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At once.”
    “And send one to Scotland Yard.”
    “Yes, sir. Queer it should have been just this particular one, isn’t it, sir? I wonder the party didn’t notice. But we generally take three or four positions, and he might not remember, you know.”
    “You’d better see if you’ve got any other positions and let me have them too.”
    “I’ve done that already, sir, but there are none. No doubt this one was selected and the others destroyed. We don’t keep all the rejected negatives, you know, sir. We haven’t the space to file them. But I’ll get three prints off at once.”
    “Do,” said Wimsey. “The sooner the better. Quick-dry them. And don’t do any work on the prints.”
    “No, sir. You shall have them in an hour or two, sir. But it’s astonishing to me that the party didn’t complain.”
    “It’s not astonishing,” said Wimsey. “He probably thought it the best likeness of the lot. And so it would be—to him. Don’t you see—that’s the only view he could ever take of his own face. That photograph, with the left and right sides reversed, is the face he sees in the mirror every day—the only face he can really recognise as his. ‘Wad the gods the giftie gie us,’ and all that.”
    “Well, that’s quite true, sir. And I’m much obliged to you for pointing the mistake out.”
    Wimsey reiterated the need for haste, and departed. A brief visit to Somerset House followed; after which he called it a day and went home.
    Inquiry in Brixton, in and about the address mentioned by Mr. Duckworthy, eventually put Wimsey on to the track of persons who had known him and his mother. An aged lady who had kept a small green-grocery in the same street for the last forty years remembered all about them. She had the encyclopaedic memory of the almost illiterate, and was positive as to the date of their arrival.
    “Thirty-two years ago, if we lives another month,” she said. “Michaelmas it was they come. She was a nice-looking young woman, too, and my daughter, as was expecting her first, took a lot of interest in the sweet little boy.”
    “The boy was not born here?”
    “Why, no, sir. Born somewheres on the south side, he was, but I remember she never rightly said where—only that it was round about the New Cut. She was one of the quiet sort and kep’ herself to herself. Never one to talk, she wasn’t. Why even to my daughter, as might ’ave good reason for bein’ interested, she wouldn’t say much about ’ow she got through ’er bad time. Chlorryform she said she ’ad, I know, and she disremembered about it, bit it’s my belief it ’ad gone ’ard with ’er and she didn’t care to think overmuch about it. ’Er ’usband—a nice man ’e was, too—’e says to me, ‘Don’t remind ’er of it, Mrs. ’Arbottle, don’t remind ’er of it.’ Whether she was frightened or whether she was ’urt by it I don’t know, but she didn’t ’ave no more children. ‘Lor!’ I says to ’er time and again, ‘you’ll get used to it, my dear, when you’ve ’ad nine of ’em same as me,’ and she smiled, but she never ’ad no more, none the more for that.”
    “I suppose it does take some getting used to,” said Wimsey, “but nine of them don’t seem to have hurt you, Mrs. Harbottle, if I may say so. You look extremely flourishing.”
    “I keeps my ’ealth, sir, I am glad to say, though stouter than I used to be. Nine of them does ’ave a kind of spreading action on the figure. You wouldn’t believe, sir, to look at me now, as I ’ad a eighteen-inch waist when I was a girl. Many’s the time me pore mother broke the laces on me, with ’er knee in me back and me ’oldin’ on to the bedpost.”
    “One must suffer to be beautiful,” said Wimsey politely. “How old was the baby, then, when Mrs. Duckworthy came to live in Brixton?”
    “Three weeks old, ’e was, sir—a darling dear—and a lot of ’air on ’is ’ead. Black ’air it was then, but it turned into the