A Hidden Past (Part V)

Althorpe fell suddenly silent, as Sir Nigel and Josephine Rumbleton appeared in the hall and began to walk towards them. Carmichael smoothed her agitated features into her normal demure expression to betray nothing of her concerns given what Althorpe had just said to her. She would tell Sir Nigel in due course, that Miss Rumbleton worried Althorpe very deeply and the matter needed to be investigated as soon as possible. Carmichael noticed that both of them seemed to be in a relaxed, mildly amused mood, obviously due to some remark that had just passed between then when they had first entered into the hallway.

"Everything all right with you, Althorpe?" Sir Nigel asked in passing as the four of them joined up and began making their way towards the Scotland Yard Annex, where the specialized internal branch of the Dead Watch which Sir Nigel and his team belonged had it's offices. Althorpe gave a brief nod to Sir Nigel, but said nothing more. Josephine Rumbleton noticed the uneasy, almost worried gaze the man gave her for a long moment before withdrawing into silence as they walked.

Millicent Carmichael on learning from Sir Nigel that Josephine was definitely going to be added to the team after taking the required 'examination' became rather more chatty, in fact downright gossipy as she traded high lights of some of the team's less classified investigations. Josephine added some of her own investigations experiences from her time with the street patrol and regular detective force, although she felt compared to Carmichael's commentary that her own experiences were rather less interesting. To her surprise, both Carmichael and Sir Nigel disagreed, to them all investigations had value or merit no matter how common place they might seem, as all too often they found in their own investigations the simplest item could have enormous importance when put in it's proper place in the solutions and operating theory of an investigation.

In many ways the building they were now in referred to by most Londoners as the Old Scotland Yard had become the offices, laboratories and records and evidence collection establishment of the Dead Watch, much of the regular police detectives and street patrol types had moved their offices to the newer and purpose built cluster of  buildings now increasingly called the New Scotland Yard. Technically the Dead Watch was actually called the Special, Paranormal and Occult Investigations and Studies Bureau. Although almost nobody inside or outside the British Police forces called it that, at least not for very long. The Bureau's chief was Sir Duncan Baird, a quiet, hard headed Scot, and an accomplished veteran of British and Imperial police work in all it's varied forms since Prime Minister Robert Banks Jenkinson, the 2nd Earl of Liverpool had set up the new model national British police administration back in 1822 through to 1829 under the guidance of the then Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel .

Originally the whole Special Investigations and Studies Bureau as it had then been called at the time, the Paranormal and Occult being added in much later, confined to the odd cluster of buildings adjacent to Old Scotland Yard, dubbed the Scotland Yard Annex. This had given the old Bureau it's nickname of the Annex Bureau, and this name still clung to the Paranormal and Occult section of the Bureau as it now largely occupied the Annex in its entirety, when the Special Investigations (now referred to by both the public and the regular police and detective force as the Dead Watch) part of the Bureau took over Old Scotland Yard as it's new place of business and operations.