THE MYSTERIES OF MODERN LONDON

By George R. Sims

Author Of "How The Poor Live," "Mary Jane's Memoirs," "Ballads Of Babylon"

With Frontispiece In Colours By S. Spurrier

London

C. Arthur Pearson Ltd.

1906

THE MYSTERIES OF MODERN LONDON

CHAPTER I--A NOTE OF INTRODUCTION--WHERE WE SHALL GO AND WHAT WE SHALL SEE

Unrecorded crimes--The mystery of the grave--The fascination of the unknown--The shady friends we make--The romance of the railway carriage--Who and what is your neighbour?--How I find my way about

|A MYSTERY is, in a popular sense, that which cannot be easily explained; a circumstance that cannot be readily accounted for. Something is, but how or why we cannot tell. The mysteries of modern London are as the sands of the seashore. The mighty city itself is a mystery. The lives of thousands of its inhabitants are mysteries. In the glare and clamour of the noonday, as in the darkness and silence of the night, the mysteries arise, sometimes to startle the world, sometimes to attract so little attention that the story of them never reaches the public ear.

There are mysteries blazoned forth with all the glamour that the contents-bill and the headline can give them, and there are mysteries that are jealously guarded by those high in authority, lest public curiosity should seek to fathom them.

There are mysteries in splendid mansions and in squalid garrets which contain all the elements of criminal romance, and yet pass with the police and the press as matter-of-fact incidents of London's daily life.

The great river hides more mysteries than ever the Seine gave up to the Paris Morgue, and many of them end with a little rest in a quiet mortuary, a "found drowned" hand-bill posted for a day or two on a police-station notice-board, an inquest, an open verdict, and a pauper's funeral.

But among the victims have been men and women the story of whose doing to death would have thrilled the masses and the classes alike; in some instances would have revealed the presence in our midst of active agents of the most desperate secret societies in the world.

There are no mysteries of modern London more terrible than its unrecorded ones. There are disappearances that are never chronicled; murders that are never discovered; victims of foul play who go certified to the grave as having succumbed to "natural causes."

If it were realized that scores of people whose death has been accomplished by the hand of the assassin are quietly buried in London cemeteries every year without the slightest suspicion of wrong, the public would be startled. But the fact remains. And its most convincing illustration is that in almost every case where a poisoner has been tried, the exhumation of former wives or relatives who have died in circumstances which the latest revelation makes suspicious, has proved that they were poisoned too.

Fire has its mysteries, which are rarely revealed. Arson is not entirely practised for the sake of the insurance-money. It happens sometimes that there is loss of life. A house has ere now been burnt to the ground to conceal a crime or to secure a death. The murderer makes good his own escape; the victim is found when at last the brave firemen are able to search among the smoking ruins.

The story of "Enoch Arden" is told again and again in our public journals, sometimes with all the pathetic romance that the Laureate wove into his poem, sometimes with the sordid details of threats and blackmail.

But all the husbands and the wives who part and go their separate ways, forget each other and contract other alliances, do not make the circumstances of their chance re-encountering public.

The tragedy has happened ere now in the stalls of a theatre, in a crowded ball-room, in a fashionable restaurant. The supposed dead man has looked carelessly across the room and seen a woman go-white as death as her eyes met his. She has explained to the husband sitting by her side that it was a sudden faintness, and from that hour has had a terror in her heart that has spoilt her life.

There sits in the House of Lords to-day a statesman whose ancestor, following his wife to the grave, met in the churchyard a stranger who had also come to pay the last respect to a dead wife. A strange story was told, and the two husbands stood side by side at the grave, both mourning the same woman.

As it happened then, so it happened in recent years in a great London cemetery. The death of a well-known man appeared in the papers, and in the announcement was the place of interment and the hour of the ceremony.

The widow laid her cross of lilies reverently on the coffin as it was lowered, and turned weeping away; then through the crowd came a woman closely veiled and when the coffin had been lowered dropped upon the lid a little bunch of violets.

She had left her husband for fifteen years and made no sign, and he had married again. But she read of his death in the country town where she was living, and came to the cemetery.

No one in the crowd of mourners knew the truth, but the younger widow learnt it afterwards in some mysterious way, and in her perplexity let her husband's relatives know of her discovery. And because of the lawsuit they brought with regard to the will the truth became known.

The mysteries of crime and of wrong-doing are common to all cities and to all races. They are part and parcel of the history of civilization. It is not my object in these pages to bring out the sensational features of police romance. My desire is to act as a guide to those who would look beneath the surface of life in the world's great capital, who would wander about its highways and by-ways and see with me that which lies hidden from the casual observer. If I can help my readers to see behind the veil, to peer into the dark recesses, to study out-of-the-way aspects of life as it is lived by thousands of their fellow-citizens, I shall have accomplished a task which has for its object not the gratifying of a morbid curiosity, but the better understanding of things as they are in the great city which is at once the wonder and the admiration of the world.

We shall see life in many of its strangest phases, in its best and sometimes, perhaps, in its worst. We shall take our journeys in search of London's mysteries at all hours of the day, and sometimes in the dead of night, when all good people are supposed to be in bed and asleep, but when thousands are out earning an honest living, and hundreds are abroad to earn a dishonest one.

"How do all these people get money?" is a question which comes naturally to the lips as one gazes at a great crowd of human atoms jostling and elbowing their way along the busy thoroughfares on a working day. And that question puts in a sentence one of the greatest mysteries of modern London.

Alike in the City and in the West there are for ever mixing with the crowd men and women whose means of obtaining a livelihood are mysteries to all but themselves. The tragedies and comedies of life cross each other at every movement of the crowd. The melodrama passes side by side with all that is ordinary and humdrum in the monotony of everyday existence.

