The Hand in the Dark

by Arthur J. Rees

The famous detective's outlook on life was cynical and coarse. The cynicism was the natural outcome of his profession; the coarseness was his heritage by birth, as his sensual mouth, blubber lips, thick nose, and bull-neck attested. It was a strange freak of Fate which had made him the guardian of the morals of society and the upholder of law and order in a modern civilized community. By temperament and disposition he belonged to the full-blooded type of humanity which found its best exemplars in the early Muscovite Czars, and, if Fate had so willed it, would have revelled in similar pursuits of vice, oppression, and torture. As Fate had ironically made a police official of him, he had to content himself with letting off the superfluous steam of his tremendous temperament by oppressing the criminal classes, and he had performed that duty so thoroughly that before he became the travelling companion of kings his name had been a terror to the underworld of London, who feared and detested his ferocity, his unscrupulous methods of dealing with them, and his wide knowledge of their class.

He was a recognized hero of the British public, which on one occasion had presented him with a testimonial for his capture of a desperado who had been terrorizing the East End of London. But Merrington disdained such tokens of popular approval. He regarded the public, which he was paid to protect, as a pack of fools. For him, there were only two classes of humanity—fools and rogues. The respectable portion of the population constituted the former, and criminals the latter. He had the lowest possible opinion of humanity as a whole, and his favourite expression, in professional conversation, was: "human nature being what it is...." He was still a mighty force in Scotland Yard, although he had passed his usefulness and reached the ornamental stage of his career, rarely condescending to investigate a case personally.

His present visit to the moat-house was one of those rare occasions, and was due to the action of Captain Stanhill, the Chief Constable of Sussex, who was seated near him. Captain Stanhill was a short stout man, with a round, fresh-coloured face, and short sturdy legs and arms. He wore a tweed coat of the kind known to tailors as "a sporting lounge," and his little legs were encased in knickerbockers and leather gaiters, which were spattered with mud, as though he had ridden some distance that morning. He was a very different type from Superintendent Merrington—a gentleman by birth and education, a churchman, and a county magnate. He never did anything so dangerous as to think, but accepted the traditions and rules of his race and class as his safe guide through life. Like most Englishmen of his station of life, he was endowed with just sufficient intelligence to permit him to slide along his little groove of life with some measure of satisfaction to himself and pleasure to his neighbours. He was a sound judge of cattle and horses, but of human nature he knew nothing whatever, and his first act, on being informed of the murder at the moat-house, was to ring up Scotland Yard and request it to send down one of its most trusted officials to investigate the circumstances. In reply to this call for assistance, Superintendent Merrington, not unmindful of the county standing and influence of the Herediths, had decided to investigate the case himself, and had brought with him two satellites—a finger-print expert who was at that moment paring his own finger-nails with a pocket-knife as he stared vacantly out of the library window, and an official photographer, who was upstairs taking photographs in the death chamber.

Seated near the finger-print expert was a police official of middle-age, Inspector Weyling, of the Sussex County Police. He was a saturnine sort of man, with a hooked nose, a skin like parchment, and a perfectly bald sugar-loaf head, surmounted at the top by a wen as large as a duck-egg. His deferential attitude and obsequious tone whenever Superintendent Merrington chose to address a remark to him indicated that he had a proper official respect for the rank and standing of that gentleman. Inspector Weyling was merely a police official. He had no personal characteristics whatever, unless a hobby for breeding Belgian rabbits, and a profound belief that Mr. Lloyd George was the greatest statesman the world had ever seen, could be said to constitute a temperament.

The fifth man was Detective Caldew, who had just completed a narrative of the events of the previous night for the benefit of his colleagues, but more especially for Superintendent Merrington, in whose hands lay the power of directing the investigations of the crime. It was by no wish of Detective Caldew that Superintendent Merrington had been brought into the case. Caldew thought when the county inspector arrived and found a Scotland Yard man at work he would be only too glad to allow him to go on with the case, and he anticipated no difficulty in obtaining the consent of his official superiors at Scotland Yard to continuing the investigations he had commenced. But Inspector Weyling, when notified of the crime by Sergeant Lumbe, had telephoned to the Chief Constable for instructions. The latter, distrustful of the ability of the county police to bring such an atrocious murderer to Justice, had begged the help of Scotland Yard, with the result that Superintendent Merrington and his assistants appeared at the moat-house in the early morning before the astonished eyes of Caldew, who was taking a walk in the moat-house garden after a night of fruitless investigations.

In the arrival of Merrington, Caldew saw all his fine hopes of promotion dashed to the ground. He was by no means confident that Merrington would permit him to take any further share in the investigations, but he was quite certain that if he did, and the murderer was captured through their joint efforts, very little of the credit would fall to his share when such a famous detective as Merrington was connected with the case. Merrington would see to that.

Caldew, in his narration of the facts of the murder, laid emphasis on the mysterious nature of the crime, in the hope that Merrington might deem it wiser to return to London and leave him in charge of the case, rather than risk a failure which would greatly damage his own reputation. Merrington listened to him gloomily. He fully realized the difficult task ahead of the police, and his temper was not improved in consequence.

"Apparently the murderer has got clean away without leaving a trace behind him?" he said.

"Yes."

"No sign of any weapon?"