“I don't think the old josser's exactly a crook,” he reported to Police Captain Hodges half an hour later. “But—my word! He fair gave me the creeps. Standing there with his arms above his head like—like—oh—one of them red plush monkeys on a stick we used to play with when we was kids—and his whole body swinging to and fro—and the expression on his face! Looking straight at me he was, but never saw me, no, sir! Looked through me, that's what he did. And then—well”—Sergeant Pinker coughed, and continued a little diffidently, like a man who knows that his word is going to be doubted—“he goes somewhere in the back of his shop, and I hears a snick and a twirl as if he was opening a safe, and back he comes and round his scrawny old neck he wears a necklace with about fifty diamonds each as big as my thumb-nail … and I knows twinklers! I knows when they're glass and when they ain't. I used to walk the Bond Street beat, sir, and I tell you them pieces of ice is worth a cool hundred thousand pound sterling and … No, sir!” indignantly, “I signed the Good Templar's pledge over three years back. No! I had nothing all morning except a cup of that hog wash Harry Snooks sells over at his stand near Drury Lane and calls it coffee—blast his eyes! Well—to go back to that Oriental josser—a jolly rum go, that's what it is …”
“Well, sergeant, keep an eye on him.”
“Yes, sir.”
And that night, sipping his stone ginger at his favorite tavern, the Running Footman near Berkeley Square, he spoke about it to his friend Jimmy Hawden,
