INSPECTOR BIRKENHEAD looked like the quintessence of all those Scotland Yard Inspectors who have figured in that vast and ever-growing field of literature, detective stories. He was indeed the only begetter of a great family. His position at Scotland Yard brought him into immediate contact with all the journalists, writers, curious persons and so forth who came in ever-increasing volume to study the type. He was Scotland Yard’s first line of defence, and the first to break cover from the thickets upon the encircled criminal. Subtler minds up-stairs remained hidden from the public eye and the public imagination. Criminals never saw them, knew nothing about them. Camera men never got hold of them. Between them and the amateur detective, a great gulf, in the shape of Inspector Birkenhead, was fixed. Edward Albert had met him already in a dozen stories under a dozen names.

The Inspector was a big heavy man, big enough indeed to be a lot of people. Edward Albert watched him place a chair for himself in the middle of the room and adjust himself firmly to its creaking accommodation, rest his hands upon his thighs and stick out his elbows. “Edward Albert Tewler, I believe.” he said.

There is no hiding things from these detectives,

“Yes,” said Edward Albert and the word half choked him.

His mouth was dry with fear.

He glanced in hope of some moral support from Pip, but Pip appeared to be lost in admiration of Enfin seul.

“I’m told you engaged to marry my daughter and that at the very last moment when everything was prepared for the ceremony, you insulted her and everybody by absenting yourself, absenting yourself without leave, from the ceremony. Have I been correctly informed?”

“I really did ‘ave a temperature, Sir. Over 104 it was. Five degrees above normal.”

“Nothing to what you’ll have some day,” said the Inspector prosaically.

“But Mr Chaser here knows — Reely, Sir.”

“We won’t argue about that. We won’t trouble Mr Chaser about that. I should say by the look of you she was well out of a thoroughly silly marriage, if it wasn’t —”

The Inspector stopped, unable to continue for a time. His face was suffused, His mouth closed grimly and he appeared to be inhaling intensely. His eyes protruded. He seemed to be swelling. He must have been full of very highly compressed air. It looked as though he might explode at any moment, but as a matter of fact he was exercising self-control.

Mr Pip Chaser had stopped looking at the picture and had come round to a position from which to observe the Inspector better. Even his expression of expectant amusement was mitigated by a touch, of awe. There was, if one may say so, a. sort of humming silence of apprehension throughout the room. What became: of all that air it is idle to speculate. It disappears from tills story. When the Inspector spoke his voice was calm and stern. He deflated imperceptibly.

“My daughter, if she is my daughter, was her mother’s child. That woman. — That woman brought disgrace upon my name. A wanton. A loose woman. And now. . . . Once again. No, I cannot have that sort of thing happen over again.”

“But I mean to marry her, Sir. I’m going to marry her.”

“You’d better. If you don’t —” And speaking as always, with the quiet dignity of a man accustomed to the use of studiously irreproachable language, he used these by no means irreproachable words: “I’ll bloody-well knock your silly block off for you! You understand me, Sir?”

“Yessir,” said Edward Albert.

“But then how are we going to do it? The mischief is done. Here’s everything disarranged and out of order. All her friends will know and talk. Well, Mr Chaser, you’ve a way of arranging things, she says, she says you can arrange Anything; and you know all these people better than I do. How you can arrange this now passes my imagination. What’s to be done?”

“Well,” said Pip. “If you ask me —~”

He came forward and stood for a moment with his mouth wide open, scratching his jaws, “Hey”, he said, slowly and extensively. “Nothing irreparable has happened. First there’s this lie about the temperature.”

Edward Albert murmured a protest.

“Lie?” said the Inspector, looked hard at Edward Albert, and said no more.

“Pure lie,” said Pip, “I invented it and I ought to know. He hadn’t a temperature. He had — hey — cold feet. . . . Still, we ought to keep that up. And the sooner Evangeline shows anxiety about it, the better. We can say she’s been round already, in a dreadful state of mind. Oh, I know that’s not true, but — hey — we can say it. And then we can say there was a misunderstanding about the date. And I lost the ring and got confused. Blame it on to me. That’s what Best Men are for. Any old story, and the more stories there are, the better. We contradict vaguely. We say to this man, ‘the fact of the matter is this’, and we say to that man, ‘the fact of the matter is that’. So everybody knows more than everybody else and we escape in the confusion. Just — hey — common sense, all that. The facts are bad. As you know, Sir, as your criminals know, the worse the facts are the more they have to be jumbled up. We aren’t going to have to be sifting the evidence, Sir, thank goodness. And the sooner we get the whole thing over, the better.”

“There I agree,” said the Inspector. “I stand by that firmly.”

“I’ll get busy,” said Puck–Pip. “I’ll do it.”

“But if there’s any more shilly-shally —”

“Block,” said Pip compactly, and turned to his client.

“You understand that, don’t you?”

Edward Albert nodded acquiescence. The Inspector stood up slowly and towered over his prospective son-inlaw. He shook not so much a finger as the whole terror of Scotland Yard at him.

“That girl is going to be decently and properly married whether she likes it or not, whether you like it or not, whoever likes it or don’t like it”— he hesitated —“or not. Not twice will I have the honour of my family trailed in the mud. You marry her and you treat her properly. She’s got the temper of a vixen, I admit, but all the same she’s an educated young lady, and don’t you forget it. She’s a young lady and you’re no gentleman. . . . ”

He ceased to address Edward Albert. He soliloquised, looking over Pip’s head.

“I’ve often thought if perhaps I’d spanked her at times Or somebody had spanked her. I couldn’t have spanked her. . . . But there I was without a woman to care for her. . . . It’s no good crying over spilt milk. As a little kid. . . . If only she could have stayed always as a little kid. . . . She was such a bright little kid.”

The lament of the father through the ages. . . .

So in a confusion of explanations the wedding feast was restored to the calendar and in due course Edward Albert found himself standing with Evangeline before a clergyman of venerable appearance and rapid enunciation. Pip stood behind Edward Albert like a ventriloquist behind his dummy, and three small bridesmaids of unknown provenance upheld Evangeline’s train. In a front pew stood Inspector Birkenhead, meticulously observant, and evidently resolved to knock the bridegroom’s sanguinary block off at the slightest hint of hanky-panky.

The elderly clergyman went off at headlong speed.

“Debloved getggether ‘n sigh Gard ‘n face congation join togeth man this wum ho’ matmony onble sta stuted Gard time man’s ‘sincy. . . . dained remdy gainsin void forncation. . . . fever after holdis peace.”

More of that. . . .

Then suddenly Edward Albert found he was bring addressed. The quick-firing clergyman was saying, “Wilt have this Worn thy wed wife. . . . keep th’only unt her — s’long both sha’ live?”

“Eh?” said Edward Albert, trying to get it clear.

“Say ‘I will’"— from Pip.

“I will.”

He turned on Evangeline who answered very clearly;

“I will.”

“Who giv’ s’wom mad this man?”

Rapid exchange of glances between the Inspector and Pip. Assenting noise from the Inspector and something very like

“O.K.” from Mr Chaser, who reached over smartly and put Evangeline’s hand in the priest’s. There was a slight fumble and the priest, with an impatient tug, joined the two right hands as he proc............