In the 'buses and the trams and the trains the silent passengers sit side by side, and no man troubles about his neighbour. But the mysteries of modem London are represented in the crowded vehicle and in the packed compartment. The quiet-looking woman sitting opposite you in the omnibus knows the secret that the police have been seeking to discover for months. The man who politely raises his hat because he touches you as he passes from his seat would, if the truth were known, be standing in the dock of the Old Bailey to answer a capital charge.

The actors and actresses in London's wild romances and terrible tragedies on shoulders with their fellows every day.

I had for months upon my study table the card of a man with the story of whose crime a few months later all England rang. He came to me in the ordinary way about a theatrical matter. He had written a pantomime--I have the book of the words--and he was about to write a comic opera. I chatted with him for a quarter of an hour, bade him good-bye, and forgot all about him until he became the sensation of the day.

He murdered and robbed a fellow-traveller in a railway carriage, made his escape, and was found hiding in a back street London lodging, brought to justice, convicted and executed.

One of the most famous adventuresses of our day, a woman whose whole life had been a romance of daring imposture, left her umbrella in my hall-stand when she drove away in a hansom. She came to claim it a week later. In the meantime she had committed a fraud which later on secured her a long term of penal servitude. It never for a moment in these cases crossed my mind that I was entertaining a man capable of a brutal murder and a woman who was to rank among the celebrated female impostors of the century. To few of us does it occur as we come and go in the course of the day's work or pleasure that we are actually in touch with the mysteries of wickedness and crime.

Going from the Old Bailey not long since, at the conclusion of a murder trial, I got to Farringdon Street just as a train was starting, and scrambled into a third-class carriage. It was nearly full, and I took the last seat. Instantly I recognized two of my fellow-travellers. They were an elderly woman and a young woman, both dressed in deep black.

No one took any notice of them. But what objects of interest they would have been to the other passengers had the identity of one of them been known!

She was the affianced wife of a young man who had that day been condemned to death for the barbarous murder of the woman to whom he was already married. The girl who was sitting with her mother in the crowded compartment on the Metropolitan Railway had just parted with the man who had murdered another woman to make her his wife, and had that day been sent to the gallows.

I had heard this poor girl on the previous day tell in the crowded court one of the strangest incidents of the tragedy. When all London was ringing with the mystery of the murder, her affianced husband came to tea with her people. The talk turned upon the startling crime, and everybody present said they hoped the murderer would soon be discovered. And all the time the murderer was sitting at the tea-table, the honoured guest of that happy little family party!

It is because its mystery has fascinated me from the beginning, and because the spell has never been weakened, that I have wandered London in every direction night and day in a ceaseless endeavour to know it in every phase and form. In these years of wandering, often far off the beaten track, I have learnt much that is not common knowledge, and every day I am learning more. If I were to say that London has laid its heart bare to me it would be untrue, for that has happened to no man. Many of its inner workings are mysteries even to those whose task in life it is to solve them.

But I have penetrated far enough to be able to act as guide to those who have no opportunity of making the journey by themselves, who, even if they had, would make it with small profit to their knowledge of facts.

For the truth does not lie in the open road, and to take the narrow winding way that leads to it, one must be armed with two things--the word that will carry you past the vigilant sentinels and the knowledge that will insure your safe return.

I have said so much that the reader who wishes to accompany me in these journeys in search of the mysterious side of London life may know over what ground we shall have to travel But I should like to say one word more. We shall not need police escort or protection. My obligation to the police is great for many kindly services rendered, and I have the sincerest admiration for the patience and the energy with which they guard the capital's wealth and the lives of its citizens, but I have never asked for their assistance in my journeyings into dark places. The police are known, and in their presence the tongue of the local gossip is tied, and the intentions of the person accompanying them are suspected.

Wherever I have gone it has always been alone or with someone whom the inhabitants of the area--whether honest or criminal, toilers or idlers, decent folk or outcasts--have always regarded with a friendly eye.

Often a journey has been made alone. It has been made by day and by night, and though there have been times when I have been glad to see the beaten track and the lights and the traffic again, I have never received either insult or injury. And I have Been in spots that are officially recognized as the most dangerous in London.

I do not make this statement in any boastful spirit, for there is no credit due to me for escaping the dangers of the dark alley and the underground cellar, the peril of the secret haunt of the foreign desperadoes, the attack of the prowling hooligan, and the wrath of the criminal surprised in the active practice of his profession.

I have gone with a passport which has enabled me to secure, if not the absolute confidence of the victims of my curiosity, at least their abstention from active resistance to my intrusion.

But the mysteries of London do not confine themselves to any one quarter or to any one class. They are to be found in the broad terraces of the West as often as in the narrow alleys of the East. In the criminal courts it is not always the prisoner in the dock who has the ghastliest skeleton in his cupboard. When the police van passes the aristocratic equipage with the coronetted panels, the elegantly dressed occupant of the latter may have the haunting terror of to-morrow in her heart, while the outcast on her road to Holloway is by comparison free from care. There are mysteries in the lordly mansions of the West that make wealth a mockery and rank a disaster. The jealous guarding of the family secret is a task that embitters the lives of brave men and fair women who bear the name that discovery would stain and besmirch.

In London, because it is the capital of the world, are the mysteries of many lands. London is a city of refuge for the outcasts of the Continent. It is an international Alsatia, where the laws from which the alien inhabitants have fled cease to run. There are quiet cafés and restaurants and clubs hidden away in back streets in which men and women meet and eat, drink, dance, and play cards according to their mood, and plot between whiles the deeds that will be ranked with the master crimes of the age. In the dingy lodging-houses of the side streets of Soho the French murderer and murderess may be leading quiet and simple lives while the Parisian police are searching for them through the length and breadth of France. In the Italian quarter that lies off the Gerkenwell Road the agents of the Mafia frequent the little wine-shops and are in constant communication with the heads of the dreaded society in Italy. Here the vendetta that in this country we associate with Italian melodrama and opera is brought to its tragic fulfilment. The stolid London policeman assists at another "stabbing affray" in Little Italy, and is informed that it arose out of a quarrel in a public-house.

