With a touch of personal pride in the vast building,
Joe Chandler marched his friends down a wide, airy corridor.
Daisy clung to her father's arm, a little
bewildered, a little oppressed by her good fortune. Her happy young
voice was stilled by the awe she felt at the wonderful place where
she found herself, and by the glimpses she caught of great rooms
full of busy, silent men engaged in unravelling - or so she
supposed - the mysteries of crime.
They were passing a half-open door when Chandler
suddenly stopped short. "Look in there," he said, in a low voice,
addressing the father rather than the daughter, "that's the
Finger-Print Room. We've records here of over two hundred thousand
men's and women's finger-tips! I expect you know, Mr. Bunting, as
how, once we've got the print of a man's five finger-tips, well,
he's done for - if he ever does anything else, that is. Once we've
got that bit of him registered he can't never escape us - no, not
if he tries ever so. But though there's nigh on a quarter of a
million records in there, yet it don't take - well, not half an
hour, for them to tell whether any particular man has ever been
convicted before! Wonderful thought, ain't it?"
"Wonderful!" said Bunting, drawing a deep breath.
And then a troubled look came over his stolid face. "Wonderful, but
also a very fearful thought for the poor wretches as has got their
finger-prints in, Joe."
Joe laughed. "Agreed!" he said. "And the cleverer
ones knows that only too well. Why, not long ago, one man who knew
his record was here safe, managed to slash about his fingers
something awful, just so as to make a blurred impression - you
takes my meaning? But there, at the end of six weeks the skin grew
all right again, and in exactly the same little creases as
before!"
"Poor devil!" said Bunting under his breath, and a
cloud even came over Daisy's bright eager face.
They were now going along a narrower passage, and
then again they came to a half-open door, leading into a room far
smaller than that of the Finger-Print Identification Room.
"If you'll glance in there," said Joe briefly,
"you'll see how we finds out all about any man whose finger-tips
has given him away, so to speak. It's here we keeps an account of
what he's done, his previous convictions, and so on. His
finger-tips are where I told you, and his record in there - just
connected by a number."
"Wonderful!" said Bunting, drawing in his breath.
But Daisy was longing to get on - to get to the Black Museum. All
this that Joe and her father were saying was quite unreal to her,
and, for the matter of that not worth taking the trouble to
understand. However, she had not long to wait.
A broad-shouldered, pleasant-looking young fellow,
who seemed on very friendly terms with Joe Chandler, came forward
suddenly, and, unlocking a common-place-looking door, ushered the
little party of three through into the Black Museum.
For a moment there came across Daisy a feeling of
keen disappointment and surprise. This big, light room simply
reminded her of what they called the Science Room in the public
library of the town where she lived with Old Aunt. Here, as there,
the centre was taken up with plain glass cases fixed at a height
from the floor which enabled their contents to be looked at
closely.
She walked forward and peered into the case nearest
the door. The exhibits shown there were mostly small,
shabby-looking little things, the sort of things one might turn out
of an old rubbish cupboard in an untidy house - old medicine
bottles, a soiled neckerchief, what looked like a child's broken
lantern, even a box of pills.. .
As for the walls, they were covered with the
queerest-looking objects; bits of old iron, odd-looking things made
of wood and leather, and so on.
It was really rather disappointing.
Then Daisy Bunting gradually became aware that
standing on a shelf just below the first of the broad, spacious
windows which made the great room look so light and shadowless, was
a row of life-size white plaster heads, each head slightly inclined
to the right. There were about a dozen of these, not more - and
they had such odd, staring, helpless, real-looking faces.
"Whatever's those?" asked Bunting in a low
voice.
Daisy clung a thought closer to her father's arm.
Even she guessed that these strange, pathetic, staring faces were
the death-masks of those men and women who had fulfilled the awful
law which ordains that the murderer shall be, in his turn, done to
death.
"All hanged!" said the guardian of the Black Museum
briefly. "Casts taken after death."
