To the chief commissioner,
C.I.D. , New Delhi,
Intimation no. 34
Ref : The silver Arrow Group.
Sir,
“on Tuesday next a deliberate attempt will be made to steal the Duchess of karol bagh’s jewel collection, at present housed at karol bagh. the raid is timed for 2.30 a.m. Entry will be made through the big kitchen window at the back. the glass will be cut and the entire pane removed. this will eliminate all possibility of contact with burglar alarms. positions of all alarms are known. Thieves concerned are the surviving members of the silver Arrow Group. there is also one other, but, except that’s name is Lyall, he is unknown to me.
acknowledge through usual channels, otherwise copy of this intimation will be forwarded to her grace.”
Abdul Rashid finished writing and sat back in his chair, thoughtfully scanning the document. it was a letter-carded, undated and unsigned, just a plainly printed card on which the square if writing stood out as neat and compact as a block of letterpress. Dain wrote in a meticulously neat hand, using a print script, every letter being distinct and separate.
His long, brown fingers pulled slowly at his chin as he read, and a deep frown of concentration creased across his forehead.
Judged on certain standards, Dain was a strikingly handsome man. There was a touch of the hawk about him, a he-hawk whose hunting ground was the granite heights of the back block ranges. He was very dark, with a skin tanned to a healthy bronze. There were times when he seemed to his real self behind a mixture of aggression and reserve –two very opposite characteristics which,in him, seemed to blend in some indefinably natural way. His black hair, strong and lustrous, was brushed back from his temples, and the lines on his face were so deeply cut that they might have been tooled out with a chisel. his eyes, too were a contradiction. They were brown and warm with something almost like a caress in them. and yet they were pitilessly cold.
He put the card down gently and stared at it for some seconds. Then with some actions as deft and precise as those of an automatic machine, he addressed it in the same upstanding print letters and sealed it, pressing the ball of his right thumb firmly into the warm wax.
He glanced across at a photograph on the polished surface of his desk, the photograph of an unusually charming-looking girl, who peeped out at him with merry impudence from behind a mass of flowers held to her breast. It was signed “Happy memories, Mercia Lyall.” Just for a moment the hand that held the envelope trembled perceptibly and the frown on his forehead intensified till the deep brows almost hid his eyes. then with a sudden shrug and an irritated click of the tongues he stuffed it into his pocket and called for his car.
Abdul Rashid, even among a crowd of unusual men, would have stood out prominently as an exceptionally curious study.
To begin with, he was admitted by the greatest scientists of the day to be one of the most extraordinary brains of the present era. Lord Marvin, president of the Royal Research society of England alleged him to be the little more than a cold. precise thinking machine set on an unusually finely developed human body. his faculty for putting an icy logic to bear on any problem that confronted him had expressed itself in a dozen different directions. as an inventor he had long since ceased to thrill at the newspaper descriptions of himself as the Indian Edison.
The name of Abdul Rashid was synonymous not only with some of the greatest inventions of modern times, but also with the giant fortune he had accumulated in exploiting them.
For Rashid was no fool where the business end of his affairs was concerned. He had read the cases of the score of other investors, the pathetic fools of genius who had worked out their lives in poverty while the overfed paunches of Big Business waxed fatter and fatter on the golden children of their fool brains. and Dain being something of the he-hawk, had set about his own business with an indifference to big Business that amounted to cold contempt. very methodically he proceeded to protect himself with patent rights in every part of the globe before putting a single invention on the market.
To be sure, Big Business made many attempts in the early days to get its grasping claws on his Inventions, but Big Business burned it’s fingers so thoroughly and so unexpectedly that it eventually that it eventually and very aggreivedly withdrew. it gave Dain up as a most unconscionable sort of an inventor.
It was Rashid’s pioneering work in connection with beet crushing plant that made the sugar industry a financially sound proposition in india. His perfected method of milling steel stamped his name on a million machines throughout the world. his new carding machine abolished three-fifths of the cotton wastage in the Lancashire mills. his entirely new principles embodied in an unbelievably ingenious box of intricacy made possible the sewing on off buttons by power, and incidentally eliminated a moiety of the pitifully sweated labour in the East end.
A part of himachal pradesh, harassed by the ever -growing mountains of quartz dust sweeping over the city sent for him and his investigations resulted in a formula for the after treatment of quartz waste which cut three Shillings a ton off the overhead costs of the Rand and stemmed the rising tide of dust.
And they were only a few of Rashid’s achievements. sitting back among his retorts and tubes, coldly exact in all he put his mind to, he invented a new bleach which was whiter than white dye. plumbers knew him as the man who had hardened iridium to such a degree that it could cut glass. aviators mentally blessed him as the man whose automatic stabilizers made flight almost fool proof and robbed night flying of ninety percent of its terrors.
That made the tally of Dain’s attainments, a solid, brilliant roll of honorable work done. Not bad for a man still standing on the threshold if the thirties.