_The discovery of the box--And what it contained--The mystery of the
coat-cellar--A dreary quarter--A house with a past--Another trunk
mystery._
|THERE are streets and squares and terraces in London which have been
renamed in order that they may no longer be associated in the public
mind with the dark deeds of which they have been the scene.
Sometimes, where the renaming has been a difficult one, the houses have
been renumbered. But many remain as they were, and Londoners pass them
daily and hourly, little dreaming of the drama that once made them
notorious.
Let us this bright spring morning take a trip round London and look at
some of the houses which a few years ago were the scenes of tragedy and
mystery.
We are in a quiet square of well-built, neatly-painted residences. There
is an air of comfort and well-to-do-ness about them which bespeaks
the "genteel" neighbourhood. The windows are gracefully curtained,
the knockers and bells are highly polished, the steps are scrupulously
clean. The window-boxes are filled with flowers.
Look well at the house with the turquoise-blue window-boxes. A canary is
hanging in the dining-room and singing merrily in the morning sunshine.
As we watch, the door opens and a nursemaid comes carefully down the
steps with a baby in a perambulator. Two prettily-dressed little girls
follow. At the open doorway a young mother stands and watches her little
ones as they start hill of childish merriment for their morning walk.
It is a pretty scene, and we know that the four walls of the house frame
a picture of happy English home-life. But some years ago there lay in
the room in which the canary is singing a corded box. At the front door
stood a van on which this box was about to be loaded.
There is another little square five minutes' walk away. On the balcony
of one of the houses at the far end a charming girl in a pink blouse
is standing. She is leaning over the balcony and talking to some girl
friends who have come out of a neighbouring house.
Presently a peal of girlish laughter rings out on the soft May air, and
the girls wave their hands to each other in token of adieu.
The pretty girl in the pink blouse goes back again into the room, and as
we move away there comes through the open window an air from the latest
Gaiety success.
Both these houses belonged at one time to an elderly clergyman. One was
empty--the one in which the Gaiety music is being played--and a workman
was employed in doing it up that it might be re-let.
The old clergyman went out one morning to see how the repairs were going
on, and that was the last that was seen of him for some time.
His elderly housekeeper at his residence in the other square expected
him back to dinner. But instead of her master the workman came. That was
the last that was seen of the old housekeeper for some time.
A few days later a van stood at the door. The caretaker, a workman,
explained that he had been left in charge and had to send a box away.
The vanman picked up the box to carry it out, and found his hand stained
with blood.
He uttered a cry of alarm and exclaimed, "What does this mean?" Then
the workman ran out of the house and the van-man ran after him. The
fugitive, who had hurriedly swallowed a dose of laudanum, was arrested
by a policeman. Other constables proceeded to the house and opened the
box.
In it was the body of the housekeeper. She had been strangled with a
rope, which was still round her neck. The rope had been drawn so tightly
that it had forced blood from the victim's mouth. The murderer had
not calculated on this, and owed the detection of his crime to the
circumstance.
Search was made at the house in the other square, and the body of the
clergyman was found buried in the drain.
That is the story of two houses in quiet Chelsea squares. In the one we
have just seen a charming girl chatting with her friends, and we have
heard her playing the piano merrily.
The happy young mother who stands at the door of the other house has no
knowledge of the tragedy that once darkened her dwelling-place. In the
room where the murder was committed her children romp and play.
Here is one of the most aristocratic thoroughfares in London. From the
windows of the beautiful houses you can look upon the green glories of
Hyde Park and watch the gay scenes of the Ladies' Mile.
Some of the houses are huge mansions, others are bijou residences. The
house to which I would direct your attention once came into the latter
category, but it has been rebuilt and enlarged, and the old premises
have been absorbed in the new. The house was taken for the season some
years ago by a young professional lady and her mother. The young
lady paid a visit to some friends from Saturday to Monday. On Monday
afternoon she returned, and, knocking, was unable to gain admittance.
She had taken her maid with her. Her mother had been left for the Sunday
with one servant only in the house--the cook, a foreigner.
When eventually admission was obtained, the young lady, in a state of
alarm, searched the house for her mother. She found her lying dead in
one of the lower rooms. She had been strangled and dragged with a rope
round her neck into the pantry. Money and jewels had been taken, and the
foreign cook had disappeared.
The murderess was arrested some time afterwards in Paris, was brought to
London, tried, found guilty, condemned, and respited.
As we stand and gaze at the house which bears the old number to-day, we
see no sign of its tragic history. There is nothing to suggest that one
woman who lived in it was murdered and another tried for her life. At
the door an electric brougham stands waiting. An elegantly-dressed young
lady comes out and enters it. A footman follows her carrying a dainty
lap-dog. The little creature is adorned with a light blue bow. The
footman places it in the brougham beside its young mistress.
