession, presented himself at the door, and inquired after the health of the birds. \"We shall do very well,\" they replied, without letting him in, \"when we've seen the last of you.\"\n\n**A villain may disguise himself, but he will not deceive the wise.**\n**14. THE SPENDTHRIFT AND THE SWALLOW**\n\n**A** spendthrift, who had wasted his fortune and had nothing left but the clothes in which he stood, saw a swallow one fine day in early spring. Thinking that summer had come and that he could now do without his coat, he went and sold it for what it would fetch. A change, however, took place in the weather, and there came a sharp frost which killed the unfortunate swallow. When the spendthrift saw its dead body he cried, \"Miserable bird! Thanks to you I am perishing of cold myself.\"\n\n**One swallow does not make summer.**\n**15. THE OLD WOMAN AND THE DOCTOR**\n\n**A** n old woman became almost totally blind from a disease of the eyes, and, after consulting a doctor, made an agreement with him in the presence of witnesses that she should pay him a high fee if he cured her, while if he failed he was to receive nothing. The doctor accordingly prescribed a course of treatment, and every time he paid her a visit he took away with him some article out of the house, until at last, when he visited her for the last time, and the cure was complete, there was nothing left.\n\nWhen the old woman saw that the house was empty she refused to pay him his fee; and, after repeated refusals on her part, he sued her before the magistrates for payment of her debt. On being brought into court she was ready with her defense. \"The claimant,\" said she, \"has stated the facts about our agreement correctly. I undertook to pay him a fee if he cured me, and he, on his part, promised to charge nothing if he failed. Now, he says I am cured. But I say that I am blinder than ever, and I can prove what I say. When my eyes were bad I could at any rate see well enough to be aware that my house contained a certain amount of furniture and other things. But now, when according to him I am cured, I am entirely unable to see anything there at all.\"\n\n**THE MOON AND HER MOTHER**\n\n**16. THE MOON AND HER MOTHER**\n\n**T** he moon once begged her mother to make her a gown. \"How can I?\" replied she. \"There's no fitting your figure. At one time you're a new moon, and at another you're a full moon; and between whiles you're neither one nor the other.\"\n**17. MERCURY AND THE WOODMAN**\n\n**A** woodman was felling a tree on the bank of a river, when his ax, glancing off the trunk, flew out of his hands and fell into the water. As he stood by the water's edge lamenting his loss, Mercury appeared and asked him the reason for his grief; and on learning what had happened, out of pity for his distress he dived into the river and, bringing up a golden ax, asked him if that was the one he had lost. The woodman replied that it was not, and Mercury then dived a second time and, bringing up a silver ax, asked if that was his. \"No, that is not mine either,\" said the woodman. Once more Mercury dived into the river, and brought up the missing ax. The woodman was overjoyed at recovering his property, and thanked his benefactor warmly; and the latter was so pleased with his honesty that he made him a present of the other two axes.\n\nWhen the woodman told the story to his companions, one of these was filled with envy of his good fortune and determined to try his luck for himself. So he went and began to fell a tree at the edge of the river, and presently contrived to let his ax drop into the water. Mercury appeared as before, and, on learning that his ax had fallen in, he dived and brought up a golden ax, as he had done on the previous occasion. Without waiting to be asked whether it was his or not the fellow cried, \"That's mine, that's mine,\" and stretched out his hand eagerly for the prize. But Mercury was so disgusted at his dishonesty that he not only declined to give him the golden ax, but also refused to recover for him the one he had let fall into the stream.\n\n**Honesty is the best policy.**\n**18. THE ASS, THE FOX, AND THE LION**\n\n**A** n ass and a fox went into partnership and sallied out to forage for food together. They hadn't gone far before they saw a lion coming their way, at which they were both dreadfully frightened. But the fox thought he saw a way of saving his own skin, and went boldly up to the lion and whispered in his ear, \"I'll manage that you shall get hold of the ass without the trouble of stalking him, if you'll promise to let me go free.\" The lion agreed to this, and the fox then rejoined his companion and contrived before long to lead him by a hidden pit, which some hunter had dug as a trap for wild animals, and into which he fell. When the lion saw that the ass was safely caught and couldn't get away, it was to the fox that he first turned his attention, and he soon finished him off, and then at his leisure proceeded to feast upon the ass.\n\n**Betray a friend, and you'll often find you have ruined yourself.**\n**19. THE LION AND THE MOUSE**\n\n**A** lion asleep in his lair was waked up by a mouse running over his face. Losing his temper he seized it with his paw and was about to kill it. The mouse, terrified, piteously entreated him to spare its life. \"Please let me go,\" it cried, \"and one day I will repay you for your kindness.\" The idea of so insignificant a creature ever being able to do anything for him amused the lion so much that he laughed aloud, and good-humoredly let it go. But the mouse's chance came, after all. One day the lion got entangled in a net which had been spread for game by some hunters, and the mouse heard and recognized his roars of anger and ran to the spot. Without more ado it set to work to gnaw the ropes with its teeth, and succeeded before long in setting the lion free. \"There!\" said the mouse, \"you laughed at me when I promised I would repay you. But now you see, even a mouse can help a lion.\"\n\n**20. THE CROW AND THE PITCHER**\n\n**A** thirsty crow found a pitcher with some water in it, but so little was there that, try as she might, she could not reach it with her beak, and it seemed as though she would die of thirst within sight of the remedy. At last she hit upon a clever plan. She began dropping pebbles into the pitcher, and with each pebble the water rose a little higher until at last it reached the brim, and the knowing bird was enabled to quench her thirst.\n\n**Necessity is the mother of invention.**\n**21. THE BOYS AND THE FROGS**\n\n**S** ome mischievous boys were playing on the edge of a pond, and, catching sight of some frogs swimming about in the shallow water, they began to amuse themselves by pelting them with stones, and they killed several of them. At last one of the frogs put his head out of the water and said, \"Oh, stop! Stop! I beg of you. What is sport to you is death to us.\"\n\n**THE NORTH WIND AND THE SUN**\n\n**22. THE NORTH WIND AND THE SUN**\n\n**A** dispute arose between the north wind and the sun, each claiming that he was stronger than the other. At last they agreed to try their powers upon a traveler, to see which could soonest strip him of his cloak. The north wind had the first try; and, gathering up all his force for the attack, he came whirling furiously down upon the man, and caught up his cloak as though he would wrest it from him by one single effort. But the harder he blew, the more closely the man wrapped it round himself. Then came the turn of the sun. At first he beamed gently upon the traveler, who soon unclasped his cloak and walked on with it hanging loosely about his shoulders. Then he shone forth in his full strength, and the man, before he had gone many steps, was glad to throw his cloak right off and complete his journey more lightly clad.\n\n**Persuasion is better than force.**\n**23. THE MISTRESS AND HER SERVANTS**\n\n**A** widow, thrifty and industrious, had two servants, whom she kept pretty hard at work. They were not allowed to lie long abed in the mornings, but the old lady had them up and doing as soon as the cock crew. They disliked intensely having to get up at such an hour, especially in wintertime; and they thought that if it were not for the cock waking up their mistress so horribly early, they could sleep longer. So they caught it and wrung its neck. But they weren't prepared for the consequences. For what happened was that their mistress, not hearing the cock crow as usual, waked them up earlier than ever, and set them to work in the middle of the night.\n**24. THE GOODS AND THE ILLS**\n\n**T** here was a time in the youth of the world when goods and ills entered equally into the concerns of men, so that the goods did not prevail to make them altogether blessed, nor the ills to make them wholly miserable. But owing to the foolishness of mankind the ills multiplied greatly in number and increased in strength, until it seemed as though they would deprive the goods of all share in human affairs, and banish them from the earth.\n\nThe latter, therefore, betook themselves to heaven and complained to Jupiter of the treatment they had received, at the same time praying him to grant them protection from the ills, and to advise them concerning the manner of their intercourse with men. Jupiter granted their request for protection, and decreed that for the future they should not go among men openly in a body, and so be liable to attack from the hostile ills, but singly and unobserved, and at infrequent and unexpected intervals. Hence it is that the earth is full of ills, for they come and go as they please and are never far away; while goods, alas, come one by one only, and have to travel all the way from heaven, so that they are very seldom seen.\n**25. THE HARES AND THE FROGS**\n\n**T** he hares once gathered together and lamented the unhappiness of their lot, exposed as they were to dangers on all sides and lacking the strength and the courage to hold their own. Men, dogs, birds, and beasts of prey were all their enemies, and killed and devoured them daily; and sooner than endure such persecution any longer, they one and all determined to end their miserable lives. Thus resolved and desperate, they rushed in a body towards a neighboring pool, intending to drown themselves. On the bank were sitting a number of frogs, who, when they heard the noise of the hares as they ran, with one accord leaped into the water and hid themselves in the depths. Then one of the older hares who was wiser than the rest cried out to his companions, \"Stop, my friends, take heart. Don't let us destroy ourselves after all. See, here are creatures who are afraid of us, and who must, therefore, be still more timid than ourselves.\"\n\n**26. THE FOX AND THE STORK**\n\n**A** fox invited a stork to dinner, at which the only fare provided was a large flat dish of soup. The fox lapped it up with great relish, but the stork with her long bill tried in vain to partake of the savory broth. Her evident distress caused the sly fox much amusement. But not long after, the stork invited him in turn, and set before him a pitcher with a long and narrow neck, into which she could get her bill with ease. Thus, while she enjoyed her dinner, the fox sat by hungry and helpless, for it was impossible for him to reach the tempting contents of the vessel.\n\n**27. THE WOLF IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING**\n\n**A** wolf resolved to disguise himself in order that he might prey upon a flock of sheep without fear of detection. So he clothed himself in a sheepskin and slipped among the sheep when they were out at pasture. He completely deceived the shepherd, and when the flock was penned for the night he was shut in with the rest. But that very night, as it happened, the shepherd, requiring a supply of mutton for the table, laid hands on the wolf in mistake for a sheep, and killed him with his knife on the spot.\n**28. THE STAG IN THE OX STALL**\n\n**A** stag, chased from his lair by the hounds, took refuge in a farmyard, and, entering a stable where a number of oxen were stalled, thrust himself under a pile of hay in a vacant stall, where he lay concealed, all but the tips of his horns. Presently one of the oxen said to him, \"What has induced you to come in here? Aren't you aware of the risk you are running of being captured by the herdsmen?\" To which he replied, \"Pray let me stay for the present. When night comes I shall easily escape under cover of the dark.\" In the course of the afternoon more than one of the farm-hands came in to attend to the wants of the cattle, but not one of them noticed the presence of the stag, who accordingly began to congratulate himself on his escape and to express his gratitude to the oxen.\n\n\"We wish you well,\" said the one who had spoken before, \"but you are not out of danger yet. If the master comes you will certainly be found out, for nothing ever escapes his keen eyes.\" Presently, sure enough, in he came, and made a great to-do about the way the oxen were kept. \"The beasts are starving,\" he cried. \"Here, give them more hay, and put plenty of litter under them.\" As he spoke, he seized an armful himself from the pile where the stag lay concealed, and at once detected him. Calling his men, he had him seized at once and killed for the table.\n**29. THE MILKMAID AND HER PAIL**\n\n**A** farmer's daughter had been out to milk the cows and was returning to the dairy carrying her pail of milk upon her head. As she walked along, she fell a-musing after this fashion : \"The milk in this pail will provide me with cream, which I will make into butter and take to market to sell. With the money I will buy a number of eggs, and these, when hatched, will produce chickens, and by and by I shall have quite a large poultry yard. Then I shall sell some of my fowls, and with the money which they will bring in I will buy myself a new gown, which I shall wear when I go to the fair. And all the young fellows will admire it, and come and make love to me, but I shall toss my head and have nothing to say to them.\" Forgetting all about the pail, and suiting the action to the word, she tossed her head. Down went the pail, all the milk was spilled, and all her fine castles in the air vanished in a moment!\n\n**Do not count your chickens before they are hatched.**\n**30. THE DOLPHINS, THE WHALES, AND THE SPRAT**\n\n**T** he dolphins quarreled with the whales, and before very long they began fighting with one another. The battle was very fierce, and had lasted some time without any sign of coming to an end, when a sprat thought that perhaps he could stop it; so he stepped in and tried to persuade them to give up fighting and make friends. But one of the dolphins said to him contemptuously, \"We would rather go on fighting till we're all killed than be reconciled by a sprat like you!\"\n**31. THE FOX AND THE MONKEY**\n\n**A** fox and a monkey were on the road together and fell into a dispute as to which of the two was the better born. They kept it up for some time, till they came to a place where the road passed through a cemetery full of monuments, when the monkey stopped and looked about him and gave a great sigh. \"Why do you sigh?\" said the fox. The monkey pointed to the tombs and replied, \"All the monuments that you see here were put up in honor of my forefathers, who in their day were eminent men.\" The fox was speechless for a moment, but quickly recovering he said, \"Oh! Don't stop at any lie, sir; you're quite safe. I'm sure none of your ancestors will rise up and expose you.\"\n\n**Boasters brag most when they cannot be detected.**\n**32. THE ASS AND THE LAPDOG**\n\n**T** here was once a man who had an ass and a lapdog. The ass was housed in the stable with plenty of oats and hay to eat and was as well off as an ass could be. The little dog was made a great pet of by his master, who fondled him and often let him lie in his lap. And if he went out to dinner, he would bring back a tidbit or two to give him when he ran to meet him on his return. The ass had, it is true, a good deal of work to do, carting or grinding the corn, or carrying the burdens of the farm; and ere long he became very jealous, contrasting his own life of labor with the ease and idleness of the lapdog. At last one day he broke his halter, and frisking into the house just as his master sat down to dinner, he pranced and capered about, mimicking the frolics of the little favorite, upsetting the table and smashing the crockery with his clumsy efforts. Not content with that, he even tried to jump on his master's lap, as he had so often seen the dog allowed to do. At that the servants, seeing the danger their master was in, belabored the silly ass with sticks and cudgels, and drove him back to his stable half dead with his beating. \"Alas!\" he cried. \"All this I have brought on myself. Why could I not be satisfied with my natural and honorable position, without wishing to imitate the ridiculous antics of that useless little lapdog?\"\n\n**THE FIR TREE AND THE BRAMBLE**\n\n**33. THE FIR TREE AND THE BRAMBLE**\n\n**A** fir tree was boasting to a bramble, and said, somewhat contemptuously, \"You poor creature, you are of no use whatever. Now, look at me. I am useful for all sorts of things, particularly when men build houses; they can't do without me then.\" But the bramble replied, \"Ah, that's all very well, but you wait till they come with axes and saws to cut you down, and then you'll wish you were a bramble and not a fir.\"\n\n**Better poverty without a care than wealth with its many obligations.**\n**34. THE FROGS' COMPLAINT AGAINST THE SUN**\n\n**O** nce upon a time the sun was about to take to himself a wife. The frogs in terror all raised their voices to the skies, and Jupiter, disturbed by the noise, asked them what they were croaking about. They replied, \"The sun is bad enough even while he is single, drying up our marshes with his heat as he does. But what will become of us if he marries and begets other suns?\"\n**35. THE DOG, THE COCK, AND THE FOX**\n\n**A** dog and a cock became great friends and agreed to travel together. At nightfall the cock flew up into the branches of a tree to roost, while the dog curled himself up inside the trunk, which was hollow. At break of day the cock woke up and crew, as usual. A fox heard, and, wishing to make a breakfast of him, came and stood under the tree and begged him to come down. \"I should so like,\" said he, \"to make the acquaintance of one who has such a beautiful voice.\" The cock replied, \"Would you just wake my porter who sleeps at the foot of the tree? He'll open the door and let you in.\" The fox accordingly rapped on the trunk, when out rushed the dog and tore him in pieces.\n\n**36. THE GNAT AND THE BULL**\n\n**A** gnat alighted on one of the horns of a bull, and remained sitting there for a considerable time. When it had rested sufficiently and was about to fly away, it said to the bull, \"Do you mind if I go now?\" The bull merely raised his eyes and remarked, without interest, \"It's all one to me. I didn't notice when you came, and I shan't know when you go away.\"\n\n**We may often be of more consequence in our own eyes than in the eyes of our neighbors.**\n**37. THE BEAR AND THE TRAVELERS**\n\n**T** wo travelers were on the road together when a bear suddenly appeared on the scene. Before he observed them, one made for a tree at the side of the road and climbed up into the branches and hid there. The other was not so nimble as his companion ; and, as he could not escape, he threw himself on the ground and pretended to be dead. The bear came up and sniffed all round him, but he kept perfectly still and held his breath, for they say that a bear will not touch a dead body. The bear took him for a corpse and went away. When the coast was clear, the traveler in the tree came down and asked the other what it was the bear had whispered to him when he put his mouth to his ear. The other replied, \"He told me never again to travel with a friend who deserts you at the first sign of danger.\"\n\n**Misfortune tests the sincerity of friendship.**\n**38. THE SLAVE AND THE LION**\n\n**A** slave ran away from his master, by whom he had been most cruelly treated, and, in order to avoid capture, betook himself into the desert. As he wandered about in search of food and shelter, he came to a cave, which he entered and found to be unoccupied. Really, however, it was a lion's den, and almost immediately, to the horror of the wretched fugitive, the lion himself appeared. The man gave himself up for lost. But, to his utter astonishment, the lion, instead of springing upon him and devouring him, came and fawned upon him, at the same time whining and lifting up his paw. Observing it to be much swollen and inflamed, he examined it and found a large thorn embedded in the ball of the foot. He accordingly removed it and dressed the wound as well as he could; and in course of time it healed up completely.\n\nThe lion's gratitude was unbounded. He looked upon the man as his friend, and they shared the cave for some time together. A day came, however, when the slave began to long for the society of his fellowmen, and he bade farewell to the lion and returned to the town. Here he was presently recognized and carried off in chains to his former master, who resolved to make an example of him, and ordered that he should be thrown to the beasts at the next public spectacle in the theater.\n\nOn the fatal day the beasts were loosed into the arena, and among the rest a lion of huge bulk and ferocious aspect. And then the wretched slave was cast in among them. What was the amazement of the spectators, when the lion after one glance bounded up to him and lay down at his feet with every expression of affection and delight! It was his old friend of the cave! The audience clamored that the slave's life should be spared; and the governor of the town, marveling at such gratitude and fidelity in a beast, decreed that both should receive their liberty.\n\n**THE FLEA AND THE MAN**\n\n**39. THE FLEA AND THE MAN**\n\n**A** flea bit a man, and bit him again, and again, till he could stand it no longer, but made a thorough search for it, and at last succeeded in catching it. Holding it between his finger and thumb, he said\u2014or rather shouted, so angry was he\u2014\"Who are you, pray, you wretched little creature, that you make so free with my person?\" The flea, terrified, whimpered in a weak little voice, \"Oh, sir! Pray let me go. Don't kill me! I am such a little thing that I can't do you much harm.\" But the man laughed and said, \"I am going to kill you now, at once. Whatever is bad has got to be destroyed, no matter how slight the harm it does.\"\n\n**Do not waste your pity on a scamp.**\n**40. THE BEE AND JUPITER**\n\n**A** queen bee from Hymettus flew up to Olympus with some fresh honey from the hive as a present to Jupiter, who was so pleased with the gift that he promised to give her anything she liked to ask for. She said she would be very grateful if he would give stings to the bees, to kill people who robbed them of their honey. Jupiter was greatly displeased with this request, for he loved mankind. But he had given his word, so he said that stings they should have. The stings he gave them, however, were of such a kind that whenever a bee stings a man the sting is left in the wound, and the bee dies.\n\n**Evil wishes, like fowls, come home to roost.**\n**41. THE OAK AND THE REEDS**\n\n**A** n oak that grew on the bank of a river was uprooted by a severe gale of wind, and thrown across the stream. It fell among some reeds growing by the water, and said to them, \"How is it that you, who are so frail and slender, have managed to weather the storm, whereas I, with all my strength, have been torn up by the roots and hurled into the river?\" \"You were stubborn,\" came the reply, \"and fought against the storm, which proved stronger than you. But we bow and yield to every breeze, and thus the gale passed harmlessly over our heads.\"\n\n**THE OAK AND THE REEDS**\n\n**42. THE BLIND MAN AND THE CUB**\n\n**T** here was once a blind man who had so fine a sense of touch that when any animal was put into his hands he could tell what it was merely by the feel of it. One day the cub of a wolf was put into his hands, and he was asked what it was. He felt it for some time, and then said, \"Indeed, I am not sure whether it is a wolfs cub or a fox's. But this I know: It would never do to trust it in a sheepfold.\"\n\n**Evil tendencies are early shown.**\n**43. THE BOY AND THE SNAILS**\n\n**A** farmer's boy went looking for snails, and when he had picked up both his hands full he set about making a fire at which to roast them, for he meant to eat them. When it got well alight and the snails began to feel the heat, they gradually withdrew more and more into their shells with the hissing noise they always make when they do so. When the boy heard it, he said, \"You abandoned creatures, how can you find heart to whistle when your houses are burning?\"\n**44\u00b7 THE APES AND THE TWO TRAVELERS**\n\n**T** wo men were traveling together, one of whom never spoke the truth, whereas the other never told a lie; and they came in the course of their travels to the land of apes. The king of the apes, hearing of their arrival, ordered them to be brought before him; and by way of impressing them with his magnificence, he received them sitting on a throne, while the apes, his subjects, were ranged in long rows on either side of him. When the travelers came into his presence he asked them what they thought of him as a king. The lying traveler said, \"Sire, everyone must see that you are a most noble and mighty monarch.\" \"And what do you think of my subjects?\" continued the king. \"They,\" said the traveler, \"are in every way worthy of their royal master.\" The ape was so delighted with his answer that he gave him a very handsome present.\n\nThe other traveler thought that if his companion was rewarded so splendidly for telling a lie, he himself would certainly receive a still greater reward for telling the truth. So when the ape turned to him and said, \"And what, sir, is your opinion?\" he replied, \"I think you are a very fine ape, and all your subjects are fine apes too.\" The king of the apes was so enraged at his reply that he ordered him to be taken away and clawed to death.\n**45. THE ASS AND HIS BURDENS**\n\n**A** peddler who owned an ass one day bought a quantity of salt and loaded up his beast with as much as he could bear. On the way home the ass stumbled as he was crossing a stream and fell into the water. The salt got thoroughly wetted and much of it melted and drained away, so that, when he got on his legs again, the ass found his load had become much less heavy. His master, however, drove him back to town and bought more salt, which he added to what remained in the panniers, and started out again. No sooner had they reached a stream than the ass lay down in it, and rose, as before, with a much lighter load. But his master detected the trick and, turning back once more, bought a large number of sponges, and piled them on the back of the ass. When they came to the stream the ass again lay down. But this time, as the sponges soaked up large quantities of water, he found, when he got up on his legs that he had a bigger burden to carry than ever.\n\n**You may play a good card once too often.**\n**46. THE SHEPHERD'S BOY AND THE WOLF**\n\n**A** shepherd's boy was tending his flock near a village, and thought it would be great fun to hoax the villagers by pretending that a wolf was attacking the sheep; so he shouted out, \"Wolf! Wolf!\" and when the people came running up he laughed at them for their pains. He did this more than once, and every time the villagers found they had been hoaxed, for there was no wolf at all. At last a wolf really did come, and the boy cried, \"Wolf! Wolf!\" as loud as he could. But the people were so used to hearing him call that they took no notice of his cries for help. And so the wolf had it all his own way, and killed off sheep after sheep at his leisure.\n\n**You cannot believe a liar even when he tells the truth.**\n**47. THE FOX AND THE GOAT**\n\n**A** fox fell into a well and was unable to get out again. By and by a thirsty goat came by, and seeing the fox in the well asked him if the water was good. \"Good?\" said the fox. \"It's the best water I ever tasted in all my life. Come down and try it yourself.\" The goat thought of nothing but the prospect of quenching his thirst, and jumped in at once. When he had had enough to drink, he looked about, like the fox, for some way of getting out, but could find none.\n\nPresently the fox said, \"I have an idea. You stand on your hind legs and plant your forelegs firmly against the side of the well, and then I'll climb onto your back, and, from there, by stepping on your horns, I can get out. And when I'm out, I'll help you out too.\" The goat did as he was requested, and the fox climbed onto his back and so out of the well. And then he coolly walked away. The goat called loudly after him and reminded him of his promise to help him out. But the fox merely turned and said, \"If you had as much sense in your head as you have hair in your beard you wouldn't have got into the well without making certain that you could get out again.\"\n\n**Look before you leap.**\n**48. THE FISHERMAN AND THE SPRAT**\n\n**A** fisherman cast his net into the sea, and when he drew it up again it contained nothing but a single sprat that begged to be put back into the water. \"I'm only a little fish now,\" it said, \"but I shall grow big one day, and then if you come and catch me again I shall be of some use to you.\" But the fisherman replied, \"Oh, no, I shall keep you now I've got you. If I put you back, should I ever see you again? Not likely!\"\n**49\u00b7 THE BOASTING TRAVELER**\n\n**A** man once went abroad on his travels, and when he came home he had wonderful tales to tell of the things he had done in foreign countries. Among other things, he said he had taken part in a jumping match at Rhodes, and had done a wonderful jump which no one could beat. \"Just go to Rhodes and ask them,\" he said. \"Everyone will tell you it's true.\" But one of those who were listening said, \"If you can jump as well as all that, we needn't go to Rhodes to prove it. Let's just imagine this is Rhodes for a minute; and now\u2014jump!\"\n\n**Deeds, not words.**\n**50. THE CRAB AND HIS MOTHER**\n\n**A** n old crab said to her son, \"Why do you walk sideways like that, my son? You ought to walk straight.\" The young crab replied, \"Show me how, dear mother, and I'll follow your example.\" The old crab tried, but tried in vain, and then saw how foolish she had been to find fault with her child.\n\n**Example is better than precept.**\n\n**THE CRAB AND HIS MOTHER**\n\n**51 . THE ASS AND HIS SHADOW**\n\n**A** certain man hired an ass for a journey in summertime, and started out with the owner following behind to drive the beast. By and by, in the heat of the day, they stopped to rest, and the traveler wanted to lie down in the ass's shadow. But the owner, who himself wished to be out of the sun, wouldn't let him do that; for he said he had hired the ass only, and not his shadow. The other maintained that his bargain secured him complete control of the ass for the time being. From words they came to blows. And while they were belaboring each other the ass took to his heels and was soon out of sight.\n**52. THE FARMER AND HIS SONS**\n\n**A** farmer, being at death's door and desiring to impart to his sons a secret of much moment, called them round him and said, \"My sons, I am shortly about to die. I would have you know, therefore, that in my vineyard there lies a hidden treasure. Dig, and you will find it.\" As soon as their father was dead, the sons took spade and fork and turned up the soil of the vineyard over and over again, in their search for the treasure which they supposed to lie buried there. They found none, however; but the vines, after so thorough a digging, produced a crop such as had never before been seen.\n**53. THE DOG AND THE COOK**\n\n**A** rich man once invited a number of his friends and acquaintances to a banquet. His dog thought it would be a good opportunity to invite another dog, a friend of his; so he went to him and said, \"My master is giving a feast. There'll be a fine spread, so come and dine with me tonight.\" The dog thus invited came, and when he saw the preparations being made in the kitchen he said to himself, \"My word, I'm in luck. I'll take care to eat enough tonight to last me two or three days.\" At the same time he wagged his tail briskly, by way of showing his friend how delighted he was to have been asked.\n\nBut just then the cook caught sight of him, and, in his annoyance at seeing a strange dog in the kitchen, caught him up by the hind legs and threw him out of the window. He had a nasty fall, and limped away as quickly as he could, howling dismally. Presently some other dogs met him and said, \"Well, what sort of a dinner did you get?\" To which he replied, \"I had a splendid time. The wine was so good, and I drank so much of it, that I really don't remember how I got out of the house!\"\n\n**Be shy of favors bestowed at the expense of others.**\n**54. THE MONKEY AS KING**\n\n**A** t a gathering of all the animals the monkey danced and delighted them so much that they made him their king. The fox, however, was very much disgusted at the promotion of the monkey. So having one day found a trap with a piece of meat in it, he took the monkey there and said to him, \"Here is a dainty morsel I have found, sire; I did not take it myself, because I thought it ought to be reserved for you, our king. Will you be pleased to accept it?\" The monkey made at once for the meat and got caught in the trap. Then he bitterly reproached the fox for leading him into danger. But the fox only laughed and said, \"O monkey, you call yourself king of the beasts and haven't more sense than to be taken in like that!\"\n\n**55. THE THIEVES AND THE COCK**\n\n**S** ome thieves broke into a house and found nothing worth taking except a cock, which they seized and carried off with them. When they were preparing their supper, one of them caught up the cock, and was about to wring his neck, when he cried out for mercy and said, \"Pray do not kill me. You will find me a most useful bird, for I rouse honest men to their work in the morning by my crowing.\" But the thief replied with some heat, \"Yes, I know you do, making it still harder for us to get a livelihood. Into the pot you go!\"\n**56. THE FARMER AND FORTUNE**\n\n**A** farmer was plowing one day on his farm when he turned up a pot of golden coins with his plow. He was overjoyed at his discovery and from that time forth made an offering daily at the shrine of the Goddess of the Earth. Fortune was displeased at this and came to him and said, \"My man, why do you give Earth the credit for the gift which I bestowed upon you? You never thought of thanking me for your good luck. But should you be unlucky enough to lose what you have gained, I know very well that I, Fortune, should then come in for all the blame.\"\n\n**Show gratitude where gratitude is due.**\n**57. JUPITER AND THE MONKEY**\n\n**J** upiter issued a proclamation to all the beasts and offered a prize to the one who, in his judgment, produced the most beautiful offspring. Among the rest came the monkey, carrying a baby monkey in her arms, a hairless, flat-nosed little fright. When they saw it the gods all burst into peal on peal of laughter. But the monkey hugged her little one to her and said, \"Jupiter may give the prize to whomsoever he likes, but I shall always think my baby the most beautiful of them all.\"\n**58. FATHER AND SONS**\n\n**A** certain man had several sons who were always quarreling with one another, and, try as he might, he could not get them to live together in harmony. So he determined to convince them of their folly by the following means. Bidding them fetch a bundle of sticks, he invited each in turn to break it across his knee. All tried and all failed. And then he undid the bundle and handed them the sticks one by one, when they had no difficulty at all in breaking them. \"There, my boys,\" said he, \"united you will be more than a match for your enemies. But if you quarrel and separate, your weakness will put you at the mercy of those who attack you.\"\n\n**Union is strength.**\n**59. THE LAMP**\n\n**A** lamp, well filled with oil, burned with a clear and steady light, and began to swell with pride and boast that it shone more brightly than the sun himself. Just then a puff of wind came and blew it out. Someone struck a match and lit it again, and said, \"You just keep alight, and never mind the sun. Why, even the stars never need to be relit as you had to be just now.\"\n\n**THE OWL AND THE BIRDS**\n\n**60. THE OWL AND THE BIRDS**\n\n**T** he owl is a very wise bird; and once, long ago, when the first oak sprouted in the forest, she called all the other birds together and said to them, \"You see this tiny tree? If you take my advice, you will destroy it now when it is small; for when it grows big, the mistletoe will appear upon it, from which birdlime will be prepared for your destruction.\" Again, when the first flax was sown, she said to them, \"Go and eat up that seed, for it is the seed of the flax, out of which men will one day make nets to catch you.\" Once more, when she saw the first archer, she warned the birds that he was their deadly enemy, who would wing his arrows with their own feathers and shoot them.\n\nBut they took no notice of what she said. In fact, they thought she was rather mad, and laughed at her. When, however, everything turned out as she had foretold, they changed their minds and conceived a great respect for her wisdom. Hence, whenever she appears, the birds attend upon her in the hope of hearing something that may be for their good. She, however, gives them advice no longer, but sits moping and pondering on the folly of her kind.\n\n**61. THE ASS IN THE LION'S SKIN**\n\n**A** n ass found a lion's skin, and dressed himself up in it. Then he went about frightening everyone he met, for they all took him to be a lion, men and beasts alike, and took to their heels when they saw him coming. Elated by the success of his trick, he loudly brayed in triumph. The fox heard him, and recognized him at once for the ass he was, and said to him, \"Oho, my friend, it's you, is it? I, too, should have been afraid if I hadn't heard your voice. \"\n**62. THE SHE-GOATS AND THEIR BEARDS**\n\n**J** upiter granted beards to the she-goats at their own request, much to the disgust of the he-goats, who considered this to be an unwarrantable invasion of their rights and dignities. So they sent a deputation to him to protest against his action. He, however, advised them not to raise any objections. \"What's in a tuft of hair?\" said he. \"Let them have it if they want it. They can never be a match for you in strength.\"\n**63. THE OLD LION**\n\n**A** lion, enfeebled by age and no longer able to procure food for himself by force, determined to do so by cunning. Be taking himself to a cave, he lay down inside and feigned to be sick; and whenever any of the other animals entered to inquire after his health, he sprang upon them and devoured them. Many lost their lives in this way, till one day a fox called at the cave, and, having a suspicion of the truth, addressed the lion from outside instead of going in, and asked him how he did. He replied that he was in a very bad way. \"But,\" said he, \"why do you stand outside? Pray come in.\" \"I should have done so,\" answered the fox, \"if I hadn't noticed that all the footprints point towards the cave and none the other way.\"\n**64. THE BOY BATHING**\n\n**A** boy was bathing in a river and got out of his depth, and was in great danger of being drowned. A man who was passing along a road hard by heard his cries for help, and went to the riverside and began to scold him for being so careless as to get into deep water, but made no attempt to help him. \"Oh, sir,\" cried the boy, \"please help me first and scold me afterwards.\"\n\n**Give assistance, not advice, in a crisis.**\n\n**THE QUACK FROG**\n\n**65. THE QUACK FROG**\n\n**O** nce upon a time a frog came forth from his home in the marshes and proclaimed to all the world that he was a learned physician, skilled in drugs and able to cure all diseases. Among the crowd was a fox, who called out, \"You a doctor! Why, how can you set up to heal others when you cannot even cure your own lame legs and blotched and wrinkled skin?\"\n\n**Physician, heal thyself.**\n**66. THE SWOLLEN FOX**\n\n**A** hungry fox found in a hollow tree a quantity of bread and meat which some shepherds had placed there against their return. Delighted with his find he slipped in through the narrow aperture and greedily devoured it all. But when he tried to get out again he found himself so swollen after his big meal that he could not squeeze through the hole, and fell to whining and groaning over his misfortune. Another fox, happening to pass that way, came and asked him what the matter was; and, on learning the state of the case, said, \"Well, my friend, I see nothing for it but for you stay where you are till you shrink to your former size. You'll get out then easily enough.\"\n**67. THE MOUSE, THE FROG, AND THE HAWK**\n\n**A** mouse and a frog struck up a friendship. They were not well mated, for the mouse lived entirely on land, while the frog was equally at home on land or in the water. In order that they might never be separated, the frog tied himself and the mouse together by the leg with a piece of thread. As long as they kept on dry land all went fairly well; but, coming to the edge of a pool, the frog jumped in, taking the mouse with him, and began swimming about and croaking with pleasure. The unhappy mouse, however, was soon drowned, and floated about on the surface in the wake of the frog. There he was spied by a hawk, who pounced down on him and seized him in his talons. The frog was unable to loose the knot which bound him to the mouse, and thus was carried off along with him and eaten by the hawk.\n**68. THE BOY AND THE NETTLES**\n\n**A** boy was gathering berries from a hedge when his hand was stung by a nettle. Smarting with the pain, he ran to tell his mother, and said to her between his sobs, \"I only touched it ever so lightly, mother.\" \"That's just why you got stung, my son,\" said she. \"If you had grasped it firmly it wouldn't have hurt you in the least.\"\n**69. THE PEASANT AND THE APPLE TREE**\n\n**A** peasant had an apple tree growing in his garden, which bore no fruit, but merely served to provide a shelter from the heat for the sparrows and grasshoppers which sat and chirped in its branches. Disappointed at its barrenness he determined to cut it down, and went and fetched his ax for the purpose. But when the sparrows and the grasshoppers saw what he was about to do, they begged him to spare it, and said to him, \"If you destroy the tree we shall have to seek shelter elsewhere, and you will no longer have our merry chirping to enliven your work in the garden.\"\n\nHe, however, refused to listen to them, and set to work with a will to cut through the trunk. A few strokes showed that it was hollow inside and contained a swarm of bees and a large store of honey. Delighted with his find he threw down his ax, saying, \"The old tree is worth keeping after all.\"\n\n**Utility is most men's test of worth.**\n**70. THE JACKDAW AND THE PIGEONS**\n\n**A** jackdaw, watching some pigeons in a farmyard, was filled with envy when he saw how well they were fed and determined to disguise himself as one of them, in order to secure a share of the good things they enjoyed. So he painted himself white from head to foot and joined the flock; and, so long as he was silent, they never suspected that he was not a pigeon like themselves.\n\nBut one day he was unwise enough to start chattering, when they at once saw through his disguise and pecked him so unmercifully that he was glad to escape and join his own kind again. But the other jackdaws did not recognize him in his white dress, and would not let him feed with them, but drove him away. And so he became a homeless wanderer for his pains.\n**71. JUPITER AND THE TORTOISE**\n\n**J** upiter was about to marry a wife and determined to celebrate the event by inviting all the animals to a banquet. They all came except the tortoise, who did not put in an appearance, much to Jupiter's surprise. So when he next saw the tortoise he asked him why he had not been at the banquet. \"I don't care for going out,\" said the tortoise. \"There's no place like home.\" Jupiter was so much annoyed by this reply that he decreed that from that time forth the tortoise should carry his house upon his back, and never be able to get away from home even if he wished to.\n\n**72. THE DOG IN THE MANGER**\n\n**A** dog was lying in a manger on the hay which had been put there for the cattle, and when they came and tried to eat, he growled and snapped at them and wouldn't let them get at their food. \"What a selfish beast,\" said one of them to his companions. \"He can't eat himself and yet he won't let those eat who can.\"\n**73. THE TWO BAGS**\n\n**E** very man carries two bags about with him, one in front and one behind, and both are packed full of faults. The bag in front contains his neighbors' faults, the one behind his own. Hence it is that men do not see their own faults, but never fail to see those of others.\n**74. THE OXEN AND THE AXLETREES**\n\n**A** pair of oxen were drawing a heavily loaded wagon along the highway, and as they tugged and strained at the yoke the axletrees creaked and groaned terribly. This was too much for the oxen, who turned round indignantly and said, \"Hullo, you there! Why do you make such a noise when we do all the work?\"\n\n**They complain most who suffer least.**\n**75. THE BOY AND THE FILBERTS**\n\n**A** boy put his hand into a jar of filberts and grasped as many as his fist could possibly hold. But when he tried to pull it out again he found he couldn't do so, for the neck of the jar was too small to allow the passage of so large a handful. Unwilling to lose his nuts but unable to withdraw his hand, he burst into tears. A bystander, who saw where the trouble lay, said to him, \"Come, my boy, don't be so greedy. Be content with half the amount, and you'll be able to get your hand out without difficulty.\"\n\n**Do not attempt too much at once.**\n\n**76.** THE FROGS ASKING FOR A KING\n\n**T** ime was when the frogs were discontented because they had no one to rule over them, so they sent a deputation to Jupiter to ask him to give them a king. Jupiter, despising the folly of their request, cast a log into the pool where they lived, and said that that should be their king. The frogs were terrified at first by the splash and scuttled away into the deepest parts of the pool.\n\nBut by and by, when they saw that the log remained motionless, one by one they ventured to the surface again, and before long, growing bolder, they began to feel such contempt for it that they even took to sitting upon it. Thinking that a king of that sort was an insult to their dignity, they sent to Jupiter a second time and begged him to take away the sluggish king he had given them and to give them another and a better one. Jupiter, annoyed at being pestered in this way, sent a stork to rule over them, who no sooner arrived among them than he began to catch and eat the frogs as fast as he could.\n\n**77. THE OLIVE TREE AND THE FIG TREE**\n\n**A** n olive tree taunted a fig tree with the loss of her leaves at a certain season of the year. \"You,\" she said, \"lose your leaves every autumn and are bare till the spring; whereas I, as you see, remain green and flourishing all the year round.\" Soon afterwards there came a heavy fall of snow, which settled on the leaves of the olive so that she bent and broke under the weight. But the flakes fell harmlessly through the bare branches of the fig, which survived to bear many another crop.\n**78 . THE LION AND THE BOAR**\n\n**O** ne hot and thirsty day in the height of summer a lion and a boar came down to a little spring at the same moment to drink. In a trice they were quarreling as to who should drink first. The quarrel soon became a fight, and they attacked one another with utmost fury. Presently, stopping for a moment to take breath, they saw some vultures seated on a rock above, evidently waiting for one of them to be killed, when they would fly down and feed upon the carcass. The sight sobered them at once, and they made up their quarrel, saying, \"We had much better be friends than fight and be eaten by vultures.\"\n**79.** THE WALNUT TREE\n\n**A** walnut tree which grew by the roadside bore every year a plentiful crop of nuts. Everyone who passed by pelted its branches with sticks and stones in order to bring down the fruit, and the tree suffered severely. \"It is hard,\" it cried, \"that the very persons who enjoy my fruit should thus reward me with insults and blows.\"\n**80.** THE MAN AND THE LION\n\n**A** man and a lion were companions on a journey, and in the course of conversation they began to boast about their prowess, and each claimed to be superior to the other in strength and courage. They were still arguing with some heat when they came to a crossroad where there was a statue of a man strangling a lion. \"There!\" said the man triumphantly. \"Look at that! Doesn't that prove to you that we are stronger than you?\" \"Not so fast, my friend,\" said the lion. \"That is only your view of the case. If we lions could make statues, you may be sure that in most of them you would see the man underneath.\"\n\nThere are two sides to every question.\n**81. THE TORTOISE AND THE EAGLE**\n\n**A** tortoise, discontented with his lowly life and envious of the birds he saw disporting themselves in the air, begged an eagle to teach him to fly. The eagle protested that it was idle for him to try, as nature had not provided him with wings. But the tortoise pressed him with entreaties and promises of treasure, insisting that it could only be a question of learning the craft of the air. So at length the eagle consented to do the best he could for him and picked him up in his talons. Soaring with him to a great height in the sky, he then let him go, and the wretched tortoise fell headlong and was dashed to pieces on a rock.\n****82.** THE KID ON THE HOUSETOP**\n\n**A** kid climbed up onto the roof of an outhouse, attracted by the grass and other things that grew in the thatch. And as he stood there browsing away he caught sight of a wolf passing below and jeered at him because he couldn't reach him. The wolf only looked up and said, \"I hear you, my young friend. But it is not you who mock me, but the roof on which you are standing.\"\n\n****83.** THE FOX WITHOUT A TAIL**\n\n**A** fox once fell into a trap and after a struggle managed to get free, but with the loss of his brush. He was then so much ashamed of his appearance that he thought life was not worth living unless he could persuade the other foxes to part with their tails also, and thus divert attention from his own loss. So he called a meeting of all the foxes and advised them to cut off their tails. \"They're ugly things anyhow,\" he said, \"and besides they're heavy, and it's tiresome to be always carrying them about with you.\" But one of the other foxes said, \"My friend, if you hadn't lost your own tail you wouldn't be so keen on getting us to cut off ours.\"\n**84. THE VAIN JACKDAW**\n\n**J** upiter announced that he intended to appoint a king over the birds and named a day on which they were to appear before his throne, when he would select the most beautiful of them all to be their ruler. Wishing to look their best on the occasion they repaired to the banks of a stream, where they busied themselves in washing and preening their feathers.\n\nThe jackdaw was there along with the rest, and realized that with his ugly plumage he would have no chance of being chosen as he was. So he waited till they were all gone, and then picked up the most gaudy of the feathers they had dropped and fastened them about his own body, with the result that he looked gayer than any of them.\n\nWhen the appointed day came, the birds assembled before Jupiter's throne; and, after passing them in review, he was about to make the jackdaw king, when all the rest set upon the king-elect, stripped him of his borrowed plumes, and exposed him for the jackdaw that he was.\n**85. THE TRAVELER AND HIS DOG**\n\n**A** traveler was about to start on a journey and said to his dog, who was stretching himself by the door, \"Come, what are you yawning for? Hurry up and get ready. I mean you to go with me.\" But the dog merely wagged his tail and said quietly, \"I'm ready, master. It's you I'm waiting for.\"\n**86.** THE SHIPWRECKED MAN AND THE SEA\n\n**A** shipwrecked man cast up on the beach fell asleep after his struggle with the waves. When he woke up, he bitterly reproached the sea for its treachery in enticing men with its smooth and smiling surface, and then, when they were well embarked, turning in fury upon them and sending both ship and sailors to destruction. The sea arose in the form of a woman, and replied, \"Lay not the blame on me, O sailor, but on the winds. By nature I am as calm and safe as the land itself, but the winds fall upon me with their gusts and gales, and lash me into a fury that is not natural to me.\"\n**87. THE WILD BOAR AND THE FOX**\n\n**A** wild boar was engaged in whetting his tusks upon the trunk of a tree in the forest when a fox came by and, seeing what he was at, said to him, \"Why are you doing that, pray? The huntsmen are not out today, and there are no other dangers at hand that I can see.\" \"True, my friend,\" replied the boar, \"but the instant my life is in danger I shall need to use my tusks. There'll be no time to sharpen them then.\"\n**88. MERCURY AND THE SCULPTOR**\n\n**M** ercury was very anxious to know in what estimation he was held by mankind, so he disguised himself as a man and walked into a sculptor's studio where there were a number of statues finished and ready for sale. Seeing a statue of Jupiter among the rest, he inquired the price of it. \"A crown,\" said the sculptor. \"Is that all?\" said he, laughing. \"And (pointing to one of Juno) how much is that one?\" \"That,\" was the reply, \"is half a crown.\" \"And how much might you be wanting for that one over there, now?\" he continued, pointing to a statue of himself. \"That one?\" said the sculptor. \"Oh, I'll throw him in for nothing if you'll buy the other two.\"\n**89. THE FAWN AND HIS MOTHER**\n\n**A** hind said to her fawn, who was now well grown and strong, \"My son, nature has given you a powerful body and a stout pair of horns, and I can't think why you are such a coward as to run away from the hounds.\" Just then they both heard the sound of a pack in full cry, but at a considerable distance. \"You stay where you are,\" said the hind. \"Never mind me.\" And with that she ran off as fast as her legs could carry her.\n\n****90.** THE FOX AND THE LION**\n\n**A** fox who had never seen a lion one day met one, and was so terrified at the sight of him that he was ready to die with fear. After a time he met him again, and was still rather frightened, but not nearly so much as he had been when he met him first. But when he saw him for the third time he was so far from being afraid that he went up to him and began to talk to him as if he had known him all his life.\n\n****91.** THE EAGLE AND HIS CAPTOR**\n\n**A** man once caught an eagle, and after clipping his wings turned him loose among the fowls in his henhouse, where he moped in a corner, looking very dejected and forlorn. After a while his captor was glad enough to sell him to a neighbor, who took him home and let his wings grow again. As soon as he had recovered the use of them, the eagle flew out and caught a hare, which he brought home and presented to his benefactor. A fox observed this, and said to the eagle, \"Don't waste your gifts on him! Go and give them to the man who first caught you; make him your friend, and then perhaps he won't catch you and clip your wings a second time.\"\n**92. THE BLACKSMITH AND HIS DOG**\n\n**A** blacksmith had a little dog, which used to sleep when his master was at work, but was wide awake indeed when it was time for meals. One day his master pretended to be disgusted at this, and when he had thrown him a bone as usual, he said, \"What on earth is the good of a lazy cur like you? When I am hammering away at my anvil, you just curl up and go to sleep; but no sooner do I stop for a mouthful of food than you wake up and wag your tail to be fed.\"\n\n**Those who will not work deserve to starve.**\n**93\u00b7 THE STAG AT THE POOL**\n\n**A** thirsty stag went down to a pool to drink. As he bent over the surface he saw his own reflection in the water, and was struck with admiration for his fine spreading antlers, but at the same time he felt nothing but disgust for the weakness and slenderness of his legs. While he stood there looking at himself, he was seen and attacked by a lion; but in the chase which ensued, he soon drew away from his pursuer, and kept his lead as long as the ground over which he ran was open and free of trees. But coming presently to a wood, he was caught by his antlers in the branches, and fell a victim to the teeth and claws of his enemy. \"Woe is me!\" he cried with his last breath. \"I despised my legs, which might have saved my life. But I gloried in my horns, and they have proved my ruin.\"\n\n**What is worth most is often valued least.**\n\n**94. THE DOG AND HIS REFLECTION**\n\n**A** dog was crossing a plank bridge over a stream with a piece of meat in his mouth, when he happened to see his own reflection in the water. He thought it was another dog with a piece of meat twice as big; so he let go his own, and flew at the other dog to get the other piece. But, of course, all that happened was that he got neither; for one was only a reflection, and the other was carried away by the current.\n**95.** **MERCURY AND THE TRADESMEN**\n\n**W** hen Jupiter was creating man, he told Mercury to make an infusion of lies, and to add a little of it to the other ingredients which went to the making of the tradesmen. Mercury did so, and introduced an equal amount into each in turn\u2014the tallow chandler, and the greengrocer, and the haberdasher, and all, till he came to the horse dealer, who was last on the list, when, finding that he had a quantity of the infusion still left, he put it all into him. This is why all tradesmen lie more or less, but they none of them lie like a horse dealer.\n**96. THE MICE AND THE WEASELS**\n\n**T** here was war between the mice and the weasels, in which the mice always got the worst of it, numbers of them being killed and eaten by the weasels. So they called a council of war, in which an old mouse got up and said, \"It's no wonder we are always beaten, for we have no generals to plan our battles and direct our movements in the field.\" Acting on his advice, they chose the biggest mice to be their leaders, and these, in order to be distinguished from the rank and file, provided themselves with helmets bearing large plumes of straw. They then led out the mice to battle, confident of victory; but they were defeated as usual, and were soon scampering as fast as they could to their holes. All made their way to safety without difficulty except the leaders, who were so hampered by the badges of their rank that they could not get into their holes, and fell easy victims to their pursuers.\n\n**Greatness carries its own penalties.**\n****97.** THE PEACOCK AND JUNO**\n\n**T** he peacock was greatly discontented because he had not a beautiful voice like the nightingale, and he went and com- plained to Juno about it. \"The nightingale's song,\" said he, \"is the envy of all the birds; but whenever I utter a sound I become a laughingstock.\" The goddess tried to console him by saying, \"You have not, it is true, the power of song, but then you far excel all the rest in beauty. Your neck flashes like the emerald, and your splendid tail is a marvel of gorgeous color.\" But the peacock was not appeased. \"What is the use,\" said he, \"of being beautiful, with a voice like mine?\" Then Juno replied, with a shade of sternness in her tones, \"Fate has allotted to all their destined gifts: to yourself beauty, to the eagle strength, to the nightingale song, and so on to all the rest in their degree. But you alone are dissatisfied with your portion. Make, then, no more complaints, for if your present wish were granted, you would quickly find cause for fresh discontent.\"\n\n**THE BEAR AND THE FOX**\n\n**98.** **THE BEAR AND THE FOX**\n\n**A** bear was once bragging about his generous feelings, and saying how refined he was compared with other animals. (There is, in fact, a tradition that a bear will never touch a dead body.) A fox, who heard him talking in this strain, smiled and said, \"My friend, when you are hungry, I only wish you would confine your attention to the dead and leave the living alone.\"\n\n**A hypocrite deceives no one but himself.**\n**99. THE ASS AND THE OLD PEASANT**\n\n**A** n old peasant was sitting in a meadow watching his ass, which was grazing close by, when all of a sudden he caught sight of armed men stealthily approaching. He jumped up in a moment, and begged the ass to fly with him as fast as he could, \"Or else,\" said he, \"we shall both be captured by the enemy.\" But the ass just looked round lazily and said, \"And if so, do you think they'll make me carry heavier loads than I have to now?\" \"No,\" said his master. \"Oh, well, then,\" said the ass, \"I don't mind if they do take me, for I shan't be any worse off.\"\n\n**100. THE OX AND THE FROG**\n\n**T** wo little frogs were playing about at the edge of a pool when an ox came down to the water to drink, and by accident trod on one of them and crushed the life out of him. When the old frog missed him, she asked his brother where he was. \"He is dead, mother,\" said the little frog; \"an enormous big creature with four legs came to our pool this morning and trampled him down in the mud.\" \"Enormous, was he? Was he as big as this?\" said the frog, puffing herself out to look as big as possible. \"Oh! Yes, much bigger,\" was the answer. The frog puffed herself out still more. \"Was he as big as this?\" said she. \"Oh! Yes, yes, mother, MUCH bigger,\" said the little frog. And yet again she puffed and puffed herself out till she was almost as round as a ball. \"As big as ... ?\" she began\u2014but then she burst.\n**101. THE MAN AND THE IMAGE**\n\n**A** poor man had a wooden image of a god, to which he used to pray daily for riches. He did this for a long time, but remained as poor as ever, till one day he caught up the image in disgust and hurled it with all his strength against the wall. The force of the blow split open the head, and a quantity of gold coins fell out upon the floor. The man gathered them up greedily, and said, \"O you old fraud, you! When I honored you, you did me no good whatever; but no sooner do I treat you to insults and violence than you make a rich man of me!\"\n**102.** **HERCULES AND THE WAGONER**\n\n**A** wagoner was driving his team along a muddy lane with a full load behind them, when the wheels of his wagon sank so deep in the mire that no efforts of his horses could move them. As he stood there, looking helplessly on, and calling loudly at intervals upon Hercules for assistance, the god himself appeared, and said to him, \"Put your shoulder to the wheel, man, and goad on your horses, and then you may call on Hercules to assist you. If you won't lift a finger to help yourself, you can't expect Hercules or anyone else to come to your aid.\"\n\n**Heaven helps those who help themselves.**\n**103. THE POMEGRANATE, THE APPLE TREE, AND THE BRAMBLE**\n\n**A** pomegranate and an apple tree were disputing about the quality of their fruits, and each claimed that its own was the better of the two. High words passed between them, and a violent quarrel was imminent, when a bramble impudently poked its head out of a neighboring hedge and said, \"There, that's enough, my friends. Don't let us quarrel.\" \n**104. THE LION, THE BEAR, AND THE FOX**\n\n**A** lion and a bear were fighting for possession of a kid, which they had both seized at the same moment. The battle was long and fierce, and at length both of them were exhausted, and lay upon the ground severely wounded and gasping for breath. A fox had all the time been prowling round and watching the fight, and when he saw the combatants lying there too weak to move, he slipped in and seized the kid and ran off with it. They looked on helplessly, and one said to the other, \"Here we've been mauling each other all this while, and no one the better for it except the fox!\"\n****105.** THE BLACKAMOOR**\n\n**A** man once bought an Ethiopian slave, who had black skin like all Ethiopians. But his new master thought his color was due to his late owner's having neglected him, and that all he wanted was a good scrubbing. So he set to work with plenty of soap and hot water, and rubbed away at him with a will, but all to no purpose. His skin remained as black as ever, while the poor wretch all but died from the cold he caught.\n**106. THE TWO SOLDIERS AND THE ROBBER**\n\n**T** wo soldiers traveling together were set upon by a robber. One of them ran away, but the other stood his ground, and laid about him so lustily with his sword that the robber was fain to fly and leave him in peace. When the coast was clear the timid one ran back, and, flourishing his weapon, cried in a threatening voice, \"Where is he? Let me get at him, and I'll soon let him know whom he's got to deal with.\" But the other replied, \"You are a little late, my friend. I only wish you had backed me up just now, even if you had done no more than speak, for I should have been encouraged, believing your words to be true. As it is, calm yourself, and put up your sword. There is no further use for it. You may delude others into thinking you're as brave as a lion; but I know that, at the first sign of danger, you run away like a hare.\"\n**107.** **THE LION AND THE WILD ASS**\n\n**A** lion and a wild ass went out hunting together. The latter was to run down the prey by his superior speed, and the former would then come up and dispatch it. They met with great success; and when it came to sharing the spoil the lion divided it all into three equal portions. \"I will take the first,\" said he, \"because I am king of the beasts; I will also take the second, because as your partner, I am entitled to half of what remains; and as for the third\u2014well, unless you give it up to me and take yourself off pretty quick, the third, believe me, will make you feel very sorry for yourself!\"\n\n**Might makes right.**\n\n**108**. **THE MAN AND THE SATYR**\n\n**A** man and a satyr became friends and determined to live together. All went well for a while, until one day in wintertime the satyr saw the man blowing on his hands. \"Why do you do that?\" he asked. \"To warm my hands,\" said the man. That same day when they sat down to supper together, they each had a steaming hot bowl of porridge, and the man raised his bowl to his mouth\n\nand blew on it. \"Why do you do that?\" asked the satyr. \"To cool my porridge,\" said the man. The satyr got up from the table. \"Good-bye,\" said he, \"I'm going. I can't be friends with a man who blows hot and cold with the same breath.\"\n**109. THE IMAGE SELLER**\n\n**A** certain man made a wooden image of Mercury, and exposed it for sale in the market. As no one offered to buy it, however, he thought he would try to attract a purchaser by proclaiming the virtues of the image. So he cried up and down the market, \"A god for sale! A god for sale! One who'll bring you luck and keep you lucky!\" Presently one of the bystanders stopped him and said, \"If your god is all you make him out to be, how is it you don't keep him and make the most of him yourself?\" \"I'll tell you why,\" replied he. \"He brings gain, it is true, but he takes his time about it; whereas I want money at once.\"\n**110. THE EAGLE AND THE ARROW**\n\n**A** n eagle sat perched on a lofty rock, keeping a sharp lookout for prey. A huntsman, concealed in a cleft of the mountain and on the watch for game, spied him there and shot an arrow at him. The shaft struck him full in the breast and pierced him through and through. As he lay in the agonies of death, he turned his eyes upon the arrow. \"Ah, cruel fate!\" he cried, \"that I should perish thus. But oh, fate more cruel still, that the arrow which kills me should be winged with an eagle's feathers!\"\n**III.** THE RICH MAN AND THE TANNER\n\n**A** rich man took up his residence next door to a tanner, and found the smell of the tan yard so extremely unpleasant that he told him he must go. The tanner delayed his departure, and the rich man had to speak to him several times about it; and every time the tanner said he was making arrangements to move very shortly. This went on for some time, till at last the rich man got so used to the smell that he ceased to mind it, and troubled the tanner with his objections no more.\n**112. THE WOLF, THE MOTHER, AND HER CHILD**\n\n**A** hungry wolf was prowling about in search of food. By and by, attracted by the cries of a child, he came to a cottage. As he crouched beneath the window, he heard the mother say to the child, \"Stop crying, do, or I'll throw you to the wolf!\" Thinking she really meant what she said, he waited there a long time in the expectation of satisfying his hunger. In the evening he heard the mother fondling her child and saying, \"If the naughty wolf comes, he shan't get my little one. Daddy will kill him.\" The wolf got up in much disgust and walked away. \"As for the people in that house,\" said he to himself, \"you can't believe a word they say.\"\n**113. THE OLD WOMAN AND THE WINE JAR**\n\n**A** n old woman picked up an empty wine jar which had once contained a rare and costly wine, and which still retained some traces of its exquisite bouquet. She raised it to her nose and sniffed at it again and again. \"Ah,\" she cried, \"how delicious must have been the liquid which has left behind so ravishing a smell.\"\n\n**114. THE LIONESS AND THE VIXEN**\n\n**A** lioness and a vixen were talking together about their young, as mothers will, and saying how healthy and well grown they were, and what beautiful coats they had, and how they were the image of their parents. \"My litter of cubs is a joy to see,\" said the fox. And then she added, rather maliciously, \"But I notice you never have more than one.\" \"No,\" said the lioness grimly, \"but that one is a lion.\"\n\n**Quality, not quantity.**\n**115. THE VIPER AND THE FILE**\n\n**A** viper entered a carpenter's shop, and went from one to another of the tools, begging for something to eat. Among the rest, he addressed himself to the file, and asked for the favor of a meal. The file replied in a tone of pitying contempt, \"What a simpleton you must be if you imagine you will get anything from me, for I invariably take from everyone and never give anything in return.\"\n\n**The covetous are poor givers.**\n\nTHE CAT AND THE COCK\n\n**116. THE CAT AND THE COCK**\n\n**A** cat pounced on a cock and cast about for some good excuse for making a meal off him, for cats don't as a rule eat cocks, and she knew she ought not to. At last she said, \"You make a great nuisance of yourself at night by crowing and keeping people awake, so I am going to make an end of you.\" But the cock defended himself by saying that he crowed in order that men might wake up and set about the day's work in good time, and that they really couldn't very well do without him. \"That may be,\" said the cat, \"but whether they can or not, I'm not going without my dinner.\" And she killed and ate him.\n\nThe want of a good excuse never kept a villain from crime.\n**117. THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE**\n\n**A** hare was one day making fun of a tortoise for being so slow upon his feet. 'Wait a bit,\" said the tortoise. \"I'll run a race with you, and I'll wager that I win.\" \"Oh, well,\" replied the hare, who was much amused at the idea, \"let's try and see.\" And it was soon agreed that the fox should set a course for them and be the judge. When the time came both started off together, but the hare was soon so far ahead that he thought he might as well have a rest. So down he lay and fell fast asleep. Meanwhile the tortoise kept plodding on, and in time reached the goal. At last the hare woke up with a start and dashed on at his fastest, but only to find that the tortoise had already won the race.\n\n**Slow and steady wins the race.**\n**118. THE SOLDIER AND THE HORSE**\n\n**A** soldier gave his horse a plentiful supply of oats in time of war, and tended him with the utmost care, for he wished him to be strong to endure the hardships of the field, and swift to bear his master, when need arose, out of the reach of danger. But when the war was over he employed him on all sorts of drudgery, bestowing but little attention upon him, and giving him, moreover, nothing but chaff to eat. The time came when war broke out again, and the soldier saddled and bridled his horse, and, having put on his heavy coat of mail, mounted him to ride off and take the field. But the poor half-starved beast sank down under his weight, and said to his rider, \"You will have to go into battle on foot this time. Thanks to hard work and bad food you have turned me from a horse into an ass; and you cannot in a moment turn me back again into a horse.\"\n**119. THE OXEN AND THE BUTCHERS**\n\n**O** nce upon a time the oxen determined to be revenged upon the butchers for the havoc they wrought in their ranks, and plotted to put them to death on a given day. They were all gathered together discussing how best to carry out the plan, and the more violent of them were engaged in sharpening their horns for the fray, when an old ox got up upon his feet and said, \"My brothers, you have good reason, I know, to hate these butchers, but, at any rate, they understand their trade and do what they have to do without causing unnecessary pain. But if we kill them, others, who have no experience, will be set to slaughter us, and will by their bungling inflict great sufferings upon us. For you may be sure that even though all the butchers perish, mankind will never go without their beef.\"\n**120.** **THE WOLF AND THE LION**\n\n**A** wolf stole a lamb from the flock, and was carrying it off to devour it at his leisure when he met a lion, who took his prey away from him and walked off with it. He dared not resist, but when the lion had gone some distance he said, \"It is most unjust of you to take what is mine away from me like that.\" The lion laughed and called out in reply, \"It was justly yours, no doubt! The gift of a friend, perhaps, eh?\"\n**121. THE SHEEP, THE WOLF, AND THE STAG**\n\n**A** stag once asked a sheep to lend him a measure of wheat, saying that his friend the wolf would be his surety. The sheep, however, was afraid that they meant to cheat her; so she excused herself, saying, \"The wolf is in the habit of seizing what he wants and running off with it without paying, and you, too, can run much faster than 1. So how shall I be able to come up with either of you when the debt falls due?\"\n\n**Two blacks do not make a white.**\n****122.** THE LION AND THE THREE BULLS**\n\n**T** hree bulls were grazing in a meadow, and were watched by a lion, who longed to capture and devour them, but who felt that he was no match for the three so long as they kept together. So he began by false whispers and malicious hints to foment jealousies and distrust among them. This stratagem succeeded so well that ere long the bulls grew cold and unfriendly, and finally avoided each other and fed each one by himself apart. No sooner did the lion see this than he fell upon them one by one and killed them in turn.\n\n**The quarrels of friends are the opportunities of foes.**\n**123. THE HORSE AND HIS RIDER**\n\n**A** young man, who fancied himself something of a horse- man, mounted a horse which had not been properly bro- ken in and was exceedingly difficult to control. No sooner did the horse feel his weight in the saddle than he bolted, and nothing would stop him. A friend of the rider's met him in the road in his headlong career, and called out, \"Where are you off to in such a hurry?\" To which he, pointing to the horse, replied, \"I've no idea. Ask him.\"\n\n**124. THE GOAT AND THE VINE**\n\n**A** goat was straying in a vineyard, and began to browse on the tender shoots of a vine which bore several fine bunches of grapes. \"What have I done to you,\" said the vine, \"that you should harm me thus? Isn't there grass enough for you to feed on? All the same, even if you eat up every leaf I have, and leave me quite bare, I shall produce wine enough to pour over you when you are led to the altar to be sacrificed.\"\n\n**THE TWO POTS**\n\n**125- THE TWO POTS**\n\n**T** wo pots, one of earthenware and the other of brass, were carried away down a river in flood. The brazen pot urged his companion to keep close by his side, and he would protect him. The other thanked him, but begged him not to come near him on any account. \"For that,\" he said, \"is just what I am most afraid of. One touch from you and I should be broken in pieces.\"\n\n**Equals make the best friends.**\n**I26. THE OLD HOUND**\n\n**A** hound who had served his master well for years, and had run down many a quarry in his time, began to lose his strength and speed owing to age. One day, when out hunting, his master started a powerful wild boar and set the hound at him. The latter seized the beast by the ear, but his teeth were gone and he could not retain his hold; so the boar escaped. His master began to scold him severely, but the hound interrupted him with these words, \"My will is as strong as ever, master, but my body is old and feeble. You ought to honor me for what I have been instead of abusing me for what I am.\"\n**127. THE CLOWN AND THE COUNTRYMAN**\n\n**A** nobleman announced his intention of giving a public entertainment in the theater, and offered splendid prizes to all who had any novelty to exhibit at the performance. The announcement attracted a crowd of conjurers, jugglers, and acrobats, and among the rest a clown, very popular with the crowd, who let it be known that he was going to give an entirely new turn. When the day of the performance came, the theater was filled from top to bottom some time before the entertainment began. Several performers exhibited their tricks, and then the popular favorite came on empty-handed and alone. At once there was a hush of expectation; and he, letting his head fall upon his breast, imitated the squeak of a pig to such perfection that the audience insisted on his producing the animal, which, they said, he must have somewhere concealed about his person. He, however, convinced them that there was no pig there, and then the applause was deafening.\n\nAmong the spectators was a countryman, who disparaged the clown's performance and announced that he would give a much superior exhibition of the same trick on the following day. Again the theater was filled to overflowing, and again the clown gave his imitation amidst the cheers of the crowd. The countryman, meanwhile, before going on the stage, had secreted a young porker under his smock; and when the spectators derisively bade him do better if he could, he gave it a pinch in the ear and made it squeal loudly. But they all with one voice shouted out that the clown's imitation was much more true to life. Thereupon he produced the pig from under his smock and said sarcastically, \"There, that shows what sort of judges you are!\"\n**128. THE LARK AND THE FARMER**\n\n**A** lark nested in a field of corn, and was rearing her brood under cover of the ripening grain. One day, before the young were fully fledged, the farmer came to look at the crop, and, finding it yellowing fast, he said, \"I must send round word to my neighbors to come and help me reap this field.\" One of the young larks overheard him, and was very much frightened, and asked her mother whether they hadn't better move house at once. \"There's no hurry,\" replied she. \"A man who looks to his friends for help will take his time about a thing.\" In a few days the farmer came by again, and saw that the grain was overripe and falling out of the ears upon the ground. \"I must put it off no longer,\" he said. \"This very day I'll hire the men and set them to work at once.\" The lark heard him and said to her young, \"Come, my children, we must be off. He talks no more of his friends now, but is going to take things in hand himself.\"\n\n**Self-help is the best help.**\n**129. THE LION AND THE ASS**\n\n**A** lion and an ass set up as partners and went a-hunting together. In course of time they came to a cave in which there were a number of wild goats. The lion took up his stand at the mouth of the cave and waited for them to come out, while the ass went inside and brayed for all he was worth in order to frighten them out into the open. The lion struck them down one by one as they appeared; and when the cave was empty the ass came out and said, \"Well, I scared them pretty well, didn't I?\" \"I should think you did,\" said the lion. \"Why, if I hadn't known you were an ass, I should have turned and run myself.\"\n**130. THE PROPHET**\n\n**A** prophet sat in the marketplace and told the fortunes of all who cared to engage his services. Suddenly there came running up one who told him that his house had been broken into by thieves, and that they had made off with everything they could lay hands on. He was up in a moment, and rushed off, tearing his hair and calling down curses on the miscreants. The bystanders were much amused, and one of them said, \"Our friend professes to know what is going to happen to others, but it seems he's not clever enough to perceive what's in store for himself.\"\n\n**131. THE HOUND AND THE HARE**\n\n**A** young hound started a hare, and, when he caught her up, would at one moment snap at her with his teeth as though he were about to kill her, while at another he would let go his hold and frisk about her, as if he were playing with another dog. At last the hare said, \"I wish you would show yourself in your true colors! If you are my friend, why do you bite me? If you are my enemy, why do you play with me?\"\n\n**He is no friend who plays double.**\n**132. THE LION, THE MOUSE, AND THE FOX**\n\n**A** lion was lying asleep at the mouth of his den when a mouse ran over his back and tickled him so that he woke up with a start and began looking about everywhere to see what it was that had disturbed him. A fox who was looking on thought he would have a joke at the expense of the lion, so he said, \"Well, this is the first time I've seen a lion afraid of a mouse.\" \"Afraid of a mouse?\" said the lion testily. \"Not I! It's his bad manners I can't stand.\"\n**133. THE TRUMPETER TAKEN PRISONER**\n\n**A** trumpeter marched into battle in the van of the army and put courage into his comrades by his warlike tunes. Being captured by the enemy, he begged for his life, and said, \"Do not put me to death. I have killed no one. Indeed, I have no weapons, but carry with me only my trumpet here.\" But his captors replied, \"That is only the more reason why we should take your life; for, though you do not fight yourself, you stir up others to do so.\"\n\n**THE WOLF AND THE CRANE**\n\n**134. THE WOLF AND THE CRANE**\n\n**A** wolf once got a bone stuck in his throat. So he went to a crane and begged her to put her long bill down his throat and pull it out. \"I'll make it worth your while,\" he added. The crane did as she was asked and got the bone out quite easily. The wolf thanked her warmly and was just turning away, when she cried, \"What about that fee of mine?\" \"Well, what about it?