“Up to no good, I expect.” Joseph Kelly, disapproval in his eyes, answered his own question, since other answer there was none. “I never see such a feller. Been mashing you, Harriet, by the look of him.”
It was a bow drawn at a venture by a shrewd colleague of the X Division. An immediate effusion of rose pink to the young man’s freckled countenance was full of information for a close observer.
“Durn me if he hasn’t!” Gargantuan laughter rose to the ceiling.
Harriet blushed. But the look in her face was not discomfiture merely. There was plain annoyance and a look of rather startled anxiety for which the circumstances could hardly account.
“Scotchie, you’re a nonesuch.” But Joe suddenly lowered his voice in answer to the alarm in the face of his sister-in-law. “You are the limit, my lad. Do you know what he did last week, Harriet? I’ll tell you.”
“Let me make you a cup of tea, Joe.” And his sister-in-law, who seemed oddly agitated by his arrival, rose in the humane hope of diverting the attack.
But the story was too good to remain untold.
“It’ll take the X Division twenty years to live it down.” Kelly throbbed and gurgled like a donkey-engine as he fixed his youthful colleague with a somber eye. “This young feller, what do you think he did last week?”
“The kettle will soon boil, Joe.”
“Harriet!”—the rich rolling voice thrilled dramatically—“about midnight, last Monday week as ever was, this smart young officer saw an old party in an eyeglass and a topper and a bit o’ fur round his overcoat, standin’ on the curb at Piccadilly Circus. He strolls up, taps him on the shoulder, charges him with loitering with intent and runs him in.”