Death at the Bar (17 page)

“A very striking young lady,” agreed Fox. “But I thought the Super said she was keeping company with young Pomeroy?”

“He did.”

“She’s a bit on the classy side for him, you’d think.”

“You would, Fox.”

“Well, now, I wonder what she’ll do. Throw him over and take Mr. Cubitt? She looked to me to be rather inclined that way.”

“I wish she’d told the truth about Watchman,” said Alleyn.

“Think there’d been something between them, sir? Relations? Intimacy?”

“Oh Lord, I rather think so. It’s not a very pleasant thought.”

“Bit of a
femme fatale
,” said Fox carefully. “But there you are. They laugh at what we used to call respectability, don’t they? Modern women—”

Alleyn interrupted him.

“I know, Fox, I know. She is very sane and intellectual and modern, but I don’t mind betting there’s a strong dram of rustic propriety that pops up when she least expects it. I think she’s ashamed of the Watchman episode, whatever it was, and furious with herself for being ashamed. What’s more, I don’t believe she knew, until today, that Legge was an old lag. All guesswork. Let’s forget it. We’ll have an early lunch and call on Dr. Shaw. I want to ask him about the wound in the finger. Come on.”

They returned by way of the furze-bush, collecting the casts and Alleyn’s case. As they disliked making entrances with mysterious bundles, they locked their gear in the car and went round to the front of the Feathers. But here they walked into a trap. Sitting beside Abel Pomeroy on the bench outside the front door was an extremely thin and tall man with a long face, a drooping moustache, and foolish eyes. He stared very fixedly at Fox, who recognized him as Mr. George Nark and looked the other way.

“Find your road all right, gentlemen?” asked Abel.

“Yes, thank you, Mr. Pomeroy,” said Alleyn.

“It’s a tidy stretch, sir. You’ll be proper warmed up.”

“We’re not only warm but dry,” said Alleyn.

“Ripe for a pint, I dessay, sir?”

“A glorious thought,” said Alleyn.

Mr. Nark cleared his throat. Abel threw a glance of the most intense dislike at him and led the way into the private bar.

“ ’Morning,” said Mr. Nark, before Fox could get through the door.

“Morning, Mr. Nark,” said Fox.

“Don’t know but what I wouldn’t fancy a pint myself,” said Mr. Nark firmly, and followed them into the Private.

Abel drew Alleyn’s and Fox’s drinks.

“ ’Alf-’n-’alf, Abel,” said Mr. Nark, grandly.

Somewhat ostentatiously Abel wiped out a shining pint-pot with a spotless cloth. He then drew the mild and bitter.

“Thank ’ee,” said Mr. Nark. “Glad to see you’re acting careful. Not but what, scientifically speaking, you ought to bile them pots. I don’t know what the law has to say on the point,” continued Mr. Nark, staring very hard at Alleyn. “I’d have to look it up. The law may touch on it and it may not.”

“Don’t tell us you’m hazy on the subject,” said Abel bitterly. “Us can’t believe it.”

Mr. Nark smiled in an exasperating manner and took a pull at his beer. He made a rabbit-like noise with his lips, snapping them together several times with a speculative air. He then looked dubiously into his pint-pot.

“Well,” said Abel tartly, “what’s wrong with it? You’m not p’isoned this time, I suppose?”

“I dessay it’s all right,” said Mr. Nark. “New barrel, b’ain’t it?”

Abel disregarded this enquiry. The ship’s decanter, that they had seen in the cupboard, now stood on the bar counter. It was spotlessly clean. Abel took the bottle of Amontillado from a shelf above the bar. He put a strainer in the neck of the decanter and began, carefully, to pour the sherry through it.

“What jiggery-pokery are you up to now, Abel?” enquired Mr. Nark. “Why, Gor’dang it, that thurr decanter was in the pi’son cupboard.”

Abel addressed himself exclusively to Alleyn and Fox. He explained the various methods used by Mrs. Ives to clean the decanter. He poured himself out a glass of the sherry and invited them to join him. Under the circumstances they could scarcely refuse. Mr. Nark watched them with extraordinary solicitude and remarked that they were braver men than himself.

“Axcuse me for a bit if you please, gentlemen,” said Abel elaborately, to Alleyn and Fox. “I do mind me of summat I’ve got to tell Mrs. Ives. If you’d be so good as to ring if I’m wanted.”

