here seemed very little
chance of that. Caldew's professional experience had imbued him with the
belief that the junior officers of Scotland Yard existed for no other
purpose than to shoulder the blame for the mistakes of their official
superiors, who divided amongst themselves the plums of promotion,
rewards, and newspaper publicity. That, of course, was the recognized
thing in all public departments. Caldew found no fault with the system.
His great ambition was to obtain some opening which would bring him
advancement and his share of the plums.

He believed his opportunity had arrived that night. It had always been
his dream to have the chance to unravel single-handed some great
crime--a murder for choice--in which he alone should have all the glory
and praise and newspaper paragraphs. He determined to make the most of
the lucky chance which had fallen into his hands, before anybody else
could arrive on the scene. He had confidence in his own abilities, and
thought he had all the qualifications necessary to make a great
detective. He was, at all events, sufficiently acute to realize that
opportunity seldom knocks twice at any man's door.

The three men set out for the moat-house. At the butler's request
Sergeant Lumbe went ahead to summon the doctor, who lived on the other
side of the village green, and while he was gone Caldew drew the details
of the crime from his companion. Lumbe rejoined them at the footbridge
which led across the meadows into the Heredith estate, and they
proceeded on their way in silence. Sergeant Lumbe's brain--such as it
was--was in too much of a whirl to permit him to talk coherently;
Tufnell, habitually a taciturn individual, had been rendered more so
than usual by the events of the night; and Caldew was plunged into such
a reverie of pleasurable expectation, regarding the outcome of his
investigations of the moat-house murder, that the stages of his
promotion through the grades of detective, sub-superintendent, and
superintendent, flashed through his mind as rapidly as telegraph poles
flit past a traveller in a railway carriage. The crime which had struck
down one human being in the dawn of youth and beauty, turned another
into a murderer, and plunged an old English family into horror and
misery, afforded Detective Caldew's optimistic temperament such extreme
gratification that he could scarcely forbear from whistling aloud. But
that is human nature.

They passed through the wood, and cr