Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 14, No. 71, October 1949

Evidence in Camera by Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham remembers clearly the circumstances under which “Evidence in Camera” was born. There were {a) the place; (b) the people; (c) the props — and (d) the put-together-er... The original idea sprang into her head in a railway train (a). She was traveling to London in an overcrowded railway carriage — the English train, Miss Allingham reminds us, is a series of little compartments, like the the cartridge wallets on the shoulder belt of what Miss Allingham calls the “War of Independence” uniform. She found herself so wedged in among elbows, handbags, and the more intimate sections of her fellow travelers (b) that she could scarcely move her head. She was sitting on something — to this day she does not know what, although it was certainly alive, at least in the beginning of the trip. At any rate, all Miss Allingham could see was someone’s limp gray vest, which quivered not more than six inches from her nose. Across the vest hung a silver chain from which various small objects (c) depended — four medals, a disc which proclaimed the wearer to be a “Tail Wagger,” a tiny metal tassel — all oscillating hypnotically before Miss Allingham’s eyes as the train (a) rocked toward London.

On Miss Allingham’s knee rested a copy of the Medico-Legal Society’s quarterly report (c), containing an article on “Psychiatry and Degrees of Murder.” Miss Allingham was in need of a short-story plot and had intended to read the article during the railway journey, in the hope of picking up a psychological gimmick. But Medico-Legal journal remained unopened and unread. Instead, to occupy her thoughts, were (a) the sardine-packed scene, (b) the helter-skelter dramatis personæ, and (c) the swinging, swaying silver string.

And then came the catalyst (d). Just before the train arrived at its London terminus, which is dark and sooty and approached by many bridges, Miss Allingham, from her cramped and uncomfortable position, heard someone in the compartment say, softly but distinctly: “You ought to get that watch photographed.”

She saw neither the speaker nor the person addressed, but the words themselves were so odd, so cryptic, so elusively difficult to pin a meaning to — well, they took hold of her imagination and they held on with a bloodhound grip.

As a matter of fact, Miss Allingham simply had to write a story combining (a) the train, (b) the occupants of the railway carriage, and (c) the chain “charms” — simply to free herself from the haunting image of (d) a watch that had to be photographed. And as a matter of further fact, the essential plot worked itself out in her mind by the time a taxicab bounced her from the railway terminus to her London flat.

Thus was born Chippy Wager, the camera criminologist, the photographic private-eye — a hands-across-the-sea blood-brother to George Harmon Coxe’s Flashgun Casey, Crime Photographer.

There are people who might consider Chippy Wager unethical, and others who go a great deal further. At the time I am telling you about, he was on the Cormorant, which is not that paper’s real name, but why make enemies if you don’t have to? He was, and still is of course, a photographer — one of those boys who shoot through a cop’s legs and jump onto the running-board of the limousine so that you can see the Society bride in tears as she takes her first cold look at the man she’s got. They pay those lads plenty, but Chippy had uses for money, mainly liquid, and he made another income on the side by taking photographs privately of practically everything from the Mayor and Corporation to the local beauty queen. He made time for these activities when there was none, and used the Cormorants excellent equipment, but, as he said, he had to drink.

We both went down to St. Piers for the fifth murder. I was on the old Post at the time, and when I say “we” went, I mean among others. The Southern Railway put on one excursion train for the Press and another for the police when the body of Mrs. Lily Clarke was found.

The story was simple and, if you like that sort of thing, good. You probably remember it. It rated about as much space as an election and by the time the body of the fifth victim, Mrs. Lily Clarke, was found at St. Piers, it was practically the one subject of conversation in the bars. Briefly, someone was killing off middle-aged redheads in seaside towns. There had been a summer of it. In May Mrs. Wild was killed in Whichborne, in June Mrs. Garrard at Turnhill Bay, and by July the murderer had got round to Southwharf and had attended to a Mrs. Jelf. In August he chose a fashionable resort and strangled Mrs. Ginger Hollis just outside the polo ground at Prinny’s Plage, and in September there was this latest affair at St. Piers.

