Page:Knaves of Diamonds.pdf/213

194 scope, and raked in the plunder with both hands from the honest and the dishonest alike.

It will be readily understood that no state of affairs could possibly be more distasteful to Mr. Inspector Lipinzki than this. Not only was his professional credit at stake, but men like Mickey Mosenstein, Ikey Cohen, Sandy Fraser, and Alexander Macadam, whom he absolutely knew either to be or to have been involved in extensive I.D.B. transactions, but who were now getting rich, and therefore men of influence in a town where the faculty of making money anyhow was the only one that "got a man on," were making sarcastic comparisons between Hounslow Heath a hundred years ago and the Diamond Fields of to-day, and were asking ugly questions about the efficiency—nay, even the incorruptibility—of the police force in general, and the Detective Department in particular.