Free SV - 03 - Sergeant Verity Presents His Compliments by Francis Selwyn Page B

the masters and ushers standing at the front, the pupils lined up before them. Inspector Swift, as duty officer, was about to combine the roles of educator and disciplinarian. While the men waited, Samson, who was next in line to Verity, said from the corner of his mouth,
    'You never came to the wake for Charley Wag, then?'
    'No!' said Verity, shocked, "ow should I?'
    'Some of us went,' whispered Samson. 'Wasn't half a do before they packed him off to Kensal Green! Porter and gin, and that gassy foreign wine what do fizz up your nose. And them fancy pies and cakes. Oh, my eye! Ain't they prime, though?'
    'Mr Samson! 'ow could you a-done it?' 'Those two doxies,' whispered Samson happily, 'Simona and Stefania, what no one had a u se for. I went into their room with them. Stripped off in a twinkling. The dark-haired one gets on her back, and that young baggage Simona gets over her with her tight little bum waggling in the air, and then. ..." 'Parade: 'Shun!'
    There was a scraping of boots and Samson stood rigidly to attention, staring piously ahead of him in his obedience to the demands of duty.
    Inspector Swift detailed the men for their various beats, one by one, until all had been accounted for except Verity. He dismissed the others to their tasks.
    'Sir?' said Verity hopefully.
    'Downstairs, sergeant,' said Swift, half sympathetically. "The ground-floor back, I'm afraid.'
    Verity swallowed with visible apprehension. 'Ground-floor back, sir?'
    'The hiring-room,' said Inspector Swift sadly. He was a large freckled Irishman who was reputed to love Mr Croaker like a dose of rat-bane. 'Orders of your own Inspector,' he added gently.
    Verity turned away slowly, bewildered at the sentence passed upon him. After the death of Charley Wag, he had been prepared to face dismissal from the force or even criminal proceedings, but the ground-floor back was a crueller fate than either. It was the hiring-room, as Swift called it, where detective officers without suitable employment in the division were paraded for hire by members of the public. In practice, their employers came from a very limited class of the wealthy and the noble who had chosen to explore some family mystery, or wished to exercise surveillance over an errant wife or scapegrace son. It was a place generally reserved for officers who had not given quite sufficient pretext for dismissal but whose age or habits made them of little value to the detail. As Mr Croaker well knew, a man who was relegated to the hiring-room had only one path ahead of him, the path of rejection by his peers and superior officers alike.
    Verity walked towards the ground-floor back, and for the only time in his police career he felt that he was close to tears. Other officers of the Private-Clothes detail were busily setting out on their beats and assignments. With their departure the building grew silent. Verity opened the scrubbed oak door of the room, which was sparsely furnished with a few wooden benches and painted in a lime-coloured wash which since the eighteenth century had been supposed to render police offices and prison cells proof against typhus and gaol fever. Four other men sat, widely-spaced, on the benches. One, a ruffianly-looking fellow, kept his head lowered and picked his teeth. Another sucked with furious energy on a short clay pipe. There was an emaciated dark-haired sergeant whose breath betrayed the sweet acidity of gin as Verity passed him, and a well-dressed man, neat and clean, who had been sent to the hiring-room merely because of his grey hair and advancing years.
    Verity found a space on one of the benches, as far removed from the others as possible, and sat down glumly. From time to time, the duty inspector would enter and call the men to attention. They stood in an irregular line, aware that from some spy-hole they were probably being surveyed by an intending customer. 'Like whores on a fucking pavement,' the cadaverous sergeant remarked in his slurred voice, after each