\" snapped the wolf, baring his teeth as he spoke. \"You can go about boasting that you once put your head into a wolfs mouth and didn't get it bitten off. What more do you want?\"\n**135. THE EAGLE, THE CAT, AND THE WILD SOW**\n\n**A** n eagle built her nest at the top of a high tree; a cat with her family occupied a hollow in the trunk halfway down; and a wild sow and her young took up their quarters at the foot. They might have got on very well as neighbors had it not been for the evil cunning of the cat. Climbing up to the eagle's nest, she said to the eagle, \"You and I are in the greatest possible danger. That dreadful creature, the sow, who is always to be seen grubbing away at the foot of the tree, means to uproot it, that she may devour your family and mine at her ease.\" Having thus driven the eagle almost out of her senses with terror, the cat climbed down the tree, and said to the sow, \"I must warn you against that dreadful bird, the eagle. She is only waiting her chance to fly down and carry off one of your little pigs when you take them out, to feed her brood with.\" She succeeded in frightening the sow as much as the eagle. Then she returned to her hole in the trunk, from which, feigning to be afraid, she never came forth by day. Only by night did she creep out unseen to procure food for her kittens. The eagle meanwhile was afraid to stir from her nest, and the sow dared not leave her home among the roots; so that in time both they and their families perished of hunger, and their dead bodies supplied the cat with ample food for her growing family.\n**136. THE WOLF AND THE SHEEP**\n\n**A** wolf was worried and badly bitten by dogs, and lay a long time for dead. By and by he began to revive, and, feeling very hungry, called out to a passing sheep and said, \"Would you kindly bring me some water from the stream close by? I can manage about meat, if only I could get something to drink.\" But this sheep was no fool. \"I can quite understand,\" said he, \"that if I brought you the water, you would have no difficulty about the meat. Good morning.\"\n**137. THE TUNA FISH AND THE DOLPHIN**\n\n**A** tuna fish was chased by a dolphin and splashed through the water at a great rate, but the dolphin gradually gained upon him, and was just about to seize him when the force of his flight carried the tuna onto a sandbank. In the heat of the chase the dolphin followed him, and there they both lay out of the water, gasping for dear life. When the tuna saw that his enemy was doomed like himself, he said, \"I don't mind having to die now, for I see that he who is the cause of my death is about to share the same fate.\"\n**138. THE THREE TRADESMEN**\n\nThe citizens of a certain city were debating about the best material to use in the fortifications which were about to be erected for the greater security of the town. A carpenter got up and advised the use of wood, which he said was readily procurable and easily worked. A stone mason objected to wood on the ground that it was so inflammable, and recommended stones instead. Then a tanner got on his legs and said, \"In my opinion there's nothing like leather.\"\n\n**Every man for himself.**\n**139. THE MOUSE AND THE BULL**\n\n**A** bull gave chase to a mouse which had bitten him in the nose, but the mouse was too quick for him and slipped into a hole in a wall. The bull charged furiously into the wall again and again until he was tired out, and sank down on the ground exhausted with his efforts. When all was quiet, the mouse darted out and bit him again. Beside himself with rage, the bull started to his feet, but by that time the mouse was back in his hole again, and he could do nothing but bellow and fume in helpless anger. Presently he heard a shrill little voice say from inside the wall, \"You big fellows don't always have it your own way. You see, sometimes we little ones come off best.\"\n\n**The battle is not always to the strong.**\n**140. THE HARE AND THE HOUND**\n\n**A** hound started a hare from her form, and pursued her for some distance; but as she gradually gained upon him, he gave up the chase. A rustic who had seen the race met the hound as he was returning, and taunted him with his defeat. \"The little one was too much for you,\" said he. \"Ah, well,\" said the hound, \"don't forget it's one thing to be running for your dinner, but quite another to be running for your life.\"\n\n**141. THE TOWN MOUSE AND THE COUNTRY MOUSE**\n\n**A** town mouse and a country mouse were acquaintances, and the country mouse one day invited his friend to come and see him at his home in the fields. The town mouse came, and they sat down to a dinner of barleycorns and roots, the latter of which had a distinctly earthy flavor. The fare was not much to the taste of the guest, and presently he broke out with \"My poor dear friend, you live here no better than the ants. Now you should just see how I fare! My larder is a regular horn of plenty. You must come and stay with me, and I promise you, you shall live on the fat of the land.\"\n\nSo when he returned to town he took the country mouse with him and showed him into a larder containing flour and oatmeal and figs and honey and dates. The country mouse had never seen anything like it, and sat down to enjoy the luxuries his friend provided. But before they had well begun the door of the larder opened and someone came in. The two mice scampered off and hid themselves in a narrow and exceedingly uncomfortable hole. Presently, when all was quiet, they ventured out again; but someone else came in, and off they scuttled again. This was too much for the visitor. \"Good-bye,\" said he, \"I'm off. You live in the lap of luxury, I can see, but you are surrounded by dangers; whereas at home I can enjoy my simple dinner of roots and corn in peace.\"\n**142. THE LION AND THE BULL**\n\n**A** lion saw a fine fat bull pasturing among a herd of cattle and cast about for some means of getting him into his clutches. So he sent him word that he was sacrificing a sheep, and asked if he would do him the honor of dining with him. The bull accepted the invitation, but, on arriving at the lion's den, he saw a great array of saucepans and spits, but no sign of a sheep; so he turned on his heel and walked quietly away. The lion called after him in an injured tone to ask the reason, and the bull turned round and said, \"I have reason enough. When I saw all your preparations it struck me at once that the victim was to be a bull and not a sheep.\"\n\n**The net is spread in vain in sight of the bird.**\n\n**THE WOLF, THE FOX, AND THE APE**\n\n**143. THE WOLF, THE FOX AND THE APE**\n\n**A** wolf charged a fox with theft, which he denied, and the case was brought before an ape to be tried. When he had heard the evidence on both sides, the ape gave judgment as follows: \"I do not think,\" he said, \"that you, O wolf, ever lost what you claim. But all the same I believe that you, fox, are guilty of the theft, in spite of all your denials.\"\n\n**The dishonest get no credit, even if they act honestly.**\n**144. THE EAGLE AND THE COCKS**\n\nThere were two cocks in the same farmyard, and they fought to decide who should be master. When the fight was over the beaten one went and hid himself in a dark corner, while the victor flew up onto the roof of the stables and crowed lustily. But an eagle espied him from high up in the sky, and swooped down and carried him off. Forthwith the other cock came out of his corner and ruled the roost without a rival.\n\n**Pride comes before a fall.**\n**145. THE ESCAPED JACKDAW**\n\n**A** man caught a jackdaw and tied a piece of string to one of its legs, and then gave it to his children for a pet. But the jackdaw didn't at all like having to live with people; so, after a while, when he seemed to have become fairly tame, and they didn't watch him so closely, he slipped away and flew back to his old haunts. Unfortunately, the string was still on his leg, and before long it got entangled in the branches of a tree and the jackdaw couldn't get free, try as he would. He saw it was all up with him, and cried in despair, \"Alas, in gaining my freedom I have lost my life.\"\n**146. THE FARMER AND THE FOX**\n\nA farmer was greatly annoyed by a fox, which came prowling about his yard at night and carried off his fowls. So he set a trap for him and caught him; and in order to be revenged upon him, he tied a bunch of tow to his tail and set fire to it and let him go. As ill luck would have it, however, the fox made straight for the fields where the corn was standing ripe and ready for cutting. It quickly caught fire and was all burnt up, and the farmer lost all his harvest.\n\n**Revenge is a two-edged sword.**\n**147**. **VENUS AND THE CAT**\n\nA cat fell in love with a handsome young man, and begged the goddess Venus to change her into a woman. Venus was very gracious about it, and changed her at once into a beautiful maiden, whom the young man fell in love with at first sight and shortly afterwards married. One day Venus thought she would like to see whether the cat had changed her habits as well as her form, so she let a mouse run loose in the room where they were. Forgetting everything, the young woman had no sooner seen the mouse than up she jumped and was after it like a shot, at which the goddess was so disgusted that she changed her back again into a cat.\n\n**VENUS AND THE CAT**\n\n**148. THE CROW AND THE SWAN**\n\ncrow was filled with envy on seeing the beautiful white plumage of a swan, and thought it was due to the water in which the swan constantly bathed and swam. So he left the neighborhood of the altars, where he got his living by picking up bits of the meat offered in sacrifice, and went and lived among the pools and streams. But though he bathed and washed his feathers many times a day, he didn't make them any whiter, and at last died of hunger into the bargain.\n\n**You may change your habits, but not your nature.**\n**149. THE STAG WITH ONE EYE**\n\nA stag, blind of one eye, was grazing close to the seashore and kept his sound eye turned towards the land, so as to be able to perceive the approach of the hounds, while the blind eye he turned towards the sea, never suspecting that any danger would threaten him from that quarter. As it fell out, however, some sailors, coasting along the shore, spied him and shot an arrow at him, by which he was mortally wounded. As he lay dying, he said to himself, \"Wretch that I am! I bethought me of the dangers of the land, whence none assailed me; but I feared no peril from the sea, yet thence has come my ruin.\"\n\n**Misfortune often assails us from an unexpected quarter.**\n**150. THE FLY AND THE DRAFT MULE**\n\n**A** fly sat on one of the shafts of a cart and said to the mule who was pulling it, \"How slow you are! Do mend your pace, or I shall have to use my sting as a goad.\" The mule was not in the least disturbed. \"Behind me, in the cart,\" said he, \"sits my master. He holds the reins, and flicks me with his whip, and him I obey, but I don't want any of your impertinence. I know when I may dawdle and when I may not.\"\n\n**THE COCK AND THE JEWEL**\n\n**151. THE COCK AND THE JEWEL**\n\nA cock, scratching the ground for something to eat, turned up a jewel that had by chance been dropped there. \"Ho!\" said he. \"A fine thing you are, no doubt, and, had your owner found you, great would his joy have been. But for me, give me a single grain of corn before all the jewels in the world!\"\n**152. THE WOLF AND THE SHEPHERD**\n\nA wolf hung about near a flock of sheep for a long time, but made no attempt to molest them. The shepherd at first kept a sharp eye on him, for he naturally thought he meant mischief. But as time went by, and the wolf showed no inclination to meddle with the flock, he began to look upon him more as a protector than as an enemy; and when one day some errand took him to the city, he felt no uneasiness at leaving the wolf with the sheep. But as soon as his back was turned, the wolf attacked them and killed the greater number. When the shepherd returned and saw the havoc he had wrought, he cried, \"It serves me right for trusting my flock to a wolf.\"\n**153. THE FARMER AND THE STORK**\n\n**A** farmer set some traps in a field which he had lately sown with corn, in order to catch the cranes which came to pick up the seed. When he returned to look at his traps he found several cranes caught, and among them a stork, which begged to be let go, and said, \"You ought not to kill me. I am not a crane, but a stork, as you can easily see by my feathers, and I am the most honest and harmless of birds.\" But the farmer replied, \"It's nothing to me what you are. I find you among these cranes who ruin my crops, and, like them, you shall suffer.\"\n\n**If you choose bad companions, no one will believe that you are anything but bad yourself.**\n**154. THE CHARGER AND THE MILLER**\n\n**A** horse who had been used to carry his rider into battle felt himself growing old and chose to work in a mill instead. He now no longer found himself stepping out proudly to the beating of the drums, but was compelled to slave away all day grinding the corn. Bewailing his hard lot, he said one day to the miller, \"Ah me! I was once a splendid war horse gaily caparisoned, and attended by a groom whose sole duty was to see to my wants. How different is my present condition! I wish I had never given up the battlefield for the mill.\" The miller replied with asperity, \"It's no use your regretting the past. Fortune has many ups and downs. You must just take them as they come.\"\n**155. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE OWL**\n\nAn owl who lived in a hollow tree was in the habit of feeding by night and sleeping by day, but her slumbers were greatly disturbed by the chirping of a grasshopper who had taken up his abode in the branches. She begged him repeatedly to have some consideration for her comfort, but the grasshopper, if anything, only chirped the louder. At last the owl could stand it no longer, but determined to rid herself of the pest by means of a trick. Addressing herself to the grasshopper, she said in her pleasantest manner, \"As I cannot sleep for your song, which, believe me, is as sweet as the notes of Apollo's lyre, I have a mind to taste some nectar, which Minerva gave me the other day. Won't you come in and join me?\" The grasshopper was flattered by the praise of his song, and his mouth, too, watered at the mention of the delicious drink, so he said he would be delighted. No sooner had he got inside the hollow where the owl was sitting than she pounced upon him and ate him up.\n\n**156. THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE ANTS**\n\nOne fine day in winter some ants were busy drying their store of corn, which had got rather damp during a long spell of rain. Presently up came a grasshopper and begged them to spare her a few grains, \"For,\" she said, \"I'm simply starving.\" The ants stopped work for a moment, though this was against their principles. \"May we ask,\" said they, \"what you were doing with yourself all last summer? Why didn't you collect a store of food for the winter?\" \"The fact is,\" replied the grasshopper, \"I was so busy singing that I hadn't the time.\" \"If you spent the summer singing,\" replied the ants, \"you can't do better than spend the winter dancing.\" And they chuckled and went on with their work.\n**157. THE FARMER AND THE VIPER**\n\nOne winter a farmer found a viper frozen and numb with cold, and out of pity picked it up and placed it in his bosom. The viper was no sooner revived by the warmth than it turned upon its benefactor and inflicted a fatal bite upon him; and as the poor man lay dying, he cried, \"I have only got what I deserved, for taking compassion on so villainous a creature.\"\n\n**Kindness is thrown away upon the evil.**\n**158. THE TWO FROGS**\n\nTwo frogs were neighbors. One lived in a marsh, where there was plenty of water, which frogs love; the other in a lane some distance away, where all the water to be had was that which lay in the ruts after rain. The marsh frog warned his friend and pressed him to come and live with him in the marsh, for he would find his quarters there far more comfortable and\u2014what was still more important\u2014more safe. But the other refused, saying that he could not bring himself to move from a place to which he had become accustomed. A few days afterwards a heavy wagon came down the lane, and he was crushed to death under the wheels.\n**159. THE COBBLER TURNED DOCTOR**\n\nAvery unskillful cobbler, finding himself unable to make a living at his trade, gave up mending boots and took to doctoring instead. He gave out that he had the secret of a universal antidote against all poisons, and acquired no small reputation, thanks to his talent for puffing himself. One day, however, he fell very ill; and the king of the country bethought him that he would test the value of his remedy. Calling, therefore, for a cup, he poured out a dose of the antidote, and, under pretense of mixing poison with it, added a little water, and commanded him to drink it. Terrified by the fear of being poisoned, the cobbler confessed that he knew nothing about medicine, and that his antidote was worthless. Then the king summoned his subjects and addressed them as follows: \"What folly could be greater than yours? Here is this cobbler to whom no one will send his boots to be mended, and yet you have not hesitated to entrust him with your lives!\"\n**160. THE ASS, THE COCK, AND THE LION**\n\nAn ass and a cock were in a cattle pen together. Presently a lion, who had been starving for days, came along and was just about to fall upon the ass and make a meal of him when the cock, rising to his full height and flapping his wings vigorously, uttered a tremendous crow. Now if there is one thing that frightens a lion, it is the crowing of a cock; and this one had no sooner heard the noise than he fled. The ass was mightily elated at this, and thought that if the lion couldn't face a cock, he would be still less likely to stand up to an ass; so he ran out and pursued him. But when the two had got well out of sight and hearing of the cock, the lion suddenly turned upon the ass and ate him up.\n\n**False confidence often leads to disaster.**\n**161. THE BELLY AND THE MEMBERS**\n\nThe members of the body once rebelled against the belly. \"You,\" they said to the belly, \"live in luxury and sloth, and never do a stroke of work; while we not only have to do all the hard work there is to be done, but are actually your slaves and have to minister to all your wants. Now, we will do so no longer, and you can shift for yourself for the future.\" They were as good as their word, and left the belly to starve. The result was just what might have been expected. The whole body soon began to fail, and the members and all shared in the general collapse. And then they saw too late how foolish they had been.\n\n**162. THE BALD MAN AND THE FLY**\n\n**A** fly settled on the head of a bald man and bit him. In his eagerness to kill it he hit himself a smart slap. But the fly escaped, and said to him in derision, \"You tried to kill me\n\nfor just one little bite. What will you do to yourself now for the heavy smack you have just given yourself?\" \"Oh, for that blow I bear no grudge,\" he replied, \"for I never intended myself any harm; but as for you, you contemptible insect, who live by sucking human blood, I'd have borne a good deal more than that for the satisfaction of dashing the life out of you!\"\n**163. THE ASS AND THE WOLF**\n\nAn ass was feeding in a meadow, and, catching sight of his enemy the wolf in the distance, pretended to be very lame and hobbled painfully along. When the wolf came up he asked the ass how he came to be so lame, and the ass replied that in going through a hedge he had trodden on a thorn, and he begged the wolf to pull it out with his teeth, \"In case,\" he said, \"when you eat me, it should stick in your throat and hurt you very much.\" The wolf said he would, and told the ass to lift up his foot, and gave his whole mind to getting out the thorn. But the ass suddenly let out with his heels and fetched the wolf a fearful kick in the mouth, breaking his teeth; and then he galloped off at full speed. As soon as he could speak the wolf growled to himself, \"It serves me right. My father taught me to kill, and I ought to have stuck to that trade instead of attempting to cure.\"\n\n**164. THE MONKEY AND THE CAMEL**\n\nAt a gathering of all the beasts the monkey gave an exhibition of dancing, and entertained the company vastly. There was great applause at the finish, which excited the envy of the camel and made him desire to win the favor of the assembly by the same means. So he got up from his place and began dancing, but he cut such a ridiculous figure as he plunged about, and made such a grotesque exhibition of his ungainly person, that the beasts all fell upon him with ridicule and drove him away.\n**165. THE SICK MAN AND THE DOCTOR**\n\n**A** sick man received a visit from his doctor, who asked him how he was. \"Fairly well, doctor,\" said he, \"but I find I sweat a great deal.\" \"Ah,\" said the doctor, \"that's a good sign.\" On his next visit he asked the same question, and his patient replied, \"I'm much as usual, but I've taken to having shivering fits, which leave me cold all over.\" \"Ah,\" said the doctor, \"that's a good sign too.\" When he came the third time and inquired as before about his patient's health, the sick man said that he felt very feverish. \"A very good sign,\" said the doctor; \"you are doing very nicely indeed.\" Afterwards a friend came to see the invalid, and on asking him how he did, received this reply: \"My dear friend, I'm dying of good signs.\"\n\n**THE TRAVELERS AND THE PLANE TREE**\n\n**166. THE TRAVELERS AND THE PLANE TREE**\n\nTwo travelers were walking along a bare and dusty road in the heat of a summer's day. Coming presently to a plane tree, they joyfully turned aside to shelter from the burning rays of the sun in the deep shade of its spreading branches. As they rested, looking up into the tree, one of them remarked to his companion, \"What a useless tree the plane is! It bears no fruit and is of no service to man at all.\" The plane tree interrupted him with indignation. \"You ungrateful creature,\" it cried, \"you come and take shelter under me from the scorching sun, and then, in the very act of enjoying the cool shade of my foliage, you abuse me and call me good for nothing!\"\n\n**Many a service is met with ingratitude.**\n**167. THE FLEA AND THE OX**\n\n**A** flea once said to an ox, \"How comes it that a big strong fellow like you is content to serve mankind, and do all their hard work for them, while I, who am no bigger than you see, live on their bodies and drink my fill of their blood, and never do a stroke for it all?\" To which the ox replied, \"Men are very kind to me, and so I am grateful to them. They feed and house me well, and every now and then they show their fondness for me by patting me on the head and neck.\" \"They'd pat me, too,\" said the flea, \"if I let them. But I take good care they don't, or there would be nothing left of me.\"\n**168. THE BIRDS, THE BEASTS, AND THE BAT**\n\nThe birds were at war with the beasts, and many battles were fought with varying success on either side. The bat did not throw in his lot definitely with either party, but when things went well for the birds he was found fighting in their ranks; when, on the other hand, the beasts got the upper hand, he was to be found among the beasts. No one paid any attention to him while the war lasted. But when it was over, and peace was restored, neither the birds nor the beasts would have anything to do with so double-faced a traitor, and so he remains to this day a solitary outcast from both.\n**169. THE MAN AND HIS TWO MISTRESSES**\n\n**A** man of middle age, whose hair was turning grey, had two mistresses, an old woman and a young one. The elder of the two didn't like having a lover who looked so much younger than herself; so, whenever he came to see her, she used to pull the dark hairs out of his head to make him look old. The younger, on the other hand, didn't like him to look so much older than herself, and took every opportunity of pulling out the grey hairs, to make him look young. Between them, they left not a hair in his head, and he became perfectly bald.\n**170. THE EAGLE, THE JACKDAW, AND THE SHEPHERD**\n\nOne day a jackdaw saw an eagle swoop down on a lamb and carry it off in its talons. \"My word,\" said the jackdaw, \"I'll do that myself.\" So it flew high up into the air, and then came shooting down with a great whirring of wings onto the back of a big ram. It had no sooner alighted than its claws got caught fast in the wool, and nothing it could do was of any use. There it stuck, flapping away, and only making things worse instead of better. By and by up came the shepherd. \"Oho,\" he said. \"So that's what you'd be doing, is it?\" And he took the jackdaw, and clipped its wings and carried it home to his children. It looked so odd that they didn't know what to make of it. \"What sort of bird is it, father?\" they asked. \"It's a jackdaw,\" he replied, \"and nothing but a jackdaw. But it wants to be taken for an eagle.\"\n\n**If you attempt what is beyond your power, your trouble will be wasted and you court not only misfortune but ridicule.**\n**171. THE WOLF AND THE BOY**\n\nA wolf, who had just enjoyed a good meal and was in a playful mood, caught sight of a boy lying flat upon the ground, and, realizing that he was trying to hide, and that it was fear of himself that made him do this, he went up to him and said, \"Aha, I've found you, you see; but if you can say three things to me, the truth of which cannot be disputed, I will spare your life.\" The boy plucked up courage and thought for a moment, and then he said, \"First, it is a pity you saw me; secondly, I was a fool to let myself be seen; and thirdly, we all hate wolves because they are always making unprovoked attacks upon our flocks.\" The wolf replied, \"Well, what you say is true enough from your point of view; so you may go.\"\n**172. THE MILLER, HIS SON, AND THEIR ASS**\n\nA miller, accompanied by his young son, was driving his ass to market in hopes of finding a purchaser for him. On the road they met a troop of girls, laughing and talking, who exclaimed, \"Did you ever see such a pair of fools? To be trudging along the dusty road when they might be riding!\"\n\nThe miller thought there was sense in what they said; so he made his son mount the ass, and himself walked at the side. Presently they met some of his old cronies, who greeted them and said, \"You'll spoil that son of yours, letting him ride while you toil along on foot! Make him walk, young lazybones! It'll do him all the good in the world.\"\n\nThe miller followed their advice, and took his son's place on the back of the ass, while the boy trudged along behind. They had not gone far when they overtook a party of women and children, and the miller heard them say, \"What a selfish old man! He himself rides in comfort, but lets his poor little boy follow as best he can on his own legs!\"\n\nSo he made his son get up behind him. Further along the road they met some travelers, who asked the miller whether the ass he was riding was his own property, or a beast hired for the occasion. He replied that it was his own, and that he was taking it to market to sell. \"Good heavens!\" said they. \"With a load like that the poor beast will be so exhausted by the time he gets there that no one will look at him. Why, you'd do better to carry him!\"\n\n\"Anything to please you,\" said the old man. \"We can but try.\" So they got off, tied the ass's legs together with a rope and slung him on a pole, and at last reached the town, carrying him between them. This was so absurd a sight that the people ran out in crowds to laugh at it, and chaffed the father and son unmercifully, some even calling them lunatics. They had then got to a bridge over the river, where the ass, frightened by the noise and his unusual situation, kicked and struggled till he broke the ropes that bound him, and fell into the water and was drowned. Whereupon the unfortunate miller, vexed and ashamed, made the best of his way home again, convinced that in trying to please all, he had pleased none, and had lost his ass into the bargain.\n**173. THE STAG AND THE VINE**\n\n**A** stag, pursued by the huntsmen, concealed himself under cover of a thick vine. They lost track of him and passed by his hiding place without being aware that he was anywhere near. Supposing all danger to be over, he presently began to browse on the leaves of the vine. The movement drew the attention of the returning huntsmen, and one of them, supposing some animal to be hidden there, shot an arrow at a venture into the foliage. The unlucky stag was pierced to the heart, and, as he expired, he said, \"I deserve my fate for my treachery in feeding upon the leaves of my protector.\"\n\n**Ingratitude sometimes brings its own punishment.**\n**174. THE LAMB CHASED BY A WOLF**\n\n**A** wolf was chasing a lamb, which took refuge in a temple. The wolf urged it to come out of the precincts, and said, \"If you don't, the priest is sure to catch you and offer you up in sacrifice on the altar.\" To which the lamb replied, \"Thanks, I think I'll stay where I am. I'd rather be sacrificed any day than be eaten up by a wolf.\"\n**175. THE ARCHER AND THE LION**\n\nAn archer went up into the hills to get some sport with his bow, and all the animals fled at the sight of him with the exception of the lion, who stayed behind and challenged him to fight. But he shot an arrow at the lion and hit him, and said, \"There, you see what my messenger can do. Just you wait a moment and I'll tackle you myself.\" The lion, however, when he felt the sting of the arrow, ran away as fast as his legs could carry him. A fox, who had seen it all happen, said to the lion, \"Come, don't be a coward. Why don't you stay and show fight?\" But the lion replied, \"You won't get me to stay, not you. Why, when he sends a messenger like that before him, he must himself be a terrible fellow to deal with.\"\n\n**Give a wide berth to those who can do damage at a distance.**\n\n**THE WOLF AND THE GOAT**\n\n**176. THE WOLF AND THE GOAT**\n\n**A** wolf caught sight of a goat browsing above him on the scanty herbage that grew on the top of a steep rock; and being unable to get at her, tried to induce her to come lower down. \"You are risking your life up there, madam, indeed you are,\" he called out. \"Pray take my advice and come down here, where you will find plenty of better food.\" The goat turned a knowing eye upon him. \"It's little you care whether I get good grass or bad,\" said she. \"What you want is to eat me.\"\n**177. THE SICK STAG**\n\n**A** stag fell sick and lay in a clearing in the forest, too weak to move from the spot. When the news of his illness spread, a number of the other beasts came to inquire after his health, and they one and all nibbled a little of the grass that grew round the invalid till at last there was not a blade within his reach. In a few days he began to mend, but was still too feeble to get up and go in search of fodder; and thus he perished miserably of hunger owing to the thoughtlessness of his friends.\n**178. THE ASS AND THE MULE**\n\n**A** certain man who had an ass and a mule loaded them both up one day and set out upon a journey. So long as the road was fairly level, the ass got on very well; but by and by they came to a place among the hills where the road was very rough and steep, and the ass was at his last gasp. So he begged the mule to relieve him of a part of his load, but the mule refused. At last, from sheer weariness, the ass stumbled and fell down a steep place and was killed. The driver was in despair, but he did the best he could. He added the ass's load to the mule's and he also flayed the ass and put his skin on the top of the double load. The mule could only just manage the extra weight, and, as he staggered painfully along, he said to himself, \"I have only got what I deserved. If I had been willing to help the ass at first, I should not now be carrying his load and his skin into the bargain.\"\n**179. BROTHER AND SISTER**\n\n**A** certain man had two children, a boy and a girl; and the boy was as good-looking as the girl was plain. One day, as they were playing together in their mother's chamber, they chanced upon a mirror and saw their own features for the first time. The boy saw what a handsome fellow he was, and began to boast to his sister about his good looks. She, on her part, was ready to cry with vexation when she was aware of her plainness, and took his remarks as an insult to herself. Running to her father, she told him of her brother's conceit, and accused him of meddling with his mother's things. He laughed and kissed them both, and said, \"My children, learn from now onwards to make a good use of the glass. You, my boy, strive to be as good as it shows you to be handsome; and you, my girl, resolve to make up for the plainness of your features by the sweetness of your disposition.\"\n**180. THE HEIFER AND THE OX**\n\n**A** heifer went up to an ox, who was straining hard at the plow, and sympathized with him in a rather patronizing sort of way on the necessity of his having to work so hard. Not long afterwards there was a festival in the village and everyone kept holiday. But, whereas the ox was turned loose into the pasture, the heifer was seized and led off to sacrifice. \"Ah,\" said the ox, with a grim smile, \"I see now why you were allowed to have such an idle time. It was because you were always intended for the altar.\"\n\n**181. THE KINGDOM OF THE LION**\n\nWhen the lion reigned over the beasts of the earth he was never cruel or tyrannical, but as gentle and just as a king ought to be. During his reign he called a general assembly of the beasts and drew up a code of laws under which all were to live in perfect equality and harmony. The wolf and the lamb, the tiger and the stag, the leopard and the kid, the dog and the hare, all should dwell side by side in unbroken peace and friendship. The hare said, \"Oh! How I have longed for this day when the weak take their place without fear by the side of the strong!\"\n**182. THE ASS AND HIS DRIVER**\n\nAn ass was being driven down a mountain road, and after jogging along for a while sensibly enough he suddenly quitted the track and rushed to the edge of a precipice. He was just about to leap over the edge when his driver caught hold of his tail and did his best to pull him back. But pull as he might he couldn't get the ass to budge from the brink. At last he gave up, crying, \"All right, then, get to the bottom your own way; but it's the way to sudden death, as you'll find out quick enough.\"\n**183. THE LION AND THE HARE**\n\n**A** lion found a hare sleeping in her form and was just going to devour her when he caught sight of a passing stag. Dropping the hare, he at once made for the bigger game; but finding, after a long chase, that he could not overtake the stag, he abandoned the attempt and came back for the hare. When he reached the spot, however, he found she was nowhere to be seen, and he had to go without his dinner. \"It serves me right,\" he said. \"I should have been content with what I had got, instead of hankering after a better prize.\"\n**184. THE WOLVES AND THE DOGS**\n\n**O** nce upon a time the wolves said to the dogs, \"Why should we continue to be enemies any longer? You are very like us in most ways. The main difference between us is one of training only. We live a life of freedom; but you are enslaved to mankind, who beat you, and put heavy collars round your necks, and compel you to keep watch over their flocks and herds for them, and, to crown all, they give you nothing but bones to eat. Don't put up with it any longer, but hand over the flocks to us, and we will all live on the fat of the land and feast together.\" The dogs allowed themselves to be persuaded by these words, and accompanied the wolves into their den. But no sooner were they well inside than the wolves set upon them and tore them to pieces.\n\n**Traitors richly deserve their fate.**\n**185. THE BULL AND THE CALF**\n\n**A** full-grown bull was struggling to force his huge bulk through the narrow entrance to a cow house where his stall was, when a young calf came up and said to him, \"If you'll step aside a moment, I'll show you the way to get through.\" The bull turned upon him an amused look. \"I knew that way,\" said he, \"before you were born.\"\n\n**THE TREES AND THE AX**\n\n**186. THE TREES AND THE AX**\n\n**A** woodman went into the forest and begged of the trees the favor of a handle for his ax. The principal trees at once agreed to so modest a request, and unhesitatingly gave him a young ash sapling, out of which he fashioned the handle he desired. No sooner had he done so than he set to work to fell the noblest trees in the wood. When they saw the use to which he was putting their gift, they cried, \"Alas! Alas! We are undone, but we are ourselves to blame. The little we gave has cost us all. Had we not sacrificed the rights of the ash, we might ourselves have stood for ages.\"\n**187. THE ASTRONOMER**\n\n**T** here was once an astronomer whose habit it was to go out at night and observe the stars. One night, as he was walking about outside the town gates, gazing up absorbed into the sky and not looking where he was going, he fell into a dry well. As he lay there groaning, someone passing by heard him, and, coming to the edge of the well, looked down and, on learning what had happened, said, \"If you really mean to say that you were looking so hard at the sky that you didn't even see where your feet were carrying you along the ground, it appears to me that you deserve all you've got.\"\n**188. THE LABORER AND THE SNAKE**\n\n**A** laborer's little son was bitten by a snake and died of the wound. The father was beside himself with grief, and in his anger against the snake he caught up an ax and went and stood close to the snake's hole, and watched for a chance of killing it. Presently the snake came out, and the man aimed a blow at it, but only succeeded in cutting off the tip of its tail before it wriggled in again. He then tried to get it to come out a second time, pretending that he wished to make up the quarrel. But the snake said, \"I can never be your friend because of my lost tail, nor you mine because of your lost child.\"\n\n**Injuries are never forgotten in the presence of those who caused them.**\n**189. THE CAGED BIRD AND THE BAT**\n\n**A** songbird was confined in a cage which hung outside a win- dow, and had a way of singing at night when all other birds were asleep. One night a bat came and clung to the bars of the cage, and asked the bird why she was silent by day and sang only at night. \"I have a very good reason for doing so,\" said the bird. \"It was once when I was singing in the daytime that a fowler was attracted by my voice, and set his nets for me and caught me. Since then I have never sung except by night.\" But the bat replied, \"It is no use your doing that now when you are a prisoner. If only you had done so before you were caught, you might still have been free.\"\n\n**Precautions are useless after the event.**\n**190. THE ASS AND HIS PURCHASER**\n\n**A** man who wanted to buy an ass went to market, and, coming across a likely-looking beast, arranged with the owner that he should be allowed to take him home on trial to see what he was like. When he reached home he put him into his stable along with the other asses. The newcomer took a look round, and immediately went and chose a place next to the laziest and greediest beast in the stable. When the master saw this he put a halter on him at once, and led him off and handed him over to his owner again. The latter was a good deal surprised to see him back so soon, and said, \"Why, do you mean to say you have tested him already?\" \"I don't want to put him through any more tests,\" replied the other. \"I could see what sort of beast he is from the companion he chose for himself.\"\n\n**A man is known by the company he keeps.**\n\n191. **THE KID AND THE WOLF**\n\n**A** kid strayed from the flock and was chased by a wolf. When he saw he must be caught he turned round and said to the wolf, \"I know, sir, that I can't escape being eaten by you; and so, as my life is bound to be short, I pray you let it be as merry as may be. Will you not play me a tune to dance to before I die?\" The wolf saw no objection to having some music before his dinner; so he took out his pipe and began to play, while the kid danced before him. Before many minutes were passed the dogs who guarded the flock heard the sound and came up to see what was going on. They no sooner clapped eyes on the wolf than they gave chase and drove him away. As he ran off, he turned and said to the kid, \"It's what I thoroughly deserve. My trade is the butcher's, and I had no business to turn piper to please you.\"\n**192. THE DEBTOR AND HIS SOW**\n\n**A** man of Athens fell into debt and was pressed for the money by his creditor; but he had no means of paying at the time, so he begged for delay. But the creditor refused and said he must pay at once. Then the debtor fetched a sow\u2014the only one he had\u2014and took her to market to offer her for sale. It happened that his creditor was there too. Presently a buyer came along and asked if the sow produced good litters. \"Yes,\" said the debtor, \"very fine ones; and the remarkable thing is that she produces females at the Mysteries and males at the Panathenea.\" (Festivals these were; and the Athenians always sacrifice a sow at one, and a boar at the other; while at the Dionysia they sacrifice a kid.) At that the creditor, who was standing by, put in, \"Don't be surprised, sir. Why, still better, at the Dionysia this sow has kids!\"\n**193. THE BALD HUNTSMAN**\n\n**A** man who had lost all his hair took to wearing a wig, and one day he went out hunting. It was blowing rather hard at the time, and he hadn't gone far before a gust of wind caught his hat and carried it off, and his wig too, much to the amusement of the hunt. But he quite entered into the joke, and said, \"Ah, well! The hair that wig is made of didn't stick to the head on which it grew, so it's no wonder it won't stick to mine.\"\n**194. THE HERDSMAN AND THE LOST BULL**\n\n**A** herdsman was tending his cattle when he missed a young bull, one of the finest of the herd. He went at once to look for him, but, meeting with no success in his search, he made a vow, that if he should discover the thief he would sacrifice a calf to Jupiter. Continuing his search, he entered a thicket, where he presently espied a lion devouring the lost bull. Terrified with fear, he raised his hands to heaven and cried, \"Great Jupiter, I vowed I would sacrifice a calf to thee if I should discover the thief; but now a full-grown bull I promise thee if only I myself escape unhurt from his clutches.\"\n**195. THE HOUND AND THE FOX**\n\n**A** hound, roaming in the forest, spied a lion, and being well used to lesser game, gave chase, thinking he would make a fine quarry. Presently the lion perceived that he was being pursued; so, stopping short, he rounded on his pursuer and gave a loud roar. The hound immediately turned tail and fled. A fox, seeing him running away, jeered at him and said, \"Ho! Ho! There goes the coward who chased a lion and ran away the moment he roared!\"\n**196. THE MULE**\n\n**O** ne morning a mule, who had too much to eat and too little to do, began to think himself a very fine fellow indeed, and frisked about saying, \"My father was undoubtedly a high-spirited horse and I take after him entirely.\" But very soon afterwards he was put into the harness and compelled to go a very long way with a heavy load behind him. At the end of the day, exhausted by his unusual exertions, he said dejectedly to himself, \"I must have been mistaken about my father; he can only have been an ass after all.\"\n**197. THE FATHER AND HIS DAUGHTERS**\n\n**A** man had two daughters, one of whom he gave in marriage to a gardener, and the other to a potter. After a time he thought he would go and see how they were getting on; and first he went to the gardener's wife. He asked her how she was and how things were going with herself and her husband. She replied that on the whole they were doing very well. \"But,\" she continued, \"I do wish we could have some good rain. The garden wants it badly.\" Then he went on to the potter's wife and made the same inquiries of her. She replied that she and her husband had nothing to complain of. \"But,\" she went on, \"I do wish we could have some nice dry weather, to dry the pottery.\" Her father looked at her with a humorous expression on his face. \"You want dry weather,\" he said, \"and your sister wants rain. I was going to ask in my prayers that your wishes should be granted; but now it strikes me I had better not refer to the subject.\"\n**I98. THE THIEF AND THE INNKEEPER**\n\n**A** thief hired a room at an inn and stayed there some days on the lookout for something to steal. No opportunity, however, presented itself, till one day, when there was a festival to be celebrated, the innkeeper appeared in a fine new coat and sat down before the door of the inn for an airing. The thief no sooner set eyes upon the coat than he longed to get possession of it. There was no business doing, so he went and took a seat by the side of the innkeeper and began talking to him. They conversed together for some time, and then the thief suddenly yawned and howled like a wolf. The innkeeper asked him in some concern what ailed him. The thief replied, \"I will tell you about myself, sir, but first I must beg you to take charge of my clothes for me, for I intend to leave them with you. Why I have these fits of yawning I cannot tell. Maybe they are sent as a punishment for my misdeeds; but, whatever the reason, the facts are that when I have yawned three times I become a ravening wolf and fly at men's throats.\" As he finished speaking he yawned a second time and howled again as before. The innkeeper, believing every word he said, and terrified at the prospect of being confronted with a wolf, got up hastily and started to run indoors; but the thief caught him by the coat and tried to stop him, crying, \"Stay, sir, stay, and take charge of my clothes, or else I shall never see them again.\" As he spoke he opened his mouth and began to yawn for the third time. The innkeeper, mad with the fear of being eaten by a wolf, slipped out of his coat, which remained in the other's hands, and bolted into the inn and locked the door behind him; and the thief then quietly stole off with his spoil.\n**199. THE PACK ASS AND THE WILD ASS**\n\n**A** wild ass, who was wandering idly about, one day came upon a pack ass lying at full length in a sunny spot and thoroughly enjoying himself. Going up to him, he said, \"What a lucky beast you are! Your sleek coat shows how well you live. How I envy you!\" Not long after the wild ass saw his acquaintance again, but this time he was carrying a heavy load, and his driver was following behind and beating him with a thick stick. \"Ah, my friend,\" said the wild ass, \"I don't envy you anymore; for I see you pay dear for your comforts.\"\n\nAdvantages that are dearly bought are doubtful blessings.\n**200. THE ASS AND HIS MASTERS**\n\n**A** gardener had an ass which had a very hard time of it, what with scanty food, heavy loads, and constant beating. The ass therefore begged Jupiter to take him away from the gardener and hand him over to another master. So Jupiter sent Mercury to the gardener to bid him sell the ass to a potter, which he did. But the ass was as discontented as ever, for he had to work harder than before; so he begged Jupiter for relief a second time, and Jupiter very obligingly arranged that he should be sold to a tanner. But when the ass saw what his new master's trade was, he cried in despair, \"Why wasn't I content to serve either of my former masters, hard as I had to work and badly as I was treated? For they would have buried me decently, but now I shall come in the end to the tanning vat.\"\n\nServants don't know a good master till they have served a worse.\n**201. THE PACK ASS, THE WILD ASS, AND THE LION**\n\n**A** wild ass saw a pack ass, jogging along under a heavy load, and taunted him with the condition of slavery in which he lived, in these words: \"What a vile lot is yours compared with mine! I am free as the air, and never do a stroke of work; and, as for fodder, I have only to go to the hills and there I find far more than enough for my needs. But you! You depend on your master for food, and he makes you carry heavy loads every day and beats you unmercifully.\" At that moment a lion appeared on the scene, and made no attempt to molest the pack ass, owing to the presence of the driver; but he fell upon the wild ass, who had no one to protect him, and without more ado made a meal of him.\n\nIt is no use being your own master unless you can stand up for yourself.\n**202. THE ANT**\n\n**A** nts were once men and made their living by tilling the soil. But, not content with the results of their own work, they were always casting longing eyes upon the crops and fruits of their neighbors, which they stole, whenever they got the chance, and added to their own store. At last their covetousness made Jupiter so angry that he changed them into ants. But, though their forms were changed, their nature remained the same; and so, to this day, they go about among the cornfields and gather the fruits of others' labor, and store them up for their own use.\n\nYou may punish a thief, but his bent remains.\n**203. THE FROGS AND THE WELL**\n\n**T** wo frogs lived together in a marsh. But one hot summer the marsh dried up, and they left it to look for another place to live in, for frogs like damp places if they can get them. By and by they came to a deep well, and one of them looked down into it and said to the other, \"This looks a nice cool place. Let us jump in and settle here.\" But the other, who had a wiser head on his shoulders, replied, \"Not so fast, my friend. Supposing this well dried up like the marsh, how should we get out again?\"\n\nThink twice before you act.\n**204.. THE CRAB AND THE FOX**\n\n**A** crab once left the seashore and went and settled in a meadow some way inland, which looked very nice and green and seemed likely to be a good place to feed in. But a hungry fox came along and spied the crab and caught him. Just as he was going to be eaten up, the crab said, \"This is just what I deserve, for I had no business to leave my natural home by the sea and settle here as though I belonged to the land.\"\n\nBe content with your lot.\n\n**THE FROGS AND THE WELL**\n\n**205. THE FOX AND THE GRASSHOPPER**\n\n**A** grasshopper sat chirping in the branches of a tree. A fox heard her, and, thinking what a dainty morsel she would make, he tried to get her down by a trick. Standing below in full view of her, he praised her song in the most flattering terms, and begged her to descend, saying he would like to make the acquaintance of the owner of so beautiful a voice. But she was not to be taken in, and replied, \"You are very much mistaken, my dear sir, if you imagine I am going to come down. I keep well out of the way of you and your kind ever since the day when I saw numbers of grasshoppers' wings strewn about the entrance to a fox's earth.\"\n**206. THE FARMER, HIS BOY** , **AND THE ROOKS**\n\n**A** farmer had just sown a field of wheat, and was keeping a careful watch over it, for numbers of rooks and starlings kept continually settling on it and eating up the grain. Along with him went his boy, carrying a sling; and whenever the farmer asked for the sling the starlings understood what he said and warned the rooks, and they were off in a moment. So the farmer hit on a trick. \"My lad,\" said he, \"we must get the better of these birds somehow. After this, when I want the sling, I won't say 'sling,' but just 'humph!' and you must then hand me the sling quickly.\"\n\nPresently back came the whole flock. \"Humph!\" said the farmer; but the starlings took no notice, and he had time to sling several stones among them, hitting one on the head, another in the legs, and another in the wing, before they got out of range. As they made all haste away they met some cranes, who asked them what the matter was. \"Matter?\" said one of the rooks. \"It's those rascals, men, that are the matter. Don't you go near them. They have a way of saying one thing and meaning another, which has just been the death of several of our poor friends.\"\n**207. THE ASS AND THE DOG**\n\n**A** n ass and a dog were on their travels together, and, as they went along, they found a sealed packet lying on the ground. The ass picked it up, broke the seal, and found it contained some writing, which he proceeded to read out aloud to the dog. As he read on, it turned out to be all about grass and barley and hay\u2014in short, all the kinds of fodder that asses are fond of. The dog was a good deal bored with listening to all this, till at last his impatience got the better of him, and he cried, \"Just skip a few pages, friend, and see if there isn't something about meat and bones.\" The ass glanced all through the packet, but found nothing of the sort, and said so. Then the dog said in disgust, \"Oh, throw it away, do. What's the good of a thing like that?\"\n**208. THE ASS CARRYING THE IMAGE**\n\n**A** certain man put an image on the back of his ass to take it to one of the temples of the town. As they went along the road all the people they met uncovered and bowed their heads out of reverence for the image; but the ass thought they were doing it out of respect for himself, and began to give himself airs accordingly. At last he became so conceited that he imagined he could do as he liked, and, by way of protest against the load he was carrying, he came to a full stop and flatly declined to proceed any further. His driver, finding him so obstinate, hit him hard and long with his stick, saying the while, \"Oh, you dunderheaded idiot, do you suppose it's come to this, that men pay worship to an ass?\"\n\nRude shocks await those who take to themselves the credit that is due to others.\n**209. THE ATHENIAN AND THE THEBAN**\n\n**A** n Athenian and a Theban were on the road together and passed the time in conversation, as is the way of travelers. After discussing a variety of subjects they began to talk about heroes, a topic that tends to be more fertile than edifying. Each of them was lavish in his praises of the heroes of his own city, until eventually the Theban asserted that Hercules was the greatest hero who had ever lived on earth, and now occupied a foremost place among the gods; while the Athenian insisted that Theseus was far superior, for his fortune had been in every way supremely blessed, whereas Hercules had at one time been forced to act as a servant. And he gained his point, for he was a very glib fellow, like all Athenians; so that the Theban, who was no match for him in talking, cried at last in some disgust, \"All right, have your way. I only hope that when our heroes are angry with us, Athens may suffer from the anger of Hercules, and Thebes only from that of Theseus.\"\n\n**THE GOATHERD AND THE GOAT**\n\n**210. THE GOATHERD AND THE GOAT**\n\n**A** goatherd was one day gathering his flock to return to the fold, when one of his goats strayed and refused to join the rest. He tried for a long time to get her to return by calling and whistling to her, but the goat took no notice of him at all; so at last he threw a stone at her and broke one of her horns. In dismay, he begged her not to tell his master. But she replied, \"You silly fellow, my horn would cry aloud even if I held my tongue.\"\n\nIt's no use trying to hide what can't be hidden.\n**211. THE SHEEP AND THE DOG**\n\n**O** nce upon a time the sheep complained to the shepherd about the difference in his treatment of themselves and his dog. \"Your conduct,\" said they, \"is very strange and, we think, very unfair. We provide you with wool and lambs and milk, and you give us nothing but grass, and even that we have to find for ourselves. But you get nothing at all from the dog, and yet you feed him with tidbits from your own table.\" Their remarks were overheard by the dog, who spoke up at once and said, \"Yes, and quite right, too. Where would you be if it wasn't for me? Thieves would steal you! Wolves would eat you! Indeed, if I didn't keep constant watch over you, you would be too terrified even to graze!\" The sheep were obliged to acknowledge that he spoke the truth, and never again made a grievance of the regard in which he was held by his master.\n**212. THE SHEPHERD AND THE WOLF**\n\n**A** shepherd found a wolfs cub straying in the pastures, and took him home and reared him along with his dogs. When the cub grew to his full size, if ever a wolf stole a sheep from the flock, he used to join the dogs in hunting him down. It sometimes happened that the dogs failed to come up with the thief, and, abandoning the pursuit, returned home. The wolf would on such occasions continue the chase by himself, and when he overtook the culprit, would stop and share the feast with him, and then return to the shepherd. But if some time passed without a sheep being carried off by the wolves, he would steal one himself and share his plunder with the dogs. The shepherd's suspicions were aroused, and one day he caught him in the act; and, fastening a rope round his neck, hung him on the nearest tree.\n\nWhat's bred in the bone is sure to come out in the flesh.\n**213. THE LION, JUPITER, AND THE ELEPHANT**\n\n**T** he lion, for all his size and strength and his sharp teeth and claws, is a coward in one thing. He can't bear the sound of a cock crowing, and runs away whenever he hears it. He complained bitterly to Jupiter for making him like that, but Jupiter said it wasn't his fault. He had done the best he could for him, and, considering this was his only failing, he ought to be well content. The lion, however, wouldn't be comforted, and was so ashamed of his timidity that he wished he might die. In this state of mind he met the elephant and had a talk with him. He noticed that the great beast cocked up his ears all the time, as if he were listening for something, and he asked him why he did so. Just then a gnat came humming by, and the elephant said, \"Do you see that wretched little buzzing insect? I'm terribly afraid of its getting into my ear. If it once gets in, I'm dead and done for.\" The lion's spirits rose at once when he heard this. \"For,\" he said to himself, \"if the elephant, huge as he is, is afraid of a gnat, I needn't be so much ashamed of being afraid of a cock, who is ten thousand times bigger than a gnat.\"\n\n**THE LION, JUPITER, AND THE ELEPHANT**\n\n**214. THE PIG AND THE SHEEP**\n\n**A** pig found his way into a meadow where a flock of sheep were grazing. The shepherd caught him, and was proceeding to carry him off to the butcher's when he set up a loud squealing and struggled to get free. The sheep rebuked him for making such a to-do, and said to him, \"The shepherd catches us regularly and drags us off just like that, and we don't make any fuss.\" \"No, I dare say not,\" replied the pig, \"but my case and yours are altogether different. He only wants you for wool, but he wants me for bacon.\"\n**215. THE GARDENER AND HIS DOG**\n\n**A** gardener's dog fell into a deep well, from which his master used to draw water for the plants in his garden with a rope and a bucket. Failing to get the dog out by means of these, the gardener went down into the well himself in order to fetch him up. But the dog thought he had come to make sure of drowning him; so he bit his master as soon as he came within reach, and hurt him a good deal, with the result that he left the dog to his fate and climbed out of the well, remarking, \"It serves me quite right for trying to save so determined a suicide.\"\n**216. THE RIVERS AND THE SEA**\n\n**O** nce upon a time all the rivers combined to protest against the action of the sea in making their waters salt. \"When we come to you,\" said they to the sea, \"we are sweet and drinkable; but when once we have mingled with you, our waters become as briny and unpalatable as your own.\" The sea replied shortly, \"Keep away from me, and you'll remain sweet.\"\n**217. THE LION IN LOVE**\n\n**A** lion fell deeply in love with the daughter of a cottager and wanted to marry her. But her father was unwilling to give her to so fearsome a husband, and yet didn't want to offend the lion; so he hit upon the following expedient. He went to the lion and said, \"I think you will make a very good husband for my daughter; but I cannot consent to your union unless you let me draw your teeth and pare your nails, for my daughter is terribly afraid of them.\" The lion was so much in love that he readily agreed that this should be done. When once, however, he was thus disarmed, the cottager was afraid of him no longer, but drove him away with his club.\n**218. THE BEEKEEPER**\n\n**A** thief found his way into an apiary when the beekeeper was away, and stole all the honey. When the keeper returned and found the hives empty, he was very much upset and stood staring at them for some time. Before long the bees came back from gathering honey, and, finding their hives overturned and the keeper standing by, they made for him with their stings. At this he fell into a passion and cried, \"You ungrateful scoundrels, you let the thief who stole my honey get off scot-free, and then you go and sting me who have always taken such care of you!\"\n\nWhen you hit back make sure you have got the right man.\n**219. THE WOLF AND THE HORSE**\n\n**A** wolf on his rambles came to a field of oats, but, not being able to eat them, he was passing on his way when a horse came along. \"Look,\" said the wolf, \"here's a fine field of oats. For your sake I have left it untouched, and I shall greatly enjoy the sound of your teeth munching the ripe grain.\" But the horse replied, \"If wolves could eat oats, my fine friend, you would hardly have indulged your ears at the cost of your belly.\"\n\nThere is no virtue in giving to others what is useless to oneself.\n\n**THE WOLF AND THE HORSE**\n\n**220. THE BAT, THE BRAMBLE, AND THE SEAGULL**\n\n**A** bat, a bramble, and a seagull went into partnership and determined to go on a trading voyage together. The bat borrowed a sum of money for his venture; the bramble laid in a stock of clothes of various kinds; and the seagull took a quantity of lead. And so they set out. By and by a great storm came on, and their boat with all the cargo went to the bottom, but the three travelers managed to reach land. Ever since then the seagull flies to and fro over the sea, and every now and then dives below the surface looking for the lead he's lost; while the bat is so afraid of meeting his creditors that he hides away by day and only comes out at night to feed; and the bramble catches hold of the clothes of everyone who passes by, hoping some day to recognize and recover the lost garments.\n\nAll men are more concerned to recover what they lose than to acquire what they lack.\n**221. THE DOG AND THE WOLF**\n\n**A** dog was lying in the sun before a farmyard gate when a wolf pounced upon him and was just going to eat him up. But he begged for his life and said, \"You see how thin I am and what a wretched meal I should make you now. But if you will only wait a few days, my master is going to give a feast. All the rich scraps and pickings will fall to me, and I shall get nice and fat. Then will be the time for you to eat me.\" The wolf thought this was a very good plan and went away. Sometime afterwards he came to the farmyard again and found the dog lying out of reach on the stable roof. \"Come down,\" he called, \"and be eaten. You remember our agreement?\" But the dog said coolly, \"My friend, if ever you catch me lying down by the gate there again, don't you wait for any feast.\"\n\nOnce bitten, twice shy.\n**222. THE WASP AND THE SNAKE**\n\n**A** wasp settled on the head of a snake, and not only stung him several times, but clung obstinately to the head of his victim. Maddened with pain the snake tried every means he could think of to get rid of the creature, but without success. At last he became desperate, and crying, \"Kill you I will, even at the cost of my own life,\" he laid his head with the wasp on it under the wheel of a passing wagon, and they both perished together.\n**223. THE EAGLE AND THE BEETLE**\n\nAn eagle was chasing a hare, which was running for dear life and was at her wits' end to know where to turn for help. Presently she espied a beetle and begged it to aid her. So when the eagle came up the beetle warned her not to touch the hare, which was under its protection. But the eagle never noticed the beetle because it was so small, seized the hare, and ate her up. The beetle never forgot this, and used to keep an eye on the eagle's nest, and whenever the eagle laid an egg it climbed up and rolled it out of the nest and broke it. At last the eagle got so worried over the loss of her eggs that she went up to Jupiter, who is the special protector of eagles, and begged him to give her a safe place to nest in; so he let her lay her eggs in his lap. But the beetle noticed this and made a ball of dirt the size of an eagle's egg, and flew up and deposited it in Jupiter's lap. When Jupiter saw the dirt, he stood up to shake it out of his robe, and, forgetting about the eggs, he shook them out too, and they were broken just as before. Ever since then, they say, eagles never lay their eggs at the season when beetles are about.\n\nThe weak will sometimes find ways to avenge an insult, even upon the strong.\n**224. THE FOWLER AND THE LARK**\n\n**A** fowler was setting his nets for little birds when a lark came up to him and asked him what he was doing. \"I am engaged in founding a city,\" said he, and with that he withdrew to a short distance and concealed himself. The lark examined the nets with great curiosity, and presently, catching sight of the bait, hopped onto them in order to secure it, and became entangled in the meshes. The fowler then ran up quickly and captured her. \"What a fool I was!\" said she. \"But at any rate, if that's the kind of city you are founding, it'll be a long time before you find fools enough to fill it.\"\n**225. THE FISHERMAN PIPING**\n\n**A** fisherman who could play the flute went down one day to the seashore with his nets and his flute; and, taking his stand on a projecting rock, began to play a tune, thinking that the music would bring the fish jumping out of the sea. He went on playing for some time, but not a fish appeared. So at last he threw down his flute and cast his net into the sea, and made a great haul of fish. When they were landed and he saw them leaping about on the shore, he cried, \"You rascals! You wouldn't dance when I piped; but now I've stopped, you can do nothing else!\"\n**226. THE WEASEL AND THE MAN**\n\n**A** man once caught a weasel which was always sneaking about the house, and was just going to drown it in a tub of water, when it begged hard for its life, and said to him, \"Surely you haven't the heart to put me to death? Think how useful I have been in clearing your house of the mice and lizards which used to infest it, and show your gratitude by sparing my life.\" \"You have not been altogether useless, I grant you,\" said the man. \"But who killed the fowls? Who stole the meat? No, no! You do much more harm than good, and die you shall.\"\n\n**THE FISHERMAN PIPING**\n\n**227. THE PLOWMAN, THE ASS, AND THE OX**\n\n**A** plowman yoked his ox and his ass together, and set to work to plow his field. It was a poor makeshift of a team, but it was the best he could do, as he had but a single ox. At the end of the day, when the beasts were loosed from the yoke, the ass said to the ox, 'Well, we've had a hard day. Which of us is to carry the master home?\" The ox looked surprised at the question. \"Why,\" said he, \"you, to be sure, as usual.\"\n**228. DEMADES AND HIS FABLE**\n\n**D** emades the orator was once speaking in the assembly at Athens. But the people were very inattentive to what he was saying, so he stopped and said, \"Gentlemen, I should like to tell you one of Aesop's fables.\" This made everyone listen intently. Then Demades began, \"Demeter, a swallow, and an eel were once traveling together, and came to a river without a bridge. The swallow flew over it, and the eel swam across.\" And then he stopped. \"What happened to Demeter?\" cried several people in the audience. \"Demeter,\" he replied, \"is very angry with you for listening to fables when you ought to be minding public business.\"\n\n**229. THE MONKEY AND THE DOLPHIN**\n\n**W** hen people go on a voyage they often take with them lapdogs or monkeys as pets to while away the time. Thus it fell out that a man returning to Athens from the East had a pet monkey on board with him. As they neared the coast of Attica a great storm burst upon them, and the ship capsized. All on board were thrown into the water, and tried to save themselves by swimming, the monkey among the rest. A dolphin saw him, and, supposing him to be a man, took him on his back and began swimming towards the shore. When they got near the Piraeus, which is the port of Athens, the dolphin asked the monkey if he was an Athenian. The monkey replied that he was, and added that he came of a very distinguished family. \"Then, of course, you know the Piraeus,\" continued the dolphin. The monkey thought he was referring to some high official or other, and replied, \"Oh, yes, he's a very old friend of mine.\" At that, detecting his hypocrisy, the dolphin was so disgusted that he dived below the surface, and the unfortunate monkey was quickly drowned.\n\nTHE MONKEY AND THE DOLPHIN\n\n**230. THE CROW AND THE SNAKE**\n\n**A** hungry crow spied a snake lying asleep in a sunny spot, and, picking it up in his claws, he was carrying it off to a place where he could make a meal of it without being disturbed, when the snake reared its head and bit him. It was a poisonous snake, and the bite was fatal, and the dying crow said, \"What a cruel fate is mine! I thought I had made a lucky find, and it has cost me my life!\"\n**231. THE DOGS AND THE FOX**\n\n**S** ome dogs once found a lion's skin, and were worrying it with their teeth. Just then a fox came by and said, \"You think yourselves very brave, no doubt; but if that were a live lion, you'd find his claws a good deal sharper than your teeth.\"\n**232. THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE HAWK**\n\n**A** nightingale was sitting on a bough of an oak and singing, as her custom was. A hungry hawk presently spied her, and darting to the spot seized her in his talons. He was just about to tear her in pieces when she begged him to spare her life. \"I'm not big enough,\" she pleaded, \"to make you a good meal. You ought to seek your prey among the bigger birds.\" The hawk eyed her with some contempt. \"You must think me very simple,\" said he, \"if you suppose I am going to give up a certain prize on the chance of a better, of which I see at present no signs.\"\n**233. THE ROSE AND THE AMARANTH**\n\n**A** rose and an amaranth blossomed side by side in a garden, and the amaranth said to her neighbor, \"How I envy you your beauty and your sweet scent! No wonder you are such a universal favorite.\" But the rose replied with a shade of sadness in her voice, \"Ah, my dear friend, I bloom but for a time. My petals soon wither and fall, and then I die. But your flowers never fade, even if they are cut; for they are everlasting.\"\n**234. THE MAN, THE HORSE, THE OX, AND THE DOG**\n\n**O** ne winter's day during a severe storm a horse, an ox, and a dog came and begged for shelter in the house of a man. He readily admitted them, and, as they were cold and wet, he lit a fire for their comfort; and he put oats before the horse, and hay before the ox, while he fed the dog with the remains of his own dinner. When the storm abated, and they were about to depart, they determined to show their gratitude in the following way. They divided the life of man among them, and each endowed one part of it with the qualities which were peculiarly his own. The horse took youth, and hence young men are high-mettled and impatient of restraint; the ox took middle age, and accordingly men in middle life are steady and hard-working; while the dog took old age, which is the reason why old men are so often peevish and ill-tempered, and, like dogs, attached chiefly to those who look to their comfort, while they are disposed to snap at those who are unfamiliar or distasteful to them.\n**235. THE WOLVES, THE SHEEP, AND THE RAM**\n\nThe wolves sent a deputation to the sheep with proposals for a lasting peace between them, on condition of their giving up the sheepdogs to instant death. The foolish sheep agreed to the terms; but an old ram, whose years had brought him wisdom, interfered and said, \"How can we expect to live at peace with you? Why, even with the dogs at hand to protect us, we are never secure from your murderous attacks!\"\n**236. THE SWAN**\n\nThe swan is said to sing but once in its life\u2014when it knows that it is about to die. A certain man who had heard of the song of the swan one day saw one of these birds for sale in the market, and bought it and took it home with him. A few days later he had some friends to dinner, and produced the swan, and bade it sing for their entertainment; but the swan remained silent. In course of time, when it was growing old, it became aware of its approaching end and broke into a sweet, sad song. When its owner heard it, he said angrily, \"If the creature only sings when it is about to die, what a fool I was that day I wanted to hear its song! I ought to have wrung its neck instead of merely inviting it to sing.\"\n**237. THE SNAKE AND JUPITER**\n\n**A** snake suffered a good deal from being constantly trodden upon by man and beast, owing partly to the length of his body and partly to his being unable to raise himself above the surface of the ground; so he went and complained to Jupiter about the risks to which he was exposed. But Jupiter had little sympathy for him. \"I dare say,\" said he, \"that if you had bitten the first that trod on you, the others would have taken more trouble to look where they put their feet.\"\n\n**238. THE WOLF AND HIS SHADOW**\n\n**A** wolf who was roaming about on the plain when the sun was getting low in the sky was much impressed by the size of his shadow, and said to himself, \"I had no idea I was so big. Fancy my being afraid of a lion! Why, I, not he, ought to be king of the beasts.\" And, heedless of danger, he strutted about as if there could be no doubt at all about it. Just then a lion sprang upon him and began to devour him. \"Alas,\" he cried, \"had I not lost sight of the facts, I shouldn't have been ruined by my fancies.\"\n**239. THE PLOWMAN AND THE WOLF**\n\n**A** plowman loosed his oxen from the plow and led them away to the water to drink. While he was absent a half-starved wolf appeared on the scene, and went up to the plow and began chewing the leather straps attached to the yoke. As he gnawed away desperately in the hope of satisfying his craving for food, he somehow got entangled in the harness, and, taking fright, struggled to get free, tugging at the traces as if he would drag the plow along with him. Just then the plowman came back, and seeing what was happening, he cried, \"Ah, you old rascal, I wish you would give up thieving for good and take to honest work instead.\"\n**240. MERCURY AND THE MAN BITTEN BY AN ANT**\n\n**A** man once saw a ship go down with all its crew, and commented severely on the injustice of the gods. \"They care nothing for a man's character,\" said he, \"but let the good and the bad go to their deaths together.\" There was an ant heap close by where he was standing, and, just as he spoke, he was bitten in the foot by an ant. Turning in a temper to the ant heap he stamped upon it and crushed hundreds of unoffending ants. Suddenly Mercury appeared, and belabored him with his staff, saying as he did so, \"You villain, where's your nice sense of justice now?\"\n**241. THE WILY LION**\n\n**A** lion watched a fat bull feeding in a meadow, and his mouth watered when he thought of the royal feast he would make, but he did not dare to attack him, for he was afraid of his sharp horns. Hunger, however, presently compelled him to do something; and as the use of force did not promise success, he determined to resort to artifice. Going up to the bull in friendly fashion, he said to him, \"I cannot help saying how much I admire your magnificent figure. What a fine head! What powerful shoulders and thighs! But, my dear friend, what in the world makes you wear those ugly horns? You must find them as awkward as they are unsightly. Believe me, you would do much better without them.\" The bull was foolish enough to be persuaded by this flattery to have his horns cut off; and, having now lost his only means of defense, fell an easy prey to the lion.\n**242. THE PARROT AND THE CAT**\n\n**A** man once bought a parrot and gave it the run of his house. It reveled in its liberty, and presently flew up onto the mantelpiece and screamed away to its heart's content. The noise disturbed the cat, who was asleep on the hearthrug. Looking up at the intruder, she said, \"Who may you be, and where have you come from?\" The parrot replied, \"Your master has just bought me and brought me home with him.\" \"You impudent bird,\" said the cat, \"how dare you, a newcomer, make a noise like that? Why, I was born here, and have lived here all my life, and yet, if I venture to mew, they throw things at me and chase me all over the place.\" \"Look here, mistress,\" said the parrot; \"you just hold your tongue. My voice they delight in, but yours\u2014yours is a perfect nuisance.\"\n**243. THE STAG AND THE LION**\n\n**A** stag was chased by the hounds, and took refuge in a cave, where he hoped to be safe from his pursuers. Unfortunately the cave contained a lion, to whom he fell an easy prey. \"Unhappy that I am,\" he cried, \"I am saved from the power of the dogs only to fall into the clutches of a lion.\"\n\nOut of the frying pan into the fire.\n**244. THE IMPOSTER**\n\n**A** certain man fell ill, and, being in a very bad way, he made a vow that he would sacrifice a hundred oxen to the gods if they would grant him a return to health. Wishing to see how he would keep his vow, they caused him to recover in a short time. Now, he hadn't an ox in the world, so he made a hundred little oxen out of tallow and offered them up on an altar, at the same time saying, \"Ye gods, I call you to witness that I have discharged my vow.\" The gods determined to be even with him, so they sent him a dream, in which he was bidden to go to the seashore and fetch a hundred crowns which he was to find there. Hastening in great excitement to the shore, he fell in with a band of robbers, who seized him and carried him off to sell as a slave. And when they sold him, a hundred crowns was the sum he fetched.\n\nDo not promise more than you can perform.\n**245. THE DOGS AND THE HIDES**\n\nOnce upon a time a number of dogs, who were famished with hunger, saw some hides steeping in a river, but couldn't get at them because the water was too deep. So they put their heads together, and decided to drink away at the river till it was shallow enough for them to reach the hides. But long before that happened they burst themselves with drinking.\n\n**246. THE LION, THE FOX, AND THE ASS**\n\n**A** lion, a fox, and an ass went out hunting together. They had soon taken a large booty, which the lion requested the ass to divide between them. The ass divided it all into three equal parts, and modestly begged the others to take their choice; at which the lion, bursting with fury, sprang upon the ass and tore him to pieces. Then, glaring at the fox, he bade him make a fresh division. The fox gathered almost the whole in one great heap for the lion's share, leaving only the smallest possible morsel for himself. \"My dear friend,\" said the lion, \"how did you get the knack of it so well?\" The fox replied, \"Me? Oh, I took a lesson from the ass.\"\n\nHappy is he who learns from the misfortunes of others.\n**247- THE FOWLER, THE PARTRIDGE, AND THE COCK**\n\nOne day, as a fowler was sitting down to a scanty supper of herbs and bread, a friend dropped in unexpectedly. The larder was empty, so he went out and caught a tame partridge, which he kept as a decoy, and was about to wring her neck when she cried, \"Surely you won't kill me? Why, what will you do without me next time you go fowling? How will you get the birds to come to your nets?\" He let her go at this, and went to his hen house, where he had a plump young cock. When the cock saw what he was after, he too pleaded for his life, and said, \"If you kill me, how will you know the time of night? And who will wake you up in the morning when it is time to get to work?\" The fowler, however, replied, \"You are useful for telling the time, I know; but, for all that, I can't send my friend supperless to bed.\" And therewith he caught him and wrung his neck.\n\n**248. THE GNAT AND THE LION**\n\n**A** gnat once went up to a lion and said, \"I am not in the least afraid of you. I don't even allow that you are a match for me in strength. What does your strength amount to after all? That you can scratch with your claws and bite with your teeth\u2014just like a woman in a temper\u2014and nothing more. But I'm stronger than you. If you don't believe it, let us fight and see.\" So saying, the gnat sounded his horn, and darted in and bit the lion on the nose. When the lion felt the sting, in his haste to crush him, he scratched his nose badly and made it bleed, but failed altogether to hurt the gnat, which buzzed off in triumph, elated by its victory. Presently, however, it got entangled in a spider's web and was caught and eaten by the spider, thus falling prey to an insignificant insect after having triumphed over the king of the beasts.\n\n**THE GNAT AND THE LION**\n\n**249. THE FARMER AND HIS DOGS**\n\n**A** farmer was snowed up in his farmstead by a severe storm and was unable to go out and procure provisions for himself and his family. So he first killed his sheep and used them for food. Then, as the storm still continued, he killed his goats. And, last of all, as the weather showed no signs of improving, he was compelled to kill his oxen and eat them. When his dogs saw the various animals being killed and eaten in turn, they said to one another, \"We had better get out of this, or we shall be the next to go!\"\n**250. THE EAGLE AND THE FOX**\n\nAn eagle and a fox became great friends and determined to live near one another. They thought that the more they saw of each other the better friends they would be. So the eagle built a nest at the top of a high tree, while the fox settled in a thicket at the foot of it and produced a litter of cubs. One day the fox went out foraging for food, and the eagle, who also wanted food for her young, flew down into the thicket, caught up the fox's cubs, and carried them up into the tree for a meal for herself and her family. When the fox came back and found out what had happened, she was not so much sorry for the loss of her cubs as furious because she couldn't get at the eagle and pay her back for her treachery. So she sat down not far off and cursed her. But it wasn't long before she had her revenge. Some villagers happened to be sacrificing a goat on a neighboring altar, and the eagle flew down and carried off a piece of burning flesh to her nest. There was a strong wind blowing, and the nest caught fire, with the result that her fledglings fell half roasted to the ground. Then the fox ran to the spot and devoured them in full sight of the eagle.\n\nFalse faith may escape human punishment, but cannot escape the divine.