Mystery Villa, page 8
He made no effort to approach the trunk again, but, with a quick movement, Bobby crossed the room to it and flung back its lid.
Within, he saw the crouched, the shrivelled, the almost mummified figure of a man, huddled there in a ghastly similitude of life, and yet in some way proclaiming, too, that here death had brooded for years in terrible concealment.
Bewildered and shaken, almost disbelieving his eyes that showed him what so incredibly was there, Bobby stood in silence, gazing down at the motionless body, and trying to collect his thoughts the abrupt horror of this discovery had scattered for the moment. The body was fully clothed, and seemed, as far as could be judged from those shrivelled, sunken features, to have been that of a young and goodlooking man. Peeping over Bobby’s shoulder, Wild said, in a whisper:
‘Look at his head; the top of his head.’
Bobby nodded. Already he had seen and noted the small, round hole there that told where a bullet, fired apparently directly from above, as by someone crouching in a tree or leaning over stairs, had penetrated downwards through the skull, through the brain. Wild spoke again:
‘Did the old woman know? She must have known. Why did she never tell?’
‘She must have known. How could she not have known?’ Bobby said, and the same thought and picture came into both their minds – of that strange old woman passing in this narrow room from youth to age in an existence that had before seemed bizarre and pitiable enough, but now had taken on an aspect of almost unbelievable horror.
‘She must have known,’ Bobby repeated. ‘Think of it, living alone for forty or fifty years with – with That.’
‘Where is she? What’s become of her?’ Wild said, looking all around as if expecting to perceive her now in some equally strange, incredible hiding-place.
‘We must report at once,’ Bobby said.
‘What’s it been?’ Wild asked. ‘Suicide, accident... murder?’
‘I never heard of a man shooting himself down through the top of his head like that,’ Bobby said slowly. ‘Besides, that shot was fired from some distance. If it was only accident, why was the body hidden? It looks to me like murder – murder long ago.’
‘There’s that wedding feast downstairs no one ever came to,’ Wild said slowly. ‘Seems to me perhaps this accounts for that... I thought at first it meant the man had funked it at the last moment, as they do at times, and let the girl down, but now –’ He made a gesture with his hand towards the shrivelled body in the trunk. ‘Is that the man?’ he asked. ‘Is that why he never came to his wedding?’
‘It looks as if it might be that,’ Bobby agreed. ‘Perhaps there was a quarrel, or she found out something... perhaps, then, she hid the body in that trunk she may have bought for the honeymoon tour, and dressed for her wedding and waited, while the guests all came and wondered why he didn’t, and said how cruel it was to treat a girl like that, and then one by one they went – and left her alone; alone with her trunk and – That.’
‘Eh, now, then,’ Wild muttered, ‘if it was like that, what a thing to happen; what a way to live.’
And they were both silent, trying in a kind of haze of incredulous amazement to realise that something of that nature must have been; to imagine the existence led all through the long and solitary years, for a full half-century, perhaps, by this woman in her lonely room, her sole companion the dreadful occupant of the Saratoga trunk. There she had lived with her appalling secret from the day when the wedding festivities had been made all ready till now when at last had come to light the secret of that murder of long ago.
‘It don’t bear thinking of,’ Wild said, at last. ‘Enough to drive you dotty... no wonder she went like she is. Where is she now, though?’
‘We must make sure she’s nowhere in the house,’ Bobby said; ‘and then, I suppose, we had better get along and report.’
‘Most likely she’s gone off with one of the parties you’ve seen here,’ Wild suggested. ‘Perhaps with the smart-looking girl that was here that other time. Can they have known, any of them? I can’t hardly believe, myself, that poor old thing could ever do such a thing. I saw her once – a little thin faded wisp of a woman you could have blown away as soon as look at.’
‘I daresay she wasn’t always like that,’ Bobby said. ‘I daresay, then, she was – different. It’s forty or fifty years ago, and in forty or fifty years...’
He left the sentence unfinished, his hot and lusty youth brought, as it were, for the first time face to face with the supreme mystery of time that slips by like a dream and yet bears all substantial things away.