The dainty lap-dog and the elegant young lady are among the occupants of
the premises on which not many years ago a woman lay strangled, and from
which a murderess fled.
A house in a big square of boarding-houses and hotels. A house now
let out for offices and business purposes, but with a portion of it
inhabited, and servants on the premises. Scores of people pass it
daily and see nothing in it to arrest their attention. The servants
and employées of the house go about undisturbed by any thought of the
tragedy once enacted within its walls. One of the servants goes every
day to the coal-cellar and fills the scuttles from the black mass that
lies around.
But in that coal-cellar there lay concealed for months the body of an
old lady who suddenly disappeared, who one day wrote to her friends, and
from that day forth was never seen again until she was found a strangled
corpse with coals and rubbish piled upon her in the corner of the cellar.
There were arrests for that murder, but no one was found guilty of it.
The crime still remains one of the mysteries of London.
Many years before she came to her end I knew the victim personally. For
some months I saw her almost daily. I ceased to visit the health resort
where she was one of the best-known habituées, and in time forgot her.
I remembered her again only when her murder revealed the fact that she
had been living a lonely lodging-house life for years in London, and had
disappeared; to be found in circumstances which added one more mystery
of crime to the capital's crowded record.
Not long ago I found myself late at night in a dark, ill-lighted street
in the south-east of London. I had been through an area of narrow byways
and alleys that has long been the despair of the authorities, an area
that to walk through at night requires a certain amount of confidence in
one's powers of self-protection. Shadowy figures crept here and there
in the darkness, and now and then in the distance were the sounds of
conflict.
It was impossible to recognize the features of anyone who passed me.
The ramshackle houses that lined the muddy lanes--one cannot call these
unpaved byways streets--had in them only a glimmer of light, and many of
them were without even that.
These long, narrow lanes of slum dwellings meandered in and out and
crossed each other till they became a maze. When in the pitch darkness
I found myself faced with a dead wall through which a narrow opening
had been cut, and discovered that it was the entrance to another maze
of alleys, I turned back and groped my way to the distant lights of a
street in which I should at least be able to see what sort of people
were round about me.
The street, when I reached it, was gloomy enough, but there were one or
two little shops in it. One was a fried-fish shop, which threw a certain
amount of light upon the muddy roadway; the other was the shop of a
general dealer.
The shop stood at the corner of the lane up which I came, and in the lane
was a side entrance, a black wooden door which led to the yard at the
back of the house.
Through this door not very long ago a man passed bearing two sacks.
Those sacks he put upon a van which he had hired, and drove away with
them. He drove to an empty house in the suburbs which he had taken, and
that night he dug a deep hole in the garden, put the sacks into it,
and covered them up. They contained the bodies of a man, a woman, and a
child.
It was close on midnight when I turned the corner, but the shop was still
open. There were no customers in it, but through the open door I could
see into the back parlour. An old man sat there alone, smoking his pipe
and looking into the dying embers of the fire.
The shop had changed hands twice since the murder. Country folks had
taken it, ignorant of its history, had found out the terrible tragedy
that had been enacted on the premises, and had left again.
I wondered as I looked at the old man if he knew the story of his home.
I have in my possession the letters the murderer wrote from the
condemned cell to the mother of his child. They are well written, and
convey a suggestion of refined feeling, which is remarkable when one
remembers the brutal crime the man committed for a paltry profit. After
the murder he remained alone in the house with his victims the long
night through, and as soon as he had succeeded in removing the remains
he set about to plan another crime of a similar character.
He intended to murder a man whom he had lured to his house, then go to
the shop where the intended victim's wife was alone, murder her, and
take possession of the business in exactly the same way that he had
taken possession of the little shop of his first victim.
Whenever I look late at night into that shop window I am fascinated, for
the whole scene reacts itself, and in fancy I see the man--whom I saw
tried and condemned--sitting in the little parlour and planning the
removal in the morning of the "sacks" through that little black door in
the side street.
A small, semi-detached house in a dull, deserted side street of Kentish
Town. In the front a little grass plot; in the windows a few pots of
ferns. A curtain is drawn aside and a young woman looks up at the sky.
She is wondering, probably, if the weather is going to clear up and
be fine for her afternoon walk. Two little boys come along and seat
themselves on the doorstep. One has a mouth-organ and plays "At the Old
Bull and Bush," while his small companion listens critically.
A sleek black cat creeps through the railings, settles down on the
little grass plot, and begins to perform an elaborate toilet.