“Certainly, Mr. Pomeroy,” said Alleyn.

Abel left them with Mr. Nark.

“Fine morning, sir,” said Mr. Nark.

Alleyn agreed.

“Though I suppose,” continued Mr. Nark wooingly, “all weathers and climates are one to a man of your calling? Science,” continued Mr. Nark, drawing closer and closer to Alleyn, “is a powerful highhanded mistress. Now, just as a matter of curiosity, sir, would you call yourself a man of science?”

“Not I,” said Alleyn, good-naturedly. “I’m a policeman, Mr. Nark.”

“Ah! That’s my point. See? That’s my point. Now sir, with all respect, you did ought to make a power more use of the great wonders of science. I’ll give in your fingerprints. There’s an astonishing thing, now! To think us walks about unconscious-like, leaving our pores and loops all over the shop for science to pick up and have the laugh on us.”

It was a peculiarity of Mr. Nark’s conversational style that as he drew nearer to his victim he raised his voice. His face was now about twenty inches away from Alleyn’s and he roared like an infuriated auctioneer.

“I’m a reader,” shouted Mr. Nark. “I’m a reader and you might say a student. How many printed words would you say I’d absorbed in my life? At a guess, now?”

“Really,” said Alleyn. “I don’t think I could possibly—”

“Fifty-eight million!” bawled Mr. Nark. “Nigh on it. Not reckoning twice-overs. I’ve soaked up four hundred words, some of ’em as much as five syllables, mind you, every night for the last forty years. Started in at the age of fifteen. ‘Sink or swim,’ I said, ‘I’ll improve my brain to the tune of four hundred words per day till I passes out or goes blind!’ And I done it. I don’t suppose you know a piece of work called
The Evvylootion of the Spices
?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a tough masterpiece of a job. Took me a year and more, that did. Yes, I’ve tackled most branches of science. Now the last two years I’ve turned my eyes in the direction of crime. Trials of famous criminals, lives of murderers, feats of detection, all the whole biling of ’em. Can’t get enough of ’em. I’m like that. Whole hog or nothing. Reckon I’ve sucked it dry.”

Mr. Nark emptied his pint-pot and, perhaps as an illustrative gesture, sucked his moustache. He looked at Alleyn out of the corners of his eyes.

“This is a very pretty little case now,” he said. “I don’t say there’s much in it, but it’s quite a pretty bit of an affair in its way. You’ll be counting on knocking it off in a day or two, I suppose?”

“I don’t know about that, Mr. Nark.”

“I was a witness.”

“At the inquest? I thought—”

“Not at the inquest,” interrupted Mr. Nark in a great hurry. “No. Superintendent Nicholas Gawd-Almighty Harper had the running of the inquest. I was a witness to the event. More than that I’ve made a study of the affair and I’ve drew my own deductions. I don’t suppose they’d interest you. But I’ve drew ’em.”

Alleyn reflected that it was extremely unlikely that Mr. Nark’s deductions would be either intelligible or interesting, but he made an agreeable noise and invited him to have another drink. Mr. Nark accepted and drew it for himself.

“Ah,” he said. “I reckon I know as much as anybody about this affair, There’s criminal carelessness done on purpose, and there’s criminal carelessness done by accident. There’s motives here and there’s motives there, each of ’em making t’other look like a fool, and all of ’em making the biggest fool of Nicholas Harper. Yes. Us chaps takes our lives in our hands when we calls in at Feathers for a pint. Abel knows it. Abel be too mortal deathly proud to own up.”

“Carelessness, you said? How did it come about?”

If Mr. Nark’s theory of how cyanide got on the dart was ever understood by him, he had no gift for imparting it to others. He became incoherent, and defensively mysterious. He dropped hints and when pressed to explain them, took fright and dived into obscurities. He uttered generalizations of bewildering stupidity, assumed an air of huffiness, floundered into deep water, and remained there, blowing like a grampus. Alleyn was about to leave him in this plight when, perhaps as a last desperate bid for official approval, Mr. Nark made a singular statement.

“The Garden of Eden,” he said, “as any eddicated chap knows, is bunk. You can’t tell me there’s any harm in apples. I grow ’em. Us started off as a drop of jelly. We’ve come on gradual ever since, working our way up through slime and scales and tails to what we are. We had to
have
a female to do the job. Us knows that. Biological necessity. But she’s been a poisonous snare and a curse to us, as even the ignorant author of Genesis had spotted and noted down, in his foolish fashion, under cover of a lot of clap-trap. She’s wuzz than a serpent on her own, and she’s mostly always at the back of our troubles.
Searchy la fem
as the French detectives say, and you ought to bear in mind. This ghastly affair started a year ago and there’s three alive now that knows it. There
was
four.”

