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At Molyneux Street, 65 men of D Division, when ordered to move off, at first refused, but on the Superintendent's appeal at once went on duty.
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All the offenders in E Division, and 39 from T division, were dismissed. Nearly all were reinstated a week later, dropping a ‘class'. Melville had not far to fall, and after this hiccup his upward progress in the force recommenced on 29 November. The future trajectory of Goodchild, a brave man, is not recorded.

Melville was based during his first six months at Bow Street; this was Metropolitan HQ, Scotland Yard not yet having been built. As a constable, Melville would carry a truncheon and a whistle and, accompanied by a more experienced officer, patrol E Division from Covent Garden to Holborn.

The ideology of the 1870s was proudly bourgeois, with a social conscience. There was a sense that government brought responsibilities, as well as rights. So, although Gustave Doré had illustrated the smoke-laden, overcrowded nightmare of central London as recently as 1869, the squalor in which the poorest people lived was slowly lessening. In the last decade or so investment in a new sewage system had made the Thames cleaner and connected private houses to efficient main drains. The London Underground railway was expanding, allowing better-paid workers access to the suburbs. As business grew there were more clerical jobs and, with universal education, more people capable of doing them. Public hangings had stopped (one of the Clerkenwell culprits was the last man hanged in public). The filth and cruelty of Smithfield's livestock market had been replaced by a properly organised meat market. Cock-fighting and prize-fighting were not the socially acceptable pastimes they used to be. And Shaftesbury Avenue would soon be driven through the notorious rookeries of St Giles where policemen dared not go.

The West End may have been tidied up, but the Bow Street force must have smirked at Sir Edward Henderson's diktat of the previous year. Alarmed by a spate of thefts from washing lines, the Commissioner had earnestly instructed all constables ‘to call at the houses of all persons on their beats having wet linen in their gardens, and caution them of the risk they run in having them stolen'.

E Division was rough, and policing it a twenty-four-hour job. It contained not only St Giles, but a major railway station at Charing Cross, the sinister black arches of the Adelphi along the river – full of rough sleepers, and the Strand, with its theatres and restaurants attracting gullible provincials and sophisticated Londoners alike. Opposite Bow Street, a gas-lit Covent Garden market began trading in fruit, vegetables and flowers long before dawn; the pubs were always open, fights commonplace, and prostitutes never off the streets. Behind the great thoroughfares, above the warren of lanes strewn with horse dung and rotten vegetables, in cold and threadbare rooms there slept, and worked, a motley band of fly-by-night purveyors of abortifacients and dubious publications by mail order. E Division was a good place to start if you wanted an overview of human life at its most desperate.

In April of 1873 PC Melville was transferred to L Division, Lambeth and Walworth, where he occupied police accommodation at 47 Kennington Road just off the Westminster Bridge Road. Some of the faces would have been familiar, for many of the prostitutes who lodged around Waterloo crossed the bridges in the evenings to pick up customers along the Strand and bring them back to York Road or other streets within walking distance of the river.

That there was a huge gulf between the behaviour of the indigent and streetwise of London and the new ‘respectable' classes is demonstrated by the first case of Constable Melville's that we know about, from
The Times
in 1876.
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The complainant was one Kate Beadle, a young woman who had for several years been housekeeper to a Mr Crisp and his family at Islington. She said that her gold watch, diamond rings and earrings, to a total value of about £30, had been stolen from her by Henry Levy, aged thirty-nine, ‘a betting man'. Hers was a sad tale of a maid gone wrong. In August of 1876 she went to Brighton Races with Miss Crisp. Upon leaving they became separated. Two well-dressed men reassured her that they had seen Miss Crisp and she wasn't far away; she would soon turn up. Miss Beadle went with them to a nearby public house. They bought her a glass of what she thought was ‘lemonade and claret'. She must have ‘got stupid'. The next thing she knew she woke up next morning sitting on a doorstep and noticed to her dismay that her diamond ring, valued at £24, was gone.