If I were to say that there is nothing in the scene to suggest
tragedy, it would not be true. There is, at least, something in the
neighbourhood, something in the street, something in the house that
suggest mystery. And we are looking upon the scene of a tragedy which
was a mystery for a time.
In a room in this house a young woman murdered one afternoon a young
mother and her child. Down the steps on which the two boys are seated
with the mouth organ the murderess, a few hours later, wheeled a
perambulator covered over with a cloth. Beneath the cloth lay the bodies
of her victims. The perambulator broke down with the weight near some
rough ground on which building operations were in progress. The woman
left the bodies--one at the back of a new building, the other some
distance away. She wheeled the broken perambulator as far as Hamilton
Terrace and went back to the little house and slept there.
All London rang next day with the discovery of the murdered woman; the
body of the baby was not found till later on. The body of the woman lay
at the mortuary for identification. Two young women came to see it. One,
the sister of the victim, recognized it; the woman who accompanied her
said that she was mistaken. A police official was present, and something
in the second woman's conduct aroused his suspicions.
He ascertained her address, and sent police officers to it to search
the house. The condition of one room left no doubt that it had been the
scene of a terrible tragedy.
The woman was convicted and hanged. Whatever the motive of the murder
was, it did not transpire at the trial. Many people believed it to be an
act of insanity, with jealousy as the root of it.
On the night of the crime the husband of the murdered woman called at
the house to see the murderess. He had no idea then that a tragedy had
happened. He found that the woman was out, and he tore off the top of
a "Pall Mall Gazette" he had with him, wrote on it a message in lead
pencil, and left it on the kitchen table. "Sorry you are out," was part
of the message. It was not until days afterwards that he learnt the
woman had gone out that evening instead of waiting in to see him as she
had promised that she would do.
All the details of the ghastly tragedy come back to me as I look to-day
at the melancholy little house. If the boys with the mouth-organ knew
the story of the perambulator that jolted down the steps upon which they
sit, they would probably shift their ground and take their _al fresco_
concert to a place of less gruesome associations.
Here is a house in a street off Tottenham Court Road. It is one of the
stately-looking old houses that tell of a day when people of wealth and
position lived around Fitzroy Square. These houses are now occupied as
offices and warehouses, or let out in unfurnished floors.
In the front window of one of these houses hangs a card--"Apartments to
Let." The vacant rooms are on the diningroom floor. Those two rooms were
to let a year or two ago. One day the card was taken out of the window.
A German lady had secured the apartments. She arrived about ten o'clock
in the morning with her boxes and belongings on a van.
The vanmen unloaded the goods carefully and carried them in. They had
great difficulty with one large trunk, and had to get assistance before
they could put it into the back room. The heavy trunk plays a leading
part in many of London's deepest mysteries.
A tall, slim, gentlemanly man, as soon as the box had disappeared into
the house, strolled across the road, entered by the open door, and
raised his hat to the German lady.
Madam bowed. The tall, slim gentleman was an old acquaintance. Madam
had been useful to him on many occasions, supplying information which
enabled him to discover the authors or authoresses of a good many
robberies of a certain class. Madam was on the best terms with the
police. "So you have moved from -------- Street?" said the detective.
"Yes, this morning."
"I've just come from -------- Street. What's been the matter in your
place? One of the walls is smeared with blood."
"Really?" said Madam. "It must have been there a long time. Some
furniture must have hidden it. I never noticed it."
"I see. Well, you are going to stay here for some time, I suppose?"
"Oh, yes, I hope so."
"Then why is that large trunk of yours addressed to 'The Station Master,
Berlin--To be called for'?"
"I am sending some things there that I don't want."
"Oh! You might let me see what they are."
The detective went outside, gave an order to the vanmen, a knife was
produced, the cords of the huge trunk were cut, and the lock forced.
The lid sprang up, and the body of a man weighing eighteen stone was
discovered inside. His skull had been split open with a hatchet.
The evidence brought forward at the trial saved Madam's neck by inducing
the jury to make their verdict manslaughter. The sentence deprived the
police of Madam's valuable information for twelve years.
We have looked up at the house in which Madam's secret was discovered;
let us look at the house in which the crime was committed.
It is only a little distance away. Here is the street It has rather a
Continental appearance. The names over the doors are mostly foreign.
There is the house. Madam's room was on the first floor.
The first floor is to let. Plenty of people have occupied it since Madam
gave it up. Some of them have slept night after night in the very room
in which a man of eighteen stone was done to death, packed up in a
trunk, and addressed to the station master at Berlin. Very few of the
occupants, I fancy, have had any knowledge of the story of that room.
The tragedies pass and are forgotten. The houses of tragedy remain and
are let to new tenants.