But behind that quarrel and the stab or the pistol-shot lies a death-sentence passed months ago in Naples or in Milan, and presently the emissary of vengeance, having accomplished his task, is smuggled out of the country by trusty and tried accomplices, who pay their rent punctually to a London landlord, and draw cheques which are honoured by their London banker.

There are romances of the "Mysterious East," strange and weird, working themselves out behind closed doors and curtained windows in the by-ways of Limehouse and Millwall. There, amid Hindu and Mohammedan rites, deeds are done whose story would read like a page from "The Arabian Nights." There are gloomy dens near the river in which solemn Chinamen, with impassive frees, are engaged in a business which would seem incredible to the Englishman if he read it in a volume that described the mysteries of Pekin.

There are dealers in spells and charms and philtres, and all the stock-in-trade of the witches, the magicians and the sorcerers, carrying on in the centre of London's rush and roar a prosperous trade, not only with the poor and ignorant, but with the rich and cultured. And among all the mysteries of London, few have a deeper or more tragic meaning than those in which the occult and the supernatural play a part.

Not all these mysteries lend themselves to the earnest student who seeks only the truth, who wants to see for himself and to tell a plain unvarnished tale. But many do, and it is these that I shall endeavour to lay before the reader, without sensationalism, without exaggeration, telling a simple story of things as they are.

Facts are more wonderful than fiction, the truth is stranger than any written tale could ever hope to be. I do not propose to dwell on horrors, or to tell again the story of startling crimes. London, the modern Babylon, the Mother of Mysteries, lies before us. It is from her own lips that we will hear the story of much that is strange and mysterious in her life.

CHAPTER II--BY THE WATERSIDE

The River of Death--How the hooligan works--The story of a man who escaped--"Found drowned"--The tragedy of vengeance--The mystery of John Wilson--The woman in the case

|A THIN mist wraps London in a shroud of grey this dismal winter afternoon as we pick our path carefully along the miry roads and sodden footways that lead us to the gloomy little building where the mysteries of the quiet water come to the light of day again.

We have come by a region of desolation, across waste land and black patches of marshy earth where men sow seed and dig and wait patiently for a few stunted vegetables to reward their toil. Here and there under the black archways, above which the trains of a great railway thunder and shriek, we have seen a group of pale-faced, scantily-clad urchins kicking a black and battered football about among broken glass and rubbish heaps, and perhaps finding as much joy in the game as the famous performers who make a goal amid the cheers of tens of thousands of spectators.

And so, gradually--always in the mist, always in the mud--we have come to a low-lying, far-stretching expanse of dingy houses and black palings and damp, oozy walls--a bit of Holland, as it were, in which the land and the water meet upon a dead level, and the only reliefs for the wearied eye are the glimmering lights of the barges and the timber ships lying far down the quiet canal.

If we turned off the muddy road and passed inside the black palings we should be by the waterside, and on the broad towing-path that, dotted here and there with lonely little houses and black, mysterious-looking sheds and outbuildings, in the gathering night suggests that river of the nether regions over which the souls of the departed pass.

And to call this silent water-way, glistening darkly where here and there a ray of lamp-light falls upon it, the Styx, would be no wild flight of fancy, for surely to those who know its record this is a River of Death.

The humid, mud-trampled pathways that run on either side are the highways of tragedy--the beaten track of the last footsteps. Here by the water-way that brings the golden freight from the great river to the heart of the busy town is the parting of the ways of Time and Eternity for many a one who lays down the burthen of life.

Not a pleasant place this, on a night of gloom, to linger and look and think. One raises one's eyes from the black water and sees far off the lights of the vehicles that cross the bridges in a steady stream, and the movement of busy life is a relief at once.

Beyond the refuge of despair the world is alive with hope, and the hum of patient toil and the stir of brave endeavour paint us a brighter picture of humanity.

But we have come as students to mark and to learn. We have looked upon the scene of sorrow, where many a tragedy of life comes to its last act. Let us hear the story of some of these tragedies of the water-way that are among the mysteries of modern London.

A few steps from the waterside and we are by a quiet grey church railed off from the road. We pass through a little gateway into a courtyard that leads to a building where those who have sought the waters of forgetfulness rest for a while before they are laid reverently to their last rest.

Not all who come here from the watery depths have taken their own lives. About the tragedies of which the law here seeks to know the truth there is often a mystery that is never penetrated.

Of the three hundred and eighty-six men and women who lay in this hostel of the dead in one year a large number were brought in from the canal. Of these, evidence in thirty-two cases did not, in the opinion of the juries, justify a verdict of suicide. Neither did it justify a verdict of murder, though in many cases the circumstances were more than suspicious.

The ugly wounds might be accounted for by passing barges; but wounding is not, as a rule, part of the process of waterside murder.

The victim is either pushed in in the course of a struggle or first stunned with a blow on the head or garotted, and then thrown in. In the first case there will be no positive signs after a few days' immersion. In the case of garotting there are also difficulties of proof. It is only when there is the mark of the knife or the pistol-shot, or some injury that points conclusively to deliberate infliction, that the worst construction can be placed on the tragedy.

Garotting was the method adopted by the hooligans who at one time infested the canal side, and made it so perilous a place that now the banks are patrolled by plain-clothes officers.

The gangs of young roughs who gather in secluded parts of the banks, where they are hidden by sheds or stacks of material, are there to gamble. They have such a well-organized system of guarding against the unwelcome intrusion of the policeman by well-placed "scouts," that in order to circumvent them it has become necessary to employ detectives for the tow-path.

