Hardly a year passed without one or more murders, the number which occurred in 1902 and 1904 being respectively 18 and 20. Most of them were of the usual type—murder for the purpose of robbery or as the punishment of a wife or mistress for infidelity. With a few exceptions, all these cases were successfully investigated by the detective branch of the force. A prolonged and complicated series of forgeries, devised and carried out by eighteen men possessed of education and private means, was cleverly brought home to the culprits by Superintendent Sloane, who was appointed head of the detective branch on the retirement of the Sirdar Mir Abdul Ali in 1903.[110] Neither the divisional nor the detective police, however, succeeded in discovering the origin of the disastrous cotton-fires which took place at Colaba in 1906. The value of the cotton destroyed or rendered unsaleable was estimated at 40 lakhs of rupees. Since that date similar conflagrations have occurred at intervals, in circumstances which seem to justify more than a suspicion of deliberate incendiarism. But in spite of special precautions and special police arrangements no practical proof of complicity has ever been obtained. In 1913 these fires at the Colaba cotton-green were so frequent and so disastrous that the Bombay Government appointed a special committee under the chairmanship of Mr. S. M. Edwardes, the Commissioner of Police at that date, to investigate the circumstances and origin of the conflagrations and make proposals for minimising the risk of them in future. The result of that committee’s enquiry will be mentioned on a later page; but it may be here stated that on each occasion of these wholesale conflagrations at the old Colaba cotton-green the police found it very difficult to initiate and prosecute inquiries about firms or individuals, suspected of aiding and abetting incendiarism, owing to the disinclination of the insurance companies, with whom the cotton was insured, to assist the inquiries or register a formal complaint in respect of their losses. The system of underwriting adopted by all the fire insurance companies in Bombay resulted in the net loss incurred in any fire being divided among so many parties that the actual sum paid out by the company concerned was comparatively trivial, and did not, in their view, justify the adoption of proceedings, which might have frightened the cotton-merchants into refusing to insure their goods with them in future. Consequently, the only chance the police had of discovering an offence was to arrest an incendiary _in flagrante delicto_, and this was rendered practically impossible by the character of the cotton, which will smoulder unseen for some time before it bursts into flame, by the enormous width and height of the stacks of cotton-bales, crowded on far too small an area on the edge of a main thoroughfare, and by the ease with which any person could escape