In all five instances the details were astonishingly similar. Each victim was respectable, homely in appearance, in the habit of letting rooms to visitors, and either naturally or artificially auburn-haired. Each woman was found strangled in a secluded place in the open air, with her untouched handbag beside her. Each woman lost some trifling ornament, such as a cheap earring, a gold clasp from a chain bracelet, a locket containing edelweiss, and once — in Mrs. Hollis’s case — a small silver button with a regimental crest on it.

Not once was any trace of the murderer seen either before or after the crime, and by the time the St. Piers news came through, the police were savage, while the press were on the verge of being bored. There was still plenty to write about but nothing new. The Cormorant and its sisters, who had worked themselves up to screaming hysterics in July, were showing signs of exhaustion, and even the heavies, like ourselves and the World, were falling back on such items as the slayer’s preference for the new moon.

From my own purely personal point of view the thing was becoming a nightmare and the principal reason for that was Chippy. I had first met him when I traveled down to Whichborne in May. On that occasion there were seventeen of us in a carriage which might have held ten without active inconvenience, and although he was the last to arrive he was in a corner seat with only myself atop of him before the journey was halfway over. I do not know how he did this. My impression is that there was a jolt in a tunnel and that when we came out into the light there he was, slung with cameras, sitting just underneath me.

Chippy is a small thin rag of a man with a surprisingly large square head in which, somewhere low down in front, has been inserted the bright predatory face of an evil child. Whenever I think of him, which is as seldom as possible, I receive a mental picture of white lashes on red lids and a row of widely spaced uneven teeth bared in a “Have you got anything I want?” smile.

His is hardly one of the dressy professions but I have seen even his confreres blench when confronted by some of his ensembles. Peterson, my opposite number on the World, who interests himself in these matters, insists that the man finds his clothes lying about in hotel bedrooms. It may be so. At any rate, when I first saw him he was certainly wearing jodhpurs, carefully tailored for larger and even more curiously shaped legs, a green cardigan buttoning on the wrong side, and a new cheap sports-coat adorned by a single gigantic beer-stain. Every pocket, one frankly marsupial, bulged strangely rather than dangerously, and he carried as much gear as a paratrooper.

I remember my conversation with him on that occasion. I had pulled back my sleeve to glance at the time and he prodded me in the back.

“That’s a good watch,” he said. “Ever had it photographed?”

I said that, strange as it might seem to him, such a notion had never entered my head.

“It’s wise,” he assured me seriously. “In case you ever have it pinched, see? Gives the busies something to go on. I’ll do it for you when we get in. It won’t cost you more than half a bar. You’re married, of course. Got any kids?”

I told him no, and he seemed hurt.

“Kids make good pictures,” he explained. “Kids and dogs. Got a dog?”

Again I had to disappoint him.

“Pity,” he said. “What a pal, eh? What a pal. You might pick one up down here. There’s a chap only five miles out who breeds Irish wolfhounds. I’ll put you on to him and we’ll take a spool. Surprise the wife, eh?”

I escaped from him as soon as I could but everything was against me. The news, what there was of it, broke late and the town was packed. By the time I realized that I should have to stay, there was no accommodation in the place. I was resigning myself to a bench on the front when I ran into Chippy just before closing time in the back bar of the Queen’s. He was in the same predicament, having, so he said, had to waste time photographing a cotton magnate and his fifth wife who were having their second honeymoon in the King’s Suite at the Grand. He was not worrying, however, and when they turned us out he produced an old friend who was the manager of a flea-ridden little pub in a back street. He fixed us up with two cots in an attic, for which I paid, and I let Chippy take a photograph of my watch, rewarding him, as far as I remember, with fourteen shillings and sixpence in cash for three excellent prints.

