y
country home a treacherous servant would receive postal orders to his or
her great delight, but the news she or he had sent in their malice, a
tit-bit concerning some poor erring woman or some foolish man, would
never see the light of day, and the contributor might look in vain for
the spicy paragraph which had been composed with such labour.

The unfortunate subjects of domestic treachery would receive in a day or
two a letter from the mysterious Montague Fallock, retailing, to their
horror, those precious secrets which they had imagined none knew but
themselves. They would not associate the gossipy little rag, which
sometimes found its way to the servants' hall, with the magnificent
demand of this prince of blackmailers, and more often than not they
would pay to the utmost of their ability to avoid exposure.

It was not only the servants' hall which supplied Montague Fallock with
all the material for his dastardly work. There were men scarcely
deserving the name, and women lost to all sense of honour, who found in
this little journal means by which they could "come back" at those
favoured people who had offered them directly or indirectly some slight
offence. Sometimes the communication would reach the _Gossip_
anonymously, but if the facts retailed were sufficiently promising, one
of Fallock's investigators would be told off to discover how much truth
there was in it. A bland letter would follow, and the wretched victim
would emerge from the transaction the poorer in pocket and often in
health.

For this remorseless and ruthless man destroyed more than fortunes; he
trafficked in human lives. There had been half a dozen mysterious
suicides which had been investigated by Scotland Yard, and found
directly traceable to letters received in the morning, and burnt by the
despairing victim before his untimely and violent departure from life.

The office of the paper was situated at the top of a building in Fleet
Street; one back room comprised the whole of its editorial space, and
one dour man its entire staff. It was his duty to receive the
correspondence as it came and to convey it to the cloakroom of a London
station. An hour later it would be called for by a messenger and
transferred to another cloakroom. Eventually it would arrive in the
possession of the man who was responsible for the contents of the paper.
Many of these letters contained contributions in the ordinary way of
business, a story or two contributed