The great city of London was once more her splendid self: mysterious as ever but bursting with new life.In the tightly packed clusters of villages with the ancient names—Hackney, Holborn, Shoreditch, Putney, Paddington, Bow—new towers were rising into the yellow sky; the open spaces, if fewer, were neater; the old houses were painted; the monuments were clean.Best news of all, the people were regrown. The same savagely cheerful race, fresh mixed with more new blood than ever in its history, jostled together in costumes inspired by every romantic fashion known to television. While round its knees in a luxuriant crop the educated children shot up like the towers, full of the future. Early one Thursday evening, late in the year at one particular moment, just before the rush hour, when the lights were coming up and the shadows deepening, five apparently unrelated incidents in five ordinary, normal lives were taking place at points set far apart within the wide boundaries of the town.

“It was called the wickedest street in London and the entrance was just here. I imagine the mouth of the road lay between this lamp standard and the second from the next down there.” In the cold darkness of the early spring night the Chief Detective Inspector of the area was talking like a guide book with sly, proprietorial satisfaction. He was a neat pink man whose name was Munday and he was more like a civil servant than a police officer. His companion, who had just followed him out of the black chauffeur-driven police car drawn up against the curb, straightened himself and stood looking at the shadowy scene before him without speaking.

The arrival of the ’bus was timed to perfection. Nobody of the slightest importance saw it at all. Traffic was slack, the theatres were only halfway through the evening performances, and no police were due on point duty until the after-the-show crush seventy minutes away.Almost more significant still, if one were seeking a reliable eye-witness, Commissionaire George Wardle had just stepped down into the staff room of the ‘Porch’ for his mid-evening pint and sausage and so was not on duty outside the famous old restaurant which faces the Duke of Grafton’s Theatre and the dark entrance to Goff’s Place which runs down beside it.

Mr William Makepeace Faraday, author of many amusing librettos, died last Saturday in Pontisbright, Suffolk, at the age of eighty-two.He was born in Cambridge in the late sixties, the son of Dr James Faraday, one-time Master of Ignatius, and Mrs Caroline Faraday, whom all who knew the University in the days preceding the First World War will remember for her dominant charm and, without ingratitude, for the overaweing hospitality which she dispensed to the undergraduates of that remote and golden age.William Faraday was educated at Charterhouse and St John’s College, Cambridge, and when he left the University he settled down to a curiously retired existence in the home of his parents, and it was only after the death of his mother in 1932, when he was fifty-nine, that his remarkable talent became evident.

GHOSTS “It may be only blackmail,” said the man in the taxi hopefully. The fog was like a saffron blanket soaked in ice-water. It had hung over London all day and at last was beginning to descend. The sky was yellow as a duster and the rest was a granular black, overprinted in grey and lightened by occasional slivers of bright fish colour as a policeman turned in his wet cape.Already the traffic was at an irritable crawl. By dusk it would be stationary. To the west the Park dripped wretchedly and to the north the great railway terminus slammed and banged and exploded hollowly about its affairs. Between lay winding miles of butter-coloured stucco in every conceivable state of repair.

‘I found a stiff in there once, down at the back just behind the arch,’ said Stanislaus Oates, pausing before the shop-window and peering in apparently to inspect a display of baby clothes. ‘I always recollect it because as I bent down and flashed my bull’s-eye—we had to carry oil lanterns in those days—it suddenly raised its arms and its cold hands closed round my throat. There was no power there, fortunately. He was just on gone and died while I clawed him off. It made me sweat, though. I was a Sergeant Detective, Second Class, then.’He swung away from the window and swept on down the crowded pavement. His raincoat, which was blackish with flecks of grey in it, billowed out behind him like a schoolmaster’s gown.

The man and the woman carried the body cautiously up the stairs. Although it was still early evening, the narrow way was grey and shadowy, and it was very cold, colder even than it had been outside amid the thin traffic of a wartime London.The two who were alive in that grim little group which writhed and breathed so hard in the gloom were both elderly people. They were an unexpected couple in any situation; the man was a large, blank-faced Cockney without any pretensions and the woman was out of place beside him, her delicate aristocratic grace accentuating both his clumsiness and the horror of her present task.

The second prettiest girl in Mayfair was thanking Superintendent Stanislaus Oates for the recovery of her diamond bracelet and the ring with the square-cut emerald in it, and Mr Campion, who had accompanied her to the ceremony, was admiring her technique.She was doing it very charmingly; so charmingly, in fact, that the Superintendent’s depressing little office had taken on an air of garden-party gaiety which it certainly did not possess in the ordinary way, while the Superintendent himself had undergone an even more sensational change.