These disguise themselves in such a way that they can pass without attracting the suspicion of the sentinels posted at a convenient distance from the muddy Monte Carlo. Most of the youths are hooligans of the worst class, and occasionally the little game of pitch-and-toss is only indulged in to reassure the stranger who, coming alone in the gloaming, or at night, might not like the look of the band, and so might take precautionary measures.

On a quiet Sunday afternoon some little time back a young man walking along the path in broad daylight was suddenly set upon by one of these gangs. He escaped the fate intended for him, and lived to tell the tale. He was going to tea with some friends, and was dressed in a frock-coat, and had on a watch and chain and a scarf-pin, and he had some loose silver in his pocket. He came upon a group of young roughs playing cards behind a stack of timber, looked at them, and passed on. It never occurred to him that on a bright Sunday afternoon in the heart of London a man could be robbed and murdered.

But before he had gone half a dozen paces farther he felt his throat clutched from behind, and two powerful hands trying to throttle him. At the same time two roughs seized his arms, while another of the gang took the watch and chain and pin and went over the victim's pockets.

But the victim was a strong young fellow, and fought desperately, though a hand thrust over his mouth prevented him from calling out.

"Throw him in!" exclaimed one of the gang.

There was a desperate struggle on the tow-path. The man, knowing that he would be stunned and pushed into the canal, to be found there perhaps days afterwards and looked upon as a suicide, fought furiously for his life.

He managed by a desperate effort to fling off his assailants, and then he took to his heels and fled. He reached his home in a condition of such exhaustion that there he fainted. The usage he had received was so brutal that he was compelled to keep his bed for a week.

That is the story of a man who escaped. The men, and the women, too, who have been less fortunate in their encounters with waterside assassins have been "found drowned."

It is a remarkable thing that there is hardly ever any money on the bodies that are brought from the canal to the mortuary. Every article found is entered in a book kept for that purpose by the official in charge. If you turn over the pages, you will find against almost every entry in which the word "drowned" occurs the words "no money" also.

To this last Guest House on the road to God's Acre there come again and again the mysteries of the unclaimed dead. Someone lies there waiting to be identified, and waits in vain. Neither kith nor kin come forward. The man has mattered so little to anyone that he has been able to pass out of life without a fellow-creature troubling as to why his home and his accustomed haunts know him no more.

Sometimes the identity of the dead upon whom the curious or the anxious come to gaze is violently disputed. Not long since two women claimed one man as a missing husband, and in the end it was proved that he belonged to neither of them. Yet both recognized the features and the clothes, and both gave certain indications as to marks which were found to exist on the body. Only those who have official knowledge of the number of people who come to identify a body "found drowned" are aware of the vast number of men and women who leave their homes and make no communication to their relatives as to their whereabouts. And these people are not always of the poorest class.

Here lay some time ago a man done to death--a foreigner shot in the streets of London. The man had been tracked by an assassin sent by a secret society from his native land. The society's agent came to London with orders to shoot the condemned man on sight.

Soon after the news of the crime got into the papers, two men of the victim's own nationality came to the mortuary to see if they could identify him.

One glance was sufficient. As they turned shuddering away, one muttered to the other, "This fate is for us, too; we shall be the next." A few days later those men met their doom, and came to lie side by side with the first victim.

The murderer being eventually discovered in the neighbourhood, and brought to bay, shot himself as he was on the point of being arrested. He was brought to this mortuary, too, and made up a gruesome quartette.

This tragedy of vengeance, as thrilling as any story that is told of the Italian Vendetta or the Russian Terrorism, happened in a quiet London suburb. These people lived in modest apartments, without a vestige of romance about them to suggest to the landlady, or the servant girl who waited on them, that they were men whose death-sentence had been pronounced by the committee of a secret society in Eastern Europe, and that one by one they were to fall to the pistol-shot of the man who had drawn the lot which made him their executioner. It reads like a page tom from a wildly sensational story. It happened in a popular London suburb, among the trams and 'buses, the crowded streets and the busy shops.

A portion of the truth was told in the court of the coroner, a good deal that lay behind the tragedy was imagined; but there were elements of mystery in this romance of the East, transplanted to the West, which yet remain to be solved.

Year in, year out, all days of the week, the mysteries of life and death come to this building of sad significance.

At the iron gate that shuts it off from the roadway the mortuary-keeper stood one summer evening. A young workman came along the street whistling. It was the young fellow's wont as he passed every evening on his way home to exchange greeting with the mortuary-keeper if he happened to be at the gate. His greeting was generally a grim joke: "All right, John," he used to say, "I'm not coming in just yet."

This summer evening as he passed he nodded and made his usual joke. "I'm not coming in just yet," he said, and went laughing on his way. He had not gone ten paces before he tottered and fell suddenly to the ground. Almost before the echo of his laughter at his own grim joke had died away, he was carried through the gates.

These are the mysteries of life and death that find their way to the House of Rest by the waterside. They are mysteries perhaps only in the sense that they are phases of the great human drama of which the busy world sees little. We pass our way without a thought of the strange happenings hidden from us by a few thin walls. Upon the mimic stage the fourth wall is always down. On the stage of life it stands and hides from all the working out of the great scheme of things. It is the fourth wall that makes many a mystery over which the world puzzles unexplainable.

There is a mystery in connection with this waterside mortuary for which an explanation has been sought in vain. The story is simple, and yet it has in it all the elements of a modern detective romance.

Just before the Coronation Day that was to have been, a man about fifty, fairly well dressed, came along the side of the canal and looked at the water. It was a broiling hot day, and it was by no means uncommon for people to leave the roadway to take a stroll nearer the cool-looking canal.