Alleyn realized, with a sinking heart, that he would have to pay attention to Mr. Nark. He saw in Mr. Nark a desire for fame struggling with an excessive natural timidity. Mr. Nark hungered for the admiring attention of the experts. He also dreaded the law, to which he seemed to accord the veneration and alarm of a neophyte before the altar of some trick and fickle deity. Alleyn decided that he must attempt to speak to him in his own language.

He said: “That’s very interesting, Mr. Nark. Strange, isn’t it, Fox? Mr. Nark has evidently,”—He fumbled for the magic word, — “evidently made the same deductions as we have, from the evidence in hand.”

Fox gave his superior a bewildered and disgusted glance. Alleyn said rather loudly: “See what I mean, Fox?”

Fox saw. “Very striking, sir,” he said. “We’ll have to get you into the force, Mr. Nark.”

Mr. Nark buttoned his coat.

“What’ll you take, gentlemen?” he asked.

But it was heavy going. To get any sense out of him Alleyn had to flatter, hint, and cajole. A direct suggestion threw him into a fever of incoherence, at a hint of doubt he became huffy and mysterious. As she seemed to be the only woman in the case, Alleyn attempted to crystallize on Decima.

“Miss Moore,” he said at last, “is naturally very much upset by Mr. Watchman’s death.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Nark. “Is she? She may be. P’raps! I don’t know anything about women. She may be. Huh!”

Alleyn achieved a knowing laugh in which Fox joined.

“You look below the surface, I see,” said Alleyn.

“I base my deductions on fact. Take an example,” said Mr. Nark. His third drink, a Treble Extra, had begun to have a mellowing effect. His native burr returned to his usually careful utterance and he smiled knowingly. “Take an example. I don’t say it’s true to natur’. It’s an illustration. A parrible. Ef I takes a stroll up-along Apple Lane of a warm night and hears a courting couple t’other side of hedge in old Jim Moore’s orchard, I draws my own conclusions, doan’t I?”

“No doubt.”

“Ess. And
ef
,” said Mr. Nark, “
ef
I do bide thurr, not with idea of eavesdropping but only to reflect and ponder in my deep bitter manner, on the wiles of females in gineral, and
ef
I yurrs a female voice I axpects to yurr, and a maskeline voice I doan’t axpects to yurr, and
ef
” continued Mr. Nark fighting his way to the end of his sentence, “I says ‘Hullo!’ to myself and passes on a step, and
ef
I meet the owner of the maskeline voice I
did
axpect to yurr, standing sly and silent in hedge… what do I say? Wait a bit. Doan’t tell me. I’ll tell you. I says, ‘Durn it!’ I says, ‘Thurr’ll be bloodshed along of this-yurr if us doan’t looks out!’ And
ef
I bides a twelvemonth or more and nothing happens, and then something does happen, bloody and murderous, what do I say then?”

Mr. Nark raised his hand as a signal that this question also was rhetorical, and paused for so long that Fox clenched both his fists and Alleyn had time to light a cigarette.

“I sez,” said Mr. Nark loudly, “not a damn thing.”

“What!” ejaculated Alleyn.

“Not a damn thing. But I thinks like a furnace.”

“What do you think, Mr. Nark?” asked Alleyn with difficulty.

“I thinks ’tis better to yold my tongue ef I want to keep breath in my body. And I yolds it. ’Ess fay, I be mum and I stays mum.”

Mr. Nark brought off a mysterious gesture with his right forefinger, leered knowingly at Alleyn, and tacked rapidly towards the door. Once there, he turned to deliver his last word.

“Doan’t you go calling my words ‘statements,’ ” he said. “They’re a n’allegory, and a n’allegory’s got nothing to do with the law. You doan’t trip me up thicky-fashion. I know natur of an oath.
Searchy la fem
.”

i

After they had lunched Alleyn brought his report up-to-date, and Fox, sitting solemnly at the parlour table, typed it in duplicate. Alleyn had a brief interview with Abel Pomeroy and returned with three tumblers. One of these he smashed to splinters with the poker, keeping the pieces together, and emptying them into a tin. The other two he wrapped up and placed, with a copy of his report, in his case. He also spent some time throwing down darts and finding that they stuck in the floor. These employments at an end, they drove to Illington. The day had turned gloomy, heavy rain was falling, and the road was slimy.

