The Official Memory sits in a big office that overlooks the Thames Embankment. It is embodied in a man who checks, day by day, hour by hour, and minute by minute, the dark happenings of the world. He is an inconsiderable person, as personalities go, for he enters no witness-box to testify against a pallid prisoner. He grants no interviews to curious newspaper reporters, he appears in no magazines as a picturesque detector of crime, but silently, earnestly, and remorselessly he marks certain little square cards, makes grim entries in strange ledgers, consults maps, and pores over foreign newspaper reports. Sometimes he prepares a dossier as a cheap-jack makes up his prize packet, with a paper from this cabinet, a photograph from that drawer, a newspaper-cutting, a docketed deposition with the sprawling signature of a dying man, a finger-print card—and all these he places in a large envelope, and addresses it in a clerkly hand to Chief Inspector So-and-So, or to the "Director of Public Prosecutions." When the case is over and a dazed man sits in a cell at Wormwood Scrubbs pondering his sentence, or, as it sometimes happens, when convict masons are at work carving initials over a grave in a prison-yard, the envelope comes back to the man in the office, and he sorts the contents jealously. It is nothing to him, the sum of misery they have cast, or the odour of death that permeates them. He receives them unemotionally, distributes the contents to their cabinets, pigeon-holes, guard-books, and drawers and proceeds to make up yet another dossier.
All things come to him; crime in all its aspects is veritably his stock-in-trade.
When George T. Baggin disappeared in 1908, his simple arrangement of indexing showed the connection between the passing of Lucas Damant, six months later, and the obliteration of Gerald Grayson. The Official Memory knew, too, what the public had no knowledge of: namely, that there had been half-a-dozen minor, but no less mysterious, flittings in the space of two years.
Their stories, briefly and pithily told, were inscribed on cards in the silent man's cabinet. Underneath was the significant word, "Incomplete." They were stories to be continued; some other hand than his might take up the tale at a future time, and subscribe "Finis" to their grim chapters. He was satisfied to carry the story forward as far as his information allowed him.
There never was a more fascinating office than this of the Silent Recorder's. It was terribly business-like, with its banked files, its innumerable drawers, its rows of deep cabinets. "A, B, C, D," they ran; then began all over again, "AA, BB, CC," except the big index drawer where "Aabot, Aaroon, Aato, Abard, Abart" commenced the record of infamous men. There were forgers here, murderers, coiners, defaulters great and small. There are stories of great swindles, and of suspected swindles, of events apparently innocent in themselves, behind which lie unsuspected criminalities.
I show you this office, the merest glimpse of it, so that as this story progresses, and information comes mysteriously to the hand of the chief actor, you will understand that no miracle has been performed, no Heaven-sent divination of purpose has come to him, but that at the back of the knowledge he employs with such assurance is this big office at New Scotland Yard. A pleasant office, overlooking the Embankment with its green trees and its sunny river and its very pleasant sights—none of which the Recorder ever sees, being short-sighted from overmuch study of criminal records.
CHAPTER VIII
THE AMBASSADOR TAKES A HAND
Mr. John Hammond Bierce, American Ambassador and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Saint James, sat in his spacious private office, and listened with an air of grave attention to the story his young protégé poured into his ears. As Van Ingen concluded, the great man leaned back in his swivel-chair until the spring creaked, and stifled a yawn behind a white, well-groomed hand.
"My dear boy," he said, "this is a very sad tale, and I am genuinely sorry for Miss Grayson. Her father appears to have been a rascal. But," he smiled across at his youthful visitor, "I do not quite see what the American ambassador has to do with the business. I understand you consulted me in my official capacity."