Mystery Villa, page 5
He was half-way along the drive to the front door now, and lie paused, almost inclined to walk away and trouble his head no more about what was neither business of his nor police business. Why, the old lady herself, Miss Barton, if that was her name, had been spoken to by one of the constables on the beat the very evening Bobby had seen Con Conway, and everything had apparently been all right. Besides, if he knocked, most likely he would get no reply, and his excuse for calling was pretty thin. Until recently, at any rate, few callers had got any reply at all – of that there was the evidence not only of Wild’s story, but also of the spider’s web Bobby himself had noticed spun across the front door to prove how long must have elapsed since it had been opened. Of course, that might be different now the girl was there he and Wild had seen. It was to be hoped she was looking after things, and had perhaps already been able to persuade the old lady to come away with her and live somewhere else in a more normal and natural manner. Apparently there was some money somewhere, though, for that matter, even a workhouse infirmary would be better than such an existence as had been led so long in Tudor Lodge.
Bobby was, in fact, turning away, having made up his mind there was nothing he could do, when round the corner of the house there came quickly, almost running indeed, the figure of a tall man in shirt-sleeves, carrying a basket on one arm. He did not see Bobby at first, for the young sergeant was hidden in the dark shadows the trees before the house cast now that night was falling, and when Bobby stepped forward to speak to him he gave a low, strangled cry of fear, and leaped wildly backward as though he meant to take to instant flight.
‘What’s the matter?’ Bobby demanded.
Flight was, in fact, not possible, for Bobby blocked the only way, save that back to the closed house and the impenetrable wilderness that once had been a garden. As though he recognised this, the stranger paused, and turned, facing Bobby.
’I didn’t see you; you gave me a start,’ he said, in a voice oddly high-pitched and none too steady. ‘I was leaving Miss Barton’s groceries – this place always gives me the creeps, scares me somehow, and then, when you jumped out on me like that–’
He left the sentence unfinished, and taking out a very dirty handkerchief began to mop his forehead. What with the gathering darkness of the night, the heavy clouds that were coming up, the shadows cast by house and tree, Bobby could not see him very plainly, but could make out that he was tall – quite as tall as Bobby himself, or even taller for that matter – with strongly marked features, and a specially prominent nose, on which he now blew a resounding peal. Beneath it he wore a heavy, dark moustache, a noticeable feature in this clean-shaven age, and his height and his nose, and a trick he appeared to have of actually looking down it at the person he was speaking to, reminded Bobby of the indignant housewife’s complaint about the ‘airs’ Mr Humphreys’ new assistant gave himself. Rather an unfortunate trick of manner in a small suburban grocer’s assistant, Bobby thought, and one that possibly accounted for the difficulty he must have had in finding employment before accepting the terms, conditions, and wages Humphreys most likely offered. Bobby said aloud:
‘Are you from Mr Humphreys?’
‘Yes, Battenberg Prospect – where you turn into the road,’ the other answered; and then, as if beginning to resent these questions, ‘You live here? We always thought the old girl was all alone.’
‘No, I don’t live here,’ Bobby answered. He put a hand on the other’s basket and looked inside. It was empty, except for a pair of new leather gardening gloves, bright yellow in hue. ‘Have you been leaving her things for Miss Barton?’ he asked.
‘Same as usual,’ the other answered. ‘Them gloves is for another customer. Only, what’s it got to do with you?’
‘What made you so startled when I spoke to you?’ Bobby asked, ignoring this.
‘Why, the way you jumped out at me; what do you think? And this house, too, gets on your nerves; you never know what mayn’t be going on. Like an old witch, she is.’ He paused, and gave an uneasy unnatural laugh. ‘Nerves,’ he repeated, ‘that’s all – and then you jumping out of the shadows there... what were you doing, anyhow, if it comes to that?’
‘I’m a police officer,’ Bobby explained, ‘and we aren’t easy about the way Miss Barton lives – an accident might easily happen.’
‘Well, it’s her affair, isn’t it?’ the other retorted. ‘She’s all right, isn’t she? Nothing for anyone to worry about; she’s doing no one any harm – except giving you the creeps. Scares me, I know, every time I go near the blessed place.’ He turned and looked up at the house. ‘There she is now, watching us,’ he said. ‘You can talk to her about it, if you like – that is, if she’ll come to the door. Mr Humphreys says she never answers anyone.’
‘Where is she?’ Bobby asked. ‘I don’t see her.’
‘She’s gone now,’ the other answered. ‘She was at that window, up there, that’s half open, peeping out – at least, I thought I saw her there; perhaps it was only a shadow or something. I don’t see it’s any business of anyone else’s how she chooses to live. She troubles nobody, and nobody is likely to trouble her – an old woman like her hardly able to keep body and soul together, and everything in the house gone to wrack and ruin through neglect.’
‘Have you ever seen her? ’ Bobby asked.
‘Only a glimpse, once or twice, dodging behind the windows. I always knock when I leave her order, but she never answers. Perhaps she will now, if you try; but it isn’t likely – not a bit likely.’
