The Dumpling by Coulson Kernahan

When I awoke next morning it was with a singular feeling of depression -- the reaction, I told myself, from the excitement of the last few days. Life seemed flat and at loose ends. I was in love, with small prospect of bringing my suit to a successful issue. Nor, in the matter of the Dumpling, could I persuade myself that I had any reason for self-congratulation. I had heroically set out to trap and to catch a criminal, instead of which I had been made a prisoner myself.

That I was here in bed, and between the blankets, was due neither to my own skill nor to my own strength, for I had been hopelessly outwitted in the former quality, and ignominiously made to feel my own inferiority in the latter. That I was here at all, instead perhaps of lying strangled in a cellar, was due to the arrival of the police on the previous evening.