CHAPTER 12SIR CHARLES DEBENHAM, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, regarded Chief Inspector J. Humphrey Bull with a mild twinkle in his eyes. Not that there was anything amusing about the murder of Arthur Pegott, valet at Number 4 Godolphin Square. Or indeed anything basically amusing about Bull himself. It was the slow, ponderous incredulity with which, after eighteen years of dealing with people who murdered other people in the Metropolitan Area of London, as well as occasionally farther afield, Bull still approached each new example of man’s inhumanity to man. He reminded Debenham of Wells’s description of that American writer chap’s prose style—a hippopotamus trying to pick up a pea out of the corner of his cage. Although he knew no hippopotamus ever got the pea with on