\n**251. THE BUTCHER AND HIS CUSTOMERS**\n\n**T** wo men were buying meat at a butcher's stall in the marketplace, and, while the butcher's back was turned for a moment, one of them snatched up a joint and hastily thrust it under the other's cloak, where it could not be seen. When the butcher turned round, he missed the meat at once, and charged them with having stolen it; but the one who had taken it said he didn't have it, and the one who had it said he hadn't taken it. The butcher felt sure they were deceiving him, but he only said, \"You may cheat me with your lying, but you can't cheat the gods, and they won't let you off so lightly.\"\n\nPrevarication often amounts to perjury.\n**252. HERCULES AND MINERVA**\n\n**H** ercules was once traveling along a narrow road when he saw lying on the ground in front of him what appeared to be an apple, and as he passed he stamped upon it with his heel. To his astonishment, instead of being crushed it doubled in size; and, on his attacking it again and smiting it with his club, it swelled up to an enormous size and blocked up the whole road. Upon this he dropped his club and stood looking at it in amazement. Just then Minerva appeared and said to him, \"Leave it alone, my friend. That which you see before you is the Apple of Discord. If you do not meddle with it, it remains small as it was at first, but if you resort to violence it swells into the thing you see.\"\n**253. THE FOX WHO SERVED A LION**\n\n**A** lion had a fox to attend on him, and whenever they went hunting the fox found the prey, and the lion fell upon it and killed it, and then they divided it between them in certain proportions. But the lion always got a very large share and the fox a very small one, which didn't please the latter at all; so he determined to set up on his own account. He began by trying to steal a lamb from a flock of sheep. But the shepherd saw him and set his dogs on him. The hunter was now the hunted, and was very soon caught and dispatched by the dogs.\n\nBetter servitude with safety than freedom with danger.\n**254. THE QUACK DOCTOR**\n\n**A** certain man fell sick and took to his bed. He consulted a number of doctors from time to time, and they all, with one exception, told him that his life was in no immediate danger, but that his illness would probably last a considerable time. The one who took a different view of his case, who was also the last to be consulted, bade him prepare for the worst. \"You have not twenty-four hours to live,\" said he, \"and I fear I can do nothing.\" As it turned out, however, he was quite wrong; for at the end of a few days the sick man quitted his bed and took a walk abroad, looking, it is true, as pale as a ghost. In the course of his walk he met the doctor who had prophesied his death. \"Dear me,\" said the latter. \"How do you do? You are fresh from the other world, no doubt. Pray, how are our departed friends getting on there?\" \"Most comfortably,\" replied the other, \"for they have drunk the water of oblivion and have forgotten all the troubles of life. By the way, just before I left, the authorities were making arrangements to prosecute all the doctors, because they won't let sick men die in the course of nature, but use their arts to keep them alive. They were going to charge you along with the rest, till I assured them that you were no doctor, but a mere impostor.\"\n**255. THE LION, THE WOLF, AND THE FOX**\n\n**A** lion, infirm with age, lay sick in his den, and all the beasts of the forest came to inquire after his health, with the exception of the fox. The wolf thought this was a good opportunity for paying off old scores against the fox, so he called the attention of the lion to his absence, and said, \"You see, sire, that we have all come to see how you are, except the fox, who hasn't come near you, and doesn't care whether you are well or ill.\" Just then the fox came in and heard the last words of the wolf. The lion roared at him in deep displeasure, but he begged to be allowed to explain his absence and said, \"Not one of them cares for you so much as I, sire, for all the time I have been going round to the doctors and trying to find a cure for your illness.\" \"And may I ask if you have found one?\" said the lion. \"I have, sire,\" said the fox, \"and it is this. You must flay a wolf and wrap yourself in his skin while it is still warm.\" The lion accordingly turned to the wolf and struck him dead with one blow of his paw, in order to try the fox's prescription; but the fox laughed and said to himself, \"That's what comes of stirring up ill will.\"\n**256. HERCULES AND PLUTUS**\n\n**W** hen Hercules was received among the gods and was entertained at a banquet by Jupiter, he responded courteously to the greetings of all with the exception of Plutus, the god of wealth. When Plutus approached him, he cast his eyes upon the ground, and turned away and pretended not to see him. Jupiter was surprised at this conduct on his part, and asked why, after having been so cordial with all the other gods, he had behaved like that to Plutus. \"Sire,\" said Hercules, \"I do not like Plutus, and I will tell you why. When we were on earth together I always noticed that he was to be found in the company of scoundrels.\"\n\n**257. THE FOX AND THE LEOPARD**\n\n**A** fox and a leopard were disputing about their looks, and each claimed to be the more handsome of the two. The leopard said, \"Look at my smart coat. You have nothing to match that.\" But the fox replied, \"Your coat may be smart, but my wits are smarter still.\"\n**258. THE FOX AND THE HEDGEHOG**\n\n**A** fox, in swimming across a rapid river, was swept away by the current and carried a long way downstream in spite of his struggles, until at last, bruised and exhausted, he managed to scramble onto dry ground from a backwater. As he lay there unable to move, a swarm of horseflies settled on him and sucked his blood undisturbed, for he was too weak even to shake them off A hedgehog saw him, and asked if he should brush away the flies that were tormenting him; but the fox replied, \"Oh, please, no, not on any account, for these flies have sucked their fill and are taking very little from me now. But if you drive them off, another swarm of hungry ones will come and suck all the blood I have left, and leave me without a drop in my veins.\"\n259. THE CROW AND THE RAVEN\n\n**A** crow became very jealous of a raven, because the latter was regarded by men as a bird of omen which foretold the future, and was accordingly held in great respect by them. She was very anxious to get the same sort of reputation herself; and, one day, seeing some travelers approaching, she flew onto a branch of a tree at the roadside and cawed as loud as she could. The travelers were in some dismay at the sound, for they feared it might be a bad omen, till one of them, spying the crow, said to his companions, \"It's all right, my friends, we can go on without fear, for it's only a crow and that means nothing.\"\n\nThose who pretend to be something they are not, only make themselves ridiculous.\n**260. THE WITCH**\n\n**A** witch professed to be able to avert the anger of the gods by means of charms, of which she alone possessed the secret; and she drove a brisk trade, and made a fat livelihood out of it. But certain persons accused her of black magic and carried her before the judges, and demanded that she should be put to death for dealings with the devil. She was found guilty and condemned to death; and one of the judges said to her as she was leaving the dock, \"You say you can avert the anger of the gods. How comes it, then, that you have failed to disarm the enmity of men?\"\n**261. THE OLD MAN AND DEATH**\n\nAn old man cut himself a bundle of sticks in a wood and started to carry them home. He had a long way to go, and was tired out before he had got much more than halfway. Casting his burden on the ground, he called upon Death to come and release him from his life of toil. The words were scarcely out of his mouth when, much to his dismay, Death stood before him and professed his readiness to serve him. He was almost frightened out of his wits, but he had enough presence of mind to stammer out, \"Good sir, if you'd be so kind, pray help me up with my burden again. \u00bb\n\nTHE MISER\n\n**262. THE MISER**\n\n**A** miser sold everything he had, and melted down his hoard of gold into a single lump, which he buried secretly in a of gold into a single lump, which he buried secretly in a field. Every day he went to look at it, and would sometimes spend long hours gloating over his treasure. One of his men noticed his frequent visits to the spot, and one day watched him and discovered his secret. Waiting his opportunity, he went one night and dug up the gold and stole it. Next day the miser visited the place as usual, and, finding his treasure gone, fell to tearing his hair and groaning over his loss. In this condition he was seen by one of his neighbors, who asked him what his trouble was. The miser told him of his misfortune; but the other replied, \"Don't take it so much to heart, my friend; put a brick into the hole, and take a look at it every day. You won't be any worse off than before, for even when you had your gold it was of no earthly use to you.\"\n**263. THE FOXES AND THE RIVER**\n\n**A** number of foxes assembled on the bank of a river and wanted to drink. But the current was so strong and the water looked so deep and dangerous that they didn't dare to do so, but stood near the edge encouraging one another not to be afraid. At last one of them, to shame the rest and show how brave he was, said, \"I am not a bit frightened! See, I'll step right into the water!\" He had no sooner done so than the current swept him off his feet. When the others saw him being carried downstream they cried, \"Don't go and leave us! Come back and show us where we too can drink with safety.\" But he replied, \"I'm afraid I can't yet. I want to go to the seaside, and this current will take me there nicely. When I come back I'll show you with pleasure.\"\n**264. THE HORSE AND THE STAG**\n\n**T** here was once a horse who used to graze in a meadow which he had all to himself. But one day a stag came into the meadow, and said he had as good a right to feed there as the horse, and moreover chose all the best places for himself. The horse, wishing to be revenged upon his unwelcome visitor, went to a man and asked if he would help him to turn out the stag. \"Yes,\" said the man, \"I will by all means; but I can only do so if you let me put a bridle in your mouth and mount on your back.\" The horse agreed to this, and the two together very soon turned the stag out of the pasture. But when that was done, the horse found to his dismay that in the man he had got a master for good.\n**265. THE FOX AND THE BRAMBLE**\n\nIn making his way through a hedge a fox missed his footing and caught at a bramble to save himself from falling. Naturally, he got badly scratched, and in disgust he cried to the bramble, \"It was your help I wanted, and see how you have treated me! I'd sooner have fallen outright.\" The bramble, interrupting him, replied, \"You must have lost your wits, my friend, to catch at me, who am myself always catching at others.\"\n**266. THE FOX AND THE SNAKE**\n\n**A** snake, in crossing a river, was carried away by the current, but managed to wriggle onto a bundle of thorns which was floating by, and was thus carried at a great rate downstream. A fox caught sight of it from the bank as it went whirling along, and called out, \"Gad! The passenger fits the ship!\"\n**267. THE LION, THE FOX, AND THE STAG**\n\n**A** lion lay sick in his den, unable to provide himself with food. So he said to his friend the fox, who came to ask how he did, \"My good friend, I wish you would go to yonder wood and beguile the big stag who lives there to come to my den. I have a fancy to make my dinner off a stag's heart and brains.\" The fox went to the wood and found the stag and said to him, \"My dear sir, you're in luck. You know the lion, our king. Well, he's at the point of death, and has appointed you his successor to rule over the beasts. I hope you won't forget that I was the first to bring you the good news. And now I must be going back to him, and, if you take my advice, you'll come too and be with him at the last.\"\n\nThe stag was highly flattered, and followed the fox to the lion's den, suspecting nothing. No sooner had he got inside than the lion sprang upon him, but he misjudged his spring, and the stag got away with only his ears torn and returned as fast as he could to the shelter of the wood. The fox was much mortified, and the lion, too, was dreadfully disappointed, for he was getting very hungry in spite of his illness. So he begged the fox to have another try at coaxing the stag to his den. \"It'll be almost impossible this time,\" said the fox, \"but I'll try.\" And off he went to the wood a second time, and found the stag resting and trying to recover from his fright.\n\nAs soon as he saw the fox he cried, \"You scoundrel, what do you mean by trying to lure me to my death like that? Take yourself off, or I'll do you to death with my horns.\" But the fox was entirely shameless. \"What a coward you were,\" said he. \"Surely you didn't think the lion meant any harm? Why, he was only going to whisper some royal secrets into your ear when you went off like a scared rabbit. You have rather disgusted him, and I'm not sure he won't make the wolf king instead, unless you come back at once and show you've got some spirit. I promise you he won't hurt you, and I will be your faithful servant.\"\n\nThe stag was foolish enough to be persuaded to return, and this time the lion made no mistake, but overpowered him, and feasted right royally upon his carcass. The fox, meanwhile, watched his chance and, when the lion wasn't looking, filched away the brains to reward him for his trouble. Presently the lion began searching for them, of course without success; and the fox, who was watching him, said, \"I don't think it's much use your looking for the brains. A creature who twice walked into a lion's den can't have had any.\"\n**268. THE MAN WHO LOST HIS SPADE**\n\n**A** man was engaged in digging over his vineyard, and one day on coming to work he missed his spade. Thinking it may have been stolen by one of his labourers, he questioned them closely, but they one and all denied any knowledge of it. He was not convinced by their denials, and insisted that they should all go to the town and take oath in a temple that they were not guilty of the theft. This was because he had no great opinion of the simple country deities, but thought that the thief would not pass undetected by the shrewder gods of the town. When they got inside the gates the first thing they heard was the town crier proclaiming a reward for information about a thief who had stolen something from the city temple. \"Well,\" said the man to himself, \"it strikes me I had better go back home again. If these town gods can't detect the thieves who steal from their own temples, it's scarcely likely they can tell me who stole my spade.\"\n**269. THE PARTRIDGE AND THE FOWLER**\n\n**A** fowler caught a partridge in his nets, and was just about to wring its neck when it made a piteous appeal to him to spare A its life and said, \"Do not kill me, but let me live and I will repay you for your kindness by decoying other partridges into your nets.\" \"No,\" said the fowler, \"I will not spare you. I was going to kill you anyhow, and after that treacherous speech you thoroughly deserve your fate.\"\n**270. THE RUNAWAY SLAVE**\n\n**A** slave, being discontented with his lot, ran away from his master. He was soon missed by the latter, who lost no time in mounting his horse and setting out in pursuit of the fugitive. He presently came up with him, and the slave, in the hope of avoiding capture, slipped into a treadmill and hid himself there. \"Aha,\" said his master, \"that's the very place for you, my man!\"\n**271. THE HUNTER AND THE WOODMAN**\n\n**A** hunter was searching in the forest for the tracks of a lion, and, catching sight presently of a woodman engaged in felling a tree, he went up to him and asked him if he had noticed a lion's footprints anywhere about, or if he knew where his den was. The woodman answered, \"If you will come with me, I will show you the lion himself.\" The hunter turned pale with fear, and his teeth chattered as he replied, \"Oh, I'm not looking for the lion, thanks, but only for his tracks.\"\n**272. THE SERPENT AND THE EAGLE**\n\n**A** n eagle swooped down upon a serpent and seized it in his talons with the intention of carrying it off and devouring it. But the serpent was too quick for him and had its coils round him in a moment; and then there ensued a life-and-death struggle between the two. A countryman, who was a witness of the encounter, came to the assistance of the eagle, and succeeded in freeing him from the serpent and enabling him to escape. In revenge the serpent spat some of his poison into the man's drinking horn. Heated with his exertions, the man was about to slake his thirst with a draft from the horn, when the eagle knocked it out of his hand and spilled its contents upon the ground.\n\nOne good turn deserves another.\n**273. THE ROGUE AND THE ORACLE**\n\n**A** rogue laid a wager that he would prove the Oracle at Delphi to be untrustworthy by procuring from it a false reply to an inquiry by himself. So he went to the temple on the appointed day with a small bird in his hand, which he concealed under the folds of his cloak, and asked whether what he held in his hand were alive or dead. If the Oracle said \"dead,\" he meant to produce the bird alive. If the reply was \"alive,\" he intended to wring its neck and show it to be dead. But the Oracle was one too many for him, for the answer he got was this: \"Stranger, whether the thing that you hold in your hand be alive or dead is a matter that depends entirely on your own will.\"\n\n**274. THE HORSE AND THE ASS**\n\n**A** horse, proud of his fine harness, met an ass on the high road. As the ass with his heavy burden moved slowly out of the way to let him pass, the horse cried out impatiently that he could hardly resist kicking him to make him move faster. The ass held his peace, but did not forget the other's insolence. Not long afterwards the horse became broken-winded and was sold by his owner to a farmer. One day, as he was drawing a dung cart, he met the ass again, who in turn derided him and said, \"Aha! You never thought to come to this, did you, you who were so proud! Where are all your gay trappings now?\"\n**275. THE DOG CHASING A WOLF**\n\n**A** dog was chasing a wolf, and as he ran he thought what a fine fellow he was, and what strong legs he had, and how quickly they covered the ground. \"Now, there's this wolf,\" he said to himself. \"What a poor creature he is. He's no match for me, and he knows it and so he runs away.\" But the wolf looked round just then and said, \"Don't you imagine I'm running away from you, my friend. It's your master I'm afraid of.\"\n**276. GRIEF AND HIS DUE**\n\nWhen Jupiter was assigning the various gods their privileges, it so happened that Grief was not present with the rest; but when all had received their share, he too entered and claimed his due. Jupiter was at a loss to know what to do, for there was nothing left for him. However, at last he decided that to him should belong the tears that are shed for the dead. Thus it is the same with Grief as it is with the other gods. The more devoutly men render to him his due, the more lavish is he of that which he has to bestow. It is not well, therefore, to mourn long for the departed, else Grief, whose sole pleasure is in such mourning, will be quick to send fresh cause for tears.\n**277.** **THE HAWK, THE KITE, AND THE PIGEONS**\n\nThe pigeons in a certain dovecote were persecuted by a kite, who every now and then swooped down and carried off one of their number. So they invited a hawk into the dovecote to defend them against their enemy. But they soon repented of their folly; for the hawk killed more of them in a day than the kite had done in a year.\n**278. THE WOMAN AND THE FARMER**\n\n**A** woman who had lately lost her husband used to go every day to his grave and lament her loss. A farmer, who was engaged in plowing not far from the spot, set eyes upon the woman and desired to have her for his wife. So he left his plow and came and sat by her side and began to shed tears himself. She asked him why he wept; and he replied, \"I have lately lost my wife, who was very dear to me, and tears ease my grief.\" \"And I,\" said she, \"have lost my husband.\" And so for a while they mourned in silence. Then he said, \"Since you and I are in like case, shall we not do well to marry and live together? I shall take the place of your dead husband, and you, that of my dead wife.\" The woman consented to the plan, which indeed seemed reasonable enough, and they dried their tears. Meanwhile, a thief had come, and stolen the oxen which the farmer had left with his plow. On discovering the theft, he beat his breast and loudly bewailed his loss. When the woman heard his cries, she came and said, \"Why, are you weeping still?\" To which he replied, \"Yes, and I mean it this time.\"\n**279. PROMETHEUS AND THE MAKING OF MAN**\n\n**A** t the bidding of Jupiter, Prometheus set about the creation of man and the other animals. Jupiter, seeing that mankind, the only rational creatures, were far outnumbered by the irrational beasts, bade him redress the balance by turning some of the latter into men. Prometheus did as he was bidden, and this is the reason why some people have the forms of men but the souls of beasts.\n**280. THE SWALLOW AND THE CROW**\n\n**A** swallow was once boasting to a crow about her birth. \"I was once a princess,\" said she, \"the daughter of a king of Athens, but my husband used me cruelly, and cut out my tongue for a slight fault. Then, to protect me from further injury, I was turned by Juno into a bird.\" \"You chatter quite enough as it is,\" said the crow. \"What you would have been like if you hadn't lost your tongue, I can't think.\"\n**2SI. THE HUNTER AND THE HORSEMAN**\n\n**A** hunter went out after game, and succeeded in catching a hare, which he was carrying home with him when he met a man on horseback, who said to him, \"You have had some sport I see, sir,\" and offered to buy it. The hunter readily agreed; but the horseman had no sooner got the hare in his hands than he set spurs to his horse and went off at full gallop. The hunter ran after him for some little distance. But it soon dawned upon him that he had been tricked, and he gave up trying to overtake the horseman, and, to save his face, called after him as loud as he could, \"All right, sir, all right. Take your hare. It was meant all along as a present.\"\n**282. THE GOATHERD AND** THE WILD GOATS\n\n**A** goatherd was tending his goats out at pasture when he saw a number of wild goats approach and mingle with his flock. At the end of the day he drove them home and put them all into the pen together. Next day the weather was so bad that he could not take them out as usual, so he kept them at home in the pen and fed them there. He only gave his own goats enough food to keep them from starving, but he gave the wild goats as much as they could eat and more; for he was very anxious for them to stay, and he thought that if he fed them well they wouldn't want to leave him.\n\nWhen the weather improved he took them all out to pasture again, but no sooner had they got near the hills than the wild goats broke away from the flock and scampered off. The goatherd was very much disgusted at this, and roundly abused them for their ingratitude. \"Rascals!\" he cried. \"To run away like that after the way I've treated you!\" Hearing this, one of them turned round and said, \"Oh, yes, you treated us all right\u2014too well, in fact. It was just that that put us on our guard. If you treat newcomers like ourselves so much better than your own flock, it's more than likely that, if another lot of strange goats joined yours, we should then be neglected in favor of the last comers.\"\n**283. THE NIGHTINGALE AND THE SWALLOW**\n\n**A** swallow, conversing with a nightingale, advised her to quit the leafy coverts where she made her home, and to come and live with men, like herself, and nest under the shelter of their roofs. But the nightingale replied, \"Time was when I too, like yourself, lived among men. But the memory of the cruel wrongs I then suffered makes them hateful to me, and never again will I approach their dwellings.\"\n\nThe scene of past sufferings revives painful memories.\n**284. THE TRAVELER AND FORTUNE**\n\n**A** traveler, exhausted with fatigue after a long journey, sank down at the very brink of a deep well and presently fell asleep. He was within an ace of falling in, when Lady Fortune appeared to him and touched him on the shoulder, cautioning him to move farther away. \"Wake up, good sir, I pray you,\" she said. \"Had you fallen into the well, the blame would have been thrown not on your own folly but on me, Fortune.\"\n**GLOSSARY OF NAMES AND TERMS FROM CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY**\n\n**Aesop.** For an account of Aesop's legendary life, see the early pages of this volume and the Introduction.\n\n**Apollo.** One of the most highly revered and respected of all the Greek gods, he presided over many aspects of life and culture, including law, religion, poetry, and music. He is often depicted playing the lyre. The most important center for Apollo worship in ancient Greece was at Delphi, where he often revealed the future through his oracle.\n\n**Athens.** The principal city of Attica, it was the center of ancient Greek civilization.\n\n**Attica.** In this ancient district in east central Greece, Athens was the principal city.\n\n**Death.** Cultural anthropologists have long noted that primitive peoples rarely have the ability to accept death as a natural and inevitable phenomenon. Thus the origin of death is described in myths from around the world, and personifications of death (for example, the Grim Reaper or the Angel of Death) are part of folk beliefs in many cultures. The character named Death in fable no. 261 is such a personification, a supernatural being who causes humans to die. However, his verdicts apparently are not necessarily final. This story, like many other folktales from around the world, shows an intended victim bargaining with his would-be captor with at least the hope of reprieve, but given the often cynical tone of Aesop's fables, most readers will not give him good chances of success.\n\n**Delphi.** This city in ancient Greece was located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. An important cultural center, Delphi was especially renowned as the location of the Oracle of Apollo.\n\n**Demades.** An Athenian diplomat famous for his oratory skills, Demades lived between about 380 B.C. and 319 B.C.\n\n**Demeter**. The name of this Greek goddess of agriculture can mean either \"grain mother\" or \"mother earth.\" Her Roman equivalent was Ceres.\n\n**Earth, Goddess of the.** The ancient Greeks worshiped a female personification of the earth whom they named Gaea. This Mother Earth figure is sometimes depicted as an adversary of Zeus, leading to the conjecture that in prehistoric times her cult was replaced by a religion centered around Zeus.\n\n**Fortune, Lady.** According to ancient Greek belief, human destiny (especially the length of one's life and one's allotment of happiness and misery) was determined by three goddesses called fates. The Lady Fortune in fable no. 284 (also the Fortune of fable no. 56) may be one of these fates, or possibly an embodiment of all three. In Roman mythology the roles of the Greek fates were played by the Parcae (singular, Parca), whose names were Nona, Decuma, and Morta.\n\n**Gods and mortals.** The morality of Aesop's fables is secular and pragmatic, and is rarely tied to religion, although the gods themselves, as well as other mythical beings, often play roles. These stories are, for the most part, of Greek origin, but they have come to us through the intermediacy of the Romans, so in the fables mythical beings are usually identified by their Roman names.\n\n**Grief.** Although Grief is identified as a god in fable no. 276, no such specific deity is mentioned in most descriptions of Greek and Roman religion. This Aesopic fable is personifying the concept of grief into a supernatural being in much the same way that the concept of death is often personified.\n\n**Hercules.** This is the Roman name of Heracles, the most famous of all Greek legendary heroes. Enormously strong and fiercely brave, Hercules was nevertheless forced into servitude and was able to free himself only by performing twelve labors. These tasks consisted for the most part in subduing terrifying mythical monsters, but one of them was the humiliating chore of cleaning dung from the stables of King Augeas, which he succeeded in doing by diverting two rivers and flooding the stables.\n\n**Hymettus.** (Imitt6s), In ancient times this mountain in Greece, southeast of Athens, was famous for its aromatic herbs and for the unusually flavored honey that they produced.\n\n**Juno.** She was the female counterpart of Jupiter (Jove), the principal deity in Roman religion. Her Greek counterpart was Hera.\n\n**Jupiter.** (Also known as Jove), Jupiter was the Sky-God and the principal deity in pre-Christian Roman religion. In most Latin-rooted languages his name is still attached to the fifth day of the week\u2014for example, jovis dies (Latin), jeudi (French), and jueves (Spanish). Jupiter's counterpart in Greek mythology was Zeus.\n\n**Mercury**. The Roman god of merchants, Mercury is identified with the Greek deity Hermes, who, according to Homer, served as the gods' messenger. Because of this association, Mercury is often portrayed with a winged helmet or winged sandals. In most Latin-rooted languages his name is still attached to the fourth day of the week\u2014fbr example, _Mercurii dies_ (Latin), _mercredi_ (French), and _mi\u00e9rcoles_ (Spanish).\n\n_Minerva._ In Roman mythology, Minerva presided over the arts and crafts and their associated skills. Because these skills could also be used in battle, she also came to be recognized as a goddess of warfare, making her a counterpart to the Greek goddess Athena.\n\n**Olympus.** A snow-capped peak of nearly 10,000 feet in northern Greece, Mount Olympus was held to be the home of the gods by the ancient Greeks.\n\n**Oracle at Delphi.** The word \"oracle\" can designate either an intermediary (such as a priestess) who communicates messages from a deity, the place (for example, a temple) where these revelations are received, or the divine message itself: The most important divination center in ancient Greece was the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi, a city located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus.\n\n**Plutus.** The Greek god of wealth, especially agricultural abundance, Plutus is often depicted in art as a boy with a cornucopia.\n\n**Prometheus.** The most famous of the Titans, a race of giants that inhabited the earth before humans were created, Prometheus is said to have formed the first humans out of clay and was their principal supporter before the gods. He is best remembered for attempting to benefit humankind by stealing fire from heaven for their use.\n\n**Rhodes.** On this easternmost of the Greek islands, just off the coast of Turkey, the capital city is also named Rhodes.\n\n_Satyr._ A creature in Greek mythology, a satyr is usually depicted as half man and half horse (or goat). Associated with Dionysus, god of wine and revelry, satyrs are marked by uncouth, licentious behavior. The most famous satyr was the Greek fertility deity Pan, often depicted playing shepherd's pipes and immortalized in such words as \"panic\" and \"pandemonium.\" The Roman counterparts of satyrs were the fauns.\n\n**Thebes.** According to tradition, King Oedipus held court at Thebes, one of the principal cities of ancient Greece. It is the setting of many classical tragedies by Aeschylus and Sophocles. The Greek Thebes should not be confused with the ancient Egyptian city of the same name.\n\n**Theseus.** A legendary Greek hero and King of Athens, Theseus greatly admired the feats of Heracles (Hercules) and attempted to make a similar name for himself by seeking out contests with a variety of powerful opponents, including the Minotaur, a fabulous beast with the head of a bull and a human's body. Theseus, identified as the duke of Athens, is featured in two of Shakespeare's plays, _A Midsummer Night's Dream and Two Noble Kinsmen._\n\nVenus. An ancient Roman deity for agriculture, Venus also came to be associated with the Greek goddess of sexuality and love, Aphrodite, at a very early time. In most Latin-rooted languages Venus's name is still attached to the sixth day of the week\u2014for example, _Veneris dies_ (Latin), _vendredi_ (French), and _viernes_ (Spanish). Venus's male counterpart was her own son (fathered by Mercury) Cupid, called Amor by Roman poets. Cupid's Greek counterpart was Eros, the god of love.\n**APPENDIX**\n\n_**Aesopic Fables and Their Aarne-Thompson Type Numbers**_\n\nThe Fox and the Grapes (no. 1), type 59\n\nThe Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs (no. 2), type 776\n\nThe Cat and the Mice (no. 3), type 113*\n\nThe Mice in Council (no. 6), type 110\n\nThe Fox and the Crow (no. 9), type 57\n\nThe Wolf and the Lamb (no. 11), type 111A\n\nMercury and the Woodman (no. 17), type 729\n\nThe Lion and the Mouse (no. 19), type 75\n\nThe Crow and the Pitcher (no. 20), type 232D*\n\nThe North Wind and the Sun (no. 22), type 298\n\nThe Mistress and Her Servants (no. 23), type 1566A*\n\nThe Hares and the Frogs (no. 25), type 70\n\nThe Fox and the Stork (no. 26), type 60\n\nThe Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (no. 27), type 123B\n\nThe Stag in the Ox-Stall (no. 28), type 162\n\nThe Milkmaid and Her Pail (no. 29), type 1430\n\nThe Ass and the Lapdog (no. 32), type 214\n\nThe Gnat and the Bull (no. 36), type 281\n\nThe Bear and the Travelers (no. 37), type 179\n\nThe Slave and the Lion (no. 38), type 156\n\nThe Oak and the Reeds (no. 41), type 298C*\n\nThe Ass and His Burdens (no. 45), type 211\n\nThe Shepherd's Boy and the Wolf (no. 46), type 1333\n\nThe Fox and the Goat (no. 47), type 31\n\nThe Fisherman and the Sprat (no. 48), type 122F\n\nThe Crab and His Mother (no. 50), type 276\n\nThe Farmer and His Sons (no. 52), type 910E\n\nJupiter and the Monkey (no. 57), type 247\n\nFather and Sons (no. 58), type 910F\n\nThe Owl and the Birds (no. 60), type 233C\n\nThe Ass in the Lion's Skin (no. 61), type 214B\n\nThe Old Lion (no. 63), type 50A\n\nThe Swollen Fox (no. 66), type 41*\n\nThe Mouse, the Frog, and the Hawk (no. 67), type 278\n\nThe Jackdaw and the Pigeons (no. 70), type 244\n\nThe Boy and the Filberts (no. 75), type 68A\n\nThe Frogs Asking for a King (no. 76), type 277\n\nThe Tortoise and the Eagle (no. 81), type 225\n\nThe Kid on the Housetop (no. 82), type 127A*\n\nThe Fox without a Tail (no. 83), type 64\n\nThe Vain Jackdaw (no. 84), type 244\n\nThe Stag at the Pool (no. 93), type 77\n\nThe Dog and His Reflection (no. 94), type 34A\n\nThe Ox and the Frog (no. 100), type 277A\n\nThe Man and the Image (no. 101), type 1643\n\nThe Two Soldiers and the Robber (no. 106), similar to type 179\n\nThe Lion and the Wild Ass (no. 107), type 51\n\nThe Man and the Satyr (no. 108), type 1342\n\nThe Wolf, the Mother, and Her Child (no. 112), type 75*\n\nThe Cat and the Cock (no. 116), type 111A\n\nThe Hare and the Tortoise (no. 117), type 275A\n\nThe Lion and the Three Bulls (no. 122), type 119B*\n\nThe Lark and the Farmer (no. 128), type 93\n\nThe Wolf and the Crane (no. 134), type 76\n\nThe Town Mouse and the Country Mouse (no. 141), type 112\n\nVenus and the Cat (no. 147), similar to type 402\n\nThe Grasshopper and the Ants (no. 156), type 280A\n\nThe Cobbler Turned Doctor (no. 159), similar to type 1641\n\nThe Belly and the Members (no. 161), type 293\n\nThe Bald Man and the Fly (no. 162), similar to type 1586\n\nThe Ass and the Wolf (no. 163), type 122J\n\nThe Birds, the Beasts, and the Bat (no. 168), type 222A\n\nThe Man and His Two Mistresses (no. 169), type 1215A\n\nThe Miller, His Son, and Their Ass (no. 172), type 1215\n\nThe Archer and the Lion (no. 175), similar to type 157\n\nThe Ass and the Mule (no. 178), type 207B\n\nThe Laborer and the Snake (no. 188), type 285D\n\nThe Bat, the Bramble, and the Seagull (no. 220), type 289\n\nThe Dog and the Wolf (no. 221), type 122F\n\nThe Nightingale and the Hawk (no. 232), similar to type 122E\n\nThe Man, the Horse, the Ox, and the Dog (no. 234), type 173\n\nThe Lion, the Fox, and the Ass (no. 246), type 51\n\nThe Gnat and the Lion (no. 248), type 281A*\n\nThe Lion, the Wolf, and the Fox (no. 255), type 50\n\nThe Old Man and Death (no. 261), type 845\n\nThe Miser (no. 262), type 1305B\n\nThe Foxes and the River (no. 263), type 67\n\nThe Lion, the Fox, and the Stag (no. 267), type 52\n\nThe Serpent and the Eagle (no. 272), similar to type 178\n\nThe Woman and the Farmer (no. 278), similar to type 1510\nINSPIRED BY _AESOP'S_ FABLES\n\nAll animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.\n\n-George Orwell, _Animal Farm_\n\nAesop (or the group of ancient storytellers we call Aesop) is famed for his mastery of the moral fable, or apologue, a distant cousin of the apology. \"Apologue\" comes from the Greek word meaning \"defense,\" and the apology as literary form is exactly that: a defense of the writer's point of view. Aesop created apologues to inform his audience's morality and point a critical finger at the authorities, yet his oblique approach saved him from censure. Over the centuries the form has been employed by figures as diverse as Socrates and Sir Philip Sidney.\n\n#  _**Orwell's**_ **Animal Farm**\n\nPerhaps the twentieth century's finest example is George Orwell's _Animal Farm_ (1945) political fable, which predicts the author's mas terpiece _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ (1949), Orwell makes use of a biting wit comparable to that of the eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift. Assigning farm animals the roles of Stalin, Trotsky, and the common man, Orwell writes a pessimistic allegory about the tyranny of world leaders and the foibles of the Bolshevik and every other revolution. The anti-utopian _Animal Farm_ is prized for its simple, direct style and profound moral stance. In his review of the novel in the _New York Times_ Book _Review,_ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, \"The story should be read in particular by liberals who cannot understand how Soviet performance has fallen so far behind Communist professions. 'Animal Farm' is a wise, compassionate and illuminated fable for our times.\"\n\n#  _Aesop in the World's Lexicon_\n\nThe fable as a form predates Aesop. Originating as long as 4,000 years ago, fables have enjoyed immense popularity throughout recorded time, in part because many of the proverbs and other expressions they contain are eminently quotable\u2014so much so that these simple truths have been absorbed into the common wisdom of our species.\n\nAesop proved especially adept at creating situations and wordings that capture a moral meaning in an intriguing and memorable way. Writers as diverse as Aeschylus, Francis Bacon, Samuel Butler, Eu ripides, Benjamin Franklin, George Herbert, Andrew Lang, James Russell Lowell, Sophocles, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde have fashioned quips from Aesop's fables and adopted his style in their work. The folklore and fairy tales of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen find their roots in the storytelling modes Aesop employed. So ubiquitous is Aesop's influence that countless fables are attributed to him regardless of their actual authorship. Indeed, invoking Aesop's name has become the most convenient way to describe the entire genre of the fable.\n\nFollowing are some of Aesop's expressions that have entered into not only our speech but our very ways of thinking (see also _From the Pages of Aesop's_ Fables, on the first page inside the front cover):\n\nAll that glitters is not gold   \nBlow hot and cold   \nCry wolf   \nDog in the manger   \nEvery man for himself   \nFamiliarity breeds contempt   \nKill the goose that lays the golden eggs   \nLeave well enough alone   \nLion's share   \nLook before you leap   \nMight makes right   \nSlow but sure   \nSour grapes   \nThrow to the wolves   \nViper in one's bosom   \nWolf in sheep's clothing\nCOMMENTS & QUESTIONS\n\n_In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filterAesop's Fables through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring fables._\n\n#  _Comments_\n\n**HERODOTUS**\n\nWhen the people of Delphi repeatedly made proclamation in accordance with an oracle, to find some one who would take up the blood-money for the death of Esop, no one else appeared, but at length the grandson of ladmon, called Iadmon also, took it up; and thus it is shown that Esop ... was the slave of ladmon.\n\n_\u2014_ from _The History of Herodotus,_   \nas translated by G. C. Macaulay (1890)\n\n**OSCAR FAY ADAMS**\n\nTeaching by fable is the most ancient method of moral instruction; and allusions to it abound in the early history of all nations. The dullest minds could be reached by an apologue or a parable, and the brightest ones were not offended by this indirect mode of giving advice. Indeed, the fable seems to have been at one period the universal method of appeal to the reason or the conscience. Kings on their thrones were addressed in fables by their courtiers and subjects were admonished by monarchs by means of skillfully-told apologues.\n\n\u2014from _Dear Old Story-Tellers_ (1889)\n\n_**THE TIMES**_ **OF LONDON**\n\nIn England \"\u00c6sop\" has remained one of the most universal of school books, and all attempts to imitate or rival him have ended in ignominious failure.\n\n\u2014March 21, 1890\n\n**THE NATION**\n\nOriginally a part of folk-lore, the fable became literature in Greece because it was made the medium of conveying political lessons at a time when, under the Tyrants, free speech was dangerous. In India the same result was produced by the use of fables by the founder of Buddhism to impart moral lessons. In Greece this use is connected with the name of \u00c6sop, about whom so little is known that it has been suggested that he is himself a fable.\n\nJuly 31, 1890\n\n**CHARLES W. ELIOT**\n\nIn _[Aesop's Fables],_ the form of the old animistic story is used without any belief in the identity of the personalities of men and animals, but with a conscious double meaning and for the purpose of teaching a lesson. The fable is a product not of the folk but of the learned; and though at times it has been handed down by word of mouth, it is really a literary form.\n\n\u2014from _The Harvard Classics: Folk-lore and_ Fable (1909)\n\n#  _**Questions**_\n\n1. Sometimes two proverbs contradict each other, as in \"Look before you leap\" and \"He who hesitates is lost.\" When two fables (or proverbs) contradict each other must we assume that one is wrong? Can you think of two of Aesop's fables that contradict each other, although both seem to apply? Is it that both apply, but to different circumstances? If so, can you describe the circumstances?\n\n2. Can you think of a public figure who characteristically acts moral in accordance with one of Aesop's fables?\n\n3. Do any of these fables always apply?\n\n4. Can one extract a worldview that governs all of these fables, rational, religious, commonsensical, or based on experience?\n\n5. Do you think these fables, or stories, are more effective in making a point than reasoned argument would be? Why or why not?\n**FOR FURTHER READING**\n\n#  _The Life of Aesop_\n\n_Aesop:_ Fables. 1692. Translation by Sir Roger L'Estrange. Every-man's Library series. New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1992. Includes \"The Life of Aesop\" (pp. 17-45).\n\nDaly, Lloyd W. _Aesop without Morals: The Famous Fables, and a Life of Aesop._ New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1961.\n\n#  _**The Aesopic Fable**_\n\nBlackham, H. J. _The Fable as Literature._ London: Athlone Press, 1985.\n\nHolzberg, Niklas. _The Ancient Fable: An Introduction._ Translated by Christine Jackson-Holzberg (from _Die antike Fabel: eine Einf\u00fchrung_ [2001], expanded edition of an introduction to Greek and Latin fables published in 1993). Studies in Ancient Folklore and Popular Culture series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.\n\nJacobs, Joseph. 1889. _History of the Aesopic Fable._ New York: Burt Franklin, 1970.\n\nPatterson, Annabel M. _Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History._ Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.\n\nPerry, Ben Edwin. _Babrius and Phaedrus._ Newly edited and translated into English together with a historical introduction and a comprehensive survey of Greek and Latin fables in the Aesopic tradition. Loeb Classical Library series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.\n\n#  Oriental Fables\n\n_The, jataka; or, Stories of the Buddha's Former Births._ Edited by E. B. Cowell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1895-1907. 6 vols. Reprint: Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1999.\n\n_The Panchatantra._ 1925. Translated from the Sanskrit by Arthur W. Ryder. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964.\n\n#  _**Folktale Studies**_\n\nAarne, Antti, and Thompson, Stith. The Types _of the_ Folktale : _A Classification and Bibliography._ Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeak atemia, 1961.\n\nAshliman, D. L. _A Guide to Folktales in the English Language._ Bibliographies and Indexes in World Literature series. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987.\n\nThompson, Stith. 1946. _The Folktale._ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Still the best introduction to the folktale.\n\n#  _**Internet Resources**_\n\nAshliman, D. L. _Folktexts._ An electronic library of folktales, folk lore, fairy tales, and mythology, sponsored by the University of Pittsburgh (<http:\/\/www.pitt.edu\/-dash\/folktexts.html>).\n\nGibbs, Laura. _Aesopica.net._ An ongoing venture, sponsored by the University of Oklahoma, to publish electronic versions of the Greek and Latin texts of Aesop's fables, together with English translations and indexes (<http:\/\/liaisons.ou.edu\/~lgibbs\/aesopica\/index.htm>).\n\nUniversity of Southern Mississippi. _Description of the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection._ This collection is especially strong in its holdings of Aesop and other fabulists (<http:\/\/www.lib.usm.edu\/~degrum\/html\/collectionhl\/ch-fables.shtml>).\n**ALPHABETICAL INDEX OF FABLES**\n\n##  A page\n\nAnt, The .....\n\nApes and the Two Travelers, The .....\n\nArcher and the Lion, The .....\n\nAss and His Burdens, The .....\n\nAss and His Driver, The .....\n\nAss and His Masters, The .....\n\nAss and His Purchaser, The .....\n\nAss and His Shadow, The .....\n\nAss and the Dog, The .....\n\nAss and the Lapdog, The .....\n\nAss and the Mule, The .....\n\nAss and the Old Peasant, The .....\n\nAss and the Wolf, The .....\n\nAss Carrying the Image, The .....\n\nAss in the Lion's Skin, The .....\n\nAss, the Cock, and the Lion, The .....\n\nAss, the Fox, and the Lion, The .....\n\nAstronomer, The .....\n\nAthenian and the Theban, The .....\n\n##  B\n\nBald Huntsman, The .....\n\nBald Man and the Fly, The .....\n\nBat and the Weasels, The .....\n\nBat, the Bramble, and the Seagull, The .....\n\nBear and the Fox, The .....\n\nBear and the Travelers, The .....\n\nBee and Jupiter, The .....\n\nBeekeeper, The .....\n\nBelly and the Members, The .....\n\nBirds, the Beasts, and the Bat, The .....\n\nBlackamoor, The .....\n\nBlacksmith and His Dog, The .....\n\nBlind Man and the Cub, The .....\n\nBoasting Traveler, The .....\n\nBoy and the Filberts, The .....\n\nBoy and the Nettles, The .....\n\nBoy and the Snails, The .....\n\nBoy Bathing, The .....\n\nBoys and the Frogs, The .....\n\nBrother and Sister .....\n\nBull and the Calf, The .....\n\nButcher and His Customers, The .....\n\n##  **C**\n\nCaged Bird and the Bat, The .....\n\nCat and the Birds, The .....\n\nCat and the Cock, The .....\n\nCat and the Mice, The.....\n\nCharcoal Burner and the Fuller, The .....\n\nCharger and the Miller, The .....\n\nClown and the Countryman, The.....\n\nCobbler Turned Doctor, The .....\n\nCock and the Jewel, The .....\n\nCrab and His Mother, The .....\n\nCrab and the Fox, The .....\n\nCrow and the Pitcher, The .....\n\nCrow and the Raven, The .....\n\nCrow and the Snake, The .....\n\nCrow and the Swan, The .....\n\n##  **D**\n\nDebtor and His Sow, The .....\n\nDemades and His Fable .....\n\nDog and His Reflection, The .....\n\nDog and the Cook, The .....\n\nDog and the Snow, The .....\n\nDog and the Wolf, The .....\n\nDog Chasing a Wolf, The .....\n\nDog in the Manger, The .....\n\nDog, the Cock, and the Fox, The .....\n\nDogs and the Fox, The .....\n\nDogs and the Hides, The .....\n\nDolphins, the Whales, and the Sprat, The .....\n\n##  **E**\n\nEagle and His Captor, The .....\n\nEagle and the Arrow, The .....\n\nEagle and the Beetle, The .....\n\nEagle and the Cocks, The .....\n\nEagle and the Fox, The .....\n\nEagle, the Cat, and the Wild Sow, The .....\n\nEagle, the Jackdaw, and the Shepherd, The .....\n\nEscaped Jackdaw, The .....\n\n##  **F**\n\nFarmer and Fortune, The .....\n\nFarmer and His Dogs, The .....\n\nFarmer and His Sons, The .....\n\nFarmer and the Fox, The .....\n\nFarmer and the Stork, The .....\n\nFarmer and the Viper, The .....\n\nFarmer, His Boy, and the Rooks, The .....\n\nFather and His Daughters, The .....\n\nFather and Sons .....\n\nFawn and His Mother, The .....\n\nFir Tree and the Bramble, The .....\n\nFisherman and the Sprat, The .....\n\nFisherman Piping, The .....\n\nFlea and the Man, The .....\n\nFlea and the Ox, The .....\n\nFly and the Draft Mule, The.....\n\nFowler and the Lark, The .....\n\nFowler, the Partridge, and the Cock, The .....\n\nFox and the Bramble, The .....\n\nFox and the Crow, The .....\n\nFox and the Goat, The .....\n\nFox and the Grapes, The .....\n\nFox and the Grasshopper, The .....\n\nFox and the Hedgehog, The .....\n\nFox and the Leopard, The .....\n\nFox and the Lion, The .....\n\nFox and the Monkey, The .....\n\nFox and the Snake, The .....\n\nFox and the Stork, The .....\n\nFox Who Served a Lion, The .....\n\nFox without a Tail, The .....\n\nFoxes and the River, The .....\n\nFrogs and the Well, The .....\n\nFrogs Asking for a King, The .....\n\nFrogs' Complaint against the Sun, The .....\n\n##  **G**\n\nGardener and His Dog, The .....\n\nGnat and the Bull, The .....\n\nGnat and the Lion, The .....\n\nGoat and the Vine, The .....\n\nGoatherd and the Goat, The .....\n\nGoatherd and the Wild Goats, The .....\n\nGoods and the Ills, The .....\n\nGoose That Laid the Golden Eggs, The .....\n\nGrasshopper and the Ants, The .....\n\nGrasshopper and the Owl, The .....\n\nGrief and His Due .....\n\n##  **H**\n\nHare and the Hound, The .....\n\nHare and the Tortoise, The .....\n\nHares and the Frogs, The .....\n\nHawk, the Kite, and the Pigeons, The .....\n\nHeifer and the Ox, The .....\n\nHercules and Minerva .....\n\nHercules and Plutus .....\n\nHercules and the Wagoner .....\n\nHerdsman and the Lost Bull, The .....\n\nHorse and His Rider, The .....\n\nHorse and the Ass, The .....\n\nHorse and the Groom, The .....\n\nHorse and the Stag, The .....\n\nHound and the Fox, The .....\n\nHound and the Hare, The .....\n\nHunter and the Horseman, The .....\n\nHunter and the Woodman, The .....\n\n##  **I**\n\nImage Seller, The .....\n\nImposter, The .....\n\n##  **J**\n\nJackdaw and the Pigeons, The .....\n\nJupiter and the Monkey .....\n\nJupiter and the Tortoise .....\n\n##  **K**\n\nKid and the Wolf, The .....\n\nKid on the Housetop, The .....\n\nKingdom of the Lion, The .....\n\n##  **L**\n\nLaborer and the Snake, The .....\n\nLamb Chased by a Wolf, The .....\n\nLamp, The .....\n\nLark and the Farmer, The .....\n\nLion and the Ass, The .....\n\nLion and the Boar, The .....\n\nLion and the Bull, The .....\n\nLion and the Hare, The .....\n\nLion and the Mouse, The .....\n\nLion and the Three Bulls, The .....\n\nLion and the Wild Ass, The .....\n\nLion in Love, The .....\n\nLion, Jupiter, and the Elephant, The .....\n\nLion, the Bear, and the Fox, The .....\n\nLion, the Fox, and the Ass, The .....\n\nLion, the Fox, and the Stag, The .....\n\nLion, the Mouse, and the Fox, The .....\n\nLion, the Wolf, and the Fox, The .....\n\nLioness and the Vixen, The .....\n\n##  **M**\n\nMan and His Two Mistresses, The .....\n\nMan and the Image, The .....\n\nMan and the Lion, The .....\n\nMan and the Satyr, The .....\n\nMan, the Horse, the Ox, and the Dog, The .....\n\nMan Who Lost His Spade, The .....\n\nMercury and the Man Bitten by an Ant .....\n\nMercury and the Sculptor .....\n\nMercury and the Tradesmen .....\n\nMercury and the Woodman .....\n\nMice and the Weasels, The .....\n\nMice in Council, The .....\n\nMilkmaid and Her Pail, The .....\n\nMiller, His Son, and Their Ass, The .....\n\nMischievous Dog, The .....\n\nMiser, The .....\n\nMistress and Her Servants, The .....\n\nMonkey and the Camel, The .....\n\nMonkey and the Dolphin, The .....\n\nMonkey as King, The .....\n\nMoon and Her Mother, The .....\n\nMouse and the Bull, The .....\n\nMouse, the Frog, and the Hawk, The .....\n\nMule, The .....\n\n##  **N**\n\nNightingale and the Hawk, The .....\n\nNightingale and the Swallow, The .....\n\nNorth Wind and the Sun, The .....\n\n##  **O**\n\nOak and the Reeds, The .....\n\nOld Hound, The .....\n\nOld Lion, The .....\n\nOld Man and Death, The .....\n\nOld Woman and the Doctor, The .....\n\nOld Woman and the Wine Jar, The .....\n\nOlive Tree and the Fig Tree, The .....\n\nOwl and the Birds, The .....\n\nOx and the Frog, The .....\n\nOxen and the Axletrees, The .....\n\nOxen and the Butchers, The .....\n\n##  **P**\n\nPack Ass and the Wild Ass, The ..............................\n\nPack Ass, the Wild Ass, and the Lion, The ..................\n\nParrot and the Cat, The .......................................\n\nPartridge and the Fowler, The ................................\n\nPeacock and Juno, The .........................................\n\nPeacock and the Crane, The ...................................\n\nPeasant and the Apple Tree, The ..............................\n\nPig and the Sheep, The .......................................\n\nPlowman and the Wolf, The ..................................\n\nPlowman, the Ass, and the Ox, The ..........................\n\nPomegranate, the Apple Tree, and the Bramble, The ........\n\nPrometheus and the Making of Man ..........................\n\nProphet, The ..................................................\n\n##  Q\n\nQuack Doctor, The ............................................\n\nQuack Frog, The ...............................................\n\n##  R\n\nRich Man and the Tanner, The ...............................\n\nRivers and the Sea, The .......................................\n\nRogue and the Oracle, The ....................................\n\nRose and the Amaranth, The .................................\n\nRunaway Slave, The ...........................................\n\n##  S\n\nSerpent and the Eagle, The ...................................\n\nSheep and the Dog, The ......................................\n\nSheep, the Wolf, and the Stag, The ...........................\n\nShe-Goats and Their Beards, The .............................\n\nShepherd and the Wolf, The ..................................\n\nShepherd's Boy and the Wolf, The ............................\n\nShipwrecked Man and the Sea, The ...........................\n\nSick Man and the Doctor, The ................................\n\nSick Stag, The .................................................\n\nSlave and the Lion, The ........................................\n\nSnake and Jupiter, The ........................................\n\nSoldier and the Horse, The ...................................\n\nSpendthrift and the Swallow, The ..............................\n\nStag and the Lion, The ........................................\n\nStag and the Vine, The ........................................\n\nStag at the Pool, The ...........................................\n\nStag in the Ox Stall, The .......................................\n\nStag with One Eye, The ......................................\n\nSwallow and the Crow, The ...................................\n\nSwan, The .....................................................\n\nSwollen Fox, The ...............................................\n\n##  T\n\nThief and the Innkeeper, The .................................\n\nThieves and the Cock, The .....................................\n\nThree Tradesmen, The ........................................\n\nTortoise and the Eagle, The ....................................\n\nTown Mouse and the Country Mouse, The ..................\n\nTraveler and Fortune, The ....................................\n\nTraveler and His Dog, The ....................................\n\nTravelers and the Plane Tree, The ............................\n\nTrees and the Ax, The ........................................\n\nTrumpeter Taken Prisoner, The ..............................\n\nTuna Fish and the Dolphin, The .............................\n\nTwo Bags, The .................................................\n\nTwo Frogs, The ...............................................\n\nTwo Pots, The .................................................\n\nTwo Soldiers and the Robber, The ............................\n\n##  V\n\nVain Jackdaw, The .............................................\n\nVenus and the Cat .............................................\n\nViper and the File, The .......................................\n\n##  w\n\nWalnut Tree, The ..............................................\n\nWasp and the Snake, The .....................................\n\nWeasel and the Man, The .....................................\n\nWild Boar and the Fox, The ...................................\n\nWily Lion, The ................................................\n\nWitch, The ....................................................\n\nWolf and His Shadow, The ...................................\n\nWolf and the Boy, The ........................................\n\nWolf and the Crane, The .....................................\n\nWolf and the Goat, The ......................................\n\nWolf and the Horse, The .....................................\n\nWolf and the Lamb, The .......................................\n\nWolf and the Lion, The .......................................\n\nWolf and the Sheep, The .....................................\n\nWolf and the Shepherd, The ..................................\n\nWolf in Sheep's Clothing, The .................................\n\nWolf, the Fox, and the Ape, The .............................\n\nWolf, the Mother, and Her Child, The .......................\n\nWolves and the Dogs, The ....................................\n\nWolves, the Sheep, and the Ram, The ........................\n\nWoman and the Farmer, The .................................\n\nA fuller bleached and thickened woolen cloth through a boiling and pounding process.\n\nThe word \"corn\" designates any type of grain.\n\nIn some versions the slave is known by the name Androcles.\n\nA common black and gray bird related to the crow.\n\nThe significance here is that a lowly bramble would dare to interject himself into a dispute between two noble fruit trees.\n\nThe ancient storyteller apparently did not know that dolphins are air-breathing mammals.\n\nA mythical flower that never fades.\n\nThis belief is the origin of the expression \"swan song.\"\n\nReminiscent of Pandora's box in Greek mythology.\n\nIn the original Greek text it was the heart that was stolen, which in antiquity was believed to be the seat of intelligence.\n\nWhere the recaptured slave will be forced to labor.\n\nA small hawk.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n\n\nProduced by Donal O'Danachair and David Widger\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE GOLDEN ASSE\n\n\nby Lucius Apuleius \"Africanus\"\n\n\n\nTranslated by William Adlington\n\n\nFirst published 1566 This version as reprinted from the edition of\n1639. The original spelling, capitalisation and punctuation have been\nretained.\n\n\n\n\nDedication\n\n\nTo the Right Honourable and Mighty Lord, THOMAS EARLE OF SUSSEX,\nViscount Fitzwalter, Lord of Egremont and of Burnell, Knight of the most\nnoble Order of the Garter, Iustice of the forrests and Chases from\nTrent Southward; Captain of the Gentleman Pensioners of the House of the\nQUEENE our Soveraigne Lady.\n\nAfter that I had taken upon me (right Honourable) in manner of that\nunlearned and foolish Poet, Cherillus, who rashly and unadvisedly\nwrought a big volume in verses, of the valiant prowesse of Alexander the\nGreat, to translate this present booke, contayning the Metamorphosis of\nLucius Apuleius; being mooved thereunto by the right pleasant pastime\nand delectable matter therein; I eftsoones consulted with myself, to\nwhom I might best offer so pleasant and worthy a work, devised by\nthe author, it being now barbarously and simply framed in our English\ntongue. And after long deliberation had, your honourable lordship came\nto my remembrance, a man much more worthy, than to whom so homely and\nrude a translation should be presented. But when I again remembred the\njesting and sportfull matter of the booke, unfit to be offered to any\nman of gravity and wisdome, I was wholly determined to make no Epistle\nDedicatory at all; till as now of late perswaded thereunto by my\nfriends, I have boldly enterprised to offer the same to your Lordship,\nwho as I trust wil accept the same, than if it did entreat of some\nserious and lofty matter, light and merry, yet the effect thereof\ntendeth to a good and vertuous moral, as in the following Epistle to the\nreader may be declared. For so have all writers in times past employed\ntheir travell and labours, that their posterity might receive some\nfruitfull profit by the same. And therfore the poets feined not their\nfables in vain, considering that children in time of their first\nstudies, are very much allured thereby to proceed to more grave and\ndeepe studies and disciplines, whereas their mindes would quickly loath\nthe wise and prudent workes of learned men, wherein in such unripe\nyears they take no spark of delectation at all. And not only that profit\nariseth to children by such feined fables, but also the vertues of\nmen are covertly thereby commended, and their vices discommended and\nabhorred. For by the fable of Actaeon, where it is feigned that he saw\nDiana washing her selfe in a well, hee was immediately turned into an\nHart, and so was slain of his own Dogs; may bee meant, That when a\nman casteth his eyes on the vain and soone fading beauty of the world,\nconsenting thereto in his minde, hee seemeth to bee turned into a brute\nbeast, and so to be slain by the inordinate desire of his owne affects.\nBy Tantalus that stands in the midst of the floud Eridan, having before\nhim a tree laden with pleasant apples, he being neverthelesse always\nthirsty and hungry, betokeneth the insatiable desires of covetous\npersons. The fables of Atreus, Thiestes, Tereus and Progne signifieth\nthe wicked and abhominable facts wrought and attempted by mortall men.\nThe fall of Icarus is an example to proud and arrogant persons, that\nweeneth to climb up to the heavens. By Mydas, who obtained of Bacchus,\nthat all things which he touched might be gold, is carped the foul\nsin of avarice. By Phaeton, that unskilfully took in hand to rule the\nchariot of the Sunne, are represented those persons which attempt things\npassing their power and capacity. By Castor and Pollux, turned into a\nsigne in heaven called Gemini, is signified, that vertuous and godly\npersons shall be rewarded after life with perpetuall blisse. And in this\nfeined jest of Lucius Apuleius is comprehended a figure of mans life,\nministring most sweet and delectable matter, to such as shall be\ndesirous to reade the same. The which if your honourable lordship shall\naccept ant take in good part, I shall not onely thinke my small travell\nand labour well employed, but also receive a further comfort to attempt\nsome more serious matter, which may be more acceptable to your Lordship:\ndesiring the same to excuse my rash and bold enterprise at this time, as\nI nothing doubt of your Lordships goodnesse. To whome I beseech Almighty\nGod to impart long life, with encrease of much honour.\n\nFrom Vniversity Colledge in Oxenforde, the xviij. of September, 1566.\n\nYour Honours most bounden,\n\nWIL. ADLINGTON.\n\n\n\n\nThe Life of Lucius Apuleius Briefly Described\n\n\nLUCIUS APULEIUS African, an excellent follower of Plato his sect, born\nin Madaura, a Countrey sometime inhabited by the Romans, and under the\njurisdiction of Syphax, scituate and lying on the borders of Numidia and\nGetulia, whereby he calleth himself half a Numidian and half a Getulian:\nand Sidonius named him the Platonian Madaurence: his father called\nTheseus had passed all offices of dignity in his countrey with much\nhonour. His mother named Salvia was of such excellent vertue, that\nshe passed all the Dames of her time, borne of an ancient house, and\ndescended from the philosopher Plutarch, and Sextus his nephew. His\nwife called Prudentila was endowed with as much vertue and riches as\nany woman might be. Hee himselfe was of an high and comely stature,\ngray eyed, his haire yellow, and a beautiful personage. He flourished\nin Carthage in the time of Iolianus Avitus and Cl. Maximus Proconsuls,\nwhere he spent his youth in learning the liberall sciences, and much\nprofited under his masters there, whereby not without cause hee calleth\nhimself the Nource of Carthage, and the celestial Muse and venerable\nmistresse of Africke. Soone after, at Athens (where in times past the\nwell of all doctrine flourished) he tasted many of the cups of the\nmuses, he learned the Poetry, Geometry, Musicke, Logicke, and the\nuniversall knowledge of Philosophy, and studied not in vaine the nine\nMuses, that is to say, the nine noble and royal disciplines.\n\nImmediately after he went to Rome, and studied there the Latine tongue,\nwith such labour and continuall study, that he achieved to great\neloquence, and was known and approved to be excellently learned, whereby\nhe might worthily be called Polyhistor, that is to say, one that knoweth\nmuch or many things.\n\nAnd being thus no lesse endued with eloquence, than with singular\nlearning, he wrote many books for them that should come after: whereof\npart by negligence of times be now intercepted and part now extant, doe\nsufficiently declare, with how much wisdome and doctrine hee flourished,\nand with how much vertue hee excelled amongst the rude and barbarous\npeople. The like was Anacharsis amongst the most luskish Scythes. But\namongst the Bookes of Lucius Apuleius, which are perished and prevented,\nhowbeit greatly desired as now adayes, one was intituled Banquetting\nquestions, another entreating of the nature of fish, another of the\ngeneration of beasts, another containing his Epigrams, another called\n'Hermagoras': but such as are now extant are the foure books named\n'Floridorum', wherein is contained a flourishing stile, and a savory\nkind of learning, which delighteth, holdeth, and rejoiceth the reader\nmarvellously; wherein you shall find a great variety of things, as\nleaping one from another: One excellent and copious Oration, containing\nall the grace and vertue of the art Oratory, where he cleareth himself\nof the crime of art Magick, which was slanderously objected against him\nby his Adversaries, wherein is contained such force of eloquence and\ndoctrine, as he seemeth to passe and excell himselfe. There is another\nbooke of the god of the spirit of Socrates, whereof St. Augustine maketh\nmention in his booke of the definition of spirits, and description\nof men. Two other books of the opinion of Plato, wherein is briefly\ncontained that which before was largely expressed. One booke of\nCosmography, comprising many things of Aristotles Meteors. The Dialogue\nof Trismegistus, translated by him out of Greeke into Latine, so fine,\nthat it rather seemeth with more eloquence turned into Latine, than it\nwas before written in Greeke. But principally these eleven Bookes of\nthe 'Golden Asse', are enriched with such pleasant matter, with such\nexcellency and variety of flourishing tales, that nothing may be more\nsweet and delectable, whereby worthily they may be intituled The Bookes\nof the 'Golden Asse', for the passing stile and matter therein. For what\ncan be more acceptable than this Asse of Gold indeed. Howbeit there be\nmany who would rather intitule it 'Metamorphosis', that is to say, a\ntransfiguration or transformation, by reason of the argument and matter\nwithin.\n\n\n\n\nThe Preface of the Author To His Sonne, Faustinus\n\nAnd unto the Readers of this Book\n\n               THAT I to thee some joyous jests\n                 may show in gentle gloze,\n               And frankly feed thy bended eares\n                 with passing pleasant prose:\n               So that thou daine in seemly sort\n                 this wanton booke to view,\n               That is set out and garnisht fine,\n                 with written phrases new.\n               I will declare how one by hap\n                 his humane figure lost,\n               And how in brutish formed shape,\n                 his loathed life he tost.\n               And how he was in course of time\n                 from such a state unfold,\n               Who eftsoone turn'd to pristine shape\n                 his lot unlucky told.\n\nWhat and who he was attend a while, and you shall understand that it was\neven I, the writer of mine own Metamorphosie and strange alteration of\nfigure. Hymettus, Athens, Isthmia, Ephire Tenaros, and Sparta, being\nfat and fertile soiles (as I pray you give credit to the bookes of more\neverlasting fame) be places where myne antient progeny and linage did\nsometime flourish: there I say, in Athens, when I was yong, I went first\nto schoole. Soone after (as a stranger) I arrived at Rome, whereas by\ngreat industry, and without instruction of any schoolmaster, I attained\nto the full perfection of the Latine tongue. Behold, I first crave and\nbeg your pardon, lest I should happen to displease or offend any of you\nby the rude and rusticke utterance of this strange and forrein language.\nAnd verily this new alteration of speech doth correspond to the\nenterprised matter whereof I purpose to entreat, I will set forth unto\nyou a pleasant Grecian feast. Whereunto gentle Reader if thou wilt give\nattendant eare, it will minister unto thee such delectable matter as\nthou shalt be contented withall.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FIRST BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE FIRST CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius riding in Thessaly, fortuned to fall into company with two\nstrangers, that reasoned together of the mighty power of Witches.\n\nAs I fortuned to take my voyage into Thessaly, about certaine affaires\nwhich I had to doe ( for there myne auncestry by my mothers side\ninhabiteth, descended of the line of that most excellent person\nPlutarch, and of Sextus the Philosopher his Nephew, which is to us\na great honour) and after that by much travell and great paine I had\npassed over the high mountaines and slipperie vallies, and had ridden\nthrough the cloggy fallowed fields; perceiving that my horse did wax\nsomewhat slow, and to the intent likewise that I might repose and\nstrengthen my self (being weary with riding) I lighted off my horse,\nand wiping the sweat from every part of his body, I unbrideled him,\nand walked him softly in my hand, to the end he might pisse, and ease\nhimself of his weariness and travell: and while he went grazing freshly\nin the field (casting his head sometimes aside, as a token of rejoycing\nand gladnesse) I perceived a little before me two companions riding, and\nso I overtaking them made a third. And while I listened to heare their\ncommunication, the one of them laughed and mocked his fellow, saying,\nLeave off I pray thee and speak no more, for I cannot abide to heare\nthee tell such absurd and incredible lies; which when I heard, I desired\nto heare some newes, and said, I pray you masters make me partaker\nof your talk, that am not so curious as desirous to know all your\ncommunication: so shall we shorten our journey, and easily passe this\nhigh hill before us, by merry and pleasant talke.\n\nBut he that laughed before at his fellow, said againe, Verily this tale\nis as true, as if a man would say that by sorcery and inchantment the\nfloods might be inforced to run against their course, the seas to be\nimmovable, the aire to lacke the blowing of windes, the Sunne to be\nrestrained from his naturall race, the Moone to purge his skimme upon\nherbes and trees to serve for sorceries: the starres to be pulled from\nheaven, the day to be darkened and the dark night to continue still.\nThen I being more desirous to heare his talke than his companions, sayd,\nI pray you, that began to tell your tale even now, leave not off so, but\ntell the residue. And turning to the other I sayd, You perhappes that\nare of an obstinate minde and grosse eares, mocke and contemme those\nthings which are reported for truth, know you not that it is accounted\nuntrue by the depraved opinion of men, which either is rarely seene,\nseldome heard, or passeth the capacitie of mans reason, which if it be\nmore narrowly scanned, you shall not onely finde it evident and plaine,\nbut also very easy to be brought to passe.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SECOND CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius told to the strangers, what he saw a jugler do in Athens.\n\nThe other night being at supper with a sort of hungry fellowes, while\nI did greedily put a great morsel of meate in my mouth, that was fried\nwith the flower of cheese and barley, it cleaved so fast in the passage\nof my throat and stopped my winde in such sort that I was well nigh\nchoked. And yet at Athens before the porch there called Peale, I saw\nwith these eyes a jugler that swallowed up a two hand sword, with a very\nkeene edge, and by and by for a little money that we who looked on gave\nhim, hee devoured a chasing speare with the point downeward. And after\nthat hee had conveyed the whole speare within the closure of his body,\nand brought it out againe behind, there appeared on the top thereof\n(which caused us all to marvell) a faire boy pleasant and nimble,\nwinding and turning himself in such sort, that you would suppose he had\nneither bone nor gristle, and verily thinke that he were the naturall\nSerpent, creeping and sliding on the knotted staffe, which the god of\nMedicine is feigned to beare. But turning me to him that began his tale,\nI pray you (quoth I) follow your purpose, and I alone will give credit\nunto you, and for your paynes will pay your charges at the next Inne we\ncome unto. To whom he answered Certes sir I thank you for your gentle\noffer, and at your request I wil proceed in my tale, but first I will\nsweare unto you by the light of this Sunne that shineth here, that\nthose things shall be true, least when you come to the next city called\nThessaly, you should doubt any thing of that which is rife in the\nmouthes of every person, and done before the face of all men. And that I\nmay first make relation to you, what and who I am, and whither I go, and\nfor what purpose, know you that I am of Egin, travelling these countries\nabout from Thessaly to Etolia, and from Etolia to Boetia, to provide for\nhoney, cheese, and other victuals to sell againe: and understanding that\nat Hippata (which is the principall city of all Thessaly), is accustomed\nto be soulde new cheeses of exceeding good taste and relish, I fortuned\non a day to go thither, to make my market there: but as it often\nhappeneth, I came in an evill houre; for one Lupus a purveyor had bought\nand ingrossed up all the day before, and so I was deceived.\n\nWherefore towards night being very weary, I went to the Baines to\nrefresh my selfe, and behold, I fortuned to espy my companion Socrates\nsitting upon the ground, covered with a torn and course mantle; who was\nso meigre and of so sallow and miserable a countenance, that I scantly\nknew him: for fortune had brought him into such estate and calamity,\nthat he verily seemed as a common begger that standeth in the streets to\ncrave the benevolence of the passers by. Towards whom (howbeit he was my\nsingular friend and familiar acquaintance, yet half in despaire) I drew\nnigh and said, Alas my Socrates, what meaneth this? how faireth it with\nthee? What crime hast thou committed? verily there is great lamentation\nand weeping for thee at home: Thy children are in ward by decree of\nthe Provinciall Judge: Thy wife (having ended her mourning time in\nlamentable wise, with face and visage blubbered with teares, in such\nsort that she hath well nigh wept out both her eyes) is constrained by\nher parents to put out of remembrance the unfortunate losse and lacke of\nthee at home, and against her will to take a new husband. And dost thou\nlive here as a ghost or hogge, to our great shame and ignominy?\n\nThen he answered he to me and said, O my friend Aristomenus, now\nperceive I well that you are ignorant of the whirling changes, the\nunstable forces, and slippery inconstancy of Fortune: and therewithall\nhe covered his face (even then blushing for very shame) with his rugged\nmantle insomuch that from his navel downwards he appeared all naked.\n\nBut I not willing to see him any longer in such great miserie and\ncalamitie, took him by the hand and lifted him up from the ground: who\nhaving his face covered in such sort, Let Fortune (quoth he) triumph yet\nmore, let her have her sway, and finish that which shee hath begun.\nAnd therewithall I put off one of my garments and covered him, and\nimmediately I brought him to the Baine, and caused him to be anointed,\nwiped, and the filthy scurfe of his body to be rubbed away; which done,\nthough I were very weary my selfe, yet I led the poore miser to my Inne,\nwhere he reposed his body upon a bed, and then I brought him meat and\ndrinke, and so wee talked together: for there we might be merry and\nlaugh at our pleasure, and so we were, untill such time as he (fetching\na pittifull sigh from the bottom of his heart, and beating his face in\nmiserable sort), began to say.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRD CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Socrates in his returne from Macedony to Larissa was spoyled and\nrobbed, and how he fell acquainted with one Meroe a Witch.\n\nAlas poore miser that I am, that for the onely desire to see a game of\ntriall of weapons, am fallen into these miseries and wretched snares\nof misfortune. For in my returne from Macedonie, wheras I sould all\nmy wares, and played the Merchant by the space of ten months, a little\nbefore that I came to Larissa, I turned out of the way, to view the\nscituation of the countrey there, and behold in the bottom of a deep\nvalley I was suddenly environed with a company of theeves, who robbed\nand spoiled me of such things as I had, and yet would hardly suffer\nme to escape. But I beeing in such extremity, in the end was happily\ndelivered from their hands, and so I fortuned to come to the house of an\nold woman that sold wine, called Meroe, who had her tongue sufficiently\ninstructed to flattery: unto whom I opened the causes of my long\nperegrination and careful travell, and of myne unlucky adventure: and\nafter that I had declared to her such things as then presently came to\nmy remembrance, shee gently entertained mee and made mee good cheere;\nand by and by being pricked with carnall desire, shee brought me to her\nown bed chamber; whereas I poore miser the very first night of our\nlying together did purchase to my selfe this miserable face, and for\nher lodging I gave to her such apparel as the theeves left to cover me\nwithall.\n\nThe I understanding the cause of his miserable estate, sayd unto him, In\nfaith thou art worthy to sustaine the most extreame misery and calamity,\nwhich hast defiled and maculated thyne owne body, forsaken thy wife\ntraitorously, and dishonoured thy children, parents, and friends, for\nthe love of a vile harlot and old strumpet. When Socrates heard mee\nraile against Meroe in such sort, he held up his finger to mee, and as\nhalfe abashed sayd, Peace peace I pray you, and looking about lest any\nbody should heare, I pray you (quoth he) I pray you take heed what you\nsay against so venerable a woman as shee is, lest by your intemperate\ntongue you catch some harm. Then with resemblance of admiration, What\n(quoth I) is she so excellent a person as you name her to be? I pray you\ntell me. Then answered hee, Verily shee is a Magitian, which hath power\nto rule the heavens, to bringe downe the sky, to beare up the earth, to\nturne the waters into hills and the hills into running waters, to lift\nup the terrestrial spirits into the aire, and to pull the gods out\nof the heavens, to extinguish the planets, and to lighten the deepe\ndarknesse of hell. Then sayd I unto Socrates, Leave off this high and\nmysticall kinde of talke, and tell the matter in a more plaine and\nsimple fashion. Then answered he, Will you hear one or two, or more of\nher facts which she hath done, for whereas she enforceth not onely\nthe inhabitants of the countrey here, but also the Indians and the\nEthiopians the one and the other, and also the Antictons, to love her in\nmost raging sort, such as are but trifles and chips of her occupation,\nbut I pray you give eare, and I will declare of more greater matters,\nwhich shee hath done openly and before the face of all men.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FOURTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Meroe the Witch turned divers persons into miserable beasts.\n\nIn faith Aristomenus to tell you the truth, this woman had a certaine\nLover, whom by the utterance of one only word she turned into a Bever,\nbecause he loved another woman beside her: and the reason why she\ntransformed him into such a beast is, for that it is his nature, when\nhee perceiveth the hunters and hounds to draw after him, to bite off his\nmembers, and lay them in the way, that the hounds may be at a stop when\nthey find them, and to the intent it might so happen unto him (for that\nhe fancied another woman) she turned him into that kind of shape.\n\nSemblably she changed one of her neighbours, being an old man and one\nthat sold wine, into a Frog, in that he was one of her occupation, and\ntherefore she bare him a grudge, and now the poore miser swimming in one\nof his pipes of wine, and well nigh drowned in the dregs, doth cry and\ncall with an hoarse voice, for his old guests and acquaintance that pass\nby. Like wise she turned one of the Advocates of the Court (because he\npleaded and spake against her in a rightful cause) into a horned Ram,\nand now the poore Ram is become an Advocate. Moreover she caused, that\nthe wife of a certain lover that she had should never be delivered of\nher childe, but according to the computation of all men, it is eight\nyeares past since the poore woman first began to swell, and now shee is\nencreased so big, that shee seemeth as though she would bring forth\nsome great Elephant: which when it was knowne abroad, and published\nthroughout all the towne, they tooke indignation against her, and\nordayned that the next day shee should most cruelly be stoned to death.