Inspector French’s Greatest Case quotes

He was not imaginative, the constable, or he would have rebelled even more strongly than he did against the weariness and monotony of his job.

A dog’s life, this of night patrol in the City, he thought, as he stopped at a cross roads, and looked down each one in turn of the four dingy and deserted lanes which radiated from the intersection.

How deadly depressing it all was! Nothing ever doing! Nothing to give a man a chance!

Once, however, he dropped a phrase which set her thinking, though she was unable to discover his meaning, and he had refused to explain.

He had asked her did she believe that a man could ever be right in doing evil that good might come, and when she had answered that she could not tell, he had sighed and said, “Pray God you may never be called on to decide.”

On the evening of his death it had been arranged that he would sit with Mrs. Gething, in order to allow his daughter to attend a social connected with the choir of the church to which she belonged.

Such, French thought, was common sense, and common sense, he considered, was right ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

But there was always the hundredth chance.

Improbabilities and coincidences did occasionally happen. He would have given a good deal at that moment to know if this case was the exception that proves the rule.

On the second evening after his return from Spain, the Inspector was regaling her with a by no means brief résumé of the Hatton Garden crime. She had listened more carefully than usual, and presently he found she had taken a notion.

“I don’t believe that poor old man was out to do anything wrong,” she declared. “It’s a shame for you to try to take away his character now he’s dead.”

French, stopping his pacing of the room, faced round.

“I’m only saying that he’s the only person we know of who could have got an impression of the key. If so, it surely follows he was out to rob the safe.”

“Well, I believe you’re wrong,” the lady affirmed, continuing with a logic as relentless as his own, “because if he was out to rob the safe, he wasn’t the sort of man that you described, and if he was the sort of man that you described, why, then, he wasn’t out to rob the safe. That’s what I think about it.”

French was a trifle staggered. The difficulty he had recognised from the beginning, but he had not considered it serious. Now, put to him in the downright, uncompromising language in which his wife usually clothed her thoughts, it suddenly seemed to him overwhelming.

Williams’s office. It was a confoundedly exasperating case—just bristling with promising clues which one after another petered out as he came to follow them up.

Being on it was like trying to cross a stream on stepping-stones which invariably gave way when he came to place his weight on them.

It was an annoying thought also that that would scarcely be the view his chief would take of the matter.

“Well, there you are—silly! What would a woman be who could make up like another woman, and put on an English or American talk, and be remembered by old Londoners?

Why, a child could guess that, Watson!

”

Of actually read books in the smoking-room there were none. In the sitting-room were a number of the lighter type of novels, together with a number in French and Spanish with extremely lurid and compromising jackets.

But among these, as out of place as an Elijah at a feast of Baal, lay a new copy of The Concise Oxford Dictionary.

There were several old bills in Madame’s inlaid davenport, but save for the names of firms with whom the lady had recently been dealing, French had learned nothing from them.