"I should not waste time
and money in consulting the police."

"Not consult the police!" exclaimed Mr. Troy in amazement. "Surely, I
have not made myself understood? I am going to the Head Office; and
I have got a letter of introduction to the chief inspector in the
detective department. I am afraid I omitted to mention that?"

"It doesn't make any difference," proceeded the other, as coolly as
ever. "You have asked for my advice, and I give you my advice. Tear
up your letter of introduction, and don't stir a step further in the
direction of Whitehall."

Mr. Troy began to understand. "You don't believe in the detective
police?" he said.

"Who _can_ believe in them, who reads his newspaper and remembers
what he reads?" his friend rejoined. "Fortunately for the detective
department, the public in general forgets what it reads. Go to your
club, and look at the criminal history of our own time, recorded in the
newspapers. Every crime is more or less a mystery. You will see that
the mysteries which the police discover are, almost without exception,
mysteries made penetrable by the commonest capacity, through the
extraordinary stupidity exhibited in the means taken to hide the
crime. On the other hand, let the guilty man or woman be a resolute and
intelligent person, capable of setting his (or her) wits fairly against
the wits of the police--in other words, let the mystery really _be_
a mystery--and cite me a case if you can (a really difficult and
perplexing case) in which the criminal has not escaped. Mind! I don't
charge the police with neglecting their work. No doubt they do their
best, and take the greatest pains in following the routine to which they
have been trained. It is their misfortune, not their fault, that there
is no man of superior intelligence among them--I mean no man who is
capable, in great emergencies, of placing himself above conventional
methods, and following a new way of his own. There have been such men in
the police--men naturally endowed with that faculty of mental analysis
which can decompose a mystery, resolve it into its component parts,
and find the clue at the bottom, no matter how remote from ordinary
observation it may be. But those men have died, or have retired. One
of them would have been invaluable to you in the case you have just
mentioned to me. As things are, unless you are wrong in believing in the
young lady's innocence, the person who has stolen that bank-note will
be no easy