Probably the most exasperating thing about the Fashion is its elusiveness. Even the word has a dozen definitions, and when it is pinned down and qualified, as “the Fashion in woman’s dress,” it becomes ridiculous and stilted and is gone again.To catch at its skirts it is safest to say that it is a kind of miracle, a familiar phenomenon. Why it is that a garment which is honestly attractive in, say, 1910 should be honestly ridiculous a few years later and honestly charming again a few years later still is one of those things which are not satisfactorily to be explained and are therefore jolly and exciting and an addition to the perennial interest of life.

Mr Campion, piloting his companion through the crowded courtyard at Burlington House, became aware of the old lady in the Daimler partly because her chauffeur almost ran over him and partly because she gave him a stare of such vigorous and personal disapproval that he felt she must either know him very well indeed or have mistaken him for someone else entirely.Juliet Fysher-Sprigge, who was leaning on his arm with all the weariness of a two-hour trek round the academy's Summer Exhibition, enlightened him.

When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.The book appeared at eighteen and sixpence, with frontispiece, in 1934, and would have passed into the limbo of the remainder lists with thousands of its prototypes had not the quality of one of the wilder anecdotes in the chapters dealing with an India the author had never seen earned it a place in the news columns of a Sunday paper.This paragraph called the memoirs to the attention of a critic who had not permitted his eminence to impair his appreciation of the absurd, and in the review which he afterwards wrote he pointed out that the work was pure fiction, not to say fantasy, and was incidentally one of the funniest books of the decade.

The story of the little man, sometimes a stockbroker, sometimes a tea merchant, but always something in the City, who walked out of his suburban house one sunny morning and vanished like a puff of grey smoke in a cloudless sky, can be recalled by nearly everyone who lived in Greater London in the first years of the century.The details vary. Sometimes it was the inquisitive lady at Number Ten who saw him go by, and the invalid propped up in the window of Number Twelve who did not; while the letter which he was about to post was found lying pathetically upon the pavement between the two houses. Sometimes the road was bounded by two high walls, with a milkman at one end and the unfortunate gentleman’s wife on her door-step at the other. In this version the wife was kissed at the garden gate and waved at from halfway down the oddly bordered road, yet the milkman saw neither hide nor hair of his patron then or afterwards.

Guffy Randall, who was allowing his car to roll in a leisurely fashion, down the gentle slope, to the sharp right-angle turn which would bring him to the front of the hotel and lunch, pulled up and observed the now closed window and the bag with that air of polite yet careless interest, which was his chief characteristic.It seemed such a foolish thing to do, this leaving of a small brown portmanteau upon the sill of a shut, first-floor window. Mr. Randall was stolid, nordic, and logical. He also had the heaven-sent gift of curiosity, and thus it was that he was still gazing idly at the hotel wall when the sequel of the first incident occurred.

There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.The assassination of another by any person of reasonable caution must, in a civilized world, tend to be a private affair.Perhaps it is this particular which accounts for the remarkable public interest in the details of even the most sordid and unintellectual examples of this crime, suggesting that it is the secret rather than the deed which constitutes the appeal.If only in view of the extreme rarity of the experience, therefore, it seems a pity that Brigadier General Sir Walter Fyvie, a brilliant raconteur and a man who would have genuinely appreciated so odd a distinction, should have left the reception at Little Venice at twenty minutes past six, passing his old acquaintance Bernard, bishop of Mould, in the doorway, and thus missing the extraordinary murder which took place there by a little under seven minutes.

When one man is following another, however discreet may be the pursuer or the pursued, the act does not often pass unnoticed in the streets of London.There were at least four people who realized that Inspector Stanislaus Oates, only lately promoted to the Big Five, was being followed down High Holborn by the short, squat, shabby man who yet bore the elusive air of a forgotten culture about him.The Inspector walked with his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, his collar turned up until it almost met the brim of his battered trilby. His shoulders were hunched, his feet were wet, and his very gait announced the dejection which he felt.

The Englishman at his side glanced across the sea of chairs at the handsome old man they had been watching. ‘Ten pounds,’ he said. ‘All right, I’ll take you. You’ve no idea what a safe little place England is.’A slow smile spread over the American’s face. ‘You’ve got no idea what a dangerous old fellow Crowdy Lobbett is,’ he said. ‘If your police are going to look after him they’ll have to keep him in a steel bandbox, and I don’t envy them that job. It’s almost a pity to take your money, though I’m giving you better odds than any Insurance Corporation in the States would offer.’

The Gyrth family had guarded the Gyrth Chalice for hundreds of years. It was held by them for the British Crown. Its antiquity, its beauty, the legends that were connected with it, all combined to make it unique. It was irreplaceable. No thief could hope to dispose of it in the ordinary way. And indeed no ordinary thief would dream of trying. Kept in a windowless chapel, and protected by a fearsome curse, the Chalice should be impervious to thievery.