Alleyn dropped Fox at Woolworth’s and went on to Dr. Shaw’s house at the end of the principal street. He was shown into a surgery that smelt of leather, iodine, and ether. Here he found Dr. Shaw, who was expecting him. Alleyn liked the look of Dr. Shaw. He had an air of authority and a pleasing directness of manner.

“I hope I’m not an infernal nuisance, coming at this hour,” said Alleyn. “Your patients—”

“That’s all right. Surgery doesn’t start till two. Old trot sitting out there in the waiting room…
Malade imaginaire
… Do her good to wait a bit, she plagues my life out. Sit down. What do you want to talk about?”

“Principally about the wound and the dart. I’ve read the police report of the inquest.”

“Thought it rather full of gaps? So it is. Mordant, the coroner you know, is a dry old stick, but he’s got his wits about him. Respectable bacteriologist in his day. He and Harper got their heads together, I imagine, and decided just how much would be good for the jury. What about the wound?”

“Were there any traces of cyanide, prussic acid, or whatever the blasted stuff is?”

“No. We got a man from London, you know. One of your tame experts. Good man. Mordant and I were both there when he made his tests. We didn’t expect a positive result from the wound.”

“Why not?”

“Two reasons. He’d bled pretty freely and, if the stuff was introduced on the dart, what wasn’t absorbed would be washed away by blood. Also, the stuff’s very volatile.”

“They found the trace on the dart.”

“Yes. Oates kept his head and put the dart into a clean soda-water bottle and corked it up. Couldn’t do that with the finger.”

“Even so, wouldn’t you expect the stuff to evaporate on the dart?”

Dr. Shaw uttered a deep growl and scratched his cheek.

“Perfectly correct,” he said, “you would. Puzzling.”

“Doesn’t it look as if the Scheele’s acid, or rather the fifty-per-cent prussic acid solution, must have been put on the dart a very short time before Oates bottled it up?”

“It does. Thought so all along.”

“How long was it, after the event, that you got there?”

“Within half an hour after his death.”

“Yes. Now, look here. For private consumption only, would you expect a cyanide solution, however concentrated, to kill a man after that fashion?”

Dr. Shaw thrust his hands in his pockets and stuck out his lower lip.

“I’m not a toxicologist,” he said. “Mordant is, and we’ve taken the king-pin’s opinion. Watchman, on his own statement, had a strong idiosyncrasy for cyanide. He told Parish and Cubitt about this the night before the tragedy.”

“Yes. I saw that in the files. It’s good enough, you think?”

“We’ve got no precedent for the affair. The experts seem to think it good enough. That dart was thrown with considerable force. It penetrated to the bone, or rather, it actually entered the finger at such an angle that it must have lain along the bone. It’s good enough.”

“There was no trace of cyanide in the mouth?”

“None. But that doesn’t preclude the possibility of his having taken it by the mouth.”

“Oh Lord!” sighed Alleyn, “nor it does. Did the room stink of it?”

“No, it stank of brandy. So did the body. Brandy, by the way, is one of the antidotes given for cyanide poisoning. Along with artificial respiration, potassium permanganate, glucose, and half a dozen other remedies, none of which is much use if the cyanide has got into the blood stream.”

“Have you a pair of scales?” asked Alleyn abruptly. “Chemical scales or larger, but accurate scales?”

“What? Yes. Yes, I have. Why?”

“Fox, my opposite number, will be here in a minute. He’s calling at the police station for the fragments of broken tumbler. I’ve got a rather fantastic notion. Nothing in it I dare say. We’ve a pair of scales at the pub but I thought you might be amused if we did a bit of our stuff here.”

“Of course I would. Wait a moment while I get rid of that hypochondriacal crone. Shan’t be long. Don’t move. She only wants a flea in her ear.”

Dr. Shaw went into the waiting room. Alleyn could hear his voice raised in crisp admonishment.

“… Pull yourself together, you know — sound as a bell… Take up a hobby… Your own physician… Be a sensible woman…”

A doorbell rang and in a moment Fox and Superintendent Harper were shown into the surgery.