After that I was doomed. The man became an incubus, haunting me as I drank furtively in corners or hunted our murderer with one eye, so to speak, behind me lest I myself should be waylaid. I do agree with Peterson that I am free, adult, and a member of a profession which ought at least to be able to look after itself, and I could once, I suppose, have got rid of him with brutality and the fishy eye, but I could not bring myself to do it. He was so fearful, so unmitigatedly awful, that he fascinated me. Some unsuspected masochism in my nature compelled me to be at least half civil to him, and then of course he was often so infuriatingly useful. There was a rumor that he was lucky, but that explanation did him less than justice. He was indefatigable, and his curious contacts and side jobs sometimes provided him with most useful breaks, as for instance when he nipped down to Whichborne station to oblige a man who wanted a shot of his greyhound and got instead a very fine one of the Yard’s Chief Inspector Tizer getting off the train at a time when no one was sure if the local police had appealed to H.Q. and, if so, who was going to be sent.

By the time the murderer had got round to St. Piers, Chippy was most anxious that the homicidal nut should be apprehended and the case finished. His reason was personal and typical, and I happened to know about it because he had confided it to me one night at Prinny’s Plage, when he had hounded me down to a hostelry which I felt fairly confident not even he had heard of. I can see him now, pointing to the Brewers’ Almanac which hung on the varnished match-boarding of the bar wall.

“Look, chum,” he said, his filthy forefinger tracing out the dates, “next new moon is September sixteen, isn’t it? Don’t think I’m complaining about that. It’ll still be summer then and the seaside suits me. But what about the month after? New moon October fourteen. I don’t want anything awkward to happen then, do I?”

I made a point of never giving him encouragement and I said nothing, knowing perfectly well I should not silence him.

“October fourteen.” He was indignant. “The Distillers Livery Company conference begins on the fourteenth. Fancy missing that. What a tragedy, eh? What a tragedy!”

That was in August. We were all expecting the September murder, although naturally there was no way of telling where it was going to crop up. When the news broke just too late for the edition which everybody was holding for it in a shamefaced way, it was very nearly anticlimax. As Peterson said, there would have been almost more news value in the story if it hadn’t occurred. No one was pleased. The livelier dailies had planted men at most of the larger southern watering places but no one had thought of St. Piers, cheap and respectable, out on the mud-flats of the estuary. We had a local correspondent there, as we had in every town in the country. The last thing he had sent us, according to the book, was an account of a stork which a coachload of machine-shop operatives had seen flying inland one evening in June the previous year. According to his story, the phenomenon had caused wild excitement in the town. It appeared to be that sort of place.

I managed to avoid Chippy going down but I saw his back disappearing into the Railway Tavern as I picked up a taxi at the station. I was glad of the respite, for the newsflash which had come in was so familiar in its wording — Body of well nurtured woman found strangled. Lonely woodland. Auburn-haired. Chief Inspector Tizer hurrying to scene — that I felt a wave of pure nausea at the prospect of having to deal with him as well.

St. Piers was much as I had feared. At first it is only the light and the faint smell of iodine which warns the newcomer that the coast is at hand; but towards the front, where the architecture veers on Victorian Moorish, a faded ocean licks a dun-colored strand and the shops sell colored buckets and sticks of sweet rock and crested china to take home.

I found our local correspondent, a tobacconist called Cuffley, in his shop on the parade. He was waiting for me on the step, every hair in his mustache electrified with excitement. He had leaped to the job, had been on the spot soon after the body had been discovered, and had had a word with the inevitable small boy who had given the first alarm. He had even written a short piece which began, as I remember, Mad Killer Visits St. Piers At Last. A baleful sun rose early this morning over the muncipally maintained woodland behind the Kursaal and must have shone down unheeding for quite a space on the ghastly blue contorted lips of a respected local resident...