Bunting smiled nervously. "They don't look dead
somehow.. They looks more as if they were listening," he said.
"That's the fault of Jack Ketch," said the man
facetiously. "It's his idea - that of knotting his' patient's
necktie under the left ear! That's what he does to each of the
gentlemen to whom he has to act valet on just one occasion only. It
makes them lean just a bit to one side. You look here - ?"
Daisy and her father came a little closer, and the
speaker pointed with his' finger to a little dent imprinted on the
left side of each neck; running from this indentation was a curious
little furrow, well ridged above, showing how tightly Jack Ketch's
necktie had been drawn when its wearer was hurried through the
gates of eternity.
"They looks foolish-like, rather than terrified, or
- or hurt," said Bunting wonderingly.
He was extraordinarily moved and fascinated by those
dumb, staring faces.
But young Chandler exclaimed in a cheerful,
matter-of-fact voice, "Well, a man would look foolish at such a
time as that, with all his plans brought to naught - and knowing
he's only got a second to live - now wouldn't he?"
"Yes, I suppose he would," said Bunting slowly.
Daisy had gone a little pale. The sinister,
breathless atmosphere of the place was beginning to tell on her.
She now began to understand that the shabby little objects lying
there in the glass case close to her were each and all links in the
chain of evidence which, in almost every case, had brought some
guilty man or woman to the gallows.
"We had a yellow gentleman here the other day,"
observed the guardian suddenly; "one of those Brahmins - so they
calls themselves. Well, you'd a been quite surprised to see how
that heathen took on! He 'declared - what was the word he used? " -
he turned to Chandler.
"He said that each of these things, with the
exception of the casts, mind you - queer to say, he left them out -
exuded evil, that was the word he used! Exuded - squeezed out it
means. He said that being here made him feel very bad. And twasn't
all nonsense either. He turned quite green under his yellow skin,
and we had to shove him out quick. He didn't feel better till he'd
got right to the other end of the passage!"
"There now! Who'd ever think of that?" said Bunting.
"I should say that man 'ud got something on his conscience,
wouldn't you?"
"Well, I needn't stay now," said Joe's good-natured
friend. "You show your friends round, Chandler. You knows the place
nearly as well as I do, don't you?"
He smiled at Joe's visitors, as if to say good-bye,
but it seemed that he could not tear himself away after all.
"Look here," he said to Bunting. "In this here
little case are the tools of Charles Peace. I expect you've heard
of him."
"I should think I have!" cried Bunting eagerly.
"Many gents as comes here thinks this case the most
interesting of all. Peace was such a wonderful man! A great
inventor they say he would have been, had he been put in the way of
it. Here's his ladder; you see it folds up quite compactly, and
makes a nice little bundle - just like a bundle of old sticks any
man might have been seen carrying about London in those days
without attracting any attention. Why, it probably helped him to
look like an honest working man time and time again, for on being
arrested he declared most solemnly he'd always carried that ladder
openly under his arm."
"The daring of that!" cried Bunting.
"Yes, and when the ladder was opened out it could
reach from the ground to the second storey of any old house. And,
oh! how clever he was! Just open one section, and you see the other
sections open automatically; so Peace could stand on the ground and
force the thing quietly up to any window he wished to reach. Then
he'd go away again, having done his job, with a mere bundle of old
wood under his arm! My word, he was artful! I wonder if you've
heard the tale of how Peace once lost a finger. Well, he guessed
the constables were instructed to look out for a man missing a
finger; so what did he do?"
"Put on a false finger," suggested Bunting.
"No, indeed! Peace made up his mind just to do
without a hand altogether. Here's his false stump: you see, it's
made of wood - wood and black felt? Well, that just held his hand
nicely. Why, we considers that one of the most ingenious
contrivances in the whole museum."
Meanwhile, Daisy had let go her hold of her father.
With Chandler in delighted attendance, she bad moved away to the
farther end of the great room, and now she was bending over yet
another glass case. "Whatever are those little bottles for?" she
asked wonderingly.
