“I was just about to come to that, sir. We have done our best, and have succeeded in uncovering the woman’s antecedents. It was an extremely difficult task, and we had to send a number of agents to different parts of the country. The name and occupation of her father could not be discovered, since her birth was illegitimate. Her mother is a Frisian. She was housekeeper on a small estate near Oldenburg. After that she lived with a pensioned tax-gatherer. After his death she opened a small shop in Hanover, but the business failed. In 1895 she was convicted of fraud, and spent three months in prison at Cleve. We lost track of her after that, until she turned up in Berlin in 1900. First she lived in Rixdorf. Next she rented rooms--first in Brüsseler Street behind the Virchow Hospital, at present in Zionskirch Square. She has been accused of renting rooms for immoral purposes, but nothing could be proved against her. She pretends to be an art-embroiderer, but as a matter of fact she practises fortune-telling and clairvoyance. To judge by her way of living there is money in the business. She never had but two children, Karen, and a son, now twenty-six, named Niels Heinrich, who is known to the police as a worthless rogue and has come into conflict with the law on several occasions. Karen has had a shady career since her early girlhood. No doubt her mother put her up to everything. When she was seventeen her mother is reported to have sold her to a Dutch ship captain for five hundred gilders. She has given birth to two illegitimate children, at Kiel in 1897 and at Königsberg in 1901. Both died shortly after birth. In addition to the cities named, she has lived in Bremen, Schleswig, Hanover, Kuxhaven, Stettin, Aachen, Rotterdam, Elberfeld, and Hamburg. At nearly all these places she was a registered prostitute. We lost sight of her between 1898 and ’99. Her circumstances seemed to have improved temporarily during that year. According to one informant she accompanied a Danish painter to Wassigny in the North of France. From Hamburg, where she gradually sank lower and lower, she was brought to Berlin in the manner concerning which we had the honour of rendering you an account in our report of February 14th.”