However, he had got the victim’s name and address for me and had written it down in block caps on the back of one of his trade cards: MRS. LILY CLARKE, KNOLE, SEAVIEW AVENUE. It was the same sort of name and the same sort of address as all the others in the long weary business, and when he told me with delight that he had recognized a relation of the dead woman among his customers, and had gone to the length of having her waiting for me in the little room behind the shop, I knew before I saw her exactly the kind of gal I was going to find. The sameness of all five cases was slightly unnerving. I recognized at once both her horror and the dreadful secret enjoyment she was finding in it. I had seen it often that summer.

Her story, too, was a fifth variation of a tale I had heard four times already. Like her predecessors, Mrs. Clarke had been a widow. She had not dyed her hair exactly but she had touched it up. She had not taken in lodgers in the ordinary way, being much too refined. But yes, on occasions she had obliged. The idea of her going for a walk at night with a man she did not know! Well, if the situation had not been so tragic the relation would have had to laugh, she would reelly.

I asked the question I had grown used to asking. “Was she a nice woman? Did you like her?” I was prepared for the girl’s hesitation and the faint uneasiness, the anxiety to speak well of the dead. I remembered comments on the other women. “She had a temper.” “You would not call her exactly generous.” “She liked her own way.” “She could be very nice when she wanted to.”

This time Mr. Cuffley’s customer, in speaking of Mrs. Clarke, said something which seemed to me to sum them all up.

“Oh, she was all for herself,” she said grimly and shut her mouth like a vice.

At Sub-Divisional Police Headquarters there was no information of a startling character. Mrs. Clarke had met her death at some time before midnight and in the process she had not been robbed. Fifteen pounds in treasury notes had been found in the mock-crocodile handbag which still hung from her arm. The sergeant in charge spoke of the negligence of the criminal in this respect with an amazement which bordered upon indignation. The only blessed things she had lost, he said regretfully, was a silver tassel which had hung from the old-fashioned silver brooch she wore in her lapel — and, of course, her life.

As in all the earlier crimes there was absolutely no suspect. There were no visitors staying at Knole, Seaview Avenue, and so far no one had come forward to report having seen the woman out with a stranger.

I sent my story off and took a tram to the Kursaal. Half the town appeared to have the same idea and I joined a stream of consciously casual strollers advancing purposefully up a threadbare path between ragged illused trees. The body had been found in a dusty glade where cartons and little scraps of paper grew instead of anemones. The spot needed no signpost. The police had got their screens up and I could see Inspector Tizer’s hunched shoulders appearing above one of them.

The sightseers stood around at a police-prescribed distance and here again nothing was new. In the last few months reams had been written about the avid, open-mouthed defectives who had come to stare at the last couch of each of the victims, and here, as far as I could see, they all were once more. I felt certain I had seen the dreary man with the fascinated blue eyes and the watch-chain full of darts medals at every road accident, case of illness in the street, or mere surface reconstruction at which I had had the misfortune to be present. The adolescent girl with the weeping baby brother was familiar, too, and as for the plump middle-aged man with the broad smile he could not possibly have known he was wearing, I was sure I had seen him, or someone very like him, grinning at the scene of every catastrophe in my experience. They were all standing about, looking and hoping, God knew what for. One group, which contained at least one collapsible perambulator, appeared to be thinking of picnicking.

I had a word with Tizer, who was not pleased to see me and had nothing to tell me. He is never sanguine and by this time his gloom was painful. I came away feeling nearly as sorry for him as I was for myself.

The Press was there in force and I walked down the hill with Peterson. We came on Chippy at the turning where the path divides. He was busy, as usual, and appeared to be taking a photograph of a holiday trio, two plump blondes in tight slacks with a flushed lout wriggling between them. There could be only one explanation of the performance and I was gratified, if surprised, to see he had the grace not to notice me.

“Grafters and buskers on fairgrounds call it mug-faking, I believe,” observed Peterson as we turned into the White Lion. “What does he charge them? Half a dollar? It’s an interesting comment on the price of whiskey.” Peterson has an acid little voice.