There were five small phials, filled with varying
quantities of cloudy liquids.
"They're full of poison, Miss Daisy, that's what
they are. There's enough arsenic in that little whack o' brandy to
do for you and me - aye, and for your father as well, I should
say."
"Then chemists shouldn't sell such stuff," said
Daisy, smiling. Poison was so remote from herself, that the sight
of these little bottles only brought a pleasant thrill.
"No more they don't. That was sneaked out of a
flypaper, that was. Lady said she wanted a cosmetic for her
complexion, but what she was really going for was flypapers for to
do away with her husband. She'd got a bit tired of him, I
suspect."
"Perhaps he was a horrid man, and deserved to be
done away with," said Daisy. The idea struck them both as so very
comic that they began to laugh aloud in unison.
"Did you ever hear what a certain Mrs. Pearce did?"
asked Chandler, becoming suddenly serious.
"Oh, yes," said Daisy, and she shuddered a little.
"That was the wicked, wicked woman what killed a pretty little baby
and its mother. They've got her in Madame Tussaud's. But Ellen, she
won't let me go to the Chamber of Horrors. She wouldn't let father
take me there last time I was in London. Cruel of her, I called it.
But somehow I don't feel as if I wanted to go there now, after
having been here!"
"Well," said Chandler slowly, "we've a case full of
relics of Mrs. Pearce. But the pram the bodies were found in,
that's at Madame Tussaud's - at least so they claim, I can't say.
Now here's something just as curious, and not near so dreadful. See
that man's jacket there?!'
"Yes," said Daisy falteringly. She was beginning to
feel oppressed, frightened. She no longer wondered that the Indian
gentleman had been taken queer.
"A burglar shot a man dead who'd disturbed him, and
by mistake he went and left that jacket behind him. Our people
noticed that one of the buttons was broken in two. Well, that don't
seem much of a clue, does it, Miss Daisy? Will you believe me when
I tells you that that other bit of button was discovered, and that
it hanged the fellow? And 'twas the more wonderful because all
three buttons was different!"
Daisy stared wonderingly, down at the little broken
button which had hung a man. "And whatever's that!" she asked,
pointing to a piece of dirty-looking stuff.
"Well," said Chandler reluctantly, "that's rather a
horrible thing - that is. That's a bit o' shirt that was buried
with a woman - buried in the ground, I mean - after her husband had
cut her up and tried, to burn her. Twas that bit o' shirt that
brought him to the gallows."
"I considers your museum's a very horrid place!"
said Daisy pettishly, turning away.
She longed to be out in the passage again, away from
this brightly lighted, cheerful-looking, sinister room.
But her father was now absorbed in the case
containing various types of infernal machines. "Beautiful little
works of art some of them are," said his guide eagerly, and Bunting
could not but agree.
"Come along - do, father!" said Daisy quickly. "I've
seen about enough now. If I was to stay in here much longer it 'ud
give me the horrors. I don't want to have no nightmares to-night.
It's dreadful to think there are so many wicked people in the
world. Why, we might knock up against some murderer any minute
without knowing it, mightn't we?"
"Not you, Miss Daisy," said Chandler smilingly. "I
don't suppose you'll ever come across even a common swindler, let
alone anyone who's committed a murder - not one in a million does
that. Why, even I have never had anything to do with a proper
murder case!"
But Bunting was in no hurry. He was thoroughly
enjoying every moment of the time. Just now he was studying
intently the various photographs which hung on the walls of the
Black Museum; especially was he pleased to see those connected with
a famous and still mysterious case which had taken place not long
before in Scotland, and in which the servant of the man who died
had played a considerable part - not in elucidating, but in
obscuring, the mystery.
"I suppose a good many murderers get off?" he said
musingly.
And Joe Chandler's friend nodded. "I should think
they did!" he exclaimed. "There's no such thing as justice here in
England. 'Tis odds on the murderer every time. 'Tisn't one in ten
that come to the end he should do - to the gallows, that is."