The Hand in the Dark

by Arthur J. Rees

When he reached the upstairs bedroom he locked the door before proceeding to examine the fireplace. It was immediately apparent to him that the pistol had not been placed in the grate or beneath it. Either place would have meant discovery when the room was searched. It was a careful examination of the upper portion of the grate which suggested the hiding-place. The weapon could have been safely hidden within the broad iron flange running round the open damper of the grate.

The complete revelation of this portion of the murderer's design came to Colwyn as he was passing his hand over the inner surface of this ledge. It was a register grate, and the space at the back had not been filled in. The murderer, when concealing the pistol at the top of the grate, had only to balance it carefully on the flange, with the muzzle pointing into the room, to ensure that the recoil from the report would cause the weapon to fall into the deep hole between the back of the grate and the chimney.

This additional proof of the murderer's perverted intelligence impressed Colwyn as much as the mechanism for the false report. The pistol, blindly recoiling and jumping behind the grate after the explosion of the blank charge, was almost as effectually concealed as at the bottom of the sea, and might have remained there for years without discovery. Colwyn plunged his arm into the hole, but could not reach the bottom.

But the murderer had more in his mind than the effectual concealment of the pistol, important though that was to him. The grate was an excellent choice for two other reasons. It carried the slight vapour from the tinder wick up the chimney, and the convex iron interior formed an excellent sounding board which would enhance the sound of the report. Truly the dark being who had planned it all had left nothing to chance. He had foreseen everything. His handiwork bore the stamp of unholy genius.

Who had done this thing? Who had sought, with such patient cunning, to upset those evidential principles by which blind Justice gropes her hesitating way to Truth? In concocting his masterpiece of malignant ingenuity the murderer had worked alone. His only accomplice—apart from the after-hand of Fate—was a piece of automatic mechanism which had done his bidding secretly, and would never have betrayed him. It was this ability to work alone, scheming and brooding in solitary concentration until the whole of the horrible conception had been perfected in every degree, which stamped the designer as a ferocious criminal of unusual mould, remorseless as a tiger, with a neurasthenic mind swayed by the unbridled savagery of natural impulse.

As Colwyn meditated over the murder, his original impression of the guests assembled in the dining-room downstairs in a premeditated scene set for its production came back to him with renewed force. The murderer had taken his part in that scene as one of the unconscious audience, dining and taking his share in the conversation, while his secret consciousness was strained to an intense anticipation of the false signal from his mechanical accomplice upstairs. Colwyn could picture him joining in the mockery of meaningless phrases with dry lips, his ears listening for every sound, his eyes covertly watching the crawling hands of the clock. Then, when the crack had pealed forth, he had been able to exchange suspense for action, and rush upstairs with the others, confident in the feeling that, let suspicion point where it would, it could not fall on him.

But the murderer had not foreseen the scream which preceded the shot. How had he comported himself under the shock of that cry, which was outside the region of his calculations? He had not time to reflect upon its origin, to investigate its source. He had to steel his nerves to face it because he dared not do otherwise. But its sudden effect on the nerve centres of his brain, previously strained almost to the breaking point, must have brought him to the verge of a subsequent collapse.

Colwyn believed he saw the end in sight. The presumptions, the facts, and the motive all pointed to one figure as the murderer of Violet Heredith. She had been killed from the dual motive of punishment in her own case and vengeance on a greater offender than herself. The alibi had been devised to ensure a tremendous revenge on the man by bringing him to the gallows as her supposed murderer. That part of the plan had gone astray, so the murderer, in the fanatical resolve of his latent fixed idea, had recourse to a further expedient as daring and original as the scheme which failed. The second instrument had been the means of his own undoing.

But as he reached this final stage of his reasoning, Colwyn stopped short in something like dismay. He had left a point of vital importance out of his calculations. If the murderer was the man he thought, he was downstairs in the dining-room at the time the false shot was fired. Then whose hand had clutched Hazel Rath's throat in the murdered woman's bedroom upstairs, just before the shot was fired?

Colwyn slowly paced up and down the room in the midnight silence, conning all the facts over again in the light of this overlooked incident.