The Coat of Arms by Edgar Wallace — Read

The Chief Constable of the C.I.D. is an imposing official. Chief Constable Landy was not of himself imposing. He was tall, very thin, and cadaverous. He wore impossible neckties and spoke in a tone of great weariness and complaint. Yet police officers who went into his presence stood stiffly to attention and said "sir" whether they were officers of high or low degree--all except T. B. Collett, who was neither policeman nor Commissioner, belonged to neither the executive nor the administrative branch. He ranked as chief inspector, but nobody ever called him "chief". He had once acted as Chief Constable in the absence of Landy, and calmly accepted the homage he invariably neglected to pay to the rightful holder of the office. He had an office as comfortably furnished as a Commissioner's yet he did not appear in the list published by all works of reference on Scotland Yard. Officially he was liaison officer between the Yard and foreign police forces. He had been stationed in India. He carried a warrant card, and, unlike Commissioners, had the power and authority to arrest. He lived in the Records Office in his spare time and wrote confidential memoranda which nobody at Scotland Yard ever read, but which were carefully docketed at the Home Office.

Landy once said that T. B. Collett was not so much a law as a custom, by which he meant that he was not codified but had come to be. T. B. himself claimed that he had a roving commission amongst pigeonholes.