The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes

breath.
And then a troubled look came over his stolid face. "Wonderful, but
also a very fearful thought for the poor wretches as has got their
finger-prints in, Joe."
      Joe laughed. "Agreed!" he said. "And the cleverer
ones knows that only too well. Why, not long ago, one man who knew
his record was here safe, managed to slash about his fingers
something awful, just so as to make a blurred impression - you
takes my meaning? But there, at the end of six weeks the skin grew
all right again, and in exactly the same little creases as
before!"
      "Poor devil!" said Bunting under his breath, and a
cloud even came over Daisy's bright eager face.
      They were now going along a narrower passage, and
then again they came to a half-open door, leading into a room far
smaller than that of the Finger-Print Identification Room.
      "If you'll glance in there," said Joe briefly,
"you'll see how we finds out all about any man whose finger-tips
has given him away, so to speak. It's here we keeps an account of
what he's done, his previous convictions, and so on. His
finger-tips are where I told you, and his record in there - just
connected by a number."
      "Wonderful!" said Bunting, drawing in his breath.
But Daisy was longing to get on - to get to the Black Museum. All
this that Joe and her father were saying was quite unreal to her,
and, for the matter of that not worth taking the trouble to
understand. However, she had not long to wait.
      A broad-shouldered, pleasant-looking young fellow,
who seemed on very friendly terms with Joe Chandler, came forward
suddenly, and, unlocking a common-place-looking door, ushered the
little party of three through into the Black Museum.
      For a moment there came across Daisy a feeling of
keen disappointment and surprise. This big, light room simply
reminded her of what they called the Science Room in the public
library of the town where she lived with Old Aunt. Here, as there,
the centre was taken up with plain glass cases fixed at a height
from the floor which enabled their contents to be looked at
closely.
      She walked forward and peered into the case nearest
the door. The exhibits shown there were mostly small,
shabby-looking little things, the sort of things one might turn out
of an old rubbish cupboard in an untidy house - old medicine
bottles, a soiled neckerchief, what looked like a child's broken
lantern, even a box of pills.. .
      As for the walls, they were covered with the
queerest-looking objects; bits of old iron, odd-looking things made
of wood and leather, and so on.
      It was really rather disappointing.
      Then Daisy Bunting gradually became aware that
standing on a shelf just below the first of the broad, spacious
windows which made the great room look so light and shadowless, was
a row of life-size white plaster heads, each head slightly inclined
to the right. There were about a dozen of these, not more - and
they had such odd, staring, helpless, real-looking faces.
      "Whatever's those?" asked Bunting in a low
voice.
      Daisy clung a thought closer to her father's arm.
Even she guessed that these strange, pathetic, staring faces were
the death-masks of those men and women who had fulfilled the awful
law which ordains that the murderer shall be, in his turn, done to
death.
      "All hanged!" said the guardian of the Black Museum
briefly. "Casts taken after death."
      Bunting smiled nervously. "They don't look dead
somehow.. They looks more as if they were listening," he said.
      "That's the fault of Jack Ketch," said the man
facetiously. "It's his idea - that of knotting his' patient's
necktie under the left ear! That's what he does to each of the
gentlemen to whom he has to act valet on just one occasion only. It
makes them lean just a bit to one side. You look here - ?"
      Daisy and her father came a little closer, and the
speaker pointed with his' finger to a little dent imprinted on the
left side of each neck; running from this indentation was a