The man was seen by passers-by and people who were loitering about, but no idea was entertained that he was going to commit suicide.

Suddenly he flung off his hat and leapt into the water.

The alarm was given. A little crowd gathered on the tow-path and did their best, but failed to rescue the man. It was half an hour before the body was recovered and taken across the road to the mortuary.

The usual careful examination was made, and in the man's breast-pocket was found an envelope on which was written: "I am John Wilson of New York." I am not giving the man's real name. There was no property of any kind found, and nothing else to lead to identification. The usual public announcements were made, and the first discovery was that a man answering the description of the deceased had been to a local firm the evening previous to the suicide, had stated he was a carpenter, and had applied for a job to assist in erecting Coronation seats.

But the foreman who gave this information stated that the man was a complete stranger to him, and only said that he was a carpenter.

The next person who came forward was a lady, apparently in good circumstances. She stated that she had seen a newspaper report, and had no doubt that the man was her brother. Before being allowed to proceed to identification, she was asked for further particulars. She produced a photograph and showed it to the official. The photograph was certainly not that of the dead man, and the official said so.

The lady was sure it must be. The name published as found on the envelope was that of her brother, who had come to this country some little time before from New York. He was not a carpenter, or anything of that sort, and she could not understand how he could have applied for work, unless, as she supposed, his mind had become affected. She had not seen him for some little time.

The photograph not being like the man, the lady was asked, as she was so positive, if she could give any indications which would assist the authorities in accepting her statement.

"Yes," she said. "My brother always had a fear of something happening to him, and lest his papers should be taken from him, he was in the habit of writing his name on a slip of paper and sewing it up in the lining of his waistcoats."

The official went at once to the room in which the clothes were kept locked away, ripped open the lining of the waistcoat, and found inside it a slip of paper, on which was written in the same handwriting as that on the envelope: "I am John Wilson of New York."

There was nothing more to be said. The evidence was accepted as conclusive. The inquest was held, and the lady arranged the funeral.

As she stated that her brother was insured in New York for a large sum of money, and that she was his only relative, and entitled to the insurance, the matter passed into the hands of a firm of solicitors, and the necessary certificates of death and burial were supplied.

There the matter would have ended, so far as the police on this side were concerned, and would probably have been forgotten, but for the startling fact that some months later a communication came from New York which put an extraordinary complexion on the affair.

One of the insurance-offices declined to pay, and advised the solicitor who had acted in England that the person whose certificate had been forwarded was not John Wilson of New York, as John Wilson, the person whose life they had insured, had been found alive, and this John Wilson was the brother of the lady who claimed the insurance-money.

There the matter rests at present, so far as the mortuary authorities are concerned.

If the American statement is correct, then a man who was not John Wilson must have committed suicide with the name of John Wilson not only in his pocket, but with a second clue to identification sewn up in the lining of his clothing. John Wilson's sister had informed the authorities that it was there, and there they had found it.

The man was a carpenter by trade, according to his own last recorded statement. How did he come to sew another man's name in his clothing, and then deliberately commit suicide? Did he personate an insured person to oblige someone else? Or was it one of those extraordinary coincidences of two men of the same name and nationality having the same habit of preparing for identification in case of accident?

* * * * *

The night has fallen ere we pass through the iron gate, which closes behind us with a clang. Here and there a few shadowy figures move about in the mist that rises from the damp ground. In the yellow flicker of a lonely lamp the black palings that shut off the towpath shine with an oily lustre. Beyond, stretching away into the dim distance, the gloomy waters of the canal lie silent and motionless, hiding many a mystery still.

CHAPTER III--AT THE FASHIONABLE HOTEL

Big incomes that do not exist--Visit to a gambling club--A deep-laid plot--Heavy blackmail--A masterly stroke--Two biters bitten

|EVERY now and then the world is startled by the story of a woman who has succeeded in obtaining thousands of pounds from men of the world and men of business who have believed in her completely, and have fallen victims to the oldest form of the confidence dodge--a clever woman's own representation that she is entitled to a large fortune, or in possession of property which for the moment she is unable to realize.

You have only to talk "big" enough to find plenty of people prepared to take you at your own valuation. The adventurer who wants to live luxuriously on his wits does not proceed on quite the same lines as the adventuress. In some respects his is a harder task, in others it is an easier one.

London swarms with men and women of all grades, whose sole means of livelihood is the credulity of the people with whom they come in contact.

The footman who persuades the lady of rank that he is a prince, and the loafer who engages himself to half a dozen servant girls a month in order to get money and their bits of jewellery, pursue practically the same methods. They go through a process which in the sporting circles is known as "telling the tale." Given a certain amount of tact and a veneer of culture, and men or women who set out deliberately to do so can assume any rank or position they consider best for the particular fraud they have in hand.

There are plenty of people in London to-day whose legitimate income is under £100 a year, and who yet live in well-appointed houses in good neighbourhoods, keep servants, and entertain on a lavish scale. In the great London hotels there are always a number of guests who are nothing but adventurers and adventuresses.

The well-dressed, well-mannered "dangerous class" has increased rapidly of late years. The conditions of modern life are wholly favourable to its development. The breaking down of social barriers which has marked the new century has opened up new and profitable fields of enterprise. In a day when millionaires spring up like mushrooms, and anybody with an American accent or a Jewish name is accepted as fabulously rich "without further inquiry," it is the easiest thing in the world for the skilful adventurer to work himself into any society--even to obtain the entrée to houses where, once having been seen, his reputation is hall-marked.

No one, as a rule--except a tradesman swindled out of his goods--seeks to pry into the mystery of these people's means. The source of the incomes of so many who live luxuriously today is a mystery, that suspicion has been lulled, and anyone with a few pounds and a portmanteau or a Saratoga trunk has only to put up a well-frequented London hotel to start making a useful circle of acquaintances at once.

