by Tony Medawar
Inspector Clutsam was not a nervous man, but he was, for many reasons, glad when the big Bentley deposited him in Bath two and a half hours later. They failed to see Mr Thornton; he was ‘up’, it seemed, testing a bus. It was not known when he would come down.
But they saw Mr William Blandy—not at the Infirmary, which he had left that morning, but at a police station behind Milsom Street, where the arrival of the celebrated Inspector Clutsam created a feverish stir. Before they saw William Blandy, who had been brought in on a charge of drunkenness, they saw the necklace—a quite first-rate bit of fake.
‘No pains spared,’ Gore commented. ‘Sixty-four diamonds, three emeralds, and twelve small diamonds in a clasp of Egyptian design—’
Blandy was produced—a haggard, depressed old down-and-out, still stupid with beer, which had made him peevish. The pupil of one bloodshot eye was still distended with atropine; he had torn off the plaster from an ugly cut on his forehead, which was still oozing blood. His story was that on Monday morning he had set out from Salisbury for Westbury and Bath, that he had lost his way trying to make a short cut across the Plain, and had ultimately lain down to sleep somewhere or other—he had no clear idea where, save that next day he had walked for two hours before reaching Westbury. He had been sound asleep when he had been struck by a mysterious missile which had rendered him unconscious. When daylight had come he had awakened, still sick and dizzy, and had found the wash-leather bag lying beside him. There had been no road near the spot, no house in view—as he himself expressed it, ‘no blinking nuffin’.’ His eye had been very painful, and his forehead had bled a lot, but he had contrived to walk to Bath. He was very indignant over his arrest, which he denounced as part of the plan of the police to deprive him of his reward. Nothing could shake his belief that the necklace was the genuine thing.
‘Quite sure,’ Gore asked, ‘that that ugly big cut on your forehead was made by this thick, soft, wash-leather bag?’
‘Sure? Of course I’m sure.’
Gore turned to the station sergeant. ‘Found anything else on him, Sergeant?’
In deference to Inspector Clutsam, the sergeant apologised profusely. The man had only been brought in an hour before. He fell upon the unfortunate Blandy at once, and, to his considerable surprise, extracted from various parts of his dingy person the sum of nine pounds odd in notes and silver, together with an expensive fountain pen. Blandy refused to say how he had come by this wealth.
‘That’s a very smart boot you’ve got on your right foot, my man,’ said Gore. ‘Let’s have a look at it. Don’t be coy.’
The prisoner’s footwear made certainly the oddest of pairs. His left boot was a shapeless, split, down-at-heel old ruin, and presented the appearance of having been dipped in whitewash the day before. The right boot was a dapper, sharp-toed, even foppish, affair of excellent quality, still presenting, beneath its dust, evidences of recent polishing.
‘Now, it’s a curious thing, Clutsam,’ mused Gore, ‘but I recall distinctly that Ruddell was wearing an extremely doggy pair of boots on Monday afternoon. I wonder if by any chance—’
Clutsam had the boot off and examined it with bristling ruff. Then he fell upon the luckless Blandy with a ferocity which suddenly sobered that unlucky finder of windfalls. He admitted that he had found the boot, close to where he had found the bag—about a hundred yards away. He had also found the nine pounds odd and the fountain pen in a pocket wallet. He had thrown away the wallet and his old right boot. He was placed forthwith in Gore’s car, which, followed by another containing a posse of uniformed searchers and two plain-clothes men on motor-cycles, made a bee-line for the high escarpments which rise against the sky to the south of Westbury, climbed them by a vile cart-track, which ended at the top, and came to a pause with the vast, flatly-heaving expanse of Salisbury Plain stretching away miles and miles to blue, daunting horizons.
The task of finding Mr Blandy’s sleeping-place appeared, in face of that vast, bare expanse, rising and falling endlessly with the monotony of the sea, almost hopeless. The man had clearly the vaguest recollection of the route by which he had reached that point—the last point of which he was even tolerably certain. The cortège remained motionless, gazing dubiously at the dismaying scenery.
But fortunately another little thing presented itself for Gore’s attention.
‘That left boot of yours has been in wet chalk,’ he said. ‘There’s been no rain for a fortnight. How did you manage it?’
‘I got in some water, looking about,’ Blandy replied, surlily.
Gore stopped his engine.
‘He came along this track, he thinks, Clutsam. Well—there’s only one kind of water on Salisbury Plain. We’ve got to find a dew pond with an old boot and a wallet near it. If you multiply twenty by twenty-five you’ll get the size of Salisbury Plain in square miles. I’m afraid you won’t get back to town by six, Inspector.’
They placed Blandy upon the track—little more than a sheep-track—and urged him forward. For nearly two miles he drifted slowly southwards, followed by his escort. But track crossed track; he went down into long, twisting valleys, and toiled up over long, baffling slopes, and became visibly more and more doubtful. At length he halted, completely lost. They left him at that point in charge of a man, and spread out to look for dew ponds.
