“Do so,” said the chief. And Freyberger departed.
CHAPTER XVII
DR GUSTAVUS MURRELL lived in Sackville Street, Piccadilly. He was a man of private means, and he possessed a medical practice that brought him in about a thousand a year. One of those pleasant practices, where the lowest fee for looking at a tongue is a guinea, and for an operation fifty.
He was a tall, well-groomed, handsome man of forty-five or so, with a jovial blue eye and a hearty manner. You never would have imagined that one of the chief hobbies of this healthy and happy-looking individual was grubbing in the cesspit of crime. Yet it was.
Only one of his hobbies, for he had several, photography amongst the rest.
Though a dilettante of criminal acts and possessed of a profound penetrative power, as far as human motives were concerned, Dr Murrell was no amateur detective. He studied criminals just as a botanist studies fungi; they interested him, and he felt a sort of sympathy for them, that sympathy which we all feel, more or less, for the things that interest us.
He acted as police surgeon, because, in that position, he was brought into contact with the people who helped to constitute his hobby. But he never helped the police in the least, beyond the assistance that his position bound him in duty to give.
On several occasions he could have given the police a clue that would have helped them considerably in their work, yet he refrained. He was the police surgeon, but he did not feel himself bound to help the police beyond the help that his surgical knowledge was able to give.
In the case of the valet Leloir he did not care twopence whether the result of his investigations brought a criminal to justice or cleared up a mystery.