Some of these people are known to the police. Their record is at Scotland Yard. It is this fact that occasionally leads to the occupant of an elegant apartment being presented with his or her bill by the management, and at the same time a polite intimation that their room is required for another guest who has secured it for that date. Sometimes the person so treated argues the matter out with a show of indignation. But, as a rule, discretion is considered the best part of valour, and the agreeable Mr. So-and-So or the charming Mrs. So-and-So is missed from the lounge or the smoking-room or the drawingroom, and the departure regretted. For these people are always "nice." If they were not, they would make no friends, and it is by the making of friends they live.

But more frequently the hotel adventurer and adventuress have not come under the official notice of the detective police. The men of position who are swindled by women, the women of good social standing who are duped by men, do not care to advertise their simplicity to the world. It is on this distaste for publicity on the part of their victims that high-class adventurers and adventuresses rely.

At a fashionable London hotel some time ago a young American arrived. He bore a well-known name, and was a partner in his father's business. The wealth and position of his family were discussed in the smoking-room, one or two Americans present volunteering information to an Englishman who had started the topic of conversation.

This Englishman, satisfied as to the bona fides of the newcomer, lost no time in making his acquaintance, and very obligingly "showed him London"--the side of it which is not in the guide-books. One night the young American was taken by his friend to a club in a side street in Soho, which he was told was a gambling club. He need not play, but the company were worth seeing. The young fellow did not want to play, but was quite willing to look on. All of a sudden a dispute arose among the players--there were about a dozen, among them some foreigners--there was a scuffle, one of the foreigners whipped out a dagger and plunged it into the breast of a man with whom he was quarrelling, his victim fell to the ground, the lights were turned down, and as the company made a rush to the door the police entered.

"This way," said the Englishman to his friend, and dragged him through a little door in the back of the room into a kitchen, out into a passage, and up a court into the main street, where they hailed a hansom and drove back to the hotel.

"We've had a narrow escape," said the Englishman. "It would have been pretty hard if we had been walked off to the station and charged. Of course, that club's illegal, and this stabbing business will be bad for everybody who was there." The young American was very thankful to have escaped the unpleasantness.

In an evening paper the next day appeared a mysterious paragraph. A man had been found stabbed in a gambling houses The police had arrested several persons present, but it was stated by the victim, who was in a precarious condition, that he believed his assailant was a young American, who managed to escape after the police had entered. The proprietor of the establishment, who was in custody, had given information which, it was hoped, would lead to the identification of the assassin. The American was horrified.

"But you know this is absurd," he said to his English friend, who gave him the paper to read. "You saw the foreigner do it." The Englishman shook his head. "It's a nasty business," he said, "and unpleasant for both of us. It's evident that the proprietor and the other people are in league to save the real culprit."

"But the man who was stabbed--he must know who did it?"

"He thinks he'll get well, I suppose, and he's afraid of accusing the real man. Some of these people belong to the most dangerous gang in London. They'll put the thing on you because they think you're not likely to come forward and deny it."

"Say," said the American, "I don't like this--it looks bad. I shall leave here and go to Paris. I wouldn't get mixed up in this business for a thousand. It would be in all the American papers."

The Englishman said he thought the plan a wise one. He himself should go to some friends in the North of England, and keep out of the way for a bit. But the plan was not quite so easily carried out. The friends had been talking together in the courtyard. As they turned to enter the hotel a man came up and touched the American on the shoulder.

"You'll excuse me," he said, "but I saw you two gentlemen at that club where the man was stabbed last night." The two friends looked at each other. Neither knew what to say.

"I was a waiter there," said the man. "I got away just after you by the back door, and followed you up the court. I saw you get into a cab, and I heard you tell the man to drive to this hotel. I thought I'd come and see if I could find you."

The Englishman had recovered himself.

"Look here," he said, "you'd better come up to my friend's room and talk the matter over."

The result of the discussion was that the young American gave the man £300 to keep quiet. He explained that he was a stranger seeing London. He was absolutely innocent of any share in the quarrel, but he didn't want to be detained in London to answer a charge which, absurd as it was, would be a very unpleasant public ordeal.

The Englishman also drew a cheque for £300, and gave it to the man not to drag him into the affair.

The American left London, thinking he had heard the last of the affair. But when he got back to his home in the States he found a letter waiting for him. That waiter had found out who he was, and wanted more hush-money. He wanted $5000. The victim of the attack at the gaming house had died, the writer said, and unless he received the amount named he should communicate with the police. Even if the young-man evaded arrest, the story would be in all the English papers, and copied into the American ones.

The young American read the letter carefully two or three times, and then went to a solicitor, telling him the whole story. The solicitor advised him not to reply, but to let him communicate with an agent in London, who would inquire into the whole affair. The investigation made by the London agent revealed the fact that the police of London were totally ignorant of any such affair, that no one had been found stabbed in a gambling house, and that no police raid on a gambling house in Soho had taken place at that date.

The American visitor to London had been marked down by one of the gang of bad characters who infest hotels for the purpose of swindling strangers. The agreeable Englishman was the concocter of the whole scheme.

The only thing that was a mystery now was the stabbing. The American had seen the dagger plunged into the man's breast.

The stabbing was a comedy, though it had looked like a tragedy at the time. The dagger was a stage dagger, which appears to penetrate the body of the victim, but really goes up the handle. The two policemen who came in were probably made up on the premises for the occasion, and the "gamblers" were members of the gang of blackmailers to which the Englishman staying at the hotel belonged.

It is not likely that this sensational little scene was arranged for the occasion only. It had doubtless been effectually played many times before on unsuspecting visitors to the metropolis. Without the stabbing' it is common enough. One of the commonest tricks of a well-known gang is to lure a visitor anxious to see life to some questionable haunt, and make him the victim of a bogus police raid. The staid and sober citizens of good repute will generally pay handsomely to avoid publicity.

