‘You know him?’ Mark asked eagerly, and with evident surprise, and Bobby hesitated. ‘Look here, Mr Lester,’ he said gravely, ‘this is a police matter and a serious one. If you have any information you ought to give it at once to the officers in charge of the case. If you try to take action yourself you may do a great deal of harm; you may be helping the guilty man to escape.’ But Mark only shrugged his shoulders with a very contemptuous air. ‘I did try to talk to one of your men,’ he said, ‘but he wouldn’t listen. Told me if I knew any actual facts to put them down in writing, but they didn’t want theories – ideas, that is. To the official mind, ideas never have any value, all it wants is facts.’ Bobby understood that all this meant simply that there had been some sort of passage of arms between Mark and one or other of the officers engaged on the case. It was fairly plain however that Mark was very much in earnest and Bobby began to think harder and quicker than ever he had done before, and much more clearly than ever he had been able to do in any examination room, where a sort of creeping miasma had always seemed to come over his spirit the moment he entered it.
What do You think about Information Received (2015)?
