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.