Four Just Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

for Home Affairs.
    J. B. Calfort, Commissioner of Police.
    Here followed a list of the sixteen crimes alleged against the four men.
    God Save the King
    All day long little knots of people gathered before the broadsheets, digesting the magnificent offer.
    It was an unusual hue and cry, differing from those with which Londoners were best acquainted. For there was no appended description of the men wanted; no portraits by which they might be identified, no stereotyped 'when last seen was wearing a dark blue serge suit, cloth cap, check tie', on which the searcher might base his scrutiny of the passer-by.
    It was a search for four men whom no person had ever consciously seen, a hunt for a will-o'-the-wisp, a groping in the dark after indefinite shadows.
    Detective Superintendent Falmouth, who was a very plain-spoken man (he once brusquely explained to a Royal Personage that he hadn't got eyes in the back of his head), told the Assistant Commissioner exactly what he thought about it.
    "You can't catch men when you haven't got the slightest idea who or what you're looking for. For the sake of argument, they might be women for all we know-- they might be chinamen or niggers; they might be tall or short; they might--why, we don't even know their nationality! They've committed crimes in almost every country in the world. They're not French because they killed a man in Paris, or Yankee because they strangled Judge Anderson."
    "The writing," said the Commissioner, referring to a bunch of letters he held in his hand.
    "Latin; but that may be a fake. And suppose it isn't? There's no difference between the handwriting of a Frenchman, Spaniard, Portuguese, Italian, South American, or Creole--and, as I say, it might be a fake, and probably is."
    "What have you done?" asked the Commissioner.
    "We've pulled in all the suspicious characters we know. We've cleaned out Little Italy, combed Bloomsbury, been through Soho, and searched all the colonies. We raided a place at Nunhead last night--a lot of Armenians live down there, but----"
    The detective's face bore a hopeless look.
    "As likely as not," he went on, "we should find them at one of the swagger hotels--that's if they were fools enough to bunch together; but you may be sure they're living apart, and meeting at some unlikely spot once or twice a day."
    He paused, and tapped his fingers absently on the big desk at which he and his superior sat.
    "We've had de Courville over," he resumed. "He saw the Soho crowd, and what is more important, saw his own man who lives amongst them--and it's none of them, I'll swear--or at least he swears, and I'm prepared to accept his word."
    The Commissioner shook his head pathetically.
    "They're in an awful stew in Downing Street," he said. "They do not know exactly what is going to happen next."
    Mr Falmouth rose to his feet with a sigh and fingered the brim of his hat.
    "Nice time ahead of us--I don't think," he remarked paradoxically.
    "What are the people thinking about it?" asked the Commissioner.
    "You've seen the papers?"
    Mr .Commissioner's shrug was uncomplimentary to British journalism.
    "The papers! Who in Heaven's name is going to take the slightest notice of what is in the papers!" he said petulantly.
    "I am, for one," replied the calm detective; "newspapers are more often than not led by the public; and it seems to me the idea of running a newspaper in a nutshell is to write so that the public will say, 'That's smart--it's what I've said all along.' "
    "But the public themselves--have you had an opportunity of gathering their idea ?" Superintendent Falmouth nodded. "I was talking in the Park to a man only this evening-- a master-man by the look of him, and presumably intelligent. 'What's your idea of this Four Just Men business?' I asked. 'It's very queer,' he said: 'do you think there's anything in it?'--and that," concluded the disgusted police officer, "is all the public thinks about it."
    But if there was sorrow at Scotland Yard, Fleet Street