He nodded and walked on, swinging his nearly empty basket on his arm, and from a loud-speaker, posted at an open window near so that all the street might hear, burst suddenly the first strains of a new opera, by a well-known woman composer, that the B.B.G. was broadcasting, and that Bobby now remembered he had intended to listen to himself.
Sounded jolly good, he thought, as he walked on towards the house. He looked into the outbuilding by the side door, and found there the meagre provision of a loaf of bread, a little tea, and a tin of condensed milk that composed, apparently, Miss Barton’s customary order. For a little time he waited, half hoping Miss Barton would appear to take in her supplies. It would be an opportunity to see. her, he thought, and perhaps to talk to her and gain her confidence. But she did not seem inclined to show herself, and after a time Bobby walked away to the strains of the new opera the loud-speaker at the open window was reproducing to all the neighbourhood.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Obsession
When Bobby woke next morning he was much annoyed to find he had been dreaming of Tudor Lodge and of that strange miasma of terror that seemed to hang about it, so that therefrom the ex-convict, Con Conway, had fled in panic, therein the young, unknown girl had seemed on the verge of swooning in horror, where even the grocer’s assistant pursuing his homely task of delivering bread and tea and tinned milk had not escaped the general fear.
That there must be some cause and reason for it Bobby was well persuaded, and yet what that cause could be he entirely failed even to imagine, or why none of those experiencing it seemed to wish to speak of it or to ask for help; or, indeed, why a house so seldom visited that spiders span webs across its door should seem now to have become the centre of so much animation.
Bobby had at the moment fully enough office work to keep him busy, for the present job was reading anonymous letters. A sensational child murder had been committed in the Notting Hill district, and, though Bobby had not been employed in the actual investigation, he had been detailed for the task of examining anonymous letters about the case, of which so many had been sent to Scotland Yard that an old sugar crate had been brought up from the canteen for their reception.
The task was one which was at the same time extraordinarily tedious, extraordinarily dull, and extraordinarily important, for while many of the letters were from obvious lunatics, and most of the rest from mere busybodies, still, each one had to be read over with extreme attention and care, since there was always the possibility that, amidst all these bushels of chaff, a really valuable grain of information might lie concealed, while, if any such piece of information were missed, the whole, not only of the success of the investigation, but also of the reputation of all Scotland Yard, might be compromised. Little mercy Press or public would show if it ever became known that some information had been sent to Scotland Yard and had been overlooked or neglected. Small allowance would be made for all the thousands of useless letters sent in, small thought for the difficulty of distinguishing the true in the midst of such a welter of rubbish. Bobby realised well enough how much hung upon his missing nothing, and to every fresh ill-spelt, ill-written, often almost illegible, communication he knew he had to come with fresh and keen attention. Even those letters chiefly concerned with expressing the writer’s firm belief that the police were certainly incompetent, and probably corrupt, had to be read with the same concentrated care, since there was always the chance that in the midst of the spate of more or less ignorant and ill-informed criticism some useful hint might show itself.
Before Bobby were two trays in which he put any letters he thought worthy of further attention. The first tray, as yet empty, was for those he considered deserved the direct and immediate attention of Superintendent Mitchell himself. The second tray was for letters containing suggestions that seemed worth acting on, or facts worth following up. So far this tray held five letters.
Behind Bobby was another old capacious sugar crate, also requisitioned from the canteen. Into this he dropped in bundles, neatly tied and docketed, those letters that seemed to him purely incoherent, trivial, malicious, or frankly insane. This was nearly full now, and there were times when Bobby, strong man as he was, nearly broke down and wept aloud with sheer boredom of the job.
When lunch-time came, with its promise of happy release for a while, he begged permission to take an extra hour or two, so that he might get a little exercise and fresh air.
‘A ten-mile walk is what I want,’ he confided to one of the other men. ‘Those letters will give me a nervous breakdown if I go on with them much longer without a change and the chance to walk ’em off a bit in the open air.’
He would make up for it, he explained, when he got back, and he thought he could promise that, even if he did extend his lunch hour, he would be able to finish not only with the letters in hand, but also with the further shoals to be expected by the later posts, before midnight, and have his report ready, together with those letters he thought worth further consideration, for submission first thing next morning, which was all that was necessary. On this understanding, therefore, he was given permission to take as much time as he liked for his lunch; and like a dog let loose from its chain, or a schoolboy released from lessons, he shot off – at a good six miles an hour, honest toe-to-heel walking.
‘’Ere’s a bloke what’s after the Brighton record,’ one cheeky youngster called after him, and indeed, but for the fear of attracting attention, Bobby would have been not walking at all, but running at top speed, so glad was he to be out in the open, exerting his muscles cramped by so long sitting at his desk, so glad to be able to relieve his eyes from the strain of poring over so many half-illegible scripts.
Almost unconsciously his legs bore him away towards the Brush Hill district that had been so long in his thoughts, and when, presently, he woke up to the direction he had been taking, he put on a little extra speed till finally he arrived once more in Windsor Crescent, his body in a pleasant glow with the exercise, his muscles satisfactorily stretched, his mind blown clear of all the cobwebs his morning’s work had spun therein.
