"Was it Dr. Randall?"
Directly he asked the question I knew that it was the doctor's face which had been there.
"The subtle personality, Wigan."
"When did you guess?"
"I didn't guess—I didn't think it possible. Bates' disbelief in the supernatural made me a little suspicious, but I didn't think it possible. To-night—that ape—the whole plot—I could only think of Randall. There was no one else."
We left the house at once, both of us in an excited state.
The constable I had on special duty soon had several others with him, and before dawn No. 5 Manleigh Road was raided.
It was only a garbled statement which got into the papers, and probably the whole truth will never be known; but I gradually gathered the main facts, partly from the doctor's confederates, partly from some of his victims.
Dr. Randall, posing as a nerve specialist, and fully qualified to do so, had lived a double life. As a doctor he was respected and was fairly successful; as the head and organizer of a small army of miscreants he had been eminent for years.
Under the guise of a respectable boarding-house, No. 5 had been used as the headquarters of the gang, and the operations had been so widespread, so all-embracing in the field of crime, that after the raid many mysteries which the police had failed to unravel were credited to Randall. Many of these he could have had nothing to do with, but he had quite enough to answer for. He seems to have exercised a kind of terrorism over his subordinates, or he would surely have been betrayed before.