For the rest of the week the case dragged on. We had our hopes raised by several false alarms. Tizer thought he had a lead and went scampering to St. Leonards with a trail of us behind him, but the chase led nowhere. Everybody did what he could. The Cormorant tried to start a stink against the police. The tame psychiatrists wrote more articles for the Sundays. Somebody asked a question in the House and the Yard sent a second Chief Inspector down. Middle-aged women everywhere began to give themselves airs.

From our point of view it was all very dull. The weather turned cold and three of the best hotels ran out of scotch. I saw Chippy now and again but he did not worry me. He was picking up plenty of work, I gathered, and if his glazed eyes in the evenings were any guide, he appeared to find it profitable.

He had a new friend, I was interested to see. So far I have not mentioned Chippy’s friends. A natural distaste and embarrassment has prevented me from enlarging on them. It is one of his major disadvantages that he always seems to discover a local drinking companion who matches, if not exceeds, the man himself in pure unpresentableness. On this occasion he had chummed up with the fat man I had seen grinning at the scene of the crime, or if it was not he it was someone like him. God knows what he was by profession — a bookmaker’s tout perhaps, or a traveler in something unmentionable. I had nothing against him save that if I had seen but the soles of his feet through a grating, or the top of his hat from a bus, I should have known unerringly that he was a fellow for whom I should never have the slightest possible use. He had crumbs in the creases of his blue serge waistcoat, he dribbled his beer when he drank, his voice was hoarse and coarse, and the broad vacant grin never left his face.

Chippy went about with him most of the time and I was grateful for my release. I was agitating the office for my recall by the Saturday and should have left, I think, by the Sunday had I not made a sudden, startling discovery. Chippy was trying to avoid not only me but every other newspaperman in the town. At first I could not bring myself to believe it, but having ceased to hide from him I suddenly found I saw very little of him, and then that Sunday morning we met face to face on the steps of the Grand. In the normal way it would have been I who had become wooden-faced and evasive, and he who pursued me to insist on the morning snifter, but today he slunk from me and for the first time in my life I thought I saw him discomposed. I even stood looking after him as he shuffled off, his harness clumping round his shanks, but it was not until I was drinking with Peterson and one or two others some fifteen minutes later that the truth occurred to me. Someone had asked if Chippy had gone, since he had not seen him lately, while somebody else observed that he too had noticed a singular freshness in the atmosphere.

Peterson defended him at once with all that charity of his which is far more lethal than straight attack, and I stood quite still, looking at the big calendar over the bar.

Of course. I could not think why I had not realized it before. For Chippy time was growing pretty short.

I was so anxious that Peterson, whom I love like a brother and who knows me nearly as well, should not cotton to my idea that I wasted several valuable minutes in what I hope was misleading casualness before I drifted off, ostensibly to phone my wife. From that moment I hunted Chippy as he had never hunted me and it was not too easy an undertaking, since, as I have said, the place was stiff with pressmen and I was more than anxious not to raise any general hue and cry. Anything Chippy had I was willing to share, but until my wire was safely sent, not with the world.

I hunted him carefully and systematically like a peasant woman going through a shawl for a flea, and for the best part of the day I was fighting a conviction that he had vanished into air. But just before six, when I was growing desperate, I suddenly saw him, still festooned with cameras, stepping ashore from a so-called pleasure steamer which had been chugging a party round the bay for the best part of three hours. The other people looked to me like the same crowd who had tramped up to the wood behind the Kursaal the day after the body was found. The adolescent girl with the baby brother was certainly there, and so was Chippy’s buddy of the moment, the man with the smile.

From that moment I do not think I lost sight of him, or them either. Shadowing them was comparatively simple. The whole party moved, it seemed by instinct, to the nearest hostelry and from there in due course they moved to the next. So it went on throughout the whole evening, when the lights first came out yellow in the autumn haze and later when they shone white against the quickening dark.

