Helping The
Police With Their Enquiries
A relative
works at Scotland Yard. I was delighted when he
invited me to tour this icon of crime detection
and learn of modern police practice.
I marvelled at computers,
state-of-the-art laboratories and the air of
efficiency as officers hurried purposefully back
and forth - presumably delivering critical pieces
of case solving information.
‘I’m amazed that
all criminals aren’t instantly banged to
rights,’ I enthused.
Henry sighed. ‘None of
it seems to help us much,’ he confided in a
whisper.
I was puzzled. ‘But
Scotland Yard has a crime detection rate envied
by the world?’
‘Come with me.’
Henry turned down a dimly lit corridor. ‘Remember,’
he continued with earnest sincerity, ‘everything
is in the strictest confidence.’
I followed him to a door at
the end of the corridor. We entered an Edwardian
styled drawing room. An old lady with greying
hair and seated on a sofa looked up whilst
pouring tea.
‘Ah, Chief Inspector,’
she said to Henry, ‘would you and your guest
care for some Assam?’
Henry introduced Dorothy.
Other older people sat in armchairs or paced the
floor, deep in thought.
‘I’m glad you
dropped by,’ said Dorothy to Henry. ‘I’ve
been thinking about the Regent’s Park Murder.
It’s clear that the victim was strangled by
an orang-utan, clubbed by a gorilla and finally
smothered with the fur of a baboon. The deceased
was also the recently spurned gay lover of the
head keeper of primates at London Zoo.’
‘So he did it,’
Henry concluded with amazement. ‘We never
had an inkling. We’ve been concentrating our
enquiries on shepherds in the Orkneys.’
Dorothy cast a puzzled
glance at Henry. ‘However, I discovered that
a cousin of the victim bore a grudge over an
inheritance which finally drove her to murder!’
Henry gasped. ‘However
did you deduce that?’
‘It was the final
words of the victim,’ Dorothy revealed.
‘He said he’d been murdered by his
cousin due to a grudge over an inheritance.’
‘We shouldn’t
have ignored that clue,’ sighed Henry, using
his mobile to brief the investigation team.
Dorothy addressed me.
‘You seem confused, Mr Morrison?’
I gestured around me.
‘I don’t see where all this fits with
Scotland Yard?’
‘It’s been known
for over a century,’ Dorothy explained,
‘that police are incapable of detecting
crime. Fortunately, that skill has remained
amongst a small group of smug, amateur, upper
class pensioners. This remains a closely guarded
secret. The crime historian, Agatha Christie, was
only allowed to publish by pretending Marple and
Poirot were fictitious.
I was incredulous. ‘So
you, and others like you, solve all crimes?’
‘Yes. Mostly we review
evidence collected by the police. If crimes are
committed by the upper classes at country houses,
of course, one of us is usually a guest at the
time, so that facilitates those investigations.’
Dorothy gestured towards
the adjoining room. ‘We undertake
denouements in the library. Suspects question why
they must dress for dinner and then hold gin and
tonics while one of us expounds details of the
crime. The guilty are always so impressed,
however, by exact analyses of their motives and
actions that they immediately confess.’
My visit to Scotland Yard
had been a revelation. I had always admired
police investigations, and now I knew how they
were undertaken.
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