et us return to the Riddle Department. The secret of dealing with such
a happening as I have painted above lies naturally in the organisation.
Every division has a certain number of reserve men--approximately 10 per
cent.

They are picked veterans of not less than eight years' service, who
receive an additional eighteenpence per week, and must always be ready
to carry out special work when called upon. These, then, are first
called out, and other men are taken as occasion demands.

There are other branches of the Metropolitan Police where a mistake
would make havoc in a department or division; here it would affect the
service as a whole.

The Executive Department is as much concerned in the work of every other
part of that complex machine as the engineers of a great ship are in
keeping the vessel moving. Sir Frederick Wodehouse, who is at its head,
in his quarter of a century's service as police administrator--twelve of
which have been spent with the City Police and the remainder at Scotland
Yard--has always been keenly alive to the necessity of keeping pace with
the science of organisation. He has as his right-hand men
Superintendents West and White, who split up the work between them--one
in charge of the Executive Department itself, the other supervising the
Statistical Department.

It will be understood why I call it a Riddle Department when I explain
some of its duties. It is concerned with the discipline and
administration of the force as a whole; the organisation of men when
they have to be used in mass; it controls the public and private
telephone and telegraph service of the force; it compiles statistics on
all sorts of police subjects: it edits and issues "Informations," "The
Inebriates' List," "The Cycle List," "The Pawnbrokers' List," reward
bills, and police notices; it makes traffic regulations; it works with
the Board of Agriculture when cattle disease breaks out; it issues
pedlars' and sweeps' certificates; it keeps a gruesome record--a sort of
photographic morgue--of all dead bodies found in London; and it has to
give its consent before any summons may be taken out by a police
officer.

That is the merest inadequate list of its duties. While other
departments are clean-cut, knowing where their work begins and ends, the
Executive Department has no limit.

Anything that does not properly belong anywhere else goes to the
Executive Department. That is why it specialises in solving riddles.

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