I do not know when he first became aware that I was behind him. I think it was on the second trip up the Marine Boulevard, where the bars are so thick that no serious drinking time is lost in transit. I met his eyes once and he hesitated but did not nod. He had a dreadful group round him. The man with the smile was still there and so was a little seedy man with a cap and a watch-chain, and two plump blondes in slacks. I recognized them all and none of them, if I make myself clear. After that I could feel him trying to shake me off, but he was hampered and I was, I think, a fraction more sober than he. There must have been a bar on the boat.

After a while I realized that he was going somewhere in particular, heading somewhere definitely if obliquely, like a wasp to its nest. His red eyes wandered to the clock more and more often, I noticed, and his moves from pub to pub seemed more frequent.

Then I lost him. The party must have split. At any rate, I found myself following one of the blondes and a sailor who I felt was new to me, unless of course it was not the same blonde but another just like her. I was in the older and dirtier part of the town, and closing time, I felt with dismay, could not possibly be far off. For some time I searched in a positive panic, diving into every lighted doorway and pushing every swinging door. As far as I remember, I neglected even to drink and it may be it was that which saved me.

At any rate I came finally to a big ugly old-fashioned drinking house on a corner. It was as large and drab and inviting as a barn and in the four-ale bar, into which I first put my head, there was no one at all but a little blue-eyed seedy man wearing a flat cap and a watch-chain weighted with medals. He was sitting on a bench close to the counter, drinking a pint with the quiet absorption of one who has been doing just that for the last two hours. I glanced at him sharply but there was no way of telling if he was the same man who had been with Chippy’s party. It was not that I am unobservant, but such men exist not in hundreds but in thousands in every town on or off the coast.

I turned away and would have passed on down the street, when I noticed that there was a second frontage to the building. I put my head in the first door I came to and saw Chippy’s back. He was leaning on the bar, which was small and temporarily unattended, the landlord having moved farther along it to the adjoining room. At first I thought he was alone, but on coming into the room I saw his smiling friend reclining on a narrow bench which ran along the inner wall. He was still beaming, but the vacancy of his broad face was intensified, if one can say such a thing, and I knew he must have ceased long ago to hear anything Chippy was telling him. Chippy was talking. He always talks when he’s drunk, not wanderingly nor thickly but with a low intensity some people find unnerving. He was in full flight now. Soft incisive words illustrated by the sharp gestures of one hand — the other, after all, was supporting him — flowed from him in a steady forceful stream.

“Trapped,” he whispered to his friend’s oblivion. “Trapped for life by a woman with a sniff and a soul so mean — so mean — so MEAN...” He turned and looked at me. “Hullo,” he said.

I remember I had some idea that in that condition of his I could fool him that I’d either been there all the time or was not there at all — I forget which.

The barman bustled back, drew me a beer and waddled off again, after nodding to Chippy in a secret important way I entirely misunderstood.

“She was mean, was she?” I ventured, mumbling into my beer.

“As the devil,” Chippy agreed and his red eyes wandered up to look over my shoulder. “Come in, son,” he said softly.

A pallid youth was hesitating in the doorway and he came forward at once, a long cardboard roll held out before him like a weapon.

“Dad said you was to have these and he’d see you tomorrow.”

As soon as the kid had gone, Chippy tore the paper off the roll and I could see it consisted of four or five huge blown-up prints, but he did not open them out.

The smiling man on the bench moved but did not rise. His eyes were tightly shut but he continued to grin. Chippy looked at him for some time before he suddenly turned to me.

“He’s canned,” he said. “Canned as a toot. I’ve been carting him round the whole week to have someone safe to talk to, and now look at him. Never mind. Listen to me. Got imagination?”

“Yes,” I assured him flatly.

“You’ll need it,” he said. “Listen. He was young, a simple ordinary friendly kid like you or I were, and he came to the seaside on his holiday. Only one week’s holiday in the year.” He paused for the horror to sink in. “One week, and she caught him.”