‘That’s right,’ agreed Wild. ‘When you’re young, you’re different; and very likely she was too, same as you say. Can she have known we were coming, and bunked off because of that?’
‘How could she have known, when we didn’t know ourselves?’ Bobby asked. ‘Besides, she had nothing to do but show herself at the window and beckon us to go away. We had no real suspicions; no search warrant; no grounds for breaking in. She was safe enough so long as she stayed here; perhaps that’s why she did stay here.’
‘Well, she’s gone,’ said Wild. ‘What I’m wondering is, how the body’s gone like that, all shrivelled up and mummified, like it is. Can she have done anything to it?’
‘The doctors may be able to tell,’ Bobby remarked.
All this time he had been holding in his hand the pearl – or bead – they had found. He put it down now, carefully, on the mantelpiece — on a sheet of paper he tore from an old letter he had in his pocket.
‘I am wondering, if that comes in, where it comes in,’ he said; and then he went across to the satin shoe they had noticed lying on the floor, and looked at it closely again, and put it down beside the pearl – or bead. ‘And that – where does that come in?’ he said. ‘For it looks to me as though it had been worn.’
‘Most likely she just kept it out of sentiment, as you might say,’ Wild suggested. ‘I remember my old woman kept a piece of our wedding-cake for years, till our youngest but three found it and ate it, and, after that, the two of us had to stop up with her all night, her being green in the face and yelling so we almost thought she was going to peg out, same as all the neighbours hoped so they could get to sleep again.’
‘It does look as if it were part of the wedding dress,’ Bobby agreed. ‘Only, it looks as if it had been a good deal worn, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else of the sort lying about – no bridal veil or wreath, or even another shoe. You know, it’s just struck me, perhaps it’s that trunk scared Con Conway, if she ever opened it. If he climbed up to that window and was looking in, and she opened the thing, and he saw what was in it, it would give him a large-size scare.’
‘Why should Con be trying to break into a place like this?’ demanded Wild; ‘all dirt and damp and just one old woman living in it. Conway goes where the big stuff is.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Bobby agreed. ‘Only, there’s that,’ he added, nodding towards the pearl – or bead – he had placed on the mantelpiece. ‘If that’s what I think it is,’ he said, ‘and if there were more of the same sort in the old jewel-case someone’s been smashing open recently, or, for that matter, if Con Conway only thought so – well, he would be after the stuff quick enough.’
‘That’s right,’ Wild confessed. He went across to look at the bead – or pearl – again. ‘Looks a bit of all right,’ he said. ‘But one of our chaps – Turner, I think – saw the old party later that same night, and she seemed O.K., and didn’t say a word about having been robbed or anything.’
‘Conway may have come back again later on,’ Bobby suggested. ‘Or, if he had been too badly scared for that, he may have passed his story on to some pal or another. It’s just possible that’s what that girl was doing here – the one we saw, I mean. I’m sure there was someone else in the house at the time, in spite of what she said.’
‘She looked all right,’ Wild said doubtfully. ‘Of course, some of ’em do – some what’s mixed up with the Con Conway sort, I mean. Their stock-in-trade to look O.K.’
‘It’s only an idea,’ Bobby went on slowly, ‘but it’s possible someone after the pearls calculated it would be easier to win the old lady’s confidence and get admittance to the house by the help of a smart nice-looking girl. Only, then, what has that fellow with the pistol Mrs Rice says she saw got to do with it? And what’s become of Miss Barton herself? Has she gone into fresh hiding because she was afraid of her secret getting known? Or has she been taken away by friends, or what’s happened? We had better make sure she’s nowhere in the house, and then one of us can report while the other waits here in case she turns up – or someone else.’
‘We’ve looked everywhere already,’ Wild remarked. ‘Not in the attics,’ Bobby reminded him.
But when they ascended the stairs leading to the second and top floor, the dust that lay thickly everywhere, covering the landing like a fall of snow, and obviously undisturbed for many years, offered good proof no one recently had visited these upper portions of the house.
