Explore "The Hand in the Dark" by Arthur J. Rees on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Superintendent Merrington sat in his office at Scotland Yard, irascible with the exertions of a trying day which had made heavy inroads upon his temper and patience. He had several big cases on his hands, his time had been broken into by a series of visitors with grievances, and he had been called upon to adjust a vexatious claim of a woman attacked in the street by a police dog, while the animal was supposed to be on duty tracking a sacrilegious thief who had felled a priest in an oratory and bolted with the silver candlesticks from the altar.
The woman had gone mad from the shock and had been placed in a public asylum, where she had imagined herself to be a horse, and in that guise had neighed harmlessly, for some years, until cured by auto-suggestion by a rising young brain doctor who had devoted much time and study to her peculiar case. Her first act of returned reason was to bring a heavy claim for damages against Scotland Yard, and Merrington had fought it out that day with an avaricious lawyer who had taken up the case on the promise of an equal division of the spoils.