Blathers and Duff
Blathers and Duff are the Bow Street Runners, the pair of police officers dispatched from London to investigate the burglary at the Maylie house in Chertsey. They serve as a satirical embodiment of official incompetence and professional vanity, arriving with theatrical self-importance, conducting their investigation through a series of contradictory interviews and self-congratulatory anecdotes, and ultimately departing without solving the crime or identifying the real perpetrators.
Identity and Arrival
Blathers, the senior officer, is a stout personage of middle height, aged about fifty, with shiny black hair cropped close, half-whiskers, a round face, and sharp eyes. He carries a pair of handcuffs, which he plays with carelessly, as if they were a pair of castanets. Duff, his colleague, is a red-headed, bony man in top-boots, with a rather ill-favored countenance and a turned-up, sinister-looking nose. They arrive at the Maylie house in a gig, and Brittles, the lad of all work, greets them with great admiration. Blathers immediately takes charge, smoothing down his hair and asking to see the governor.
Investigation and Methods
The officers' investigative method consists of a melodramatic reenactment. They first inspect the premises: they look out at the window from inside the little room at the end of the passage, then go around by way of the lawn and look in at the window, have a candle handed out to inspect the shutter, a lantern to trace footsteps, and a pitchfork to poke the bushes. After this, Mr. Giles and Brittles are put through a dramatic representation of their share in the previous night's adventures, which they perform some six times over, contradicting each other in not more than one important respect the first time, and in not more than a dozen the last. Having completed this, Blathers and Duff clear the room and hold a long council together, compared with which, for secrecy and solemnity, a consultation of great doctors on the knottiest point in medicine would be mere child's play.
Anecdotes and Professional Vanity
Blathers is given to lengthy, self-aggrandizing anecdotes. While waiting to examine Oliver, he tells the story of Conkey Chickweed, a publican who faked a robbery of his own money to gain sympathy and then, in his eagerness to keep up appearances, nearly drove the investigating officer mad by repeatedly claiming to have spotted the fictional thief. Blathers tells this story with great relish, clinking his handcuffs together at the conclusion. He and Duff also engage in professional one-upmanship, debating whether the Chertsey burglary was the work of a criminal known as "the Family Pet" or the great Mr. Conkey Chickweed himself, revealing that their primary interest is in assigning credit for the crime within their own lore rather than in discovering the truth.
Resolution and Departure
When they finally examine Oliver, Mr. Losberne has already prepared a false story, claiming the boy was accidentally wounded by a spring-gun while trespassing. Giles and Brittles, thoroughly confused and intimidated by the doctor's aggressive questioning, contradict themselves so thoroughly that they cannot swear to Oliver's identity. The officers then learn that Giles's pistol was loaded only with gunpowder and brown paper, not a ball, further undermining the case. The next morning, a rumor sends them to Kingston to investigate two men and a boy found sleeping under a haystack, but the suspicion proves groundless. They return to the Maylie house as wise as they went, and are ultimately rewarded with a couple of guineas before returning to London, having failed to solve the burglary or identify the real criminals.