“Hullo, hullo!” said Harper. “What’s all this I hear? Thought I’d come along. Got an interesting bit of news for you.” He dropped his voice. “I sent a chap up to London by the milk train. He’s taken the dart to Dabs and they’ve just rung through. The prints are good enough. What do you think they’ve found?”

“I can see they’ve found something, Nick,” said Alleyn, smiling.

“You bet they have. Those prints belong to Mr. Montague Thringle, who did four years for embezzlement and came out of Broadmoor twenty-six months ago.”

“Loud cheers,” said Alleyn, “and
much
laughter.”

“Eh? Yes, and that’s not the best of it. Who do you think defended one of the accused and shifted all the blame on to Thringle?”

“None other than Luke Watchman, the murdered K.C.?”

“You’re right. Legge’s a gaol-bird who owes, or thinks he owes, his sentence to Watchman. He’s just dug himself in pretty, with a nice job and lots of mugs eating out of his hand, and along comes the very man who can give him away.”

“Now I’ll tell you something
you
don’t know,” said Alleyn. “Who do you think was implicated with Montague Thringle and got off with six months?”

“Lord Bryonie. Big scandal it was.”

“Yes. Miss Darragh’s unfortunate cousin, the Lord Bryonie.”

“You don’t tell me that! Miss Darragh! I’d put her right out of the picture.”

“She holds a watching-brief for Thringle-alias-Legge, I fancy,” said Alleyn, and related the morning’s adventure.

“By gum!” cried Harper, “I think it’s good enough. I reckon we’re just about right for a warrant. With the fact that only Legge could have known the dart would hit — what d’you think? Shall we pull him in?”

“I don’t think we’ll make an arrest just yet, Nick.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I think the result would be what the highbrows call a miscarriage of justice. I’ll tell you why.”

ii

But before he had finished telling them why, an unmistakable rumpus in the street announced the arrival of Colonel Brammington’s car. And presently Colonel Brammington himself came charging into the room with Dr. Shaw on his heels.

“I saw your car outside,” he shouted. “A galaxy of all the talents with Æsculapius to hold the balance. Æsculapius usurps that seat of justice, poetic justice with her lifted scale.”

Dr. Shaw put a small pair of scales on the table and grinned. Colonel Brammington took one of Alleyn’s cigarettes and hurled himself into a chair.

“Curiosity,” he said, “was praised by the great Doctor, as one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect His namesake, the rare Ben, remarked that he did love to note and to observe. With these noble precedents before me, I shall offer no excuse, but following the example of Beatrice, shall like a lapwing run, close to the ground to hear your confidence. An uncomfortable feat and one for which my great belly renders me unfit. Have you any matches? Ah, thank you.”

Harper, with his back to the Chief Constable, turned his eyes up for the edification of Fox. He laid a tin box on the table.

“Here you are, Mr. Alleyn.”

“Good.” Alleyn weighed the box speculatively in his hands and then emptied its contents into the scale.

“What is that?” demanded Colonel Brammington. “Glass? Ah, the orts and fragments of the brandy glass, perhaps”

“That’s it, sir,” said Alleyn.

“And pray why do you put them on the scales?”

“Sir,” murmured Alleyn politely, “to find out their weight.”

Colonel Brammington said mildly: “You mock me, by Heaven. And what do they weigh?”

“Two ounces, forty-eight grains. That right, Dr. Shaw?”

“That’s it.”

Alleyn returned the fragments to their box and took a second box from his pocket.

“In this,” he said, “are the pieces of an identically similar glass for which I gave Mr. Pomeroy one and sixpence. They are his best glasses. Now then.”

He tipped the second shining heap into the scales.

“Yes, by George,” said Alleyn softly. “Look. Two ounces, twenty-four grains.”

“Here!” exclaimed Harper. “That’s less. It must be a lighter glass.”

“No,” said Alleyn. “It’s the same brand of glass. Abel took the glasses for the brandy from a special shelf. I’ve borrowed two more, unbroken. Let’s have them, Fox.”

Fox produced two tumblers. Each of them weighed two ounces, twenty-four grains.

“But look here,” objected Harper. “We didn’t get every scrap of that glass up. Some of it had been ground into the boards. Watchman’s glass should, if anything, weigh less than the others.”

“I know,” said Alleyn.

“Well then—”

“Some other glass must have fallen,” said Colonel Brammington. “They were full of distempering draughts, red-hot with drinking. One of them may have let fall some other glass. A pair of spectacles. Didn’t Watchman wear an eyeglass?”