It was just seven o’clock when an excited motor-cyclist rounded up the part with the tidings that Blandy’s discarded boot had been found, as Gore had predicted, close to a large dew pond, about four miles south-east of the point at which they had debouched on to the Plain. Hurried concentration produced, after some time, some further finds—Chief Inspector Ruddell’s wallet, a bunch of keys, a small automatic pistol with an empty magazine, one of Messrs Collins’ pocket novels, and a silk handkerchief marked with the initials W.R.
At Gore’s suggestion these articles were left where they were found, spaced out at varying intervals over a distance of nearly a mile, and marked by sentinels. Blandy was moved up to point out the exact spot where he had slept, and indicated the gorse bush in which the automatic 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
‘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, and it was followed in 1912 by a ‘most delightful comedy’, At the Barn, starring the celebrated singer Marie Tempest. At the Barn was also a success and in 1921 a cinema adaptation appeared under the title Two Weeks. However, his next play—Sylvia Greer—was a flop, which McAlister appears to have anticipated because he did not allow his name to appear in any advertisements or even outside the theatre. In 1913 there was a brief run of a one-act thriller, 13 Simon Street, and in 1915 A Guardian Angel and Benvenuto Cellini.
By this time McAlister was serving in France with the Motor Machine Gun Service of the British Army. He was wounded twice and in 1916, while he was lying in a Dublin hospital, his next play, inspired by the Maybrick case, was staged; the script of The Riddle was co-credited to another writer, Morley Roberts, although he had done little more than edit McAlister’s original script. The production had a strong cast—including the playwright Dion Boucicault as a Machiavellian barrister and, as a woman once accused of murder, the great Irene Vanbrugh. The notices were good but McAlister was unhappy with Roberts’ changes and, around a year later, the play was re-staged in Dublin in its original form, this time credited solely to ‘Anthony P. Wharton’ and with the original title, The Ledbetter Case. McAlister must have been very disappointed that this—the original version of his play—was less well received than The Riddle.
Although Irene Wycherley and other plays continued to be staged, McAlister’s reputation as a playwright was beginning to fade. He therefore began writing fiction again, with short stories appearing in Pearson’s Magazine and the Empire Review. His first novel, Joan of Overbarrow (1921) was a comedic romance—‘If I had to choose between marrying you and dying in a pigsty, I should prefer to die in a pigsty’. Later books were more serious. The Man on the Hill (1923) anticipates the General Strike of 1926 while Be Good, Sweet Maid (1924) is a viciously misogynistic study of a woman novelist. In a lighter vein, Evil Communications (1926) is a series of sketches providing ‘a rollicking study of village life’, and The Two of Diamonds (1926) is a historical romance set in Second Empire France.
In the 1920s, crime fiction was very much considered a lesser branch of literature and for his first mystery, McAlister—then working as a publican in Surrey—adopted a new pseudonym, ‘Lynn Brock’. His first Brock novel, The Deductions of Colonel Gore (1924), introduced Wickham Gore, a retired soldier turned explorer who returns from Africa to discover blackmail and murder among his friends. In an overcrowded market, Colonel Gore was an immediate success. His first case was followed up by a golfing my
stery, Colonel Gore’s Second Case (1925), and the extraordinary Colonel Gore’s Third Case: The Kink (1925). Over the next twenty years, McAlister produced four more Colonel Gore books including The Mendip Mystery (1929), its sequel QED (1930) and the multiple murder mystery The Stoat (1940). The Lynn Brock name also appeared on some standalone novels, perhaps the best known being the revenge thriller Nightmare (1932).
At heart McAlister was always a playwright, and he wrote two final plays, presented as by Lynn Brock: in 1929 a farce called Needles and Pins, which received poor reviews; and in 1931, an adaptation of The Mendip Mystery.
One of only two uncollected short stories to feature Colonel Gore, ‘Some Little Things’ was first published in the Radio Times on 21 December 1928. I am grateful to the bookseller and archivist Jamie Sturgeon for drawing it to my attention.
HOT STEEL
Anthony Berkeley
‘’Itler wouldn’t ’arf give something for a sight of what you’re lookin’ at now,’ bawled the little foreman.
Amid the deafening din of a huge munition works, Roger Sheringham could hardly hear the words. He grinned amiably and nodded, saving his larynx.
‘Come and see what this lot’s doin’,’ invited the foreman.
Roger looked round for his host, saw that he had not re-appeared, and followed his deputy towards a little group of half-naked men who were wiping the sweat off their foreheads with the air of something accomplished.
Some kind of a lull in the general din made conversation possible, and Roger learned that they had been forging the barrel of a six-inch gun. He said the appropriate things.
‘And I expect Hitler would give something for the sight of that, too,’ he added with a smile.