Opposite Tudor Lodge he came to a halt, and, leaning on the gate, he lighted a cigarette and began to smoke it. Everything seemed just the same – a few more scraps of paper blown in by the wind perhaps, another empty tin or two lying about, but nothing more than that. He noticed that the window the football had smashed had not yet been mended. When he had finished his cigarette he decided it was time to get back to that awful treadmill of the anonymous letters, but first, he thought, he would stroll up the drive and back, keeping the while a cautious eye on the front door he more than half expected to see suddenly open to allow egress to some entirely new and still more panic-stricken personage. He noticed that the persevering spider whose work these recent comings and goings had destroyed had now respun its web across the door.
‘Might be misleading, in some cases,’ Bobby told himself. ‘Easy to think a web like that has been in position much longer than it has in reality.’
In spite of his expectation the door remained closed, no fresh terror-stricken fugitive made any new appearance, and Bobby was in the act of turning away when some impulse he hardly understood, but that was, in fact, a proof of the extraordinary fascination the place exercised upon him, made him go to the door and knock.
There was no answer. He knocked again, and yet once more, and still there came no reply.
It might have been a house of the dead for all the answer that he got.
He could not help feeling a little disappointed. What he had expected he hardly knew, but certainly some development of some kind or another, not this blank unbroken silence.
‘A house of the dead, it might be,’ he muttered half aloud, as he turned away after a final, and again unanswered, hammering with the knocker.
Then he reflected that perhaps it was just as well no one had answered his summons, as he would have a difficulty in explaining what he wanted. He supposed he would have had to say he was selling vacuum cleaners or something of the sort. And then, after all, for many years past apparently, every knock upon that closed door had been ignored, just as his had been.
But he felt the thing was getting an obsession with him and he must stop thinking about it, and in this wise resolution he was confirmed when he observed a neighbour at a window of the house next door watching him with great interest and attention. Very likely she had seen him before in the company of Sergeant Wild, and would guess, therefore, that he was connected with the police. Only the good Lord knew what trail of gossip might now be started.
The last time, Bobby told himself with emphasis, Tudor Lodge was going to see him, or very likely some complaint would be coming in about police interference and spying.
So far as he was concerned the thing was done with. People might go running in and out of the house in all the stages of panic and terror they liked. It was no affair of his, Bobby repeated in his thoughts, and he wasn’t going to run the risk of being asked by his superiors why he had been poking in his nose where it had no official business, and if there wasn’t trouble enough in the world already for a harassed C.I.D. without going looking for more? So, turning his back resolutely on Tudor Lodge and its unsolved problems, off he went at his best pace, without once looking back, but well aware all the time of the neighbour’s eyes following him with intense and eager interest till he was out of sight. ‘
As he had been rather longer away than he had intended, he took a bus back to the Yard. He was entering the building when he saw his chief, Superintendent Mitchell, approaching, and stood aside to allow him to enter first.
‘Ah, Owen,’ Mitchell said pleasantly. ‘Nice weather we’re having... I thought it looked a bit like rain though, so I brought my new umbrella along.’
As he spoke he swung forward, carelessly, an umbrella he was carrying; an expensive, brand-new, gold-mounted, silk umbrella that, with eyes fairly popping out of his head, Bobby recognised as his own – the one he had last seen when he had also last seen Con Conway.
‘Ah,’ said Mitchell, ‘admiring my new umbrella, I see – not bad, is it?’
Bobby, quite unable to speak, gurgled some inarticulate response.
‘You’re wondering,’ observed Mitchell, in his most thoughtful tones, ‘how, in these days of cuts and income-tax and breakfast bacon costing the eyes out of your head, a poor devil of an overworked underpaid super can afford a swell umbrella like this?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Bobby faintly.
‘Of course, really,’ explained Mitchell, ‘it’s to impress the Home Secretary next time there’s a conference. Gold-mounted, best silk cover,’ Mitchell pointed out appreciatively. ‘Why, I haven’t felt such a swell since I went courting... gives a man a leg up to be seen in the company of an umbrella like that.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Bobby, eyeing longingly his lost treasure, as Mitchell, with a friendly nod, passed on.
But then the Superintendent turned back.
‘After all,’ he said, ‘I don’t much think it’ll rain to-day, so you can keep it for me for the present, will you? I’ll let you know when I want it again; next time I’m going to Buckingham Palace probably – and,’ added Mitchell, ‘take a tip from me. Next time a chap like Con Conway tries to touch you, watch out. Walking pensions some of his sort would make us, if we let them. I should like to see, Mitchell went on, with a grim smile, ‘any of them trying to get anything out of me, or Con Conway trying to touch me for two bob for bed and breakfast with a yarn about sleeping on the Embankment when he has a comfortable room of his own down Brixton way, and as likely as not something still left in the bank from the last job he did. There, take your umbrella, my lad; and remember, in our work it doesn’t do to be soft with men like Con Conway. Let you down, they do, nine times out of ten, or a lot oftener than that.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Young Man
Fortunately the spate of letters, anonymous and other, in the Notting Hill case had begun to abate, the later posts that day brought in a bare score of them, and Bobby, in spite of his lunch-time excursion, was able to get finished in quite reasonable time.
