He plunged off toward the open door, and I heard him
racing down the Assyrian Room.
“He had a short rope ladder fixed from the gutter!”
he cried back at us. “Graham! Graham!”
(the constable on duty in the hall)— “Get
the front door open! Get . . . " His voice died
away as he leapt down the stairs.
From the direction of Orpington Square came a horrid,
choking scream. It rose hideously; it fell,
rose again—and died.
The thief escaped. We saw the traces upon the
ivy where he had hastened down. Bristol ascended
by the same route, and found where the ladder-hooks
had twice been attached to the gutterway. Constable
Graham, who was first actually to leave the building,
declared that he heard the whirr of a re-started motor
lower down Great Orchard Street.
Bristol’s theory, later to be dreadfully substantiated,
was that the thief had broken the glass and reached
into the case with an arrangement similar to that
employed for pruning trees, having a clutch at the
end, worked with a cord.
“Hassan has been too clever for us!” said
the inspector. “But— what in
God’s name did that awful screaming mean?”
I had a theory, but I did not advance it then.
It was not until nearly dawn that my theory, and Bristol’s,
regarding the clutch arrangement, both were confirmed.
For close under the railings which abut on Orpington
Square, in a pool of blood we found just such an instrument
as Bristol had described.
And still clutching it was a pallid and ghastly shrunken
hand that had been severed from above the wrist!
“Merciful God!” whispered the inspector—“look
at the opal ring on the finger! Look at the
bandage where he cut himself on the broken window-glass
that first night, when Mr. Mostyn disturbed him.
It wasn’t the Hashishin who stole the thing .
. . . It’s Earl Dexter’s hand!”
No one spoke for a moment. Then—
“Which of them has—” began
Mostyn huskily.
“The slipper of the Prophet?” interrupted
Bristol. “I wonder if we shall ever know?”
A SHRIVELLED HAND
Around a large square table in a room at New Scotland
Yard stood a group of men, all of whom looked more
or less continuously at something that lay upon the
polished deal. One of the party, none other
than the Commissioner himself, had just finished speaking,
and in silence now we stood about the gruesome object
which had furnished him with the text of his very
terse address.
I knew myself privileged in being admitted to such
a conference at the C.I.D. headquarters and owed my
admission partly to Inspector Bristol, and partly
to the fact that under the will of the late Professor
Deeping I was concerned in the uncanny business we
were met to discuss.
