In 1812, after a supposed visit to the West Indies, he reappeared in London, where he was arrested for breach of faith with the bank and sent to Glasgow for trial. He got off by a promise of further restitution, and because the bank was unable at that time to prove his complicity in the burglary. An agent who had handed over £1,000 on his account, was then sued by Mackoull for acting without proper authority, and was obliged to refund a great part of the money. Nothing could exceed his effrontery. He traded openly as a bill broker in Scotland under the name of James Martin; buying the bills with the stolen notes and having sometimes as much as £2,000 on deposit in another bank. At last he was arrested, and a number of notes and drafts were seized with him. He was presently discharged, but the notes were impounded, and by-and-by he began a suit to recover "his property"--the proceeds really of his theft from the bank. His demeanour in court was most impudent. Crowds filled the court when he gave his evidence, which he did with the utmost effrontery, posing always as an innocent and much-injured man. It was incumbent upon the bank to end this disgraceful parody of legal proceedings. Either they must prove Mackoull's guilt or lose their action--an action brought, it must be remembered, by a public depredator against a respectable banking company for daring to retain a part of the property of which he had robbed them. In this difficulty they appealed to Mr. Denovan, well known as an officer and agent of the Scottish courts, and sent him to collect evidence showing that Mackoull was implicated in the original robbery in 1811. Denovan left Edinburgh on January 8, 1820, meaning to follow the exact route of the fugitives to the south. All along his road he came upon traces of them in the "post books" or in the memory of innkeepers, waiters, and ostlers. He passed through Dunbar, Berwick, and Belford, pausing at Belford to hunt up a certain George Johnson who was said to be able to identify Mackoull. Johnson had been a waiter at the Talbot Inn, Darlington, in 1811, but was now gone--to what place his parents, who lived in Belford, could not say. "Observing, however, that there was a church behind the inn," writes Mr. Denovan, "a thought struck me I might hear something in the churchyard on Sunday morning;" and he was rewarded with the address of Thomas Johnson, a brother of George's, "a pedlar or travelling merchant." "I immediately set forth in a postchaise and found Thomas Johnson, who gave me news of George. He was still alive, and was a waiter either at the Bay Horse in Leeds or somewhere in Tadcaster, or at a small inn at Spittal-on-the-Moor, in Westmorland, but his father-in-law, Thomas Cockburn, of York, would certainly know."