Jimmy's wife broke into hysterical sobbing, and the fat woman expostulated. She had come to see the show and didn't know anything about the man. The four People behind the suburban couple were equally reluctant to be mixed up in a thing they knew nothing about, with results that no one could foresee. They too protested their ignorance.
"Maybe," said the policeman, "but you'll have to explain all that at the station. There's nothing to be scared of," he added for their comfort, and rather unconvincingly in the circumstances.
So the queue came on. The doorkeeper brought a green curtain from somewhere and covered up the body. The automatic clink and rattle of coin began again and went on, indifferent as rain. The doorkeeper, moved from his habitual Jovian abstraction by their plight or by the hope of reward, offered to keep their rightful seats for the seven derelicts. Presently came the ambulance and the police from Gowbridge Police Station. An inspector had a short interview with each of the detained seven, took names and addresses, and dismissed them with a warning to be ready to come up if called upon. Jimmy took his sobbing wife away to a taxi, and the other five straggled soberly into the seats over which the door-keeper was brooding, just as the curtain rose on the evening performance of Didn't You Know?
2 — Inspector Grant
Superintendent Barker applied a carefully manicured forefinger to the ivory bell-push on the under side of his table, and kept it there until a minion appeared.
"Tell Inspector Grant that I want to see him," he said to the minion, who was doing his best to look obsequious in the great man's presence, but was frustrated in his good intention by an incipient embonpoint which compelled him to lean back a little in order to preserve his balance, and by the angle of his nose which was the apotheosis of impudence. Bitterly conscious of failure, the minion withdrew to deliver the message and to bury the memory of his confusion among the unsympathetic perfection of files and foolscap from which he had been summoned, and presently Inspector Grant came into the room and greeted his chief cheerily as one man to another. And his chief's face brightened unconsciously in his presence.
If Grant had an asset beyond the usual ones of devotion to duty and a good supply of brains and courage, it was that the last thing he looked like was a police officer. He was of medium height and slight in build, and he was — now, if I say dapper, of course you will immediately think of something like a tailor's dummy, something perfected out of all individuality, and Grant is most certainly not that; but if you can visualize a dapperness that is not of the tailor's dummy type, then that is Grant. Barker had for years striven unsuccessfully to emulate his subordinate's chic; he succeeded merely in looking too carefully dressed. He lacked the flair for things sartorial as he lacked flair in most things. He was a plodder. But that was the worst that could be said about him. And when he started plodding after some one, that some one usually wished he had never been born.
He regarded his subordinate now with an admiration untinged with any resentment, appreciated his son-of-the-morning atmosphere — he himself had been awake most of the night with sciatica — and came to business.
"Gowbridge are very sick," he said. "In fact, Gow Street went so far as to insinuate that it was a conspiracy."
"Oh? Some one been pulling their legs?"