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LOOKING backward, I fancy it was on the summer morning, some years ago, when the shadow of the Cleremount Abbey horror first darkened the threshold of Messrs. Bowl, Treadgold & Flack's dignified premises in Savile Row, that the resolve hardened in me to keep a note-book with a view to ultimately setting down in black and white some of the outstanding examples of my friend H. B. Treadgold's prowess as a crime investigator. Although for the past fifteen years, in succession to my father, the late Nathaniel Duckett, of Lincoln's Inn, I have been the firm's legal adviser, there is nothing improper in my undertaking. It is not of Treadgold, my tailor client, but of Treadgold the crime analyst I shall write ; and if in the course of my narrative I succeed in painting the portrait of Treadgold the man, and my most admired friend, I shall not feel that the hours I have spent at my typewriter have been in vain. Of course, many of the problems submitted to his scrutiny in his capacity as an amateur investigator are of a much too private a nature ever to see |