Shuttlecock Read Free

sub-department of the police. I hasten to add, I am not a policeman. I am more a sort of specialized clerk, an archivist. Our department has little to do with the day-to-day activities of the police – the police as the public think of them, the men in blue and conspicuous plain clothes. And yet it is an important, even an indispensable department.
    Have you ever wondered what happens to the records of crimes that were committed long ago? Of police inquiries that took place up to a hundred years, or more, in the past? More to the point, have you ever wondered what happens to the records of crimes, or the evidence of possible crimes, relating to recent years, which because of some factor or other – often the death of the party or parties involved – have ceased to be acted upon? A suspectedchild-molester, for example, who commits suicide before proceedings can be taken, so that, after the inquest, the case is officially closed. Or an almost-successful embezzler who, being discovered after years milking the company funds, succumbs to a fortuitous coronary. All such records are the business of our department. In our vaults you will find the memorials of century-old murders, arsons, thefts and frauds – the delight of professional criminologists who, admitted only by the strictest permit, sit sometimes all day, at little lamp-lit reading desks, working through sheaves of yellowed documents. But you will find also – or you would find, if Quinn ever allowed you to – information relating to the living; information sometimes of a nefarious and inflammatory nature, the subjects of which would, to say the least, feel uneasy if they knew such information were stored, no matter how discreetly and inertly, in a police building. But it is not true – in case you are beginning to draw in your nostrils – that we keep files on people as such. Ours are distinct from ordinary police criminal records, where the criminal history of any person possessing one can quickly be referred to. We deal solely with individual cases, and ones which have been formally closed. In the official phrase, with ‘dead crimes’.
    What then is the object of our department? You will be surprised – the police are no fools. They know that every scrap of information is worth preserving. If in every hundred files only one contains a fact that may be useful in future, then it is worth keeping a hundred files. Before a case is closed, every avenue is checked first, so that what filters down to Quinn is only a tiny fraction of all that is handled. And once in our department, in the great majority of cases, there it stays, never to be touched again. But should some investigation yet-to-be discovera new link, should the material in our files prove relevant to some other case, it is instantly unearthed.
    That is the main function of our department. But there is another. You may be surprised again: the police not only aren’t fools, they consider their obligations too. What a relief from responsibility, what a weight off the official mind it would be if half the files in our office could be instantly destroyed. But they cannot be destroyed. And the police are aware of what possible harm might be done – not in the sense, of course, of direct incrimination, but in the damage done to reputations, livelihoods, personal trusts and confidences – if the contents of these files were revealed to the wrong people. We sit in a strong-room of secrets. We are custodians. Though custodians of what is often as much a mystery to us as to the public. For many of our files are sealed. Only Quinn can unseal and reseal them. And many are not only sealed but kept in safes and locked boxes which only Quinn can unlock.
    What is it about institutions such as ours that invariably sites them underground? Most people, these days, go up from the street to work; we go down. We – that is, I and Quinn’s other four assistants, Vic, Eric, Fletcher and O’Brien – work in a cavernous