The Laughing Dog: An Inspector Knollis Mystery (The Inspector Knollis Mysteries Book 5) by Francis Vivian

Author:Francis Vivian [Vivian, Francis]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Dean Street Press
Published: 2018-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

XI

The Thread of Thought

Ellis led his chief’s thoughts into comparatively trivial channels as they left the cinema. He had known Knollis for upwards of five years, and worked with him on practically every one of his cases. In that time he had learned not a little about him, and some aspects of creative psychology never mentioned in the lecture rooms. The Knollis method was to cram the brain with facts, and then retire, as it were, leaving the demon of the inner brain to classify and correlate them. Knollis never fully understood the operations of his own mind, and was inclined to hark back, dragging fact after fact from his mental reservoir and subjecting them to the cold light of reason. It was this phase which Ellis wished him to avoid, and so, as he fell in step beside him, and as his eyes sought for a café or restaurant, he began to question him about his early days.

“Y’know,” he said in a thoughtful strain, “I’ve often wondered about you.”

“Oh? In what respect?” Knollis asked absently. “You joined the Force in twenty-two, didn’t you?”

“March, twenty-two; yes.”

“When did you leave school?”

“School?” said Knollis. “See, it would be September, Nineteen-eighteen.”

Then, dragging himself back into Ellis’s company, he asked: “Why this sudden interest in my life, Ellis?”

“You’d be sixteen when you left school, and too young for the remaining months of the war.”

“Er—yes, that’s right.”

“That’s what I mean,” Ellis explained. “What did you do for a living for the four years before you joined the Force?”

Knollis chuckled. “You’d never guess in a week of Sundays. I was learning to be a mechanical engineer. Those were the days! Working from seven in the morning until five in the evening, and attending technical classes four nights a week. There wasn’t much spare time now I come to think back!”

Ellis fingered his black moustaches. “It doesn’t make sense. Why the dickens did you turn thief-taker?”

“If you’ll cast your mind back you’ll remember that the engineering trade wasn’t in a healthy state at that time, and so I got out. It isn’t such a great change when you come to think about it. I merely turned a flair or a bent into another channel. I always liked taking things to pieces, finding out how they worked, and putting them together again. Joining the Force was an experiment. I didn’t know whether I was going to like it or not. I wasn’t worried about the monetary side, because I’ve always maintained that doing the thing one wants to do is more important than making money at some job you don’t care for. The first few months in the Force were deadly, and then I began to realize that people could be as interesting as machines, and more so. I began to take them to pieces to see how they ticked, and then I began to study mentality, and behaviour, and all the subjects generally classed under the one term psychology. Coincident with my interest in people I began to find a curious sense of satisfaction in the unravelling of problems.

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