CHAPTER XIII.
The Black Museum.
Outside Scotland Yard they call it the "Black Museum"; within, it is simply the "Museum"—a private museum the like of which exists nowhere else in the world. Money cannot purchase access to it, and curious visitors are only admitted on orders signed by senior executive officials who know them personally. For the museum contains too many of the secrets of crime to be a wholesome place for the general public, although the indiscriminate publicity that it has suffered in print has made it appear to be a kind of gratuitous show-place. If that were its only purpose, it would not exist at Scotland Yard.
It was originally established, some forty years ago, in a cellar of Old Scotland Yard, as a place where young police officers might get an elementary acquaintance of the ways and appliances of evil-doers.
Gradually relics of great crimes began to accumulate there until there are now over six hundred exhibits, ranging over the whole gamut of criminal activity. There is much, perhaps too much, to appeal to the morbid-minded—revolvers by the score, wicked-looking blood-stained knives, hangmen's ropes, plaster casts of murderers taken after death; but more interesting are the tools and equipment of the professional thief and swindler, by which demonstrations are made to raw policemen of the weapons with which his adversaries wage their war upon society.
In one case it is an innocent-looking ring, now palpably tarnished brass. But examine it, and you will find that it bears a tolerable imitation of an eighteen-carat hall-mark. When it was fine and bright it was picked up in the street, very ostentatiously, by an astute gentleman who promptly sold it for as much as he could get from a passer-by, who had probably thought it a bargain when he noticed the forged hall-mark. That same trick flourishes to-day, as it flourished over a century ago when Sir John Fielding issued a warning to the public.
Close by are a little heap of white sapphires, calculated at one time, with their glitter and dazzle when set as "diamond" rings, to deceive all but the most sophisticated of pawnbrokers. Similarly so, "field-glasses" stamped with the names of famous makers. These are little things, perhaps, but they give the most trusting of young constables some ideas of "ways that are dark and tricks that are vain."
Publicans and pawnbrokers seem to be the invariable victims of a certain type of swindler. There is a walking-stick, innocent enough to all appearance, but with a tong-like attachment which, at the touch of a spring, will jump out of the ferrule, enabling a wineglass full of coins to be lifted from a shelf across the counter.