The moment when, at his trial, the two faces again confronted each other across a space no wider than that which had separated them on the dread occasion in Seventeenth Street, is said to have been one of the most dramatic in the annals of that ancient court room.
MISS NORA VAN SNOOP
Created by Clarence Rook (1862-1915)
Born in Kent and educated at Oxford, Clarence Rook became a journalist and worked on a variety of newspapers and periodicals in the 1890s, from The Illustrated London News to The Idler, the magazine founded by the humourist Jerome K Jerome. The work for which he is best known is The Hooligan Nights, first published in 1899, which purports to tell the story of ‘Young Alf’, a hoodlum from Lambeth, mostly in his own words. (The book is subtitled ‘Being the Life and Opinions of a Young and Impertinent Criminal Recounted by Himself and Set Forth by Clarence Rook’.) In all likelihood, Young Alf’s adventures were largely invented by Rook. He may have had contacts among London’s street gangs but his book has some suspicious resemblances to other, undoubtedly fictional tales of the city’s slums such as Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets. The Hooligan Nights may not be the direct reportage it claims to be but it is certainly well written and still deserves to be read. Once praised by George Bernard Shaw as ‘a very clever fellow’, Rook also wrote much else, including a volume of sketches of London life (London Sidelights), a guide to Switzerland and a number of short stories. One of the latter was ‘The Stir Outside the Café Royal’ which first appeared in The Harmsworth Magazine in September 1898. This is not a conventional detective story, in that it contains no great mystery to which a solution is discovered, but it deserves its place in this anthology because of its resourceful heroine Nora Van Snoop who is also shrewd enough to outwit a supposed master criminal.
THE STIR OUTSIDE THE CAFÉ ROYAL
Colonel Mathurin was one of the aristocrats of crime; at least Mathurin was the name under which he had accomplished a daring bank robbery in Detroit which had involved the violent death of the manager, though it was generally believed by the police that the Rossiter who was at the bottom of some long firm frauds in Melbourne was none other than Mathurin under another name, and that the designer and chief gainer in a sensational murder case in the Midlands was the same mysterious and ubiquitous personage.
But Mathurin had for some years successfully eluded pursuit; indeed, it was generally known that he was the most desperate among criminals, and was determined never to be taken alive. Moreover, as he invariably worked through subordinates who knew nothing of his whereabouts and were scarcely acquainted with his appearance, the police had but a slender clue to his identity.
As a matter of fact, only two people beyond his immediate associates in crime could have sworn to Mathurin if they had met him face to face. One of them was the Detroit bank manager whom he had shot with his own hand before the eyes of his fiancée. It was through the other that Mathurin was arrested, extradited to the States, and finally made to atone for his life of crime. It all happened in a distressingly commonplace way, so far as the average spectator was concerned. But the story, which I have pieced together from the details supplied – firstly, by a certain detective sergeant whom I met in a tavern hard by Westminster; and secondly, by a certain young woman named Miss Van Snoop – has an element of romance, if you look below the surface.
It was about half-past one o’clock, on a bright and pleasant day, that a young lady was driving down Regent Street in a hansom which she had picked up outside her boarding house near Portland Road Station. She had told the cabman to drive slowly, as she was nervous behind a horse; and so she had leisure to scan, with the curiosity of a stranger, the strolling crowd that at nearly all hours of the day throngs Regent Street. It was a sunny morning, and everybody looked cheerful. Ladies were shopping, or looking in at the shop windows. Men about town were collecting an appetite for lunch; flower girls were selling ‘nice vi’lets, sweet vi’lets, penny a bunch’; and the girl in the cab leaned one arm on the apron and regarded the scene with alert attention. She was not exactly pretty, for the symmetry of her features was discounted by a certain hardness in the set of the mouth. But her hair, so dark as to be almost black, and her eyes of greyish blue set her beyond comparison with the commonplace.
Just outside the Café Royal there was a slight stir, and a temporary block in the foot traffic. A brougham was setting down, behind it was a victoria, and behind that a hansom; and as the girl glanced round the heads of the pair in the brougham, she saw several men standing on the steps. Leaning back suddenly, she opened the trapdoor in the roof.
‘Stop here,’ she said, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
The driver drew up by the kerb, and the girl skipped out.
‘You shan’t lose by the change,’ she said, handing him half-a-crown.
There was a tinge of American accent in the voice; and the cabman, pocketing the half-crown with thanks, smiled.
‘They may talk about that McKinley tariff,’ he soliloquised as he crawled along the kerb towards Piccadilly Circus, ‘but it’s better ‘n free trade – lumps!’
Meanwhile the girl walked slowly back towards the Café
