GENEALOGIES erected and pedigrees searched by an Oxonian curiously qualified. Strict confidence exacted and extended.

This was what I wanted. I made a note of the box number, and that night I wrote my letter. I wanted a pedigree searched, I said, and if it proved possible to erect a genealogy on it I should like that, too.

I don’t know what I expected, but the advertisement suggested a pedant well past youth and of a sharp temper. I was utterly unprepared for the curiously qualified Oxonian when he arrived in my study two days later. He seemed not to be much older than myself, and had a shy, girlish manner and the softest voice that was compatible with being heard at all. The only elderly or pedantic thing about him was a pair of spectacles of a kind nobody wore then—gold-rimmed and with small oval lenses.

“I thought I’d come round instead of writing, because we are near neighbours,” he said, and handed me a cheap visiting-card on which was printed—

ADRIAN PLEDGER-BROWN

CORPUS CHRISTI

So this was the curiously qualified Oxonian!

“Sit down,” I said. “You erect genealogies?”

“Oh, indeed,” he breathed. “That is to say, I know precisely how it is done. That is to say, I have examined many scores of pedigrees which have already been erected, and I am sure I could do it myself if I were to be entrusted with such a task. It involves research, you see, of a kind I understand quite well and could undertake with a very fair likelihood of success. I know, you see, where to look, and that is everything. Almost everything.”

He smiled such a girlish smile and his eyes swam so unassumingly behind the comic specs that I was tempted to be easy with him. But that was not the Pargetter way. Beware of a witness who appeals to you, he said. Repress any personal response, and if it seems to be gaining the upper hand, go to the other extreme and be severe with the witness. If Ogilvie had remembered that in Cripps-Armstrong vs. Clatterbos & Dudley in 1884 he would have won the case, but he let Clatterbos’s difficulty with English arouse his compassion; it’s a famous instance. So I sprang upon Pledger-Brown, and rent him.

“Am I right in deducing that you have never erected a genealogy independently before?”

“That would be—well, to put it baldly—yes, you might say that.”

“Never mind what I might say or might not say. I asked a plain question, and I want a plain answer. Is this your first job?”

“My first professional engagement? Working as an independent investigator? If you wish to put it that way, I suppose the answer must be that it is.”

“Aha! You are, in a word, a greenhorn.”

“Oh, dear, no. I mean, I have studied the subject, and the method, extensively.”

“But you have never done a job of this kind before, for a fee. Yes or no?”

“To be completely frank, yes; or rather no.”