\nWhich purpose of theirs she prevented by the vertue of her inchantments,\nand as Medea (who obtained of King Creon but one days respit before her\ndeparture) did burn all his house, him, and his daughter: so she, by her\nconjurations and invocations of spirits, (which she useth in a certaine\nhole in her house, as shee her selfe declared unto me the next day\nfollowing) closed all the persons in the towne so sure in their houses,\nand with such violence of power, that for the space of two dayes they\ncould not get forth, nor open their gates nor doore, nor break downe\ntheir walls, whereby they were inforced by mutuall consent to cry unto\nher, and to bind themselves strictly by oaths, that they would never\nafterwards molest or hurt her: and moreover, if any did offer her any\ninjury they would be ready to defend her. Whereupon shee, mooved by\ntheir promises, and stirred by pitty, released all the towne. But shee\nconveyed the principal Author of this ordinance about midnight, with\nall his house, the walls, the ground, and the foundation, into another\ntowne, distant from thence an hundred miles, scituate and beeing on\nthe top of an high hill, and by reason thereof destitute of water, and\nbecause the edifices and houses were so nigh built together, that it was\nnot possible for the house to stand there, she threw it downe before the\ngate of the towne. Then I spake and said O my friend Socrates you\nhave declared unto me many marvellous things and strange chances, and\nmoreover stricken me with no small trouble of minde, yea rather with\ngreat feare, lest the same old woman using the like practice, should\nfortune to heare all our communication. Wherefore let us now sleepe, and\nafter that we have taken our rest, let us rise betimes in the morning,\nand ride away hence before day, as far as we can possible.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FIFTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Socrates and Aristomenus slept together in one Chamber, and how they\nwere handled by Witches.\n\nIn speaking these words, and devising with my selfe of our departing the\nnext morrow, lest Meroe the witch should play by us as she had done by\ndivers other persons, it fortuned that Socrates did fall asleepe, and\nslept very soundly, by reason of his travell and plenty of meat and wine\nwherewithall hee had filled him selfe. Wherefore I closed and barred\nfast the doores of the chamber, and put my bed behinde the doore, and\nso layed mee downe to rest. But I could in no wise sleepe, for the great\nfeare which was in my heart, untill it was about midnight, and then I\nbegan to slumber. But alas, behold suddenly the chamber doores brake\nopen, and locks, bolts, and posts fell downe, that you would verily have\nthought that some Theeves had been presently come to have spoyled and\nrobbed us. And my bed whereon I lay being a truckle bed, fashioned in\nforme of a Cradle, and one of the feet broken and rotten, by violence\nwas turned upside downe, and I likewise was overwhelmed and covered\nlying in the same. Then perceived I in my selfe, that certaine affects\nof the minde by nature doth chance contrary. For as teares oftentimes\ntrickle downe the cheekes of him that seeth or heareth some joyfull\nnewes, so I being in this fearfull perplexity, could not forbeare\nlaughing, to see how of Aristomenus I was made like unto a snail [in]\nhis shell. And while I lay on the ground covered in this sort, I peeped\nunder the bed to see what would happen. And behold there entred in two\nold women, the one bearing a burning torch, and the other a sponge and\na naked sword; and so in this habit they stood about Socrates being\nfast asleep. Then shee which bare the sword sayd unto the other, Behold\nsister Panthia, this is my deare and sweet heart, which both day and\nnight hath abused my wanton youthfulnesse. This is he, who little\nregarding my love, doth not only defame me with reproachfull words, but\nalso intendeth to run away. And I shall be forsaken by like craft as\nVlysses did use, and shall continually bewaile my solitarinesse as\nCalipso. Which said, shee pointed towards mee that lay under the\nbed, and shewed me to Panthia. This is hee, quoth she, which is his\nCounsellor, and perswadeth him to forsake me, and now being at the point\nof death he lieth prostrate on the ground covered with his bed, and hath\nseene all our doings, and hopeth to escape scot-free from my hands,\nbut I will cause that hee will repente himselfe too late, nay rather\nforthwith, of his former intemperate language, and his present\ncuriosity. Which words when I heard I fell into a cold sweat, and my\nheart trembled with feare, insomuch that the bed over me did likewise\nrattle and shake. Then spake Panthia unto Meroe and said, Sister let us\nby and by teare him in pieces or tye him by the members, and so cut them\noff. Then Meroe (being so named because she was a Taverner, and loved\nwel good wines) answered, Nay rather let him live, and bury the corpse\nof this poore wretch in some hole of the earth; and therewithall shee\nturned the head of Socrates on the other side and thrust her sword up to\nthe hilts into the left part of his necke, and received the bloud that\ngushed out, into a pot, that no drop thereof fell beside: which things\nI saw with mine own eyes, and as I thinke to the intent that she might\nalter nothing that pertained to sacrifice, which she accustomed to make,\nshe thrust her hand down into the intrals of his body, and searching\nabout, at length brought forth the heart of my miserable companion\nSocrates, who having his throat cut in such sort, yeelded out a dolefull\ncry, and gave up the ghost. Then Panthia stopped up the wide wound of\nhis throat with the Sponge and said, O sponge sprung and made of the\nsea, beware that thou not passe by running river. This being said, one\nof them moved and turned up my bed, and then they strid over mee, and\nclapped their buttocks upon my face, and all bepissed mee until I was\nwringing wet. When this was over they went their wayes, and the doores\nclosed fast, the posts stood in their old places, and the lockes and\nbolts were shut againe. But I that lay upon the ground like one without\nsoule, naked and cold, and wringing wet with pisse, like to one that\nwere more than half dead, yet reviving my selfe, and appointed as I\nthought for the Gallowes, began to say Alasse what shall become of me to\nmorrow, when my companion shall be found murthered here in the chamber?\nTo whom shall I seeme to tell any similitude of truth, when as I shall\ntell the trueth in deed? They will say, If thou wert unable to resist\nthe violence of the women, yet shouldest thou have cried for help;\nWouldst thou suffer the man to be slaine before thy face and say\nnothing? Or why did they not slay thee likewise? Why did they spare thee\nthat stood by and saw them commit that horrible fact? Wherefore although\nthou hast escaped their hands, yet thou shalt not escape ours. While\nI pondered these things with my selfe the night passed on, and so I\nresolved to take my horse before day, and goe forward on my journey.\n\nHowbeit the wayes were unknown to me, and thereupon I tooke up my\npacket, unlocked and unbarred the doors, but those good and faithfull\ndoores which in the night did open of their owne accord, could then\nscantly be opened with their keyes. And when I was out I cried, O sirrah\nHostler where art thou? Open the stable doore for I will ride away by\nand by. The Hostler lying behinde the stable doore upon a pallet, and\nhalf asleepe, What (quoth hee) doe you not know that the wayes be very\ndangerous? What meane you to rise at this time of night? If you perhaps\nguilty of some heynous crime, be weary of your life, yet thinke you not\nthat we are such Sots that we will die for you. Then said I, It is\nwell nigh day, and moreover, what can theeves take from him that hath\nnothing? Doest thou not know (Foole as thou art) if thou be naked,\nif ten Gyants should assaile thee, they could not spoyle or rob thee?\nWhereunto the drowsie Hostler half asleepe, and turning on the other\nside, answered, What know I whether you have murthered your Companion\nwhom you brought in yesternight, or no, and now seeke the means to\nescape away? O Lord, at that time I remember the earth seemed ready to\nopen, and me thought I saw at hell gate the Dog Cerberus ready to devour\nmee, and then I verily beleeved, that Meroe did not spare my throat,\nmooved with pitty, but rather cruelly pardoned mee to bring mee to the\nGallowes. Wherefore I returned to my chamber, and there devised with my\nselfe in what sort I should finish my life. But when I saw that fortune\nshould minister unto mee no other instrument than that which my bed\nprofered me, I said, O bed, O bed, most dear to me at this present,\nwhich hast abode and suffered with me so many miseries, judge and\narbiter of such things as were done here this night, whome onely I may\ncall to witnesse for my innocency, render (I say) unto me some wholesome\nweapon to end my life, that am most willing to dye. And therewithal I\npulled out a piece of the rope wherewith the bed was corded, and tyed\none end thereof about a rafter by the window, and with the other end I\nmade a sliding knot, and stood upon my bed, and so put my neck into\nit, and leaped from the bed, thinking to strangle my selfe and so dye,\nbehold the rope beeing old and rotten burst in the middle, and I fell\ndown tumbling upon Socrates that lay under: And even at that same very\ntime the Hostler came in crying with a loud voyce, and sayd, Where\nare you that made such hast at midnight, and now lies wallowing abed?\nWhereupon (I know not whether it was by my fall, or by the great cry\nof the Hostler) Socrates as waking out of sleepe, did rise up first and\nsayd, It is not without cause that strangers do speake evill of all such\nHostlers, for this Catife in his comming in, and with his crying out, I\nthinke under a colour to steale away something, hath waked me out of a\nsound sleepe. Then I rose up joyfull with a merry countenance, saying,\nBehold good Hostler, my friend, my companion and my brother, whom thou\ndidst falsly affirme to be slaine by mee this might. And therewithall I\nembraced my friend Socrates and kissed him: but hee smelling the stinke\nof the pisse wherewith those Hagges had embrued me, thrust me away and\nsayd, Clense thy selfe from this filthy odour, and then he began gently\nto enquire, how that noysome sent hapned unto mee. But I finely feigning\nand colouring the matter for the time, did breake off his talk, and\ntooke him by the hand and sayd, Why tarry we? Why lose wee the pleasure\nof this faire morning? Let us goe, and so I tooke up my packet, and\npayed the charges of the house and departed: and we had not gone a mile\nout of the Towne but it was broad day, and then I diligently looked upon\nSocrates throat, to see if I could espy the place where Meroe thrust in\nher sword: but when I could not perceive any such thing, I thought with\nmy selfe, What a mad man am I, that being overcome with wine yester\nnight, have dreamed such terrible things? Behold I see Socrates is\nsound, safe and in health. Where is his wound? Where is the Sponge?\nWhere is his great and new cut? And then I spake to him and said, Verily\nit is not without occasion, that Physitians of experience do affirme,\nThat such as fill their gorges abundantly with meat and drinke, shall\ndreame of dire and horrible sights: for I my selfe, not tempering my\nappetite yester night from the pots of wine, did seeme to see this night\nstrange and cruel visions, that even yet I think my self sprinkled and\nwet with human blood: whereunto Socrates laughing made answer and\nsaid, Nay, thou art not wet with the blood of men, but art embrued with\nstinking pisse; and verily I dreamed that my throat was cut, and that\nI felt the paine of the wound, and that my heart was pulled out of my\nbelly, and the remembrance thereof makes me now to feare, for my knees\ndo so tremble that I can scarce goe any further, and therefore I would\nfaine eat somewhat to strengthen and revive my spirits. Then said I,\nbehold here thy breakefast, and therewithall I opened my script that\nhanged upon my shoulder, and gave him bread and cheese, and we sate\ndowne under a greate Plane tree, and I eat part with him; and while I\nbeheld him eating greedily, I perceived that he waxed meigre and pale,\nand that his lively colour faded away, insomuch that beeing in great\nfear, and remembring those terrible furies of whom I lately dreamed, the\nfirst morsell of bread that I put in my mouth (that was but very small)\ndid so stick in my jawes, that I could neither swallow it downe, nor yet\nyeeld it up, and moreover the small time of our being together increased\nmy feare, and what is hee that seeing his companion die in the high-way\nbefore his face, would not greatly lament and bee sorry? But when that\nSocrates had eaten sufficiently hee waxed very thirsty, for indeed he\nhad well nigh devoured a whole Cheese: and behold evill fortune! There\nwas behind the Plane tree a pleasant running water as cleere as Crystal,\nand I sayd unto him, Come hither Socrates to this water and drinke thy\nfill. And then he rose and came to the River, and kneeled downe on the\nside of the banke to drinke, but he had scarce touched the water with\nlips, when as behold the wound in his throat opened wide, and the Sponge\nsuddenly fell out into the water, and after issued out a little remnant\nof bloud, and his body being then without life, had fallen into the\nriver, had not I caught him by the leg and so pulled him up. And after\nthat I had lamented a good space the death of my wretched companion, I\nburied him in the Sands there by the river.\n\nWhich done, in great feare I rode through many Outwayes and desart\nplaces, and as culpable of the death of Socrates, I forsooke my\ncountrey, my wife, and my children, and came to Etolia where I married\nanother Wife.\n\nThis tale told Aristomenus, and his fellow which before obstinatly would\ngive no credit unto him, began to say, Verily there was never so foolish\na tale, nor a more absurd lie told than this. And then he spake unto me\nsaying, Ho sir, what you are I know not, but your habit and countenance\ndeclareth that you should be some honest Gentleman, (speaking to\nApuleius) doe you beleeve this tale? Yea verily (quoth I), why not? For\nwhatsoever the fates have appointed to men, that I beleeve shall happen.\nFor may things chance unto me and unto you, and to divers others, which\nbeeing declared unto the ignorant be accounted as lies. But verily I\ngive credit unto his tale, and render entire thankes unto him, in that\nby the pleasant relation thereof we have quickly passed and shortned our\njourney, and I thinke that my horse was also delighted with the same,\nand hath brought me to the gate of this city without any paine at all.\nThus ended both our talk and our journey, for they two turned on the\nleft hand to the next villages, and I rode into the city.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SIXTH CHAPTER\n\nHow Apuleius came unto a city named Hipate, and was lodged in one Milos\nhouse, and brought him letters from one Demeas of Corinth.\n\nAfter that those two Companions were departed I entred into the City:\nwhere I espied an old woman, of whom I enquired whether that city was\ncalled Hipata, or no: Who answered, Yes. Then I demaunded, Whether she\nknew one Milo an Alderman of the city: Whereat she laughed and said:\nVerily it is not without cause that Milo is called an Elderman, and\naccounted as chiefe of those which dwel without the walls of the City.\nTo whom I sayd againe, I pray thee good mother do not mocke, but tell\nme what manner of man he is, and where he dwelleth. Mary (quoth shee) do\nyou see these Bay windowes, which on one side abut to the gates of the\ncity, and on the other side to the next lane? There Milo dwelleth, very\nrich both in mony and substance, but by reason of his great avarice\nand insatiable covetousnes, he is evill spoken of, and he is a man that\nliveth all by usurie, and lending his money upon pledges. Moreover he\ndwelleth in a small house, and is ever counting his money, and hath a\nwife that is a companion of his extreame misery, neither keepeth he\nmore in his house than onely one maid, who goeth apparelled like unto a\nbeggar. Which when I heard, I laughed in my self and thought, In\nfaith my friend Demeas hath served me well, which hath sent me being a\nstranger, unto such a man, in whose house I shall not bee afeared either\nof smoke or of the sent of meat; and therewithall I rode to the doore,\nwhich was fast barred, and knocked aloud. Then there came forth a maid\nwhich said, Ho sirrah that knocks so fast, in what kinde of sort will\nyou borrow money? Know you not that we use to take no gage, unless it be\neither plate or Jewels? To whom I answered, I pray you maid speak more\ngently, and tel me whether thy master be within or no? Yes (quoth shee)\nthat he is, why doe you aske? Mary (said I) I am come from Corinth, and\nhave brought him letters from Demeas his friend. Then sayd the Maid, I\npray you tarry here till I tell him so, and therewithall she closed fast\nthe doore, and went in, and after a while she returned againe and sayd,\nMy master desireth you to alight and come in. And so I did, whereas I\nfound him sitting upon a little bed, going to supper, and his wife sate\nat his feet, but there was no meat upon the table, and so by appointment\nof the maid I came to him and saluted him, and delivered the letters\nwhich I had brought from Demeas. Which when hee had read hee sayd,\nVerily, I thanke my friend Demeas much, in that hee hath sent mee so\nworthy a guest as you are. And therewithall hee commanded his wife to\nsit away and bid mee sit in her place; which when I refused by reason of\ncourtesie, hee pulled me by my garment and willed me to sit downe; for\nwee have (quoth he) no other stool here, nor no other great store\nof household stuffe, for fear of robbing. Then I according to his\ncommandement, sate down, and he fell in further communication with me\nand sayd, Verily I doe conjecture by the comly feature of your body,\nand by the maidenly shamefastnesse of your face that you are a Gentleman\nborne, as my friend Demeas hath no lesse declared the same in his\nletters. Wherfore I pray you take in good part our poore lodging, and\nbehold yonder chamber is at your commaundement, use it as your owne,\nand if you be contented therewithall, you shall resemble and follow the\nvertuous qualities of your good father Theseus, who disdained not the\nslender and poore Cottage of Hecades.\n\nAnd then he called his maid which was named Fotis, and said, Carry this\nGentlemans packet into the chamber, and lay it up safely, and bring\nwater quickly to wash him, and a towel to rub him, and other things\nnecessary, and then bring him to the next Baines, for I know that he is\nvery weary of travell.\n\nThese things when I heard, I partly perceived the manners of Milo, and\nendeavouring to bring my selfe further into his favour, I sayd, Sir\nthere is no need of any of these things, for they have been everywhere\nministred unto mee by the way, howbeit I will go into the Baines, but\nmy chiefest care is that my horse be well looked to, for hee brought mee\nhither roundly, and therefore I pray thee Fotis take this money and buy\nsome hay and oats for him.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SEVENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius going to buy fish, met with his companion Pythias.\n\nWhen this was done, and all my things brought into the Chamber, I walked\ntowards the Baines; but first I went to the market to buy some victuals\nfor my supper, whereas I saw great plenty of fish set out to be sould:\nand so I cheapened part thereof, and that which they at first held at an\nhundred pence, I bought at length for twenty. Which when I had done, and\nwas departing away, one of myne old acquaintance, and fellow at Athens,\nnamed Pithias, fortuned to passe by, and viewing me at a good space, in\nthe end brought me to his remembrance, and gently came and kissed mee,\nsaying, O my deare friend Lucius, it is a great while past since we two\nsaw one another, and moreover, from the time that wee departed from our\nMaster Vestius, I never heard any newes from you. I pray you Lucius tell\nme the cause of your peregrination hither. Then I answered and sayd, I\nwill make relation thereof unto you tomorrow: but I pray you tell me,\nwhat meaneth these servitors that follow you, and these rods or verges\nwhich they beare, and this habit which you wear like unto a magistrate,\nverily I thinke you have obtained your own desire, whereof I am right\nglad. Then answered Pithias, I beare the office of the Clerke of the\nmarket, and therfore if you will have any pittance for your supper\nspeake and I will purvey it for you. Then I thanked him heartily and\nsayd I had bought meat sufficient already. But Pithias when hee espied\nmy basket wherein my fish was, tooke it and shaked it, and demanded of\nme what I had payd for all my Sprots. In faith (quoth I), I could scarce\ninforce the fishmonger to sell them for twenty pence. Which when I\nheard, he brought me backe again into the market, and enquired of me\nof whom I bought them. I shewed him the old man which sate in a corner,\nwhome by and by, by reason of his office, hee did greatly blame, and\nsayd, Is it thus you serve and handle strangers, and specially our\nfriends? Wherefore sell you this fish so deare, which is not worth a\nhalfepenny? Now perceive I well, that you are an occasion to make this\nplace, which is the principall city of all Thessaly, to be forsaken of\nall men, and to reduce it into an uninhabitable Desart, by reasone of\nyour excessive prices of victuals, but assure yourself that you shall\nnot escape without punishment, and you shall know what myne office is,\nand how I ought to punish such as offend. Then he took my basket and\ncast the fish on the ground, and commanded one of his Sergeants to tread\nthem under his feet. This done he perswaded me to depart, and sayd that\nonely shame and reproach done unto the old Caitife did suffice him, So\nI went away amazed and astonied, towards the Baines, considering with\nmyself and devising of the grace of my companion Pythias. Where when I\nhad well washed and refreshed my body, I returned againe to Milos house,\nboth without money and meat, and so got into my chamber. Then came Fotis\nimmediately unto mee, and said that her master desired me to come to\nsupper. But I not ignorant of Milos abstinence, prayed that I might be\npardoned since as I thought best to ease my wearied bones rather with\nsleepe and quietnesse, than with meat. When Fotis had told this to Milo,\nhe came himselfe and tooke mee by the hand, and while I did modestly\nexcuse my selfe, I will not (quoth he) depart from this place, until\nsuch time as you shall goe with me: and to confirm the same, hee bound\nhis words with an oath, whereby he enforced me to follow him, and so he\nbrought me into his chamber, where hee sate him downe upon the bed, and\ndemaunded of mee how his friend Demeas did, his wife, his children, and\nall his family: and I made answer to him every question, specially hee\nenquired the causes of my peregrination and travell, which when I had\ndeclared, he yet busily demanded of the state of my Countrey, and the\nchief magistrates there, and principally of our Lievtenant and Viceroy;\nwho when he perceived that I was not only wearied by travell, but also\nwith talke, and that I fell asleep in the midst of my tale, and further\nthat I spake nothing directly or advisedly, he suffered me to depart to\nmy chamber. So scaped I at length from the prating and hungry supper of\nthis rank old man, and being compelled by sleepe and not by meat, and\nhaving supped only with talke, I returned into my chamber, and there\nbetooke me to my quiet and long desired rest.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE SECOND BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE EIGHTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius fortuned to meet with his Cousin Byrrhena.\n\nAs soone as night was past, and the day began to spring, I fortuned to\nawake, and rose out of my bed as halfe amazed, and very desirous to know\nand see some marvellous and strange things, remembring with my selfe\nthat I was in the middle part of all Thessaly, whereas by the common\nreport of all the World, the Sorceries and Inchauntments are most used,\nI oftentimes repeated with my self the tale of my companion Aristomenus\ntouching the manner of this City, and being mooved by great desire, I\nviewed the whole scituation thereof, neither was there any thing which\nI saw there, but that I did beleeve to be the same which it was indeed,\nbut every thing seemed unto me to be transformed and altered into other\nshapes, by the wicked power of Sorcerie and Inchantment, insomuch that I\nthought that the stones which I found were indurate, and turned from\nmen into that figure, and that the birds which I heard chirping, and\nthe trees without the walls of the city, and the running waters, were\nchanged from men into such kinde of likenesses. And further I thought\nthat the Statues, Images and Walls could goe, and the Oxen and other\nbrute beasts could speake and tell strange newes, and that immediately\nI should see and heare some Oracles from the heavens, and from the\ngleed of the Sun. Thus being astonied or rather dismayed and vexed with\ndesire, knowing no certaine place whither I intended to go, I went from\nstreet to street, and at length (as I curiously gazed on every thing)\nI fortuned unwares to come into the market place, whereas I espied a\ncertaine woman, accompanied with a great many servants, towards whom I\ndrew nigh, and viewed her garments beset with gold and pretious stone,\nin such sort that she seemed to be some noble matron. And there was\nan old man which followed her, who as soon as he espied me, said to\nhimself, Verily this is Lucius, and then he came and embraced me, by and\nby he went unto his mistresse and whispered in her eare, and came to\nmee againe saying, How is it Lucius that you will not salute your deere\nCousin and singular friend? To whom I answered, Sir I dare not be so\nbold as to take acquaintance of an unknown woman. Howbeit as halfe\nashamed I drew towards her, and shee turned her selfe and sayd, Behold\nhow he resembleth the very same grace as his mother Salvia doth, behold\nhis countenance and stature, agreeing thereto in each poynt, behold his\ncomely state, his fine slendernesse, his Vermilion colour, his haire\nyellow by nature, his gray and quicke eye, like to the Eagle, and his\ntrim and comely gate, which do sufficiently prove him to be the naturall\nchilde of Salvia. And moreover she sayd, O Lucius, I have nourished thee\nwith myne owne proper hand: and why not? For I am not onely of kindred\nto thy mother by blood, but also by nourice, for wee both descended of\nthe line of Plutarch, lay in one belly, sucked the same paps, and\nwere brought up together in one house. And further there is no other\ndifference betweene us two, but that she is married more honourably than\nI: I am the same Byrrhena whom you have often heard named among your\nfriends at home: wherfore I pray you to take so much pains as to come\nwith me to my house, and use it as your owne. At whose words I was\npartly abashed and sayd, God forbid Cosin that I should forsake myne\nHost Milo without any reasonable cause; but verily I will, as often as I\nhave occasion to passe by thy house, come and see how you doe. And while\nwe were talking thus together, little by little wee came to her house,\nand behold the gates of the same were very beautifully set with pillars\nquadrangle wise, on the top wherof were placed carved statues and\nimages, but principally the Goddesse of Victory was so lively and with\nsuch excellencie portrayed and set forth, that you would have verily\nhave thought that she had flyed, and hovered with her wings hither\nand thither. On the contrary part, the image of the Goddesse Diana was\nwrought in white marble, which was a marvellous sight to see, for shee\nseemed as though the winde did blow up her garments, and that she did\nencounter with them that came into the house. On each side of her were\nDogs made of stone, that seemed to menace with their fiery eyes, their\npricked eares, their bended nosethrils, their grinning teeth in such\nsort that you would have thought they had bayed and barked. An moreover\n(which was a greater marvel to behold) the excellent carver and deviser\nof this worke had fashioned the dogs to stand up fiercely with their\nformer feet, and their hinder feet on the ground ready to fight. Behinde\nthe back of the goddesse was carved a stone in manner of a Caverne,\nenvironed with mosse, herbes, leaves, sprigs, green branches and\nbowes, growing in and about the same, insomuch that within the stone\nit glistered and shone marvellously, under the brim of the stone hanged\napples and grapes carved finely, wherein Art envying Nature, shewed\nher great cunning. For they were so lively set out, that you would have\nthought if Summer had been come, they might have bin pulled and eaten;\nand while I beheld the running water, which seemed to spring and leap\nunder the feet of the goddesse, I marked the grapes which hanged in the\nwater, which were like in every point to the grapes of the vine, and\nseemed to move and stir by the violence of the streame. Moreover,\namongst the branches of the stone appeared the image of Acteon: and\nhow that Diana (which was carved within the same stone, standing in the\nwater) because he did see her naked, did turne him into an hart, and\nso he was torne and slaine of his owne hounds. And while I was greatly\ndelighted with the view of these things, Byrrhena spake to me and sayd,\nCousin all things here be at your commandement. And therewithall shee\nwilled secretly the residue to depart: who being gone she sayd, My\nmost deare Cousin Lucius, I do sweare by the goddesse Diana, that I doe\ngreatly tender your safety, and am as carefull for you as if you were\nmyne owne naturall childe, beware I say, beware of the evil arts and\nwicked allurements of that Pamphiles who is the wife of Milo, whom\nyou call your Host, for she is accounted the most chief and principall\nMagitian and Enchantresse living, who by breathing out certain words and\ncharmes over bowes, stones and other frivolous things, can throw down\nall the powers of the heavens into the deep bottome of hell, and reduce\nall the whole world againe to the old Chaos. For as soone as she espieth\nany comely yong man, shee is forthwith stricken with his love, and\npresently setteth her whole minde and affection on him. She soweth\nher seed of flattery, she invades his spirit and intangleth him with\ncontinuall snares of unmeasurable love.\n\nAnd then if any accord not to her filthy desire, or if they seeme\nloathsome in her eye, by and by in the moment of an houre she turneth\nthem into stones, sheep or some other beast, as her selfe pleaseth, and\nsome she presently slayeth and murthereth, of whom I would you should\nearnestly beware. For she burneth continually, and you by reason of your\ntender age and comely beauty are capable of her fire and love.\n\nThus with great care Byrrhena gave me in charge, but I (that always\ncoveted and desired, after that I had heard talk of such Sorceries and\nWitchcrafts, to be experienced in the same) little esteemed to beware\nof Pamphiles, but willingly determined to bestow my money in learning of\nthat art, and now wholly to become a Witch. And so I waxed joyful, and\nwringing my selfe out of her company, as out of linkes or chaines, I\nbade her farewell, and departed toward the house of myne host Milo,\nby the way reasoning thus with my selfe: O Lucius now take heed, be\nvigilant, have a good care, for now thou hast time and place to satisfie\nthy desire, now shake off thy childishnesse and shew thy selfe a man,\nbut especially temper thy selfe from the love of thyne hostesse, and\nabstain from violation of the bed of Milo, but hardly attempt to winne\nthe maiden Fotis, for she is beautifull, wanton and pleasant in talke.\nAnd soone when thou goest to sleepe, and when shee bringeth you gently\ninto thy chamber, and tenderly layeth thee downe in thy bed, and\nlovingly covereth thee, and kisseth thee sweetly, and departeth\nunwillingly, and casteth her eyes oftentimes backe, and stands still,\nthen hast thou a good occasion ministred to thee to prove and try the\nmind of Fotis. Thus while I reasoned to myselfe I came to Milos doore,\npersevering still in my purpose, but I found neither Milo nor his wife\nat home.\n\n\n\n\nTHE NINTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius fell in love with Fotis.\n\nWhen I was within the house I found my deare and sweet love Fotis\nmincing of meat and making pottage for her master and mistresse, the\nCupboord was all set with wines, and I thought I smelled the savor of\nsome dainty meats: she had about her middle a white and clean apron,\nand shee was girded about her body under the paps with a swathell of\nred silke, and she stirred the pot and turned the meat with her fair and\nwhite hands, in such sort that with stirring and turning the same, her\nloynes and hips did likewise move and shake, which was in my mind a\ncomely sight to see.\n\nThese things when I saw I was halfe amazed, and stood musing with my\nselfe, and my courage came then upon mee, which before was scant. And I\nspake unto Fotis merrily and sayd, O Fotis how trimmely you can stirre\nthe pot, and how finely, with shaking your buttockes, you can make\npottage. The shee beeing likewise merrily disposed, made answer, Depart\nI say, Miser from me, depart from my fire, for if the flame thereof doe\nnever so little blaze forth, it will burne thee extreamely and none can\nextinguish the heat thereof but I alone, who in stirring the pot and\nmaking the bed can so finely shake my selfe. When she had sayd these\nwords shee cast her eyes upon me and laughed, but I did not depart from\nthence until such time as I had viewed her in every point. But what\nshould I speak of others, when as I doe accustome abroad to marke the\nface and haire of every dame, and afterwards delight my selfe therewith\nprivately at home, and thereby judge the residue of their shape, because\nthe face is the principall part of all the body, and is first open to\nour eyes. And whatsoever flourishing and gorgeous apparell doth work and\nset forth in the corporal parts of a woman, the same doth the naturall\nand comely beauty set out in the face. Moreover there be divers, that to\nthe intent to shew their grace and feature, wil cast off their partlets,\ncollars, habiliments, fronts, cornets and krippins, and doe more delight\nto shew the fairnesse of their skinne, than to deck themselves up in\ngold and pretious stones. But because it is a crime unto me to say so,\nand to give no example thereof, know ye, that if you spoyle and cut the\nhaire of any woman or deprive her of the colour of her face, though shee\nwere never so excellent in beauty, though shee were throwne downe from\nheaven, sprung of the Seas, nourished of the flouds, though shee were\nVenus her selfe, though shee were waited upon by all the Court of Cupid,\nthough were girded with her beautifull skarfe of Love, and though shee\nsmelled of perfumes and musks, yet if shee appeared bald, shee could in\nno wise please, no not her owne Vulcanus.\n\nO how well doth a faire colour and a shining face agree with glittering\nhair! Behold, it encountreth with the beams of the Sunne, and pleaseth\nthe eye marvellously. Sometimes the beauty of the haire resembleth the\ncolour of gold and honey, sometimes the blew plumes and azured feathers\nabout the neckes of Doves, especially when it is either anointed with\nthe gumme of Arabia, or trimmely tuft out with the teeth of a fine\ncombe, which if it be tyed up in the pole of the necke, it seemeth to\nthe lover that beholdeth the same, as a glasse that yeeldeth forth a\nmore pleasant and gracious comelinesse than if it should be sparsed\nabroad on the shoulders of the woman, or hang down scattering behind.\nFinally there is such a dignity in the haire, that whatsoever shee\nbe, though she be never to bravely attyred with gold, silks, pretious\nstones, and other rich and gorgeous ornaments, yet if her hair be\nnot curiously set forth shee cannot seeme faire. But in my Fotis, her\ngarments unbrast and unlaste increased her beauty, her haire hanged\nabout her shoulders, and was dispersed abroad upon her partlet, and in\nevery part of her necke, howbeit the greater part was trussed upon her\npole with a lace. Then I unable to sustain the broiling heat that I was\nin, ran upon her and kissed the place where she had thus laid her haire.\nWhereat she turned her face, and cast her rolling eyes upon me, saying,\nO Scholler, thou hast tasted now both hony and gall, take heed that thy\npleasure do not turn unto repentance. Tush (quoth I) my sweet heart, I\nam contented for such another kiss to be broiled here upon this fire,\nwherwithall I embraced and kissed her more often, and shee embraced and\nkissed me likewise, and moreover her breath smelled like Cinnamon, and\nthe liquor of her tongue was like unto sweet Nectar, wherewith when my\nmind was greatly delighted I sayd, Behold Fotis I am yours, and shall\npresently dye unlesse you take pitty upon me. Which when I had said she\neftsoone kissed me, and bid me be of good courage, and I will (quoth\nshee) satisfie your whole desire, and it shall be no longer delayed than\nuntil night, when as assure your selfe I will come and lie with you;\nwherfore go your wayes and prepare your selfe, for I intend valiantly\nand couragiously to encounter with you this night. Thus when we had\nlovingly talked and reasoned together, we departed for that time.\n\n\n\n\nTHE TENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Byrrhena sent victuals unto Apuleius, and how hee talked with Milo\nof Diophanes, and how he lay with Fotis.\n\nWhen noone was come, Byrrhena sent to me a fat Pigge, five hennes, and a\nflagon of old wine. Then I called Fotis and sayd, Behold how Bacchus the\negger and stirrer of Venery, doth offer him self of his owne accord, let\nus therefore drink up this wine, that we may prepare our selves and\nget us courage against soone, for Venus wanteth no other provision than\nthis, that the Lamp may be all the night replenished with oyle, and the\ncups with wine. The residue of the day I passed away at the Bains and\nin banquetting, and towards evening I went to supper, for I was bid by\nMilo, and so I sate downe at the table, out of Pamphiles sight as\nmuch as I could, being mindfull of the commandement of Byrrhena, and\nsometimes I would cast myne eyes upon her as upon the furies of hell,\nbut I eftsoones turning my face behinde me, and beholding my Fotis\nministring at the table, was again refreshed and made merry. And behold\nwhen Pamphiles did see the candle standing on the table, she said,\nVerily wee shall have much raine to morrow. Which when her husband did\nheare, he demanded of her by what reason she knew it? Mary (quoth shee)\nthe light on the table sheweth the same. Then Milo laughed and said,\nVerily we nourish a Sybel prophesier, which by the view of a candle doth\ndivine of Celestiall things, and of the Sunne it selfe. Then I mused in\nmy minde and said unto Milo, Of truth it is a good experience and proof\nof divination. Neither is it any marvell, for although this light is but\na small light, and made by the hands of men, yet hath it a remembrance\nof that great and heavenly light, as of his parent, and doth shew unto\nus what will happen in the Skies above. For I knew at Corinth a certain\nman of Assyria, who would give answers in every part of the City, and\nfor the gaine of money would tell every man his fortune, to some he\nwould tel the dayes of their marriages, to others he would tell when\nthey should build, that their edifices should continue. To others, when\nthey should best go e about their affaires. To others, when they should\ngoe by sea or land: to me, purposing to take my journey hither, he\ndeclared many things strange and variable. For sometimes hee sayd that\nI should win glory enough: sometimes he sayd I should write a great\nHistorie: sometimes againe hee sayd that I should devise an incredible\ntale: and sometimes that I should make Bookes. Whereat Milo laughed\nagaine, and enquired of me, of what stature this man of Assyria was,\nand what he was named. In faith (quoth I) he is a tall man and somewhat\nblacke, and hee is called Diophanes. Then sayd Milo, the same is he and\nno other, who semblably hath declared many things here unto us, whereby\nhee got and obtained great substance and Treasure.\n\nBut the poore miser fell at length into the hands of unpittifull and\ncruell fortune: For beeing on a day amongst a great assembly of people,\nto tell the simple sort their fortune, a certaine Cobler came unto\nhim, and desired him to tel when it should be best for him to take his\nvoyage, the which hee promised to do: the Cobler opened his purse and\ntold a hundred pence to him for his paines. Whereupon came a certaine\nyoung gentleman and took Diophanes by the Garment. Then he turning\nhimselfe, embraced and kissed him, and desired the Gentleman, who\nwas one of his acquaintance, to sit downe by him: and Diophanes being\nastonied with this sudden change, forgot what he was doing, and sayd, O\ndeare friend you are heartily welcome, I pray you when arrived you into\nthese parts? Then answered he, I will tell you soone, but brother I pray\nyou tell mee of your comming from the isle of Euboea, and how you sped\nby the way? Whereunto Diophanes this notable Assyrian (not yet come unto\nhis minde, but halfe amased) soone answered and sayd, I would to god\nthat all our enemies and evil willers might fall into the like dangerous\nperegrination and trouble. For the ship where we were in, after it was\nby the waves of the seas and by the great tempests tossed hither\nand thither, in great peril, and after that the mast and stern brake\nlikewise in pieces, could in no wise be brought to shore, but sunk into\nthe water, and so we did swim, and hardly escaped to land. And after\nthat, whatsoever was given unto us in recompense of our losses, either\nby the pitty of strangers, or by the benevolence of our friends, was\ntaken away from us by theeves, whose violence when my brother Arisuatus\ndid assay to resist, hee was cruelly murthered by them before my face.\nThese things when he had sadly declared, the Cobler tooke up his money\nagaine which he had told out to pay for the telling of his fortune, and\nran away. The Diophanes comming to himselfe perceived what he had done,\nand we all that stood by laughed greatly. But that (quoth Milo) which\nDiophanes did tell unto you Lucius, that you should be happy and have a\nprosperous journey, was only true. Thus Milo reasoned with me. But I\nwas not a little sorry that I had traind him into such a vaine of talke,\nthat I lost a good part of the night, and the sweete pleasure thereof:\nbut at length I boldly said to Milo, Let Diophanes fare well with his\nevil fortune, and get againe that which he lost by sea and land, for\nI verily do yet feel the wearinesse of my travell, whereof I pray you\npardon mee, and give me licence to depart to bed: wherewithall I rose up\nand went unto my chamber, where I found all things finely prepared and\nthe childrens bed (because they should not heare what we did in the\nnight) was removed far off without the chamber doore. The table was all\ncovered with those meats that were left at supper, the cups were filled\nhalfe full with water, to temper and delay the wines, the flagon stood\nready prepared, and there lacked nothing that was necessary for the\npreparation of Venus. And when I was entring into the bed, behold my\nFotis (who had brought her mistresse to bed) came in and gave me roses\nand floures which she had in her apron, and some she threw about the\nbed, and kissed mee sweetly, and tied a garland about my head, and\nbespred the chamber with the residue. Which when shee had done, shee\ntooke a cup of wine and delaied it with hot water, and profered it me to\ndrinke; and before I had drunk it all off she pulled it from my mouth,\nand then gave it me againe, and in this manner we emptied the pot twice\nor thrice together. Thus when I had well replenished my self with wine,\nand was now ready unto Venery not onely in minde but also in body, I\nremoved my cloathes, and shewing to Fotis my great impatiencie I sayd, O\nmy sweet heart take pitty upon me and helpe me, for as you see I am now\nprepared unto the battell, which you your selfe did appoint: for after\nthat I felt the first Arrow of cruell Cupid within my breast, I bent my\nbow very strong, and now feare, (because it is bended so hard) lest my\nstring should breake: but that thou mayst the better please me, undresse\nthy haire and come and embrace me lovingly: whereupon shee made no long\ndelay, but set aside all the meat and wine, and then she unapparelled\nher selfe, and unattyred her haire, presenting her amiable body unto me\nin manner of faire Venus, when shee goeth under the waves of the sea.\nNow (quoth shee) is come the houre of justing, now is come the time of\nwarre, wherefore shew thy selfe like unto a man, for I will not retyre,\nI will not fly the field, see then thou bee valiant, see thou be\ncouragious, since there is no time appointed when our skirmish shall\ncease. In saying these words shee came to me to bed, and embraced me\nsweetly, and so wee passed all the night in pastime and pleasure,\nand never slept until it was day: but we would eftsoones refresh our\nwearinesse, and provoke our pleasure, and renew our venery by drinking\nof wine. In which sort we pleasantly passed away many other nights\nfollowing.\n\n\n\n\nTHE ELEVENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius supped with Byrrhena, and what a strange tale Bellephoron\ntold at the table.\n\nIt fortuned on a day, that Byrrhena desired me earnestly to suppe with\nher; and shee would in no wise take any excusation. Whereupon I went to\nFotis, to aske counsell of her as of some Divine, who although she was\nunwilling that I should depart one foot from her company, yet at length\nshee gave me license to bee absent for a while, saying, Beware that\nyou tarry not long at supper there, for there is a rabblement of common\nBarrettors and disturbers of the publique peace, that rove about in\nthe streets and murther all such as they may take, neither can law nor\njustice redress them in any case. And they will the sooner set upon you,\nby reason of your comelinesse and audacity, in that you are not afeared\nat any time to walke in the streets.\n\nThen I answered and sayd, Have no care of me Fotis, for I esteeme the\npleasure which I have with thee, above the dainty meats that I eat\nabroad, and therefore I will returne againe quickly. Neverthelesse I\nminde not to come without company, for I have here my sword, wherby I\nhope to defend my selfe.\n\nAnd so in this sort I went to supper, and behold I found in Byrrhena's\nhouse a great company of strangers, and the chiefe and principall of the\ncity: the beds made of Citron and Ivory, were richly adorned and spread\nwith cloath of gold, the Cups were garnished pretiously, and there were\ndivers other things of sundry fashion, but of like estimation and price:\nhere stood a glasse gorgeously wrought, there stood another of Christall\nfinely painted. There stood a cup of glittering silver, and there stood\nanother of shining gold, and here was another of amber artificially\ncarved and made with pretious stones. Finally, there was all things\nthat might be desired: the Servitors waited orderly at the table in rich\napparell, the pages arrayed in silke robes, did fill great gemmes and\npearles made in the forme of cups, with excellent wine. Then one brought\nin Candles and Torches, and when we were set down and placed in order,\nwe began to talke, to laugh, and to be merry. And Byrrhena spake unto\nmee and sayd, I pray you Cousine how like you our countrey? Verily I\nthink there is no other City which hath the like Temples, Baynes, and\nother commodities which we have here. Further we have abundance of\nhousehold stuffe, we have pleasure, we have ease, and when the Roman\nmerchants arrive in this City they are gently and quietly entertained,\nand all that dwell within this province (when they purpose to solace and\nrepose themselves) do come to this city. Whereunto I answered, Verily\n(quoth I) you tell truth, for I can finde no place in all the world\nwhich I like better than this, but I greatly feare the blind inevitable\ntrenches of witches, for they say that the dead bodies are digged out of\ntheir graves, and the bones of them that are burnt be stollen away, and\nthe toes and fingers of such as are slaine are cut off, and afflict and\ntorment such as live. And the old Witches as soone as they heare of the\ndeath of any person, do forthwith goe and uncover the hearse and spoyle\nthe corpse, to work their inchantments. Then another sitting at the\ntable spake and sayd, In faith you say true, neither yet do they spare\nor favor the living. For I know one not farre hence that was cruelly\nhandled by them, who being not contented with cutting off his nose, did\nlikewise cut off his eares, whereat all the people laughed heartily,\nand looked at one that sate at the boords end, who being amased at their\ngazing, and somewhat angry withall, would have risen from the table, had\nnot Byrrhena spake unto him and sayd, I pray thee friend Bellerophon sit\nstill and according to thy accustomed curtesie declare unto us the losse\nof thy nose and eares, to the end that my cousin Lucius may be delighted\nwith the pleasantnes of the tale. To whom he answered, Madam in the\noffice of your bounty shall prevaile herein, but the insolencie of some\nis not to be supported. This hee spake very angerly: But Byrrhena was\nearnest upon him, and assured him hee should have no wrong at any mans\nhand. Whereby he was inforced to declare the same, and so lapping up the\nend of the Table cloath and carpet together, hee leaned with his elbow\nthereon, and held out three forefingers of his right hand in manner of\nan orator, and sayd, When I was a young man I went unto a certaine city\ncalled Milet, to see the games and triumphs there named Olympia, and\nbeing desirous to come into this famous province, after that I had\ntravelled over all Thessaly, I fortuned in an evil hour to come to the\nCity Larissa, where while I went up and down to view the streets to\nseeke some reliefe for my poore estate (for I had spent all my money)\nI espied an old man standing on a stone in the middest of the market\nplace, crying with a loud voice and saying, that if any man would watch\na dead corps that night hee should be reasonably rewarded for this\npaines. Which when I heard, I sayd to one who passed by, What is here\nto doe? Do dead men use to run away in this Countrey? Then answered he,\nHold your peace, for you are but a Babe and a stranger here, and not\nwithout cause you are ignorant how you are in Thessaly, where the women\nWitches bite off by morsels the flesh and faces of dead men, and thereby\nwork their sorceries and inchantments. Then quoth I, In good fellowship\ntell me the order of this custody and how it is. Marry (quoth he) first\nyou must watch all the night, with your eyes bent continually upon the\nCorps, never looking off, nor moving aside. For these Witches do turn\nthemselves into sundry kindes of beasts, whereby they deceive the eyes\nof all men, sometimes they are transformed into birds, sometimes into\nDogs and Mice, and sometimes into flies. Moreover they will charme the\nkeepers of the corps asleepe, neither can it be declared what meanes and\nshifts these wicked women do use, to bring their purpose to passe: and\nthe reward for such dangerous watching is no more than foure or sixe\nshillings. But hearken further (for I had well nigh forgotten) if the\nkeeper of the dead body doe not render on the morning following, the\ncorps whole and sound as he received the same, he shall be punished in\nthis sort: That is, if the corps be diminished or spoyled in any part of\nhis face, hands or toes, the same shall be diminished and spoyled in the\nkeeper. Which when I heard him I tooke a good heart, and went unto the\nCrier and bid him cease, for I would take the matter in hand, and so\nI demanded what I should have. Marry (quoth he) a thousand pence, but\nbeware I say you young man, that you do wel defend the dead corps from\nthe wicked witches, for hee was the son of one of the chiefest of the\ncity. Tush (sayd I) you speak you cannot tell what, behold I am a man\nmade all of iron, and have never desire to sleepe, and am more quicke of\nsight than Lynx or Argus. I had scarse spoken these words, when he tooke\nme by the hand and brought mee to a certaine house, the gate whereof was\nclosed fast, so that I went through the wicket, then he brought me into\na chamber somewhat darke, and shewed me a Matron cloathed in mourning\nvesture, and weeping in lamentable wise. And he spake unto her and said,\nBehold here is one that will enterprise to watch the corpes of your\nhusband this night. Which when she heard she turned her blubbered face\ncovered with haire unto me saying, I pray you good man take good heed,\nand see well to your office. Have no care (quoth I) so you will give\nmee any thing above that which is due to be given. Wherewith shee was\ncontented, and then she arose and brought me into a chamber whereas the\ncorps lay covered with white sheets, and shee called seven witnesses,\nbefore whom she shewed the dead body, and every part and parcell\nthereof, and with weeping eyes desired them all to testifie the matter.\nWhich done, she sayd these words of course as follow: Behold, his nose\nis whole, his eyes safe, his eares without scarre, his lips untouched,\nand his chin sound: all which was written and noted in tables, and\nsubscribed with the hands of witnesses to confirme the same. Which done\nI sayd unto the matron, Madam I pray you that I may have all things here\nnecessary. What is that? (quoth she). Marry (quoth I) a great lampe with\noyle, pots of wine, and water to delay the same, and some other drinke\nand dainty dish that was left at supper. Then she shaked her head and\nsayd, Away fool as thou art, thinkest thou to play the glutton here and\nto looke for dainty meats where so long time hath not been seene any\nsmoke at all? Commest thou hither to eat, where we should weepe and\nlament? And therewithall she turned backe, and commanded her maiden\nMyrrhena to deliver me a lampe with oyle, which when shee had done they\nclosed the chamber doore and departed. Now when I was alone, I rubbed\nmyne eyes, and armed my selfe to keep the corpes, and to the intent I\nwould not sleepe, I began to sing, and so I passed the time until it was\nmidnight, when as behold there crept in a Wesel into the chamber, and\nshe came against me and put me in very great feare, insomuch that I\nmarvelled greatly at the audacity of so little a beast. To whom I said,\nget thou hence thou whore and hie thee to thy fellowes, lest thou feele\nmy fingers. Why wilt thou not goe? Then incontinently she ranne away,\nand when she was gon, I fell on the ground so fast asleepe, that Apollo\nhimself could not discern which of us two was the dead corps, for I lay\nprostrat as one without life, and needed a keeper likewise. At length\nthe cockes began to crow, declaring that it was day: wherewithall I\nawaked, and being greatly afeard ran to the dead body with the lamp\nin my hand, and I viewed him round about: and immediately came in the\nmatron weeping with her Witnesses, and ran to the corps, and eftsoons\nkissing him, she turned his body and found no part diminished. Then she\nwilled Philodespotus her steward to pay me my wages forthwith. Which\nwhen he had done he sayd, We thanke you gentle young man for your paines\nand verily for your diligence herein we will account you as one of the\nfamily. Whereunto I (being joyous of by unhoped gaine, and ratling my\nmoney in my hand) did answer, I pray you madam esteeme me as one of\nyour servants, and if you want my service at any time, I am at your\ncommandement. I had not fully declared these words, when as behold all\nthe servants of the house were assembled with weapons to drive me away,\none buffeted me about the face, another about the shoulders, some strook\nme in the sides, some kicked me, and some tare my garments, and so I was\nhandled amongst them and driven from the house, as the proud young man\nAdonis who was torn by a Bore. And when I was come into the next street,\nI mused with my selfe, and remembred myne unwise and unadvised words\nwhich I had spoken, whereby I considered that I had deserved much more\npunishment, and that I was worthily beaten for my folly. And by and by\nthe corps came forth, which because it was the body of one of the chiefe\nof the city, was carried in funeral pompe round about the market place,\naccording to the right of the countrey there. And forthwith stepped out\nan old man weeping and lamenting, and ranne unto the Biere and embraced\nit, and with deepe sighes and sobs cried out in this sort, O masters, I\npray you by the faith which you professe, and by the duty which you owe\nunto the weale publique, take pitty and mercy upon this dead corps, who\nis miserably murdered, and doe vengeance on this wicked and cursed woman\nhis wife which hath committed this fact: for it is shee and no other\nwhich hath poysoned her husband my sisters sonne, to the intent to\nmaintaine her whoredome, and to get his heritage. In this sort the old\nman complained before the face of all people. Then they (astonied at\nthese sayings, and because the thing seemed to be true) cried out, Burne\nher, burne her, and they sought for stones to throw at her, and willed\nthe boys in the street to doe the same. But shee weeping in lamentable\nwise, did swear by all the gods, that shee was not culpable of this\ncrime. No quoth the old man, here is one sent by the providence of\nGod to try out the matter, even Zachlas an Egypptian, who is the most\nprincipall Prophecier in all this countrey, and who was hired of me for\nmoney to reduce the soule of this man from hell, and to revive his body\nfor the triall hereof. And therewithall he brought forth a certaine\nyoung man cloathed in linnen rayment, having on his feet a paire of\npantofiles, and his crowne shaven, who kissed his hands and knees,\nsaying, O priest have mercy, have mercy I pray thee by the Celestiall\nPlanets, by the Powers infernall, by the vertue of the naturall\nelements, by the silences of the night, by the building of Swallows nigh\nunto the towne Copton, by the increase of the floud Nilus, by the secret\nmysteries of Memphis, and by the instruments and trumpets of the Isle\nPharos, have mercy I say, and call to life this dead body, and make that\nhis eyes which he closed and shut, may be open and see. Howbeit we meane\nnot to strive against the law of death, neither intend we to deprive the\nearth of his right, but to the end this fact may be knowne, we crave\nbut a small time and space of life. Whereat this Prophet was mooved, and\ntook a certaine herb and layd it three times against the mouth of the\ndead, and he took another and laid upon his breast in like sort. Thus\nwhen hee had done hee turned himself into the East, and made certaine\norisons unto the Sunne, which caused all the people to marvell greatly,\nand to looke for this strange miracle that should happen. Then I pressed\nin amongst them nigh unto the biere, and got upon a stone to see this\nmysterie, and behold incontinently the dead body began to receive\nspirit, his principall veines did moove, his life came again and he held\nup his head and spake in this sort: Why doe you call mee backe againe to\nthis transitorie life, that have already tasted of the water of Lethe,\nand likewise been in the deadly den of Styx? Leave off, I pray, leave\noff, and let me lie in quiet rest. When these words were uttered by the\ndead corps, the Prophet drew nigh unto the Biere and sayd, I charge\nthee to tell before the face of all the people here the occasion of thy\ndeath: What, dost thou thinke that I cannot by my conjurations call up\nthe dead, and by my puissance torment thy body? Then the corps moved\nhis head again, and made reverence to the people and sayd, Verily I was\npoisoned by the meanes of my wicked wife, and so thereby yeelded my\nbed unto an adulterer. Whereat his wife taking present audacity, and\nreproving his sayings, with a cursed minde did deny it. The people were\nbent against her sundry wayes, some thought best that shee should be\nburied alive with her husband: but some said that there ought no credit\nto be given to the dead body. Which opinion was cleane taken away, by\nthe words which the corps spoke againe and sayd, Behold I will give\nyou some evident token, which never yet any other man knew, whereby\nyou shall perceive that I declare the truth: and by and by he pointed\ntowards me that stood on the stone, and sayd, When this the good Gard of\nmy body watched me diligently in the night, and that the wicked Witches\nand enchantresses came into the chamber to spoyle mee of my limbes, and\nto bring such their purpose did transforme themselves into the shape\nof beasts: and when as they could in no wise deceive or beguile his\nvigilant eyes, they cast him into so dead and sound a sleepe, that by\ntheir witchcraft he seemed without spirit or life. After this they did\ncall me by my name, and never did cease til as the cold members of my\nbody began by little and little and little to revive. Then he being of\nmore lively soule, howbeit buried in sleep, in that he and I were named\nby one name, and because he knew not that they called me, rose up first,\nand as one without sence or perseverance passed by the dore fast closed,\nunto a certain hole, whereas the Witches cut off first his nose, and\nthen his ears, and so that was done to him which was appointed to be\ndone to me. And that such their subtility might not be perceived, they\nmade him a like paire of eares and nose of wax: wherfore you may see\nthat the poore miser for lucre of a little mony sustained losse of his\nmembers. Which when he had said I was greatly astonied, and minding to\nprove whether his words were true or no, put my hand to my nose, and my\nnose fell off, and put my hand to my ears and my ears fell off. Wherat\nall the people wondred greatly, and laughed me to scorne: but I beeing\nstrucken in a cold sweat, crept between their legs for shame and escaped\naway. So I disfigured returned home againe, and covered the losse of\nmyne ears with my long hair, and glewed this clout to my face to hide my\nshame. As soon as Bellephoron had told his tale, they which sate at the\ntable replenished with wine, laughed heartily. And while they drank one\nto another, Byrrhena spake to me and said, from the first foundation of\nthis city we have a custome to celebrate the festivall day of the god\nRisus, and to-morrow is the feast when as I pray you to bee present, to\nset out the same more honourably, and I would with all my heart that you\ncould find or devise somewhat of your selfe, that might be in honour\nof so great a god. To whom I answered, verily cousin I will do as you\ncommand me, and right glad would I be, if I might invent any laughing\nor merry matter to please of satisfy Risus withall. Then I rose from the\ntable and took leave of Byrrhena and departed. And when I came into the\nfirst street my torch went out, that with great pain I could scarce get\nhome, by reason it was so dark, for ear of stumbling: and when I was\nwell nigh come unto the dore, behold I saw three men of great stature,\nheaving and lifting at Milos gates to get in: and when they saw me they\nwere nothing afeard, but assaied with more force to break down the dores\nwhereby they gave mee occasion, and not without cause, to thinke that\nthey were strong theeves. Whereupon I by and by drew out my sword which\nI carried for that purpose under my cloak, and ran in amongst them, and\nwounded them in such sort that they fell downe dead before my face.\nThus when I had slaine them all, I knocked sweating and breathing at\nthe doore til Fotis let me in. And then full weary with the slaughter of\nthose Theeves, like Hercules when he fought against the king Gerion, I\nwent to my chamber and layd me down to sleep.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRD BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWELFTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was taken and put in prison for murther.\n\nWhen morning was come, and that I was awaked from sleep, my heart burned\nsore with remembrance of the murther I had committed the night before:\nand I rose and sate downe on the side of the bed with my legges acrosse,\nand wringing my hands, I weeped in most miserable sort. For I imagined\nwith my selfe, that I was brought before the Judge in the Judgement\nplace, and that he awarded sentence against me, and that the hangman was\nready to lead me to the gallows. And further I imagined and sayd, Alasse\nwhat Judge is he that is so gentle or benigne, that will thinke that I\nam unguilty of the slaughter and murther of these three men. Howbeit the\nAssyrian Diophanes did firmely assure unto me, that my peregrination\nand voyage hither should be prosperous. But while I did thus unfold my\nsorrowes, and greatly bewail my fortune, behold I heard a great noyse\nand cry at the dore, and in came the Magistrates and officers, who\ncommanded two sergeants to binde and leade me to prison, whereunto I was\nwillingly obedient, and as they led me through the street, all the City\ngathered together and followed me, and although I looked always on the\nground for very shame, yet sometimes I cast my head aside and marvelled\ngreatly that among so many thousand people there was not one but laughed\nexceedingly. Finally, when they had brought me through all the streets\nof the city, in manner of those that go in procession, and do sacrifice\nto mitigate the ire of the gods, they placed mee in the Judgement hall,\nbefore the seat of the Judges: and after that the Crier had commanded\nall men to keep silence, and people desired the Judges to give sentence\nin the great Theatre, by reason of the great multitude that was there,\nwhereby they were in danger of stifling. And behold the prease of people\nincreased stil, some climed to the top of the house, some got upon the\nbeames, some upon the Images, and some thrust their heads through the\nwindowes, little regarding the dangers they were in, so they might see\nme.\n\nThen the officers brought mee forth openly into the middle of the hall,\nthat every man might behold me. And after that the Cryer had made a\nnoise, and willed all such that would bring any evidence against me,\nshould come forth, there stept out an old man with a glasse of water in\nhis hand, dropping out softly, who desired that hee might have liberty\nto speake during the time of the continuance of the water. Which when it\nwas granted, he began his oration in this sort.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTEENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was accused by an old man, and how he answered for\nhimselfe.\n\nO most reverend and just Judges, the thing which I propose to declare to\nyou is no small matter, but toucheth the estate and tranquillity of this\nwhole City, and the punishment thereof may be a right good example to\nothers. Wherefore I pray you most venerable Fathers, to whom and every\none of whom it doth appertain, to provide for the dignity and safety of\nthe Commonweale, that you would in no wise suffer this wicked Homicide,\nembrued with the bloud of so many murthered citisens, to escape\nunpunished. And thinke you not that I am moved thereunto by envy or\nhatred, but by reason of my office, in that I am captain of the night\nWatch, and because no man alive should accuse mee to bee remisse in the\nsame I wil declare all the whole matter, orderly as it was done last\nnight.\n\nThis night past, when as at our accustomed houre I diligently searched\nevery part of the City, behold I fortuned to espy this cruell young man\ndrawing out his sword against three Citisens, and after a long combat\nfoughten between them, he murthered one after another miserably: which\nwhen hee had done, moved in his conscience at so great a crime hee ran\naway, and aided by the reason of darknes, slipt into a house, and there\nlay hidden all night, but by the providence of the Gods, which suffereth\nno heynous offence to pass unpunished, hee was taken by us this morning\nbefore he escaped any further, and so brought hither to your honourable\npresence to receive his desert accordingly.\n\nSo have you here a guilty person, a culpable homicide, and an accused\nstranger, wherefore pronounce you judgement against this man beeing\nan alien, when as you would most severely and sharply revenge such\nan offence found in a known Citisen. In this sort the cruell accuser\nfinished and ended his terrible tale. Then the Crier commanded me to\nspeake, if I had any thing to say for my selfe, but I could in no wise\nutter any word at all for weeping. And on the other side I esteemed not\nso much his rigorous accusation, as I did consider myne owne miserable\nconscience. Howbeit, beeing inspired by divine Audacity, at length I gan\nsay, Verily I know that it is an hard thing for him that is accused to\nhave slaine three persons, to perswade you that he is innocent, although\nhe should declare the whole truth, and confesse the matter how it was\nindeed, but if your honours will vouchsafe to give me audience, I will\nshew you, that if I am condemned to die, I have not deserved it as myne\nowne desert, but that I was mooved by fortune and reasonable cause to\ndoe that fact. For returning somewhat late from supper yester night\n(beeing well tippled with wine, which I will not deny) and approaching\nnigh to my common lodging, which was in the house of one Milo a Citisen\nof this city, I fortuned to espy three great theeves attempting to break\ndown his walls and gates, and to open the locks to enter in. And when\nthey had removed the dores out of the hookes, they consulted amongst\nthemselves, how they would handle such as they found in the house. And\none of them being of more courage, and of greater stature than the\nrest, spake unto his fellows and sayd, Tush you are but boyes, take mens\nhearts unto you, and let us enter into every part of the house, and such\nas we find asleep let us kill, and so by that meanes we shall escape\nwithout danger. Verily ye three Judges, I confess that I drew out my\nsword against those three Citizens, but I thought it was the office and\nduty of one that beareth good will to this weale publique, so to doe,\nespecially since they put me in great fear, and assayed to rob and spoyl\nmy friend Milo. But when those cruell and terrible men would in no case\nrun away, nor feare my naked sword, but boldly resist against me, I\nran upon them and fought valiantly. One of them which was the captain\ninvaded me strongly, and drew me by the haire with both his hands, and\nbegan to beat me with a great stone: but in the end I proved the hardier\nman, and threw him downe at my feet and killed him. I tooke likewise the\nsecond that clasped me about the legs and bit me, and slew him also.\nAnd the third that came running violently against me, after that I\nhad strucken him under the stomacke fell downe dead. Thus when I had\ndelivered my selfe, the house, Myne host, and all his family from this\npresent danger, I thought that I should not onely escape unpunished, but\nalso have some great reward of the city for my paines.\n\nMoreover, I that have always been clear and unspotted of crime, and that\nhave esteemed myne innocency above all the treasure of the world, can\nfinde no reasonable cause why upon myne accusation I should be condemned\nto die, since first I was mooved to set upon the theeves by just\noccasion. Secondly, because there is none that can affirm, that there\nhath been at any time either grudge or hatred between us. Thirdly, we\nwere men meere strangers and of no acquaintance. Last of all, no man can\nprove that I committed that fact for lucre or gaine.\n\nWhen I had ended my words in this sort, behold, I weeped againe\npitteously, and holding up my hands I prayed all the people by the mercy\nof the Commonweale and for the love of my poore infants and children, to\nshew me some pitty and favour. And when my hearts were somewhat relented\nand mooved by my lamentable teares, I called all the gods to witnesse\nthat I was unguilty of the crime, and so to their divine providence, I\ncommitted my present estate, but turning my selfe againe, I perceived\nthat all the people laughed exceedingly, and especially my good friend\nand host Milo. Then thought I with my selfe, Alasse where is faith?\nWhere is remorse of conscience? Behold I am condemned to die as a\nmurtherer, for the safeguard of myne Host Milo and his family. Yet is\nhe not contented with that, but likewise laugheth me to scorne, when\notherwise he should comfort and help mee.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FOURTEENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was accused by two women, and how the slaine bodies were\nfound blowne bladders.\n\nWhen this was done, out came a woman in the middle of the Theatre\narrayed in mourning vesture, and bearing a childe in her armes.\nAnd after her came an old woman in ragged robes, crying and howling\nlikewise: and they brought with them the Olive boughs wherewith the\nthree slaine bodies were covered on the Beere, and cried out in this\nmanner: O right Judges, we pray by the justice and humanity which is in\nyou, to have mercy upon these slaine persons, and succour our Widowhood\nand losse of our deare husbands, and especially this poore infant, who\nis now an Orphan, and deprived of all good fortune: and execute your\njustice by order and law, upon the bloud of this Theefe, who is the\noccasion of all our sorrowes. When they had spoken these words, one of\nthe most antient Judges did rise and say, Touching this murther, which\ndeserveth great punishment, this malefactor himselfe cannot deny, but\nour duty is to enquire and try out, whether he had Coadjutors to help\nhim. For it is not likely that one man alone could kill three such great\nand valiant persons, wherefore the truth must be tried out by the racke,\nand so wee shall learne what other companions he hath, and root out the\nnest of these mischievous murtherers. And there was no long delay, but\naccording to the custome of Grecia, the fire, the wheele, and many other\ntorments were brought in. Then my sorrow encreased or rather doubled, in\nthat I could not end my life with whole and unperished members. And\nby and by the old woman, who troubled all the Court with her howling,\ndesired the Judges, that before I should be tormented on the racke, I\nmight uncover the bodies which I had slaine, that every man might\nsee their comely shape and youthfull beauty, and that I might receive\ncondign and worthy punishment, according to the quality of my offence:\nand therewithall shee made a sign of joy. Then the Judge commanded me\nforthwith to discover the bodies of the slain, lying upon the beere,\nwith myne own handes, but when I refused a good space, by reason I would\nnot make my fact apparent to the eies of all men, the Sergeant charged\nme by commandement of the Judges, and thrust me forward to do the\nsame. I being then forced by necessity, though it were against my wil,\nuncovered the bodies: but O good Lord what a strange sight did I see,\nwhat a monster? What sudden change of all my sorrows? I seemed as\nthough I were one of the house of Proserpina and of the family of death,\ninsomuch that I could not sufficiently expresse the forme of this new\nsight, so far was I amased and astonied thereat: for why, the bodies of\nthe three slaine men were no bodies, but three blown bladders mangled\nin divers places, and they seemed to be wounded in those parts where\nI remembred I wounded the theeves the night before. Whereat the people\nlaughed exceedingly: some rejoyced marvellously at the remembrance\nthereof, some held their stomackes that aked with joy, but every man\ndelighted at this passing sport, so passed out of the theatre. But I\nfrom the time that I uncovered the bodies stood stil as cold as ice,\nno otherwise than as the other statues and images there, neither came I\ninto my right senses, until such time as Milo my Host came and tooke mee\nby the hand, and with civil violence lead me away weeping and sobbing,\nwhether I would or no. And because that I might be seene, he brought me\nthrough many blind wayes and lanes to his house, where he went about to\ncomfort me, beeing sad and yet fearfull, with gentle entreaty of talke.\nBut he could in no wise mitigate my impatiency of the injury which I\nconceived within my minde. And behold, by and by the Magistrates and\nJudges with their ensignes entred into the house, and endeavoured to\npacify mee in this sort, saying, O Lucius, we are advertised of your\ndignity, and know the genealogie of your antient lineage, for the\nnobility of your Kinne doe possesse the greatest part of all this\nProvince: and thinke not that you have suffered the thing wherfore you\nweepe, to any reproach and ignominy, but put away all care and sorrow\nout of your minde. For this day, which we celebrate once a yeare in\nhonour of the god Risus, is alwaies renowned with some solemne novel,\nand the god doth continually accompany with the inventor therof, and wil\nnot suffer that he should be sorrowfull, but pleasantly beare a joyfull\nface. And verily all the City for the grace that is in you, intend to\nreward you with great honours, and to make you a Patron. And further\nthat your statue or image may be set up for a perpetuall remembrance.\n\nTo whome I answered, As for such benefits as I have received of the\nfamous City of Thessaly, I yeeld and render the most entire thanks, but\nas touching the setting up of any statues or images, I would wish that\nthey should bee reserved for myne Auntients, and such as are more worthy\nthan I.\n\nAnd when I had spoken these words somewhat gravely, and shewed my selfe\nmore merry than I was before, the Judges and magistrates departed, and I\nreverently tooke my leave of them, and bid them farewell. And behold,\nby and by there came one running unto me in haste, and sayd, Sir,\nyour cousin Byrrhena desireth you to take the paines according to your\npromise yester night, to come to supper, for it is ready. But I\ngreatly fearing to goe any more to her house in the night, said to the\nmessenger, My friend I pray you tell to my cousine your mistresse, that\nI would willingly be at her commandement, but for breaking my troth and\ncredit. For myne host Milo enforced me to assure him, and compelled\nme by the feast of this present day, that I should not depart from his\ncompany, wherefore I pray you to excuse, and to defer my promise to\nanother time.\n\nAnd while I was speaking these words, Milo tooke me by the hand, and led\nme towards the next Baine: but by the way I went couching under him,\nto hide my selfe from the sight of men, because I had ministred such\nan occasion of laughter. And when I had washed and wiped my selfe, and\nreturned home againe, I never remembred any such thing, so greatly was\nI abashed at the nodding and pointing of every person. Then went I to\nsupper with Milo, where God wot we fared but meanly. Wherefore feigning\nthat my head did ake by reason of my sobbing and weeping all day, I\ndesired license to depart to my Chamber, and so I went to bed.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FIFTEENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Fotis told to Apuleius, what witchcraft her mistresse did use.\n\nWhen I was a bed I began to call to minde all the sorrowes and griefes\nthat I was in the day before, until such time as my love Fotis, having\nbrought her mistresse to sleepe, came into the chamber, not as shee was\nwont to do, for she seemed nothing pleasant neither in countenance nor\ntalke, but with sowre face and frowning looke, gan speak in this sort,\nVerily I confesse that I have been the occasion of all thy trouble this\nday, and therewith shee pulled out a whippe from under her apron, and\ndelivered it unto mee saying, Revenge thyself upon mee mischievous\nharlot, or rather slay me.\n\nAnd thinke you not that I did willingly procure this anguish and sorrow\nunto you, I call the gods to witnesse. For I had rather myne owne body\nto perish, than that you should receive or sustaine any harme by my\nmeans, but that which I did was by the commandement of another, and\nwrought as I thought for some other, but behold the unlucky chance\nfortuned on you by my evill occasion.\n\nThe I, very curious and desirous to know the matter, answered, In faith\n(quoth I), this most pestilent and evill favoured whip which thou hast\nbrought to scourge thee withal, shal first be broken in a thousand\npieces, than it should touch or hurt thy delicate and dainty skin. But I\npray you tell me how have you been the cause and mean of my trouble and\nsorrow? For I dare sweare by the love that I beare unto you, and I will\nnot be perswaded, though you your selfe should endeavour the same, that\never you went to trouble or harm me: perhaps sometimes you imagined an\nevil thought in your mind, which afterwards you revoked, but that is not\nto bee deemed as a crime.\n\nWhen I had spoken these words, I perceived by Fotis eys being wet with\ntears and well nigh closed up that shee had a desire unto pleasure and\nspecially because shee embraced and kissed me sweetly. And when she was\nsomewhat restored unto joy shee desired me that shee might first shut\nthe chamber doore, least by the untemperance of her tongue, in\nuttering any unfitting words, there might grow further inconvenience.\nWherewithall shee barred and propped the doore, and came to me againe,\nand embracing me lovingly about the neck with both her armes, spake with\na soft voice and said, I doe greatly feare to discover the privities\nof this house, and to utter the secret mysteries of my dame. But I have\nsuch confidence in you and in your wisedome, by reason that you are come\nof so noble a line, and endowed with so profound sapience, and further\ninstructed in so many holy and divine things, that you will faithfully\nkeepe silence, and that whatsoever I shall reveale or declare unto\nyou, you would close them within the bottome of your heart, and never\ndiscover the same: for I ensure you, the love that I beare unto you,\nenforceth mee to utter it. Now shal you know all the estate of our\nhouse, now shal you know the hidden secrets of my mistres, unto whome\nthe powers of hel do obey, and by whom the celestial planets are\ntroubled, the gods made weake, and the elements subdued, neither is the\nviolence of her art in more strength and force, than when she espieth\nsome comly young man that pleaseth her fancie, as oftentimes it hapneth,\nfor now she loveth one Boetian a fair and beautiful person, on whom she\nemployes al her sorcerie and enchantment, and I heard her say with mine\nown ears yester night, that if the Sun had not then presently gon downe,\nand the night come to minister convenient time to worke her magicall\nenticements, she would have brought perpetuall darkness over all the\nworld her selfe. And you shall know, that when she saw yester night,\nthis Boetian sitting at the Barbers a polling, when she came from the\nBaines shee secretly commanded me to gather up some of the haires of his\nhead which lay dispersed upon the ground, and to bring it home. Which\nwhen I thought to have done the Barber espied me, and by reason it was\nbruited though all the City that we were Witches and Enchantresses,\nhe cried out and said, Wil you never leave off stealing of young mens\nhaires? In faith I assure you, unlesse you cease your wicked sorceries,\nI will complaine to the Justices. Wherewithall he came angerly towards\nme, and tooke away the haire which I had gathered, out of my apron:\nwhich grieved me very much, for I knew my Mistresses manners, that she\nwould not be contented but beat me cruelly.