In the case of the young American, a deliberate scheme of lifelong blackmail was planned. The report in the evening newspaper was a master stroke. But there are means of getting a sensational statement that has not a word of truth in it past the most vigilant of sub-editors.

* * * * *

Some of the most dangerous female swindlers in the world are to be found in fashionable hotels. They frequently have foreign titles. Princesses, marchionesses, countesses, and baronesses there are who are well known to the international police, and who yet continue to live luxuriously year in, year out, on a methodical system of fraud.

Few of them are young--many of them are middle-aged, and some are elderly. But they rarely fail to pay their expenses, though they may fail to pay the tradespeople they honour with their patronage. Even in this matter, however, they are careful, and avoid, if they possibly can, any transaction with a shopkeeper which might lead to the publicity of the police court A charge of swindling would be inconvenient. It would necessitate the adoption of a new title, and that would be awkward, because the majority of these adventuresses are too well known to certain people in fashionable resorts to be able to change a title without exciting suspicion.

One of the most brilliant adventuresses of recent years posed as a philanthropist, and visited town after town in furtherance of her philanthropic scheme. She was received with open arms by clergymen, and on two occasions was entertained by local mayors. She might have gone on posing as a philanthropist looking about for a deserving charity on which to bestow a vast sum of money, if she had not allowed herself the indiscretion of falling in love with and marrying a young man who was supposed to be the son of an English nobleman. It was when the police got on the track of the Hon. Mr. Dash, eldest son of Lord Fourstars, and made a descent upon his rooms at a fashionable hotel, that one of the detectives was struck by the resemblance the Hon. Mrs. Dash bore to a woman who had been through his hands some years previously.

The astonishment of the newly married couple, who were on their honeymoon, was not so much at the arrest as at the discovery that they had both deceived each other. In the lady's case the force of the blow was somewhat mitigated by the fact that she had not really lost a title. She had a previous husband somewhere in the colonies.

Both these swindlers met each other first at a fashionable hotel in London. There was some excuse for the man being taken in. When he met the lady she was in the company of a colonial bishop and his wife, with whom she had established quite a friendly intimacy.

With one dangerous type of hotel adventuress--the lady with a husband who arrives unexpectedly and late at night from America--I need not deal. But good round sums have been parted with again and again by quite innocent victims to avoid a scandal. It is at the hotel that the wonderful tale is frequently told which never seems to fail to find victims. It is the story of the fortune that is coming. The idea of great expectations appeals at once to the cupidity of certain natures.

I know at the present moment a simple-minded couple who have as their guest in their pretty country home a young lady who came to stay a week, and has already stayed three months. The parties met at a London hotel. The young lady made the acquaintance of the country couple, and gradually took them into her confidence. She was the niece of a wealthy Australian, an elderly widower, who had died in London without a will.

Her mother was the Australian's only sister, and he had no other relatives. Something like a million of money was involved. On the news of his death reaching Melbourne, the young lady--her mother being in ill-health--had come to London to claim the fortune.

The reader will guess the end of the story. It is as old as the hills. Every now and then it is told in the police court, but as a rule it continues to impose upon its dupes until the impostor has got all that is to be had, and conveniently disappears.

The plot is simple. There are trouble and expense. The available funds have run low, and unless a remittance arrives from somewhere a very long way off, the legal process of claiming the fortune will be delayed. The delay is dangerous. Another claimant who has no earthly right has turned up, and, having money, is forging ahead. A million may be lost for a hundred pounds or so of ready money. The dupes, encouraged by the promise of a bounteous gift when the fortune has been secured, find that hundred or so.

Then a further difficulty occurs. Lawyers' letters, sometimes deeds, are shown, and the victims are bled afresh. To save the loss of the hundred pounds parted with, hundreds more are advanced. Sometimes the bubble bursts in a few weeks. Sometimes it remains floating gracefully for a couple of years.

The people I know have advanced five hundred pounds, and the young lady is still their honoured guest. They refuse to have their faith shaken in her, or to request her to find hospitality elsewhere. They cling to their belief in the plausible adventuress. To acknowledge to themselves that they had been duped would mean to recognize that they had lost five hundred pounds. Human nature is always human nature, and hope springs eternal in the human breast. It is the hope of ultimate success that causes millions of good money to be flung after bad, and keeps the Bankruptcy Court busy.

*****

A mystery that still remains unravelled had its first scene in a London hotel. A young man of fortune, an inebriate, was staying in one. There he met two young men of apparently good social position who were just starting for a European trip.

These men fired the imagination of their new acquaintance. He had better come with them.

The young man consented, informed his friends and his solicitor of his intention, and started, taking with him letters of credit for a large amount.

Two or three communications were received from him from various parts of the Continent. The last letter was from a small Spanish town. After that he only telegraphed when he wanted more money sent out.

He telegraphed from a Spanish sea-coast town for such a large sum of money to be sent, that the solicitor who had charge of his affairs felt it his duty to consult a relative with whom the young man was not friendly, but who was his next-of-kin.

A suspicion seems to have crossed the minds of both that something was wrong, and the British Consul in the town was communicated with. He went to the hotel to which the money was to be sent, and having been supplied with a photograph of Mr. ------ by the solicitor, asked to see him.

The proprietor of the hotel recognized the portrait, said

Mr. ------ was staying there, but was out with two friends.

That evening when the consul called again he saw the two friends. They appeared to be very distressed. They stated that Mr. ------ had been drinking heavily. While out together walking by the shore he had suddenly left them and disappeared. They had made every effort to find him, but had failed, and they feared he must have made his way to a lonely part of the coast and drowned himself.

