times I even seemed to remember seeing her use it. I know I saw her touch the table-top, I know I saw the glitter of the blade. I know she stepped away as Gentleman started to stagger. But Mrs Sucksby had been there,
too, she had moved as quick as anyone; and sometimes I thought it was her hand I remembered seeing dart and flash ... At last I told the simple truth: that I did not know what I had seen. It didn''t matter, anyway. They had John Vroom''s word, and Mrs Sucksby''s own confession. They didn''t need me. On the fourth day after they took us, they let me go.
The others they kept longer.
Mr Ibbs was brought before the magistrate first. His trial lasted half-an-hour. He was done, after all, not on account of the poke left lying about the kitchen—he was too good at taking the seals and stampings off, for that—but for the sake of some of the notes in his cigarette box. They were marked ones. The police, it turned out, had been watching the business at Mr Ibbs''s shop, for more than a month; and in the end they had got Phil—who, you might remember, had sworn he''d never do another term in gaol, at any cost—to plant the marked notes on him. Mr Ibbs was found to have handled stolen goods: he was sent to Pentonville. Of course, he knew many of the men in there, and might be supposed to have had an easy time among them—except that, here was a funny thing: the fingersmiths and cracksmen who had been so grateful to get an extra shilling from him on the outside, now quite turned against him; and I think his time was very miserable. I went to visit him, a week after he went in. He saw me, and put his hands before his face, and was in general so changed and so brought down, and looked at me so queerly, I could not bear it. I didn''t go again.