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dogged, though a man of few words, those few words were intense enough to make you feel he knew all about you. It was thus bootless to conceal what he already knew. Impressed from the first, I strove to anticipate his requests and to please him, though it took me a time to fathom his methods.
    He required from me a daily synopsis of events across the capital. Studying the newspapers thus became dignified as work. I took pleasure in keeping up with current affairs, and skimming the cream off the news for him. The papers were full of triumphalist trumpeting and apocalyptic clamour. Election fever swept the nation every five minutes or so. The columns were full of questions: the Irish Question, the Reform Question, the Slavery Question. People wrung their hands over the Whitechapel garottings, only for that to be eclipsed by new scandals about Middle Eastern canals or East Midlands cotton.
    The leading articles exalted rationality and condemned passion and profiteering. The other pages glamorised the same, especially the theatre reviews. Mr Darwin’s book was de rigueur on the coffee table, though I never met a soul who read it. Anticipation of the underground train gave way to boredom. And the Queen’s array of mid-European quacks sparked rumours that her forefathers’ madness was descending upon her.
    Besides all this, Wardle had an ongoing task for me. “I want to put my house in order,” he told me. “There’s years of rubbish in these cabinets. When I retire, I want everything left straightforward for the man who steps into my boots.”
    So, on quieter days, I set to work whittling down the paperwork from forty years of cases. Of closed cases I was to throw out everything but the final report. If a case was not closed, I was to close it, that is, tidy up loose ends and write the report.
    Some cases solved themselves. Complaints were outdated, debts invalidated, or infringements irrelevant. Some gave of obvious action. Missing persons were frequently no longer missing, and if the necessary letters were written and answered, they could be tied up in a matter of days.
    Other cases were less clear. I learnt that many investigations are never concluded. This took me aback at first. I gradually came to realise how much tramping about town each scrap of paper in the files represented: questioning here, corroborating there. It was no wonder there were so many loose ends.
    Only when bewildered could I trouble Wardle, and he would always choose the simplest way to be done with it. I learnt to propose my own plan of action for each case. At the end of quiet days in the office, I would run through the files while he stood at the window, gazing out into the grubby courtyard at the heart of the Yard buildings. New reports drew an approving murmur. To my plan for cases outstanding, he would listen impatiently, snapping, “Nobody weeps over the likes of them, Watchman. Spare us the Celtic indignation and lighten the burden.”
    It was a peculiar process, dispensing with history thus. I would flick through the material painstakingly transcribed and fastidiously labelled by Jackman, dash off a summary reprise, then throw out the rest, refiling the nice, slim envelope in a drawer marked “Cases Closed”. Not that I didn’t make mistakes. Unsolved murders, I quickly learnt, he was content to leave open.
    “Bodies have a way,” he said “of lingering. You never know when a skeleton’ll fall out the closet and point a bony finger at someone.”
    Nor had it occurred to me to take into account the persons involved. A caution for drunkenness against Billy Broad of Barking could go straight into the wastepaper basket; but, should Baron Burlington of Belgravia’s china vases turn up in a Sotheby’s catalogue, we would need the full details of their disappearance. I got a roasting for throwing out a theft at Charles Dickens’ house.
    “Use your nous, Watchman. A public figure. Writer. Experienced with the courts. Suppose he pops in,