\n\nWherefore I intended to runne away, but the remembrance of you put\nalwayes the thought out of my minde, and so I came homeward very\nsorrowful: but because I would not seeme to come to my mistresse sight\nwith empty hands, I saw a man shearing of blowne goat skinnes, and the\nhayre which he had shorne off was yellow, and much resembled the haire\nof the Boetian, and I tooke a good deale thereof, and colouring of the\nmatter, I brought it to my mistresse. And so when night came, before\nyour return form supper, she to bring her purpose to passe, went up to\na high Gallery of her house, opening to the East part of the world, and\npreparing her selfe according to her accustomed practise, shee gathered\ntogether all substance for fumigations, she brought forth plates of\nmettal carved with strange characters, she prepared the bones of such as\nwere drowned by tempest in the seas, she made ready the members of dead\nmen, as the nosethrils and fingers, shee set out the lumps of flesh of\nsuch as were hanged, the blood which she had reserved of such as were\nslaine and the jaw bones and teeth of willed beasts, then she said\ncertaine charmes over the haire, and dipped it in divers waters, as in\nWel water, Cow milk, mountain honey, and other liquor. Which when she\nhad done, she tied and lapped it up together, and with many perfumes\nand smells threw it into an hot fire to burn. Then by the great force\nof this sorcerie, and the violence of so many confections, those bodies\nwhose haire was burning in the fire, received humane shape, and felt,\nheard and walked: And smelling the sent of their owne haire, came and\nrapped at our doores in stead of Boetius. Then you being well tipled,\nand deceived by the obscurity of the night, drew out your sword\ncourageously like furious Ajax, and kild not as he did, whole heard\nof beastes, but three blowne skinnes, to the intent that I, after the\nslaughter of so many enemies, without effusion of bloud might embrace\nand kisse, not an homicide but an Utricide.\n\nThus when I was pleasantly mocked and taunted by Fotis, I sayd unto her,\nverily now may I for this atcheived enterprise be numbered as Hercules,\nwho by his valiant prowesse performed the twelve notable Labors, as\nGerion with three bodies, and as Cerberus with three heads, for I have\nslaine three blown goat skinnes. But to the end that I may pardon thee\nof that thing which though hast committed, perform, the thing which\nI most earnestly desire of thee, that is, bring me that I may see and\nbehold when thy mistresse goeth about any Sorcery or enchantment, and\nwhen she prayeth unto the gods: for I am very desirous to learne that\nart, and as it seemeth unto mee, thou thy selfe hath some experience in\nthe same. For this I know and plainly feele, That whereas I have always\nyrked and loathed the embrace of Matrones, I am so stricken and subdued\nwith thy shining eyes, ruddy cheekes, glittering haire, sweet cosses,\nand lilly white paps, that I have neither minde to goe home, nor to\ndepart hence, but esteeme the pleasure which I shall have with thee this\nnight, above all the joyes of the world. Then (quoth she) O my Lucius,\nhow willing would I be to fulfil your desire, but by reason shee is\nso hated, she getteth her selfe into solitary places, and out of the\npresence of every person, when she mindeth to work her enchantments.\nHowbeit I regarde more to gratify your request, than I doe esteeme the\ndanger of my life: and when I see opportunitie and time I will assuredly\nbring you word, so that you shal see all her enchantments, but always\nupon this condition, that you secretly keepe close such things as are\ndone.\n\nThus as we reasoned together the courage of Venus assailed, as well our\ndesires as our members, and so she unrayed herself and came to bed, and\nwe passed the night in pastime and dalliance, till as by drowsie and\nunlusty sleep I was constrained to lie still.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SIXTEENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Fotis brought Apuleius to see her Mistresse enchant.\n\nOn a day Fotis came running to me in great feare, and said that her\nmistresse, to work her sorceries on such as shee loved, intended the\nnight following to transforme her selfe into a bird, and to fly whither\nshe pleased. Wherefore she willed me privily to prepare my selfe to see\nthe same. And when midnight came she led me softly into a high chamber,\nand bid me look thorow the chink of a doore: where first I saw how shee\nput off all her garments, and took out of a certain coffer sundry kindes\nof Boxes, of the which she opened one, and tempered the ointment therein\nwith her fingers, and then rubbed her body therewith from the sole of\nthe foot to the crowne of the head, and when she had spoken privily with\nher selfe, having the candle in her hand, she shaked the parts of her\nbody, and behold, I perceived a plume of feathers did burgen out, her\nnose waxed crooked and hard, her nailes turned into clawes, and so she\nbecame an Owle. Then she cried and screeched like a bird of that kinde,\nand willing to proove her force, mooved her selfe from the ground by\nlittle and little, til at last she flew quite away.\n\nThus by her sorcery shee transformed her body into what shape she would.\nWhich when I saw I was greatly astonied: and although I was inchanted by\nno kind of charme, yet I thought that I seemed not to have the likenesse\nof Lucius, for so was I banished from my sences, amazed in madnesse, and\nso I dreamed waking, that I felt myne eyes, whether I were asleepe or\nno. But when I was come againe to my selfe, I tooke Fotis by the hand,\nand moved it to my face and said, I pray thee while occasion doth serve,\nthat I may have the fruition of the fruits of my desire, and grant me\nsome of this oyntment. O Fotis I pray thee by thy sweet paps, to make\nthat in the great flames of my love I may be turned into a bird, so\nI will ever hereafter be bound unto you, and obedient to your\ncommandement. Then said Fotis, Wil you go about to deceive me now, and\ninforce me to work my own sorrow? Are you in the mind that you will not\ntarry in Thessaly? If you be a bird, where shall I seek you, and when\nshall I see you? Then answered I, God forbid that I should commit such\na crime, for though I could fly in the aire as an Eagle or though I were\nthe messenger of Jupiter, yet would I have recourse to nest with thee:\nand I swear by the knot of thy amiable hair, that since the time I first\nloved thee, I never fancied any other person: moreover, this commeth to\nmy minde, that if by the vertue of the oyntment I shall become an Owle,\nI will take heed I will come nigh no mans house: for I am not to learn,\nhow these matrons would handle their lovers, if they knew that they were\ntransformed into Owles: Moreover, when they are taken in any place they\nare nayled upon posts, and so they are worthily rewarded, because it\nis thought that they bring evill fortune to the house. But I pray you\n(which I had almost forgotten) to tell me by what meanes when I am an\nOwle, I shall return to my pristine shape, and become Lucius againe.\nFeare not (quoth she) for my mistres hath taught me the way to bring\nthat to passe, neither thinke you that she did it for any good will and\nfavour, but to the end that I might help her, and minister some remedy\nwhen she returneth home.\n\nConsider I pray you with your selfe, with what frivolous trifles so\nmarvellous a thing is wrought: for by Hercules I swear I give her\nnothing else save a little Dill and Lawrell leaves, in Well water, the\nwhich she drinketh and washeth her selfe withall. Which when she had\nspoken she went into the chamber and took a box out of the coffer,\nwhich I first kissed and embraced, and prayed that I might [have] good\nsuccesse in my purpose. And then I put off all my garments, and greedily\nthrust my hand into the box, and took out a good deale of oyntment and\nrubbed my selfe withall.\n\n\n\n\nTHE SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius thinking to be turned into a Bird, was turned into an Asse,\nand how he was led away by Theves.\n\nAfter that I had well rubbed every part and member of my body, I hovered\nwith myne armes, and moved my selfe, looking still when I should bee\nchanged into a Bird as Pamphiles was, and behold neither feathers nor\nappearance of feathers did burgen out, but verily my haire did turne\nin ruggednesse, and my tender skin waxed tough and hard, my fingers and\ntoes losing the number of five, changed into hoofes, and out of myne\narse grew a great taile, now my face became monstrous, my nosthrils\nwide, my lips hanging downe, and myne eares rugged with haire: neither\ncould I see any comfort of my transformation, for my members encreased\nlikewise, and so without all helpe (viewing every part of my poore body)\nI perceived that I was no bird, but a plaine Asse.\n\nThe I though to blame Fotis, but being deprived as wel of language as\nof humane shape, I looked upon her with my hanging lips and watery eyes.\nWho as soon as shee espied me in such sort, cried out, Alas poore wretch\nthat I am, I am utterly cast away. The feare I was in, and my haste hath\nbeguiled me, but especially the mistaking of the box, hath deceived me.\nBut it forceth not much, in regard a sooner medicine may be gotten for\nthis than for any other thing. For if thou couldst get a rose and eat\nit, thou shouldst be delivered from the shape of an Asse, and become\nmy Lucius againe. And would to God I had gathered some garlands this\nevening past, according to my custome, then thou shouldst not continue\nan Asse one nights space, but in the morning I shall seek some remedy.\nThus Fotis lamented in pittifull sort, but I that was now a perfect\nasse, and for Lucius a brute beast, did yet retaine the sence and\nunderstanding of a man. And did devise a good space with my selfe,\nwhether it were best for me to teare this mischievous and wicked harlot\nwith my mouth, or to kicke and kill her with my heels. But a better\nthought reduced me from so rash a purpose: for I feared lest by the\ndeath of Fotis I should be deprived of all remedy and help. Then shaking\nmyne head, and dissembling myne ire, and taking my adversity in good\npart, I went into the stable to my owne horse, where I found another\nasse of Milos, somtime my host, and I did verily think that mine owne\nhorse (if there were any natural conscience or knowledge in brute\nbeasts) would take pitty on me, and profer me lodging for that night:\nbut it chanced far otherwise. For see, my horse and the asse as it were\nconsented together to work my harm, and fearing lest I should eat up\ntheir provender, would in no wise suffer me to come nigh the manger, but\nkicked me with their heels from their meat, which I my self gave them\nthe night before. Then I being thus handled by them, and driven away,\ngot me into a corner of the stable, where while I remembred their\nuncurtesie, and how on the morrow I should return to Lucius by the help\nof a Rose, when as I thought to revenge my selfe of myne owne horse, I\nfortuned to espy in the middle of a pillar sustaining the rafters of the\nstable the image of the goddesse Hippone, which was garnished and decked\nround about with faire and fresh roses: then in hope of present remedy,\nI leaped up with my fore feet as high as I could, stretching out my\nneck, and with my lips coveting to snatch some roses. But in an evill\nhoure I did go about that enterprise, for behold the boy to whom I gave\ncharge of my horse, came presently in, and finding me climbing upon the\npillar, ranne fretting towards me and said, How long shall wee suffer\nthis wild Asse, that doth not onely eat up his fellowes meat, but also\nwould spoyl the images of the gods? Why doe I not kill this lame theefe\nand weake wretch. And therewithall looking about for some cudgel, hee\nespied where lay a fagot of wood, and chusing out a crabbed truncheon\nof the biggest hee could finde, did never cease beating of mee poore\nwretch, until such time as by great noyse and rumbling, hee heard\nthe doores of the house burst open, and the neighbours crying in most\nlamentable sort, which enforced him being stricken in feare, to fly his\nway. And by and by a troupe of theeves entred in, and kept every part\nand corner of the house with weapons. And as men resorted to aid and\nhelp them which were within the doores, the theeves resisted and kept\nthem back, for every man was armed with a sword and target in his hand,\nthe glimpses whereof did yeeld out such light as if it had bin day. Then\nthey brake open a great chest with double locks and bolts, wherein was\nlayd all the treasure of Milo, and ransackt the same: which when they\nhad done they packed it up and gave every man a portion to carry: but\nwhen they had more than they could beare away, yet were they loth to\nleave any behind, but came into the stable, and took us two poore asses\nand my horse, and laded us with greater trusses than wee were able to\nbeare. And when we were out of the house, they followed us with great\nstaves, and willed one of their fellows to tarry behind, and bring\nthem tydings what was done concerning the robbery: and so they beat us\nforward over great hils out of the way. But I, what with my heavy\nburden and long journy, did nothing differ from a dead asse: wherfore I\ndetermined with my self to seek some civil remedy, and by invocation\nof the name of the prince of the country to be delivered from so many\nmiseries: and on a time I passed through a great faire, I came among a\nmultitude of Greeks, and I thought to call upon the renowned name of the\nEmperor and say, O Cesar, and cried out aloud O, but Cesar I could in\nno wise pronounce. The Theeves little regarding my crying, did lay me on\nand beat my wretched skinne in such sort, that after it was neither apt\nnor meet to make Sives or Sarces. Howbeit at last Jupiter administred\nto me an unhoped remedy. For when we had passed through many townes\nand villages, I fortuned to espy a pleasant garden, wherein beside many\nother flowers of delectable hiew, were new and fresh roses: and being\nvery joyful, and desirous to catch some as I passed by, I drew neerer\nand neerer: and while my lips watered upon them, I thought of a better\nadvice more profitable for me, lest if from an asse I should become a\nman, I might fall into the hands of the theeves, and either by suspition\nthat I were some witch, or for feare that I should utter their theft,\nI should be slaine, wherefore I abstained for that time from eating of\nRoses, and enduring my present adversity, I did eat hay as other Asses\ndid.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE FOURTH BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER\n\nHow Apuleius thinking to eat Roses, was cruelly beaten by a Gardener,\nand chased by dogs.\n\nWhen noone was come, that the broyling heate of the sunne had most\npower, we turned into a village to certaine of the theeves acquaintance\nand friends, for verily their meeting and embracing together did give\nme, poore asse, cause to deeme the same, and they tooke the trusse from\nmy backe, and gave them part of the Treasure which was in it, and they\nseemed to whisper and tell them that it was stollen goods, and after\nthat we were unladen of our burthens, they let us loose in a medow to\npasture, but myne own horse and Miloes Asse would not suffer me to feed\nthere with them, but I must seeke my dinner in some other place.\n\nWherefore I leaped into a garden which was behinde the stable, and being\nwell nigh perished with hunger, although I could find nothing there\nbut raw and green fallets, yet I filled my hungry guts therwithall\nabundantly, and praying unto all the gods, I looked about in every place\nif I could espy any red roses in the gardens by, and my solitary being\nalone did put me in good hope, that if I could find any remedy, I should\npresently of an Asse be changed into Lucius out of every mans sight. And\nwhile I considered these things, I loked about, and behold I saw a farre\noff a shadowed valley adjoyning nigh unto a wood, where amongst divers\nother hearbes and pleasant verdures, me thought I saw bright flourishing\nRoses of bright damaske colour; and said within my bestaill minde,\nVerily that place is the place of Venus and the Graces, where secretly\nglistereth the royall hew, of so lively and delectable a floure. Then I\ndesiring the help of the guide of my good fortune, ranne lustily towards\nthe wood, insomuch that I felt myself that I was no more an Asse, but a\nswift coursing horse: but my agility and quicknes could not prevent the\ncruelty of my fortune, for when I came to the place I perceived that\nthey were no roses, neither tender nor pleasant, neither moystened with\nthe heavenly drops of dew, nor celestial liquor, which grew out of the\nthicket and thornes there. Neither did I perceive that there was any\nvalley at all, but onely the bank of the river, environed with great\nthick trees, which had long branches like unto lawrell, and bearing a\nflour without any manner of sent, and the common people call them by the\nname of Lawrel roses, which be very poyson to all manner of beasts. Then\nwas I so intangled with unhappy fortune that I little esteemed mine own\ndanger, and went willingly to eat of these roses, though I knew them to\nbe present poyson: and as I drew neere I saw a yong man that seemed\nto be the gardener, come upon mee, and when he perceived that I had\ndevoured all his hearbes in the garden, he came swearing with a great\nstaffe in his hand, and laid upon me in such sort, that I was well nigh\ndead, but I speedily devised some remedy my self, for I lift up my legs\nand kicked him with my hinder heels, that I left him lying at the hill\nfoot wel nigh slain, and so I ran away. Incontinently came out his wife,\nwho seeing her husband halfe dead, cried and howled in pittifull sort,\nand went toward her husband, to the intent that by her lowd cries shee\nmight purchase to me present destruction. Then all the persons of the\ntown, moved by her noise came forth, and cried for dogs to teare me\ndown. Out came a great company of Bandogs and mastifes, more fit to\npul down bears and lions than me, whom when I beheld I thought verily\nI should presently die: but I turned myself about, and ranne as fast as\never I might to the stable from whence I came. Then the men of the towne\ncalled in their dogs, and took me and bound mee to the staple of a post,\nand scourged me with a great knotted whip till I was well nigh dead, and\nthey would undoubtedly have slaine me, had it not come to passe, that\nwhat with the paine of their beating, and the greene hearbes that lay in\nmy guts, I caught such a laske that I all besprinkled their faces with\nmy liquid dung, and enforced them to leave off.\n\n\n\n\nTHE NINETEENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was prevented of his purpose, and how the Theeves came to\ntheir den.\n\nNot long after, the theeves laded us againe, but especially me, and\nbrought us forth of the stable, and when wee had gone a good part of our\njourney what with the long way, my great burthen, the beating of staves,\nand my worne hooves, I was so weary that I could scantly go. Then I\nsaw a little before mee a river running with fair water, and I said to\nmyself, Behold, now I have found a good occasion: for I will fall down\nwhen I come yonder, and surely I will not rise againe, neither with\nscourging nor with beating, for I had rather be slaine there presently,\nthan goe any further.\n\nAnd the cause why I had determined so to doe was this, I thought that\nthe theeves when they did see me so feeble and weake that I could not\ntravell, to the intent they would not stay in their journey, they would\ntake the burthen from my backe and put it on my fellowes, and so for\nmy further punishment to leave me as a prey to the wolves and ravening\nbeasts. But evill fortune prevented so good a consideration; for the\nother Asse being of the same purpose that I was of, by feigned and\ncoloured wearinesse fell downe first, with all his burthen on the ground\nas though hee were dead, and he would not rise neither with beating nor\nwith pricking, nor stand upon his legs, though they pulled him by the\ntail, by his legs, and by his eares: which when the theeves beheld, as\nwithout all hope they said one unto another, What should we stand here\nso long about a dead or rather a stony asse? let us bee gone: and so\nthey tooke his burthen, and divided some to mee, and some to my horse.\nAnd then they drew out their swords and cut off his legs, and threw\nhis body from the point of a hill down into a great valley. Then I\nconsidering with my selfe of the evill fortune of my poore companion,\nand purposed now to forget all subtility and deceit, and to play the\ngood Asse to get my masters favour, for I perceived by their talke that\nwe were come home well nigh at our journeys end. And after that wee had\npassed over a little hill, we came to our appointed place, and when we\nwere unladen of our burthens, and all things carried in, I tumbled and\nwallowed in the dust, to refresh my selfe in stead of water. The thing\nand the time compelleth me to make description of the places, and\nespecially of the den where the theeves did inhabit, I will prove my\nwit in what I can doe, and the consider you whether I was an Asse in\njudgement and sence, or no. For first there was an exceeding great hill\ncompassed about with big trees very high, with many turning bottoms full\nof sharp stones, whereby it was inaccessible. There was many winding\nand hollow vallies, environed with thickets and thornes, and naturally\nfortressed round about. From the top of the hill ranne a running water\nas cleare as silver, that watered all the valleyes below, that it seemed\nlike unto a sea inclosed, or a standing floud. Before the denne\nwhere was no hill stood an high tower, and at the foot thereof were\nsheep-coats fenced and walled with clay. Before the gate of the house\nwere pathes made in stead of wals, in such sort that you could easily\njudge it to be a very den for theeves, and there was nothing else except\na little coat covered with thatch, wherein the theeves did nightly\naccustome to watch by order, as I after perceived. And when they were\nall crept into the house, and we were all tied fast with halters at the\ndore, they began to chide with an old woman there, crooked with age, who\nhad the government and rule of all the house, and said, How is it old\nwitch, old trot, and strumpet, that thou sittest idley all day at home,\nand having no regard to our perillous labours, hast provided nothing for\nour suppers, but sittest eating and swilling thyself from morning till\nnight? Then the old woman trembled, and scantly able to speak gan\nsay, Behold my puissant and faithfull masters, you shall have meat and\npottage enough by and by: here is first store of bread, wine plenty,\nfilled in cleane rinsed pots, likewise here is hot water prepared to\nbathe you.\n\nWhich when she had said, they put off all their garments and refreshed\nthemselves by the fire. And after they were washed and noynted with\noyle, they sate downe at the table garnished with all kind of dainty\nmeats. They were no sooner sate downe, but in came another company of\nyong men more in number than was before, who seemed likewise to bee\nTheeves, for they brought in their preyes of gold and silver, Plate,\njewels, and rich robes, and when they had likewise washed, they sate\namong the rest, and served one another by order. Then they drank and eat\nexceedingly, laughing, crying and making much noyse, that I thought that\nI was among the tyrannous and wilde Lapithes, Thebans, and Centaures.\nAt length one of them more valiant than the rest, spake in this sort, We\nverily have manfully conquered the house of Milo of Hippata, and beside\nall the riches and treasure which by force we have brought away, we are\nall come home safe, and are increased the more by this horse and this\nAsse. But you that have roved about in the country of Boetia, have lost\nyour valiante captaine Lamathus, whose life I more regarded than all the\ntreasure which you have brought: and therfore the memory of him shall\nbee renowned for ever amongst the most noble kings and valiant captains:\nbut you accustome when you goe abroad, like men with ganders hearts to\ncreepe through every corner and hole for every trifle. Then one of them\nthat came last answered, Why are you only ignorant, that the greater the\nnumber is, the sooner they may rob and spoyle the house? And although\nthe family be dispersed in divers lodgings, yet every man had rather\nto defend his own life, than to save the riches of his master: but\nwhen there be but a few theeves, then will they not only rather regard\nthemselves, but also their substance, how little or great soever it be.\nAnd to the intent you may beleeve me I will shew you an example: wee\nwere come nothing nigh to Thebes, where is the fountain of our art and\nscience, but we learned where a rich Chuffe called Chriseros did dwell,\nwho for fear of offices in the publique wel dissembled his estate,\nand lived sole and solitary in a small coat, howbeit replenished with\naboundance of treasure, and went daily in ragged and torn apparel.\nWherefore wee devised with our selves to go to his house and spoyl him\nof all his riches. And when night came we drew towards the dore, which\nwas so strongly closed, that we could neither move it, nor lift it out\nof the hooks, and we thought it best not to break it open lest by the\nnoyse we should raise up to our harm the neighbours by. Then our strong\nand valiant captaine Lamathus trusting in his own strength and force,\nthrust in his had through a hole in the dore, and thought to pull back\nthe bolt: but the covetous caitif Chriseros being awake, and making no\nnoise came softly to the dore and caught his hand and with a great naile\nnailed it fast to the post: which when he had done, he ran up to the\nhigh chamber and called every one of his neighbours by name, desiring\nthem to succour him with all possible speed, for his own house was on\nfire. Then every one for fear of his owne danger came running out to aid\nhim, wherewith we fearing our present peril, knew not what was best to\nbe don, whether wee should leave our companion there, or yeeld ourselves\nto die with him: but we by his consent devised a better way, for we cut\noff his arm by the elbow and so let it hang there: then wee bound his\nwound with clouts, lest we should be traced by the drops of blood: which\ndon we took Lamathus and led him away, for fear we would be taken: but\nbeing so nigh pursued that we were in present danger, and that Lamathus\ncould not keepe our company by reason of faintnesse; and on the other\nside perceiving that it was not for his profit to linger behinde, he\nspake unto us as a man of singular courage and vertue, desiring us by\nmuch entreaty and prayer and by the puissance of the god Mars, and the\nfaith of our confederacy, to deliver his body from torment and miserable\ncaptivity: and further he said, How is it possible that so courageous a\nCaptaine can live without his hand, wherewith he could somtime rob and\nslay so many people? I would thinke myself sufficiently happy if I could\nbe slaine by one of you. But when he saw that we all refused to commit\nany such fact, he drew out his sword with his other hand, and after\nthat he had often kissed it, he drove it clean through his body. Then\nwe honoured the corps of so puissant a man, and wrapped it in linnen\ncloathes and threw it into the sea. So lieth our master Lamathus, buried\nand did in the grave of water, and ended his life as I have declared.\nBut Alcinus, though he were a man of great enterprise, yet could he not\nbeware by Lamathus, nor voide himselfe from evill fortune, for on a day\nwhen he had entred into an old womans house to rob her, he went up into\na high chamber, where hee should first have strangled her: but he had\nmore regard to throw down the bags of mony and gold out at a window,\nto us that stood under; and when he was so greedy that he would leave\nnothing behinde, he went into the old womans bed where she lay asleep,\nand would have taken off the coverlet to have thrown downe likewise, but\nshee awaked, and kneeling on her knees, desired him in this manner:\nO sir I pray you cast not away such torn and ragged clouts into my\nneighbours houses, for they are rich enough, and need no such things.\nThen Alcinus thinking her words to be true, was brought in beleefe, that\nsuch things as he had throwne out already, and such things as hee should\nthrow out after, was not fallen downe to his fellowes, but to other mens\nhouses, wherefore hee went to the window to see, and as hee thought to\nbehold the places round about, thrusting his body out of the window, the\nold woman marked him wel, and came behind him softly, and though shee\nhad but small strength, yet with sudden force she tooke him by the\nheeles and thrust him out headlong, and so he fell upon a marvellous\ngreat stone and burst his ribs, wherby he vomited and spewed great\nflakes of blood, and presently died. Then wee threw him to the river\nlikewise, as we had done Lamathus before.\n\nWhen we had thus lost two of our companions, we liked not Thebes, but\nmarched towards the next city called Platea, where we found a man of\ngreat fame called Demochares, that purposed to set forth a great game,\nwhere should be a triall of all kind of weapons: hee was come of a good\nhouse, marvellous rich, liberall, and wel deserved that which he had and\nhad prepared many showes and pleasures for the Common people, insomuch\nthat there is no man can either by wit or eloquence shew in words his\nworthy preparations: for first he had provided all sorts of armes, hee\ngreatly delighted in hunting and chasing, he ordained great towers and\nTables to move hither and thither: hee made many places to chase and\nencounter in: he had ready a great number of men and wilde beasts, and\nmany condemned persons were brought from the Judgement place, to try\nand fight with those beasts. But amongst so great preparations of noble\nprice, he bestowed the most part of his patrimony in buying of Beares,\nwhich he nourished to his great cost, and esteemed more than all the\nother beasts, which either by chasing hee caught himself, or which he\ndearely bought, or which were given him from divers of his friends.\n\nHowbeit for all his sumptuous cost, hee could not be free from the\nmalitious eyes of envy, for some of them were well nigh dead with too\nlong tying up, some meagre with the broyling heat of the sunne, some\nlanguished with lying, but all having sundry diseases, were so afflicted\nthat they died one after another, and there was well nigh none left, in\nsuch sort that you might see them lying in the streets pittiously dead.\nAnd the common people having no other meat to feed on, little regarding\nany curiosity, would come forth and fill their bellies with the flesh\nof the beares. Then by and by Babulus and I devised a pretty sport, wee\ndrew one of the greatest of the Beares to our lodging, as though wee\nwould prepare to eat thereof, where wee flayed of his skinne, and kept\nhis ungles whole, but we medled not with the head, but cut it off by\nthe necke, and so let it hang to the skinne. Then we rased off the flesh\nfrom the necke, and cast dust thereon, and set it in the sun to dry.\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTIETH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Thrasileon was disguised in a Beares skin, and how he was handled.\n\nWhen the skin was a drying we made merry with the flesh, and then we\ndevised with our selves, that one of us being more valiant than the rest\nboth in body and courage (so that he would consent thereto) should\nput on the skin, and feigning that he were a Beare, should be led to\nDemochares house in the night, by which means we thought to be received\nand let in. Many were desirous to play the Beare, but especially one\nThrasileon of a couragious minde would take this enterprise in hand.\nThen wee put in into the Beares skin, which him finely in every point,\nwee buckled it fast under his belly, and covered the seam with the\nhaire, that it might not be seen. After this we made little holes\nthrough the bears head, and through his nosthrils and eyes, for\nThrasileon to see out and take wind at, in such sort that he seemed a\nvery lively and natural beast: when this was don we went into a cave\nwhich we hired for the purpose, and he crept in after like a bear with\na good courage. Thus we began our subtility, and then wee imagined thus,\nwee feigned letters as though they came from one Nicanor which dwelt\nin the Country of Thracia, which was of great acquaintance with this\nDemochares, wherein we wrote, that hee had sent him being his friend,\nthe first fruits of his coursing and hunting. When night was come, which\nwas a meet time for our purpose, we brought Thrasileon and our forged\nletters and presented them to Demochares. When Demochares beheld\nthis mighty Beare, and saw the liberality of Nicanor his friend, hee\ncommanded his servants to deliver unto us x. crowns, having great store\nin his coffers. Then (as the novelty of a thing doth accustom to stir\nmens minds to behold the same) many persons came on every side to see\nthis bear: but Thrasileon, lest they should by curious viewing and\nprying perceive the truth, ran upon them to put them in feare that they\ndurst not come nigh. The people said, Verily Demochares is right happy,\nin that after the death of so many beasts, hee hath gotten maugre\nfortunes head, so goodly a bear. Then Demochares commanded him with all\ncare to be put in the park with all the other beasts: but immediately\nI spake unto him and said, Sir I pray you take heed how you put a beast\ntired with the heat of the sun and with long travell, among others which\nas I hear say have divers maladies and diseases, let him rather lie in\nsome open place in your house nie some water, where he may take air and\nease himself, for doe you not know that such kind of beasts do greatly\ndelight to couch under the shadow of trees and hillocks neer pleasant\nwells and waters? Hereby Demochares admonished, and remembring how many\nhe had before that perished, was contented that we should put the\nbear where we would. Moreover we said unto him, that we ourselves were\ndetermined to lie all night neer the Bear, to look unto him, and to give\nhim meat and drink at his due houre.\n\nThen he answered, Verily masters you need not put yourselves to such\npaines, for I have men that serve for nothing but that purpose. So wee\ntooke leave of him and departed: and when we were come without the gates\nof the town, we perceived before us a great sepulchre standing out of\nthe highway in a privy and secret place, and thither we went and\nopened the mouth thereof, whereas we found the sides covered with the\ncorruption of man, and the ashes and dust of his long buried body,\nwherein we got ourselves to bring our purpose to passe, and having\nrespect to the dark time of night, according to our custome, when\nwe thought that every one was asleepe, we went with our weapons and\nbesieged the house of Demochares round about. Then Thrasileon was ready\nat hand, and leaped out of the caverne, and went to kill all such as he\nfound asleepe: but when he came to the Porter, he opened the gates and\nlet us in, and then he shewed us a large Counter, wherein we saw the\nnight before a great aboundance of treasure: which when by violence\nwe had broke open, I bid every one of my fellows take as much gold and\nsilver as they could carry away: and beare it to the sepulchre, and\nstill as they carried away I stood at the gate, watching diligently when\nthey would returne. The Beare running about the house, to make such of\nthe family afeared as fortuned to wake and come out. For who is he that\nis so puissant and couragious, that at the ougly sight of so great a\nmonster will not quayle and keep his chamber especially in the night?\nBut when wee had brought this matter to so good a point, there chanced a\npittifull case, for as I looked for my companions that should come from\nthe sepulchre, behold there was a Boy of the house that fortuned to\nlooke out of a window, and espied the Bear running about, and he went\nand told all the servants of the house. Whereupon incontinently they\ncame forth with Torches, Lanthornes, and other lights, that they might\nsee all the yard over: they came with clubs, speares, naked swords,\nGreyhounds, and Mastifes to slay the poore beast. Then I during this\nbroyle thought to run away, but because I would see Thrasileon fight\nwith the Dogs, I lay behinde the gate to behold him. And although I\nmight perceive that he was well nigh dead, yet remembred he his owne\nfaithfulnes and ours, and valiantly resisted the gaping and ravenous\nmouths of the hell hounds, so tooke hee in gree the pagiant which\nwillingly he tooke in hand himself, and with much adoe tumbled at length\nout of the house: but when hee was at liberty abroad yet could he not\nsave himself, for all the dogs of the Streete joyned themselves to the\ngreyhounds and mastifes of the house, and came upon him.\n\nAlas what a pittifull sight it was to see our poore Thrasileon thus\nenvironed and compassed with so many dogs that tare and rent him\nmiserably. Then I impatient of so great a misery, ranne in among the\nprease of people, and ayding him with my words as much as I might,\nexhorted them all in this manner: O great and extreame mischance, what\na pretious and excellent beast have we lost. But my words did nothing\nprevaile, for there came out a tall man with a speare in his hand, that\nthrust him cleane through, and afterwards many that stood by drew out\ntheir swords, and so they killed him. But verily our good Captaine\nThrasileon, the honour of our comfort, received his death so patiently,\nthat he would not bewray the league betweene us, either by crying,\nhowling, or any other meanes, but being torn with dogs and wounded with\nweapons, did yeeld forth a dolefull cry, more like unto a beast than a\nman. And taking his present fortune in good part, with courage and glory\nenough did finish his life, with such a terror unto the assembly, that\nno person was hardy until it was day, as to touch him, though hee were\nstarke dead: but at last there came a Butcher more valiant than the\nrest, who opening the panch of the beast, slit out an hardy and ventrous\ntheefe.\n\nIn this manner we lost our Captain Thrasileon, but he left not his fame\nand honour.\n\nWhen this was done wee packed up our treasure, which we committed to the\nsepulchre to keepe, and got out of the bounds of Platea, thus thinking\nwith our selves, that there was more fidelity amongst the dead than\namongst the living, by reason that our preyes were so surely kept in the\nsepulchre. So being wearied with the weight of our burthens, and well\nnigh tyred with long travell, having lost three of our soldiers, we are\ncome home with these present cheats.\n\nThus when they had spoken in memory of their slaine companions, they\ntooke cups of gold, and sung hymns unto the god mars, and layd them\ndowne to sleep. Then the old woman gave us fresh barley without measure,\ninsomuch that my horse fed so abundantly that he might well thinke hee\nwas at some banquet that day. But I that was accustomed to eat bran\nand flower, thought that but a sower kinde of meate. Wherfore espying a\ncorner where lay loaves of bread for all the house I got me thither and\nfilled my hungry guts therewith.\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER\n\n\nHow the Theeves stole away a Gentlewoman, and brought her to their den.\n\nWhen night was come the Theeves awaked and rose up, and when they had\nbuckled on their weapons, and disguised their faces with visards, they\ndeparted. And yet for all the great sleep that came upon me, I could in\nno wise leave eating: and whereas when I was a man I could be contented\nwith one or two loaves at the most, now my huts were so greedy that\nthree panniers full would scantly serve me, and while I considered these\nthings the morning came, and being led to a river, notwithstanding\nmy Assie shamefastnesse I quencht my thirst. And suddenly after, the\nTheeves returned home carefull and heavy, bringing no burthens with\nthem, no not so much as traffe or baggage, save only a maiden, that\nseemed by her habit to be some gentlewoman borne, and the daughter of\nsome worthy matron of that country, who was so fair and beautiful, that\nthough I were an Asse, yet I had a great affection for her. The virgin\nlamented and tare her hair, and rent her garments, for the great sorrow\nshe was in; but the theeves brought her within the cave, and assisted\nher to comfort in this sort, Weep not fair gentlewoman we pray you, for\nbe you assured we wil do no outrage or violence to your person: but take\npatience a while for our profit, for necessity and poore estate hath\ncompelled us to do this enterprise: we warrant you that your parents,\nalthough they bee covetous, will be contented to give us a great\nquantity of mony to redeeme and ransome you from our hands.\n\nWith such and like flattering words they endeavoured to appease the\ngentlewoman, howbeit shee would in no case be comforted, but put her\nhead betwixt her knees, and cried pittiously. Then they called the old\nwoman, and commaunded her to sit by the maiden, and pacify her dolor\nas much as shee might. And they departed away to rob, as they were\naccustomed to doe, but the virgin would not asswage her griefes, nor\nmitigate her sorrow by any entreaty of the old woman, but howled and\nsobbed in such sort, that she made me poore Asse likewise to weepe, and\nthus she said, Alas can I poore wench live any longer, that am come of\nso good a house, forsaken of my parents, friends, and family, made a\nrapine and prey, closed servilely in this stony prison, deprived of all\npleasure, wherein I have been brought up, thrown in danger, ready to be\nrent in pieces among so many sturdy theeves and dreadful robbers, can\nI (I say) cease from weeping, and live any longer? Thus she cried and\nlamented, and after she had wearied herself with sorrow and blubbered\nher face with teares, she closed the windowes of her hollow eyes, and\nlaid her downe to sleepe. And after that she had slept, she rose again\nlike a furious and mad woman, and beat her breast and comely face more\nthat she did before.\n\nThen the old woman enquired the causes of her new and sudden\nlamentation. To whom sighing in pittifull sort she answered, Alas now I\nam utterly undone, now am I out of all hope, O give me a knife to kill\nme, or a halter to hang me. Whereat the old [woman] was more angry,\nand severely commanded her to tell her the cause of her sorrow, and\nwhy after her sleep, she should renew her dolour and miserable weeping.\nWhat, thinke you (quoth she) to deprive our young men of the price of\nyour ransome? No, no therefore cease your crying, for the Theeves doe\nlittle esteeme your howling, and if you do not, I will surely burn you\nalive. Hereat the maiden was greatly feared, and kissed her hand and\nsaid, O mother take pitty upon me and my wretched fortune, and give me\nlicense a while to speake, for I think I shall not long live, let there\nbe mercy ripe and franke in thy venerable hoare head, and hear the sum\nof my calamity.\n\nThere was a comely young man, who for his bounty and grace was beloved\nentirely of all the towne, my cousine Germane, and but three years older\nthan I; we two were nourished and brought up in one house, lay under one\nroofe, and in one chamber, and at length by promise of marriage, and by\nconsent of our parents we were contracted together. The marriage day was\ncome, the house was garnished with lawrel, and torches were set in\nevery place in the honour of Hymeneus, my espouse was accompanied by his\nparents, kinsfolke, and friends, and made sacrifices in the temples and\npublique places. And when my unhappy mother pampered me in her lap, and\ndecked me like a bride, kissing me sweetly, and making me a parent for\nChildren, behold there came in a great multitude of theeves armed like\nmen of warre, with naked swords in their hands, who went not about\nto doe any harme, neither to take any thing away, but brake into the\nchamber where I was, and violently tooke me out of my mothers armes,\nwhen none of our family would resist for feare.\n\nIn this sort was our marriage disturbed, like the marriage of Hyppodame\nand Perithous. But behold my good mother, now my unhappy fortune is\nrenewed and encreased: For I dreamed in my sleepe, that I was pulled out\nof our house, out of our chamber, and out of my bed, and that I removed\nabout in solitary and unknowne places, calling upon the name of my\nunfortunate husband, and how that he, as soone as he perceived that he\nwas taken away, even smelling with perfumes and crowned with garlands,\ndid trace me by the steppes, desiring the aid of the people to assist\nhim, in that his wife was violently stollen away, and as he went crying\nup and down, one of the theeves mooved with indignation, by reason of\nhis pursuit, took up a stone that lay at his feet, and threw it at my\nhusband and killed him. By the terror of which sight, and the feare of\nso dreadfull a dreame, I awaked.\n\nThen the old woman rendring out like sighes, began to speake in this\nsort: My daughter take a good heart unto you, and bee not afeared at\nfeigned and strange visions and dreams, for as the visions of the day\nare accounted false and untrue, so the visions of the night doe often\nchange contrary. And to dream of weeping, beating, and killing, is a\ntoken of good luck and prosperous change. Whereas contrary to dreame\nof laughing, carnal dalliance, and good cheere, is a signe of sadnesse,\nsicknesse, loss of substance, and displeasure. But I will tell thee a\npleasant tale, to put away all thy sorrow, and to revive thy spirits.\nAnd so shee began in this manner.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE MARRIAGE OF CUPID AND PSYCHES\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER\n\n\nThe most pleasant and delectable tale of the marriage of Cupid and\nPsyches.\n\nThere was sometimes a certaine King, inhabiting in the West parts,\nwho had to wife a noble Dame, by whom he had three daughters exceeding\nfair: of whom the two elder were of such comly shape and beauty, as\nthey did excell and pass all other women living, whereby they were\nthought worthily to deserve the praise and commendation of every person,\nand deservedly to be preferred above the residue of the common sort.\nYet the singular passing beauty and maidenly majesty of the youngest\ndaughter did so farre surmount and excell then two, as no earthly\ncreature could by any meanes sufficiently expresse or set out the same.\n\nBy reason wherof, after the fame of this excellent maiden was spread\nabout in every part of the City, the Citisens and strangers there beeing\ninwardly pricked by the zealous affection to behold her famous person,\ncame daily by thousands, hundreths, and scores, to her fathers palace,\nwho was astonied with admiration of her incomparable beauty, did no less\nworship and reverence her with crosses, signes, and tokens, and other\ndivine adorations, according to the custome of the old used rites and\nceremonies, than if she were the Lady Venus indeed, and shortly after\nthe fame was spread into the next cities and bordering regions, that the\ngoddess whom the deep seas had born and brought forth, and the froth of\nthe waves had nourished, to the intent to show her high magnificencie\nand divine power on earth, to such as erst did honour and worship her,\nwas now conversant among mortall men, or else that the earth and not\nthe sea, by a new concourse and influence of the celestiall planets,\nhad budded and yeelded forth a new Venus, endued with the floure of\nvirginity.\n\nSo daily more and more encreased this opinion, and now is her flying\nfame dispersed into the next Island, and well nigh unto every part and\nprovince of the whole world. Wherupon innumerable strangers resorted\nfrom farre Countries, adventuring themselves by long journies on\nland and by great perils on water, to behold this glorious virgin. By\noccasion wherof such a contempt grew towards the goddesse Venus, that no\nperson travelled unto the Towne Paphos, nor to the Isle Gyndos, nor\nto Cythera to worship her. Her ornaments were throwne out, her temples\ndefaced, her pillowes and cushions torne, her ceremonies neglected, her\nimages and Statues uncrowned, and her bare altars unswept, and fowl with\nthe ashes of old burnt sacrifice. For why, every person honoured and\nworshipped this maiden in stead of Venus, and in the morning at her\nfirst comming abroad offered unto her oblations, provided banquets,\ncalled her by the name of Venus, which was not Venus indeed, and in her\nhonour presented floures and garlands in most reverend fashion.\n\nThis sudden change and alteration of celestiall honour, did greatly\ninflame and kindle the love of very Venus, who unable to temper her\nselfe from indignation, shaking her head in raging sort, reasoned with\nher selfe in this manner, Behold the originall parent of all these\nelements, behold the Lady Venus renowned throughout all the world,\nwith whome a mortall maiden is joyned now partaker of honour: my name\nregistred in the city of heaven is prophaned and made vile by terrene\nabsurdities. If I shall suffer any mortall creature to present my\nMajesty on earth, or that any shall beare about a false surmised\nshape of her person, then in vaine did Paris the sheepheard (in whose\njudgement and competence the great Jupiter had affiance) preferre me\nabove the residue of the goddesses, for the excellency of my beauty: but\nshe, whatever she be that hath usurped myne honour, shal shortly repent\nher of her unlawful estate. And by and by she called her winged sonne\nCupid, rash enough and hardy, who by his evill manners contemning all\npublique justice and law, armed with fire and arrowes, running up and\ndown in the nights from house to house, and corrupting the lawfull\nmarriages of every person, doth nothing but that which is evill, who\nalthough that hee were of his owne proper nature sufficiently prone to\nworke mischiefe, yet she egged him forward with words and brought him to\nthe city, and shewed him Psyches (for so the maid was called) and having\ntold the cause of her anger, not without great rage, I pray thee (quoth\nshe) my dear childe, by motherly bond of love, by the sweet wounds\nof thy piercing darts, by the pleasant heate of thy fire, revenge the\ninjury which is done to thy mother by the false and disobedient beauty\nof a mortall maiden, and I pray thee, that without delay shee may fall\nin love with the most miserablest creature living, the most poore, the\nmost crooked, and the most vile, that there may bee none found in all\nthe world of like wretchednesse. When she had spoken these words she\nembraced and kissed her sonne, and took her voyage toward the sea.\n\nWhen she came upon the sea she began to cal the gods and goddesses,\nwho were obedient at her voyce. For incontinent came the daughters of\nNereus, singing with tunes melodiously: Portunus with his bristled and\nrough beard, Salita with her bosome full of fish, Palemon the driver of\nthe Dolphine, the Trumpetters of Tryton, leaping hither and thither, and\nblowing with heavenly noyse: such was the company which followed Venus,\nmarching towards the ocean sea.\n\nIn the meane season Psyches with all her beauty received no fruit\nof honor. She was wondred at of all, she was praised of all, but she\nperceived that no King nor Prince, nor any one of the superiour sort\ndid repaire to wooe her. Every one marvelled at her divine beauty, as it\nwere some Image well painted and set out. Her other two sisters, which\nwere nothing so greatly exalted by the people, were royally married to\ntwo Kings: but the virgin Psyches, sitting alone at home, lamented her\nsolitary life, and being disquieted both in mind and body, although\nshe pleased all the world, yet hated shee in her selfe her owne beauty.\nWhereupon the miserable father of this unfortunate daughter, suspecting\nthat the gods and powers of heaven did envy her estate, went to the town\ncalled Milet to receive the Oracle of Apollo, where he made his prayers\nand offered sacrifice, and desired a husband for his daughter: but\nApollo though he were a Grecian, and of the country of Ionia, because of\nthe foundation of Milet, yet hee gave answer in Latine verse, the sence\nwhereof was this:--\n\n     Let Psyches corps be clad in mourning weed,\n     And set on rock of yonder hill aloft:\n     Her husband is no wight of humane seed,\n     But Serpent dire and fierce as might be thought.\n     Who flies with wings above in starry skies,\n     And doth subdue each thing with firie flight.\n     The gods themselves, and powers that seem so wise,\n     With mighty Jove, be subject to his might,\n     The rivers blacke, and deadly flouds of paine\n     And darkness eke, as thrall to him remaine.\n\nThe King, sometimes happy when he heard the prophesie of Apollo,\nreturned home sad and sorrowful, and declared to his wife the miserable\nand unhappy fate of his daughter. Then they began to lament and weep,\nand passed over many dayes in great sorrow. But now the time approached\nof Psyches marriage, preparation was made, blacke torches were lighted,\nthe pleasant songs were turned into pittifull cries, the melody of\nHymeneus was ended with deadly howling, the maid that should be married\ndid wipe her eyes with her vaile. All the family and people of the city\nweeped likewise, and with great lamentation was ordained a remisse time\nfor that day, but necessity compelled that Psyches should be brought to\nher appointed place, according to the divine appointment.\n\nAnd when the solemnity was ended, they went to bring the sorrowful\nspowse, not to her marriage, but to her final end and burial. And while\nthe father and mother of Psyches did go forward weeping and crying unto\nthis enterprise, Psyches spake unto them in this sort: Why torment your\nunhappy age with continuall dolour? Why trouble you your spirits, which\nare more rather mine than yours? Why soyle ye your faces with teares,\nwhich I ought to adore and worship? Why teare you my eyes in yours? why\npull you your hory haires? Why knocke ye your breasts for me? Now you\nsee the reward of my excellent beauty: now, now you perceive, but too\nlate, the plague of envy. When the people did honour me, and call me\nnew Venus, then yee should have wept, then you should have sorrowed as\nthough I had been dead: for now I see and perceive that I am come to\nthis misery by the only name of Venus, bring mee, and as fortune has\nappointed, place me on the top of the rocke, I greatly desire to end my\nmarriage, I greatly covet to see my husband. Why doe I delay? why should\nI refuse him that is appointed to destroy all the world.\n\nThus ended she her words, and thrust her selfe among the people that\nfollowed. Then they brought her to the appointed rocke of the high hill,\nand set [her] hereon, and so departed. The Torches and lights were\nput out with the teares of the people, and every man gone home, the\nmiserable Parents well nigh consumed with sorrow, gave themselves to\neverlasting darknes.\n\nThus poore Psyches being left alone, weeping and trembling on the toppe\nof the rocke, was blowne by the gentle aire and of shrilling Zephyrus,\nand carried from the hill with a meek winde, which retained her garments\nup, and by little and little bought her downe into a deepe valley,\nwhere she was laid in a bed of most sweet and fragrant flowers.\n\nThus faire Psyches being sweetly couched among the soft and tender\nhearbs, as in a bed of sweet and fragrant floures, and having qualified\nthe thoughts and troubles of her restlesse minde, was now well reposed.\nAnd when she had refreshed her selfe sufficiently with sleepe, she rose\nwith a more quiet and pacified minde, and fortuned to espy a pleasant\nwood invironed with great and mighty trees. Shee espied likewise a\nrunning river as cleare as crystall: in the midst of the wood well nigh\nat the fall of the river was a princely Edifice, wrought and builded not\nby the art or hand of man, but by the mighty power of God: and you would\njudge at the first entry therin, that it were some pleasant and worthy\nmansion for the powers of heaven. For the embowings above were of\nCitron and Ivory, propped and undermined with pillars of gold, the walls\ncovered and seeled with silver, divers sorts of beasts were graven and\ncarved, that seemed to encounter with such as entered in. All things\nwere so curiously and finely wrought, that it seemed either to be the\nworke of some Demy god, or of God himselfe. The pavement was all of\npretious stones, divided and cut one from another, whereon was carved\ndivers kindes of pictures, in such sort that blessed and thrice blessed\nwere they that might goe upon such a pavement: Every part and angle of\nthe house was so well adorned, that by reason of the pretious stones and\ninestimable treasure there, it glittered and shone in such sort, that\nthe chambers, porches, and doores gave light as it had beene the Sunne.\nNeither otherwise did the other treasure of the house disagree unto\nso great a majesty, that verily it seemed in every point an heavenly\nPalace, fabricate and built for Jupiter himselfe.\n\nThen Psyches moved with delectation approched nigh and taking a bold\nheart entred into the house, and beheld every thing there with great\naffection, she saw storehouses wrought exceedingly fine, and replenished\nwith aboundance of riches. Finally, there could nothing be devised\nwhich lacked there: but among such great store of treasure this was\nmost marvellous, that there was no closure, bolt, nor locke to keepe the\nsame. And when with great pleasure shee had viewed all these things, she\nheard a voyce without any body, that sayd, Why doe you marvell Madame\nat so great riches? behold, all that you see is at your commandement,\nwherefore goe you into the chamber, and repose your selfe upon the bed,\nand desire what bath you will have, and wee whose voyces you heare bee\nyour servants, and ready to minister unto you according to your desire.\nIn the meane season, royall meats and dainty dishes shall be prepared\nfor you.\n\nThen Psyches perceived the felicity of divine providence, and according\nto the advertisement of the incorporeall voyces she first reposed her\nselfe upon the bed, and then refreshed her body in the baines. This\ndone, shee saw the table garnished with meats, and a chaire to sit\ndowne.\n\nWhen Psyches was set downe, all sorts of divine meats and wines were\nbrought in, not by any body, but as it were with a winde, for she saw no\nperson before her, but only heard voyces on every side. After that all\nthe services were brought to the table, one came in and sung invisibly,\nanother played on the harpe, but she saw no man. The harmony of the\nInstruments did so greatly shrill in her eares, that though there were\nno manner of person, yet seemed she in the midst of a multitude of\npeople.\n\nAll these pleasures finished, when night aproched Psyches went to bed,\nand when she was layd, that the sweet sleep came upon her, she greatly\nfeared her virginity, because shee was alone. Then came her unknowne\nhusband and lay with her: and after that hee had made a perfect\nconsummation of the marriage, he rose in the morning before day, and\ndeparted. Soone after came her invisible servants, and presented to her\nsuch things as were necessary for her defloration. And thus she passed\nforth a great while, and as it happeneth, the novelty of the things by\ncontinuall custome did encrease her pleasure, but especially the sound\nof the instruments was a comfort to her being alone.\n\nDuring this time that Psyches was in this place of pleasures, her father\nand mother did nothing but weepe and lament, and her two sisters hearing\nof her most miserable fortune, came with great dolour and sorrow to\ncomfort and speake with her parents.\n\nThe night following, Psyches husband spake unto her (for she might feele\nhis eyes, his hands, and his ears) and sayd, O my sweet Spowse and dear\nwife, fortune doth menace unto thee imminent danger, wherof I wish thee\ngreatly to beware: for know that thy sisters, thinking that thou art\ndead, bee greatly troubled, and are coming to the mountain by thy steps.\nWhose lamentations if thou fortune to heare, beware that thou doe in no\nwise make answer, or looke up towards them, for if thou doe thou shalt\npurchase to mee great sorrow, and to thyself utter destruction.\nPsyches hearing her Husband, was contented to doe all things as hee had\ncommanded.\n\nAfter that hee was departed and the night passed away, Psyches lamented\nand lamented all the day following, thinking that now shee was past all\nhopes of comfort, in that shee was closed within the walls of a prison,\ndeprived of humane conversation, and commaunded not to aid her sorrowful\nSisters, no nor once to see them. Thus she passed all the day in\nweeping, and went to bed at night, without any refection of meat or\nbaine.\n\nIncontinently after came her husband, who when he had embraced her\nsweetly, began to say, Is it thus that I find you perform your promise,\nmy sweet wife? What do I finde heere? Passe you all the day and the\nnight in weeping? And wil you not cease in your husbands armes? Goe too,\ndoe what ye will, purchase your owne destruction, and when you find it\nso, then remember my words, and repent but too late. Then she desired\nher husband more and more, assuring him that shee should die, unlesse he\nwould grant that she might see her sisters, wherby she might speak with\nthem and comfort them, wherat at length he was contented, and moreover\nhee willed that shee should give them as much gold and jewels as she\nwould. But he gave her a further charge saying, Beware that ye covet\nnot (being mooved by the pernicious counsell of you sisters) to see the\nshape of my person, lest by your curiosity you deprive your selfe of so\ngreat and worthy estate. Psyches being glad herewith, rendered unto him\nmost entire thankes, and said, Sweet husband, I had rather die than to\nbee separated from you, for whosoever you bee, I love and retaine you\nwithin my heart, as if you were myne owne spirit or Cupid himselfe: but\nI pray you grant this likewise, that you would commaund your servant\nZephyrus to bring my sisters downe into the valley as he brought mee.\n\nWherewithall shee kissed him sweetly, and desired him gently to grant\nher request, calling him her spowse, her sweetheart, her Joy and her\nSolace. Wherby she enforced him to agree to her mind, and when morning\ncame he departed away.\n\nAfter long search made, the sisters of Psyches came unto the hill where\nshe was set on the rocke, and cried with a loud voyce in such sort that\nthe stones answered againe. And when they called their sister by her\nname, that their lamentable cries came unto her eares, shee came forth\nand said, Behold, heere is shee for whom you weepe, I pray you torment\nyour selves no more, cease your weeping. And by and by she commaunded\nZephyrus by the appointment of her husband to bring them downe. Neither\ndid he delay, for with gentle blasts he retained them up and laid them\nsoftly in the valley. I am not able to expresse the often embracing,\nkissing and greeting which was between them three, all sorrows and tears\nwere then layd apart.\n\nCome in (quoth Psyches) into our house, and refresh your afflicted\nmindes with your sister.\n\nAfter this she shewed them the storehouses of treasure, shee caused them\nto hear the voyces which served her, the bain was ready, the meats were\nbrought in, and when they had filled themselves with divine delecates,\nthey conceived great envy within their hearts, and one of them being\ncurious, did demand what her husband was, of what estate, and who was\nLord of so pretious a house? But Psyches remembring the promise which\nshe had made to her husband, feigned that hee was a young man, of comely\nstature, with a flaxen beard, and had great delight in hunting the dales\nand hills by. And lest by her long talke she should be found to trip or\nfaile in her words, she filled their laps with gold, silver, and Jewels,\nand commanded Zephyrus to carry them away.\n\nWhen they were brought up to the mountain, they made their wayes\nhomeward to their owne houses, and murmured with envy that they bare\nagainst Psyches, saying, behold cruell and contrary fortune, behold how\nwe, borne all of one Parent, have divers destinies: but especially\nwe that are the elder two bee married to strange husbands, made as\nhandmaidens, and as it were banished from our Countrey and friends.\nWhereas our younger sister hath great abundance of treasure, and hath\ngotten a god to her husband, although shee hath no skill how to use such\ngreat plenty of riches. Saw you not sister what was in the house, what\ngreat store of jewels, what glittering robes, what Gemmes, what gold we\ntrod on? That if shee hath a husband according as shee affirmeth, there\nis none that liveth this day more happy in all the world than she. And\nso it may come to passe, at length for the great affection which hee may\nbeare unto her that hee may make her a goddesse, for by Hercules, such\nwas her countenance, so she behaved her self, that as a goddesse she had\nvoices to serve her, and the windes did obey her.\n\nBut I poore wretch have first married an husband elder than my father,\nmore bald than a Coot, more weake than a childe, and that locketh me up\nall day in the house.\n\nThen said the other sister, And in faith I am married to a husband that\nhath the gout, twyfold, crooked, nor couragious in paying my debt, I am\nfaine to rub and mollifie his stony fingers with divers sorts of oyles,\nand to wrap them in playsters and salves, so that I soyle my white and\ndainty hands with the corruption of filthy clouts, not using my self\nlike a wife, but more like a servant. And you my sister seem likewise to\nbe in bondage and servitude, wherefore I cannot abide to see our\nyounger sister in such felicity; saw you not I pray you how proudly and\narrogantly she handled us even now? And how in vaunting her selfe she\nuttered her presumptuous minde, how she cast a little gold into our\nlaps, and being weary of our company, commanded that we should be borne\nand blown away?\n\nVerily I live not, nor am a woman, but I will deprive her of all her\nblisse. And if you my sister bee so far bent as I, let us consult\ntogether, and not to utter our minde to any person, no not to our\nparents, nor tell that ever we saw her. For it sufficeth that we have\nseene her, whom it repenteth to have seene. Neither let us declare her\ngood fortune to our father, nor to any other, since as they seeme not\nhappy whose riches are unknowne: so shall she know that she hath sisters\nno Abjects, but worthier than she.\n\nBut now let us goe home to our husbands and poore houses, and when we\nare better instructed, let us return to suppresse her pride. So this\nevill counsell pleased these two evil women, and they hid the treasure\nwhich Psyches gave them, and tare their haire, renewing their false and\nforged teares. When their father and mother beheld them weep and lament\nstill, they doubled their sorrowes and griefes, but full of yre and\nforced with Envy, they tooke their voyage homeward, devising the\nslaughter and destruction of their sister.\n\nIn the meane season the husband of Psyches did warne her againe in the\nnight with these words: Seest thou not (quoth he) what perill and danger\nevill fortune doth threaten unto thee, whereof if thou take not good\nheed it will shortly come upon thee. For the unfaithfull harlots doe\ngreatly endeavor to set their snares to catch thee, and their purpose is\nto make and perswade thee to behold my face, which if thou once fortune\nto see, as I have often told, thou shalt see no more. Wherfore if these\nnaughty hagges, armed with wicked minds, doe chance to againe (as I\nthink no otherwise but that they will) take heed that thou talk not with\nthem but simply suffer them to speake what they will, howbeit if thou\ncanst not refraine thy selfe, beware that thou have no communication\nof thy husband, nor answer a word if they fortune to question of me, so\nwill we encrease our stocke, and this young and tender childe, couched\nin this young and tender belly of thine, shall be made an immortall god,\notherwise a mortal creature. Then Psyches was very glad that she should\nbring forth a divine babe, and very joyfull in that she should be\nhonored as a mother. She reckened and numbered carefully the days and\nmonths that passed, and beeing never with child before, did marvel\ngreatly that in so short a time her belly should swel so big. But those\npestilent and wicked furies breathing out their Serpentine poyson, took\nshipping to bring their enterprise to passe. The Psyches was warned\nagain by her husband in this sort: Behold the last day, the extream\ncase, and the enemies of thy blood, hath armed themselves against us,\npitched their campe, set their host in array, and are marching towards\nus, for now thy two sisters have drawn their swords and are ready\nto slay thee. O with what force are we assailed on this day! O sweet\nPsyches I pray thee to take pitty on thy selfe, of me, and deliver thy\nhusband and this infant within thy belly from so great danger, and see\nnot, neither heare these cursed women, which are not worthy to be called\nthy sisters, for their great hatred and breach of sisterly amity, for\nthey wil come like Syrens to the mountains, and yeeld out their pittious\nand lamentable cries. When Psyches had heard these words she sighed\nsorrowfully and said, O deare husband this long time have you had\nexperience and triall of my faith, and doubt you not that I will\npersever in the same, wherefore command your winde Zephyrus, that hee\nmay doe as hee hath done before, to the intent that where you have\ncharged me not to behold your venerable face, yet that I may comfort\nmyself with the sight of my sisters. I pray you by these beautifull\nhaires, by these round cheekes delicate and tender, by your pleasant hot\nbreast, whose shape and face I shall learn at length by the childe in my\nbelly, grant the fruit of my desire, refresh your deare Spowse Psyches\nwith joy, who is bound and linked unto you for ever. I little esteeme to\nsee your visage and figure, little doe I regard the night and darknesse\nthereof, for you are my only light.\n\nHer husband being as it were inchanted with these words and compelled by\nviolence of her often embracing, wiping away her teares with his haire,\ndid yeeld unto his wife. And when morning came, departed as hee was\naccustomed to doe.\n\nNow her sisters arrived on land, and never rested til they came to the\nrock, without visiting their parents, and leapt down rashly from the\nhill themselves. Then Zephyrus according to the divine commandment\nbrought them down, although it were against his wil, and laid them in\nthe vally without any harm: by and by they went into the palace to their\nsister without leave, and when they had eftsoone embraced their prey,\nand thanked her with flattering words for the treasure which she gave\nthem, they said, O deare sister Psyches, know you that you are now no\nmore a child, but a mother: O what great joy beare you unto us in your\nbelly? What a comfort will it be unto all the house? How happy shall\nwe be, that shall see this Infant nourished amongst so great plenty of\nTreasure? That if he be like his parents, as it is necessary he should,\nthere is no doubt but a new cupid shall be borne. By this kinde of\nmeasures they went about to winne Psyches by little and little, but\nbecause they were wearie with travell, they sate them downe in chaires,\nand after that they had washed their bodies in baines they went into a\nparlour, where all kinde of meats were ready prepared. Psyches commanded\none to play with his harpe, it was done. Then immediately others sung,\nothers tuned their instruments, but no person was seene, by whose sweet\nharmony and modulation the sisters of Psyches were greatly delighted.\n\nHowbeit the wickednesse of these cursed women was nothing suppressed\nby the sweet noyse of these instruments, but they settled themselves to\nwork their treasons against Psyches, demanding who was her husband, and\nof what Parentage. Then shee having forgotten by too much simplicity,\nwhat shee had spoken before of her husband, invented a new answer, and\nsaid that her husband was of a great province, a merchant, and a man of\nmiddle age, having his beard intersparsed with grey haires. Which when\nshee had spoken (because shee would have no further talke) she filled\ntheir laps with Gold and Silver, and bid Zephyrus to bear them away.\n\nIn their returne homeward they murmured within themselves, saying, How\nsay you sister to so apparent a lye of Psyches? First she sayd that her\nhusband was a young man of flourishing yeares, and had a flaxen beard,\nand now she sayth that he is halfe grey with age. What is he that in\nso short a space can become so old? You shall finde it no otherwise my\nsister, but that either this cursed queane hath invented a great lie, or\nelse that she never saw the shape of her husband. And if it be so that\nshe never saw him, then verily she is married to some god, and hath a\nyoung god in her belly. But if it be a divine babe, and fortune to come\nto the eares of my mother (as God forbid it should) then may I go and\nhang my selfe: wherfore let us go to our parents, and with forged lies\nlet us colour the matter.\n\nAfter they were thus inflamed, and had visited their Parents, they\nreturned againe to the mountaine, and by the aid of the winde Zephyrus\nwere carried down into the valley, and after they had streined their eye\nlids, to enforce themselves to weepe, they called unto Psyches in this\nsort, Thou (ignorant of so great evill) thinkest thy selfe sure and\nhappy, and sittest at home nothing regarding thy peril, whereas wee goe\nabout thy affaires and are carefull lest any harme should happen unto\nyou: for we are credibly informed, neither can we but utter it unto you,\nthat there is a great serpent full of deadly poyson, with a ravenous\ngaping throat, that lieth with thee every night Remember the Oracle\nof Apollo, who pronounced that thou shouldest he married to a dire and\nfierce Serpent, and many of the Inhabitants hereby, and such as hunt\nabout in the countrey, affirme that they saw him yesternight returning\nfrom pasture and swimming over the River, whereby they doe undoubtedly\nsay, that hee will not pamper thee long with delicate meats, but when\nthe time of delivery shall approach he will devoure both thee and thy\nchild: wherefore advise thy selfe whether thou wilt agree unto us\nthat are carefull of thy safety, and so avoid the perill of death, bee\ncontented to live with thy sisters, or whether thou remaine with the\nSerpent and in the end be swallowed into the gulfe of his body. And\nif it be so that thy solitary life, thy conversation with voices, this\nservile and dangerous pleasure, and the love of the Serpent doe more\ndelight thee, say not but that we have played the parts of naturall\nsisters in warning thee.\n\nThen the poore and simple miser Psyches was mooved with the feare of\nso dreadful words, and being amazed in her mind, did cleane forget the\nadmonitions of her husband, and her owne promises made unto him, and\nthrowing her selfe headlong into extreame misery, with a wanne and\nsallow countenance, scantly uttering a third word, at length gan say in\nthis sort: O my most deare sisters, I heartily thanke you for your great\nkindnesse toward me, and I am now verily perswaded that they which have\ninformed you hereof hath informed you of nothing but truth, for I never\nsaw the shape of my husband, neither know I from whence he came, only\nI heare his voice in the night, insomuch that I have an uncertaine\nhusband, and one that loveth not the light of the day: which causeth me\nto suspect that he is a beast, as you affirme. Moreover, I doe greatly\nfeare to see him, for he doth menace and threaten great evill unto mee,\nif I should goe about to spy and behold his shape wherefore my loving\nsisters if you have any wholeome remedy for your sister in danger, give\nit now presently. Then they opened the gates of their subtill mindes,\nand did put away all privy guile, and egged her forward in her fearefull\nthoughts, perswading her to doe as they would have her whereupon one\nof them began and sayd, Because that wee little esteeme any perill or\ndanger, to save your life we intend to shew you the best way and meane\nas we may possibly do. Take a sharpe razor and put it under the pillow\nof your bed; and see that you have ready a privy burning lampe with\noyle, hid under some part of the hanging of the chamber, and finely\ndissembling the matter when according to his custome he commeth to bed\nand sleepeth soundly, arise you secretly, and with your bare feet goe\nand take the lampe, with the Razor in your right hand and with valiant\nforce cut off the head of the poysonous serpent, wherein we will aid and\nassist you: and when by the death of him you shall be made safe, we wil\nmarry you to some comely man.\n\nAfter they had thus inflamed the heart of their sister fearing lest some\ndanger might happen unto them by reason of their evill counsell, they\nwere carried by the wind Zephyrus to the top of the mountaine, and so\nthey ran away and tooke shipping.\n\nWhen Psyches was left alone (saving that she seemed not to be alone,\nbeing stirred by so many furies) she was in a tossing minde like the\nwaves of the sea, and although her wil was obstinate, and resisted to\nput in execution the counsell of her Sisters, yet she was in doubtfull\nand divers opinions touching her calamity. Sometime she would, sometime\nshe would not, sometime she is bold, sometime she feareth, sometime\nshee mistrusteth, somtime she is mooved, somtime she hateth the beast,\nsomtime she loveth her husband: but at length night came, when as she\nprepared for her wicked intent.\n\nSoon after her husband Came, and when he had kissed and embraced her he\nfell asleep. Then Psyches (somwhat feeble in body and mind, yet mooved\nby cruelty of fate) received boldnes and brought forth the lampe, and\ntooke the razor, so by her audacity she changed her mind: but when\nshe took the lamp and came to the bed side, she saw the most meeke and\nsweetest beast of all beasts, even faire Cupid couched fairly, at whose\nsight the very lampe encreased his light for joy, and the razor turned\nhis edge.\n\nBut when Psyches saw so glorious a body shee greatly feared, and amazed\nin mind, with a pale countenance all trembling fel on her knees\nand thought to hide the razor, yea verily in her owne heart, which\ndoubtlesse she had done, had it not through feare of so great an\nenterprise fallen out of her hand. And when she saw and beheld the\nbeauty of the divine visage shee was well recreated in her mind, she saw\nhis haires of gold, that yeelded out a sweet savor, his neck more white\nthan milk, his purple cheeks, his haire hanging comely behinde and\nbefore, the brightnesse whereof did darken the light of the lamp, his\ntender plume feathers, dispersed upon his sholders like shining flours,\nand trembling hither and thither, and his other parts of his body so\nsmooth and so soft, that it did not repent Venus to beare such a childe.\nAt the beds feet lay his bow, quiver, and arrowes, that be the weapons\nof so great a god: which when Psyches did curiously behold, she\nmarvelling at her husbands weapons, took one of the arrows out of the\nquiver, and pricked her selfe withall, wherwith she was so grievously\nwounded that the blood followed, and thereby of her owne accord shee\nadded love upon love; then more broyling in the love of Cupid shee\nembraced him and kissed him and kissed him a thousand times, fearing the\nmeasure of his sleepe But alas while shee was in this great joy, whether\nit were for envy for desire to touch this amiable body likewise, there\nfell out a droppe of burning oyle from the lampe upon the right shoulder\nof the god. O rash and bold lampe, the vile ministery of love, how\ndarest thou bee so bold as to burne the god of all fire? When as he\ninvented thee, to the intent that all lovers might with more joy passe\nthe nights in pleasure.\n\nThe god beeing burned in this sort, and perceiving that promise and\nfaith was broken, bee fled away without utterance of any word, from the\neyes and hands of his most unhappy wife. But Psyches fortuned to catch\nhim as hee was rising by the right thigh, and held him fast as hee flew\nabove in the aire, until such time as constrained by wearinesse shee let\ngoe and fell downe upon the ground. But Cupid followed her downe, and\nlighted upon the top of a Cypresse tree, and angerly spake unto her in\nthis manner: O simple Psyches, consider with thy selfe how I, little\nregarding the commandement of my mother (who willed mee that thou\nshouldst bee married to a man of base and miserable condition) did come\nmy selfe from heaven to love thee, and wounded myne owne body with my\nproper weapons, to have thee to my Spowse: And did I seeme a beast unto\nthee, that thou shouldst go about to cut off my head with a razor, who\nloved thee so well? Did not I alwayes give thee a charge? Did not I\ngently will thee to beware? But those cursed aides and Counsellors of\nthine shall be worthily rewarded for their pains. As for thee thou shalt\nbe sufficiently punished by my absence. When hee had spoken these words\nhe tooke his flight into the aire. Then Psyches fell flat on the ground,\nand as long as she could see her husband she cast her eyes after him\ninto the aire, weeping and lamenting pitteously: but when hee was gone\nout of her sight shee threw her selfe into the next running river,\nfor the great anguish and dolour that shee was in for the lack of her\nhusband, howbeit the water would not suffer her to be drowned, but tooke\npity upon her, in the honour of Cupid which accustomed to broyle and\nburne the river, and threw her upon the bank amongst the herbs.\n\nThen Pan the rusticall god sitting on the river side, embracing and\n[instructing] the goddesse Canna to tune her songs and pipes, by whom\nwere feeding the young and tender Goats, after that he perceived Psyches\nin sorrowful case, not ignorant (I know not by what meanes) of her\nmiserable estate, endeavored to pacific her in this sort: O faire maid,\nI am a rusticke and rude heardsman, howbeit by reason of my old age\nexpert in many things, for as farre as I can learnt by conjecture (which\naccording as wise men doe terme is called divination) I perceive by your\nuncertaine gate, your pale hew, your sobbing sighes, and your watery\neyes, that you are greatly in love. Wherefore hearken to me, and goe\nnot about to slay your selfe, nor weepe not at all, but rather adore\nand worship the great god Cupid, and winne him unto you by your gentle\npromise of service.\n\nWhen the god of Shepherds had spoken these words, she gave no answer,\nbut made reverence to him as to a god, and so departed.\n\nAfter that Psyches had gone a little way, she fortuned unawares to come\nto a city where the husband of one of her Sisters did dwell. Which when\nPsyches did understand, shee caused that her sister had knowledge of\nher comming, and so they met together, and after great embracing and\nsalutation, the sister of Psyches demaunded the cause of her travell\nthither. Marry (quoth she) doe you not remember the counsell you gave\nme, whereby you would that I should kill the beast which under colour of\nmy husband did lie with mee every night? You shall understand, that\nas soone as I brought forth the lampe to see and behold his shape, I\nperceived that he was the sonne of Venus, even Cupid himselfe that lay\nwith mee. Then I being stricken with great pleasure, and desirous to\nembrace him, could not thoroughly asswage my delight, but alas by evill\nill chance the oyle of the lampe fortuned to fall on his shoulder which\ncaused him to awake, and seeing me armed with fire and weapons, gan say,\nHow darest thou be so bold to doe so great a mischiefe? Depart from me\nand take such things as thou didst bring: for I will have thy sister\n(and named you) to my wife, and she shall be placed in thy felicity, and\nby and by hee commaunded Zephyrus to carry me away from the bounds of\nhis house.