The Confession Nobody Signed
The confession was delivered to Bow Street on the Sunday afternoon by a boy in a blue jersey, who said he had been given it by a gentleman at the corner of Long Acre with a shilling for his trouble and instructions to deliver it to the desk at the station and ask for Inspector Wren by name. The boy did not know the gentleman. The boy had spent the shilling already. The sergeant at the desk sent him away.
The confession was four pages of foolscap, written in an agitated hand — that is, in a hand that had taken pains to appear agitated. It was signed *Digby Salt*, with a flourish under the name. It confessed, in tolerable English and with occasional lapses into the diction of the penny press, that Mr. Digby Salt, lamplighter of the Bloomsbury district, had on the twenty-ninth of March ult. taken the sum of three pounds from an unnamed person to abduct the young person Miss Phoebe Latham between the lanterns, which he had done, by means of a cord drawn across the pavement at ankle-height, and that he had then conveyed her, insensible, to a certain house, and had been paid a further two pounds, and had been overcome by remorse, and was now prepared to go before a magistrate, provided the magistrate was not Sir Henry Clarke, whose severity was notorious, but some other. The confession gave, with a great many circumstantial details, the location of Miss Latham's body, which was said