“His wife caught him, you say?”

“No.” He lowered his voice to the intense stage-whisper again. “Her mother. The landlady. She worked it. Twisted him.” He made a peculiar bending movement with his two hands. “You know, said things. Made suggestions. Forced it. He had to marry the girl. Then he had hell. Couldn’t afford it. Got nagged night and day, day and night.”

He leaned towards me and I was aware of every one of his squat uneven teeth.

“He grew old,” he said. “He lost his job. Got another, buying old gold. Used to go round buying old gold for a little firm in the Ditch. It went on for years and years. Years and years. And more years. A long time. Then it happened. He began to see her.”

“Who?” I demanded. “His wife?”

“No, no.” Chippy was irritated. “She’d left him, taken all he had, sold the furniture, and scampered with another poor mug. That was years ago. No, he began to see the mother.”

“Good God,” I said, “and she was red-haired, I suppose?”

“Imagination,” he whispered at me. “Use it. Think. He married the girl in 1912, but this year he began to see the mother as she used to be!

“He’s been traveling round the coast for years, buying old gold. Everybody knows him and nobody notices him. Millions of women recognize him when he taps at their doors and very often they sell him little things. But he was ill last winter, had pleurisy, had to go into a hospital. Since he’s been out he’s been different. The past has come back to him. He’s been remembering the tragedy of his life.” He wiped his mouth and started again.

“In May he saw her. At first she looked like a woman he knew called Wild, but as they were talking her face changed and he recognized her. He knew just what to do. He told her he’d had a bargain he didn’t feel like passing on to his firm. Said he’d got a ring cheap, and if she’d meet him he’d show it to her and maybe sell it to her for the same money he paid for it.”

“And when he got her alone he killed her?” I whispered.

“Yes.” Chippy’s voice held an echoed satisfaction. “Paid her out at last. He went off happy as an old king and felt freed and contented and satisfied until June, when he went to Turnhill Bay and knocked all unsuspecting at a door in a back street and — saw her again.”

It was at this precise moment that the smiling drunk on the bench opened his eyes and sat straight up abruptly, as drunks do, and then with a spurt set out at a shambling trot for the door. He hit the opening with a couple of inches to spare and was sucked up by the night. I yelled at Chippy and started after him, pausing on the threshold to glance back. Chippy leaned there against the bar, looking at me with fishlike unintelligence.

I looked over my shoulder and saw Chief Inspector Tizer and the local Super, together with a couple of satellites, slip quietly across the road and come into the bar.

Then Chippy stood at the bar with Tizer on one side of him and the local man on the other. The five blown-up prints were spread out on the wood and everyone was so engrossed in them that I came back.

They were five three-quarter length portraits of the same man. Each one had been taken out of doors in a gaping crowd, and on each print a mid-section was heavily circled with process-white. In every case, within the circle was a watch-chain hung with darts medals and other small decorations, which might easily have been overlooked had not attention thus been called to them. In the first portrait the watch-chain carried two medals and a cheap silver earring In the second, a gold clasp from a chain-bracelet had been added. In the third, a small locket. In the fourth, a silver button with a crest on it. And in the fifth there hung beside the rest an ugly little tassel from an old-fashioned brooch.

“You’re trying to tell me you only noticed this yesterday and you had the astounding luck to find the earlier photographs in your file?” Tizer said.

“I am lucky,” Chippy said, “and observant.” He glanced at the bartender. “Ready, George?”

“Yes, he’s still there, Mr. Wager.”

The police moved forward in a body. Chippy turned to me.

“Poor little blob,” he said. “He’s quite happy now, you see, till the next new moon.”

“When you will be otherwise engaged, I seem to remember,” I said.

He glanced at me with a sudden smile and adjusted his camera.

“That’s right,” he said. “There’s sympathy in this business, but no sentiment. Wait just a minute while I get the arrest.”