On Tuesday afternoon, when Juliet, having hung up the telephone through which she had been conversing with Lord Ashiel, hurried out to see what Bond Street could provide her with, a little man was sitting writing in a luxuriously furnished room in a flat in Whitehall. He was small and thin, and possessed a pair of extraordinarily bright and intelligent brown eyes, which saw a good deal more of what happened around him than perhaps any other eyes within a radius of a mile from where he sat. He was, in other words, observant to a very high degree; and, what was more remarkable, he knew how to use his powers of observation. There was not a criminal in the length and breadth of the country who did not wonder uneasily whether he had really left the scene of his crime as devoid of clues as he imagined, when he heard that the celebrated detective, Gimblet, had visited the spot in pursuit of his investigations.
For this was the man, who, in a few years, had unravelled more apparently insoluble mysteries, and caused the arrest of more hitherto evasive scoundrels, than his predecessors had managed to secure in a decade. The name of Gimblet was known and detested wherever a coiner carried on his forbidden craft, or a blackmailer concocted his cowardly plans; burglars and forgers cursed freely when he was mentioned, and there was hardly an illicit trade in the country which had not suffered at one time or another from his inquisitive habit of interesting himself in other people's affairs. Scotland Yard officials were never too proud to call upon him for help, and many a difficulty he had helped them out of, though he refused an offer of a regular post in the Criminal Investigation Department, preferring to be at liberty to choose what cases he would take up. Above all things he loved the strange and inexplicable. Gimblet had not always been a detective. Indeed, he often smiled to himself when he thought of the extraordinary confidence which the public now elected to repose in him.
No one was more conscious than himself that he was far from being infallible; in fact, his admirers appeared to him to be wilfully blind to that elementary truth; so that when he failed to bring a case to a successful issue people were apt to show an amount of disappointment that he, for his part, thought very unreasonable. It was, perhaps, in the nature of things that the puzzles he solved correctly received so much more publicity than was given to his mistakes; but he often could not avoid wishing that less were expected of him, and that his reputation had not grown so tropically on what he could but consider insufficient nourishment.