That was the last that was ever heard of the missing young man who went travelling with two strangers he met at a London hotel.

Whether they would have taken possession of the money had it been sent it was impossible to say. And there was no proof forthcoming that they had anything to do with the disappearance of Mr. ------, though there is very little doubt they had the bulk of the large sum of money he took with him.

* * * * *

There is one feature of the fashionable hotel which is not strictly confined to those who live in it. That is the use made by swindlers of the stamped hotel paper. Thomas, the man who committed the crimes for which the unfortunate Mr. Beck suffered so cruelly, wrote nearly all his letters on the note-paper of fashionable hotels. He simply walked in, sat down at a writing-table, and had at once a good address with which to inspire his victims with confidence.

On the strength of that hotel note-paper he was accepted by experienced women of the world as an English nobleman of vast fortune. The fashionable hotel is the happy hunting ground of the most dangerous criminals known and unknown to the police.

CHAPTER IV--IN A COMMON LODGING-HOUSE

A superior place--Class distinctions--The men who have fallen--The family outcast--The shabby minister--A strange disappearance--The common kitchen

|IT is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and the church bells have just ceased ringing. Along the broad thoroughfare which is one of the main arteries of London a few belated worshippers are wending their way, prayer-book in hand. But from the side streets come the roar and clamour of a busy market at its height. The hoarse shrieks of the hawkers and the cheap Jacks rise above the murmur of the mob, which elbows its way, a black stream of humanity, between two banks of barrows and open shops.

At the corner of one of the side streets--the corner at which the clamour of the market ends and the quiet of the English Sabbath begins--there is a huge, well-ordered, common lodging-house.

The whole neighbourhood is Jewish, the area is given up now almost entirely to the alien immigrant; but in this vast lodging-house the guests are not Jews but Gentiles.

In the entrance hall there is a case in which the letters awaiting the arrival of guests are exposed. There are letters from abroad, letters with American and colonial stamps on them; envelopes directed in a clerkly hand, envelopes directed in handwriting which tells of culture and refinement, and there are envelopes with a scrawled, ill-spelt address upon them.

For this Hotel of the Poor, where the prices range from five-pence to sixpence a night, has a reputation for comfort, good order, and good management, and attracts a superior order of men to that found in the fourpenny lodging-houses in the locality which are largely patronized by the criminal and the vagabond class.

On Sunday morning the clients of the doss-house lie later. It is a privilege accorded by custom. On ordinary days the guests are expected to be out of bed and downstairs by ten at the latest, but on Sunday, if you go over the dormitories and cubicles, even as late as twelve o'clock, you will find plenty of beds still occupied by slumbering--sometimes by snoring--citizens.

But by noon the majority of the patrons of the Poor Man's Hotel have "descended." Some are lounging against the wall in the street, taking the air. Many are in the vast underground apartment which serves the purpose of a common kitchen, and breakfast is in the course of preparation or consumption. Hard by this apartment is another, which is fitted up with every arrangement for as much ablution as the client of the house may care to indulge in. He can have a bath, or he can wash his face and hands. He can, if he is so minded, brush his hat, and there is a bit of looking-glass, in front of which he can arrange his collar--if he has one--and his necktie.

Fivepence carries you considerably further on the road to comfort here than fourpence does in most of the smaller establishments.

I know the doss-houses of most parts of London. I have spent mornings and evenings round the coke fire of the common kitchen with all sorts and conditions of male and female dossers, and I have always been struck by the note of classification which distinguishes them. Even the poorest of the poor have their sympathies, and, if I may use the word, their "aloofnesses."

The thieves do not care to mix with the honest folks; the tramps and vagabonds look down upon the workers, and the men of the working-class look askance at the wreckage of the black coat brigade. So each class has its own particular doss-houses. Even the begging-letter writers have their favourite haunts; in one house the clients are nearly all begging-letter writers, and sometimes pool the receipts.

The "screever," who is practically a public writer at the service of anyone willing to pay for a well-concocted story and a touching appeal, is not so particular. He puts up at any house where he is likely to find clients.

The lodging-house we are visiting this Sunday morning is so huge, and its accommodation is so vast, that it is patronized by the poor of every class. The poor working man is there, and the poor clerk; the wreckage of the superior class is there also, but there are no professional tramps. The professional tramp would find the society slow, and there would be no one with whom he could compare notes and yarn about the bad times that had come to the road. He prefers the more genial and instructive society of the street beggar, the itinerant musicians, and the "dodgers."

You will rarely see any work being done in a tramps' lodging-house.

The nearest approach to it is when one or two of the company patch their rags or take a needle and thread and collect their rents--those in their garments.

But in the lodging-house we are visiting you will find a number of the occupants hard at work, even on Sunday morning.

Beyond the common kitchen is a room with a long, wide table. Every seat at this table is occupied by men who are writing as diligently as if they were in an office.

Most of the men are of the broken-down clerk class. Many are young; only one or two are middle-aged. But all are lean and dilapidated and hungry-looking.

These poor fellows are addressing envelopes at so much a thousand, or filling in circulars, or doing copying work. On the table is a Post Office Directory for the use of the envelope-directors, and there is a good supply of inkstands.

Some of the men have been at work since nine, and, with a short interval, will work away till late in the afternoon, perhaps till the evening. They are earning the price of the next night's bed.

These men belong to the shabby-genteel brigade of the common lodging-house. Many of them have still the traces of refinement on their features, though their clothes are threadbare and their bowler hats weather-beaten and greasy-brimmed.

Who are they? What stroke of evil fortune brought them to this last ditch in the fight with Fate?

Many of them are mysteries. They do not, like the tramps and the vagabonds, wear their heart upon their sleeve. There is no confidence between them and the other occupants of the "writing-room" in the poor man's hotel.