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He was a thirty-two-year-old Dutchman, and he was arrested on 29 May in the presence of detectives from G Section. In his room there was evidence of communication with Dierks as far back as March, cigar samples and lists of tobacconists. But the company's price list was somewhat odd, with inexplicable notes on it indicating a code. There was also a current copy of Jane's
Fighting Ships
and a puzzling collection of items including eau-de-cologne (which he was not wearing), custard powder, liquid gum, pens, nibs and a mapping pen.

Other cables had gone to Dierks and Co. this month. There had been two from Edinburgh on 17 and 18 May and another on 25 May which was followed by a £25 remittance from Dierks. The sender in Edinburgh, another Dutchman called Willem Johannes Roos, had left the city. He was traced to Aberdeen; then to Inverness and, finally, on 2 June, to London where he was arrested by Herbert Fitch of Special Branch at a commercial hotel in Aldgate.
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When he came into the country on 14 May, he had claimed to represent Dobbelmann's of Rotterdam, a legitimate cigar trader; but there was no evidence of that. A search of his room by G Section detectives revealed Dierks' stationery and cigar stock lists, and recent hotel bills, which were the only indication that this man might be a commercial traveller for Dierks as he now claimed. However, he did have a magazine article about F.E. Jane of
Fighting Ships
fame, some notes on ships he had seen, custard powder, pens, and a letter from Janssen.

The men were held in custody and interrogated, probably by Drake and Cumming. Janssen, protesting his innocence, said he was a former merchant seaman who had even received a medal from the Board of Trade for rescuing British sailors from a sinking ship. It had been awarded to him at Liverpool in February. This was interesting, for although it was true, further investigation showed that he also travelled to Cardiff, Hull and Edinburgh on that occasion. This time he had entered the country via Hull on 13 May and immediately wired for the funds that did not arrive until 27 May at Southampton. He had been to other South Coast ports in the meantime. He had visited no tobacconists and obtained no orders. He claimed that he had never heard of Roos.

The cigar lists smelled of scent and there was secret writing on them, which a forensic expert said been made with eau-de cologne and a talc fixative. But Roos had more codes on his, respecting ports in the north and east, as might be expected. Roos had to admit that he knew Janssen, because he had a letter from him, but said that Janssen didn't work for Dierks. Janssen insisted he knew nothing of Roos; this went on for some time even after they were brought into the same room. It was pretty tragic stuff because the more they talked the more they denied the obvious. They were not legitimate cigar traders, they knew each other, and they were communicating salient facts to the enemy.

They were tried at Westminster Guildhall and found guilty. Major Drake presented convincing evidence. At some stage both realised that the game was up, and separately wrote to their wives giving the same address to which to apply for a pension. Janssen, after the court martial, talked resignedly about spying. Information came out of England every day, he said; sometimes messages were hidden in the spines of books. He informed on a naval inspector called Hochenholz. Roos said nothing further, but is said to have tried to cut his own throat in prison.
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The two Dutch sailors were shot in the Tower on 30 July.

Thanks to the watch on mail to Dierks & Co., Melville and his detectives were already working on the next case. On 25 May a letter addressed to the firm had been sent from London by a George T. Parker, who could not be traced. Then

The Censor forwarded from Holland a telegram of 30th May 1915 announcing the despatch to Reginald Rowland, c/o Société Générale, Regent Street, London, of £30 on account of Norton B Smith & Co., New York.
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On 3 June came another letter from the mysterious Parker, this time addressed to H. Flores in Rotterdam. Both of Parker's letters referred to a female accomplice called Lizzie. From the context investigators deduced that this might mean the liner
Queen Elizabeth.
In Holland, Tinsley and his agents were quietly checking all the Dutch contacts.

On the same day, Scotland Yard received a report about a woman called Mrs Wertheim who had been asked to leave her hotel at Inverness. Something about her behaviour, her general throwing around of money and nosiness and getting herself driven about the local naval installations, had alerted the hotelkeeper, who called in the Chief Constable, who visited this lady and told her to get out of town; she apparently left for London.

