The third, a bit of a dark horse from the first, was at the end of eighteen months something of a dark horse still to the department.

Upon the whole Chief Inspector Heat believed him to be in the main harmless--odd-looking, but harmless.

He was speaking now, and the Chief Inspector listened with outward deference (which means nothing, being a matter of duty) and inwardly with benevolent toleration.
"Michaelis reported himself before leaving London for the country ?" "Yes, sir.

He did." "And what may he be doing there ?" continued the Assistant Commissioner, who was perfectly informed on that point.

Fitted with painful tightness into an old wooden arm-chair, before a worm-eaten oak table in an upstairs room of a four-roomed cottage with a roof of moss-grown tiles, Michaelis was writing night and day in a shaky, slanting hand that "Autobiography of a Prisoner" which was to be like a book of Revelation in the history of mankind.