Excerpt from Scotland Yard
Every schoolboy knows Scotland Yard from fiction. Which means that the schoolboy and all other lovers of fiction about that world-famous organisation of criminal-hunters have missed the better story. By a stroke of good fortune it has been my privilege as a writer to see from the inside the Scotland Yard of fact; to talk intimately with its chiefs; to study at close range its crime-hunting machine and watch it work on actual cases; to look at photograph albums of famous crimes - a glimpse that haunted my sleep for nights; to spend hours in its gloomy "Black Museum"; to delve into its private records and borrow some of them for my work in writing these pages. And the story of the real Scotland Yard needs no colouring to give it richer glamour than fiction does.
Let us put an actual case into the Scotland Yard machine and study its parts and workings by the way it spun a web of steel from the merest gossamers of clues. It began with a "bobby," best-known, best-loved policeman in the world, the bluecoat of London. He, too, is part of Scotland Yard, its uniformed arm.
This particular bobby patrolled a residential section of London, neither rich nor poor nor striking in any way. Which was the reason an elderly spinster, Mary Ennis, chose to live there. She had a reason for living in a colourless way in a colourless part of London; it developed later.
She had a small three-room flat in the upper story of a small brick house in a street full of small brick houses exactly like hers. The ground floor and basement she presumably tried to rent out; but the bobby who patrolled that street decided that she was difficult to please; for he observed that while quite a number of people seemed ready to rent the place, she chose none of them.
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