Jimgrim by Talbot Mundy

Bureaucracy, of course, inevitably strangles itself with red tape sooner or later. Mere efficiency becomes the end aimed at, instead of the means by which ends are attained. However, subject to that limitation, the speed and accuracy of the Marseilles police dragnet was almost incredibly good. Perhaps an hour had elapsed since I was conducted into that room to write my statement. In addition to I don't know what else, the police had meanwhile managed to identify the body in the morgue as that of Guido Georges Marie de la Tournee. They had a full report, all ready for the Prefect, of how he had committed suicide by leaping from the summit of the funicular at Notre Dame de la Garde. They had, furthermore, identified him as a former Czarist spy of no particular attainments; and they had dug up a record of his having been deported from India, Cuba, the Argentine and the United States. He appeared to have had French citizenship papers and to have served two short terms in prison, for assaults committed while under the influence, once of absinthe, once of hashish, against former employers who, he said, had insulted him.

His medical report was interesting. He had been set down by the prison doctors as "not insane enough for detention" but as evidencing signs of persecution-mania. One doctor, probably with time on his hands, had filled up two sheets of foolscap about him. As a surgeon I was allowed to see it, and I formed the opinion that, if I had been the prison doctor, the man would have been certified as probably incurably insane. However, there was another report about him, and it was more to the point: