"Can't you find somebody to put you on the lay, sir? some friend of his--somebody that's seen him, or maybe heard from him since you have?"
"Oh, don't talk rubbish!" snapped Narkom, with a short, derisive laugh. "Friends, indeed! What friends has he outside of myself? Who knows him any better than I know him--and what do I know of him, at that? Nothing--not where he comes from; not what his real name may be; not a living thing but that he chooses to call himself Hamilton Cleek and to fight in the interest of the law as strenuously as he once fought against it. And where will I find a man who has 'seen' him, as you suggest--or would know if he had seen him--when he has that amazing birth gift to fall back upon? _You_ never saw his real face--never in all your life. _I_ never saw it but twice, and even I--why, he might pass me in the street a dozen times a day and I'd never know him if I looked straight into his eyes. He'd come like a shot if he knew I wanted him--gad, yes! But he doesn't; and there you are."
Imagination was never one of Petrie's strong points. His mind moved always along well-prepared grooves to time-honoured ends. It found one of those grooves and moved along it now.
"Why don't you advertise for him, then?" he suggested. "Put a Personal in the morning papers, sir. Chap like that's sure to read the news every day; and it's bound to come to his notice sooner or later. Or if it doesn't, why, people will get to knowing that the Yard's lost him and get to talking about it and maybe he'll learn of it that way."
Narkom looked at him. The suggestion was so bald, so painfully ordinary and commonplace, that, heretofore, it had never occurred to him. To associate Cleek's name with the banalities of the everyday Agony Column; to connect _him_ with the appeals of the scullery and the methods of the raw amateur! The very outrageousness of the thing was its best passport to success.
"By James, I believe there's something in that!" he said, abruptly. "If you get people to talking.... Well, it doesn't matter, so that he _hears_--so that he finds out I want him. You ring up the _Daily Mail_ while I'm scratching off an ad. Tell 'em it's simply got to go in the morning's issue. I'll give it to them over the line myself in a minute."