She tottered off towards Brighton, and along the way a working man told her she could find a bed for the day – presumably to sleep off the effects of that single, devastating lemonade and claret – at a house near the town. She found the place and was relating her woes to the landlady when a young man who overheard said she could come to his house instead.

So – the court did not enquire too deeply here – she stayed with him for three or four days. Then they went to London together and took lodgings in Hercules Buildings, Westminster Bridge Road. He was a gentlemanly fellow, and single, but unfortunately in the habit of taking everything she put down. Jewels and earrings just vanished into thin air. Distraught, Miss Beadle made discreet enquiries and was told that if she were truly contrite she could return to her work at Mr Crisp's. This she decided to do; but when she announced her intention Henry, who had a persuasive way with him, swore that if she did he would send daily letters and wait outside the house. So – with unprecedented cunning – she pretended she would stay, but went to visit the Crisps at Islington anyway. When she came back he had taken all her clothes.

At this point we may assume that she approached the kind policeman of Kennington Road and Mr Henry Levy's fate was sealed. Detective Melville followed him all the way to Muswell Hill and took him into custody at the Alexandra Races. The accused allegedly said ‘I know all about it. I wish I'd never seen her. I've lost more than I've gained by her.' Pawn tickets were found. He claimed that all the goods had been taken with Miss Beadle's consent. He had a wife and children, and according to another detective who gave evidence in court, was ‘a rogue and a vagabond, well known at racecourses'.

In this stratified society, women of all but the very highest and lowest class were treated like children, and in consequence they were as naïve as children.

The Times
already referred to Melville as a detective. He was not a member of the central Detective Branch, which was quite small and had been in existence since 1842. He was probably relieved not to be, because neither its effectiveness nor its probity were held in great esteem. Each division used officers as detectives, but they were occasional, plain-clothes ‘winter patrols' of two working on a monthly shift system in the divisions.
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So Melville would have been a detective for part of the time and pounding the beat in uniform for the rest.

The next case of his to be reported in
The Times
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showed him in contact with a much rougher type, and off duty. As he was in plain clothes, he was probably rather useful. Two couples living at Tennison Street, York Road, were followed late one dark afternoon in November 1877 by Detective Sergeant Ranger and Sergeant Walsh. Off-duty Constable Melville was also following. At Brixton, the two couples were joined by a man named Smith. The police suspected all three men of a series of burglaries in South London, and when Detective Sergeant Ranger and the others approached, one of the women was found to be concealing a jemmy and skeleton keys. At the station they were all charged with loitering with intent in possession of house-breaking implements, and the men were accused of burglary. The police bungled here, as possession of jemmies and skeleton keys was evidently less serious at 6.00 p.m., when they were taken in, than it would have been had the police waited until 9.00 p.m. The chairman of the Surrey Sessions, regretting this anomaly in the English law, awarded Melville £1 for his trouble anyway. This kind of gratuity by results was at the discretion of the magistrates and was common. The result in this case was crime prevention.

The burglars probably came to the knowledge of the police through an informer. This was perfectly obvious and yet it was not mentioned. Unless an informer (a criminal associate) or informant (an uninvolved observer) is known to bear a grudge against a person who is innocent, or otherwise stands to gain from a conviction in court, there is no point in the defence raising the matter. To this day informers are usually invisible: detectives ‘act on information received' and no questions are asked. In the 1870s the use of informers was particularly problematic. The most senior policemen had not risen through the ranks, and did not approve of their officers consorting with criminals and spending time in pubs. Quite apart from the risks of collusion and alcohol dependency, they believed (rightly) that this gave detectives a bad name. Further, because detectives had to advance money out of their own pockets for information, and could not claim the money back unless a crime was attempted and someone convicted, their evidence was always suspect.
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This was never acknowledged in court either.