“It was round his neck,” said Dr. Shaw, “unbroken.”

“There seems to have been no other glass broken, sir,” said Alleyn. “I’ve asked. Did you find all the pieces in one place, Harper?”

“Like you’d expect, a bit scattered and trampled about. I daresay there were pieces in the soles of their boots. Damn it all,” cried Harper in exasperation, “
it must
weigh lighter.”

He weighed the glass again, peering suspiciously at the scales. The result was exactly the same. The fragments of Watchman’s glass weighed twenty-four grains heavier than the unbroken tumbler.

“This is rather amusing,” said Colonel Brammington.

Alleyn sat at the table and spread the broken glass over a sheet of paper. Fox gave him a pair of tweezers and he began to sort the pieces into a graduated row. The other men drew closer.

“It’s the same tumbler,” said Colonel Brammington. “There, you see, are the points of one of those loathsome stars.”

Alleyn took a jeweller’s lens from his pocket. “Ah!” muttered Colonel Brammington, staring at him with a bulging and raffish eye. “He peers. He screws a glass into his orb and with enlarged vision feeds his brain.”

“We always feel rather self-conscious about these things,” said Alleyn, “but they have their uses. Here, I think, are three, no four small pieces of glass that
might
be different from — well, let’s weigh them.” He put them in the scales.

“Thirty-one grains. That, Harper, leaves a margin of eleven grains for the bits you missed. Any good?”

“Do you think these bits are a different class of stuff, Mr. Alleyn?” asked Harper.

“I think so. There’s a difference in colour and if you look closely you can see they’re a bit thicker.”

“He has written a monograph on broken tumblers,” cried Colonel Brammington delightedly. “Let me look through your lens.”

He crouched over the table.

“They are different,” he said. “You are quite right, my dear Alleyn. What can it mean? The iodine bottle? No, it was found unbroken beneath the settle.”

“What did you discover at Woolworth’s, Fox?” asked Alleyn.

“Nothing much, Mr. Alleyn. I tried all the other places as well. They haven’t sold any and they say there’s very little shop-lifting in Illington.”

“Veil upon veil will lift,” remarked Colonel Brammington, “but there will be veil upon veil behind. What is this talk of shop-lifting?”

“I’ll explain, sir,” began Alleyn.

“On second thoughts, pray don’t. I prefer, Alleyn, to be your Watson. You dine with me to-night? Very good. Give me the evidence, and let me brood.”

“But don’t you wish to hear Mr. Alleyn’s case, sir?” asked Harper in a scandalized voice. “Your position—”

“I do not. I prefer to listen to voices in the upper air nor lose my simple faith in mysteries. I prefer to take the advice of the admirable Tupper and will let not the conceit of intellect hinder me from worshipping mystery. But nevertheless, give me your plain plump facts. I will sing, with Ovid, of facts.”

“You will not have Ovid’s privilege of inventing them,” rejoined Alleyn. “I have brought a copy of my report on the case. It’s up-to-date.”

Colonel Brammington took the file and seemed to become the victim of an intolerable restlessness. He rose, hitched up his shapeless trousers and said rapidly in a high voice: “Well, good-bye, Shaw. Come to dinner tonight.”

“Oh, thank you very much, sir,” said Dr. Shaw. “I’d like to. Black tie?”

“As the fancy takes you. I shall make some gesture. Broadcloth and boiled line. You come, Harper?”

“Thank you, sir, I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve got to—”

“All right. I see. Three then. You, Alleyn; Shaw, and — ah—”

“Ah yes. Splendid. Well
au revoir
.”

“Fox,” said Alleyn.

“Ah yes. Splendid. Well,
au revoir
.”

“I was going to ask you, sir—” began Harper.

“Oh God! What?”

“It doesn’t matter, sir, if you’re in a hurry,” Harper opened the door with emphasized politeness. “Good afternoon, sir.”

“Oh, good-bye to you, Harper, good-bye,” said Colonel Brammington, impatiently, and plunged out.

“If that,” said Harper sourly, “is the modern idea of a Chief Constable it’s not mine. You wouldn’t credit it, would you, that when the gentleman’s brother dies, he’ll be a Lord. A lord, mind you! Bawling hurricane. Where’s he get the things he says, Doctor? Out of his head or out of books?”