\n\nPsyches had scantly finished her tale but her sister pierced with the\npricke of carnall desire and wicked envy ran home, and feigning to\nher husband that she had heard word of the death of her parents tooke\nshipping and came to the mountaine. And although there blew a contrary\nwinde, yet being brought in a vaine hope shee cried O Cupid take me a\nmore worthy wife, and thou Zephyrus beare downe thy mistresse, and so\nshe cast her selfe headlong from the mountaine: but shee fell not into\nthe valley neither alive nor dead, for all the members and parts of her\nbody were torne amongst the rockes, wherby she was made prey unto the\nbirds and wild beasts, as she worthily deserved.\n\nNeither was the vengeance of the other delayed, for Psyches travelling\nin that country, fortuned to come to another city where her other sister\ndid dwel; to whom when shee had declared all such things as she told to\nher other sister shee ran likewise unto the rock and was slaine in like\nsort Then Psyches travelled about in the countrey to seeke her husband\nCupid, but he was gotten into his mothers chamber and there bewailed the\nsorrowful wound which he caught by the oyle of a burning lamp.\n\nThen the white bird the Gull, which swims on the waves of the water,\nflew toward the Ocean sea, where he found Venus washing and bathing her\nselfe: to whom she declared that her son was burned and in danger of\ndeath, and moreover that it was a common brute in the mouth of every\nperson (who spake evill of all the family of Venus) that her son doth\nnothing but haunt harlots in the mountain, and she her self lasciviously\nuse to ryot in the sea: wherby they say that they are flow become\nno more gratious, pleasant nor gentle, but incivile, monstrous and\nhorrible. Moreover, that marriages are not for any amity, or for love of\nprocreation, but full of envy, discord, and debate. This the curious Gul\ndid clatter in the ears of Venus, reprehending her son. But Venus began\nto cry and sayd, What hath my sonne gotten any Love? I pray thee gentle\nbird that doest serve me so faithfully, tell me what she is, and what is\nher name that hath troubled my son in such sort? whether shee be any of\nthe Nymphs, of the number of the goddesses, of the company of the Muses,\nor of the mistery of the Graces? To whom the bird answered, Madam I know\nnot what shee is, but this I know that she is called Psyches. Then Venus\nwith indignation cried out, What is it she? the usurper of my beauty,\nthe Vicar of my name? What did he think that I was a bawd, by whose shew\nhe fell acquainted with the maid? And immediately she departed and went\nto her chamber, where she found her son wounded as it was told unto her,\nwhom when she beheld she cries out in this sort.\n\nIs this an honest thing, is this honourable to thy parents? is this\nreason, that thou hast violated and broken the commandement of thy\nmother and soveraign mistresse: and whereas thou shouldst have vexed my\nenemy with loathsom love, thou hast done otherwise?\n\nFor being of tender and unripe yeares, thou hast with too licentious\nappetite embraced my most mortall Foe, to whome I shall bee made a\nmother, and she a Daughter.\n\nThou presumest and thinkest, thou trifling boy, thou Varlet, and without\nall reverence, that thou art most worthy and excellent, and that I am\nnot able by reason of myne age to have another son, which if I should\nhave, thou shouldst well understand that I would beare a more worthier\nthan thou. But to worke thee a greater despight, I do determine to adopt\none of my servants, and to give him these wings, this fire, this bow,\nand these Arrowes, and all other furniture which I gave to thee, not\nto this purpose, neither is any thing given thee of thy father for this\nintent: but first thou hast been evill brought up and instructed in thy\nyouth thou hast thy hands ready and sharpe. Thou hast often offended thy\nantients, and especially me that am thy mother, thou hast pierced mee\nwith thy darts thou contemnest me as a widow, neither dost t thou\nregard thy valiant and invincible father, and to anger me more, thou art\namorous of harlots and wenches: hot I will cause that thou shalt shortly\nrepent thee, and that this marriage shal be dearely bought. To what a\npoint am I now driven? What shall I do? Whither shall I goe? How shall\nI represse this beast? Shall I aske ayd of myne enemy Sobriety, whom I\nhave often offended to engender thee? Or shall I seeke for counsel of\nevery poore rusticall woman? No, no, yet had I rather dye, howbeit I\nwill not cease my vengeance, to her must I have recourse for helpe, and\nto none other (I meane to Sobriety), who may correct thee sharpely, take\naway thy quiver, deprive thee of thy arrowes, unbend thy bow, quench thy\nfire, and which is more subdue thy body with punishment: and when that\nI have rased and cut off this thy haire, which I have dressed with myne\nowne hands, and made to glitter like gold, and when I have clipped thy\nwings, which I my selfe have caused to burgen, then shall I thinke to\nhave revenged my selfe sufficiently upon thee for the injury which thou\nhast done. When shee had spoken these words shee departed in a great\nrage out of her chamber.\n\nImmediatelie as she was going away came Juno and Ceres, demaunding the\ncause of her anger. Then Venus answered, Verily you are come to comfort\nmy sorrow, but I pray you with all diligence to seeke out one whose name\nis Psyches, who is a vagabond, and runneth about the Countries, and (as\nI thinke) you are not ignorant of the brute of my son Cupid, and of his\ndemeanour, which I am ashamed to declare. Then they understanding the\nwhole matter, endeavoured to mitigate the ire of Venus in this sort:\nWhat is the cause Madam, or how hath your son so offended, that you\nshold so greatly accuse his love, and blame him by reason that he is\namorous? and why should you seeke the death of her, whom he doth fancie?\nWe most humbly intreat you to pardon his fault if he have accorded to\nthe mind of any maiden: what do you not know that he is a young man? Or\nhave you forgotten of what yeares he is? Doth he seeme alwayes unto\nyou to be a childe? You are his mother, and a kind woman, will you\ncontinually search out his dalliance? Will you blame his luxury? Will\nyou bridle his love? and will you reprehend your owne art and delights\nin him? What God or man is hee, that can endure that you should sowe or\ndisperse your seed of love in every place, and to make restraint thereof\nwithin your owne doores? certes you will be the cause of the suppression\nof the publike paces of young Dames. In this sort this goddesse\nendeavoured to pacifie her mind, and to excuse Cupid with al their power\n(although he were absent) for feare of his darts and shafts of love.\nBut Venus would in no wise asswage her heat, but (thinking that they\ndid rather trifle and taunt at her injuries) she departed from them,\nand tooke her voiage towards the sea in all haste. In the meane season\nPsyches hurled her selfe hither and thither, to seeke her husband, the\nrather because she thought that if he would not be appeased with the\nsweet flattery of his wife, yet he would take mercy on her at her\nservile and continuall prayers. And (espying a Church on the top of a\nhigh hill) she said, What can I tell whether my husband and master be\nthere or no? wherefore she went thitherward, and with great paine\nand travell, moved by hope, after that she climbed to the top of the\nmountaine, she came to the temple, and went in, wheras behold she espied\nsheffes of corn lying on a heap, blades withered with garlands, and\nreeds of barly, moreover she saw hooks, sithes, sickles, and other\ninstruments, to reape, but every thing lay out of order, and as it were\ncast in by the hands of laborers which when Psyches saw she gathered\nup and put everything in order, thinking that she would not despise or\ncontemne the temples of any of the Gods, but rather get the favour and\nbenevolence of them all: by and by Ceres came in, and beholding her\nbusie and curious in her chapell, cried out a far off, and said, O\nPsyches needfull of mercy, Venus searcheth for thee in every place to\nrevenge her selfe and to punish thee grievously, but thou hast more mind\nto be heere, and carest for nothing lesse, then for thy safety. Then\nPsyches fell on her knees before her, watring her feet with her teares,\nwiping the ground with her haire, and with great weeping and lamentation\ndesired pardon, saying, O great and holy Goddesse, I pray thee by thy\nplenteous and liberall right hand, by the joyfull ceremonies of thy\nharvest, by the secrets of thy Sacrifice, by the flying chariots of\nthy dragons, by the tillage of the ground of Sicilie, which thou hast\ninvented, by the marriage of Proserpin, by the diligent inquisition of\nthy daughter, and by the other secrets which are within the temple of\nEleusis in the land of Athens, take pitty on me thy servant Psyches, and\nlet me hide my selfe a few dayes amongst these sheffes of corne, untill\nthe ire of so great a Goddesse be past, or until that I be refreshed of\nmy great labour and travell. Then answered Ceres, Verely Psyches, I am\ngreatly moved by thy prayers and teares, and desire with all my heart\nto aide thee, but if I should suffer thee to be hidden here, I should\nincrease the displeasure of my Cosin, with whom I have made a treatie\nof peace, and an ancient promise of amity: wherefore I advise thee to\ndepart hence and take it not in evil part in that I will not suffer thee\nto abide and remaine here within my temple. Then Psyches driven away\ncontrary to her hope, was double afflicted with sorrow and so she\nreturned back againe. And behold she perceived a far off in a vally\na Temple standing within a Forest, faire and curiously wrought, and\nminding to over-passe no place whither better hope did direct her, and\nto the intent she would desire pardon of every God, she approached nigh\nunto the sacred doore, whereas she saw pretious riches and vestiments\ningraven with letters of gold, hanging upon branches of trees, and the\nposts of the temple testifying the name of the goddesse Juno, to whom\nthey were dedicate, then she kneeled downe upon her knees, and imbraced\nthe Alter with her hands, and wiping her teares, gan pray in this sort:\nO deere spouse and sister of the great God Jupiter which art adored and\nworshipped amongst the great temples of Samos, called upon by women\nwith child, worshipped at high Carthage, because thou wast brought from\nheaven by the lyon, the rivers of the floud Inachus do celebrate thee:\nand know that thou art the wife of the great god, and the goddesse of\ngoddesses; all the east part of the world have thee in veneration,\nall the world calleth thee Lucina: I pray thee to be my advocate in my\ntribulations, deliver me from the great danger which pursueth me, and\nsave me that am weary with so long labours and sorrow, for I know that\nit is thou that succorest and helpest such women as are with child and\nin danger. Then Juno hearing the prayers of Psyches, appeared unto her\nin all her royalty, saying, Certes Psyches I would gladly help thee, but\nI am ashamed to do any thing contrary to the will of my daughter in law\nVenus, whom alwaies I have loved as mine owne child, moreover I shall\nincurre the danger of the law, intituled, De servo corrupto, whereby\nam forbidden to retaine any servant fugitive, against the will of his\nMaster. Then Psyches cast off likewise by Juno, as without all hope of\nthe recovery of her husband, reasoned with her selfe in this sort: Now\nwhat comfort or remedy is left to my afflictions, when as my prayers\nwill nothing availe with the goddesses? what shall I do? whither shall I\ngo? In what cave or darknesse shall I hide my selfe, to avoid the\nfuror of Venus? Why do I not take a good heart, and offer my selfe with\nhumilitie unto her, whose anger I have wrought? What do I know whether\nhe (whom I seeke for) be in his mothers house or no? Thus being in\ndoubt, poore Psyches prepared her selfe to her owne danger, and devised\nhow she might make her orison and prayer unto Venus. After that Venus\nwas weary with searching by Sea and Land for Psyches, shee returned\ntoward heaven, and commanded that one should prepare her Chariot, which\nher husband Vulcanus gave unto her by reason of marriage, so finely\nwrought that neither gold nor silver could be compared to the\nbrightnesse therof. Four white pigeons guided the chariot with great\ndiligence, and when Venus was entred in a number of sparrowes flew\nchirping about, making signe of joy, and all other kind of birds sang\nsweetly, foreshewing the comming of the great goddesse: the clouds gave\nplace, the heavens opened, and received her joyfully, the birds that\nfollowed nothing feared the Eagle, Hawkes, or other ravenous foules of\nthe aire. Incontinently she went unto the royall Pallace of God Jupiter,\nand with a proud and bold petition demanded the service of Mercury, in\ncertaine of her affaires, whereunto Jupiter consented: then with much\njoy shee descended from Heaven with Mercury, and gave him an earnest\ncharge to put in execution her words, saying: O my Brother, borne\nin Arcadia, thou knowest well, that I (who am thy sister) did never\nenterprise to doe any thing without thy presence, thou knowest also how\nlong I have sought for a girle and cannot finde her, wherefore there\nresteth nothing else save that thou with thy trumpet doe pronounce the\nreward to such as take her: see thou put in execution my commandment,\nand declare that whatsoever he be that retaineth her wittingly, against\nmy will shall not defend himselfe by any meane or excusation: which when\nshe had spoken, she delivered unto him a libell, wherein was contained\nthe name of Psyches, and the residue of his publication, which done,\nshe departed away to her lodging. By and by, Mercurius (not delaying the\nmatter) proclaimed throughout all the world, that whatsoever hee were\nthat could tell any tydings of a Kings fugitive Daughter, the servant\nof Venus, named Psyches, should bring word to Mercury, and for reward of\nhis paines, he should receive seaven sweet kisses of Venus After that\nMercury had pronounced these things, every man was enflamed with desire\nto search out Psyches.\n\nThis proclamation was the cause that put all doubt from Psyches, who was\nscantly come in the sight of the house of Venus, but one of her servants\ncalled Custome came out, who espying Psyches, cried with a loud voyce,\nsaying: O wicked harlot as thou art, now at length thou shalt know\nthat thou hast a mistresse above thee. What, dost thou make thy selfe\nignorant, as though thou didst not understand what travell wee have\ntaken in searching for thee? I am glad that thou art come into my\nhands, thou art now in the golfe of hell, and shalt abide the paine and\npunishment of thy great contumacy, and therewithall she tooke her by the\nhaire, and brought her in, before the presence of the goddesse Venus.\nWhen Venus spied her, shee began to laugh, and as angry persons\naccustome to doe, she shaked her head, and scratched her right eare\nsaying, O goddesse, goddesse, you are now come at length to visit your\nhusband that is in danger of death, by your meanes: bee you assured,\nI will handle you like a daughter: where be my maidens, Sorrow and\nSadnesse? To whom (when they came) she delivered Psyches to be cruelly\ntormented; then they fulfilled the commandement of their Mistresse,\nand after they had piteously scourged her with rods and whips, they\npresented her againe before Venus; then she began to laugh againe,\nsaying: Behold she thinketh (that by reason of her great belly, which\nshe hath gotten by playing the whore) to move me to pitty, and to make\nme a grandmother to her childe. Am not I happy, that in the flourishing\ntime of al mine age, shall be called a grandmother, and the sonne of\na vile harlot shall bee accounted the nephew of Venus: howbeit I am a\nfoole to tearm him by the name of my son, since as the marriage was made\nbetweene unequall persons, in the field without witnesses, and not by\nthe consent of parents, wherefore the marriage is illegitimate, and the\nchilde (that shall be borne) a bastard; if we fortune to suffer thee to\nlive so long till thou be delivered. When Venus had spoken these words\nshe leaped upon the face of poore Psyches, and (tearing her apparell)\ntooke her by the haire, and dashed her head upon the ground. Then she\ntooke a great quantity of wheat, of barly, poppy seede, peason, lintles,\nand beanes, and mingled them altogether on a heape saying: Thou evil\nfavoured girle, thou seemest unable to get the grace of thy lover, by\nno other meanes, but only by diligent and painefull service, wherefore I\nwill prove what thou canst doe: see that thou separate all these graines\none from another, disposing them orderly in their quantity, and let it\nbe done before night. When she had appointed this taske unto Psyches,\nshe departed to a great banket that was prepared that day. But Psyches\nwent not about to dissever the graine, (as being a thing impossible to\nbe brought to passe by reason it lay so confusedly scattered) but\nbeing astonyed at the cruell commandement of Venus, sate still and said\nnothing. Then the little pismire the emote, taking pitty of her great\ndifficulty and labour, cursing the cruellnesse of the daughter of\nJupiter, and of so evill a mother, ran about, hither and thither, and\ncalled to all her friends, Yee quick sons of the ground, the mother of\nall things, take mercy on this poore maid, espouse to Cupid, who is in\ngreat danger of her person, I pray you helpe her with all diligence.\nIncontinently one came after another, dissevering and dividing the\ngraine, and after that they had put each kinde of corne in order, they\nranne away againe in all haste. When night came, Venus returned home\nfrom the banket wel tippled with wine, smelling of balme, and crowned\nwith garlands of roses, who when shee had espied what Psyches had done,\ngan say, This is not the labour of thy hands, but rather of his that is\namorous of thee: then she gave her a morsel of brown bread, and went to\nsleep. In the mean season, Cupid was closed fast in the surest chamber\nof the house, partly because he should not hurt himself with wanton\ndalliance, and partly because he should not speake with his love: so\nthese two lovers were divided one from another. When night was passed\nVenus called Psyches, and said, Seest thou yonder Forest that extendeth\nout in length with the river? there be great sheepe shining like gold,\nand kept by no manner of person. I command thee that thou go thither\nand bring me home some of the wooll of their fleeces. Psyches arose\nwillingly not to do her commandement, but to throw her selfe headlong\ninto water to end her sorrows. Then a green reed inspired by divine\ninspiration, with a gratious tune and melody gan say, O Psyches I pray\nthee not to trouble or pollute my water by the death of thee, and yet\nbeware that thou goe not towards the terrible sheepe of this coast,\nuntill such time as the heat of the sunne be past, for when the sunne\nis in his force, then seeme they most dreadfull and furious, with their\nsharpe hornes, their stony foreheads and their gaping throats, wherewith\nthey arme themselves to the destruction of mankinde. But untill they\nhave refreshed themselves in the river, thou must hide thy selfe here\nby me, under this great plaine tree, and as soone as their great fury is\npast, thou maist goe among the thickets and bushes under the wood side\nand gather the lockes their golden Fleeces, which thou shalt finde\nhanging upon the briers. Then spake the gentle and benigne reed, shewing\na mean to Psyches to save her life, which she bore well in memory, and\nwith all diligence went and gathered up such lockes as shee found,\nand put them in her apron, and carried them home to Venus. Howbeit the\ndanger of this second labour did not please her, nor give her sufficient\nwitnesse of the good service of Psyches, but with a sower resemblance of\nlaughter, did say: Of a certaine I know that this is not thy fact, but I\nwill prove if that thou bee of so stout, so good a courage, and singular\nprudency as thou seemest to bee. Then Venus spake unto Psyches againe\nsaying: Seest thou the toppe of yonder great Hill, from whence there\nrunneth downe waters of blacke and deadly colour, which nourisheth the\nfloods of Stix, Cocytus? I charge thee to goe thither, and bring me a\nvessell of that water: wherewithall she gave her a bottle of Christall,\nmenacing and threatening her rigorously. Then poor Psyches went in all\nhaste to the top of the mountaine, rather to end her life, then to\nfetch any water, and when she was come up to the ridge of the hill, she\nperceived that it was impossible to bring it to passe: for she saw a\ngreat rocke gushing out most horrible fountaines of waters, which ran\ndowne and fell by many stops and passages into the valley beneath: on\neach side shee did see great Dragons, which were stretching out their\nlong and bloody Neckes, that did never sleepe, but appointed to keepe\nthe river there: the waters seemed to themselves likewise saying, Away;\naway, what wilt thou doe? flie, flie, or else thou wilt be slaine. Then\nPsyches (seeing the impossibility of this affaire) stood still as though\nshe were transformed into a stone and although she was present in body,\nyet was she absent in spirit and sense, by reason of the great perill\nwhich she saw, insomuch that she could not comfort her self with\nweeping, such was the present danger that she was in. But the royall\nbird of great Jupiter, the Eagle remembring his old service which he had\ndone, when as by the pricke of Cupid he brought up the boy Ganimedes, to\nthe heavens, to be made butler of Jupiter, and minding to shew the like\nservice in the person of the wife of Cupid, came from the high-house of\nthe Skies, and said unto Psyches, O simple woman without all experience,\ndoest thou thinke to get or dip up any drop of this dreadfull water? No,\nno, assure thy selfe thou art never able to come nigh it, for the Gods\nthemselves do greatly feare at the sight thereof. What, have you not\nheard, that it is a custome among men to sweare by the puissance of the\nGods, and the Gods do sweare by the majesty of the river Stix? but give\nme thy bottle, and sodainly he tooke it, and filled it with the water\nof the river, and taking his flight through those cruell and horrible\ndragons, brought it unto Psyches: who being very joyfull thereof,\npresented it to Venus, who would not yet be appeased, but menacing\nmore and more said, What, thou seemest unto me a very witch and\nenchauntresse, that bringest these things to passe, howbeit thou shalt\ndo nothing more. Take this box and to Hell to Proserpina, and desire her\nto send me a little of her beauty, as much as will serve me the space of\none day, and say that such as I had is consumed away since my sonne\nfell sicke, but returne againe quickly, for I must dresse my selfe\ntherewithall, and goe to the Theatre of the Gods: then poore Psyches\nperceived the end of all fortune, thinking verely that she should never\nreturne, and not without cause, when as she was compelled to go to the\ngulfe and furies of hell. Wherefore without any further delay, she went\nup to an high tower to throw her selfe downe headlong (thinking that it\nwas the next and readiest way to hell) but the tower (as inspired) spake\nunto her saying, O poore miser, why goest thou about to slay thy selfe?\nWhy dost thou rashly yeeld unto thy last perill and danger? know thou\nthat if thy spirit be once separated from thy body, thou shalt surely go\nto hell, but never to returne againe, wherefore harken to me; Lacedemon\na Citie in Greece is not farre hence: go thou thither and enquire for\nthe hill Tenarus, whereas thou shalt find a hold leading to hell, even\nto the Pallace of Pluto, but take heede thou go not with emptie hands\nto that place of darknesse: but Carrie two sops sodden in the flour of\nbarley and Honney in thy hands, and two halfepence in thy mouth. And\nwhen thou hast passed a good part of that way, thou shalt see a lame\nAsse carrying of wood, and a lame fellow driving him, who will desire\nthee to give him up the sticks that fall downe, but passe thou on and do\nnothing; by and by thou shalt come unto a river of hell, whereas Charon\nis ferriman, who will first have his fare paied him, before he will\ncarry the soules over the river in his boat, whereby you may see that\navarice raigneth amongst the dead, neither Charon nor Pluto will do any\nthing for nought: for if it be a poore man that would passe over and\nlacketh money, he shal be compelled to die in his journey before they\nwill shew him any reliefe, wherefore deliver to carraine Charon one of\nthe halfpence (which thou bearest for thy passage) and let him receive\nit out of thy mouth. And it shall come to passe as thou sittest in the\nboat thou shalt see an old man swimming on the top of the river, holding\nup his deadly hands, and desiring thee to receive him into the barke,\nbut have no regard to his piteous cry; when thou art passed over the\nfloud, thou shalt espie old women spinning, who will desire thee to\nhelpe them, but beware thou do not consent unto them in any case, for\nthese and like baits and traps will Venus set to make thee let fall\none of thy sops, and thinke not that the keeping of thy sops is a light\nmatter, for if thou leese one of them thou shalt be assured never to\nreturne againe to this world. Then shalt thou see a great and marvailous\ndogge, with three heads, barking continually at the soules of such as\nenter in, but he can do them no other harme, he lieth day and night\nbefore the gate of Proserpina, and keepeth the house of Pluto with great\ndiligence, to whom if thou cast one of thy sops, thou maist have accesse\nto Proserpina without all danger: shee will make thee good cheere, and\nentertaine thee with delicate meate and drinke, but sit thou upon the\nground, and desire browne bread, and then declare thy message unto her,\nand when thou hast received such beauty as she giveth, in thy returne\nappease the rage of the dogge with thy other sop, and give thy other\nhalfe penny to covetous Charon, and come the same way againe into the\nworld as thou wentest: but above all things have a regard that thou\nlooke not in the boxe, neither be not too curious about the treasure\nof the divine beauty. In this manner tire tower spake unto Psyches, and\nadvertised her what she should do: and immediately she tooke two halfe\npence, two sops, and all things necessary, and went to the mountaine\nTenarus to go towards hell. After that Psyches had passed by the lame\nAsse, paid her halfe pennie for passage, neglected the old man in the\nriver, denyed to helpe the woman spinning, and filled the ravenous month\nof the dogge with a sop, shee came to the chamber of Proserpina. There\nPsyches would not sit in any royall seate, nor eate any delicate meates,\nbut kneeled at the feete of Proserpina, onely contented with course\nbread, declared her message, and after she had received a mysticall\nsecret in a boxe, she departed, and stopped the mouth of the dogge with\nthe other sop, and paied the boatman the other halfe penny. When Psyches\nwas returned from hell, to the light of the world, shee was ravished\nwith great desire, saying, Am not I a foole, that knowing that I carrie\nhere the divine beauty, will not take a little thereof to garnish my\nface, to please my love withall? And by and by shee opened the boxe\nwhere she could perceive no beauty nor any thing else, save onely an\ninfernall and deadly sleepe, which immediatly invaded all her members as\nsoone as the boxe was uncovered, in such sort that she fell downe upon\nthe ground, and lay there as a sleeping corps.\n\nBut Cupid being now healed of his wound and Maladie, not able to endure\nthe absence of Psyches, got him secretly out at a window of the chamber\nwhere hee was enclosed, and (receiving his wings,) tooke his flight\ntowards his loving wife, whom when he had found, hee wiped away the\nsleepe from her face, and put it againe into the boxe, and awaked her\nwith the tip of one of his arrows, saying: O wretched Caitife, behold\nthou wert well-nigh perished againe, with the overmuch curiositie: well,\ngoe thou, and do thy message to my Mother, and in the meane season,\nI will provide for all things accordingly: wherewithall he tooke his\nflight into the aire, and Psyches brought her present to Venus.\n\nCupid being more and more in love with Psyches, and fearing the\ndispleasure of his Mother, did pearce into the heavens, and arrived\nbefore Jupiter to declare his cause: then Jupiter after that hee had\neftsoone embraced him, gan say in this manner: O my well beloved sonne,\nalthough thou haste not given due reverence and honour unto me as thou\noughtest to doe, but haste rather spoiled and wounded this my brest\n(whereby the laws and order of the Elements and Planets be disposed)\nwith continuall assaults, of Terren luxury and against all laws, and the\ndiscipline Julia, and the utility of the publike weale, in transforming\nmy divine beauty into serpents, fire, savage beasts, birds, and into\nBulles: howbeit remembring my modesty, and that I have nourished thee\nwith mine owne proper hands, I will doe and accomplish all thy desire,\nso that thou canst beware of spitefull and envious persons. And if there\nbe any excellent Maiden of comely beauty in the world, remember yet the\nbenefit which I shall shew unto thee by recompence of her love towards\nme againe. When lie had spoken these words he commanded Mercury to call\nall the gods to counsell, and if any of the celestiall powers did\nfaile of appearance he would be condemned in ten thousand pounds: which\nsentence was such a terrour to all the goddesses, that the high Theatre\nwas replenished, and Jupiter began to speake in this sort: O yee gods,\nregistred in the bookes of the Muses, you all know this young man Cupid\nwhom I have nourished with mine owne hands, whose raging flames of his\nfirst youth, I thought best to bridle and restraine. It sufficeth that\nhee is defamed in every place for his adulterous living, wherefore all\noccasion ought to bee taken away by meane of marriage: he hath chosen a\nMaiden that fancieth him well, and hath bereaved her of her virginity,\nlet him have her still, and possesse her according to his owne pleasure:\nthen he returned to Venus, and said, And you my daughter, take you no\ncare, neither feare the dishonour of your progeny and estate, neither\nhave regard in that it is a mortall marriage, for it seemeth unto me\njust, lawfull, and legitimate by the law civill. Incontinently after\nJupiter commanded Mercury to bring up Psyches, the spouse of Cupid, into\nthe Pallace of heaven. And then he tooke a pot of immortality, and said,\nHold Psyches, and drinke, to the end thou maist be immortall, and that\nCupid may be thine everlasting husband. By and by the great banket and\nmarriage feast was sumptuously prepared, Cupid sate downe with his deare\nspouse between his armes: Juno likewise with Jupiter, and all the other\ngods in order, Ganimedes filled the pot of Jupiter, and Bacchus served\nthe rest. Their drinke was Nectar the wine of the gods, Vulcanus\nprepared supper, the howers decked up the house with roses and other\nsweet smells, the graces threw about blame, the Muses sang with sweet\nharmony, Apollo tuned pleasantly to the Harpe, Venus danced finely:\nSatirus and Paniscus plaid on their pipes; and thus Psyches was married\nto Cupid, and after she was delivered of a child whom we call Pleasure.\nThis the trifling old woman declared unto the captive maiden: but I\npoore Asse, not standing farre of, was not a little sorry in that I\nlacked pen and inke to write so worthy a tale.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE SIXTH BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTY-THIRD CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius carried away the Gentlewoman, and how they were taken\nagaine by the theeves, and what a kind of death was invented for them.\n\nBy and by the theeves came home laden with treasure, and many of them\nwhich were of strongest courage (leaving behind such as were lame and\nwounded, to heale and aire themselves) said they would returne backe\nagaine to fetch the rest of their pillage, which they had hidden in\na certaine cave, and so they snatched up their dinner greedily, and\nbrought us forth into the way and beate us before them with staves.\nAbout night (after that we had passed over many hilles and dales) we\ncame to a great cave, where they laded us with mighty burthens, and\nwould not suffer us to refresh our selves any season but brought us\nagaine in our way, and hied so fast homeward, that what with their haste\nand their cruell stripes, I fell downe upon a stone by the way side,\nthen they beate me pittifully in lifting me up, and hurt my right thigh\nand my left hoofe, and one of them said, What shall we do with this lame\nIll favoured Asse, that is not worth the meate he eats? And other said,\nSince the time that we had him first he never did any good, and I thinke\nhe came unto our house with evill lucke, for we have had great wounds\nsince, and losse of our valiant captaines, and other said, As soone as\nhe hath brought home his burthen, I will surely throw him out upon the\nmountaine to be a pray for wild beasts: While these gentlemen reasoned\ntogether of my death, we fortuned to come home, for the feare that I was\nin, caused my feet to turne into wings: after that we were discharged\nof our burthens, they went to their fellowes that were wounded, and\ntold them of our great tardity and slownesse by the way, neither was I\nbrought into small anguish, when I perceived my death prepared before\nmy face: Why standest thou still Lucius? Why dost thou not looke for\nthy death? Knowst thou not that the theeves have ordained to slay thee?\nseest thou not these sharpe and pointed flints which shall bruise and\nteare thee in peeces, if by adventure thou happen upon them? Thy gentle\nMagitian hath not onely given thee the shape and travell of an Asse, but\nalso a skinne so soft and tender as it were a swallow: why dost thou not\ntake courage and runne away to save thy selfe? Art thou afraid of the\nold woman more then halfe dead, whom with a stripe of thy heele thou\nmaist easily dispatch? But whither shall I fly? What lodging shall I\nseek? See my Assy cogitation. Who is he that passeth by the way and\nwill not take me up? While I devised these things, I brake the halter\nwherewith I was tyed and ran away with all my force, howbeit I could not\nescape the kitish eyes of the old woman, for shee ran after me, and with\nmore audacity then becommeth her kind age, caught me by the halter and\nthought to pull me home: but I not forgetting the cruell purpose of the\ntheeves, was mooved with small pity, for I kicked her with my hinder\nheeles to the ground and had welnigh slaine her, who (although shee was\nthrowne and hurled downe) yet shee held still the halter, and would not\nlet me goe; then shee cryed with a loud voyce and called for succour,\nbut she little prevayled, because there was no person that heard her,\nsave onely the captive gentlewoman, who hearing the voice of the old\nwoman, came out to see what the matter was, and perceiving her hanging\nat the halter, tooke a good courage and wrested it out of her hand, and\n(entreating me with gentle words) got upon my backe. Then I began\nto runne, and shee gently kicked mee forward, whereof I was nothing\ndispleased, for I had as great a desire to escape as shee: insomuch\nthat I seemed to scowre away like a horse. And when the Gentlewoman\ndid speake, I would answere her with my neighing, and oftentimes (under\ncolour to rub my backe) I would sweetly kisse her tender feet. Then shee\nfetching a sigh from the bottome of her heart, lifted up her eyes to the\nheavens, saying: O soveraigne Gods, deliver mee if it be your pleasure,\nfrom these present dangers: and thou cruell fortune cease thy wrath, let\nthe sorrow suffice thee which I have already sustained. And thou little\nAsse, that art the occasion of my safety and liberty, if thou canst\nonce render me safe and sound to my parents, and to him that so greatly\ndesireth to have me to his wife, thou shalt see what thankes I will\ngive: with what honour I will reward thee, and how I will use thee.\nFirst, I will bravely dresse the haires of thy forehead, and then will\nI finely combe thy maine, I will tye up thy rugged tayle trimly, I will\ndecke thee round about with golden trappes, in such sort that thou shalt\nglitter like the starres of the skie, I will bring thee daily in my\napron the kirnels of nuts, and will pamper thee up with delicates; I\nwill set store by thee, as by one that is the preserver of my life:\nFinally, thou shalt lack no manner of thing. Moreover amongst thy\nglorious fare, thy great ease, and the blisse of thy life, thou shalt\nnot be destitute of dignity, for thou shalt be chronicled perpetually in\nmemory of my present fortune, and the providence divine. All the whole\nhistory shall be painted upon the wall of our house, thou shalt he\nrenowned throughout all the world. And it shall be registred in the\nbookes of Doctours, that an Asse saved the life of a young maiden that\nwas captive amongst Theeves: Thou shalt be numbred amongst the ancient\nmiracles: wee beleeve that by like example of truth Phryxus saved\nhimselfe from drowning upon the Ram, Arion escaped upon a Dolphin, and\nthat Europa was delivered by the Bull. If Jupiter transformed himselfe\ninto a Bull, why may it not be that under the shape of this Asse, is\nhidden the figure of a man, or some power divine? While that the Virgin\ndid thus sorrowfully unfold her desires, we fortuned to come to a place\nwhere three wayes did meet, and shee tooke me by the halter, and would\nhave me to turne on the right hand to her fathers house: but I (knowing\nthat the theeves were gone that way to fetch the residue of their\npillage) resisted with my head as much as I might, saying within my\nselfe: What wilt thou doe unhappy maiden? Why wouldst thou goe so\nwillingly to hell? Why wilt thou runne into destruction by meane of my\nfeet? Why dost thou seek thine own harme, and mine likewise? And while\nwe strived together whether way we might take, the theeves returned,\nlaiden with their pray, and perceived us a farre off by the light of the\nMoon: and after they had known us, one of them gan say, Whither goe you\nso hastely? Be you not afraid of spirits? And you (you harlot) doe you\nnot goe to see your parents? Come on, we will beare you company? And\ntherewithall they tooke me by the hatter, and drave me backe againe,\nbeating me cruelly with a great staffe (that they had) full of knobs:\nthen I returning againe to my ready destruction, and remembering the\ngriefe of my hoofe, began to shake my head, and to waxe lame, but he\nthat led me by the halter said, What, dost thou stumble? Canst thou not\ngoe? These rotten feet of thine ran well enough, but they cannot walke:\nthou couldest mince it finely even now with the gentlewoman, that thou\nseemedst to passe the horse Pegasus in swiftnesse. In saying of these\nwords they beat mee againe, that they broke a great staffe upon mee. And\nwhen we were come almost home, we saw the old woman hanging upon a bow\nof a Cipresse tree; then one of them cut downe the bowe whereon shee\nhanged, and cast her into the bottome of a great ditch: after this\nthey bound the maiden and fell greedily to their victuals, which the\nmiserable old woman had prepared for them. At which time they began to\ndevise with themselves of our death, and how they might be revenged;\ndivers was the opinions of this divers number: the first said, that hee\nthought best the Mayd should be burned alive: the second said she should\nbe throwne out to wild beasts: the third said, she should be hanged upon\na gibbet: the fourth said she should be flead alive: thus was the death\nof the poore Maiden scanned betweene them foure. But one of the theeves\nafter every man had declared his judgement, did speake in this manner:\nit is not convenient unto the oath of our company, to suffer you to waxe\nmore cruell then the quality of the offence doth merit, for I would that\nshee should not be hanged nor burned, nor throwne to beasts, nor dye any\nsodaine death, but by my council I would have her punished according to\nher desert. You know well what you have determined already of this dull\nAsse, that eateth more then he is worth, that faineth lamenesse, and\nthat was the cause of the flying away of the Maid: my mind is that he\nshall be slaine to morrow, and when all the guts and entrailes of his\nbody is taken out, let the Maide be sowne into his belly, then let us\nlay them upon a great stone against the broiling heate of the Sunne, so\nthey shall both sustaine all the punishments which you have ordained:\nfor first the Asse shall be slaine as you have determined, and she shall\nhave her members torne and gnawn with wild beasts, when as she is bitten\nand rent with wormes, shee shall endure the paine of the fire, when as\nthe broyling heat of the Sunne shall scortch and parch the belly of the\nAsse, shee shall abide the gallows when the Dogs and Vultures shall\nhave the guts of her body hanging in their ravenous mouthes. I pray you\nnumber all the torments which she shall suffer: First shee shall dwell\nwithin the paunch of an Asse: secondly her nosethrilles shall receive a\ncarraine stinke of the beast: thirdly shee shall dye for hunger: last of\nall, shee shall finde no meane to ridde her selfe from her paines, for\nher hand shalt be sowen up within the skinne of the Asse: This being\nsaid, all the Theeves consented, and when I (poore Asse) heard and\nunderstood all their device, I did nothing else but lament and bewayle\nmy dead carkasse, which should be handled in such sort on the next\nmorrow.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE SEVENTH BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTY-FOURTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow hee that was left behinde at Hippata did bring newes concerning the\nrobbery of Miloes house, came home and declared to his Company, that all\nthe fault was laid to one Apuleius his charge.\n\nA soone as night was past, and the cleare Chariot of the Sunne had\nspred his bright beames on every coast, came one of the company of the\ntheeves, (for so his and their greeting together did declare) who at the\nfirst entry into the Cave (after hee had breathed himselfe, and was able\nto speake) told these tydings unto his companions in this sort. Sirs,\nas touching the house of Milo of Hippata, which we forcibly entred and\nransackt the last day, we may put away all feare and doubt nothing at\nall. For after that ye by force of armes, had spoyled and taken away all\nthings in the house, and returned hither into our Cave; I (thrusting my\nselfe amongst the presse of the people, and shewing my selfe as though\nI were sad and sorrowful for the mischance) consulted with them for the\nboulting out of the matter, and devising what meanes might be wrought\nfor the apprehension of the theeves, to the intent I might learne and\nsee all that was done to make relation thereof unto you as you willed\nme, insomuch that the whole fact at length by manifest and evident\nproofes as also by the common opinion and judgement of the people, was\nlaid to one Lucius Apuleius charge as manifest author of this common\nrobbery, who a few dayse before by false and forged letters and colored\nhonesty, fell so farre in favour with this Milo, that he entertained him\ninto his house, and received him as a chiefe of his familiar friends,\nwhich Lucius after that he had sojourned there a good space, and won the\nheart of Miloes Maid, by fained love, did thoroughly learne the waies\nand doores of all the house, and curiously viewed the cofers and chests,\nwherein was laid the whole substance of Milo: neither was there small\ncause given to judge him culpable, since as the very same night that\nthis robbery was done he fled away, and could not be found in no place:\nand to the intent hee might cleane escape, and better prevent such as\nmade hew and crie after him, he tooke his white horse and galloped away,\nand after this, his servant was found in the house, who (accused as\naccessary to the fellony and escape of his Master) was committed to\nthe common gaole, and the next day following was cruelly scourged and\ntormented till hee was welnigh dead, to the intent hee should confesse\nthe matter, but when they could wreast or learne no such thing of him,\nyet sent they many persons after, towardes Lucius Countrey to enquire\nhim out, and so to take him prisoner. As he declared these things, I did\ngreatly lament with my selfe, to thinke of mine old and pristine estate,\nand what felicity I was sometimes in, in comparison to the misery that I\npresently susteined, being changed into a miserable Asse, then had I no\nsmall occasion to remember, how the old and ancient Writers did\naffirme, that fortune was starke blind without eies, because she alwaies\nbestoweth her riches upon evil persons, and fooles, and chooseth or\nfavoureth no mortall person by judgement, but is alwaies conversent,\nespecially with much as if she could see, she should most shunne, and\nforsake, yea and that which is more worse, she sheweth such evill or\ncontrary opinions in men, that the wicked doe glory with the name of\ngood, and contrary the good and innocent be detracted and slandred as\nevill. Furthermore I, who by her great cruelty, was turned into a foure\nfooted Asse, in most vile and abject manner: yea, and whose estate\nseemed worthily to be lamented and pittied of the most hard and stonie\nhearts, was accused of theft and robbing of my deare host Milo, which\nvillany might rather be called parricide then theft, yet might not I\ndefend mine owne cause or denie the fact any way, by reason I could not\nspeake; howbeit least my conscience should seeme to accuse me by reason\nof silence, and againe being enforced by impatience I endevored to\nspeake, and faine would have said, Never did I that fact, and verely the\nfirst word, never, I cried out once or twise, somewhat handsome, but the\nresidue I could in no wise pronounce, but still remaining in one voice,\ncried, Never, never, never, howbeit I settled my hanging lips as round\nas I could to speake the residue: but why should I further complaine of\nthe crueltie of my fortune, since as I was not much ashamed, by reason\nthat my servant and my horse, was likewise accused with me of the\nrobbery.\n\nWhile I pondered with my selfe all these things, a great care [came] to\nmy remembrance, touching the death, which the theeves provised for me\nand the maiden, and still as I looked downe to my belly, I thought of my\npoore gentlewoman that should be closed within me. And the theefe which\na little before had brought the false newes against me, drew out of the\nskirt of his coate, a thousand crowns, which he had rifled from such\nas hee met, and brought it into the common treasury. Then hee carefully\nenquired how the residue of his companions did. To whom it was declared\nthat the most valiant was murdred and slaine in divers manners,\nwhereupon he perswaded them to remit all their affaires a certaine\nseason, and to seeke for other fellowes to be in their places, that by\nthe exercise of new lads, the terror of their martiall band might be\nreduced to the old number, assuring them that such as were unwilling,\nmight be compelled by menaces and threatnings, and such as were willing\nmight be incouraged forward with reward. Further be said, that there\nwere some, which (seeing the profite which they had) would forsake their\nbase and servile estate, and rather bee contented to live like tyrants\namongst them. Moreover he declared, that for his part he had spoken with\na certaine tall man, a valiant companion, but of young age, stout in\nbody, and couragious in fight, whom he had fully perswaded to exercise\nhis idle hands, dull with slothfullnesse, to his greater profit, and\n(while he might) to receive the blisse of better Fortune, and not to\nhold out his sturdy arme to begge for a penny, but rather to take as\nmuch gold and silver as hee would. Then everyone consented, that hee\nthat seemed so worthy to be their companion, should be one of their\ncompany, and that they would search for others to make up the residue\nof the number, whereupon he went out, and by and by (returning againe)\nbrought in a tall young man (as he promised) to whom none of the residue\nmight bee compared, for hee was higher then they by the head, and of\nmore bignesse in body, his beard began to burgen, but hee was poorely\napparelled, insomuch that you might see all his belly naked. As soone\nas he was entred in he said, God speed yee souldiers of Mars and my\nfaithfull companions, I pray you make me one of your band, and I will\nensure you, that you shall have a man of singular courage and lively\naudacity: for I had rather receive stripes upon my backe, then money or\ngold in my hands. And as for death (which every man doth feare) I passe\nnothing at all, yet thinke you not that I am an abject or a begger,\nneither judge you my vertue and prowesse by ragged clothes, for I have\nbeene a Captaine of a great company, and subdued all the countrey of\nMacedonia. I am the renowned theefe Hemes the Thracian, whose name all\ncountreys and nations do so greatly feare: I am the sonne of Theron\nthe noble theefe, nourished with humane bloud, entertained amongst\nthe stoutest; finally I am inheritour and follower of all my fathers\nvertues, yet I lost in a short time all my company and all my riches,\nby one assault, which I made upon a Factor of the Prince, which sometime\nhad beene Captaine of two hundred men, for fortune was cleane against\nme; harken and I will tell you the whole matter. There was a certaine\nman in the court of the Emperour, which had many offices, and in great\nfavour, who at last by the envy of divers persons, was banished away and\ncompelled to forsake the court: his wife Platina, a woman of rare faith\nand singular shamefastnes having borne ten children to her husband,\ndespised all worldly Pompe and delicacy, and determined to follow her\nhusband, and to be partaker of his perils and danger, wherefore shee cut\noff her haire, disguised her selfe like a man, and tooke with her all\nher treasure, passing through the hands of the souldiers, and the naked\nswords without any feare, whereby she endured many miseries, and was\npartaker of much affliction, to save the life of her husband, such\nwas her love which she bare unto him. And when they had escaped many\nperillous dangers, as well by land as by sea, they went together towards\nZacynthe, to continue there according as fortune had appointed. But when\nthey were arived on the sea coast of Actium (where we in our returne\nfrom Macedony were roving about) when night came, they returned into a\nhouse not far distant from their ship, where they lay all night. Then\nwe entred in and tooke away all their substance, but verely we were in\ngreat danger: for the good matron perceiving us incontinently by the\nnoise of the gate, went into the chamber, and called up every man by his\nname, and likewise the neighbors that dwelled round about, insomuch that\nby reason of the feare that every one was in, we hardly escaped away,\nbut this most holy woman, faithfull and true to her husband (as the\ntruth must be declared) returned to Caesar, desiring his aid and\npuissance, and demanding vengeance of the injury done to her husband,\nwho granted all her desire: then went my company to wracke, insomuch\nthat every man was slaine, so great was the authority and word of the\nPrince. Howbeit, when all my band was lost, and taken by search of\nthe Emperours army, I onely stole away and delivered my selfe from the\nviolence of the souldiers, for I clothed my selfe in a womans attire,\nand mounted upon an Asse, that carryed barly sheafes, and (passing\nthrough the middle of them all) I escaped away, because every one deemed\nthat I was a woman by reason I lacked a beard. Howbeit I left not off\nfor all this, nor did degenerate from the glory of my father, or mine\nown vertue, but freshly comming from the bloody skirmish, and disguised\nlike a woman, I invaded townes and castles alone to get some pray. And\ntherewithall he pulled out two thousand crownes, which he had under his\ncoate, saying: Hold here the dowry which I present unto you, hold eke\nmy person, which you shall alwayes find trusty and faithfull, if you\nwillingly receive me: and I will ensure you that in so doing, within\nshort space I wilt make and turne this stony house of yours into gold.\nThen by and by every one consented to make him their Captaine, and so\nthey gave him better garments, and threw away his old. When they had\nchanged his attire, hee imbraced them one after another, then placed\nthey him in the highest roome of the table, and drunk unto him in token\nof good lucke.\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow the death of the Asse, and the Gentlewoman was stayed.\n\nAfter supper they began to talke, and declare unto him the going away\nof the Gentlewoman, and how I bare her upon my backe, and what death\nwas ordained for us two. Then he desired to see her, whereupon the\nGentlewoman was brought forth fast bound, whom as soone as he beheld, he\nturned himselfe wringing his nose, and blamed them saying: I am not so\nmuch a beast, or so rash a fellow to drive you quite from your purpose,\nbut my conscience will not suffer me to conceale any thing that toucheth\nyour profit, since I am as carefull for you, howbeit if my counsell doe\ndisplease you, you may at your liberty proceed in your enterprise.\nI doubt not but all theeves, and such as have a good judgement, will\npreferre their owne lucre and gain above all things in the world,\nand above their vengeance, which purchaseth damage to divers persons.\nTherefore if you put this virgin in the Asses belly, you shall but\nexecute your indignation against her, without all manner of profit; But\nI would advise you to carry the virgin to some towne and to sell her:\nand such a brave girle as she is, may be sold for a great quantity\nof money. And I my selfe know certaine bawdy Marchants, amongst whom\nperadventure one will give us summes of gold for her. This is my opinion\ntouching this affaire: but advise you what you intend to do, for you\nmay rule me in this case. In this manner the good theefe pleaded and\ndefended our cause, being a good Patron to the silly virgin, and to\nme poore Asse. But they staied hereupon a good space, with long\ndeliberation, which made my heart (God wot) and spirit greatly to\nquaile. Howbeit in the end they consented to his opinion, and by and\nby the Maiden was unloosed of her bonds, who seeing the young man, and\nhearing the name of brothels and bawdy Merchants, began to wax joyfull,\nand smiled with herself. Then began I to deeme evill of the generation\nof women, when as I saw the Maiden (who was appointed to be married to a\nyoung Gentleman, and who so greatly desired the same) was now delighted\nwith the talke of a wicked brothel house, and other things dishonest. In\nthis sort the consent and manners of women depended in the judgement of\nan Asse.\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTY-SIXTH CHAPTER\n\nHow all the Theeves were brought asleepe by their new companion.\n\nThen the young man spake againe, saying, Masters, why goe wee not about\nto make our prayers unto Mars, touching this selling of the Maiden, and\nto seeke for other companions. But as farre as I see, here is no other\nmanner of beast to make sacrifice withall, nor wine sufficient for us to\ndrinke. Let me have (quoth hee) tenne more with me, and wee will goe to\nthe next Castle, to provide for meat and other things necessary. So\nhe and tenne more with him, went their way: In the meane season, the\nresidue made a great fire and an Alter with greene turfes in the honour\nof Mars. By and by after they came againe, bringing with them bottles\nof wine, and a great number of beasts, amongst which there was a big Ram\nGoat, fat, old, and hairy, which they killed and offered unto Mars. Then\nsupper was prepared sumptuously, and the new companion said unto the\nother, You ought to accompt me not onely your Captaine in robbery\nand fight, but also in pleasures and jolity, whereupon by and by with\npleasant cheere he prepared meat, and trimming up the house he set all\nthings in order, and brought the pottage and dainty dishes to the\nTable: but above all he plyed them wel with great pots and jugs of wine.\nSometimes (seeming to fetch somewhat) hee would goe to the Maiden and\ngive her pieces of meate, which he privily tooke away, and would drinke\nunto her, which she willingly tooke in good part. Moreover, hee kissed\nher twice or thrice whereof she was well pleased but I (not well\ncontented thereat) thought in my selfe: O wretched Maid, thou hast\nforgotten thy marriage, and doest esteeme this stranger and bloudy\ntheefe above thy husband which thy Parents ordained for thee, now\nperceive I well thou hast no remorse of conscience, but more delight to\ntarry and play the harlot heere amongst so many swords. What? knowest\nthou not how the other theeves if they knew thy demeanour would put\nthee to death as they had once appointed, and so worke my destruction\nlikewise? Well now I perceive thou hast a pleasure in the dammage\nand hurt of other. While I did angerly devise with my selfe all these\nthings, I perceived by certaine signes and tokens (not ignorant to\nso wise an Asse) that he was not the notable theefe Hemus, but rather\nLepolemus her husband, for after much communication he beganne to speake\nmore franckly, not fearing at all my presence, and said, Be of good\ncheere my sweete friend Charites, for thou shalt have by and by all\nthese thy enemies captive unto thee. Then hee filled wine to the theeves\nmore and more, and never ceased, till as they were all overcome with\nabundance of meat and drinke, when as hee himselfe abstained and bridled\nhis owne appetite. And truely I did greatly suspect, least hee had\nmingled in their cups some deadly poyson, for incontinently they all\nfell downe asleepe on the ground one after an other, and lay as though\nthey had beene dead.\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER\n\nHow the Gentlewoman was carried home by her husband while the theeves\nwere asleepe, and how much Apuleius was made of.\n\nWhen the theeves were all asleepe by their great and immoderate\ndrinking, the young man Lepolemus took the Maiden and set her upon my\nbacke, and went homeward. When we were come home, all the people of the\nCitie, especially her Parents, friends, and family, came running forth\njoyfully, and the children and Maidens of the towne gathered together to\nsee this virgin in great triumph sitting upon an Asse. Then I (willing\nto shew as much joy as I might, as present occasion served) I set and\npricked up my long eares, ratled my nosethrils, and cryed stoutly, nay\nrather I made the towne to ring againe with my shrilling sound: when\nwee were come to her fathers house, shee was received in a chamber\nhonourably: as for me, Lepolemus (accompanied with a great number of\nCitizens) did presently after drive me backe againe with other horses to\nthe cave of the theeves, where wee found them all asleepe lying on the\nground as wee left them; then they first brought out all the gold, and\nsilver, and other treasure of the house, and laded us withall, which\nwhen they had done, they threw many of the theeves downe into the\nbottome of deepe ditches, and the residue they slew with their swords:\nafter this wee returned home glad and merry of so great vengeance upon\nthem, and the riches which wee carried was commited to the publike\ntreasurie. This done, the Maid was married to Lepolemus, according to\nthe law, whom by so much travell he had valiantly recovered: then my\ngood Mistresse looked about for me, and asking for me commanded the very\nsame day of her marriage, that my manger should be filled with barly,\nand that I should have hay and oats aboundantly, and she would call\nme her little Camell. But how greatly did I curse Fotis, in that shee\ntransformed me into an Asse, and not into a dogge, because I saw the\ndogges had filled their paunches with the reliks and bones of so worthy\na supper. The next day this new wedded woman (my Mistresse) did greatly\ncommend me before her Parents and husband, for the kindnesse which I had\nshewed unto her, and never leaved off untill such time as they promised\nto reward me with great honours. Then they called together all their\nfriends, and thus it was concluded: one said, that I should be closed\nin a stable and never worke, but continually to be fedde and fatted\nwith fine and chosen barly and beanes and good littour, howbeit another\nprevailed, who wishing my liberty, perswaded them that it was better\nfor me to runne in the fields amongst the lascivious horses and mares,\nwhereby I might engender some mules for my Mistresse: then he that had\nin charge to keepe the horse, was called for, and I was delivered unto\nhim with great care, insomuch that I was right pleasant and joyous,\nbecause I hoped that I should carry no more fardels nor burthens,\nmoreover I thought that when I should thus be at liberty, in the spring\ntime of the yeere when the meddows and fields were greene, I should\nfind some roses in some place, whereby I was fully perswaded that if my\nMaster and Mistresse did render to me so many thanks and honours being\nan Asse, they would much more reward me being turned into a man: but\nwhen he (to whom the charge of me was so straightly committed) had\nbrought me a good way distant from the City, I perceived no delicate\nmeates nor no liberty which I should have, but by and by his covetous\nwife and most cursed queane made me a mill Asse, and (beating me with a\ncudgill full of knots) would wring bread for her selfe and her husband\nout of my skinne. Yet was she not contented to weary me and make me a\ndrudge with carriage and grinding of her owne corne, but I was hired of\nher neighbours to beare their sackes likewise, howbeit shee would not\ngive me such meate as I should have, nor sufficient to sustaine my life\nwithall, for the barly which I ground for mine owne dinner she would\nsell to the Inhabitants by. And after that I had laboured all day, she\nwould set before me at night a little filthy branne, nothing cleane\nbut full of stones. Being in this calamity, yet fortune worked me other\ntorments, for on a day I was let loose into the fields to pasture, by\nthe commandement of my master. O how I leaped for joy, how I neighed\nto see my selfe in such liberty, but especially since I beheld so many\nMares, which I thought should be my wives and concubines; and I espied\nout and chose the fairest before I came nigh them; but this my joyfull\nhope turned into otter destruction, for incontinently all the stone\nHorses which were well fedde and made strong by ease of pasture, and\nthereby much more puissant then a poore Asse, were jealous over me, and\n(having no regard to the law and order of God Jupiter) ranne fiercely\nand terribly against me; one lifted up his forefeete and kicked me\nspitefully, another turned himselfe, and with his hinder heeles spurned\nme cruelly, the third threatning with a malicious neighing, dressed his\neares and shewing his sharpe and white teeth bit me on every side. In\nlike sort have I read in Histories how the King of Thrace would throw\nhis miserable ghests to be torne in peeces and devoured of his wild\nHorses, so niggish was that Tyrant of his provender, that he nourished\nthem with the bodies of men.\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was made a common Asse to fetch home wood, and how he was\nhandled by a boy.\n\nAfter that I was thus handled by horses, I was brought home againe to\nthe Mill, but behold fortune (insatiable of my torments) had devised a\nnew paine for me. I was appointed to bring home wood every day from a\nhigh hill, and who should drive me thither and home again, but a boy\nthat was the veriest hangman in all the world, who was not contented\nwith the great travell that I tooke in climbing up the hill, neither\npleased when he saw my hoofe torne and worne away by sharpe flintes, but\nhe beat me cruelly with a great staffe, insomuch that the marrow of my\nbones did ake for woe, for he would strike me continually on the right\nhip, and still in one place, whereby he tore my skinne and made of my\nwide sore a great hole or trench, or rather a window to looke out at,\nand although it runne downe of blood, yet would he not cease beating\nme in that place: moreover he laded me with such great burthens of wood\nthat you would thinke they had been rather prepared for Elephants then\nfor me, and when he perceived that my wood hanged more on one side then\nanother, (when he should rather take away the heavy sides, and so ease\nme, or else lift them up to make them equall with the other) he laid\ngreat stones upon the weaker side to remedy the matter, yet could be not\nbe contented with this my great misery and immoderate burthens of wood,\nbut when hee came to any river (as there were many by the way) he to\nsave his feete from water, would leape upon my loynes likewise, which\nwas no small loade upon loade. And if by adversity I had fell downe in\nany dirty or myrie place, when he should have pulled me out either with\nropes, or lifted me up by the taile, he would never helpe me, but lay\nme on from top to toe with a mighty staffe, till he had left no haire on\nall my body, no not so much as on mine eares, whereby I was compelled\nby force of blowes to stand up. The same hangman boy did invent another\ntorment for me: he gathered a great many sharp thornes as sharp as\nneedles and bound them together like a fagot, and tyed them at my\ntayle to pricke me, then was I afflicted on every side, for if I had\nindeavoured to runne away, the thornes would have pricked me, if I had\nstood still, the boy would have beaten mee, and yet the boy beate mee to\nmake me runne, whereby I perceived that the hangman did devise nothing\nelse save only to kill me by some manner of meanes, and he would sweare\nand threaten to do me worse harme, and because hee might have some\noccasion to execute his malicious minde, upon a day (after that I had\nendeavoured too much by my patience) I lifted up my heeles and spurned\nhim welfavouredly. Then he invented this vengeance against me, after\nthat he had well laded me with shrubs and rubble, and trussed it round\nupon my backe, hee brought me out into the way: then hee stole a burning\ncoale out of a mans house of the next village, and put it into the\nmiddle of the rubbell; the rubbell and shrubs being very dry, did fall\non a light fire and burned me on every side. I could see no remedy how I\nmight save my selfe, and in such a case it was not best for me to stand\nstill but fortune was favourable towards me, perhaps to reserve me for\nmore dangers, for I espyed a great hole full of raine water that fell\nthe day before, thither I ranne hastily and plunged my selfe therein, in\nsuch sort that I quenched the fire, and was delivered from that\npresent perill, but the vile boy to excuse himselfe declared to all the\nneighbours and shepheards about, that I willingly tumbled in the fire as\nI passed through the village. Then he laughed upon me saying: How long\nshall we nourish and keepe this fiery Asse in vaine?\n\n\n\n\nTHE TWENTY-NINTH CHAPTER\n\nHow Apuleius was accused of Lechery by the boy.\n\nA few dayes after, the boy invented another mischiefe: For when he had\nsold all the wood which I bare, to certaine men dwelling in a village\nby, he lead me homeward unladen: And then he cryed that he was not able\nto rule me, and that hee would not drive mee any longer to the hill for\nwood, saying: Doe you not see this slow and dulle Asse, who besides all\nthe mischiefes that he hath wrought already, inventeth daily more and\nmore. For he espyeth any woman passing by the way, whether she be old or\nmarryed, or if it be a young child, hee will throw his burthen from his\nbacke, and runneth fiercely upon them. And after that he hath thrown\nthem downe, he will stride over them to commit his buggery and beastly\npleasure, moreover hee will faine as though hee would kisse them, but\nhe will bite their faces cruelly, which thing may worke us great\ndispleasure, or rather to be imputed unto us as a crime: and even now\nwhen he espyed an honest maiden passing by die high way, he by and by\nthrew downe his wood and runne after her: And when he had throwne her\ndown upon the ground, he would have ravished her before the face of all\nthe world, had it not beene that by reason of her crying out, she was\nsuccored and pulled from his heeles, and so delivered. And if it had\nso come to passe that this fearefull maid had beene slaine by him,\nwhat danger had we beene in? By these and like lies, he provoked the\nshepheards earnestly against me, which grieved mee (God wot) full sore\nthat said nothing. Then one of the shepheards said: Why doe we not make\nsacrifice of this common adulterous Asse? My sonne (quoth he) let us\nkill him and throw his guts to the dogges, and reserve his flesh for the\nlabourers supper. Then let us cast dust upon his skinne, and carry it\nhome to our master, and say that the Woolves have devoured him. The\nboy that was my evill accuser made no delay, but prepared himselfe to\nexecute the sentence of the shepheard, rejoycing at my present danger,\nbut O how greatly did I then repent that the stripe which I gave him\nwith my heele had not killed him. Then he drew out his sword and made it\nsharp upon the whetstone to slay me, but another of the shepheards gan\nsay, Verely it is a great offence to kill so faire an Asse, and so (by\naccusation of luxurie and lascivious wantonnesse) to lack so necessarie\nhis labour and service, where otherwise if ye would cut off his stones,\nhe might not onely be deprived of his courage but also become gentle,\nthat we should be delivered from all feare and danger. Moreover he would\nbe thereby more fat and better in flesh. For I know my selfe as\nwell many Asses, as also most fierce horses, that by reason of their\nwantonnesse have beene most mad and terrible, but (when they were gelded\nand cut) they have become gentle and tame, and tractable to all use.\nWherefore I would counsell you to geld him. And if you consent thereto,\nI will by and by, when I go to the next market fetch mine irons and\ntooles for the purpose: And I ensure you after that I have gelded and\ncut off his stones, I will deliver him unto you as tame as a lambe.\nWhen I did perceive that I was delivered from death, and reserved to\nbe gelded, I was greatly sorrie, insomuch that I thought all the hinder\npart of my body and my stones did ake for woe, but I sought about to\nkill my selfe by some manner of meanes, to the end if I should die, I\nwould die with unperished members.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTIETH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow the boy that lead Apuleius to the field, was slaine in the wood.\n\nWhile I devised with my selfe in what manner I might end my life, the\nroperipe boy on the next morrow lead me to the same hill againe, and\ntied me to a bow of a great Oke, and in the meane season he tooke his\nhatchet and cut wood to load me withall, but behold there crept out of\na cave by, a marvailous great Beare, holding out his mighty head, whom\nwhen I saw, I was sodainly stroken in feare, and (throwing all the\nstrength of my body into my hinder heeles) lifted up my strained head\nand brake the halter, wherewith I was tied. Then there was no need to\nbid me runne away, for I scoured not only on foot, but tumbled over the\nstones and rocks with my body till I came into the open fields, to the\nintent I would escape from the terrible Beare, but especially from the\nboy that was worse than the Beare. Then a certaine stranger that passed\nby the way (espying me alone as a stray Asse) tooke me up and roade upon\nmy backe, beating me with a staffe (which he bare in his hand) through a\nwide and unknowne lane, whereat I was nothing displeased, but willingly\nwent forward to avoid the cruell paine of gelding, which the shepherds\nhad ordained for me, but as for the stripes I was nothing moved, since\nI was accustomed to be beaten so every day. But evill fortune would not\nsuffer me to continue in so good estate long: For the shepheards looking\nabout for a Cow that they had lost (after they had sought in divers\nplaces) fortuned to come upon us unwares, who when they espied and knew\nme, they would have taken me by the halter, but he that rode upon my\nbacke resisted them saying, O Lord masters, what intend you to do? Will\nyou rob me? Then said the shepheards, What? thinkest thou we handle thee\notherwise then thou deservest, which hast stollen away our Asse? Why\ndost thou not rather tell us where thou hast hidden the boy whom thou\nhast slaine? And therewithall they pulled him downe to the ground,\nbeating him with their fists, and spurning him with their feete. Then he\nanswered unto them saying, titathat he saw no manner of boy, but onely\nfound the Asse loose and straying abroad, which he tooke up to the\nintent to have some reward for the finding of him and to restore him\nagaine to his Master. And I would to God (quoth he) that this Asse\n(which verely was never seene) could speake as a man to give witnesse of\nmine innocency: Then would you be ashamed of the injury which you have\ndone to me. Thus (reasoning for Himselfe) he nothing prevailed, for they\ntied the halter about my necke, and (maugre his face) pulled me quite\naway, and lead me backe againe through the woods of the hill to the\nplace where the boy accustomed to resort. And after they could find him\nin no place, at length they found his body rent and torne in peeces, and\nhis members dispersed in sundry places, which I well knew was done\nby the cruell Beare: and verely I would have told it if I might have\nspoken, but (which I could onely do) I greatly rejoiced at his death,\nalthough it came too late. Then they gathered together the peeces of his\nbody and buried them. By and by they laid the fault to my new Master,\nthat tooke me up by the way, and (bringing him home fast bound to their\nhouses) purposed on the next morrow to accuse him of murther, and to\nlead him before the Justices to have judgement of death.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTY-FIRST CHAPTER\n\nHow Apuleius was cruelly beaten by the Mother of the boy that was\nslaine.\n\nIn the meane season, while the Parents of the boy did lament and weepe\nfor the death of their sonne, the shepheard (according to his promise)\ncame with his instruments and tooles to geld me. Then one of them said,\nTush we little esteeme the mischiefe he did yesterday, but now we are\ncontented that to morrow his stones shall not onely be cut off, but also\nhis head. So was it brought to passe, that my death was delayed till the\nnext morrow, but what thanks did I give to that good boy, who (being so\nslaine) was the cause of my pardon for one short day. Howbeit I had\nno time then to rest my selfe, for the Mother of the boy, weeping and\nlamenting for his death, attired in mourning vesture, tare her haire\nand beat her breast, and came presently into the stable, saying, Is it\nreason that this carelesse beast should do nothing all day but hold\nhis head in the manger, filling and belling his guts with meat without\ncompassion of my great miserie, or remembrance of the pittiful death of\nhis slaine Master: and contemning my age and infirmity, thinketh that I\nam unable to revenge his mischiefs, moreover he would perswade me, that\nhe were not culpable. Indeed, it is a convenient thing to looke and\nplead for safety, when as the conscience doeth confesse the offence, as\ntheeves and malefactors accustome to do. But O good Lord, thou cursed\nbeast, if thou couldest utter the contents of thine owne mind, whom\n(though it were the veriest foole in all the world) mightest thou\nperswade that this murther was voide or without thy fault, when as it\nlay in thy power, either to keepe off the theeves with thy heeles, or\nelse to bite and teare them with thy teeth? Couldest not thou (that so\noften in his life time diddest spurne and kicke him) defend him now at\nthe point of death by the like meane? Yet at least, thou shouldest have\ntaken him upon thy backe, and so brought him from the cruell hands of\nthe theeves: where contrary thou runnest away alone, forsaking thy good\nMaster, thy pastor and conductor. Knowest thou not, that such as denie\ntheir wholsome help and aid to them which lie in danger of death, ought\nto be punished, because they have offended against good manners, and\nthe law naturall? But I promise thee, thou shalt not long rejoyce at my\nharmes, thou shalt feele the smart of thy homicide and offence, I will\nsee what I can doe. And therewithall she unclosed her apron, and bound\nall my feete together, to the end I might not help my selfe, then she\ntooke a great barre, which accustomed to bar the stable doore, and never\nceased beating me till she was so weary that the bar fell out of her\nhands, whereupon she (complaining of the soone faintnesse of her armes)\nran to her fire and brought a firebrand and thrust it under my taile,\nburning me continually, till such time as (having but one remedy) I\narayed her face and eies with my durty dunge, whereby (what with the\nstinke thereof, and what with the filthinesse that fell in her eies) she\nwas welnigh blinded: so I enforced the queane to leave off, otherwise I\nhad died as Meleager did by the sticke, which his mad mother Althea cast\ninto the fire.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE EIGHTH BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTY-SECOND CHAPTER\n\n\nHow a young man came and declared the miserable death of Lepolemus and\nhis wife Charites.\n\nAbout midnight came a young man, which seemed to be one of the family\nof the good woman Charites, who sometimes endured so much misery and\ncalamity with mee amongst the theeves, who after that hee had taken\na stoole, and sate downe before the fireside, in the company of the\nservants, began to declare many terrible things that had happened unto\nthe house of Charites, saying: O yee house-keepers, shepheards and\ncowheards, you shall understand that wee have lost our good mistris\nCharites miserably and by evill adventure: and to the end you may learne\nand know all the whole matter, I purpose to tell you the circumstances\nof every point, whereby such as are more learned then I (to whom fortune\nhath ministred more copious stile) may painte it out in paper in forme\nof an History. There was a young Gentleman dwelling in the next City,\nborne of good parentage, valiant in prowesse, and riche in substance,\nbut very much given and adicted to whorehunting, and continuall\nrevelling. Whereby he fell in company with Theeves, and had his hand\nready to the effusion of humane blood; his name was Thrasillus. The\nmatter was this according to the report of every man. Hee demanded\nCharites in marriage, who although he were a man more comely then the\nresidue that wooed her, and also had riches abundantly, yet because he\nwas of evill fame, and a man of wicked manners and conversation, he\nhad the repulse and was put off by Charites, and so she married with\nLepolemus. Howbeit this young man secretly loved her, yet moved somewhat\nat her refusall, hee busily searched some meanes to worke his damnable\nintent. And (having found occasion and opportunity to accomplish his\npurpose, which he had long time concealed) brought to passe, that the\nsame day that Charites was delivered by the subtill meane and valiant\naudacity of her husband, from the puissance of the Theeves, he mingled\nhimselfe among the assembly, faining that he was glad of the new\nmarriage, and comming home againe of the maiden, Whereby (by reason that\nhe came of so noble parents) he was received and entertained into the\nhouse as one of their chiefe and principall friends: Howbeit under\ncloake of a faithfull welwiller, hee dissimuled his mischievous mind\nand intent: in continuance of time by much familiarity and often\nconversation and banketting together, he fell more and more in favour,\nlike as we see it fortuneth to Lovers, who first doe little delight\nthemselves in love: till as by continuall acquaintance they kisse and\nimbrace each other. Thrasillus perceiving that it was a hard matter to\nbreake his minde secretly to Charites, whereby he was wholly barred\nfrom the accomplishment of his luxurious appetite, and on the other side\nperceiving that the love of her and her husband was so strongly lincked\ntogether, that the bond betweene them might in no wise be dissevered,\nmoreover, it was a thing impossible to ravish her, although he had\nconsented thereto, yet was hee still provoked forward by vehement lust,\nwhen as hee saw himselfe unable to bring his purpose to passe. Howbeit\nat length the thing which seemed so hard and difficill, thorough hope of\nhis fortified love, did now appeare easie and facill: but marke I pray\nyou diligently to what end the furious force of his inordinate desire\ncame. On a day Lepolemus went to the chase with Thrasillus, to hunt for\nGoates, for his wife Charites desired him earnestly to meddle with no\nother beasts, which were of more fierce and wilde nature. When they were\ncome within the chase to a great thicket fortressed about with bryers\nand thornes, they compassed round with their Dogs and beset every place\nwith nets: by and by warning was given to let loose. The Dogs rushed in\nwith such a cry, that all the Forrest rang againe with the noyse, but\nbehold there leaped out no Goat, nor Deere, nor gentle Hinde, but an\nhorrible and dangerous wild Boare, hard and thicke skinned, bristeled\nterribly with thornes, foming at the mouth, grinding his teeth, and\nlooking direfully with fiery eyes. The Dogs that first set upon him, he\ntare and rent with his tuskes, and then he ranne quite through the nets,\nand escaped away. When wee saw the fury of this beast, wee were greatly\nstriken with feare, and because wee never accustomed to chase such\ndreadfull Boares, and further because we were unarmed and without\nweapons, we got and hid our selves under bushes and trees. Then\nThrasillus having found opportunity to worke his treason, said to\nLepolemus: What stand we here amazed? Why show we our selves like\ndastards? Why leese we so worthy a prey with our feminine hearts? Let us\nmount upon our Horses, and pursue him incontinently: take you a hunting\nstaffe, and I will take a chasing speare. By and by they leaped upon\ntheir Horses, and followed the beast. But hee returning against them\nwith furious force, pryed with his eyes, on whom hee might first assayle\nwith his tuskes: Lepolemus strooke the beast first on the backe with his\nhunting staffe. Thrasillus faining to ayde and assist him, came behind,\nand cut off the hinder legges of Lepolemus Horse, in such sort that hee\nfell downe to the ground with his master: and sodainely the Boare came\nupon Lepolemus and furiously tare and rent him with his teeth. Howbeit,\nThrasillus was not sufficed to see him thus wounded, but when he desired\nhis friendly help, he thrust Lepolemus through the right thigh with his\nspeare, the more because he thought the wound of the speare would be\ntaken for a wound of the Boars teeth, then he killed the beast likewise,\nAnd when he was thus miserably slaine, every one of us came out of our\nholes, and went towards our slaine master. But although that Thrasillus\nwas joyfull of the death of Lepolemus, whom he did greatly hate, yet he\ncloked the matter with a sorrowfull countenance, he fained a dolorous\nface, he often imbraced the body which himselfe slew, he played all the\nparts of a mourning person, saving there fell no teares from his eyes.