He had some difficulty in recognizing Detective Caldew as the village urchin of a score of years before who had touched his cap to the moat-house butler as a great personage, second only in importance to Sir Philip Heredith himself.
Tufnell was not aware that in the former village boy who had become a London detective he was in the presence of a young man of soaring ambition.

Caldew had gone to London fifteen years before with the idea of bettering himself.

After tramping the streets of the metropolis for some months in a vain quest for work, he had enlisted in the metropolitan police force rather than return to his native village and report himself a failure.

At the end of two years' service as a policeman he had been given the choice of transfer to the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard.

He had gladly accepted the opportunity, and had shown so much aptitude for plain-clothes work that by the end of another two years he had risen to the rank of detective.
Caldew thought he was on the rapid road to further promotion, and had married on the strength of that belief.