as Lord Cedarbrook had so reasonably observed, “why run between the shafts?” There are four important private detective agencies in London (there were five until last year when The Green Rhomboid got into such trouble over Lady Marshmoreton’s frivolous divorce and lost their licence). “Alberts’ Agency, which has pursued its devious and shadowy ways for nearly a hundred years from a set of offices in Ely Place, is as unlike the popular conception of a detective agency as can well be imagined. It doesn’t even mention the word “detective” in its note headings which profess to undertake “Enquiries on Credit, the Serving of Summonses and other Confidential Work.” It calls its employees “officers” and Alberts’ best officers are modest men, hard-working and discreet, if a trifle cynical about human behaviour and liable to suffer from gastric ulcers. Incidentally, they are not given to violence, nor to inductive analytical reasoning and few of them possess the palate (or the cellar) of a Lord Peter Wimsey.