At least one lead could be pursued: sooner or later Mr Rowland would collect his £30 in Regent Street. He proved to be a thin, blond, young man of about twenty-eight, rather highly strung – as he would be in the circumstances. He had a German accent with an American twang and claimed that he was a naturalised American. The detectives searched his accommodation. They found hotel bills establishing part of his movements; cards of Norton B. Smith and a letter showing that he represented the firm; Jane's
Fleets of the World 1915;
a phial of lemon juice; pens and a tin of talc; a code not unlike that used by Janssen and Roos; and a receipt for a registered letter, sent to L. Wertheim in Inverness. His handwriting looked just like Parker's. Upon investigation, they found that L. Wertheim was Lizzie, that George Parker and Reginald Rowland were one and the same, and that Scotland Yard had already received a report on Mrs Wertheim.

Rowland/Parker was using an American passport in the name of Reginald Rowland which was a fake, and yet Reginald Rowland did exist; he was an older man who had deposited his documents with the authorities in Berlin for just one hour earlier in the year. So who was this man with the false passport? Rowland/Parker was saying nothing.

And now, on 4 June, the day of Rowland's arrest, came another wire from Dierks & Co. This one was addressed to a Fernando Buschmann, and mentioned Flores. Buschmann, a young Brazilian, was picked up on 5 June. He seemed to be connected with a German naval inspector called Grund. The list of suspect names was lengthening. Postcards addressed to Flores, and to Grund c/o other suspects, were detected at once; they came from a man called Roggen.

Melville's Special Staff were almost overwhelmed. They were still looking for Lizzie Wertheim. She had apparently been in Edinburgh before Inverness, having travelled from London in the company of an American woman called Knowles-Macy. It being wartime, Miss Knowles-Macy should have brought her passport to register with, but did not, and was turned away from the Edinburgh hotel. This had left Mrs Wertheim to continue her Scottish tour alone.

Patient detective work uncovered relations of Lizzie Wertheim in Hampstead. They did not want anything to do with her. But by 9 July enquiries led them to the house of another acquaintance, a Miss Brandes in the Hammersmith Road. She had turned Lizzie Wertheim out two days before. Finally, on 9 June, they traced her to the house of Miss Knowles-Macy at 33 Regent's Park Road. She was arrested there. ‘When the police went to search her room, she entered the maid's room, tore up a letter from George T. Parker and threw it out of the window.'
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Reading between the lines, she was an annoying, self-dramatising, selfish woman. Her papers were circumstantially, rather than substantially, incriminating; besides the scent and talc of the regulation spy kit were evidence that she had recently been in Berlin and had been in touch with German prisoners of war, a letter from Parker, an envelope addressed to Rowland, an Irish railway guide and Irish money, £115 in banknotes, and all sorts of correspondence and addresses linking her to suspected persons, notably one ‘Dr Brandt' in Amsterdam. There was no technical data, no evidence that all the touring around Ireland, Fishguard, the Isle of Man, the South Coast and elsewhere looking at naval installations had provided the Germans with anything they could otherwise not have guessed. But she must have given them useful information, because she had been earning more money from them than she was used to having (she had started taking cocaine; even in 1915, nature's way of telling her she was overpaid).

Incarcerated in Brixton on remand, and knowing that Wertheim had been arrested, Rowland decided the game was up. He told the full story. He was George Breeckow, a Russian born in 1884, whose father had lost money and taken the family to live at Stettin when George was a child. George Breeckow was brought up speaking German and at some stage was in the German army. He earned his living playing the piano for five or six years before the war in America, and although he took out naturalisation papers the process remained incomplete when he returned to Europe in 1914.

He was engaged in Antwerp in March of 1914 ‘to act as imperial courier between Germany and America' but his first assignment was to go to England. He had £45 for Mrs Wertheim and a mission to persuade a Mr Carter of Southampton to work for the Germans; this the man declined to do. It was all downhill from there onwards. Lizzie Wertheim spent a few days with Breeckow in Southampton and proved to be a trying companion, determined to draw attention to herself. When she left for Scotland, he travelled to Ramsgate with a male friend and sent information to Germany. He then returned to London, and was arrested.

