Chapter 161: The crappy detective (Edited)

The light in the police archive room is very dim, giving the feeling that it is already dark outside, but in reality it is ten o'clock in the morning.

The reason for the dimness is that the curtains are closed on all the archives windows and, of course, the smoke in the archives room. The darkness in the archives was so smoky that it looked like a "fairy tale". The root of all this is the only living person in the archive room: a middle-aged man.

The middle-aged man has his feet up on his desk and is smoking a pipe. He is tall, over six feet tall, long-limbed and gray-eyed, and has a big, slicked back haircut and a diamond-sharp face. His jaw is square and prominent, and he looks very hard and determined. He also has a long, thin, hawk-like nose, which, perhaps because he is well fed and washes his hair regularly, does not give him a greasy, creepy, villainous look, but gives him an alert and determined appearance.

He had a bowler in his hand, a black coat and tall black felt hat on a perch behind him, and a cane resting on his desk.

With a creak, the door opened and an older woman, who looked to be in her mid-fifties, pushed open the archives door.

"Joseph Bell! You're smoking in the file room again." As soon as she entered, the old woman choked and coughed several times. She held her nose, ran to the office window, pulled the curtains, opened the window, let the light in, and let the smoke out.

"Mrs. Stubbs, I like to analyze and deduce complicated cases under the blanket of smoke." Joseph's voice was low and strong, with a hint of vicissitude.

Mrs. Stubbs sighed and murmured, "I wonder who that young man has offended to be assigned to you, come on in!"

She knocked on the door and a young man in his early twenties entered.

"The new intern, I hope he gets along well." Mrs. Stubbs rolled her eyes as she said this, clearly he had little faith in her.

"John," the young intern approached Joseph, offering his hand for a handshake, "John Livingstone."

"Joseph Bell," Joseph said as he put his feet down from the table.

"I'll leave you," Mrs. Stubbs said as she prepared to leave the file room, "And smoke less..."

Joseph acted as if he hadn't heard, but set his pipe aside. Unlike a cigarette, a pipe can easily go out on its own if left unattended, and some novices even put it out in the middle of a puff.

"What time is it?" he asked suddenly.

"Uh," John fumbled, noting the unusual absence of a clock in the file room, so he pulled a pocket watch out of his jacket pocket, opened it and looked at the time.

"Two minutes to quarter to ten, sir."

Joseph nodded, at which point Mrs. Stubbs said to Joseph as if she had suddenly remembered something, "By the way, I believe you said earlier that Mrs. Hudson, a neighbor of yours, was looking for a new tenant, could you recommend this little fellow." Mrs. Stubbs turned to John and said, "If you haven't found a suitable house yet."

"Of course he hasn't found a house yet." Joseph cast a nonchalant look and said 'casually', "But I'm curious, why don't you live with your father? Is it because you can't stand his drinking?"

"I'm sorry, what did you say?" John was a little confused, and Mrs. Stubbs, off to the side, rolled her eyes, with an expression that seemed to say, "Gosh, are you doing it again?

Joseph tapped his pipe, "Your father, who was an alcoholic, recently divorced your mother..."

John: "???"

"Young man, stay and work hard, I think you'll be my best assistant, I was sure the moment I heard your name!"

John: "No, ah, you...?"

"I know you must have doubts inside you, and with patience I will give you, my future assistant, the answers," Joseph waved his hand, unconsciously picking up his pipe, but looking at John's face, he didn't relight it after all.

"You must be asking, we just met, you and I haven't known each other's names for over a minute, how could I have seen so much?"

John nodded, "Yes, that's true, but..."

"The inscription." Joseph pointed to John's pocket watch, "The engraving on your pocket watch, 'Livingstone', your surname, I'm sure is a relative of your family, but not of the same generation, the watch appears to be a popular model from the thirties, and the wear marks on it suggest that it was at least passed down through your grandfather's generation. Of course, it could have been given to you by your father's brother, but the odds are negligible, because when you opened the lid I could see a black and white photograph of you inside, which was most likely your father's."

"But half of the picture was torn off, which means your relationship had broken up, and you kept your father's half, which means you live with him. You didn't rent an apartment because your hair smells like hotel shampoo, which is so obvious it requires no reasoning."

"As for the inference that your father was an alcoholic, just a little genius speculation, I see some small scratches and dings on the back of his pocket watch and where it is wound, suggesting he had shaky hands every night when he wound it and sometimes dropped it on the floor, and if I'm not mistaken, the dial glass must have been post-dated as well. "

Joseph spoke so fast that John gasped.

"My God..."

Joseph sketched a small smile as he cheerfully cleared the clutter from his desk. "Just a little deduction, I'm the police records office manager, but also a detective..."

"...you didn't get a single one right."

Joseph: "???"

Σ(っ°Д°;)っ

"Your reasoning is fundamentally flawed."

Joseph showed an expression of disbelief.

"I bought this pocket watch at an antique market".

Joseph: "???"

"But it has...".

"I engraved it."

Joseph: "..."

He looked at the engraving and found that he could not tell the age of the engraving because of the dirt and distance. There was a miscalculation that affected the whole reasoning.

