The construction of the Criminal Investigation Department resembles the construction of some beautiful and intricate piece of mechanism.
The detection of crime is its chief function, but it has others. It keeps the eye of a stern father upon the law-breakers. There is not a considerable criminal walking about free in London who is not known and docketed at the Yard.
It knows more about him than he knows about himself; it knows his height, weight and colour of his hair; it has the prints of his fingers and the photograph of his face, it knows where he lodges and with whom he associates, it knows the exact extent and bent of his moral twist.
When a crime of a special nature has been committed by some unknown person, the Yard searches amongst the criminals who make that especial crime their speciality.
One might fancy that in the case of a crime committed by a man in the position of Sir Anthony Gyde, that the search for him would not be any more difficult than the search for a professional criminal. As a matter of fact, it is much more so.
Your non-professional law-breaker has no associates to betray him, and, what is more, being a novice, he adopts no beaten methods. He will often escape, because of his ignorance as to how he should hide, just as a novice in fencing will sometimes, through his own stupidity and want of knowledge, succeed in touching a master-at-arms.
There is nothing a detective dreads more than the ingenuous.
Whilst Freyberger had been pursuing his investigations, the Yard had not been idle.
By eleven o’clock that morning an embargo had been laid upon all the ports of England, as close as that which Buckingham laid in the case of Anne of Austria’s jewels.
No person in the least like Sir Anthony Gyde could possibly have left the Kingdom, unless by flight.