The Three Taps by Ronald A. Knox — Read

I have already mentioned that the Indescribable kept its own tame doctor, a man at the very head of his profession. He was not in the least necessary to it; that is to say, a far cheaper man would have done the work equally well. But it suited the style of the Indescribable to have the very best man, and to advertise the fact that he had given up his practice in order to work exclusively for the company; it was all of a piece with the huge white building, and the frieze, and the palms in the waiting-room. It looked well. For a quite different reason the Indescribable retained its own private detective. This fact was not advertised; nor was he ever referred to in the official communications of the company except as "our representative. " He carried neither a lens nor a forceps -- not even a revolver; he took no injections; he had no stupid confidential friend; but a private detective he was for all that. An amateur detective I will not call him, for the company paid him, and as you would expect, quite handsomely; but he had nothing whatever to do with Scotland Yard, where the umbrellas go to.

He was not an ornament to the company; he fulfilled a quite practical purpose. There are, even outside the humorous stories, business men in a small way who find it more lucrative to burn down their premises than to sell their stock. There are ladies -- ladies whose names the Indescribable would never dream of giving away -- who pawn their jewels, buy sham ones, and then try to make the original insurance policy cover them in the event of theft. There are small companies (believe it or not) which declare an annual loss by selling their stuff below cost price to themselves under another name. Such people flocked to the Indescribable. It was so vast a concern that you felt no human pity about robbing it -- it was like cheating the income tax, and we all know how some people feel about that. The Indescribable never prosecuted for fraud; instead, it allowed a substantial margin for these depredations, which it allowed to continue. But where shady work was suspected "our representative" would drop in in the most natural way in the world and by dint of some searching inquiries made while the delinquent's back was turned would occasionally succeed in showing up a fraud and saving the company a few hundreds of thousands by doing so.