\nThus hee resembled us in each point, who verily and not without occasion\nhad cause to lament for our master, laying all the blame of this\nhomicide unto the Boare. Incontinently after the sorrowfull newes of the\ndeath of Lepolemus, came to the eares of all the family, but especially\nto Charites, who after she had heard such pitifull tydings, as a mad\nand raging woman, ran up and down the streets, crying and howling\nlamentably. All the Citizens gathered together, and such as they met\nbare them company running towards the chasse. When they came to the\nslaine body of Lepolemus, Charites threw her selfe upon him weeping and\nlamenting grievously for his death, in such sort, that she would have\npresently ended her life, upon the corps of her slaine husband, whom\nshee so entirely loved, had it not beene that her parents and friends\ndid comfort her, and pulled her away. The body was taken up, and in\nfunerall pompe brought to the City and buried. In the meane season,\nThrasillus fained much sorrow for the death of Lepolemus, but in his\nheart he was well pleased and joyfull. And to counterfeit the matter, he\nwould come to Charites and say: O what a losse have I had of my friend,\nmy fellow, my companion Lepolemus? O Charites comfort your selfe,\npacifie your dolour, refraine your weeping, beat not your breasts: and\nwith such other and like words and divers examples he endeavoured to\nsuppresse her great sorrow, but he spake not this for any other intent\nbut to win the heart of the woman, and to nourish his odious love with\nfilthy delight. Howbeit Charites after the buriall of her husband sought\nthe meanes to follow him, and (not sustaining the sorrows wherein she\nwas Wrapped) got her secretly into a chamber and purposed to finish\nher life there with dolour and tribulation. But Thrasillus was very\nimportunate, and at length brought to passe, that at the intercession of\nthe Parents and friends of Charites, she somewhat refreshed her fallen\nmembers with refection of meate and baine. Howbeit, she did it more at\nthe commandement of her Parents, then for any thing else: for she could\nin no wise be merry, nor receive any comfort, but tormented her selfe\nday and night before the Image of her husband which she made like unto\nBacchus, and rendred unto him divine honours and services. In the meane\nseason Thrasillus not able to refraine any longer, before Charites had\nasswaged her dolor, before her troubled mind had pacified her fury, even\nin the middle of all her griefes, while she tare her haire and rent her\ngarments, demanded her in marriage, and so without shame, he detected\nthe secrets and unspeakeable deceipts of his heart. But Charites\ndetested and abhorred his demand, and as she had beene stroken with some\nclap of thunder, with some storme, or with the lightning of Jupiter, she\npresently fell downe to the ground all amazed. Howbeit when her spirits\nwere revived and that she returned to her selfe, perceiving that\nThrasillus was so importunate, she demanded respite to deliberate and to\ntake advise on the matter. In the meane season, the shape of Lepolemus\nthat was slaine so miserably, appeared to Charites saying, O my sweet\nwife (which no other person can say but I) I pray thee for the love\nwhich is betweene us two, if there he any memorie of me in thy heart, or\nremembrance of my pittifull death, marry with any other person, so that\nthou marry not with the traitour Thrasillus, have no conference with\nhim, eate not with him, lie not with him, avoid the bloudie hand of\nmine enemie, couple not thy selfe with a paricide, for those wounds (the\nbloud whereof thy teares did wash away) were not the wounds of the teeth\nof the Boare, but the speare of Thrasillus, that deprived me from thee.\nThus spake Lepolemus, unto his loving wife, and declared the residue of\nthe damnable fact. Then Charites, awaking from sleepe, began to renew\nher dolour, to teare her garments, and to beate her armes with her\ncomely hands, howbeit she revealed the vision which she saw to no manner\nof person, but dissimuling that she knew no part of the mischiefe,\ndevised with her selfe how she might be revenged on the traitor, and\nfinish her owne life to end and knit up all sorrow. Incontinently came\nThrasillus, the detestable demander of sodaine pleasure, and wearied the\nclosed eares of Charites with talke of marriage, but she gently refused\nhis communication, and coloring the matter, with passing craft in the\nmiddest of his earnest desires gan say, Thrasillus you shall understand\nthat yet the face of your brother and my husband, is alwayes before mine\neies, I smell yet the Cinamon sent of his pretious body, I yet feele\nLepolemus alive in my heart: wherefore you shall do well if you grant to\nme miserable woman, necessarie time to bewaile his death, that after the\nresidue of a few months, the whole yeare may be expired, which thing\ntoucheth as well my shame as your wholsome profit, lest peradventure by\nyour speed and quicke marriage we should justly raise and provoke the\nspirit of my husband to worke our destruction. Howbeit, Thrasillus\nwas not contented with this promise, but more and more came upon her:\nInsomuch, that she was enforced to speake to him in this manner: My\nfriend Thrasillus, if thou be so contented untill the whole yeare be\ncompleate and finished, behold here is my bodie, take thy pleasure, but\nin such sort and so secret that no servant of the house may perceive\nit. Then Thrasillus trusting to the false promises of the woman, and\npreferring his inordinate pleasure above all things in the world, was\njoyfull in his heart and looked for night, when as he might have his\npurpose. But come thou about midnight (quoth Charites) disguised without\ncompanie, and doe but hisse at my chamber doore, and my nourse shall\nattend and let thee in. This counsell pleased Thrasillus marveilously,\nwho (suspecting no harme) did alwaies looke for night, and the houre\nassigned by Charites. The time was scarce come, when as (according\nto her commandement) he disguised himselfe, and went straight to the\nchamber, where he found the nourse attending for him, who (by the\nappointment of her Mistresse) fed him with flattering talke, and gave\nhim mingled and doled drinke in a cup, excusing the absence of her\nMistresse Charites, by reason that she attended on her Father being\nsick, untill such time, that with sweet talke and operation of the\nwine, he fell in a sound sleepe: Now when he lay prostrate on the ground\nreadie to all adventure, Charites (being called for) came in, and with\nmanly courage and bold force stood over the sleeping murderer, saying:\nBehold the faithfull companion of my husband, behold this valiant\nhunter; behold me deere spouse, this is the hand which shed my bloud,\nthis is the heart which hath devised so many subtill meanes to worke my\ndestruction, these be the eies whom I have ill pleased, behold now they\nforeshew their owne destinie: sleepe carelesse, dreame that thou art in\nthe hands of the mercifull, for I will not hurt thee with thy sword or\nany other weapon: God forbid that I should slay thee as thou slewest my\nhusband, but thy eies shall faile thee, and thou shalt see no more, then\nthat whereof thou dreamest: Thou shalt thinke the death of thine enemie\nmore sweet then thy life: Thou shalt see no light, thou shalt lacke the\naide of a leader, thou shalt not have me as thou hopest, thou shalt have\nno delight of my marriage, thou shalt not die, and yet living thou shalt\nhave no joy, but wander betweene light and darknesse as an unsure Image:\nthou shalt seeke for the hand that pricked out thine eies, yet shalt\nthou not know of whom thou shouldest complaine: I will make sacrifice\nwith the bloud of thine eies upon the grave of my husband. But what\ngainest thou through my delay? Perhaps thou dreamest that thou embracest\nme in thy armes: leave off the darknesse of sleepe and awake thou to\nreceive a penall deprivation of thy sight, lift up thy face, regard thy\nvengeance and evill fortune, reckon thy miserie; so pleaseth thine eies\nto a chast woman, that thou shall have blindnesse to thy companion, and\nan everlasting remorse of thy miserable conscience. When she had spoken\nthese words, she tooke a great needle from her head and pricked out both\nhis eies: which done, she by and by caught the naked sword which her\nhusband Lepolemus accustomed to weare, and ranne throughout all the\nCitie like a mad woman towards the Sepulchre of her husband. Then all\nwe of the house, with all the Citizens, ranne incontinently after her\nto take the sword out of her hand, but she clasping about the tombe of\nLepolemus, kept us off with her naked weapon, and when she perceived\nthat every one of us wept and lamented, she spake in this sort: I pray\nyou my friends weepe not, nor lament for me, for I have revenged the\ndeath of my husband, I have punished deservedly the wicked breaker\nof our marriage; now is it time to seeke out my sweet Lepolemus, and\npresently with this sword to finish my life. And therewithall after she\nhad made relation of the whole matter, declared the vision which she\nsaw and told by what meane she deceived Thrasillus, thrusting her sword\nunder her right brest, and wallowing in her owne bloud, at length with\nmanly courage yeelded up the Ghost. Then immediately the friends\nof miserable Charites did bury her body within the same Sepulchre.\nThrasillus hearing all the matter, and knowing not by what meanes he\nmight end his life, for he thought his sword was not sufficient to\nrevenge so great a crime, at length went to the same Sepulchre, and\ncryed with a lowd voice, saying: o yee dead spirites whom I have so\nhighly and greatly offended, vouchsafe to receive me, behold I make\nSacrifice unto you with my whole body: which said, hee closed the\nSepulchre, purposing to famish himselfe, and to finish his life there\nin sorrow. These things the young man with pitifull sighes and teares,\ndeclared unto the Cowheards and Shepheards, which caused them all to\nweepe: but they fearing to become subject unto new masters, prepared\nthemselves to depart away.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTY-THIRD CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was lead away by the Horsekeeper: and what danger he was\nin.\n\nBy and by the Horsekeeper, to whom the charge of me was committed,\nbrought forth all his substance, and laded me and other Horses withall,\nand so departed thence: we bare women, children, pullets, sparrowes,\nkiddes, whelpes, and other things which were not able to keepe pace\nwith us, and that which I bare upon my backe, although it was a mighty\nburthen, yet seemed it very light because I was driven away from him\nthat most terribly had appointed to kill me. When we had passed over\na great mountaine full of trees, and were come againe into the open\nfields, behold we approached nigh to a faire and rich Castell, where\nit was told unto us that we were not able to passe in our journey that\nnight, by reason of the great number of terrible Wolves which were\nin the Country about, so fierce and cruell that they put every man\nin feare, in such sort that they would invade and set upon such\nwhich passed by like theeves, and devoure both them and their beasts.\nMoreover, we were advertised that there lay in the way where we should\npasse, many dead bodies eaten and torne with wolves. Wherefore we were\nwilled to stay there all night, and on the next morning, to goe close\nand round together, whereby we might passe and escape all dangers.\nBut (notwithstanding this good counsell) our caitife drivers were so\ncovetous to goe forward, and so fearefull of pursuite, that they never\nstayed till the morning: But being welnigh midnight, they made us trudge\nin our way apace. Then I fearing the great danger which might happen,\nran amongst the middle of the other Horses, to the end I might defend\nand save my poore buttocks from the Wolves, whereat every man much\nmarvelled to see, that I scowred away swifter then the other Horses. But\nsuch was my agility, not to get me any prayse, but rather for feare: at\nthat time I remembered with my selfe, that the valiant Horse Pegasus did\nfly in the ayre more to avoyd the danger of dreadful Chimera, then for\nany thing else. The shepheards which drave us before them were well\narmed like warriours: one had a speare, another had a sheepehooke, some\nhad darts, some clubbes, some gathered up great stones, some held up\ntheir sharp Javelings, and some feared away the Woolves with light\nfirebrands. Finally wee lacked nothing to make up an Army, but onely\nDrummes and Trumpets. But when we had passed these dangers, not without\nsmall feare, wee fortuned to fall into worse, for the Woolves came not\nupon us, either because of the great multitude of our company, or else\nbecause [of] our firebrands, or peradventure they were gone to some\nother place, for wee could see none, but the Inhabitants of the next\nvillages (supposing that wee were Theeves by reason of the great\nmultitude) for the defence of their owne substance, and for the feare\nthat they were in, set great and mighty masties upon us, which they had\nkept and nourished for the safety of their houses, who compassing us\nround about leaped on every side, tearing us with their teeth, in\nsuch sort that they pulled many of us to the ground: verily it was a\npittifull sight to see so many Dogs, some following such as flyed, some\ninvading such as stood still, some tearing those which lay prostrate,\nbut generally there were none which escaped cleare: Behold upon this\nanother danger ensued, the Inhabitants of the Towne stood in their\ngarrets and windowes, throwing great stones upon our heads, that wee\ncould not tell whether it were best for us to avoyd the gaping mouthes\nof the Dogges at hand or the perill of the stones afarre, amongst whome\nthere was one that hurled a great flint upon a woman, which sate upon my\nbacke, who cryed out pitiously, desiring her husband to helpe her. Then\nhe (comming to succour and ayd his wife) beganne to speake in this\nsort: Alas masters, what mean you to trouble us poore labouring men so\ncruelly? What meane you to revenge your selves upon us, that doe you no\nharme? What thinke you to gaine by us? You dwell not in Caves or Dennes:\nyou are no people barbarous, that you should delight in effusion of\nhumane blood. At these words the tempest of stones did cease, and the\nstorme of the Dogges vanished away. Then one (standing on the toppe of\na great Cypresse tree) spake unto us saying: Thinke you not masters that\nwe doe this to the intent to rifle or take away any of your goods, but\nfor the safeguard of our selves and family: now a Gods name you may\ndepart away. So we went forward, some wounded with stones, some bitten\nwith Dogs, but generally there was none which escaped free.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTY-FOURTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow the shepheards determined to abide in a certaine wood to cure their\nwounds.\n\nWhen we had gone a good part of our way, we came to a certaine wood\ninvironed with great trees and compassed about with pleasant meddowes,\nwhereas the Shepheards appointed to continue a certaine space to cure\ntheir wounds and sores; then they sate downe on the ground to refresh\ntheir wearie minds, and afterwards they sought for medicines, to heale\ntheir bodies: some washed away their blood with the water of the running\nRiver: some stopped their wounds with Spunges and cloutes, in this\nmanner every one provided for his owne safety. In the meane season wee\nperceived an old man, who seemed to be a Shepheard, by reason of the\nGoates and Sheep that fed round about him. Then one of our company\ndemanded whether he had any milke, butter, or cheese to sell. To whom he\nmade answere saying: Doe you looke for any meate or drinke, or any other\nrefection here? Know you not in what place you be?\n\nAnd therewithall he tooke his sheepe and drave them away as fast as he\nmight possible. This answere made our shepheards greatly to feare, that\nthey thought of nothing else, but to enquire what Country they were\nin: Howbeit they saw no manner of person of whom they might demand. At\nlength as they were thus in doubt, they perceived another old man with a\nstaffe in his hand very weary with travell, who approaching nigh to our\ncompany, began to weepe and complaine saying: Alas masters I pray you\nsuccour me miserable caitife, and restore my nephew to me againe, that\nby following a sparrow that flew before him, is fallen into a ditch\nhereby, and verily I thinke he is in danger of death. As for me, I am\nnot able to helpe him out by reason of mine old age, but you that are so\nvaliant and lusty may easily helpe me herein, and deliver me my boy,\nmy heire and guide of my life. These words made us all to pity him. And\nthen the youngest and stoutest of our company, who alone escaped best\nthe late skirmish of Dogges and stones, rose up and demanded in what\nditch the boy was fallen: Mary (quod he) yonder, and pointed with his\nfinger, and brought him to a great thicket of bushes and thornes where\nthey both entred in. In the meane season, after we cured our wounds, we\ntooke up our packs, purposing to depart away. And because we would not\ngoe away without the young man our fellow: The shepheards whistled and\ncalled for him, but when he gave no answer, they sent one out of their\ncompany to seeke him out, who after a while returned againe with a pale\nface and sorrowfull newes, saying that he saw a terrible Dragon eating\nand devouring their companion: and as for the old man, hee could see him\nin no place. When they heard this, (remembring likewise the words of the\nfirst old man that shaked his head, and drave away his sheep) they\nran away beating us before them, to fly from this desart and pestilent\nCountry.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTY-FIFTH CHAPTER\n\nHow a woman killed her selfe and her child, because her husband haunted\nharlots.\n\nAfter that we had passed a great part of our journey, we came to a\nvillage where we lay all night, but harken, and I will tell you what\nmischiefe happened there: you shall understand there was a servant to\nwhom his Master had committed the whole government of his house, and was\nMaster of the lodging where we lay: this servant had married a Maiden\nof the same house, howbeit he was greatly in love with a harlot of the\ntowne, and accustomed to resort unto her, wherewith his wife was so\nhighly displeased and became so jealous, that she gathered together all\nher husbands substance, with his tales and books of account, and threw\nthem into a light fire: she was not contented with this, but she tooke\na cord and bound her child which she had by her husband, about her\nmiddle and cast her selfe headlong into a deepe pit. The Master taking\nin evill part the death of these twaine, tooke his servant which was the\ncause of this murther by his luxurie, and first after that he had put\noff all his apparell, he annointed his body with honey, and then bound\nhim sure to a fig-tree, where in a rotten stocke a great number of\nPismares had builded their neasts, the Pismares after they had felt the\nsweetnesse of the honey came upon his body, and by little and little (in\ncontinuance of time) devoured all his flesh, in such sort, that there\nremained on the tree but his bare bones: this was declared unto us by\nthe inhabitants of the village there, who greatly sorrowed for the death\nof this servant: then we avoiding likewise from this dreadfull lodging\nincontinently departed away.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTY-SIXTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was cheapned by divers persons, and how they looked in his\nmouth to know his age.\n\nAfter this we came to a faire Citie very populous, where our shepheards\ndetermined to continue, by reason that it seemed a place where they\nmight live unknowne, far from such as should pursue them, and because it\nwas a countrey very plentifull of corne and other victuals, where when\nwe had remained the space of three dayes, and that I poore Asse and\nthe other horses were fed and kept in the stable to the intent we might\nseeme more saleable, we were brought out at length to the market, and\nby and by a crier sounded with his horne to notifie that we were to be\nsold: all my companion horses were bought up by Gentlemen, but as for\nme I stood still forsaken of all men. And when many buiers came by and\nlooked in my mouth to know mine age, I was so weary with opening my\njawes that at length (unable to endure any longer) when one came with a\nstinking paire of hands and grated my gummes with his filthy fingers, I\nbit them cleane off, which thing caused the standers by to forsake me as\nbeing a fierce and cruell beast: the crier when he had gotten a hoarse\nvoice with crying, and saw that no man would buy me, began to mocke\nme saying, To what end stand we here with this wilde Asse, this feeble\nbeast, this slow jade with worne hooves, good for nothing but to make\nsives of his skin? Why do we not give him to some body for he earneth\nnot his hay? In this manner he made all the standers by to laugh\nexceedingly, but my evill fortune which was ever so cruell against me,\nwhom I by travell of so many countreys could in no wise escape, did more\nand more envie me, with invention of new meanes to afflict my poore body\nin giving me a new Master as spitefull as the rest. There was an old man\nsomewhat bald, with long and gray haire, one of the number of those that\ngo from door to door, throughout all the villages, bearing the Image of\nthe goddesse Syria, and playing with Cimbals to get the almes of good\nand charitable folks, this old man came hastely towards the cryer, and\ndemanded where I was bred: Marry (quoth he) in Cappadocia: Then he\nenquired what age I was of, the cryer answered as a Mathematician, which\ndisposed to me my Planets, that I was five yeares old, and willed the\nold man to looke in my mouth: For I would not willingly (quoth he) incur\nthe penalty of the law Cornelia, in selling a free Citizen for a servile\nslave, buy a Gods name this faire beast to ride home on, and about in\nthe countrey: But this curious buier did never stint to question of my\nqualities, and at length he demanded whether I were gentle or no: Gentle\n(quoth the crier) as gentle as a Lambe, tractable to all use, he will\nnever bite, he will never kicke, but you would rather thinke that under\nthe shape of an Asse there were some well advised man, which verely you\nmay easily conject, for if you would thrust your nose in his taile you\nshall perceive how patient he is: Thus the cryer mocked the old man, but\nhe perceiving his taunts and jests, waxed very angry saying, Away doting\ncryer, I pray the omnipotent and omniparent goddesse Syria, Saint Sabod,\nBellona, with her mother Idea, and Venus, with Adonis, to strike out\nboth thine eies, that with taunting mocks hast scoffed me in this sort:\nDost thou thinke that I will put a goddesse upon the backe of any fierce\nbeast, whereby her divine Image should be throwne downe on the ground,\nand so I poore miser should be compelled (tearing my haire) to looke\nfor some Physition to helpe her? When I heard him speake thus, I thought\nwith my selfe sodainly to leap upon him like a mad Asse, to the intent\nhe should not buy me, but incontinently there came another Marchant that\nprevented my thought, and offered 17 Pence for me, then my Master was\nglad and received the money, and delivered me to my new Master who was\ncalled Phelibus, and he caried his new servant home, and before he came\nto his house, he called out his daughters saying, Behold my daughters,\nwhat a gentle servant I have bought for you: then they were marvailous\nglad, and comming out pratling and shouting for joy, thought verely that\nhe had brought home a fit and conveniable servant for their purpose,\nbut when they perceived that it was an Asse, they began to provoke him,\nsaying that he had not bought a servant for his Maidens, but rather an\nAsse for himselfe. Howbeit (quoth they) keepe him not wholly for your\nowne riding, but let us likewise have him at commandement. Therewithall\nthey led me into the stable, and tied me to the manger: there was\na certaine yong man with a mighty body, wel skilled in playing on\ninstruments before the gods to get money, who (as soone as he had espied\nme) entertained me verie well, for he filled my racke and maunger full\nof meat, and spake merrily saying, O master Asse, you are very welcome,\nnow you shall take my office in hand, you are come to supply my roome,\nand to ease me of my miserable labour: but I pray God thou maist\nlong live and please my Master well, to the end thou maist continually\ndeliver me from so great paine. When I heard these words I did\nprognosticate my miserie to come.\n\nThe day following I saw there a great number of persons apparelled in\ndivers colours, having painted faces, mitres on their heads, vestiments\ncoloured like saffron, Surplesses of silke, and on their feet yellow\nshooes, who attired the goddesse in a robe of Purple, and put her\nupon my backe. Then they went forth with their armes naked to their\nshoulders, bearing with them great swords and mightie axes, and dancing\nlike mad persons. After that we had passed many small villages, we\nfortuned to come to one Britunis house, where at our first entrie they\nbegan to hurle themselves hither and thither, as though they were mad.\nThey made a thousand gestures with their feete and their hands, they\nwould bite themselves, finally, every one tooke his weapon and wounded\nhis armes in divers places.\n\nAmongst whom there was one more mad then the rest, that let many deepe\nsighes from the bottome of his heart, as though he had beene ravished in\nspirite, or replenished with divine power. And after that, he somewhat\nreturning to himselfe, invented and forged a great lye, saying, that\nhe had displeased the divine majesty of the goddesse, by doing of some\nthing which was not convenable to the order of their holy religion,\nwherefore he would doe vengeance of himselfe: and therewithall he\ntooke a whip, and scourged his owne body, that the bloud issued out\naboundantly, which thing caused me greatly to feare, to see such wounds\nand effusion of bloud, least the same goddesse desiring so much the\nbloud of men, should likewise desire the bloud of an Asse. After they\nwere wearie with hurling and beating themselves, they sate downe, and\nbehold, the inhabitants came in, and offered gold, silver, vessels of\nwine, milke, cheese, flower, wheate and other things: amongst whom there\nwas one, that brought barly to the Asse that carried the goddesse, but\nthe greedie whoresons thrust all into their sacke, which they brought\nfor the purpose and put it upon my backe, to the end I might serve for\ntwo purposes, that is to say, for the barne by reason of my corne, and\nfor the Temple by reason of the goddesse. In this sort, they went from\nplace to place, robbing all the Countrey over. At length they came to a\ncertaine Castle where under colour of divination, they brought to passe\nthat they obtained a fat sheepe of a poore husbandman for the goddesse\nsupper and to make sacrifice withall. After that the banket was\nprepared, they washed their bodies, and brought in a tall young man of\nthe village, to sup with them, who had scarce tasted a few pottage, when\nhee began to discover their beastly customes and inordinate desire of\nluxury. For they compassed him round about, sitting at the table, and\nabused the young man, contrary to all nature and reason. When I beheld\nthis horrible fact, I could not but attempt to utter my mind and say, O\nmasters, but I could pronounce no more but the first letter O, which I\nroared out so valiantly, that the young men of the towne seeking for a\nstraie Asse, that they had lost the same night, and hearing my voice,\nwhereby they judged that I had beene theirs, entred into the house\nunwares, and found these persons committing their vile abhomination,\nwhich when they saw, they declared to all the inhabitants by, their\nunnatural villany, mocking and laughing at this the pure and cleane\nchastity of their religion. In the meane season, Phelibus and his\ncompany, (by reason of the bruit which was dispersed throughout all the\nregion there of their beastly wickednesse) put all their trumpery upon\nmy backe, and departed away about midnight. When we had passed a great\npart of our journey, before the rising of the Sun, we came into a wild\ndesart, where they conspired together to slay me. For after they had\ntaken the goddesse from my backe and set her gingerly upon the ground,\nthey likewise tooke off my harnesse, and bound me surely to an Oake,\nbeating me with their whip, in such sort that all my body was mortified.\nAmongst whom there was one that threatened to cut off my legs with his\nhatchet, because by my noyse I diffamed his chastity, but the other\nregarding more their owne profit than my utility, thought best to spare\nmy life, because I might carry home the goddesse. So they laded me\nagaine, driving me before them with their naked swords, till they came\nto a noble City: where the principall Patrone bearing high reverence\nunto the goddesse, Came in great devotion before us with Tympany,\nCymbals, and other instruments, and received her, and all our company\nwith much sacrifice and veneration. But there I remember, I thought my\nselfe in most danger, for there was one that brought to the Master\nof the house, a side of a fat Bucke for a present, which being hanged\nbehind the kitchin doore, not far from the ground, was cleane eaten\nup by a gray hound, that came in. The Cooke when he saw the Venison\ndevoured, lamented and wept pitifully. And because supper time\napproached nigh, when as he should be reproved of too much negligence,\nhe tooke a halter to hang himselfe: but his wife perceiving whereabout\nhe went, ran incontinently to him, and taking the halter in both her\nhands, stopped him of his purpose, saying, O husband, are you out of\nyour writs? pray husband follow my counsel, cary this strange Asse out\ninto some secret place and kill him, which done, cut off one of his\nsides, and sawce it well like the side of the Bucke, and set it before\nyour Master. Then the Cooke hearing the counsell of his wife, was well\npleased to slay me to save himselfe: and so he went to the whetstone, to\nsharpe his tooles accordingly.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE NINTH BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius saved himselfe from the Cooke, breaking his halter, and of\nother things that happened.\n\nIn this manner the traiterous Cooke prepared himselfe to slay me: and\nwhen he was ready with his knives to doe his feat, I devised with my\nselfe how I might escape the present perill, and I did not long delay:\nfor incontinently I brake the halter wherewith I was tied, and flinging\nmy heeles hither and thither to save my selfe, at length I ran hastily\ninto a Parlour, where the Master of the house was feasting with the\nPriests of the goddesse Syria, and disquieted all the company, throwing\ndowne their meats and drinks from the table. The Master of the house\ndismayed at my great disorder, commanded one of his servants to take me\nup, and locke me in some strong place, to the end I might disturb them\nno more. But I little regarded my imprisonment, considering that I\nwas happily delivered from the hands of the traiterous Cooke. Howbeit\nfortune, or the fatall disposition of the divine providence, which\nneither can be avoided by wise counsell, neither yet by any wholesome\nremedie, invented a new torment, for by and by a young ladde came\nrunning into the Parlour all trembling, and declared to the Master of\nthe house, that there was a madde Dog running about in the streetes,\nwhich had done much harme, for he had bitten many grey hounds and horses\nin the Inne by: And he spared neither man nor beast. For there was one\nMitilius a Mulettour, Epheseus, a Cooke, Hyppanius a chamberlaine, and\nAppolonius a Physition, who (thinking to chase away the madde Dogge)\nwere cruelly wounded by him, insomuch that many Horses and other beasts\ninfected with the venyme of his poysonous teeth became madde likewise.\nWhich thing caused them all at the table greatly to feare, and thinking\nthat I had beene bitten in like sort, came out with speares, Clubs, and\nPitchforks purposing to slay me, and I had undoubtedly beene slaine,\nhad I not by and by crept into the Chamber, where my Master intended to\nlodge all night. Then they closed and locked fast the doores about me,\nand kept the chamber round, till such time as they thought that the\npestilent rage of madnesse had killed me. When I was thus shutte in the\nchamber alone, I laid me downe upon the bed to sleepe, considering it\nwas long time past, since I lay and tooke my rest as a man doth. When\nmorning was come, and that I was well reposed, I rose up lustily. In the\nmeane season, they which were appointed to watch about the chamber all\nnight, reasoned with themselves in this sort, Verely (quoth one) I\nthink that this rude Asse be dead. So think I (quoth another) for the\noutragious poyson of madness hath killed him, but being thus in divers\nopinions of a poore Ass, they looked through a crevis, and espied me\nstanding still, sober and quiet in the middle of the chamber; then they\nopened the doores, and came towards me, to prove whether I were gentle\nor no. Amongst whom there was one, which in my opinion, was sent from\nHeaven to save my life, that willed the other to set a bason of faire\nwater before me, and thereby they would know whether I were mad or no,\nfor if I did drinke without feare as I accustomed to do, it was a signe\nthat I was whole, and in mine Assie wits, where contrary if I did flie\nand abhorre the tast of the water, it was evident proofe of my madness,\nwhich thing he said that he had read in ancient and credible books,\nwhereupon they tooke a bason of cleere water, and presented it before\nme: but I as soone as I perceived the wholesome water of my life, ran\nincontinently, thrusting my head into the bason, drank as though I had\nbeene greatly athirst; then they stroked me with their hands, and bowed\nmine eares, and tooke me by the halter, to prove my patience, but I\ntaking each thing in good part, disproved their mad presumption, by my\nmeeke and gentle behaviour: when I was thus delivered from this double\ndanger, the next day I was laded againe with the goddesse Siria, and\nother trumpery, and was brought into the way with Trumpets and Cymbals\nto beg in the villages which we passed by according to our custome. And\nafter that we had gone through a few towns and Castles, we fortuned to\ncome to a certaine village, which was builded (as the inhabitants there\naffirme) upon the foundation of a famous ancient Citie. And after that\nwe had turned into the next Inne, we heard of a prettie jest committed\nin the towne there, which I would that you should know likewise.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER\n\n\nOf the deceipt of a Woman which made her husband Cuckold.\n\nThere was a man dwelling in the towne very poore, that had nothing but\nthat which he got by the labour and travell of his hands: his wife was\na faire young woman, but very lascivious, and given to the appetite and\ndesire of the flesh. It fortuned on a day, that while this poore man was\ngone betimes in the morning to the field about his businesse, according\nas he accustomed to doe, his wives lover secretly came into his house to\nhave his pleasure with her. And so it chanced that during the time\nthat shee and he were basking together, her husband suspecting no such\nmatter, returned home praising the chast continency of his wife, in\nthat hee found his doores fast closed, wherefore as his custome was, he\nwhistled to declare his comming. Then his crafty wife ready with shifts,\ncaught her lover and covered him under a great tub standing in a corner,\nand therewithall she opened the doore, blaming her husband in this sort:\nCommest thou home every day with empty hands, and bringest nothing\nto maintaine our house? thou hast no regard for our profit, neither\nprovidest for any meate or drinke, whereas I poore wretch doe nothing\nday and night but occupie my selfe with spinning, and yet my travell\nwill scarce find the Candels which we spend. O how much more happy is my\nneighbour Daphne, that eateth and drinketh at her pleasure and passeth\nthe time with her amorous lovers according to her desire. What is the\nmatter (quoth her husband) though Our Master hath made holiday at the\nfields, yet thinke not but I have made provision for our supper; doest\nthou not see this tub that keepeth a place here in our house in vaine,\nand doth us no service? Behold I have sold it to a good fellow (that is\nhere present) for five pence, wherefore I pray thee lend me thy hand,\nthat I may deliver him the tub. His wife (having invented a present\nshift) laughed on her husband, saying: What marchant I pray you have you\nbrought home hither, to fetch away my tub for five pence, for which I\npoore woman that sit all day alone in my house have beene proffered so\noften seaven: her husband being well apayed of her words demanded what\nhe was that had bought the tub: Looke (quoth she) he is gone under, to\nsee where it be sound or no: then her lover which was under the tub,\nbegan to stirre and rustle himselfe, and because his words might agree\nto the words of the woman, he sayd: Dame will you have me tell the\ntruth, this tub is rotten and crackt as me seemeth on every side. And\nthen turning to her husband sayd: I pray you honest man light a Candle,\nthat I may make cleane the tub within, to see if it be for my purpose\nor no, for I doe not mind to cast away my money wilfully: he by and\nby (being made a very Oxe) lighted a candle, saying, I pray you good\nbrother put not your selfe to so much paine, let me make the tub cleane\nand ready for you. Whereupon he put off his coate, and crept under\nthe tub to rub away the filth from the sides. In the meane season\nthis minion lover cast his wife on the bottome of the tub and had his\npleasure with her over his head, and as he was in the middest of his\npastime, hee turned his head on this side and that side, finding fault\nwith this and with that, till as they had both ended their businesse,\nwhen as he delivered seaven pence for the tub, and caused the good man\nhimselfe to carry it on his backe againe to his Inne.\n\n\n\n\nTHE THIRTY-NINTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow the Priests of the goddesse Siria were taken and put in prison, and\nhow Apuleius was sold to a Baker.\n\nAfter that we had tarried there a few dayes at the cost and charges\nof the whole Village, and had gotten much mony by our divination and\nprognostication of things to come: The priests of the goddesse Siria\ninvented a new meanes to picke mens purses, for they had certaine lotts,\nwhereon were written:\n\nConiuncti terram proscindunt boves ut in futurum loeta germinent sata\n\nThat is to say: The Oxen tied and yoked together, doe till the ground to\nthe intent it may bring forth his increase: and by these kind of lottes\nthey deceive many of the simple sort, for if one had demanded whether he\nshould have a good wife or no, they would say that his lot did testifie\nthe same, that he should be tyed and yoked to a good woman and have\nincrease of children. If one demanded whether he should buy lands and\npossession, they said that he should have much ground that should\nyeeld his increase. If one demanded whether he should have a good and\nprosperous voyage, they said he should have good successe, and it should\nbe for the increase of his profit. If one demanded whether hee should\nvanquish his enemies, and prevaile in pursuite of theeves, they said\nthat this enemy should be tyed and yoked to him: and his pursuits after\ntheeves should be prosperous. Thus by the telling of fortunes, they\ngathered a great quantity of money, but when they were weary with giving\nof answers, they drave me away before them next night, through a lane\nwhich was more dangerous and stony then the way which we went the night\nbefore, for on the one side were quagmires and foggy marshes, on the\nother side were falling trenches and ditches, whereby my legges failed\nme, in such sort that I could scarce come to the plaine field pathes.\nAnd behold by and by a great company of inhabitants of the towne armed\nwith weapons and on horsebacke overtooke us, and incontinently arresting\nPhilebus and his Priests, tied them by the necks and beate them cruelly,\ncalling them theeves and robbers, and after they had manacled their\nhands: Shew us (quoth they) the cup of gold, which (under the colour of\nyour solemne religion) ye have taken away, and now ye thinke to escape\nin the night without punishment for your fact. By and by one came\ntowards me, and thrusting his hand into the bosome of the goddesse\nSiria, brought out the cup which they had stole. Howbeit for all they\nappeared evident and plaine they would not be confounded nor abashed,\nbut jesting and laughing out the matter, gan say: Is it reason masters\nthat you should thus rigorously intreat us, and threaten for a small\ntrifling cup, which the mother of the Goddesse determined to give to her\nsister for a present? Howbeit for all their lyes and cavellations, they\nwere carryed backe unto the towne, and put in prison by the Inhabitants,\nwho taking the cup of gold, and the goddesse which I bare, did put and\nconsecrate them amongst the treasure of the temple. The next day I was\ncarryed to the market to be sold, and my price was set at seaven pence\nmore then Philebus gave for me. There fortuned to passe by a Baker of\nthe next village, who after that he had bought a great deale of corne,\nbought me likewise to carry it home, and when he had well laded me\ntherewith, be drave me through a thorny and dangerous way to his bake\nhouse; there I saw a great company of horses that went in the mill day\nand night grinding of corne, but lest I should be discouraged at the\nfirst, my master entertained me well, for the first day I did nothing\nbut fare daintily, howbeit such mine ease and felicity did not long\nendure, for the next day following I was tyed to the mill betimes in\nthe morning with my face covered, to the end in turning amid winding so\noften one way, I should not become giddy, but keepe a certaine course,\nbut although when I was a man I had seen many such horsemills and knew\nwell enough how they should be turned, yet feining my selfe ignorant of\nsuch kind of toile, I stood still and would not goe, whereby I thought\nI should be taken from the mill as an Asse unapt, and put to some other\nlight thing, or else to be driven into the fields to pasture, but my\nsubtility did me small good, for by and by when the mill stood still,\nthe servants came about me, crying and beating me forward, in such\nsort that I could not stay to advise my selfe, whereby all the company\nlaughed to see so suddaine a change. When a good part of the day was\npast, that I was not able to endure any longer, they tooke off my\nharnesse, and tied me to the manger, but although my bones were weary,\nand that I needed to refresh my selfe with rest and provender, yet I was\nso curious that I did greatly delight to behold the bakers art, insomuch\nthat I could not eate nor drinke while I looked on.\n\nO good Lord what a sort of poore slaves were there; some had their\nskinne blacke and blew, some had their backes striped with lashes, some\nwere covered with rugged sackes, some had their members onely hidden:\nsome wore such ragged clouts, that you might perceive all their naked\nbodies, some were marked and burned in the heads with hot yrons, some\nhad their haire halfe clipped, some had lockes of their legges, some\nvery ugly and evill favoured, that they could scarce see, their eyes and\nface were so blacke and dimme with smoake, like those that fight in the\nsands, and know not where they strike by reason of dust: And some\nhad their faces all mealy. But how should I speake of the horses my\ncompanions, how they being old and weake, thrust their heads into the\nmanger: they had their neckes all wounded and worne away: they rated\ntheir nosethrilles with a continuall cough, their sides were bare with\ntheir harnesse and great travell, their ribs were broken with beating,\ntheir hooves were battered broad with incessant labour, and their skinne\nrugged by reason of their lancknesse. When I saw this dreadfull sight,\nI began to feare, least I should come to the like state: and considering\nwith my selfe the good fortune which I was sometime in when I was a man,\nI greatly lamented, holding downe my head, and would eate no meate, but\nI saw no comfort or consolation of my evill fortune, saving that my mind\nwas somewhat recreated to heare and understand what every man said, for\nthey neither feared nor doubted my presence. At that time I remembred\nhow Homer the divine author of ancient Poetry, described him to be a\nwise man, which had travelled divers countries and nations, wherefore I\ngave great thanks to my Asse for me, in that by this meanes I had seene\nthe experience of many things, and was become more wise (notwithstanding\nthe great misery and labour which I daily sustained): but I will tell\nyou a pretty jest, which commeth now to my remembrance, to the intent\nyour eares may be delighted in hearing the same.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FORTIETH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was handled by the Bakers wife, which was a harlot.\n\nThe Baker which bought me was an honest and sober man; but his wife was\nthe most pestilent woman in all the world, insomuch that he endured many\nmiseries and afflictions with her, so that I my selfe did secretly pitty\nhis estate, and bewaile his evill fortune: for she had not one fault\nalone, but all the mischiefes that could be devised: shee was crabbed,\ncruell, lascivious, drunken, obstinate, niggish, covetous, riotous in\nfilthy expenses, and an enemy to faith and chastity, a despise of all\nthe Gods, whom other did honour, one that affirmed that she had a God\nby her selfe, wherby she deceived all men, but especially her poore\nhusband, one that abandoned her body with continuall whoredome. This\nmischievous queane hated me in such sort, that shee commanded every day\nbefore she was up, that I should he put into the mill to grind: and the\nfirst thing which she would doe in the morning, was to see me cruelly\nbeaten, and that I should grind when the other beasts did feed and take\nrest. When I saw that I was so cruelly handled, she gave me occasion to\nlearne her conversation and life, for I saw oftentimes a yong man which\nwould privily goe into her chamber whose face I did greatly desire to\nsee, but I could not by reason mine eyes were covered every day. And\nverily if I had beene free and at liberty, I would have discovered all\nher abhomination. She had an old woman, a bawd, a messenger of mischiefe\nthat daily haunted to her house, and made good cheere with her to the\nutter undoing and impoverishment of her husband, but I that was greatly\noffended with the negligence of Fotis, who made me an Asse, in stead\nof a Bird, did yet comfort my selfe by this onely meane, in that to the\nmiserable deformity of my shape, I had long eares, whereby I might\nheare all things that was done: On a day I heard the old bawd say to the\nBakers wife:\n\nDame you have chosen (without my counsell) a young man to your\nlover, who as me seemeth, is dull, fearefull, without any grace, and\ndastard-like coucheth at the frowning looke of your odious husband,\nwhereby you have no delight nor pleasure with him: how farre better is\nthe young man Philesiterus who is comely, beautifull, in the flower of\nhis youth, liberall, courteous, valiant and stout against the diligent\npries and watches of your husband, whereby to embrace the worthiest\ndames of this country, and worthy to weare a crowne of gold, for one\npart that he played to one that was jealous over his wife. Hearken how\nit was and then judge the diversity of these two Lovers: Know you\nnot one Barbarus a Senator of our towne, whom the vulgar people call\nlikewise Scorpion for his severity of manners? This Barbarus had a\ngentlewoman to his wife, whom he caused daily to be enclosed within his\nhouse, with diligent custody. Then the Bakers wife said, I know her very\nwell, for we two dwelleth together in one house: Then you know (quoth\nthe old woman) the whole tale of Philesiterus? No verily (said she) but\nI greatly desire to know it: therefore I pray you mother tell me the\nwhole story. By and by the old woman which knew well to babble, began to\ntell as followeth.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FORTY-FIRST CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Barbarus being jealous over his wife, commanded that shee should be\nkept close in his house, and what happened.\n\nYou shall understand that on a day this Barbarus preparing himselfe to\nride abroad, and willing to keepe the chastity of his wife (whom he so\nwell loved) alone to himselfe, called his man Myrmex (whose faith he\nhad tryed and proved in many things) and secretly committed to him the\ncustody of his wife, willing him that he should threaten, that if any\nman did but touch her with his finger as he passed by, he would not\nonely put him in prison, and bind him hand and foote, but also cause\nhim to be put to death, or else to be famished for lacke of sustenance,\nwhich words he confirmed by an oath of all the Gods in heaven, and so\ndeparted away: When Barbarus was gone, Myrmex being greatly astonied of\nhis masters threatnings, would not suffer his mistresse to goe abroad,\nbut as she sate all day a Spinning, he was so carefull that he sate by\nher; when night came he went with her to the baines, holding her by the\ngarment, so faithfull he was to fulfill the commandement of his master:\nHowbeit the beauty of this matron could not be hidden from the burning\neyes of Philesiterus, who considering her great chastity and how she was\ndiligently kept by Myrmex, thought it impossible to have his purpose,\nyet (indeavouring by all kind of meanes to enterprise the matter, and\nremembring the fragility of man, that might be intised and corrupted\nwith money, since as by gold the adamant gates may be opened) on a day,\nwhen he found Myrmex alone, he discovered his love, desiring him to shew\nhis favour, (otherwise he should certainly dye) with assurance that\nhe need not to feare when as he might privily be let in and out in the\nnight, without knowledge of any person. When he thought, with these and\nother gentle words to allure and prick forward the obstinate mind of\nMyrmex he shewed him glittering gold in his hand, saying that he would\ngive his mistresse twenty crowns and him ten, but Myrmex hearing these\nwords, was greatly troubled, abhorring in his mind to commit such a\nmischiefe: wherfore he stopped his eares, and turning his head departed\naway: howbeit the glittering view of these crownes could never be out of\nhis mind, but being at home he seemed to see the money before his eyes,\nwhich was so worthy a prey, wherefore poore Myrmex being in divers\nopinions could not tell what to doe, for on the one side lie considered\nthe promise which he made to his master, and the punishment that should\nensue if he did contrary. On the other side he thought of the gaine, and\nthe passing pleasure of the crownes of gold; in the end the desire of\nthe money did more prevaile then the feare of death, for the beauty\nof the flowrishing crownes did so sticke in his mind, that where the\nmenaces of his master compelled him to tarry at home, the pestilent\navarice of gold egged him out a doores, wherefore putting all shame\naside, without further delay, he declared all the whole matter to his\nMistresse, who according to the nature of a woman, when she heard him\nspeake of so great a summe she bound chastity in a string, and gave\nauthority to Myrmex to rule her in that case. Myrmex seeing the intent\nof his Mistresse, was very glad, and for great desire of the gold, he\nran hastily to Philesiterus, declaring that his Mistresse was consented\nto his mind, wherefore he demanded the gold which he promised. Then\nincontinently Philesiterus delivered him tenne Crownes, and when night\ncame, Myrmex brought him disguised into his mistresses Chamber. About\nMidnight when he and she were naked together, making sacrifice unto the\nGoddesse Venus, behold her husband (contrary to their expectation)\ncame and knocked at the doore, calling with a loud voice to his Servant\nMyrmex: whose long tarrying increased the suspition of his Master,\nin such sort that he threatned to beat Myrmex cruelly: but he being\ntroubled with feare, and driven to his latter shifts, excused the matter\nsaying: that he could not find the key: by reason it was so darke. In\nthe meane season Philesiterus hearing the noise at the doore, slipt on\nhis coat and privily ran out of the Chamber. When Myrmex had opened the\ndoore to his Master that threatned terribly, and had let him in, he\nwent into the Chamber to his wife: In the mean while Myrmex let out\nPhilesiterus, and barred the doores fast, and went againe to bed. The\nnext morning when Barbarus awaked, he perceived two unknown slippers\nlying under his bed, which Philesiterus had forgotten when he went away.\nThen he conceived a great suspition and jealousie in mind, howbeit he\nwould not discover it to his wife, neither to any other person, but\nputting secretly the slippers into his bosome, commanded his other\nServants to bind Myrmex incontinently, and to bring him bound to the\nJustice after him, thinking verily that by the meane of the slippers he\nmight boult out the matter. It fortuned that while Barbarus went towards\nthe Justice in a fury and rage, and Myrmex fast bound, followed him\nweeping, not because he was accused before his master, but by reason he\nknew his owne conscience guilty: behold by adventure Philesiterus (going\nabout earnest businesse) fortuned to meet with them by the way, who\nfearing the matter which he committed the night before, and doubting\nlest it should be knowne, did suddainly invent a meane to excuse Myrmex,\nfor he ran upon him and beate him about the head with his fists, saying:\nAh mischievous varlet that thou art, and perjured knave. It were a good\ndeed if the Goddesse and thy master here, would put thee to death, for\nthou art worthy to be imprisoned and to weare out these yrons, that\nstalest my slippers away when thou werest at my baines yester night.\nBarbarus hearing this returned incontinently home, and called his\nservant Myrmex, commanding him to deliver the slippers againe to the\nright owner.\n\nThe old woman had scant finished her tale when the Bakers wife gan say:\nVerily she is blessed and most blessed, that hath the fruition of so\nworthy a lover, but as for me poore miser, I am fallen into the hands of\na coward, who is not onely afraid of my husband but also of every clap\nof the mill, and dares not doe nothing, before the blind face of yonder\nscabbed Asse. Then the old woman answered, I promise you certainly\nif you will, you shall have this young man at your pleasure, and\ntherewithall when night came, she departed out of her chamber. In the\nmeane season, the Bakers wife made ready a supper with abundance of wine\nand exquisite fare: so that there lacked nothing, but the comming of the\nyoung man, for her husband supped at one of her neighbours houses. When\ntime came that my harnesse should be taken off and that I should rest my\nselfe, I was not so joyfull of my liberty, as when the vaile was taken\nfrom mine eyes, I should see all the abhomination of this mischievous\nqueane. When night was come and the Sunne gone downe, behold the old\nbawd and the young man, who seemed to be but a child, by reason he had\nno beard, came to the doore. Then the Bakers wife kissed him a thousand\ntimes and received him courteously, placed him downe at the table: but\nhe had scarce eaten the first morsell, when the good man (contrary to\nhis wives expectation) returned home, for she thought he would not have\ncome so soone: but Lord how she cursed him, praying God that he might\nbreake his necke at the first entry in. In the meane season, she caught\nher lover and thrust him into the bin where she bolted her flower, and\ndissembling the matter, finely came to her husband demanding why he came\nhome so soone. I could not abide (quoth he) to see so great a mischiefe\nand wicked fact, which my neighbours wife committed, but I must run\naway: O harlot as she is, how hath she dishonoured her husband, I sweare\nby the goddesse Ceres, that if I had [not] seene it with mine eyes, I\nwould never I have beleeved it. His wife desirous to know the matter,\ndesired him to tell what she had done: then hee accorded to the request\nof his wife, and ignorant of the estate of his own house, declared the\nmischance of another. You shall understand (quoth he) that the wife\nof the Fuller my companion, who seemed to me a wise and chast woman,\nregarding her own honesty and profit of her house, was found this night\nwith her knave. For while we went to wash our hands, hee and she were\ntogether: who being troubled with our presence ran into a corner, and\nshe thrust him into a mow made with twigs, appoynted to lay on clothes\nto make them white with the smoake of fume and brymstone. Then she sate\ndown with us at the table to colour the matter: in the meant season the\nyoung man covered in the mow, could not forbeare sneesing, by reason of\nthe smoake of the brymstone. The good man thinking it had beene his\nwife that sneesed, cryed, Christ helpe. But when he sneesed more, he\nsuspected the matter, and willing to know who it was, rose from the\ntable, and went to the mow, where hee found a young man welnigh dead\nwith smoke. When hee understood the whole matter, he was so inflamed\nwith anger that he called for a sword to kill him, and undoubtedly he\nhad killed him, had I not restrained his violent hands from his purpose,\nassuring him, that his enemy would dye with the force of his brimstone,\nwithout the harme which he should doe. Howbeit my words would not\nappease his fury, but as necessity required he tooke the young man well\nnigh choked, and carried him out at the doores. In the meane season,\nI counsailed his wife to absent her selfe at some of her Neighbours\nhouses, till the choller of her husband was pacified, lest he should be\nmoved against her, as he was against the young man. And so being weary\nof their supper, I forthwith returned home. When the Baker had told\nhis tale, his impudent wife began to curse and abhorre the wife of the\nFuller, and generally all other wives, which abandon their bodies with\nany other then with their owne Husbands, breaking the faith and bond\nof marriage, whereby she said, they were worthy to be burned alive. But\nknowing her owne guilty conscience and proper whoredome, lest her lover\nshould be hurt lying in the bin, she willed her husband to goe to bed,\nbut he having eaten nothing, said that he would sup before he went to\nrest: whereby shee was compelled to maugre her eies, to set such things\non the Table as she had prepared for her lover.\n\nBut I, considering the great mischiefe of this wicked queane, devised\nwith my selfe how I might reveale the matter to my Master, and by\nkicking away the cover of the binne (where like a Snaile the young-man\nwas couched) to make her whoredome apparent and knowne. At length I was\nayded by the providence of God, for there was an old man to whom the\ncustody of us was committed, that drave me poore Asse, and the other\nHorses the same time to the water to drinke; then had I good occasion\nministred, to revenge the injury of my master, for as I passed by, I\nperceived the fingers of the young-man upon the side of the binne,\nand lifting up my heeles, I spurned off the flesh with the force of\nmy hoofes, whereby he was compelled to cry out, and to throw downe the\nbinne on the ground, and so the whoredome of the Bakers wife was knowne\nand revealed. The Baker seeing this was not a little moved at the\ndishonesty of his wife, but hee tooke the young-man trembling for feare\nby the hand, and with cold and courteous words spake in this sort: Feare\nnot my Sonne, nor thinke that I am so barbarous or cruell a person,\nthat I would stiffle thee up with the smoke of Sulphur as our neighbour\naccustometh, nor I will not punish thee according to the rigour of the\nlaw of Julia, which commandeth the Adulterers should be put to death:\nNo no, I will not execute my cruelty against so faire and comely a young\nman as you be, but we will devide our pleasure betweene us, by lying\nall three in one bed, to the end there may be no debate nor dissention\nbetweene us, but that either of us may be contented, for I have alwayes\nlived with my wife in such tranquillity, that according to the saying\nof the wisemen, whatsoever I say, she holdeth for law, and indeed equity\nwill not suffer, but that the husband should beare more authority then\nthe wife: with these and like words he led the young-man to his Chamber,\nand closed his wife in another Chamber. On the next morrow, he called\ntwo of the most sturdiest Servants of his house, who held up the young\nman, while he scourged his buttockes welfavouredly with rods like a\nchild. When he had well beaten him, he said: Art not thou ashamed, thou\nthat art so tender and delicate a child, to desire the violation of\nhonest marriages, and to defame thy selfe with wicked living, whereby\nthou hast gotten the name of an Adulterer? After he had spoken these and\nlike words, he whipped him againe, and chased him out of his house. The\nyoung-man who was the comeliest of all the adulterers, ran away, and\ndid nothing else that night save onely bewaile his striped and painted\nbuttockes. Soone after the Baker sent one to his wife, who divorced her\naway in his name, but she beside her owne naturall mischiefe, (offended\nat this great contumely, though she had worthily deserved the same) had\nrecourse to wicked arts and trumpery, never ceasing untill she had found\nout an Enchantresse, who (as it was thought) could doe what she would\nwith her Sorcery and conjuration. The Bakers wife began to intreate her,\npromising that she would largely recompence her, if shee could bring\none of these things to passe, eyther to make that her husband may be\nreconciled to her againe, or else if hee would not agree thereto, to\nsend an ill spirit into him, to dispossesse the spirit of her husband.\nThen the witch with her abhominable science, began to conjure and to\nmake her Ceremonies, to turne the heart of the Baker to his wife, but\nall was in vaine, wherefore considering on the one side that she could\nnot bring her purpose to passe, and on the other side the losse of her\ngaine, she ran hastily to the Baker, threatning to send an evill\nspirit to kill him, by meane of her conjurations. But peradventure some\nscrupulous reader may demand me a question, how I, being an Asse, and\ntyed alwayes in the mill house, could know the secrets of these women:\nVerily I answer, notwithstanding my shape of an Asse, I had the sence\nand knowledge of a man, and curiously endeavoured to know out such\ninjuries as were done to my master. About noone there came a woman\ninto the Milhouse, very sorrowfull, raggedly attired, with bare feete,\nmeigre, ill-favoured, and her hayre scattering upon her face: This woman\ntooke the Baker by the hand, and faining that she had some secret matter\nto tell him, went into a chamber, where they remained a good space, till\nall the corne was ground, when as the servants were compelled to call\ntheir master to give them more corne, but when they had called very\noften, and no person gave answer, they began to mistrust, insomuch that\nthey brake open the doore: when they were come in, they could not find\nthe woman, but onely their master hanging dead upon a rafter of the\nchamber, whereupon they cryed and lamented greatly, and according to the\ncustome, when they had washed themselves, they tooke the body and buried\nit. The next day morrow, the daughter of the Baker, which was married\nbut a little before to one of the next Village, came crying and beating\nher breast, not because she heard of the death of her father by any\nman, but because his lamentable spirit, with a halter about his necke\nappeared to her in the night, declaring the whole circumstance of his\ndeath, and how by inchantment he was descended into hell, which caused\nher to thinke that her father was dead. After that she had lamented a\ngood space, and was somewhat comforted by the servants of the house, and\nwhen nine dayes were expired, as inheretrix to her father, she sold away\nall the substance of the house, whereby the goods chanced into divers\nmens hands.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FORTY-SECOND CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius after the Baker was hanged, was sold to a Gardener, and\nwhat dreadfull things happened.\n\nThere was a poore Gardener amongst the rest, which bought me for the\nsumme of fifty pence, which seemed to him a great price, but he thought\nto gayne it againe by the continuall travell of my body. The matter\nrequireth to tell likewise, how I was handled in his service. This\nGardener accustomed to drive me, every morning laded with hearbes to the\nnext Village, and when he had sold his hearbes, hee would mount upon\nmy backe and returne to the Garden, and while he digged the ground and\nwatered the hearbes, and went about other businesse, I did nothing but\nrepose my selfe with great ease, but when Winter approached with sharpe\nhaile, raine and frosts, and I standing under a hedge side, was welnigh\nkilled up with cold, and my master was so poore that he had no lodging\nfor himselfe, much lesse had he any littor or place to cover me withall,\nfor he himselfe alwayes lay under a little roofe shadowed with boughes.\nIn the morning when I arose, I found my hoofes shriveled together with\ncold, and unable to passe upon the sharpe ice, and frosty mire, neither\ncould I fill my belly with meate, as I accustomed to doe, for my master\nand I supped together, and had both one fare: howbeit it was very\nslender since as wee had nothing else saving old and unsavoury sallets\nwhich were suffered to grow for seed, like long broomes, and that had\nlost all their sweet sappe and juice.\n\nIt fortuned on a day that an honest man of the next village was\nbenighted and constrained by reason of the rain to lodge (very lagged\nand weary).in our Garden, where although he was but meanely received,\nyet it served well enough considering time and necessity. This honest\nman to recompence our entertainment, promised to give my master some\ncorne, oyle, and two bottels of wine: wherefore my master not delaying\nthe matter, laded me with sackes and bottels, and rode to the Towne\nwhich was seaven miles off.\n\nWhen we came to the honest mans house, he entertained and feasted my\nmaster exceedingly. And it fortuned while they eate and dranke together\nas signe of great amity there chanced a strange and dreadfull case: for\nthere was a Hen which ran kackling about the yard, as though she would\nhave layed an Egge. The good man of the house perceiving her, said: O\ngood and profitable pullet that feedest us every day with thy fruit,\nthou seemest as though thou wouldest give us some pittance for our\ndinner: Ho boy put the Pannier in the corner that the Hen may lay. Then\nthe boy did as his master commanded, but the Hen forsaking the Pannier,\ncame toward her master and laid at his feet not an Egge, which every\nman knoweth, but a Chickin with feathers, clawes, and eyes, which\nincontinently ran peeping after his damme. By and by happened a more\nstrange thing, which would cause any man to abhorre: under the Table\nwhere they sate, the ground opened, and there appeared a great well and\nfountain of bloud, insomuch that the drops thereof sparckled about the\nTable. At the same time while they wondred at this dreadfull sight one\nof the Servants came running out of the Seller, and told that all the\nwine was boyled out of the vessels, as though there had beene some great\nfire under. By and by a Weasel was scene that drew into the house a dead\nSerpent, and out of the mouth of a Shepheards dog leaped a live frog,\nand immediately after one brought word that a Ram had strangled the same\ndog at one bit. All these things that happened, astonied the good man of\nthe house, and the residue that were present, insomuch that they could\nnot tell what to doe, or with what sacrifice to appease the anger of\nthe gods. While every man was thus stroken in feare, behold, one brought\nword to the good man of the house, that his three sonnes who had been\nbrought up in good literature, and endued with good manners were dead,\nfor they three had great acquaintance and ancient amity with a poore man\nwhich was their neighbour, and dwelled hard by them: and next unto him\ndwelled another young man very rich both in lands and goods, but bending\nfrom the race of his progenies dissentions, and ruling himselfe in the\ntowne according to his owne will. This young royster did mortally hate\nthis poore man, insomuch that he would kill his sheepe, steale his oxen,\nand spoyle his corne and other fruits before the time of ripenesse, yet\nwas he not contented with this, but he would encroch upon the poore mans\nground, and clayme all the heritage as his owne. The poore man which\nwas very simple and fearefull, seeing all his goods taken away by the\navarice of the rich man, called together and assembled many of his\nfriends to shew them all his land, to the end he might have but so much\nground of his fathers heritage, as might bury him. Amongst whom, he\nfound these three brethren, as friends to helpe and ayd him in his\nadversity and tribulation.\n\nHowbeit, the presence of these honest Citizens, could in no wise\nperswade him to leave his extort power, no nor yet to cause any\ntemperance of his tongue, but the more they went about with gentle\nwords to tell him his faults, the more would he fret and likewise fume,\nswearing all the oathes under God, that he little regarded the presence\nof the whole City, whereupon incontinently he commanded his servants to\ntake the poore man by the eares, and carry him out of his ground, which\ngreatly offended all the standers by. Then one of the brethren spake\nunto him somewhat boldly, saying: It is but a folly to have such\naffiance in your riches, whereby you should use your tyranny against the\npoore, when as the law is common for all men, and a redresse may be\nhad to suppresse your insolency. These words chafed him more then the\nburning oile, or flaming brimstone, or scourge of whipps, saying: that\nthey should be hanged and their law too, before he would be subject\nunto any person: and therewithall he called out his bandogges and great\nmasties, which accustomed to eate the carrion and carkases of dead\nbeasts in the fields, and to set upon such as passed by the way: then\nhe commanded they should be put upon all the assistance to teare them\nin peeces: who as soone as they heard the hisse of their master, ran\nfiercely upon them invading them on every side, insomuch that the more\nthey flied to escape away, the more cruell and terrible were the dogges.\nIt fortuned amongst all this fearefull company, that in running, the\nyoungest of the three brethren stombled at a stone, and fell down to the\nground: Then the dogs came upon him and tare him in peeces with their\nteeth, whereby he was compelled to cry for succour: His other two\nbrethren hearing his lamentable voice ran towards him to helpe him,\ncasting their cloakes about their left armes, tooke up stones to chase\naway the dogs, but all was in vaine, for they might see their brother\ndismembred in every part of his body: Who lying at the very point of\ndeath, desired his brethren to revenge his death against that cruell\ntyrant: And therewithall lie gave up the ghost. The other two brethren\nperceiving so great a murther, and neglecting their owne lives, like\ndesperate persons dressed themselves against the tyrant, and threw a\ngreat number of stones at him, but the bloudy theefe exercised in such\nand like mischiefes, tooke a speare and thrust it cleane through the\nbody: howbeit he fell not downe to the ground. For the speare that came\nout at his backe ran into the earth, and sustained him up. By and by\ncame one of these tyrants servants the most sturdiest of the rest to\nhelpe his master, who at the first comming tooke up a stone and threw at\nthe third brother, but by reason the stone ran along his arme it did not\nhurt him, which chanced otherwise then all mens expectation was: by and\nby the young man feigning that his arme was greatly wounded, spake these\nwords unto the cruell bloud sucker: Now maist thou, thou wretch, triumph\nupon the destruction of all our family, now hast thou fed thy insatiable\ncruelty with the bloud of three brethren, now maist thou rejoyce at the\nfall of us Citizens, yet thinke not but that how farre thou dost remove\nand extend the bounds of thy land, thou shalt have some neighbor, but\nhow greatly am I sorry in that I have lost mine arme wherewithall I\nminded to cut off thy head. When he had spoken these words, the furious\ntheefe drew out his dagger, and running upon the young man thought\nverily to have slaine him, but it chanced otherwise: For the young man\nresisted him stoutly, and in buckling together by violence wrested the\ndagger out of his hand: which done, he killed the rich theefe with his\nowne weapon, and to the intent the young man would escape the hands of\nthe servants which came running to assist their master, with the same\ndagger he cut his owne throat. These things were signified by the\nstrange and dreadfull wondres which fortuned in the house of the good\nman, who after he had heard these sorrowfull tydings could in no wise\nweepe, so farre was he stroken with dolour, but presently taking his\nknife wherewith he cut his cheese and other meate before, he cut his\nowne throat likewise, in such sort that he fell upon the bord and\nimbraced the table with the streames of his blond, in most miserable\nmanner. Hereby was my master the Gardener deprived of his hope, and\npaying for his dinner the watry teares of his eyes, mounted upon my\nbacke and so we went homeward the same way as wee came.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FORTY-THIRD CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was found by his shadow.\n\nAs wee passed by the way wee met with a tall souldier (for so his habite\nand countenance declared) who with proud and arrogant words spake to my\nmaster in this sort:\n\nQuorsum vacuum ducis Asinum?\n\nMy master somewhat astonied at the strange sights which he saw before,\nand ignorant of the Latine tongue, roade on and spake never a word: The\nsouldier unable to refraine his insolence, and offended at his silence,\nstrake him on the shoulders as he sate on my backe; then my master\ngently made answer that he understood not what he said, whereat the\nsouldier angerly demanded againe, whither he roade with his Asse? Marry\n(quoth he) to the next City: But I (quoth the souldier) have need of\nhis helpe, to carry the trusses of our Captaine from yonder Castle, and\ntherewithall he tooke me by the halter and would violently have taken me\naway: but my master wiping away the blood of the blow which he received\nof the souldier, desired him gently and civilly to take some pitty upon\nhim, and to let him depart with his owne, swearing and affirming that\nhis slow Asse, welnigh dead with sicknesse, could scarce carry a few\nhandfuls of hearbs to the next towne, much lesse he was able to beare\nany greater trusses: but when he saw the souldier would in no wise\nbe intreated, but ready with his staffe to cleave my masters head, my\nmaster fell down at his feete, under colour to move him to some pitty,\nbut when he saw his time, he tooke the souldier by the legs and cast him\nupon the ground: Then he buffetted him, thumped him, bit him, and tooke\na stone and beat his face and his sides, that he could not turne and\ndefend himselfe, but onely threaten that if ever he rose, he would\nchoppe him in pieces. The Gardener when he heard him say so, drew out\nhis javelin which hee had by his side, and when he had throwne it away,\nhe knockt and beate him more cruelly then he did before, insomuch that\nthe souldier could not tell by what meanes to save himselfe, but by\nfeining that he was dead, Then my master tooke the javelin and mounted\nupon my backe, riding in all hast to the next village, having no regard\nto goe to his Garden, and when he came thither, he turned into one of\nhis friends house and declared all the whole matter, desiring him to\nsave his life and to hide himselfe and his Asse in some secret\nplace, untill such time as all danger were past. Then his friends not\nforgetting the ancient amity betweene them, entertained him willingly\nand drew me up a paire of staires into a chamber, my master crept into\na chest, and lay there with the cover closed fast: The souldier (as I\nafterwards learned) rose up as one awaked from a drunken sleepe, but he\ncould scarce goe by reason of his wounds: howbeit at length by little\nand little through ayd of his staffe he came to the towne, but hee would\nnot declare the matter to any person nor complaine to any justice, lest\nhe should be accused of cowardise or dastardnesse, yet in the end he\ntold some of his companions of all the matter that happened: then they\ntooke him and caused him to be closed in some secret place, thinking\nthat beside the injury which he had received, he should be accused of\nthe breach of his faith, by reason of the losse of his speare, and when\nthey had learned the signes of my master, they went to search him out:\nat last there was an unfaithfull neighbour that told them where he was,\nthen incontinently the souldiers went to the Justice declaring that\nthey had lost by the way a silver goblet of their Captaines, and that a\nGardener had found it, who refusing to deliver the goblet, was hidden in\none of his friends houses: by and by the Magistrates understanding the\nlosse of the Captaine, came to the doores where we were, commanded our\nhost to deliver my master upon paine of death: howbeit these threatnings\ncould not enforce him to confesse that he was within his doores, but by\nreason of his faithfull promise and for the safeguard of his friend, he\nsaid, that hee saw not the Gardener a great while, neither knew where\nhe was: the souldiers said contrary, whereby to know the verity of\nthe matter, the Magistrates commanded their Seargants and ministers\nto search every corner of the house, but when they could find neither\nGardener nor Asse, there was a great contention betweene the souldiers\nand our Host, for they sayd we were within the house: and he said no,\nbut I that was very curious to know the matter, when I heard so great\na noyse, put my head out of the window to learne what the stirre and\ntumult did signifie. It fortuned that one of the souldiers perceived my\nshadow, whereupon he began to cry, saying: that hee had certainly seene\nme; then they were all glad and came up into the chamber, and pulled me\ndowne like a prisoner. When they had found mee, they doubted nothing of\nthe Gardener, but seeking about more narrowly, at length they found him\ncouched in a chest. And so they brought out the poore gardener to the\nJustices, who was committed immediately to prison, but they could never\nforbeare laughing from the time they found me by my shadow, wherefore is\nrisen a common Proverbe: 'The shadow of the Asse.'\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE TENTH BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE FORTY-FOURTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow the souldier drave Apuleius away, and how he came to a Captaines\nhouse, and what happened there.\n\nThe next day how my master the Gardener sped, I knew not, but the gentle\nsouldier, who was well beaten for his cowardise, lead me to his lodging\nwithout the contradiction of any man: Where hee laded me well, and\ngarnished my body (as seemed to me) like an Asse of armes. For on the\none side I bare an helmet that shined exceedingly: On the other side\na Target that glistered more a thousand folde. And on the top of my\nburthen he put a long speare, which things he placed thus gallantly, not\nbecause he was so expert in warre (for the Gardener proved the contrary)\nbut to the end he might feare those which passed by, when they saw such\na similitude of warre. When we had gone a good part of our journey,\nover the plaine and easie fields, we fortuned to come to a little towne,\nwhere we lodged at a certaine Captaines house. And there the souldier\ntooke me to one of the servants, while he himselfe went towards his\ncaptaine; who had the charge of a thousand men. And when we had remained\nthere a few dayes, I understood of a wicked and mischievous fact\ncommitted there, which I have put in writing to the end you may know the\nsame. The master of the house had a sonne instructed in good literature,\nand endued with vertuous manners, such a one as you would desire to have\nthe like. Long time before his mother dyed, and when his father married\na new wife, and had another child of the age of xii. yeares. The\nstepdame was more excellent in beauty then honesty: for she loved this\nyoung man her sonne in law, either because she was unchast by nature,\nor because she was enforced by fate of stepmother, to commit so great a\nmischiefe. Gentle reader, thou shalt not read of a fable, but rather a\ntragedy: This woman when her love began first to kindle in her heart,\ncould easily resist her desire and inordinate appetite by reason\nof shame and feare, lest her intent should be knowne: But after it\ncompassed and burned every part of her brest, she was compelled to yeeld\nunto the raging flame of Cupid, and under colour of the disease and\ninfirmity of her body, to conceale the wound of her restlesse mind.\nEvery man knoweth well the signes and tokens of love, and the malady\nconvenient to the same: Her countenance was pale, her eyes sorrowfull,\nher knees weake, and there was no comfort in her, but continuall weeping\nand sobbing, insomuch that you would have thought that she had some\nspice of an ague, saving that she wept unmeasurably: the Phisitians\nknew not her disease, when they felt the beating of her veines, the\nintemperance of her heart, the sobbing sighes, and her often tossing of\nevery side: No, no, the cunning Phisitian knew it not, but a scholler of\nVenus Court might easily conjecture the whole. After that she had beene\nlong time tormented in her affliction, and was no more able to conceale\nher ardent desire, shee caused her sonne to be called for, (which word\nson she would faine put away if it were not for shame:) Then he nothing\ndisobedient to the commandement of his mother, with a sad and modest\ncountenance, came into the chamber of his stepdame, the mother of his\nbrother, but she speaking never a word was in great doubt what she might\ndoe, and could not tell what to say first, by reason of shame. The young\nman suspecting no ill, with humble courtesie demanded the cause of her\npresent disease. Then she having found an occasion to utter her intent,\nwith weeping eyes and covered face, began boldly to speake unto him in\nthis manner: Thou, thou, art the originall cause of all my dolour:\nThou art my comfort and onely health, for those thy comely eyes are\nso enfastned within my brest, that unlesse they succour me, I shall\ncertainly die: Have pitty therefore upon me, be not the occasion of my\ndestruction, neither let my conscience reclaime to offend thy father,\nwhen as thou shalt save the life of thy mother. Moreover since thou dost\nresemble thy fathers shape in every point, it giveth me cause the more\nto fancy thee: Now is ministred unto thee time and place: Now hast thou\noccasion to worke thy will, seeing that we are alone. And it is a common\nsaying:\n\nNever knowne, never done.\n\nThis young man troubled in mind at so suddaine an ill, although hee\nabhorred to commit so beastly a crime, yet hee would not cast her off\nwith a present deniall, but warily pacified her mind with delay of\npromise. Wherefore he promised to doe all according to her desire:\nAnd in the meane season, he willed his mother to be of good cheere, and\ncomfort her selfe till as he might find some convenient time to come\nunto her, when his father was ridden forth: Wherewithall hee got him\naway from the pestilent sight of his stepdame. And knowing that this\nmatter touching the ruine of all the whole house needed the counsell\nof wise and grave persons, he went incontinently to a sage old man and\ndeclared the whole circumstance of the matter. The old man after long\ndeliberation, thought there was no better way to avoyd the storme of\ncruell fortune to come, then to run away. In the meane season this\nwicked woman impatient of her love, and the long delay of her sonne,\negged her husband to ride abroad into farre countreyes. And then she\nasked the young-man the accomplishment of his promise, but he to rid\nhimselfe entirely from her hands, would find alwayes excuses, till in\nthe end she understood by the messengers that came in and out, that he\nnothing regarded her. Then she by how much she loved him before, by so\nmuch and more she hated him now. And by and by she called one of her\nservants, ready to all mischiefes: To whom she declared all her secrets.\nAnd there it was concluded betweene them two, that the surest way was\nto kill the young man: Whereupon this varlet went incontinently to buy\npoyson, which he mingled with wine, to the intent he would give it to\nthe young man to drinke, and thereby presently to kill him. But while\nthey were in deliberation how they might offer it unto him, behold here\nhappened a strange adventure. For the young sonne of the woman that came\nfrom schoole at noone (being very thirsty) tooke the pot wherein the\npoyson was mingled, and ignorant of the venim, dranke a good draught\nthereof, which was prepared to kill his brother: whereby he presently\nfell downe to the ground dead. His schoolemaster seeing his suddaine\nchange, called his mother, and all the servants of the house with a lowd\nvoyce. Incontinently every man declared his opinion, touching the death\nof the child: but the cruell woman the onely example of stepmothers\nmalice, was nothing moved by the bitter death of her sonne, or by her\nowne conscience of paracide, or by the misfortune of her house, or by\nthe dolour of her husband, but rather devised the destruction of all her\nfamily. For by and by shee sent a messenger after her husband to tell\nhim the great misfortune which happened after his departure. And when\nlie came home, the wicked woman declared that his sonne had empoysoned\nhis brother, because he would not consent to his will, and told him\ndivers other leasings, adding in the end that hee threatned to kill her\nlikewise, because she discovered the fact: Then the unhappy father was\nstroken with double dolour of the death of his two children, for on the\none side he saw his younger sonne slaine before his eyes, on the other\nside, he seemed to see the elder condemned to dye for his offence:\nAgaine, where he beheld his wife lament in such sort, it gave him\nfurther occasion to hate his sonne more deadly; but the funerals of his\nyounger sonne were scarce finished, when the old man the father with\nweeping eyes even at the returne from the grave, went to the Justice and\naccused his sonne of the slaughter of his brother, and how he threatned\nto slay his wife, whereby the rather at his weeping and lamentation, he\nmoved all the Magistrates and people to pitty, insomuch that without any\ndelay, or further inquisition they cryed all that hee should be stoned\nto death, but the Justices fearing a farther inconvenience to arise by\nthe particular vengeance, and to the end there might fortune no sedition\namongst the people, prayed the decurions and other Officers of the City,\nthat they might proceed by examination of witnesses, and with order of\njustice according to the ancient custome before the judging of any hasty\nsentence or judgment, without the hearing of the contrary part, like as\nthe barbarous and cruell tyrants accustome to use: otherwise they should\ngive an ill example to their successours. This opinion pleased every\nman, wherefore the Senatours and counsellors were called, who being\nplaced in order according to their dignity, caused the accuser and\ndefender to be brought forth, and by the example of the Athenian law,\nand judgement materiall, their Advocates were commanded to plead their\ncauses briefly without preambles or motions of the people to pitty,\nwhich were too long a processe. And if you demand how I understood all\nthis matter, you shall understand that I heard many declare the same,\nbut to recite what words the accuser used in his invective, what answer\nthe defender made, the orations and pleadings of each party, verily I\nam not able to doe: for I was fast bound at the manger. But as I learned\nand knew by others, I will God willing declare unto you. So it was\nordered, that after the pleadings of both sides was ended, they thought\nbest to try and boult out the verity by witnesses, all presumptions and\nlikelihood set apart, and to call in the servant, who onely was reported\nto know all the matter: by and by the servant came in, who nothing\nabashed, at the feare of so great a judgment, or at the presence of the\nJudges, or at his owne guilty conscience, which hee so finely fained,\nbut with a bold countenance presented himselfe before the justices and\nconfirmed the accusation against the young man, saying: O yee judges, on\na day when this young man loathed and hated his stepmother, hee called\nmee, desiring mee to poyson his brother, whereby hee might revenge\nhimselfe, and if I would doe it and keepe the matter secret, hee\npromised to give me a good reward for my paines: but when the young man\nperceived that I would not accord to his will, he threatned to slay mee,\nwhereupon hee went himselfe and bought poyson, and after tempered it\nwith wine, and then gave it me to give the child, which when I refused\nhe offered it to his brother with his own hands. When the varlet with a\ntrembling countenance had ended these words which seemed a likelihood\nof truth, the judgement was ended: neither was there found any judge or\ncounsellor, so mercifull to the young man accused, as would not judge\nhim culpable, but that he should be put and sowne in a skin, with\na dogge, a Cocke, a Snake, and an Ape, according to the law against\nparricides: wherefore they wanted nothing but (as the ancient custome\nwas) to put white stones and black into a pot, and to take them out\nagaine, to see whether the young-man accused should be acquitted by\njudgment or condemned, which was a thing irrevocable.\n\nIn the mean season he was delivered to the hands of the executioner. But\nthere arose a sage and ancient Physitian, a man of a good conscience\nand credit throughout all the City, that stopped the mouth of the\npot wherein the stones were cast, saying: I am right glad ye reverend\njudges, that I am a man of name and estimation amongst you, whereby I am\naccompted such a one as will not suffer any person to be put to death by\nfalse and untrue accusations, considering there hath bin no homicide\nor murther committed by this yong man in this case, neither you (being\nsworn to judge uprightly) to be misinformed and abused by invented lyes\nand tales. For I cannot but declare and open my conscience, least I\nshould be found to beare small honour and faith to the Gods, wherefore\nI pray you give eare, and I will shew you the whole truth of the matter.\nYou shall understand that this servant which hath merited to be hanged,\ncame one of these dayes to speake with me, promising to give me a\nhundred crownes, if I would give him present poyson, which would cause\na man to dye suddenly, saying, that he would have it for one that was\nsicke of an incurable disease, to the end he might be delivered from all\ntorment, but I smelling his crafty and subtill fetch, and fearing least\nhe would worke some mischiefe withall, gave him a drinke; but to the\nintent I might cleare my selfe from all danger that might happen, I\nwould not presently take the money which he offered. But least any of\nthe crownes should lacke weight or be found counterfeit, I willed him to\nscale the purse wherein they were put, with his manuell signe, whereby\nthe next day we might goe together to the Goldsmith to try them, which\nhe did; wherefore understanding that he was brought present before you\nthis day, I hastily commanded one of my servants to fetch the purse\nwhich he had sealed, and here I bring it unto you to see whether he will\ndeny his owne signe or no: and you may easily conject that his words are\nuntrue, which he alleadged against the young man, touching the buying\nof the poyson, considering hee bought the poyson himselfe. When the\nPhysitian had spoken these words you might perceive how the trayterous\nknave changed his colour, how hee sweat for feare, how he trembled in\nevery part of his body: and how he set one leg upon another, scratching\nIbis head and grinding his teeth, whereby there was no person but would\njudge him culpable. In the end, when he was somewhat returned to his\nformer subtility, he began to deny all that was said, and stoutly\naffirmed, that the Physitian did lye. But the Physitian perceiving that\nhe was rayled at and his words denyed, did never cease to confirme his\nsayings, and to disprove the varlet, till such time as the Officers\nby the commandment of the Judges, bound his hands and brought out the\nseale, wherewith he had sealed the purse which augmented suspition which\nwas conceived of him first. Howbeit, neither the feare of the wheele or\nany other torment according to the use of the Grecians, which were ready\nprepared, no, nor yet the fire could enforce him to confesse the matter,\nso obstinate and grounded was he in his mischievous mind. But the\nPhysitian perceiving that the menaces of these torments did nothing\nprevaile, gan say: I cannot suffer or abide that this young man who\nis innocent, should against all law and conscience, be punished and\ncondemned to die, and the other which is culpable, should escape so\neasily, and after mocke and flowte at your judgement: for I will give\nyou an evident proofe and argument of this present crime. You shall\nunderstand, that when this caytiffe demanded of me a present and strong\npoyson, considering that it was not my part to give occasion of any\nothers death, but rather to cure and save sicke persons by meane of\nmedicines: and on the other side, fearing least if I should deny his\nrequest, I might minister a further cause of his mischiefe, either that\nhe would buy poyson of some other, or else returne and worke his wicked\nintent, with a sword or some dangerous weapon, I gave him no poyson,\nbut a doling drinke of Mandragora, which is of such force, that it\nwill cause any man to sleepe as though he were dead. Neither is it any\nmarvaile if this most desperate man, who is certainly assured to be put\nto death, ordained by an ancient custome, can suffer and abide these\nfacill and easie torments, but if it be so that the child hath received\nthe drinke as I tempered it with mine owne hands, he is yet alive and\ndoth but sleepe, and after his sleepe he shall returne to life againe,\nbut if he be dead indeed, then may you further enquire of the causes\nof his death. The opinion of this ancient Physitian was found good, and\nevery man had a desire to goe to the Sepulchre where the child was layd;\nthere was none of the Justices, none of any reputation of the towne, nor\nany of the common people, but went to see this strange sight. Amongst\nthem all the father of the child remooved with his owne hands the stone\nof the Sepulchre, and found his Sonne rising up after his dead and\nsoporiferous sleepe, whom when he beheld, he imbraced him in his armes,\nand presented him before the people, with great joy and consolation, and\nas he was wrapped and bound in his grave, so he brought him before the\nJudges, whereupon the wickednesse of the Servant, and, the treason\nof the stepdame was plainely discovered, and the verity of the matter\nrevealed, whereby the woman was perpetually exiled, the Servant hanged\non a Gallowes, and the Physitian had the Crownes, which was prepared to\nbuy the poyson. Behold how the fortune of the old man was changed, who\nthinking to be deprived of all his race and posterity, was in one moment\nmade the Father of two Children. But as for me, I was ruled and handled\nby fortune, according to her pleasure.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE FORTY-FIFTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius was sold to two brethren, whereof one was a Baker, and the\nother a Cooke, and how finely and daintily he fared.\n\nTHE Souldier that payed never a peny for me, by the commandement of his\nCaptaine was sent unto Rome, to cary Letters to the great Prince, and\nGenerall of the Campe. Before he went, he sold me for eleven pence to\ntwo of his Companions, being Servants to a man of worship, whereof one\nwas a Baker that baked sweet bread and delicates, the other a Cooke,\nwhich dressed fine and excellent meats for his Master. These two lived\nin common, and would drive me from place to place, to carry such things\nas was necessary, insomuch that I was received by these two, as a third\nBrother, and Companion, and I thought I was never better placed, then\nwith them: for when night came that Supper was done, and their businesse\nended, they would bring many good morsels into their Chamber for\nthemselves. One would bring Pigs, Chickens, fish, and other good meates,\nthe other fine bread, pasties, tarts, custards and other delicate\nJunkets dipped in hony. And when they had shut their chamber doore, and\nwent to the bains: (O Lord) how I would fill my guts with these goodly\ndishes: neither was I so much a foole, or so very an Asse, to leave\nthe dainty meats, and to grind my teeth upon hard hay. In this sort\nI continued a great space, for I played the honest Asse, taking but a\nlittle of one dish, and a little of another, wherby no man distrusted\nme. In the end, I was more hardier and began to devoure the whole messes\nof the sweet delicates, which caused the Baker and the Cooke to suspect,\nhowbeit they nothing mistrusted me, but searched about to apprehend the\ntheefe. At length they began to accuse one another of theft, and to set\nthe dishes and morsels of meat in order, one by another, because they\nwould learne what was taken away, whereby one of them was compelled to\nsay thus to his fellow: Is it reason to breake promise and faith in\nthis sort, by stealing away the best meat, and to sell it to augment\nthy good, and yet neverthelesse to have thy part in the residue that\nis left: if our partnership doe mislike thee, we will be partners and\nbrothers in other things, but in this we will breake of: for I perceive\nthat the great losse which I sustain, will at length be a cause of great\ndiscord betweene us. Then answered the other, Verily I praise thy great\nconstancy and subtilnesse, in that (when thou hast secretly taken away\nthe meat) [thou] dost begin to complaine first, whereas I by long space\nof time have suffered thee, because I would not seeme to accuse my\nbrother of theft, but I am right glad in that wee are fallen into\ncommunication of the matter, least by our silence, like contention might\narise betweene us, as fortuned betweene Eteocles and his Brother. When\nthey had reasoned together in this sort, they swore both earnestly, that\nneither of them stale or tooke away any jote of the meate, wherefore\nthey concluded to search out the Theefe by all kind of meanes. For they\ncould not imagin or thinke, the Asse who stood alone there, would eate\nany such meates, neither could they thinke that Mice or Flyes, were so\nravenous, as to devouer whole dishes of meat, like the Birds Harpies\nwhich carried away the meates of Phineus the King of Archadia. In the\nMeane season while I was fed with dainty morsels, I gathered together my\nflesh, my skin waxed soft, my haire began to shine, and was gallant on\nevery part, but such faire and comely shape of my body, was cause of\nmy dishonour, for the Baker and Cooke marvelled to see me so slick and\nfine, considering I did eate no hay at all. Wherefore on a time at their\naccustomed houre, they went to the baines, and locked their chamber\ndoore. It fortuned that ere they departed away, they espyed me through\na hole, how I fell roundly to my victuals: then they marvelled greatly,\nand little esteemed the losse of their meate, laughed exceedingly,\ncalling the servants of the house, to shew them the greedy gorge and\nappetite of the Asse. Their laughing was so immoderate that the master\nof the house heard them, and demanded the cause of their laughter,\nand when hee understood all the matter, hee looked through the hole\nlikewise, wherewith he took such a delectation that hee commanded the\ndoore to be opened, that hee might see mee at his pleasure. Then I\nperceiving every man laugh, was nothing abashed, but rather more bold,\nwhereby I never rested eating, till such time as the master of the\nhouse commanded me to be brought into his parler as a novelty, and there\ncaused all kinds of meates which were never touched to be set on the\ntable, which (although I had eaten sufficiently before, yet to win the\nfurther favour of the master of the house) I did greedily devoure and\nmade a cleane riddance of all the delicate meates. And to prove my\nnature wholly, they gave met such meates as every Asse doth abhorre:\nfor they put before mee beefe and vinegar, birds and pepper, fish and\nverjuice: in the meane season they that beheld met at the table did\nnothing but laugh. Then one of the servants of the house sayd to his\nmaster, I pray you sir give him some drinke to his supper: Marry (quoth\nhee) I thinke thou saist true, for it may be, that to his meate hee\nwould drinke likewise a cup of wine. Hoe boy, wash yonder pot, and fill\nit with wine, which done, carry it to the Asse, and say that I have\ndrunke to him. Then all the standers by looked on, to see what would\ncome to passe: but I (as soone as I beheld the cup) staied not long, but\ngathering my lips together, supped up all the wine at one draught. The\nmaster being right joyfull hereat caused the Baker and Cooke which had\nbought me, to come before him, to whom he delivered foure times as much\nfor me, as they paid, which done he committed me to one of his rich\nLibertines, and charged him to looke well to me, and that I should lacke\nnothing, who obeied his masters commandement in every point: and to the\nend he would creepe further into his favour, he taught me a thousand\nqualities. First he instructed me to sit at the table upon my taile, and\nhow I should leape and dance, holding up my former feete: moreover hee\ntaught me how I should answer when any body spake unto me, with nodding\nmy head, which was a strange and marvailous thing, and if I did lacke\ndrinke, I should looke still upon the pot. All which things I did\nwillingly bring to passe, and obeyed his doctrine: howbeit, I could have\ndone all these things without his teaching, but I feared greatly lest in\nshewing my selfe cunning without a master, I should pretend some great\nand strange wonder, and thereby be throwne out to wild beasts. But my\nfame was spred about in every place, and the qualities which I could\ndoe, insomuch that my master was renowned throughout all the Country by\nreason of mee. For every man would say: Behold the Gentleman that\nhath an Asse, that will eate and drinke with him, that will dance, and\nunderstand what is said to him, will shew his fantasie by signes. But\nfirst I will tell you (which I should have done before) who my master\nwas, and of what country. His name was Thiasus, hee was borne at\nCorinth, which is a principall towne of Achaia, and he had passed many\noffices of honor, till hee had taken upon him the degree Quinquenuall,\naccording as his birth and dignity required, who to shew his\nworthinesse, and to purchase the benevolence of every person, appointed\npublike joyes and triumphs, to endure the space of three dayes, and to\nbring his endeavour to passe, he came into Thessaly to buy excellent\nBeasts, and valiant fighters for the purpose.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FORTY-SIXTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow a certaine Matron fell in love with Apuleius, how hee had his\npleasure with her, and what other things happened.\n\nWhen he had bought such things as was necessary, he would not returne\nhome into his Countrey in Chariots, or waggon, neither would he ride\nupon Thessalian Horses, or Jenets of France, or Spanish Mules, which\nbe most excellent as can be found, but caused me to be garnished and\ntrimmed with trappers and barbs of Gold, with brave harnesse, with\npurple coverings, with a bridle of silver, with pictured cloths, and\nwith shrilling bells, and in this manner he rode upon me lovingly,\nspeaking and intreating me with gentle words, but above all things\nhe did greatly rejoyce in that I was his Servant to beare him upon my\nbacke, and his Companion to feed with him at the Table: After long time\nwhen we had travelled as well by Sea as Land, and fortuned to arrive\nat Corinth, the people of the Towne came about us on every side, not so\nmuch to doe honour to Thiasus, as to see me: For my fame was so greatly\nspread there, that I gained my master much money, and when the people\nwas desirous to see me play prankes, they caused the Gates to be shut,\nand such as entered in should pay money, by meanes whereof I was a\nprofitable companion to them every day: There fortuned to be amongst the\nAssembly a noble and rich Matron that conceived much delight to behold\nme, and could find no remedy to her passions and disordinate appetite,\nbut continually desired to have her pleasure with me, as Pasiphae had\nwith a Bull. In the end she promised a great reward to my keeper for the\ncustody of me one night, who for gaine of a little money accorded to her\ndesire, and when I had supped in a Parler with my Master, we departed\naway and went into our Chamber, where we found the faire Matron, who had\ntarried a great space for our comming: I am not able to recite unto you\nhow all things were prepared: there were foure Eunuches that lay on a\nbed of downe on the ground with Boulsters accordingly for us to lye on,\nthe Coverlet was of cloth of Gold, and the pillowes soft and tender,\nwhereon the delicate Matron had accustomed to lay her head. Then the\nEunuches not minding to delay any longer the pleasure of their Mistresse\nclosed the doores of the Chamber and departed away: within the Chamber\nwere Lamps that gave a cleare light all the place over: Then she put off\nall her Garments to her naked skinne, and taking the Lampe that\nstood next to her, began to annoint all her body with balme, and mine\nlikewise, but especially my nose, which done, she kissed me, not as they\naccustome to doe at the stews, or in brothel houses, or in the Curtain\nSchools for gaine of money, but purely, sincerely, and with great\naffection, casting out these and like loving words: Thou art he whom I\nlove, thou art he whom I onely desire, without thee I cannot live, and\nother like preamble of talke as women can use well enough, when as they\nmind to shew or declare their burning passions and great affection of\nlove: Then she tooke me by the halter and cast me downe upon the\nbed, which was nothing strange unto me, considering that she was so\nbeautifull a Matron and I so wel bolded out with wine, and perfumed\nwith balme, whereby I was readily prepared for the purpose: But nothing\ngrieved me so much as to think, how I should with my huge and great legs\nimbrace so faire a Matron, or how I should touch her fine, dainty, and\nsilken skinne, with my hard hoofes, or how it was possible to kisse her\nsoft, pretty and ruddy lips, with my monstrous mouth and stony teeth, or\nhow she, who was young and tender, could be able to receive me.\n\nAnd I verily thought, if I should hurt the woman by any kind of meane, I\nshould be throwne to the wild Beasts: But in the meane season she kissed\nme, and looked in my mouth with burning eyes, saying: I hold thee my\ncanny, I hold thee my noose, my sparrow, and therewithall she eftsoones\nimbraced my body round about, and had her pleasure with me, whereby I\nthought the mother of Miniatures did not ceaseless quench her inordinate\ndesire with a Bull. When night was passed, with much joy and small\nsleepe, the Matron went before day to my keeper to bargain with him\nanother night, which he willingly granted, partly for gaine of money,\nand partly to finde new pastime for my master. Who after he was informed\nof all the history of my luxury, was right glad, and rewarded my keeper\nwell for his paine, minding to shew before the face of all the people,\nwhat I could doe: but because they would not suffer the Matron to abide\nsuch shame, by reason of her dignity, and because they could finde no\nother that would endeavour so great a reproach, at length they obtained\nfor money a poore woman, which was condemned to be eaten of wilde\nbeasts, with whom I should openly have to doe: But first I will tell you\nwhat tale I heard concerning this woman. This woman had a husband, whose\nfather minding to ride forth, commanded his wife which he left at home\ngreat with child, that if she were delivered of a daughter, it should\nincontinently be killed. When the time of her delivery came, it fortuned\nthat she had a daughter, whom she would not suffer to be slaine, by\nreason of the naturall affection which she have unto her child, but\nsecretly committed her to one of her neighbours to nurse. And when her\nhusband returned home, shee declared unto him that shee was delivered of\na daughter, whom (as hee commanded), shee had caused to be put to death.\nBut when this child came to age, and ready to be married, the mother\nknew not by what meanes shee should endow her daughter, but that her\nhusband should understand and perceive it. Wherefore shee discovered the\nmatter to her sonne, who was the husband of this woman, condemned to be\neaten of wild beasts: For shee greatly feared least hee should unawares\nfancie or fall in love with his owne sister. The young man understanding\nthe whole matter (to please and gratify his mother) went immediately to\nthe young maiden, keeping the matter secret in his heart, for feare of\ninconvenience, and (lamenting to see his sister forsaken both of mother\nand father) incontinently after endowed her with part of his owne goods,\nand would have married her to one of his especial and trusty friends:\nBut although hee brought this to passe very secretly and sagely, yet in\nthe end cruell fortune sowed great sedition in his house. For his wife\nwho was now condemned to beasts, waxed jealous of her husband and began\nto suspect the young woman as a harlot and common queane, insomuch that\nshee invented all manner of meanes to dispatch her out of the way. And\nin the end shee invented this kind of mischiefe: She privily stale away\nher husbands ring, and went into the country, whereas she commanded one\nof her trusty servants to take the ring and carry it to the mayden. To\nwhom he should declare that her brother did pray her to come into the\ncountry to him, and that she should come alone without any person.\nAnd to the end shee should not delay but come with all speed he should\ndeliver her the ring, which should be a sufficient testimony of the\nmessage. This mayden as soone as she had received the ring of her\nbrother, being very willing and desirous to obey his commandement: (For\nshe knew no otherwise but that he had sent for her) went in all hast as\nthe messenger willed her to doe. But when she was come to the snare and\nengine which was prepared for her, the mischievous woman, like one that\nwere mad, and possessed with some ill spirit, when the poore maiden\ncalled for helpe with a loud voyce to her brother, the wicked harlot\n(weening that she had invented and feined the matter) tooke a burning\nfirebrand and thrust it into her secret place, whereby she died\nmiserably. The husband of this maiden but especially her brother,\nadvertised of her death, came to the place where she was slain, and\nafter great lamentation and weeping, they caused her to be buried\nhonourably. This yong man her brother taking in ill part the miserable\ndeath of his sister, as it was convenient he should, conceived so great\ndolour within his mind and was strucken with so pestilent fury of bitter\nanguish, that he fell into the burning passions of a dangerous ague,\nwhereby he seemed in such necessity, that he needed to have some speedy\nremedy to save his life. The woman that slew the Maiden having lost the\nname of wife together with her faith, went to a traiterous Physician,\nwho had killed a great many persons in his dayes and promised him\nfifty peeces of Gold, if he would give her a present poyson to kill her\nhusband out of hand, but in presence of her Husband, she feined that\nit was necessary for him to receive a certaine kind of drink, which\nthe Maisters and Doctours of Physicke doe call a sacred Potion, to the\nintent he might purge Choller and scoure the interiour parts of his\nbody. But the Physitian in stead of that drinke prepared a mortall and\ndeadly poyson, and when he had tempered it accordingly, he tooke the pot\nin the presence of the family, and other neighbours and friends of the\nsick yong man, and offered it to his patient. But the bold and hardy\nwoman, to the end she might accomplish her wicked intent, and also gaine\nthe money which she had promised the Physitian, staid the pot with her\nhand, saying: I pray you master Physitian, minister not this drinke unto\nmy deare Husband, untill such time as you have drunke some part thereof\nyour selfe: For what know I, whether you have mingled any poyson in the\ndrinke or no, wherein I would have you not to be offended: For I know\nthat you are a man of wisedome and learning, but this I do to the intent\nthe conscience and love that I beare to the health and safeguard of my\nhusband, may be apparent. The Physitian being greatly troubled at the\nwickednesse of this mischievous woman, as voyd of all counsell and\nleysure to consider of the matter, and least he might give any cause\nof suspition to the standers by, or shew any scruple of his guilty\nconscience, by reason of long delay, tooke the pot in his hand, and\npresently drunke a good draught thereof, which done, the young man\nhaving no mistrust, drunke up the residue. The Physitian would have gone\nimmediately home to receive a counterpoyson, to expeth and drive out the\nfirst poyson: But the wicked woman persevering in her mischiefe, would\nnot suffer him to depart a foot, untill such time as the poyson began to\nworke in him, and then by much prayer and intercession she licensed him\nto goe home: By the way the poyson invaded the intrailes and bowels of\nthe whole body of the Physitian, in such sort that with great paine he\ncame to his owne house, where he had scarce time to speake to his wife,\nand to will her to receive the promised salitary of the death of two\npersons, but he yeelded up the ghost: And the other young man lived not\nlong after, but likewise dyed, amongst the feined and deceitfull teares\nof his cursed wife. A few dayes after, when the young man was buried and\nthe funerall ended, the Physitians wife demanded of her the fifty peeces\nof gold which she promised her husband for the drinke, whereat the ill\ndisposed woman, with resemblance of honesty, answered her with gentle\nwords, and promised to give her the fifty peeces of gold, if she would\nfetch her a little of that same drinke, to proceed and make an end of\nall her enterprise. The Physitians wife partly to winne the further\nfavour of this rich woman, and partly to gaine the money, ranne\nincontinently home, and brought her a whole roote of poyson, which\nwhen she saw, having now occasion to execute her further malice, and\nto finish the damnable plot, began to stretch out her bloody hands\nto murther. She had a daughter by her husband (that was poysoned) who\naccording to order of law, was appointed heire of all the lands and\ngoods of her father: but this woman knowing that the mothers succoured\ntheir children, and received all their goods after their death, purposed\nto shew her selfe a like parent to her child, as she was a wife to\nher husband, whereupon she prepared a dinner with her owne hands, and\nempoysoned both the wife of the Physitian and her owne daughter: The\nchild being young and tender dyed incontinently by force of the drinke,\nbut the Physitians wife being stout and strong of complexion, feeling\nthe poison to trill down into her body, doubted the matter, and\nthereupon knowing of certainty that she had received her bane,\nran forthwith to the judges house, that what with her cryes, and\nexclamations, she raised up the people of the towne, and promising them\nto shew divers wicked and mischievous acts, caused that the doores and\ngates were opened. When she came in she declared from the beginning to\nthe end the abhomination of this woman: but shee had scarce ended her\ntale, when opening her falling lips, and grinding her teeth together,\nshe fell downe dead before the face of the Judge, who incontinently to\ntry the truth of the matter, caused the cursed woman, and her servants\nto be pulled out of the house, and enforced by paine of torment to\nconfesse the verity, which being knowne, this mischievous woman farre\nlesse then she deserved, but because there could be no more cruell a\ndeath invented for the quality of her offence, was condemned to be eaten\nwith wild beasts. Behold with this woman was I appointed to have to doe\nbefore the face of the people, but I being wrapped in great anguish, and\nenvying the day of the triumph, when we two should so abandon our selves\ntogether, devised rather to sley my selfe, then to pollute my body with\nthis mischievous harlot, and so for ever to remaine defamed: but it was\nimpossible for me so to doe, considering that I lacked hands, and was\nnot able to hold a knife in my hoofes: howbeit standing in a pretty\ncabin, I rejoyced in my selfe to see that spring time was come, and that\nall things flourished, and that I was in good hope to find some Roses,\nto render me my humane shape. When the day of triumph came, I was led\nwith great pompe and benevolence to the appointed place, where when I\nwas brought, I first saw the preamble of that triumph, dedicated with\ndancers and merry taunting jests, and in the meane season was placed\nbefore the gate of the Theater, whereas on the one side I saw the greene\nand fresh grasse growing before the entry thereof, whereon I greatly\ndesired to feed: on the other side I conceived a great delectation\nto see when the Theater gates were opened, how all things was finely\nprepared and set forth: For there I might see young children and\nmaidens in the flowre of their youth of excellent beauty, and attired\ngorgiously, dancing and mooved in comely order, according to the order\nof Grecia, for sometime they would dance in length, sometime round\ntogether, sometime divide themselves into foure parts, and sometime\nloose hands on every side: but when the trumpet gave warning that every\nman should retire to his place, then began the triumph to appeare. First\nthere was a hill of wood, not much unlike that which the Poet Homer\ncalled Idea, for it was garnished about with all sort of greene verdures\nand lively trees, from the top whereof ran downe a cleare and fresh\nfountaine, nourishing the waters below, about which wood were many young\nand tender Goates, plucking and feeding daintily on the budding trees,\nthen came a young man a shepheard representing Paris, richly arrayed\nwith vestments of Barbary, having a mitre of gold upon his head, and\nseeming as though he kept the goates. After him ensued another young man\nall naked, saving that his left shoulder was covered with a rich cloake,\nand his head shining with glistering haires, and hanging downe, through\nwhich you might perceive two little wings, whereby you might conjecture\nthat he was Mercury, with his rod called Caduceus, he bare in his right\nhand an Apple of gold, and with a seemely gate went towards him that\nrepresented Paris, and after hee had delivered him the Apple, he made a\nsigne, signifying that Jupiter had commanded him so to doe: when he had\ndone his message he departed away. And by and by, there approached a\nfaire and comely mayden, not much unlike to Juno, for she had a Diademe\nof gold upon her head, and in her hand she bare a regall scepter: then\nfollowed another resembling Pallas, for she had on her head a shining\nsallet, whereon was bound a garland of Olive branches, having in one\nhand a target or shield: and in the other a speare as though she would\nfight: then came another which passed the other in beauty, and presented\nthe Goddesse Venus, with the color of Ambrosia, when she was a maiden,\nand to the end she would shew her perfect beauty, shee appeared all\nnaked, saving that her fine and dainty skin was covered with a thin\nsmocke, which the wind blew hither and thither to testifie the youth and\nflowre of the age of the dame. Her colour was of two sorts, for her\nbody was white as descended from heaven, and her smocke was blewish,\nas arrived from the sea: After every one of the Virgins which seemed\ngoddesses, followed certaine waiting servants, Castor and Pollus went\nbehind Juno, having on their heads helmets covered with starres. This\nVirgin Juno sounded a Flute, which shee bare in her hand, and mooved her\nselfe towards the shepheard Paris, shewing by honest signes and tokens,\nand promising that hee should be Lord of all Asia, if hee would judge\nher the fairest of the three, and to give her the apple of gold: the\nother maiden which seemed by her armour to be Pallas, was accompanied\nwith two young men armed, and brandishing their naked swords in their\nhands, whereof one named Terror, and the other Feare; behind them\napproached one sounding his trumpet to provoke and stirre men to\nbattell; this maiden began to dance and shake her head, throwing her\nfierce and terrible eyes upon Paris and promising that if it pleased him\nto give her the victory of beauty, shee would make him the most strong\nand victorious man alive. Then came Venus and presented her selfe in the\nmiddle of the Theater, with much favour of all the people, for shee was\naccompanied with a great many of youth, whereby you would have judged\nthem all to be Cupidoes, either to have flowne from heaven or else from\nthe river of the sea, for they had wings, arrowes, and the residue\nof their habit according in each point, and they bare in their hands\ntorches lighted, as though it had beene a day of marriage. Then came in\na great multitude of faire maidens: on the one side were the most comely\nGraces: on the other side, the most beautifull Houres carrying garlands\nand loose flowers, and making great honor to the goddesse of pleasure;\nthe flutes and Pipes yeelded out the sweet sound of Lydians, whereby\nthey pleased the minds of the standers by exceedingly, but the more\npleasing Venus mooved forward more and more, and shaking her head\nanswered by her motion and gesture, to the sound of the instruments. For\nsometimes she would winke gently, sometimes threaten and looke aspishly,\nand sometimes dance onely with her eyes: As soone as she was come before\nthe Judge, she made a signe and token to give him the most fairest\nspouse of all the world, if he would prefer her above the residue of the\ngoddesses. Then the young Phrygian shepheard Paris with a willing mind\ndelivered the golden Apple to Venus, which was the victory of beauty.\n\nWhy doe ye marvell, ye Orators, ye Lawyers, and Advocates, if many of\nour judges now a daies sell their judgements for money, when as in the\nbeginning of the world one onely Grace corrupted the sentence betweene\nGod and men, and that one rusticall Judge and shepheard appointed by\nthe counsell of great Jupiter, sold his judgement for a little pleasure,\nwhich was the cause afterward of the ruine of all his progeny? By like\nmanner of meane, was sentence given between the noble Greekes: For the\nnoble and valiant personage Palamedes was convicted and attainted of\ntreason, by false perswasion and accusation, and Ulisses being but of\nbase condition, was preferred in Martiall prowesse above great Ajax.\nWhat judgement was there likewise amongst the Athenian lawyers, sage and\nexpert in all sciences? Was not Socrates who was preferred by Apollo,\nabove all the wise men in the world, by envy and malice of wicked\npersons impoysoned with the herbe Cicuta, as one that corrupted the\nyouth of the countrey, whom alwaies be kept under by correction? For we\nsee now a dayes many excellent Philosophers greatly desire to follow his\nsect, and by perpetual study to value and revolve his workes, but to\nthe end I may not be reproved of indignation by any one that might say:\nWhat, shall we suffer an Asse to play the Philosopher? I will returne to\nmy further purpose.\n\nAfter the judgement of Paris was ended, Juno and Pallas departed away\nangerly, shewing by their gesture, that they would revenge themselves\non Paris, but Venus that was right pleased and glad in her heart, danced\nabout the Theater with much joy. This done from the top of the hill\nthrough a privy spout, ran a floud of the colour of Saffron, which fell\nupon the Goates, and changed their white haire into yellow, with a sweet\nodour to all them of the Theater. By and by after by certaine engines,\nthe ground opened, and swallowed up the hill of wood: and then behold\nthere came a man of armes through the multitude, demanding by the\nconsent of the people, the woman who was condemned to the beasts, and\nappointed for me to have to doe withall: our bed was finely and bravely\nprepared, and covered with silke and other things necessary. But I,\nbeside the shame to commit this horrible fact, and to pollute my body\nwith this wicked harlot did greatly feare the danger of death: for I\nthought in my selfe, that when she and I were together, the savage beast\nappointed to devoure the woman, was not so instructed and taught, or\nwould so temper his greedinesse, as that hee would teare her in\npeeces lying under mee, and spare mee with a regard of mine innocency.\nWherefore I was more carefull for the safeguard of my life, then for the\nshame that I should abide, but in the meane season while my master made\nready the bed, all the residue did greatly delight to see the hunting\nand pleasantnesse of the triumph, I began to thinke and devise for my\nselfe. When I perceived that no man had regard to mee, that was so tame\nand gentle an Asse, I stole out of the gate that was next me, and then I\nran away with all force, and came to Cenchris, which is the most famous\ntowne of all the Carthaginians, bordering upon the Seas called Ageum,\nand Saronicum, where is a great and mighty Haven, frequented with many a\nsundry Nation. There because I would avoyd the multitude of the people,\nI went to a secret place of the Sea coast, where I laid me down upon the\nsand, to ease and refresh my selfe, for the day was past and the Sunne\ngone downe, and lying in this sort on the ground, did fall in a sound\nsleepe.\n\n\n\n\n\nTHE ELEVENTH BOOKE\n\n\n\n\nTHE FORTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow Apuleius by Roses and prayer returned to his humane shape.\n\nWhen midnight came that I had slept my first sleepe, I awaked with\nsuddaine feare, and saw the Moone shining bright, as when shee is at the\nfull, and seeming as though she leaped out of the Sea. Then thought I\nwith my selfe, that was the most secret time, when the goddesse Ceres\nhad most puissance and force, considering that all humane things be\ngoverned by her providence: and not onely all beasts private and\ntame, but also all wild and savage beasts be under her protection. And\nconsidering that all bodies in the heavens, the earth and the seas,\nbe by her increasing motions increased, and by her diminishing motions\ndiminished: as weary of all my cruell fortune and calamity, I found good\nhope and soveraigne remedy, though it were very late, to be delivered\nfrom all my misery, by invocation and prayer, to the excellent beauty of\nthe Goddesse, whom I saw shining before mine eyes, wherefore shaking off\nmine Assie and drowsie sleepe, I arose with a joyfull face, and mooved\nby a great affection to purifie my selfe, I plunged my selfe seven times\ninto the water of the Sea, which number of seven is conveniable and\nagreeable to holy and divine things, as the worthy and sage Philosopher\nPythagoras hath declared. Then with a weeping countenance, I made this\nOrison to the puissant Goddesse, saying: O blessed Queene of heaven,\nwhether thou be the Dame Ceres which art the originall and motherly\nnource of all fruitfull things in earth, who after the finding of thy\ndaughter Proserpina, through the great joy which thou diddest presently\nconceive, madest barraine and unfruitfull ground to be plowed and sowne,\nand now thou inhabitest in the land of Eleusie; or whether thou be\nthe celestiall Venus, who in the beginning of the world diddest couple\ntogether all kind of things with an ingendered love, by an eternall\npropagation of humane kind, art now worshipped within the Temples of the\nIle Paphos, thou which art the sister of the God Phoebus, who nourishest\nso many people by the generation of beasts, and art now adored at the\nsacred places of Ephesus, thou which art horrible Proserpina, by reason\nof the deadly howlings which thou yeeldest, that hast power to stoppe\nand put away the invasion of the hags and Ghoasts which appeare unto\nmen, and to keepe them downe in the closures of the earth: thou which\nart worshipped in divers manners, and doest illuminate all the borders\nof the earth by thy feminine shape, thou which nourishest all the fruits\nof the world by thy vigor and force; with whatsoever name or fashion it\nis lawfull to call upon thee, I pray thee, to end my great travaile and\nmisery, and deliver mee from the wretched fortune, which had so\nlong time pursued me. Grant peace and rest if it please thee to my\nadversities, for I have endured too much labour and perill. Remoove from\nme my shape of mine Asse, and render to me my pristine estate, and if\nI have offended in any point of divine Majesty, let me rather dye then\nlive, for I am full weary of my life. When I had ended this orison, and\ndiscovered my plaints to the Goddesse, I fortuned to fall asleepe, and\nby and by appeared unto me a divine and venerable face, worshipped even\nof the Gods themselves. Then by little and little I seemed to see the\nwhole figure of her body, mounting out of the sea and standing before\nmee, wherefore I purpose to describe her divine semblance, if the\npoverty of my humane speech will suffer me, or her divine power give me\neloquence thereto. First shee had a great abundance of haire, dispersed\nand scattered about her neck, on the crowne of her head she bare many\ngarlands enterlaced with floures, in the middle of her forehead was a\ncompasse in fashion of a glasse, or resembling the light of the Moone,\nin one of her hands she bare serpents, in the other, blades of corne,\nher vestiment was of fine silke yeelding divers colours, sometime\nyellow, sometime rosie, sometime flamy, and sometime (which troubled my\nspirit sore) darke and obscure, covered with a blacke robe in manner\nof a shield, and pleated in most subtill fashion at the skirts of her\ngarments, the welts appeared comely, whereas here and there the starres\nglimpsed, and in the middle of them was placed the Moone, which shone\nlike a flame of fire, round about the robe was a coronet or garland\nmade with flowers and fruits. In her right hand shee had a timbrell of\nbrasse, which gave a pleasant sound, in her left hand shee bare a cup\nof gold, out of the mouth whereof the serpent Aspis lifted up his head,\nwith a swelling throat, her odoriferous feete were covered with shoes\ninterlaced and wrought with victorious palme. Thus the divine shape\nbreathing out the pleasant spice of fertill Arabia, disdained not with\nher divine voyce to utter these words unto me: Behold Lucius I am come,\nthy weeping and prayers hath mooved mee to succour thee. I am she that\nis the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all\nthe Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, chiefe of powers divine,\nQueene of heaven! the principall of the Gods celestiall, the light of\nthe goddesses: at my will the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds\nof the Seas, and the silences of hell be diposed; my name, my divinity\nis adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable\ncustomes and in many names, for the Phrygians call me the mother of the\nGods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians,\nDiana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other\nBellona, other Hecate: and principally the Aethiopians which dwell\nin the Orient, and the Aegyptians which are excellent in all kind of\nancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustome to worship\nmee, doe call mee Queene Isis. Behold I am come to take pitty of thy\nfortune and tribulation, behold I am present to favour and ayd thee,\nleave off thy weeping and lamentation, put away all thy sorrow, for\nbehold the healthfull day which is ordained by my providence, therefore\nbe ready to attend to my commandement. This day which shall come after\nthis night, is dedicated to my service, by an eternall religion, my\nPriests and Ministers doe accustome after the tempests of the Sea,\nbe ceased, to offer in my name a new ship as a first fruit of my\nNavigation. I command thee not to prophane or despise the sacrifice\nin any wise, for the great Priest shall carry this day following in\nprocession by my exhortation, a Garland of Roses, next the timbrell of\nhis right hand: follow thou my procession amongst the people, and when\nthou commest to the Priest make as though thou wouldest kisse his hand,\nbut snatch at the Roses, whereby I will put away the skin and shape of\nan Asse, which kind of beast I have long time abhorred and despised, but\nabove all things beware thou doubt not nor feare any of those things, as\nhard and difficill to bee brought to passe, for in the same houre that\nI am come to thee, I have commanded the Priest by a vision what he shall\ndoe, and all the people by my commandement shall be compelled to give\nthee place and say nothing! Moreover, thinke not that amongst so faire\nand joyfull Ceremonies, and in so good a company that any person shall\nabhorre thy ill-favoured and deformed figure, or that any man shall be\nso hardy, as to blame and reprove thy suddaine restoration to humane\nshape, wherby they should gather or conceive any sinister opinion: and\nknow thou this of certaine, that the residue of thy life untill the\nhoure of death shall be bound and subject to me! And think it not an\ninjury to be alwayes serviceable towards me, since as by my meane and\nbenefit thou shalt become a man: thou shalt live blessed in this world,\nthou shalt live glorious by my guide and protection, and when thou\ndescendest to Hell, where thou shalt see me shine in that subterene\nplace, shining (as thou seest me now) in the darkness of Acheron, and\nraigning in the deepe profundity of Stix, thou shalt worship me, as\none that hath bin favourable to thee, and if I perceive that thou art\nobedient to my commandement, addict to my religion, and merite my divine\ngrace, know thou, that I will prolong thy dales above the time that the\nfates have appointed, and the celestial Planets ordeined.\n\nWhen the divine Image had spoken these words, she vanished away! By and\nby when I awaked, I arose, haveing the members of my bodie mixed with\nfeare, joy and sweate, and marvailed at the cleare presence of the\npuissant goddesse, and being sprinkled with the water of the sea, I\nrecounted orderly her admonitions and divine commandements. Soone after,\nthe darknes chased away, and the cleare and golden sunne arose, when as\nbehold I saw the streets replenished with people going in a religious\nsort and in great triumph. All things seemed that day to be joyfull,\nas well all manner of beasts and houses, as also the very day it selfe\nseemed to rejoyce. For after the hore-frost, ensued the hot and temperat\nsun, whereby the little birds weening that the spring time had bin come,\ndid chirp and sing in their steven melodiously: the mother of stars,\nthe parent of times, and mistres of all the world: The fruitfull trees\nrejoyced at their fertility: The barren and sterill were contented at\ntheir shadow, rendering sweete and pleasant shrills! The seas were quiet\nfrom winds and tempests: the heaven had chaced away the clouds, and\nappeared faire and cleare with his proper light. Behold then more and\nmore appeared the pomps and processions, attired in regall manner and\nsinging joyfully: One was girded about the middle like a man of armes:\nAnother bare and spare, and had a cloake and high-shooes like a hunter!\nanother was attired in a robe of silke, and socks of gold, having his\nhaire laid out, and dressed in forme of a woman! There was another ware\nlegge-harnesse, and bare a target, a sallet, and a speare like a martial\nsouldier: after him marched one attired in purple with vergers before\nhim like a magistrate! after him followed one with a maurell, a staffe,\na paire of pantofles, and with a gray beard, signifying a philosopher:\nafter him went one with line, betokening a fowler, another with hookes\ndeclaring a fisher: I saw there a meeke and tame beare, which in matron\nhabite was carried on a stoole: An Ape with a bonet on his head, and\ncovered with lawne, resemling a shepheard, and bearing a cup of gold in\nhis hand: an Asse which had wings glewed to his backe, and went after\nan old man, whereby you would judge the one to be Pegasus, and the\nother Bellephoron. Amongst the pleasures and popular delectations, which\nwandered hither and thither, you might see the pompe of the goddesse\ntriumphantly march forward: The woman attired in white vestiments, and\nrejoicing, in that they bare garlands and flowers upon their heads,\nbedspread the waies with hearbes, which they bare in their aprons, where\nthis regall and devout procession should passe: Other caried glasses\non their backes, to testifie obeisance to the goddess which came after.\nOther bare combs of Ivory, and declared by their gesture and motions of\ntheir armes, that they were ordained and readie to dresse the goddesse:\nOthers dropped in the wayes as they went Balme and other pretious\nointments: Then came a great number, as well of men as women, with\nCandels, torches, and other lights, doing honour to the celestiall\ngoddesse: After that sounded the musical harmony of instruments: then\ncame a faire companie of youth, apparelled in white vestiments, singing\nboth meter and verse, with a comely grade which some studious Poet had\nmade in honour of the Muses: In the meane season, arrived the blowers\nof trumpets, which were dedicated unto Serapes, and to the temple before\nthem were officers and beadles, preparing roome for the goddess to\npasse. Then came the great company of men and women, which had taken\ndivine orders, whose garments glistered all the streets over. The women\nhad their haire annointed and their heads covered with linnen: but\nthe men had their crownes shaven, which were the terrene stars of the\ngoddesse, holding in their hand instruments of brasse, silver and gold,\nwhich rendered a pleasant sound.\n\nThe principall Priests which were apparelled with white surplesses\nhanging downe to the ground, bare the relikes of the puissant goddesse.\nOne carried in his hand a light, not unlike to those which we used in\nour houses, saving that in the middle thereof appeared a bole which\nrendred a more bright flame. The second attired hike the other bare\nin his hand an Altar, which the goddesse her selfe named the succor of\nnations. The third held a tree of palme with leaves of gold, and the\nverge of Mercurie. The fourth shewed out a token of equitie by his left\nhand, which was deformed in every place, signifiing thereby more equitie\nthen by the right hand. The same Priest carried a round vessell of gold,\nin forme of a cap. The fifth bare a van, wrought with springs of gold,\nand another carried a vessell for wine: By and by after the goddesse\nfollowed a foot as men do, and specially Mercurie, the messenger of\nthe goddesse infernall and supernall, with his face sometime blacke,\nsometime faire, lifting up the head of the dogges Annubis, and bearing\nin his left hand, his verge, and in his right hand, the branches of a\npalme tree, after whom followed a cow with an upright gate, representing\nthe figure of the great goddesse, and he that guided her, marched on\nwith much gravity. Another carried after the secrets of their religion,\nclosed in a coffer. There was one that bare on his stomacke a figure of\nhis god, not formed like any beast, bird, savage thing or humane shape,\nbut made by a new invention, whereby was signified that such a religion\nshould not be discovered or revealed to any person. There was a vessel\nwrought with a round bottome, haveing on the one side, pictures figured\nlike unto the manner of the Egyptians, and on the other side was an\neare, whereupon stood the Serpent Aspis, holding out his scaly necke.\nFinally, came he which was appointed to my good fortun according to the\npromise of the goddesse. For the great Priest which bare the restoration\nof my human shape, by the commandement of the goddes, Approached more\nand more, bearing in his left hand the timbrill, and in the other a\ngarland of Roses to give me, to the end I might be delivered from cruel\nfortune, which was alwaies mine enemie, after the sufferance of so much\ncalamitie and paine, and after the endurance of so manie perilles:\nThen I not returning hastilie, by reason of sodaine joye, lest I should\ndisturbe the quiet procession with mine importunitie, but going softly\nthrough the prease of the people, which gave me place on every side,\nwent after the Priest. The priest being admonished the night before, as\nI might well perceive stood still and holding out his hand, thrust out\nthe garland of roses into my mouth, I (trembling) devoured with a great\naffection: And as soone as I had eaten them, I was not deceived of the\npromise made unto me. For my deforme and Assie face abated, and first\nthe rugged haire of my body fell off, my thick skin waxed soft and\ntender, the hooves of my feet changed into toes, my hands returned\nagaine, my neck grew short, my head and mouth began round, my long eares\nwere made little, my great and stonie teeth waxed lesse like the teeth\nof men, and my tayle which combred me most, appeared no where: then the\npeople began to marvaile, and the religious honoured the goddesse, for\nso evident a miracle, they wondered at the visions which they saw in\nthe night, and the facilitie of my reformation, whereby they rendered\ntestimonie of so great a benefit which I received of the goddesse.\nWhen I saw my selfe in such estate, I stood still a good space and said\nnothing, for I could not tell what to say, nor what word I shoulde first\nspeake, nor what thanks I should render to the goddesse, but the\ngreat Priest understanding all my fortune and miserie, by divine\nadvertisement, commanded that one should give me garments to cover me:\nHowbeit as soone as I was transformed from an asse to my humane shape,\nI hid the privitie of my body with my hands as shame and necessity\ncompelled mee. Then one of the company put off his upper robe and put\nit on my backe: which done, the Priest looked upon me, with a sweete\nand benigne voice, gan say in this sort: O my friend Lucius, after the\nendurance of so many labours, and the escape of so many tempests of\nfortune, thou art at length come to the port and haven of rest and\nmercy: neither did thy noble linage, thy dignity, thy doctrine, or any\nthing prevaile, but that thou hast endured so many servil pleasures,\nby a little folly of thy youthfullnes, whereby thou hast had a sinister\nreward for thy unprosperous curiositie, but howsoever the blindnes of\nfortune tormented thee in divers dangers: so it is, that now unwares to\nher, thou art come to this present felicitie: let fortune go, and fume\nwith fury in another place, let her finde some other matter to execute\nher cruelty, for fortune hath no puissance against them which serve and\nhonour our goddesse. For what availed the theeves: the beasts savage:\nthy great servitude: the ill and dangerous waits: the long passages: the\nfeare of death every day? Know thou, that now thou art safe, and under\nthe protection of her, who by her cleare light doth lighten the other\ngods: wherefore rejoyce and take a convenable countenance to thy white\nhabit, follow the pomp of this devout and honorable procession, to the\nend that such which be not devout to the Goddes, may see and acknowledge\ntheir errour. Behold Lucius, thou art delivered from so great miseries,\nby the providence of the goddesse Isis, rejoyce therefore and triumph of\nthe victory of fortune; to the end thou maist live more safe and sure,\nmake thy selfe one of this holy order, dedicate thy minde to the Obsequy\nof our Religion, and take upon thee a a voluntary yoake of ministrie:\nAnd when thou beginnest to serve and honour the goddes, then thou\nshalt feele the fruit of thy liberty: After that the great Priest had\nprophesied in this manner, with often breathings, he made a conclusion\nof his words: Then I went amongst the company of die rest and followed\nthe procession: everie one of the people knew me, and pointing at\nme with their fingers, said in this sort: Behold him who is this day\ntransformed into a man by the puissance of the soveraigne goddesse,\nverily he is blessed and most blessed that hath merited so great grace\nfrom heaven, as by the innocencie of his former life, and as it were by\na new regeneration is reserved to the obsequie of the goddesse. In the\nmeane season by little and little we approached nigh unto the sea cost,\neven to that place where I lay the night before being an Asse. There\nafter the images and reliques were orderly disposed, the great Priest\ncompassed about with divers pictures according to the fashion of the\nAegyptians, did dedicate and consecrate with certaine prayers a fair\nship made very cunningly, and purified the same with a torch, an egge,\nand sulphur; the saile was of white linnen cloath, whereon was written\ncertaine letters, which testified the navigation to be prosperous,\nthe mast was of a great length, made of a Pine tree, round and very\nexcellent with a shining top, the cabin was covered over with coverings\nof gold, and all the shippe was made of Citron tree very faire; then all\nthe people as well religious as prophane tooke a great number of Vannes,\nreplenished with odours and pleasant smells and threw them into the sea\nmingled with milke, untill the ship was filled up with large gifts and\nprosperous devotions, when as with a pleasant wind it launched out into\nthe deep. But when they had lost the sight of the ship, every man caried\nagaine that he brought, and went toward the temple in like pompe and\norder as they came to the sea side. When we were come to the temple, the\ngreat priest and those which were deputed to carrie the divine figures,\nbut especially those which had long time bin worshippers of the\nreligion, went into the secret chamber of the goddesse, where they put\nand placed the images according to their ordor. This done, one of the\ncompany which was a scribe or interpreter of letters, who in forme of a\npreacher stood up in a chaire before the place of the holy college, and\nbegan to reade out of a booke, and to interpret to the great prince, the\nsenate, and to all the noble order of chivalry, and generally to all\nthe Romane people, and to all such as be under the jurisdiction of Rome,\nthese words following (Laois Aphesus) which signified the end of their\ndivin service and that it was lawfull for every man to depart, whereat\nall the people gave a great showt, and replenished with much joy, bare\nall kind of hearbs and garlands of flowers home to their houses, kissing\nand imbracing the steps where the goddesse passed: howbeit I could not\ndoe as the rest, for my mind would not suffer me to depart one foot\naway, so attentiv was I to behold the beauty of the goddesse, with\nremembrance of the great miserie I had endured.\n\n\n\n\nTHE FORTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER\n\n\nHow the parents and friends of Apuleius heard news that he was alive and\nin health.\n\n\nIn the mean season newes was carried into my countrey (as swift as the\nflight of birds, or as the blast of windes) of the grace and benefit\nwhich I received of the goddesse, and of my fortune worthy to be had in\nmemory. Then my parents friends and servants of our house understanding\nthat I was not dead, as they were falsely informed, came towards me with\ngreat diligence to see me, as a man raised from death to life: and\nI which never thought to see them againe, was as joyfull as they,\naccepting and taking in good part their honest gifts and oblations that\nthey gave, to the intent I might buy such things as was necessarie for\nmy body: for after I had made relation unto them of all my pristine\nmiserie, and present joyes, I went before the face of the goddesse and\nhired me a house within the cloister of the temple to the end I might\ncontinually be ready to the service of the goddesse, and ordinarily\nfrequent the company of the priests, whereby I would wholy become devout\nto the goddesse, and an inseparable worshipper of her divine name:\nIt fortuned that the goddesse appeared to me oftetimes in the night\nperswading and commanding me to take the order of her religion, but I,\nthough I was indued with a desirous good will, yet the feare of the\nsame withheld me considering her obeysance was hard and difficile, the\nchastitie of the Priests intolerable, and the life fraile and subject to\nmanie inconveniences. Being thus in doubt, I refrained my selfe from all\nthose things as seemed impossible.\n\nOn a night the great priest appeared unto me, presenting his lap full\nof treasure, and when I demanded what it signified, he answered, that\nit was sent me from the countrey of Thessaly, and that a servant of\nmine named Candidus was arived likewise: when I was awake, I mused in\nmy selfe what this vision should pretend, considering I had never any\nservant called by that name: but what soever it did signifie, this I\nverely thought, that it was a foreshew of gaine and prosperous chance:\nwhile I was thus astonied I went to the temple, and taried there till\nthe opening of the gates, then I went in and began to pray before the\nface of the goddesse, the Priest prepared and set the divine things of\nevery Altar, and pulled out the fountaine and holy vessell with solempne\nsupplication. Then they began to sing the mattens of the morning,\ntestifying thereby the houre of the prime. By and by behold arived my\nservant which I had left in the country, when Fotis by errour made me\nan Asse, bringing with him my horse, recovered by her through certaine\nsignes and tokens which I had upon my backe. Then I perceived the\ninterpretation of my dreame, by reason that beside the promise of gaine,\nmy white horse was restored to me, which was signified by the argument\nof my servant Candidus.\n\nThis done I retired to the service of the goddesse in hope of greater\nbenefits, considering I had received a signe and token, whereby my\ncourage increased every day more and more to take upon me the orders and\nsacraments of the temple: insomuch that I oftentimes communed with the\nPriest, desiring him greatly to give me the degree of the religion,\nbut he which was a man of gravitie, and well renowned in the order of\npriesthood, deferred my affection from day to day, with comfort and\nbetter hope, as parents commonly bridle the desires of their children,\nwhen they attempt or indeavour any unprofitable thing, saying, that the\nday when any one should be admitted into their order is appointed by the\ngoddesse, the Priest which should minister the sacrifice is chosen by\nher providence, and the necessary charges of the ceremonies is alotted\nby her commandement, all which things he willed me to attend with\nmarvailous patience, and that I should beware either of too much\nhastinesse, or too great slacknesse, considering that there was like\ndanger, if being called I should delay: or not called I should be hasty:\nmoreover he said that there was none of his company either of so\ndesperate a mind, or so rash and hardy, as to enterprise any thing\nwithout the commandernent of the goddesse, whereby he should commit a\ndeadly offence, considering that it was in her power to damne and save\nall persons, and if any were at the point of death, and in the way\nto damnation, so that he were capable to receive the secrets of the\ngoddesse, it was in her power by divine providence to reduce him to the\npath of health, as by a certaine kind of regeneration: Finally he said\nthat I must attend the celestiall precept, although it was evident and\nplaine, that the goddesse had already vouchsafed to call and appoint me\nto her ministery, and to will me refraine from prophane and unlawfull\nmeates, as those Priests which were already received, to the end I might\ncome more apt and cleane to the knowledge of the secrets of religion.\nThen was I obedient unto these words, and attentive with meek\nquietnesse, and probable taciturnity, I daily served at the temple: in\nthe end the wholesome gentlenesse of the goddesse did nothing deceive\nme, for in the night she appeared to me in a vision, shewing that the\nday was come which I had wished for so long, she told me what provision\nand charges I should be at, and how that she had appointed her\nprincipallest Priest Mythra to be minister with me in my sacrifices.\n\nWhen I heard these divine commandements, I greatly rejoyced: and arose\nbefore day to speake with the great Priest, whom I fortuned to espie\ncomming out of his chamber: Then I saluted him, and thought with my\nselfe to aske and demand his counsell with a bold courage, but as soone\nas he perceived me, he began first to say: O Lucius now know I well\nthat thou art most happy and blessed, whom the divine goddesse doth so\ngreatly accept with mercy, why dost thou delay? Behold the day which\nthou desiredst when as thou shalt receive at my hands the order of\nreligion, and know the most pure secrets of the gods, whereupon the old\nman tooke me by the hand, and lead me to the gate of the great temple,\nwhere at the first entrie he made a solempne celebration, and after\nmorning sacrifice ended, brought out of the secret place of the temple\nbooks, partly written with unknown characters, and partly painted\nwith figures of beasts declaring briefly every sentence, with tops\nand tailes, turning in fashion of a wheele, which were strange and\nimpossible to be read of the prophane people: There he interpreted to me\nsuch things as were necessary to the use and preparation of mine order.\nThis done, I gave charge to certaine of my companions to buy liberally,\nwhatsoever was needfull and convenient, then he brought me to the next\nbains accompanied with all the religious sort, and demanding pardon\nof the goddesse, washed me and purified my body, according to custome.\nAfter this, when noone approached, he brought me backe againe to the\ntemple, presented me before the face of the goddesse, giving a charge of\ncertaine secret things unlawfull to be uttered, and commanding me, and\ngenerally all the rest, to fast by the space of ten continuall daies,\nwithout eating of any beast, or drinking any wine, which thing I\nobserved with a marvellous continencie. Then behold the day approached,\nwhen as the sacrifice should be done, and when night came there arrived\non every coast, a great multitude of Priests, who according to their\norder offered me many presents and gifts: then was all the Laity and\nprophane people commanded to depart, and when they had put on my back a\nlinnen robe, they brought me to the most secret and sacred place of all\nthe temple. You would peradventure demand (you studious reader) what was\nsaid and done there, verely I would tell you if it were lawfull for me\nto tell, you should know if it were convenient for you to heare,\nbut both thy eares, and my tongue shall incur the like paine of rash\ncuriositie: Howbeit, I will content thy mind for this present time,\nwhich peradventure is somewhat religious and given to some devotion,\nlisten therefore and beleeve it to be true: Thou shalt understand that\nI approached neere unto Hell, even to the gates of Proserpina, and after\nthat, I was ravished throughout all the Element, I returned to my proper\nplace: About midnight I saw the Sun shine, I saw likewise the gods\ncelestiall and gods infernall, before whom I presented my selfe, and\nworshipped them: Behold now have I told thee, which although thou hast\nheard, yet it is necessarie thou conceale it; this have I declared\nwithout offence, for the understanding of the prophane.\n\nWhen morning came, and that the solemnities were finished, I came forth\nsanctified with xii. Stoles and in a religious habit, whereof I am not\nforbidden to speake, considering that many persons saw me at that time:\nthere I was commanded to stand upon a seate of wood, which stood in the\nmiddle of the temple, before the figure and remembrance of the goddesse;\nmy vestiment was of fine linnen, covered and embroidered with flowers.\nI had a pretious Cope upon my shoulders hanging downe to the ground,\nwhereon were beasts wrought of divers colours as Indian dragons, and\nHiperborian Griphons, whom in forme of birds, the other world doth\ningender; the Priests commonly call such a habit, a celestiall Stole: in\nmy right hand I carried a light torch, and a garland of flowers upon my\nhead, with Palme leaves sprouting out on every side: I was adorned like\nunto the Sun, and made in fashion of an Image, in such sort that all the\npeople compassed about to behold me: then they began to solemnize the\nfeast of the nativitie, and the new procession with sumptuous bankets\nand delicate meates: the third day was likewise celebrated with like\nceremonies with a religious dinner, and with all the consummation of the\norder: when I had continued there a good space, I conceived a marvailous\ngreat pleasure and consolation in beholding ordinarily the Image of the\ngoddesse, who at length admonished me to depart homeward, not without\nrendring of thanks, which although it were not sufficient, yet they were\naccording to my power. Howbeit I could unneth be perswaded to depart,\nbefore I had fallen prostrate before the face of the goddesse, and wiped\nher steps with my face, whereby I began so greatly to weepe and sigh\nthat my words were interrupted, and as devouring my prayer, I began to\nsay in this sort: O holy and blessed dame, the perpetuall comfort of\nhumane kind, who by thy bounty and grace nourishest all the world, and\nhearest a great affection to the adversities of the miserable, as a\nloving mother thou takest no rest, neither art thou idle at any time in\ngiving thy benefits, and succoring all men, as well on land as sea; thou\nart she that puttest away all stormes and dangers from mans life by thy\nright hand, whereby likewise thou restrainest the fatall dispositions,\nappeasest the great tempests of fortune and keepest backe the course of\nthe stars: the gods supernall doe honour thee: the gods infernall have\nthee in reverence: thou environest all the world, thou givest light to\nthe Sunne, thou governest the world, thou treadest downe the power of\nhell: By thy meane the times returne, the Planets rejoyce, the Elements\nserve: at thy commandment the winds do blow, the clouds increase, the\nseeds prosper, and the fruits prevaile, the birds of the aire, the\nbeasts of the hill, the serpents of the den, and the fishes of the\nsea, do tremble at thy majesty, but my spirit is not able to give thee\nsufficient praise, my patrimonie is unable to satisfie thy sacrifice, my\nvoice hath no power to utter that which I thinke, no if I had a thousand\nmouths and so many tongues: Howbeit as a good religious person, and\naccording to my estate, I will alwaies keepe thee in remembrance and\nclose thee within my breast. When I had ended mine orison, I went to\nembrace the great Priest Mythra my spirituall father, and to demand his\npardon, considering I was unable to recompence the good which he had\ndone to me: after great greeting and thanks I departed from him to visit\nmy parents and friends; and within a while after by the exhortation of\nthe goddesse. I made up my packet, and tooke shipping toward the Citie\nof Rome, where with a prosperous winde I arrived about the xii. day of\nDecember. And the greatest desire that I had there, was daily to make\nmy praiers to the soveraigne goddesse Isis, who by reason of the place\nwhere her temple was builded, was called Campensis, and continually\nadored of the people of Rome. Her minister and worshipper was I, howbeit\nI was a stranger to her Church, and unknowne to her religion there.\n\nWhen the yeare was ended, and the goddesse warned me againe to receive\nthis new order and consecration, I marvailed greatly what it should\nsignifie, and what should happen, considering that I was a sacred.\nperson already, but it fortuned that while I partly reasoned with my\nselfe, and partly examining the thing with the Priests and Bishops,\nthere came a new and marvailous thought in my mind, that is to say, I\nwas onely religious to the goddesse Isis, but not sacred to the religion\nof great Osiris the soveraigne father of all the goddesses, between\nwhom, although there was a religious unitie and concord, yet there was\na great difference of order and ceremony. And because it was necessary\nthat I should likewise be a minister unto Osiris, there was no long\ndelay: for in the night after, appeared unto me one of that order,\ncovered with linnen robes, holding in his hands speares wrapped in Ivie,\nand other things not convenient to declare, which then he left in my\nchamber, and sitting in my seate, recited to me such things as were\nnecessary for the sumptuous banket of mine entrie. And to the end I\nmight know him againe, he shewed me how the ankle of his left foote was\nsomewhat maimed, which caused him a little to halt.\n\nAfter that I manifestly knew the will of the God Osiris, when mattins\nwas ended, I went from one to another, to find him out which had the\nhalting marke on his foote, according as I learned by my vision; at\nlength I found it true: for I perceived one of the company of the\nPriests who had not onely the token of his foote, but the stature and\nhabite of his body, resembling in every point as he appeared in the\nnight: he was called Asinius Marcellus, a name not much disagreeing from\nmy transformation. By and by I went to him, which knew well enough all\nthe matter, as being monished by like precept in the night: for the\nnight before as he dressed the flowers and garlands about the head of\nthe god Osiris, he understood by the mouth of the image which told the\npredestinations of all men, how he had sent a poore man of Madura, to\nwhom he should minister his sacraments, to the end hee should receive\na reward by divine providence, and the other glory, for his vertuous\nstudies. When I saw my selfe this deputed unto religion, my desire was\nstopped by reason of povertie, for I had spent a great part of my goods\nin travell and peregrination, but most of all in the Citie of Rome,\nwhereby my low estate withdrew me a great while.\n\nIn the end being oft times stirred forward, not without great trouble\nof mind, I was constrained to sell my robe for a little money: howbeit\nsufficient for all my affaires. Then the Priest spake unto me saying,\nHow is it that for a little pleasure thou art not afraid to sell thy\nvestiments, and entring into so great ceremonies, fearest to fall into\npovertie? Prepare thy selfe, and abstaine from all animall meats, as\nbeasts and fish. In the meane season I frequented the sacrifices of\nSerapis, which were done in the night, which thing gave me great comfort\nto my peregrination, and ministred unto me more plentifull living,\nconsidering I gained some money in haunting the court, by reason of my\nLatin tongue.\n\nImmediately after I was eftsoones called and admonished by the god\nOsiris, to receive a third order of religion. Then I was greatly\nastonied, because I could not tell what this new vision signified, or\nwhat the intent of the celestiall god was, doubting least the former\nPriests had given me ill counsell, and fearing that they had not\nfaithfully instructed me: being in this manner as it were incensed the\ngod Osiris appeared to me the night following, and giving me admonition\nsaid, There is no occasion why thou shouldest be afraid with so often\norder of religion, as though there were somewhat omitted, but that thou\nshouldest rather rejoyce, since as it hath pleased the gods to call thee\nthree times, when as there was never yet any person that atchieved to\nthe order but once: wherefore thou maist thinke thy selfe happy for\nso great benefits. And know thou that the religion which thou must\nnow receive, is right necessary, if thou meane to persever in the\nworshipping of the goddesse, and to make solempnity on the festivall\nday with the blessed habite, which thing shalt be a glory and renowne to\nthee.\n\nAfter this sort, the divine majesty perswaded me in my sleepe, whereupon\nby and by I went towards the Priest, and declared all that which I had\nseene, then I fasted ten dayes according to the custome, and of mine\nowne proper will I abstained longer then I was commanded: and verely I\ndid nothing repent of the paine which I had taken, and of the charges\nwhich I was at, considering that the divine providence had given me such\nan order, that I gained much money in pleading of causes: Finally after\na few dayes, the great god Osiris appeared to me in the night, not\ndisguised in any other forme, but in his owne essence, commanding me\nthat I should be an Advocate in the court, and not feare the slander and\nenvie of ill persons, which beare me stomacke and grudge by reason of my\ndoctrine, which I had gotten by much labour: moreover, he would not that\nI should be any longer of the number of his Priests, but he allotted me\nto be one of the Decurions and Senatours: and after he appointed me\na place within the ancient pallace, which was erected in the time of\nSilla, where I executed my office in great joy with a shaven Crowne.\n\n\n\n\n\nEnd of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Golden Asse, by Lucius Apuleius\n\n*** ","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}