They went downstairs again, and Wild proceeded to report while Bobby waited, smoking a cigarette, till presently Mrs Rice, who from her accustomed post of observation at her window had been an interested spectator of as much, of all this as she could see, appeared and introduced herself. So Bobby was very polite and amiable, and thanked her warmly for the assistance she had been, and then proceeded, very gently, to see if she had any more information she could supply. All they knew at present, he explained, was that Miss Barton wasn’t in the house, and there was nothing to show what had become of her. Of the grisly discovery that had, in fact, been made, he said nothing as yet, for discretion is the first of all departmental virtues, but he explained that it was feared some accident might have happened, and enquiries would have to be made at the hospitals and elsewhere to see if she could be traced. He added that if Mrs Rice could tell, or had heard or seen anything likely to help in the quest, he hoped she would be sure to give full information of it at once.
So Mrs Rice explained, on her side, that she wasn’t one to interest herself in other folks’ business, and, if it was gossip Bobby wanted to hear, it was somewhere else he would have to go. This firmly established, and by Bobby fully and frankly accepted, Mrs Rice went on to admit that those who did like talking about their neighbours’ affairs talked a good deal about Miss Barton. It seemed there really was some vague story current in the neighbourhood about her having been crossed in love when she was a girl, though this story was but a feeble one, flickering, indeed, to extinction, since it seemed difficult to associate that flitting, ghost-like form with any tale of love, or to relate the sad, eccentric, solitary existence of the half-crazed old woman with any suggestion of youth and joy and passion. Impossible, indeed, most seemed to have found it to imagine her as ever young at all, yet, indeed, spring flowers for us all, though winter waits behind, and for Bobby there was evidence enough in the dreadful discovery they had made in the room above that strange and awful passion had once held sway in this old, sad, moth-eaten, mouse-ridden residence.
Mrs Rice, however, gave no hint that anyone had ever suspected Miss Barton of possessing any money, or of there being anything worth stealing in the house. None, indeed, of the stories about her seemed to have been of a nature likely to attract gentlemen of Con Conway’s profession.
Further talk revealed that Mrs Rice had observed and been much interested in the appearance of the girl who had on one occasion opened the door to Bobby and to Wild. Mrs Rice knew all about that, and, indeed, Bobby was soon convinced that not much that had happened during the last few days – or probably at any other time – in that neighbourhood had escaped her attention.
She had been a spectator, for instance, from her vantage post at her window, of Bobby’s brief encounter with Humphreys’ assistant making one of his regular bi-weekly calls with the bread, the tea, the tinned milk that, with occasional matches and candles, seemed to have been all Miss Barton had needed during her long years of solitude.
Mrs Rice had not seen Miss Barton for some days, but there was nothing unusual in that – often a week or more would pass without any glimpse of her, and then the little worn old woman would be seen again, slipping, like the shadow she almost seemed, up or down the Tudor Lodge drive on one of her rare excursions into the outer world.
‘One had only to say a good night to her,’ declared Mrs Rice, somewhat resentfully, ‘and she would be off like a mouse bolting back into its hole when it sees a cat – and there didn’t seem much more to her than a mouse either. A good meal, and plenty of them, was what she wanted, but what could you do when she scuttled away the moment anyone spoke?’
‘Nothing,’ Bobby agreed, and when he asked what Miss Barton generally wore, the answer so interested him that he went upstairs and brought down the worn seal-skin coat and old black frock and other things that had been lying by the side of the Saratoga trunk.
Mrs Rice identified them instantly, recognising, especially, the worn seal-skin, and an old-fashioned bonnet, with strings, that had formed part of the pile.
‘Well, now,’ she exclaimed, handling this last item. ‘Never once have I seen her not wearing that – I used to say she went to bed in it, and I daresay she did, too; and my hubby said once – when he caught sight of her for a minute, slipping along up the garden path to the house, just like a leaf the wind was blowing – that someone ought to give her a good price for it, so it could be put in the London Museum along with the other funny things people used to wear,’ said Mrs Rice, proudly conscious of her own quite up-to-date attire, with a butterfly bow of which the ends could almost have met behind her back, bare arms except for gloves whereof the gauntlets nearly reached the elbow’s, stockingless legs, and a hat like a saucer perched insecurely on a head cropped like a convict’s.