"The black and white photo is of me, with my ex-girlfriend, whom I trashed after breaking up. The connection between the scratches and alcoholism is too tenuous, isn't it? Why can't it be that I drop things a lot? As for the shampoo, I don't know what happened, I just picked up a bottle from the supermarket on sale." John clasped his hands together and said your reasoning doesn't hold water.

Mrs. Stubbs burst out laughing on the sidelines, "Boy, this colleague of yours is an avid Sherlock Holmes fan, he always likes to make deductions like Sherlock Holmes, unfortunately they are always outrageous: the first time we met he deduced that I was the widow of a drug dealer! "

A trace of embarrassment crossed Joseph's face, "It's all right, Mrs. Stubbs, I still have to tell the newcomer about your work!"

Mrs. Stubbs left the file room laughing.

When she left, Joseph also became serious, tidied up the clutter on his desk, put away in a drawer a copy of Sherlock Holmes Complete Mysteries and another of the lately very popular Adventures of Lockhart. Then Joseph gave John a serious talk about the job.

"My job is actually very easy, we just file all the cases that come in from the London police stations, Mrs. Stubbs brings them in every morning and we just divide them up by districts and put them on these shelves according to time. It's usually done in the morning, after all, there aren't many cases to file."

It's not that London's security is so bad at night, it's that the police are so thin on the ground that they don't call the police unless it's a very serious case, and with less police presence, there are fewer files to send to the main office for back up.

"Occasionally the police come to us to retrieve files, but it's unlikely." Joseph shrugged, there were so many old cases in this huge file that no police officer had ever thought to turn them over to solve.

As Joseph said this, John realized that his job was actually pretty quiet.

Joseph had plenty of time to do the things he wanted to do, like read crime novels.

"Working here is all about peace of mind. It's hard to move up here, but it's much easier to do it on a regular basis," Joseph said as he offered his trainee a cup of tea, "There's not much pressure, and even if you don't do your daily work, you don't have to worry about it, no one will hold you accountable, we're directly under the administration department, the police have nothing to do with us. And these files that are filed are, to be honest, a formality, they are hardly investigated."

Joseph brought out a plate of cookies and the two had a nice chat.

"I often look at those files and reason like a real detective..." Joseph patted the stack of folders on his desk, "There was a rather interesting case that came in the other day about a train bombing, it seemed unimportant, but the witness statements are very interesting. It's an interesting case, and complicated, it's a case that will take three full puffs of cigarettes to solve..."

Joseph told his assistant about an interesting case he had read about.

"Sounds like a paranormal event." John listened to the details of the case and agreed that there was something odd about it, "It's very strange, and although the witness statements are unreliable, the case is strange in every way."

"One, there were no body parts at the crime scene, so it's too much of a stretch to say there were no bones left from the explosion. Two, I don't understand why there was a verbal altercation before the crime if it was an assault. Isn't it a matter of surprise? All the passengers ran out because they were arguing. Third, what do the passengers mean by a fireball? Can anyone really fight back when they are on fire?"

The two men had a lively discussion about the truth of the case.

"Maybe two magicians got into a fight on a train and fled when the commotion got too loud, that would explain it all!". Joseph said in a joking tone, and picked up his own pipe at the same time.

"Very good imagination, I think you could write a novel."

"A novel?"

"That popular book 'The Adventures of Lockhart' is about a wizard who travels from place to place, you could design a protagonist who one day goes somewhere and stumbles upon Lockhart traveling around." John spoke eloquently, he had seen the copy of 'The Adventures of Lockhart' on his predecessor's desk, had read it and was fascinated by it.

"I think it's a great idea, a guy wants to go to the bank to get a loan to start a business, then he meets Lockhart there and a whole new world opens up to him..."

"Wait, why would a magician go to a bank?"

John was also stuck: yes, why would a magician go to a bank? But he soon found a solution.

"Just create a plot! Let's say there's some sort of magical creature in the bank that likes to collect and seize treasures, and the wizard Lockhart has to catch it and return the treasures to their rightful owners."

"Good idea, what if the magical creature is a dragon? Greedy and treasure-loving."

"Isn't that too big? I suppose it could be one of those little thief-like creatures with a kangaroo-like pouch in its belly to hold stolen treasure..."

The two men engaged in a heated argument.

...

Tom's investigation came to a standstill. Although he had seen the policemen who had come that day using his basilisk eye, the information he had been given by the receptionist was too biased to help him identify the officers who had come to investigate that day, since Tom had not seen what had happened.

Worse, his sources of information were extremely limited. In modern times, finding a police station near a train station is as easy as opening a map app, whereas Tom and the others would have had to buy paper maps and check them out piecemeal.

In this latest era, with the information explosion, access to all kinds of information is greatly reduced. If this were the 1920s, Tom and the others could have solved their problem by going to the Internet, and right now they would be looking at the archives in the Hogwarts common room. But now that the Internet is in its infancy, they would have to figure out how to research on their own.

The only thing they had gleaned was that none of the police stations near the train station had taken up the case that day.

Other than that, there had been no progress. To top it off, it had rained heavily during the night. Tom stood in front of the hotel window and let out a long sigh, "I'll take you back to Hogwarts."

He made the decision to send Harry and Ron back to school while he continued to explore London. A worried Tom was walking down the street, the rain had stopped, and a figure in a suit caught Tom's eye.