In February 1879
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Melville appeared in the witness box at Southwark court with his right hand in a sling. The week before he and ‘another detective' called Beale had followed a couple of ticket-of-leave convicts (men released on parole). They saw them enter 1 Windmill Street, and emerge having changed their clothes. They followed the men to a window of Sarah Bennett's shop at 30 Blackfriars Road where one fellow surreptitiously cut a pane out of the window, seized two boxes of cigars, and passed his booty to the other. Constable Melville raced across the road but the pair had begun to run; he grabbed the one with the cigars and in the ensuing struggle his hand was severely cut with glass before he overcame the offender. Added to the charge of theft was that of cutting and wounding Constable Melville of L Division.

Melville was plainly well suited to this kind of work. He gave evidence confidently and stated no assumptions that could provide an opening for an astute cross-examiner. He liked to see without being seen and, with the policeman's towering helmet off, he had the detective's required ability to melt into a crowd: he was an open-faced young man, ordinary in every way.

It so happened that the central Detective Branch was being reformed after a scandal that emerged in 1877. A Madame de Goncourt had been swindled out of £30,000 and two men associated with horse-racing fraud, Benson and Kerr, were wanted to answer charges. Benson was in custody in Amsterdam and the Superintendent of the Detective Branch, Adolphus ‘Dolly' Williamson, sent a smart, multi-lingual Chief Inspector Druscovitch to Holland to collect him. Bringing him back to London seemed unusually difficult. At home, Sergeant Littlechild and a couple of other officers were on the track of Kerr, but he too kept slipping through their fingers. No sooner did they find out where he was staying than he had moved on. Littlechild was getting suspicious by now, and he was not the only one. Finally they caught up with him in Edinburgh. Kerr tried to make a run for it; Littlechild raced after him and the man pulled a gun. ‘For Heaven's sake, don't make a fool of yourself, it means murder!' cried Littlechild.
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Kerr submitted, and the story began to unravel.

For the past four years – between 1873 and 1877 – a Detective Inspector Meiklejohn had been in Kerr's pay – hence the tip-offs. And Meiklejohn, who knew that Druscovitch was worried by his brother's debts, had offered Druscovitch the opportunity to earn backhanders from Kerr as well. A chief inspector called Palmer was also implicated. Palmer, Druscovitch and Meiklejohn (who later went into business as a private detective) were jailed for a couple of years and the scandal tainted ‘Dolly' Williamson's career. He was not corrupt, but his supervisory skills were called into question. An enquiry was set up and an opinionated young barrister and journalist called Howard Vincent saw his chance: this was a golden opportunity for him to make a strong representation to the enquiry, and to come in as a new broom who would lead the detective force.

Charles Howard Vincent was not yet thirty. After Westminster School, where as a frail, undistinguished scholar he had failed to shine, he had served in the Army for five years and in the Territorials; he had lived in Paris and Dresden, Moscow and Constantinople; he was war correspondent to the
Daily Telegraph.
As a barrister he was ambitious and hard-working but lacked professional focus, and therefore preferment in the law. But he knew English politicians and senior civil servants, and had enough contacts in Paris to put his plan into action.

He travelled to Paris and with the help of a
préfet
in the Sûreté wrote a précis of the way the French criminal investigation system worked, with recommendations for its adaptation to English use. This he refined, according to his biography, eighteen times.
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The result was short, readable and incisive. The service required re-structuring. The central Detective Branch should be enlarged and divisional detective patrols should liaise with it, the whole thing forming a criminal investigation department.

The enquiry committee were impressed; everyone admired the French system, and here it was, on paper ready to be implemented. Vincent moved on to the next step: to gather support for himself as holder of the Head of CID post that would necessarily be created if his recommendations were adopted. He concentrated attention upon his legal experience – there were quite enough ex-soldiers in the police already and they seemed to be part of the problem – and his four languages, and attracted the backing of the Attorney General and several members of the committee including Sir William Hardman, the Chairman of Surrey Sessions (who had coincidentally given Constable Melville his £1 reward). Sir Richard Cross, the Tory Home Secretary, was pleased to offer him a job. Vincent's salary, at his own suggestion, was set at that of an assistant
commissaire
– £1,100 pa. His title was to be Director of Criminal Intelligence. His position was at first anomalous, for he was both subordinate to the Commissioner and independent; in charge, but with no power of enforcing directives to staff.
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