CHAPTER III.
The Real Detective.
Through a little back door, up a stone flight of stairs, into a broad corridor one passes to the offices where are quartered the heads of the most important branch of Scotland Yard—the Criminal Investigation Department, with its wide-reaching organisation stretching beyond the confines of London over the whole world.
It is its business to keep its fingers on the pulse of crime, to watch vigilantly the comings and goings of thousands of men and women, and to bring to justice all those whose acts have made them a menace to society.
No department of Scotland Yard has been more written around; none has been more misunderstood. It does its duty effectually, unswervingly, in the same unemotional spirit that marks the other departments of the service, but with perhaps even a keener eye to its own reputation. The C.I.D. knows how high is the reputation it has won among international police forces, and is very properly jealous of its maintenance.
There have been critics of the C.I.D. Many have held that the system of recruiting from the uniformed police is wrong in essence—that educated men employed direct from civilian life would be more effective. There is no bar against anyone being appointed direct if the authorities chose—but it has been tried.
Once upon a time—this was a long while ago—an ardent reformer held the reins of the detective force. He made many valuable changes, and some less valuable—among the latter the experiment of "gentlemen" as detectives. There were six of them, and the full story of these kid-glove amateurs would be interesting reading. They were, in the euphemistic words of the reformer himself, "eminently unsatisfactory." "There is," he added, "little doubt that the gentlemen who have failed in one of the professions which they usually adopt are less trustworthy, less reliable, and more difficult to control than those who enter a calling such as the police in the ordinary course."[2] So the only approach to Sherlock Holmes that Scotland Yard has ever seen was killed for good and all, though there is still no legal bar to anyone being appointed directly a detective.
Six hundred and fifty picked officers, all of whom have worn the blue uniform and patrolled the streets at the regulation pace, form a mobile army scattered over the metropolis.
Quiet and unobtrusive men for the most part, dogged, tactful, and resourceful, they must always be ready to act at a moment's notice as individuals or as part of a machine. For it is the machinery of Scotland Yard that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred calls check to the criminal's move. It is long odds on law and order every time.