Free Meet The Baron by John Creasey Page A

those two signs he might have been twenty-eight, not forty-eight. His back was as straight as a rod, his stomach flat, his biceps passably hard, even when relaxed, and his eyes, flinty grey beneath almost white brows, were as keen and shrewd as ever. His lips smiled less often, perhaps, but his eyes laughed more.
    At times he was called the Philosopher, because he appeared to let nothing worry him. At other times he was called the Posh William, because he dressed fastidiously, and wore a buttonhole on every possible occasion. At other times still he was called the Mug, because every Commissioner selected him for the most difficult, tiring, intricate, and unlikely problems. The imagination of his fellow-officers - and subordinates - at Scotland Yard was not, then, as fertile nor as subtle as it might have been.
    There was one compensation, however. Certain members of the fraternity that takes its pleasures and earns its living at the expense of more orderly members of society revealed greater subtlety by calling him Old Bill.
    It might have been possible for them to have selected a man more antithetical of Bairnsfather’s creation, but few people would have believed it. Bristow’s face was square, tight-skinned, and alert, while his moustache was a neat military-cum-Colman attachment. Bristow fingered it a great deal, as though endeavouring to remove the yellow stains of nicotine that soiled the greyness of it. By habit he smoked cigarettes heavily, drank beer a little and spirits usually by invitation, and shaved night and morning when the trials of his job permitted. The thirty-seven housewives who lived in Gretham Street, Chelsea - excluding his own wife - believed that he was a commercial traveller. He had two sons approaching maturity and a daughter of fifteen. Perhaps one of the most significant things about him was that he adored his wife.
    One morning in the August of I936 Old Bill walked rapidly along Mile End Road, acknowledging an occasional friendly grin from the enemy who were at times his friends, frowning, wishing for winter - or at least for a temperature below seventy-five degrees - and confounding the Dowager Countess of Kenton.
    The Countess had lost an emerald brooch valued at seven hundred and fifty pounds. That had been on the Monday, three days before this visit of the Inspector’s to Limehouse. At ten o’clock on the night of the loss she had telephoned Scotland Yard to lodge her complaint, and, allowing for the six hours she apparently slept at night, she had telephoned Scotland Yard every other hour afterwards.
    The theft had been a neat one, but not exceptionally clever. During a dance - the Dowager had an unattached daughter - the lights had been cut off for thirty seconds, and the brooch had been snatched from the Dowager’s corsage. Before she had stopped screaming the lights had been switched on again, whereat she had fainted, and no one had kept a cool head in the ensuing confusion.
    A ladder leading to the windows at the rear of No. 7 Portland Square revealed the means of ingress, an unconscious housekeeper near the electric main switch - which in turn was near the window - revealed the burglar’s preparedness to use violence, and the fact that no one of the party had switched the light on again proved the raider, who must have done it himself, to have been of unusual daring and nerve.
    The detective liked nerve, and, knowing that the housekeeper was not badly hurt, was amused. On the third day he disliked the Dowager so much that he was disappointed when Levy Schmidt, a pawnbroker in the Mile End Road, telephoned him to say that a client had tried to pass the Kenton brooch. That is to say, the human element in the detective was disappointed; the official element was pleased.
    Bristow turned into the small, ill-lit shop and stood waiting amidst a row of second-hand dresses, a soiled heap of more intimate garments, a collection of cheap clocks, vases, and ornaments. After a few minutes Levy