Bodies from the Library 3. Группа авторов

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