P.-C. Lee: Complete Series (ALL 24 Detective Stories in One Volume). Edgar Wallace

      Mr. Simmons’ Profession

       Table of Contents

      The magistrate looked over his glasses at the prisoner in the dock, and the prisoner nodded in the friendliest way.

      The clerk at his little desk before the magistrate jerked his head round in the direction of the dock.

      “Were you drunk last night?” he asked pointedly. “I were in a manner of speakin’ excited,” said the prisoner carefully.

      “You are charged with being drunk. Are you guilty or not guilty?”

      “Not guilty,” said the accused loudly.

      The clerk nodded, and a constable made his way to the box.

      A stolid-looking constable, who moved with surprising agility, and glanced at the resentful prisoner with a twinkling eye.

      “P.C. Lee 333 ‘D’,” he began, “I was on duty last night—”

      “Hold hard,” said the aggressive prisoner, “let’s have all this took down in black an’ white.”

      He fished out from the depths of his mud-stained overcoat a tattered memorandum book and the stump of pencil.

      “Now then,” he said sternly, “what did you say your name was, me man?”

      “P.C. Lee, of ‘D’,” repeated the goodnatured constable.

      “Oh!”

      Very deliberately the accused closed his book and replaced it. He looked benevolently round, then:

      “Guilty,” he said.

      “Seven and six or five days,” said the magistrate. “The fact of it is, sir,” said the accused man later — he was sitting in the waiting room whilst his wife was collecting the necessary three half-crowns— “I didn’t catch your name.”

      “I dessay,” said P.C. Lee with a smile.

      “I respect you, Mr. Lee,” said the prisoner oratorically, “as if you was me own brother — hopin’ there’s no offence.”

      “None whatever,” said P.C. Lee, “an’ talkin’ about brothers, where’s your brother Elf?”

      “Elf?” said the other wonderingly, “Elf? Why, he’s in Orstralian.”

      “I don’t knew a public house of that name,” said P.C. Lee reflectively. “but I dessay I shall find him.”

      P.C. Lee lives quite close to me. We have met professionally when he was severely reticent and remarkably polite and respectful: we have met privately, when he was more communicative.

      Inspector Fowler, to whom I mentioned the fact of our acquaintance, had nothing but praise for Lee.

      “He’s a remarkable chap,” he said enthusiastically. “He’s practically the last court of appeal in the Notting Dale district. They take him all their little disputes to settle and he holds an informal court at his lodgings.”

      For P.C. Lee lives in the heart of Notting Dale, in a tiny house near Arbuckle Street. and sometimes, when he’s off duty, and when there is a slack time in his arbitration court, he comes to me to smoke a pipe and talk shop.

      “Crime,” reflected P.C. Lee, “ain’t always murder, nor highway robbery, nor forgin’ cheques for £10,000. That’s the crimes authors — present company excepted — write about. It’s generally a tale about how a detective with whiskers fails to discover the lost diamonds, an’ a clean. shaven feller, who plays the fiddle, works it out on paper that the true robber was the Archbishop of Canterbury, But crime, as we know it in the ‘D’ Division, is mostly made up of ‘bein’ a suspected person’ or ‘loiterin’ with intent’ or ‘being found on unoccupied premises for the purpose of committin’ a felony’; or, as you