Mrs Wertheim was a Pole whose mother lived in Berlin. She had British citizenship by marriage but had been separated from her husband since about 1911. She was defiant to the end. They were tried at the Old Bailey on 20 September and Breeckow was sentenced to death. He appealed against the sentence. Wertheim got ten years' penal servitude because she was a woman. Kell was angry, saying that this would encourage Germany to send more female spies in future.
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Fernando Buschmann, arrested shortly after his arrival in June, was convicted on the scant evidence of intercepted communication under the Defence of the Realm Act. Buschmann was a Brazilian of German descent and his motive for spying was never clear. Roggen had time to travel around a little before he was caught; like Janssen and Roos, he had arrived with a cover story that did not bear the most cursory examination. He was supposedly a Uruguayan farmer on the look-out for horses to buy, but knew nothing of Uruguay and did not buy horses but arrived in Scotland for ‘fishing and his health' to stay just a couple of miles from a torpedo testing site. Documents and circumstantial evidence linked him with Breeckow. He, and Buschmann, were tried by court martial in September and shot in October 1915.

Not long after MO5 was renamed MI5 in 1916, James Melville's friend from the Middle Temple, Henry Curtis-Bennett, was informally approached by Sir Archibald Bodkin and

Without further explanation, he took Curtis-Bennett by the arm and led him to offices at the corner of Charles Street, Haymarket. It was the headquarters of the Secret Service, nerve centre of the British counter-espionage system.

Curtis-Bennett joined in November 1916. His biographers say he found that

German agents who came to England were given all the rope they needed, provided eventually they hanged themselves. He took to this strange game of bluff and double bluff with enthusiasm… He was the man of the world among the soldiers, sailors and policemen with whom he was now working, and they used his supreme ability to read character and motive to great effect.
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From 1917 onwards Curtis-Bennett became part of the triumvirate who interrogated suspects. One of the three was always a military man like Drake or Kell and one was Basil Thomson; Curtis-Bennett was the other. Curtis-Bennett at least occasionally found himselfoverwhelmed with remorse when the questioning was successful, for the evidence thus produced would almost inevitably send the man to his death. There were, increasingly, exceptions. Sharing a cell with Buschmann had been a middle-aged Dutchman called Joseph Marks; he, like so many, had been let down by props (in his case a stamp collection) and a cover story that did not bear examination by a detective.
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But unlike the rest, Marks confessed and provided information about his spymaster in Holland. He received a five-year sentence and was deported after the war.

In 1916 German intelligence began to take the likelihood of detection more seriously. A man called Vieyra came under observation from May onwards because Richard Tinsley, in Rotterdam, had heard that he was a German spy. Vieyra was also known as Pickard, and lived in Acton with a woman called Mrs Fletcher. He had run a midget troupe before the war and had then got into the film distribution business, which took him to the continent and America. He came back from Holland in May, went about his business, and apart from the odd bank deposit from overseas, nothing was noticeably strange. His letters and business were ordinary. Enquiries on the continent, however, revealed some mysterious correspondents, an untrace-able ‘partner' and a mistress whose testimony, while not exactly incriminating, was not reassuring either.

The Vieyra case is interesting for several reasons. For one thing, Tinsley according to the records had access to the services of a Dutch police sergeant; for another, some of the correspondence to and from the untraceable ‘partner' must have travelled via the diplomatic bag of the Dutch Consulate in London. Vieyra's letters, when they were finally developed in a three-stage process taking several days, showed not only that he was spying, but that the Germans had invented a new kind of invisible ink. Vieyra was also the first spy to be condemned to death and then have his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. In this way his testimony could continue to be of use in future cases.

Over a five-month period starting at the end of the year the British security services detected a sophisticated spy network which, if its full ramifications were to be understood, must be kept in place.
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The first suspect was a man called Denis, who in September 1916 was under observation by Richard Tinsley in Holland. On 20 September George Vaux Bacon, an American journalist newly arrived in England from New York, wrote to Denis from London. On 22 September Bacon went to Holland where he stayed throughout October; his letter, however, was not intercepted until 29 September and not read until 9 October, so its late arrival at Denis's address in Holland naturally aroused Bacon's suspicion. This was compounded when, in October, Tinsley's agent Mauritz Hyman approached Bacon rather clumsily.