‘And the seal-skin coat,’ Bobby asked; ‘you can swear to that, too?’
Mrs Rice could, So, she supposed, could everyone else who had ever seen Miss Barton. The quaint old bonnet and that seal-skin worn nearly smooth were not things anyone could forget once they had been seen.
‘Well, she doesn’t seem to be in the house now,’ Bobby remarked; ‘so she must have got a new outfit before she went out.’
Mrs Rice fairly giggled at the idea of Miss Barton in a new outfit. It seemed so funny somehow. However, there were Miss Barton’s clothes, and no Miss Barton, so evidently she must have changed her attire – a point Bobby thought of interest.
But now Mrs Rice went on to tell an interesting story of how she had seen a stranger looking at the house a few days ago – she couldn’t be sure when, she was one of those persons always a little vague about dates, but she thought more than a week ago, though it might not have been as long as that, or, again, it might have been longer still. She had noticed, specially, that he was wearing plus-fours, a form of garment much favoured by Mr Rice when at home, and one in which a gentleman always looked a gentleman, provided, of course, he had the legs for it. But for his plus-fours suit she would have thought the stranger an enterprising house agent on the look-out for possible business – house agents sometimes came to try to get Tudor Lodge on their books for selling or letting – or even a man delivering circulars, little they cared whether they pushed their circulars into an occupied or unoccupied house. The plus-fours suit, attire seldom seen in Brush Hill except on Sundays and holidays, and the way in which its wearer had hung about staring up at the house as if specially interested in it, had attracted Mrs Rice’s attention so much that she had watched him for some time. Unfortunately he had been wearing a peaked cap, pulled well down over his face, and she had not been able to see his features very plainly, and could give little description of them, or, indeed, of him, except, always, for his suit of plus-fours in well-cut tweed. Unfortunately, too, a smell of burning from her kitchen across the landing had summoned her post haste to attend to the cake she had in the gas-oven there. When she returned – the cake, fortunately, little the worse – the plus-fours stranger was still there, indeed, but in the act of departing. Mrs Rice had watched him cross the street towards Osborne Terrace, and immediately afterwards she had also seen Miss Barton come slipping out from the side door in her usual silent, ghost-like fashion, almost as though she were following the plus-fours stranger.
Mrs Rice had not seen the stranger again. She could not say for certain whether or no she had noticed Miss Barton on any later occasion, but was quite clear she had never once seen her except wearing the seal-skin coat and the bonnet Bobby had just displayed.
‘If I had seen her in anything else,’ declared Mrs Rice, ‘I should have thought the end of the world had come.’
Nor had she seen any other stranger near the house, but, obviously, others might have been without her knowledge.
‘I’m not like some,’ Mrs Rice explained, a little proudly. ‘I’m not at my window all day long, just staring. Of course,’ she added with perfect justice, ‘no one can help seeing what’s going on before their own eyes.’
Bobby agreed that that was indeed impossible, and, in reply to other questions, found that Mrs Rice had been an interesting spectator of the arrival of the girl who had opened the door once to himself and to Wild. Mrs Rice had observed every detail of that interview, and also had watched, earlier, the girl’s arrival, had noticed that she seemed nervous and had hesitated a good deal, apparently, and not unnaturally, disliking the deserted and gloomy appearance of the house. Finally, she had gone round to the side door, which had immediately been opened for her, before she had time to knock even, exactly as though she had not only been expected, but watched and waited for. The description Mrs Rice gave of her, and especially of her clothing, was extremely good and clear – a fact of some importance, since it suggested that her description of the young man of the pistol whom she said she had seen would be equally accurate, and that her account of his tie, for example, was probably as exact as her exhaustive tally of the girl’s frock and accessories.
