Oliver Bacon has come a long way in life. Born into poverty in London's East End, he is now a very wealthy jeweler, one of the richest and most successful men in Britain's capital city.

Oliver can't quite believe how far he's come. He talks out loud to himself, marveling at how a man who began life in “a filthy little alley” is now able to afford to wear such expensive clothing, cut from the finest cloth that money can buy.

The prosperous jeweler thinks back to when he was a dirty little ragamuffin in Whitechapel, when he used to sell stolen dogs to well-to-do women. It's amazing to think that this was once the height of his ambitions.

In due course, before he became a jeweler, Bacon tried his hand at other ways of earning a crust, some legal, some not. Once upon a time, he used to work behind a counter. He also used to sell cheap watches.

Whether they were cheap because they “fell off the back of a lorry”—a common British euphemism for items that have been stolen—we cannot know for sure, but it seems a fair bet that there was something decidedly less than legitimate about Bacon's latest money-making scheme.

There was certainly nothing remotely legal and above board with Bacon's diamond-smuggling activities. This is what Woolf means when she says that he had taken a wallet to Amsterdam. The Dutch city has been famous for its trade in precious gems for centuries, and it would've been a port of call for anyone engaged in this highly lucrative but also highly dangerous and illegal business.