had been found. He admitted then that he had found it, but had been afraid to take it. He agreed that possibly it might have been the automatic which had struck him.
Gore looked along the line of sentinels. ‘Anything occur to you, Clutsam? I mean, from the fact that these things are all along one dead straight line—from this dew pond to where that farthest man is. Let’s just see where Bath lies from here.’
One of the motorcyclists produced a map; Gore himself produced a pocket compass. A very brief inspection revealed the fact that the line of sentinels ran dead for the point where, invisible and thirty miles away to north-west, Bath lay among its hills. ‘By Jing!’ muttered Clutsam.
Gore turned about to face south-east again. ‘Well, now,’ he smiled, ‘all we have to do is to go along our line until we come to Ruddell.’
The vast emptiness of the landscape chilled Clutsam’s hope.
‘Hell!’ he murmured.
‘Well,’ demanded Gore, ‘if you can find me in England a likelier place for a stunt of this sort, we’ll go there. Of course, Ruddell’s your bird, my dear fellow.’
‘Well, we’ll go on—for a bit,’ agreed Clutsam at last.
The party spread out and advanced in parallel, with occasional halts to verify the line of march. The sun went down in a final crash of gold and scarlet, the landscape greyed; a chill little wind whispered of the coming night. The men began to mutter. Were they going to walk to Salisbury? As the miles crept up, even Gore himself began to think of a dinner that wouldn’t happen.
But the end of the quest came with startling suddenness. Abruptly, from behind one of those rings of beeches that studded the desolation blackly, an aeroplane shot up, wheeled, and came rushing towards them. Twice it circled above their heads, then fled away to north-west, along the line by which they had come.
‘Well, we shan’t find Mr Thornton,’ commented Gore. ‘Perhaps not Ruddell. All the same, I should like to see if there’s anything in that clump of beeches.’
They pushed on for a last mile and passed into the gloomy shadow of the trees. In there was an abandoned farm, silent and desolate. But in its living room they found the remains of a recent picnic meant for four people. And in a padlocked cellar of extremely disagreeable dampness and darkness they found Chief Inspector Ruddell, handcuffed and flat on his back on the slimy floor to which he was securely pinned down. Above his head a water butt stood on trestles, and from its spigot, at intervals of thirty seconds or so, a drop fell upon his forehead. For the greater part of three days and two nights that drop had fallen in precisely the same spot—between the victim’s eyes. Ruddell was a man of iron nerve, but he was rambling a bit already.
Day was breaking when Gore deposited Inspector Clutsam outside his house at Balham. He waited until the big, burly man came hastening down the narrow little strip of garden again.
‘Good news, Colonel,’ he said. ‘The kid’s got through the night. They say he’ll pull through now. I won’t forget this. It’ll be a big thing for me.’
‘Good,’ smiled Gore. ‘But don’t forget the little things. You never know …’
Whatever it proved for Inspector Clutsam, the Yard maintained a modest silence concerning the affair. But Lady Isaacson was quite frank about it in a little chat which she had with Gore next day. In their anxiety to identify her male companion in the night of the smash (they suspected that he had been the driver of the car), Ruddell and Clutsam had undoubtedly overdone their repeated examinations of the lady, who had determined to ‘get some of her own back’. Thornton, a well-known flying man and, as Gore suspected, the hero of the ‘smash up’, arranged the plan and enlisted the necessary aides, three reckless airmen. An imitation necklace was procured and a vacant office opposite Thornton’s taken; a bogus robbery of the real necklace was actually carried out, leaving careful clues as bait for the police. The next step was to enlist Messrs Gore and Tolley as stool pigeons, and get Ruddell to their offices at a known hour. At three o’clock on the Monday afternoon the lift had been put out of action, Ruddell was in Gore’s office, and everything was ready.
As he went down the stairs, Ruddell had been met on the third floor by a young man who, under the pretence of having some information to give him, had persuaded him to enter ‘Welder’s’ offices. There, in an inner room, the fake necklace had been produced and had completely deceived the Chief Inspector. While he was examining it, Thornton and his fellow conspirators had entered the outer room. As Ruddell came out, they caught him neatly with a noosed rope, gagged him, and handcuffed him—not without a severe struggle, despite the odds—and, when the building was quiet, had lowered him in a sack to the Yard, and quite simply carted him off to Bath. There he had been transferred to a big passenger plane and carried off a little before midnight to the lonely old farm on Salisbury Plain which had been rented for the ‘stunt’.
The mysterious windfalls were simply accounted for. Above the Plain Thornton had had the pleasant idea of slinging the unfortunate Chief Inspector over the side of the plane by his waist and legs. In due course Ruddell’s pockets had emptied themselves of their heavier contents, while the rope holding one leg had slipped and had pulled off one of his boots.
It had not been intended to carry the torture of the dripping drop to any serious point. The prisoner had been visited twice a day and was to have been released on the Friday. Lady Isaacson, who had made a personal inspection of her victim, was quite satisfied that she had got more than her own back in return for her ruffled self-respect.
‘I’ll say this for the brute,’ she laughed, ‘he never squealed from start to finish. Look here, what put you on to us?’
Gore rose, smiling, to finish the interview.
‘Oh, one or two little things,’ he said.
‘Lynn Brock’ was one of several pseudonyms used by the Irish writer, Alister McAlister (1877–1943). Born in Dublin, McAlister was educated at Clongowes College, a Jesuit school in County Kildare once attended by James Joyce. After school he gained a scholarship to the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin and on graduating in 1899 with a First in Ancient Classics, he set about becoming a playwright while working as a clerk at his alma mater. Although McAlister had some success with short stories, his first three playscripts were rejected—one by W. B. Yeats—but perseverance paid off and his first play was presented—as by ‘Henry Alexander’—on 12 May 1905 by Edward Compton’s Comedy Company. A one act comedy, The Desperate Lover is set in a bookshop in the eighteenth century, and its original cast included Compton’s son Montague, later to become rather better known as the novelist Compton Mackenzie.
McAlister was nothing if not bold. After seeing the actor-manager Lena Ashwell perform in London, he sent her The Desperate Lover suggesting she might like to present it. Ashwell was impressed and commissioned a second play from him—the result, a three-act melodrama called Irene Wycherley, opened in 1907 at the Kingsway Theatre in London with Ashwell in the title role. The ‘horribly grim but splendidly acted’ play, credited to ‘Anthony P. Wharton’, was a huge success, even more so when it toured the following year with the celebrated actress Mrs Patrick Campbell in the lead, and the Irish Independent hailed Wharton as ‘a brilliant fellow, a person of intellect, a writer of promise’.
McAlister’s next play was A Nocturne, staged in 1908 as one of a quartet of one-act plays,
